Benji
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression [a] and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken. [b]
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes [c] his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
- Isaiah 53 (8th century BC)
Hi everyone. thanks for your emails and plane letters etc, i have read and appreciated each one. I am having a great time at camp, and hopefully i will be able to put some photos up when i buy a camera.
But I've had a really confusing week, because a friend of mine from Church was killed in a car accident last Sunday. He was quite involved with my church's youth group, but noone really knew if he had decided to be a Christian or not.
Life is uncertain. There is no guarrantee of tomorrow. And I know that 'HELL' is not a politically correct term, and will no doubt offend many people. But it is real.
So what about you? Will you shrug this post off like you have with anything else you have met that rubs you the wrong way? Or are you gonna do something about it?
"And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" - Acts 2:21
posted by Jakes @ 2:30 PM
25 comments
25 Comments:
yeah jakes, fully awesome to hear from you.
real rad to hear that your having fun.
just had my spanish exam.three down one to go! :D
hell?man its such a nasty idea.i've always thought hell to be like...room 606 was it?some room anyway, in 1984 where they take you after you've been in that constantly brightly lit room so you lose track of time.yeah.that room, where they expose you to what frightens you the most.
although the idea of rats gnawing at my head seems pretty scary.
anyways.
but this life on earth seems pretty hell-ish as well.kinda seems like a constant cycle.kinda seems like it.
uh.im still not 100% sure of my beliefs.so if i died tomorrow in some horrible unforseen accident; i would go to hell?
its unclear to me....say if you were brought up in a pagan society/culture? i dunno you could be in some unknown village in the pacific, what happens to you then? is God biased toward those who have access to christianity?is he prejudiced in favour of the western world?....hm.i think not.or a hope not anyway.
i love red bull.
what a nice incongruant way to end the comment.
agama hindu dharma doesn't. it believes in life cycles. If you don't pick up on it in one life, you come back again and again in different forms - until you can eventually reach the form of nirvana.
good plan.
involves a lot of work though. many many rituals. many. many.
but it makes a lot more sense.
if you don't get it, you are given the oppurtunity to try again.
rather than - okay, this is what you could believe. oh you dont? never heard of it? fine, eternal suffering it is.
I was always told that the state of nirvana means a state of nothingness. Im not sure about you but why would I spend my live working towards attaining nothing?
You make it sound like fear and guilt are bad things...
Is it not fear of starvation that drives you to eat? fear of looking poor that drives you to earn lots of money? fear of being raped that drives you to avoid albert park in the dark?
Does guilt not teach us when we do something wrong? teach us when to say sorry?
you might say there are negative sides to fear and guilt, but I dont see it that way...in a similar way to suffering.
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actually, I don't think I could say that I know anyone who has become a follower of Christ because they feared Hell.
I dont think that fear should be our main motivation for being a Christ follower. Should it not be our desire for eternal life?
Which part about Christianity doesnt make sense to you?
I personally think people should be convinced about God and about Christ because of factual evidence. Fear has never been an issue for me so I have never given it much thought.
If my main motivation in life was to be happy and comfortable, I would probably be Buddist or 'agama hindu dharma', according to Hannah . I mean, it gives you all the good stuff! Second and third and fourth chances at life, no eternal punishment, tolerance of all beliefs (so that you won't be in conflict with anyone), and you live for what you want! Score! Many rituals? Dont need them. Remember, your own truth is what you want, so you can make sacrifices by eating. Thatd be sweet. It makes waaaaay more sense in terms of making me feel good and secure.
Seriously, I disagree with Chuck. The Christian life can be tough. Real tough. Killing your own desires and plans for your life and sacrificing it to God is hard.
So why do I believe Christianity? Why do I believe that there is a God, and He sent His only son to live a perfect life and die on a cross and then come back to life?
Because its the TRUTH. And the truth can hurt.
"Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."
- 2 Corinthians 4
Im not trying to use Hell as a threat. Im trying to provide you all the facts so that you can make a educated decision about your life.
Sorry Rob, your comment just came up. Thanks for it, the honesty was cool.
I agree with you on the fear thing. My motivation for being a Christian is to love God.
Does the fact that the Bible is 2000 years old automatically qualify for it to be innacurate and untrue? You keep bringing this up and you know that this idea is full of holes. What is more believable, a source that needs to be updated frequently, or an undeterred source that has yet to be proven wrong despite the fact that there has been oportunity for the past few thousand years? (keeping old testament in mind too)
And can you seriously say, from all that I've posted on this blog and the countless conversations that we've had, that I honestly blindly follow Christianity without questioning it? You know me better than that.
"There’s no real reason why you deserve heaven over any of us.
Or any reason why we deserve to suffer for eternity for our ‘ignorance’ aka lack of baseless belief."
You know the answer to this one, you just refuse to believe the fact. And to be fair, it is the hugest and most expensive fact of all.
Why do we ALL deserve Hell? Sin.
Why do we have the chance for a relationship with God? Because of God's grace, giving us what we don't deserve, if only we'd accept it.
To all who read this blog:
I am not telling you this so I get Brownie points with God. I am telling you this because I love you guys heaps, and I want you to see you dudes in Heaven with me.
As far as the bible being the "word of God" I have to be honest and say I haven't studied too in depth into it.
I would like to point our the passage that Jakes put at the top of this post. The passage is from Isaiah and was written as a prophesy of the messiah who was said would save the Jewish people. The book of Isaiah has 48 prophesies about how the messiah would come to earth. In the gospels we find that Jesus fulfilled 48 of these prophesies.
Ok, big whoop. The problem is that we have historical and archaeological evidence that the book of Isaiah was written 800 years before Jesus was even born...
Although the bible was written by humans and put together by humans, it is believed to be divinely inspired because of the way it is written.
The new testament was circulated among people (non-christians too) who were there when Jesus was crucified, where there when he made the blind see and the lame walk. There were so many copies and yet the works of Jesus are never disputed in any literature of antiquity - Chrisitan and non-christian alike.
One of the things that annoys me the most about a few Christians is that they portray they are better than other people because they are saved. Nothing could be furthur from the truth. No-one is deserving of heaven. If you ignore the gift of grace given by God you are no more deserving of hell than I am.
Because God is perfect, anything that is not perfect cannot come into his presence. We were made perfectly, but given a free will to choose to do wrong. It is because God is perfect that we cannot commune with him alone. It is only through the sacrifice of Jesus - who lived a perfect life because he is God - that we are presented as blameless and so can enter the kingdom of heaven.
One of the hardest things that I had to overcome before I committed my life to following Christ was my desire to control my own future. I didn't want someonelse dictating to me what I should or shouldn't be doing. I wanted to work under my own strength to be deserving of Heaven through the good that I did. The problem was that I could never do everything right. It is really really hard to let go of all you hold dear and trust that God knows the best way to use you. But who would you trust explain something to you better, the teacher or the creator?
personally, I haven't heard mr. creator explaining anything to me. If he did that would be great. Instead all I hear is interpretations from self-proclaim teachers.
and you said you'd heard of nirvana as 'nothingness' and questioned why anyone would want that.
I'd describe it more as 'deep tranquility'. why would you not want that?
Firstly we have more than only biblical references to the life of Jesus. The book of Luke (one of the gospels of Jesus' life) is so highly respected by top scholars in the field of literature of antiquity that when there is any doubt as to what happened in 1st centuary BC they look to Luke to find the answer. In fact, when they believe the bible to be wrong, it is proven right through archeological digs.
Secondly, the first members of the Christian church were persecuted, tortured and crucified for their beliefs. The idea that anything that didnt agree with the Church was destroyed is ludicrous. For many many years Christianity was the scapegoat for all the wrong things that happened in the Roman Empire, it was more likely that any documents affirming Christianity would have been destroyed.
I'm sorry that I didn't explain that well. I was simply trying to explain why we are all deserving of hell.
yeah nirvana is just another form of heaven isnt it?well of paradise?
ok.so adam and eve were tight with God correct?
if you had such a mindblowingly close relationship with God, why on earth would you go and screw that up by doing the ONE THING he told you not to do?
is God not that awesome enough to respect what he says?
did God create a stupid stupid species to rule the earth?
why did eve eat it?
cos the devil tempted her?
thats a pretty lame excuse methinks.
"ah crap God im really really sorry that i totally undermined you and did what you specifically told me not to do...it was that damn satan down the road.can you go kick his ass instead?"
and we have to burn for what they did.those bastards.
umm not the dead sea scrolls as far as i can remember. It was a Roman historian. I'll look up the name and the quote for you when I get a chance. It was discussed on a video the Jakes showed me on the resurrection of Christ and how we know the bible is true. It would be good to see it. It explains a lot of what I'm trying to say in a much better way. Oh and yeah it did explicitly say something along the lines of "the was a man name Jesus of Nazereth some called him the Christ. He did many wonderous things (i do remember it referring to his miricles) and ws crucified on a roman cross by the roman governor Pontias Pilate." - thats the general jist anyway.
As to the whole extent of the burn and pillage - thats only what we've been told in books right?
Yeah, I have always thought it was really crap that we have to pay for the mistake that adam and eve made. But when you think about it, are there any of those things that we know God says is wrong that we do anyway?
*sigh It is amazing, how much proof people need...
Perhaps the problem is not in the lack of proof, but that the proof requires something of you. If its not true, you dont have to worry about it, but if it is, it means everything you do and believe has to change. Quite and obstacle.
there is so much evidence that a one true God exists.
how do you know that the Christian God is the right one?
how are you sure that the God portrayed in the bible is more ...how to put it... valid than the Muslim God?
"Perhaps the problem is not in the lack of proof, but that the proof requires something of you. If its not true, you dont have to worry about it, but if it is, it means everything you do and believe has to change. Quite and obstacle."
- JQ
Agreed. good comment.
"That’s another thing, the way Christians can turn their backs on their religion shows quite blatantly either incredible stupidity on their part or a lack of actual reasons to believe in it –(ie: it shows that even after having actually been Christian, they still are not certain of your creators existence)." - Rob
You've forgotten one huge chunk of the situation, and that huge chunk is the Devil. He wants to do anything he possibly can to stop Christians from doing what they're doing. But also another huge factor in leaving is just no real commitment in the first place, or not really knowing God.
"how do you know that the Christian God is the right one?
how are you sure that the God portrayed in the bible is more ...how to put it... valid than the Muslim God?" - Stace
we've already discussed this heaps, but I'll say a quick run-down on why I don't believe in other religions. Basically, the crux of the matter is the perfect life of Jesus, His crucifiction, and His ressurection. This was all predicted in the old testament, otherwise known as the Jewish Bible.
And no, as far as I know Robbie, the old testament writers were only predicting the coming of THE Messiah (ie there can only be one). Prove me otherwise. His life and death were recorded in resources external to the Bible (refer to JQ, or the Jesus video tape that he has. If you cant be bothered researching this properly, I highly recomend you re-evaluate your priorities in life), as well as the effects of early Christianity, and the lives (and executions) of the original 12 disciples.
Basically, Jesus was witnessed by thousands of people in his miracles, He was also witnessed by the ancient prophets, who declared Him as being God. What miralces/predictions of the future did Mohammed achieve? who were the people who predicted his coming?
you know why i dont believe Buddism and those other relativistic religions, and why i dont believe in Judaism. It's ALL about Jesus:
'Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."' - John 14
update coming soon.
the dead sea scrolls are copies of old testament books.
but did muhammed predict anything that came to pass? was there any supernatural occurance that pointed others to think he was God's only true servant?
I see wot you are saying with JQ's comment, but it is not simply a few minor changes in the way you live. it is a totally new life, and it is really hard.
Wot could the devil possibly do if you knew Christianity was true? I dont know, but I know that he would do everything he possibly could to make you think otherwise.
"Jacob, the way I can justify not researching this is:
Only in the last few decades have people discovered all these facts and made them accessible to everyone.
What did Christians do before that?-followed it blindly.
How can your salvation be dependant on what you choose to follow blindly? –it can’t."
-Robbie
That is a lame excuse for not researching dude.You have the advantage, you have been given an opportunity with all this info to believe that others did not.
Why can't it? And what do you mean by 'Blindly'?
I have decided now that I am not christian. Some of my beliefs differ from those who seem to call themselves christians. Christian is a dirty word that is used by many to mean many different things. My relgion does not fit what non-christians define as christian, nor what many 'christians' define as christian.
Therefore from this day foward, I am merely 'religious'.
Also in reply to the only thing i read on this page.
Rob: "Christianity = baseless belief. –unless you base it on personal proof i.e. through prayer."
Archeological evidence & history, creation science, argument from design, cosmological argument, argument from miracles, morality.
Your claim is baseless not to mention foolish.
The word Christian is knocked about quite a bit, and it often carries bad connotations.
But Christian basically means "follower of Christ". So, if one follows the teachings of Christ, (and therefore believes that He lived a perfect life, died for our sins and came back to life), that means by the original definition that they are Christian. Those are my thoughts, thanks for yours Leitch.
Robbie, Isaiah is one of the books of the Qumran. Check out this site if you are confused:
http://www.ao.net/~fmoeller/qumdir.htm#Directory
"That is a lame excuse for not researching dude.You have the advantage, you have been given an opportunity with all this info to believe that others did not."
I see what you are saying dude - if you really know it, how can you NOT follow? Well, we have a tendancy within ourselves that is sinful and selfish. To follow God is to rebel against yourself - you are constantly at war with your sinful nature. Internal conflict. Don't say its easy until you've tried it yourself - I know I find it hard, aswell as even Paul (formerly Christian-killer Saul), who was a super-Christian, when he said this:
1"I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out." -Romans 7
I miss you guys.
You are correct with the definition jakes. And in its true meaning the word is applicable to me.
However, unfortunately because of the incorrect connotations imposed by society and secularists, I dont believe that I should catagorize myself as something that is misleading.
I am a student of the holy scriptures.
incorrect connotations?
Yes Robbie, I believe we are not on a level playing field. Maybe my sister and brother and I needed to be brought up in a Christian environment in order to follow.
Maybe for you, you would be more inclined to believe if you started from the outside. Maybe you have been given every reason and proof do believe, but you never will.
But I don't understand God's ways. Just make the most of the opportunities that have been given to you.
And under what authority do you think that you can classify anthing as being just or unjust?
I can look at my life as a prime example in support of Jakes' rebuttal.
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