We are fearfully and wonderfully made

 

 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

-- Psalm 139:14 

Nor will I again destroy every living thing, and day and night shall not cease

Just as the promise of a coming prophet like unto Moses is set aside by the Torah itself, so also is the expectation of an apocalyptic final judgment ruled out by its testimony.

Hope dashed, but fear allayed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

And the LORD smelled a soothing aroma. Then the LORD said in His heart, I will never again curse the ground for man's sake, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done.

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease. 

-- Genesis 8:20ff.

Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:  ...

the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

-- Genesis 9:11ff.

The Lord raises up evil

Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house ... 

τάδε λέγει κύριος ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἐξεγείρω ἐπὶ σὲ κακὰ ἐκ τοῦ οἴκου σου ...

-- II Samuel 12:11

The author of κακά

I am the one who once fashioned the light and made the darkness

the one who presently makes peace and creates calamity

I the Lord God am the one who does all these things

ἐγὼ ὁ κατασκευάσας φῶς καὶ ποιήσας σκότος

ὁ ποιῶν εἰρήνην καὶ κτίζων κακά

ἐγὼ κύριος ὁ θεὸς ὁ ποιῶν ταῦτα πάντα

-- Isaiah 45:7 (LXX)

 

but he that doeth evil hath not seen God

 

ὁ δὲ κακοποιῶν οὐχ ἑώρακεν τὸν θεόν

-- III John 1:11

Thou wilt taste no pleasure solitary?

What think'st thou then of me, and this my state?

Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed

Of happiness, or not? who am alone

From all eternity, for none I know

Second to me, or like, equal much less.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

A God like this makes theology (rational talk about God) impossible

The LORD killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up. The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.

-- I Samuel 2:6f.

The stupid statement of the day comes from the solitary Joel Miller

 

 

Here:

The early Church flourished without any political power.

The early church was a political power.

The statement is breathtakingly oblivious to the irreducible political nature of man, most memorably articulated in antiquity by Aristotle, reinterpreted in St. Paul's notion of the one body of Christ and its many members, and most famously embraced by the Christian theologian Aquinas. You have to be a dumb animal, eating the grass of the field, not to grasp the self-evident fact that the early church itself constituted a (rival) political force which took over the Roman Empire from within because it became socially dominant.

From Aristotle, Politics 1, 1253a:

From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war') inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.

Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.

Therefore the impulse to form a partnership of this kind is present in all men by nature; but the man who first united people in such a partnership was the greatest of benefactors. For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony. Justice on the other hand is an element of the state; for judicial procedure, which means the decision of what is just, is the regulation of the political partnership.

Depart from your cell, Joel, and join the human race.