Why do Christians make God out to be dumb?

God did not need to convince himself to absolve sin. Dieing on the cross had nothing to do with absolving sin. Sin still exists. Murder, lies, adultery.... What He did was provide a way for our sins of our past (and our future) to be fogiven and forgotten. And He did not need to convince Himself to do that either. He created us, he loves us, and wants to be with us. Sin separates us from him. So He did what it took to close the gap. Why does sin separate us...that is a whole other question... The holy, pure blood of Jesus was the only thing that could enable us to be with Him. ....more on this later.

Why? It comes to a question of the deffinition of love. From my own experience I have learned that love is a choice involving hard sacrifice that sometimes brings joy, pain, peace, and confusion. When we CHOOSE to love there are concequences. When we CHOOSE not to love there are concequences. When we choose not to love by our actions (sin) we are essentially walking away from God. That is what creates the gap. Us walking away from him. When we choose not to love our friends around us, we alienate our selves from them. It is the same with God. WE made that gap, not him, so now we have to do something (anything!) to fill the gap. But now, all of the sudden we cannot just turn around and undo all those choices we have made to put us away from God. So God said, "I will clean you. I will fill those giant holes for you." But he looked around and could not find anything but dirty water, dirty earthly blood to clean us, could not find any thing but more holes in the earth and in the heart of the human. So he had to look inside himself to find something that would acutally get us clean and whole. He saw that we should die for our sins, but that would just put him right back where he started at before creation....with no one to love. So he said, "Here. I will have my son die for you, for I can raise him from the dead, thus allowing me to raise you from the dead."You see, we cannot undo our choices. He cannot undo our choices. They are done. We made them and they will always be. But now he can say, "all you have to do is let me clean you and they will be forgotten, You can start anew." But it took holy blood to clean us.He is GOD. And we are human. He gave us free will with consequences for our choices. But he also knows that we are only human, so he gave us a bit of himself (a BIG bit)so that we could be better. Be with him.

Yaro: If I may, I would like to pose just one question to you. What is the point in loving someone if they are just forced to love you back? Is that true love? I know this may sound cheazy, but have you seen the movie Bruce Almighty? A very serious question is posed: How do you make someone love you without affecting free will? That is just it. FREE WILL. How is love love or hate hate if God just says, "okay. love me." We are given the choice to love him. Yes, God is emtirely omnipitent. But even an omnipitent God knows that love given freely is of much more worth than comanded love. If he were to just say, "let the gap be filled" then where is our free choice of love and sacrifice for him.As to the value of blood.... blood is life. If a person has no blood, they have no life. It is not that God desires dead things to be offered up to him, it is that from sin comes death (the loss of blood). But if we as humans do not want to spill our own blood, then it has to come from somewhere. Hence the animals in the old testament and the blood of Jesus in the new.I know that this is not a very long or good explanation but I am speaking with the first thing that comes to mind. I will look up some Bible refferences for you to try to better explain... But I hope that gives you a little bit better understanding.Try to think of it as if you had a child. (maybe you do) You can watch that child grow and make mistakes and try to fix them all you want. But a child does not really learn untill it suffers the consequences of it's mistakes. It is the same with us.....More later... I will try to give some better explanations.....

You cannot just plot an "AUTHENTIC" sticker on something and make it so. A cubitzerconia will always be just a cheap imitation for a diamond, no matter how polished. That is just a fact. God can see straight to your heart and know your feelings and whether they are true or not.He could have made us all robots and just said, "okay, love me" just as simple as turning on a light switch. You are right, he could have done that. But how much more beautiful to watch true love unfold as a human grows to realize that they are capable to love and are unconditionally loved! Free will is a part of life, a part of every relationship. It's the beautiful and priceless part. If all of my friends were so simply because my mom slipped them a $20 how pointless and worthless that would be. I would rather have no friend at all than a fake one. How much more beautiful for me to see a friendship unfold and develop over time by the learning of eachothers true feelings about life. That is why truth is so valuable. Because it is so rare. True love even more so.Do you care whether love is sincere? I do. When I look into my boyfriends eyes after I know I have just insulted him without meaning to, and I find understanding and forgiveness in his eyes because he knew my intentions....that moment will always be sweeter than when some guy at the super market looks at me admirably. One is love, the other lust. What a difference.Why does God care? Because he made you. I don't know if you have ever built something before.....created something that was your very own. I paint. I know what it is like to make something, to put time and effort into a piece of work. A peice of work that only I could have made. When you are creating, it is the most beautiful thing to watch it unfold before your eyes and take on a life and a meaning of it's own but that is still entirely yours, simply because you are the only one who could have ever made it. The pride is emense. (even on the ugly peices of art...because it is MY ugly peice) That is how I know the care God has for us. Because I have experienced it, felt it. Even if it was just a miniscule little fraction of what he must feel in us..... his human creation. I can imagine the time and care he took to make us, form us into creatures that are a physical representation of his spirit, even puting his spirit in us. He cares if we love him because he made us.And whether you believe it or not, he cares about each individual person's heart. Knowing every one is not beyond his reach. He is after all omnipitent. If you have 20 kids, you still want to know everyone and be a part of all of their lives. Time and money are the only things that would stand in the way. Time and money are not a barier for God.I don't know if there is life outside of earth (i gues we will see about mars) our out there somewhere in the universe, but if there is I know God is not too small to handle it all. He cares about every heart.He is not threatened by us. We are threatened by Him and the thought of unconditional love....because we are scared that one day it won't be there. Well, let me tell ya. It will.

I tried to tuch on the issue of blood a little bit.... ask away any more questions you might have and I will try to find an answer for you.To the issue of Why God's Son? I want to tell you that sins were cleansed at the cross yes, but Jesus accomplished so much more.If you look at the old testament, Israel could not get it right. They really could not stay on the right path for more than a genneration or two, if even that. They did not know how to live a life close to God, following his commandments. Jesus showed us how. In Isaiah God lists off many of the things that pulled Israel away from God and He prosmises to destroy all of those distractions. Jesus was tempted by those same things that Israel was but he said no, (Luke 4) instead turning to God. Jesus also taught us how to pray, how to encourage one another, how to simply live life close to God. Then he said, "it is finished" when he died on the cross. Saying your past is over. "Start fresh. I died for you, for your sin. Now live the life that I have shown you by example."He cleaned us and closed the gap, but he also gave us the ability to do what we need to do to stay close to Him. He encourages me by saying to my heart, "I know it's hard. I walked it. I lived it. I breathed it. But if I can do it, so can you. I will help you by giving you streangth."

Just because a loveing God exists does not mean that a hate doesn't. See that's the thing. People want to blame all of the bad things that happen in life on God or the nonexistance of one. How about the existance of Satan? There is good and bad in this world. They are opposing factors that do have spiritual forces behind them. I have SEEN suffering in families, in friends, in my own short life. I am not going to say that I can understand where everyone has come from but I do see where I have come from and I see family and friends go throught emense pain, but that doesn't mean that it's God's fault. Jesus came to heal the wounded and broken hearted. He did not say that there will never be suffering in this world again. He simply gave us the power to say no to sin and to help others out of their chains and then gave a promise of coming agian to abolish it all forever.Other people and their choices may affect me (and they have!), maybe someday even unto death, but that is their choice. It is may choice of how I deal with the way they hurt me. Believe me, it is hard but I recognize that it is their choice. In some cases it has taken me years to let things go but I am not going to let their bad choices affect me and my choices. No matter how painful it may be.

Crashfrog:No one says you cannot question God. In the Bible He tells us to test everything against His Spirit and Word. Translation, read the Bible and see if you can find any answers for your questions and hey! why not even ask God himself and see if he answers you! But that actually requires effort on your part to look beyond yourself and your own reasoning mind to find answers to those questions that run rampant in our heads. We ARE given the ability to reason for a purpose. Hello, comon sense is a must. But sometimes, infact, most of the time I am faced with questions that I cannot reasonable find an answer to untill I put my own preconceptions aside and try to see what God says about the matter.We are given the ability to determine right from wrong but about 90% of the time I can reason away why something is wrong and then just do it anyway.To be perfectly honest with you (and this is coming from a christian herself) I question God's actions and his reasons behind things all of the time. I use to think that it was unfaithful for me to question him.....that I was somehow stupid for questioning and that i could never really understand him. But that wasn't cutting it for me. So I started asking "why" all of the time. And amazingly enough I got answers. But for us to understand someone's reasoning behind things we have to understand their posistion. For me to understand anyone in my circle of friends, I have to have atleast some sort of empathy for them....having to put myself in their shoes. That doesnot mean I abandon my whole thought process or don't compare it to what I would have done in a situation, but it does mean that I take into account their whole history. That is exactly what I have to do with God and understanding Him. I TRY to see things from his point of veiw. I can never fully understand what it is like to be God but I might beable to understand his reasoning if I ask him to show it to me. .....but you must remember, not always is this the case. Sometimes we just cannot understand people no matter how much empathy we have. And that is okay with me.That is where trust and faith come in. Although God does desire for us to understand him, walking on water is still a part of the game. The GREATEST aspect of love, true love is trust. I never trully understood that untill I fell in love. When you love someone, the greatest gift you could ever give them is your trust. And that is what God asks of us. True love consisting of trust. But once agian, a lover wants you to know him and understand him..... so does God. Which is why he does answer our questions. We just have to accept the answers he gives us even when they are hard to accept.But I must say, love is not always rational. And love is NOT a science. Science does not hold absolute truths. Science holds theorys and "scientific laws" which are constantly changing. Let me say that again. Science is constantly changing. How can you find answers in something where the rule book is always needing to be updated and changed?

you raise the question of children dieing and God's "silence" about it. this, once agian, cannot be answered without discussing the issue of a greater evil in this world (which God did not create...he created free will) which i won't go into now but i will tell you that i see the suffering, God sees it and he has asked me to do something about it. so i am. and i could give you block full of people in just my little circle of connections that are doing things aobut it as well. but we aren't enough. God has been asking for people to help fix the problems (see that is the crazing thing aobut God, he likes to use people and work though them instead of just coming down in all of his glory and might and fixing things. he likes to do things through humans touching humans because that is an even greater miracle) but no one answers him. i have seen the pain, as a person having been abandond and left for dead (and God used other humans to save me) and i have seen the pain through his eyes and cryed with him, saying "i'll help, i'll go" i work with orphaned/foster children teaching art.really, you think you could predict love? socio-economic background: poor/poverty. father: alcoholic, hardworking, but no sense of responsibility when it comes to kids (he left with out any goodbye) mother: responsible, faithful, hurt by her own father, and constantly stressed out. is this enough information? i really would be interested to hear who you think i have fallen inlove with.i find relevant answers in the Bible because God's Holy Spirit reveals to me how it relates to my life. to our society today. you have to compare their society with ours and look at the parallels. there are many.[This message has been edited by burntdaisy622, 02-05-2004]

crashfrog:that was a great attempt! entirely off base but it did make me smile. my mother was a christian and fell inlove with the wrong guy...who wasn't a christian but loved her too. he just had too many problems to be a dad. (alcholol and drugs) i became a christian when i was 13yrs old (sorry no love relationships before then) but didn't really deal with the whole abandonment issue untill i was 16. although my mom had made some bad choices (particularly in the guy department) she always relayed to me that my dad did love me, he just had made bad coices becuase of his own problems. she always made sure that i knew it wasn't my fault. it didn't really start hurting untill i realized that you can chose to be there for someone. that you should chose to be their for you kid. then i cryed and cryed and then i forgave him. that was long after i realized all that Jesus had done for us, long after i had realized the far reaching power of God..... I didn't fall inlove untill i was 18yrs old. and that was with my best friend of 3 years. (you are right to assuem i am a female) He is absolutely wonderful. But i didn't go through a whole bunch of bad ones to get to him. And i wouldn't have even if we had met later on in life..... i was determined not to fall for the same kinds of guys my mom had. so i didn't. i just got enturely blessed and met him when i was still a little girl. and from the time we met, he had had plenty of other relationships. we were just friends. then we fell inlove after 3yrs. oh.... and he isnt poor. ...oh, and no drugs.Satan is not greater than God....God would smite him today if he wanted to but he has promised that he will not send satan to hell untill everyone has had atleast one chance to hear about Jesus. In the mean time we have to turn to God when satan does hurt us or the ones we love and ask God what to do about it. But he has not eternally condemed satan because not everyone has heard the "good news"i know that these people that came to my families rescue did not do it on their own becasue they did not have the resources to. the just did what God told them to.... even at their own pesonal loss.[This message has been edited by burntdaisy622, 02-06-2004]

Mike,You paint a pretty dim picture for the unbeliever. ....I would have to say that I don't entirely agree with you. I know the whole "the cross is foolishness to the world" and I believe it. But I think that if they were to approach the Bible with an open heart and ask for understanding from the Holy Spirit then they will understand. I think the God softens the hearts of those who are willing.I'm sure you know this....I just wanted to make sure....