Greetings
Dear Reader,
In my
journey toward belief I conceded that there was something beyond me. There is an inherent arrogance in the faith I
profess. As someone dear to me pointed
out the God I follow is very clear that he is jealous and will not tolerate
rivals. He has dealt with people
violently and ruthlessly. If I am to be
honest in my profession I must admit that on the surface these seem
contradictory to the humble Christ who came to fulfill the law.
The
first thing that I wrestled with after accepting that God existed was how one
could reconcile his love and mercy with his violent justice. It took some deep and honest thinking on my
part to see how God could be both. I
think that to keep from being over long in any one post I will address this in
two or three parts.
If I
choose to believe in a God then I must choose if he has character, intellect,
morals, and values. It would seem that
just the creativity involved in the world would rule out a god without
personality. The question then is what
is this God in relation to me? Not to
put too fine a point on it, this God would be sovereign, in control, and free
to do as he wills.
It makes
sense that a sovereign God would then either be good or bad. It makes sense that he would have a will and
want that will to permeate his world. I
struggled with all of this deeply because I could not reconcile a good God to
the violence and rigidity I saw in the Old Testament. To be transparent I must say that I still
struggle with this at times.
I think
part of the answer lies in that struggle.
Because I am not perfect and not wholly good it is hard for me to
conceive of a being who is. This being
who is beyond me truly holds all the cards.
He is GOD. This is a true hinge
on which belief must swing. I must
accept God as sovereign if I am to make any progress in reconciling what
remains. He must be good if I am to reconcile
any of it. So how do I find it
reasonable that there is a sovereign good God?
We will get to this part of my journey after we review some other
aspects.
Wishing
you joy in the journey,
Aramis
Thorn
Mat
13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every writer who has become a
disciple of Christ’s rule of the universe is like a home owner. He liberally
hands out new and old things from his great treasure store."
Posts
There are several things that I agree with in this entry. God or the gods usually have an intellect, a morality, and character in worldwide mythologies. Some gods are primal or bestial, but as civilization develops the gods do become more civilized in their mythologies.
ReplyDeleteI will wait to comment on sovereignty again except to say that its assumption is not necessary to belief in God. It is only necessary to the belief that God is perfect given the history of God that the world has.
If sovereignty is not necessary for God to exist, God does not have to hold all of the cards. There are so many religions in history and the present age that accept that the gods are imperfect. There are good and evil gods. There are gods that repent. In Buddhist thought the gods are even subject to the same consequences of good and evil that we must endure. Why must God be perfect to exist, or to rule one's life?
The premise that God exists, but is flawed is not logically impossible. One can even have reasonable faith in Jesus while accepting that premise. It would make certain miracles more difficult, and it does change the salvation equation, but it is not impossible. Deists might profess something similar to this: God is real, he made the world, and he left us to our own devices. I am not espousing Deism, but this is a worldview that exists, and one that is important to American culture. Again, God is not necessarily perfect.
An American-Christian theology may require God to be perfect and sovereign. Much of the world does not require their deities to be such. They teach that people must make of the world what they want it to be. For what it is worth, I think that Jesus taught this as well. I am anxious to see an apology for God's perfection all the same.
I must admit that though my faith is young I've never analized it like this before, in the first beginnings of my faith one thing was made very clear and that was :: do I want a God that I could comprehend or a God that was bigger then me and in all ways is beyond us yet there for us. I took that proposed question and chose that I wanted a uncomprehendable God that was almighty and that I could know and rely on in all ways. For God to be God he needs to be bigger then us in all ways for he created us and all we know. So it is very interesting to be privy to this struggle of yours when I've not held it into account of my faith.
ReplyDeleteSo thank you