I guess I just don't 'get out enough'. I literally don't know any Christian personally who thinks they see perfectly or who are capital P perfect.
I would suggest that sects claiming to have a "sole lock" on "all truth" are a fact, and could point to at least 6 major orthodox sects that make such claims.
And I know a lot of Christians. I've met some blind atheists that think they see perfectly, but no Christians.
The claims of having "all truth" equates to being Jesus, who Is Truth. I consider such claims to be religious delusion.
I appreciate many of your posts as well. This one was well written. Your posts certainly make me think about things.
I guess being from the rural south, I just haven't been exposed to the perfect P church. I have served on pastor search committee and one of the things I looked for was humility (being human, not god). All my past pastors are most effective when they use their personal struggles in their flesh as examples rather than pointing out other people's sins.
I expect an atheist to act like one. Doesn't do me as much good as when a pastor points out their own deficiencies (or mine) versus when he uses an example that 'hits me where it hurts'.
I'd much rather come out of a sermon needing to repent than to be told I'm a great person.
The general observation is that we are all faulted internally, and this does not change while we are "in the flesh." This firmly pushes us to understand and move into the Grace and Mercy of God in Christ, because of our "built in" need of His Eternal Conveyances. In faith, these are the Eternal Matters we receive in Christ, and these we also "share in" by distribution/reflecting these things from our lives unto others.
The more interesting aspects of scriptures are WHY these built in faults are so, what are their purposes, how do we steer clear of deeper forms of slaveship, etc. And for these we study, scripturally, the "adversarial" components. How God made them, how do "they" react, for what uses do they serve, etc. etc.
The best scriptural summary of all of these matters is in 1 Cor. 15, where Paul describes that in the Ways of God, there is first the 'natural' which is essentially Divinely doomed to failure. There is a natural temporal/temporary "body" which is in the factual conditions of dishonor, corruption and weakness. This is also expressed by Paul as sin dwelling in the flesh and evil present with us. We, in the spiritual senses, divide from these workings, so they don't rule over us, but to say we don't have them makes us instant liars and hypocrites. It's a tricky place for most believers. We want to be "only good" in order to be "acceptable to God in Christ" and our flesh deceives us into thinking that's the case, that we are only good. Reality however shows that we are entrenched in 'opposition' precisely to show us our need for His Mercy and Grace. When we think we, personally, have removed our faults, then have we not also removed our needs for His Mercy and Grace? This is where a lot of religiously minded people land. They forget our needs in Christ
are based on our faults. And conversely, we do not heap Grace and Mercy upon the evil present with us.
These are hard things to understand. That's why Peter warned us about "how" we handle Paul's Holy Spirit inspired writings, because they can FALSELY be wrested to "our own" destruction, when we do not "differentiate" ourselves as Gods children and the "evil present" with us,
which is spiritual adversity that is NOT US, that WILL BE destroyed.
2 Peter 3:16
As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things;
in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures,
unto their own destruction.
At least half the believing people that post here think they see, in the scriptures, their OWN (possible) destruction.
This just isn't the case.
God in Christ came to save us, and He Will Prevail. This matter was not left in our hands. What is it we are being saved from by Him should be the focus of their attempts to understand.
Paul, in order to remind him of GODS GRACE, and in order to keep him from bragging himself into irrelevance, had a "messenger of Satan" put upon him, in his own flesh, to remind him that GODS GRACE IS sufficient for us. And conversely, it will be GODS GRACE that will ultimately DESTROY that messenger of Satan in hell. 2 Cor. 12:7-9. This IS a hard thing to understand. That both "eternal life" was upon Paul and the exact opposite fate is in store for the messenger of Satan in Paul's flesh. This is just a tough tough place to get to for our minds. We are all quite blindly led to see "just Paul." Or just ourselves. This ISN'T the scriptural case that is made about us or about mankind in general. There is mankind, and there is the opposition movement, unseen, that is UPON the minds of all mankind.
In order to understand scripture we have to be able to see TWO PARTIES standing in the same pair of shoes. And no 'natural man' is prone to see that way. They can't. So they only believe part of what the scriptures present and mar the balance.
