WHAT GLORY FOR GOD?
After reading many volumes in the “Left Behind” series, I finally read “Glorious Appearing.” I have major problems with it.
What glory is there if God destroys and punishes with eternal damnation persons totally dependent upon God? Persons who would not exist if God did not create them, persons who could not continue to exist if God did not deliberately keep them in existence.
There might be human glory in such actions, the kind of human glory that always triumphs seeing the wicked utterly destroyed, pushed out of the way, and annihilated so that they never cause trouble again. I have a feeling, however, that even for human beings, there is no real glory in this. God is so much more than a human being that any glory that seems plausible for human beings would fall far short of the glory that belongs to God.
Consider for a moment that God created all these persons. They made no prior agreement, no acceptance, showed no willingness to exist. Before these persons were created, such agreements are impossible. God, through God’s own intentions, created every person, no exception. Once created, these persons, by God’s design, were given free will, the freedom to obey God or refuse obedience.
A tremendous gift, when one considers it, because, being free persons puts us almost on a level with God. We are not compelled to obey. We are free. Freedom gives us individuality. Freedom makes us a conscious reality. We are real, and we know it, and we make our own choices of what we want to do.But, obviously, we must all obey God. Any disobedience on our part will disrupt what God has given other persons. Our disobedience deprives other persons of what God wants them to have.
Since God knows everything, God knows what conduct will bring, not only the greatest happiness, but perfect happiness, perfect happiness and perfect fulfillment for everyone.
What a dilemma we all face. We did not ask to be created, yet here we are. We did not agree to any prior conditions, yet we must obey. If we were not persons, we would have no choice. We would automatically obey without any conscious thought. We wouldn’t be human. We are persons! We have a choice. We can obey or refuse to obey.What dignity if we freely choose to obey. Nobody forced us. We chose on our own to obey. We can say, we should say, we chose to obey because we recognize who God is. We know God is right. There is no other way for all created persons to have happiness and fulfillment unless we all obey.
What dignity to freely choose obedience. We do so because we know God, we trust God, we love God. Loving God and, in return, being loved by God, as free persons, is the greatest gift imaginable. We would be like gods ourselves, not the one-and-only Most High God, but children of God, acting freely and wholeheartedly as God would act, loving God and every person God created as God loves them, caring for them and providing for them as God would. We would all be gods with a small “g.”
But what if any of us refuse obedience? The damage our disobedience would do is incalculable, not only for our victims, but to ourselves also. The powers God gave us to serve God, the special way we were predestined to accomplish what God wanted us to accomplish are now thrown away. In throwing them away, we have inflicted unimaginable harm upon other persons.
Look at the injustice, persecution, and selfishness in the world today and realize what disobedience can do.Once someone realizes the blunders made by disobedience, one can long for annihilation, to no longer exist, to be gone, disappear, or take it upon oneself to commit suicide, as if, by our own choice, we can no longer exist. But God will not permit annihilation, nor will God annihilate any person. God revealed through Scripture that, once created, we would always exist.
We must take responsibility for our actions. We have to make recompense to God for our disobedience, which, of course, is impossible because the consequences of our disobedience are too enormous. We cannot make recompense for our disobedience. Only God can. But we can repent. We can recognize that we have chosen wrong and ask God’s forgiveness. Most important of all, we can accept God’s retribution for our disobedience and God’s reconstruction of who we now are despite our disobedience.
God said many times in Scripture that (some of) the first will be last and (some of) the last will be first. Jesus also said, that if your eye offends you, tear it out. It’s better to enter the kingdom of heaven minus an eye than to enter hell with ones whole body. So there is some retribution God expects from us if we disobey, some loss of the power and ability given us if we misuse that power and ability. If we were created to illumine the thinking of others, but refuse, or, worse than that, deliberately spread falsehood, then we are no longer fit to illumine others. Someone else will do it. That does not mean that God will not forgive us if we repent, but it does mean we lost the original position God gave us.
We all passed through a trial when we were first created, a trial that established how we would use our freedom. If we used our freedom incorrectly, and many of us did, then God will give us different positions, different ministries, dependant on how we acted. We all can be forgiven, if we seek forgiveness, and we all will fit into a new heaven and a new earth consistent on how we acted during our trial. Remember that all persons who did choose to obey, especially those victimized by persons who refused obedience, would now have a different and better relationship with God.
Salvation is what God always wanted, what God always said throughout Scripture, the repentance of a sinner and the sinner’s restoration to spiritual wholeness. This is why Jesus died: to earn forgiveness for sinners. His most terrible agony in the Garden of Gethsemane was the realization that, in spite of everything Jesus did to make remedy for disobedience, some persons will not take advantage of it and will never choose to obey.
It makes sense that these persons will have to be forever excluded from the kingdom of heaven because, in the end, God will not tolerate any disobedience in the kingdom of heaven. Their exclusion will be eternal because no person will ever be annihilated.If God wanted Jesus to suffer so much to save sinners, what glory could God possibly find in killing millions of persons during the rapture and with the locusts and the horsemen and the battle of Armageddon? As I said earlier, even an ordinary human being would not find glory in that.
What would be glorious would be the repentance of sinners; those who were once spiritually dead, but now are spiritually alive. I think the prophecies in Revelation are not meant to be taken as literally as LaHaye and Jenkins take them. It leaves a person spiritually cold to read about so many persons slaughtered and confined to eternal punishment by a God that acts more like a human being than a divine, loving creator. What if the predictions were meant to be warnings for those who decide never to repent, but when God starts to show sternness, many do repent and find salvation? Wouldn’t that make more sense?
The greatest glory for God would be if every disobedient person repented. Even I don’t think that will happen. I think, when the Glorious Appearing occurs, those who do repent, receive forgiveness, and find a place in the kingdom of heaven will manifest God’s glory.Those who do not repent will always be a source of sorrow for God, and for Jesus, and for those closest to Jesus, those who recognize His divinity and God’s glory. This makes more sense to me.
Maurice A. Williams
author of Apocalypse: Four Horsemen Three Woes
http://www.geocities.com/mauricewms2003/Aindexhttp://www.lulu.com/maurice-williamsLabels: Freedom, God, Persons
A SOBERING VIEW OF LIFE
The Biblical philosopher, Qoheleth said "Vanity of vanities! . . . All is vanity. What does a man gain by the toil at which he toils under the sun? . . . I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind." (Ecclesiastes 1:12).
I once questioned these thoughts. Now, I'm sympathetic to them. I'm positive that there must be a reason why things are the way they are. I'm sure there is a reason, but how discover it? One doesn't live long enough to discover it. All of us together, everyone contributing their best, can build up over generations, a partial answer to why things are the way they are. None of us can do it alone.
Long ago, I got interested in events that baffle human understanding, these fascinating events that challenge the human mind. Now, I see threads of vanity even in resolving mysteries, the vane way people impose their own bias even when pursuing truth. This bothers me. It saddens me, after years of reading, to realize that reports of flying saucers, sasquash, lockless monster, and the Bermuda Triangle are all distorted by the vanity of some authors who try explaining these things. Whatever truth was there to begin with is overlaid with every kind of falsehood, in some cases, deliberate lies, so that, what might have been discovered, if honesty prevailed, is lost because of human vanity.
Even philosophy, at philosophy's simplest starting point: "what is reality?" is disappointing. Is reality something that exists outside of me, unaffected by what I think? Or is reality purely subjective, existing only in my mind? If I recognize something, it is real. If I don't recognize it, it doesn't exist. If a tree falls and nobody is present to hear the noise, does the tree fall soundlessly? This started with Descartes: "I think, therefore I am!" Did Descartes really believe this is the reason why he exists? Might his statement really mean, "I know I exist because I realize I can think." What came first: his existence or his thinking?
Traditional science is also tainted. Did everything we see merely evolve without any planning, direction, any point for existing? Describing the ultimate origin, the "Big Bang," as a singularity, which, by definition, is a situation both unknown and unknowable. Is this science? Why didn't scientists confess to begin with that they didn't know? Why drag us back 13.7 billion years to finally admit that they don't know.
Qoheleth Is right! Everything is tainted by human vanity. If a singularity cannot be known, then how valid are the "natural" laws these scientists postulate? Does evolution proceed exactly as these laws propose? Must creation start at the ultimate, unknowable, theoretical beginning and proceed slowly, step by step, until things are as they are now? Why is there no theory proposing that, perhaps, creation did not start with a Big Bang but started with a fully developed universe governed by laws that can be extrapolated back to a plausible condition before creation, which condition, in fact, never existed.
What about me? Did I evolve? I, the person whose mind is composing what you are reading. If I, the person writing these lines did not come into existence until after my body was born, as so many scientists claim, then I did not even evolve from my mother. I, the person writing these lines, am the product of a spontaneous creation. One moment I did not exist. A split-second later, here I am, fully alive, fully human, ready to exist within my own body, independent of my mother. There was no slow-moving evolutionary process in it. My mother, in fact, had nothing to do with the origin of the person writing these lines. It was only after separation from my mother that the person whom I am came into existence.
What singularity brought me into existence? Was it our government, who now face-to-face with me, has no choice but to admit that I exist? Was it God who created me, but not at the logical beginning when my body first formed at conception? Oh no! I came into existence after my body was fully formed and able to exist on its own. What a contradiction to all of our previous thought. What an obvious rationalization to avoid believing what was always believable to our ancestors.
Are there really angels? non-physical beings that, in an instant, were created, fully mature, fully alive, fully intelligent, fully aware that a split second ago they did not exist? How different they are than we are. None of us remember our origin. The best we can do is recall when we were three or four years old, when we were slowly growing into maturity and slowly learning about the world surrounding us. We do not experience that we were created because we cannot remember that far back.
How different angels are than we. There is no progressive growth with angels because they are not physical beings. They don't exist as part of the physical world, made of matter, having weight, occupying space, existing in the four known dimensions of length, breath, depth, and time. If they were created before the physical universe, then length, breath, depth, and time have no hold on them. They understand these concepts, but they are not locked into them as we are. Especially time, they would exist outside of our experience of time.
Consider again the angels. Suddenly they exist, fully mature, fully intelligent, knowing that an instant ago they did not exist. How would you feel if you came into existence this way? Would you wonder "why am I here?" Why am I the way I am when I had no choice in it? Why am I different from others? Why don't I have what others have? Why don't I have everything everyone else has? What confusion for us if we started out that way. It's a good thing we can't remember our ultimate origin. It's a good thing we slowly become aware of who and what we are, so slowly that we just naturally accept what we are and naturally feel at home with those who surround us. And yet we face the same questions the angels might ask. I think this is why human science and human thinking is so full of human vanity. That vanity is our attempt to influence the reason why we exist, our attempt to dictate the purpose for our existence.
It's not only in science, our bias to believe what we want to believe is also and especially noticeable in political thought and what is presented today as politically correct thinking. We are worse than ignorant. We have eyes, but refuse to see, ears, but refuse to hear. We are truly blind.I've already argued that our rationalization justifying abortion is illogical. It's worse than illogical. For reasons of imposing our own opinions, we have destroyed the theory of evolution, and we gave ourselves an even more difficult question of how did you and I come into existence. We really are, if those who defend abortion are correct, the products of spontaneous creation. In an instant, we came into existence with absolutely no change in our physical bodies. Therefore, we did not evolve.
A more difficult question is "who or what created us?" Who breathed the person writing these words into the non-human body born of my mother?It doesn't end there. The gay community would have us believe that they are neither male nor female. Their objectives go far beyond requesting politeness and respect from others. They insist that the human race is different than it really is. I suppose they might acknowledge that God created the human race male and female, but, somehow, the human race didn't develop that way. Somehow there is a third division, and this third division deserves to be recognized as a third category, neither male nor female. If they believe in a creator, how is it possible that the creator could miscalculate?
Not satisfied with preferred opinions, like the above, certain influential authorities theorize about religion. All religions are good, they say, equally true, equally worthy of acceptance. However, if most religions were generated by human thought, and God revealed one, wouldn't that revealed religion be better? If there were more than one religion claiming to be revealed by God, wouldn't an unbiased search for the one that was really revealed be in the best interests of humankind? If the rival revealed religions contain contradictory elements, isn't it obvious that they can't all be true? The honest search for the true religion ought to be the noblest quest of humans.
We all know that very few people make that search. What if we made that search? What if we found a true "re-ligature" to God? That's what religion means "rebinding." What if we fully understood and believed God's revelation of a religion that is able to answer all the questions we might have asked were we created like the angels were. Without God's revelation, we would have never have known why we were created and what was expected of us, nor would the angels. Therefore, all religions are not equally good. Valid is the right word. The only religion that is really good (and valid) is the religion endorsed by God. That valid religion has been with the human race all along, but most humans won't accept it. Vanity of vanities, all things are vain when based on human vanity.
Maurice A. Williams
author of
Revelation and the Fall of Judea
ISBN: 1401068049
http://www.geocities.com/mauricewms2003/RindexLabels: Angels, Creation, Philosophy, Qoheleth, Reality, Religions, Vanity
