TheFirstBigW
The Fly
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2002
- Messages
- 262
I agree that God won't let a single one of his children slip through the cracks, and somehow he's going to make sure that he reaches all of them, regardless of their location, nationality, etc... (like you say, who knows how exactly he's working).BonoVoxSupastar said:
A God like this would not let his children be abandoned.
The only thing that you wrote that gives me pause is the phrase "The God I know".
I bring this up because I think that we have to be careful not to create a false representation of God in our minds.
For example, if someone said that they loved you because you like to breed ostriches and you firmly stand up for the right to smoke in public buildings, I'm guessing you'd probably have to say that that person doesn't really love you because they don't really know you at all. They're simply in love with a version of you that they've invented in their mind.
I'm not saying that you're guilty of this when it comes to your view of God (I have to admit that sometimes I've been guilty of it), but I think that, just like all of us, God wants us to love him for who he truly is, regardless of whether or not we're able to fully appreciate or understand everything about his character at the time.
Hypothetically, if it was actually true that God's nature included some things that make us uncomfortable (wrath, judgement, etc...), then we would have two options:
1) we could say, "Even though I don't understand these aspects of God's character, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he only gets angry or passes judgement when he has fully exhausted every recourse that love offers and has a perfectly just reason for it", or
2) we could say, "This doesn't mesh with my expectations of who God is, so I'm going to stick to believing that God must be the way that I think he is."
I think this places a certain level of responsibility on us to try to learn more about God and to try to spend time with him to get to know him better so that we're not accidentally worshipping what the Bible describes as an "idol" that we've created in our mind. In other words, when we search to learn who God really is, we should not be looking for evidence that can support our own expecations while discarding any contradictory evidence, but rather we should be resolved to look for the whole truth regardless of whether or not it matches up with who we believe or want God to be.
To the best of my understanding, I believe that God's nature includes both love and wrath (as I think the Bible indicates), but that God allows love to trump wrath in the end for everyone who is willing to turn away from sin, trust in Jesus to pay for their sins on their behalf, and allow God's Spirit to enter their heart and help them become more and more like him. The only reason why wrath still has a place is because there are apparently some people who will reject God's love and refuse to turn from sin to the bitter end, therefore leaving God with no other recourse but to satisfy justice through the only other means possible: judgement.