In my last post, discussion turned to the question of whether or not we need God. One of my regular contributors, William, posted the following comment, and I felt it deserved its own post:
I am just having problems understanding whether humans “need” a god.
Do humans “need” a father? it may be beneficial if it’s a good father, but we can see many who get along fine who have not had a father, so “need” is the wrong term.
And what if that father is never around, left before you were born, and only left a letter to you explaining (not always in the easiest or most direct of terms) how he expects you to behave and promises that he’ll take care of you and promises to severely punish you for disobedience or for leaving him?
is that a good father? is that a father we need? isn’t it laughable that such a father could even begin to threaten the child for “leaving him” (since the father clearly left the child) not to mention how absurd it is to think that such a father actually does anything to really take care of the child?
I’m having a hard time understanding how we’re ingrained to “need” such a father, or why we’d even call such a father good?
Finding Truth 
While Jesus does often confront people, He is really confronting them – within their ideology. I doubt He could have convinced the Pharisees that God was a loving Father, simply because they were so steeped in the Law that Jesus had to actually die to show them that. His final words on the cross have convinced me that heaven is not a place where some get in and some don’t (I don’t actually see heaven as a place, per se, but we can discuss that another time), “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” We crucified Jesus (we, not God) out of our violence and rejection of love, but Jesus’ words show us that God’s love has no limits. He was praying forgiveness for the ACTUAL people crucifying Him, which is much more astounding.
The upside-down Kingdom is one in which God is not like what we think (violent, vindictive, punishing) and we are not what we think (peaceful, loving, forgiving). The crucifixion is the “crux” of all of history and everything I believe hinges on it (and the resurrection).
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“What is God proving? that we are fallen? He knows that? maybe He’s not proving anything. But whats with this whole comedy called life? the beauty? the cruelty? what is God showing us? that He is just? Why does He need witnesses besuides Himself to witness He is God?”
Portal – I recommend you read:
Between Noon and Three
The Mystery of Christ…And Why We Don’t Get It
The Parables of Judgment
all By Robert Farrar Capon
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KC, yes, God did not demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. They knew the end of the story. 🙂 The Jews still believed (even in Jeremiah’s day) that the way to appease the gods was through blood sacrifice. They let themselves be enticed by the pagan nations around them and they started believing that God must be like that too (since they were in exile, God had to be angry at them, right?).
In Abraham’s day, there was not “Bible God”. God was just beginning to reveal Himself. All Abraham knew was the surrounding pagan gods and what people believed they were like. His assumption would have begun with that and he would have thought the God talking to him was just like the other gods.
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Josh, I appreciate your thoughts 🙂 what do you makie ofn the bible when it says things that seem to go against what your saying?
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Portal,
You wrote:
“What is God proving? that we are fallen? He knows that? maybe He’s not proving anything. But whats with this whole comedy called life? the beauty? the cruelty? what is God showing us? that He is just? Why does He need witnesses besuides Himself to witness He is God?”
Um, beats me! 🙂
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make*
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JudahFirst, where do you find this in your Bible ? “KC, yes, God did not demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac.” My Bible says he did . Confused…….
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I think at the end of the day, unless someone has encountered a direct revelation, we are all doing the best we can with the information we are given, and then choose who to trust based on that information.
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Portal-
“what do you make of the bible when it says things that seem to go against what your saying?”
I go back to God as revealed in Jesus. I really recommend you read the books I listed, especially The Mystery of Christ and The Parables of Judgment. We are already in the Stadium, my friend. You can choose to stay and watch the game, or leave and keep trying to purchase your ticket.
“God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.”
“The time for judging this world HAS COME, when Satan, the ruler of this world, will be cast out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw EVERYONE to myself.” He said this to indicate how he was going to die.”
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“We are already in the Stadium, my friend. You can choose to stay and watch the game, or leave and keep trying to purchase your ticket.”
I like that, and I love your attitude 🙂
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Portal-
That’s from Robert Capon. I can’t claim originality.
Another way to challenge what you think is this. Go back and read through all of the parables that seem to express judgment (The Ten Virgins, The Farmer employing workers, The Wedding guests, etc, etc). Try to notice that every time someone is “excluded” at the end of the parable they were already “included” at the beginning. No one ends up on the outside who wasn’t already presumed to be invited to the party. Even in the Sheep and the Goats it’s the ones who never for a second presumed they were invited who get let in. It’s the ones who thought they were shoe-ins because they earned it who were out. It’s never that we’re not included. It’s that we put ourselves on the outside because we hold on so tightly to the belief that we HAVE to earn it and CANNOT just enjoy it.
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I hope you are right
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KC, God never asked Abraham to actually go through with it. Work with me here. 🙂 In the end God did not ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Telling him to take his son up the mountain to be sacrificed was an invitation to learn something NEW about God. Before it was all over, did Abraham THINK God was asking him to sacrifice his son. Certainly. Wouldn’t have been much of a lesson if he hadn’t. My point was that this was normal to him whereas it is horrible to you.
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“I hope you are right”
If Jesus was God, I believe that I am. Trust Him, my friend. 🙂
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Trust, thats what I struggle with 🙂
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when you read the bible it talks about god’s love, god’s mercy, god’s wrath, god’s vengeance. it talks about the splendors of heaven and the terrors of hell. It talks about obedience and punishment for disobedience. Christ talks about love and also pitting father against son, etc (Matt 10)
And I think KC makes a fair point regarding the human sacrifice. I mean, we can excuse the WWII Nazi Germans if we dismiss it as the common practice for that time and place. While I know some human sacrifices did in fact take during that time, i am skeptical that it was rampant.
JudahFirst made a good point, that you could look at that Abraham/Isaac event not as god testing Abraham, but teaching him that human sacrifice was wrong, but then the passages themselves make it seem like a test from god and not a lesson to Abraham.
and I wonder how wonderful heaven will be when not all of my children would there, or my friends, or family, or just knowing that other people missed out, or worse, burning in everlasting torment – jesus taught that as well, if we believe the bible’s claims.
And I’d rather everyone not be punished forever. Does that make me more merciful than god?
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KC, I want to clarify my statement that offering Isaac was “normal” to Abraham. I do not mean to imply that it was no big deal to him. Not at all! Quite the contrary in fact! My earlier statement was that Abraham had likely spent the first 13 years of Isaac’s life in utter terror that God was one day going to ask this of him (because it was COMMON – that’s what I mean by normal) in those days. That God did not turn out to need Isaac as a sacrifice to Abraham would have begun to put to death Abraham’s fears of what God might be like (the gods the pagans around him worshiped – the ones Abraham was not certain were like the God he was hearing or not).
Portal, my blog “Walking Through the Pieces” deals with the issue of law versus grace (reference your discussion with Josh). Be blessed!
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I find it hard to trust something that permeates my decisions and my whole life, without evidence I can measure
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JudahFirst, I am trying to work with you 🙂 But God did ask him to sacrifice whether he made him do it or not does not negate what he said in Jer 19:5 , “They have built pagan shrines to Baal, and there they burn their sons as sacrifices to Baal. I have never commanded such a horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing!”
God DID command it and it DID cross his mind . I think any Jury in the country would convict God of lying here. I’m sorry JudahFirst, but I can’t work with you when it requires me to ignore what I’m reading. I still like you, however. 🙂
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William, EXACTLY! I’m absolutely for sure certain that I am not more merciful than God. That fact alone made me start looking harder at what the Bible really does say. I deal pretty extensively on my blog with the issues of heaven/hell, punishment, etc. and hate to keep repeating myself here (although the Abraham illustration is something I love to talk about and have not blogged about yet).
Meanwhile, interpretation really is everything. I wonder have you ever tried reading the N.T. without chapters and verses? I think you might be astounded at what you find there. When you take entire books in context rather than 10 or so verses, you start to find that verses we take out of context aren’t saying what we thought they were. For instance, if people understood that the passage about the rich man and Lazarus is preceded by 3 other chapters in Luke and that the heading for the entire section is (my paraphrase): “Because the Pharisees were lovers of money” or some such, then you begin to understand that Jesus is not trying to give us a literal picture of hell (or ANY picture of hell, actually), but he was instead confronting the Pharisees idea that poor people had been abandoned by God and rich people were on God’s favorite list … all of it starts to have a completely different MEANING though the words have not changed. Interpretation, interpretation, INTERPRETATION!
Another example:
Modern Evangelicals think that when Jesus used the word “hell” he was talking about a place of eternal punishment or separation from God. But we can be almost certain that is NOT what Jesus was saying by simply understanding what the Jews who were hearing him thought He meant by the word Gehenna (Jesus used that word exclusively, everywhere you see it translated “hell”, Paul used the word “Sheol” or “Hades” which simply means “the unseen” or the “place of the dead”, almost exclusively).
The Jews had absolutely no understanding of ECT (eternal conscious torment), and believed when you died you went to sleep until the judgment. Even post judgment they would not have had any inkling that Jesus meant anything like what we have come to believe “hell” is.
Interpretation is first and foremost a function of the original audience. If we cannot start there we are in danger of going sorely awry (as almost every church in America today attests).
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KC, if God had commanded Abraham to go through with it, then yes. The point of the Jeremiah passage is to say that God has never required such a thing and it has never crossed His mind to need, demand, or command anyone to do that – and follow through. God was not about to let Abraham kill the next in line in the lineage of Jesus. That Abraham BELIEVED God commanded him to do it I will allow. The only way God would have commanded it is if He had required Abraham to do it, which He did not.
As to it “entering into His mind”, the idea did that every time He saw one of his children sacrificing an idol to a pagan God. He was asserting through Jeremiah to the people that He was not the god they were worshiping when they did that – they were worshiping pagan gods who DO require blood.
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Portal, I hear ya (re. trust). 🙂
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JudahFirst, I always enjoy your comments but will we will have to agree to disagree. 🙂
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God, I want us to all be at peace. Maybe im not open enough to God, I want us all to be happy, as cliche as that sounds
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JidahFirst, I have only read parts without verse or chapter designations, although I try to take into the account the whole context when reading that’s a good point.
and it also seems like the jew’s notion of hell changed as they became influenced by the Persians and then the greeks. I guess that’s on reason that jesus used the word “Gehenna,” because there was no hebrew word for it – although it was supposedly always there? Always there but but god’s chosen people didnt have a word for it until they were surrounded by greeks?
And I can and actually do agree that the bible was written for specific people at a specific time – it’s of the reasons I no longer think it’s for all people of all time and that it’s not of god.
But good thoughts.
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