Originally posted by AdventChild
i'm sry ....i think God is just an idea...as well as the devil and most other religions....so and idea can't stop believing in us because it's an idea created by man....
You can...You can believe God is just an idea...The way people have screwed up the idea sometimes it's easier to just believe that...
For me, I know there is something I'm apart of and it's apart of me...It's in everything I touch, it communicates with me through experiences and I believe it is God in some form.
Originally posted by AdventChild
Just shut up already....If God loved us why should we prove ourselves worthy....If he's almighty and powerful then why didn't he know that Lucifer was going to turn against him.... if he's so great why doesn't he do anything about the innocent dying and all the suffering people....I stopped believing in him cause he stopped believing us.....
God did know that Satan (Lucifer is NOT the correct term and is very, very mistakenly taken to be the name of Satan) was going to turn against Him. He knew you were going to do the same. Satan was allowed to turn against God out of Love, as were you. It is a purely human expression to say that if you really love someone you will love them enough to let them go, and it is true. God wants us to be able to do what we want and to have freedom.
When I was younger, we had a dog. He was inherited to my family, and they did not dislike him but he was more a burden than anything, and they did not love him. I did. They required him to spend his life chained up on a 6 foot leash, chained to a chair his entire life, other than when we walked him. This is not love. They took care of him, fed him, took him to the vet, and had him groomed, but they clearly did not love him.
When I was MUCH younger, too young to remember, my family had another dog that was not inherited and was their own. He was allowed to roam the house, and was not on a leash. They loved him. Now it made it so that he could harm them (by chewing stuff up, urinating on the carpet, etc.), or that he could get harmed (by going somewhere unsafe due to his lack of restraint). He eventually did get hurt; he escaped and got hit by a car and died.
The fact is, however, that the first dog was kept tied up out of a lack of love, whereas the second was let free out of love. This is the same with God. He lets us be free, and have free will. He lets us do this, even though we can hurt ourselves (by killing one another, by letting ourselves or others wind up in poverty, by making choices that send us to hell), and we can hurt Him (by rejecting Him, by persecuting those who believe in Him).
This is why suffering exists. Additionally, it exists because it doesn't matter! In the end the suffering of this earth does not matter one bit. We do not suffer on this earth out of punishment from God (other than those times He does choose to punish us), but the following example holds true. When a parent punishes a child, the parent knows the child is suffering. The parent does not stop the child's suffering because of this, because the parent knows that the suffering does not matter in the end. In the end, the child will learn something which will help it be safer and more succesful in life. The parent knows that the child will be better off in the end and that the suffering doesn't matter. God lets us suffer because it doesn't matter at all; only what comes after life truly matters.
Furthermore, it is not God that makes us suffer, but ourselves and Satan. We make choices to lead to our suffering, and Satan encourages us to make these choices. God cannot stop it because he is a righteous and faithful God. He has promised us all free will. If God chooses to keep people safe from the suffering caused by terrorists, then he is not following His promise to the terrorists that they may have free will. To do anything else requires God to play favorites, and to treat some different from others. He cannot because it is not righteous to do so, and it is not fair to treat me one way and you another. It is not right to promise Saddam Hussein free will and then go back on that promise because He does not like what Saddam is doing. That would be like a parent telling a young child that she can spend her $5 in birthday money on anything she wants, and then not letting her buy something because ithe parent does not like it, only much worse. You may say that the parent is only doing that because he or she is wiser than the child and is trying to protect the child, but that is a HUMAN reaction, one that is still wrong, and one that still requires the breaking of a promise. God is perfect and cannot break a promise as this would be imperfection and it would be wrong. Even the most minor wronghood is something God cannot do because He cannot do any wronghood, not matter how small.
Hell was not made for us. It was not made for humans. It was made for Satan and his demons (other fallen angels). The only way we can end up there is by telling God that we want to go there. By rejecting God, that is what we are telling Him. He made Heaven for us. This is the key. God has made two places.... Heaven, for us, and Hell, for Satan. Once we die we must go to one or the other. When we reject God, we reject His gift of Heaven. Why?
We can choose to be one of two things: dependant on God, or independant of Him. When we believe, we accept what He is, and we know that we are dependant on Him. When we choose not to believe, for whatever reason, whether we are mad at Him, or just belive He does not exist, we are saying that we are fine on our own. We are saying that we can take care of ourselves and don't need anyone to do it for us. Now some parents are different and cut children off earlier, but for most people, we reach the age where we are old enough to support ourselves, but our parents still want to pay for our haircuts and provide us with health insurance, and especially clothing and food. Most of the time we accept these things. Some teenagers become so set on being independant, and refuse to accept food, clothing, anything from their parents.
Even though these parents are forever standing with their hands out, food and clothing being offered freely, the children want to support themseleves. Why? Perhaps they don't want to feel bound to their rules. Perhaps they just want to feel like they are not dependant on them. Either way, the food is there, the clothes are there, but it is simply not taken.
When we say we are independant from God, this is what we are doing. He is literally standing there offering to us all He has to give, and we simply say we don't want it. Maybe we don't want to follow his rules. Do we say that a parent does not love us because they want us to folow rules? Of course not. We know that (other than a few crazy parents here and there) their rules are designed because they know what is best for us and their rules are for our own good, even if we don't understand why. [Did you know that God required the Jews to be circumcised on the 8th day of life? They did not know why, to the ancient people it seemed like a random rule; this does not mean it was not for their own good. Today, we know that the blood in a baby coagulates best on the 8th day. Not the 7 days before, none of the days after, but on the 8th day. God's rule was for their own good.] Nobody would say a parent does not love a child because the parent has rules. Maybe we are saying that we want to be independant from God. Either way, He is standing there, even more so He is walking up to us and asking us to take what He is offering and we are simply saying no!
God Loves you even now. You can say the most horrible things about Him and He still loves. There is nothing you can do that will turn him away from you. It is never too late, no matter what you have done. If you are stubborn, or won't turn to God because you have not for so long, it doesn't matter. He Loves you.... He Loves you.
God Bless You
Originally posted by debbiejo
I believe He loves everyone...And wouldn't send anyone to hell. WHY? because it's not in His nature. A perfect God wouldn't send ANY of His creation away just because it's imperfect or never heard of Jesus...That would make Him imperfect and have human tendencies which are flawed.
Your right, God doesn't send us to Hell. It is an object chosen by those who don't want to be with him. That's all it is. That's the only reason why he made. God's all about freedom of choice. So after you live your life, based about the way you lived, he gives you two options. You can reign with me in paradise, or sperate yourself from me, and live in torment. He's basically making the choice for you, but you wouldn't believe the amount of people who take the ladder...
Originally posted by debbiejo
I knew you'd say that...Again, people don't go into torment...that is a creation of the Roman Church...The weeping and gnashing of teeth does NOT remotely suggest eternal torment...
Why torture yourself.
It's good to know that you know me that well. 😉
Why does one weep and knash teeth? I always thought in the presence of great pain. Why torture yourself? Because some people are that stupid...
Originally posted by debbiejo
I believe He loves everyone...And wouldn't send anyone to hell. WHY? because it's not in His nature. A perfect God wouldn't send ANY of His creation away just because it's imperfect or never heard of Jesus...That would make Him imperfect and have human tendencies which are flawed.
There are many trains of thought on this idea.
Some believe that it is the belief in God as a person knows Him that matters. By this thought, some African tribe would be fine because they believe and trust in what they think of as God. I don't go for this one.
Some theologians (actually the first was Catholic bishop) have suggsted that when a person dies, he or she is brought before God and given the entire truth about creation and given the choice to choose. This is based on a few things. For one, the Bible says several times that all men will hear the truth. Secondly, God is out of time. He is not constrained by the bounds of time, and therefore a choice made at death (when we too would be in some way outside of time, though in a lesser way to God) would be just as good as a choice any other time (although this does not enable one who has heard the truth in life to go through life rejecting it purposefully knowing he can just change his mind at death). I kind of like this idea. I am not sure if it is true, but it could be.
The bottom line is we don't know a thing compare to God, so He could do it any way. I think everyone has to choose, and can condemn themselves to Hell, BUT I also believe everyone is actually given that choice at some point.
This also could start to get into the Calvanist/Arminian debate, one which I have no interest in digging up!
Though when studying the "concept of Hell", it is clear to me, that it doesn't exist. It was expounded and elaborated on by Justin Martyr for one in 150 AD, and has grown from there...Gee, look at what Johnathon Edwards did to it!!! Though I did grow up with this idea for ever tormented in hell that is.
I'll post it again...Of course this is only the ending conclusions for a much larger article.
SOME FACTS ABOUT HELL..AND NOBODIES GOING THERE..
IMPORTANT FACTS
Gehenna was a well-known locality near Jerusalem, and ought no more to be translated Hell, than should Sodom or Gomorrah. See Josh. 15: 8; II Kings 17: 10; II Chron. 28: 3; Jer. 7: 31, 32; 19: 2.
Gehenna is never employed in the Old Testament to mean anything else than the place with which every Jew was familiar.
The word should have been left untranslated as it is in some versions, and it would not be misunderstood. It was not misunderstood by the Jews to whom Jesus addressed it. Walter Balfour well says: "What meaning would the Jews who were familiar with this word, and knew it to signify the valley of Hinnom, be likely to attach to it when they heard it used by our Lord? Would they, contrary to all former usage, transfer its meaning from a place with whose locality and history they had been familiar from their infancy, to a place of misery in another world? This conclusion is certainly inadmissible. By what rule of interpretation, then, can we arrive at the conclusion that this word means a place of misery and death?"
The French Bible, the Emphatic Diaglott, Improved Version, Wakefield's Translation and Newcomb's retain the proper noun, Gehenna, the name of a place as well-known as Babylon.
Gehenna is never mentioned in the Apocrypha as a place of future punishment as it would have been had such been its meaning before and at the time of Christ.
No Jewish writer, such as Josephus or Philo, ever uses it as the name of a place of future punishment, as they would have done had such then been its meaning.
No classic Greek author ever alludes to it and therefore it was a Jewish locality, purely.
The first Jewish writer who ever names it as a place of future punishment is Jonathan Ben Uzziel who wrote, according to various authorities, from the second to the eighth century, A. D.
The first Christian writer who calls Hell Gehenna is Justin Martyr who wrote about A. D. 150.
Neither Christ nor his apostles ever named it to Gentiles, but only to Jews which proves it a locality only known to Jews, whereas, if it were a place of punishment after death for sinners, it would have been preached to Gentiles as well as Jews.
It was only referred to twelve times on eight occasions in all the ministry of Christ and the apostles, and in the Gospels and Epistles. Were they faithful to their mission to say no more than this on so vital a theme as an endless Hell, if they intended to teach it?
Only Jesus and James ever named it. Neither Paul, John, Peter nor Jude ever employ it. Would they not have warned sinners concerning it, if there were a Gehenna of torment after death?
Paul says he "shunned not to declare the whole counsel of God," and yet though he was the great preacher of the Gospel to the Gentiles he never told them that Gehenna is a place of after-death punishment. Would he not have repeatedly warned sinners against it were there such a place?
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Dr. Thayer significantly remarks: "The Savior and James are the only persons in all the New Testament who use the word. John Baptist, who preached to the most wicked of men did not use it once. Paul wrote fourteen epistles and yet never once mentions it. Peter does not name it, nor Jude; and John, who wrote the gospel, three epistles, and the Book of Revelations, never employs it in a single instance. Now if Gehenna or Hell really reveals the terrible fact of endless woe, how can we account for this strange silence? How is it possible, if they knew its meaning and believed it a part of Christ's teaching that they should not have used it a hundred or a thousand times, instead of never using it at all; especially when we consider the infinite interests involved? The Book of Acts contains the record of the apostolic preaching,and the history of the first planting of the church among the Jews and Gentiles, and embraces a period of thirty years from the ascension of Christ. In all this history, in all this preaching of the disciples and apostles of Jesus there is no mention of Gehenna. In thirty years of missionary effort these men of God, addressing people of all characters and nations never under any circumstances threaten them with the torments of Gehenna or allude to it in the most distant manner! In the face of such a fact as this can any man believe that Gehenna signifies endless punishment and that this is part of divine revelation, a part of the Gospel message to the world? These considerations show how impossible it is to establish the doctrine in review on the word Gehenna. All the facts are against the supposition that the term was used by Christ or his disciples in the sense of endless punishment. There is not the least hint of any such meaning attached to it, nor the slightest preparatory notice that any such new revelation was to be looked for in this old familiar word."
Jesus never uttered it to unbelieving Jews, nor to anybody but his disciples, but twice (Matt. 23: 15-33) during his entire ministry, nor but four times in all. If it were the final abode of unhappy millions, would not his warnings abound with exhortations to avoid it?
Jesus never warned unbelievers against it but once in all his ministry (Matt. 23: 33) and he immediately explained it as about to come in this life.
If Gehenna is the name of Hell then men's bodies are burned there as well as their souls. Matt. 5: 29; 18: 9.
If it be the name of endless torment, then literal fire is the sinner's punishment. Mark 9: 43-48.
Salvation is never said to be from Gehenna.
Gehenna is never said to be of endless duration nor spoken of as destined to last forever, so that even admitting the popular ideas of its existence after death it gives no support to the idea of endless torment.
Clement, a Universalist, used Gehenna to describe his ideas of punishment. He was one of the earliest of the Christian Fathers. The word did not then denote endless punishment.
A shameful death or severe punishment in this life was at the time of Christ denominated Gehenna (Schleusner, Canon Farrar and others), and there is no evidence that Gehenna meant anything else at the time of Christ.http://www.tentmaker.org/books/TheBibleHell.html
This link is from a different site.
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