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The Beginning of The Quest
In the video clip of one of the early worldwide inernet teaching sessions of "A New Earth" Oprah was asked the question as to how she (Oprah) was able to reconcile these spiritual teaching with her ‘Christian’ beliefs, She says she was able to open her mind “to the absolute indescribable hugeness of that which we call God” She said she “Took God out of the box because she “grew up in the Baptist church and there were rules and belief systems, doctrines”. She goes on to say that she “happened to be sitting in church” in her late twenties and she was going to this church that you “had to get there at eight o’clock in the morning or you couldn’t get a seat.” It had “a very charismatic minister” and everybody was just into the sermon and “this great minister was preaching about how great God was.. omniscient, omnipresent and God is everything. And then he said “The Lord thy God is a jealous God”. She goes on to say that she
“was caught up in the rapture of the moment until he said “jealous”.. Something struck me. I was like 27 or 28.. I was thinking.. God is all, God is omnipresent, and God’s also jealous? God is jealous of me? Something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit. Because I believe that God is love and that God is in all things so that’s when the search for something more than doctrine started within me”.
This is a prime example of the sheer audacity and the sheer foolishness of this woman.
One It was not the preachers idea since the Bible says that God is a jealous God. However if that statement struck Oprah as being a little odd, as I am sure it has struck thousands of Christians through the ages... all she had to do was investigate this a little more closely. In fact a simple reading of the passages in question would have been sufficient to show that The verses that refer to God as a "jealous God" are often misunderstood. When we use the word jealous, we use it in the sense of being envious of someone who has something we don't have… in other words “envy” or perhaps even “resentment”. However, this is not the intended meaning of the word jealous when used in reference to God. In fact
The New Oxford Dictionary gives this as one of the definitions of Jealous..
Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary has this as one of the definitions of jealous:
Which is how we should understand this word as applied to God.
Instead Oprah took off at a tangent because it ‘didn’t feel right in her spirit’. [See The Jealousy of God]
Two: She states that she says that she believes “that God is love and that God is in all things”. However what does she base these beliefs on? One’s knowledge about God has to come from somewhere.. a) Either God Himself has communicated the information somehow, b) she has met God or c) knows someone who has. one can not pull information about a supreme deity or much else out of thin air. Nor can one say that “I feel this and so it must be right”.
Why is it that we would not accept this kind of argument from a member of the medical profession or an attorney but are willing to swallow just about any argument, and/or anyone’s feeling when it comes to spiritual matters?
Just how stupid are we getting?
By The Way... I have a very simple answer for the young woman who asked the question (just in case she ever reads this) Oprah can reconcile any beliefs with her version of Christianity simply because she is not a Christian. Calling herself a Christian does not make her one.
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