The second coming of Christ

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The Second Coming of Christ and Judgment Day
We believe that Christ will come again. Christ Himself promised that He will return (John 14:1-3). This promise was echoed by the Apostles (I Thess. 4:15-16). Members of the Church are commanded to prepare for the second coming of Christ for no one knows the exact day and hour of His coming, except God, the Father (Matt. 24:36, 42, 44).

Christ, however, knew and told us the signs that herald His second coming and these are wars, famines, earthquakes in different places, as well as increasing hardships and wickedness which shall cause the love for God of many to wax cold (Matt. 24:6-8, 12).

The Second Coming of Christ is the day of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men. On this day, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire and be burned up (II Pet. 3:7, 10). The cry on the day of the Lord is bitter, the mighty man cries aloud there. Neither silver nor gold shall be able to deliver man on the day of the wrath of the Lord (Zeph. 1:14, 18).

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@Rose Marie,

Matthew 20:28; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Mark 10:45; For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Hebrews 9:28 so also Christ was offered once to bear the sins of MANY, he will come again, not to deal with our sins, but to bring salvation to all who are eagerly waiting for him.

English Standard Version. so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of MANY, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. Berean Study Bible.

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@Rose Marie,

Rose Marie wrote:

The Second Coming of Christ and Judgment Day
We believe that Christ will come again. Christ Himself promised that He will return (John 14:1-3). This promise was echoed by the Apostles (I Thess. 4:15-16). Members of the Church are commanded to prepare for the second coming of Christ for no one knows the exact day and hour of His coming, except God, the Father (Matt. 24:36, 42, 44).

Christ, however, knew and told us the signs that herald His second coming and these are wars, famines, earthquakes in different places, as well as increasing hardships and wickedness which shall cause the love for God of many to wax cold (Matt. 24:6-8, 12).

The Second Coming of Christ is the day of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men. On this day, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire and be burned up (II Pet. 3:7, 10). The cry on the day of the Lord is bitter, the mighty man cries aloud there. Neither silver nor gold shall be able to deliver man on the day of the wrath of the Lord (Zeph. 1:14, 18).

So...those are the signs!

Has there ever been a time when there have not been "...wars, famines, earthquakes in different places?"

He might as well have used "there will be night followed by day followed by night" as a sign.

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He ain't coming back.

Quote:

Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

(Matthew 24: 25-34)

He never showed up.

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One if by land, two if by sea
And I on the opposite shore will be -
Longfellow

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The Resurrection, The Second Coming, the Virgin birth, these are all things that refer metaphorically to processes that ideally occur in the development of the human psyche. To take these things literally is to miss the point on both sides, theistic and atheistic. Literalism always leads to atheism. This is what has occurred in the United States.

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@coluber2001,

coluber2001 wrote:

The Resurrection, The Second Coming, the Virgin birth, these are all things that refer metaphorically to processes that ideally occur in the development of the human psyche. To take these things literally is to miss the point on both sides, theistic and atheistic. Literalism always leads to atheism. This is what has occurred in the United States.

Coluber...can you give us a metaphorical or non-literal take on:

"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them shall be
put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their
lives."

Leviticus 20:13

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@Frank Apisa,

These religious myths and symbols are all metaphors of experience that is always misunderstood second hand. That's what happens to religion.

Joseph Campbell said that half the people take these myths and symbols literally as facts and the other half say they are just lies.

"Via Joseph Campbell: My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, "The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts."The third best are what we talk about."
Heinrich Zimmer

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@coluber2001,

coluber2001 wrote:

These religious myths and symbols are all metaphors of experience that is always misunderstood second hand. That's what happens to religion.

Joseph Campbell said that half the people take these myths and symbols literally as facts and the other half say they are just lies.

"Via Joseph Campbell: My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, "The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts."The third best are what we talk about."
Heinrich Zimmer

Sounds like pretty talk to me...without much in the way of meaning.

The Bible is held out to be "the word of god."

Is it...or is it not?

My guess, for what it is worth, is that a very self-serving history (of sorts) of the early Hebrew people...a relatively unsophisticated, unknowledgeable, superstitious people who had many enemies in the areas where they lived. Their enemies worshiped barbarous, vengeful, wrathful, unforgiving, demanding, murderous, petty gods. And to protect themselves from those gods, they invented an especially barbarous, vengeful, wrathful, unforgiving, demanding, murderous, petty god...and worshiped it. The story seems to be a necessary mythology. The mythology served a needed purpose at that time and I can easily understand why the ancient Hebrews felt about it the way they did.

The fact that modern theists feel the way they do about it...is disappointing and disheartening.

That is why I asked the question I asked you.

It is easy to suppose the words are allegory or metaphor. I don't think they are. I think they were meant LITERALLY, mostly because I think they expressed the feelings of the people who wrote them. The people who wrote that Leviticus passage I asked about...did NOT mean that as metaphor. They meant is about as literally as possible.

Same goes for almost all the passages that get explained away as metaphor.

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@coluber2001,

Atheists can understand these processes. But they still are allowed to be atheists.

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I think that metaphorical understanding of religious mythology is a defensive afterthought which develops over time as society matures, knowledge evolves, and literalism becomes harder to accept. It's likely that the members of the early church truly believed that faith in Jesus would allow them to spend eternity with their loved ones. As Christianity spread outside of the Jewish community its traditional doctrines began to encounter criticism as the stories themselves began to lose persuasive power. Literate pagans, armed with philosophical methods of approaching text, raised questions and counterarguments which could only be reliably defended by intellectual constructions, as the stories themselves no longer carried sufficient weight for any but the gullible and the unschooled.

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@hightor,

Spiritual Development is up to the individual. Whether 99% of the people take religion literally or reject it is irrelevant to personal development. It's up to the individual.

It's difficult because if people are heavily indoctrinated into a religion as children, it's very difficult for them to get past that.

And often if they do get past it it's a yes or no question. They totally reject spirituality and view spirituality only in terms of literalism. Atheism is a response to literalism. God existing or not existing is totally irrelevant to religious experience. People were having religious experiences as long as they were aware of time. You can't deny religious experience any more than you can deny the experience of love. But if you started thinking of love as having some objective reality, that would be absurd. And the same thing has happened in religion. People have taken religion second-hand and assigned an objective reality to it that they call God or rejecting it and it's not important because it's irrelevant to spiritual development.

That's one reason why young people in the sixties when they were experimenting with psychedelic drugs and having true religious experiences, were rejected both by the religious community and the atheists. They couldn't explain what was happening to them because it was outside experience of the theistic and non-theistic community.

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@coluber2001,

Good points. Personal development should be the real context of religion, not political power and social control.

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Construing mental processes with religion can take one on some imaginative flights of fancy. Still doesn't negate cold hard facts.

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@Rose Marie,

Quote:

The Second Coming of Christ is the day of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men. On this day, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire and be burned up (II Pet. 3:7, 10). The cry on the day of the Lord is bitter, the mighty man cries aloud there. Neither silver nor gold shall be able to deliver man on the day of the wrath of the Lord (Zeph. 1:14, 18).

The second coming of Jesus is not the great day of judgement.

Jesus comes to rule the Great Sabbath of one thousand years, which is the seventh day from the day that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit and died in that day at the age of 930.

Jubilees 4: 30; And he (ADAM) lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore was it written concerning the tree of knowledge: ’On the day that ye eat thereof ye shall die.’ For this reason, he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it.

We are now approaching the close of the 6th day and the beginning of the 7th, which is the great Sabbath, “The Day of The Lord” the seventh period of one thousand years from the day that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit and died in that first day at the age of 930, which Sabbath day begins after the greatest period of tribulation that this world has ever seen.

This coming period of tribulation is said to be so severe, that if it were not for the intervention of the Lord, no flesh would survive. We are almost at the close of the sixth day, and soon comes the great tribulation, which is the war to end all wars, after which the Sabbath will dawn, but when? Nobody knows the exact date.

Colossians 2: 16-17; So let no one make rules about what you eat or drink or about holy days or the New Moon Festival or the Sabbath. All such things are only a shadow of things in the future; etc.

The weekly Sabbath was but a shadow of the coming reality, which is fulfilled in Jesus, the thousand years day of the Lord. Acts 17: 31; The ‘DAY’ that the Lord has fixed in which He shall judge the whole world with justice by means of a ‘MAN’ He has ‘CHOSEN’. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising that ‘MAN’ from death.

Revelation 20: 7; It is after the thousand years Sabbath if over, that heavenly fire descends and incinerates all physical life forms that remain on this planet as foretold by the Lord through his prophet Zephaniah 1: 2-3; The LORD said, “I am going to destroy everything on earth, all human beings and animals, birds and fish. I will bring about the downfall of the wicked. I will destroy the whole human race, and no survivors will be left. I, the LORD, have spoken.

Verse 18; On the day when the LORD shows his fury, not even all their silver and gold will save them. The whole earth will be destroyed by the fire of his anger. He will put an end — a sudden end — to everyone who lives on earth.

Everyone who lives on earth, being the operative sentence, for as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: 51-52; “We shall not all fall asleep in death, but at the sound of the Last trumpet, (As the heavenly fire is about to incinerate all physical life forms on this earth) we shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye from bodies of corruptible matter into glorious bodies of brilliant and blinding light.

This refers to the end of this age, but not the end of our universe as spoken of by Peter, which occurs at a much later date, when this universe is crushed back into the singularity from which it originated.

Peace.

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@The Anointed,

Quote:

We are now approaching the close of the 6th day and the beginning of the 7th, which is the great Sabbath, “The Day of The Lord” the seventh period of one thousand years from the day that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit and died in that first day at the age of 930, which Sabbath day begins after the greatest period of tribulation that this world has ever seen

Thus weuns haave to submeyut to seeeyux Mower weeyuks a winterrr

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@farmerman,

Quote:

Thus weuns haave to submeyut to seeeyux Mower weeyuks a winterrr

Sorry mate, I can only read that which is written in English.

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@The Anointed,

It was not directed at you pap, it was meant for the younger, more intelligent, yet mirthful souls, so... by definition cuz...

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@farmerman,

Quote:

It was not directed at you pap, it was meant for the younger, more intelligent, yet mirthful souls, so... by definition cuz...

Lying as usual I see.

Even the blind people can see that you were responding to my post in which I wrote; "We are now approaching the close of the 6th day and the beginning of the 7th, which is the great Sabbath, “The Day of The Lord” the seventh period of one thousand years from the day that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit and died in that first day at the age of 930, which Sabbath day begins after the greatest period of tribulation that this world has ever seen.”

And I see that your reading, writing and comprehension skills are still as woeful as always.

Goodbye old mate, I’ll be ignoring your lying, non understandable responses from hereon with the contempt that they deserve.

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