Question #1:
Why Do You Think God Created All The Other Planets Aside The Earth?

In your estimation, what for?
Is it for a future inhabitation?
Or a previous habitation?

The number of galaxies in the universe is largely unknown to humans. In fact, scientists speculate that there may be an infinite number of galaxies. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to host about 100 billion planets most of which orbit a star. In the near past, astronomers have discovered hundreds of planets in our galaxy, some of whom exhibit some Earth-like characteristics. Our solar system comprises of the sun, eight planets and their moons, and several small solar system bodies.
Previously, Pluto was considered to be the ninth planet in the Solar System. However, in 2006, Pluto was demoted to the status of a "dwarf planet". This was due to more concrete, strict definitions of what a planet is. In order to constitute as a planet, an object must not only orbit the Sun, but must also have large enough mass that gravity can create a rounded shape. A potential planet must also be the most important object in its "neighborhood". As Pluto has close neighbors, it no longer counts as a planet in its own right.
The planets in the Solar System are as follows:
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune

Response #1:
Hello there.

It's an interesting question. To begin with, the Bible says almost nothing about the vast universe out there. At least, it says nothing in detail about it, so that when we attempt to give answers to questions like yours, we ought to be careful to avoid making unwarranted speculations.

The Scriptures say:

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day...
...And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
Genesis 1:6-8, 14-19 ESV

and

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
6 His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
Psalm 19:1-6 KJV

and

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades
or loose the cords of Orion?
Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
or can you guide the Bear with its children?
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?
Can you establish their rule on the earth?"
Job 38:31-33 ESV

There are two things that we can draw out of the above passages:

1. The Universe outside the Earth exists to teach us of the Glory and Power of God. Its immensity and complexity are witnesses to His Incredible Ability, the limits of which are impossible to imagine. One Who made such a great thing must be worthy of our awe. This in turn serves to humble us and force us to acknowledge our own unworthiness, because in addition to being sinful creatures, we are also incredibly arrogant creatures.

2. The talk of "rule" in Genesis and Job suggests that the operations of the earth are affected significantly by the other things in the universe. It may be difficult for us to figure out exactly how some distant galaxy or star has anything to do with our little planet, but that would also be the point of the Job passage. We cannot fully comprehend everything God has done in creating the universe (Ecclesiastes 8:17). But if God says that the heavens maintain some kind of rule over the earth, we can take that to be true, even if we don't know how it is true. We do know that the Sun's gravity keeps us in this fixed path that we always travel around it so that life can be sustained on this planet. That, at least, is gracious evidence of such rule, not to mention the cycles of day and night and month and year that are all possible because of the Sun's position and the Moon's orbit around the earth.

There is at least one other thing that we can say about the vast universe outside the earth: it separates us from God's Holy Abode in the Third Heaven, so that we are not destroyed because of our sinfulness. You can see this in the Genesis passage and in Hebrews 4:14; 9:11, 24-25, as well as in Revelation 4:6. The vast stretch of space is actually part of a double impenetrable (from the human point of view) barrier to the Third Heaven (the temporary Seat of God's Rule over all Creation), with the other part being the upper waters that were divided from the waters below in Genesis. It enables us, as sinful as we are, to have the time required to make our choices about God without being destroyed by exposure to His Unclad Glory.

So, while we can take for granted that there is no other intelligent physical life anywhere in the Universe, because mankind exists as a resource for replacing the angels that rebelled in God's Family, we can also take for granted that the other planets in the universe along with their stars and what other phenomena there are out there are part of the furniture of human physical existence. That is, they are part of one harmonious whole that was created so that human beings can exist and make an eternal choice about God.

This does not mean that there is nothing more to be known about the universe that surrounds us, but it does mean that we know enough to fulfill our purpose for existing in this body for now. Besides, this physical universe will eventually be destroyed and a new one made for perfect righteousness where believers will live with the Lord God for all eternity. So, getting too hung up on it is not a very good idea.

Question #2:
Lol. I feel certain that he didn't get that from the bible. The bible isn't that smart

Response #2:
For someone who thinks that absolute statements are arrogant, you sure make a bunch of them very easily.

Question #3:
Eeeehn, I guess I'm not that perfect then huh?

I'm guessing my statement about the bible got you pissed?

I'm sorry about that then

Response #3:
About your statement's effect on me, please don't be troubled about that. I wasn't annoyed. I was actually just pointing something out.

We all know some things for sure and are not worried about sounding sure about them. That we sound sure about them does not mean that we are being arrogant, even if other people disagree with us on those things.

I have no doubts at all that the Bible is perfectly true. I trust it completely. I stand on its authority to say everything that I say. That does not mean that I'm arrogant. It just means that I trust the Bible to be completely reliable and accurate. If you disagree with me, it does not make me wrong. It just means that you disagree with me.

As I always say, each person's beliefs are entirely their right and responsibility to choose. I don't begrudge you the right to have any given feeling about the Bible. What I always tell everyone is that it is God that you will eventually answer to, not me. If I'm wrong and you're right, then that is no big deal at all.

As for my first response, I really mean it, and I am quite happy to see that even though you are an atheist, you do recognize that you are not perfect. None of us is. I certainly am not. But that is why I am a Christian. I am leaning very heavily on the Perfection of Jesus Christ for my own peace and for rights of access to God Who is Perfection itself. If I could persuade you at all to be as I am, I would. But each person is free and responsible to make their own choice, so I have no intention to impose anything on you.

Question #4:
Ur mention of some far far away galaxy reminds me of star wars boss grin
Soo hmm,the bible never makes the claim that we are alone, matter of fact it's quite the opposite. The bible does mention quite a number of other intelligent beings asides from man.
But if you're talking about the universe been populated by other intelligent beings made up of ordinary matter just like us(regardless of the biology), well that's kinda of a whole different ballgame. You can check out something called the[b] Fermi Paradox[/b] to get the gist of it.

Response #4:
I found your post quite interesting, so I looked you up. I like very much what I see, and I thought to say hi and encourage you to keep growing and progressing in the Truth.

The Bible Project sounds familiar to me, but the two videos I just sampled on Joshua and Sin are unfamiliar, so I don't think I have ever seen anything they have taught, but I was happy to see it. Of course, there is so much more to learn in the Bible, and given that spiritual growth is about a comprehensive appreciation (that is, the learning and believing) of everything that the Bible has to say in a systematic manner, I think it might take very many short videos indeed to work anyone through the systematic theology that is necessary to at the very least bring them to a certain basic level of spiritual maturity. But what I saw so far is brilliant. And your responses on this board are quite the same, in my opinion.

It is ridiculously rare to find people who love the Truth, so seeing what I have on your profile excites me.

For my part, I am quite strongly affiliated with https://ichthys.com. When it pleased God to Grant my pleas to learn the Truth, that was where He took me late in 2017. I haven't had even a moment of regret of finding that ministry. If I hadn't, I may not have appreciated The Bible Project as much as I do now. I think I am the type that needs the kind of treatment and handling that Ichthys does. I suspect that it is only from a position of some maturity that I could ever appreciate the very versatile summaries that I find on The Bible Project.

I pray that Grace and Mercy and Peace from the Father and our Lord Jesus continue to sustain and strengthen you in all your good endeavors to honor the One Who bought us with His Blood.

PS: I have just looked a little more at The Bible Project. I tested out their series on Spiritual Beings, and I was sorely disappointed. Genesis is very critical to biblical theology, and when it is improperly understood, very much of biblical Truth is lost to the believer. The very nature of God, the reason for mankind's existence, the unparalleled importance of Jesus Christ and His Cross, and the hope of all believers are wound up with Genesis. Without the Cross, nothing would ever have been created. But the Cross answers the doom of Man. The doom of Man, in turn, resulted directly from God's Answer to angelic rebellion in pre-human history. Finally, the Cross secures the Hope of Mankind and the Hope of all Creation too.

So, when we get mixed up about the beginnings of Creation in the manner that The Bible Project does, some error will shoot through the entire system of theology that is almost certain to cause critical damage or at least produce an extreme vulnerability in the Structure of Truth in our hearts.

I hope you will not take offence at this, my brother. My intent is to make sure that nothing I said before leads to a fatal sense of safety in a ministry that I have not found to be as safely reliable as I could demand of any human ministry. It is not to knock them or you. I still believe that they are far better than most other "teaching" ministries out there, all of whom do not deserve the name by a long mile.

Question #5:
No offense taken boss, I'm not affiliated with the bible project team smiley and I doubt the guys behind the project would be offended also...

With that being said, I would like to offer some words on the issue u raised. Like u alluded to in ur writeup, the bible is really really deep and the biblical authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit were literary ninjas in the way they interwove themes and concepts together and how they were able to packed so much depth into seemly short texts. For instance, the story of Cain and Abel, which would take less than 10mins for the average reader to read through ,is packed with so much depth that for centuries, people with decades of bible knowledge under their belt are still parsing through it. Ancient readers of this text would recognise this concepts but sadly most of it is lost to modern day readers ,and I believe this is where the bible project comes in. I believe the goal of their videos is not to present deep theological breakdown of the scriptures but to ease 21 century readers into dropping our preconceived notion of the world and read the bible with a bit of understanding of the worldview in which the bible was written. We can't find the truth statements written in the bible if we keep trying to force our own will on the it. Their short videos help people ease into trying to understand the scriptures on its own terms without having them sit through long lectures...most people won't sit down and watch a 4hr lecture on the say the book of jonah for example( believe me I've tried getting friends interested in stuffs like this, but no luck so far smiley). With that as their focus , i think the bible project guys are doing a good job because at the very least, their videos try to get the broad gist across and hopefully get people to not only humbly begin to read God's word on it's own terms but to also let God's word read them(i personally believe,we not only read the scriptures, the scriptures also reads us and forces us to look inwards as we grow in our journey in Christ).

But as you have noticed, there's always going to be some drawbacks in trying to condense soooo much information into a 6min video. There's going to be many things left out and there's no hard and fast rule in choosing how to simplify some certain things or which things to leave out. This would boil down to judgement calls. But remember the target audience is people who are either new believers or people who would like to begin reading the scriptures as it should be read regardless of how long they have been reading it( I'm not trying to claim any superior knowledge over anybody but I've been in churches where almost every scripture that was quoted was quoted out of context...and it was not like the preachers were intentionally trying to deceive anyone but that's just how they've always read and understood the scriptures).
But for those who God has put it in their hearts to go a bit further, a 6min video would obviously not suffice, but luckily there are lots of lectures and sites out there by sound bible scholars to help one continue to grow. Even Tim Mackie (the main voice in the bible project videos) has hours and hours of lectures on his website where he goes deeper into several topics and like I said, the web is teaming with loads of OT/NT scholar, teachers and even schools of theology who offer great courses for free online (Dallas school of theology is a good one).

And finally, no one man or generation knows the whole truth, we all know in part. We all have blindspots, so it's ok for us to disagree on certain issues as long as it's not heretical(like those who try to use the bible to entertain sexual immorality or try to diminish the cross and the person of Christ). Concerning the spiritual beings series( I've personally not watched the whole series and can vaguely remember the ones I watched), it's fine if you disagree with the fundamentals of that particular series, There are many people who I listen to and respect that i don't agree with their take on certain topics... Sometimes it takes me months of chewing on the topic before I agree with them and sometimes I never agree with their take on it(no one is a 100% right all the time). It's all part of the journey.

Thanks for your words of encouragement and I pray God's hand would continue to guide and bless you. Have a wonderful Sunday.

Response #5:
To be sure, I don't have many on this board over whom I rejoice just like I do over you. I am happy, very happy to read you here. It is very encouraging.

We agree on quite a lot, judging by the above. As you said, we may not agree on everything. There is probably only one believer in this world with whom I have found 100% agreement in everything so far, and he is the man who helped me to grow up spiritually, and who continues to support me in my spiritual progress. He too, in his turn, had a teacher who helped him grow up, but when he embarked on his own pastor-teaching ministry, he disagreed with his teacher on some things, both in doctrine and in practice. So, it's not like uniformity is the goal. The issue is allegiance to the Truth. No matter what, we must stand with what the Bible says. That is the greatest thing that I learned from Professor Robert Luginbill, the man of whom I just spoke. It is what I try to live by today.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ, God become Man to die on the Cross for our sins and deliver us from the Judgment of the Lake of Fire, is my brother and my sister. I am not enemies with such a person. Because, however, of the lukewarm nature of the vast majority of believers today, I don't assume that these people are necessarily my friends in the Race. Very few of them in fact are committed to running at all, much less running well. When I find any who is showing zeal for the Truth, I do my best to help and encourage them. I take for granted that we will almost certainly not agree on everything, since we still live in a sinful body, but zeal for the Truth means that we will eventually converge at the βήμα or Tribunal of the Lord Jesus Christ, largely with each other's help, to receive our rewards for faithfulness and diligence in the Truth.

I suppose that it is possible that in the more comprehensive discussions of the Spiritual Beings concept, The Bible Project may clear up what I perceived to be fatal errors, and I do agree that as long as we are not carrying on heresies, we can, to some degree at least, safely disagree on what we believe and teach. I suppose the reason I am so concerned is that I know that it is not just the stacks of truths that we know and believe that counts but the integrity of the Truth-structure in our hearts that matters. Truth works just like a building or an organization. Every biblical truth fits in a very specific way with all other biblical truths in order to form one harmonious whole that operates in a very unique way. When "truth-bricks" are missing, in whole or in part, or damaged somehow, or even misaligned with each other, the integrity of the whole is compromised to some degree.

Of course, none of us is perfect, certainly not in understanding, but that does not mean that we should not fight for or push for the highest degree of accuracy in the Truth we believe in our hearts. If we don't, we are likely to be prancing about on an extremely dangerous battlefield pretty much half-Unclad and near-defenceless. Satan knows this and works very hard to corrupt the Truth so that we can be easier pickings for him. I know too many on this board who are enemies of the Cross today for just this reason: they were never properly taught the Scriptures, and they never particularly cared enough to learn, so the enemy stole them away.

This is actually what advises my activities on this board and elsewhere. I wish to help those who want or will receive my help to build a system of Truth in their hearts that is not only structurally sound but also powerfully versatile, so that no challenge thrown at them either by antichristians or by the affairs of this life will shake their Faith in the Lord. Apart from the incontrovertible fact that every believer goes through personal Tribulation for their Faith in the Lord, no matter what time or era that they are living in, our generation is the one that will pass through the Tribulation, so there is perhaps that much more urgency to prepare everyone who will allow it for the times pretty much immediately ahead of us.

I thank you very much indeed for your prayers. I am much encouraged both by them and by yourself. Peace from our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Question #6:
Thanks alot boss... I would very much like to hear what u believe to be fatal errors in the way we understand the genesis story that might affect our understanding of the Cross though... Maybe on a separate thread so we don't continue derailing this thread more than we have already 

Enjoy the rest of ur weekend boss...

Response #6:
That would be my pleasure. I rarely open threads because of my specific goals in my activities here, so if I may impose upon you, would you be so kind as to open the thread yourself? Please bear with me in this request.

Thank you. I hope that your own weekend has turned out well.

Question #7:
That's going to be kinda hard since Im not sure the errors your are concerned about. But i'm sure one of this days, there will be a discussion on this forum on something similar and we can both jump in on the conversation

Response #7:
I understand. I figured that that might be a hard thing to ask of you.

I think that although it is not exactly the subject of this thread, it is still within the general ambit of the discussion since the issue of spiritual beings in the videos had to do with the how the ancient peoples conceptualized the heavenly bodies among other things, so we could still have the conversation here. If you don't mind, I'll share the videos here and we can proceed from there:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH0Szn1yYNeef2AIszbltRK15dgoxA_57

That's the playlist.

PS: the first and most important error, in my view, is in the idea that the writers of Scripture necessarily saw the world the same way that the rest of the ancient world did and this impacted what they wrote. This is neither a necessary assumption to make nor a good one. It is a dangerous one because if we look at the Bible purely through the lens of the ancient cultures, we are apt to get the wrong ideas about what God is saying.

Now, I don't mean that the Bible can be understood without reference to the contemporary cultures in which it was written. No. Every pastor-teacher who is worth his salt would take the trouble of understanding the cultures contemporary to the times of the writing of the Scriptures so that the cultural references that abound in the Bible can be interpreted properly. This would work, for example, to explain the laws of Moses and, as an illustration, why men who raped unbetrothed young Hebrew women were required by law to marry them. But it is important to make a difference between how the writers of Scripture saw the world as believers in the Lord God and how the unbelieving world did too, because if we do not, we will read ancient pagan concepts into the Bible.

The Egyptians, for example, worshiped the sun, regarding it not only as sentient but also as deity. Moses obviously did not worship the sun. But did he regard it as sentient when he wrote that the Lord God made it, among other extraterrestrial phenomena, to rule over the day? Did Paul consider it the same way more than a thousand years later when he said that there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies and one glory of the sun and another of the moon etc? It would be a leap of logic to say so, since the language can be understood another way. Furthermore, if the rest of the Bible teaches that not only does "rule" not necessarily imply sentience but also that the universe is sometimes spoken of in anthropopathic terms, it means that it is a bad idea to assume that Moses, Paul, the psalmists, and Solomon necessarily thought of the sun and moon and the others as spiritual beings.

What the Bible actually teaches is that extraterrestrial phenomena like the sun, moon, and stars operate in ways that determine what happens on earth. For example, when the sun's rays reach a given part of the earth, the day begins, and when they are no longer visible, the night has come. The moon too rises to give less light at night, and help track the time, so that we can work out monthly cycles. The more we have learned of the Universe that God created too, the more we have come to see that the Universe outside the Earth affects events on Earth. We don't know even the tenth of it, but it is obviously so. That is what Rule means. The earth was created in the midst of a vast system that works to keep it habitable for human beings, and not only that, but also to limit the evil in human nature, as will be most clearly seen during the Tribulation with the use of asteroids and meteors and tsunamis to judge human evil at the time.

None of that makes the "heavenly bodies" sentient, nor does any of it mean that the writers of Scripture thought that the sun was a spiritual being.

What we can gain from understanding ancient cultures here is that their superstition and paganism must have come somehow from a corrupted understanding of the Pristine Truth that we find in Genesis. For example, it is entirely conceivable that although after the Flood, Noah's family did know of the Great God Who just destroyed all life apart from them, people like Ham and his descendants promptly rejected any notion that they should obey that God, so they forsook the Truth that they learned from Noah, and began to make things up on the basis of emotional preferences about the Nephilim that occasioned that destruction. This would lead to an entire religious system that culminated in the Tower of Babel in short order.

A corrupt appreciation of God's command that the sun and moon and stars should operate to order the times and seasons of the Earth would thus lead to worship of them, because Mankind rejects God Himself. This is what we can take away from an appreciation of the Bible in the context of ancient cultures, not that Moses thought like the Egyptians around him when he wrote Genesis.

But the Bible does speak of a heavenly host. And it talks of stars doing things in Revelation that you wouldn't expect giant gas balls to do. Of course, the Bible explains too through other things it says that angels are like stars because of their literal brightness. After all, in Daniel, we are told too that the righteous will shine the same way, and the Lord Jesus is said to be brighter in appearance than the Sun itself shining in all its strength, and He is called the Bright Morning Start too. So, we are to understand "heavenly host" in two ways: the physical luminary phenomena out in space AND the angelic beings. They are not to be considered the same, because when the Bible speaks of them, it makes enough of a difference between the two to warn us not to consider them the same. The failure to do this is what is and has always been paganism.

In Igboland, both in antiquity and today, the very Earth itself is considered a spiritual being (even in spite of its stark physicality), so are the waters, the sun, the moon, lightning and thunder, and the wind. None of this is warranted by the Bible at all. And it is not moreso just because we are speaking of Akkad, ancient Babylon, or ancient Egypt. We do see though that the Bible associates control of at least some of the physical phenomena like water and fire with the angels, so that there is an angel in Revelation that has power over fire, and there is also an angel of the waters in the same book. That is an example of some of these differences I spoke of.

In conclusion, the most important fatal error here is the one that attacks the utter separateness of the writers of the Scriptures from their contemporaries. We must recognize that separation or else we will fall into the trap of interpreting the Bible through pagan ideas. While the ancient peoples would have understood what Moses was writing, it would not have been because he agreed with them, it would have been because they would recognize the source of the Truth that had been twisted into their myths and religions.

If this error is fixed, it will address the other consequent but perhaps less dangerous errors about not only the Nature of God and the expression of that Nature in Creation, the Nature of the Angelic Rebellion, the Meaning of Man, the events of the Global Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the full Meaning of the Messiah. As it is, however tortured the route that they took to arrive at the Messiah, they did arrive there and addressed it correctly: the Lord Jesus is God Who became Man to come and die for our sins and reconcile us back to God. The trouble, of course, is that if anyone started attacking the vulnerabilities in this chain that led up to that most critical point, we are going to end up with a fledgling believer who believes in the Lord Jesus and is not entirely sure why. He may hang on to his Faith desperately so that he never falls away, but he will spend his entire life in defence, accomplishing very little else of value for the Lord, because his strength is so small.

Edited.
Question #8:
I can understand why you would disagree with their position on how the biblical authors saw the world but rather than I giving you my own opinion, I would rather let the bible project guys themselves why they hold such positions. They have a podcast on their website where they discuss at length the subject matter on each video series they do. That way you can see the rationale and thinking behind each video and you can evaluate it on your own terms... I think the podcast series on God might be of help at see how they arrived at the positions they hold
https://thebibleproject.com/podcast/series/god-series/ ..
Like I said earlier boss, I don't necessarily agree with everything they propose but their way of looking at the old testament is actually not unique to them...quite a number of old testament and even Jewish scholars parse these passages the same way.( ofcourse that doesn't mean they are right though)... hope you check it out... you might end up still disagreeing with them in totality or might just agree with bits and pieces of what they are saying.

It is well boss...

Response #8:
It will take a little while to work through all the podcasts at the link, and I think that I'll do so in time, but at the moment I am near the end of the first one and I still find them largely in this fatal error that I spoke of.

However, they present as teachers of the Bible and have not asked my opinion of their position, so it is not really for them that I have said what I have said. I endorsed their project before and am only trying to add a necessary caveat to that endorsement for the sake of anyone who may listen to me.

But I thank you for the link. At this point in my own development, I am starting on a lot of research for a major teaching project of my own, so I often find things like this useful in one way or another.

Grace be with your spirit.

Question #9:
Sorry I wasn't able to get back sooner.... I'm glad you are going through the material and i hope you get the time to supplement it with your own research so as not to get closed up in a knowledge bubble. I am of the believe that if you go through the materials and your own personal research, you'll see there's no way of reading paganism into the bible(quite the contrary, the biblical authors were very clear and intentional about this). But when people who think they are able to discredit the bible because they have read somethings about some ancient near eastern mythology, it would be easy to show where the worldviews converge and at the same time show how the bible was vastly different from it's surrounding cultures. Please once again boss, the aim is not to convince you to agree on every single thing(as long as we agree on the fundamentals of who Christ is, why He went to the cross and that He bodily arose on the third day, we have common ground to stand on) but as you said in your post, the material might be useful one way or another.

I'm glad to hear you are doing alot of research for your teaching project. This generation needs more teachers like you who are willing to take their time to dig into actual biblical hermeneutics and exegesis. There are too many opinions in the world today that are presented as facts, and with the amount of information accessible to people today, the simple answers that were enough for our parents, wont suffice in this generation( I know people who no longer believe much because, when they had tough questions, the answers given did not match-up with reality..... I'm personally learning how to say "i don't know" when I really don't know something,rather than doing a merrygoround of words and cause more damage to someone's faith).

I wish you all the best in your endeavors and may God bless and guide you.

Response #9:
It's okay. It's good to hear back from you. Everyone is busy, so that you make time to respond is appreciated.

Thank you for your kind words. Those with the pastor-teaching gift have a responsibility to be thoroughly prepared for the work of teaching the Truth, with spiritual growth, study in the original languages, and study in ancient history and church history, at least. Of course, this isn't easy at all, so there are many out there who have no preparation at all, even when they possess the gift at all, pretending to teach things they know next to nothing about.

As for the Bible Project, I completely agree that we are on the same side. I'm still quite convinced that they've got it wrong with the issue of Spiritual Beings and the issue of gods, but I'm still glad to have come across their work.

Thank you for your prayers, my brother. The Lord continue to strengthen you with His Grace.

Question #10:
@Ihedinobi3 ... Hey boss, hope your weekend was good.... I have this video on my timeline and I thought it might be of interest to you also based on your research work....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MXOOIEagxg

The speaker is Michael Heiser, a solid OT scholar and the scholar-in-residence for faithlife corp(the logos bible software people).

It's quite a long video but I think it would add some value to your work. Again boss, I do not mean to say one must agree with everything he says because of he's qualifications (only God is infallible) but I do believe I always learn a new way of parsing certain scriptures from listening to people like him.

Ps: Incase some of the stuffs he is alluding to in first hour are not quite clear, i believe watching this video first help might clear some things up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZKy1Xt2Ow0

Have a blessed week boss..
No vex say I'm sharing the video with u oo, u're the only person that I know that might be remotely interested in long lectures like this.... 

Response #10:
Hello bro.

Yes, my weekend turned out well. I hope that yours did too.

Thank you for the links. I watched (or rather, listened to) the second video. I think that Heiser may be missing the Bible's point, and that may explain some of the errors in the things that he said, but he wasn't all wrong. I certainly don't agree with the crux of his position, which he shares with The Bible Project too, by the way, that the Bible writers were that much in sync with their cultures in writing. I don't believe that because the medium of En-dor called Samuel in the interim state a god (and the term she used also means "mighty ones" ), that Jeremiah thought that departed believers are gods. Granted that the Hebrews didn't necessarily think of all gods as worthy of worship, the Bible does show that a misunderstanding of and an unwarranted fascination with the spiritual realm tends to lead to idolatry. That, in fact, is a huge reason why it is a bad idea to define Jeremiah's thinking by the medium of En-dor's, for example.

The use of material like this for me is that I have a strong apologetic bent in my pastor-teaching gift, so understanding the errors that can take believers captive is something that I tend to do, even unwittingly. What I see in material such as these is usually a sprinkling of correct ideas stemming from a tight grip on the fundamental Truth of the Bible, that is, that the Lord Jesus is God Who became Man to die for our sins, in a wrong system of theology. That is, on the whole, the picture that Heiser paints is, at least, problematic and worrisome, if not quite dangerously wrong. I haven't seen a private agenda yet in what I have seen, so it is my opinion that this kind of erroneous approach to the Bible comes from never having learned from a gifted and prepared teacher so that one can know exactly how to read the Bible. In other words, these may be the errors of a novice in the Scriptures.

As I said, I make these comments for clarity about where I, as a Bible teacher, stand. It isn't so much to get you to agree with me or to simply knock other teachers. So, please receive them in like spirit. As for me, as I said, I'm grateful for the videos. I do have use for them, even if I don't agree with them.

Question #11:
It is well boss... Maybe someone else on the timeline might find the lectures useful in some small way. And just as an aside, the guys u alluded to as novices in the scriptures are actually PhD level bible teachers. They are the bible teachers to bible teachers and it's the work that people like him do that informs bible translators and helps further the understanding of the biblical languages...but that's besides the point sha, I just thought u might find some nuggets of knowledge from the body of work that others have done as u do ur research and that's part of the reason I shared the video with you.
Also your statement that what was referred to in 1 Samuel 28:13 ("mighty ones" is not a good translation here) and how it connects to Jeremiah somehow implies that departed believers are also gods in the way we understand the the word "god" is still somewhat of a mystery to me and Im not sure how u got that from the talk. Maybe u were distracted with other stuffs and missed the points along the line but that's fine.
Enjoy the rest of your week boss.
Edited

Response #11:
I am sorry if I offended you with what I said. Putting you off was not what I wanted, although I considered it a possible risk in what I said. As I said, you are one of a very small group that I have met on here who seems to have actually learned something of the Truth of the Bible and who actually seems to care about that Truth, so my intent with respect to you is to encourage you in this Truth, if at all I can.

About the qualifications of Bible teachers, while formal education, especially of such depth or height, certainly has some value in preparing for the job of teaching the Bible, it is neither necessary nor always useful to understanding the Bible for, well, immature believers. In fact, it can be pretty dangerous for such. Nor is it necessary at all for mature believers either. The only group of believers for whom that kind of education is actually useful are mature ones with the pastor-teaching gift, because spiritual maturity in consonance with their gift helps them to parse the information they get correctly without losing biblical truth. But even without a formal education, a pastor-teacher who has been taught by another can still do a decent job of Bible-teaching.

The point in which we disagree here is how one learns the Bible. It is not by going to a seminary or listening to people with high-sounding qualifications. Not only is this clear from the Bible (Ephesians 4:11-16; 2 Timothy 2:2), but personal experience and observation easily bear that out. I certainly did my best growing up to listen to everyone who seemed to have the right qualifications. I ended up with more than thirty years of much spiritual confusion and insecurity. It was only when I found Professor Robert Luginbill of Ichthys.com that things turned around for me.

Now, if seminaries and schools were taught by only gifted and prepared Bible teachers, and each student is diligent to restrict themselves to one teacher and pay attention and believe what they hear, then these sorts of qualifications you mentioned would mean something. But that is not the case. The nature of this world makes it pretty much certain that you will not grow spiritually in a seminary or University just by going to class and doing all your coursework. For this reason, spiritual growth and preparation for ministry has been happening much behind the scenes throughout the Church Age. Paul trained Timothy and Titus, at least, and we don't see a formal track involved in that. Today, I am trained by a Bible teacher who is practically invisible on the theological stage. In my turn, I will possibly do the same too. So, no, men like Heiser are not necessarily the Bible teachers who train Bible teachers. Many like him are still novices in the Faith, in spite of all their academic qualifications. And this is something that shows once they attempt to teach the Bible, just like Heiser did.

As for Bible translators and understanding original languages, Heiser's work is actually the sort of thing that hinders such progress. You see, what he did is read the Bible and then make assumptions that are neither truly supported by the Bible nor by standard scholarship outside the Bible and then impose those assumptions on Bible scholarship. Let me demonstrate:

The medium of En-dor calls Samuel in the interim state elohim. The Bible reports that she did. Then, Heiser assumes from that (and other examples like that) that the inspired writers thought that departed believers are elohim, at least in the same sense that the medium did. This is exactly similar to the argument that Nephilim survived the Flood because the cowardly spies in Numbers claimed that they saw them in Canaan.

This is a bad assumption to make. At the very least, it is not a good one. There is a leap of logic from observing that the medium of En-dor thought of departed saints like Samuel as elohim to concluding that Jeremiah who recorded the story thought the same. That is not good reasoning. Jeremiah was merely being accurate in his report. Once you make such leaps of logic, you begin to read things into the Bible that are not there.

If biblical scholars buy this whole train of thought, then it will not help translations and scholarship in any way. Rather it will cause a revision of previous scholarship, which may have been correct. In fact, that is what I suspect is happening with much of biblical scholarship right now. The revision of the NIV to produce a completely different translation in 2011 than what was last edited in 1984 is probably an example of such degradation in Bible scholarship. I personally expect more of that to happen as the Tribulation draws closer.

As for the links, as I said before, I do find them useful. As I said also, not everything that Heiser or the Bible Project says is wrong. Of course, what I see is a very poor theology in their position, one that even if it has no ulterior motives right now for existing, provides very fertile ground for the sowing of very dangerous lies that can derail Faith in the end. I do appreciate the enthusiasm or hunger that I think that I see in them, that desire to understand and explain the Scriptures to others, but even zeal can be misguided. Mine certainly was for many years (I have years of posts on this forum as proof). And I certainly appreciate, very deeply appreciate your own love for the Truth and your dedication to learning it. But how can I serve you in good conscience if I do not point out to you whether this love and dedication is being rightly directed? In fact, I would much rather not say anything that you may find offensive and discouraging in your pursuit of the Truth of the Bible. I have only said what I have here because I jumped the gun the first time I commented on The Bible Project. I am a Bible teacher. Some people may be listening to me, unbeknownst to me. If I give them the wrong ideas about things that may be dangerous to them by what I say about other teachers, ministries, and "systems of truth," I would be failing in my duties to tend and feed the Lord's sheep.

As for the whole business of how we conceptualize the term "god" today, I do see what both the Bible Project and Heiser are saying. God is quite obviously not a personal name. But even today in the 21st century, pretty much everyone knows that. Atheists pretend that the word implies a specific entity, because it gives them wiggle room in debates, but in English, we differentiate between "God," the Transcendent and Great Being Who made all things, and "gods," who may be His Agents or may be impressive creatures and even humans that fire our imagination in one way or another. This thing is evident in all cultures across the world. In Igbo culture, for example, the departed dead are regarded as part of the rank and file in the spiritual realm that answers overall to the Chi-Ukwu or the Chi-na-Eke, and although they are generally called ichie, they are also mmuo (spirit), which is a synonym sometimes for chi (god). You can see the similarity in that thought with the medium of En-dor. It is actually a pagan thought that shoots through all cultures.

Now, I still am not clear why they are so interested in making this observation about how the words are used today. It seems to me that it is only indicative and preparatory for something that they actually want to say, but I don't yet know what. But the biblical position is thus:

The Trinity is the true God, the One in Whom all Authority resides. The angels (including the cherubim, who are only the highest rank of angels, not a different order of creature) are sons of God because they were created to exercise God's Authority over Creation, using their free will to choose whether to remain loyal to God in doing so or to rebel against Him (since they were all created loyal to Him, that is, holy) in doing so. They are "gods" because they all act as God's deputies in varying ways and to varying degrees over the Creation presently extant. Adam was created in the exact same role. That is why he too is called a son of God in Luke 3. But his choice to rebel put him under Satan's dominion, so his descendants are mostly not really acting as God's deputies anymore. We are not exactly rulers of this earth in the sense that we were created to be. However, some human beings have been acting as God's deputies over the human race since the beginning. Adam was given rule over Eve, and thus all men have rule over their households and are answerable to God for how they exercise their authority. Furthermore, when communities form, those who rule are also God's deputies answerable to God for the people over whom they rule. All rulers, therefore, are "gods" and sons of the Most High. In fact, this is one place that Heiser was quite obviously wrong. Psalm 82 was about human rulers, not angels. Proverbs bears this out, as does Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2.

Biblical theology is only truly formed from what the Bible says, not from what we think it says. That is, if the Bible says that the witch of En-dor thought of Samuel as a god, then that is what it says. It does not say that Samuel was a god. I should also explain that while you and I can speak of gods as we have been in this conversation, the Hebrew means "mighty ones" (elohiym is a plural of majesty for "God" ). This does play into the whole business of deputying for God. God's deputies do possess real power to bring their will to bear upon their spheres of authority, so they are "mighty" in a very literal sense. That too is why we are taught to pray for rulers, rather than defy them or rebel against them, as we see in 1 Timothy 2. Their power is real. The same is also why this whole exorcism business (that is, the deliverance ministry economy) is so wildly dangerous. Even rebel angels still have real authority and power, and we ought never to meddle with them without God's express injunction, and He has not given such an injunction again since the Bible was completed by the apostles and their special companions.

In other words, Heiser and the Bible Project are not reading the Bible as it was written. They are reading into it assumptions that are warranted neither by the Bible nor by any external evidence (and any external evidence is necessarily suspect, by nature).

Again, I ask you not to be offended by the above. This is only my duty as a teacher. I certainly don't require you to believe me or agree with me. I have said what I have said because I am convinced that it is true. Have a good week yourself, my friend.

PS.: @omokoladejames, I should make this correction: you are right that Heiser and The Bible Project don't hold that gods like the ones in Psalm 82 and 1 Samuel 28 are to be worshipped.

The more I consider it, the more I see that the problem is not in the conception of God and gods. My first red alert was the description/definition of spiritual beings in The Bible Project that put the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies in the spiritual realm. Perhaps I didn't understand what they were saying about it. Right now, my problem with Heiser is when he says things like how the council in Psalm 82 is necessarily the same as the one in Psalm 89 and how Genesis 1 is speaking of God as deciding with the angels to make Man.

This sort of thing is rife in the things that they say, and I think I let them confuse other things they rightly said, like that the ancient world conceived of a spiritual world where there was a plethora of entities. I certainly hold that all the religions and cultural mores of the world, especially the very old ones began from Eden and are only corruptions and twists of the Truth, that is, that they are caricatures of what the human race began with. So, I am also of the opinion that the Bible was written to straighten things out, to, if you will, recall us to the Truth and expand it to answer the growing complexity of human existence. So, when Heiser mentions the Enuma Elish, I consider that my typical answer to arguments of that sort from antichristians is that the Bible need not have either preceded such tales or copied them. It need only be the correct version of the facts caricatured by such made-up stories.

I think that I also have a significantly different view of inspiration than they do. That would be a major difference, if I am understanding them correctly.

Question #12:
It is well sir... And please sir, it was't annoyance that I was trying to convey in my last post, I was just trying to convey that regardless of whether we think a person is wrong or not, we should try not to diminish them or their lives work. For example many phd level biologist wholeheartedly believe in Abiogenesis(which i personally think is wrong) but i'll still take it as an unfair assesment of them if someone was to say they are novices in biology. Thats the only reason i brought up their credentials, it wasn't to elevate them in anyway and from all our previous conversations, you can attest to the fact that i've always maintained that anybody can be wrong regardless of how the world perceives them...We all have blind spots and only God is infallible..Kindly accept my apologies if my statements came across as aggressive.

I'm glad that you see the point they are trying to make.Bible scholars are realizing that the word "god"(Elohim) does not carry the same meaning to the biblical authors as it does to us modern readers(I use the term scholars,so that there it doesn't come across as if it's just this two who are pushing personal theologies...U can verify it). Just like how the word "girl" to someone living in the middle ages just meant a child(whether male or female), the word Elohim is better understood as meaning a disembodied spirit(divine beings) to an ancient isrealite. It doesn't carry the same baggage of attributes we attribute to it like worship,alligence, ominpotent etc. Part of what brings confusion for modern readers to the word elohim is the fact that it is used for Yahweh but at the same time it used for many other types of spiritual beings(angels,false gods,spirit of a dead person) and also one or two other places in the bible that one can argue that humans were in view in the text(one doesn't need to go there, but the argument can still be made). But almost in every case where the word elohim is used in the bible, a spiritual being is in view, so it makes sense when the biblical authors use the word Elohim for Yahweh also because Yahweh is also a Spirit. But He is a Unique Spirit(No other spirit can be compared to Him) and He is the sole creator of everything both visible and invisible, which includes other spirits and He is the only one who is Sovereign over all. But the biblical authors were usually clear who they were talking about when they use Elohim for Yahweh in contrast to other spiritual beings.Usually they either used the article "ha-" in conjuction with the word elohim to specify or used words like "Elohim of elohim" or Elohim ḥayyim("the living God"wink etc. So though the word 'god' is not technically a wrong translation,it might just carry many unnecessary connotations to it for a modern day reader who has already been pre-configured to attach some 21st century meaning to the word. Hence why spirit or divine being might be a better way of understanding how the biblical authours viewed the word "god'. That was the point that was been made and you can also see this thought process been reflected in modern translations in places like 1 Samuel 28 where the appearance of samuel is translated as spirit,divine being,ghost etc and also psalm 82 where the gods are usually translated as divine being...
I can understand why you would say that elohim can also be translated as "mighty ones" in 1 samuel 28 because of its root word ' El ' which connotes strength or power and also used for God in the bible ,majorly in connection with the divine attributes like El Shaddai, El Elyon and also with names connected with the God of isreal like Samu-el,Beth-el,Micha-el etc, but I'm of the opinion that translating elohim as "mighty ones" in 1 samuel 28 would give the wrong meaning of what the author was trying to convey in the text.

Ofcourse we can disagree in how the biblical authors viewed the word god in the OT and that what they meant by god is what we mean by it, that would fine but what usually surprised me was how you took what was said in a very different way and i wasn't sure how you were getting there. If i hadn't watched those videos myself or actually tried to verify it in my own little way and all i had was what you were writting , I would have lost hope in many bible translations and lost hope in solid christain institution. But i am glad you agree for now that what is being said cannot lead one down the wrong path in anyway(atleast concerning how the isrealites viewed the word god) and if i may say also its of my opinion that it would actually help people clear up the misconceptions that the early isrealites were in some way polytheist or henotheist.

I'm not sure what you mean here sir as i know they and every serious believer believes the scriptures to be the word of God. I think this might also stem from a misunderstanding of their position.

God bless u sir

Response #12:
I largely agree with you. As for the meaning of "elohiym," I think I have it on good authority that the literal meaning is "mighty ones." I'm not saying that the literal meaning is always the right one to translate the expression. For example, the Lord God is Elohiym, but we don't understand "Elohiym" there to mean that the Lord God is "mighty ones." It's a plural of majesty in His Case, so we know that when the term is used for Him, we mean the Almighty, or the Most High God, or even simply God.

The context will generally decide, therefore, how to translate the word when it is used. However, in 1 Samuel 28, I would say that the medium was terrified, not unlike Daniel later was when he saw a vision of an archangel. It is not unlikely that that fear led to her qualifying Samuel in the wrong manner. She was an unbeliever, after all.

I apologize for how I reacted to them. I tend to hurry through large material, especially because I do have a lot on my plate much of the time, and I'm always rather wary of Bible teachers. There are many out there who are doing all kinds of harm, both wittingly and unwittingly.

As for the difference I perceive between me and them with respect to inspiration, you may be right. I find that I have to listen to them carefully, so as to not misunderstand them. But some things I heard led me to think that it might be the case. For example, I don't believe that Scripture writers necessarily wrote only things that made sense within the context of their culture. If that were the case, 1 Peter 1:10-12 would be false. Clearly, prophecy meant that in some cases, the prophetic writer was speaking of things much wider than their native culture. They didn't always have native knowledge of the things that they wrote. Very much indeed was revealed to them. So, quite often, the answer to what they meant is not really in their culture, but in the Bible itself independent of any human culture. That is what I was concerned about. But, as I said, I may have misunderstood them again here.

It was good talking to you. I'm sorry that you have deactivated your account. Your presence here was an encouragement to my spirit.

Question #13:
Hi, I got ur message on LinkedIn, sorry it took me a while to see it(I don't get to check my LinkedIn often). I'm also not sure you got the Facebook account as I didn't see ur message. 

Hope you are doing good and hope your project is moving forward with Gods' grace.

Thank you for reaching out, I am grateful for the gesture and I hope we are able to strengthen each other as time goes on.
I'm also back on nairaland but with a new handle but might not engage too much on there.

Have a wonderful week ahead and God bless you my brother.

Response #13:
Dear _____

This is Ihedinobi. I'm emailing you from my personal email. Ihedinobi is my real name, but I am called Odii by my family and friends. My first name is Odichinma.

It's very good to hear from you. I was sad to see you gone from Nairaland when you left, not because I thought it was such a great place to be (clearly is not, obviously), but because I didn't properly make your acquaintance before you left, and you are the sort of person that I like to get to know. You seem to me to love the Truth and have a zeal for it. That is an impression that I have of you, and I don't think I'm wrong about it.

Another reason I reached out was because I thought that I hadn't been quite fair to the ministries that you shared with me. I tried to look a little harder at them. At least, I took some time to listen to The Bible Project so that I could make a more correct assessment of them. I don't like discouraging any love for the Truth or misrepresenting other ministries that may be truly working for the Truth. I find that the Bible Project is a very useful ministry. Their summaries on the books of the Bible are quite nifty. I found them very helpful for the most part, at least for the Old Testament books that I watched. I haven't seen their summaries for the New Testament books. However, I found that I couldn't agree on some critical doctrines with them, especially in the matter of eschatology. That doctrine is key to the Christian Hope.

Nonetheless, I am very glad to have met you on there and I hope that we will continue to communicate going forward. If we can spur each other on in the Truth, that would be a major gain for both of us.

The project has been cooking in my head, but I have been taking time to recover my strength. Apparently, I've had heart trouble for a while and not known it, and it was costing me plenty energy, so I haven't been able to work at full blast. I started medication a couple days ago, and I'm feeling more alive and strong now, so I expect to start doing more with my time. Hopefully, I'll actually begin to write soon.

I see that you are in the tech industry. I once tried to start a business there, but I never got it off the ground. I am a management consultant now with special interest in organizational design.

I also live in Jos, although I'm originally from Abia State. What about you?

Yours in Jesus Christ

Question #14:
Hi Ihedinobi, 
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, it's been quite an eventful week for me.

Im sorry to hear about your health issue and I'm glad you are feeling better. I pray that God in his grace will extend His healing hand to you and give you strength.

Yeah, I left nairaland mainly because it made me focus on the things I did not want to focus on. I personally would like to have meaningful conversations with people about the Bible and the awesomeness of God and His word. But I found out that I was been pulled into the "I know more than you, I am right and I need to show you that you are wrong" syndrome that seems to be prevalent on nairaland. I do not consider myself to be a bible teacher but I do love to learning more about God, the bible, history, christainity and science and I hope with the grace of God to be able to share what I know with those it may be helpful to. I am still very much interested in having conversations with people and learning from one another as I believe no one man knows the whole truth and there's always something to take away from every conversation even if we don't agree, but I fear based on my own personal experience that nairaland might not be very helpful in that regard(it may be because I wasn't patient enough though ). I'm back there now as I still find nairaland to be helpful in the aspect of understanding others point of view by their comments and also challenge my own understanding of the scriptures to see if they holdup under scrutiny.

I'm glad you find the bible project useful. I think you might find Tim Mackie's actual lectures also quite helpful although they are usually long and there are many other faithful scholars that you might find helpful like NT Wright, Richard Hays. 

From our last discussion, I got the feeling that you are skeptical about biblical scholarship and teachers that hold opposing views to what you have been taught. Truth is I can understand your skepticism, as I am very much aware of how people re-interpret the scriptures to fit their agenda. But if I may, I would like you to consider not painting everyone with the same brush. Everyone in the body of Christ is needed, the scholars, the textual critics, the translators, the archeologists,historians,teachers,pastors, worship leaders etc. Everyone has a part to play as we lean on each other in God's perfect love. I really do hope you see how we need each faithful witness's work in God's kingdom and yes some things will challenge certain conceptions we hold but as long as our focus is on the cross, no devil can blow us away from the truth (I personally say a quick prayer before reading or listening to anyone on matters of faith and I believe God has been keeping steady). I hope we get to have more meaningful discussions and help each other in whatever capacity God places in our hands. 
Also if I may, I would like to bring up an issue we briefly touched on: Modern bible translation. I know there are no perfect translations but no major bible translation distorts the main tenets of the faith in anyway. The ones that distort the faith are usually christains cult translations like jw bible, Mormons or translations done by only one person but major translations from kjv to niv ,though having their faults would not lead anyone down the wrong part. I only bring this up because u made mention of how bible translations are getting worse in our last conversation and even though it's not a problem for me, it might be for some other person and they might begin to doubt the bible. That is a dangerous place to be as a Christian and I believe we should not be the ones to put people in such positions. You can look up talks by Bruce Metzger on how bible translations work. He is a faithful witness of the gospel confirmed by other faithful witnesses. And whenever you are less busy, you can check out the history of bible translations from the second temple period down to the modern era.

We are actually more of an Idea company than a tech company, but since we mostly come from tech backgrounds we naturally gravitate towards tech idea.
Organization design, that sounds nice, maybe we might be in need of your services one of these days.

Have a wonderful week my brother and may God bless you.

Response #14:
Hello  

It's okay. I understand that times are not always opportune for communication. It is good to hear from you when you can afford to email.

Thank you for your concern and for your kind prayer in my behalf. I deeply appreciate it.

I understand about Nairaland. I myself am only there because it appears to be something the Lord is pleased to have me do. I am sort of holding up a beacon for the rare believer or unbeliever that happens by in search of the Truth or who, like Apollos, has some understanding and love of the Truth that makes it likely for them to enter into it or grow and become established in it. It's not something I expect to last forever. Nairaland is a toxic place to be. The mix of immaturity and outright deception makes it a very hard place to work. There are too many who have no place in the Body of Christ who presume to teach there, leading many into condemnation along with themselves. Keeping a level head there and doing your job can be quite a challenge.

As for being a Bible teacher, it is an admirable thing to aspire to, as Paul told Timothy, but you are right that it is not a wise thing to claim to be when one is not sure that that is what they are both by spiritual gifting and by necessary preparation for the job. But if one is a pastor and teacher by gifting, then it would be really unwise to pretend not to be. It is not humility to reject a job that the Lord has given to us. It is the Lord after all Who gives us our spiritual gifts, assigns us our unique ministries, empowers us to do our jobs in the Body, and produces the effects of our obedience (1 Corinthians 12:4-7). I don't know what your gift in the Body is, so I'm not saying that you are rejecting your gifting. I'm only saying what I'm saying because some people speak as you do in a false humility that serves nobody any good.

As for nobody knowing the whole Truth, that is one reason that many people do not submit to the authority of a pastor-teacher. Like you, lots of well-meaning believers listen to an assortment of teachers and essentially play the umpire, selecting what to believe and what to reject. That doesn't work very well in the end, because in the end, you are basically teaching yourself. And can one who does not know teach one's own self? Besides that, Ephesians 4:11-16 teaches us that the Church's growth to maturity is only possible under the authority of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers. As it is, apostles and prophets have finished their work in the Body for now (except for the 144 000 who will be apostles to the Jews during the Tribulation), so only evangelists and pastor-teachers are left. The Body grows in number through the work of evangelism, and individual believers grow to spiritual maturity through the work of pastor-teachers. If anyone refuses to submit to the "foot-washing" of other believers, they essentially cut themselves off from the Body. Each of us has a unique role to play, and in accepting each other's help, we grow. Pastor-teachers are responsible to the Lord to make the Bible understandable to other believers. As such, it is critical that other believers yield to their authority in this regard. And the right way to do so is to accept one, just one pastor-teacher's authority regarding the Bible. Accepting multiple teachers' authority is accepting no teacher's authority. But, of course, this is not something you should do without testing the pastor-teacher. You should take the time to test the teacher to make sure that they are really teaching the Truth. The Bereans did that by comparing what Paul taught with what was actually written in the Bible. The Lord told us that you cannot get good fruit from bad trees or bad fruit from good trees, in relation to this matter. So, when you test a pastor-teacher's words against the Bible, that should tell you whether or not, they are good trees or bad trees. Once that is established, the right thing to do is to give them benefit of the doubt and listen to everything they have to say about the Bible as a whole and learn from them. So, while I agree that it is impossible to us to know everything in the Bible, because we're in corrupt flesh, it is absolutely possible to "come into the whole realm of biblical truth" so that you are absolutely sure what is biblically true and what is not.

I tested N T Wright years ago, and eventually decided that it is a bad idea to learn from him. I don't know Richard Hays. I have personally committed to the ministry of Professor Robert Luginbill at https://ichthys.com as I told you. I have been with that ministry since October 3, 2017. It is essentially my church. I am perfectly satisfied with it, and have come to form solid friendships with Professor Robert and quite a number of other followers of the ministry. I'm currently on the cusp of starting my own pastor-teaching ministry. That is actually what my research is leading to. I am not looking for people to learn from now. It just so happens that when you are researching a given subject, it is usually useful to see what others who are qualified have to say about it. That often shows you the errors that you ought to avoid and teach other people to avoid, about as much as it gives you new insight into things that you already know.

About formal scholarship, I am skeptical about it, yes, but perhaps not in the manner that you think. Professor Robert is a scholar. He was seminary-trained as well. His training in ancient languages and history was also in order for him to do ministry. He writes like a scholar and often relies on the works of other scholars like Bruce Metzger whom you mentioned. Yet I trust him. My problem with formal scholarship is that most believers consider it the same thing as spiritual maturity when it actually isn't. If a given scholar never took the time to learn the Bible from a gifted and prepared Bible teacher, there is a large chance that they will only do incredible damage with the things that they get from seminaries and universities. Please, believe me when I say that that did not just come from my studentship under Professor Robert. As I told you, I used to follow scholars too. I followed Professor N T Wright for a couple of years before I decided that it was a bad idea to continue to. Formal scholarship is no substitute for diligent study under a gifted and prepared Bible teacher.

As for being opposed to those who teach differently than what I have learned, apart from the fact that that is only to be expected, there is also the fact that I also am testing what I am hearing against what I see in the Bible. If I had no confidence either in the Bible that I read or in what I have learned from the ministry that I have submitted to, then I would be exactly as Paul described in Ephesians 4:14. I realize that many believers like to tell themselves to take courage in what they think is true although they have almost no reason to believe that it is true, so that there are many who are merely showing bravado, but that is not what I mean in my case. I spent my life reading the Bible. I didn't understand it very well, but at least I knew what it said and didn't say when I was listening to teachers. That is actually why I didn't commit fully to any teacher until I found Ichthys. All the teachers that I knew prior violated the Scriptures in one way or another, so I didn't commit to them indefinitely. That has not been my experience with Ichthys. So, I have confidence that what I have read and continued to read in the Bible is true, and that what Professor Robert teaches is true. So when I see things that fly in the face of what I have learned, I know that something is wrong with them. Incidentally, because of the length of time that I spent trying to learn the Truth, and because of the various places I have looked and the methods that I have used, it is rare that I should run into errors that I have not once held myself.

Your words are very good, and I take great encouragement from them. I do believe, as you can tell by what I have already said, that we all have our unique roles to play. I also don't consider differences of belief in some doctrines as a reason to break fellowship with one another. For example, I consider eschatology a most critical doctrine of the Bible. In fact, it seems to me to connect every other doctrine in the Bible, but even so, I don't consider The Bible Project to not be friends and brothers in Christ just because they understand it in a way that I consider erroneous. Paul himself said to the Philippians that if any mature believer thought differently of what he had just taught them in the Bible, God would make it clear to them (Philippians 3:15). I can disagree with other believers even while remaining in fellowship with them. The trouble is that if we disagree on certain things that are critical, we cannot really discuss them without finding that we are just wasting time. So, there is often little reason in continuing to discuss issues on which we disagree.

You're exactly right about Bible translations. My concern is that, for example, NIV2011 is practically a completely different translation of the Bible from NIV1984, and it is an inferior translation to it. The publishers of the NIV too went to lengths to remove the 1984 translation from the market and replace it with this inferior one. And as far as we know, Biblica is not run by one of the cults we are concerned about. The situation does not surprise me, nor do I think that it would surprise anyone with a bit of spiritual common sense. The only hope we have in this world is the Word of Truth, so it only follows that Satan will wage war on it, and he has been for six thousand years now. Given that the Lord's Return is so close now, it is only to be expected that he will begin to mount this kind of offensive against the Truth again, especially given that the Laodicean Church (that is, the Church of our generation) is so uninterested in the Truth. I have little concern about Bible translations, not only because it is my job to learn the original languages and learn to access the manuscripts for myself (a job that is taking me too long to do, I might add), but also because it is very hard indeed to mess with the Truth. Even cult-sponsored translations shoot themselves in the foot in their effort to obscure the Truth. To deny the Truth completely, a translation has to basically change the entire Bible, or else it will just create a mass of contradictions that points to the untrustworthiness of the translation.

An idea company?! That is delightful. In fact, ideas are my thing. My preference in work is to figure stuff out and interpret things for other people. That is where my natural talents lie. But since that kind of thing lacks a name, as far as I know, I identify more as a management consultant, since I do a lot of my work in that field anyway. I certainly hope that you will find use for me at some point.

Yours very warmly in Jesus Christ

Question #15:
1. In the book of Genesis, sons of God refer to fallen angels. The Nephilim are the offsprings of the sons of God.

2. This is a tricky one, something I myself have had to question, but I was able to gain an understanding:

Since no humankind but Noah, his wife, the three sons and their wives survived the flood, then it made sense that the genetic code of the Nephilim survived through one of the wives of his sons.
The giants who existed after the flood were called the sons of Anak, not the Nephilim. Take note
Anak is a descendant of Ham, second son of Noah, and also the bearer of the curse of his father after seeing his unclothedness.

Response #15:
Hi.

For what it's worth, no Nephilim of any kind survived the Flood. I understand that because the cowardly spies in Numbers claimed to see Nephilim in Canaan, and because some translations appear to make the Rephaim and the Nephilim one and the same by using the word "giants" for both, it is often argued that they did, but that is not true. There have been no Nephilim until very recently with the birth of the Antichrist.

There were no Nephilim in Canaan. The cowardly spies used that false story to try to prevent Israel going to war in Canaan. They lied out of their unbelief.

As for the Rephaim, they were abnormally sized human beings, but they certainly were not part-angel at all. That was an unfortunate mishap of translation.

As far as the Bible goes, Noah and his family were saved both for Noah's righteousness and for the purity of their origins. They were all fully human. All Nephilim were destroyed in the Flood.

Only with the birth of the Antichrist and the ten kings that will rule Tribulational Rome with him have there been any new Nephilim since then.

Finally, Ham was Noah's youngest son, not his second son.

Cheers.

Question #16:
The giants after the flood were not Nephilim, I explicitly stated they were knows as the sons of Anak descended from Ham, not Nephilim.
Certainly you can't disagree that there were in fact giants after the flood. Would you say Goliath was just abnormally sized and not a giant?

What about the king mentioned in Deuteronomy 3:11?

About Ham's position, well i suppose the term 'younger' is what gives the impression he is not the middle child. But then, Moses wrote those books and every time he listed children, it was always hierarchal top to bottom, why would Noah's be different?

Younger does not mean youngest.

I'm open for some explanation regarding the above

Response #16:
I appreciate what you said about the giants being descendants of Anak and not Nephilim. I must apologize for not acknowledging that earlier, but sometimes, I am just being efficient in my responses, so I don't address or acknowledge everything in a given post or comment.

I don't really know that the Anakites came from Ham. I don't see that in the Bible just yet, but I do know that the Philistines came from Ham through Mizraim, and Goliath and his brothers were all Philistines.

As for giants existing after the Flood, that was what I meant by "abnormally sized human beings." The Rephaim including Og of Bashan were giants just like Goliath, but like you said, they were not Nephilim. The Nephilim were not giants. They were angelic hybrids, that's all. My comment was concerned with your speculation that the Nephilim strain was preserved through members of Noah's family. That is not true. Nothing Nephilic survived the Flood.

As for Ham, I did think that he was the middle child too, but Genesis 9:24 seems to me to settle the matter, unless it was a matter of translation. I will try to confirm about that, but in two of the best translations I know, the verse calls him the youngest.

Question #17:
Here is something i just came across regarding this. Tell me what you think, it's new to me especially the Canaan part.

http://www.blackhistoryinthebible.com/the-hamites/ham-the-father-of-africans/

Response #17:
I have a few things to say both about the link and about Bible interpretation in general:

1. About the link, it is of very little value. It does excellently in showing that what happened did not involve sex of any kind, as some crazy people like to claim. Ham only saw his father Unclad and thought it was something funny to talk about. That brought a very specific prophetic curse on his own son, not directly on himself, although we must be aware that there is such a thing as "cursing by association" as much as there is "blessing by association," the first of which is exemplified by God's cursing of the earth in association with Adam's disobedience and the other of which is exemplified by His blessing of the world in association with Abraham's obedience. Another example is God's killing of David's first son by Bathsheba for David's double sin of adultery and murder. We may consider such things as unjust of God, but we are not qualified to judge God. However, it is clear that it is still judgment upon the sinner when God strikes something that is dear or necessary to them - the earth, in the case of Adam, and David's child, in David's case. So, the curse that came upon Canaan was still punishment for Ham. Additionally, although Canaan was an infant at the time, the Lord knew that the sort of thing that his father Ham did would come to characterize him and his own descendants, which is why eventually God destroyed all Canaanites. Compare God's rejection of Esau ("Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated" ) in this matter.

The rest of the article focuses on issues of race. That is really of no value whatsoever. It is true that some misguided people take the curse on Ham's son to mean that God cursed all Africans. That is obviously false, since the curse was specifically meant for Canaan and his descendants. That is another thing that the article got right, but as for who was black and who wasn't, that was a waste of print in the article.

Still, the article got the important things right. It only subsumed those important things in a rather useless context.

2. About general interpretation, I have suggested before to you that the right thing to do is to stick with what the Bible actually says. It is always a bad idea to extrapolate, especially when you can't pin your extrapolations to anything actually written in the Bible. So, for example, you don't pretend, as someone with no respect for the Bible would, and has right here, that when the Bible says that Noah discovered what his youngest son had done to him, that it must mean Canaan. Obviously, Canaan was not even Noah's son, much less, his youngest. Additionally, the word was "youngest," not "younger." Even more importantly, it couldn't have referred to an infant, especially when the Bible had been talking about the adult Ham up to that point. That is all treating the Bible very disrespectfully. The Bible says what it says and means what it means. You can take it or leave it, you may not change it to suit your own whims, however noble they may seem to you.

3. Not everyone who handles the Bible and talks about it has any right whatsoever to teach it. Many people who aren't even believers pretend to the authority to interpret the Bible. Sometimes, they are even ridiculously vehement about their supposed authority. It would be incredibly foolish to pay such people any mind. Then there are those who may be believers but who are woefully immature because they have never taken the time to learn the Bible from a gifted and prepared Bible teacher, yet such people presume to teach the Bible to others. Timothy was warned by Paul not to give teaching authority to such people (1 Timothy 3:6). Such people often carry a wild mixture of truths and falsehoods that leave their listeners blowing in the wind with no firm foundation under their feet.

I have listened to both kinds of people in my past, and I have been the latter too. I assure you that it is an incredibly bad idea to listen to such teachers. It endangers your salvation, if you are saved at all. If you are not, it almost certainly makes your ever being saved impossible.

4. All I can do is offer these helps, warnings, and corrections, if you are even open to them. I cannot protect you from your own choices. It is entirely up to you what you choose to believe and do with yourself. As I said, I will keep praying for you, and I will also continue to take every opportunity available to me to help you come into the Truth, if you are at all open to my help. But that's all I can do.

Grace be with you.

Question #18:
Of course i am open to your corrections, help, and warnings. I've always appreciated them.

Thank you

Response #18:
As always, I am very happy to help.

Question #19:
These are very wrong connections to make

Response #19:
I'm quite sure that you are free to reject any interpretation as you please. On the other hand, I'm quite confident that the connections are correct.

Question #20:
As a follower of Jesus, this is a wrong statement to make. You might not have gone through the hardship of being treated as less than human because of the color of your skin but many brothers and sisters have had to live with this reality. How do you think someone who has been taught from a very young age that they are under a curse from the God for something they cannot change feel and what type of relationship do you think such a person would have with God. The bible teaches us that love is the greatest commandment we have from God and one of the hallmarks of love is empathy. Empathy has to do with putting yourself in others shoes and understanding their pain . The race angle of the article might not be of importance to you but it definitely is ,for a whole lot of people and if all the article was able to achieve was to lighten the load some people are carry due to false teaching, then it's of immense value. It would have been better not to say anything than to trivialize the burdens others are carrying.
Just to be clear I only speak of that one article as I have read no other article on the site and know nothing about it.

Response #20:
A man once asked the Lord Jesus to prevail upon his brother to share the inheritance with him. Your argument here would make the Lord Jesus's response out to have been insensitive and uncaring about any injustice - if there turned out to be any - in that situation. But that cannot be true, can it? Our Lord died for the sins of all the world. He can hardly be accused of insensitivity and injustice. His Answer in that situation is mine here. I do not use the Bible to solve social problems. If the Bible does not attend to race, neither will I. Nothing about Genesis 9 is concerned with race, so neither am I here.

That does not mean either that God approves of racism or that I do. It just means that I do not put words in God's Mouth. My job as a pastor-teacher is to teach the Bible as is, without any presumption on what it should say.

Question #21:
It's always a good idea to be cautious when taking the moral high ground because we might be guilty of the same things we point at.

Response #21:
I couldn't agree more.

Question #22:
On this thread, you talked about how the nephilim didn't survive the flood and the spies in Numbers 13 we're just lying. That's quite a plausible opinion and quite a popular one but the problem is that's not what the text says.

The actual word "nephilim" was used only twice In the entire hebrew bible and both times don't support your opinion without you adding things to the text that it doesn't have.

1)The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
Genesis 6:4 ESV
Remember the Genesis account was written after the flood, so the part "and also afterwards" lends to the fact that the nephilims somehow appeared after the flood.

2)And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."
Numbers 13:33 ESV
°Note that the word here is "saw" and there is nowhere in the entire scriptures bible that says the spies were lying about what they saw out of fear and we find no passage where Moses, Joshua or Caleb called out the spies for lying about the nephilim as surely it would have been news to them if they believed the nephilim were extinct.

°Again note that the author of Numbers links the the sons of Anak to the nephilim, letting us the reader know how they came to be(This is partially where the thinking of nephilims as gaints come from and this thinking goes all the way back to second temple period and even the septuigent renders the word as giants. It is not a 21st century idea as lot of people tend to think).

So from reading the text in any language, there's no way of saying the the spies simple lied without adding words into the scriptures.

Response #22:
As you know, it matters very little to me what anybody chooses to believe. It is entirely your prerogative to believe whatever you want. My job is to teach the Truth, or at least, what I have come to believe to be true.

Now, since you appeal to the text (and I rejoice in such an appeal), clearly Genesis 6:4 does not say "and also after the Flood." As you yourself quoted, it only says, "and also afterwards." It is then a matter of interpretation what the frame of reference is. In this case, it is your interpretation that Moses meant after the Flood. The text says nothing of the sort. How then can you be sure that you are right? You claim to derive your certainty from when Genesis was written, but I don't see why the text doesn't say that the Nephilim were in the earth "to this day," for example, as it says in many other cases in the Bible. After all, Moses was writing Genesis about the same time that the spies were checking out Canaan.

Furthermore, why then did the Lord flood the world? If it was merely for human wickedness, what was the point since human beings have never not been wicked. In fact, just a century after the Flood, the whole world was building the Tower of Babel in their bid to stamp out faith from the human race. Ham's behavior right after the Flood is proof that he was not very like his own father in righteousness, yet he was saved from the Flood. What then was the point of flooding the Earth if it was not to destroy the Nephilim?

As for Numbers 13:33, the Bible is a faithful record of history, but why must it be held responsible for what the people it records as saying anything actually say? I mean, why must we treat something as true when somebody is recorded as saying it in the Bible? When Satan claimed to the Lord Jesus that if He threw Himself off of the Pinnacle of the Temple that angels would catch Him, should we also assume it to be true? The spies were cowards and they did not want to go to war. They saw large people in Canaan that terrified them. All this is true. But why should we assume that they were telling the truth that the people that they saw were Nephilim when we have the story of the Flood to tell us that there were no more Nephilim after the Flood?

The Bible is One Story, although it is told in bits and pieces in several books. There is a coherence to it all. For example, we are told by Peter and Jude that the angels that were involved in the madness of Noah's time were chained and locked up in dark dungeons in the Abyss. Considering that we were also told through the story of the Legion that the Lord cast out of the mad men in the Gadarenes that angels don't like the Abyss, we can assume that rebel angels wouldn't be in a hurry to repeat the business of the Nephilim unless it was a desperate gambit. So, we would fully expect that there would be no new Nephilim so soon after the Flood. The covenant that the Lord made with Noah and his descendants also made it abundantly clear that anything that challenged human free will and attempted to cut short the full time of human testing would be dealt with most decisively by Him, so we know from that too that Satan and his angels would be careful about trying to produce human beings with an unyielding bent toward evil. In light of all this, it is more than clear that the spies were lying. There were no Nephilim in Canaan because there couldn't have been Nephilim in Canaan.

As for Joshua's, Caleb's, and Moses's silence on the matter, that is a lot like assuming that because I don't respond to every lie on this board, I must agree with them. Obviously, that is ridiculous. Sometimes, the circumstances suggest that it is a bad idea to challenge a lie straight on. Some lies are so ridiculous and yet so popular that it is best to just leave those who embrace them to their own devices. As we see in that account, Joshua and Caleb were almost stoned for even claiming that the Lord could help them beat the giants - something that later proved to be true. If that was the case, a history lesson would have done them even less good.

No, the author of Numbers did not link the Anakim to Nephilim at all. Again, that is your own interpretation, and although it may be true as easily as it may be false, it is obvious too that this is merely what the spies actually said.

Of course, the idea that the Nephilim were giants is not a 21st century idea. It was what the Septuagint brought about, as you said. When the translation used the word "gigantes" to describe the Nephilim, the idea had been to compare them to a very well-known Greek concept of their day. That was what the KJV translated willy-nilly with very little accommodation to the difference in the realities and cultures of the King James period. At the time of the Septuagint, the word would have been understood to refer to the greatness of the Nephilim, to their god-like abilities, but not necessarily to their physical size or appearance. In fact, the Greeks of that time had an incredibly different physical conception of giants than we do, so if they conceptualized the Nephilim as giants, believe me, it would make them ridiculous to us, not least because the Giants of Greek mythology were very large and had hundreds of hands.

In fact, the Bible only teaches that the Nephilim were remarkable human beings, with incredible superhuman abilities. That does explain why the Flood was so severe and lasted so long on the earth. They were pretty hardy, very difficult to kill. You can see that too in the account of the Antichrist who survives a fatal injury (but then, you probably don't see the Tribulation and Second Advent as actual events, do you?) and recovers so fully as to still go to war to avenge himself.

Question #23:
You also talked about how Noah's family was saved because of Noah's righteousness and purity of their origins but that is also adding things to the scriptures.
The bible only says was righteousness and blameless man and he found grace in the eyes of God. The bible doesn't talk about the purity of Noah's wife, his sons and his daughter in-laws. Again that's adding things to the scriptures.

But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord . These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.
Genesis 6:8‭-‬9 ESV

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation.
Genesis 7:1 ESV

We all have to be cautious and mindful as we run this race. Enjoy the rest of your day sir.

Response #23:
I obviously did not claim that Noah's wife, sons, and sons' wives were necessarily of the same moral character as himself. I only said that they too were purely human just as he was. It is true that the Bible testifies to both Noah's righteousness and to his full humanity, and that it says nothing about his family, but it is not "adding things to the Scriptures," because if his family had been Nephilim, they would not have gone into the Ark with him - they were all adults, after all, and one can see that they could have acted just as Lot's family later did. Also, because Noah was righteous, he would not have married a Nephiyl, assuming there were any female Nephilim. Could his sons' wives have been Nephilim? Indeed, but if they were, they too would not have got in the Ark with them. Why would they not have? Because the Nephilim were inveterate rebels against God (Genesis 6:5), so they would never have accepted His Mercy in the form of that Ark.

You are exactly right that we have to be cautious and mindful as we run this race. I've been trying to be like that my whole life. I'm not without failure in this and other regard, but I certainly have put in the effort. I don't envy other people their own experiences and journeys, and I don't pretend to be anyone's judge. But I am never going to be shy either of standing for the Bible or of protecting any believer who will accept my protection, not even if my doing so makes me look arrogant to other people.

Question #24:
I think you should reread Luke 12:13-15 again and you would see what I pointed out and what Jesus was teaching are two different things.

I think You are missing the point I was making.
Over the ages, people have used the bible as a weapon to dehumanize their fellow human being and here comes an article that tries to set some of the records straight, but just because it's not an issue you can relate with, you conclude its of no value and a waste of ink. Like I said in my previous post, if you can't empathize with the people going through racial subjugation, it would have been better to have not said anything, rather than make light of other peoples struggles.

Yes, the bible is not some ethics manual or a rule book on societal problems but if you hold the position that the bible and the God of the bible are not concerned about the widows and the orphans, the poor and the marginalized, the segregated and the ones the society has left behind, then I'm not sure we are reading the same bible.

.

First off sir, I do not claim to have certainty over the interpretation of the text, as the text gives very little details and has been the subject of quite a lot of debates over the centuries. My point was, we should be cautious when taking the moral high ground as we can be guilty of the same things we point at. I was showing you how u also moved away from what the bible actually says to adding things that are purely opinions.
Secondly your statement of Moses writing Genesis at the same time the spies were checking out Canaan is not factual as no one knows when Moses penned down the Genesis account. All we have are opinions and speculations.
Finally,may I know your interpretation of when the "and also afterwards" part of the text could be referring to?

?

Again what does the text actually say?

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord . These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
Genesis 6:5‭-‬9‭, ‬11‭, ‬13 ESV
There is no doubt the nephilim were part of the problem but what the text focuses on is, the wickedness of man and nowhere does it say it was mainly because of the nephilim the Lord flooded the earth. The text says it was because of the wickedness of man. Of course you are free to say the level of wickedness was enormous because of the nephilim but that's just opinions as the text doesn't say that.

Why should we also assume they were lying? Going that route is actually adding something to the text that cannot be backed up by scripture. Secondly where in the Bible does it say there were no more nephilim after the flood?

Thirdly in the case of our Lord Jesus, the bible clearly states that the devil came to tempt him. The definition of a temptation is:the wish to do or have something that you know you should not do or have. In this case the bible does give us context, so u can't compare Numbers 13:33 to the temptation of Jesus.

There's nothing in the Lord's convenant with Noah that has to do with humanities free will and the nephilim. I hope you do not think that capital punishment was instituted because of the nephilim as that would be a very huge stretching of the text.

Again this is making alot of assumptions and extrapolating your own opinions into the text.

Again I brought this up as a means of asking you how u were infering from the text that the spies were lying. If you can't infer it from Moses ,Caleb or Joshua that were in the story, then from which later prophet or new testament author can you say pointed back to this passage to show that the spies were
indeed lying about seeing the nephilim. If all you can say is the spies must be lying because there's no way the nephilim strain survived ,but can't back it up scripturally, then that's basically making statements the text is not making and adding your own opinions to the text.
There's nothing wrong with having opinions and we can definitely engage others with our opinions to see if they holdup to scrutiny, but in this case, you're actually swimming against what the text actually says or can even be inferred just to hold on to idea you've already preconceived to be true.

.
I believe the bible begs to differ, except you have a bible translation that renders the text differently. I also believe you have enough bible knowledge under your belt to recognize when there's a break in the story for the insertion of the authors note, so let's not even go that route.
And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."
Numbers 13:33 ESV

Let's stop here as my aim is not to try pick apart everything wrote but I do hope you get the gist of what I was trying to convey. We are all learning and no matter how much you know, there's still a lot more out there to learn and unlearn.
As for the race part: I believe these 2 quotes embody what I was trying to convey
its more important to live the scriptures than have outstanding knowledge of the scriptures.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
1 Corinthians 13:1‭-‬8 ESV

As your last statement implied, we are all human and not without our own faults so hopefully when you also see me not to be living the scriptures, i hope u let me know.

Have a blessed Wednesday.

Response #24:
Hello _____.

When you say that you do not claim to have certainty over interpretation of the text, I think that that is obviously untrue. Clearly, you consider yourself enough of an authority to see through my own unfounded pretence to authority. Or else why are you working so hard to show that I am wrong about everything that I have said here? Can one do so without believing that they can be certain of some understanding of the text? Of course not.

As I have told you, the business of pastor-teaching is to interpret the Bible. That often involves bringing to light inferences in the Bible that aren’t apparent to those without the gift. So, when you claim that something is not in the text – an authoritative statement to make too – are you reading all the text and appreciating what they mean? Or are you deliberately turning a blind eye to things that you don’t want to see because you want to show how nobody is any more of an authority for interpreting the Scriptures than yourself? Is that perhaps why you prefer to “take apart” everything I say instead of bothering to actually explain what the Bible teaches – which you actually do while offering caveats to prevent anyone holding you accountable for what you say? It is easy enough to be a challenger, especially when you believe it is arrogant to stand up for something, but whether or not we are doing our bit to help others grow and be established in the Truth in order to please the Lord is what matters. The Lord will bring it all to light and reward us individually according to the work of our hands.

As for Luke 12:13-15, it is not I who need to read it again. I know precisely what I said and why I said it. The question is why you think it does not apply to your argument. I can’t answer that question for you. As far as I see, both things – the man’s complaint and yours – are the same. If you think that they are not and you consider it spiritually useful for me – and anyone else who may be reading our exchanges – to appreciate the difference, the onus is on you to demonstrate the difference. That, after all, is what ministry is about: making the Truth clear to those who can benefit from hearing it.

As for race, believe me, I am not missing the point at all. I told you that Satan has been attacking the Truth for a long time. It is entirely his job description to do so, but it is not mine or any pastor-teacher's to do the same. Just because people abuse the Bible in one way is no reason for me to abuse it in another. That is pretty ludicrous. Yes, there are always wicked men who think that they can twist the Scriptures to say whatever they want to uphold their evil intentions as righteous, but then when we decide to stand against their wickedness by putting words in the Bible's mouth, it is hard to see how we are not being just like them. As I told you, the business of pastor-teaching is to interpret the Bible, not to tell it what it needs to say in order to solve social problems. If human beings twisted it to approve racism, that is no call for me to twist it to disapprove of it. If I teach the Bible clearly enough, I have no doubt that anyone who submits to its authority will quit their racism or come to appreciate the evil of racism without my forcing things into the Bible. That is just how the Bible works. It is the reason that I jealously guard what the Bible actually says against whatever emotional concerns society at large is running itself ragged over.

Furthermore, I am puzzled how you can in one breath agree that the Bible is not some ethics manual and then in another claim that it is concerned with ethical issues. Do you not see the contradiction in that? The Bible is certainly concerned with the good of humankind, but that is not the same as that we may use it to solve social problems as if it were the tool for that. The Bible is God's Truth. If we learn God's Truth, it will straighten out our own individual ethics. If we pretend to take hold of God’s Truth as if it were a screwdriver or spanner to fix the faults of social ethics, we are going to find out very quickly that it does not yield itself readily to such abuse. Consider that even from the Old Testament, it is at least not very clear (it is, in fact, abundantly clear, but not readily so to the ungifted and untrained eye) that God disapproves of slavery, and in spite of the great revelations of the New Testament we don’t see the Apostles and other writers of the New Testament campaigning against it. Rather we see Paul telling believers that if they are slaves that they shouldn’t get worried about it, but rather if they are able to get out of it, they should. That is a far cry from campaigning against slavery, even if it is still clear that this is not a condition of life that God necessarily approves of.

For what it is worth, I will explain the dynamics to you: this world is the devil’s world for now. As John taught and the Lord Jesus confirmed, it lies in the wicked one. As such, its systems and processes are very much within the devil’s policies. Apart from the kindness of God in His interferring to provide all humankind with all that we need to live and make our choices about Him, and apart from His protection and defence of those who choose for Him in this world, everything around us is run by Satan. He, in league with the sin nature of human beings, created this wild system of corruption that has worked out in all the social ills that plague us. Those things will never be removed on a global scale until the Lord Jesus returns to destroy Satan’s rule over the world. For now, what matters is the individual position we each take in these matters in response to God’s Truth. So, while it is easily clear that God does not approve of racism, you will not see that the Bible lends itself to social justice for the eradication of racism in human communities. That is why I will not pretend that it does. If you want to go on a social justice campaign, by all means, do so. If you pretend that Genesis 9 claims that Ham and his descendants were black, I will oppose you to anyone who is willing to listen to me about what the Bible says. It really is that simple. I won’t endorse your lie just because you think that the nobility of your cause makes it acceptable.

As for when Moses wrote the Pentateuch, I think that you are playing the ostrich. Moses could only have written those works during the Exodus. When else could he have written them?

As for my interpretation of Genesis 6, believe me, I've wasted plenty of time and energy on that on this platform answering that. You haven’t proved to be a more desirable reason for any further expenditure of time and energy on it. Clearly, I am no pastor-teacher in your eyes, and that is just fine for me, but why then would I bother to give you more reason to exercise yourself over my lack of authority to explain the Bible? I have not seen any effort on your part to defend your own interpretations, which I was given to understand demonstrated the failures in mine. To what end then would I be giving you more of what you reject for no clear reason?

About what the text says, I couldn’t agree more that the Nephilim were obviously part of the problem. The disparity in our views is clearly how much a part. You consider “man” in the text to not necessarily refer to the Nephilim alone, and that is good from where I stand, but you disregard a few things in doing so. The Nephilim were man, just like pure human beings were man too. They may have been brought about by the agency of rebel angels, but the Bible does not treat them like they were not human beings. So when the Scriptures say that the wickedness of man was great, there was no other way that they could have put it in order to point out that the Nephilim were the problem. In fact, the way that they did in order to make clear that it was the Nephilim was to point out the unrepentance that was so pronounced in that wickedness it spoke of in verse 4. Human beings can be pretty hard-hearted in our wickedness, but we tend to retain the ability to repent as long as we are alive, which is why even the vilest unbeliever can still turn around even at the end of a long and wild career of sin to trust in the Lord and be saved (witness Manasseh king of Judah as an example here). The Nephilim, on the other hand, did not seem to have any capacity to repent. As you quote, “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” That is not typical of pure humans. If it were, there would be no point in leaving us alive. We can change. We can repent. But the Nephilim either could not or simply would not, no matter what, both of which amount to the same thing. That was why the Lord destroyed them.

I'll bet you'll ask me to find a passage that says verbatim, “the Nephilim could not or would not repent no matter what, both of which amount to the same thing” too. That would be about as serious as your other demands. Interpretation means restating what is said in more understandable and relatable form, without violating the sense of what is said. That is what I have done here. In other words, the text does say that the Nephilim were the problem, only you couldn’t (probably still can’t) see that that is what it says. If you call it my opinion, that won’t change it for all that. It is still what it says.

As for the spies, I am absolutely certain that I did not say that we should assume that they were lying. I asked you why we should assume that they were telling the Truth as you were claiming that they were. I have already demonstrated that they were actually lying. There is no assumption on my part in the matter, and I have not advised such a thing either. I am certain that they were lying, and I have shown you how they were. Again, if you claim that the Scripture does not say that they were, that too is an interpretation of yours. Is it a correct one? Or do you suppose that you are right because it was you who said it? Regarding your question about the existence of the Nephilim after the Flood, I have already explained that. If you don’t accept my explanation, that is fine by me. You’re under no obligation to, not unless you wish to accept my “foot-washing.”

As for Satan’s tempting of the Lord, you mean to tell me that you can interpret his words as unreliable, not because the Bible states explicitly that they are, but because it says that his intent was to tempt the Lord? Why, of course, you’re right. Now, why do you not apply the same thing to the spies? The ten spies were looking to discourage God’s Assembly from going to war in Canaan per God's Own Desire of them. In other words, as your definition goes, they were wishing to do or have something that they knew that they should not do or have, namely to avoid going to war. Why then do you assume their excuses to be more reliable here than Satan’s later was? Obviously, by your own words, the spies had to have been lying. But I don’t expect you to accept that any more than anything else that you have already rejected so far.

As for Genesis 8:21-9:17, why, you’re the boss. I can hardly dare to contradict you. If you say that the text has nothing to do with free will and the Nephilim, it must be so, must it not? I don’t think you agree with that statement just now, do you? Genesis 8:21-9:17 guaranteed that humanity would never again be brought near to extinction, just like it had been with the Flood. That had been Satan’s goal with the Nephilim. Until that time, Satan kept working to murder all the human race. His first attempt had been to get Adam and Eve to disobey God, so that He would kill them. God didn’t, however. Rather, He preserved them for Redemption, something that Satan had not anticipated. Next, Cain killed Abel, the unrighteous murdering the righteous. Instead of starting a trend of wanton killing and vengeance, however, the Lord exerted a punishment that discouraged murder in the extreme, so until, as we see later in Genesis 6, the Nephilim brought about a time of incredible violence, murder was not the norm. So, his new plan was to introduce a new kind of humanity that had no interest in the Truth and would not repent, even given an opportunity. That was what the Nephilim was. If human beings were corrupted to the point that they simply would never accept redemption, then there was no reason for humanity to exist, therefore, the Lord would destroy them. That was what Satan did with the Nephilim. After the Flood, the Lord guaranteed to Noah and all of his descendants including us today that that sort of thing would never happen again. We are never going to be corrupted so much that we can no longer be saved. That was the point of promising that there would never again be an extinction-level event brought against man.

As for guaranteeing the sanctity of human life, apart from the horror of the violence of the Nephilim, that also addressed the fact that God would guard every individual's right to make their choice about Him. That, after all, is what life on this Earth is about. In protecting human life with that law and with all the provision that He guaranteed to us, He was preserving human free will from any new extreme attacks. He proved His Commitment to keeping this Word in the soon-to-occur Tower of Babel debacle.

Again, what you choose to believe is entirely yours to believe. I never offer my answers expecting them to be accepted. So, while I’m happy to defend them, don’t expect me to make you like or accept them. I have neither responsibility nor ability to do so.

As for making assumptions and extrapolating from the text, as I said, you’re the boss. If you say so, it must be true.

As for Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, not only earlier in this response, but in other responses, I have already shown why and how the spies were lying. If you insist that you will only accept the words of Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, then it is you who know why the Bible must say so in order to prove that the spies were lying. As I said, I work with the Bible as is. I don’t work with what it doesn’t say. If it says elsewhere that the Nephilim didn’t exist anymore after the Flood, then I don’t need Moses, Joshua, and Caleb to say that the ten spies were lying before I'll believe it. In verse 32, however, the Bible does say that they gave a “bad (or evil) report” of the land. In fact, Numbers 13:33 is the only place that this claim about the Nephilim is made. In every other reference, whether it was Moses (Deuteronomy 1:18-36), Caleb (Joshua 14:6-9), or Amos (Amos 2:9) recalling the issue, none of them claimed that there were Nephilim in the land. They only spoke of the stature of the inhabitants of the land, that is, that they were giants. I don’t expect that to convince you any more than anything I have said, but it does demonstrate how heavy the evidence is against what you prefer to believe.

No, I didn’t say, and I am not saying that the spies must have lied. I said and am saying that they lied. There were no Nephilim. They made that up to scare Israel and avoid going to war. As I told you, the Nephilim were very hard to kill. Legends of them were still around at the time. In fact, they are at the root of even our conceptions today of superhuman human beings. Nobody would have been happy to go to war with them. So it was a most effective lie to use against an already-reluctant army.

Of course, you would say that there is nothing wrong with having opinions. Isn’t that why you've spent so much energy to try to show that my interpretation of the Bible is not authoritative at all? No one can claim the right to interpret the Bible, according to you, because we all equally have opinions. That is precisely why there is so little spiritual maturity in the Laodicean Church. Since we all are equal, nobody is willing to have their feet washed by anybody else or to wash anybody else’s feet. That is pretty insane. I have not shared my own private opinions. I have given authoritative interpretations of the Bible. You will not be able to fault them, however hard you try, but that does not mean that you will have no choice but to accept them. You have a free will. You can accept and reject anything you please. Whether it is sensible to accept something or reject it will not be in doubt, but nobody can force you to accept or reject anything you don’t want to accept or reject. So, your rejection of what I say is not going to make it false. Your claim that it is “swimming against what the text actually says or can even be inferred just to hold on to idea [I've] already preconceived to be true” is not going to become true just because you said it. The Truth is the Truth. The Bible says what it says. The Bible means what it means. I have no apologies for standing with it and interpreting it as I have. I am perfectly convinced that my interpretation is correct. I neither require you to hold the same view as I do nor expect you to. But that does not mean that I will endorse your position if I consider it in conflict with the Bible, just for the sake of “peace,” falsely so called.

As for the insertion of an author's note, I believe you believe wrong. As I said, there are other places in the Bible where this incident is referenced, at least one of which was also authored by Moses. In none of them is the Nephilim mentioned, so even if I did not know that there was no author's note in that verse, I would not be so quick to agree with you, especially in light of Genesis 6-9. It would be foolishness on my part. Why the parentheses, however? I don’t think there is a principle anywhere that states that parentheses must be an author’s or reporter’s insertion in the speech that they are reporting. Nonetheless, even if we assume that there was some device in the Hebrew that corresponded to the parentheses, you can look at this link - https://biblehub.com/numbers/13-33.htm - for an assortment of translations to see if other translators necessarily think as you do, and that is even assuming that the ESV translators considered the parentheses as Moses’s commentary. I don’t think that your opinion was necessarily shared by them. That is all academic, however, since the Bible is its own witness, and I don’t see it confirming your position at all.

As for what your aim is, it was very disheartening to see your challenge. I realize that my attitude to the people you considered authorities when we first conversed may have rubbed you wrong; that was why I took so much trouble to connect with you outside of this madhouse, if perhaps I could soothe the hurt somehow. I took the trouble to look even more closely at them, so that I would correct any wrong notion that I had entertained about them. I felt that I had judged them too quickly. And I tried to give them their due wherever they deserved it, but apparently, the damage was already done, because here you are expending effort to prove to me that I'm not better than anyone else. I'm afraid I see nothing in your efforts here that suggests that you are not “[trying] to pick apart everything [I] wrote.” I'm not so naïve as to believe something like that. Considering how you create contradictions of this sort in your denial-confirmation systems, perhaps you actually believe that you are not.

I love all of God’s people, although I don’t necessarily trust them all or like them all. Many of us are actively attacking their own brothers and hobbling them, although they think that they are doing something good, just as you are. I can’t help that some of us are like that, but I certainly can avoid being like that myself. That is why I am zealous for the Truth. I choose the Truth over and above every emotional consideration, over and above every idea and philosophy, and over and above every person. That way I can serve everybody to their benefit, even when they will not accept my service.

You think that I am pretending to know more than everyone else? You think I revel in being better at interpreting the Bible than anyone else? You think there is some pride to be had by speaking authoritatively about what the Bible says? That is unfortunate. I wish that all the Lord's children are teachers! I am doing this because for some reason it has pleased the Lord to give me the gift that I have. I am responsible to Him. That is something that matters deeply to me. You certainly have the right to believe that nobody knows enough to claim the right to teach. That is entirely your prerogative, but you are not the Lord, so I am not beholden to you. I am not responsible to agree with you on that or anything else. I happen to be convinced that the Bible's Truth can be known, that I have been taught it, and that I possess the gift and the readiness to teach it to the degree that I am. That you disagree is merely unfortunate. It does not make these things any less true.

As for 1 Corinthians 13, it is yet another proof that you don’t know the Bible as well as you seem to want to claim with your energetic chastisement of me. Clearly, you cannot live what you don’t understand. Clearly too, we cannot love if we do not know what love is. Finally, Paul obviously was warning the Corinthians that angling after dramatic spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues was folly if they did not understand that spiritual gifts are given so that we can use them to build each other up in the Truth, that is, they are not for show. I teach the Bible, _____. I don't do it for show. I’m not a celebrity here by any means. I make no money from my activities here, and I certainly make very few friends. Many who start out liking me end up trying to bend me to their whims and not liking me very much for their failure. Being here costs me in my personal life. As I told you, it’s not a pleasant place to work, nor is it a place I hope to stay around forever. This post has taken almost three hours to type up, and it cost energy too. I don’t often do that anymore, but I do it for the Lord’s Sake, for His Truth, and for His people. If you think that you can judge me on this, be welcome to it. But don’t expect me to stop. I did not receive either my gift or my Salvation from you.

Edited.

Question #25:
Hi, I come in peace, not to fight

"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and afterward as well, when the sons of God had sexual relations with the daughters of men. And they bore them children who became the mighty men of old, men of renown (i.e. a gibborim, on the earth, meaning one who magnifies himself, behaves proudly, a tyrant, who is bold, audacious)"
- Genesis 6:4

"1This is the account of Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who also had sons after the flood
6The sons of Ham: Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan.
8And Cush was the father of Nimrod, who began to be a mighty one (i.e. a gibborim, on the earth, meaning one who magnifies himself, behaves proudly, a tyrant, who is bold, audacious)
9He was a mighty hunter (i.e. a gibborim, in defiance, bold disobedience) before the LORD so it is said, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD."
- Genesis 10:1,6,8-9

"10Before the Lord gave the Moabites their land (i.e. one of Lot's sons, born of incest with his daughters), a large and powerful tribe lived there. They were the Emim, and they were as tall as the Anakim.
11The Moabites called them Emim, though others sometimes used the name Rephaim for both the Anakim and the Emim."
- Deuteronomy 2:10-11

20Before the Ammonites conquered the land (i.e. the second of Lot's sons, born of incest with his daughters) that the Lord had given them, some of the Rephaim used to live there, although the Ammonites called them Zamzummim.
21The Zamzummim were a large and powerful tribe and were as tall as the Anakim. But the Lord helped the Ammonites, and they killed many of the Zamzummim and forced the rest to leave. Then the Ammonites settled there."
- Deuteronomy 2:20-21

"The people are strong and tall, the descendants of the Anakim. You know about them and you have heard it said about them, 'Who can stand up to the sons of Anak?"
- Deuteronomy 9:2

For what it's worth, the terms Nephilim, Rephaim and other names that these giants are/were known by, effectively have the same or similar connotations, as the terms used for the giants were done out from describing certain attributes about or of the giants. Take for example, Genesis 6:4 above, where we have the first adjective. They are called Nephilims, because they caused the world to fall even as they fell themselves. Nephilim comes from the root hebrew word naphal and properly means, a feller ( i.e. a bully or tyrant and thats a giant)

Genesis 10:1,6,8-9 above and other verses is a second example of giants being called gibborim and this because of their non-compliant, open resistance, tyrant, bold, audacious behaviour

In Deuteronomy 2:10-11 above, is the third example of giants getting called, Emim, the name is translated as "the dreaded ones" and it's because whoever that saw one of them was seized with terror.

The fourth example is where, the giants as seen in Deuteronomy 2:20-21 above are called Zamzummims because they inspired fear and were fierce warriors, they also were called Rephaim, for the sight of them, made people fearfully soft like as if melting hot wax

The fifth example is Deuteronomy 9:2 above where the giants are so called Anakim because they're long-necked tall men and wearing huge necklaces in great numbers

I thought you just earlier above said, no Nephilim of any kind survived the Flood, erhn? If no Nephilim of any kind survived the Flood, then where from recently has the birth of the Antichrist spring the Nephilim out from Ihedinobi3, hmm?

Nephilim, Rephaim and other terms are names that giants are/were known as and interchangeably used to describe them. The Nephilims and/or Rephaims and whatnot, definitely werent angel hybrids stock (i.e. they certainly weren't part-angel part human at all)

The bible vouched the purity of Noah and not anyone else. If any of Nephilims had hearkened to Noah's 120 years of preaching of immimnent doom, they would have been on board the ark, but obviously they didnt, except for a daughter of man with a dormant Nephilim gene who did.

Though I have my hunch how the Nephilim will resurface again, please Ihedinobi3 throw more light on how the birth of the Antichrist and the ten kings that will rule Tribulational Rome with him will bring about the new Nephilim. Thank you.

"After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth."
- Genesis 5:32

Ihedinobi3 fyi, as you can see from the above Genesis 5:32 birth order, Ham was Noah's middle son (i.e. second son), while Ham's son Canaan was Noah's "youngest son". I very much will be happy to prove this to you backing it up with scriptures if you so much disagree

Response #25:
**No response**

Question #26:
I dont see or read in the text that Ham thought it was something funny to talk about seeing his dad nنked? Instead I read that Ham didnt cover up his dad, but he went to tell his brothers, period. There was nothing about funniness, about Ham finding it amusing or him laughing about it to his brothers anything said in that text. Again, it was just that he should have immediately covered his old man up before go looking for the "calvary" to tell them what's up

"The person who sins is the one who will die. The child will not be punished for the parent’s sins, and the parent will not be punished for the child’s sins. Righteous people will be rewarded for their own righteous behavior, and wicked people will be punished for their own wickedness."
- Ezekiel 18:20

"That brought a very specific prophetic curse on his own son, not directly on himself" is not in line with Ezekiel 18:20 above

It was the guilty person, Canaan, who was rightfully got pronouced a curse upon. It was Canaan who directly got cursed by Noah because Noah knew what Canaan, and not Ham, had done to him. What exactly did Canaan do to his grandfather? We'll leave that Q&A hanging in the air, lol, hmm. Suffice to say, Canaan was showing the tendencies of his future descendants, the Canaanites, lol. The Canaanites certainly inherited their predisposition from Canaan

The scripture, in Genesis 3:17, said, God told Adam that the ground will be under a curse because of what he, Adam did. What exactly did Adam do, warranting that the ground be under a curse? We'll leave that Q&A hanging in the air too, lol, hmm.

Just like to Adam's disobedience opened the door for ills to plague our world, Abraham's Genesis 22:18 et al obedience opened another door for the same ills to be countered and so we have the process and prophetic of Genesis 3:15, beginning to gradually develop

4Then Saul said to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and run it through me, or these uncircumcised men will come and run me through and torture me!”
But his armor-bearer was terrified and refused to do it. So Saul took his own sword and fell on it.
5When his armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he too fell on his own sword and died with him.
6So Saul, his three sons, his armor-bearer, and all his men died together that same day.
1 Samuel 31:4-6

13So Saul died for his unfaithfulness to the LORD, because he did not keep the word of the LORD and even consulted a medium for guidance,
14and he failed to inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse.
- 1 Chronicles 10:13-14

Why do you say God killed David's first son Ihedinobi3 when it is obvious the kid died because he was sick? Compare 1 Samuel 31:4-6 and 1 Chronicles 10:13-14 concerning King Saul's death

I am seeing a regular pattern forming in your submissions. I see you habitually taking the freedom to depart from logical deductive reasoning(s) and the facts of a matter to giving in to scarcely credible and fanciful over-imaginative guesswork. Take for example Ihedinobi3, I dont see nor read the text saying Canaan was an infant at time of that recorded Noah being nنked incident

I am totally and unequivocally in agreement with you on this

I dont know about extrapolations, but I do know about Proverbs 25:2 stating that: "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out" and so implies that deductive reasoning used to reach logical true conclusions are permitted

Now, fyi Ihedinobi3, the word used in Genesis 9:24 is "his son" and then to qualify it more, further used "younger" after it. Noah, claimed Canaan as his son, the same and similar way, Jacob claimed Joseph's two sons to be his

I have always maintained that if a crooked stick is put on the ground before you, you need not explain how crooked it is. Go search and come back to lay a straight one down, by the side of it, and the work is well done. Do just that and error will stand abashed from seeing how crooked and twisting your "truth" lies

Every stick has two ends. Unfortunately some of us, as opposed the right end, grab the wrong end of the stick and so end up not understanding a situation(s) correctly

I am totally and unequivocally in agreement with you on this, that what Ihedinobi3 has, are absolutely wrong connections to make, and I've already above being countering a few of them as I can time possibly do.

I am sure you are quite confident that the connections are correct. It is well.

Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, as in, was righteous before God in that generation because it was only him, Noah, who did not take the daughters of men as wife. Fyi, a generation is a span of 40 years

Everyone including the Nephilims were given the opportunity to save themselves from the about to happen destruction. God allowed Noah to warn everyone by preaching for 120 years. I would say, God is fair here. None of Noah's sons and their wives were forced to enter the ark, they each were sensible enough to do, if the Nephilim were too, they would have been allowed also into the ark. Its as simple as that
Response #26
Hello ______.

When I said, "So, for example, you don't pretend, as someone with no respect for the Bible would, and has right here, that when the Bible says that Noah discovered what his youngest son had done to him, that it must mean Canaan," it was you that I meant.

So, you and I will not be discussing anything here or anywhere else, unless and until I see that you will actually quit presuming to put words in God's Mouth. We do have history, you remember. I see no reason to believe that anything important has changed since the last time we discussed the Bible.

Question #27:
_____, incidentally, I had already partly responded to this _____ comment but left it fully responded to and so unfinished on my laptop back burner.

Some think reading a book is for belief and having knowledge, and can't understand that, some read books for belief, having knowledge and understanding.

I am just glad not all think that way and personally delight in you all's reading sic.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom, is knowing and understanding, not to put it tomato in a fruit bowl or fruit salad. Wisdom comes from wise thinking, good information, and then good judgement

Wisdom is seeing how the Book of Enoch, slanders the angelic hosts and falsefully accuse them of something impossible for them to carry out. The book insults the intelligence, satirically insults God, and even particularly ridicules events, just same way, we both know as the Quran does. The mind that is behind the Book of Enoch is devilish and perverted.

_____, Peter and Jude paraphrased and quoted from the Book of Enoch, knowing that it is fiction and not one moment, believing in any of its ludicrous contents, the same way you and I would sometimes quote from the Quran, when making biblical theological points to a muslim

In the bible, angels are never called sons of God. I challenge you _____ and anyone else for that matter to search, you will look high and low, long and hard, but will never find any verse in the Bible where God says or calls any angelic being(s) a son(s) of God

"24What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.
25But Jesus rebuked the spirit. “Be silent!” He said. “Come out of him!”"
- Mark 1:24

_____, the above are _____ comment and my response to his no point that the Book of Enoch preaches Christ. His comment has some similarity to your tone that the Book of Enoch as far as you are concerned acknowledges the Lord Jesus Christ. Well _____, I presented _____ with Matthew 7:22-23 to show the pointlessness of holding such a viewpoint like that, but with you, I will palm you Mark 1:24-25 above.

As you can see _____, recognising and/or acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ, doesnt mean, one has good intentions, it doesnt mean one wouldnt be rightfully dealth with, as was done in Mark 1:25, to that foul spirit that recognised and even acknowledged our Lord Jesus Christ

_____, the book of Enoch encourages belief in Jewish fables. God, in Titus 1:14 says, we are not to listen to Jewish fables.

The book of Enoch tallies with nothing that the Bible says, thats concerning facts. It is a catalogue of one lopsided contradiction after another
You need to unsheath your sword, take hold of the microscope, and this time look in through the right end up, in order to clearly and properly see , each trace and every detail of heresy in the uninspired by God accursed book, so to come to a good understanding.

_____, don't be joining gang, please I beg you, dont be tossed to and fro by the waves and get carried about by every wind of doctrine. I didnt expect to hear a bullet fired in the air at me, and turn round to come see, you're the one behind the smoking gun. The sight hurt me.

_____, I have done this earlier for _____ but I will for your fyi and benefit redo it here below again. Now, _____, brace yourself and let me show you a few proofs that the book of Enoch, is a first century bestseller fantansy/fiction pack book. Dont worry _____, about needing to do any heavy liftings, as I'll do them for you without you ever so much need to lift you teeny weeny little finger, nor risk get your hands dirty.

1/ "... and the number was not entered in the book of the annals of King David (i.e. never written in King David's official records)" - 1 Chronicles 27:24
2/ "... written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?" - 1 Kings 11:41
3/ "... are indeed written in the Book of Samuel the See ..." - 1 Chronicles 29:29
4/ "... are indeed written in the ... the Book of Nathan the Prophet ..." - 1 Chronicles 29:29 and/or 2 Chronicles 9:29
5/ "... are indeed written in the ... the Book of Gad the Seer," - 1 Chronicles 29:29
6/ "... indeed they are written in the book of Jehu the son of Hanani, which is mentioned in the book of the kings of Israel." - 2 Chronicles 20:34
7/ "Now the rest of the acts of Uzziah, first and last, were written by Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz." - 2 Chronicles 26:22
8/ "... they are written in the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz the prophet, on the book of the kings of Judah and Israel" - 2 Chronicles 32:32
9/ "... indeed they are written among the sayings of Hozai" - 2 Chronicles 33:19
10/ "... behold, it is written in the book of Jasher," - Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18
11/ "... are they not written in the book of Shemaiah the prophet, and of Iddo the seer concerning genealogies? " - 2 Chronicles 12:15
12/ "... it is stated in the Book of the Wars of the LORD:" - Numbers 21:14
13/ UNLIKE OTHER MENTIONS, THERE IS NO OUTRIGHT MENTION OF THE Book of Enoch IN THE BIBLE. GOD and the Bible does not see the Book of Enoch deemed worthy enough to be black and white mentioned in the scripture. The book is a pariah, not worthy to physically be seen written the Bible.
14/ "... as it is written in the book of the law of Moses," - Joshua 8:31
15/ "... behold, it is written in the book of Jasher," - 2 Samuel 1:18
16/ "... as it is written in the law of Moses" - 2 Chronicles 23:18
17/ "... as it is written in the law of the LORD." - 2 Chronicles 31:3
18/ "... as it is written in the book of Moses" - 2 Chronicles 35:12
19/ "... as it is written in the book of this covenant," - 2 Kings 23:21
20/ "... as it is written in the law of Moses the man of God..." - Ezra 3:2
21/ "... as it is written in the law" - Nehemiah 10:36

1/ ".. But He answered and said, It is written," - Matthew 4:4
2/ "... Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." - Matthew 4:7
3/ "... Then saith Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad." - Matthew 26:31
4/ ""For," said Peter, "it is written in the Book of Psalms: "'May his place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in it,' and, "'May another take his place of leadership." - Acts 1:20
5/ " Paul replied, “Brothers, I did not realize that he was the high priest; for it is written: ‘Do not speak evil about the ruler of your people" - Acts 23:5
6/ "Rather, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.”" - 1 Corinthians 2:9
7/ "Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" - John 10:34
8/ "As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." - Romans 9:13
9/ "Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God." - Hebrews 10:7
10/ "Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy." - 1 Peter 1:16

_____, I know the above two set of listings are self explanatory enough, but I'll nonetheless, explain. The first, one to twenty one above, is part of the remarkable proof, that whenever you're reading about texts or books of undisputed origin and not something like the nature of the Book of Enoch, you'll find the Bible or the prophets in the Old Testament making the connection with sayings, like "as it is written in the ..." or "... it is written ..." or "... for it is written" or " it is stated" or "indeed they are written", but fraudulent books like the book of Enoch is deprived of this high opinion, respect and honour and never given the courtesy of mentioning of the word Book of Enoch anywhere in the scripture. There is no official approval or recognition of the Book of Enoch and so unlike others as can be seen in the above listings, it gets no mention whatsover anywhere in the Old Testament

_____, equally in New Testament (i.e. the other 1-10 listing) with the Johannine, Pauline or Petrine letters and even Jesus Christ too, you'll find in their letters and/or when discussing texts or books of undisputed origin and not something like the nature of the Book of Enoch, again you'll see the use the familiar phrase or similar "as it is written in the ..." or "... it is written ..." or "... for it is written" or " it is stated" or "indeed they are written".

_____, I submit to you that Jude nor Peter NEVER used "as it is written in the ..." or "... it is written ..." or "... for it is written" or " it is stated" or "indeed they are written" when paraphrasing the Book of Enoch because it is a popular well known best selling fantansy/fiction book that was well circulated up to and around the first century.

As I have earlier highlighted and advanced _____, the Bible doesn't generally quote books of questionable and/or profane sources, like the Book of Enoch is, this is why the Bible too, never has "as it is written" or "... it is written" as a form of certification and accreditation of the book of Enoch anywhere in the entirety of the Bible. The book of Enoch was never treated as being inspired by God and this solely why so it wasnt ever authoritatively used or referenced, but it was just merely paraphrased and passingly referenced without at all making mention of the words, the Book of Enoch.

_____, on towards closing this post, fyi, the Enoch featured in the Book of Enoch, is not the same Enoch mentioned in Genesis, Luke and Hebrews. How can we know this I hear you, ask under your breath, well, it is because no mention of Enoch in the entirety of the "The Book of Enoch" was made about Enoch in the book, in reference to him being a man of faith (i.e. the book doesnt like as done with Hebrews 11:5 confirm this) nor is there any reference to Enoch's genealogy (i.e. no genelogy like as done in Luke 3:37), instead the book, obviously a work of fiction, made a complete glaring birth position order mistake when compared and contrasted with the two real Enoch of the Bible, birth order positions, in their genealogies.

_____ smh, may I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please? Will the real Slim Shady Enoch please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Slim Shady Enoch please stand up? We're gonna have a problem here. Y'all act like you never know ... Lol, smh.

_____ I felt inclined to intimate you with the "as it is written" above persuasion and to explain that Peter and Jude, only used the book of Enoch as source material. They were not in any shape or form endorsing the Book of Enoch as scripture that is God-breathed.

Lastly on closing, fyi, every other book mentioned in the above listings are lost. The Book of Jasher you currectly see about and possibly might have read is a hoax. It is not the real missing book of Jasher. Did you hear the voice of reason, Ihedinobi3, what he said about this matter hmm? He said has it been considered that these books may only be forgeries that were given the names of the true originals named in the Bible? Well, _____, I have done my bit, I've shown how to do the litmus test to find out, if or not any book, appearing genuine or stating to be true, though not necessarily so, is really an inspired word and work of God. Did I hand you back your knife? Lol.

Response #27:
For what it is worth, I am not on your side, ________. I can't stop you from quoting me, referencing me, or invoking my name. But, even where it seems as if we are in agreement, we are not on the same side.

What is more, your answers here are only more proof of your gross disrespect for the Word of God. I could not be more opposed to you, since I rejoice in the Word of God and love it with all my heart. I bow to it, and choose to live for and by it. Also, I am committed to helping anyone who will accept my help to understand it. None of these things is true about you. So, it is gross dishonesty to attempt to lump me together with you.

Question #28:
Let us examine the books of the Bible that made references to other books;

1) The Annals of King David - referenced in 1 Chronicles 27 v 24.
2) The Acts of Solomon - referenced in 1 Kings 11 v 41.
3) The Acts of Samuel the Seer - referenced in 1 Chronicles 29 v 29.
4) The book of Nathan the Prophet - referenced in 1 Chronicles 29 v 29 and 2 Chronicles 9 v 29.
5) The book of Gad the Seer - referenced in 1 Chronicles 29 v 29
6) The book of Jehu - referenced in 2 Chronicles 20 v 34
7) The Acts of Uzziah - referenced in 2 Chronicles 26 v 22
8 ) The vision of Isaiah - referenced in 2 Chronicles 32 v 32
9) The sayings of the Seer, also known as the Sayings of Hozai - referenced in 2 Chronicles 33 v 19
10) The book of Jasher - referenced in Joshua 10 v 13 and 2 Samuel 1 v 18
11) The book of Shemaiah the Prophet - referenced in 2 Chronicles 12 v 15
12) The book of the Wars of the Lord - referenced in Numbers 21 v 14
13) The book of Enoch - referenced in Jude 1 v 4,6,13,14,15 and 2 Peter 2 v 4, 3 v 13 <already dealt with on this thread>

I still find it baffling that the entire words of God can suddenly be limited to just 66 books... afterall, Apostle John clearly mentioned that if all the acts of Jesus alone were recorded, the entire world cannot contain what will be written...

Response #28:
Hello.

1. Have you considered that these books may only be forgeries that were given the names of the true originals named in the Bible?

2. Have you considered that the books referenced and quoted in the Bible are only referenced and quoted whenever they are right and useful rather than to suggest in any way that they are inspired? If referencing and quoting them meant that they were inspired, should we not be looking for Greek and Cretan poets and philosophers to read too, since Paul quoted them? Should we assume that these pagan poets and philosophers were also inspired by the Lord to write?

Question #29:
1) Please I'd like to know the criteria for books that were inspired by the Holy Spirit. And how many inspired books we have in total.

2) Is the word of God limited to a set of books? Yes or No

3) Have you read any of those books to prove whether they are forgeries or not?

Thank you.

Response #29:
Obviously (or, at least, anyone can tell from our history with each other), I'm not aiming to persuade you to or even believing that there is any chance that you will change your mind about the Bible, so I wasn't asking those questions in order that we would have any kind of meaningful debate. They were for anyone who is actually open to the Truth to consider. I don't consider you to be such a person.

Now, you presume to ask questions of me when you won't answer mine. I will answer yours, and then I will entertain no further response from you until you answer mine.

1. 2 Timothy 3:16 is saying the exact same thing as Hebrews 4:12. They both mean that the Scriptures have life in them. That is, they are living words. That is what makes anything the "Word" or "Oracle" of God: the presence of life in them. That something is alive is an objective reality. It has nothing to do with the observer's feelings. So, anyone may read the Bible and completely ignore their unique quality of life or pretend that other writings possess the same quality. That makes no difference to what I just said.

There are only 66 books that have life in them. They are what Evangelical Protestants call the Bible.

2. Yes. Why on Earth would it not be?

3. There are way too many for anyone to read them all in one lifetime, but I have read some of them. I did have a Roman Catholic heritage in my mom's side of the family.

Now, what are your answers to my own questions?

Question #30:
Nice... so the standard of the Evangelical Protestants suddenly becomes the standard for the books that were inspired by the Spirit of God?;

The first version of King James Bible (1611 version) had more than 66 books, the extra books were not inspired?

What of the Ethiopian Bible which is one of the oldest bibles around with over 80 books, are the extra books in there not also inspired?

1 As for the authenticity of the book of Enoch for example, it was found as part of the books in the dead sea scrolls alongside other ancient manuscripts that formed some of the books of the new testament we have today. Any objections to that?

2 The books of Peter and Jude made reference to the writings of Enoch, any objections to that?

Response #30:
I'm not sure if this is your answer to my questions.

Essentially, the first question is whether it is impossible that these books you make so much of are forgeries that people made and tried to sell on the basis of the lie that they are the books referenced in the Bible.

The second is whether reference in the Bible to a book or a quote in the Bible from some source means that the book or source is inspired. If you think it is, should we consider the pagan poets that Paul quoted in the Bible as inspired? Should we now go looking for their works to read too?

Question #31:
Oh, so the part of those books the Bible made reference to are suddenly inspired because the Bible made reference to them?

So it's possible to have partially inspired books hmmm?

You've not answered the bit on the first version of the King James Bible (1611), are the extra books in there not inspired as well?
The extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible are also not inspired?

Response #31:
I'm not sure how you read. If I am asking you whether the Bible's quoting a source makes that source inspired, I clearly am asking you if you think that sources are inspired because a biblical author quoted them. Why are you making it seem like that was what I suggested myself? Is that not your argument for the inspiration of the Book of Enoch? That it was quoted by Jude?

I have no idea where you got the idea that there is any partially inspired book. Is it something you think I said?

I have told you what makes a book inspired. And I have told you which books are inspired.

Question #32:
And I am also asking you this;

The portion of the uninspired book the Bible made reference to, are they now suddenly inspired since they are included in the Bible?

Ahn ahn... abi the the uninspired books are now "partially inspired" since the Bible made reference to parts of them?

Response #32:
I wonder if perhaps you mean to suggest that the inclusion of a quote in the Bible necessarily means that the quote is true. When Satan was quoted as tempting the Lord Jesus, should we consider his words to have been true too? The narration is inspired in that it carries God's Signature that it is all true, that is, that Satan really said what he is quoted to have said, but not necessarily that what he said was true or that God is telling us of it so that we can use it like it is true.

When the Greek poets in Athens said that we are also God's offspring, they may have been pagans, but they were speaking the truth. That truth was not theirs. It is the Lord's. It belongs in the realm of natural revelation (Romans 1:20), which is accessible to all whether they are believers or not.

When Jude quoted Enoch, he was quoting the pre-Flood prophet whose words were revealed to him by the Holy Spirit without any recourse to any literature. So, there is no comparison here.

What we can talk about is the other books that are referenced in the Bible, like the Book of Jasher. These books contained historical records that would have given contemporaries a corroborating witness of what the Bible actually said, and provided more information for them that they might have found useful in their time. Many of these records never survived. If they did, they wouldn't have been inspired either, because their job was merely to contain historical records that could be referenced for a more robust appreciation of the Bible's witness.

So, the Bible's inspiration is not merely that the individual words are imbued with life. Rather, it is that the whole is endorsed by God and imbued with His Life so that we can be blessed by believing the message.

Question #33:
Oh yes, going by your understanding, the books are inspired because of the decisions of the Protestant church to limit God's word to 66 books. The position of the Orthodox, Coptic and Catholic churches that existed before Protestant church should now be discarded.

Ask yourself again, the Bible is inspired...what business does it have making reference to "uninspired books"? Are those portions of the uninspired books suddenly now inspired since the Bible made reference to them?

You are still avoiding these other questions;

What is your take on the extra books in the first version of the King James Bible (1611 version)?
What was the book of Enoch doing alongside other canonized books in the ancient dead sea scrolls?
Are the extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible also uninspired?

Response #33:
I'm wondering if there is any point in continuing to talk to you. Do you have a problem understanding what you read?

I said to you that books that are inspired are recognized by the presence of life in them. That's it. I did not say that books that are inspired are recognized by the Evangelical Protestants' acceptance of them.

I said that there are only 66 such books, and those are the ones that are accepted by Evangelical Protestants. That is, I said that the books that are inspired are in the collection that Evangelical Protestants have universally accepted. That is merely identifying which books are inspired, not telling you why they are inspired. Please, don't waste any more of my time asking me to repeat things I have said in writing.

As for the Orthodox, Coptic, and Roman churches, I don't see any reason why their say matters. The Bible was known as it was written. The Jewish nation knew what the Old Testament was right as it was being written (Jeremiah 36). They certainly did not need the Orthodox, Coptic, and Roman churches to tell them which book was inspired and which book wasn't. In the days of the apostles, it was the same (2 Peter 3:15-16). No one has ever needed the Orthodox, Coptic, and Roman churches to tell them which book was inspired and which book wasn't. Any living conscience can recognize the Word of God when it is spoken.

As for what business the Bible has referencing uninspired books, it's exactly the same business that it has referencing creation to prove the Existence of God and His Character (Romans 1:20; Psalm 19:1-6). Wherever there is any truth at all, it belongs to God. Only God defines Truth. Whatever He says is true. Therefore, when He built the world, He filled it with witnesses of His Truth, so that everyone who wishes to hear His Truth will find it by listening to them. If a reasonably accurate account of history is written, it will bear testimony to the veracity of the Bible. That is why the Bible references the books that it does.

As for the King James Bible, I am not going to repeat myself again.

Whatever the Book of Enoch was doing there is probably what every other preserved bit of literature is or was doing wherever it is found. That does not mean that every preserved bit of literature is God's Truth. Are you going to call the Roman tax records inspired because they still exist? Or are you going to say that it is only documents found in the Qumran caves that are inspired? Why? Because the caves are holy ground?

As for the Ethiopian Bible, please don't waste my time.

Question #34:
you mean Jude was quoting Enoch who had a book written down way long before Jude was born?

Can you explain how this came to be?

Enoch Chapter 1 v 9;

And behold! He comes with ten thousand of His holy ones (saints) in order to execute judgment on all, to destroy all the ungodly (wicked ones), and to convict all flesh of their works of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

Jude 1 v 14 - 15;

14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
15 To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

HINT: THE BOOK OF ENOCH WAS WRITTEN WAY BEFORE JUDE LEARNT HOW TO READ AND WRITE!

Meanwhile, these questions are awaiting your answers;
What is your take on the extra books in the first version of the King James Bible (1611 version)?
What was the book of Enoch doing alongside other canonized books in the ancient dead sea scrolls?
Are the extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible also uninspired?

Response #34:
Are you deliberately playing unintelligent? Or are you refusing to read what I write and just making stuff up to attribute to me?

I said that Jude quoted Enoch without any recourse to anything written. That means that he did not quote a written source. He quoted what he was shown by the Holy Spirit what Enoch said, very likely orally. He had a vision, is what I mean.

How do you know when the Book of Enoch was written? The Holy Spirit showed you while you were in your closet?

Finally, there is no book of Enoch.

Question #35:
Bros please use your head.

Tell us how Enoch 1 v 9 and Jude 1 v 14-15 contains the same text, bearing in mind the book of Enoch was written way before Jude's parents were even born;

Enoch Chapter 1 v 9;

And behold! He comes with ten thousand of His holy ones (saints) in order to execute judgment on all, to destroy all the ungodly (wicked ones), and to convict all flesh of their works of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

Jude 1 v 14 - 15;

14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
15 To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

HINT: THE BOOK OF ENOCH WAS WRITTEN WAY BEFORE JUDE LEARNT HOW TO READ AND WRITE!

Meanwhile, these questions are awaiting your answers;
1)What is your take on the extra books in the first version of the King James Bible (1611 version)?
2)What was the book of Enoch doing alongside other canonized books in the ancient dead sea scrolls?
3)Are the extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible also uninspired?

Response #35:
It's simple enough how the Book of Enoch had the quote. Someone may very well have copied Jude to produce the Book of Enoch. There are plenty enough novels today that quote accurate historical sources. That does not mean that they are reliable historical sources themselves.

As for your questions, I have already answered them, some of them multiple times even, so I'm not wasting my time on them again.

Question #36:
Are you kidding me? So the book of Jude is older than the book of Enoch?

Like seriously?

Response #36:
Why on Earth would I be kidding you? What makes you think your book of Enoch was written before Jude?

Question #37:
Let’s start with the ancient Dead Sea scrolls, what was the book of Enoch doing there alongside other canonised scriptures?

Are you also aware there oldest fragments of the Book of Enoch available dates as far back as 300BC?

Now remind me again, when was the book of Jude written?

Response #37:
I'm not going to waste my time answering that question about the Qumran Caves again. If you have a problem with the answer I gave before, you can simply tell me what it is, and we'll take it from there.

According to whose dating is this information?

The Book of Jude was written in the first half of the first century.

Question #38:
What answer did you give me on the questions below?
1)What is your take on the extra books in the first version of the King James Bible (1611 version), are the extra books uninspired?
2)What was the book of Enoch doing alongside other canonized books in the ancient dead sea scrolls?
3)Are the extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible also uninspired?

Response #38:
You want me to go and find an answer that I wrote quoting you as my respondent on Nairaland? You're not serious. If you want to engage my answer, go and find it yourself. Why do I have to keep jumping through hoops for you?

Question #39:
The older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) of the text are estimated to date from about 300–200 BCE, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably to the 100 BCE.

Source: Fahlbusch, E.; Bromiley, G.W. The Encyclopedia of Christianity: P–Sh page 411,

Various Aramaic fragments found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as Koine Greek and Latin fragments were proof that The Book of Enoch was known by early Jews and Christians. This book was also quoted by some 1st and 2nd century authors as in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Authors of the New Testament were also familiar with some content of the story. A short section of 1 Enoch (1:9) is cited in the New Testament, Epistle of Jude, Jude 1:14–15, and is attributed there to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:8 ), although this section of 1 Enoch is a midrash on Deuteronomy 33:2. Several copies of the earlier sections of 1 Enoch were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sources:

1. Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899), "Apocalyptic Literature" (column 220). "The Book of Enoch as translated into Ethiopic belongs to the last two centuries BCE. All of the writers of the NT were familiar with it and were more or less influenced by it in thought"

2. Barker, Margaret. (2005) [1998]. The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and Its Influence on Christianity. London: SPCK; Sheffield Phoenix Press.

NOW, WHO WAS INSINUATING THE BOOK OF ENOCH COPIED FROM THE BOOK OF JUDE?

Just to add, the book of Enoch was also discussed in detail by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Athenagoras

Response #39:
I have a few quotes of my own from an actual classical historical authority, Professor Robert Luginbill:

"...all of the Apocrypha may post-date all of the New Testament, it may very well be that whatever "allusions" are present (to the extent that there are any in fact; I don't really even see that to any great degree), this may be explained by deliberate aping of New Testament language as in the Enoch example (the later work mimicking the earlier famous literature)."

"Jude 1:9 is only known to us as having something to do with a work called the "Ascension/Assumption of Moses" because of some of the church fathers, Clement, Origen, et al. Most likely this is also a case of the counterfeit following the inspired original. Of course, it would be easy to speculate and expand a very scriptural sounding parallel to Jude 1:9 just on the basis of putting together Deuteronomy 34:6 with Malachi 4:4-5 and Genesis 5:24. This sort of thing happens very frequently in Greek literature and many scholars have been led astray by failing to recognize clever conjecture by ancient authors. For writing of this type was a very common thing in antiquity (e.g., the letters of Plato, the letters of Themistocles, interpolations into Thucydides [3.84], and many a work reputedly by some famous figure but undeniably not in fact). However, since we don't know anything more about the specific pseudepigraphical work in question besides these glancing references, it's only speculation either way."

"I think the best answer is that the Apocrypha either did not exist at the time the New Testament was written, or, that such parts of it that did exist were understood very well for what they were, namely, a secular, pseudo-religious philosophical literature written to lay claim to scriptural authority by human will out of human ambition (and given short shrift by all biblical writers as a result)."

"Most scholars use a range for these writings as they are of widely disparate provenance. The most common range I have seen is "200 B.C. to 100 A.D." which certainly admits of some if not all of the Apocrypha post-dating the New Testament. When it comes to dating such things, that is a highly subjective endeavor in any case. For example, Sirach is often dated as having an ante quem (it should only be good for post quem) of 132 B.C. because of the introduction's reference to Ptolemy Euergetes. But of course any work trying to hype its own authority will claim an antiquity greater than what is actually the truth (and what better way to do so than to drop a famous name of yore?). Given the vast number of Greek writings of this and a similar sort which are not in fact as old as they make out, I retain my skepticism."

Source: https://ichthys.com/mail-Issues-of-Canonicity.htm

Question #40:
And the dodging game begins;

You gave no direct response to the extra books in the ancient Ethiopian Bible, or why the first version of KJV had extra books as well OR what the book of Enoch was doing alongside other canonized scriptures in the ancient dead sea scrolls.

You merely regurgitated the position of the "Evangelical Protestants" as your basis for what the word of God is... 66 books
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/4#83311384

Well done...

Response #40:
I gave no direct response? Given that you have several times misquoted me and pretty much interpreted my posts like someone with a reading disability, and given also that the link up there is not the one I made in answer to your continuous badgering about the Dead Sea scrolls, I would say that I don't need to take you seriously.

I made the post in response to your question about the Dead Sea scrolls at 8:44pm. Find it, if you please. I really couldn't be bothered to do it for you.

And, believe me, I have never wasted time worrying about accusations like "dodging." You really are better off when I "dodge" your challenges.

Question #41:
1) So how did the book of Enoch make it alongside other canonized books in the ancient Dead sea scrolls?

2) What business did early church fathers like Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement e.t.c have to do with the book of Enoch?

3) How on earth is Professor Robert Luginbill suddenly an actual classical historical authority whilst this source existed way before him?
Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899), "Apocalyptic Literature"

4) How exactly does the bolded give us the precise date of the oldest manuscript of the book of Enoch available? One scholar's view against numerous other scholar's views... quite interesting! Pay special attention to your quote I bolded in red. That shows you his own point of view.

Response #41:
1. You can keep typing this question until you cramp your fingers. Not going to answer it again. Go find the answer where I made it and come and say whatever you have to say.

2. Aren't you the one that just claimed that the church fathers quoted your book of Enoch?

3. I think you should never ask such a question in public again. He is a historical authority because he is an erudite scholar of classical history. I would sooner take his word about historical questions over yours.

4. As for the question of numbers, I would sooner accept the testimony of one person telling the truth than that of a thousand telling lies. Who would you rather believe: the eyewitness or those who heard something secondhand? Scholars are not always unanimous in their position on questions in their field. It is up to you why you believe who you believe. I happen to believe Professor Luginbill because his arguments actually make sense.

As for "his own point of view," you are true to type. If you had not pointed that out, I would have thought that you are a wiser person than I believe you to be. Of course, it is his point of view. Does that make it a wrong point of view?

Question #42:
That's great to know, after modifying your post.

Lemme go and read it.

Response #42:
LOL. I rarely modify my posts without warning. I have not edited any response to you. I have edited my responses to another poster here, to correct my grammar, but not a single response to you. That would be a grand waste of time.

Question #43:
Dude, stop lying abeg. I've seen you modify your posts on another thread last we both commented on last week.

You modified that post you just referred me to.

Response #43:
I can understand how you think that I must be like you, looking to deceive and trick others into joining whatever madness you like. I'm not like that. If I modify my post in a way that changes its meaning significantly, I always include "Edited" at the end to warn that I changed it. Whenever I don't, it is in error that I don't, and I don't remember any instance when I forgot to.

Whenever I edit my post for grammar or similar adjustments, I don't bother to warn that I edited it. I did the same thing twice or three times in my exchange with ______ here. There is no dishonesty in that, since I didn't change anything significant in the post.

In the post in question, there isn't even a grammatical correction made. I couldn't really care less if you claim that I edited it, but clearly you don't pay attention to the discussions you get into. You are too blinded by the lies that you want to sell to the world that you cannot see anything clearly. You have read posts I made and quoted them to read completely differently than what I said, so how could you not miss an entire post and then turn around and claim that it was edited?

Question #44:
Awww... I just love how Professor Lunginbill is suddenly now the supreme authority on scholarly and classical history, whilst all other scholars can have their views burn to ashes cheesy cheesy cheesy

Increase your sample size and see how you'll fall short eventually

Response #44:
I didn't know that you were assigning places to scholars.

Question #45:
And the Orthodox, Catholic and Coptic churches also see the presence of life in those extra books beyond the 66 books accepted by the Evangelical Protestants. Any act of blasphemy here?

Of course their say also matters. Afterall, they existed before the Evangelical Protestants came into existence. Isn't it worth thinking why their versions of the Bible is more than 66 books...till the Evangelical Protestants whittled it down to 66?

This still does not answer my question. The portions of these "uninspired books" the Bible made references to, are they now suddenly inspired because the Bible made reference to them? Does that mean these "uninspired books" can now be referred as "partially inspired"?

You've not made any point at all on the 1611 KJV Bible, why do we have more than 66 books there?

Oh please tell us how and why Jude and Peter made references to the book of Enoch in their writings...if they did not consider it inspired. undecided

Oh wait, I guess it's only the part the made reference to, that is the inspired part... 

Response #45:
Right. I'm done discussing with you. I don't have the antidote either to dishonesty or to stupidity.

Question #46:
Ah yes, it's time for them to beat a hasty retreat when further evidences keep cropping up.

I really had a good laugh at your discovery today though. The book of Jude was written before the book of Enoch, and copied from it. Smh

Response #46:
Don't let my "hasty retreat" stop you from posting all your "further evidences." You've been doing that on this thread regardless.

I just don't waste my time on discussions with people like you. I have already repeated myself too many times here. To continue in the conversation, I would have to just repeat things I have said before. Since, I wasn't responding to convince you of anything, I would be a fool to do that. Best that I leave now and give my time to more productive tasks. My witness here is made. Those who have ears will hear. Others like you...well, as Paul put it you are the

[18][ones that] keep [trying to defraud] [us] of [our] prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking [your] stand on visions [you have] seen, inflated without cause by [your] fleshly mind,
[19]and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.
Colossians 2:18-19

Can't waste time on people like that.

Question #47:
Dude, again stop lying.

Do you want me to refer to the posts you edited by posting large volumes of information subsequently on the other thread? I can't believe you'll stoop this low to telling lies here.

Response #47:
I dare you to.

Question #48:
My pleasure, co-incidentally...it was on this thread

Did you modify these posts of yours below to Jamesid29? I recalled those posts had next to nothing in it, before those large volumes of information (copy and paste I presume) later cropped up. Yes or No?

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179902
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179929

Response #48:
Why are you asking me? I thought you were going to show evidence of my modifying posts deceitfully. Or were you planning to post any random link and then ask me to confirm that I modified it. Why would you believe anything I say in the matter? Where is proof of sneaky editing, _______?

Question #49:
Did you modify those posts in your response to Jamesid29? Yes or No

Those are your posts on this thread.

Response #49:
Yes, they are my posts. If I have to answer your question about the second link, then I would be a fool to do so. If I have to answer your question about the first link, I would also be a fool to do so, although for a different reason - should I be aiding you to call me a liar?

You claim that I am a liar. Now, prove your claim. Or else put up your sword and stop making a fool of yourself.

Question #50:
All this evasion tactics.

First you lied you only edited your posts to solite on this thread only for correction of grammatical errors.

You clearly modified your posts to ______ in those links I pasted earlier. Initially those posts had next to nothing in them before you updated them.

Just as you modified the other post you referred me to.

It’s so shameful you’ve resorted to outright lies.

Simple question: Did you modify those posts to _______? Yes or No

_________, hope you’re taking note of this development.

Response #50:
I'll list the lies in this post (and they're only a sampling in this conversation with you):

1. Evasion tactics? A lie. Why would I be evading your question? Am I denying anything? You claimed that I edited my posts. Why do you look to me for proof? I'm not a fool, so I won't help you make your accusation. If you want to be believed, you go and get your proof and cement my guilt. Using accusations of evasion is only increasing your dishonesty.

2. "I only edited my posts to ______." A lie. I never claimed that those were the only posts that I edited here. I only gave them as an example of posts that I edited here. I also said why I edited them. If you mean to suggest that I edited them for any other reason, by all means, show what the reason is.

3. "I modified my posts to _______." This one's a travesty.

4. "I modified my post to you." Another lie. I have many responses to you with grammatical errors that I even thought of modifying, but I decided against it, because discussing with you is annoying to me. When I compile these discussions for publishing elsewhere, I'll make the editorial corrections I need to make for clarity. But here, I can't wait to quit talking with you. It feels like eating something not only evil-tasting and evil-smelling, but it also fouls up my stomach.

5. "I've resorted to outright lies." Why not? What else would you say to make your own lies disappear? No better way to escape accusation than to make one of your own. Rather than showing how your Book of Enoch is actually part of the Bible, it is now my "outright lies" about modifying my posts that is the important subject of the day.

Finally, keep asking the question. At some point, you might even force me to answer you. Don't give up.

Question #51:
@ihedinobi3,

Don't bother, the following clarifies your position;

1) You post "Edited" at the bottom of your message after you've significantly altered it.
2) That was the same thing that happened in your convo with ________

Hence, you modified those posts I pointed your attention to.

Response #51:
Oh, I'm so excited for you. You finally actually looked at the posts that you were huffing and puffing about. Of course, I had "Edited" at the bottom of the second post all along. I deleted two or three sentences from the fifteenth paragraph and added one. That was why I wrote "Edited" at the bottom. And I did it a few days ago too. So, all this time you've been losing your mind over nothing.

As for whether or not I posted volumes after initially having nothing there, that would have been hilarious, if I felt like laughing. I wrote those two posts as one post on my Word app, then I copied and pasted it into one post that was too long, so it didn't get published on Nairaland. I broke the post in two and posted them one after the other with nothing else ever posted in the same text boxes before.

In other words, the only modification made there was the one I told you about in the second post. But you are a liar by nature. So, of course, all you wanted to see was that I was just as deceitful as you.

If I needed proof of your own deceitfulness, just look at all my responses to you. I would make a response quoting you, only to discover that you had already edited your post without warning. So, many of the posts I have quoted in my comments end up different from your old posts. This happened too on the other thread where you and other arrogant false teachers like yourself were trading pictures of your false visions of the Lord. How many times did you bother to warn me that you had changed your post? And you felt like I was like you too. I am not, OkCornel. Deal with it.

Question #52:
Dude you are liar, you just mentioned you never modified your post to ______ some moments ago;

You modified these two posts to _________...
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179902
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179929

The end of the first post referred to the second one for a continuation, which you ended with the word "EDITED"

Response #52:
No, ______, I'm not a liar like you. I never claimed not to modify my posts to _______. I said that your accusation in that regard is a travesty. You ignored the "Edited" at the bottom of the second post, and you claimed that I posted nothing earlier and then replaced it with large volumes of text. That is why I called your accusation a travesty.

As I said, I only edited the second post, and I put "Edited" there when I did. And I certainly never did what you claimed. I posted both parts of the post immediately I copied them to new posts on the thread. I never had any earlier response that I changed. That is all your own "vision."

I still have the Word document I copied from to post here.

PS.: Anyhow, _______, I've wasted enough of my night and morning talking to you. It's like shouting at the wind, for all the good it does to you.

You are free to believe whatever you want, and to accuse me of any fantasy that shows up in your head. It's not my problem. It won't make you less of a liar, nor will it free you from the Wrath of the Lord Jesus for the damage that you are doing to His sheep. For all your noise and bluster, it is not me that you really have to worry about. It's Him. Of course, I can barely stand talking to you because of the wickedness of your heart. You really annoy me. The absolute disregard you have for the Lord's Truth, and your brazen effort to destroy His sheep really upset me. But I'm nothing. What can I do to you? I can mock you, I can spite you, I can ignore you. But what good would any of that really do to you? If I ignore you, at least I will not give you occasion to blaspheme. Maybe. What stops you from blaspheming anyway using my name or my comments elsewhere as an excuse? You wouldn't be the first to do it. Another is doing the exact same here on this thread. So, ignoring you would not necessarily stop you from blaspheming and misleading the Lord's flock.

Nonetheless, to avoid falling any deeper into sin because of my distaste for your lies, I will do so and quit talking to you at this point. It is not my place to be angry with you or to even discipline you for the things you do. That is the Lord's Place.

Question #53:
Ahn ahn, I didn't know holding onto a single professor's view (Dr. Luginbill) is now the standard for looking into the matter of the book of Enoch thoroughly?

I mean, you discounted and turned a blind eye to the view of other numerous scholars and encyclopedias to hinge onto a funny speculative view that the book of Jude was written before the book of Enoch? As in...who in his or her right senses would conclude the book of Jude was written before the book of Enoch?

Amazing how someone can tell lies comfortably and defend it vigorously.

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/8#83327413

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/9#83328261

By the way, there's a certain false teacher that claimed the Holy Spirit withheld some of His gifts from the church since after the Bible era. I'm still trying to recall this false teacher vividly.... 

Response #53:
Hello __________.

I have a reason for returning to this discussion with you. Incidentally, that reason is also one of your challenges to believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, God Who put on Humanity as well to die for all human sin. You asked,

"Or which of this advice should we adhere to?
Proverbs 24 v 5-6;

4 Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit."

Both are two halves of one whole. There are times when you do not answer a fool because there is no good answer for him. A fool rejects reason. It is meaningless then to seek to reason with him. However, there are times when a fool's arrogance needs to be challenged, so that he learns humility. It is wisdom to know the difference.

My policy in general is not to bother with people who reject Scriptural authority, except when they ask direct questions that I consider reasonable. Such questions, like the one you asked above, may be asked in order to trip believers up, but they often provide me with opportunities to demonstrate to young believers that there are really answers to such questions in the Bible. Otherwise, I consider it a waste of precious time and energy to engage in debates with such people. Also, there are times when I am simply unable to bear the emotional burden of dealing with such people, so I don't engage at such times.

You are clearly determined to do significant damage to believers using this thread - and others like it, I'm sure. You know why it is important to you to do just that. As for me, I think I am up to the burden right now, and it seems to me like your questions and challenges need to be answered.

I'll begin then from where I just left off above:

1. Contradictions in the Bible.
I. You claim that there are contradictions in the 66 books that evangelical Protestants accept as inspired.

a) Why though is this claim any use to you when you argue, not that the 66 books are not inspired, but that there are other books that are just as inspired as them?

b) Are you changing positions now to claim that the 66 books are not inspired, but rather that the books that you claim that they referenced and quoted are the inspired ones?

c) Can any inspired literature possess contradictions and internal inconsistency?

d) If your answer to (c) above is "yes," how can you explain the possibility that God can lie, because inspiration only means that He endorses the whole message of the literature as reliable and true and worthy of acceptance among all generations of men (that is why the Word of God is living: it endures without fail)?

II. In answer to your question about 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1, I will call to your mind two other passages in the Bible that are similar. One is 1 Kings 22:19-23 and Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7.

Principle I: Nothing happens without God's say-so.

Principle II: All things, including Satan, are tools in God's Hands to serve His Purposes.

These two principles are apparent in the Scriptures above. God did move David to carry out a census in Israel. Satan did tempt David to carry out a census in Israel. Yes, it was the same census. No, there was no contradiction. Satan merely got God's Permission to tempt David in the manner that He did. God permitted him to do it, because God was angry with Israel and meant to punish them as a result of that census.

Now, there are two things that are important to point out about Satan's temptation of believers and censuses in Israel.

i) Satan does ask for and sometimes obtains special permission to tempt some believers. We have already seen that in the example of Job above. But it bears repeating. In Luke 22:31, the Lord Jesus confirms this in His warning to Peter. So, it can be expected that Satan asked for special permission to tempt David in this matter of the census.

ii) Censuses in Israel were a sacred affair. In Exodus 30:12, God commanded that no censuses were to be carried out without providing a ransom for each male who is counted. Without that ransom, a plague would come upon Israel. So, while it was not wrong for David to seek to know the number of all Israelite males in his dominions - in fact, Moses carried out several censuses of Israel during the time that he led the nation, and so did many other leaders and kings -, there was a divinely ordained procedure that he was supposed to follow to carry out such a census. David did not follow this procedure.

So, the picture to be seen here is that David carried out an unsanctioned census after Satan tempted him to do so, and that provided the Lord with a means to punish Israel at the time. Seventy thousand Israelites died of a plague as a punishment for David's failure, but this too was what the Lord had sought to accomplish by allowing Satan to tempt David.

As to why the Lord would do things this way, He is the King of the Universe. He has every right to do whatever He pleases. However, it is clear that Israel was acting in the manner that Israel usually did whenever they had everything in abundance: they got spiritually lazy. That was proved by David's unusual failure in alertness when he was tempted in the matter of the census. David was usually careful to find out whether the Lord wanted him to do this or that, but we see no signs of this here, even when Joab, a not particularly exemplary character, sought to dissuade him from it. The result is that he carried out an unsanctioned census and brought about the deaths of tens of thousands of Israelites in a manner that woke Israel up from their spiritual slumber.

Conclusion: There was no contradiction between those two passages, just as there was none in the other two that I treated at the beginning of this post.

III. In the matter of the disparity in amounts paid, in 2 Samuel 24, David paid for the threshing-floor and the equipment and provisions for the sacrifices that he made to the Lord. In 1 Chronicles 21, David paid for the whole site on which the threshing-floor was built to make it a shrine to the Lord at the time. This can happen because the urgency would have led him to pay the 50 shekels of silver first for the threshing-floor and the provisions for the sacrifices just to get the sacrifices done, then later he would have paid the 600 shekels of gold for the whole land because Araunah/Ornan could no longer use the place as a threshing-floor with an altar standing on it.

2. The Matter of Scholarship.
This is actually a very simple matter. Even in so-called precise sciences like physics, interpreting data, proposing theories, creating new scientific methods each results in plenty enough disagreement in the scientific community. So, that there is dissent on the part of even one member of an erudite community is not really proof of any kind that that member is less than erudite.

For another thing, argumentum ad populum is usually a fallacy. Although, in general, if more people believe something, it is usually because it is true, it is not therefore a universal case. That is, it is incorrect to assume that a given thing is true because more people believe it than don't. That is to say, that something is popular does not automatically make it true. Again, so-called precise sciences like physics have proven this time and again, that popular ideas are often false. So, the fact that you have a great number of scholars touting one opinion is no proof that that opinion is correct. It may be, but it won't be just because so many people believe it.

Finally, I was not quoting a scholarly work. Those were excerpts from personal emails that the Professor exchanged with inquirers who read his Bible-teaching website (you would know this if you actually bothered to check out the link). As such, his tone would have been necessarily different than if he were writing for his peers or as an expert in classical history. This is a very normal thing. Non-initiates in any given field, in general, do not often appreciate exactly how knowledge in that field works, so when experts speak to outsiders, they sound somewhat different than when they speak as authorities or peers. Having said that, as I said before, that someone has an opinion does not automatically mean that their opinion is either false or inadmissible, especially if the person is an expert in the field in which he or she is having an opinion.

3. Your accusations of me.
Have you looked up the word "travesty?" These are two definitions of it from the Cambridge dictionary online:

i) something that fails to represent the values and qualities that it is intended to represent, in a way that is shocking or offensive

ii) something that completely fails to do what it is intended or expected to do, and therefore seems ridiculous

I said that your accusation of me to have modified my post to ______ without warning was a travesty. I meant that it was a ridiculous accusation. Not only had I indicated that I edited the second post when I did days ago, but I never edited either post in any other way, much less in the manner that you described. You obviously didn't know what you were talking about, since the "Edited" tag had been there all along while you were making your accusations. I didn't bother to deny that I had modified the posts because you had not accused me of modifying them. You had accused me of modifying them without warning and also of modifying them in a way that I simply did not. As I said, I knew that you didn't know what you were talking about, so I simply waited for you to catch up.

Question #54:
Please educate us further, when is the perfect time to answer a fool, and when not to answer a fool? Oh well, I guess that is a totally subjective matter to be swept under the carpet of "wisdom to know the difference"

Per the bolded, please why are you dodging questions on the extra books in the first version of the KJV Bible? Or are those extra books no longer scriptural authority? Same goes for the extra books in the Ethiopian Bible.

Please and please, can you point out where I claimed the 66 books are not inspired? My position has been clear on this thread. GOD'S WORD CANNOT BE LIMITED TO A SET OF BOOKS? An eternal God who has been talking before man invented ink and paper suddenly has all His words limited to 66 books?
Take for example a prophecy/revelation from God concerning Nigeria that comes to pass in our time, is that prophecy/revelation the word of God? Yes or No. Must one cross check and look for where Nigeria is written in the Bible before one concludes the prophecy/revelation is from God?

Please can you point out where I claimed the 66 books are not "inspired"? Are you finding it difficult to understand what I've been saying all this while is GOD'S WORDS CANNOT BE LIMITED TO 66 BOOKS?

Absolutely yes, you cannot rule out the impact of errors made by imperfect men in the course of writing down the words of an perfect God.

Refer to my answer in (c) above. God is perfect, but man is subject to bias, errors and mistakes. The imperfections of man cannot be used as a basis to evaluate whether God is a liar or not.

I was predictably expecting you to use the case of Job to explain the obvious contradiction between 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1.
Please bear in mind, according to you and the 66 books crew, the 66 books are the inspired and complete words of God. Can you point out where exactly God had a meeting with Satan, authorizing Satan to tempt David?

Per the bolded, please I don't want your assumptions. The 66 books of the Bible is the complete word of God right? Kindly point out where God had a meeting with Satan permitting him to tempt David.

I guess if we use this assumption of yours, perhaps Satan was the one who also hardened Pharoah's heart with God's permission cheesy

Did you miss out on the total package Ornan offered to David in both 1 Chronicles 21 v 23 and 2 Samuel 24 v 21-22?

1 Chronicles 21 v 23-25;
23 And Ornan said unto David, Take it to thee, and let my lord the king do that which is good in his eyes: lo, I give thee the oxen also for burnt offerings, and the threshing instruments for wood, and the wheat for the meat offering; I give it all.

2 Samuel 24 v 21-22
21 And Araunah said, Wherefore is my lord the king come to his servant? And David said, To buy the threshingfloor of thee, to build an altar unto the Lord, that the plague may be stayed from the people.
22 And Araunah said unto David, Let my lord the king take and offer up what seemeth good unto him: behold, here be oxen for burnt sacrifice, and threshing instruments and other instruments of the oxen for wood.

Please and please, where in this discussion between David and Araunah a.k.a. Ornan did the seller (Ornan) imply in anyway threshing floor is totally different from the land David bought? Is this your subtle addition into the 66 books representing the complete word of God?

Ah yes... argument ad populum is a fallacy when majority of scholars concludes the book of Enoch was written well before book of Jude, But argument ad populum is not a fallacy when most christians believe only 66 books makes up the complete inspired words of God...
I love the double standards at play here.

Per the bolded, so sticking to the views of a professor via personal e-mails exchanged with inquirers is a more persuasive evidence than researched findings documented on various christian and religious encyclopedias out there? I'm really baffled.

Bros, abeg we all went to school here, stop twisting the obvious.

You clearly claimed I lied when I said you modified your posts to Jamesid29;

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/8#83327413

And same you now turned around to contradict yourself here.

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/9#83328261

Dude, keep on defending your lies here.

^^^^
Just look at another blatant lie here, I asked you this simple question on more than one occasion. Did you modify your posts to Jamesid29? Yes or No?

https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/8#83326873

And I still insist, these two posts of yours to Jam.esid29 had next to nothing in them before you pasted a whole lot in there.
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179902
https://www.nairaland.com/5450889/why-book-enoch-removed-bible/3#83179929

Response #54:
About Proverbs 24:5-6.
Your challenge was to resolve the contradiction, was it not? Well, there is no contradiction between both verses. It was all in your mind.

Extra Books in some translations.
About the extra books you have kept asking about, as I said before, it is not my concern what you want to believe. The only thing that is truly Scripture is whatever has the life of God in it, that is, whatever is inspired by the Lord God. If you can see the quality of life in ancient Greek pagan poetry, then by all means consider it Scripture as well. It's not my problem. For those of us who believe in the Lord Jesus, God Who became Man to die for the sins of the world, there are only 66 books which possess that quality of life. We are content to receive those as the Oracles of God. You don't have to accept them too. The Mormons have a whole other book in addition to the Bible. The Muslims do not even care for the Bible, they have the Qur'an. You don't have to accept the 66 books that Evangelical Protestants accept. You don't have to accept anything at all. If you consider your own self inspired, you could even write your own Scriptures. Believe me, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. It's not my problem.

About the inspiration of the 66 books and inspiration in general.
As for your position on the inspiration of the 66 books, I have seen your answer. You do consider them inspired, but you hold that an inspired book can contradict itself.

Regarding this position then that an inspired work can contradict itself, you claim that the imperfection of men can corrupt a work inspired by God, but this is what the Bible (and you do accept that the 66 books are inspired, remember) says,

[21]...no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.
2 Peter 1:21 NASB

That is, human will is never involved in prophecy. The only sense in which it is is that the prophet has the choice to prophesy, that is, to deliver God's Message, or to not do so (Ezekiel 3:17-21; compare the example of Jonah). But he cannot manufacture, adapt, correct, or in any sense alter that Message for any reason. So, you are wrong. The imperfection of man has nothing to do with the Oracles of God. Therefore, an inspired work can never contradict itself, since it is entirely God's Truth.

Concerning 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1
I will ask you a question of my own, and if you answer me, I will also give you an answer to your question. Here's my question:

Where does the Bible say that your extra books including your book of Enoch is inspired by God?

Concerning the transaction between David and Araunah/Ornan
This is what the Bible says:
[24]However, the king said to Araunah, "No, but I will surely buy it from you for a price, for I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God which cost me nothing." So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.
2 Samuel 24:24 NASB

[25]So David gave Ornan 600 shekels of gold by weight for the site.
1 Chronicles 21:25 NASB

Re: Re: The Matter of Scholarship
1. About argumentum ad populum, it is not my responsibility to satisfy your standards whatever they may be. My argument is simple: things do not become true because the most people believe it. That is principle of reasoning. This principle is why it doesn't impress me that you can appeal to all the scholars in the world, if I can only appeal to one. The question is whether your scholars are right and mine is wrong, or whether mine is right and yours are wrong. That's all. The double standards that you are complaining about don't concern me.

2. About the mode of communication, this again is a travesty of reasoning. Does the mode of communication change the quality of the knowledge passed? If a professor tells his child in the privacy of his home that the earth orbits the sun, is that then an unreliable bit of information because he did not present it to the child in a peer-reviewed article? The professor I quoted simply shared with correspondents in personal emails and in colloquial form information that he has already developed in research and very likely published in multiple scholarly material. He, after all, is a professor. You don't become a professor by conjecturing in personal emails, do you?

Re: Re: Your accusations of me
1. Of course, I claimed you lied. Does the fact that I said that your accusation was a travesty mean that you did not lie? I did provide definitions for the word in my post, and you just claimed that you went to school. What more do you want me to do for you?

2. As I said, your lie was not that you said that I modified my posts to Jamesid29. It was that you claimed that I did so without warning and that I posted copious amounts of information in posts that I had made prior without such information on them. Both were lies. You already admitted to your mistake in the first when you went and saw that I did warn that I edited my second post. But you have maintained your second lie until now.

3. You have the ability and the right to insist on anything you please, but no one can force the truth to become a lie or force the lie to become true. So, insist all you want, but until you can actually prove that I did in fact post copious amounts of text in posts I had previously made without such text in them, you, sir, are a liar, and a vicious one for fighting so hard to impugn my character for no just cause.

Question #55:
kudos bro, really doing justice to the issues.

Response #55:
Thank you for your kind words, my friend. I'm always happy to see that anything I write does good to those who read it.

Question #56:
Any spirit filled Christian could easily dismiss the fraud called book of enoch.

Some people base their belief on the validity of the book of enoch on the fact of what Jude said in judr 1vv14 forgetting that jude didnt say it was a book he quoted.
How do we know books that were inspired and those that are not?
Ignorant people who knows little or no history of the bible think the bible was just an accidental book with no divine influence.
A look at the history of the bible reveals that the bible has an internal consistency which justify itself as authentic.

The book of the old testament were kept and recognised by the Jewish nation, a race chosen by God as his oracle and keeper of his words, to know if a testimony is true there must be a witness to its truity, All the books of the prophets, kings and prominent men were well cannonised and recognized as inspired by God by the jewish nation and the book of enoch was never among.

Response #56:
Additionally, if Enoch wrote any book at all, it is unlikely that it survived the Flood.

Even further, all the books of the Bible were written by Jews, God's Chosen People. This makes sense, since God created that nation specifically to separate them out for His Truth. That is equivalent to separating land from sea in His seven-day re-creation of the Earth, in order to let life flourish. The same is what happened with Israel: by separating out a nation for Himself, He created a means for His Truth to flourish in the world.

The first Hebrew was Abraham, not Enoch. So, it makes sense that no inspired writings existed before Abraham. In fact, none existed before Israel was called out of Egypt. Similarly no inspired writing has come into existence since the Church was called out from among the Gentiles.

Question #57:
thank God for this insight, you know it is eaiser to see the tricks and the lies of the devil if one allows the truth of God speak for itself. All the books of the old testament were centered around God's dealing with his chosen people the Israelites, their future, christ birth life, death and resurrection and some hints and prophecy concerning the church. The book of enoch is deception that leads to angelic devotion and worship nothing divine about that book just completely occultic and demonic.

Response #57:
You're exactly right about angelic devotion. Incidentally, this sort of thing has been calling a portion of Colossians to mind for me:

[18]Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,
[19]and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.
Colossians 2:18-19 NASB

It isn't coincidence that the people who make so much of these "left-out books" tend to be the same people who keep talking about visions and revelations and seeing "hidden things" that only they have some special ability to see.

Question #58:
I for one used to delight in these so called books that claims to reveal special secrets of Angels until I got saved and I realised Jesus was all sufficient for me, these so called books became useless and pointless and I quickly realised these books were satanic.
I usually mark people who elevate their so called visions on the same standard as the bible.
These lastdays are particularly interesting as all the words spoken by the apostles are coming to pass.

Response #58:
You're right that everything the apostles warned about is occurring now. People are turning away from the Truth after fictions created by men, because they cannot stand the Truth anymore. That is why these books are becoming the big deal that many of these rebels are making of them.

Question #59:
or it could be a common knowledge among the jews about what enoch said. Jude didn't say it was written by enoch.

Response #59:
This could be true, but given that Jude was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write, and that Enoch was not a Jew, so that his prophecies would necessarily be important to Jews, and given also that Enoch's prophecies are mentioned nowhere else in this body of Jewish sacred writings called the Old Testament, it is unlikely that Jude's quote was ever common knowledge among the Jews. It is very possibly what was shown to Him by the Lord, just like Moses was given to see the entire history of Creation up to the point of the Exile, including the very words of ancient prophets like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is really not an unreasonable or particularly difficult conclusion to draw.

Question #60:
I think you are right. The Holy Spirit might have revealed to Jude the prophecy of enoch, and also note that the devil might have also revealed a corrupted version of the prophecy of enoch midst other books to in secret so as to counter the word of God.
Do you know that the Egyptian account of creation is similar to that of moses, so that one might think moses learnt it from the Egyptians just as some think jude got the prophecy from the book of enoch.

In 1933 and 1934, Yahuda identified several similarities between Genesis 1-2 and ancient Egyptian texts. He also identified Egyptian influence throughout the Pentateuch.2

In 1982, Cyrus Gordon showed similarities between the Egyptian and Hebrew traditions of the creation of man.3 He drew several parallels between the creation tradition of Khnum, the potter-god, and Genesis 2:4-25.

In 1983, James Hoffmeier also identified several striking parallels between Genesis 1-2 and ancient Egyptian cosmology.4 First, he discussed the state of the cosmos at the time when God began His creation. The Egyptian and the Hebrew share similar concepts although the words used are unrelated etymologically.5 Second, Hoffmeier mentioned similarities between “the initial acts of creation.”6 Third, Hoffmeier examined the similarities of man’s creation shared by the Egyptian and Hebrew accounts.

Response #60:
It is not improbable that Satan was involved in all the caricatures and corruptions of biblical accounts. In fact, it is highly likely, since the Truth is the only way to beat him in this world. But it is not absolutely necessary that he be involved. Human ego is incredibly enough to cause the same damage. Just the desire to be identified with something great or famous is enough to lead people into creating counterfeits of such things.

Consider the example of Jeremiah. When he was prophesying about the doom of Jerusalem and Judah, other prophets arose that wanted to be identified with great prophecy too. They too claimed to be speaking for the Lord. They used the right phrases and even went so far as to link themselves with what Jeremiah was doing. For example, Jeremiah had been commanded by the Lord to wear a wooden yoke to symbolize the slavery that was about to come upon Judah, but one such false prophet took it off of him and broke it, claiming that the Lord had said that He was going to break the yoke on Judah. Jeremiah said, "Amen, let it be that the Lord has said such a thing." But that was not the end of the matter. The Lord sent a message to say that the wooden yoke would be replaced with an iron one, and that the false prophet would pay dearly for speaking falsely in His Name.

The same thing happened with most of the Apocrypha and pseudepigraphical literature. They simply aped existing Scripture, making themselves sound like them, so that people would be deceived into thinking that they were Scripture too.

As for Creation myths, that is the same sort of thing. We know that almost immediately after the Lord had shown to Adam and Eve that redemption would only come through a bloody sacrifice, Cain - only the second generation from Eden - decided to ignore the Lord's clear teaching and offer vegetables for his sin. That is how human arrogance is. If Cain could treat the teaching of the Lord so disrespectfully so soon, it is no surprise that other descendants of Noah's, who must have had all the opportunity for 350 years after the Flood to learn the true Creation story from him, would simply take germs of truth from the true story and fashion fictions of their own that they prefer.

The same thing happened with the Gospel. Even while the Lord Jesus was still in the flesh, people who saw His Miracles decided to describe them completely differently than what they were. They admitted that they were Miracles, but they claimed that He did them in Satan's power. That is the hard-hearted nature of man. It was not long after He went back to be with the Father that fools began to write all manner of fiction about Him, not least in the Apostles' names for popularity. That is where many of the so-called "lost gospels" came from.

Human beings have been doing this since the days of Cain. Satan certainly rejoices in it and helps them along with choice embellishments, but they do it quite well without his help too.

Question #61:
you are wasting your time on an apostate

Response #61:
I agree up to a point. I often get into these conversations in order to leave a witness, a shining beacon for any young believer who is still looking to grow in the Truth. It should tell them where there is danger and what sort of danger it is, and hopefully show them the way to the Truth. I already left signals all over this thread for them.

But, of course, when I allow myself to be drawn in up to the point of getting emotionally involved, it starts to defeat the purpose. That is why I often end these discussions and exit them, as I did here. It is never for the sake of these rebels, except in so far as they may be saved by being shown their error, but that is almost never likely.

Question #62:
I get you, you have tried to clarify yourself but you are been intentionally misquoted and your evidence ignored, like you side there is a limit to which one can push. Just ignore unnecessary repetition but leave fact for the validity of your points. Stay blessed

Response #62:
That is certainly one way to put it, but I actually just intended to register a falsehood. I mean that the questions I asked when I entered the conversation with the false teacher in question were deliberately asked to demonstrate that he had not looked at the matter thoroughly. I really didn't plan to argue for anything after that. My going on to engage him was not what I intended. I knew that I could never persuade him to abandon his madness, since I have met him before in a similar setting. So, it was a waste of time, except in so far as engaging him could produce insights for those who are considering the question of the inspiration of any literature.

But thank you very much for your kind words.

I think I have offered you this advice before, but if I might, let me do so again: you should include appropriate attribution to any sources you quote, not only to give credit where it is due, but also to allow those who find what you post useful to go and look at the full work wherever it is available. Also, with proper attribution, you don't bear responsibility for the full thoughts and intents of the author of the work, and then you won't accidentally misrepresent anything that they may be saying.

Grace be with you.

Question #63:
Hmmmmm. This is my conclusion!

I am beginning to regret bringing this thread up. It has stirred quite a lot of dissent, and insults traded around like strings of spaghetti....

In the end, the quote above is what we should really adhere to.

We're all still Christians...

Response #63:
Hello there.

It is true that the Bible calls all believers to be at peace with each other:

[1]Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, [2]with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, [3]being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. [4]There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; [5]one Lord, one faith, one baptism, [6]one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.
Ephesians 4:1-6 NASB

However, this is a command to believers. Among those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, God Who put on Humanity and died for our sins, there are many different kinds of people. There are those who are living rebelliously, loving sin and refusing to take the Truth seriously and grow spiritually. There are those who are growing spiritually but who are at varying stages of development. There are those who have attained spiritual maturity but who are at varying degrees of maturity. There are those who are extremely advanced in their walk with the Lord. This is all true. It is also true that even among the very mature, agreement between believers is not perfect. There is plenty enough that we tend to disagree on, because, after all, we are still in this mortal body. For this reason, the Bible commands us to learn to tolerate each other, to be humble and not prefer our own selves to other believers, to be gentle in the way we treat each other, to be diligent to preserve our unity in the bond of peace, with careful attention given to the desire of the Lord Jesus expressed in His Prayer in John 17:11, 21-23. The Lord wants us to be one. He died for this too. But, as I said, this is a command to believers (compare John 17:9).

There are plenty enough people in this world who masquerade as Christians, not least to lead immature and impressionable believers away from their saving faith in Jesus Christ. That is why the Lord Jesus gave shepherds to the church, that is, pastor-teachers. These shepherds are responsible to protect young believers (that is, believers who have not yet reached spiritual maturity) from such wicked people (John 17:12; 21:15-17; 1 Peter 5:1-3; Acts 20:17-18a, 28; compare Acts 20:29). When these shepherds do their job of protection, it is never a pretty sight. Compare the example of the Lord with the Pharisees, scribes, and priests. Consider Paul's letters to his various charges, not least Galatians 5:12, for example. There is no peace to be had with people who make it a point of duty to mislead the Flock of the Lord Jesus Christ. The wickedness of such people is greater than you may be able to imagine (Luke 17:1-2).

Now, why am I bringing this up here? It is because you suppose that everyone who claims some kind of association with the Bible and with Jesus Christ is a believer. That is a tremendous tragedy. Only those who believe in Jesus Christ, that is, the Man Who was and is God and Who died for us so that we can be saved from the righteous consequences of our sins, are believers. Nobody else is. It does not matter how they sound, how much of the Bible they quote, how they behave. All such people are unbelievers, if they do not believe in the Lord. But if they were only unbelievers, we could pity them and pray that they will receive the Gospel and be saved. Some of them are not content to reject the Lord, however. They also make a sport of preventing weak Christians from following the Lord faithfully and learning who He is, without any trouble, just like the Amalekites did to Israel on their way from Egypt: they kept harassing the weak, the stragglers in the rear, killing weak ones who were trailing behind (Deuteronomy 25:17). This kind of people is abominable to the Lord and to His shepherds. There can never be peace with them (compare Exodus 17:14-16; 1 Samuel 15:2-3 - note God's punishment of Saul in taking from him his position as shepherd over Israel for his failure to carry out God's vengeance against Amalek), unless they repent their wickedness and turn to the Lord.

This thread (and this forum at large) provides such people with an incredible opportunity to attack weak believers. The reason is that there is only one thing that keeps a believer safe in this world: the Truth of God (John 17:15-17). If you feed the children of God lies, they will be poisoned, their spiritual growth will be stunted, and they will have to endure a weak faith, incapable of ever adequately defending themselves against the enemy or amounting to anything significant for their Lord and Master. At worst, they could end up falling away from the faith entirely. Therefore, an effective way for the enemy to harm believers is to infiltrate their ranks with false teachers and rebellious men who attack the Truth, either claiming that it cannot be known, so that everyone is free to make things up as they please, or else claiming that something is Truth when it is not at all. A public forum where anyone can speak without restraint, especially with respect to the Bible, is an incredibly fertile opportunity for the enemy to attack weak believers with incredible lies that would leave more mature Christians completely stupefied to hear.

The Book of Enoch, along with the rest of the pseudepigraphical materials and the Apocrypha, is NOT Truth. If anyone enjoys reading them for their literary value, that is all to the good: anyone can enjoy Homer, Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Chinua Achebe, etc. But to persuade believers that it is Scripture is the worst thing to do to a believer. There is nothing worse than this. Whoever offers poison to the children as food will be held accountable for their wickedness. Anyone may enjoy fiction of any sort that they please, but anyone who dares to sell it as truth to the children of God has no idea what awaits them. That is why this cannot be a peaceful thread. It is also why you are wrong to call those who do such wickedness "Christians." If they are saved at all, they are at the door of apostasy. It is unlikely that they are saved at all.

Question #64:
Mr Ihedinobi3, how will you proved that the Songs Of Solomon is God's inspired book supposing it was not part of the 66 books?

Response #64:
Hello.

Although I have not been addressing you on this thread, you've been here, and, given your question, you've seen my responses to other people here. In quite a few of those responses, I repeated several times that one can only know what is Scripture by the presence of life in the Message of the writing. That's it. Any believer can tell if something is Scripture just by reading it. That is how believers have known for millennia which books are inspired and which are not.

In other words, as I told your cohort here, it is not because any book is in the collection accepted by this church or that church or this or that group that we consider it inspired. It is not because the Song of Songs is among the 66 books accepted by Evangelical Protestants that I or any other believer considers it inspired. We consider it inspired because we can sense life in the words of the book. When we read it, itself declares that it is God's very Word. It is on the basis of this testimony that the book makes for itself that God-fearing believers down the ages have accepted them as Scripture. Evangelical Protestants merely accept the witness of the book itself. They did not and do not create canons. The books themselves are the canon.

Question #65:
1. How do we know that the songs of Solomon has life in it?

2. What are the characteristics of this life in the songs of Solomon?

@bolded if broken down into simpler units will indicate that;
1. "If something is scripture".........this is an indication that any book can be scripture if life is in the message of the writing. It also indicates that the life of God's inspired book is not limited to 66 books except you are trying to tell us that the "Life" you are talking about is limited.

2. "Any believer"..........this is an indication that you are wrong or just being sentimental towards believers that hold the book of Enoch with high esteem because they "might have seen the life" you are talking about.

But then again, this can only be proved when you tell us about the "Life in the message of Writing" you are talking about.

My brother it is good I judge things from the characteristics of the Life you are talking about. But my question;

Since inspired books are not by collections why do you think the life of God in writings is limited to 66 books collections?

Then back to my original question what is this life exactly?

Response #65:
Re: Your questions about Song of Songs.
1. We can know that there is life in any literature or any message if we have life in ourselves too. It is a response of kinship (1 Corinthians 2:9-16; John 10:26-27, compare Romans 8:9). The life which is in Scripture is the same life that believers have as a result of their Faith in Jesus Christ.

2. What are the characteristics of anything which lives?

Re: Your challenges about my statement.
1. I actually said that as long as any literature possesses the Breath of God, that is, life, it is Scripture. That is what makes anything Scripture. I've said that so many times on this thread that I have become a broken record. So, yes, if you can find life in any literature, that makes it Scripture. It certainly doesn't have to be the 66 books that Evangelical Protestants accept, although incidentally it is only those books that believers have found to have this quality. So, it is entirely your own words, not mine, that there are Scriptures besides the 66 books. I know of no other Scriptures outside of those books. No other book possesses the Breath of God in it. But then, you don't have to take mine or anybody else's word for it. You can believe whatever you please.

2. I have no idea how I am wrong or being sentimental here. It is only reasonable to expect that only those who have the same Life as that which is in inspired literature will be able to recognize it in them, so any believer who reads Scripture will recognize it as such. It's that simple. If someone claims to recognize life in any other literature, then I'm not stopping them from treating it as Scripture. They just aren't believers in Jesus Christ, so they don't need to expect believers in Jesus Christ to agree with them. I, like all other believers, cannot detect life in anything outside of those 66 books. It's just not possible for us. So, we are not the same as those who see life everywhere. There's a fundamental difference between us. Mormons have the right idea: they separate themselves from believers (and everyone else, I'll grant) because of their unique ability to detect the Book of Mormons as Scripture. I'm dead certain that no Mormon would be offended if I refuse to identify as a Mormon or to treat them as fellow believers. It should be the same with those who see life everywhere. They don't have to force their ability to see Scripture in every literature on those of us who only see it in the 66 books.

Re: Why I think the life of God is limited only to the 66 books
You mistake me. There is no thinking happening in this matter, any more than there is in your calling a wall a wall and a door a door. I am not thinking that the life of God is limited to 66 books, I simply can't see it anywhere else, and there is a completeness to the 66 books that make it completely unnecessary for me to look for it anywhere else.

Re: What is this Life exactly?
It is just as you said, "the life of God" (John 6:63; Hebrews 4:12).

Question #66:
Ok. I have the life of God in me because I have in Jesus Christ my Lord.

2. What are the characteristics of anything which lives?

one time you said you don't know and another time you came to a conclusion that there is no other book that possess the life of God except the 66 books. Is that not self confusion?

Anyway I have the life of God in me, I have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and I touch life in any literature that has the life of God outside the 66 books of the Bible.

Mr Ihedinobi3 it is not the fault of believers who see life in literatures outside the 66 books of bible. It might be that you are not mature enough spiritually to see the breath of God in them.

You can believe whatever you please and me too. Lol.

people come and see o.

I have life because I have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and if I see life in any other literature outside the 66 books I'm no longer a believer or not a believer. With this statements, are you sure you are not wrong or sentimental Mr Ihedinobi3? Do you even understand what you are saying?

You don't see it because of your spiritual level and thank God the life of God is not limited to 66 books.

But if you want to see it clearly you can act like Zacchaeus that climb a tree or press forward like the woman with the issues of blood.

Lord God Almighty let thy Holy Spirit in me continually lead me to see your life anywhere and everywhere through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Response #66:
I am not going to dispute with you your claim to be a believer. That is between you and the Lord. For mine and other believers' part, we are to avoid people who claim to be believers but engage in blatant sinning (1 Corinthians 5:9-11) and people who are heretics (Titus 3:10-11). So, it makes little difference if you claim to be a believer. If you attack the Word of Truth and will not listen to correction, we who believe and hold fast to the Truth will treat you like you're an unbeliever.

Both things I said were necessary. I said the first because you tried to put words in my mouth and have it seem like I believe that there may be other books that are inspired. Of course, I don't believe or know any such thing. What I do know is that only the 66 books in question are inspired.

As for your claim to a special maturity, that is why we are warned by Paul through the Holy Spirit in Colossians 2:18-19 to not listen to people like you. The Lord Jesus said clearly in John 10 that those who believe in Him know His Voice and listen to Him. He did not even suggest that you have to be mature in order to be able to recognize His Voice more than others. But arrogant people like you who will not submit to the Truth will be looking to pretend that you are something special. That is why you end up as apostates (2 Timothy 3:8-9; 2 Peter 2; Jude 1:10-13).

Question #67:
How I so much Love this, my salvation is neither between me and you nor any other person except the Lord Jesus Christ whether in heaven or earth, so why should I care about what you think about me....... Lol

So I'm now sinning because I regard the book of Enoch, you are just confusing yourself oga.

Stop quoting scriptures up and down, Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Thank God my salvation is not between me and you or any other believers but Christ Jesus my Lord.

You are not fit to give corrections and there is no correction you are trying to give. Take corrections first Ihedinobi3 before giving corrections.

The 66 books are inspired because they have life in the message of their writings which I totally agree and believe.

I also see life in the book of Enoch or is it my fault that you aren't seeing it?

BTW Ihedinobi3 have you read the first book of Enoch?

The voice of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is different from yours, no need to bother myself about that. And I am not afraid because I have the Holy Spirit in me.

Thank God spiritual maturity is not to believe in the 66 books but to love the Lord God Almighty with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbors also.

only me arrogant, and you have quickly prophesied about me saying I will end up as an apostate. O Lord Jesus, have mercy.

Thank God Ihedinobi3 is not in charge of salvation, I wonder what would have become of me.

Ihedinobi3 you never expected that you will come across something like this that will shake your belief, the reason I became your follower is because you engage facts with facts but what I'm seeing here is empty display of emotions, confusing statements, and confrontations with anyone that will not align with you.

A snail cannot hide too long under its shell. Now I know you better. But anyways we learn on daily basis and I pray you unlearn, relearn and learn perfect truth.

Go back to the drawing board, ask you shall receive, knock and the door shall be opened, seek and you shall find.

I love you.

Thanks.

God bless.

Response #67:
I certainly agree that what I think of you is of no consequence - unless it is the same as what the Bible says about you, then you should really pay attention. After all, I care little what opinions anyone has of me, unless they are resonant with the Bible.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that you "are sinning because [you] regard the book of Enoch." Of course, if you treat something as God's Word when it is not, then you are committing a sin, but I hadn't even gone so far as to say that yet. In that post, I was only describing the types of people that obedient believers are supposed to avoid, even if they claim to be believers too. You talk like one of those two types, the heretic, that was why I said what I said. I'm not sure what confusion you are seeing here.

You have a problem with hearing or reading the Bible invoked? Well, I'm a pastor-teacher. The Bible is the authority I rely on, so you have no chance of hearing me defend the Lord's Flock without using the Bible to do so. If you don't want to hear appeals to the Bible, you should quit talking to me. And isn't it interesting that it bothers you that I'm "quoting Scriptures up and down" when you are the one claiming a special maturity that enables you to see Scripture everywhere? For one who is so great at seeing Scripture everywhere, shouldn't you be thrilled to have it quoted at you too?

As for studying to show myself approved as a workman who knows his job, you appear to be proof that I have and am. I don't see your rebuttals proving that I don't know what I'm talking about or what the Scriptures say.

If truth could be made whatever we want it to be, then your pronouncements and denunciations would mean something. As it is, that is not possible.

As I said, if you see life in the Book of Enoch, by all means, use it as Scripture. Don't let me stop you from doing so. But don't even pretend that those of us who believe in the Lord Jesus should be like you. You are clearly different from us, so you shouldn't be among us nor demand that we be like you. We are very different from you.

As for what spiritual maturity is, it is also a good thing that the Bible itself tells us what it is. We don't have to be deceived by you about that:

[11]And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
[12]for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ;
[13]until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.
[14]As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;
[15]but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ,
[16]from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
Ephesians 4:11-16 NASB

[6]Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away;
[7]but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory;
[8]the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;
[9]but just as it is written, "Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, And which have not entered the heart of man, All that God has prepared for those who love Him."
[10]For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God.
[11]For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.
[12]Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God,
[13]which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.
[14]But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.
[15]But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.
[16]For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2:6-16 NASB

That is, spiritual maturity is a matter of epignosis, that is knowledge about the Bible that is believed in the heart. It is not merely about a woolly, ethereal concept of love that has nothing to do with what the Bible says. If you love the Lord, you will obey Him. His Command? Believe in the Lord Jesus. But how can you believe what you do not know? You have to seek the Truth, study it, and then believe it. You can only do that with the help of a pastor-teacher. If you love your neighbor, you will treat them as the Lord commands. But how can you treat people as the Lord commands if you don't know what the Lord commands? Again, you need a pastor-teacher to teach you what the Lord commands. And you need to believe what he tells you, if you have tested him according to the Bible and proved that he is reliable. Then, and only then, you can and must obey him. That is how the love described in the Bible works. But then, it may be different in your "other Scriptures."

There was no prophecy. I'm not a prophet. I'm a pastor-teacher. I teach the Bible. I was showing you that according to the Bible, people like you end up as apostates. If you listen, maybe you won't end up like the others. If you don't, maybe you will. Either way, it is your choice, not mine. If it were up to me, I would drag you off the path you're on kicking and screaming. But then, it's not, just as you said. It's your choice.

"Shake [my] belief?" That's a good one. Do you know the last time anything at all "shook my belief?" It has been ages. And that thing was guilt over my own sins. You have absolutely no chance in this world to even cause my faith to feel the wind. You are so transparent to me that I could never be worried that you could be right about what you say. My Faith in the Lord Jesus is very fine, thank you very much. But it certainly is interesting that you actually considered my faith in the Lord - a faith that you yourself claimed to share - should be threatened by your own actions here on this thread. In other words, you actually feel comfortable and accomplished in putting the faith of those you claim to be fellow believers with at risk? That only proves everything that I have said here about you and your kind. You are enemies of the Truth.

As for being my follower, it was only yesterday that I found out that you followed me. Obviously, that means almost nothing to me. Many people "follow" people like me in order to oppose them. I never consider a "following" to mean anything but a possibility in either direction. In John 6, nearly all the Lord's Disciples abandoned Him when they couldn't stand the Truth anymore. They didn't want to be associated with a "cannibal." And they certainly thought He was being arrogant in claiming to be the Christ. So, your attribution of emotional arguments to me here is received in the same light. You obviously have never actually listened to what I teach. If you had, you would have expected everything I have said on this thread.

As for knowing me better, that is probably good for you. At least, you can be sure where you stand with respect to what I teach. But make no mistake, I will not be changing the position I hold now, not ever. My journey to the Truth was too long and too tortuous for me to ever want to go back. So, you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for me to become like you. That will never happen. As for you, I have no ability to make anybody's choices for them. You are whoever you choose to be. While I can and do warn you to get off this dangerous path you are on, I cannot make you do so. What I can certainly do is protect other believers who listen to me from you, and, believe me, I will do that, no matter how you feel about it. As you yourself said about me, you didn't die for me. The Lord Jesus did. So, the One to Whom I owe my allegiance and obedience is the Lord Jesus, not you. He gave me my gift of pastor-teaching. He trained me in the Truth through another pastor-teacher. He is preparing me through the tests and work that He has given me to do. He is the One Who will judge me. So it is His Opinion and His Command that I concern myself with. If you threaten the spiritual safety and security of any believer for whom I have responsibility to the Lord, there will be no peace between me and you. You can be sure of that.

Question #68:
It is thinking such as these that stood as the basis for every christain cult over the ages. When Believers begin to so elevated themselves and their callings over others to the point that they begin to consider themselves final authorities and anyone who goes against their teachings even on matters that are really not that important is not only wrong but can also be deemed heretical and heading towards God's wrath.

That's what concerned me in some of our previous conversation before this thread. Not that I didn't think you were knowledgeable and might make a fine teacher but that you have put yourself on such a level that even if you were right 90% of the time, the 10% in which you are wrong, there won't be be anyone you consider trustworthy enough to listen to and make adjustments accordingly.

I really do hope you meet people who can help you get back to some of the fundamentals of the christain faith before you go into full time ministry.

Response #68:
Exactly why am I the one who needs to be given this warning? In what have you actually demonstrated a true sense of being any different than you have described me here? Are you not presenting yourself as elevated over me in order to give me the warning that you do here? Are you not presenting yourself as knowing more or better than I do in deciding what is important and what is not to have differences over? In what way have you listened to me about anything that you may be wrong about? And how are you doing any different than you accuse me of in declaring that I have departed from the fundamentals of the Faith?

How is it that you do not see these things for yourself?

Shall I pretend that I don't know what I know so that you can like me? Shall I pretend to lack teaching authority in such a wild place as this so that I don't offend your sensibilities?

Question #69:
I wonder why you'd make out Jesus who said Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; ... For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? , was only asking you to be at peace with believers, especially when he also blessed the peacemakers, and told you to let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven!?

Are you just stating your own misunderstanding perhaps?

Response #69:
13“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.

15“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

16“Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, that is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.’ 17“You fools and blind men! Which is more important, the gold or the temple that sanctified the gold? 18“And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, that is nothing, but whoever swears by the offering on it, he is obligated.’ 19“You blind men, which is more important, the offering, or the altar that sanctifies the offering? 20“Therefore, whoever swears by the altar, swears both by the altar and by everything on it. 21“And whoever swears by the temple, swears both by the temple and by Him who dwells within it. 22“And whoever swears by heaven, swears both by the throne of God and by Him who sits upon it.

23“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. 24“You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

25“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. 26“You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.

27“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28“So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

29“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31“So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32“Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. 33“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?
Matthew 23:13-32 NASB

1He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! 2“It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble. 3“Be on your guard!
Luke 17:1-3 NASB

9When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; 10and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” 11And there was given to each of them a white robe; and they were told that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who were to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also.
Revelation 6:9-11 NASB

4Then the third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of waters; and they became blood. 5And I heard the angel of the waters saying, “Righteous are You, who are and who were, O Holy One, because You judged these things; 6for they poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and You have given them blood to drink. They deserve it.” 7And I heard the altar saying, “Yes, O Lord God, the Almighty, true and righteous are Your judgments.”
Revelation 16:4-7 NASB

14...But He will be indignant toward His enemies.

15For behold, the LORD will come in fire
And His chariots like the whirlwind,
To render His anger with fury,
And His rebuke with flames of fire.

16For the LORD will execute judgment by fire
And by His sword on all flesh,
And those slain by the LORD will be many.

17“Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go to the gardens,
Following one in the center,
Who eat swine’s flesh, detestable things and mice,
Will come to an end altogether,” declares the LORD.
Isaiah 66:14c-17 NASB

2“It will come about in that day,” declares the LORD of hosts, “that I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they will no longer be remembered; and I will also remove the prophets and the unclean spirit from the land. 3“And if anyone still prophesies, then his father and mother who gave birth to him will say to him, ‘You shall not live, for you have spoken falsely in the name of the LORD’; and his father and mother who gave birth to him will pierce him through when he prophesies. 4“Also it will come about in that day that the prophets will each be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies, and they will not put on a hairy robe in order to deceive; 5but he will say, ‘I am not a prophet; I am a tiller of the ground, for a man sold me as a slave in my youth.’ 6“And one will say to him, ‘What are these wounds between your arms?’ Then he will say, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’
Zechariah 13:2-6 NASB

12Now this will be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples who have gone to war against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongue will rot in their mouth. 13It will come about in that day that a great panic from the LORD will fall on them; and they will seize one another’s hand, and the hand of one will be lifted against the hand of another. 14Judah also will fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be gathered, gold and silver and garments in great abundance. 15So also like this plague will be the plague on the horse, the mule, the camel, the donkey and all the cattle that will be in those camps.
Zechariah 14:12-15 NASB

11And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. 12His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. 13He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. 14And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses. 15From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. 16And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”

17Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried out with a loud voice, saying to all the birds which fly in midheaven, “Come, assemble for the great supper of God, 18so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great.”

19And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assembled to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army.

20And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone. 21And the rest were killed with the sword which came from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse, and all the birds were filled with their flesh.
Revelation 19:11-21 NASB

The above is only a sampling of Scriptural passages about God's attitude to those who rebel against Him, those who corrupt His Truth and cause others to stumble, and those who persecute and murder His Children. Among them too is one about the prayer of believers who were martyred that the Lord would avenge them upon their murderers. The psalms are full of that kind of thing too.

You are not one of us, ________. You're the worst kind of human being there is. You do not want Salvation, and you will not let those who want it have it in peace. You are forever looking for obstacles to throw in the way of those who are on the high road to Jerusalem, if perhaps you can cause some to go lame or be discouraged and turn back. Maybe you will repent one day and submit to the Lord Jesus and be saved. Until then, you are simply building up God's Anger against you, and when He pours it out on you, you will wish that you were never born.

Do I wish for your peace? Why would I give you all the warnings that I constantly give you if I did not? But I am not naive. I am not a fool. So I do not believe that you are a friend of the Lord's or of His People. Therefore, I do not treat you like you are either. That is what is meant by there can be no peace with the likes of you. I certainly cannot do you any harm. What can I do? Even if I knew you in person, the worst thing that I could do to you is to stay as far away from you as I can. I cannot harm you. You are not mine to harm. But if you speak about the Bible and misrepresent the Lord to anyone who will listen to me, then I will oppose you. That is how there is no peace between us. The harm that will come to you will come from the Lord, not from me.