What does "everybody is evil" mean?
24 Aug '15 17:46Originally posted by sonship
[b] God cannot be defended for the flood of Noah, which killed children.
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Just out of curiosity - How do you know that children WERE killed ?
I'm not insisting none were. I am simply asking how you know children were drowned?
God cannot be defended for the kil ...[text shortened]... e then Americans wrong to celebrate it ?
Not quite the slam-dunk you thought it would be, huh?
God hardened the heart of Pharoah, to make sure the 10th plague would happen.
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This is indeed a controversial matter. The Bible says both - that Phariah hardened his heart and that God hardened his heart.
The Bible does not just say it was done by God. It says Pharoah hardened, it says God hardened.
But I have no easy explanation to this age old controversy. It has never been so problematic as to cause me to not read the rest of the Bible.
Have you tried this?
Metonymy is integrally involved in understanding many of the verses that seem to make God the direct and active cause of negative circumstances. Metonymy has many forms, and the biblical examples that concern us here are those related to the concepts of cause and effect, permission and prophecy. In the Old Testament, God often revealed Himself as the author of both good and evil. Thus “God” is often put by Metonymy as the cause of events that were actually engineered by the Devil.
To get a better understanding of the complexities of cause and effect, let us consider the case of Mr. Smith, who gets drunk at a party one night and then heads for home in his car, driving well above the posted speed limit on a two-lane highway. An oncoming car makes a left turn in front of him, but Mr. Smith’s impaired perception causes him to misjudge the distance and swerve to avoid the other car. He loses control of his car, hits a concrete bridge abutment and is killed.
A policeman arriving at the scene might say that excessive alcohol was the cause of Mr. Smith’s death. Mr. Smith’s family might say the driver of the other car was the cause. The coroner’s report would probably conclude that he died because he flew through the windshield and his head hit the concrete abutment.
In a sense, each of the statements is valid, although the coroner’s report seems to most accurately reflect why Mr. Smith actually died. But did the concrete “kill” Mr. Smith? Not in the active sense in which one person “kills” another. Yet the concrete was the final cause of his death, for if he had driven into a huge pile of mattresses instead of an immovable object, he might have survived. Nevertheless, we understand that the actual cause of his death was something other than the abutment, which did not jump into his path. The actual cause was whatever made him lose control of his car, which in his case was his heavily impaired faculties and judgment.
It has been said that one cannot “break” God’s laws, but only breaks himself against them, because they are “immovable objects.” God has set up the universe to function according to many laws and principles, which He said were “very good” (Gen. 1:31). In reality, physical laws cannot be broken. A farmer who disregards the principles of soil fertility will eventually go broke. The window cleaner with a cavalier attitude toward safety, whose worn-out rope breaks while he is dangling from the roof of a highrise office building, will, because of the law of gravity, be rudely introduced to an unsuspecting pedestrian.
http://www.truthortradition.com/articles/the-figure-of-speech-metonymy-as-used-in-the-bible
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