Obedience starts with fear, irrational Christianity

Can you be scared into love? It does not sound that reasonable, you can be scared into paying your taxes but it is not all that likely that you will find that after paying your taxes you find that you love paying your taxes. Wesley Snipes is in jail for not paying his taxes do any of us really think that when he gets out he will love paying taxes? Often however Christianity has this mindset that says we first fear God because of what He will do to us and that through the obedience out of fear we will later learn to love Him.

Recently on the Adventist Today website discussion of an article on Hell one of the bloggers of the site said the following:

“My take on the “hell” doctrine is that if it were not for it, there would be no Christians. It is somewhat analogous to teaching/informing your children that there are, and will be, corporal consequences to willful disobedience; even though your strong preference is that there will never be an occasion to ever administer it.

Obedience starts with fear. As we mature and come to understand that the source of the consequences cares about us and knows more than we do, fear becomes respect. As the maturation process continues further, and we realize that we love and owe a debt of gratitude to the executor of the potential consequences, obedience results out of…love and gratitude.
If there were no initial fear of (ultimate) consequences, the obedience which always directly results in our good would never commence in the first place.”

There is something twisted in this kind of thinking, but the author of the above is probably in the majority of Christians. They see God in terms of crime and punishment. Obey or God will kill you. And if you obey Him then He won't kill you and you then become thankful that He won't kill you and you begin to love Him. Christianity as a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. After all God in the Old Testament is quite free with His killing. It is that kind of thinking that informs many people as their interpret the Creation story. Eat of the fruit and God says He will kill them. As the King James version says

Genesis 2:27 KJV But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die

Many interpreters take that to mean God is pronouncing what God will do as opposed to a natural consequence to the action. The more accurate New English Bible makes it clear that the “day” is idiomatic for “when”, after all they did not die on that day and no they did not spiritually die on the day either though you will hear teachers make such claims as nonsensical as they may be.

But this idea of death as punishment rather then the natural consequence of actions has powerfully changed Christianity. The cessation of life because one does not accept the gift of life given by God becomes God's punishment of death. Instead of God as the source of life they focus on God as the cause of death. But if one rejects the offer of life from God the natural consequence is death because God's gift is not accepted. The wrath of God then becomes something that God does to people rather then something that people do to themselves by their own actions. It is very understandable if one does not read the progression of understanding in the Bible. After all in the Old Testament both the good and the bad came from God. The successful blessed by God the sick cursed by God. The side that won the war was the result of God making them successful. We who read the Bible have to learn to read it with these historical factors figured in however.

After all there is a lot of confusing language in the Bible. If we took it all literally we could not mix crops or material in clothing, we would be killing rebellious children, adulterers and sabbath breakers and even as we kill them claiming we are loving them. That become the problem, we assume these kind of things about God and make Him to be as irrational as ancient human beings. Then of course to explain the irrationality we would say God's ways are not our ways or God is mysterious and we can't understand what He does or will do.

But is this what God in human form wanted us to do. Jesus wanted us to be friends with God, Jesus wanted us to move even beyond the idea of servants because servants do what their master says to friends who understand what the Master wants done.

John 15:15 NIV: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

When we look at the first sermon ever recorded being preached after the resurrection of Christ it has nothing to do with fear.

Acts 2:22-24 NASB“Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know— this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. “ But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power

The good news, the New Testament is not about the threat of God but the salvation of God. Peter could have threatened them with damnation for killing Christ but he did not, he offered what God offered and that is forgiveness rather than condemnation. Love as a demonstration of God rather then punishment to scare people into behavior. You can scare people into conformity but you can't scare them into love.

The question we should always be asking is what does our doctrine say about the God we believe in?

Law of Love

God is Love, The Law

By Ron Corson

Submitted for your consideration; there is little written about the conditions which produced our world in the state it is in. The following is my theory as to the role played in this story by God’s Law. It is based largely on my understanding of the entire Bible beginning to end, it is likely much different from what most people think about when they think about God's Law.

Sometime ago undoubtedly before the creation of Earth, there existed a Law. A law I will refer to as the Law of God. This law in its basic nature was extremely simply yet profound. The Law is "God is Love". Like the law of gravity this law can’t be broken. It is a fact, it is just the way things are, it exists because that is what the character of God is. Nothing anyone can do can change this law, however someone could distort, or misrepresent the law. To use and old English word, the law can be transgressed. Say I am a cleverly deceptive person and I try to tell you that gravity is not a result of the mass of an object, but the result of a giant gopher who is trapped in the center of the earth and by his animal magnetism he draws all objects toward him. Lets say I got a lot of people to believe my explanation of gravity. In fact in doing all this I have not changed the law of gravity, it still exists as it always did. However I have gone beyond the bounds of the law (transgression). I have violated it by my bizarre reinterpretation of the law of gravity.

Now lets move from earth to heaven in the beginning (whenever that was). There is a law in heaven, not a set of written precepts, but one based on the nature of the author of the universe. That law is "God is Love". Like the law of gravity on earth, this law can’t be broken, it exists and it is true. But this Law of God can be reinterpreted in such a way that it is violated. Say there was a cleverly deceptive person, lets say Satan (the name literally means an adversary). Now if Satan were to say that God is not really loving, that He is hiding important information from us, information that could make us just like Him. And that basically God is not a truthful person, Satan’s reinterpretation of the Law of God would violate the true Law of God. The law that "God is love" still exists and is still true, but Satan’s transgressed against the law, his redefining what God is, has confused other persons.

At this point it is important to note that God has no law that says you must love Him. He wants us to love Him but love can never be forced, in fact to force love would be against God’s Law, i.e. "God is Love". It is His kindness which leads us to repentance, and repentance leads us back to loving God. Do what I say or else, is one of the distortions which try to redefine love. Because of Satan’s distortions of God, Satan is removed from Heaven and God proceeds with His plan to answer Satan’s inaccurate and slanderous view of God. Remember that Satan literally means adversary which indicates that God now has to answer people's misunderstanding of God as well because even with the best of intentions a person could misunderstand God and distort what God is like thus transgressing the Law of Love. This is important to remember as we even as Christians and believers in God have been known to and often continue to distort the law of God, the law of love.

The Law "God is love" is the foundation upon which all other laws dealing with humans is based. It is to what all other laws point. The laws given in the old testament are intended as our school master to point us to the one supreme law of God. This is why on the Sermon on the Mount Jesus points out that even our thoughts quite apart from actions can be counted as sin. Or as Paul tells us even good things done, if done apart from faith in God are sins. We violate the law when we misrepresent, or ignore "God is love". If someone says God loves good little children but He cannot love naughty little children. That is as much a violation of the law of God as to say that we are gods. The law of God stands not on written instructions on how to live and what not to do, but upon the very nature of God Himself.

Many in our churches today will say that the 10 commandments are a transcript of God’s character. I pity anyone who reads the 10 commandments as God’s character. What a distorted view they must have of God. He would be seen as someone demanding human worship, punishing those who reject Him and showing mercy to only those who obey Him. Not a particularly loving God, rather one who loves you only after you first love and obey Him. This is not to disparage the 10 commandments, there is nothing wrong with them, they are good. However they must be viewed in the context derived from the entire Bible, that is that "God is love". They are instructions on how to live toward God and man. They point to the one law, "God is love". They do not provide anyone with salvation, rather they instruct the reader as to how to live in harmony with the supreme law of God. They are as Paul says, our school master teaching us of our need to return to God.

Abraham acting out of a relationship with God, and guided by the Law of God, followed God’s instructions to offer up Isaac. Realizing that God’s actions are out of love, Abraham trusted that whatever was going to happen would be for his own families good. And true to the law of God the ending was good just as he expected. When a person comes to this point in their lives, that is, they know that "God is love" they are meeting all the requirements of Gods law. No other laws are needed in their lives.. Because this one law is the summation of all others. Their faith is counted as righteousness. This is why Paul could say: Col 2:14 having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. (NIV) Because the Law of God’s love was so completely revealed to us through Christ’s life death and resurrection, the written code is no longer the best method of bring us back to repentance. Gods kindness is shown so perfectly through Jesus Christ that He is now the central point of the gospel message. If there remains any reason to teach the law, let it be the law of Love.

[from http://newprotestants.com/GODSLAW.htm This is posted here to help satisfy those critics of mine who complain that I never offer enough devotional material here. ]