Tell me who the devil is and I’ll tell you who God is — or however that saying goes! Today, I’d like to start a new category of posts on the Member’s Digest. For now, I’m going to call it God vs. Devil — a category that hopes to employ deconstructive theory.
Long term, I’d like to spark a conversation around whether or not God or the Devil can exist without the other. Here are a couple topics worth talking about (that we’d never hear in worship services today):
- Should Judas be considered a hero? If it weren’t for him, Christ would never have sacrificed himself for our sins, right?
- The Gospel of Judas which was not included in the bible (by the roman catholic officials who put together the bible), suggests that Christ CHOSE Judas to pave the way for his sacrifice.
- To be saved, one MUST have sins to repent for. Therefore, without sin (or the devil to convince us to sin), one cannot be saved. Right?
In short, what would it mean if the only way of finding real faith involved betraying it with a kiss?
Take a moment to digest that last question.
I woke up this morning to horrible news of 50 people being shot dead and 53 more injured at a popular Gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. My immediate question, similar to every horrible event that happens on Earth, was: If God is all-present, where was he then?
We are supposed to believe that God participates in our every day lives. That’s why the church teaches us to pray. That’s why the church administration has the authority and control that they do — because we believe God directs them and possibly even speaks to them. So in the event of a terrorist attack like today, I don’t feel wrong asking where God is.
Does he reeeeeally answer our prayers? Does he reeeeeally participate in our lives? Or is he just watching us do our own thing to only judge us at the end? Ask three ministers and you’ll get three different answers.
If we are to blame the devil for today’s headline, then is it also God’s fault for “letting it happen”? Because, God, participant or not, is guilty simply by association, right? What are your thoughts? I would really like to know — because the less the church cares about my questions in-person, the more questions I tend to have…and it’s beginning to feel like we only have each other (members or former-members) to make sense of it all.
I’m just so sick of the answer “Don’t think like that brother…”
Looking forward to what you all think in the comments below!
During the decades that I’ve been Iglesia, I have never believed that God participates in our everyday life. I believe that he listens to our prayers and that, on occasion, he answers our prayers (sometimes not in the way we’d expect), but our lives are our own. It is our choices that define our character, and it will be (in essence) our character that will be judged in the end. He knows what we do – He knows why we do it – and he gives us the freedom to make those choices.
Otherwise, we’d all simply be finger-puppets. I don’t believe we are.
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I completely understand your sentiment because I used to also share the same. I use the past tense because I no longer think that to be true, although I do not condemn you or anyone else’s viewpoints; I’ll leave that type of behavior for our beloved administration.
You mention the idea of being finger puppets if we have no room to make our own choices in life without God intervening. But my argument to that would be the idea of a heaven — a place where sin does not exist. Now if no sin exists there then there is no room for you to decide to sin, you simply could not do it. No free will in heaven, the very place many sacrifice everything for the chance to live there. In essence, we WANT no free will, and God wants to give it to us, so long as we somehow manage to muddle our way through free will now and don’t screw ourselves. You can see where I’m going with this.
So I no longer think the idea of heaven is something that we’ve examined closely enough, because if we did, we wouldn’t be giving the concept of free will the adoration we give it today. Just my opinion.
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