Some sects within Christianity don't fit together. I just watched a show on PBS on Peter and Paul, and for me, it seems that the Jerusalem Church was still very much tied in with Judaism. Paul argued and won that the non-Jewish converts didn't have to get circumcised and eat kosher to be Christian.
The state of certain sects made of men or demons is irrelevant, all that matters is God's truth.
Peter was not in disagreement. Peter was the one in acts 15 who convinced the church that Paul was right.
In Acts 11, some had gotten upset that Peter had even taken the gospel to a handful of gentiles, until they realized that the Holy Spirit intended for the gospel to be taken to the gentiles and not just given to the Jews.
Initial impressions and assumptions on their part were set aside by the working of the Holy Spirit, and in Acts 15:28 they state that it was the Holy Spirit who told them that it was not necessary for the gentiles to keep the law.
Just as in Acts 11 we find it was the Holy Spirit who first told them it was even ok to bring the gospel to the gentiles.
Marcion and I'm sure others saw the God of the Hebrew Scriptures as much different than God the Father and his Son and his Holy Spirit of the new.
Marcion's view didn't line up with scripture.
Marcion rejected the old testament.
Marcion rejected the new testament. He outright rejected half of the books, and the rest he heavily edited upon his own whims in order to line up with his viewpoint.
Marcion is the one who had an idea of God that was not consistent with it's Jewish roots.
He didn't even think they were the same God. He believed, falsely, that the two testaments could not be reconciled together, but that was ignorance on his part. They can be reconciled.
Marcion admited even that his view of God and Christ did not line up with the original 12 apostles. He thought they got it wrong and edited their writings with an aim to "correct" them.
Marcion was just one of many of the false teachers we were warned would come along by Jesus and the apostles. He had absolutely no basis for anything he taught. He completely rejected all the divine revelation that had come before him, both from the old testament prophets and the original 12 apostles. He didn't even accept the teachings of Paul, even though he claimed Paul was the only one with the truth. He got rid of half of his letters and heavily edited the other half to suit his viewpoint.
If I'm not mistaken, the eye plucking is tied in with seeing a woman and lusting after her. I don't know of anybody that doesn't lust. Therefore, if Jesus was being literal, then we should all be blind. However, if he was trying to get them to realize the gravity of their choices by showing that a few moments of pleasure isn't worth an eternity in hell, then I understand.
Jesus was being literal when He said it's better for you to lose a body part than to lose everything in hell - Assuming it were possible for you to avoid hell by losing a body part.
Chances are you would find that the only way to avoid from having your body lead you to sin would require removing everything.
That is why He never teaches that salvation requires dismemberment, because He provided a way for salvation through His sacrifice and His Spirit. His sacrifice covers our mistakes, and His Spirit allows us to stop making those mistakes.
Jesus was a man and is a man in a glorified body,
Jesus didn't have a glorified body while on earth. That came after the resurrection.
It's the same kind of body we will have when we are resurrected.
but God is not a man? That's my problem.
It says "God is not man", not "a man". The hebrew word for man is "adam".
God is not mankind that he should lie.
God created adam, man, and chose to reveal himself to us through the likeness of man, but He is not man. He is not created. He is God.
He reveals himself to us through "a human being", but that doesn't make him "adam" (fallen mankind) in the sense of defining his character . He's still God.
I looked up the Council of Nicaea and read a little about the debate there concerning Jesus and his relation to God. That was three hundred years after Jesus and his followers weren't in 100% agreement.
Truth is never dependant on the ability for 100% of people in the world to recognize it.
If 100% of the people could recognize 100% of the truth, they everyone would know God perfectly and would not have any darkness blinding them anymore.
The arian issue can be settled based on scripture.
Is it that simple? My favorite group are the snake-handlers. They take the words of Jesus literally and pick up rattlesnakes.
Mark 16
And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
He was being literal when He said it "would" happen. He didn't tell you to go out and actively seek to handle snakes or drink poison though.
Paul was literally bitten by a deadly snake and not harmed, and believers today are still protected in the same way.
They literally laid hands on the sick and saw them healed, and they still do.
They literally spoke in new languages, and they still do.
They literally drove out demons, and they still do.
I'm sure there are also plenty of instances out there, if one were to look, of believers who have literally been poisoned but were not harmed.
The issue with the snake handlers is not that Jesus didn't mean what He said, but they took what He said and created a man made doctrine around that. Their doctrine says "let's go out and try to handle snakes and drink poison to prove our faith".
Jesus never told you that you needed to handle snakes and drink poison as an attempt to demonstrate your faith. Maybe at one point He might lead you by the Spirit to do so as a demonstration of faith for the sake of saving the lost, but He isn't actually commanding you to do it in the scripture, therefore there's probably not much value in trying to do it all the time just for the sake of doing it.
My grandmother lit candles and prayed a hundred Hail Mary's every night. She loved Jesus, but it wasn't the same Jesus that Protestants believe in.
Jesus said that God has to be worshipped in Spirit and Truth.
He said this to the Samaritans who had a false idea of God, and worshipped Him falsely.
However, I've heard some Christians say a person like Gandhi is going to hell. His religion inspired him and gave him hope. Krishna essentially said he was God, yet his "truth" isn't valid for most Christians, because it isn't centered around Jesus and the Bible.
You'll always find lies mixed in with truth. The best way to sell a lie is to mix it in with some truth.
I personally see reason in scripture and history to believe that the true knowledge of God and the promise of His redemptive savior and the resurrection have been known in some form since the fall of man, first expressed to Adam and then known to the whole world by Noah after the flood.
But the world then diverged from the truth after the flood, and carried false ideas around the world with them after the fall of babylon.
That is why a comparison of world religions will allow you to find common ground.
You can see remnants of truth contained within them, but there's also a lot of lies mixed in and omissions of important truth.
Christ, and the tradition that has been handed down to us by the scripture of the Jews, represents the most accurate and complete understanding of God that we have. This is the event that man was looking forward to in their relationship with God in pre-christ times, and it is what we look back to from today as the defining point of God's most complete revelation of Himself to us.
I also see evidence in scripture that the Jews had a more full understanding of Christ at some point, and in their history and writings I see a basis of believing that their oral teachings often had a lot of revelation about the truth in it as well. But that this had been lost to a large extent by the time of Christ as the religious establishment had led the nation astray, or the truth was buried by wrong ideas. Jesus had a genuine expectation that the religious leaders should have been able to see who He was, if they weren't veiled in darkness but were receptive to discerning the truth.
How could you not know before hand that this is what Jehovah Witnesses believe?
