Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Judging God
This is a response to a commenter on a New Covenant thread. I was going to put it in the comments, but ran out of room. It dovetails nicely with a previous article anyway.
DarkSyde,
I am personally glad that I worship a God who destroys the wicked and mercifully protects His people. I don't feel the need to apologize for His actions, and I don't think He's a God that changed in the New Testament. You don’t get to decide whether or not God fits your standards of morality. What you get to do is to decide to submit yourself to His standards of right and wrong, or rebel against Him and destroy yourself in the process.
I don’t claim to understand everything that God commanded in the Old Testament, any more than I understand everything that He ordains today. But the people of the earth are in His hands to do with as He pleases, and I’d much rather be in His hands than in the hands of the philosophers that the modern age has given us. What is it, do you think, that gave you such a high view of morality? It sure wasn’t atheism, or relativism, or naturalism, or any other philosophy that’s come along in the last couple of centuries.
If the people that God commanded destroyed were innocent, then God took them off to heaven with Him, and they’re better off. If they weren’t innocent, then no harm no foul. Ed's wrong, by the way, when you say no human dictator has ever commanded the destruction of whole peoples. Hitler with the Jews, Stalin with the Ukrainians, Mao with anyone who looked foreign. It’s happened over and over, and I’d submit to you that there’s a major difference when the God who created them commands such a thing, and when man commands such a thing. I’m not saying I’m always comfortable with God as He actually is, but then nobody ever told me I ought to be. Job wasn't comfortable with how God was, and God answered, "Where were you when I created the world?" When Paul hypothetically poses the question in Romans 9, the answer is, Who are you, O Man, to reply against God?"
So go ahead and invent a God that’s more to your liking, if it makes you feel better. Or just write Him out of the picture altogether. But you might find Him knocking at the door one day, and you might not like what He’s got to say.
Matt
DarkSyde,
I am personally glad that I worship a God who destroys the wicked and mercifully protects His people. I don't feel the need to apologize for His actions, and I don't think He's a God that changed in the New Testament. You don’t get to decide whether or not God fits your standards of morality. What you get to do is to decide to submit yourself to His standards of right and wrong, or rebel against Him and destroy yourself in the process.
I don’t claim to understand everything that God commanded in the Old Testament, any more than I understand everything that He ordains today. But the people of the earth are in His hands to do with as He pleases, and I’d much rather be in His hands than in the hands of the philosophers that the modern age has given us. What is it, do you think, that gave you such a high view of morality? It sure wasn’t atheism, or relativism, or naturalism, or any other philosophy that’s come along in the last couple of centuries.
If the people that God commanded destroyed were innocent, then God took them off to heaven with Him, and they’re better off. If they weren’t innocent, then no harm no foul. Ed's wrong, by the way, when you say no human dictator has ever commanded the destruction of whole peoples. Hitler with the Jews, Stalin with the Ukrainians, Mao with anyone who looked foreign. It’s happened over and over, and I’d submit to you that there’s a major difference when the God who created them commands such a thing, and when man commands such a thing. I’m not saying I’m always comfortable with God as He actually is, but then nobody ever told me I ought to be. Job wasn't comfortable with how God was, and God answered, "Where were you when I created the world?" When Paul hypothetically poses the question in Romans 9, the answer is, Who are you, O Man, to reply against God?"
So go ahead and invent a God that’s more to your liking, if it makes you feel better. Or just write Him out of the picture altogether. But you might find Him knocking at the door one day, and you might not like what He’s got to say.
Matt
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