Are they saying 50,000 already?
No
But there are truly many more than you can imagine. This is because the Scripture must be fulfilled: “he who does not gather with me, scatters” and “he that falls on this stone shall be broken to pieces: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter him as dust.”
In poetry. Is Jesus literally a worm?
Had you seen Him in the dust, all covered in wounds and blood from head to toes, crawling and trying to lift up the cross, exhausted, you would understand why the Holy Spirit says what he says. It is not just poetry, it reflects a most sorrowful reality. The apostles do say that Christ was made a curse and sin. Is Christ literally a curse and sin? No, but He became such for our sake, in this temporal reality, though in His eternal divinity His glory was not affected in one bit.
It was a trial so God would know how this matter would be settled in Abraham’s heart. That’s what the text tells us.
The text tells us more than that. God is not ignorant, but all-knowing. God already knew Abraham’s heart. God wanted a man and his only son to become types for Him and His Only Son. God knew that Abraham and Isaac were those men, because He knew their hearts. Isaac knew what Abraham was going to do, and he accepted to carry the wood of his own sacrifice and lay on it, yet he did not open his mouth, like a lamb taken to the slaughterhouse. Abraham knew that God would not take away his only son or abandon him in the realm of the dead, for he told his servants: “we will go offer a sacrifice and we will come back”. When Isaac asked what was going to be sacrificed, Abraham replied: “God will provide the Lamb for the offering”. God in fact provided for the sacrifice, but He provided only a little goat. About two thousand years later a prophet coming from the desert saw the Son of Man walking and, filled with the Spirit, said: “Behold, the Lamb of God!” God graciously knows, always and everything.
How do you interpret “now I know”?
A manner of speech to define that it was the fullness of time for that to be experienced. God is outside of time, but it was in that moment that, in time, the certainty of the event had been fulfilled. Just as with Scripture: when Christ says, the words that you have heard are fulfilled in your ears. In God’s eyes, it was clear that Christ would come and fulfill His work of redemption. But only in that moment the Scripture was fulfilled.
There’s nothing about deception in Jer 3:6-7
Ok, but then how could God think that Israel would do something and Israel manage to do something else? Israel must have deceived God, tricking Him to think that he would return, when he actually didn’t. That is not possible in God’s eyes, for He cannot be deceived. If Israel was not going to return, God would have foreknown this even before Israel was formed in the womb.
That I take the bible seriously.
Indeed you do, and that is very good. But the Bible is not God. It is not even the Word of God. It is just the word of God with lowercase w. There is more to it. And to pick passages and focus on them to sustain a doctrine that contradicts tradition is a practice called in Greek
haireomai, which has never led to good results. For hundreds of years the Early Church did not even have a Bible until the Church compiled its Canon. The orthodox doctrine was transmitted by tradition, in word or writing, through the indisputable authority of the episkopoi and of the presbyteros, who were successors of the blessed apostles of Christ. The truth was sought in the apostolic churches established by these, over which they were shepherds. It is to them that others went to clarify matters on the Bible. Iraeneus points this out when he writes: “Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient churches with which the apostles held constant conversation, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question?”
So you claim. Still, his view of transubstantiation is based in a rejected substance theory. Clearly he’s wrong on some things.
Of course he is wrong on some things. No doubt about it. He sure wasn’t omniscent, and I do not know how could he or anyone be expected to know scientific facts 800 years before their discovery. But I do not have the necessary knowledge, nor the gifts of the Spirit, nor the boldness to claim that I know better than Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor of the Church that influenced theology forever and the philosopher who contributed to shape Western philosophy as a whole. And even if humbly I were to realize that he is not correct on some matter, I would go back to what others said on this - others with authority, such as the Church Fathers - and having found that their basic doctrine is coherent and uncontradicted, I will patiently wait until a better term, say, than substance and transubstantiation, is found to describe the Divine Mysteries, and I will be content with the reply of John Damascene: “if you enquire how this happens, it is enough for you to learn that it was through the Holy Spirit”. This we know as a fact. We also know that there remain two realities after the consecration: an earthly and a divine. Whether realities, substance and accident, or who knows what other terms are good, they still reflect with fallible human words a concept that is ineffable in itself but undeniable in the eyes of two thousand years of tradition beginning at the Last Supper and even before (for Scripture speaks of the Eucharist throughout its books).
