Vague Bible Quotes

This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out." "Yes, sir," Andrews said. "Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you--that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old." "No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is." "You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet....look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man." "No," Andrew said. "That's not all. That's not all I have." "Then what? What have you got?" Andrews was silent. "You can't answer. Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name? "That was his name," Andrews said. "And that's all that's left of him," McDonald said. "His name. And he didn't even come out of it with that for himself." McDonald nodded, not looking at Andrews. "Sure, I know. I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learned a long time ago. I let the lies come back. I had a dream, too, and because it was different from yours and Miller's, I let myself think it wasn't a dream. But now I know, boy. And you don't. And that makes all the difference.

Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America,” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something." “Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested.

Still, as the Mass went on, things seemed more normal; there were Bible readings, quite familiar, and then the accustomed descent into the vaguely pleasant boredom of a sermon, in which the inevitable Christmas annunciations of “peace,” “goodwill,” and “love” rose to the surface of his mind, tranquil as white lilies floating on a pond of words.

Communication through revelation is part of what makes Christianity unique. It takes you from a vague idea of “there is some kind of something up there,” to a personal God who communicates with us, revealing what he is like and how to have a relationship with him. Anything that could get in the way of that revelation would be disastrous to us either knowing about God or knowing him personally.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . . [F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . . In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . . The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . . The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . . They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . . Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . . Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.

By defining faith (Gk. pistis) as “assurance” and “conviction,” the author indicates that biblical faith is not a vague hope grounded in imaginary, wishful thinking. Instead, faith is a settled confidence that something in the future—something that is not yet seen but has been promised by God—will actually come to pass because God will bring it about. Thus biblical faith is not blind trust in the face of contrary evidence, not an unknowable “leap in the dark”; rather, biblical faith is a confident trust in the eternal God who is all-powerful, infinitely wise, eternally trustworthy—the God who has revealed himself in his word and in the person of Jesus Christ, whose promises have proven true from generation to generation, and who will “never leave nor forsake” his own

An especially powerful type of historical evidence [for the Bible and Christianity] is that of fulfilled prophecy - historical events written down long before they actually happen. Hundreds of prophecies in the Bible have been remarkably fulfilled exactly as fortold but often hundreds of years later. This type of evidence is unique to the Bible and can be explained only by divine inspiration. God, the Creator of time, is outside of time. He is the One who controls the future and, therefore, is the only One who knows the future. "Bible prophecies are not vague and rambling, such as those of Nostradamus and other supposed extrabiblical prophets. Prophecies in the Bible deal with specific places, people, and events, and their fulfillments can be checked by reference to subsequent history.

We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.) The lady urinated. “Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?” Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.” THE GREAT HOUSE had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.

When he went closer to investigate, Yahweh had called to him by name and Moses had cried: “Here I am!” (hineni!), the response of every prophet of Israel when he encountered the God who demanded total attention and loyalty: “Come no nearer” [God] said, “Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am the god of your father,” he said, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At that Moses covered his face, afraid to look at God.18 Despite the first of the assertions that Yahweh is indeed the God of Abraham, this is clearly a very different kind of deity from the one who had sat and shared a meal with Abraham as his friend. He inspires terror and insists upon distance. When Moses asks his name and credentials, Yahweh replies with a pun which, as we shall see, would exercise monotheists for centuries. Instead of revealing his name directly, he answers: “I Am Who I Am (Ehyeh asher ehyeh).”19 What did he mean? He certainly did not mean, as later philosophers would assert, that he was self-subsistent Being. Hebrew did not have such a metaphysical dimension at this stage, and it would be nearly 2000 years before it acquired one. God seems to have meant something rather more direct. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is a Hebrew idiom to express a deliberate vagueness. When the Bible uses a phrase like “they went where they went,” it means: “I haven’t the faintest idea where they went.” So when Moses asks who he is, God replies in effect: “Never you mind who I am!” or “Mind your own business!” There was to be no discussion of God’s nature and certainly no attempt to manipulate him as pagans sometimes did when they recited the names of their gods. Yahweh is the Unconditioned One: I shall be that which I shall be.

Yet is all this fair to Erasmus? Was he not the one who made the Greek New Testament available, so providing the coals for the Reformation? Certainly he did, and yet his possession of the Scriptures (and his deep study of them) changed little for the man himself because of how he treated them. Burying them under convenient assertions of their vagueness, he accorded the Scriptures little practical, let alone governing, authority. The result was that, for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many, and so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. To break out of that suffocating scheme and achieve any substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude, that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura). The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority and allowed to contradict and overrule all other claims, or else it would itself be overruled and its message hijacked. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgment that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change.

person anywhere in Europe would have had a solid grounding in the classics. Certainly the coiner of addict did. Is it an exaggeration to say that Latin and Greek were known quantities in households with more books than a lone family bible? Probably, but if a member of such a household completed any kind of undergraduate or postgraduate work, there would have been significant accumulated exposure to the classical languages, and the cultures they represented, and their stories, their myths and their legends. Obviously old Gabriel Fallopius knew all that stuff. Certainly Friedrich Sertürner knew all about the Greek god of dreams. (And was probably ready to argue for forty-five minutes why it was indeed dreams, not sleep.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anyone educated in Germany as a pharmacist would have known that kind of thing. Which meant Felix Hoffmann did, too. So why did he call it heroin? Even before I learned it was so, I always vaguely assumed ‘hero’ was ancient Greek. It just sounded right. I further vaguely assumed even in modern times the word might signify something complicated, central and still marginally relevant in today’s Greek heritage. Naively I assumed I was proved right, the first time I came to New York, in 1974. I ate in Greek diners with grand and legacy-heavy names like Parthenon and Acropolis, and from Greek corner delis, some of which had no name at all, but every single establishment had ‘hero sandwiches’ on the menu. This was partly simple respect for tradition, I thought, like the blue-and-white take-away coffee cups, and also perhaps a cultural imperative, a ritual genuflection, but probably most of all marketing, as if to say, eat this mighty meal and you too could be a legend celebrated for millennia. Like Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. But no. ‘Hero’ was a simple phonetic spelling in English of the Greek word ‘gyro’. It was how New Yorkers said it. A hero sandwich was a gyro sandwich, filled with street-meat thinly carved from a large wad that rotated slowly against a source of heat. Like the kebab shops we got in Britain a few years later. Central to modern culture, perhaps, but not to ancient heritage. Even

For instance, John Calvin, a leading Reformer, relates in a footnote in his commentary notes on Psalm 63:9–11:22 Under the Hebrew word שׂועל‎, shual, here rendered fox, was comprehended, in common language, the jackal, or Vulpes aureus, golden wolf, so called in Latin because its color is a bright yellow; and in this sense שׂועל‎, shual, has been generally interpreted here, because the jackal is found in Palestine, and feeds on carrion. Both of these circumstances are, however, also applicable to the fox, and, moreover, Bochart has made it probable that the specific name of the jackal (the θως of the Greeks) in Hebrew was אי‎, aye, the howler, being so called from the howling cry which he makes particularly at night. The term occurs in Isa 13:22, 34:14; and Jer 50:39; where איים‎, ayim, is rendered, in our version, “the wild beasts of the islands,” an appellation very vague and indeterminate. At the same time, it is highly probable that shual generally refers to the jackal. Several of the modern oriental names of this animal, as the Turkish chical, and the Persian sciagal, sciachal, or schachal — whence the English jackal — from their resemblance to the Hebrew word shual, favor this supposition; and Dr Shaw, and other travelers, inform us, that while jackals are very numerous in Palestine, the common fox is rarely to be met with. We shall, therefore, be more correct, under these circumstances, in admitting that the jackal of the East is the Hebrew shual.

If only he could say what is true!” said Totochabo. Marcellin and I looked at him. He went on: “You heard. If only you could stop dreaming for a minute, we could talk perhaps. But talk about what?” And with a shrug of the spine, he made as if to go. Marcellin held him back by the tail of his coat, and declared: “Now listen. I’m very much aware that I can’t think. I’m a poet. But I cannot think. I was never shown how. I’m always being teased about it. When I hear my friends holding philosophical discussions, I’d like to join in too, but they always go too fast for me. They tell me to read Plato, the Upanishads, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Hegel, Benjamin Fondane, the Tao-Teh, Karl Marx, and even the Bible. I’ve had many goes at reading all of them, except the Bible, because (Bible indeed!) they must be having me on. It’s all crystal clear as I read the stuff, but afterwards I forget, or can’t talk about it, or come up with contradictory ideas which I can’t choose between, in a word, it doesn’t work.” “My dear Marcellin,” I began, “first, you should …” “Shut up, I said!” the old man shouted again and the superior smile blooming on my lips slid down into my stomach. “Carry on!” he said to Marcellin who proceeded to finish what he was saying: “Well, now. I want you to tell me once and for all if I am an idiot and, if I’m not, what you have to do in order to think.” “Think about what?” Totochabo said wearily and he turned away. This time, we were both too dismayed to try and stop him. But, more important, we were thirsty and it did not take us too long to discover a small demijohn which fitted the bill very nicely. As we drank, lounging like ancient Romans, we recited convoluted poems. Just before my eyes closed, I had a vague twinge of conscience just as you do sometimes when you take a few steps back and rise onto the tips of your woes so as to get a good run at sleep and I remarked to Marcellin that I was much more of an idiot than he believed but a much less of one than I thought, which was almost true.

Kevin Josten, is now preaching in his mega-church in Dallas, Texas. His message is about prosperity gospel; you know, if you dream it, God will give it. It’ll be more like, you give Josten lots of money and he’ll be rich beyond all of his wildest dreams. The second, Ryan Whittier, will set himself up to be the Preacher to the Politicians, and he’s in California. Someday, he wants to be seen as the go-to guy for politicians to find out what God says about this or that. The third is Mark Goat. With my help, he plans on setting up a television network that will air vaguely Christian messages from prosperity gospel preachers, messages from the occasional Fundamentalist nutcases, and even the out there End Times preachers. Our plan is to confuse those uneducated about what the Christian message really is. Heck, Goat and Whittier want to join Christians with Muslims, get the uneducated types thinking that the barbarians in the Middle East actually believe the same thing as real Christians. They call it Chrislam. We sow chaos in the Bible Belt and we can rule America the way we want,

The third is Mark Goat. With my help, he plans on setting up a television network that will air vaguely Christian messages from prosperity gospel preachers, messages from the occasional Fundamentalist nutcases, and even the out there End Times preachers. Our plan is to confuse those uneducated about what the Christian message really is. Heck, Goat and Whittier want to join Christians with Muslims, get the uneducated types thinking that the barbarians in the Middle East actually believe the same thing as real Christians. They call it Chrislam. We sow chaos in the Bible Belt and we can rule America the way we want,

We live in a day of abounding vagueness and indistinctness on doctrinal subjects in religion. Now, if ever, it is the duty of all advocates of clear, well-defined, sharply-cut theology, to supply proof that their views are thoroughly borne out by Scripture.

The question to ask is this: Are all the “interpretations” listed here, not least the mutually contradictory ones, equally acceptable to God? An atheist will be uncomfortable with such a question; a Christian must ask it. Is it enough simply to hold the beliefs of one’s “Christian” community? How about the interpretive community of Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons? Or how about, say, Muslims? Buddhists? Materialist Marxists? I do not know how Smith would respond to such questions. If he draws the line somewhere, then of course I will ask him how he knows that is the place to draw it. At the very least he has then admitted the existence of objective truth, the denial of which is dangerous. If, in line with the central heritage of the Christian church, he ties that truth to the Bible, then one must push hard and ask which of the other interpretations can properly be justified and which must be ruled out by what the Bible says—or will he retreat again to some vague notion of equivalent value in all interpretations? If he denies that there is any way we can know that we are pleasing God, and that the best we can do is live in line with our interpretive communities, what possible excuse could he make for Luther breaking out of one community to start another? Was Luther right? How do we decide? If Smith hides behind the community in the face of such questions, then his interlocutor is basically right. And I would review with him the points I have already tried to make in this chapter and the previous one. In short, I agree that all our understanding is interpretive, and that the interpretive communities in which we find ourselves are extremely influential. But this does not mean, on the one hand, that we cannot articulate objective truth, and on the other that our interpretive communities bind us utterly.

Be this as it may, an increasing number of us find that something is missing . . . something vague . . . something—dare I say—spiritual. Even those of us who scoff at religious and spiritual institutions have to admit that there is something there—purpose, meaning, internal calm, a like-minded society, and a chance to serve our fellow man—all of which are admirable. We are attracted and repulsed at the same time, primarily because there seems to be a steep price to pay when we enter the so-called spiritual arena.

Prayer, then, is a response to the knowledge of God, but it works itself out at two levels. At one level, prayer is a human instinct to reach out for help based on a very general and unfocused sense of God. It is an effort to communicate, but it cannot be a real conversation because the knowledge of God is too vague. At another level, prayer can be a spiritual gift. Christians believe that through the Scripture and the power of the Holy Spirit, our understanding of God can become unclouded. The moment we are born again by the Spirit through faith in Christ (John 1:12–13; 3:5), that Spirit shows us that we are not simply God’s subjects but also his children, and we can converse with him as our Father (Gal 4:5–6).90 The knowledge of God for instinctive prayer comes intuitively and generally through nature (Rom 1:20). What Christians know about God comes with verbal specificity through the words of the Scripture and its main message—the gospel. In the Bible, God’s living Word, we can hear God speaking to us and we respond in prayer, though we should not call this simply a “response.” Through the Word and Spirit, prayer becomes answering God—a full conversation.

The name Hamito-Semitic, derived from the Bible, is deliberately vague.

I wonder how many other well-intentioned Christians haven’t looked at Genesis 19 in a while, leaving them with nothing more than a vague sense of, “That’s the story about God destroying cities because of homosexuality, right?” Wrong.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love “the lost.” You can’t feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as “all lost people.” Don’t wait for a feeling of love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of a compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. The Bible says in Ephesians 6:7–8: “With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.” Humanity does not deserve the love of God any more than you or I do. We should never be Christian humanists, taking Jesus to poor sinful people, reducing Jesus to some kind of product that will better their lot. People deserve to be damned, but Jesus, the suffering Lamb of God, deserves the reward of His suffering.

Grace. There was that five letter word I had scribbled in my journal and sang about in church. It was a familiar word; a word I had heard preached from pulpits thousands of times, but more like an acquaintance than a dear friend. Grace was a beautiful but vague word adorning the pages of my Bible and the hymn books I grew up with. I knew I was saved by grace, but that didn’t mean I understood the depth of its meaning or how amazing it really was. I didn’t know all the dimensions of grace; the shades of glorious wonder that grace possessed. I didn’t understand the workings of grace, and the strength of grace. But that night, like the first flicker of light in a dark room, grace captivated my attention.

A vague goal like trying to eat better requires you to constantly assess what you should eat and how much. However, if you have a bright-line rule such as “No eating sugar” or “No eating after 8:00 p.m.,” you’re far more likely to see your eating habits improve.

scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology that is so painfully current in the present age. It is vain to shut your eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity today that you cannot declare positively unsound, but which, nevertheless, is not quite accurate or biblical. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably something about Christ, something about grace, something about faith, something about repentance, and something about holiness, but it is not the real thing as it is in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion.

TIMOTHY AND THE PAROUSIA. 1 TIM. 6:14: - [I give thee charge] ‘that thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ: which in his times he shall show,’ etc. This implies that Timothy might expect to live until that event took place. The apostle does not say, ‘Keep this commandment as long as you live;’ nor, ‘Keep it until death;’ but ‘until the appearing of Jesus Christ.’ These expressions are by no means equivalent. The ‘appearing’ [έπιφάνωια] is identical with the Parousia, an event which St. Paul and Timothy alike believed to be at hand. Alford’s note on this verse is eminently unsatisfactory. After quoting Bengel’s remark ‘that the faithful in the apostolic age were accustomed to look forward to the day of Christ as approaching; whereas we are accustomed to look forward to the day of death in like manner,’ he goes on to observe: - ‘We may fairly say that whatever impression is betrayed by the words that the coming of the Lord would be in Timotheus’s life-time, is chastened and corrected by the καιρόις ίδίοις [his own times] of the next verse.’ dldl In other words, the erroneous opinion of one sentence is corrected by the cautious vagueness of the next! Is it possible to accept such a statement? Is there anything in καιρόις ίδίοις to justify such a comment? or is such an estimate of the apostle’s language compatible with a belief in his inspiration? It was no ‘impression’ that the apostle ‘betrayed,’ but a conviction and an assurance founded on the express promises of Christ and the revelations of His Spirit. No less exceptionable is the concluding reflection: - ‘From such passages as this we see that the apostolic age maintained that which ought to be the attitude of all ages, - constant expectation of the Lord’s return.’ But if this expectation was nothing more than a false impression, is not their attitude rather a caution than an example? We now see (assuming that the Parousia never took place) that they cherished a vain hope, and lived in the belief of a delusion. And if they were mistaken in this, the most confident and cherished of their convictions, how can we have any reliance on their other opinions? To regard the apostles and primitive Christians as all involved in an egregious delusion on a subject which had a foremost place in their faith and hope, is to strike a fatal blow at the inspiration and authority of the New Testament. When St. Paul declared, again and again, ‘The Lord is at hand,’ he did not give utterance to his private opinion, but spoke with authority as an organ of the Holy Ghost. Dean Alford’s observations may be best answered in the words of his own rejoinder to Professor Jowett: - ‘Was the apostle or was he not writing in the power of a spirit higher than his own? Have we, in any sense, God speaking in the Bible, or have we not? If we have, then of all passages it is in these which treat so confidently of futurity that we must recognise His voice: if we have it not in these passages, then where are we to listen for it at all?

The Bible's only explicit reference to homosexuality is that passage in Leviticus you misquoted, and even it is sort of vague. Man shall not lie with man. Says nothing about sex or love or long-term commitment.

The Bible and The Koran are so confusing and vague that thousands interpret them in many different ways, for both good and bad purposes. Does this sound the work of an omniscient, all-powerful, all good deity? How can any rational human being determine the truth when there are so many versions of it?

Lesson Focus God shows compassion where he wills. • God is responsive to small steps in the right direction. • God’s compassion is not earned and never deserved. Lesson Application God sometimes shows compassion on us by giving us a second chance when we don’t deserve it. • We respond to God’s Word by taking steps in the right direction. • We recognize that God’s compassion is great. Biblical Context The book of Jonah is about how people respond to the Lord and how the Lord responds to them. Both the sailors and the Ninevites, though pagans, were responsive to what they saw the Lord doing. Jonah, a prophet who should have known better, was the least responsive and had to be taught a lesson about God’s compassion. Interpretational Issues in the Story Jonah’s prophetic mission (Jonah 3:4). Jonah was sent to denounce Nineveh, not to save it. His word to them was a word of judgment. He did not even name Yahweh and he did not confront them with their offenses, instruct them as to what they ought to do, or offer any hope for them to avoid the judgment. If the text does not offer this information, we cannot read those things between the lines and assume that they occurred. Great fish (Jonah 1:17). Nothing in the text indicates the species of the creature, and while a whale cannot be ruled out (they would not have distinguished sea-dwelling mammals from fish), the text is vague. Fish as rescue, not punishment (Jonah 2:6, 9). Jonah’s prayer demonstrates that he saw the fish as deliverance, not judgment. He was drowning, and the Lord used the fish to save his life. Jonah’s prayer (Jonah 2:4, 7–9). Jonah offered no repentance and did not ask forgiveness when he prayed inside the fish. He assumed that since the Lord had saved him from death, he had been restored to favor. He spoke ill of those who worship idols, which apparently included the sailors (whose response had been far better than his own) as if he was insisting, “At least I’m not a pagan idol-worshiper!” He made no mention of his disobedience and indicated no willingness to go to Nineveh. The vows he referred to (v. 9) would have involved sacrifices of thanksgiving at the temple for his rescue. This prayer was a farce, and Jonah was still unchanged (as the rest of the book demonstrates). Ninevite response (Jonah 3:5). The Ninevites believed what Jonah said, but that does not mean they converted to his God. He never even told them the identity of his God, and there is no indication that they got rid of their idols or understood the law. They repented, but any Assyrian would have done so under these circumstances. If they had been convinced that some god was angry at them and about to destroy them, they would have sought to appease that god. That is how they took Jonah’s warning. In the ancient world people believed that there were all sorts of powerful gods, but they only worshiped the ones they believed had power over their lives. Jonah was informing them that a God they had not recognized had noticed them and was going to act against them, and they were grateful for this information. Likely they checked Jonah’s message against their omens and afterward were eager to respond. Sackcloth (Jonah