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Author Topic:   What Do You Believe?
GDR
Member
Posts: 6202
From: Sidney, BC, Canada
Joined: 05-22-2005
Member Rating: 1.9


Message 26 of 26 (696098)
04-11-2013 9:42 PM


God always was, is now, and always will be a God of Love
I am a Christian. I am convinced that the resurrection of Jesus is an historical event. I believe that the resurrection confirms the message that Jesus delivered and that the Gospels represent the best efforts of His early followers to accurately describe what Jesus said and did.
I believe that the Bible is a tool that God uses to speak truth to us, however, to believe that it is divinely inspired word for word gives us a very inaccurate representation of God and His desires for us. A god that would be complicit in having His people slaughter the Caanaites and then tell us through Jesus that we are to love our enemies and that we are to be forgiven as we forgive, presents an unbridgeable impasse. If we are to attribute genocidal violence to God then we are negating all of the other loving attributes that we might see in Him.
The OT is primarily a collection of books that documents the faith of ancient Israel and their understanding of God. Through the Gospels we can see how Jesus continuously referred back to the Hebrew Scriptures both to clarify the true nature of God as well as to clarify what God was doing through Him.
The Epistles primarily were about establishing the church but also to flesh out Jesus’ message.
I use the Bible so that I better understand the Nature of God and to understand the history of what He has done and what He will do in broad terms, but I look to science to understand how it was accomplished. As I’ve said numerous times before I consider science as a natural theology, which interestingly enough, is consistent with what the Bible tells us.
I believe that as a Christians specifically, but also as humans generally we are called to reflect God’s love, peace, mercy, forgiveness, justice etc into all of creation. We are called to love all of mankind and to be loving stewards over all life which of course entails the planet in general.
I believe that in the end there will be perfect justice for all because I believe in a loving and just God. I don’t know how that looks. It is a matter of faith which all goes back to the resurrection. In the end all theists believe in the same god. It is simply our understanding of the nature of God. I worship the nature of God that has been shown to us in the person of Jesus Christ and then confirmed by God by the resurrection of that same Jesus.

He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8

  
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