jeremiah1five
Well-known member
That is the same false interpretation found in Gentile textbooks of how God saw the wickedness of men that their thoughts were evil continually, and it REPENTED God created man? That God "changed His mind"?False, unless you believe that
- Men can deceive God. The text says:"When God saw their actions, that they turned from their evil ways, He changed His mind about the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it." (Jonah 3:10)
God doesn't have a change of heart. What God has ordained to happen will happen and it is for our benefit that appears that God changes His Mind or "repents "of His acts. God is not a man that He should lie nor a God who changes His Mind. God knows the end from the beginning because He's ORDAINED the end.
This repentance had nothing to do with the eternal salvation God promised Israel. In one or two generations later while that generation that repented was still alive God destroyed Nineveh so extensively that to find where Nineveh existed one has to dig deep into the sand.
- Jesus was wrong. He said: "The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and will condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah." (Matthew 12:41)
Again, such repentance has nothing to do with eternal salvation for the repentance was foreign and completely separated from the covenant promises of salvation and deliverance God gave Abraham and his seed. God loves and God hates. Both derive from a Sovereign will and purpose. If God loves "you", God will save "you." If God doesn't love "you" God will not save "you." That is the whole theme of His covenant with Abraham and those that obey Him and those not in covenant and the wrath of God ABIDES on "them." There's a reason why Jesus says, "already condemned" in John 3. If they are already condemned in the first century with no hope of changing their trajectory towards the eternal separation from God, He doesn't state "already condemned" and later change His Mond and sees their repentance and changes His judgment from "already condemned" to a full pardon. The only people who are the recipients of God's gracious pardon are those who've made it to the New Covenant era and the performance and application of the substitutionary sacrifice of the Lamb of God for those in the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenant who were "kept" until Faith should appear? And Faith appeared in the Person of the Holy Spirit of Promise PROMISED TO ISRAEL by the prophet Joel.CONCLUSION:
God loved the non-Hebrew people of Nineveh. God sent Jonah to them to preach repentance. They repented. God accepted their repentance. Your claim that such repentance was not genuine is unsupported. It has been refuted.
4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,
5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. Gal. 4:4–5.
Many Prodigal Sons that form a long, long, line back to their Father. You see, this parable states the Prodigal Son began as a son and ended as a son. Once a son, always a son. It is impossible to un-son oneself from their biological parentage. God contemplated His elect people in His Mind in eternity BEFORE He created heaven, earth, and man. God more than animated the formed clay in Genesis when He blew into the nostrils of man and man became a living soul. Follow the lineage in Matthew and Luke and see the sonship of the biological people that was [the son] of God and who "begat" who in the blessed family line of God.
There is no "plan" for anyone in the afterlife. The afterlife IS the plan, whether one is hid in Christ in God and who is eternally separated from God. When Jesus said of Judas in John 6 that he was a "son of perdition" the word "perdition" defined as "ruin" has three senses in which to interpret its use in a given verse where it is found. The three senses are "physical, spiritual, and eternal" ruin. How "perdition" or ruin applied to Judas was not eternal ruin because Judas was personally "named [them] apostle(s)" (Lk. 6:12-13), and there are no apostles of the lamb in "hell." It wasn't physical ruin of Judas because the Holy Spirit had not yet been sent to Israel. It was a physical ruin because Judas did commit suicide in obedience to the Law of Moses and Scripture does say "his bowels gushed out", so Physical ruin does fit its usage of Judas being a son of perdition. Among other reasons - all biblical - is why I receive Judas as being with the Lord and eternally secure in his redemption. What I am saying is that the twenty-three thousand that were wiped out by God for worshiping the golden calf merely lost their physical lives and not their eternal lives since their eternal lives are forever connected to the covenant they were under is the same when God sends rain upon the good and evil or the just and the unjust of His people despite themselves. So, a person's perdition is dependent upon when they met their ruin - Old Testament or New Testament - and who they are and whether they are in covenant with God or not.That may be the result of a returned of wickedness of other generation... or part a broader plan for them in the afterlife.
Afterall, God allows earthquakes, wars and diseases to destroy the life of Hebrews and not Hebrews alike, good and bad, believers and unbelievers. Isn't that so?