Discussion Boards - The Big Issues

The Law of Two or Three Witnesses:

For the Word to be established and true, 2Co 13:1 … “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.” (Also found in Matt 18:16 & Duet 19:15).

The theory of the rapture as Israel has already mentioned, is only BASED ON ONE SCRIPTURE with no other witnesses. All other scriptures are then interpreted to CONFORM to the ideology and theory of the rapture. With 2 Cor 13:1 in mind, any teaching based on one scripture alone is NOT established and is NOT biblically or scripturally true.

From my last post, you are mainly questioning the presence of the Father when the Son of Man comes, yes?

Principle of Actual Language:

In the KJV translation the scripture reads Mat 16:27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory OF HIS Father with his angels.
But looking at the ORIGINAL text it should read: For the Son of man shall come in the glory OF HIMSELF, THEMSELVES, THEM Father with his angels. The Greek word used here (hautou) means “Of Himself, themselves, them”. Following the Principle of Two or Three Witnesses this same word is found in Mar 8:38 & Luk 9:26, therefore this Word is established.

Principle of Consistency and Principle of Total Significance:

"come in the glory ...". Whenever we see the "glory" or the "glory cloud" written throughout scripture, the Father was ALWAYS within the glory or the glory cloud. This is throughout the entire bible, Old and New Testament. So when we read Matt 16:27 and see "the Son of man shall come in the glory", following the Principle of Consistency we know the Father is at one and is present within the glory.

Blessings to all :-)

Painful....

Isaiah 64 - 66.
Daniel 7 - 12.
Joel 3.
Matthew 24.

"The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light;"...

I interpret that the scriptures to state that our star the Sun has much more Lead (Pb) buildup inside it than the astronomy scientists care to mention. Would you care to say that the Suns time could already be up? This is because our star is a secondary star and there is no way of telling how much heaver material it has to start with when the star was formed. The nuclear fusion reaction compressing lead into a heaver element is endothermic and absorbs energy rather than being exothermic and giving off energy that happens for most nuclear fusion reactions. This causes the star to blow off a dust (gas, dust and rocks) cloud and turn red. Our star will grow as a red star and consume the mercury and then venus over the many years that follow. The way I personally interpret this, is that if you looked at the Sun right when the event happens, the sun would be darkened by the dust cloud to look like sack cloth and the moon will look blood red, reflecting the Suns light. As the dust cloud passes by the earth, it will roll back the atmosphere due to the rotation of the earth, and rain down rocks upon the earth that will look like falling stars. Once the gas cloud has past by the earth, it will form into a looped pattern to look like the sign that Constantine saw, the sign of Christ. A cross. The effect of the dust cloud on the Earth and the Moon will cause the Earth "to reel around like a drunkard".

And all this before Jesus comes back.

If you see someone who claims to be Jesus Christ back a second time, remind them, the Sun is not red yet.

Woah, that is a lot of info that I haven't read in scripture before David 665. I remember watching the news, and there was thick smoke in some country which made the moon appear red (looking at it through the smoke) and the sun dark during the day.

Hey Dave; wow lot of information.
Can you clarify for me; what I think your saying is that whenever there is enough dust, gas, rocks etc, in our atmosphere this can produce a blood moon? There were a number of us about 6 - 8 maybe more months back, that saw a blood moon, it was really red, but i dont remember there being no sun the next day....

Nice to see you back Heather.

Soooo i think it would be fair to say that Jesus is awesome and his return is inevitable. When-who knows, but in the meantime we should be doing all we can to 1. Become more like christ while we each run the race we have been called to run and 2. encourage our brothers and sisters in christ on their journeys so they can become more of who God has called them to be...and 3. LOVE others in such a way that they will be transformed.

Been a very interesting thread thats for sure

Hey Heather - nice to 'meet' you by the way : ) I was just going to say that you probablly saw the red moon when there was an eclips of the moon a while back. Whenever the moon is completely in the shaddow of the earth (a lunar eclips) it appears to be red. This is because no light can reach the moon from the sun except for the light right at the red end of the spectrum which is bent around the earth by the earth's gravity, hits the moon and is reflected back to us. Cool hey : )

Dave 665, you need to be a bit more specific whith your references...... You have some interesting ideas there that would be fascinating to look into some time. Did you know that there will be several 'blackouts' leading up to Christ's return? I wonder if they will be caused by 'natural' causes like the one you are suggesting, or if perhaps some of them may be 'supernatural' like the one which occured when Jesus died, or like the one which was over the land of Egypt during one of the plagues. Interesting stuff to mull over!

Pauline, I have only just come on and will take a bit of time to read your posts before answering ; )

Hi Pauline, you have a very long list of interpretation rules!

Actually, the kind of principles I was speaking about are much more rudimentary than these. Take your law about two or three witnesses for example. Before you can make this rule, you must interpret 2 Corinthians 13:1. Having come to a conclusion about what this verse means, you have then put the meaning you see into practice and you are applying it to the rest of scripture. (I actually disagree about your understanding of this verse, but I’ll get to that later : )

That is fine, and a good thing to do. If that is what Paul is really saying, then we should be applying this to all scripture. But what I am getting at is the point that before you can make a rule like this, you have to employ some kind of method of interpreting what is written there in Paul's letter. This method is primarily what I am talking about when I say that we should all think about and be aware of the principles of interpretation we are using. All the other principles flow out of our using this original method to interpret what is written.

I am talking about the essence of communication. Each language has its own rules, but underlying every language are the basic and common rules of communication which apply to every form of communication. These laws were created by God, just as the laws of physics were created by God, and when we violate them (often without realising or intending to), that is when we have miscommunication.

So, the basic laws of communication are:

1) The meaning if any communication is the meaning the speaker intends. So when you read a letter or listen to a speech etc., you are not free to make up your own meaning, you must seek to understand the meaning of the one communicating.

(There are some instances where the meaning the author intends is for you to be inspired to find your own meaning – as in some modern poetry, but even here, in finding your own meaning, you are obeying the intent of the author).

2) Words mean just what they say. Every word has a meaning which is understood by the speakers of that language. No one is free to give someone else’s words a new meaning.

3) The meaning of words is governed by context. Many words have more than one meaning. We are to determine the meaning of any word by the context of:

a. The words around it – the sentence and paragraph it is in.
b. The author’s topic and flow of thought.
c. The geographical situation.
d. The culture of the speaker and of his/her intended audience.

These are the laws you see in operation in any human communication, in any time in history. I believe God created communication in order that he might communicate with us. Since he is a God of order, and not of chaos (as can be seen in all he has created), he created communication to follow an orderly pattern – to follow set laws. It makes sense that God, who created communication, would stick to his own laws when communicating. For this reason, I believe we should employ these laws of communication when we read God’s word.

D.L. Cooper has summarised this nicely in the following statement:

"When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense;
therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning,
unless the facts of the immediate context,
studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths,
indicate clearly otherwise."

As we read scripture, employing these basic laws , we start to see patterns emerging. For instance, when we read Hebrew poetry, we can start to see the structure it has. This can then help us to understand what is being said. For example, having read a lot of Hebrew poetry, it is clear that one form of being poetic is to repeat what you have just said, using different words. This is helpful when we read something like the account in Genesis 4:23-24 of Lamech speaking to his wives:

“Adah and Zillah, listen to my voice,
You wives of Lamech, give heed to my speech
For I have killed a man for wounding me
And a boy for striking me...”

Knowing what we have observed in Hebrew poetry, we can see that Lamech is speaking poetically. He is not actually saying he has killed both a man and a young boy, but he is speaking synonymously, telling his wives he has murdered a young male.

Can you see what I mean? This understanding of Hebrew poetry flows out of our use of the basic laws of communication. Because we have applied these laws consistently, we have discovered a structure, which we can use to help us in our further study.

It is the same for many of the rules you have written up. They are secondary to the basic laws of communication, and may be challenged to see if they actually do arise from a correct use of the basic laws. If they do, we keep them, if they don’t, we should reject them.

This is part A of my response – addressing the issue of interpretation. I’m going to have lunch now, and hopefully after that I will write part B, discussing Matt 16:27 : )

I give up ... way too long, Hannah.

The Church is not peripheral to the world,
The World is peripheral to the Church.

Zephaniah 1:2, "I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth, " declares the LORD.

Let me start out by stating that my guess on events could be wrong and that the biblical prophesies will happen.

"The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light"...
Isaiah 13:10, Joel 3:15, Matthew 24:29, Mark 13:24.

There is another theory that the 3rd brightest star in Orion is about to supernova and will brighten our night. Maybe so, but will that event so far away cause our Sun to darken? http://io9.com/5738542/earth-may-soon-have-a-second-sun
Or that someone ran out of paper and did not make the Maya Calendar go for long enough. http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/5thsun.htm

This is my prediction, for what it is worth.

For our Sun to via off the main sequence early, our star must have much more heavier elements (from iron plus) inside it than the astronomy scientists care to mention (How can we know using SOHO? http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/ Could the variation in radiated emissions and sun spots help predict the nearing to the change, like a gas stove being turned off?) Would you care to say that the Suns time could already be up? This is because our star is a secondary star and there is no way of telling how much heaver material it has to start with when the star was formed. References, [1] [2]. I am sure that you can find more evidence that by looking back in time to the space around us, there are very few (if any) stars like ours that have. The prediction is for another 5 billion years [3][4] or 10 billion [2] years, choose your source. The best predictor is by looking at the stars within our own galaxy the milky way. But it is only estimating based on the observation of other stars. We do not actually know how much of the heavier matter has built up within the Sun.

[1] http://paulturnbull.org/pdf/HIST1601_lec3final.pdf - How the solar system formed.
[2] http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/AstronNotes/STARS.HTM - The life of stars showing the main sequence.
[3] http://www.solarviews.com/eng/sun.htm
[4] http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/040604a.html

Why is the sun considered a second generation star?
Because it has elements other than Helium and hydrogen while still on the main sequence.
What is a second generation star?
A second generation star is a star that has formed from the remnants of a previous star (this line was edited to make sense).
[5] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_evidence_proves_that_the_sun_is_a_second_generation_star

The nuclear fusion reaction compressing iron into a heaver element is endothermic and absorbs energy rather than being exothermic and giving off energy that happens for most nuclear fusion reactions [Nuclear Binding Energy Yield - 7].
[6] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/astfus.html
[7] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucbin.html#c2 - How much energy Einstein?
[8] http://www.webelements.com/ - A good chemistry reference as seen on many classroom walls.

This causes the star to blow off a dust (gas, dust and rocks) cloud and turn red. Our star will grow as a red star and may consume the mercury and then venus over the many years that follow, or will it? [9].

[9] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070914-red-giants.html

The way I personally interpret this, is that if you looked at the Sun right when the event happens, the sun would be darkened by the dust cloud to look like sack cloth and the moon will look blood red, reflecting the Suns light - Isaiah 50:3. As the dust cloud passes by the earth, it will roll back the atmosphere due to the rotation of the earth, and rain down rocks upon the earth that will look like falling stars. Once the gas cloud has past by the earth, it will form into a looped pattern to look like the sign that Constantine saw, the sign of Christ. A cross. The effect of the dust cloud on the Earth and the Moon will cause the Earth "to reel around like a drunkard" - Isaiah 24:20.

Isaiah 2:19, Revelation 6:15 - People will be living in the caves and tunnels to escape the situation.

And now for the melodramatic movie version.
[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm9_gpGF3Xw

- I could be wrong, But Christ is coming after this has taken place. You better be ready!

Hey Pauline, I’m not sure where you’re getting your info from about the verb ‘hautou’. According to my Greek text book and dictionary, it is a singular masculine possessive pronoun (meaning ‘of him’ or ‘his’) and couldn’t possibly mean ‘of them’ or ‘themselves’ as these are plural and would require a different form of the word. The structure of the sentence indicates that this word ‘hautou’ is being used to emphasise that the glory is of the father himself. – emphasising the greatness of this.

Also, the rapture is not based on one scripture alone, but several, as I have stated previously. I actually think that our beliefs on this event are similar, except that you believe we will be changed while we remain on earth, and I believe that we will be changed as we are taken from the earth to heaven. Would that be an accurate assessment?

Hannah, Sorry for the late reply. I've been tripping around the countryside lol. Just got back from Perth on the weekend and tomorrow I drive west from nth qld, my journey will take just under 9hrs .... Pray that I don't get tired and weary on the road :-)

I use Thayers Greek Lexicon for NT and Brown, Drivers & Briggs Hebrew Lexicon for OT.

Just to clarify, which I should have done when I wrote it up originally, I didn't write the list of principles. That was written by an Apostle with 40 years in ministry and has quite a few churches under him :-)

Ciao 4 now