Hi all,
Someone wrote, and Seal copied, "I can picture a God that created evolution being a God that is just as personal as a God involved in creationism."
Possibly, but it may not be his loving relationship that you are understating so much as his power. You see the bottom line, for this author, is that the God who can speak everything into 'perfect' creation in a matter of moments, is a wiser and more powerful god, than the one who must acquiesce to natural 'evolutionary' methods, and of course that god, didn't create everything 'perfect'. He just created a form which nature then took over and is currenty continueing to work out its perfection.
The God I know and love is the same God that Jesus spoke of when he cautioned people to fear not the one who can take our lives and then nothing more; but rather fear Him who can not only take our lives, but then cast our eternal being into the pit. There is a nature of God which we should fear, just as their is a nature of any judge that we should fear if we are wrongdoers and I'm confident that the Scriptures portray all created men as wrongdoers, save for the one who was able to make the acceptable sacrifice for my wrongdoing.
I'm a sinner. I accept that and I understand why. The nature of my flesh draws me into sin because I have always and still do struggle with the desires of my flesh. The 60's hippie culture hit it square on the head when they brought out the mantra, "if it feels good do it!" That is exactly what we, who have believed in the word of God as our testimony of God's revelation to His created, struggle with daily. Some of us are better at overcoming these desires than others, but it is a constant and daily struggle for God's children to be 'holy'. To be 'separate' from those following after the ways of the world which always seek to gratify the flesh. Even those who do great charitable deeds, apart from God, do it to gratify their feelings of being a good person.
So, while one may, although I have a hard time agreeing that the relationship of love is quite exactly the same for the one who sees all the creation as being made for just any purpose and initially only supporting wild animals and fauna, vs. the one who understands that all that God has made, from the farthest star of the universe to the microscopic cellular level of this earth, as having been made by a loving God who did it all for him who is a sinner. The love of that God, is far more powerful, deeper, stronger and intentional to this author.
God bless you all.
In Christ, Ted