Tough Question

[Malakar]

What does light have to do with darkness?

What are yoou saying, exactly?

 

[Biarien]

I get the impression that he's saying Christians should not respond to anti-Christian points of view, which is entirely un-Biblical. I hope I'm wrong though.

 

[Lay down all]

I don't think that's exactly what he was saying.

But by looking at the words you've used maybe he was talking of ANTI christians, as in anti-Christs.
These people hold no truth, they are in darkness, it's our job to try to pull them out.
They are against the love of God, they can't help us with their views.
We are to pulll them into the light not be dragged back into the darkness by listening to their words which oppose all God tells us.
When you start listening to the world and take their words as truth it causing doubt on Gods word and even rejection of it, thinking the world holds answers over Gods Word.
Gods Word gives us the answers to Gods word, mans word gives us the answer of man.
And the answers of man when He's not of God is to reject God.

Let me ask you malakar, where did it lead you listening to the atheists word as if it held some truth?

They tried to discredit God and blaspheme Him as some feeble human with insecurities, they tried to get you to doubt Gods word and follow theirs even though they are the lost, why would you follow lost.
Why would you beleive someone who insults God in such a way.
Don't look to the unGodly to show you the light of Gods Word, for they can only drag you into the darkness, God will show you His way, but that takes putting off the influences of the world, don't let them drag you back into their world.

 

[HomeBound]

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements. Ultimately I've come to the realization that I will follow God no matter what people say, and I will follow him even when I don't understand his ways. But we shouldn't ignore an argument like that, because people who make this kind of argument will only be confirmed that Christians are closed minded.

I do believe that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than our strength, so we won't understand the reasons for the things he does until we go to Heaven.

What did you look at only one of my posts?

1) Who cares what atheists are confirmed of? They will make assessments like that no matter what. You can have a brilliant argument with an atheist, and they will still come to their same preconceived conclusions. It's all I see on these forums. I'm not saying that it should be a general practice to ignor them, but when they make you question God (which is what is clearly happening to you) then for the sake of your faith you need to ignor them.

2) You managed to respond to one of my posts, but ignor the question I have asked twice already. Where in the Bible does it say that if we don't love God........ We go to Hell?

3) Are you trying to be difficult?

 

[Malakar]

What did you look at only one of my posts?

1) Who cares what atheists are confirmed of? They will make assessments like that no matter what. You can have a brilliant argument with an atheist, and they will still come to their same preconceived conclusions. It's all I see on these forums. I'm not saying that it should be a general practice to ignor them, but when they make you question God (which is what is clearly happening to you) then for the sake of your faith you need to ignor them.

2) You managed to respond to one of my posts, but ignor the question I have asked twice already. Where in the Bible does it say that if we don't love God........ We go to Hell?

3) Are you trying to be difficult?

1) The same goes for Christians like you. Did you notice that? I want you to understand Job questioned God too. Jesus said Ask and you shall recieve, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be open unto you. Right now I'm seeking.

2) I am very sorry for ignoring your question. It's the first commandment God gave us, love the Lord your God with all you heart, mind soul, and strength. Maybe I was off color with the love comment, but God does require our worship and praise. I do not understand this. I know that when I do praise God in singing, I feel better, but I still don't understand. When it comes to worshipping God by caring for others and loving your neighbor, that I understand completely. Singing and praising God is a mystery to me.

3) Yes!! I play devil's advocate sometimes, but this time I am really seeking.

 

[Lay down all]

maybe you should stop being the devils advocator and try to be Gods more.

The question is do you desire to worship God, do you not think He should be worshipped?

How can you worship God when you don't worship God, God is God, He is great there is nothing and no one that even comes close to His greatness, can you know God and not want to worship Him, can you love God as God and not want to worship Him.

Love comes from worshipping God, love is of God and without loving God and wanting His love then where does our love come from.
For can you love you neighbour without loving God.
For if you love with only what you decide is love and righteous, then who's love is it, and is such an unperfect being capable of love by his unperfect judgement.
Is a person trapped in sin capable of love when they welcome sin upon one another.
For if one trapped in sin is not convicted or it's sinfulness then how can he want any better for his fellow man, he knows no better for he's blinded by his sin.
The blind lead the blind, but why do you desire to be led by the blind.

Can you not trust God to show you the truth, why do you listen to words of one who knows not the truth who speaks against the Truth.

 

[Malakar]

Thank you for your help.

Playing 'devil's advocate' is a figure of speech. I am really not on the side of the devil. These are some honest questions I really do have. I do enjoy worshipping God. I just want to know why he needs our worship. I want to be deeper in my understanding of God's love. If I ignore tough questions like that atheist's I'm not going deeper. If I can't challenge it by looking into the reasons atheists don't believe Jesus even existed or the 'contradictions' they point out in the Bible, I am not going deeper if I ignore them.
Anyhow talking to you has answered some questions I've had and I thank you for that.

 

[Joesmith78]

Does Being Loved Mean Being Made Much Of?



For many people, this is not obviously an act of love. They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.



This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God – and savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors.



Pathological at the Grand Canyon



The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but of self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves. And each of these rare and precious moments in life – beside the Canyon, before the Alps, under the stars – is an echo of a far greater excellence, namely the glory of God. That is why the Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).



Sometimes people say that they cannot believe that, if there is a God, he would take interest in such a tiny speck of reality called humanity on Planet Earth. The universe, they say, is so vast, it makes man utterly insignificant. Why would God have bothered to create such a microscopic speck called earth and humanity and then get involved with us?



Beneath this question is a fundamental failure to see what the universe is about. It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself. And he says it for us to learn and enjoy – namely, that he is infinitely great and powerful and wise and beautiful. The more the Hubble Telescope sends back to us about the unfathomable depths of space, the more we should stand in awe of God. The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God. And it is an understatement. But the point is not to nullify us but to glorify him.



Loving People Means Pointing Them to the All-Satisfying God.



Now back to what it means to be loved. The idea has been almost totally distorted. Love has to do with showing a dying soul the life-giving beauty of the glory of God, especially his grace. Yes, as we will see, we show God’s glory in a hundred practical ways that include care about food and clothes and shelter and health. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).



Every good work should be a revelation of the glory of God. What makes the good deed an act of love is not the raw act, but the passion and the sacrifice to make God himself known as glorious. Not to aim to show God is not love, because God is what we need most deeply. And to have all else without him is to perish in the end. The Bible says that you can give away all that you have and deliver your body to be burned and have not love (1 Corinthians 13:3). If you don’t point people to God for ever-lasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life



Is Eternal Life a Heaven Full of Mirrors



Now think what this means for God’s love. How shall God love us? Mere logic could give us the answer: God loves us best by giving us the best to enjoy forever, namely himself, for he is best. But we are not dependent on logic alone. The Bible makes it clear. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). What is eternal life? It is to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ. No thing can satisfy the soul. The soul was made to stand in awe of a Person – the only person worthy of awe. All heroes are shadows of Christ. We love to admire their excellence. How much more will we be satisfied by the one Person who conceived all excellence and embodies all skill, all talent, all strength and brilliance and savvy and goodness. This is what I have been trying to say. God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever.



Or consider the way the apostle Peter says it. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Why did God send Christ to die for our sins? “That he might bring us to God” – to himself. God sent Christ to die so that we could come home to the all-satisfying Father. This is love. God’s love for us is God’s doing what he must do, at great cost to himself, so that we might have the pleasure of seeing and savoring him forever. If it is true, as the Psalmist says to God, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11), then what must love do? It must rescue us from our addiction to self and bring us, changed, into the presence of God.



Are You Being Used?



So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into this world’s distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making much of him forever?


Suppose you answer, “I want to be free from self and full of joy in God; I want to enjoy making much of God, not me. And I want the fullness of joy to last forever.” If you responded this way, then you will also have an answer to the fear I mentioned earlier, that you are just being used by God when he creates you for his glory. Now we see that in creating us for his glory, he is creating us for our highest joy. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.



God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act. Anyone who exalts himself distracts from what we need, namely, God. But if God exalts himself, he calls attention to the very thing we need most for our joy. If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, “Look! Look at me. I am the reason you are here.” And when you look and exult in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy would be full. You would not complain that the paintings should have kept quiet. They rescued you from wasting your visit. In the same way no child complains, “I am being used” when his father delights to make the child happy with his own presence.



(“Don’t Waste Your Life,” John Piper, Crossway Books, 2003, pgs 33-36)

I believe this passage from John Piper's book succinctly addresses the discussion here. I strongly recommend you pick up his book.



I apologize, admins, for such a long excerpt, but I felt it necessary to get the context. If this is too long for copyright reasons, please delete.

 

[Lay down all]

Devils advocate can mean what it says, for the world speaks what the devil teaches them, he gives them words to justify their sin and they should be foolish to the believer, it's Gods Word we are to advocate, it's Gods Word we are to trust.

I understand you seeking, but the world doesn't have the answers the world doesn't speak Gods word they speak their own.
They will put doubts on His Word and make it harder for you, seek His Word for the answers not theirs.

1Jo 4:4 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.
1Jo 4:5 They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.
1Jo 4:6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.

For if we don't worship God for His glorious gifts, for the great God He is, then have we any respect for anything He's given and offers us.
Have we any respect and love for the Almighty if we don't desire to worship Him.
Remember God is not a man, He's not foolish and sinful like us, our foolishness and sin comes from turning from Him.
He posseses all greatness, He doesn't posses the sinful emotions that we find in man.

What He offers us is great there is nothing better we can posses than that which is of God, to praise God for His greatness proves where our heart lays.

Maybe God searches the hearts of men to see who does truly worship Him, in Spirit and truth and not by how we may desire to worship Him, but how He has set it out from the beginning of creation to be worshipped.

Does God need it, maybe not, but we do.

 

[Lay down all]

Malakar, don't misunderstand me, i'm not saying you should not or not beable to answer the questions the world throws at you, for you should.
But what i'm trying to say is that you shouldn't listen to it as if it has any value, for it is foolishness and should be recogmized as that by what Gods Word teaches you.

Your word when you speak of God will be dispised by many of them, but some of your Words of God will convict their hearts and they will hear the truth of what you preach, not by speaking their words but by speaking the Word of God which will not be accepted by all.

You should have the answers and will by continuing in His Word, but the Word you then speak of Him is not going to be the answer they want to hear, and is not going to be a word spoken in the same kind of foolishness so that all the foolish will understand, for the Word of God convicts the heart and the life they live in as sinners.
The Word of God is not tainted by their words where as they praise one another in their foolishness, but the Word of God is above the foolishness of man, and is a Word that can save them from it and not give them answers to stay in it.
By all means seek the answers, but not of man but of God.
And some things are not even important to know, but seek to know what can save another, and be prepared to lay down all of what you once maybe believed and sought after, and give your life to God as a servant of His, not as one in bondage but as one freed from all.

 

[Malakar]

Thanks Lay down all, but Joesmith answered the question just fine. And You still haven't convinced me to ignore anything. If this is truth, which I firmly believe it is, we should be able logically argue for it.

 

[Lay down all]

Yes i agree Joesmiths post was a great post.

I haven't told you to ignore anything but to see it as what it is, for lies show you what's true and what's true shows you what's a lie, they don't go together to be mingled together but point each other out very clearly.

Yes we are to be able to answer to the lies with the truth, but what is truth is what God shows us not what the world regards as truth.
Even though their lies can point out the truth as truth and show their lies for lies, but their lies is not to be regarded as truth.

 

[Serapha]

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements.

Hi there!




That is an excellent philosophy for debate forums, but this isn't a debate forum....

God's egoistic tendencies are something that I find quite absurd. I'm not clear why such a conception of an all-powerful being would be so full of itself and have such strong desire to be praised, worshipped, and feared by relatively insignificant and pathetic human creatures from a tiny blue dot in the outter edge of this little galaxy. It just doesn't make sense to me, and I smell a rat here. It seems implausible, and sounds fabricated to me, so much so that I have a hard time anyone could fall for it.
There is a part that has been omitted here, and that part is that God wants our voluntary love and worship. That is why God created a creature that has free will as well as the redemptive ability to be reconciled to God without a concept of love, but simply by fact... that one places their hope in Jesus Christ.




... But why would a god show such tendencies? Shouldn't a god be above such egoistic desires? I would think that it would be.


God has no "needs" from humankind. He created angels to administer to all of the "needs" of heaven. It isn't about "power" but about achieving those things which are eternal.


If there were a god, one with the ability to spawn universes and forge life, it *knows* it's god, its got to be secure in its own power and godliness (there is nothing greater than itself), so what sort of gradification could such a powerful being derive from the coerced devotion and admiration of us little humans on this relatively insignificant rock floating around this insignificant little star?

Free will is not coerced devotion... but voluntarily recognizing the Creator as the Creator.



And why would it feel the need to create humans in the first place just so they can glorify its ego? Could a "god" really show such human-like pettiness and egoism? I find that extremely hard to believe


Angels glorify God, therefore, the worship is not about "ego".... which is an earthy concept. With God, everything is spiritual... off the plane of earthly concepts.

 

[Malakar]

Yeah the reason I posted it here, was because I only wanted Christians to respond.

 

[Tam4givin]

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements. Ultimately I've come to the realization that I will follow God no matter what people say, and I will follow him even when I don't understand his ways. But we shouldn't ignore an argument like that, because people who make this kind of argument will only be confirmed that Christians are closed minded.

I do believe that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than our strength, so we won't understand the reasons for the things he does until we go to Heaven.

God has no foolishness! God has no weakness! God does what he does for us because he knows what is best for us!

 

[Malakar]

God has no foolishness! God has no weakness! God does what he does for us because he knows what is best for us!

You missed the point. Go look at 1 Cor. 1:25. Now quit arguing before I go Bible Ninja on j00!!

 

[aagard]

we r here because that is what God wants, He is God, if u were God u would make the rules. God does not make u love him he made u free willed creature with a choice. yes God will send u to hell if u do not obey Him. i have been serving the lord for over 21 years now and i still do not undrstand much about Him i understand why we r here and what God wants but Him i do not understand. i do not know what else to tell u