Thank you for taking the time and energy to respond. It shows that there are men out there who care. You’re right….”arguing” about religion is not productive so I won’t go there. I’m glad you have a good relationship with God.
Hey man, there's a lotta guys here who care, probably most since everyone here has gone thru something hard and is still dealing with it.
I probably could've said it better than arguing. There's guys who are good at discussing theology and they're really smart and it's all good, I'm just not equipped that way. A lotta times it comes across as academic and I wanna know what's real and living about the things that are talked about.
From my upbringing…I was taught that God know all before it happens…and that He can see that past, present, and future. (That God is not bound by “time” like we are but can freely move about….including the future).
Yeah that's one of those theological ideas, I think I've heard more that God is outside time but in the present as well, but I had this friend who was pretty passionate that God experienced time like we do and works thru what is. I find what matters isn't the answer to that question so much as believing that God is able to bring about the future that matters to Him, otherwise what good are His promises.
“Free will” only applies to “man”…not God. In my understanding…”man” often applies our own limited abilities to God.
Yeah, a lotta times we assume God's like us, but maybe that's just missing the point of God becoming like us in Jesus, or His promise of us becoming like Him in Christ.
Did God not tell Joseph and Mary “to return by another route” because he knew people where waiting to harm them on their originally planned route? He did. He knows. Yet does not always reveal.
Let’s say that I knew someone was waiting to harm my friend as he walked home from the park yet I don’t tell him. Wouldn’t I be guilty of harming my friend by omission? I know I would feel guilty…because I could have helped prevent it. Therefore…isn’t God guilty by omission as well? He is in my opinion.
Maybe you've had the experience of being kept from something worse than should've happened or deserved to happen, I have enough times. It's the kinda things where you come away not just feeling lucky but more like this sense that there's more for you to do in this life.
I have kids like you do and wanna keep them from harm and suffering if I can, it's being a parent, it's what loving them is. Emotionally, I hurt when they're suffering. But one of the things that seems true about love in this world is that love at its deepest includes sacrifice and suffering, or at least allows that suffering doesn't preclude love. You don't have to be abused to know that this world is no paradise, and when love is found in this world, it's often accompanied by heartache and suffering. And when something as true and pure as God's love is real here in a world like our's, it's a battle and there's suffering that goes with it. At least for me, that's what makes sense about Jesus coming here and being crucified, not that God didn't love Jesus but that He loved us enough to send Him here and Jesus loved us enough to come and die for us.
I know that's not enough to explain why God acts or doesn't act to rescue. There's a story where Jesus says something that offends people and they pick up stones to kill Him but Jesus walks right thru unharmed, no one throws a stone and the bible says that it wasn't His time. The Bible tells about the times His disciples escaped being killed, but history tells us about that they all finished their life here being martyred in brutal ways.
There's some verses that I've kept that have helped make sense of the things I go thru. One says to "count it all joy whenever you fall into various trials..." and the other says "we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only that, we rejoice in our sufferings..." Both verses follow with this, that sufferings and the testing of your faith produces patient endurance. That makes sense to me, that sufferings are part of this deal but they're not the point or the goal, patient endurance is as a reality of who you are in this world.
You’re right…we do become what we experience. My “beef” with God is that He hasn’t….despite “believing” “confessing” “praying and begging” and doing everything in my power to change to ugly stuff “I became” from those experiences I didn’t want or ask for. God has not changed those things or helped me move pst them. That has caused me to lose faith and feel abandoned. 25 years of praying, therapy, seeking…believing have gotten to nowhere. That’s just to cold hard truth. What’s up with that?
Hey man, I hear you, I've battled same sex attractions most of my married life, in some ways it seems like a defining thing in my life cause it's been that kinda battle, being drawn to what you hate. It's been this battle for decades but it was only about 5 years ago that the memory of being molested at 16 came back, it was triggered reading something a pastor friend had written titled "Grace Filled Sexuality". How's that for irony? It's only been a year or so that the thought occurred to me that my ssa might have something to do with what happened at 16. Could God have let that memory come back sooner? Yeah, but maybe I couldn't have handled it sooner. I certainly didn't handle it well when I remembered. It was a huge challenge to faith, at the time it felt alone, like dying.
I don't have it all together, I'm here at MS too. But what I've found with faith over the years trying to process ssa in particular is this hunger to know and experience the reality of the spiritual things I've heard and read. They're more than just doctrines if they're true and real. The challenge of faith for me isn't just believing doctrines, it's loving God's truth in the doctrines, that believing is a matter of the heart. I'm gonna stop, I'm not much good at preaching anyway, but here if ya wanna talk.