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Old 10-31-2008, 04:31 PM
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MC1171611 MC1171611 is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Western Ohio
Posts: 436
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Something tricky to watch for is verb tenses and indirect objects.

"For God so loved the world..."

First, that's past tense. It doesn't say "loves." At a point in history, God loved the...

Secondly, that's "the world," not "everyone in the world" or "all the people in the world." "World" is a collective noun, not a specific noun. God saw His creation steeped in sin and headed for Hell, and His infinite love (balanced by His perfect wrath) made a way for His creation to be saved.

About David: from what I've been able to tell from Scripture (and talking to certain people who I respect for their Biblical knowledge), David is the only person in the Bible who appears to have been capable of righteous hatred. He said that he hated people, whereas we cannot do so without being guilty of murder. The fact that he is called "a man after God's own heart" is likely the cause: he was so close to God that he was capable of righteous hatred, without becoming a murderer in his heart.