Store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven
where moth and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal

Saturday, May 8, 2010

In Your Face!

Have you read the New Testament? If you have then you'll see that:

"In your face" is God’s attitude toward death.

It’s God’s attitude to those who don’t think He has control over life and death.

We often talk about the resurrection of Jesus and how amazing that was. Indeed, amazing doesn’t half describe someone supernaturally coming back to life. But the New Testament is loaded with new life - resurrected life. I don’t think there was one funeral mentioned in the Gospels where Jesus didn’t bring the person back to life. At the moment of Jesus’ own death, graves opened. In a frenzy of warfare over sin and its main consequence, life returned to those from whom it had been taken.

This is so in your face.

So outrageous.

So God.

“You don’t think I have power over death? Then go to hell!”

God proclaims, without apology to have brought the cosmos into existence from nothing.

God proclaims, without apology to have brought life into being from inanimate and inorganic gases.

God proclaims, without apology to have raised Jesus from the dead.

God proclaims, without apology that He will one day raise you from the dead - either to eternal glory or to eternal punishment.

He simply does not care if you think yourself too sophisticated to believe in life after death.

For genuine sceptics like Thomas, Jesus showed Himself to be indisputably alive in a body that proved His victory over death.

For belligerent sceptics like atheists - well - no amount of evidence will do. “Even when I rise from the dead, some of you will refuse to believe.”

As many have said, “The only reason that Jesus went into the tomb was to prove to everyone that He could and would come out of the tomb just as predicted.”

Believe it and live eternally - if you want.

Deny it and die eternally - if you want.

8 comments:

  1. Why would god need to punish someone forever?
    Why would god need to punish anyone at all?
    What's the point of bringing someone back from the dead just to watch them burn?
    Why would someone so loving of "his" creation, bestow the... oh fuck it, forget it. This is hopeless.

    It doesn't matter. I'm just startled that anybody can believe something so infantile and barbaric.

    **Hey bro, you better believe that this ghost/spirit/messiah exists, or your not gonna get to chill in our christian club for all of eternity. Oh and by the way, if you don't get accepted into our special club, your gonna burn in FIRE for all eternity.
    Yeah! Jesus is a baddass! Murdered somebody? just ask forgiveness. But if you dare question his position, your fuckin dead bro!
    By the way bro, to get accepted in our clube you need to dunk your head in water, cut off your foreskin, murmur whispers with your eyes closed, and eat magic crackers that turn into flesh. Welcome to the club!!!**

    You know mak, you may notice that the only people commenting on your weird blog, are atheists. You ever wonder why that is? No its not because the power of christ compels us. It's because of the way you talk about atheists. It provokes a returned anger. If you go around calling atheists retarded all day, you bet your ass your gonna get responses. And it works, you get them. And if their is anything dull of mind about us, its that we continue to bang away at our keyboards on this silly blog. Atheists have historically gotten treated with "disrespect". Disrespect, of course, meaning being burnt at the stake, being disowned by your family, or not getting elected into public office. But no amount of dialogue is gonna change anything, your a lost cause. You are so messed up that you call honest observation from atheists, crazy talk. And you call your crazy talk, honest observation. And your too far gone to be able to see how far you've gone.

    You throw around words like "eternal glory"? what the fuck does that even mean in a universal context. What use would a being who transcends space and time have for "eternal glory"? What use would a being with the knowledge of infinity have for jonah and the whale?

    There is a good reason why that doesn't make sense, because its batshit crazy. So Jesus came out in a motorcycle and a leather jacket and said "fuck you if you don't believe in me." How can anybody believe that and keep a strait face? How can you consistently call atheists dull of mind, when you come up with insanely dumb crap like that?

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  2. "Why would god need to punish someone forever?
    Why would god need to punish anyone at all?"

    Just as there are physical realities, this is a Spiritual reality. One day evil is going to be banished from the Kingdom of God. Those on the side of evil will go with it.

    All of us deserve to be cast into utter darkness. Like many atheists have said and John 3:18 confirms, we're all born as enemies of Creator God. We are all born in rebellion to the idea that we are accountable to our Creator.

    However, out of His great love, your Creator has provided a means by which you can have your sins forgiven. There is no need for you to go to hell. Jesus has ensured that if you wind up in hell, you will have had to step over His dead body to get there.

    God is not going to force you accept that offer. He's left the choice up to you. You can either accept that offer of forgiveness and be saved. Or you can remain as you are and pay the price of that persistent rejection which is eternal separation from God in a place called hell.

    Why forever? Because it's a fitting punishment for rejecting your Creator and siding with a Power whose sole purpose is the destruction of this Creation.

    Why punish anyone at all? Because God is just.

    There is not going to be any doubt that those who go to hell deserve to be there.

    There will be no doubt that those who go to heaven DON'T deserve to be there.

    For those who have accepted God's offer of forgiveness, it's His grace that ensures that we get what we don't deserve (heaven) and His mercy that ensures that we don't get what we do deserve (hell).
    -------------

    "What's the point of bringing someone back from the dead just to watch them burn?"

    What makes you think that those who were brought back to life rejected the One who made that possible? Matthew 27:52 says that it was "Godly people" who were brought back to life. More than likely they dedicated the rest of their second chance to serving Him and proclaiming Him as Lord and Saviour.

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  3. "God proclaims, without apology to have brought the cosmos into existence from nothing."

    I have not personaly met any gods yet.So i think its more honest to suggest .Humans proclaimed this

    "God proclaims, without apology to have brought life into being from inanimate and inorganic gases."

    I have not personaly seen or met any gods yet.So i think its more honest to suggest .Humans proclaimed this


    "God proclaims, without apology to have raised Jesus from the dead."

    I think its more honest to suggest the ancient bible and human prophets proclaimed this.

    "God proclaims, without apology that He will one day raise you from the dead - either to eternal glory or to eternal punishment."

    Maybe more honest and correct to suggest humans proclaim this.

    "He simply does not care if you think yourself too sophisticated to believe in life after death. "

    Once again i cannot see or hear god in person suggesting this.Once again its humans proclaiming such things.

    Mak would you say your "faith" is honestly actually more likely put in the hands of god or humans ?

    I dont have anything against having faith or trust in a god/s .Its putting faith and trust in humans that worrys me a little

    Is that really so surprising considdering outcomes experienced in history ? ...Human sacrifice ...Persecution of people of certain types of nationalities etc etc

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  4. Why would a being of infinite power and wisdom give a shit about whether or not we believe in him. Don't you see how strange the belief is? God sounds more like a man than god. A being of infinite power doesn't quite match up to a being who cares about whether or not we ritually pray before eating the food we earned. Why would god care for such trivial things.

    But the worst part is this... infinite power is unlimited in it's creative yield. I ask you, why suffer? And you say, because we deserve it. This can only come from a shallow and simple mind. Christians seem to think that unlimited power means reconfigurations of existance as we know it, just a mix up of what we already have. But philosophically, unlimited power shouldn't yield to natural laws or physics. It shouldnt end at requirements, tests, or barriers. Why would unlimited power give way to an existance fitted for suffering? To make valid the contentions of Christians, a god that wants suffering, death, confusion, retaliation, and misery is absolutely required. If it exists, god must will it. Because with perfect power there are no unwanted or unforseen byproducts or circumstances, only pure intention.

    And you want to worship a god that takes responsibility for that? God sounds like a barbaric, simple-minded, primitive asshole, not an being of infinite wisdom. Because there are those of us with very finite wisdom who know better than this Christian deity. I mean god gives you a choice, but if you don't make the right one you burn for eternity? That's not a choice, that's putting a gun to someone's head. Mak, you say atheists are philosophical dunces, but what does that make you? How philosophically ignorant must a person be to believe that a being with unlimited power thinks so much like a human?

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  5. @ snacker - good luck with that.

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  6. Good luck with what?

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  7. Oh nevermind, I should have expected a chicken shit response. You wanted to argue philosophically so here I was, and of course you won't argue on philosophical terms, duh. I'm dull of mind to think you could come back with something.

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  8. I suspect that there are more than a few believers who find some kind of solace in the doctrine of Hell, sad as this fact is. It would appear that the belief offers a way to get back at all those who have hurt them and are seemingly getting away with it.

    But there's a big problem with this belief and this motive for believing it--it stands in complete contract to the teachings of Jesus who rejected the idea that God intends to get back at anyone, not for a moment, much less for eternity.

    I've actually written an entire book on this topic--Hell? No! Why You Can Be Certain There's No Such Place As Hell, (for anyone interested, you can get a free ecopy of Did Jesus Believe in Hell?, one of the most compelling chapters in my book at www.thereisnohell.com), but allow me to share one of the many points I make in it to explain why.

    Jesus most certainly rejected the idea that God wants or needs "justice: "You have heard it said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say to you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” which is found in Matthew 5:38-39, and then expanded upon in Luke 6:29f, “and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also.” Now, just in case you didn’t know, Jesus is quoting from the Old Testament book of Exodus, Chapter 21 which has God telling Moses to tell the people of Israel that if someone pokes out your eye, then you’re to poke out his. But Jesus says that not what God REALLY wanted, that he didn’t want or need “justice,” or revenge, but instead, to respond to evil with good. Quite the opposite of what the Jews of his day had heard all their lives, this teaching was revolutionary!

    It carried with it a view of God’s nature that rebuked the “eye for an eye” concept, and the view that God is all about getting back at those who do bad things, that he is compelled by his “just” (or let’s face it, the real word is “vengeful”) nature to hurt people to the same degree they had allegedly sinned.

    Instead, Jesus’ bold assertion implied God is anything but vengeful and, therefore, he asks that we return good for evil because that’s what God does.

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