well, my brother, we are dealing with a symbolic book, are we not?

so when are the angels literal and when are they symbolic? does this "angel" literally cast a censor filled with fire onto the earth? does this "angel" literally have a sickle and literally gather grapes and literally press them in a winepress?does this angel literally have a bowl/vial full of darkness? will the darkness cast on the earth be really darkness or is it symbolic of the withdrawel of the HS?

answering a question with a question, eh? or you dont have an answer? but we cant help but bring our preconceived opinions into it, or read it according to what has happened to us. all of us. no one is exempt.

years ago my mother was saying something she shouldnt to my oldest daughter, then 3 or 4 years old. i got on my mother about it and her reply and "logic" was that she needed to be prepared to go through the persecution, supposedly by being persecuted now. that made me seriously wonder what she had done to us the time we had with her as children?!?

i only bring that up to say that there are things in our lives we dont think about that influence how we spiritual things.


im asking about the picture that comes to mind when reading those accounts.
which does what? i mean what exactly does this angel do? is it a literal angel with a literal vial?
glad you liked that.

Such distinctions do not determine violent vs non-violent deaths. Consider two scenarios:

1) Someone intentionally gives you enough morphine to cause you to fall asleep and die.

2) You are hiking and accidentally fall down the side of a mountain. At the bottom, you find yourself with two dislocated shoulders, two broken legs, a few broken ribs, and wedged underneath a huge log. A few hours of your feeble cries for help only results in the unwanted attention of a hungry mountain lion. And this is in addition to the ants that found you soon after you fell. Your suffering is over a few minutes later, and you are little more than cat and ant food.

Which scenario describes a violent death?

The difference between death by bonk and death by slip is not violence, but culpability.

Here again is the definition of "violent."



From wiki:



Another cite:



I suppose one could argue whether or not accidental deaths should or should not apply, according to the above definition, but regardless, this would hardly apply to our conversation, as if God caused an "accident" to happen to someone, it wouldn't be an accident. The deaths which are caused by "active human intervention" are unnatural, or violent ("effected by force or injury rather than natural causes").

What I've been suggesting is that violence is not a principle by which God runs His government, and, given this, it could not be that He would violently kill someone.

And you're also suggesting that God just removes His protection, and lets Satan (or hurricanes, or heart attacks, etc.) do the violent killing. Is that right?

Also, you are suggesting that whenever God removes His protection, death is sure to follow. It is not possible to survive without God's protection. Right?

The "fire of God" came down after Elijah said that it would come down if he was a man of God. So you're saying that this proof of Elijah's calling as a man of God did not actually come from God. Is that right?

If so, who would send this fire down? Satan? He helped prove Elijah to be a man of God? Sounds counterproductive for Satan.


The OT has quite of few of these "isolated, individual" texts. If they are so confusing, Jesus should have said, "Search the scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life, but these are they which confuse your ideas of me." Paul should have said of the Bereans, "These were more confused than the others, for they compared my words with the scriptures."


More than zapping, the Bible describes God as destroying the planet, melting everything with fervent heat. Is that incomprehensible too? That's much bigger than 102 impenitent soldiers.

the question is, how do we know when God makes statements such as these that they are in a permissive sense and not in a causative sense?

Exo 15:26 And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes,

I will put none of these diseases upon thee,

which I have brought upon the Egyptians:

for I am the LORD that healeth thee.

Deu 7:15 And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee;
but will lay them upon all them that hate thee.

i had to share this,
The time of trouble, trouble such as was not since there was a nation, is right upon us, and we are like the sleeping virgins. We are to awake and ask the Lord Jesus to place underneath us His everlasting arms, and carry us through the time of trial before us. {3MR 305.2}

I'll come back to the 2 Kings 2 question later.



I think the principle applies to all of them.

The question comes down to, "How do we understand God?" Do we:

1)Take Christ is a full and complete revelation of God, using this as our bedrock, and interpret more difficult to understand passages in the light of this?

2)Do we put the more difficult passages on equal footing with Christ?

3)Do we start with the more difficult passages, using that as our bedrock, and then interpret Christ's revelation in the light of that?

Probably no one would suggest 3). So we're really looking at 1) vs. 2). The question comes down to whether Christ in the flesh, Emanuel, was a full and complete revelation of God, or a partial one which we should augment with other revelation, such as these more difficult passages in the OT.

I believe 1) is correct. Christ is the new wine which requires new wine skins. He ever challenges our paradigms, correcting our wrong thinking in relation to God. To the extent that we subjugate the revelation of Christ to some other revelation, I believe our understanding of God's character will suffer. This is because Christ in the flesh was a full and complete revelation of God, so to the extent that we stray from that revelation, we err.

A comment regarding the expression "more difficult passages." Someone might respond, "There's nothing difficult about these passages at all. God at time zaps those who act contrary to His will. No problem here."

I think there is a problem, and that is that the idea that God causes those who act contrary to His wishes to suffer excruciating pain and/or violently kills them is at odds with what Christ lived and taught. Something needs to be done to resolve this tension.



I think you may have misunderstood Christ's intent, having left out the most important point of what Christ was saying, which is that they would not come to Him in whom they could find life. His whole point was that life was not to be found in the Scriptures, but in Him. So Christ was saying:

1.Search the Scriptures.
2.They testify of Me.
3.Come to Me, that you might have life.

He wasn't saying to search the Scriptures in order to know what Christ was like, which seems to be what you are suggesting.



Romans says that all creation groans under sin. I think it's the sustaining power of God that protects the earth from the destructive power of sin. At some point, God has to let go. He can't continue prolonging the artificial environment which now exists in which sin continues to exist. One the truth has been seen by all, there's no longer any need for God to do so. He can allow the wages of sin to take effect.

In order to take the position that it is God who destroys things, one must take the position that sin is not destructive, or not destructive enough to destroy. If sin is destructive enough to destroy, clearly all that God needs to do is to allow that destruction to happen. There's no need for Him to add destruction to destruction.

The view that God must actively destroy must deny that God must actively prevent destruction from coming about.

Also the fires which destroy the earth are not setting live people on fire, so your whole point seems moot (unless you're suggesting that they do; are you?)



I suggested what happens is similar to a parent who allows a child to leave home, and then something bad happens to the child.



No, I've not suggested this. Sometimes Satan's blesses his followers, making it appear to others that God is blessing them, in order to cause confusion.



If God were to cease doing all He does to counteract the consequences of sin for a given person, that person would surely die.

Since you have been saying that God cannot kill in a "violent" way, could you please clarify some points to me? Does God kill in "non-violent" ways? Since you classified death during sleep as non-violent, do you believe God's angel killed the soldiers in the Assyrian army? Or do you believe God doesn't kill at all?


1) You are not saying that sin destroys, but that God removes His protection, which is something completely different. In the cases where the forces of nature are involved, for instance. If God is protecting people from nature, He is protecting both righetous and wicked. If He removes His protection from the righteous, they will perish just like the wicked. So what is the relationship between this and the fact that "sin destroys"?

2) Sin does destroy, but this is not immediate. In the cases where people are given up to the control of Satan, as in the case of the Jews, their sin took 40 years to destroy them.

3) There are situations in which God cannot just sit and wait for ruin to follow. Sin sometimes takes too long to perform its work of destruction and, for the sake of those who can still be saved, God cannot wait for so long.

For instance, maybe the antediluvians would have destroyed themselves, but by then there would no longer be a single righteous on the face of the earth. For the sake of those 8 righteous, who would preserve God’s knowledge and the lineage of the Messiah, and for the sake of the antediluvians themselves, who were spoiling themselves and one another, these people must die.

The same is true about the idolatry at Sinai.

"So with the apostasy at Sinai. Unless punishment had been speedily visited upon transgression, ... the earth would have become as corrupt as in the days of Noah. Had these transgressors been spared, evils would have followed, greater than resulted from sparing the life of Cain. It was the mercy of God that thousands should suffer, to prevent the necessity of visiting judgments upon millions. In order to save the many, He must punish the few. Furthermore, as the people had cast off their allegiance to God, they had forfeited the divine protection, and, deprived of their defense, the whole nation was exposed to the power of their enemies. Had not the evil been promptly put away, they would soon have fallen a prey to their numerous and powerful foes. It was necessary for the good of Israel, and also as a lesson to all succeeding generations, that crime should be promptly punished. And it was no less a mercy to the sinners themselves that they should be cut short in their evil course. Had their life been spared, the same spirit that led them to rebel against God would have been manifested in hatred and strife among themselves, and they would eventually have destroyed one another. It was in love to the world, in love to Israel, and even to the transgressors, that crime was punished with swift and terrible severity" (PP 325, 326).

If the transgressors had been spared, they would eventually have destroyed one another, but by then Isarel would already have fallen a prey to their enemies, and corruption would have already been widespread, affecting the whole people of Israel and, through them, the whole earth.

Rosangela, I wrote several long and every detailed posts on this subject in this thread. Please refer to those.



No, it's not completely different. To say these things are completely different implies there's no connection, but there's a very definite connection, and that's what I had in mind when I made my statement.

If it weren't for sin, there would be no need for God's performing any actions to counteract its bad effects, as there would be no bad effects. Sin impacts how nature works, how our bodies work, and what people and angels do. God counteracts all of these effects of sin.



If it weren't for sin, there would be no bad effects for God to counteract. You're right, of course, that God protects both the righteous and the unrighteous; He causes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust. Sometimes God allows bad things to happen to righteous people, and sometimes He allows bad things to happen to unrighteous people.



It's only not immediate because the bad effects of sin which God allows are not immediate. If God ceased to counteract the immediate effects of sin, the destruction would be immediate. For example, Herod's death was immediate.



I think this is being completely oblivious to the destructive power of sin. It impacts a lot more areas and in a lot more ways than you are allowing for. It is because of the actions God takes to counteract sin that it's power is not seen.



So what was the mechanism that caused their death? We know the flood came about as a result of waters bursting forth from the great depths. These waters arose into the atmosphere, and came back in the form of torrential downpours (There were some other factors, but this is where most of the water came from; what would become our vast oceans were under the earth's crust).

In order for these waters to burst forth, they had to be under tremendous pressure. God must have been restraining this pressure until the "right time." God gave a long period for repentance, 120 years. After this time period, God withdrew His protecting hand, and the waters, under great pressure, erupted.



This is a separate case, as no one even alleges that God killed anyone here. The question under consideration her would involve God's commanding someone else to kill. Of course, there are some aspects in common, such as culpability (to will for someone else to do something makes you culpable, if you have the power to cause them to do your will), but this isn't the same question. This is an question which we've also already discussed at length.

I can't help but come back to the same point I've been making, and that is that the real difference between our perspectives here has to do with our paradigms. I think Teresa hit the nail on the head in her illustration involving the Calvinistic idea of predestination. Our paradigms disallow the Calvinistic understand of things, and so we offer explanations for the texts Calvinists put forth because of this paradigm. A similar example involves the immortality of the soul and eternal punishment of the wicked.

I also gave an explanation involving Piaget which I thought was pretty good (but no one has commented on).

You have a paradigm that allows for God's doing things mind does not. We both share a paradigm that doesn't allow for God doing things that other people's paradigm allows for (e.g. tormenting/torturing the wicked forever).

I think the key to the puzzle comes about not as a result of considering individual texts, which is what all the inquiry here seems to be involving, but in the revelation of Jesus Christ, which we aren't discussing at all.

How did Christ live? What did He teach? What does His revelation of God entail?

I really believe that the answers to the questions are key to understanding God's "violent" actions.