(March 30, 2012 at 3:19 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: GodsChild, your sorietology is all wrong. Sacrificial atonement makes two wrongs a right. The so-called sin of Adam corrected by the brutal injustice of the Passion now absolves the guilty of their crimes? It disregards the need for sinners to repent and take actions leading to their regeneration. Christ saves us by the example of His life, not through the manner of his death.
All the prophets served as examples and representatives of the Word. When our Lord commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute, it served as a metaphor for the way the Israelis whored the Word. God also commanded Ezekiel to eat cow dung. In this way, the Lord revealed that the Israelis had mixed falsity and evil into the Word. Isaiah was told to spend three years naked and barefoot. Jeremiah wore a yoke to show how the priests and scribes had burdened the Word with man-made rules and commands. Jesus in His humanity struggled with the call to represent the state of the God’s covenant in his role as the greatest prophet. At the time our Lord prayed in Gethsemane, the church despised, tortured, and ultimately murdered the spiritual meaning of the Word.
Our Lord’s death and resurrection is only important because if the corpse of the Jewish carpenter, Jesus, had remained dead then you would see the Word symbolically destroyed for all time. But that is not what the Gospels record. He arose. You cannot escape the clear symbolism; the spiritual meaning of the Word cannot be destroyed.
Jesus was not, as you believe, a God/Man from birth, but someone who through the course of his life fully identified with and responded to the purpose of the God consciousness within himself. In so doing he shed the natural human nature that is prone to temptation and suffering. Through glorification he became the Divine Human which guides us by example in our regeneration.
In his glorified state our Lord Jesus Christ provides us with an image of the Ideal Form, the Divine Human to which all other humans aspire but can only partially manifest. God is incarnate in the lives of all humans when they act according to the call from God. This is what it means to be "saved".
That was almost beautiful. Crazy as balls, but beautiful.
