MORMONS True or False: If people use their free agency to join the LdS Church their obedience binds God to bless them.

Comments

Comments

• Then how do you explain Job, Jesus, and all the other saints of the Bible who were obedient yet suffered and even died while being obedient?

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on March 2nd, 2010

• Is death a punishment? Or is being freed from earthly trials and suffering a blessing? Job was blessed for his faithfulness in his adversity. Jesus suffered and died to fulfill righteousness. Righteousness does not guarantee that we will avoid suffering. We need not sin to suffer, but we are blessed all the more for enduring in faith and righteousness.

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  by illyena on February 22nd, 2011

• YOU WROTE
  "Is death a punishment? Or is being freed from earthly trials and suffering a blessing?"
  
  MY RESPONSE
  Makes sense. So why don't we just start holding them down when they're being baptized and truly bless them with such a wonderful, wonderful gift?
  
  Let's just by-pass all the earthly trials and suffering and send them straight to glory pure and clean!

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on February 22nd, 2011

• lol,I adore you. :) If the punishments were exacted by God, which he actually seems to do very rarely and usually on a fairly grand scale, i.e. Flood, Sodom and Gamorrah, 10 plagues, etc.. (Which makes me think that Jonah going to Ninevah was REALLY a big deal) then they would have been punished unjustly, but God only allowed their suffering and death, then blessed them after they had gone through their trials.

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  by illyena on February 22nd, 2011

• But weren't the situations that you're describing judgments due to sin?
  
  For example:
  
  "...the LORD said, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave..."
  Genesis 18:20 (KJV)
  
  "The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”
  Jonah 1:1&2 (NIV)
  
  So your interpretation seems incongruous with what the text actually says.

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on February 22nd, 2011

• Correct, punishment was all due to sin, allowing suffering and death is not a form of punishment. perhaps I should have said "If there were punishments exacted by God." Which there were not.

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  by illyena on February 23rd, 2011

• YOU WROTE
  "If there were punishments exacted by God." Which there were not."
  
  MY RESPONSE
  Could you explain how these weren't "punishments exacted by God" especially in light of what the text states:
  
  Sodom and Gomorrah:
  24 Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. ...
  (Genesis 19 KJV)
  
  29 So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.
  
  Ninevah:
  1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
  3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
  (Jonah 3)

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on February 23rd, 2011

• MIT, those were not what I was referring to. I was referring to the suffering of Jesus and Job, which were not punishments exacted by God, only God allowing them to endure the suffering, which he blessed them greatly for afterward.
  My references to the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and Jonah were specifically to emphasize that the punishments of God stand out and are recognizable as punishment for the sin of an individual or a population. Specific action to accomplish a specific goal.

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  by illyena on February 23rd, 2011

• Thank you for clarifying.

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on February 23rd, 2011

Comments

• I don't know - no Mormon has responded yet.

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on December 12th, 2009

• That is, unless you're Mormon. Are you?

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  by Mister IT is trying to Liahona outta here on December 12th, 2009