If God loves us why is all reality an illusion?

[yeshuaslavejeff]

If God demands absolute certainty in an impossible statement then there is no hope.

Why would there be no hope ?

 

[DarkSoul999]

Why would there be no hope ?

Because I cannot force my brain to believe in something that directly contradicts all experience. If God was supposed to program people for believe in the impossible then I am literally a living glitch and a cosmic mistake.

 

[ViaCrucis]

It starts from the very beginning of the Bible where it describes the creation of the Earth in 7 literal days. I've tried very hard to find a way to reason around this but there is no way it is true unless this is intended to be poetic. "There was evening and there was morning" cannot be an accurate description of reality unless the writer received visions of a single day in between vast expanses of time. That would be totally rational. Or perhaps all of time is happening at once and the writer is trying to describe "God time" but a human can only understand it sequentially so he mentally divides it into 7 evenings and mornings witnessed in the vision. That is also very reasonable.

Bingo, it is poetic. "There was evening and there was morning" is a refrain. It's not about describing a literal-historical play-by-play of the material origins of the cosmos, but instead to speak about God as the Creator of all things who imbues His creation with purpose and significance. Pay attention to how the six days of creation are parallel; for example the first day is the separation of light and dark, day and night; whereas the fourth day is the creation of the sun, moon, and stars to inhabit and rule the day and night. Those parallels are consistent: day 2 is the separation of waters above and waters below, day 5 is the creation of flying things and swimming things to inhabit and rule the sky and seas.

There is also something of a temple parallel going on, as ultimately God is creating the abode in which He shall dwell, and the final act of creation is the creation of human beings, created in God's image--when building a temple the last act is the installment of an image of the god and the consecration of the temple; the creation of human beings in the first chapter of Genesis is, in essence, God placing His own image in His house and charging human beings with the task of taking care of God's creation, which seems to be a very priestly designation.

Now, obviously what I've said above is not going to be agreed to by all Christians as there are lots of Christians who do read the text very differently, and sometimes very literally; but what I've described above is a rather common perspective among many Christians from across many backgrounds.

I do not have enough of a background in history or ancient literature to understand this style of writing. If it is meant to be a purely literal read then there is no hope...the Bible is either an ancient fairy tale or God is a deceiver (not supported by scripture). I would prefer not to jump to either conclusion but....

Let's assume that Chapter 1 really is intended to be a literal description of reality over the course of a single week. Why would God make it totally impossible for us to verify this? 100% of evidence in nature supports an old Earth. Only people with zero scientific training or highly dishonest former scientists will say otherwise. So it would prove that God is a deceiver only out to test for blind faith. He would trick our eyes with such intensity that only those who can somehow get locked into psychological confirmation bias will be able to find salvation.

This is NOT consistent with the rest of the Bible. God does not create FAKE universes to test the faith of humanity. That is an incredibly cruel thing to do. Salvation is already difficult even if you don't have to question the accuracy of the Bible.

I don't know where to go with this. We cannot prove without a doubt that Genesis had poetic elements. There is no disclaimer at the bottom of the ancient text stating "this is a poem yall!". The author's intentions are mysterious. The only thing that we can determine with certainty is that God is described as the creator. If that was the ONLY intention for that passage then we are in the clear for all of this. The Bible is not required to give a detailed account of all creation. An abbreviated summary finished off with evening-morning period divider would work just fine but there is no way to know if this was intended.

If God loves us why can't he at least make chapter 1 a bit easier? Don't you think it is pretty essential to start off on the correct footing if you want someone to believe that Jesus died and came back to life to save your soul?

Note:
I have no idea what part of the forum this should go in but my faith is pretty weak so I'm putting it here

And some of those things are some of the reasons many Christians are unable to accept a woodenly literal reading of Genesis ch. 1; it's not the only reason (I actually think simple exegesis is sufficient here), but it is certainly a reason. The ramifications are such that if Genesis 1 is literal, then it runs contrary to the very real observations we see with our own eyes about the universe, if the universe was made all within a week less than 10,000 years ago then we have to address the fact that the data and observations of the universe show that not only is the universe magnitudes older than that, so is the earth. One attempt to explain away the discrepancy has been to assert the premise of "apparent age", things appear older than they are because God created them that way, but that is a terrible argument from a purely theological level because it amounts to God intentionally lying to us; and it results in the universe being--as you say--basically illusion. That isn't the God which Christianity believes in, that isn't the God our Scriptures talk about. It is, therefore, a wholly unacceptable position to take. And it should be very disconcerting that if in trying to defend a particular interpretation of a text we engage in blasphemous attacks on God's very character, there's clearly a problem then if we do that.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[DarkSoul999]

Oh really? (That's considered flaming here, but don't do it again and I'll let it ride)

You either believe literal creation or you don't. If you read the list of creation one could surmise that plants cannot live without sunshine and such for more than a few days... surely not millions of years.

I don't think your issue is with creation though. Your issue is believing in God. You cannot and will not be able to understand or have faith in God's Word until you have faith in God Almighty. (I suspect you have a god of something that you believe in, maybe it's yourself?)

God says, "For the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them for they are SPIRITUALLY DISCERNED. " You need the Holy Spirit to enlighten you for understanding.

I don't care if you find the truth offensive. This statement wasn't even controversial.

You have zero interest in trying to understand me or getting to know me. You just need a simple answer to condemn someone so you can relax and move on with your easy life. Just like many other people with easy lives.

I am already in perpetual unending torment and there is no hope of it ending. I hate myself and my existence is totally cursed. Other people are worth far more. I try to serve some useful function in society before God tosses my worthless defective soul into the burning pit.

I bet you will enjoy the show! Eternal bonfire!

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

Because I cannot force my brain to believe in something that directly contradicts all experience.

Don't even bother trying.

Someone lied to you about "experience". Stop believing them.

Then you can believe Jesus and turn to God to be taught.

Otherwise, if you still believe the man who lied to you,
just sit back and watch what happens to him. If you follow him, you will eventually end up where he ends up . Not a good thing.

 

[Kevin Snow]

Alright, you are asking an easy question and an honest question. So don't be afraid, God is able to answer you.

Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me? ~Jeremiah 32:27

Now the answer is sitting there right in front of your nose my friend, but follow me now and I'll show it to you. It's really just right there.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. ~Genesis 1:3-5
...
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. ~Genesis 1: 14-19

Do you see what I'm pointing out to you? It is quite clear. The morning and the evenings are mentioned for the first day just as in the fourth day. But it's in the fourth day in which God makes the sun and moon by which we understand our days. In the first day God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And so it was that these very things in that moment became the first evening and the first morning. Thus the first morning and the first day was a cosmic time, not a solar time. So also, the rest of the evenings and mornings were also cosmic times, not solar, human based times.

And this is all perfectly legal for him to do because after all, he is God, he can do whatever he wants. Remember the word:

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against Yahweh. ~Proverbs 21:30

—and Scripture cannot be broken— ~John 10:35

If you have any further questions, consider messaging me directly and by the grace of God I tell you God will give you an answer. For when it comes to the context of the framework you live in: the earth being old, that also is not actually true in the scientific community. All the dating technology used is based off of faulty physical principles and do not in fact give the true dates. But everything historically actually shows evidence for a young earth about 5700 years old. You can research the temperature of Jupiter for instance to prove this point easily.

Consider a cup of hot coffee sitting on the table. You don't know who set it there or why but you measure the room temperature and the temperature of the coffee and see that it is still quite hot. From this you can understand that whoever set it there must have set it there fairly recently. This is exactly the situation with Jupiter. Jupiter is very hot but it is cooling down. The rate at which it cools down shows that if our solar system was so very old, Jupiter would be an ice ball by now. But as it is it is not by far.

So consider the very essence of creation. When Adam and Eve were made, how old were they? Newborn infants, they were completely new. But wait, they weren't in fact babies were they? No, they were fully mature adults. So science would tell us that by the appearance of things, Adam and Eve were very old! But in fact, God made this universe fully mature, but young. And this is at once the proof of God's creation and handiwork.

Let all glory be given to God! Praise him in deed and in truth my friend.

If you are not firm in faith, then you will not be firm at all. ~Isaiah 7:9

 

[Sketcher]

If all of reality is an illusion, your question is meaningless.

 

[DarkSoul999]

Don't even bother trying.

Someone lied to you about "experience". Stop believing them.

Then you can believe Jesus and turn to God to be taught.

Otherwise, if you still believe the man who lied to you,
just sit back and watch what happens to him. If you follow him, you will eventually end up where he ends up . Not a good thing.

You might as well be talking in Chinese. First you say that my entire career in science was a dream and an illusion that never happened and all those experiments I did never happened. Then you say that once I accept that my entire life was an illusion (the blue pill) and once I accept a different physical plane of reality (the red pill) I end up in the "real world".

This is the script from the 1999 movie "The Matrix"....not The Bible.

 

[DarkSoul999]

If all of reality is an illusion, your question is meaningless.

Well....yea that is true. I'm in trouble either way.

 

[drjean]

I don't care if you find the truth offensive. This statement wasn't even controversial.

You have zero interest in trying to understand me or getting to know me. You just need a simple answer to condemn someone so you can relax and move on with your easy life. Just like many other people with easy lives.

I am already in perpetual unending torment and there is no hope of it ending. I hate myself and my existence is totally cursed. Other people are worth far more. I try to serve some useful function in society before God tosses my worthless defective soul into the burning pit.

I bet you will enjoy the show! Eternal bonfire!

Well we can talk like adults or you can continue to attack me. Your choice.
When did you get your mind-reading skills? MY easy life? Are you interested?

What is causing your torment? What do you need to help you?
There is hope...and you have enough of it that you began this thread.... God loves you. But you must come to Him and trust Him before you will avoid that burning pit. The fact that you are concerned means He is drawing you to Him.
Nothing else matters until you accept the GIFT Jesus' payment for sin ... and believe that He resurrected and lives so that you (and me) can live eternally with Him.

Do you talk to God (even in anger?_ that's ok He can handle it and says, "Come let us reason together.")

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

QUOTE="DarkSoul999, post: 72685790, member: 400849"]You might as well be talking in Chinese. First you say that my entire career in science was a dream and an illusion that never happened and all those experiments I did never happened. Then you say that once I accept that my entire life was an illusion (the blue pill) and once I accept a different physical plane of reality (the red pill) I end up in the "real world".

This is the script from the 1999 movie "The Matrix"....not The Bible.[/QUOTE

Unbelief is the one sin that leads to eternal judgment.
If you continue in unbelief, that is what you have coming.

If you continue to believe in that which is opposed to God every day,
if you continue to trust in anyone else (man/mankind/ science),
if you continue to think that men are somehow ever in any way smarter than God,

then there is no hope for you; not until you give all that up, if God Permits you,
and
TRUST IN GOD THE CREATOR and JESUS THE SAVIOR.

Until you do as God says, you will never have peace nor joy nor eternal life.

 

[Kevin Snow]

Darksoul999, I gave you answers to every one of your questions. Please read my response above if you haven't already.

 

[DarkSoul999]

Alright, you are asking an easy question and an honest question. So don't be afraid, God is able to answer you.

Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me? ~Jeremiah 32:27

Now the answer is sitting there right in front of your nose my friend, but follow me now and I'll show it to you. It's really just right there.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. ~Genesis 1:3-5
...
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. ~Genesis 1: 14-19

Do you see what I'm pointing out to you? It is quite clear. The morning and the evenings are mentioned for the first day just as in the fourth day. But it's in the fourth day in which God makes the sun and moon by which we understand our days. In the first day God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And so it was that these very things in that moment became the first evening and the first morning. Thus the first morning and the first day was a cosmic time, not a solar time. So also, the rest of the evenings and mornings were also cosmic times, not solar, human based times.

And this is all perfectly legal for him to do because after all, he is God, he can do whatever he wants. Remember the word:

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against Yahweh. ~Proverbs 21:30

—and Scripture cannot be broken— ~John 10:35

This was a fantastic response. Had you stopped here I might actually be able to sleep tonight and not need 15 shots of Vodka to contain the stress.

If you have any further questions, consider messaging me directly and by the grace of God I tell you God will give you an answer. For when it comes to the context of the framework you live in: the earth being old, that also is not actually true in the scientific community. All the dating technology used is based off of faulty physical principles and do not in fact give the true dates. But everything historically actually shows evidence for a young earth about 5700 years old. You can research the temperature of Jupiter for instance to prove this point easily.

Now I'm totally lost. The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that the Earth is a about 4.5 billion years old. This is based on a vast body of data in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology.

Also, the equations for radioactive decay are still valid and have plentiful real world applications. Unfortunately, one of them was the creation of the Atomic bomb. Go tell the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the science behind the bomb doesn't exist.

Why are you LYING to me?!

I probably won't sleep tonight. Work is going to be awful tomorrow (yea I work 7 days a week).

Consider a cup of hot coffee sitting on the table. You don't know who set it there or why but you measure the room temperature and the temperature of the coffee and see that it is still quite hot. From this you can understand that whoever set it there must have set it there fairly recently. This is exactly the situation with Jupiter. Jupiter is very hot but it is cooling down. The rate at which it cools down shows that if our solar system was so very old, Jupiter would be an ice ball by now. But as it is it is not by far.

Have you done calculations on this or are you just making this up? Emotions are not truth.

Parameterization of radiative heating and cooling rates in the stratosphere of Jupiter, Icarus | DeepDyve

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/729/1/32/pdf

So consider the very essence of creation. When Adam and Eve were made, how old were they? Newborn infants, they were completely new. But wait, they weren't in fact babies were they? No, they were fully mature adults. So science would tell us that by the appearance of things, Adam and Eve were very old! But in fact, God made this universe fully mature, but young. And this is at once the proof of God's creation and handiwork.

Let all glory be given to God! Praise him in deed and in truth my friend.

If you are not firm in faith, then you will not be firm at all. ~Isaiah 7:9

It shouldn't be a problem if humans were specially created apart from other lifeforms but we do have DNA and outright body parts that have no practical function. Example, humans have a vestigial tailbone and men have nipples. If God spontaneously created humanity he clearly doesn't want it to be obvious.

 

[DarkSoul999]

QUOTE="DarkSoul999, post: 72685790, member: 400849"]You might as well be talking in Chinese. First you say that my entire career in science was a dream and an illusion that never happened and all those experiments I did never happened. Then you say that once I accept that my entire life was an illusion (the blue pill) and once I accept a different physical plane of reality (the red pill) I end up in the "real world".

This is the script from the 1999 movie "The Matrix"....not The Bible.[/QUOTE

Unbelief is the one sin that leads to eternal judgment.
If you continue in unbelief, that is what you have coming.

If you continue to believe in that which is opposed to God every day,
if you continue to trust in anyone else (man/mankind/ science),
if you continue to think that men are somehow ever in any way smarter than God,

then there is no hope for you; not until you give all that up, if God Permits you,
and
TRUST IN GOD THE CREATOR and JESUS THE SAVIOR.

Until you do as God says, you will never have peace nor joy nor eternal life.

Well the good news is that it doesn't matter. I'm single, childless, and have vert few friends.

Nobody will care when God tosses my worthless soul into the furnace.

Humans wrote the Bible. It is not the word of God unless it contains information NOT available 4000 years ago.

The ONLY reason you believe is because of social conditioning. You do not believe for any other reason.

If I wanted to be in rebellion and reject God then explain WHY I would be writing in this forum for months and months? People who love sin and hate God have other things to do with their time.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

The ONLY reason you believe is because of social conditioning. You do not believe for any other reason.

Social conditioning ? Look around - all society is AGAINST TRUTH - opposed to JESUS and killing the followers of JESUS.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

If I wanted to be in rebellion and reject God then explain WHY I would be writing in this forum for months and months? People who love sin and hate God have other things to do with their time.

? I don't know? ocd? seeking 'comfort' even if sinful ?

never accepted the truth yet ? (not according to you posts )

Looking for support / a way out of the self-deception ?

 

[DarkSoul999]

Social conditioning ? Look around - all society is AGAINST TRUTH - opposed to JESUS and killing the followers of JESUS.

I have done the opposite but I still can't believe.

I am proof that God makes people by mistake and you are the monster who reminds me of the fact.

 

[DarkSoul999]

? I don't know? ocd? seeking 'comfort' even if sinful ?

never accepted the truth yet ? (not according to you posts )

Looking for support / a way out of the self-deception ?

You are a monster

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

You might as well be talking in Chinese.

As God says, the natural (dark) mind of man
CANNOT UNDERSTAND chin.... er anything spiritual (truth)
There is no way an unregenerate mind of man can understand the secret of lawlessness
unless Yahweh grants him the understanding - no, no way.
So of course it sounds foreign, like chinese...

 

[Kevin Snow]

You shall suck the milk of nations; you shall nurse at the breast of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. ~Isaiah 60:16

Ill answer each of your questions in reverse. Let's not lose ourselves with creating too many ideas. A flood of information will always be murky waters.

The words of a man’s mouth are deep waters; the fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook. ~Proverbs 18:4

So go slowly and don't create extra arguments, because this is easy for God remember? So lets keep it easy ourselves.

I did some research a while back, you can do some of your own about Jupiter. So we'll leave that there.

As for the dating, again, we must remember what we are talking about, God creating the universe in 7 days which were cosmic times.

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ~2 Peter 3:8

So this (2 Peter 3:8) is an example of poetry my friend, not a math equation. Those cosmic times can easily be trillions of years of our solar time if God so pleased to make it so. The problem with the dating is the context. When you date something on the basis of physical rates of decay, then you'll be getting let's say a cosmic approximation of that material but not actually how many solar days those things existed on earth and were functioning. So when the scientific community agrees something is old, they are doing it without the lens of scripture and are only seeing what Solomon said here:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. ~Ecclesiastes 3:11

So do you understand what this means? The big picture. Man, in the lens of his own sight cannot see what God has done. You HAVE to listen to God and believe in him. God MADE this universe to work that way and that's what scripture teaches us!

So again,

If you are not firm in faith, then you will not be firm at all.