That Pope appears more interested in his Father’s planet’s health than our Pope is interested in his Father’s planet’s health… 
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Nah…, I outgrew the “magic” stage long time ago. Now I am in the “mature faith” stage… faith that I am going to make it thorugh one more day every day… 
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But why would we care, George? The world is ending the next Sunday morning. Haven’t you heard?
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Good to hear…lol
no, but it has the mix of minerals and superheated temperatures that would definitely cause the unheard of mega fires the bible predicts, if ripped open through an earthquake…
it’s part of the slow, steady game plan the church has had to reclaim the world dominance it lost in 1798…the deadly wound of the beast is slowly healing…
Have you considered the fact that the sun doesn’t have anything to “rip” and it doesn’t get flattened?
You seem to think that a pancake is the natural state of a planet in space, and it’s one big earthquake away to deflate to it? Why do you think planets and stars are spherical in shape?
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no…we don’t have any prophecies that say that everybody will see christ return to the sun…
a flattened earth enables everybody to see christ return at the same time…it overcomes the problems of time zones and visibility vantage points…if something like this is part of end-time reality, it will only need to be a temporary event that affects only the planet earth…the planet earth is the only place where people are…
But it doesn’t overcome the fact that everyone on Earth would be dead if that’s really to take place.
The impact of the displaced oceans alone washing all of the landmass off would actually be the least of the geological problems for humans to see anything right after that scenario.
I understand that you are working backwards from an assumption, but that’s the kind of stuff that makes the rest of the story a lot less believable for many people, so we should be careful.
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“Behold, he comes with clouds…” is another way of saying that Christ is judge. This is imagery from Daniel 7 about the Son of Man coming on the clouds to the Ancient of Days in judgement against the beasts and monsters and in vindication of his people. This is a theme throughout the OT, the Psalms, and in Revelation. Every eye seeing him is a way of saying that Christ’s judgement and vindication, and his setting of the world to rights, will be universally experienced and witnessed, not about how every literal eye will see him descending in literal clouds. Rev. 14:6ff is in line with this.
To try to extrapolate a physical changing of the earth into a flattened disc is not what the passage or the book is saying. The ancients seemed to believe in a flat disc earth anyway, so such speculation would be superfluous to authorial intention. In the end, the point is theological, not about a physical change in cosmology. Christ, as judge, will universally consummate the kingdom of God, his reign of justice, mercy, and peace, on earth as it is in heaven.
We don’t have to speculate about what the passage never intended to say.
Frank
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it’s a question of trade-offs…on the one hand we know that “every eye shall see him”…unless this means “every eye shall eventually see him”, which doesn’t seem to be the thrust of Rev 1:7, it means “every eye shall see him at the same moment”…this in turn means one of two things:
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the only people living when christ returns will be those living in time zones where visibility vantage points happen simultaneously, even if their clocks say different things…in other words, billions of people will have been killed off during the seven last plagues…
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all the billions of people in the world, including those resurrected from the dead, are positioned on the same visibility vantage point, which can only mean a flattened surface of some kind…
the problem with interpretation 1. is that it necessarily pits the first world against the third world, since these are the two regions of the world that exist on opposite sides of the globe…this seems a bit xenocentric…
the advantage of 2. is that the seventh plague does actually include an unheard of earthquake, which could be the mechanism god uses to initiate a spreading rupture that eventually flattens the earth into a single visibility vantage point…presumably he’d do it in a way that people left standing wouldn’t be killed…
i’m not saying any of this is a perfect scenario…but it sure beats no scenario, and just letting an important text lie unexamined…
i don’t agree…the seventh plague happens after IJ, but before the lake of fire at the end of the millennium…the phrase, “and every eye shall see him”, refers to christ’s second coming, not his third coming…
Jeremy…
You’re just not reading the book according to its literary character, nor in terms of what it would have meant to its original audience. Se la vie…
Frank
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Frank, I would suggest when Christ comes He is consummating the " now and not yet" of the Kingdom and the Kingdom of God becomes seen in fulness and reality for we are with Him
Yes, Pat. Revelation speaks of Jesus as judge, among other images. The rule of God is fully established by his just judgement that overthrows the beasts and monsters of this age, vindicates his faithful people, and results in the restoration of all things. This is thematic to the entire book.
All my point was is that the image of Jesus coming with clouds, a pointed reference to the judgement scene in Daniel 7, has more to do with that overarching theological theme, than it does with some kind of nonsensical idea of a spherical earth turning flat, or of a world wide broadcast of Jesus’s appearing to explain “every eye shall see him.”
It’s literalism run amok, with no regard for apocalyptic genre, nor what it would have meant for its original audience.
Frank
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those are interesting aspects, but they mean little to us now…we need to read the bible in terms of what it means to us now…
One can only accurately read what it means to us now, by accurately understanding what it meant to its original recipients. The Bible, and in this case, Revelation, was written for us, not to us. That is crucial for sound interpretation. Otherwise, you’re lost in an eisegetical free for all with no textual control. That seems to be where you are.
Frank
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Hosea 11:1 says that when israel was in its infancy, god loved israel, and called israel out of the slavery of egypt…the immediate context of this text is that hosea is building yet another diatribe against israel due to its departure from god…
in Matthew 2:12-15, matthew, under inspiration, calls Hosea 11:1 a messianic prophecy that joseph needed to fulfill by taking mary and jesus into egypt until the death of herod so that jesus, the son of god, could be called out of egypt…this apostolic meaning would have been considered eisegetical free fall by the pharisees, who were the biblical experts in the land…even other apostolic christians, who had access to the writings of hosea, and who were educated enough to read, would not have read Hosea 11:1 in this way…
so what does your version of sound biblical interpretation matter in a case like this (and there are other cases like this in the NT)…what this shows is that the only interpretation of a biblical text that matters in any given point in time is what the holy spirit through an inspired agent indicates…in our time, the most recent inspired agent we have access to is egw…obviously the only meaning in the bible that can possibly matter to us is what the holy spirit has indicated through egw…
of course on texts she doesn’t comment on - and there aren’t many - we have to do the best we can, knowing that any moment, a future prophet can arise and tell us that our assumptions are all wrong…so take whatever comfort you can find in what you consider to be sound biblical interpretation…but understand that you’ll most likely be wrong, just like christians in matthew’s day would have been wrong about Hosea 11:1…the reality is that there’s no way to know what a biblical text really means in our time unless the holy spirit tells us what it means…
The biblical writers reshaped the entire OT around Jesus as Messiah, because of the encounter they had with him. Yes, we believe they did this under inspiration, as the Spirit directed them to the primacy of Jesus alone, and this has been accepted by the church for the better part of two millenia as canon. Something that EGW is not, no matter how much you doth protest.
Even if one were to believe her to be a prophet, she is not to be put in the position of inspired interpreter of Scripture, effectively putting her above it, and effectively setting aside what the NT says about how the prophetic gift is to be handled and measured. By doing this, you put a chokehold on any fresh biblical insight, you nullify the chuch’s continued calling and vocation to grapple with the word anew in each generation, and you have eliminated all controls on anything she wrote or uttered. Her word becomes supreme, not the word of the gospel.
You simply don’t read the bible for what it’s saying. Your views are Whiteist, not really biblical or gospel centered.
Frank
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think what you want, frank, but the reality is that if egw was inspired, as we believe, it means she holds the same primacy over what scripture is saying in our time as the apostles held in their’s, which was centuries before any notion of any canon had formed…
and let’s not pretend that the apostles framed a jesus narrative because they had a selfish motive to elevate their time with him…they were constrained to proclaim present truth that god himself had framed in the same way that egw was constrained to proclaim present truth that god, once more, had determined needed to be framed…
and don’t think that this process of proclaiming present truth ended with egw…truth is a constantly unfolding phenomenon that is legitimized and defined, not by human notions of exegesis, but by the power of god himself…the best we can do is bow to that power, wherever it chooses to manifest itself…
This is fantastical thinking. First, one must accept that she was inspired. Secondly, one must disregard what the NT itself says about the of the churches’ necessity to weigh and sift the message of those claiming prophetic messages and utterances.
Aside from the movement of the Spirit upon the gifted individual, this assumes the move of the Spirit in the congregations. It also assumes that there were some external measurement through which the messages were evaluated. One was the gospel message and teaching of the apostles. The other was the Scriptures themselves…or have you conveniently forgotten the story of the Bereans and Paul in Acts 17?
You put EGW in a position in which there is no way to evaluate her writings. It leads to a distortion of the gospel, and kool aid drinking…which are in abundance within our denomination.
Where in the world did you get the idea that I was saying their motives were selfish?? They were moved by the Spirit to testify of Jesus, and saw the Scriptures with new eyes…focused now on Jesus himself…see Luke 24, and 2 Cor. 3. Jesus was the climax, goal, and point of Israel’s story, and their scriptures.
God’s power is not confined to being displayed through supernatural manifestations. It can be displayed through scholarship, the careful handling of the word, historical discovery, deeper insights into biblical cultures and languages, etc. IOW, God has given us brains to use, and expects us to use them as we encounter him through the bible and the message of the gospel. He has provided us with gifted and educated people in these areas to help us in this journey.
A good example of this is Paul himself. After his life changing encounter with the risen Christ, the Spirit used his vast knowledge of the scriptures to help clarify the Christ event, elucidate its meaning for the believing communities, and to help form the basis of the theology of the early church.
You make false dichotomies.
Frank
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