• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

The 144,000 and the "Rapture" (Christians only)

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
There are two tribulations.
The first tribulation is when Satan and his angels are cast out of heaven to the earth..

The second tribulation is when The Lord Jesus Christ comes and catches everyone in the very act of worshipping Satan.

Had you read Mark 13:24--"But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light"
Notice ( after that tribulation)
This being the first tribulation of Satan.
And then the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light"
This being the second tribulation at the coming of Christ Jesus...when he catches people in the very act of worshipping Satan.
You know. You just might do a lot better if you stop listening to mans teachings and doctrines in the churches and listen more to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

You know the Lord Jesus Christ Condemns man's teachings and doctrines in
Matthew 15:7-9,
7--"You hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men"

There you have The Lord Jesus Christ himself condemning man's teachings and doctrines in the churches.
Let's put it partially this way: first, how would a person know he's worshipping satan? See if you understand this, it's a little story, two birds were talking, and one said to the other, once we're finished with this war and conquer the enemy, we're going to have peace and a better life. The other bird said, "Yeah, kill, kill, kill."
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Again, I go through what the theologians say, but even with them I don't blindly accept what one of them or even a consensus of them may believe and teach.

Who said that I "have no clue..."? Didn't you read my previous post on the "144,000"? And there is no "official answer" on this within Catholicism as interpretations can and do vary.

The enemy of serious theological scholarship is "certainty", because anyone whom has spent any serious time in scriptural studies well knows that intelligent and well-informed people can have different interpretations on a great many narratives. Even within the early Church, the Book of Revelation was so controversial that, according to the theologian William Barclay, roughly 1/3 of the local congregations didn't use it. It took the Church's 4th century selection of the canon to make it part of the Bible that we read today.

A message that I give to my students along this line runs this way: "To a child a tree is very simple, but to a biologist a tree is very complex". If you want to throw insinuations and insults around, you're not only acting like the former but you're also not doing any serious studying on the matter.

Thus, with this, I'm done respond to your arrogant insults.
Don't forget that for quite a while the common person couldn't read or write, therefore Bible reading was quite the forbidden task.
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
sad to think there are people that believe your nonsense

Well it's evidence that you follow man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..

Where is it written in what book and chapter and verses where it's written that Satan has already been cast out of heaven in the Bible/Scriptures..
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
Faithofchristian Do you believe God has created spirits for everyone that will be born on earth?
So for example God has created spirits for the triplets that Jane will give birth to, or the twins that Debbie has conceived?
What if Mary has a miscarriage? Or what if Janet has an abortion?
What about the millions of babies born in the porn business, or sex orgies?
Are you saying God has created spirits for sll of these?

I think it would be expected that the average thinker, would want to know where in the Bible they would find such an idea, sine it sounds more like human error.

Before we came to born by our mothers into this world...
We were with God as Spirit beings..
Then God formed us in our mothers belly to be born of flesh and blood beings..
Of course man's teachings and doctrines in the churches does not teach this..all because by man's teachings and doctrines will tell you that everything started with Adam and Eve.....which is just another false teaching of man's in the churches.

Before we were born of flesh and blood..
we were with God as Spirit beings..
Jeremiah 1:4-5, will prove this.

Jeremiah 1:4-5,
4--"Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations"

Therefore before the Lord God formed us in the belly of our mothers..God knew us..That means we were with God as Spirit beings..

Therefore for God to have known us, means we were with God...then God formed us in the belly of our mothers..

Ecclesiastes 12:7...is another good example how we were with God as Spirit beings..

Ecclesiastes 12:7--"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it"

Okay now seeing our body were taken from the dust of the earth..our bodies will return back to the dust of the earth..

And our Spirit which is insider our body..shall return back to God who gave it..

To return back to God.... Simply means we were with God from the start..

Like a baseball player they start at home base then once they hit the ball they run
all the bases and return right back to home base..from where they got their starting point.

Therefore our spirit started with God...and God formed our body of flesh and blood inside of our mothers belly...

Then at death our bodies return back to the earth...and our Spirit returns back to God where it had it's starting point..God..

Therefore we were with God...before we came here in this world to be born of flesh and blood beings..

But then of course you follow man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..
That will say....our starting point came by Adam and Eve..
This is just another false teaching of man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..

You do know that The Lord Jesus Christ Condemns man's teachings and doctrines in Matthew 15:7-9..
You probably didn't know that either...man's teachings and doctrines will not teach that either right..

Matthew 15:7-9,
7--"You hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men"

There you have The Lord Jesus Christ himself condemning man's teachings and doctrines...
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
So you actually think you were a person "with God" before you were conceived in your mother's womb? Just to make sure you understand me, I am asking if you were a baby or an adult when you were "with God" before you were conceived in your mother's womb?

To answer your question..

When The Lord Jesus Christ was in the belly of Mary..was Jesus Christ a baby or adult..
And before Jesus Christ was formed in the belly of Mary....was Jesus Christ a baby or adult ?
Now Go Figure..

Where we were with God as Spirit beings.. Naturally we were adults and then God formed us.. in the belly of our mothers as a baby..
You sure don't us logic thinking..
Therefore before Jesus Christ was in the belly of Mary... Jesus Christ was adult..
And then Jesus Christ being in the belly of Mary as a baby..
Go Figure
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
Let's put it partially this way: first, how would a person know he's worshipping satan? See if you understand this, it's a little story, two birds were talking, and one said to the other, once we're finished with this war and conquer the enemy, we're going to have peace and a better life. The other bird said, "Yeah, kill, kill, kill."

Because when we were with God as Spirit beings....this was before Satan started his rebellion against God...
Then once Satan started his rebellion against God....then God took us as Spirit beings and place is in the belly of our mothers to be born of flesh and blood..

And while we are here on earth..we are to learn what we didn't learn back in the first earth age... the difference between Satan deceptions and lies..
And God's Truth..

Of course you wouldn't know this..all because people are not taught God's Truth in the churches...
 

cataway

Well-Known Member
Well it's evidence that you follow man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..

Where is it written in what book and chapter and verses where it's written that Satan has already been cast out of heaven in the Bible/Scriptures..
and you are making things up tp promote the things you want to believe
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
Before we came to born by our mothers into this world...
We were with God as Spirit beings..
Then God formed us in our mothers belly to be born of flesh and blood beings..
Of course man's teachings and doctrines in the churches does not teach this..all because by man's teachings and doctrines will tell you that everything started with Adam and Eve.....which is just another false teaching of man's in the churches.

Before we were born of flesh and blood..
we were with God as Spirit beings..
Jeremiah 1:4-5, will prove this.

Jeremiah 1:4-5,
4--"Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations"

Therefore before the Lord God formed us in the belly of our mothers..God knew us..That means we were with God as Spirit beings..

Therefore for God to have known us, means we were with God...then God formed us in the belly of our mothers..

Ecclesiastes 12:7...is another good example how we were with God as Spirit beings..

Ecclesiastes 12:7--"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it"

Okay now seeing our body were taken from the dust of the earth..our bodies will return back to the dust of the earth..

And our Spirit which is insider our body..shall return back to God who gave it..

To return back to God.... Simply means we were with God from the start..

Like a baseball player they start at home base then once they hit the ball they run
all the bases and return right back to home base..from where they got their starting point.

Therefore our spirit started with God...and God formed our body of flesh and blood inside of our mothers belly...

Then at death our bodies return back to the earth...and our Spirit returns back to God where it had it's starting point..God..

Therefore we were with God...before we came here in this world to be born of flesh and blood beings..

But then of course you follow man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..
That will say....our starting point came by Adam and Eve..
This is just another false teaching of man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..

You do know that The Lord Jesus Christ Condemns man's teachings and doctrines in Matthew 15:7-9..
You probably didn't know that either...man's teachings and doctrines will not teach that either right..

Matthew 15:7-9,
7--"You hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men"

There you have The Lord Jesus Christ himself condemning man's teachings and doctrines...
Ah. I see how you are looking at it.

You said God forms us - the spirit, and then you say God forms us in the womb. Which one is us?

Tell me a bit more about these created spirits.
What happens when a fetus is sucked out and destroyed... or what if the fetus is terminated before it forms, that is, in the zygote stages?
What does God do with all those created spirits... of the dead?
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
Well it's evidence that you follow man's teachings and doctrines in the churches..

Where is it written in what book and chapter and verses where it's written that Satan has already been cast out of heaven in the Bible/Scriptures..
Of course you know Revelation 12.
The Bible says in revelation 1, that it is a Revelation of things that would shortly take place.
Shortly take place from the time John wrote. We can average that that would have been nearly 2000 years now.
Therefore, those who discern from the scriptures, that Christ began to rule, would be correct in saying that the Devil was cast to the earth some time in our modern era. Would that not be so?
What makes you think the Devil has not been cast down already?
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
Is that all you got..seeing that you haven't given any proof of evidence that Satan
has been already cast of heaven...
So where's your proof of evidence..
(Revelation 12:9-14) 9 So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him. 10 I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come to pass the salvation and the power and the Kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ, because the accuser of our brothers has been hurled down, who accuses them day and night before our God! 11 And they conquered him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their witnessing, and they did not love their souls even in the face of death. 12 On this account be glad, you heavens and you who reside in them! Woe for the earth and for the sea, because the Devil has come down to you, having great anger, knowing that he has a short period of time.” 13 Now when the dragon saw that it had been hurled down to the earth, it persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child. 14 But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is to be fed for a time and times and half a time away from the face of the serpent.

Thoughts and pictures come to my mind, . . . thoughts from before the year 1914 when there was real peace, quiet and security on this earth - a time when we didn’t know fear. . . . Security and quiet have disappeared from the lives of men since 1914.
Konrad Adenauer, Cleveland West Parker, January 20, 1966, p. 1

I should like to begin this essay with a fable. Once upon a time, there was a great war that involved the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, every-one said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To that end, the victorious nations sent all of their wisest men to a great peace conference, where they were given the task of drawing up a settlement that would be so carefully designed, so unquestionably fair to all concerned, that it would eliminate war as a phenomenon of human existence. Unfortunately, that settlement lasted only twenty years. There followed yet another great war involving the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, everyone said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To everyone's horror, though, the victors in that conflict immediately fell to quarreling among themselves, with the result that no peace conference ever took place. Within a few years each of the major victors had come to regard each other, and not a few years each of the major victors had come to regard each other, and not their former enemies, as the principal threat to their survival; each sought to ensure that survival by developing weapons capable, at least in theory, of ending the survival of everyone on earth. Paradoxically, that arrangement lasted twice as long as the first one, and as the fable ended showed no signs of coming apart anytime soon. It is, of course, just a fable, and as a general rule one ought not to take fables too seriously. There are times, though, when fables can illuminate reality more sharply than conventional forms of explanation are able to do, and this may well be one of them. For it is the case that the post-World War II system of international relations, which nobody designed or even thought could last for very long, which was based not upon the dictates of morality and justice but rather upon an arbitrary and strikingly artificial division of the world into spheres of influence, and which incorporated within it some of the most bitter and persistent antagonisms short of war in modern history, has now survived twice as long as the far more carefully designed World War I settlement, has approximately equaled in longevity the great 19th century international systems of Metternich and Bismarck, and unlike those earlier systems after four decades of existence shows no perceptible signs of disintegration. It is, or ought to be, enough to make one think. To be sure, the term "peace" is not the first one that comes to mind when one recalls the history of the past forty years. That period, after all, has seen the greatest accumulation of armaments the world has ever known, a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars, an abundance of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, and civil violence, as well as some of the deepest and most intractable ideological rivalries in human experience. Nor have those more ancient scourges - famine, disease, poverty, injustice - by any means disappeared from the face of the earth. Is it not stretching things a bit, one might well ask, to take the moral and spiritual desert in which the nations of the world conduct their affairs, and call it "peace"?
- "The Long Peace"

If that's not enough, there is a lot more I can get for you.
Then there is 2 Timothy 3:1-5, which confirms that what we see today, in the attitudes of people is proof that we are living during the last days of Satan's system.

I can get some more quotes, but I think we have there all the evidence we need.
What's your proof that Satan has not been cast down to the earth?
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
@Faithofchristian just in case...

“Ever since 1914, everybody conscious of trends in the world has been deeply troubled by what has seemed like a fated and predetermined march toward ever greater disaster. Many serious people have come to feel that nothing can be done to avert the plunge towards ruin.”—Bertrand Russell, The New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1953.


The London Evening Star commented that the conflict “tore the whole world’s political setup apart. Nothing could ever be the same again. If we all get the nuclear madness out of our systems and the human race survives, some historian in the next century may well conclude that the day the world went mad was August 4, 1914.”–London Evening Star, quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 5, 1960, and The Seattle Times, August 4, 1960, p. 5.

“Half a century has gone by, yet the mark that the tragedy of the Great War [World War I, which started in 1914] left on the body and soul of the nations has not faded . . . The physical and moral magnitude of this ordeal was such that nothing left was the same as before. Society in its entirety: systems of government, national borders, laws, armed forces, interstate relations, but also ideologies, family life, fortunes, positions, personal relations—everything was changed from top to bottom. . . . Humanity finally lost its balance, never to recover it to this day.”—General Charles de Gaulle, speaking in 1968 (Le Monde, Nov. 12, 1968, p. 9).

“The last completely ‘normal’ year in history was 1913, the year before World War I began.”—Editorial in the Times-Herald, Washington, D.C., March 13, 1949.

“Looking back from the vantage point of the present we see clearly today that the outbreak of World War I ushered in a twentieth-century ‘Time of Troubles’—in the expressive term of the British historian Arnold Toynbee—from which our civilization has by no means yet emerged. Directly or indirectly all the convulsions of the last half century stem back to 1914.”—The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order (New York, 1963), Edmond Taylor, p. 16.

No previous war in history compared with it. It was so different that historians of that time called it The Great War.
Of it, an encyclopedia states: “World War I took the lives of twice as many men as all major wars from 1790 to 1913 put together.” It noted that total military casualties were over 37,000,000, and added: “The number of civilian deaths in areas of actual war totaled about 5,000,000. Starvation, disease, and exposure accounted for about 80 of every 100 of these civilian deaths. Spanish influenza, which some persons blamed on the war, caused tens of millions of other deaths.–The World Book Encyclopedia, 1966, Vol. 20, p. 377.
World War! Pestilences! Food shortages!

“Everything would get better and better. This was the world I was born in. . . . Suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.”—British statesman Harold Macmillan, The New York Times, November 23, 1980.

“Increasingly, the 75-year period from 1914 to 1989, covering two world wars and the cold war, is being seen by historians as a single, discrete epoch, a time apart in which much of the world was fighting war, recovering from war or preparing for war.”—The New York Times, May 7, 1995.
“The whole world really blew up about World War I and we still don’t know why. Before then, men thought that utopia was in sight. There was peace and prosperity. Then everything blew up. We’ve been in a state of suspended animation ever since . . . More people have been killed in this century than in all of history.”—Dr. Walker Percy, American Medical News, November 21, 1977.

“It is indeed the year 1914 rather than that of Hiroshima which marks the turning point in our time, for by now we can see that . . . it was the first world war that ushered in the era of confused transition in the midst of which we are floundering.”—Dr. René Albrecht-Carrié, Barnard College, The Scientific Monthly, July 1951.

“In 1914 the world lost a coherence which it has not managed to recapture since. . . . This has been a time of extraordinary disorder and violence, both across national frontiers and within them.”—The Economist, London, August 4, 1979.

“World War I and its aftermath led to the greatest economic depression in history during the early 1930’s. The consequences of the war and the problems of adjustment to peace led to unrest in almost every nation.”–The World Book Encyclopedia (1966, Vol. 20) on page 379 under its heading “World War I”

Author Maurice Genevoix, who was a military officer during that war, said of it: “Everyone agrees in recognizing that in the whole history of mankind, few dates have had the importance of August 2, 1914. First Europe and soon after almost all humanity found themselves plunged into a dreadful event. Conventions, agreements, moral laws, all the foundations shook; from one day to the next, everything was called into question. The event was to exceed both instinctive forebodings and reasonable anticipations. Enormous, chaotic, monstrous, it still drags us in its wake.”—Maurice Genevoix, member of the Académie Française, quoted in the book Promise of Greatness (1968).

“The modern era . . . began in 1914, an
d no one knows when or how it will end. . . . It could end in mass annihilation.”—The Seattle Times, January 1, 1959.

“In its scope, its violence, and above all, in its totality, it established a precedent. World War I ushered in the century of Total War, of—in the first full sense of the term—global war. . . .Never before 1914-1918 had a war absorbed so much of the total resources of so many combatants and covered so large a part of the earth. Never had so many nations been involved. Never had the slaughter been so comprehensive and indiscriminate.”–World War I, by H.W. Baldwin, pages 1,2

The World Book Encyclopedia noted that the number of soldiers killed and wounded was over 37,000,000, and added:
“The number of civilian deaths in areas of actual war totaled about 5,000,000. Starvation, disease, and exposure accounted for about 80 of every 100 of these civilian deaths. Spanish influenza, which some persons blamed on the war, caused tens of millions of other deaths.”—1966 edition, Vol. 20, p. 377.

More than 50 years after 1914, German statesman Konrad Adenauer wrote: “Security and quiet have disappeared from the lives of men since 1914.”—The West Parker, Cleveland, Ohio, January 20, 1966.

“Some historians believe that the 20th century will be seen as a time of unparalleled savagery,” notes The New York Times.

An article in The Washington Post concurs: “Our 20th-century wars have been ‘total wars’ against combatants and civilians alike,” it says. “The casualties, including the genocide of the Jews, are measured in the tens of millions. The barbarian wars of centuries past were alley fights in comparison.” Civil insurrections have added to the carnage. How many have died? “The ‘megadeaths’ since 1914, by an estimate of Zbigniew Brzezinski, have totaled 197 million, ‘the equivalent of more than one in ten of the total world population in 1900,’” says the Post. It adds that it is an “indisputable fact that terrorism and wanton killing are embedded deeply in the culture of this century” and that “no political or economic system has so far in this century pacified or satisfied the restless millions.”

As regards economic consequences, Ashby Bladen, a senior vice president of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, writes: “Before 1914 the monetary and the financial systems were compatible. . . . If one takes August 1914 as marking the dividing line between them, the contrasts between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries are striking. In many aspects of human affairs there has been a complete reversal of trend. . . . One major reason was the severance of the linkage between the financial system and money with intrinsic value that began in 1914. . . . The breaking of the linkage was a momentous event. . . . 1914 marked a radical, and in the end catastrophic, transformation of that system.”

“The 19th century—defined as a set of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes and morals—did not end on Jan. 1, 1901,” wrote columnist Charley Reese. “It ended in 1914. That’s also when the 20th century, defined the same way, began.”
Reese explained: “Virtually all of the conflicts that we have been concerned with all of our lives stemmed from that [first world] war. . . . It destroyed 19th century optimism and created the 20th century versions of hedonism, cynicism, anxiety, angst and nihilism.”
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
Ah. I see how you are looking at it.

You said God forms us - the spirit, and then you say God forms us in the womb. Which one is us?

Tell me a bit more about these created spirits.
What happens when a fetus is sucked out and destroyed... or what if the fetus is terminated before it forms, that is, in the zygote stages?
What does God do with all those created spirits... of the dead?

Those that has abortion in destroying a life will answer to The Lord Jesus Christ on Judgement day..

Only the body of flesh and blood dies..
The Spirit is eternal that can not dies..
Only God has the power to destroy the spirit...
As The Lord Jesus Christ said in
Matthew 10:28--"And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell"

Therefore only God holds the power to destroy the Spirit..
Therefore the spirit is eternal which can not die.....only God holds the power to destroy the spirit..
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
Of course you know Revelation 12.
The Bible says in revelation 1, that it is a Revelation of things that would shortly take place.
Shortly take place from the time John wrote. We can average that that would have been nearly 2000 years now.
Therefore, those who discern from the scriptures, that Christ began to rule, would be correct in saying that the Devil was cast to the earth some time in our modern era. Would that not be so?
What makes you think the Devil has not been cast down already?

Well first of all..
The whole book of Revelation is coming to it's fulfilment even to this very day and still future from us..
That of Revelation 12..it's also evidence that have no clue or idea what
Revelation 12 is about..
Revelation 12 is still yet to be fulfilled which is still future from us..

Maybe just maybe of you study the Lord Jesus Christ book of Revelation.

And put the things in Revelation in their proper order of events....you may just learn what is to happen and when they are to take place..
Nice try though..
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
(Revelation 12:9-14) 9 So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him. 10 I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come to pass the salvation and the power and the Kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ, because the accuser of our brothers has been hurled down, who accuses them day and night before our God! 11 And they conquered him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their witnessing, and they did not love their souls even in the face of death. 12 On this account be glad, you heavens and you who reside in them! Woe for the earth and for the sea, because the Devil has come down to you, having great anger, knowing that he has a short period of time.” 13 Now when the dragon saw that it had been hurled down to the earth, it persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child. 14 But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is to be fed for a time and times and half a time away from the face of the serpent.

Thoughts and pictures come to my mind, . . . thoughts from before the year 1914 when there was real peace, quiet and security on this earth - a time when we didn’t know fear. . . . Security and quiet have disappeared from the lives of men since 1914.
Konrad Adenauer, Cleveland West Parker, January 20, 1966, p. 1

I should like to begin this essay with a fable. Once upon a time, there was a great war that involved the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, every-one said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To that end, the victorious nations sent all of their wisest men to a great peace conference, where they were given the task of drawing up a settlement that would be so carefully designed, so unquestionably fair to all concerned, that it would eliminate war as a phenomenon of human existence. Unfortunately, that settlement lasted only twenty years. There followed yet another great war involving the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, everyone said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To everyone's horror, though, the victors in that conflict immediately fell to quarreling among themselves, with the result that no peace conference ever took place. Within a few years each of the major victors had come to regard each other, and not a few years each of the major victors had come to regard each other, and not their former enemies, as the principal threat to their survival; each sought to ensure that survival by developing weapons capable, at least in theory, of ending the survival of everyone on earth. Paradoxically, that arrangement lasted twice as long as the first one, and as the fable ended showed no signs of coming apart anytime soon. It is, of course, just a fable, and as a general rule one ought not to take fables too seriously. There are times, though, when fables can illuminate reality more sharply than conventional forms of explanation are able to do, and this may well be one of them. For it is the case that the post-World War II system of international relations, which nobody designed or even thought could last for very long, which was based not upon the dictates of morality and justice but rather upon an arbitrary and strikingly artificial division of the world into spheres of influence, and which incorporated within it some of the most bitter and persistent antagonisms short of war in modern history, has now survived twice as long as the far more carefully designed World War I settlement, has approximately equaled in longevity the great 19th century international systems of Metternich and Bismarck, and unlike those earlier systems after four decades of existence shows no perceptible signs of disintegration. It is, or ought to be, enough to make one think. To be sure, the term "peace" is not the first one that comes to mind when one recalls the history of the past forty years. That period, after all, has seen the greatest accumulation of armaments the world has ever known, a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars, an abundance of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, and civil violence, as well as some of the deepest and most intractable ideological rivalries in human experience. Nor have those more ancient scourges - famine, disease, poverty, injustice - by any means disappeared from the face of the earth. Is it not stretching things a bit, one might well ask, to take the moral and spiritual desert in which the nations of the world conduct their affairs, and call it "peace"?
- "The Long Peace"

If that's not enough, there is a lot more I can get for you.
Then there is 2 Timothy 3:1-5, which confirms that what we see today, in the attitudes of people is proof that we are living during the last days of Satan's system.

I can get some more quotes, but I think we have there all the evidence we need.
What's your proof that Satan has not been cast down to the earth?


Maybe if you had put things in Revelation in their proper order of events.
Then maybe you may have something..

But seeing you have not put things in Revelation in their proper order events.

Therefore Revelation 12:7-12.
Is still yet to happen and is still future from us..
Nice try though..
 

Faithofchristian

Well-Known Member
Maybe if you had put things in Revelation in their proper order of events.
Then maybe you may have something..

But seeing you have not put things in Revelation in their proper order events.

Therefore Revelation 12:7-12.
Is still yet to happen and is still future from us..
Nice try though..
 
Top