Stathol wrote:
Beryllin wrote:
If calamity comes, do you suppose that only believers will experience that calamity? If God judges this nation and hands it over to its enemies, do you suppose that only believers will be in dire straits?
"God causes His sun to shine on the just as well as the unjust".
This is an extremely aggravating thing to hear you say for two reasons:
1) Implicitly, you're dividing up the nation into two groups: the just and the unjust. Guess which side you've given yourself the flattery of being in? Because, ah yes -- homosexuality is a
special sin. A really bad sin. A sin that's
clearly worse than your own sins, and therefore it's those evil homosexual apostates that are to blame to God's wrath -- you didn't have
anything to do with it because you're less sinful than they are!
2) The passage you quoted pretty well undermines your entire argument that God makes good things happen if you do good things, and bad things happen if you do bad things. Someone who's spent as much time studying the scripture as you have shouldn't be so foolish. Do you not remember the community around Job pointing to him and saying, "gee, Job must be doing something
really bad. Stop that, Job, and God will start being nice again." Did you miss the entire point of that exchange? Or did you miss that part of new testament where Jesus warned that a special measure of suffering awaited -- not the unrighteous -- but anyone who chose to follow him? Maybe you've forgotten that Paul was imprisoned, flogged, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, cold, naked, and persecuted and assaulted by bandits, Jews, Gentiles, and false believers. I guess Paul must have been a raging homo, because apparently that's the only thing that cause bad things to happen to anyone.
1) ALL have sinned. ALL. Every single last one of us. There are NONE righteous; no, not ONE!
The only reason some are called "just" is because of the grace of God, through faith. "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." To say that I view homosexuality as some kind of special sin is false in the extreme. I have sinned, and apart from the work of God I am as guilty as any homosexual ever was, of being a sinner. Nor is there a single homosexual out there who is beyond the reach and grace of God.
2) I have not forgotten. God causes His sun to shine on the just as well as the unjust. Just as Christ said, "No servant is above his master. If they have hated Me, they will hate you also."
Paul, even with what he had suffered, was still able to write:
"What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? it is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
"For your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter" Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us...."
I have not forgotten. Should it please God that I suffer such things as Paul, in order to bring Him glory, may I bear it as well as Paul did.
But then, that does not invalidate my point.