Why are there no new books of the Bible?

Oh yea, forgot to add. You have those insisting folks who always preach from door to door and offer their magazines and their special offer -- free Bible study. I believe they have a lot about modern application of the Bible in their literature. Perhaps, God is speaking through them, too? "You never know until you try it yourself!" -- I told myself one fine day and was never disappointed about it.

 

A very wise preacher I know was always faced with bickering questions from his congregation about the deficiencies of some other religion. "They can't be a real religion because they do this, or that... bla bla bla."

His steady response was always.... "If it uplifts God, it's good"

That pretty much sums it up.


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In my congregation everyone knows the marks of true religion from the Bible, because in such crucial matters one cannot rely on the authority of another man.

And the correct understanding of the Bible is the central point there. It is like learning some foreign language: once you've learned it, you can read the books and communicate. That is how you KNOW that you have learned it well enough, you know. English is not my mother tongue, but I understand everything on this forum, and can make myself understood. Even though I might need at times to look up some slang or rare word in a dictionary -- but that you have to do at times even for your mother tongue.

So it is with the correct understanding of the Bible. You learn the core "grammar" -- the basic principles, teachings and views of God, the main traits of his personality, as they are found in the Bible. You also know the meaning of the "words", your vocabulary. It takes time to study all these, but another point is to continuously APPLY in your life what you learn. Well just like studying foreign languages: you'll never master it, unless you practice, at least read some stuff in that language regularly.
So, starting from the very early stages of your Bible study you can see, whether or not what they are feeding to you is the TRUE understanding of the Bible, or just their sectarian views. If your study gives you definite answers to ALL your questions from the Bible itself, then it is the truth. But if every now and then they tell you like "oh you know this is a great mystery, nobody knows", or like "humans cannot understand God's ways!", or maybe even "humble people don't ask questions!" stuff -- then it's a counterfeit. Made no sense to give us that big book, seeing that we generally "cannot understand God's ways", for the very purpose of the book is that we DO understand God's ways well enough to be able to accept them deep in our heart.

 

"If it uplifts God, it's good" is a good way to look at things but the problem is who decides what uplifts?

I've heard people say that "God is Love" and anything we want to do is okay, because he loves us.

Well that may seem to "uplift" God but really demeans him.

It would mean that God has low or no standards, that to him nothing is right or wrong and that he doesn't care about us or what happens to us.

But because "God is Love" and does care what is best for us and cares what happens to us, he has high standards and tells us what is right and wrong for us, that way we can get the best out of life.

So we must be careful to use God's standards as to what uplifts.

 

Cheers for answering. I'm a little unsure as to how we know we're in "the last days". I know people have been saying that we are for a while now (I think there's a reference to it in Candide, which was about 300 years ago now). Does the Bible give any indication of how long the last days, um, last?

 

In theory, God.

In practice, any individual with the audacity to say that they know what God thinks. This set unfortunately tends to include a disproportionate number of psychopaths.

 

It only seems that way because wackos tend to stand out in a crowd. In practice, there are millions who know what God thinks and uplift God with their lives but don't make the front page news with it.

 

I thought God's will was supposed to be ineffable. Has that changed since I was at Sunday school? I'd hate to think I was fobbed off.

 

Oh, and incidentally, I doubt most psychopaths make front page news any more. You don't have to be a multiple murderer to be a psychopath, and plenty of people do things that they SHOULD know are terrible because they believe God is telling them to. I would say that a sensible Christian would be willing to distance himself from those people, but then, that would also require him to explain how a person knows that the voice they hear is actually the voice of God and not just some glitch in the neural network, and I've never met one who was willing or able to do so.

 

Sorry to tell you but I believe you were fobbed off.

 

So you think "a sensible Christian" hears voices in their head?

 

Oh. I didn't mean it in my post above, but yes, there are signs that we actually ARE living in last days. By the end of the 19th Century a group led by then famous preacher "Pastor" Russell calculated the year 1914 to be "the end of the gentile times", referred to by Jesus. They thought this would mark the beginning of Jesus' reign as King in Heaven. This was widely published in newspapers back then.

Of course, when the World War I broke out, many recalled these publications. Here are some quotations regarding the events of 1914 and their effect on the situation in the world and people's minds:

“It is indeed the year 1914 rather than that of Hiroshima which marks the turning point in our time.”—René Albrecht-Carrié, The Scientific Monthly, July 1951.
“Ever since 1914, everybody conscious of trends in the world has been deeply troubled by what has seemed like a fated and predetermined march toward ever greater disaster. Many serious people have come to feel that nothing can be done to avert the plunge towards ruin. They see the human race, like the hero of a Greek tragedy, driven on by angry gods and no longer the master of fate.”—Bertrand Russell, The New York Times Magazine, September*27, 1953.
“The modern era .*.*. began in 1914, and no one knows when or how it will end. .*.*. It could end in mass annihilation.”—The Seattle Times, January*1, 1959.
“In the year 1914 the world, as it was known and accepted then, came to an end.”—James Cameron, 1914, published in 1959.
“The whole world really blew up about World War*I and we still don’t know why. .*.*. Utopia was in sight. There was peace and prosperity. Then everything blew up. We’ve been in a state of suspended animation ever since.”—Dr.*Walker Percy, American Medical News, November*21, 1977.
“In 1914 the world lost a coherence which it has not managed to recapture since. .*.*. This has been a time of extraordinary disorder and violence, both across national frontiers and within them.”—The Economist, London, August*4, 1979.
“Civilization entered on a cruel and perhaps terminal illness in 1914.”—Frank Peters, St.*Louis Post-Dispatch, January*27, 1980.
“Everything would get better and better. This was the world I was born in. .*.*. Suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.”—British statesman Harold Macmillan, The New York Times, November*23, 1980.

And in the book of Revelation ch.12 you read this about the beginning of Jesus' reign:

So, it explains WHY the situation would turn so BAD on Earth at the beginning of Jesus' reign. Demons are hurled down to earth!
The calculation that brings us to 1914 is based on the prophecy of Daniel.

 

And they thought they were all going to be home by Christmas.

 

Fortunately, I do not believe that.

Dare I ask what you think gave you that impression?

 

I will of course concede if you can prove otherwise, but given Bertrand Russell's stated beliefs I would be very surprised if the above was not quoted out of context. Either way, pundits claiming the end of an era happened on [x date in the past] are as common as doomsayers claiming that one will end at [y date in the future]. That they would appear to corroborate each other in any instance is not that surprising.

This is not to dismiss the significance to society of World War I (which I am assuming is the big thing in 1914 that they're harping on about). But I think the idea that society is somehow damaged because it hasn't snapped back to how things were before 1914 is a little odd. Surely if anything, it would be a sign of a rotten society if we could do that? Western society has changed since then, but I think too many people are too ready to wring their hands as if all change is bad change. What 1914 did signal and symbolise was the birthpangs of modernism, which almost inevitably led to a weakening of the church's influence over society. People stopped seeing science as a mere curio. The decline of religion's overt influence over society began a long time before this though; it was pretty much inevitable since sometime between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

 

"Years ago, my mother gave me a bullet...a bullet, and I put it in my breast pocket. Two years after that, I was walking down the street, when a berserk evangelist heaved a Gideon bible out a hotel room window, hitting me in the chest. Bible would have gone through my heart if it wasn't for the bullet."

 

I guess that's why you believe the things you do but I'd check my sources more carefully if I were you.

Perhaps your statement:

 

It's your thread, so I guess you can say pretty much anything you want, whether it makes sense or not.

 

Ah, I see. You're reading "voice" literally, yes?

Most people who convert to religion talk about a moment of revelation, of clarity, of realisation that God is real and that one way or another He is informing the way that people should live their lives. The "voice" is an impulse to do God's work, it needn't actually be a literal voice in your head.

Either way, this is a semantic quibble. What I am saying is that, in order to distance himself from those who do terrible things in God's name, a Christian needs to understand what makes the impulses that tell him to do God's work - be that through trusting the word of the Bible, working hard every day, being charitable and so forth - different from those that tell someone to shoot up a school because they think it's what God wants.

This is what I was referring to, and it is notable to me that remarkably few Christians will actually stand up and say "this guy wasn't acting in God's name, he was just a nutcase". I just wonder if that stems from a fear that they may be "hearing the same voices" (again, not literally), and that they only difference between them is that those "voices" haven't told them to do anything bad (yet).

 

Well, obviously you would, because you believe that the will of God is knowable and that you happen to know it.

I was taught that it was not for Man to second-guess God's will. I found this unsatisfying, and it pretty much did for any Christian belief I could ever have had.

However, I find the idea that Man can know God's will (as in, the Christian god of the Bible) not only unsatisfying but rather unsettling, since it grants the nutters of the world too much leeway.

To put it bluntly, your version of Christianity, where it is acceptable for someone to pontificate about why things must be the way they are, not only seems utterly pointless and self-defeating, it also makes me feel kind of sick.