JustARide said:
And when the stakes are as big as eternal reward or eternal suffering, why are we merely given vague "ideas" about what is required?
Using the same analogy (our legal system), let us ask this: does our law strive to be vague or specific? I believe the answer would be "specific." Ours is a system in constant revision, as we strive to make the law increasingly clear and applicable in a fair manner to all parties involved. Most of our punishments are small ones, relatively speaking; hell, on the other hand, is the most severe punishment possible, yet God only gives us a vague guide as to how we might avoid such a fate.
Mercy, in your book, seems to refer to any instance in which someone/something with great power opts to not inflict the worst punishment possible for any conceivable crime, no matter how large or small. Odd.
I've covered this ground before. The law strives to be specific, it's got a clause and a subclause for every possible contingency
and yet it's still insufficient. You know why? Because it tries to replace such "vague" concepts as love and tolerance - and in a lot of places, common sense as well. Yes, these things are
vague, but that has never stopped anybody from applying them very specifically and deliberately. Another difference between the law on paper and the law in your heart is the
standard to which you can hold it. A statute only tries to prevent you from acting out selfishness to the point that it interferes with another's freedom, but it never condemns your selfishness itself. One is external control, the other is internal control, and the Bible teaches nothing if not self-control.
1 Corinthians 11:31
But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment.
Then we're right back where we started. Our sin leads to judgment, and judgment by whom? Presumably, God.
If God is merely judging by the law, then the law is somehow outside of God. If, however, God invents the law as he sees fit, then the law is merely another form of judgment.
By my explanation above,
our laws are outside of God, true, and that's why they're not really representative. Jesus
was representative. The internal law was condemned by our external set of laws - God was condemned by people. The only law that never condemned Jesus - the one that was fulfilled - is love. Unselfish sacrificial love. The external law judges, the internal one saves. It was necessary to point out sin, that's why Moses' laws were called a "teacher". But you can't stay a student forever (unless you're Van Wilder). At some point you have to put into practice what you know, and what you practice will bear fruit, and what you achieve will have consequences. Write that down.
Then God has no control over death? Who decided death would be the end of our earthly lives if not God? And don't say Adam and Eve, unless you are prepared to admit that God's judgment is not up to him, but to some source outside of him.
Sin causes death - just like the absence of nousihment causes death. God does control it - by supplying what we need
not to die. You can live a healthy spiritual life even while your body is dying. That should say something.
Look, you can talk about covenants and divine abstractions all you want. You cannot say God is infinite and all-powerful, but some of his decisions must be made based upon abstract "contracts" and the like. God created us and God controls our fate in the afterlife, correct? God can make any decision he wants. You can add all the earthly legalese you want to our situation - it still boils down to this: we are here now, we can do nothing to change the fact that we were brought into existence under this God, and the Bible says this God will judge us, and currently, we have no sure way of knowing what his decision will be based upon.
How can you still say that? That's exactly what Jesus came to achieve. Before, nobody knew whether their sacrifices or lives were acceptable to God or not. The Jews had some idea, and today they sit with over 600 religious laws (and that's just the basic ones). All they really know is that God is interested in righteous, holy lives, and they tried to define that to perfection. Jesus came to close that book, and open our hearts instead. He
makes us acceptable. He is the only reason we can ever presume to be. God showed that it requires a physical sacrifice, but that we don't ever have to worry whether it is worth it.
You can't buy with what you don't own - and we don't
own our lives on earth, it was a gift. We can't ever buy (deserve) the next life, but we can accept it by giving this life to God so that He can renew it. He bought our lives back from the laws that would have condemned us - not by dropping His standards (as you seem to think He should), but by fulfilling them.
It's not a matter of postponing any judgment. Punishment can take an inifinite number of forms - even as we see on Earth with jail, fines, community service, etc. - but, assuming eternal life exists and we are capable of changing in the afterlife, then final judgment is not needed and, in fact, anathema to justice.
As you see with all our forms of justice is that it fits the crime - or a close aproximation of it. Life incarceration is supposed to "pay" for taking away another person's life completely. The worst punishment a person can ever receive is the death penalty -
and it's the one we all receive at the end of our lives on earth anyway. The whole universe is in entropy, everything is running down, yet we continue to survive because we can give birth to new life. When everything has run down, nature will have taken its course, but will we naturally have eternal life? Will people eventualy adapt to become spiritual as Medicince*Women believes?
God judges sin, and sin takes away our lives from God - our
eternal lives. The punishment for sin is eternal incarceration - death. But Jesus conquered death, because He was sinless it had no hold on Him. Yet for our sake God
attributed all our sins to Him - He took it on Himself, and suffered the punishment for us. Do you understand the sacrifice God made for us now?
Taking every person who dies and judging them immediately and forever based on one trial, as it were, would be like an earthly judge sentencing every criminal to either a lifetime guarantee of riches or death, no matter the severity of the crime. Judgment need not be postponed, but it need not be final either.
Justice has only been carried out
when it's final. Because if there is still something
left to be judged, justice hasn't been served yet! It's more like an earthly judge who freed everybody on death row on the condition that they change their lives. And we were
all on death row. The judgment of our lives is complete whenever we die, but the sentence is postponed while we're alive. God couldn't have cut us a better deal. But you can't really be alive while you believe you're still on death row. If you ever wondered why it's called the
gospel, it's because it's good news to hear you're free in God's eyes. The only thing that condemns you now is the world itself.
If eternal life is ahead of us and it is then we come to know the truth about God, then why would God chose to judge us before we even have that knowledge?
John said, "I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony." (3:11)
You already know the truth, you have all but admitted it.
1 John 3
14We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. 15Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.
Why are there so many different religions in the world? Why do people believe so many different things? It's not because everyone in the world gets the chance to study the Bible and reject God knowingly, and side with evil necessarily. A child born today is confronted with an overwhelming number of choices about what to believe, and as evidenced by the number of perfectly capable, intelligent, loving men and women who have chosen not to be Christian, this decision (what to believe) is not some simple yes/no proposition. Nor is it necessarily a choice between good and evil, for many good people have chosen Buddhism and many evil people have chosen Christianity.
So, sure, death is indiscriminate. We know that much. But God, the Bible teaches, is not indiscriminate. He does not send everybody to the same place. Death is the one great equalizer and we have no idea why it exists or where it leads, but the Bible tells us God will judge us after death. But if eternal life has been granted to us, only so that most of us can go to Hell for reasons we were unaware of in our lives, how exactly is that a gift?
Look, all religions have something to teach, I won't deny that. I have learned a lot about Christianity from Buddhism and even from Islam, but none of them dares to make the claim Christ made. If you are merely interested in an excuse to be a good person, any religion will do. If you have no interest in spirituality you don't even need a religion at all. But in this sense, at least, Christianity is not about you - it's about God and what He did for you. You can rest assured that nobody goes to hell who does not belong there, but like you, not many people are quite sure who
does belong there, if anyone. It's been a problem since the dawn of humanity - the fear of the unknown punishment, the unknown God, or of his unknown anger. That's why you could say Christianity preys on fear. It seems to, because it recognizes that those fears are valid. But more importantly, it recognizes that salvation is an initiative of
God. It uncovered a benevolence of God that was almost just as unknown before. Actually I should correct myself: not Christianity, but
Christ. You can think of Christ as just another Ghandi, or Buddha, or Dalai Lama, but that would be ignoring what He said and did. Christians are people who don't (or are supposed not to) ignore the significance of what God meant with Jesus.
Yes, justice and peace are rewards and I'm not saying they should not exist at the "end of the journey" (though I still wonder why the journey has to end if indeed eternal life is... eternal), but those whose actions are purest are those who do good for the sake of seeing good done, right? If God truly wanted to test people's faith, wouldn't he even refrain from mentioning heaven and instead see who loved him for the sake of loving him?
God tested people faith with Jesus. Before that, it was His laws. The criterium has always been the purity of people's actions. Heaven and hell has been romanticized out of proportion, because they follow naturally out of the knowledge that death is not final, or that there will be judgment.
For all Jesus said about heaven, he might as well have not mentioned it. It wasn't the focus of his ministry, it was just the result of his work. A result that most people were expecting to come about
on earth, and which they thought they would have to fight for like the Israelites did, with their messiah at their side. Jesus instead made a point of it to show that heaven would not come about by victory of people, but by victory over evil - the only glory there would be for anybody is the glory of God himself. The journey ends with Him.
[/quote]I'm sure the 9/11 hijackers were comforted by thoughts of heaven in their final moments before being engulfed in flame. Allah Akbar![/quote]
I'm sure they were very disappointed as well...
Exactly. And those who believe so strongly in afterlife rewards often devalue life on earth, for they see it as merely a ticket to a better life later on. A. Whitney Brown described that belief this way:
"Maybe if I close my eyes during the movie, I'll get my money back at the end."
Indeed, heaven is a strong incentive for the persecuted... and often the modus operandi for the persecutors as well.
Well let me put it this way: your exit from the theatre depends on how well you pay attention to the movie, because it's trying to tell you something.
Well, unlike Jesus, Jenyar, I have no radio to God. I cannot know his will any more than I can know whether or not I will be "resurrected," can I?
How do you know God's will? You read, you pray, you listen, and you act. Believe in Him, and He will give you His Spirit. That's the radio you're missing. Then you won't have just your natural instinct to rely on.
I'm saying sacrifice very much depends on what the giver knows he is sacrificing. If I give $5000 to a charity, I am making a bigger sacrifice than, let's say, Bill Gates would be making if he gave the same amount.
People who give their lives not knowing what death brings are offering a greater sacrifice than someone who knows exactly what he is risking. Presumably, Jesus - being divine in nature - knew he was not going to cease to exist when he was killed. We, on the other hand, do not know that when we die, therefore our deaths carry a great deal more uncertainty with them and, by extension, sacrifice.
Not really, the sacrifice depends on how much it means to God, because
you're certainly not gaining anything by it. And the Bible is quite clear about what God considers an acceptable sacrifice. That's part of why we still use the Old Testament. It isn't the risk, or the size, or the amount, or the uncertainty, it's the
heart. Remember the scripture about the old women who gave her last two cents, vs the rich man who gave his full 10th as the law prescribed?
What you will need to sacrifice is uncertainty. If you can't, then you should consider that maybe Jesus made a greater sacrifice than you think.
1. How could he know the extent of the repercussions of breaking that command without knowledge of good and evil?
2. If God wanted people to simply follow commands, then he did not create us to have free will in the first place. He wanted robots to praise him and follow his commands without thinking or consciously deciding to follow them based on "right" and "wrong." Any computer can follow a command. Is that what God originally wanted?
1. God said "... but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2:17),
and Eve repeated it in Gen.3:3, showing they understood the warning.
2. God gave them all the freedom they could have, except the "freedom" to disobey Him, that's why He warned them of the danger.
He equipped them with the knowledge they needed to remain free. And they were more free than you and I, but they gave it up because they desired more than freedom.
What would have happened had Adam not eaten from it? Would we all be sitting around in a garden right now, obeying commands from God (naive, like children), but never really knowing why? Morality would not exist, for there would be no reference by which to judge it. How would that decision not to eat the fruit carry any meaning, beyond its indication that we, like dogs, would obey a command?
We would have had knowledge of good, which is all the knowledge you need for a free and happy life. There would be no such thing as naivity, because knowledge would be complete and pure. Evil does not complete good, if that's what you think - it opposes it. We would also know why: because it would cause our deaths. If they could understand the concept of death, then they
did have a reference by which to judge their existence. And if you measure everything against such a frame of reference, you have morality right there. "Does it cause death? No. Then it is right. Yes? Then it is wrong." Not eating the fruit carried the meaning of a continued existence. It also implied that some desires need to be controlled, or they can lead to death.
You can see they knew more than you give them credit for, and what we know more than them hardly deserves credit, because it can never justify sin.
There is a difference between being "informed" (which, by the way, never means having complete knowledge of anything) and simply being intellectually capable of something.
I do not blame babies for crying at inappropriate times. Why not? Babies are intellectually capable of not crying whenever they feel like it, but they are uninformed, undeveloped, and uneducated. They are making decisions based on less information than I am, therefore I do not begrudge them for their actions.
Babies don't cry because they lack any information - it develops their lungs. Some adults, on the other hand, have learn under therapy not to repress their emotions because they were silenced when they were young. The difference is control, and that is something you can learn in a loving environment, without ever being exposed to hate.
If Adam and Eve were somewhat like children (a comparison you made above), then their decision to eat the fruit, especially considering their lack of moral knowledge, should not have been viewed as some massive affront to God any more than crying at an inappropriate time is viewed as an affront to a baby's parents.
The point is, if God was not willing to endow human beings with knowledge of good and evil (information God possessed, but withheld from Adam and Eve), then how could he expect them to make valid decisions? For instance, I don't expect my cat to make "moral" decisions, because she is acting based on an entirely different set of standards and assumptions than I am. I can try to train her to obey commands (as it appears God was doing with Adam and Eve in Genesis), but, since she does not operate on the same intellectual or "moral" level, I do not view her disobedience as tantamount to betrayal.
If I do not want my drapes to be ripped up, I will not buy a cat and place drapes in front of her.
Likewise, if God did not want his creation to disobey him, he never should have created people and placed a forebidden tree in front of them.
You realize we're once again trying to juggle multiple discussions simultaneously? Anyway...
I have already demonstrated that they could make moral decisions. They were able to name animals, have intelligent discussions and sophisticated thought, so we shouldn't take the children analogy too far. We shouldn't take the whole scene too far, for that matter. The difference between your cat and Adam is that Adam had the ability
not to follow his natural instincts without question. It was this faculty that God appealed to in His warning; selfcontrol and restraint. The Bible itself makes this distinction, like here:
Jude 1:10 Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals--these are the very things that destroy them.
Children learn by obedience first, not by knowledge - who knows what they would have learned if they could only just listen at first. But we can be sure it would not have lead to wars, slavery or death.