Nick wrote:
1. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land here in the United States. What is to be done when someone in governmental position breaks the law?

2. Eric from NC wote
The Bible says that we should honor God first. He should take precedence over man's judgement. It says, If possible, live peaceably with all men. It's not peaceable to shut down churches. It says, Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together. This is what the Bible says. The judges are wrong.

As good as it is to have legal guarantees in place for freedom of speech, association and worship as included in the text of the American constitution, such work as 'guidelines'.

If emergencies suggest *temporal* adjustment for the sake of the immediate good of the country and fellow citizens, it is not a matter of breaking the law, or being unconstitutional, but of being sensible, and honouring temporal measures or instructions.

When *'Congress'* makes permanent laws contradicting bible truth, that will be the time to sound the alarm.

John UK wrote:
Regarding the apostasy of the churches, have a think about this: If Jesus could write to seven churches in the 1st century and find plenty to castigate them for, do you not think that if wrote a letter to our churches in the 21st century he would also find plenty to tell us about that we are doing wrong?

US
Please, use valid logic in interpreting intend. My response to QC was to avoid unnecessary repetition of what had been already stated.

John UK wrote:
1. There will always be those who have no intention of discussing in a friendly fashion.

2. ... get to grips with what scripture teaches us. If that means jettisoning some things we have been brainwashed with, so be it.

3. Mike, the verb is stauroo (which has a line above the second o). The noun is stauro. In the KJV we have 'crucified' and 'cross', and that is what we have been fed with for centuries. But how will you translate these Greek words?

"I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: ... that I may present you as a 'chaste' virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."

2. Sound

3. Impalled

John UK wrote:
Doc, in a game of football there are goal posts at each end of the pitch.
Let us say that the goal is argument 1, and if you want to counter the argument, you have to kick the ball between the goal posts.
But you realise that you have already lost the argument, and you cannot counter it, so there is only one thing left to do. You create a false argument (argument 2), which you know you can counter successfully, which means that you have to move the goal posts.
It's a bit like creating a strawman, which no-one is arguing for.
Thusly, it is dishonest, and does not make for good, Christian discussion.

Dr. Tim wrote:
Mrs. McCausland, I have not used any dishonesty, and you are a raging liar if you say that I have. As to “moving the post,” I assume that is a British idiomatic expression, and I don’t know what it means.

Thanks for the quote from Vines Complete Expository Dictionary John. The facts are true and go along the broad reading of history, nothing new.

Dr. Tim wrote:
You people have absolutely not one shred of evidence, biblical or historical, that Jesus was not nailed to a literal cross. End of discussion as far as I’m concerned.

Dr. Tim wrote:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a CROSS...” —Flavius Josephus

Did Josephus speak or write in English?
If not who translated him and when? Modern or RC translators would repeat the Vulgate doing failing to identify the precise wording, but rather rendering a convenient politically correct equivalent satisfactory to a current agenda or context at the risk of accuracy.
What is the original word for 'cross' in the original writing?

For your convenience,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=staurw%3D%7C&la=greek&can=staurw%3D%7C0&prior=h(mi=n

Dr. Tim wrote:
“ We owe all to Jesus crucified. What is your life, my brethren, but the cross? Whence comes the bread of your soul but from the cross? What is your joy but the cross? What is your delight, what is your heaven, but the Blessed One, once crucified for you, who ever lives to make intercession for you?”
Silly Spurgeon, getting his theology from YouTube!

True, there are many passages which content runs over our heads as water runs the back of a duck.

Here a some considering the theme of piercing.
Take care

"... the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet."

"I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn."

"But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, ... that the scripture should be fulfilled ... They shall look on him whom they pierced."

Carol wrote:
“Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary.At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.”
J.C. Ryle.

***

For instance,
"The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree."

Or "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree"

Saying that however, when the rendering of 'crucified' appears in modern translations, the stauros word behind this term points to the sense of impaling, say hanging a human by piercing, not necessarily by ropes.

Prisoners of war or people charged with treason were executed by hanging on a tree or pole in old times. We can see in Scriptures divers cases as that, for instance the baker in Joseph's dungeon.

From wikipedia,
Impaling as used in Babylonia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire as early as the 18th century BC. meant the torture or killing by penetration of a human by a piercing object such as a stake, pole, spear, or hook, often by the complete or partial perforation of the torso.

With all the above in mind, we might gather that Christ's death gets a deeper theological sense than the mere RC melodramatic scene of a crucifixion.

***

Adriel wrote:
The reason why the cross has become a "graven image" is because of its association with the Death of Christ the Son of God.

Iconography is ... another big idolatrous practice of the papists.
This too has been censured by true Christians in history.

... the cross is a graven image in the religious idolatry of many in churches across the world. Just as icons ...

Is. 44:9 They that make a graven image are all of them vanity ... that is profitable for nothing?

John UK wrote
The stauros is the real thing; the cross is an invention of man.

The magical Egyptian sign for life made of a cross with a loop on top might be an antecendent of the 'Christian cross'.

The sign of the cross became through history a "graven image" of the apostate church, infiltrating the global church and present undiscerning evangelical settings via the Vulgate translation which rendered stauros as crux, crucem or crucis, -all different declensions of the word cross in Latin which alters the word endings to show grammatical case, number and gender- instead of rendering an specific term for stauros.

"... When they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre."

Mike wrote:
It is good to determine the crux of the matter.

Though Christ when responding to Thomas' challenge only mentioned his hands and side to him, he mentioned his hands and feet to scared and unbelieving disciples as in Luke 24,

However, every time the word crucified, or even cross, appears in NT the corresponding Greek term is stauros, a pole, and the idea is to impale, hung up, or to be 'lifted up' as mentioned in John 3 for instance, when alluding to the type of the serpent being lifted up on the pole in the desert.
Prophetically, we read 'curse upon any one hanging on a tree', say a pole, or to be impaled to death by that way.
As in Deuteronomy,
"And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree"

Yet, Psalm 22:16 and the post resurrection incident with Thomas points to the piercing of hands and feet.

Mike wrote:
Thank you to all my "kin" in the Lord. Very much appreciated. A reminder to me that, though we may have differing views on different subjects, there is a time when those differences seem small when compared to what we share.