I really liked this, you put a lot of questions that I've been thinking about.

But why did he have to die so that us and God would be even? It would have been easier/better/nicer/more forgiving if He would just said ‘Hey, we’re even’ without having to kill his Son (and seemingly use it to throw in our face for the rest of eternity).

That's been my biggest problem with all of this too. If God is all powerful, why not just forgive us? Why does Jesus need to be the middle man? Why can't we deal directly with God?

sorry double post

The quickest answer to your question would be "to show us the way out."

He came to show us the way out of this life we now live. We live in a sinful mixed up world (who can deny that?) and his desire is to take us away from that to something better. He had to become a human to show us this. Someone puts it this way....Jesus became a maggot, like what we'd find in the bottom of a trashcan, to show the other maggots how to get out.

Sin separates us from God. His system of sacrifice started right from the beginning with the first sin committed. When Adam and Eve sinned they found themselves separated in their fellowship with God. Their relationship was marred. God killed an animal and covered them with the skins...all a symbol of a restored relationship with him. It was all HIS doing not theirs. The animal clothed their nakedness. See, their nakedness revealed their sin. When we are out of fellowship with God because of sin, it's as if we're naked before him.

Atonement is always made with blood because the life is in the blood.

Christ's blood was far superior than that of goats and bulls. His blood didn't cover the sins of the people but cleansed them instead totally washing them clean. When he looks at us, as we've accepted the sacrifice, he sees his Son in us and we have become washed by the blood of the lamb and fully restored to God the father. We are now clothed in Christ's righteousness not our own. Our own righteousness is said to be as filthy rags. So in effect, we've gone from rags to riches when we accept Christ as our Savior and we will find ourselves someday living in the Kingdom of God.

The death of his son is clear evidence that God cares for us deeply. Deeply enough to die for us. There is no greater love than one willing to take the place of another. Christ did that for us. So now we get a chance to respond to this....one way or another.

I have a few problems wit hthe show us the way out explanation.

Using the trash can analogy, why couldnt God have just picked all of us maggots up and out of the trashcan? It would have been so much easier and more complete. He could have just put in our minds the right way without having to become one of his lowly creations.

Next, atonement always being made with blood, God, in his omnipotence, could have made this one time, just not a blood thing, or at the same cost as a bull or goat. He has infinite forgiveness and power to whipe away sin (even original sin) without the use of Jesus or anything really. He could have just forgave and forgot.

Finally, assuming that Christianity is true, then wouldn't it be even clearer evidence of God's love and caring if Jesus was always around and dying for us, like once every 100 years or so. That way, everyone would always know about it and see this clear evidense. Or at least, why didnt God wait til people had made camcorders or have some reliable historians taking notes on the whole Jesus thing? Assuming God is omnipotent, these would all be very small things God could do to help us make the most important response we have the chance to make.

Using the maggot analogy, why did God make us disgusting maggoty beings in the first place? And make us imperfect? (subject to temptation and disobedient.)

It's us humans in our imperfections that show how god is not all powerful, because if he is also all loving, why would he want us to be anything less than perfect? You can't really use the argument that we would learn something or we would love him more by experiencing pain because if we were perfect we would not be able to love any less, we would be at maximum capacity for all good things. lol Koontz, you make me think!

That sounds really easy now doesn't it? But God wants us to love him and follow him on our own. Belief is tied to action.

Jesus gave a parable in Matthew 21:33-37 about a man who planted a vineyard and then left. He sent his servants (OT Prophets) to later reap the fruit but the people beat, stoned and killed the servants. So this man sent out more servants than the first but got the same results. The people would not listen to the servants killing them instead. So he sends his son, thinking surely they will listen to the son. But no, they did the same to the son (Christ) killing him as they did the servants that went before him.

Like I said before, we've got a choice to respond to his coming, one way or the other. Either we listen to him as he shows us the way or we kill him off as just another maggot.

Belief is tied to action.



How many times would be enough? It wouldn't have made a difference. We have had very good preachers all over the globe past, present and future that have brought us the good news of the gospel. In the OT they looked ahead and spoke of him and today we look back and speak of him. Are we listening?



first of all, we don't have alot of answers to the "why" questions. There are alot of why questions we all have. Why did Adam and Even sin in the first place when they had it so cushy? Why did he create Sataan? Why did he put that tree in the garden? If Jesus came today in our day and age, most likely he would have been aborted anyhow.

If you look at scripture and all the geneologies and such, you'd see there was a definite plan going on. Christ came exactly on time when he was supposed to.

STILLKOONTZ WRITES:

The short answer is that Almighty God is Infinitely merciful to wretched sinners like us. As much as we can understand Revelation that has been given concerning the Second Person of the BLessed Trinity, Jesus Christ, His First Advent or Incarnation, His Passion and Death on the Cross and His Resurrection, we can also say it is a supernatural mystery. God is God, Jesus is God and we're not...and we can't put limits on what God/or Jesus has done and is going to do for us.

You are correct, Jesus died to save us from our sins, both actual and Original Sin of Adam and Eve, the latter of which through God's sentence of punishment we all inherit when we are conceived. Before Almighty God drove them out of paradise, He gave them the promise of a Redeemer. The very thought that by their sin they had condemned themselves to the misery of the outside world and eternal ruin in the next would have driven them to utter despair had not God told them of the hope of a coming Savior. The curse pronounced upon the infernal serpent contained a consolation for fallen man...that sin and the devil, even physical death, would be overcome some day, and the gates of the heavenly paradise would be opened. From this we see that God punishes man in mercy and imposes temperal punishments on him so as to save his immortal soul and make him eternally happy.

Why did ALmighty GOd suffer His Son to be so greviously insulted?
It was our Blessed Lord's free will to be to be treated as if He was the worst of men becasue He had taken the sins of all men upon Him in order to make satisfaction for them to the divine Justice. He took upon Himself the curse which rested on mankind in order to bring all men that blessing which God promised to Abraham, 'In thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed."

God humbled Himself and came to earth as a lowly man like us in every way except sin. Sinless Himself He offered the most complete saitsfaction for our sins. Man had offended God by a disobedience which sprang from pride when he desired "to be like GOd". The Divine Redeemer atoned for this pride by choosing the most painful and ignominious of deaths..He suffered Himself to be hung on a cross when alive. Jesus abased Himself as far as He could so as to offer satisfaction. Our Lord chose to die on the Cross to show His unbounded love for us and to move our hearts to love Him in return.

God wants us to love him and follow him on our own? It's cruel to laugh at the simple. So excuse me a minute while I choke a little on my own laughter.

Why does God want us to love 'him'? Want implies deficiency, and God cannot be deficient. So God does not 'want' us to love It (him, if you must). Perhaps God wants us to love him so that he can be in relationship with us? That's rather like a grain of sand saying to a mountain that there must be a relationship between them: something laughably incongruous.

The truth is this. We create our gods in the image of what we most want. And since, as Nietzsche pointed out, the world has come to be populated by those who want the Love of Daddy more than anything else, then the god that most of us want is just that - an autocratic father-figure dispensing rewards to those who can beg hard enough to be given them. Which is why KFC can state such childish drivel with complete sincerity - she's one of those who knows how to beg for treats from Daddy.

As to the article itself. There is no point to 'Jesus' because 'Jesus' isn't the name of something that could have a point. It's the title of an Office, that each of us can hold in relation to ourselves and others, and not the name of a person.

I don't doubt that there was a man called Jesus, and that he said and did remarkable things. But he was no more the 'saviour of the world' than is my cat, Meeps.

KFC POSTS:

Well said, KFC, well said.

"Belief is tied to action"....which is so true. I'll save this.. for to me...this means belief is tied to good works"!!!!!

KFC POSTS:

To be Biblically technical....God didn't create Satan. Besides the visible world, God created invisible spirits called angels. Like everything else from the hand of GOd, they too all came forth good and holy. But they all didn't continue in that state, some rebelled against God with Lucifer as their leader. There was a great battle in Heaven and St.Michael fought against and conquered Lucifer, now Satan, and the bad angels and they were thrown out of Heaven down to hell.

hahahahah you're cute Lula. You know "darn" well what I meant here. Good works/action is evidence of our salvation, not the other way around.



at this point it's semantics because we know that God created everything.

"For by him were ALL THINGS created,that are in heaven and that are in earth visible and invisible whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by him and FOR HIM." Col 1:16

That includes us. God created us not so we can love him so much as he created us so that HE CAN LOVE US. If God is a God of Love and that's his greatest attribute how can this be used if he has no one here to love?

To: stillkoontz

Something I've noticed in both your posts (which are the first to tempt me out of my most recent retirement from JU, both of which I thought were well written, well informed and cogently argued - though from flawed premises). You assume that God is good. Why not assume that God is beyond any human understanding of good and evil?Why not assume, as a first principle, that any such understanding, even if it derives in its first instance from the Imago dei, is necessarily flawed and untrustworthy because limited?

To have a point is to have an end. The 'end' of the Christian understanding of Jesus is for him to serve as the Perfected Adam (archetypal humanity redeemed through saving grace) and as the tangible expression within history of the presence of God. It was necessary for him to die because, within both Judaism and its bastard offspring, Christianity, there is no remission of wrong without blood-sacrifice - and only a perfect sacrifice is sufficient to 'cover' the heinous crime committed by Adam and Eve, the stain of which is passed from generation to generation by the sexual act (according to that arch-hypocrite, Augustine) and in the guilt of which we are all involved.

Assume that God has nothing to do with 'good' or 'evil' which, in all places and at all times, have never been more than matters of opinion. Assume further that God has not the least interest in you, personally, unless and until It decides to screw up your life (as in the cases of Job, Jonah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah and a bunch of other Prophets).

The most readily apparent characteristic of God, as described in the OT, is seeming caprice - the prime example being the treatment meted out to Pharoah and the Egyptians prior to the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. God chose to make Pharoah stubborn, whereas It might have chosen to make him humble. It chose to make Pharoah stubborn, and so brought about the death of every male firstborn, and all the other plagues.

This is either caprice, pure and simple, or conformity to a principle so far removed from and beyond our understanding that it looks like caprice. As a matter of personal preference, I accept the latter explanation and not the former. God doesn't play dice - but that doesn't mean that the rules by which It plays in relation to us will be intelligible to us. And if such rules are unintelligible to us then, in relation to our own case, they may as well not exist at all - because we'll never know if they do or not.

Because they are unintelligible.

There appears to be a pervasive, inescapable desire in human beings to know God. But our condition is such that we are unable to know anything at all about God - though we are certainly capable of producing endless and totally impotent speculation on the subject of God. And this situation is, to me, proof of God's existence.

The Ostrich and the Platypus are proof that God has a sense of humor. And what's funnier than a sick ape looking at its reflection in a jungle pool and thinking it sees God? The only reason God pays any attention at all to humanity is because we make It laugh.