No-Divorces.org

Sacrifice to Greek God Apollo

People have weird ideas of religion because people focus on abusing it for their own purposes rather than applying the principles and values of it to their own lives first. Within a location or group, people agree to laws that say if you’re going to live with us, you have to abide by our laws. In the old testament, the law said if you’re going to live as a Jew, you’re not going to practice witchcraft. God and His angels were welcome. Satan and his angels were not. In witchcraft one worshiped various deities to obtain some object of personal desire–protection, wealth, health, perhaps revenge, power, sexual favors, whatever.

But, there was a concept of holiness or faithfulness to one’s god or God or gods.

Some felt the best approach was witchcraft or paganism attempting to get spiritual power from anywhere, anything, or anyone. The concept of one legitimate God was more reasonable to many because it would seems there can be only one “best”. If two or more gods are perfect, they would in essence be one. They would believe the same, know all things, and their power must be directed in the same direction because two all-powerful beings could not conflict or the one who loses wouldn’t be God.

So, if this One God is perfect, all knowing, all powerful, and good, and if our knowledge is limited, then our moral obligation would be to trust and obey this one God for the sake of the greatest universal good. Anything else would be selfish, cowardly, dishonest, sinful.

However, sinners naturally lie concerning the nature of God. Most are willing to hijack the concept of God and put others under false obligation for their own pleasure or protection. They may say, “I am God’s appointed Prophet, and to obey God you have to obey me.” So they through life indulging themselves to the loss of everyone else. So, we have Pharoahs, Emperors, and Kings who were worshiped as gods.

The problem, though, is their character ran counter to the character of God as we all tend to feel it in our bones somehow. Perhaps they lie, murder, have harems, steal other men’s wives and families. and do ungodly things, even in the name of God. So instead of blaming the offender, some people blame religion, most of which have nothing to do with that individual, or they blame God because they feel if He existed, then He could have stopped the offense but chose not to do so.

But, what if the love and integrity and justice of God found it best to create people with a free will and let them have a range of expression of their character so that they, or we, could see for ourselves what we are and where our loyalties lie? What if in order to love we had to be free to hate? What if in order to love or hate we had to be free to bring good or harm to others? What if these limits seem so extreme simply because no matter where God set these limits, they would always be at the edges of our experience and appear extreme for that reason? And what if this is consistent with the love of God?

What if we all sinned and justice demanded hell of us all? And what if God loved us enough to keep the penalty in place so we would be able to tell God we hate Him so much we’d rather go to hell than live with Him in heaven forever? What if God loved us enough to take on the form of man, live faithful and honorable, and die a most miserable death to pay for our sins? What if He created us knowing this would be necessary? What if He had to live from eternity to eternity with perfect anticipation and perfect memory of the pain and joy of every human being who ever lived?

What if God’s love, wisdom, knowledge, power, faithfulness, goodness are really that good? And what if we still hated him?