RE: Franics Collins
January 16, 2016 at 5:22 pm
(This post was last modified: January 16, 2016 at 5:23 pm by athrock.)
(January 16, 2016 at 4:34 pm)Cecelia Wrote:(January 16, 2016 at 4:23 pm)athrock Wrote: Unless you are simply wrong. From a single reading? Really?
Do you not recall that God gave David three choices:
David reasoned that the latter would be the best option because he trust more in the mercy of God than in the mercy of men (his enemies).
- three years of famine
- three months of fleeing his enemies
- three days of plague.
Why did this happen? Two possibilities come to mind:
It's understandable that you have emotional difficulties with this, but if God's judgment is perfect based upon His omniscience, then His justice is also perfect. Nothing that He did was unfair or unjust.
- God was punishing the entire nation for offences that had been building up over time, or
- God sought to teach His people (note that carefully, the Israelites were HIS people) an important lesson concerning strict obedience to His instructions.
In this account, the multitude was killed for the sin of one man; later, one man would be killed for the sins of the multitude on a cross.
So it's perfectly okay according to you that God killed 70,000 people for a census? What makes that justice? The fact that he's god? Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Him being God would not absolve him of anything. If God killed 70,000 people for a census, then I would say you cannot say that his justice is perfect.
Did you read Lord of the Rings several times, and discover that Sauron was actually the good guy all along?
To be perfectly honest if anyone managed to convince me that the Christian God Existed, I'd more likely worship Satan instead. He sounds far more reasonable.
LOL. No, because unlike God, Sauron WASN'T a good guy all along.
The census may have merely been the final straw or occasion of punishment for a series of events or patterns of sins that God finally had to address. And yes, I can say that God's just is perfect because His justice matched the offense in ways that you cannot comprehend.
For example, everyone rants about the killing of the Canaanites...conveniently overlooking the fact that the Canaanites were truly horrible people...engaged in all sorts of perversions including child sacrifice to their idols, etc. Or they whine about the flood when God wiped out everyone but Noah's family...again missing the point that the sins of the people were a stench in God's nostrils. Or they point to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (recently uncovered by archaeologists, btw - another vindication of the historical accuracy of the Bible), and claim that God was unfair while completely ignoring the sinful lifestyle of the homosexual population of the cities that was the cause of God's wrath.
Like I said before, your emotional reaction to these stories is understandable at one level, but your failure to deal with the full set of data is the real reason why you can't understand why God acted as He did.
