Posted on 05/16/2002 10:43:23 AM PDT by Siobhan
The day is coming when those oppose Christianity on Biblical grounds will be accused of twisting the Bible to feed their own hatred.
Just curious...Why would anyone expect that you not support Annie Graham Lotz? You are both Christians and both believe in redemption through Jesus Christ? I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian and I love and admire Ms. Graham-Lotz and gladly support her.
Show me America losing a war. Show me American cities besieged, cut off from food and supplies. Show me starving mothers boiling and eating their children. Show me destruction of entire cities. Show me over half of America going into slavery in a foreign land.
That's how God disciplined the nation of Israel.
Later, God dealt with Israel's oppressors. They got it worse.
When the nation has hundreds of millions of people and only a few thousand are killed, when only a few buildings are destroyed, of course everyone is "impacted." But most of us still have our houses, our families are still intact, our jobs are still there, and we are still a sovereign nation.
It's hardly comparable with the scale of the events in Old Testamant Israel.
God Bless Her.
This part might make sense if we imagine that people choose what they believe by how attractive it is to them. This, however, would be nothing but wishful thinking. "Thinking about Jehovah makes me sad. Thinking about Gaia makes me happy. I guess I'll believe in Gaia."
People may say they believe in their wishes, but that is somewhere between neurosis and psychosis. Intellectual belief is the result of convincing evidence, and usually an honest person is willing to believe even an unpleasant truth. Spiritual faith is the result of convicting revelation, and one can then no longer deceive oneself with wishful thinking.
...but to worship it as well. To me, such a deity, who could destroy so many people, children, pregnant women, decent fathers, is an enemy of humanity.
You speak as one who has not read the entire history of Israel—and the rest of humanity. You also speak as one who is more comfortable judging God than being judged by Him. I can just imagine: "You can do whatever you want to, God! But if you don't meet MY standards of divine behavior and ethics, you won't get an ounce of worship from me!"
But to properly judge someone you must understand their motives. So perhaps you read the parts about the destruction of the world by a flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone, the destruction of Jericho by Israel, the destruction of Israel by the Chaldeans, etc., and attribute to Him motives of immature petulance and omnipotent temper tantrums. You dismiss the parts about His love for Israel because they don't fit your picture. But God did not equip us to understand His motives. Instead, He says,
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.But many people prefer to judge the Judge. Even in Israel.
Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of the Lord is not equal. O house of Israel, are not my ways equal? are not your ways unequal? Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord Jehovah. Return ye, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. Cast away from you all your transgressions, wherein ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord Jehovah: wherefore turn yourselves, and live.
If you read the Old Testament, Israel didn't live in total prosperity prior to a total destruction. Read Deuteronomy, and you'll find the prophecies of Moses, where the Israelites are told the progressive stages of judgment. It didn't come all at once.
A marvelous thing that is happening, is that Christians are finding one another. The doctrinal issues that divide them have not gone away, but faced with an increasingly hostile world, they are discovering that they are united in their love of God, and united as fellow soldiers under fire.
I know people believe it, but I find it hard to understand how people come to not only believe in a deity that could do such a thing, but to worship it as well. To me, such a deity, who could destroy so many people, children, pregnant women, decent fathers, is an enemy of humanity.
Whoa, hold on a moment. God didn't kill three thousand people on September 11. Osama and his band of maniacs killed three thousand people on September 11.
God is not responsible for leaving us defenseless on that day; our own fecklessness, 10 years of appeasing evil, rather than confronting it, led to September 11. We knew they were coming for us, we had repeated warnings (WTC '93, the embassies, the Cole, the Khobar Towers, and more) and we did nothing.
So, lets not over-spiritualize what happened, to the point that we lose sight of it. If you allow your consciences to become deadened to the point that you can not recognize evil, if you choose cowardice over courage, then the laws of consequences take over, and you get what you get.
Faith is courage in motion. A lack of faith leads to deadly consequences.
You may not believe this, but that was in fact the point I was trying to make to you. You had written, ...I find it hard to understand how people come to not only believe in a deity that could do such a thing... It is not as if they were shopping around to see if they could find a nice enough god to believe in.
I am very comfortable about being judged, but I also believe that one who dishes it out should be able to take it. I have absolutely no problem with judging those who judge me.
No doubt.
Then he should not be surprised when we judge him without a knowledge of his motives.
The difficulty, however, is that probably all of us (myself included) greatly underestimate how low we (the entire race) have fallen, morally and spiritually, and how far above us God was, even before the Fall. At the final judgment, when we see things clearly for the first time, everyone will realize that God has been just and good all along, and that we have been depraved in motive and judgment. At that time everyone will see and acknowledge that His judgments of all of us were, and are, just. Our judgments of Him will be seen to be part of our rebellion against Him.
And yes, He expects you to judge Him, just as He expects many people to lie, and cheat, and kill each other, and fornicate, and covet, and rebel against Him in so many more subtle ways. Given what our sin has done to us, it's only natural.
We judge others without understanding their motives simply because we, as humans, have no alternative. A person has trouble enough trying to understand his own motives, much more trying to understand anyone else's. For, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately wicked: who can know it?"
But by ignoring motive, we run the risk of unjust judgment. Of course, we can simply redefine "justice" so that our judgments are "just" by our definition. But , as Abraham Lincoln often said, "Calling a dog's tail a leg doesn't make it one." Neither our frantic redefinitions, nor the impossibility of one person understanding another's motives, will make an unjust judgment just.
And how much more, being human, do we unjustly judge God? We love the worthless and despise the worthy. We can imagine "could have beens" but we never know them as He does. But the idea that our ignorance of His motives and of the true state of things somehow excuses our unjust judgment of Him is ludicrous. We should know better than to judge Him at all! The ability to judge does not make judgment right. Perfect wisdom is what makes judgment right.
Honestly, God's ways often seem very strange to me. There are things He has done in my life that I didn't understand the reason for until much later. There are things He has done in the world, and things He has allowed others to do, that I can't begin to fathom. But because I have learned something of the deceitfulness, the wickedness, and the foolishness of my own heart, I forbear to judge God until the time when I can see things clearly. It is not because I judge all His acts to be good that I worship Him. I worship Him because I know Him to be good, and I believe that when the time arrives, we will see that all of His acts were always good. For now, rather than living according to the dictum "seeing is believing" I will live by faith: "believe, and you will see."
I hope fervently that you are right this time. You know, back during the Byzantine era, the Western and Eastern Christian churches did not view their mission in a Christian light and divided as they were, Eastern Christendom fell and the lands of the East were completely lost to the cult of Mohamed. Will this scenario play itself out again?
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