09-24-2006, 01:27 PM
Quote:Bismillah:
Am sorry? Trinity is <b>a VERY simple concept</b>?
Look at what you just said in the above statement and in your last paragraph of post # 5.
Simple and hard :confused_smile:
Do you know how many times he<b> called himself </b> son of man and how many times he was <b>CALLED BY OTHERS </b> as son of God? and do you know what is the meaning of SON OF GOD in the Hebrew language? and do you know that ALL OF US are called SONS of God according to the Bible?
Salam
Wael
Simple and hard? lol Thank you for pointing that out. I guess it could be confusing. eh?
All great truths are simple and hard. For example: Love your enemy.
Obviously if we can love our enemy, then eventually we will have no enemy. So it is simple. Yet, it is very hard as well. The concept of "enemy" means to be opposed to that person. Thus you must love who you hate, which is very hard to do and not obvious, thus it is intellectually and emotionally "hard" to grasp as well. Everything in our society encourages people to conquer. Politics, business, academics, etc., everything is about "getting ahead." Thus "love your enemy" goes against all of the status quo in one swoop. It is both an easy concept, meaning it is a clear and simple principle; yet it is also hard to understand. Why would one want to make himself vulnerable and at a disadvantage? It turns our concept of power on its head.
In the case of Christ, God is all powerful, so why would he make himself weak? That is what makes the trinity hard to understand. It requires wisdom and faith for the strong to make themselves weak. Look at the contrast that Jesus sets up in healing others and lifting others out of death, yet he does nothing to defend himself. He uses his strength for the weak, and not against the strong. With one exception, he casts out the devil when he encounters him.
In some ways there are two trinities, not one. There is the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. And there is also us (man,) God and the Devil. For us, it is a struggle (jihad) to be moral and have faith, but when rooted in the Trinity it is "easy and hard." Easy because with faith all things are possible, hard because faith is continually unfolding itself and asking more from us...and yes, we are all sons of God, which is why loving our enemy is so important. We are a family, and brother should not slay brother like Cain did to Abel. Thus, we need to "reconcile with our brother" before we can be admitted into Heaven. We are not only obliged to purge the hate and fear in our own heart, but we are also obliged to help our brother do the same. We are our brother's keeper, and what we "keep" is faith.
The Trinity should not present a stumbling block for you, for as Jesus said, those that accept him also accept the father who sent him. Similarly, I can love Muhammed as easily as Hitler or Osama or my next door neighbor or Cain. For they all have God within them, but none of them were "sent" the way Jesus was. To love the sinner and not the sin is what I must do when I look in my mirror every morning as well. When Allah is described as merciful, then there must be the sinful and merciless who need forgiveness, right? Only the merciless need mercy.
To put it another way, it is more important to follow who the prophets follow (God or Allah) and not the prophets themselves. The President of Iran, for example, struggles to understand how to reconcile montheism with secular political authority. He sees Christ as a prophet, as did Arafat and many other Muslim leaders. The fact that he tries to make sense of these prophets makes him unintelligible to many in the West, who have separated church and morality from state. Yet the problem is that he does not quite grasp that the idea of nationhood (and religious sect) is the essential bigotry that plagues mankind. The idea of separate states for Israel and Palestine is not a solution. There needs to be one community of men, not a community for Christians, Muslims or Jews.
Just as all the Christian sects need to reconcile, so too do all the Jewish and Muslim sects, and then they all need to reconcile as one on top of that. This will not be accomplished without using Christ as the doorway with the Holy Spirit, imo.