If it’s not sinful to lie, if in fact it’s often the act of a righteous man and thereby approved by God, it would be reasonable to assume Jesus himself lied. Perhaps he lied a lot. So then. Which bits of Christ’s teaching were deliberate lies? If not Jesus, what lies were told by Mary, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Peter?
We know that Christians since those times have often lied, obscuring the truth and bringing shame on Christ. Except in rare cases where to lie was manifestly the lesser of two evils, we’ve despised them for it, and rightly so.
We have lies of commission and lies of omission. We know from direct scriptural testimony that Jesus did not lie, but we also know he didn’t always tell the whole story. He often spoke in parables with the intention that not everyone would understand what he was saying, so…where does that leave us, exactly?
Treating or repaying or two different propositions, the second half adds no new information that repaying and treating are the same thing. Treating is not repaying, nor is repaying, treating. If you are going to try to prove your point, use better examples since the propositional composition of your example has no relation to: “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” It is an invalid analogy, a fallacy.
That is irrelevant to the conversation. Adam is the son of the devil, Adam is the Father of Lies. Jesus is a type of Adam, who did not sin (unlike Adam) and did not lie (unlike Adam.) However this has nothing to do with lying being a declared a sin. Because before he ate of the apple (breaking the command), He lied to Woman about not touching the fruit (thinking that this ‘hedge’ would prevent them from eating it). The lie of Adam wasn’t the sin, the disobedience to the command of God was the sin.
Jacob became Israel, because he was both deceitful and a liar, God blessed him for it.
Here’s the thing. Unless God is perfectly good we cannot love him with all our hearts. It’s literally impossible to love something that isn’t lovely. If God makes a human being in order to demonstrate his strength by destroying him, he is no longer perfectly good. He’s an ego-driven bully with psychopathic tendencies, and no longer worth worshipping.
This is how I read that passage in Romans 9. God makes two sorts of vessels out of the same lump of clay. ie. there is both good and evil in us all as individuals, as institutions and as nations. God has bound us to this evil for a time. It is an act of divine mercy, teaching us the difference between good and evil existentially, not abstractly. When the time is right, God will set us free from our “body of death”. The darkness in humanity’s heart (individually and collectively) will be destroyed by being filled with the light of God. The vessels of dishonor will be broken and God’s glory made manifest.
I have to disagree. If it is impossible to love something that isn’t lovely, then we are seriously in the soup. God loves us even when we are still his enemies, and very unlovely indeed. The only way we can love God with all our hearts is if he gives us the capacity to do so, as we are incapable of that in and of ourselves.
Incorrect premise. As firstborn888, has mentioned before. You are living out of the tree of knowledge, looking through the lenses of good and evil. Something God said is a dangerous thing and why He gave the command not to eat of the tree of knowledge, knowing good and evil. Now, we are like God, knowing both good and evil. A paradox if your definition of ‘perfectly good’ means He knows no evil.
Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
God most certainly knows evil, and Scripture even says He created it.
What if the righteous man who wrote that bit of scripture was lying?
If I have money in my pocket, that’s not lying. If I have a private thought in my head, that’s not lying. It’s not wrong to conceal a truth.
But… This is getting tricky…
Aragorn goes about disguised as Strider. Isn’t that a lie? The deception is intentional. He’s not merely concealing a truth. If someone says, “Hey! You’re Aragorn!”, he will reply in his best (fake) accent, “No. I’m Strider.” Because Aragorn is good, the falsehoods don’t bother us. Rather, they delight and intrigue us, and we call him a hero. But when Saruman goes about in disguise, because he is evil we fear and condemn him, and call him a liar.
Our condemnation doesn’t spring from the deception itself but from the heart behind it.
While we were enemies, Christ died for us. There is something in me worth saving. God’s loves this part of me because it’s able to be loved. It’s loveable. It’s lovely. God’s not about the save the evil in me. Not even God can love my “body of death”. He’s going to burn that to ashes. Rather, he’s going to save the good.
It also says God is the Father of Lights in whom there is no shadow of turning. And that God cannot be tempted by evil nor does he tempt anyone, but that we are lead astray by our own evil desires.
I can make darkness by turning off the lights. This is true subjectively but false objectively. Darkness certainly seems to be something I can experience, and something that I can make. However, it’s not something at all. It’s the absence of something. In the same way, evil isn’t something. It’s the absence of something. If God “creates” evil, he does so by subtraction, not by addition, by removing the good. For example, God in his mercy might make a man a coward by removing from him the spirit of courage. There now will be a shadow in this man’s heart. He will be led astray by his own evil desires. He now must experience life bound to that particular disobedience, and in living this life, he will learn to love good and hate the evil from the inside.
Again, I think this is incorrect. The Hebrew word Ra encompasses a concept that is something other than simply moral lack. A better definition is: that which is destructive. But as we have seen, destruction can be used in the hands of God for an ultimately benevolent purpose.
Scripture says quite opposite. God is found in the thick darkness.
Exodus 20:21
The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.
Samuel 22:12
He made darkness His canopy around Him-the dark rain clouds of the sky.
Psalm 139:11-13
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Isaiah 45:7
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.
Isaiah 45:19
I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right.
I know what the Scriptures says. Your logic is based on a premise of ‘good’ vs 'evil. This bipolar world you live in, has no place if you believe God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc.
Anyone who does an honest study of the word RA, know it means utter evil, moral and otherwise. If it meant ‘calamity’ or ‘destruction’, the word would have been 'eyd or hayah. Since it is not, and RA was used, we cannot skirt around this issue.
How is it possible that at least 4 people in this thread can accept God created both good and evil and have no issue whatsoever with it? To Allan, he implies we are completely nuts, because he cannot believe (if what we say is true) that we can operate fully 100% out of love, knowing such things.
The reason is because WE DO NOT LIVE BY THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL! We live by FAITH by His Grace walking in the KNOWLEDGE OF TRUTH.
**1 Timothy 2:3 **
This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and reason.
**Isaiah 45:7 **
I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right.
It is not about what is ‘good’, it is not about what is ‘evil’. God declares what is right without consulting the Tree of Knowledge and that implies a lot more than what can ever be discussed in this thread.
“God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”
God’s light was hidden in a cloud. The metaphor would have sprung from the sun (sun-god?) being obscured by clouds, by smoke from fires, and ash from volcanoes (Thera?). It tells us nothing of God’s work or God’s nature beyond revealing his mercy. He does not wish to fry us like ants beneath a magnifying glass.
God understands evil, but evil cannot understand God. God understands because Christ “became sin for us” and descended into the depths. We also understand evil, because we share our lives with a shadow.
How is darkness created? It’s created by removing the light. How is disaster created? By removing prosperity.
I agree. God does not speak from a land of darkness, but from a heaven of light. We, down here deep in the tohu and bohu of the dark primordial sea, once had only the sun, moon and stars to give us light. But now the light from heaven has come.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit some of those verses.
A good teacher might give a child this equation: “Twice two is five.” This equation doesn’t possess a quality called “false”. Rather, it lacks the quality called “truth”. Truth is real, not falsehood, because God is truth. The child, counting on his fingers, spots the error and points it out. The teacher praises him and the child smiles. By struggling for a time with something which is not, the child learns something which is.
While we were enemies, Christ died for us. There is something in me worth saving. God’s loves this part of me because it’s able to be loved. It’s loveable. It’s lovely. God’s not about the save the evil in me. Not even God can love my “body of death”. He’s going to burn that to ashes. Rather, he’s going to save the good.
now here’s where I agree with you
I must say though Allan that student has a strong case that in his words isn’t easy to skirt around
perhaps we could continue the start of this tangent in my ‘‘to lie or not to lie that is the question’’ post
in the mean time back to the topic at hand ‘‘what is truth’’
I hoped to address the verses that have come up here, but unfortunately I don’t really have the time to make particularly good posts – this thread is moving much too quickly for me to catch up. I do intend to discuss the Isaianic verse stuartd raised and the “lying spirit” though, because I think there are reasonable explanations for both of these verses. And I guess as a bit of a “shotgun approach”: peculiar descriptions in the Hebrew scriptures do not equate to prescriptions for Christians today.
I was taught this for eighteen dark years of my life (and continue to hear it today). I am told that love is violent. That love is coercive. That the ways of empire are ordained. That Yeshua suffered a lambish life purely to satiate a cosmic bully, until He returns to wreak destruction upon the world.
But the Bible, not any soppy sensitivities of mine, teaches very differently. The Bible teaches that Yeshua (as He lived and taught) reflects the very essence of Yahweh. The Bible teaches that Yeshua (as He lived and taught) is our only example and Lord. The Bible teaches that it is by “the blood of the lamb and by the word of our testimony” that we overcome the wicked (Revelation 12:11). If we ever run to the Book of Revelation to find justification for a wrathful, violent, curb-stomping god we completely miss the point of war metaphors, both there and in Early Church literature, and we cannot remain faithful to the book’s genre or our Lord Yeshua the Christ. The whole purpose of the Book of Revelation is to vindicate God’s sacrificial “lambish” way of conquering evil. Men might be skeptical now, but one day all will see that it triumphs in the end.
I do appreciate that you don’t exactly hold this view and that one can “reasonably” misconstrue scripture to teach a violent theology.
The problem with all of your dilemmas is that you create a tragic and emotionally-intense situation where the only option is sinful. Your premises are entirely faulty and do not prove anything. You imply that we are forsaken by Yahweh and only have one option. But the truth is it’s not just you having to face these decisions. Yahweh is with us, weeping with us, but He is bigger than all of us and He does move providentially throughout our lives. I know that if I am given the control and strength to act as I believe in these situations (by not lying) Yahweh will be with me; guiding me and working in the heart of a lost brother who is willing harm. If we remain faithful to Yeshua’s teachings we can move mountains. Have faith brother.
Yahweh will fight for you; you only need to be still. (Exodus 14:14)
now here’s where I agree with you 
Allan that student has a strong case that in his words isn’t easy to skirt around