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Christianity was supposed to be about becoming like Jesus. | |
We went in the wrong direction. |
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Is God a Meanie?
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refute the idea of the exitance of God by citing all of the pain and
suffering in the world. However, this presupposes that God would intend
for us to live lives of perpetual ease and comfort. If one observes
humans that were raised in ease and comfort one usually sees the worst
in human development. We are all born helpless, ignorant, and selfish.
Ease and comfort generally do not help us improve on this condition. There are two categories of difficulty we can experience, that which we do to ourselves and others and that which result from our bodies failing and a hostile environment. God cursed the ground after Adam and Eve sinned (Gen 3:17). Apparently this was insufficient to curb the human tendency towards selfish, sinful, and self-destructive pursuits (Gen 6:5). God destroyed all humans except for Noah and his family and the environment became much more hostile such as now having winter, droughts, and atmospheric calamities. At the same time human life expectancy seemed to shrink to 120 years (Gen 6:3). Our hostile environment seemed sufficient after the flood to inhibit our self-destructiveness until the Industrial Revolution and the rise of technology. Since then we have increased human comfort levels back to the point where foolish indulgences can begin to flourish again. And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. - Genesis 6;5 By having bodies that decay and die and having to survive an environment where there is difficulty getting food and shelter forced us to depend on each other and attempt to overcome our own selfish natures. The basic problem is we need each other and our selfish natures drive us apart. God gives us a picture of the selflessness he would have for us when we become parents and need to abandon our own selfishness to care for our children. As we move out of a difficult natural world into an more comfortable artificial world of almost endless entertainment and amusement, there is little to restrain delusion and vain imagination. A difficult life was not punishment from God, but an incentive to recognize that it is our own selfishness that causes much of our suffering. This recognition may also lead us to see that the only hope we have to escape our poisoned nature lies in placing our trust in Jesus and his payment for our sin on the cross, by which we can be supernaturally placed into the body of Christ and have his Spirit in us giving us a new nature and eternal life. If we look at the world in terms of what we want, we can seen no basis for a God because we can’t get what we want. If we look at the world as a field ripe for harvest by a God who created us with the gift of free will, we might see our discomfort as the result of our rejection of God and our various expressions of selfishness. Like a parent who exercises “tough love” on a rebellious child, our difficult circumstances last as long as we continue to reject the love that God offers us by Christ. Even after trusting in Jesus, we can continue in mystifying pain and suffering. Some because our mortal bodies continue to fail and some because we have not taken advantage of the opportunity to transition from selfishness to the selflessness of love that can be found in Christ-likeness. And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. - 2 Corinthians 5:15 |
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Information about Christianity and the Christian life. |
Pictures and views of our farm | Some of our animals | See some of the old-fashioned crafts we are trying to relearn | ||