Teaching through Omission

Teaching through Omission

Written and published by Jean-Louis Mondon

It is interesting that “sanctification” is absent in the doctines in Romans 8:28-29. where we can find predestination, calling, justification and glorification in that order.

If anything, it should appear between justification and glorification. That is if we understand it as a life long progressive sanctification which is what is mostly preached and taught in churches.

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you knows how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.1 Thessalonians 4:3-5

But it appears in other scriptures, this time after "being washed"
in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. Here Paul is talking about positional sanctification.

 "And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood," Revelation 1:5

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

Alive with Christ

…But because of his great love for us , God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our trespasses. It is by grace you have been saved! And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7in order that in the coming ages He might display the surpassing riches of His grace, demonstrated by His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.… Ephesians 2:4,5.

This is why it is of the utmost importance to read the whole counsel of God from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation.

Are there other examples where one side of the coin is hidden from the other side. Can we see the dark side of the moon?

But the Lord helps us understand the completeness of His word if we seek wisdom and the illumination of the Holy Spirit to help us in our search for the truth. Is the word rapture written in the Bible. Does it prove that such a doctrine doesn´t exist?

Let´s talk about appearance and how tricky it is.

“Abstain from all appearance of evil.” 1 Thessalonians 5:22

What about the other side of the coin?

If there is true righteousness, the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us, is there a false righeousness or the appearance of good as demonstrated in the hypocrisy of the Pharisees? For further reading on the subject click on https://lightnseed.blogspot.com/2019/06/false-righteousness-and-true.html

These 2 concepts are not included in the same sentence because of the specific context.

The few examples cited above illustrate a certain type of attitudes that tends to exclude and judge others whose understanding are different from theirs.

I like the saying:it is better to dig a well 100 feet deep than dig 100 wells 1 foot deep.

It reminds me of Jesus teaching the parable of the wise and the foolish men.

The House on the Rock
…47I will show you what he is like who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them: 48He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid his foundation on the rock. When the flood came, the torrent crashed against that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. 49But the one who hears My words and does not act on them is like a man who built his house on ground without a foundation. The torrent crashed against that house, and immediately it fell—and great was its destruction!”…

A Reflection on Love.

Written and published by Jean-Louis Mondon

Love always hopes. When everything seems hopeless to the world, the Christian has hope in God working out His will and plan for the ultimate best.

We can do more than praying after we have prayed.

We cannot do more than praying until we have prayed.

In Corinthians, we have love defined by its nature and principles, in Ephesians Paul calls the believers to understand and grow into the dimensional aspect of love.

The Corinthians being immature needed to learn the ABCs, the rudiments of doctrine, they needed things to be spelled out for them.

In Corinthians 10:7, Paul tells them: You are looking only on the surface of things.

Again in 2 Cor 3:15 he tells them: “So fix your eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”.

In 2 Cor 5:12, he talks about those who take pride in what is seen rather than what is in the heart.

The Corinthians had all the external trappings of religion, the experience of the emotional release that can be found in and is similar to any gathering of people coming together for whatever the happening is football game, movie, circus, concert, etc.

The danger present in the situation is that they would revert back to the kind of worship and life style that was prevalent in Corinth among the pagan cults they came out of and wouldn’t know the difference.

This is why Paul took time to explain to them the principles of godly agape love, not some kind of philosophical, cerebral, ethereal, or emotional kind of love, but a love that has practical application in its outward manifestation as willful and deliberate attitudes of the heart, a relational love resulting in works of love.

Now contrast this with the prayer found in Ephesians 3:16 through 3:19

Paul's Prayer for the Ephesians

I ask that out of the riches of His glory He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being,17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth 19of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.…

If in Corinthians Paul writes about the nature of love and what to do, in Ephesians, he writes about the dimensional aspect of love and how this love is manifested.

The qualities and nature of Christ’s love as it is expressed through the believer’s life have width, length, height and depth which implies the ability to be measured and the possibility of increasing.

Sometimes, time and space which we consider to be limitations in the natural state of man can be turned around for our ultimate good and our benefit in the development of the qualities of love, if we understand them properly and apply them accordingly in their dimensional aspects and grow into “being filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 3:19.

Psalms 71 declares:“My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long though I do not know its measure”.

''Metanoeo'' - by Jack Kinsella

Omega Letter Community·

''Metanoeo'' - by Jack Kinsella

The Bible was originally recorded in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek -- but not in the working language of Jesus' day, which was Latin.

The reason, I believe, is that Latin, like English, was a notoriously imprecise language. To the ancients, Latin was the language of business, Greek the language of philosophy and humanity, and Hebrew the language of God.

There is also a saying in our modern world to the effect that English is the language of business, French the language of love and Spanish the language of God. That reflects the areas in which those languages are the most descriptive.

The United Nations uses six official languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Originally, there were only five; Arabic wasn't added until the OPEC Crisis in 1973. The reason for six official languages is to make allowances for those things that get 'lost in translation' from one language to another.

Of the six, English is the most deficient. As with Latin, more things are lost in translating TO English than FROM it.

Some words have no English equivalent; 'Schadensfreude' is a German word that means, 'happiness at the misfortune of others' in English, but to a native German, it carries all kinds of shades and sub-texts English cannot support.

(The closest English word to "Schadensfreude" is "epicaricacy" -- I rest my case.)

Both Hebrew and Greek are very precise languages -- which explains why God chose those languages to record His Word -- there are some concepts that only Hebrew or Greek can do justice to -- they "lose something in the translation" into English.

The Greek word 'metanoeo' is one of those words that defies transliteration into English. The closest English equivalent to it is 'repent' but that word comes no closer to expressing the flavor of 'metanoeo' than 'epicaricacy' does for 'Schadensfreude'.

The Greek 'metanoeo' is a compound word; 'meta' meaning 'after' and implying 'change' and 'noeo' meaning 'the mind'. Combining them, 'metanoeo' literally means 'after thought' in the sense of 're-thinking'.

The implication here is, after rethinking everything, you have a change of mind from one thing to something else. (We don't have an English word that says all that. The closest we can come is 'repent' but it only applies to religion, not thought)

"metanoeo... lit. to perceive afterwards (meta, after, implying change, noeo, to perceive; [comes from the Greek noun] nous, the mind, the seat of moral reflection), in contrast to pronoeo, to perceive beforehand, hence signifies to change one's mind or purpose..." (Vine's Expository Dictionary).

By implication, metanoeo means a complete change of mind from one thing to another in which the two positions are mutually exclusive, rather than simply meaning any old change of thinking.

For a hard-line Far Left Democrat to become a hard-line conservative Republican is an example of 'metanoeo', for example, whereas deciding you like country music after all, is not.

(One can like country music without giving up one's love for Big Band Swing, one cannot become a "hard-line conservative" Republican and remain on the fence about abortion.)

Metanoeo is not just a 'changed' mind, it is a total reversal of one's previous beliefs.

When the Bible says 'repent and be saved' what it means is understand the nature of sin and be aware of your personal guilt. The concepts of sin and righteousness are originally perceived spiritually, but understanding and awareness of them are functions of the mind.

The fact that God demands repentance shows that it involves your mind; it is something you choose to do. Metanoeo suggests more than just rejecting your former position or attitude, and includes turning to and embracing a new one.

For some Christians, 'repenting' is what you do once when you get saved, and after that, it almost seems as if no further repentance is necessary. One is forgiven and that's that.

THAT version of 'repentance' is more like deciding you like country music but you still love swing.

On the other side of the extreme, 'repentance' means to never sin again. For some Christians, that means that one maintains their own salvation on guts alone, in constant fear they will sin themselves out of God's protective Hand.

That version doesn't require a change of mind, it demands a change of works. There are many churches who have voted to disfellowship someone because they 'showed no signs of repentance' -- which is nothing less than judging what is in another person's mind and heart -- both the exclusive provinces of God.

Biblical 'metanoeo' is somewhere in the middle -- it is neither a one-time event before resuming the life of Good Times Charlie nor is it a Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of a believer.

Before I was a believer, my concept of sin was anything that hurt another person directly (especially if it meant I'd be exposed as the culprit). It's been rightly observed that the "best measure of a man's character is what he does when nobody is looking."

When I became a believer, I knew that no matter what I did, whether in Grand Central Station or alone in a locked room, there was always Somebody looking. It was a total reversal of my worldview -- a complete change of mind that brought with it a semi-complete change of heart.

I say 'semi-complete' change of heart because metanoeo is a process -- I am not the believer I was twenty years ago -- indeed, I'm not the believer I was twenty days ago.

If you are a sincere, born again, Blood-bought believer, there is something in your life you've undergone a metanoeo over since coming to Christ. (If you are like me, there are many somethings -- and a couple on the horizon you're still wrestling with)

Before I was a believer, I was uninterested in coming to Christ because of all the things I'd have to give up first. Like most unbelievers, I believed that salvation meant cleaning myself up first, and then presenting myself before the Lord. It was too much to even contemplate.

When I learned the Gospel, I underwent a total metanoeo about both my guilt and God's forgiveness, and as I've matured in the Lord, that 'change of mind' has continued.

A related word is metanoia, which usually is translated "repentance" or "conversion." It literally means your thinking has been converted. It does not mean you have achieved sinless perfection, nor does it hold out any promise that you will in this life.

It means understanding that you CANNOT, and that Jesus Christ in His mercy, made a way for you to be converted (notice 'being converted' is a process), starting by removing your sin and your guilt at the moment of salvation.

"Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ:" (Philippians 1:6)

You can be 'confident' that it is Jesus Who began 'a good work in you' and it is Jesus Who will perform it. Trust Him and allow Him direct you on the path He has prepared for you.

Don't let doubts or the enemy or some clever argument steal away your victory. The refrain from the old hymn, "Saved" says it all. At the moment you were saved by the Crucified One, "Your sins are all pardoned, your guilt is all gone!"

But your metanoeo was just beginning.

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