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If you believe in God, life makes more sense

By Jeremy Myers
9 Comments

If you believe in God, life makes more sense

Sometimes I get asked why I believe in God.

In the past, I used to say that I found it harder to not believe in the existence of God than to believe in His existence.

To put this another way, I found it easier to believe that everything came from God than to believe that everything came from nothing.

believing in GodAnd yet … let’s be honest … saying that “everything came from God” only pushes the logical causality of everything further back one step. If I have trouble believing that everything came from nothing, and so say that everything came from God, the question is then, “Well then, where did God come from?” The Christian answer is that He didn’t come from anything; He just always was.

So really, the choice is between believing that everything came from nothing, or believing that God has always existed. Neither choice is easily understood or comprehended by the human mind. However, even with these two options, I still prefer to believe in the existence of God, for at least with God, there is the recognition of a mystery that cannot be understood by human finite minds, whereas without God, the idea that something came from nothing is just pure nonsense.

But recently I have come to realize something different.

I don’t necessarily believe in God because I can prove the existence of God.

No, I believe in God because through this belief, the world makes more sense.

Belief in the existence of God is the organizing principle of everything. Without a belief in the existence of God, everything is simply random meaninglessness. But with a belief in the existence of God, many of the dilemmas and confusing things of life suddenly make sense.

C. S. Lewis once said something like “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” I mentioned this in my recent podcast on Genesis 1:4.

belief in God - CS Lewis

As usual, C. S. Lewis is right on target.

Believing in God is like believing in light.

While light can be seen, you only really see light itself when it shines directly into your eye, like when someone shines a flashlight into your eye, or when you look at a light bulb or the sun. But you don’t need to have a light shown into your eye to know that a room has light. You know that a room has light because you can see the room. When you look at the walls of a room, and the items that are in the room, you are not seeing light, but are seeing things by the light. When light hits something, it allows you to see that thing. It diffuses, scatters, or reflects.

When we look at things and see them, we can know that the light is on them, not because we see the light, but because, by the light we can see.

As I have come to see the world through the light of Jesus Christ, the crucified God, this crucivision lens has helped me understand life, Scripture, and theology more clearly, and it has helped me grow in love for others more deeply.

So also with the existence of God. Believing in the existence of God helps us see ourselves, other people, this world, and our purpose more clearly.

Of course, you have to believe in God as He is revealed in Jesus Christ, or else you may end up believing in a god that acts like Hitler, and seeing the world through that lens will not be helpful for anybody. But that’s a subject for a future time.

Do you believe in the existence of God? Why? Do you think that this belief helps you understand life and live your life better than if you didn’t believe in God?

God is Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: apologetics, CS Lewis, existence of God, Theology of God, Theology of the Church

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2 Keys to Understanding the Heart of God

By Jeremy Myers
7 Comments

2 Keys to Understanding the Heart of God

There are two ideas I have been mulling over the last couple years which are central to understanding the heart of God, and which most Christians do not seem to understand. These two keys are based on God’s omniscience, that fact the He is all-knowing. While it is amazing to think that God knows everything, I think we have not grasped what this means when it comes to heart of God.

heart of GodThese keys are summarized by some quotes I heard from somewhere … (I cannot recall where or from whom … sorry).

There is no person you would not love if you only knew their story.

I think this quote might be from Darin Hufford, though I am not certain.

It is often easy to judge and condemn other people when all we see is their outward actions or behavior.

We all tend to hate people who treat us with spite or anger.

We even get frustrated at loved ones when they do not do what we think they should in the way we want them to.

But God, who is the only being in the universe who knows everything about everyone, loves each and every person unconditionally.

When a person is rude to you, you get angry in return. But if, like God, we saw the fight they had with their spouse that morning, or the way they had been treated by their boss when they showed up late, or how the person they had encountered right before you had cussed them out, we would be able to love that person in spite of their rudeness, because we would know their story. We would know what led up to them being rude.

You do this with yourself all the time. If you are rude to someone, you might feel bad about it afterwards, and you might even apologize. But you probably also know everything that is going on in your life which caused you to react rudely toward someone else. Since you know your own story, you are often able to keep loving yourself despite the things you do.

Since God knows everything about us, He is able to understand what led up to our bad behavior, and He loves us anyway. He loves us in the midst of our bad behavior, because He knows what led up to it.

This is the first key to knowing the heart of God. The second key is like it:

To know all, is to forgive all.

forgivenessI think I might have heard this from Greg Boyd, but again, I cannot be certain.

This second idea is almost exactly the same as the first. God is willing and able to forgive us for everything, in part because He knows all the events and circumstances which led up to whatever sin we committed.

It is not that we get to blame others for what we do, or even that God lets us off the hook for our sin, but that God forgives us for what we do, partly because He knows what led up to it.

Since God is omniscient, He alone knows everything that happened to the rapist which caused that man to become a rapist. He is still at fault for what he did, and made some terrible choices en route to such a terrible crime, but God is able to forgive the rapist because He knows what led up to the man committing such a terrible sin.

So How Then Should We Live?

You and I do not know everything about everyone. So does this mean that we do not have to love them or forgive them?

No, it means that we do need to love and forgive them, for we know that God, the one being who does know everything, loves and forgives.

Our job is to unconditionally love and freely forgive others, despite not knowing everything about them.

If we leave omniscience up to God, we can love all and forgive all, just as God loves and forgives us.

God is Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: forgiveness, Greg Boyd, love, omniscience, sin, Theology of God

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Dear World, I am sorry. Will you forgive me?

By Jeremy Myers
15 Comments

Dear World, I am sorry. Will you forgive me?

i am sorryWe Christians owe the world an apology.

I, at least, owe the world an apology. So here it is:

Dear World, I am sorry.

About what?

About so many things …

… But the one thing I am sorry about the most is presenting to you a picture of God which you found repulsive and repugnant and worthy only of your rejection.

If I had done a better job of presenting God as He really is, as the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, you might have loved Him instead of hated Him. You might have seen how much He loves you. How much He likes you.

Instead, I told you that if you do not do certain things that he wants, he will torment you forever in hell.

You could not love or worship a god like that. (Who truly can?) And so you rejected this god.

You figured that if this god really existed, and if he was going to send you to hell anyway, you might as well “live it up.”

I told you that God loves you, but his love has strings attached. His grace has limits. His mercy eventually fails. But you knew better. You knew that this was not true love, not free grace, not real mercy. And so you rejected this god.

You figured that if this god really existed, and since you could never really be sure of his love for you, you might as well live any way you wanted.

I told you that God would forgive you of all sin, but I added conditions to this forgiveness. God would forgive you “if” you did this and this, “and” as long as you kept yourself from that, “but” only when you felt this or that.

You figured that if this god really existed, it did not appear that you could ever know real forgiveness, so you decided to stop trying and go sin all you want.

I told you that the kind of people god wanted in heaven were the types of people who sat in pews on Sunday morning, who dressed in “proper” clothes and spoke “proper” language. Everybody else was headed for hell.

You figured that if god only wanted certain types of people in his presence, and you could never be one of those types of people, you might as well follow all your friends to hell.

I am sorry for all those things I told you.

Not a single one of them was true.

Not one.

I lied.

Jesus reveals god to us

The truth, as I see it now, is the truth you have always known to be true.

The truth is what you always tried to tell me was true, but I never listened. Because I was the Bible expert.

The truth is that you were right all along, and I was wrong. You hated the god I was proclaiming because that god was a god of my own making. I invented that god. And you knew it. Thanks for being patient with me while I came to the same realization you knew all along.

You see, I have recently come to understand that everything you hated about the god I proclaimed, you hated because you were listening to the voice of God better than I was. The true God hates that false god also. The true God hates the god I was proclaiming.

So in rejecting the god I was proclaiming, you were more godly than I.

And I am sorry for condemning you for it.

I have come to see the truth of your position because I have come to see the truth of Jesus.

You have always liked Jesus, because you knew that if God existed, He would look like Jesus. You always knew that if God was like Jesus (as I claimed), He would be loving and compassionate. Full of justice and mercy. He would be kind and generous. He would laugh a lot. He would tell good stories. He would go to parties. He would hang out with people that religious folk labeled as “sinners.”

But the god I was proclaiming looked nothing like Jesus, and so you rejected him.

And as a result of rejecting the god I proclaimed, I condemned you.

So I am sorry.

I never accepted the Jesus you knew to be true, because your Jesus didn’t fit with my conception of god. But now that I see that Jesus truly reveals God to us, and now that I see that the god I was proclaiming was a god of my own making, I have come to see that the Jesus you knew is the Jesus who really exists, and therefore, is what God is really like as well.

So I now see the truth you have seen all along.

What truth is that?

The truth that God loves us. Period.

The truth that God forgives us. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The truth that God likes us so much He wants to hang out with us and our friends. Just as we are.

The truth that God doesn’t care so much if we sit in those pews on Sunday morning. In fact, He may prefer that we don’t.

The truth that God isn’t concerned about our sin. He only cares about sin because it hurts us. And since He loves us, He doesn’t want to see us hurt.

And regarding all those silly rules about what to wear (and not wear), what to say (and not say), and where to go (and not go) … the truth that God doesn’t give a rat’s ass about those things. Those aren’t His “rules.” He never made those. We made those. Yes, we religious people. We invented those rules to make ourselves feel better. To make ourselves think we were better than you. When we’re not.

So we’re sorry.

No, I’m sorry.

And if you ever want to tell me more about Jesus, I would love to learn.

God is Redeeming Church Bible & Theology Topics: crucifixion, cruciform, crucivision, evangelism, looks like Jesus, Theology of God, Theology of Jesus, Theology of Sin

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God loves you? No … God LIKES You

By Jeremy Myers
19 Comments

God loves you? No … God LIKES You

Recently I wrote a post on the All About Eve blog that the theological invitation “Believe in Jesus for eternal life” is more concretely summed up with the statement “God loves you.”

I wrote that many people have trouble understanding what it means to believe in Jesus for eternal life. And while this invitation is referred to over and over in the Gospel of John (e.g., John 3:16; 5:24; 6:47), this offer of eternal life is often equated with the fact and foundation of God’s love for humanity.

So I believe that if we really understand God’s love for us, we will have also understood that He gives us eternal life freely through Jesus Christ.

Therefore, when someone says, “I don’t know if I have believed enough, or believed the right thing,” one way to help people sort through this is to ask if they know that God loves them.

God loves youAnd I mean REALLY loves them. No conditions. No limits. No ifs, ands, or buts.

This sort of understanding of God’s love is so radical, it revolutionizes everything we think about God, Scripture, ourselves, and the church.

Understanding that God loves you infinitely and completely no matter what you have done in the past or what you do in the future, whether you change or not, this is equivalent to understanding that God gives you eternal life freely by His grace.

This sort of teaching about love is what grants people freedom from sin, freedom from religion, and freedom from fear.

I have previously written about this on numerous posts in numerous ways.

But here’s the thing that I have come to realize in the last couple of days:

The church has bastardized the biblical concept of love.

I doubt you could find a church in the world which does not preach the message that “God loves you.” But so few churches and Christians actually understand it or believe it.

Yet rather than try to fight this misunderstanding about love, I think might be best to start saying something else instead.

Rather than saying “God loves you” to people, maybe we should start saying “God likes you.”

Yes, yes, I know. “Like” is a much weaker word than “love.” But there are countless millions of people who would agree in a second that God loves them, but who do not for a second believe that God likes them.

God likes you

To understand what I’m talking about, let’s back up a bit. In Christian circles, it is not uncommon to hear someone say this: “I love my neighbor … but I don’t like them.” Or maybe instead of your neighbor, you have said this about an in-law, the church gossip, or a rude deacon.

When we say we love someone but don’t like them, we mean this: “I love them (because I know I am supposed to), but I don’t want to hang out with them or be their friend.”

This sort of idea is often preached in our pulpits as well. Again, you will sometimes hear pastors say this: “As Christians, we are supposed to love everybody, just as God loves us. But even though you love them, you don’t have to like everything about them. Remember, we love the sinner and hate the sin!”

Do you see? We have this attitude toward others because we think this is God’s attitude toward us. We think God loves us, but doesn’t really like us. At least, He doesn’t like us the way we are now. He likes some future version of us where we have cleaned up our lives, gotten rid of sin, read our Bibles and pray more faithfully, and witnesses regularly to our friends and neighbors. That future “fixed” person is the one God wants to be friends with and hang out with; not the “broken” and sinful person we are now.

So you see? Though we believe God loves us, we don’t really think He likes us.

But here is the Gospel truth as revealed in Jesus Christ: GOD LIKES YOU!

Let me bring this down to earth a little bit more.

Think of a famous author, actor, or musician you would love to be friends with.

For me, I think of people like N. T. Wright, Brad Paisley, and Keanu Reeves. I think it would be awesome to be best friends with these guys. You know … to have such a good friendship that it became informal … that they just drop by my house to see what’s going on, and I could do the same for them. It would be assumed that we watch football together on Monday nights. That when we went camping, we would invite the other along. That if we just wanted to chat about life and theology, we would call up the other person first.

Do you have someone in mind who is like that? Someone you would love to get to know, hang out with, and have “inside jokes” with?

God likes youUsually, when we think about God, we tend to put God in the place of these famous people we want to know. We think, “It would be so cool if God and I were on a first-name basis. If I could call God any time I wanted. If we could hang out like best friends.”

But here is the actual truth: When God thinks about you, He thinks about you the way you think about the famous people you want to know. The way I think about being friends with N. T. Wright, Brad Paisley, and Keanu Reeves, that is how God thinks about me.

God likes me so much, He dreams about being on a first-name basis with me! He dreams about hanging out with me to watch a football game. He dreams about just showing up at my house with no other purpose than to say, “What’s happening?”

And this is the same way God feels about you.

More than anything else, He wants to hang out with you. He wants to be your friend. You are the famous person He would “name drop” to all the angels when He talks about what He did over the weekend. More than anything, God wants to be on a first-name basis with you. He wants to be the one you think of calling when things are going great, and the one you call when things are going bad.

God likes you so much, He wants to even hang out with you when you are weeding your garden, filling your car with gas, and running errands to Sears.

And best of all, God likes you just as you are. He doesn’t want to be friends with some “better and improved” version of you. He wants to be friends with you … as you are right now.

God likes YOU.

This is the truth about God that many people do not believe and cannot accept. They cannot believe that the God of the universe is so madly in love with them, so infatuated with them, so in awe of who they are and what they like and the sorts of things they do, that He would “like” every single one of your Facebook posts, would “Favorite” every single Tweet, and would “Repin” every single picture on Pinterest.

God is your biggest fan, and He dreams of just being in your presence.

God likes you.

This is the Gospel message. This is what Jesus came to reveal.

Do you believe this?

God is Redeeming Life, Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: believe, faith alone, God likes you, gospel, love of God, love of Jesus, Theology of God

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God is not very Christlike … or is He?

By Jeremy Myers
8 Comments

God is not very Christlike … or is He?

Christians are always encouraged to become more “Christlike.”

But we rarely do.

Or at least, not to any significant degree.

Over the centuries, pastors and theologians have proposed dozens of explanations as to why this happens. Some say we just need to be more “filled with the Spirit.” Others say that the problem is that people who don’t live like Christians were never really Christians in the first place, and they won’t be until they truly “get saved.” A few proclaim that the problem is a lack of Bible knowledge, and that if we can just “renew our minds” with the Word of God, renewed lives will follow. And on and on it goes.

Christlike God

Can I propose something radical?

Maybe the reason many Christians are not very Christlike is because the God we worship is not very Christlike.

In the minds of most Christians, God is sitting in heaven with His arms crossed and a scowl on His face about all the sin in our lives. In the minds of most, the primary activity of God is to judge sin, point out our failures and weaknesses, and decide who is truly righteous enough to be part of His family.

He is controlling to the point of determining who lives and who dies, and He is to blame for tsunamis, earthquakes, diseases, famines, and wars.

He manipulates countries, pulls strings to govern human affairs, and demands the people follow and obey Him “or else.” And although He says He loves humanity, He does not seem to like us very much. At least, not until we fix ourselves up a bit. After all, “God cannot even look upon sin. He loves the sinner, but hates the sin.”

And since humans become like what we worship, when we worship this God who doesn’t look much like Jesus, we become more like God and less like Jesus.

Just like God, we sit around with our arms crossed and a scowl upon our faces at all the sin in other people’s lives.

Just like God, our primary activities seem to include judging sin, pointing out the failures and weaknesses in others, and deciding who is truly righteous enough to be in God’s family.

Just like God, we seek to control the lives of others, telling them what they can and cannot do, can and cannot believe.

And since our God seems to be at war against “wicked people,” we feel it is our duty and responsibility to also wage war against people we think are “wicked.” You know, the Muslims, the gays, and the abortion doctors.

Just like God, we try to manipulate rulers and leaders to do what we want. We try to pull the strings behind the scenes to get others to follow our ideas and our teachings.

And just like God, while we say that we love everybody, we don’t seem to like other people very much. We do not hang out with “sinners,” because they might pollute us. We say that we “love the sinner, but hate their sin.”

We have become images of the God we worship.

And since our God is not very Christlike, neither are we.

But in recent decades, a growing number of people are beginning to see what it really means for Jesus to be God incarnate.

An increasing number of people are beginning to recognize that one of the primary reasons Jesus came was to reveal God to us.

People are beginning to see that Jesus is not like God; God is like Jesus.

And God has always been like Jesus. God has always been with us and among us, sharing our pain, taking our blame, and redeeming our shame. He heals, He comforts, He restores. He hates nobody, kills nobody, and condemns nobody. He knows all, loves all, and forgives all.

And though many among Western Christianity are just now coming to understand that Jesus reveals God to us, this view is not new. It was the dominant view of the church for over 1000 years, and has always been the view of Jesus in Eastern Christianity. It is only in the West, where we allowed economics and empire to guide our theology, that God came to look more like a king on a throne than Jesus on the cross.

But that is all changing now, and I cannot wait to see what happens in the church and in the world as a result.

Jesus hangs out with sinners

To become more Christlike ourselves, we need a more Christlike God, and to see a Christlike God, we simply need to look at Jesus.

And when we look at Jesus, and recognize the truth … that He is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15) and the exact representation of God (Heb 1:3), we will discover that we start to become more Christlike as well.

We will bless those who curse us.

We will pray for those who persecute us.

We will serve those who wish us only harm.

We will love those who seek violence against us.

We will hang out with those that religious people label as “sinners.”

We will see all people as our brothers and sisters, rather than just those who dress like us and believe like us.

We will no longer judge and condemn others, but will freely forgive them instead.

And we will do all these things because this is how Jesus treated others and how our Heavenly Father treats us.

When we see that God is Christlike, we will become Christlike as well.

God is Redeeming Theology Bible & Theology Topics: Christian living, Christlike, Colossians 1:15, cruciform, crucivision, Hebrews 1:3, looks like Jesus, love of God, Theology of God, Theology of Jesus, violence of God

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