Praise the Lord everybody!! Let everything that has breath praise His holy name!! Happy New Year!! to everyone out there, I am believing God for a wonderful and blessed new year in Christ, and looking forward to what He gives me to share with you all.
Today I want to share with you something God revealed to me while I was talking to a friend of mine about witnessing to nonbelievers and how to answer some of the Questions they always seem to ask when the concept of whether there is a God or not comes up. A lot of times I've heard it said "there is no God, how can any God allow so many bad things to happen to innocent children and people? What kind of God is that?" they ask me and when I try and take them to the Bible, they begin to point to how the God of the bible had people and even whole cities wiped out, women and children, everything, put to the sword or drowned by floods or burned up by fire. "what kind of God would do that?" they asked.
As my friend and I began to discuss how to answer these questions, God began to tell me that they needed to begin to see those situations and this world the way that He saw it, and He brought me back to the beginning, to Genesis and the creation. God's word tells us in Genesis 1:26-31 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth days.
As we see here God created everything, including man. The man was special in God's eyes because He created man in His own image, and gave him dominion over all His other creations. God was pleased with the man and saw that he was "very good."
When God saw man He saw a reflection of Himself, the man walked naked before God at that time because there was nothing between man and God, he was pure, clean, and holy unto his creator. When the man disobeyed God and sinned against his creator, that was no longer the case. That sin became a barrier between the two, now when God looked upon is creation He no longer saw a reflection of himself but a lawbreaker, not worthy of his current position, a covenant breaker who God could no longer see as His finest creation. So God covered man in the skins of dead animals, one reason I believe God did that was that at that point I believe He saw the man on the same level as the animals, as He angerly drove him out of the Garden and into the world controlled by the prince of the air, Satan.
As time went on and man began to multiply throughout the Earth, they reflected God less and less and their sinful nature became more dominant until God tells us in Genesis 6:5-8 5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
6 And it repented the Lord that he had made the man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
7 And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
When people ask me about the existence of "God," or the God of the Old Testament and how could He allow certain things to befall so-called "innocent" men, woman, and children, I tell them they must learn to see things the way God sees them. When God looked at man all He could see was a renegade creation that was mutating into something He could not recognize.
2. An outlaw; a rebel.
In God's eyes, we were deserters, outlaws, and rebels, who had bitten the hand that fed them in order to go their own way, do their own thing. When God disowned man He cursed His creation. in Genesis 3:14-19 14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou has taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
God gave man free will, but here he lets him know there is a price to be paid for the sin of disobedience. He turned us over to our own devices and choices, thus the evil that befalls the so-called "innocent" is, for the most part, the direct result of man's choices.
First let me say that there are two types of evil, Moral evil, and natural evil. first, let us begin with "moral evil. Moral evil is the immorality and pain and suffering and tragedy that come because we choose to be selfish, arrogant, uncaring, hateful and abusive. Romans 3:23 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
So much of the world’s suffering results from the sinful action or inaction of ourselves and others. For example, people look at a famine and wonder where God is, but the world produces enough food for each person to have 3,000 calories a day. It’s our own irresponsibility and self-centeredness that prevents people from getting fed.
In other words: look at your hand. You can choose to use that hand to hold a gun and shoot someone, or you can use it to feed hungry people. It’s your choice. But it’s unfair to shoot someone and then blame God for the existence of evil and suffering. Like that old cartoon said: “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
God tells us in His word that "my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" see Hosea4:6. God is not only talking about believers but also about His creation.
I'm going to end here, but next time we will pick up with "natural evil" and a few other things connected with God and His "Renegade Creation."
God bless you all, Brother Darrell, Speaking Off The Wall
God tells us in His word that "my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" see Hosea4:6. God is not only talking about believers but also about His creation.
I'm going to end here, but next time we will pick up with "natural evil" and a few other things connected with God and His "Renegade Creation."
God bless you all, Brother Darrell, Speaking Off The Wall
No comments:
Post a Comment