At what point would you as a Christian fight rather than turn the other cheek?

repentance, humbling, prayer, and obeying are the greatest way to fight and see the hand of God move in your life. IF we do these thing before we react, the Holy Spirit will lead us from danger instead of always getting us out of danger

The best way to get out of Quicksand is not to go where you k ow it is and step in it.

Anyway I wish you luck on your unique journey. I truly do wish you Christian love.

We disagree on the one issue, but that doesn't mean we hate one another. Firstly I'm so sorry for all you went through. And I'm glad that you found the Lord through all of those circumstances. I don't mean to sound like a "know it all" but I tend to be forceful on issues that I feel strongly about. And this is one of those issues. So rather than argue, just please keep an open heart and pray about it. Otherwise I wish you a blessed day sister.

What he really thinks: Trump mocks Christians, calls them "fools" and "schmucks"

The above is just one of many things you can find out about Trump online. The "pastors" surrounding Trump were largely apostate and helped to mislead a lot of the nation. I believe that discernment is the biggest spiritual discipline lacking today.

1 John 4:1 - Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

James 1:5 - If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all [men] liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

I cannot find RunningMan's original post but I too believe that we will not be "raptured out." I read that this was false teaching that the enemy instituted to make Christianso passive and to destroy their faith when they aren't removed.

Scripture does say however, to "pray that you may escape the things that are to come." And I believe in doing that. But I also agree that the passivity that has been preached from the pulpits has the potential to do much harm.

I never understood why everyone was so intent on keeping the 2nd Amendment: The right to bear arms until I studied history. Please everyone: take the time to read this treatise - I pray that it speaks to you as it did to me:

https://politicalvelcraft.org/2013/...ogy-and-attacking-your-constitutional-rights/

Also:

https://www.henrymakow.com

What he really thinks: Trump mocks Christians, calls them "fools" and "schmucks"

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  Michael Cohen's book about his years as Donald Trump's fixer is a clarion call to Christians to wake up; recognize the man many of them revere as a heavenly agent is a religious fraud; and act.
  Trump loathes Christians and mocks their faith, but pretends to believe if it suits his purposes.
  
  In Disloyal, published today, Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices "bullshit," then soon after masterfully posing as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump's religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.
  Cohen's insider stories add significant depth to my own documentation of Trump's repeated and public denouncements of Christians as "fools," "idiots" and "schmucks."
  In extensive writing and speeches, Trump has declared his life philosophy is "revenge." That stance is aggressively anti-Christian. So are Trump's often publicly expressed desires to violently attack others, mostly women, and his many remarks that he derives pleasure from ruining the lives of people over such minor matters as declining to do him a favor.
  Cohen describes himself as an "active participant" with Trump in activities ranging from "golden showers in a sex club in Vegas" to corrupt deals with Russian officials.
  The author offers new anecdotes about Trump's utter disregard for other people and his contempt for religious belief. Cohen's words should shock the believers who were crucial to his becoming president, provided they ever read them.
  By denouncing the book Trump has ensured that many of those he has tricked into believing he is a deeply religious man will never fulfill their Christian duty to be on the lookout for deceivers.
  None of the evangelicals I have interviewed in the past five years knew Trump has denounced in writing their beliefs and written of the communion host as "my little cracker."
  Trump detests Christianity
  Despite the irrefutable evidence that Trump detests Christianity and ridicules such core beliefs as the Golden Rule and turning the other cheek, America is filled with pastors who praise him to their flocks as a man of God. Trump himself has looked heavenward outside the White House to imply he was chosen by God.
  Pastors who support Trump were scolded two years ago by Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, for not denouncing Trump as "profoundly immoral." Many evangelical pastors then attacked the magazine rather than following the Biblical exhortation to examine their own souls.
  Cohen writes that as a young man who grew up encountering Mafioso and other crooks at a country club he fell into the "trance-like spell" of Trump, whom he describes as an utterly immoral, patriarchal mob boss and con man.
  Trump is "consumed by the worldly lust for wealth and rewards," Cohen writes, which puts him at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ about what constitutes a good life.
  "Places of religious worship held absolutely no interest to him, and he possessed precisely zero personal piety in his life," Cohen writes.
  Prosperity gospel embraced
  Cohen explains that the only version of Christianity that could possibly interest Trump is the "prosperity gospel." That is a perverse belief that financial wealth is a sign of heavenly approval rooted in 19th Century occult beliefs that is anathema to Christian scripture.
  Many actual Christians regard the prosperity gospel as evil. Christianity Today, calls it "an aberrant theology" promoted by disgraced televangelists including Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Baker.
  Early in Trump's aborted 2012 presidential campaign, Cohen writes, he was ordered to reach out to faith communities. Soon Paula White, now the White House adviser on faith, proposed a meeting at Trump Tower with evangelical leaders. Cohen writes that Trump liked White because she was blonde and beautiful.
  Cohen said that among those attending were Jerry Falwell Jr., who recently resigned in disgrace over sex and greed allegations as head of Liberty University, and Creflo Dollar, who solicited donations for a $65 millioncorporate jet and who was criminally charged that year with choking his daughter. Dollar said those charges were the work of the devil.
  Once the evangelical leaders took their seats, Cohen writes, Trump quickly and slickly portrayed himself as a man of deep faith. Cohen writes that this was nonsense.
  Laying on hands
  After soaking in Trump's deceptions, the leaders proposed laying hands on Trump. One purpose of laying on hands is to call on the Holy Spirit for divine approval.
  Cohen was astounded when Trump, a germaphobe, eagerly accepted.
  "If you knew Trump as I did, the vulgarian salivating over beauty contestants or mocking Roger Stone's" sexual proclivities "you would have a hard time keeping a straight face at the sight of him affecting the serious and pious mien of a man of faith. I knew I could hardly believe the performance or the fact that these folks were buying it.
  "Watching Trump I could see that he knew exactly how to appeal to the evangelicals' desires and vanities – who they wanted him to be, not who he really was. Everything he was telling them about himself was absolutely untrue."
  To deceive the evangelicals, Cohen writes, Trump would "say whatever they wanted to hear."
  A perverse epiphany
  Trump's ease at deception became for Cohen an epiphany, though a perverse one.
  In that moment, Cohen writes, he realized the boss would someday become president because Trump "could lie directly to the faces of some of the most powerful religious leaders in the country and they believed him."
  Later that day, Cohen writes, he met up with Trump in his office.
  "Can you believe that bullshit," Trump said of the laying on of hands. "Can you believe that people believe that bullshit."
  Cohen also writes about Trump's desire, expressed behind closed doors, to destroy those who offend him. Trump has said the same, though less vividly, in public.
  "I love getting even," Trump declared in his book Think Big, espousing his anti-Christian philosophy: "Go for the jugular. Attack them in spades!"
  He reiterated that philosophy this year at the National Prayer Breakfast. Holding up two newspapers with banner headlines reporting his Senate acquittal on impeachment charges, Trump said, "I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, 'I pray for you,' when they know that that's not so."
  Trump spoke after Arthur Brooks, a prominent conservative, told the breakfast meeting that "contempt is ripping our country apart."
  Brooks went on: "We're like a couple on the rocks in this country…Ask God to take political contempt from your heart. And sometimes, when it's too hard, ask God to help you fake it."
  Everyone in the room rose to applaud Brooks except Trump, though he finally stood up as the applause died down.
  Taking the microphone, Trump said, "Arthur, I don't know if I agree with you… I don't know if Arthur is going to like what I'm going to say."
  Trump then said he didn't believe in forgiveness. That is just as Cohen wrote: "Trump is not a forgiving person." Trump's words at the prayer breakfast made clear that he rejects the teaching of Jesus at Luke 6:27: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you."
  The question pastors should raise in their Sunday sermons, the question Cohen's book lays before them, is how can any Christian support a man who mocks Christianity, embraces revenge as his only life philosophy and rejects that most basic Biblical teaching—forgiveness.
  
  
  
  The above is just one of many things you can find out about Trump online. The "pastors" surrounding Trump were largely apostate and helped to mislead a lot of the nation. I believe that discernment is the biggest spiritual discipline lacking today.
  
  
  
  1 John 4:1 - Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
  
  
  James 1:5 - If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all [men] liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

I agree there is persecution now. I think Satan is driving people (the spirit now at work in the disobedient) to harass believers. I don't care to recount what I've endured the last years but I know some of what persecution is.

I didn't think people were thinking about it because of the people that I've dealt with - they aren't talking about it. My one friend was dismissive of me and would act superior because I guess she thought her faith was stronger and she wasn't concerned about things like I was. My other friend is completely clueless. And at bible study they had the attitude that we didn't have to worry because we would be raptured out. I think they're in some kind of warm and fuzzy world that doesn't exist.

I think the verse about turning the other cheek is focused on the relationship between two or a few number of people, not about injustice inflicted by a system. I think it just means forgive the other person.

Similarly, the word "remain" from 1 Thess 4:15 (that figures prominently in the Pre-Trib argument), in the Greek means "to survive", as in making it through a horrible event, or slaughter.

Not necessarily; think of the context... the context is talking much about those who have "died / sleep through Jesus / dead in Christ" (even in their day; but this kind of thing [saints DYING] would stretch on throughout church history as well, that is, into the future from their perspective, during the entirety of when "the Church which is His body" exists on the earth)... so the contrast here would be more akin to this, below (being in contrast to that segment of "the Body" who DIE before the event being referenced), when speaking of the "we which are ALIVE and remain" would be more akin to how we say something like the following, using the word "SURVIVE":

--"The dictionary definition of “to be survived by someone” is that they are alive after a particular person dies"

...which is the very kind of CONTEXT being covered by Paul in this text.

It doesn't really need to be about anything concerning "making it through a horrible event, or slaughter," but rather, in relation to those of the believers who have preceded us IN DEATH (and that some will NOT die before the event being referenced by Paul, here).

I disagree with your explanation of "when" ^ (He gave the word regarding this)... and here's why:
"by the word of the Lord" (10x) -

10) 1 Thessalonians 4:15 -
"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep."

--I believe this ^ refers to what He had given the NT "apostles and prophets" to SAY to a particular need [the Thessalonians' need to "understand" a particular thing] in their present-day... It was recorded in Scripture because it is something the Spirit / Lord also intends for "us" to know / understand (1Cor2:9-10a,16b)... via the NT "apostles and prophets" (when written together this way, in this order, always speaks of the NT "apostles and prophets")... this particular "word/revelation" being from the "ascended and glorified Lord Jesus Christ," as I understand it. [Once "hidden in God" (in ages past), but NOW "revealed..."... See again 1Cor2:8 "for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory"]
My two cents = )[
/QUOTE]


Instead of "when" Jesus answered the Disciples first question in Matthew 24, I could change it to "as" He answered their question. He answered their question right after they asked it, not after He was resurrected, but as they were sitting on the Mount of Olives. In 1 Thess 4, Paul is reiterating what Jesus said to the Disciples in Matthew 24. (Sorry, but I may not be understanding what you are saying about "when").

Also, not sure I undertand about "this" pertaining to only the Thessalonians, and not to us, or not to them, and only to us?

But, either way, 1 Thess 4:14-17 is a complete picture of Christ's Second Coming in the clouds (with the souls of the dead in Christ), the First Resurrection and the Rapture. In comparing scripture with scripture, these passages are confirmed exactly by the words of Jesus, during His ministry on earth during the Olivet Discourse, and further by Paul and Peter in their epistles, and John in Revelation.

Here is another picture of the resurrection of the dead saints, and the Rapture of the living, at Christ's Second Coming that Paul tells in a different way, but describing the same Second Coming He wrote of in the 1 Thess 4 verses: