Is God good?

Some Christians do seem to make up their own ideas about God, and the "fluffy bunny" trend is certainly one of those. However, what you think contradicts God's character in the Bible is probably just YOUR made-up idea about God.Here's a very thorough investigation into God's character based on what the Bible shows about Him, in an online book titled The Attributes of God by A W Pink, a British Reformed writer of the early 20th C.In his chapter on God's Love he could be said to be criticizing what you call "fluffy bunny" Christianity:

But we AREN'T interpreting the Bible "to fit modern values," we're interpreting it according to scripture itself, according to the New Testament, which is the key to the Old.A "wooden-headed literalist" gets everything wrong about the Bible.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You insist on reading the Old Testament the way it was written for Israel and ignoring the fact that the New Covenant changed how we relate to the Old, and this is standard orthodox teaching about the Bible, not something I'm making up. The food laws were rescinded in the New Testament, for instance, and yet people here will insist we should still shun the foods God prohibited to Israel, and in that atmosphere of aggressive ignorance I tend to avoid discussions of the subject.And by the way, A W Pink's Attributes of God is regarded as a classic, he's not just "some guy."HOWEVER, I was thinking about the fact that we used to have sodomy laws in this country, skimmed through the Wikipedia article on the subject and realize I've been overlooking how seriously it used to be regarded as a crime. Even punishable by death in Virginia in Thomas Jefferson's day -- he tried to change the punishment to castration instead. Other states held it to be a felony punishable by imprisonment and hard labor until quite recently.Sodomy laws in the United States - WikipediaI think I'm going to have to rethink some of this as one of the many many ways we've been falling away from God and bringing judgment on our nation. I suspect the same trend is true in the UK as well.

Believers who have an appreciation of the infinities of God expect to be plumbing the depths of His word for all eternity. That's an utterly ridiculous number. The differences are minuscule among Bible-believing denominations, and we all recognize each other as Bible believers despite minor differences. That number probably includes groups we DON'T recognize, since what would you care what it includes? Pascal said something to the effect that the Bible contains enough light to guide believers and enough obscurity to thwart the profane inquiries of unbelievers. There's nothing garbled and contradictory about it to a believer.It certainly wasn't the Bible that caused the violence, it was the Roman Church whose doctrines are predominantly man-made rather than Bible based, which the Protestant Reformers came to recognize as not Christian at all but the seat of the Antichrist which had been persecuting, torturing and murdering true Bible believers for at least a thousand years. The Reformers had all been Catholics themselves, most of them priests. They also recognized dissenting groups that had existed outside the Roman Church all the way back to apostolic times as true Bible believers that had been slandered by Rome and murdered for "heresy" such as the Paulicians, the Waldensians and the Albigensians. I avoid the word "literal" because it is so easily misused. Regarding the Bible as inerrant and accurate doesn't require reading it as literally literal. I follow Reformed theology which is shared by many denominations these days and they can tell you what a wooden-headed literalist is, usually someone who doesn't recognize that the New Testament is the standard for interpreting the Old. Yes I read the first eleven Chapters of Genesis as straight history. Seems to me you don't know what you are talking about.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Interpretation, bringing out deeper meanings, is not adding to or subtracting from the word of God.But I look forward to Jaywill's answer as he's been doing a very good job, thankless as all such attempts here are.

So I saw the nomination for your post and of course came and read it and of course disagreed with everything in it although you do succeed in representing your point of view very effectively, which I guess deserves the recognition maybe, and I wasn't going to respond at first but then it kept coming back to me so here I am responding after all.I have two remarks, the first to your claim that God's committing what you call "genocide" is exactly the same as Hitler's etc., and there's only one thing to say to that which is that God does not act out of blind selfish hatred as human murderers do but in justice He judges evil. And He's going to judge Hitler and all those who joined with him the same way when they appear before Him. Which makes ME very happy. The prospect of evil people getting their due punishment in the end ought to make anyone happy it seems to me.The other remark is to your absurd rationalization of abortion: Except that if you weren't suffering from some sort of moral dementia on this point you would recognize that the "clump of fetal cells" would soon become a sentient human being if you left it alone, which cannot be said for the cockroach. The fact that people can rationalize abortion because the human being at that stage of life isn't yet fully sentient strikes me as just a way to justify the unjustifiable. So you get knocked on the head and are unconscious for a while, you are not self-aware, you are not sentient for that period, but you wouldn't be in favor of someone bashing your brains out for that reason, yet it's OK with you to kill the new human being that hasn't yet developed sentience but inevitably would assuming a normal development, just as when you recover from your temporary unconsciousness you would resume your sentient life. It's so obvious that a "fetus" is merely a stage of human growth that the twisted ways we give ourselves permission to murder it must be doing violence to the conscience at some level.I can't believe I used to think the same way, but I did. How deluded I was.

Just saw this post, had forgotten this exchange. Calling Him a murderer isn't going to stand in the end, Rahvin, a murderer kills for selfish reasons. The death penalty is a righteous judgment for evils that should not be allowed to go on threatening living people, or even polluting the environment. The "victim" is the victim of the murderer and if truly innocent will be vindicated and protected by the righteous Judge in the end. I'm afraid you'll only find this out the hard way, of course.God is going to judge us all eventually. Well, actually, because I am a believer in Christ who died for me I am already judged through His taking my punishment for me, for which I am really really grateful because NOBODY is going to escape God's judgment in the end and I certainly wouldn't want to be punished for my collection of sins. I will face Him for judgment of my deeds for which I will either be rewarded or deprived of rewards but not my salvation. Which is really foolish of you. I guess you really think Hitler and his ilk should be allowed to go on living although they murdered millions of innocents, or any of the garden-variety murderers, serial killers, child molesters who kill them to cover their tracks and so on. I have a really hard time understanding the mind of the liberal. My my my, you really should have been appointed God yourself, shouldn't you? You are so MUCH more righteous than the God who made you and made this entire creation and is in a position to know things you couldn't possibly know. Liberals are so self-righteous it just takes the breath away. I tremble for you when you finally do meet Him, as you will. I assume you meant "voluntarily"? You have an extremely naive idea of the evils that stalk this world that NEED to be judged, need to be stopped cold so they can't do worse, can't continue to hurt others. You seem to think everybody is just a nice person. I'm certainly glad you AREN'T God. Oh I KNOW you don't care about "eventualities," you've got that all thoroughly rationalized away so you don't have to think about the reality. This IS a human being you are advocating murdering, a human being at its earliest stage of growth that just doesn't happen to move your emotions in that condition just becuase you can't see it or talk to it, what a Neanderthal way of thinking. Actually the Neanderthals no doubt had more humanity in them. you have simply decided not to regard it as human so you can do away with it when it suits you, just by refusing to think about it beyond your liberal categories. This is a case of self-delusion in the service of murder if there ever was one. I'm sure you can argue quite effectively against OTHER ways of dehumanizing some groups in order to rationalize murdering them, you know, like Hitler's calling his victims "vermin." That's what you're doing with the unborn child but you aren't going to let yourself know that, are you? Na, as long as it isn't RIGHT NOW a human being according to YOUR standards it's just a cockroach. Same thinking really. Sophistry worthy of a Jesuit. Sophistry indeed. You've got it down pat. Aren't you just the last word in moral philosophy? Hey, this threat- to-the-mother stuff is just more sophistry for the simple reason that this situation just about never occurs these days, and if and when it does I'm just as much for saving the mother over the baby as you are. There is really NO justification for late-term abortion at all since at that stage it's rare that both can't be saved, but again, IF there IS a threat to her life that can't be prevented if the child lives, of course she is the one to be saved. In most cases she'll be heartbroken to lose her child as a matter of fact but hard decisions sometimes have to be made. Gosh you're good at this. We're not talking "moment of conception" here since just about nobody knows when that has occurred -- except those who want so badly to be pregnant they monitor themselves like fanatics to find out. And I'm happy to leave it to God (or nature) if a particular conception turns out not to be viable. We're talking "point at which woman knows she's pregnant." That's when killing it becomes an issue. That's still pretty early, of course, just a few weeks, but you know what, it even LOOKS like a human being at only twelve weeks, fingers, toes, the works. Thank you for acknowledging my "cogent" argument, can't say the same for yours I'm afraid since it all hangs on timing. It doesn't have a fully formed brain NOW, so let's kill it before it develops one, which is going to happen very very soon if this is a normal pregnancy.Again, I used to fall for the same rationalizationsl. They all look so stupid to me now.In fact I did have an abortion when I was twenty, long before I was a Christian, and I had a dream about that baby being alive but taken off in a hearse, a toddler-aged child waving goodbye to me through the back window of that big black car, very sad dream. But of course I dismissed even that sad dream as just an illusion -- oh I was SUCH a good atheist in those days -- though it proves really that even then I knew my rationalizations were false but I still wouldn't face the fact. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : fix quotes etc.

Nobody can understand specific instances as well as you think we should, that's why FAITH is required. We KNOW that the Bible is God's word and we TRUST that He does everything right whether we can understand it or not. But it is human SIN that allows such hideous events as you describe, not God. It's fundamental humility in the face of things beyond our ability to understand this based on His word to us, which apparently doesn't influence you unbelievers of course who feel quite free to judge the omnipotent God, may He have mercy on you. God has given us responsibility and if you use your responsibility to work against Him things aren't going to turn out too well.Me I pray that God would restrain the evil in this world in a general way, and maybe if only a billion of us prayed this way every day we could make a difference in such horrible things as you are describing. But when there are people who think God is evil working against us there's really not a lot of hope anything good on a large scale could result.But here's a stab at a rough explanation. Hideous things happen on this earth because we EARNED them by giving ourselves over to Satan. This world BELONGS to the devil -- scripture calls him the "prince of this world" -- because he earned the right to use and abuse us by deceiving our ancestors but also by seducing every one of us every day even now because we're spiritually blind. But Jesus died to save us from this very power of the devil, as even some of our Christmas carols say, but you can't avail yourself of that power over the devil unless you believe in Christ and put yourself in His hands. That's how things go in the economy of God, you take it or leave it.Specific events don't always have an explanation we can trace, we simply have to understand that's sin operating in the human race because we abandoned God and chose the devil to rule over us. If people PRAY for God to intervene He may do so, that happens all the time among Christians, but otherwise he leaves us to our devilish sinful fallen ways. "Free will" and all that.We'RE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, EVEN YOU UNBELIEVERS. You wield a spiritual power for EVIL in this world because you set yourself against the God who is your maker in whose image you were made. You do it blindly but you nevertheless have great power for evil BECAUSE of your status as a human being which is an enormous honor, to have been made in the image of God, which can't be said even of the holy angels.All this moral denunciation of God you guys exercise here is both a reflection of the fact that you were made in the image of the God who wrote the moral law that governs the universe and that you are sold under the devil who has twisted that moral sense into something that serves him instead.ABE Still haven't said it: Trying to say you don't recognize the great honor you have and the responsibility hyou have, that the human race as a whole has, that is SHOWN IN THE FACT THAT GOD DOES NOT - NOT -- INTERVENE IN OUR AFFAIRS even when we are committed to extreme evil. Again, He WILL intervene when we ASK HIM TO, otherwise He leaves us to the devil's cruel power over us, since we CHOSE it. This is enormous RESPECT of us, don't you see? Human power and responsibility is extremely great, He will NOT intervene unless enough of us ask Him to. He's warned us what we are earning in the way of etyernal punishment and now it's up to us, He lets us go on earning it because we CHOSE it. So we have the RIGHT to run this universe into the ground, which we are doing a really really good job of. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

God IS good but you'll never see that as long as you insist on your own view of things. You are judging God according to your fallen nature, which is blind to the true situation in this world, so your judgment is wrong and if you go on sticking to it you will ultimately be condemned by it.Try understanding that your mind is flawed, your moral judgment is flawed, in other words try HUMILITY in the face of such unknowns as you are trying to understand with your inadequate mind, develop a little fear of God, fear that you might be wrong, fear that you're stumbling around in the dark, and ASK GOD to show you where you're wrong.IF you're sincere He'll answer. IF. Big IF there. You won't like the answer from your present point of view but if you're capable of tolerating being wrong about everything you think you know (I had to go through that) it could save your soul.

How do I know you aren't being guided by God? Because you haven't said one thing to make me think you are.YOU COULD NOT CALL GOD EVIL IF YOU KNEW HIM AT ALL, SO OBVIOUSLY YOU DON'T.If it's just ME you'd be trusting in, of course, forget it, I'd like to get you look at HIM, not me and yes I know that still sounds like I'm asking you to trust me personally but you know there are lots of others who believe as I do, just take a leap and believe that maybe we're right no matter how stupid you think we are. No, you don't have any reason to unless somehow you've got a glimmer that maybe there might be something to it. If not, oh well. But I did say to ASK GOD. He hears. If you really want to know the truth He'll answerIf you have done this as you seem to be saying you have then He will answer, but when He does you'll know it and you'd say things in such a way that I'd jknow it too,AND AGAIN YOU COULD NOT CALL GOD EVIL IF YOU KNEW HIM AT ALL, AND HE WON'T ANSWER YOU UNTIL YOU GIVE THAT UP.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yeah, well again you just express your fallen mind which thinks it's so superior to God that you won't even consider you might be wrong. As I SUGGESTED, consider you might be wrong about all this, that your fallen mind can't judge such things, instead of just going on and on with your self-righteous judgment and then you might come to see things rather differently. Yeah I know you LIKE your superior judgment. Well, God ain't gonna disabuse you of it as long as you are glued to it. CONSIDER seriously that you might be wrong, and you might then find out some very interesting things. But if not, then not, oh well.

I don't sound like I'm yelling to my own ears so I'm not sure how to stop sounding like that to you.You want me to try to persuade you what's wrong with this post? OK I'm looking at it again. Well, WE do. It would be nice if you'd consider that some people who aren't as stupid as you like to think we are do think we know this, because maybe it might cause you to stop and think it's possible for this to be true, but if not, then not. That SOUNDS so reasonable but it simply denies the whole structure of reality and God's purposes in the playing out of good versus evil. Theoretically God COULD have made the whole thing some other way completely but why should I trust my own ideas about what He could or should have done? He didn't do it my way and I have at least enough sense not to judge Him. I for one believe that what He says in His word is true, that He is good, that the way things are is the only way they could be for the best possible outcome. He is good and I am not in a position to see why He did what He did as He did it, I have to take it on faith. That's all I can do, and it's all i can offer you or anyone.I know I can't recommend just trying to have faith, that never works, so I'm suggesting a preliminary way you might start to see things differently and the first thing you might consider doing is consdering that you are wrong in your judgment of these things. Best I can do I think. Maybe jaywill could do better.Actually it's where I started. I remember making the decision to give up a particular thing/wish/idea/opinion I'd been holding onto, and things started changing from that point. It took a while, I was really blind and lost, but the more I gave over the more things looked different. So I guess that's why I suggest this as a starting place. I still try to take this advice when I'm in a muddle: Consider that you might be wrong, choose against your own wishes and opinions. All I can say is what I already said: THIS IS CAUSED BY SIN, BY OUR FALLEN NATURE, AND BY THE DEVIL WHO OWNS THIS WORLD. We inherit sin from our ancestors. You cannot judge things by their surface appearance. Things are a lot bigger, a lot more mysterious and a lot more evil than you have any idea. BUT IF WE BELIEVE GOD WE CAN REVERSE THESE EFFECTS THROUGH PRAYER AND TRUST IN HIM. As I said.Otherwise we CHOSE the devil's rule and it's the devil's rule we get until we decide to choose God's instead. I obviously can't talk you out of your moral judgment, that's why I didn't try. Things aren't as they seem. Try not judging God for a change. Consider you might be wrong about the big picture. Best I can do. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Ah Panda, don't talk like that, it's clever to no good purpose.

I was responding to a typical put down of believers, Crash, couldn't you leave it at that? I really do think that if you recognize that someone is not stupid but does think things through, that that should be some reason to seriously consider their opinion about certain subjects. I see by the rest of your post that's a naive expectation but it still seems to me to be a reasonable opinion.I was once an atheist myself, for most of my life, so when I became a believer I already knew most of the arguments, and once I knew the Bible is God's word I knew it in a way that is very solid. I think it's less like something your mind figures out and more like things that are revealed and recognized, maybe sort of like suddenly seeing the solution to a puzzle you've been working on, or suddenly recognizing who the murderer is in a mystery story.And once you've recognized the Bible IS God's word, you DO submit your mind to it. You couldn't learn from it any other way. You may have to battle through many points -- I did, still do, that's inevitable, but you CAN'T rest any more in any opinion that contradicts God's word, you simply cannot. So if something in the Bible isn't clear to you, as many things aren't of course, you either battle it through until you understand it or you put it aside for later. Often if you are a reader as I am you'll come across some great old (or new) book that explains a particular point. There is no other way to use your mind about a revelation you KNOW is from God.However, as far as originally judging the Bible as God's word goes, I did make the judgment that the Biblical witnesses were credible while many on the other side seem to spend all their time making up reasons not to think they're credible.And besides that I do have a long history of Bible believers to look back to as well, you know, from whom I've learned a great deal, believers who *know* just as I do that the Bible is God's word, who also trust the Bible witnesses as I do, quite a large company, great preachers, great men and women of the faith. Yes, in a certain sense, but once you've come to believe you've also entered this huge company of other believers who are all "of the same mind" on the basics. So I don't rely only on my own interpretation for any of this, I've got a large storehouse of the teachings of others down the centuries to support my take or correct it. If you're like jar anything's possible so you ARE relying on your own personal take on things, but if you identify with the whole history of Christian Bible-believing faith you've got thousands of others who share the same faith who can help you figure out things that your own mind isn't up to at any given time, and although you can't have perfection because we're all still fallible human beings, overall it works together so beautifully it's a building and confirming process instead of the tearing-down process of the fallen mind. See above. See above. See above. Wow, sure doesn't do any good to make the effort to explain anything to you I guess. I use my intellect all the time, I've never abandoned it, I use it for instance to try to GRASP the meaning of God's word, and I use it to try to explain things I know through other sources of knowledge than intellect. And if you think so highly of my intellect I would think that ought to be a reason to take what I say somewhat seriously. But obviously it isn't. I guess I should have said SOME things can't be judged by their surface appearance. But some things can. Such as the fact that biological systems HAD to have been created by an intelligence and couldn't have simply arisen by purely chemical processes. I do think that's quite obvious.But other things can't be known except through Biblical revelation. When it comes to the existence of evil, there's really no way to explain that through your mere fallen mind, you HAVE to have the Biblical revelation to begin to make sense of it. Blaming God for the horrible evils done by human beings, (and yes by the devil -- there is such a creature who has billions of spirits under his command) is false and scarily blasphemous.God mercifully gave us a revelation of things our fallen minds CANNOT grasp, it's really not a very good use of your mind to reject such a great gift.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, He's TOLD us how we are allowed to approach Him, we can't make it up for ourselves, find out first and then approach Him. He's GOD, after all, you CANNOT tell Him He has to put up with your "honesty" about thinking He is "evil" when it's a contradiction of His revelation that *HE*IS*GOOD* which all those who believe in Him affirm. He gave us His revelation but you think it's OK just to ignore it and require Him to obey YOU? That is NOT how it works. We do not judge God, He judges US. We do not judge His word, It judges US. You, in fact most here, talk about God as if He's somebody you have a right to push around. Wow, is that ever a scary mistake. Some Kings would have had you in the dungeon in a flash for anything near this sort of effrontery. He's awfully kind and merciful to you nevertheless, puts up with all your nonsense no doubt because it's so obvious how ignorant you are.Now if you are at least WILLING to give up your opinion and you approach Him with that much humility, and really do want to know the truth even if it contradicts everything you've always thought, I'm pretty sure you'd get answers to your questions. What confusion? You are unwilling to play by His rules, you want Him to play by yours, that's all that's going on here, no confusion.