Bible Study for the Biblically Challenged Anyone?

thanks Nancy, my grandchildren where here all day today with nasty colds are were terribly cranky!  I think my DIL is taking them to a bday party tomorrow so I will take my quiet time to either read or nap, whichever my body tells me is more improtant.  I am reading what the girls are writing and learning alot and I am anxious to get back to reading the sections I was in when I set my bible aside.

I am home now with my own bible and books ...... 

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Another thing I remember about Sarah is that she is like all of us ... sometimes doubting and wanting to take the bull by the horns and take control.  Sometimes things don't happen fast enough.  Here she knew what God's promise was ... that Abraham and she would be parents!  Back in that day, concubines children were considered children of those that owned them.  Hagar was her slave.  So rather than wait on her LORD, Sarah took things into her own hands and told Abraham to sleep with Hagar.  As we saw, her impatience did not pay off!!!  Her impatience and action was not the answer.  God would fulfill his promise in his own time and his way ...  And apparently they needed to learn to rely on God's promise. 

I will not be able to take time to read and concentrate til later in the week. Since most recent cancer tx and narcotics it takes two or three times to read sometihng to take in what it is saying.  so trying to do it with my precious little babies around doesn't do me any good at all!  I am actually going to have a quiet Thanksgiving because everyone will be off at other peoples houses.  Guess this is a sign that my children are growing up with they have inlaws and boyfriend/girlfriends houses for holiday dinners 

I am reading the posts though and think that will help me understand the chapters as I read them.  Thanks for starting this thread

Perhaps anyone who says that their truth excludes the truths of others only has part of the greater truth.  So how is calling any other religion a false religion if it doesn't agree with you, not judging? Given how the various religions, especially the catholic church has changed our references (the Bible) over the eons, I wonder just how much we can trust a given passage?  My conscience and my personal relationship with the holy spirit asks me to be tolerant and not judge another's path to God.  God in all his omnipotence, omniscence and omnipresence can do anything, knows all and is everywhere so I am not about to call another person's path to God wrong or false, it is hard enough for me to keep my path straight and my relationship clean without judging another's with such harsh words. 

I find God of the New Testament to be loving and open, not isolating and closed.  The New Testament is a new covenant that reaches out to all the people of the world without judgment.  It commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, it doesn't say to just love Baptists or Episcopalians. 

I have learned by the instruction and patience of God to be tolerant with myself when I fail and to forgive myself for my missteps.  Can I do less for anyone else?  Perhaps God has provided many paths and routes to his presence, can we pick one passage from a book that has gone through many translations, additions and subtractions since the early disciples wrote God's words, to the exclusion of the the whole message of love and tolerance, and still be sure it is God's will? 

Can we take the tone and the intolerance of the Old Testament when God was trying to establish his people, over the New Covenant of the New Testament?  I believe that I am not capable of judging other's religion, I can offer mine and it may be accepted or not, but I am not the one to judge if another's path will lead to God, that is between that person and God. 

I humbly offer my perspective and my conscience, I may be wrong, but it is what I believe.  I offer you all what I have come to believe and live by, the way I believe God has instructed me to live. You may accept it or not, but I wonder how love and tolerance will fail to be God's desire when judgment and exclusion has caused so much violence and pain in our world? 

The message I recieve is that Satan will pick apart the message of God and lead us astray with passages taken out of context, I am commanded to listen to the word of God, not listen to part of it and be lead astray by something out of the context of the whole message.  Suppose originally, the passage about Christ being "the way" was not written in an exclusive way, perhaps it was misinterpreted by some zealot about Christ's teachings and wrote it as the only way.  Christ himself said that we all have God within us, we can all be as he was.  Did he mean we can all be the son of God?  Did he mean that if all women who had faith as he did would suddenly become male?  The overall message of the New Covenant is of love and tolerance without judgment, for me that doesn't reconcile with determining other people cannot reach God in any way different from my own.

Gracie I am catholic, just not one that goes to church every Sunday.  Moody invited me to join into this group and I had started reading the bible on my own prior to this and though this might be a good opportunity for me to better understand certain parts of derrive more meaning into what I read.  No one here is preaching his or her religion, just discussions of topics in everyone's bible and our belief in God.  Each religion has their own rites and rituals but this is just a non denominational discussion.  So far it has been enlightening for me.  It is helping better understand someof the stuff I have been reading about Sarah

So Moody, what happened to your undersatnd of Lot that you were going to post today or did I miss it?

Thanks, Luann and Moody  Yeah, I will follow along  I just didn't want to cause any problems because there are some differences in meanings of scriptures and the last thing I want to do is to cause any friction  But I appreciate the invitations to come and discuss and share

 Blessings,

Gracie 

Gracie-  I believe the point of this thread was to share thoughts, questions, interpretations and anwers--nothing is right or wrong.  Hope you will join in and share your thoughts.

Elaine 

Moody, to me you are moving wayyyyyyyyy to fast ........ 

We've totally skipped over Sarah and Hagar .... and that is DOOZIE of what the two represent (free woman and slave)

I think that each subject maybe should take a whole thread ... I have only been missing since late night on the 23rd and you've  gone from Sarah ... right thru Lot and then onto Rebekkah .. there is no time for reflection, prayer or meditation.  Really, I think that in order for everyone to participate we need to have different threads on each subject.