You've missed the "Why?" in your description here. Rather an important thing to skip over, I think.
I already know why. If you admit my statement is true, why is irrelevant. The only why that need be asked is: Why do you require something (blood) you made yourself to appease yourself into accepting something (humans) you made yourself?
No, I don't think the "Why?" is irrelevant at all. God is holy and just. It's that simple. His own holiness and justice, which are a part of His essential nature, demand that our sin, our contravention of God's just and holy laws be punished. God would be neither holy nor just if He simply swept our sin aside and extended us mercy. Instead, God worked to satisfy His justice and holiness
and His love and mercy in the redemptive solution He achieved on the cross of Calvary. THere God met the demands of His own holy and just nature and the demands of His loving and merciful nature, too. God did not exempt Himself from the demands of His own justice. His sacrifice of Himself on the cross was done in order to be both just and merciful.
1.) God is not our Parent. He is our Creator. He does not become our Heavenly Father until we, by faith, accept His Son as our Saviour and Lord. If we do not, God relates to us only as a holy, wrathful Judge.
That's no defense. Whether or not he "adopts" me, he is still my creator and the sole reason I was born.
But your analogy proposed a child-parent relationship, which is not the relationship we share initially with our Creator. Only our acceptance of God's salvation bring us into such a relationship with Him.
3.) God has revealed Himself in a general way to all humanity through His Creation and through our innate moral sense. He has not vanished leaving no trace. He entered human history very directly in the person of Christ. So no one truly "grows up" without God. He is there and we know it, which is why we are held responsible for what we do with this knowledge.
The Mayans, the Egyptians, the Asians, the thousands of tribes all over the globe for many a millennium had no idea who Jesus was. All died worshiping gods that represented the creation you speak of. All had a moral compass and none of this has anything to do with my analogy.
Your analogy asserted the following:
"Parent: Makes a child (You) and then disappears, never revealing himself to child."
As an analogy of how God has dealt with us this is, as I pointed out above, not the case. God
has made Himself evident in Creation, in our Moral Sense, and finally through His Son.
We are responsible for what we do with the light we have, but ultimately people aren't sentenced to hell because they are
ignorant of the Gospel but because they have
sinned.
4.) God does not judge us and threaten punishment simply because we have been "childish." Far from it. We stand under God's wrathful judgment because we have contravened the holy, just law of the Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe.
I disagree. I was born. Nothing more. This makes my analogy spot on: the parent returns to punish the adult for acting as he was created.
God does not punish us for acting as we were created to act. We were created to be in fellowship with God, not to live in a self-serving, sinful way. And when we turn our backs on our Creator, and live as we please, and sin, we fall under His judgment.
God does not demand our love and allegiance in a vacuum. He does not say, "Love me or die." Instead, He has gone to enormous lengths to demonstrate to us that He loves us. This is the heart of the Gospel.
Actually, all evidence points to the contrary. Love me or die is precisely the message. Also, what are these enormous lengths? Even if Jesus is the true son of god it's not saying much. On a scale of time and population, your god revealed himself to a tiny fraction of a percent of people for what is essentially a millionth of second on the world clock. Before that, he occasionally revealed himself only to the Jewish people, who were too busy killing rivals to win them over for Jesus. After to his temporary death on the cross, no one has seen or heard of him. So what do you mean by enormous lengths?
The enormous lengths to which God has gone to save us from our own wickedness begin with the setting aside of His heavenly glory and power, then humiliating Himself in taking on human flesh, then living as a servant to the creatures who despised Him and ridiculed Him, and who finally killed Him in a most cruel and savage fashion on a cross. Incredibly, though God was in no way obliged to do any of this, He did. He would have been fully within His rights as a holy, just Creator-God to simply send every sinner straight to hell. But God, as the Bible tells us, is also a loving and mericful God and so, in an effort to satisfy both His justice
and His love He died on a cross to atone for our sin.
The Good News of what God has done to save us from our sin in the person of His Son has spread around the world. It can be heard on radio, on t.v. and the internet, or one can read of it in any of the millions of Bibles that exist. While Christ only lived for a relatively short time on the Earth, he is still known and followed centuries later. It seems that additional, regular, world-wide appearances have not been necessary.
I would correct you, though, about your claim that Christ was not seen after his death. In fact, the apostles saw a resurrected Jesus, and Paul the apostle reports that Christ also appeared to himself and a crowd of about five hundred people before he ascended to heaven. Over the centuries, too, many have claimed to have encountered Jesus in visions and dreams. Many Muslims converting to Christianity today have claimed to have met Jesus this way.
What sacrifice? How does an immortal being sacrifice himself? I'll die to save your life right now if I know I'm coming back to say goodbye before I spend thousands of years in paradise. Again, what does this have to do with my analogy?
Your analogy stated:
"You: Accept his terms because you don't wish to be burned."
To which I responded when I wrote,
"Many people "accept God's terms" because they recognize the tremendous love He has shown them in the sacrifice of His Son on the cross for them, not simply because they hope to escape punishment."
I'm not sure what your complaints above have to do with the effectiveness or legitimacy of Christ's atonement for our sin. Jesus sacrificed himself as the God-man. He experienced the pain of crucifixion and death just as you or I would. How does the fact that he was resurrected diminish this?
8.) God speaks to me personally every day in His Word, the Bible, which His Spirit illuminates to me as I study it. God is not silent, nor is He distant.
That's awesome for you. I wish I knew how to make that happen for me, but again, What does this have to do with my analogy? All 8 points were supposed to be a demonstration to me of how my analogy wasn't fair. It seems my analogy was very fair.
It wasn't that your analogy wasn't "fair" but that it was a poor parallel to that which it was intended to analogize. You attempted in your analogy to characterize the relationship between God and humanity but did it very poorly - as my points explained.
The result is the same. Offering someone a choice of eternal life or endless torment IS the same as terrifying you into obedience. One of your fellow christians already admitted that in a previous post in this very thread.
If you are hiking into the mountains and a passing Ranger tells you that trail #1 is safe, and enjoyable, and has a spectacular view but warns you that trail #2 leads to danger and very likely death for any who travel it, is he merely "terrifying you into obedience"? It seems to me his warning demonstrates a certain measure of concern for you. He is not trying to
threaten you into taking trail #1; he is trying to
protect you from the harm of trail #2. The Ranger also intends, not just to keep you from harm, but to urge you to a path that will maximize your hiking pleasure. Clearly, then, the Ranger does nothing evil in presenting you with the potential outcomes of the hiking trail you choose to follow. In the same way, God warns us of the final consequences of the life-path we choose to follow. All paths that lead away from Him end in utter disaster but the path of fellowship with Him leads to "life everlasting." In telling us this, God shows us His
love, not a tyrannical desire for obedience. How warped your view of God has become that you see the good that He does only as evil.
I'll gladly serve him. All he need do is reveal himself to me. I've been searching a very long time. (Which incidentally, is why I know so much about your Bible and your god.)
God must reveal Himself to all who would be His children. But He may not do so in the manner in which you expect or desire.
I don't see that you "know much" about the Bible or the God revealed in it... Your analogy indicates rather the opposite.
It seems to me that if god truly wanted to give us a fair shot at being with him, he could do a whole lot better than showing up one time in the middle of human history and leaving behind a book that even his followers can't agree on.
What God has done to reveal Himself to humanity has been more than enough for many millions of Christians. I don't see, then, that God has to do more. In any case, Christ
will return one day and reveal himself to the world in person but it will be too late to avoid the consequence of one's denial of him at that point.
Oh come on. What evil? Being born? Acting on the human impulses that he gave us?
I don't know of any place in the Bible that says that we do evil in being born, or in acting upon the various fleshly impulses that are intrinsic to being human. Sin is, fundamentally, the contravention of the command of God. When we pursue our impulses a
t the expense of following the command of our holy Creator, it is then that we sin. And you - just like everyone else - is guilty of doing this many times.
Also, I do act with truly selfless love. I would never burn my son or even you for denying me love and affection. Never.
But you aren't God. You aren't anywhere even close. What God demands of us He demands as our
Creator and Sustainer. Why should you be free to call the shots in
God's universe? What's more, your standard of holiness, of moral purity, and your understanding of justice are not informed by perfection and omniscience as God's is. His justice and holiness are
perfect; your sense of these things is warped and darkened by your own selfishness and weakness as a sin-prone human being. The reasons why God judges our sin as He does and why you would not are not clarified by trying to compare yourself to God.
One, it's not my story, and two, just because you make a claim does not make it true. The story shows that the overwhelming majority of people on this planet have more forgiveness and mercy in their hearts than your god has shown to billions of souls who have found themselves in hell -- never knowing who he was or why they had arrived.
But this "story" is utterly
fictional and makes
enormous assumptions about what people would do in regards to forgiveness and mercy. The story is not true in any sense. It cannot, then, serve as a basis for asserting anything objectively true about humanity
or God.
Also, how do you know people arrive in hell totally ignorant as to why?
Selah.
