I have further problems with whole Noah story and the whole idea of God wanting to wipe nearly all creation because of human sin. Most of creation is innocent of wrong, so why should God punish innocent creation for human misdeeds? it does not portray a moral God.
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So, it’s all right if He murders twenty million people, as long as He doesn’t drown the bunny wunnies?
He’s been there since the rebellion. Most of us decide that’s where we want to be. It feels futile to try so hard to warn people that it is unimaginably terrible there. I came close to falling into it. Scared me out of my mind. It took the fiery flames of that awful place to lick my boots before I reached out. Most will not listen. Most shrug it off. I did. I can’t imagine how God feels about it.
Often times people plunging to their deaths on an jet scream out for his help, at the very last seconds of their lives. If He’s good enough for us when we die, He’s good enough for us while we live, I remember someone saying.
I know 2 things. I don’t want to go there and I don’t want anyone else to. It is the most terrible, dark, hopeless, rotten, disturbing place, evil and sick and miserable.
I will be condemned, hated, scoffed at, called a fool, you name it, for my absolute certainty that it exists, though having nothing to do with its formation. I will be as despised and rejected as Christ was, while all I want is for you not to go there.
But, you know the answers to your questions, I think. We all know why. Unless and until I am personally confronted in realistic terms, in painful, crushing experiences, that if not for Christ, my destiny is in hell, I will never acknowledge the situation. Not me. I have to be thoroughly broken (ego) before I will seek help.
I don’t think God likes us to be destroyed or to destroy us, personally. IMO, he hates it. It hurts him terribly, terribly.
He tried to warn people. He did warn people. He warns us today. He made a way to escape these horrors. I can choose. At the risk of sounding old fashion, primitive, like a bible-babbling, holy roller, fundamentalist, He died to make a way. If that is true, IF, then I can make a choice and avoid his wrath. If it isn’t true, I’m wasting my time thinking about it. I can say with all my heart, HE is, and goodness gracious people, HE LOVES US. HE REALLY DOES. You may hate even the idea of God being capable of this kind of destruction. If you decide to ask him for a relationship, you will be amazed, I think, how your perspective will change. You will even feel the same emotions He feels about people losing their souls. You will be grieved that they refuse to come to him. Grieved.
It’s all right Ralphie. It’ll be all right. Nobody goes to Hell regardless.
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It’s interesting that you reject the God of the Bible – “…from Genesis through Revelation” were your approximate words, but pluck Jesus out of it while eschewing his words (not to mention the epistler’s), and mold him to your imagination.
I’m sorry for your perspective. It’s sorry.
Klax, I wish with all my heart that was true. Yet,
I don’t know how to rely on what Christ said, on the one hand, and reject what He told us about that terrible place, on the other.
14 kNow when she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and ldid not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”
She, supposing Him to be the gardener, said to Him, “Sir, if You have carried Him away, tell me where You have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”
16 Jesus said to her, m“Mary!”
She turned and said to 3Him, “Rabboni!” (which is to say, Teacher).
17 Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet nascended to My Father; but go to oMy brethren and say to them, p‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to qMy God and your God.’ ”
Can’t you see this scene in your mind’s eye? Can’t we tell it is real? Can’t we tell that no one made it up? Can’t we see and hear and feel her tears as we watch her lunging into his arms to hug the one she loved so much, who was gone, dead, never to return? Can’t we see real life anymore? What’s happened to us?
What does that have to do with my previous comment exactly? Why do you get so emotional anyways?
He’s a good guy
Amen. 150 odd replies or so and this might be the first person to mention God the Destroyer. God killing all the animals and people on the planet. If that is real God does not deserve our love.
There is hardly anything redeemable about Noah. At least Abraham questioned God and tried to save some when our loving Father was on one of his many murderous tirades:
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?“
Nothing from Noah. No attempts to save any of his friends or bargain for them. Just blind-puppet like compliance.
Then when the flood ends what does Noah do? He goes about his business and roasts meat to God amidst the barren wasteland littered with bloated bodies. No mention of them. No sadness and despair at what’s around him. God finds the smell of meat burning pleasant and Noah’s flattery, not the horror of his petulant temper tantrum, causes him to make a covenant with men. The rainbow helps him remember. Thank goodness. We wouldn’t want him forgetting.
And many Christians give their kids Arks to play with! If you believe God could destroy everyone for being evil and defend him to boot, you could also do it for a human ruler.
The flood story is disgusting and dangerous. You shouldn’t need a geologist to tell you the story is fiction.
Vinnie
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“Nothing from Noah. No attempts to save any of his friends or bargain for them. Just blind-puppet like compliance.”
I think that is an unfair accusation. We can’t know that. It doesn’t say. He may have tried to warn people and he may have been devastated. Ehrman says from reading Luke, we believe Jesus was brave, confident and unconcerned about his crucifixion because it doesn’t say otherwise. I don’t think it’s fair to come to that conclusion merely because Luke doesn’t describe it that way. I think it is more than a safe assumption that He was frightened and miserable. He was a man.
This is an example of the kind of “piling on” that is so common today, that I’ve mentioned before. It’s the, ‘Let’s assume the worst right off the bat’, attitude. I don’t find much in the way of willingness to pause, to see if we’re jumping to conclusions. This mindset, this rush to attach negative thoughts and conclusions about so many issues regarding scripture, Christians and Christ does not sit well with me. It is a sign to me that some have found a precious, longed for, bitterly resented target and more than anything, they want to strike it. It’s a sport for some. And there is a high degree of furious energy to destroy that target totally and it is sweeping across America at a fevered pitch. Even as some like Pilate try to calm the crowd, the chanting gets louder and louder, almost in unison, “Crucify him, crucify him–for good this time!”
“Then when the flood ends what does Noah do? He goes about his business and roasts meat to God amidst the barren wasteland littered with bloated bodies. No mention of them. No sadness and despair at what’s around him. God finds the smell of meat burning pleasant and Noah’s flattery, not the horror of his petulant temper tantrum, causes him to make a covenant with men. The rainbow helps him remember. Thank goodness. We wouldn’t want him forgetting.”
He said it all from love, in love, predicated on love, to be interpreted by love. There is no terrible place in love. Only in allegory, only in rhetoric, only in fear, only in ignorance, only in the human mind. Love wins. Love conquers all. Love fixes everything.
Love does reign supreme. I agree a million percent. Other factors like his purity (holiness) are important, too, from what I can tell.
What do we do with the words He spoke about hell? How does He want us to interpret them?
In love, through the lens of competent, omnipotent love. He wants us to love. I’ve no idea what purity/holiness is separate from that.
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Sin. Sin is our lack of love for you and me and him, if I understand your response. Anything not like him is lacking.
I hate my family, if my love for him isn’t far greater. Yet, I can love him more than all others because He deserves it. He has never betrayed me, or turned his back on me, or required that I must be who I cannot be. He loved me when no one else cared. He has made me into some one I could barely dream I could become–like loving others enough to be kind to them regardless how they treat me or others. He raised me up and communicated that He saw the good in me–with his Spirit in me, empowering me to love and not to hate.
Falling short of these things is covered by his love, but not all things are.
He refuses to let us hate forever without consequences. That’s why choosing him is important. On my own, I can’t be what He made me to be.
In the transcendent nobody is alone. He chooses everyone.
I love the God behind the primitive allegories in the Bible, even if some of the writers and some of the readers took… take them literally.
You know what the weirdest thing in the whole universe is? Can you guess?
I asked the one written about on those pages if He was real. I will never forget the exact words although it was many years ago. “Okay, if you’re there, come on in.” It was no big deal. I forgot about it. I remembered saying that in my mind looking up into a beautiful Arizona sky, but it meant nothing to me. I meant it. I really meant it sincerely, but I knew there was nothing to it. It was like asking Santa Claus something. It was ridiculous. I knew that better than anyone and I would prove there was nothing to that nonsense if anyone mentioned it again. And that was it. Utterly preposterous.
Oh my. My oh my. He heard me. That tiny, insignificant, request, He heard me Klax. He really did. I’m not crazy (mother had me tested! right?) What He can do with the smallest step toward him.
Brian Welch from Korn
Q. What have you learned in these fifteen years? Have you had friends, mentors or people who have helped you grow in the faith so that you can now help others?
A. "I had a few mentors who helped me in the beginning, and the good thing is that most of them told me, ‘I am mentoring you to go to Jesus yourself, because He is alive’. So they stirred me and corrected me when I was a little bit off. But they told me that the big thing is that Holy Spirit will teach you and you can go the Scriptures yourself. That was a big help.
There is an open door directly to God, directly to Jesus Christ. I think that we need to get our foundation on that intimate relationship with Him ourselves, because when things come in this planet, like the coronavirus, and people get fearful… If you have your relationship with God yourself, you will have a strong peace in the midst of devastation or loss of job or sickness. You will have this hope, this firm foundation. It is an anchor for the soul, as it says in the Bible."
Yes, it’s so quaint that Jesus and Paul took themselves seriously. I don’t believe you love Jesus’ God.
You are an expert in rationalizations, even false ones. Your Jesus is purely imaginary… based on scripture, right?