Posted on 05/19/2013 12:21:32 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
Edited on 05/25/2013 2:44:13 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
"Where were You, God?" The question arises daily as news of tragedies abound, and even from time to time as the tragedy involves ourselves. Servicemen die in a bungled military defense operation that should have been a cake walk, and no government official has credible answers. A son is shot dead in his prime by a wanton criminal. A wife dies decades too soon from a deadly disease. A busy mother dies unexpectedly from a sudden heart attack. Maybe you were emotionally abused when a child and have been saddled with a destructive habit that you acquired in an effort to escape from the torment by the only means you knew, and prayer -- once you realized you were in a trap -- seemed scant help or comfort. In these myriad situations the bitter questions often arise: "Oh Lord, where were You? Dear God, why did You roll over for this? Almighty Father, I've always heard that you are righteous and omnipotent, so why did You not act when it would have been so simple for You to stop it from happening? Oh, the heart-rending woe! Why did You lose, God?"
This is not a modern question, and it was not discovered by modern atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers. It arose many thousands of years ago to a man named Job (pronounced with a long "o") who kept a tender conscience towards God about what he did, and as a result displayed a very upright life, and was blessed with a large, loving family and many earthly riches. And yet without warning this man's world came crashing down upon him. It began with the destruction and theft of his great riches, and was topped by the loss of most of the lives of his dear family. Then, the trouble soon escalated with an inexplicable illness that covered him with sores. His wife, in an apparent hint that God was fickle and undeserving of love, in great disgust told him to curse God and die. His friends, who initially wisely comforted him in silence, then began to lecture him sarcastically about how he must have done something terribly wrong to provoke God's wrath, and his agony grew as a heated argument erupted and Job insisted he had done nothing to deserve the tragedy. Finally a wiser friend suggested that Job look to God's sovereignty, and then God answered Job from a whirlwind, challenging the limitations of Job's knowledge about what God can do. With a deeper appreciation of God's capabilities, Job stopped complaining, and soon God blessed Job twice as much as he had been blessed before.
There is a simple enough answer to the question, at least to the mind: by allowing the world and even our selves to fail so dramatically at times, God highlights His capacity to save, a faith in which we sometimes are sorely lacking, and even if we know it in our heads, our hearts are slower and lag behind that and need to be taught. For God is not merely solving complex intellectual problems. He is solving problems that encompass our entire beings that He has created and bestowed with capabilities that are an image of His own.
I’ll take the harshness of the truth of reality over dogmatic fantasies, any day, hour, minute or second.
The reverse is true for Jehovah. He created man in His image. He does not have some weird passion known only to green Martians.
God wastes NOTHING in our lives. Growing to trust him in all things is a huge part of that. I've heard it said that when we look at our life it is like looking at a tapestry from the underneath. The threads go in all different ways, making no sense, no pattern. But from the top - God's view - it ALL makes perfect sense and we see every thread has a purpose in that magnificent tapestry. We will finally learn:
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:4-7)
Exactly. There's a reason "Thou shalt not rape" didn't make the cut in Moses' time.
This pertains to Theodicy, my proposals being that God could have,
1. made us (and angels) with no moral sense and or deprived us from the moral ability to respond to or choose good [morally insensible].
2. granted us free moral agency, but never have given us anything to choose between [negation of moral choices].
3. provided moral revelation and influences but always have moved us to do good, and never have allowed us to choose evil (such as make believing in God and choosing good so utterly compelling — like God appearing daily and doing miracles on demand, and preventing any seeming evidence to the contrary so that no man could attempt excuses [effective negation of any freedom to choose].
4. allowed us to do evil, but immediately reversed any effects [negation of moral consequences].
5. allowed us to do bad, but restricted us to a place where it would harm no one but ourselves [restriction of moral consequences].
6. allowed us to choose between good and evil, and to affect others by it, but not ultimately reward or punish us accordingly [negation of eternal moral consequences].
7. given us the ability to choose, and alternatives to chose from, and to face and overcome evil or be overcome by it, with the ability to effect others and things by our choices, and to exercise some reward or punishment in this life for morality, and ultimately reward or punishment us accordingly [pure justice].
8. in accordance with the above, except have manifested Himself in the flesh, and by Him to provide man a means of escaping the ultimate retribution of Divine justice, and instead receive unmerited eternal favor, at God’s own expense and credit, appropriated by a repentant obedient faith, in addition to the loss or gaining of certain rewards based on one’s quality of work as a child of God. And conversely, eternal punish to varying degrees those whose response to God’s revelation manifested they want evil, while making the evil that man does to work for the good of those who want good, and who thus love God, who is good [justice maintained while mercy and grace given].
“Dogma” is like the markings on a map of the ocean. They aren’t the ocean. But they tell you something about the ocean that thousands who have sailed it have discovered for themselves. In this case we’d have to extend the metaphor a bit by saying the ocean actually talked to sailors.
Indeed, as despite your scorn of their faith, Christians are taught to prepare for death, and know that this life is simply a speck in eternity, though it is to be taken very seriously, and it is here where we decide where we will spend the next life, and that there is eternity.
Thus Job would see his loved ones shortly if they were on the Lord's side, while the replacement family excelled that which was taken.
However, your objections are based on unbelief, but they do not apply when dealing with how a believer as Job would feel.
"11 Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.12 So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.13 He had also seven sons and three daughters.14 And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren–happuch.15 And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.16 After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations.17 So Job died, being old and full of days." (Job 42:11-17)
"11 Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." (James 5:11)
Rape would have been a combination of physical assault and adultery. It would fall squarely under the Decalogue’s categories.
Well, it was divinely sanctioned for them to capture, enslave and force “marriage” (a.k.a rape) the unmarried women and children of enemy tribes.
It’s in the Bible.
You could do it to your wife/wives and female slaves.
Quite true; if Job’s original family were, as we Christians put it today, saved by faith, then they’d all meet joyously in eternity.
What the hell is the Uper room?
Is that a club for those upper peninsula Michigan folks?
Is it a special area in a Goth club?
Is it like Romper Room for folks who like to dress as babies?
I won’t get into the argy-bargy of “rape of spouses.” Beating a spouse would be considered a no-no, though. (Islam never glommed onto that idea.)
Female slaves... you’d at the least have to marry them first, and polygamy wasn’t a big deal at first.
I no more understand people immersing themselves in this ancient, Middle Eastern saga any more than I understand people dressing up and going to Star Trek conventions.
Heh, heh, heh... none of those. It was a place where various Jewish Christians of many nationalities had met for the Hebrew holiday of Shavuoth (literally “weeks”). 50 days, 7 weeks and a day, after Passover. At that time the Holy Spirit alit on the Jewish Christians, and they spoke prophecies and praises to God in their own languages, yet could understand one another.
Hey lady, ever heard of anything spiritual at all?
If she can’t say “No” to either the sex or the marriage, it’s rape. You could rape your wife, you could rape your slaves. This is so because your God was created by Middle Eastern men, and he has whatever values they gave him.
I don’t go any more for the picture that the Lord cannot chalk in the elect from a seat quite outside the time-space continuum of His creation... too often Calvinists portray this as some kind of arbitrary divine cement that was cast at or logically prior to physical T=0 (which most Arminians bristle at with equally unhelpful logic from another set of scriptures). “Go find out if you are lucky, punk” is not a gospel message....
These are modern concepts that, again, atheists and freethinkers did not bring us — Christianity did.
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