I remember the day I sold my soul to Jesus. I was in grade school. Cornerstone Christian Achademy in Fayetteville, North Carolina while Dad worked at Fort Bragg. It probably wasn't the first time I'd heard or even understood the gospel, but for some reason this time it sank deeper than just understanding. I knew about Heaven and Hell. I saw them in the cartoons often enough. Heaven is where good cats' nine lives go. Hell of course has dog devils to torment bad cats with pitchforks. I guess what I understood for the first time in that classroom was that Jesus took the punishment instead of me. A done deal.
All I had to do was pray, "I'm sorry for being bad, thank you for suffering in my stead," and mean it. So I did. Simple as that. That day I spontaneously became a door-to-door evangelist and went around the neighborhood asking, "Are you Christian?" with dreams of some day becoming a medical missionary who would help heal wounds and wounded hearts. This remained my life's goal for a very long time.
But by the time I was in the 5th grade I was having doubts. "What if I didn't really mean it when I prayed the sinner's prayer. What if I didn't really believe. Sure belief is all there is needed to make it to Heaven, but how do I know if I really believed? Better safe than sorry. I'll pray that prayer again, this time with more feeling." So I did. On many occasions.
By middle school the bigger questions were hitting. "Why does God allow rape? Isn't he all-knowing? Isn't he all-powerful? Isn't he good?" I was baptized and confirmed into the church, but whenever I mustered up the guts to ask an adult in the church, I got answers like, "God is great and powerful. God is good and wants us to be good and wants us to love him. But he chooses to not
force us to be good. He allows us all to make our own choices. Because if he didn't we'd all be just robots. Love cannot be forced."
So God allows rape because... of love?! This made no sense to me and it still doesn't. This was the first taste I had of what I've come to call, "Christian double-speak." If *I* had the knowledge and power to prevent horrible, monstrous people from doing horrible, monstrous things, *I* totally would. And I'm just a kid. I'm not even as cool as a police man who would chop that badguy's head off! (
http://axecop.com/ ) Isn't God cool too? Didn't he flood the whole world to stop the badguys? And send them to Hell? Love. Psh. Yeah, right. They've got a crazy idea of what love is if it includes looking the other way while someone is screaming for help.
But if I questioned the answer, I didn't get anywhere. "God is good." "Evil exist because people are sinful." "It was the Devil's fault." "Just take it on faith" was one phrase that drove me nuts. Dad's answers didn't much appeal to me either. One, Romans 9:20 "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" (My interpretation: I'm not allowed to question God?! What happened to God saying, "Come let us reason together," in the scripture? Isaiah 1:18) Two, "Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi," "What is legitimate for Jove (Jupiter), is not legitimate for the ox." For one, I don't like being compared to a cow. For another, I don't like borrowing a saying from another religion to plug the holes in my own.
Sadly, I wasn't faithful enough to really dig deep into the scripture. Tried a number of times to go cover-to-cover but tended to give up around the endless "beget" section. I had more fun books to read, like, Lord of the Rings or the Narnia series. So instead I carried a bitter grudge against God and Christianity into my college years. On my pastor's recommendation, I went to his alma mater, Messiah Christian College. Pastor Paul was a very practical, no-nonsense type that was more interested in helping people than splitting hairs over doctrine. Someone I respect. So I had high hopes for the school he learned at.
Didn't get better answers there, really. Questions on the reliability of Scripture are answered readily enough being that the Bible is the most reliable historical document in the world with hundreds of times more documented proof for Jesus' life than George Washington's.
http://www.amazon.com/Evidence...stians/dp/0785243631 I can believe God is real readily enough. God is
good? Not so much.
When I came home and complained about my unanswered Theodicy questions to Dad, "How can God not be held accountable for allowing evil? Isn't it his fault people are the way they are? He made them, after all!" he offered me a book on reformed doctrine. In it I read that the Bible teaches both that God is in complete control of everything that happens, good or bad, AND that even though sinners can't change their fate, they are still responsible for their sin. These two apparently disparate ideas are both true according to scripture. The book then pointed to a famous Bible story of Joseph to illustrate the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..._of_Jacob)#Narrative
Then, when Joseph found out that the brothers that had betrayed him were afraid of him getting back at them, he said, "Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive."
(
http://www.biblegateway.com/pa...-21&version=NASB )
A more intriguing answer than I've ever seen before, but still not satisfactory. Because it was still God who sent the famine that Joseph says people were saved from. I came up with metaphors of Superman pushing people off buildings in order to swoop down at the last second to save them.
Then there's the whole story of Jesus' sacrifice. Without getting too much into the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo about "Jesus is both the son of God and is God in human form all at the same time," it still doesn't make sense to me for someone to a) allow their own son to be tortured and murdered in order to forgive the murderers, or b) allow themselves to be tortured and murdered for the same reason. So is God/Jesus a sadist? A masochist? Both? Seriously taboo questions. He could have chosen to make the price for entering Heaven something as simple as "do more good deeds than evil." That's what most folks figure will get them into Heaven anyway, so why not?
Well they say the truth hurts. Jesus claims, "I am the truth," and has been called, "The man of suffering," so that's consistent. If I'm honest with myself, my objection to evil is the same as my objection to suffering. Evil causes suffering and that's why I hate it so much. But if I reject everything that causes hurt as evil, I must also reject truth. It was looking like I had to dig a little deeper and swallow a bitter pill if I were find the answers I was looking for.
What I was hung up on all this time was my idea of "good." My idea was that comfort is good, not suffering. Suffering is bad. But I wasn't about to accept that if ignorance is bliss and lies are comforting that I must welcome ignorance and lies as "good." So I had to go back and reevaluate what "good" really means.
The dictionary defines "good" as being "of high quality" and as "correct or proper."
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/good In other words, it's a measure of meeting a standard. Now if truth is a measure of coinciding with reality, truth is good - meeting the standard being what is real - even if the truth makes me hurt. If I want to believe in what is good and true, I must conform my mind to what is real. And the painful reality of life is that suffering is a part of life. Why? The Bible teaches that Jesus is truth, and is The Man of Suffering. The truth hurts. The reality of life is suffering. I had stumbled upon the first noble truth without realizing. An unhappy truth, noble or not.
So if "good" and "truth" were all about meeting a standard, by what standard would I measure He who sets the standards? As an American, all my life I've been sold on the idea of Lex Rex, The Law is King. No one is above the law, not even the President. But God sure doesn't obey his own Ten Commandments. "'Thou shalt not kill.' Hey, God. Remember that one? Try it sometime." Yet the saints of the Bible never make this point. Why? What am I missing?
Let's try the other commandments. "Thou shalt not lie." "For this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie." - 2 Thessalonians 2:11 "And if the prophet is deceived and speaks a word, I, the LORD, have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel." - Ezekiel 14:9 Marvelous. So not only does God lie, but he condemns those he uses to lie in the same breath.
"Thou shalt not envy." "...I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God..." - Exodus 20:5
"Thou shalt not steal."
OK now we're on to something.
Can God steal? "Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it," Deuteronomy 10:14 Apparently not. This smacks of an answer to the age-old question, "Can God create a rock he cannot lift?" A simple logical puzzle to the assertion that God is all powerful. The simple answer being no. Being all powerful doesn't remove certain limitations. Like the limitations of "there is nothing bigger than infinity" or "you cannot steal what already belongs to you" or "you cannot make a rock too heavy for you to lift."
So certain standards cannot apply to God. "Thou shalt have no other God." "Honor your father and mother." "Thou shalt not commit adultery." They just... don't apply. So if God cannot meet the standard, doesn't that mean he cannot be "good" since "good" means meeting the standard? Or... am I applying the wrong standard?
But what else am I supposed to compare my God to? Zeus? Odin? They don't look any more appealing. How about Nature? The impersonal forces that just somehow made the stars, the earth, life, love, and everything by random chance. As much as I'd rather believe that there is no God than to believe that God would allow evil and suffering, I've never been able to make that one stick. Is this an exercise in futility? Am I trying to conform my mind to reality or am I just trying to force reality to fit into my tiny brain?
How does one decide on a standard anyway? "The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." Wow. Arbitrary. Why not round off to 1/300,000,000 of a second? And what a tiny, tiny sliver of a ray of light. But there's probably some logical story behind it. Like, it's the closest we can get to some concrete, predictable, tangible measure familiar to the human experience that doesn't change... much. Relativity complicating things and all that. Ancient measures were based off someone's arm length. Probably someone important. But when the old cubit rods wore out, they'd need a new guy to be the new standard for the new rods, and the old records of sizes of things would then be obsolete.
The Ten Commandments were based off someone important according to the Bible. Someone concrete, predictable, and doesn't change from generation to generation. Not very familiar to the human experience, though. But a standard. Like the metre, the Ten Commandments are apparently but a tiny, tiny sliver of the thing that it came from. And like the metre, one cannot measure the fullness of the thing the Ten Commandments came from with such a measure.
So God is immeasurable. Too big to fit into the human mind. Cannot be accurately compared to anything in the human experience. I gave up.
But the questions kept coming back. There must be some way to understand. "God is good," sure, if by "good" you mean he fits the God standard perfectly. Which, of course, doesn't feel like it measures up to even the Human standard of "do no harm." Why do Humans even do harm in the first place? Often when they don't even want to. Where did we get those nasty instincts? The Bible says it came from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden which, by the way, God planted there. The all-knowing knew Adam and Eve would eat that poison fruit and.... Waaait. The Devil was right!
"For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be
like God,
knowing good and evil." - Genesis 3:5
Like God. Knowing good and
evil. So knowing evil was an attribute of God since before the beginning. Is evil a separate force? Something that exists outside God? The Bible claims that nothing exists outside God, so instead it must be a part of him. At least, assuming evil is a thing that has existence. No, evil is real. It, like suffering, is a part of life. Denying the existence of evil is silly. It was always there. Was suffering always there?
"All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast — all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life,
the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world." Rev 13:8
The Man of Suffering was slain from the creation of the world? Suffering has been a part of him all along? Well no wonder it's a part of Humanity! If we are "made in God's image," then it couldn't be any other way. He
couldn't make a creature bigger and better than himself! God might be more human than I ever imagined.
Looking back, the evidence was everywhere in scripture. God displaying a lot of human traits. Anger, satisfaction, pride, regret, sarcasm, even sorrow. All this time I was raised on the "God is good" mantra and assumed that it meant that to be "good" one had to be free of all the human flaws. In fact, I had even reasoned for the existence of God because of how not-human he is. Because all the man-made gods of old were just reflections of the humans who created them. But now I'm faced with the uncomfortable evidence that the Christian God I was sold on, the all-loving Santa Clause in the sky, wasn't real in the least. Wasn't what the scripture described. The God of the Bible was much less soft and cuddly than the God of Sunday School.
"How dare you, God. How dare you be flawed. Like me." What an unpleasant truth. That God cannot live up to the standards he set for me. "Do as I say, not as I do." How can I accept that? And where do Christians get off telling me "God is love?" How come God isn't held accountable for all the pain and suffering caused by natural disasters, much less all the villains he created? Why did he bother creating us in the first place if suffering was all that was in store for us?
Not that I would do any better. When I was a kid, I used to love building blocks. First for the building, then for the knocking down. Toy cars? Build the race course so they would smash together! Pen and paper? Stories and drawings of robots fighting and destroying each other. It was in my nature to build up in order to tear down. So is that what life is? God's a little kid who builds up for the fun of tearing down? An author who writes a tragic story where the most the characters have to hope for is to just survive to the last chapter?
Suppose it is? What can I do about it as a character on a page? Can I call up out of the pages to the one writing the story, "Hey! Stop writing such a dark story, or stop writing!" But isn't that exactly what I believe is happening right now? God, the author of all history, infinite in knowledge, knew each keystroke I would be writing this very moment. Knew each and every angry word I would raise against him. Yet there it is. Is God writing this because he's angry with himself? I know I get angry with myself when I take a long, hard look inside.
How would I react to the villain of my novel objecting to his defeat at the hands of the hero? Would he have the right to accuse me of wrongdoing? Of course not. I created him to do and say whatever I please. He belongs to me just like the paper and the ink I formed him from. Yet every thing he does in that story came from my mind. From my thoughts. He is a part of me just as much as the hero is. Who's side am I on? I made the villain who killed the hero's family to motivate him to seek justice. Yet even after the hero defeats the villain, the hero's family is still gone. The pain is still there. Even after the satisfaction of bringing the villain to justice, the hero would probably rather never have been written in the first place. Would I regret writing the story? Maybe. But something inside me needed to.
It'd be silly for me to accuse Tolkein of murder, but I remember crying even when Boromir died let alone how upset I was over Gandalf. As the author, Tolkein had the right to do with his creation whatever he chose, and nobody questioned that. He could have kept them both dead, but I was sure happy to get Gandalf back. So if I step out of the pages of life and look at it for what I believe it to be, it begins to make more sense how the saints of scripture tend not to accuse God of wrongdoing, even in the midst of suffering.
A bitter pill to swallow when I step back into the pages of the story of life. But it adds up. Scripture seems to support the idea.
"This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 'Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.' So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
"Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, 'Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?' declares the Lord. 'Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel.'" Jeremiah 18:1-6
"What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy." - Romans 9:14-16
Where do I go from here? Back to Jesus, I suppose. God had written several chapters of his chosen people refusing to obey him and punished to the point of being occupied by Rome. From there the story could have ended in the Earth ending in a cataclysm of fire, famine, disease, and asteroids. The last verse of the Old Testament sure hints at that.
"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."
But instead God writes his Marty Stu into the story. Born to signs and angels and fulfilled prophesy. Born to a
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:37, Fri 04 Oct 2013.