Single-minded message for and from a double-minded man

I posted this over on John Smulo's site. I was responding to a query John had regarding his 12 year old son making the observation that God acted violently when he brought on the flood. It doesn't always make it easy for us when God seems to contradict the teachings of Jesus like it seems he did with the advent of the great flood. Yet, more and more, I ask myself questions like, did God do it or did we? or Did we leave Him with a choice? While we tend to make God the scapegoat when things go wrong, is He to blame, or are we? In that situation, mankind would soon have self-destructed had God not intervened. When we look at the horrific conditions some people must suffer under today, do we blame God, or are we, in fact the cause of this distress? I've made some wretched decisions in my life. Among hypocrites, I am chief. Yet, I am trying to do my best. I think we all mean well. The problem is that we don't always act well. Faith is really a simple thing, yet we tend to fail at it repeatedly, never learning the lessons God has for us from our actions.

Call me a liberal if you like, but as I see it, some of the NT writers also had double standards and contradicted themselves--especially on issues regarding the Law. But, I think God left those words in the Bible because he wanted to remind us how easy it is for us to exchange His ways for our own mere human reasoning. Paul could sometimes come off as being as legalistic as he was prior to his conversion, yet if we read books such as Romans without trying to twist them to condemn things like homosexuality, for example, like we typically do, we find an incredible expose on the power of grace and mercy--which serves to affirm Jesus' own teachings instead of nullifying them. So, why do we take Paul's teaching out of context and use them to beat people up spiritually rather than to love them unconditionally? We're all in this together, along with those who came before us like Paul, Peter, John and others--the whole lot of us struggling to make sense of it all, stumbling into the Kingdom as best as we can, ever hearing, yet seldom grasping the simple message that God loves us. Did Jesus not say that to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves was tantamount to the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets?

Someone once said that the OT was kind of like God's flannel graph for humanity to teach us what it really means to have a relationship with God. He had to do things in a big way sometimes to get his point across for our own good. While that sounds somewhat childish, do we all not learn our lessons the hard way if we learn them at all? People trying to reach the heavens on their own, making a name for themselves, rather than for God, is something that has kept us from beholding the unconditional love and providence of a merciful God ever since the days of Babel and before. Yet, here we are in 2008, and we still--even as Gods own people--refuse to rise from the ashes of our own personal, institutional and global failures and accept the notion that God has a better way. No, we always think we can do it better than God even if we don't openly admit that. We prove it by our own actions.

We don't really build massive church empires for Him, we build really them for ourselves, just as we have since the days of Babel. We don't bring our tithes and offering to Him, we spend the bulk of them on our own comforts and desires while 64,000 people die around the world every day of malnutrition-related causes, while millions of little kids have to prostitute themselves just to keep from becoming one of the starvation statistics, and while millions of others turn to drugs to run away from the disparity of life. We don't fight wars for God, we fight them because we have failed to be His hands and feet to a desperate world, whose hatred for us mounts because of our selfishness, greed and apathy, while we continue to spend more and more on ourselves--even in the name of Jesus!

When you stop to think about it, the fact that we allow such injustice to go on in the world is indicative of a society that is so inherently violent that they couldn't care less, as long as it doesn't happen to them. But, just in case it does, we're right there, not only repaying evil with evil, but lobbing bombs on innocent men, women and children in the process--and calling it just--even from our pulpits.

Yeah, God tried to teach us some important lessons in the OT days that we never learned. Still He loved us so much that He even gave His only begotten Son to suffer and die in payment for our sins. Yet we still sin, and His Church is often the worst among sinners--crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to public disgrace day in and day out. Sorry for the rant. Praise God that I don't wake up every day bearing a burden like this!