Seeking Jesus First - Aug. 3, 2023
Why?
This seems to be the beginning of most arguments against believing in God.
Why would God…?
Why did God…?
Christians have several ways to respond to these “Why?” questions.
No matter what the why, God is God and we can come to know Him and His ways. God never changes and yet His ways have changed.
One need only look at the covenants that God made with different men in the Bible. These covenants were not all the same. If God never changed the way He interacts with us, how would it be possible to change covenants?
Actually, the covenant in place dictated how God would interact with the people under the covenant. God is not a man that He should lie so He always kept His part of the covenant.
Adam had a covenant with God with only one requirement. Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
God cut a Grant Covenant with Abraham that extended a promise to Abraham’s descendants. It was a covenant of blessing. God protected Abraham and made sure that he multiplied and prospered in the earth. God protected Abraham and blessed him even when he was unwise. Sin reigned in the earth and was producing death in everything that was alive. But God cut covenant with Abraham, making no demands of Abraham save circumcision. God accounted Abraham’s faith as righteousness - right standing with God. God did not hold Abraham’s sin on Abraham’s account. God promised to extend this blessing to His descendants. While they kept the sign of circumcision as a work, the argument can be made that they did not hold firmly to faith in God. But some did. Only God knows who and how many.
Coming out of Egypt behind Moses, the Israelites made a different kind covenant with God. God offered a covenant but the Israelites set the parameters. They told Moses that God was too scary and they didn’t want to die so they wanted a buffer between God and them. This established a priesthood and a vassal covenant. It was a system of rewards and punishments. Apostle Paul called it the ministration of death. Sin had reigned supreme over the earth until this time working death in all living creatures. Now there was a way to come out from under the consequences of sin, but it was only temporary and it was only for Israelites. The covenant required a renewal sacrifice every year which postponed the consequences of sin to a future day of atonement. At which time, a perfect sacrifice could once and for all remove forever the consequences of sin.
God interacted with people differently under these covenants. In the Old Testament, only certain people could hear from God. It was an external hearing in the form of an angel, a dream, an audible voice, or a vision, etc. that jolted their consciousness in such a way that they had to act or be consumed inside themselves by that encounter (Ex. “A fire shut up in my bones.”). And he did it only with those who found favor in His sight. Something in how they spoke and lived drew His attention. Most probably, it was faith. He did this because they did not have capability, through the indwelling Holy Spirit that we have now, to interact with God on the spirit level. God actually forbid them from trying to interact with Him on a spirit level because He knew that they had no pure way of receiving from Him that way.
Covenants limit God, but they remove the limits from us.
I deal with the “Why?” questions from a free will position. I believe God wanted a relationship with people who chose to be in relationship with Him because they recognized His love, life, light and power. It may start with any reason that a person seeks God. When they find Him, and they will, He will reveal Himself to them. It was the love of God that moved Him to make us in His class of being - a spiritual being with a free will who could choose to love.
Didn’t Adam choose to love Eve when he decided to share her fate? He knew God. He loved God. He knew God loved him. They walked in the cool of the day together every day. He knew God would choose to love him and deliver him even if God had to share in his judgement.
Somebody asked why didn’t God kill the devil a long time ago? God is a man of His word. A person who honor His own nature and keeps His words and cannot lie does things the proper and legal way. God is righteous and holy. His ways are higher than man’s ways. A man gave over the earth to sin. So a man had to take it back. And not just any man. It had to be a man that represented God The Father perfectly. So He sent His son - the perfect physical expression of Himself. And His son, Jesus, lived like The Father on earth and went to the cross and shared in the judgement of Adam, releasing all of humanity from the consequences of sin. Jesus crushed Satan under His feet. Now Jesus is crushing Satan under our feet. The devil is not a man. He is an angel. In my understanding, that means he is a spiritual being with an eternal existence. But he is crushed and defeated. He has no legal claim to the earth or to anyone who rejects him.
But for many reasons, people still allow that dark spirit to permeate their lives. They do not know the love of The Father and cannot act with prefect love towards others. Selfish acts of people cause pain to other people. So let’s hurry up and show them The Father by being filled with and walking in the love of God.