Question: Which mother loved her children?
One mother had two sons. One listened to her, and was obedient. She told him to be kind, and to help anyone who asks for help. The other, she told the same, to be kind, and to help others, but he did not listen. He was disobedient. When the two grew up, the obedient one was kind, and selfless. The other was cruel, and even stole from those who asked him for help.
The other mother also had two sons. One was obedient, and the other was not. She told them both, as the other mother did, to be kind, and to help all those who ask for help. The one showed he was of a disobedient mind, so she chained him up before he was a man, and threatened to bind the other brother if he didn’t continue to obey.
We ask God why He allows such terrible things in the world, why He doesn’t stop all the evil that is done.
But we don’t want Him enslaving us either.
We cannot blame God for giving us all the right to choose, just because of those that used their freedom of choice to hurt us.
Any mother who would chain up one child, and threaten the other with chains, we would hate and call a terrible mother.
Yet even when a good mother has a son who commits crimes and is evil in our eyes, we say she did not do enough.
If a human walks past another human who is chaining up their child, or beating them, or raping them, the human rushes to help. Maybe they attack the abuser, maybe they call the police.
God watches abuse happen and does nothing to stop it. We seem to hold God, who is more powerful and intelligent than we are, to lower standards than we hold other humans. That’s unfair.
You don’t blame a homeless man for causing pollution while million dollar companies pour heaps of toxic waste into the sea. So why should we blame weak humans when a powerful god could do so much more, and yet doesn’t?
So God should enslave us, because of those of us who chose wrong?
If God saves some of us from one wrong choice, then to be fair, He has to save ALL of us from ALL the wrong choices.
Do you want free will? Or do you want God to choose for all of us?
Do the police enslave us when they stop crimes?
There’s a difference between “rushing to help someone in trouble” and “brainwashing people to only do what you want”
Actually, they do.
A lot of arrests end up in someone losing their freedom either for a short period, or for their entire lives.
God is not a person like us. He has to be fair, and just. He does not act based on our own interpretations of good and evil, He acts on the true meaning of good, with the true response to evil.
He is not just a person walking by who hears a cry for help, He is a God who has said we all can choose, and when our life in this world is over, we must answer for all the choices we made.
He is a Judge, and a Healer, and a Father. He is not a puppet master who acts upon our human interpretations of right and wrong, controlling us whenever we want to make a decision.
A Judge is who the criminal faces when he’s been caught, and a Doctor answers to those who call Him for healing, and a good Father does not enslave His children. He let’s them choose, offers guidance, and loves them in spite of their choices, and comforts them if they choose to go to Him.
The criminal does not remain in the presence of the judge if he is sentenced, the sick do not remain in the presence of the doctor if they refuse treatment, and the son does not remain in his father’s house if he rejects him.
If his idea of fair and just is letting kids get raped, not a big fan.
That’s not even including all the things that people don’t choose but are bad anyway. Earthquakes and tornadoes and volcanoes and droughts and stuff. There is no man who you can point at and say “He caused that, it’s his choice”.
Or maybe what is fair, is that He paid for all of those sins against everyone, felt all the pain of mankind all at once.
Not just the physical pain, but the pain and suffering of every choice against the innocent, every choice everyone made against themselves. Every choice to lie, murder, rape, steal, and all the wickedness and wretchedness that we all had to offer, He paid for, both with physical suffering, and the suffering that all that the consequences of sin had to offer.
Because the God of all creation saw everything all at once, and knew what it would take to save us without taking that freedom away from us; and He knew that the solution, was to suffer it all at once, and intimately know our pain for Himself.
I don’t know much about earthquakes, but I do know that when a choice was made to define good and evil for ourselves, the whole earth suffered the choice.
But so did God, through His Son, who felt all the pain of humanity at once, and suffered for it, so that we don’t have to suffer forever. He chose that.
He chose to pay for what we would have paid for, and all we have to do is accept that He did that for us.
All we have to do is love our neighbor and enemy alike. All we have to do is build a relationship with Him, and love Him.
Or we don’t.
You can live life as you always have, or you can choose to believe differently.
But the only reason the “why others still believe when you don’t” matters is because the answers you’ve gotten so far make it harder to keep making the same decisions you always have.
Do you really want the truth? Or do you want to be comfortable with the way you live your life now?
I think what peasant wants is for the Almighty to act in accordance to his idea of morality. Ie, “get rid of them but not me.” Because if we ask for God to get rid of all wrong doings on earth, we must be prepared to be gotten rid of as well: for we are just as guilty as any other sinner.
“But saying bad things to anonymous people online isn’t the same as raping children” he argues. Says who? Who decides which sins are “less evil” or “more evil” than others? Not God; He sees all sin as equally distancing us from Him. Jeshua said that he who is angry at his neighbor without cause or insults his neighbor is guilty of punishment .
The real question is not “why doesn’t God get rid of all sin”, but “how do we conduct ourselves between now and the end of the world, when God does get rid of sin?”
The Viking Blog 