{"id":172,"date":"2010-02-15T09:51:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T16:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/?p=172"},"modified":"2011-08-11T00:07:02","modified_gmt":"2011-08-11T06:07:02","slug":"whats-the-deal-god-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/archives\/172","title":{"rendered":"What’s The Deal, God? (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the comments to my last blog<\/a> was:<\/p>\n

\n

While God certainly has the right to dictate His own terms, I think that this argument causes many people to believe that if God exists that He acts way too arbitrarily to be loving. I personally do not believe that God is arbitrary or unloving, but that perspective can be a natural reaction to the argument that God can set whatever terms He wants.<\/p>\n

Do you have specific thoughts about those who think God arbitrary, capricious, or unloving? I have some responses to that position about God but they are difficult to state clearly and rely heavily on my personal conception of sin, salvation, heaven, and hell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Great question! I want to dive into it! Here are my thoughts for those who would wonder the same thing (I find myself wondering this as well):<\/p>\n

I think this is where faith in God is needed. Does God know what He is doing? Can He be trusted to do the right thing? Similar to the relationship between a parent and a child, a child does not always understand why the parent does what he\/she does, but that’s because a child is simply a child. We are simply humans. Things may not look “fair” at first from our perspective, but maybe when we start to look at the world through God’s perspective, we realize He really is more than fair. So that this answer doesn’t seem like a “cop-out,” I’d like to see if we can try to gain more of God’s perspective on the matter of sin.<\/p>\n

According to the terms He set forth at the beginning, anyone who sins must die. That might seem unfair\/unloving to us, but can we look at it from God’s perspective? He created us to glorify Him and find our enjoyment in Him only. This is essential to God. It’s not about simply breaking a rule set forth from God–breaking the rule screws things up more royally than we really understand.<\/span> Rebelling actually destroys our relationship with God. It destroys our relationships with one another. It has cascading effects for the entire universe. Trust has now been broken. Heartache and pain enter. Our pure understanding of God has now been skewed by understandings of evil.<\/p>\n

Who has been the one who has been unfair\/unloving–God or us?<\/p>\n

That we will die because of our sin is now what awaits us. Sin is much more harmful than we realize. It already destroyed our relationship with God, it is destroying our neighbor, and in the end it will destroy us. Beyond this, sin is a power that now consumes us. As much as we’d like to free ourselves from it, we can’t. We try but fail. We are now under it’s power\/curse, and it will drag us to hell (even if some go fighting all the way). Sin is now our enemy. It was already God’s enemy, but sin is no match for a strong, pure God. Unfortunately for us, we are no match for it. We are weak, needy humans who were created to be dependent and in relationship with God, but now find ourselves in such a horrible state.<\/p>\n

God’s first only requirement was simple: Do whatever you want, except one thing (do not partake from a certain “tree”). We screwed that up. God, in his mercy, once again now has only one new requirement: You must partake from a certain “Tree.” The reason it is a requirement (or term) is simple: We can do nothing for ourselves to cure our current condition–we’ve screwed ourselves over. It is the only source of healing for your condition. Jesus, the only righteous one, has provided a way for his righteousness to be given freely to you. That way cost him His life. There was no way around that. (Similar to our sin costs us our lives–no way around that.) If you will recognize your hopeless condition and cry out to God for his mercy, He will give you this gift. How does this make God unloving?<\/p>\n

Well, some might say, “Why doesn’t God just give this gift to everyone, whether they recognize their need for it or not? This makes God so unloving–so unfair to us.” (This argument feels a little uncomfortable to me right now, given that it’s coming from sinners who have screwed everything up.)<\/p>\n

But let’s be foolish for a bit and actually consider that question to be a valid one. I think the answer to that is, God will only apply his righteousness to those who are willing to stop trusting in anything else, and trust only in His Son. As long as humans think they can find other ways to God other than through God’s provision, we demonstrate that we are still in rebellion against pure dependence on God.<\/span> We have to get to the point where we see the situation for what it is before we will open ourselves up to God’s grace for us. It’s not that God is saying, “If you don’t believe in me, then fine! See if I want to save you!” Instead, He is saying that we turned away to begin with. Now He is simply asking us to turn back to Him. The fact that we would trust our own judgment, our own abilities, our own wisdom, our own opinions of what is fair\/unfair clearly shows that we are still in darkness.<\/p>\n

Why should the people who have screwed up ourselves, our destiny, our reasoning, the universe, and God’s reflection of his glory be in any position to dictate what the fair\/loving thing for God to do is? Are we in any position to say that we see more clearly, that we know better, that we love better, that we deserve better?<\/p>\n

God’s terms are that to receive His gift, we must come to him as a child who recognizes their need for Him and that we are helpless\/hopeless. What’s so unfair\/unloving about that? I believe when the gospel is presented to people who are in this state, they will receive God’s gift gladly. But to everyone else, they find all of this foolish. Jesus said only a few will understand (sin has screwed up our reasoning too!). We look around and see everyone turning to this or that (or especially to their own selves), and we wonder…can anyone be saved?<\/p>\n

Jesus says, “With men, this is not possible. But with God all things are possible.”<\/p>\n

To those who recognize they are quickly sinking in the deadly quicksand of sin, grab a hold of Jesus. Allow Him to pull you out. Stop holding out for any other way. You must let him pull you out from your life of sin. He is offering you the gift by extending his hand. If you believe Him that this quicksand is killing you and will kill you in the end, reach your hands out to Him, and he will grab you. He is stronger than the quicksand. You can be free from sin and it’s inevitable outcome.<\/p>\n

I started this post off by saying that what is needed is faith in God. Without faith in Jesus’ grace, we cannot be saved. This is the only term\/requirement God sets forth. The Apostles gave their very lives\u00a0 in the effort to spread this good news around the world. They died for this cause. They saw it as essential to get this word out to the world, so that they don’t perish in the quicksand of sin. So that they can hear the message, and they can finally reach out to God through Jesus Christ. They knew that it was imperative that everyone hear this message, so that they too could be free. We must place our trust in Jesus Christ! Of course, I can’t force you to. But like Paul said in the Bible, as if I were an ambassador for Jesus, as though God were making his appeal through me, I plead with you on Christ\u2019s behalf: Be reconciled to God! God made him who had no sin (Jesus) to be sin for us, so that in him (Jesus) we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:20-21)<\/p>\n

If anyone has questions about any of this and you don’t feel comfortable sharing them in public by posting a comment, email me: comments@timfalk.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the comments to my last blog was: While God certainly has the right to dictate His own terms, I think that this argument causes many people to believe that if God exists that He acts way too arbitrarily to be loving. I personally do not believe that God is arbitrary or unloving, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-the-gospel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timfalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}