Steve you wrote:I don't understand the objection. I thought being a Christian disciple meant that we surrender everything to God—wife, children, our own lives also. If we begin complaining about His administration of what is His, this strikes me as a renunciation of that surrender. Maybe someone can show me where I'm thinking wrongly here.
What objection do you not understand? Are you referring to the belief that God is entirely loving as the apostle John said when he wrote “God is Love” twice in his letter?
When I became a Christian, it involved the acknowledgement that God has all the rights and He only does right things. If someone has not reached that conclusion, what is there about their commitments that can be regarded as "Christian"?
I don't understand how this paragraph fits into to the position that God doesn't kill people or cause the unnecessary atrocities which occur among humanity. I, for one, have never questioned God's “rights”. I agree with your conclusion that God does only right things. Whether or not that is the case is not the issue. The disagreement lies in whether or not He is behind the horrible atrocities which constantly occur among people.
God can take anything He wants from me, and the Bible affirms that He does so.
All right.
To take a living person from this life is only to take at that time what would have been taken at another time (a no less painful loss at any other time).
But does He take a living person ANY time? Hebrews 2:14 affirms that it is the devil who has the power of death.
To pretend that the scriptures can be trusted in all cases, except when they tell us something about God or His activities that we don't like, is to adopt the exegetical habits of the Word of Faith folks, who think that God is not "good" if He does not always choose the circumstances of health and wealth for people.
Who is pretending? I don't think even Word of Faith people (with whom I disagree) are pretending — only mistaken. I believe the Bible is true history. But during that long historical period, particularly in pre-Christian times, the understanding of the character of God was deficient. No one truly understood His character until His Son was born on earth and revealed it.
This is making-up our theology as we go along, according to our tastes. Anyone who likes that methodology is welcome to it. I would prefer my life to be built upon firmer ground than that.
Steve you have stated many times during our discussion about this very important matter, that my position arises from emotions — that I pick and choose parts of the Bible according to what I like. This suggests that my position if merely subjective in spite of the fact that I have already explained otherwise. I won't accuse you of ignoring my explanation; perhaps you somehow skipped over it. In any case, I will affirm it again.
Jesus, the great Messiah, my Saviour from sin, is my authority. I believe all that He has said. You have never read from my posts any rejection of His words on the grounds that the gospel writers were mistaken. You have pointed out that Jesus referred to Moses and the prophets. True enough. But did Jesus ever quote Moses or the prophets in connection with God ordering hands to be cut off, killing disobedient children, “taking away” (through death) anyone's wife, etc.?
The writer to the Hebrews affirmed that the Son of God is the exact image of the Father's essence (Heb 1:3). If your depiction of the character of God is correct, and if Jesus has exactly the same character as God, wouldn't we expect that He would have killed a few people while He was here on earth? But He didn't kill even one person. Indeed, He, with a wise word, prevented the Pharisees from stoning a woman to death.
Jesus revealed the Father as He really is when He said that the Father is kind to ungrateful and evil people. (Luke 6:35). He said that we will truly be children of the Father if we love our enemies and do good as the Father does. At no time did Jesus reveal the Father as being hateful or vengeful or killing people for trivialities such in the case of Uzzah, whom He supposedly killed for steadying the ark of the covenant when it was about to fall.
Those of us who are married, or have children (or siblings, or parents, or grandparents, or friends, or anyone else sharing our world with us) should know that each person we care about (and we ourselves) is going to die.
Yes, all shall die, with the exception of those who will be alive at Jesus coming. I don't think many people suggest otherwise, although in 1920s a JW publication was titled, “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”, and a few small groups think that God will “give life” to some individuals and that they will never die. Nevertheless, I affirm that death was not God's intention for creation. It was part of the fall of man. Genesis 3 states that God “cursed” the ground, perhaps meaning as Greg Boyd suggests, that he lifted his protective hand from creation so the Satanic powers had their way.
Fortunately, this life is not all there is, and it is certainly not what we, or anyone else, should be living for. Jesus said, in every Gospel, one way or another, that we cannot love our lives in this world and still be HIs disciples. We allegedly accepted His terms when we signed up.
Jesus did not say that we should prefer death over life — indeed quite the opposite. He didn't say, “I came that they might have death” but “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). He was talking about this present life, not the life which people will have after their resurrection. His statement that we cannot love our lives in this world and still be His disciples, refers to loving to live our lives as we want to live them instead of submitting to Christ's authority in everything. It does not refer to a rejection of living, and preferring to die.
Paidion doesn't believe what I am about to say (we have discussed it here more than once), but my convictions are as follows:
1) As with Belshazzar, our breath is in God's hands (Dan.5:23). If this does not mean that God has power over life and death, I do not know what it could possibly mean. Every breath we take is a gift granted because God chooses to extend our life that much longer (there will be an end of breaths);
I don't know what it means, though I suspect it means that God originally breathed into man the breath of life, and thus the reason those persons could even breathe is due to God. He also says, "and whose are all your ways". We might wonder how the ways of these people could be God's since they were worshipping "the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone." It can't mean that the worship of these gods are God's ways. And I suspect the former does not mean that God held their breath in His hands ready to take it from them at any time, as you seem to mean when you indicate that it means, "God has power over life and death." However, I remind you again that the writer to the Hebrews affirmed that it is the devil who has the power of death.
2) With reference to believers, God's supernatural, unconquerable protection is guaranteed for the duration of our proper lifetimes (Psalm 34:7; 91:11-12). We are able to survive in a deadly dangerous world because of this protection. There is no power greater than God to protect those whom He may wish to protect. When we succumb to something that kills us, it can only be because God chose not to proect us from that circumstance, in which case, He was either evil or He had good reasons. His being too weak to save and protect is not one of the options.
So why would God first protect you, and then choose not to protect you? What would be His motivation?
I have never been able to understand how anyone can face crises without understanding these truths. What possible "peace" (a constant endowment—"like a river"—for the believer) can be had if there are powers greater than the God we serve, who, despite His desire to keep people alive, can overwhelm Him and snatch His things out of His hand? I'll stick with the God who revealed Himself in scripture and in Christ, and leave the lesser gods to other faiths.
I was able to face my first wife's death with the understanding that God had nothing to do with it. If I had believed as you do, that God killed her, I couldn't have faced it with any peace. Such a “truth”, had I believed in it, may have destroyed my faith, and certainly I would have lost my confidence in God's protection.
3) Paul said that, for a believer, "To die is gain." Given the other components in the constellation of a Christian's worldview, this conclusion would have been self-evident, even if Paul had not mentioned it. Why would any Christian complain if God chose to promote a loved one (or him/herself) to a more desirable condition than that which they occupied here on earth? What, that is, other than a renunciation of our former surrender to His will?
Whose complaining about God's choices? Certainly not I. If I were going to complain, it would be about man's choices to hold to such a horrible view of God's character. You ask if I must hold out for “a lesser God whose thoughts are more like my own". Yes, God's thoughts are like my own. I was created in His image! I don't think you and I believe in two different Gods. I think we believe in the same God but disagree about His character. But if we did believe in two different Gods, I think yours would be the lesser. Mine is the God of Love which the apostle John proclaimed. Love surpasses all things. “The greatest of these is Love” said Paul. Yours is the schizophrenic God who loves and protects you one minute, but may hate and kill you the next.