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He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
God has set within each of us, a sense of the eternal. A perception of the unending duration of all His works. Something which is unsatisfied with the temporal nature of the things of this world, something which is constantly seeking after a lasting fulfillment. Whether it be material pleasures of the world or the philosophies of men, the wonders of the modern age or the wisdom teachings of old, the thirst is not slaked; it goes unsatiated.
Things change, around us and within us. The desires of today become the conquests of yesteryear, and the footprints we leave behind are washed away beneath the shifting sands. The cosmology of our priorities continues in a constant flux, dragged into a black hole one moment, illuminated by a supernova the next. One thing remains the same; that sense of longing for something more, something to fill in the gap, between heart and mind. A full circuit of truth, with all parties in full agreement.
Some people ignore it, do anything they can to distract themselves from it, this pereptual, lingering dissatisifaction, seeking the gratification they can squeeze out of the moment. A place of endless dreary corridors leading to sterile rooms that exude overdose and fracture. Others accept it..mediocrity, purposeless meaninglessness, a prison ship made of mind and sinew, set adrift in the formless chaos; in a dead calm praying for a tempest. Home is anywhere, so long as it is somewhere else.
But home is where the heart is, it is where you store up your treasure. If your treasure is things that are perishing, your heart will never be at rest, it will never attain lasting satisfaction; for from the heart flow the issues of life. It is that taste of eternity without which it cannot do; it needs nothing less than total sufficiency. The thirst will never be satiated without an eternal wellspring. This is life eternal, found only in Him, the living waters of truth; faith hope and love. The bridge to eternity; our all-sufficient savior by whose stripes we are healed. In Him, the full assurance of the things to come; life everlasting. It is what God set in our hearts so we would seek after Him.
The desires may drown it, keep us going in circles, on and on forevermore. Apathy is wiser than its years, but more naive than a newborn child, because there is only today, and nothing else. What is ahead is not like what is behind, where we are going is not like where we have been. Our time here is just a sand castle awaiting high tide..we need better fortifications, a house built on solid rock:
Matthew 7:21-29
Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.
I was decent enough to read that. PLEASE be decent enough to never ever put passages on here again. It's preaching and I'm 80% sure it's against site rules. If you have an opinion, by all means come forward with them, but please do not copy and paste passages. It's a waste of your time and ours.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
September 27, 2011 at 5:40 pm (This post was last modified: September 27, 2011 at 5:48 pm by lucent.)
Ahh, well I wrote all of that, save the specific verses I mentioned and a few references to verses. It's my opinion, by exposition and personal experience, on the human condition, the temporal versus the eternal, and what is in the human heart.
(September 27, 2011 at 9:02 am)5thHorseman Wrote: I was decent enough to read that. PLEASE be decent enough to never ever put passages on here again. It's preaching and I'm 80% sure it's against site rules. If you have an opinion, by all means come forward with them, but please do not copy and paste passages. It's a waste of your time and ours.
Aside from the verses that is my opinion, based on exposition and personal experience..it isn't a biblical text
(September 27, 2011 at 8:51 am)KichigaiNeko Wrote: So where IS YOUR opinion Luce??
All you seem to be able to do is regurgitate lines from a misguided text written ~2000 years ago.
(September 27, 2011 at 8:43 am)lucent Wrote: Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
God has set within each of us, a sense of the eternal. A perception of the unending duration of all His works. Something which is unsatisfied with the temporal nature of the things of this world, something which is constantly seeking after a lasting fulfillment. Whether it be material pleasures of the world or the philosophies of men, the wonders of the modern age or the wisdom teachings of old, the thirst is not slaked; it goes unsatiated.
Things change, around us and within us. The desires of today become the conquests of yesteryear, and the footprints we leave behind are washed away beneath the shifting sands. The cosmology of our priorities continues in a constant flux, dragged into a black hole one moment, illuminated by a supernova the next. One thing remains the same; that sense of longing for something more, something to fill in the gap, between heart and mind. A full circuit of truth, with all parties in full agreement.
Some people ignore it, do anything they can to distract themselves from it, this pereptual, lingering dissatisifaction, seeking the gratification they can squeeze out of the moment. A place of endless dreary corridors leading to sterile rooms that exude overdose and fracture. Others accept it..mediocrity, purposeless meaninglessness, a prison ship made of mind and sinew, set adrift in the formless chaos; in a dead calm praying for a tempest. Home is anywhere, so long as it is somewhere else.
But home is where the heart is, it is where you store up your treasure. If your treasure is things that are perishing, your heart will never be at rest, it will never attain lasting satisfaction; for from the heart flow the issues of life. It is that taste of eternity without which it cannot do; it needs nothing less than total sufficiency. The thirst will never be satiated without an eternal wellspring. This is life eternal, found only in Him, the living waters of truth; faith hope and love. The bridge to eternity; our all-sufficient savior by whose stripes we are healed. In Him, the full assurance of the things to come; life everlasting. It is what God set in our hearts so we would seek after Him.
The desires may drown it, keep us going in circles, on and on forevermore. Apathy is wiser than its years, but more naive than a newborn child, because there is only today, and nothing else. What is ahead is not like what is behind, where we are going is not like where we have been. Our time here is just a sand castle awaiting high tide..we need better fortifications, a house built on solid rock:
Matthew 7:21-29
Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - Carl Sagan
Mankind's intelligence walks hand in hand with it's stupidity.
Being an atheist says nothing about your overall intelligence, it just means you don't believe in god. Atheists can be as bright as any scientist and as stupid as any creationist.
You never really know just how stupid someone is, until you've argued with them.
September 27, 2011 at 7:34 pm (This post was last modified: September 27, 2011 at 7:35 pm by Minimalist.)
Oh, but Shel, let me preach back at him.....I want to shove his fucking bible up his ass.
It is so common with jesus freaks that they cherry pick one line out of a text and twist it to suit whatever meaning they want.
Why did not you continue on with Eccl 3 to verse 21, Luce? Inconvenient?
Let's let everyone else look at it.
Quote: 18 I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. 19 Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath[c]; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
22 So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?
Greek stuff....and reasonably late Greek stuff at that.
Quote:Modern scholarship now attributes the book to the 3rd century BC, at a time when the Jews were under the influence of various Greek philosophic systems, such as Epicureanism and Stoicism. Ecclesiastes is part of the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, which includes the Books of Job and Proverbs.
Quote:Modern scholarship now attributes the book to the 3rd century BC, at a time when the Jews were under the influence of various Greek philosophic systems, such as Epicureanism and Stoicism. Ecclesiastes is part of the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, which includes the Books of Job and Proverbs.
Great link Min. Sadly, he will only ignore this or at best, argue context. *sigh*
Ah yeah... the context nazis. We used to get them all the time at Evil Bible. Every time their fucking god murdered a village full of people one asshole or another would show up insisting that we understand the "context." I always invited them to put this particular holy massacre in whatever context they wanted and then try to explain how fucking good their god was.
I got surprisingly few takers. I doubt that most of them knew what "context" meant.
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