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I'd settle for a purely emotionally based explanation. I can't find any way at all to draw a line that connects the dots that get you from "god exists outside of time" to "my god is better than your god".

How does making a big deal about God existing outside of time accomplish that goal?

Okay, first of all, the grammar here needs work. I mean, its two whole sentences. Did you just for get the order in which you placed the three supposedly created things in the first sentence before you got to the end of the second? This sort of thing shows a lack of mental precision and is...

I often wonder what it is that makes someone so loyal to the idea that God exists outside of time. What is it that they get out of it?

Yes, well they had already tried to get the Romans involved a couple of times before. There was the question they asked Jesus about paying taxes and the episode with the woman caught in adultery. These were both situations intended to entrap Jesus with the Roman authorities and so, in Jesus'...

I miss Bob so much!

(y) Legitimacy in the eyes of the public, you mean? That was probably part of it, I'm sure but there's no real way to know, right? Regardless of their motives, I'm not sure that it could have gone down any other way once it was decided that rejection and death of their Messiah was the path...

That isn't relevant. They knew what they could get away with and what they couldn't. Maybe they had to bribe someone, maybe they already had someone on the pay roll, maybe they didn't care this time around and decided to ask forgiveness rather than permission. It doesn't matter. This was an...

There are indeed lots of details but the broad strokes are that God is not subject to the criminal justice laws that He has placed us under. Justice is God's cat, not ours, and He can skin it in the manner in which He sees fit.

Well, yes and no. It's not as if Stephen was the first person every to be put to death for religious reason in Israel since Rome took over. The Jewish leadership knew how to get done what they wanted done. The point is that it was an official act done by the governing leadership of Israel, not...

Okay, so in addition to all of the excellent input you guys have offered, why couldn't a sufficient response to this argument be as simple as saying... Mankind is subject to God's criminal justice system, God is not. If you remember my previous essay entitled "Our Moral God", I discussed that...

I agree.

In some sense, the nation of Israel has always been the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was present in whatever sense Jesus meant it in Luke 17:21. Beyond that, we are in agreement. In Matthew 16 Jesus was not talking about some spiritualized version of the Kingdom. He was talking about His...

I disagree. The man caught with her, obviously should have been charged as well, but there is no legal requirement to bring charges against neither if you can't (or don't) charge both. What if the man had escaped or been killed by the husband, does that mean that the woman should go free...

It is important to point out that in the case of the adulteress, Jesus did not override the law. On the contrary, He followed it to the letter. Guilt in such cases must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses and when all those witnesses went away, so did the case against her...

The fact that dealing with sin vs dealing with crime are two separate issues is very clearly true but I'm fairly sure that you missed my point, which was to implicitly employ the fact that they are two separate issues as the basis for my question. In other words, if dealing with sin doesn't...

And so, once again, why do we put professing believers to death when they've committed a capital crime? This gets circular is the point I'm making here and so I'm not convinced that this is the whole answer. I think I have another part of it but I'm still mulling it over.

And so, if justice demands the death penalty, in what way then is God not unjust?

The biblical fact of the matter is that He did so and that it did not come to pass. Except that isn't what He said, Derf. That's the way you want to interpret what He said but that simply isn't what He actually said. I didn't say anything about mankind. There won't be a single human being...

Playing devil's advocate.... Then, we should not be in favor of the death penalty for those who publicly profess repentance toward God and who accept Christ as their savior? (I have no doubt that this is the tack that the person I was discussing this with would take.)