-- John 3:31-36 (NRSV)
January 21, 2005
The One Who Comes from Above
The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, yet no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted his testimony has certified this, that God is true. He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God's wrath.
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7 comments:
No equivocations here. Real sheep and goats stuff.
Sheep and goats stuff indeed; it bears a marked resemblance to Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25. And this translation, much more so than the King Jim one: it says "whoever believes on" while here we see "believes in". More significantly the 'goats' are such because they have disobeyed the son rather than "believed not".
IMHO the emphasis we find on belief in the KJV of John represents a distortion of Jesus' thoughts. The synoptic accounts focus more on trust than on belief. (Apparently the Greek allows use of either word.)
the NAB reads ...
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.... if the wrath of God remains upon him, does that mean, not so much that he will be punished, but that he will not be excused from already existing wrath? Either way - yikes! I hate the sheep and goats idea ... it makes no sense to me that a God who encourages forgiveness and love would torture people in lakes of fire for all eternity. I think (hope) this is the ax grinding rhetoric of the gospel writer, not divine info.
Crystal:
Wrath is subject to many interpretations. I suspect all of us agree with you about hell fire.
The hell fire that some have been frightened by is more an invention of the jacklegs and rogues than of the Bible. You and I would not want to worship such a God, and it's not what Jesus said.
We have to face the reality that there is a great deal of bad religion in the world. Those scary stories have been used by (what I call) bad men to frighten the credulous and use them in various ways.
The real truth about Jesus is that he replaced the fear of the O.T. with God's love.
Crystal:
Wrath is subject to many interpretations. I suspect all of us agree with you about hell fire.
The hell fire that some have been frightened by is more an invention of the jacklegs and rogues than of the Bible. You and I would not want to worship such a God, and it's not what Jesus said.
We have to face the reality that there is a great deal of bad religion in the world. Those scary stories have been used by (what I call) bad men to frighten the credulous and use them in various ways.
The real truth about Jesus is that he replaced the fear of the O.T. with God's love.
I dunno. I wouldn't mind seeing a few television excs down there :0)
They keep adding new reality shows to the line up messing with shows I do like to watch.
I'm increasingly thinking that hell is in the here and now -- we see others in it, we feel ourselves in it at times. What happens after the body dies, I know not, but there is suffering now, and there is salvation now.
I don't really know what I'm supposed to believe about Jesus, but I have a hard time imagining God as correcting our multiple choice test, saying, whoops, she filled in the wrong circle, off to hell you go.
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