Ninjahound

The COSMIC-SIZED PROBLEM I think you are outining is why is salvation through Jesus necessary when Ezekiel points out that God forgives sins anyway following repentance - in either case the relationship with God is back on track.

I don’t understand the full rationale of atonement yet - still working on it. Nothing I have read so far makes full sense. I plead humbly in prayer ‘agnosco’ - ‘Please, Lord, may I park this for the time being? You gave me my reason, and I don’t think it is your will that I pretend to believe what reason rejects. Of course I accept that my reasoning may be faulty; in that case please, if it be your will, enlighten me; or, suffer me neither to believe or disbelieve until enlightenment reaches me.’

God is the creator god and our scientific knowledge allows us to follow, to model mentally, quite a lot of his creative processes. As yet a very small portion of the whole, but still quite a lot. This is hardly surprising since he made us in his image and we have a sub-set, to the extent allowed by him, of his mental power.

It has appeared increasingly likely over the last 150 years or so that God used and continues to use evolution as a tool.  He designed and implemented an evolutionary process that generates life on the planet as we know it.

He has made us out of evolutionary clay, if you like, and in order to turn us into pots has to smooth or eliminate the lumps that evolution has left behind.

These evolutionary lumps explain, at least in part, our tendency to sin. Compare our competitiveness with the competitiveness, or territoriality, of the song-birds in your garden … or the piglets in a litter … or myriads of natural examples.  Competitiveness is the root of much of what we call sin.  Compare our lustful sexual tendencies with those of rams in a flock of ewes … or myriads of other natural examples.

God doesn’t want these evolutionary behavioural relics in the kingdom of heaven he is building with us here on earth.  They hinder his purpose.  I do not believe that he ‘hates’ or ‘abhors’ or ‘cannot abide’ human behaviour that is animalistic or evolutionary in origin for the simple reason that he made us the way we are. But I do think that is not part of his purpose, his much higher purpose, for the development our lives and the human race generally.

He is achieving all this behavioural development through attraction, not compulsion.  In his omnipotence he could remove our wills and convert us in a twinkling of an eye into sinless automata … but that is not what he wants.  He wants people to behave the way he wants because they want to.

That is where I think that our Lord Jesus Christ comes in.  He showed us what God wants (he revealed God to us .. ‘I and the Father are one’) and left us the most attractive behavioural example in human history.  It cost him his life, as God always knew it would, and such was God’s love for the rest of his creation that he allowed this personal sacrifice to be made and didn’t stifle it.

Without this example that Jesus gave, our behaviour would, in general, be much worse now than it actually is.  Overall, the behaviour of the human race is much, much better now than it was in the Roman empire 2,000 years ago.

This doesn’t contradict Ezekiel .. God does and did forgive those who repent.  That is what desirable behaviour modification is … in a word, repentance.  The point is that without Jesus example, we would be much less inclined to repent and when the full implication of this increased willingness to repent is grasped, the magnitude of Jesus achievement becomes clearer.

Peter Farmer 6 Apr 06