--On Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:55:34 Allen Roy wrote: > >From: "Stuart d Kirkley" <stucandu@lycos.com> >> What is soul? If we are all individual souls, then what sustains us? > >Why didn't Adam and Eve die immediately when they sinned? After all, they >cut themselves off from a close personal relationship with God and God is >the only possible source of life. They should have died instantly. > >However, there is a big problem with that for God. God wants to win their >loyalty back. He wants to win their love again so that they can live >forever with him. Then he will be able to love them forever, and they will >be able to love Him forever. But, since the dead know nothing and are not >able to respond to any overtures of love towards them, He cannot allow them >to die until he has the opportunity to try to gain their trust, love and >obedience again. So human kind is endowed with a certain vitality that >allows a person to be born, grow and live until the body wears out or is >destroyed by disease or is killed in violence. > >> Are we self sustained souls? That would be sophistry, which is pretty >limited. > >The Bible is clear, only God has immortality. As souls, we are mortal, not >immortal.
How do you explain the resurrection from this premise? If we are mortal, how is it that Jesus resurrectred himself and others from the dead. As did Paul, and Elisha in the OT. If we are able to be resurrected, doesn't that indicate that soul is immortal. Yet you state that only God has immortality. True, for in Him we live, and move and have our being. We are not individual, detached mortal souls, but divine reflections of the one Soul, or God. The only Life and Soul of all creation. The rest is mortal illusion, which Christ, divine Truth, dispels in the resurrection to the spiritual reality of existence.
We exist for a while because God wants the opportunity to win us >back in love. Each one of us has the chance to either live forever in love >with God or reject God's love and sustenance and thereby, simply erase >ourselves.
How can we erase part of God's creation? God is the only power. Period. There is no opposing power which could attempt to erase, or obliterate, or do anything contrary to God's all power. How can there be if God is all power? > > >> But what sustains us, obviously something does, since we all >> have consciousness. Perhaps we are not individual entities or souls, >> but reflections of the one Soul, or Life which is God, who is our >> life and our truth of being. If we acknowledge God as the one Soul or >> one Life, are we not more in tune with the first commandment? As soon >> as we divide the one Soul into multiple souls, or multipel lives, it >> is like a schism, and we are without a rational basis for what >> sustains these souls. This is pantheism, which is also very limited, >> and breaks the first commandment. But if God is Soul, the one Soul, >> in whom we live and move and have our being, then we know what >> sustains us, and we don't have to feel overly burdened by the notion >> that we are ultimately responsible for our fate. We can cast our >> burdens on the Lord, and He will lift us up. > >You are right, it is pantheism. And certainly not Biblical theology. > >We truly are guilty and responsible for our choices. But being guilty and >feeling the burden of guilt are two separate things. We can get our guilt >erased by simply accepting the substitutionary life and death of Jesus. We >are thereby justified -- not guilty -- in Christ. Once we are justified and >no longer guilty, we need not feel guilty, for God has thrown our sins and >the responsibility for them to the bottom of the sea to be forgotten. And >as the song goes, "He put up a no fishing sign." We are not to dredge them >back up. We are forgiven. We need to forgive ourselves.
True, Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. But we can truly cast 'all' our burdens on the Lord, even the notion that we need to forgive ourselves. All we have to do is acknowledge God as all power, all knowing, and all presence. If He is all presence, and He is all good, how can there be any room for anything which is unlike Him, unlike Good. If He is all knowing, how can there be any knowing that is not of His blessed creation. If He is all power, there can be no power opposed to His government. Period. THere can't be, since He is all in all. We just need to harmonize with that truth of being, and we do this by being faithful to the First Commandment, not recognising any other power than that of God, good. Stuart K.
Stuart K. >
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