Queen's Road Cell

We met in Shaun and Wen Ai's place today. As I said, we had a rather morbid QC session where Selwyn shared his recent apparently paranormal experiences (phones ringing after office hours, objects on tables moving) in his office. We discussed briefly what the Bible taught about 'ghosts'. There is the story of the witch of Endor in 1 Sa 28 when the spirit of the departed Samuel seemed to appear to Saul. Some think that God would not have allowed the repose of a godly man to be troubled by being summonable by someone practicing forbidden magical arts. I personally think that God allowed this encounter specifically to pass judgement on Saul. In Matt 14:26 and Mark 6.49 the disciples think that Jesus was a 'ghost' ('phantasma'). But we are told no more about this, and we are left to surmise that there was certainly a belief in ghosts, but not taught anything about their nature. Given that people die and afterwards face judgement (Heb 9:27), it seems wrong that...

I shared that this was a difficult study to prepare for, not just because the passages and ideas seemed to be all over the place, but because there were so many areas in which I felt I fell short. My introductory comment was that we Protestants tend to think of righteousness solely as something we recieve by imputation from Christ (2 Cor 5:21), not necessarily something we seek to develop and achieve through effort. And yet Scripture encourages us to "strive... for...holiness, without which no one will see the Lord" (Heb 12:14). If we do not exhibit practical as well as positional righteousness, then, we place ourselves at risk of "losing our salvation" (if you are Arminian), or proving that you were never one of the elect (if you are Calvinist). Hebrews 12:5 and James 1:14-15 remind us that sinning starts in small ways, but then grows to destroy our lives and the lives of many others. We spent a great deal of time talking about sins of speech mentioned in Col 3...