....the cultural and legal constructs created to keep our earthly sovereign honest simply do not apply to our Heavenly Sovereign. To take a controversial example — just war theories I endorse and have lived are incompatible with the conquest of Canaan. The Israelites were not acting in self-defense but as conquerors, and their God-directed methods were extreme. This analysis applies to any number of Old Testament conflicts, where God directed His people to carry out His will through extreme violence. In other cases, God himself acted violently on the world — killing even children — from the Flood to Sodom. His actions in the Book of Job can seem inexplicable — and the only answer He gave to Job’s repeated entreaties was a lengthy, vivid version of “Who do you think you are to question Me?”....
....if we are fallen (and we are) and limited in our understanding, how can we even be sure that our “enemies” are wrong? How can we know what God has purposed for them? ...Simply put, God’s judgment is perfect. Ours is often ridiculous.
Knowing that evil creatures such as Osama bin Laden, Joseph Stalin and Ted Kennedy are suffering endless torment serves to reveal that God is Eternally Just. That’s not a characteristic of a moral monster but of a Virtuous Creator.
Amen! In the ways of God, I believe we are not supposed to understand it all - if we did, where would faith fit in? Without faith, Scripture says, it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.
“is a God who only saves some of His children a moral monster”
He saves ALL of His children. The rest have rejected Him and are not His children.
Mathew 7: 13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Only a FEW are saved. MANY are not.
John 10:25 Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. 27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all[c]; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
Luke 20: 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.
John 1: 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
Romans 8:14
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.
Galatians 3:25 Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. 26 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
1 John 3:1
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Revelation 21:6 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7 Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars —they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
ALL are NOT God’s children.
Ping for later.
I love this verse:
“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like like crimson they shall be as wool.” (Isaiah 1:18)
Another I love:
“For He[God] hath made Him[Jesus] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
May we remember “Calvin was not a Calvinist, Luther was not a Luthern, Wesley was not a Methodist” we named and called them by those titles long after they were gone.
Why don’t you go back and read the Bible in the Hebrew and understand the Jewish roots and it might make a lot more sense..just saying. I, for one, can not understand the Bible unless I use a Jewish prism, but that is just me. And am not Jewish.
Man has free will to do whatever he wants to do - but not what he OUGHT to do.
“Is the God of Calvinism a Moral Monster?” [Calvinist Caucus]
No. Next question?
Seriously, I can think of a couple ways to go at this. 1)Creator-creature distinction. And, 2)noting that one of the usual examples, the conquest of Caanan, should serve as an illustration of, and warning of, the final judgement. Google on "intrusion ethics".
is a God who only saves some of His children a moral monster?
Note the assumption in the question.
I'll have to look this post, and thread, over in more detail later.