marco wrote:
onewithhim wrote:
Obviously a portion of His people were not paying any attention to what He had told them through the Law of Moses and the many prophets. Jehovah didn't tell people different things. To disregard His letting them know about His own government coming to the earth, and pawning off that notion to embrace a vague, ethereal notion of some spiritual development inside people, is not His fault....He clearly told them over and over again.
Isaiah 9:6,7 Daniel 2:44 Psalm 37:9-11, 29 Matthew 5:5
Well he HAS to take some of the blame, for if the four places are the best you can come up with as the "clear" expression of God's intentions, then his prophets could have done with an elementary course in communication.
"They shall inherit the Earth" is a riddle. Yes, we can go away with our own interpretation. But why word it thus, when a few simple words would have sufficed to explain one of the meanings? Try this:
"Look folk, there's no soul or spirit - the body will go on living. The Planet Earth will be refurbished; mountains lowered, volcanoes removed and tsunamis a thing of the past. Good folk will live on this new Earth for ever."
Matthew's words are just an echo of Psalms, which is the usual trick of finding some bit of the OT to give the appearance of prophecy.
Now look at the next lines after your Psalms quote. "For yet a little while and the wicked shall not be." What possible meaning has this? Is this clarity?
Your Daniel quote starts: "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed."
The days of what kings ? Again this is as clear as mud. Yet you harangue people for not extracting a meaning from these words.
Should we put aside our belief in a soul because of these meaningless lines? I think not.
The clear expressions of God's intentions for the earth are exemplified in the four scriptures I cited....there is a whole 66-book canon that harmonizes with those cited scriptures. You offer a message that would've left little doubt about God's intentions, and may I say that that is exactly what He has told us---not in a sentence or two---but throughout the Bible. Don't folks find fault with a sentence here and a sentence there and accuse certain ones of "taking out of context," etc.? Well, that's why we have to read the whole book to get the whole idea. (And certainly, if Jesus reiterated what David had written, wouldn't there be merit in checking out a lot of what David had to say? Obviously Jesus agreed with him. David said, "Evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD,
they will inherit the land....The humble will inherit the land and will delight themselves in abundant prosperity.....The righteous will inherit the land and dwell in it forever." (Psalm 37:9,11,29, NASB)
I think it IS clarity when God inspired "the wicked shall not be." He obviously is telling us that we can keep from being despairing & feeling hopeless, because wicked people will not always be here. They will be "cut off," or, put out of operation by being destroyed. This is good news and a real hope for people who are sighing and crying over the wickedness being practiced in the world. (See Ezekiel 9:4, KJV.)
Why don't you go to Daniel chapter 2 and read it all? I assume people will do that so they will see I am not taking thoughts "out of context." Daniel describes all the major world governments that have had a direct influence on God's people, down through the centuries. He starts with
Babylon and goes down through
Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, all the way down to the kingdoms that would come after Rome. (Daniel 2:38-43) If you sneer at this, because I'm a JW, type in on your search engine "Immense Image of Daniel Ch.2," and you'll find an assortment of illustrations of this image from many different denominations. It seems that scholars agree on the powers that preceded the ones represented by the feet. Whether everyone agrees or not on what powers the feet represent, they do agree that the Kingdom of God will put them out of business some time after the Roman Empire. It takes a lot of studying to figure out just what powers are involved in the feet. Wouldn't you consider it interesting to find out what the thinking is on that? They are far from meaningless, and I have to say that your belief in an immortal soul is
readily contradicted by a whole line of arguments connected directly with clear scriptures....that have been muddied by church people, scribes with bias, and certain ones with a hidden agendum, mixing "soul" and "spirit" together and misrepresenting scriptures that contradict their shoddy teachings. (Such as Ecclesiastes 12:7.) People get all out of shape when
Ecclesiastes 9:5 is quoted. They say, "Solomon was depressed! We can't take that seriously!"
But then they defend the belief in an immortal soul by quoting
Ecclesiastes 12:7! Wasn't Solomon still depressed, if he was depressed when he wrote Eccl.9:5?
Whether or not he was depressed, the two verses seem to contradict themselves, IF you believe in an immortal soul. So let's just say that Eccl.9:5 is legitimate. "The dead are conscious of nothing." How do we understand Eccl.12:7? (Never mind that the "spirit" is not the same thing as the "soul.") The "spirit" MUST have a different meaning than an immortal soul. What happens to a dead person? He goes back to dust (Genesis 3:19; first part of Eccl.12:7). If the dead know nothing, then what could the spirit possibly be? How about
the vital force in living creatures? The force from God that keeps a being alive?
The Hebrew Scriptures, inspired by the Designer of man, evidently use
ru'ach to denote this vital force that is the very principle of life, and
neshamah' to represent the breathing that sustains it. (More interesting information available from
Insight on the Scriptures Volume 2, by the WT Bible & Tract Society, at no cost.)
This "ru'ach" (spirit) returns to God in the sense that He is the Source of life. It is He who will decide the future prospects of the dead person.
There is plenty of solid reason to reject the belief in an immortal soul. It takes EFFORT to read all of the scriptures and glean an accurate picture of what God wants us to know about our origins, His nature, why there is suffering, why the sacrifice of Jesus means something, what the future is for the Earth. The scriptures are full of what conditions on the Earth will be like when the Messiah begins his reign. (One such scripture is
Isaiah 11:1-10. A person who is familiar with the Bible knows that "a twig out of the stump of Jesse" is referring to the Messiah, who is a descendant of David, the son of Jesse.)
