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Mormons at my Door

Response to comment [from a Christian]: "I just spoke with a couple of young Mormon guys who came by my home..."

Good job. And you've mentioned it here so we can pray for them. :alien:

"'What you have [in Mormonism] is just plain charlatanry by Joseph Smith, who created Mormonism...It's interesting that Smith and his father, when they lived in New York, were obsessed with finding Captain Kidd's buried gold. Then what does Smith later claim he finds? gold plates from the Angel Moroni, and then they disappear and are supposedly taken to heaven and never seen again.

What you have here is an elaborate hoax...The problem with Mormons is basically one of credibility because of the unreliability of Joseph Smith and a blatant lack of corroboration. Unlike the gospels, whose credibility has been greatly enhanced by archaeology , archaeological discoveries have repeatedly failed to substantiate the Book of Mormon.' (pg. 71, The Case for Faith)."

See:

Mormons

Response to comment [from other]: [Are there three hells?] "Hades (the grave), gehenna (the lake of fire), tartaros (incarceration)."

That is incorrect:

"Cast them into hell," is one word, it is a fascinating word. The word is tartarosos(?). To transliterate it, he tartarized them. Now that's not something you do with your fish when you eat out, close. He tartarized them. What does it mean? He sent them to Tartaros. That's a funny name, what's that? Well you can see here the translators have elected to translate it with the English word "hell" because that's what it was used to refer to. Since no one who discussed hell or preached about hell or read about hell had been there, and since its punishments and torments were basically inexplicable unless given some analogy, there had to be a word in the culture that they could use to describe something about what hell was. You remember that Jesus when He talked about hell liked to use the word Gehenna because that word gave a picture of what hell was like. Gehenna was the name for the valley in which the dump of Jerusalem was located. And it had an unending, burning fire...always burning all the time and that was the word Jesus chose to illustrate the inextinguishable flames of hell.

Here Peter borrows a word from Greek mythology...the word Tartaros. The Greeks said that Tartaros was a place lower than Hades, it was the lowest place for wicked, rebellious gods and people were sent there to receive the worst punishment. It was the lowest place a being could go. And the Jews eventually came to use that term to describe the place where the fallen angels were sent. It was the lowest hell, the deepest pit, the most terrible place of torture and eternal suffering.

So Peter borrows this vivid word from Greek mythology from the language of his time because any of his readers, both Gentile and Jew, would understand its meaning. And these angels that sinned, it says in verse 4, were cast into Tartaros, were tartarized into the deepest hell.

He further describes it in verse 4 as having them committed to pits of darkness. The word "committed" here is used, by the way, in the book of Acts twice, 8:3 and 12:4, of turning over a prisoner for imprisonment. They were turned over for imprisonment. Tartaros here is further described as a pit of darkness. The word "pit" is a Greek word seiros, it's really transliterated s-i-r-o, and the word that we have in our language that comes from it is s-i-l-o, silo, which is a storage place where something is kept. In ancient times such places of storage were in the ground, subterranean pits for the storing of grain.

And so, Peter says angels that sinned were sent to the deepest, severest place of punishment, a subterranean pit of darkness. This is reminiscent again of Jesus' teaching in Matthew 8:12 when He says that hell is a place of blackness and darkness.

Some manuscripts, and maybe if you have a King James, instead of "pits" you might have the word "chains." Some ancient manuscripts do have that word but the best evidence indicates that the better manuscripts use the word "pits." Jude in verse 6 of his little epistle does refer to their imprisonment in chains, and some scribe perhaps wanting to make Peter consistent with Jude slipped Jude's word over into Peter's epistle when he was copying a manuscript and thus it arrived there. But it's best to see it as the word "pits." Either way, whether it's pits or chains, it's the same idea. The word darkness is zophos, blackness.

So here were some angels who sinned and were sent to the deepest hell in a subterranean pit of blackness to be kept there until the day of judgment...the deepest place of torment. And they are held there, the end of verse 4 says, reserved for judgment. They're like a prisoner who's incarcerated awaiting final sentencing. There's no bail for them. There's no way out. The place is only temporary in the sense that in the day of judgment they will go to another place. Do you know what other place? Revelation 20:10 says the devil and all his angels will be cast into the...what?...the lake of fire. That's the final form of hell..." Full text : Divine Judgment on False Teachers, Part 1 Peter 2:3b-5 by John MacArthur

Response to comment [from other]: "...Death and life are opposites..."

What cult or 'ism do you belong to? Pagan? Run of the mill heathen? What?

Mormons at my door