Despair Over the Future

No, no, no, I have absolutely no disagreement with you.

As a famous politician once said, "there you go again". You presume to know my heart. You don't. And that is all I have to say to you.

I can only say that you are wicked, evil and bound for destruction. Your nice sounding human words are only a facade to deceive others like yourself who are going to the same place.

I have nothing else to say to you as you are not one of us. You might appear to come out of us but you definitely are not one of us. You belong to Satan and his hosts.

You will deserve what you get as God is no respecter of persons.

"There are plenty of arguments we could all make about what we do or don’t agree about the Bible, contemporary Christianity, etc. But we can’t control a single aspect of it. What you’re looking for is control over every facet of your life and everything you don’t like about the world. You already know that kind of control doesn’t exist for people. And that appears to be what frustrates you."

That's the problem. Why give humanity free will and then place them in conditions/circumstances they have essentially no control over (other than perhaps their emotional response to it, which isn't real control at all)? Why shouldn't we just accept the awfulness of this world when there's no point trying to change it? After all, trying to change things would be "playing God."

Just tell every doctor in the world that humans are destined to die, so there's no point trying to make people better.
Tell every person working to stop human trafficking that it's a fool's errand, cause people will always be into sex.
Just tell people it's okay to pollute the planet to sh*t, because otherwise we're just delaying the inevitable.

You know what that all sounds like to me? Gnosticism. The assertion that physical reality is at best irrelevant and at worst evil. Only the spirit is worth preserving.

Without even knowing it, millions of Christians have invited Gnosticism and its fatalistic attitudes into their spiritual lives. No wonder Christianity is now seen as irrelevant at best. We may be interested in piety (the definition of which will vary from person to person), but not in actually accomplishing anything.

"No. That is exactly why God allows free will. You have the choice on how you live. Some choose to rebel while some choose to abide."

Do we though? We don't choose where we're born or to whom. We don't choose our gender or what skin color we have. We don't choose the economic circumstances we're born into. We don't choose whether or not we go to school. We don't even really choose our jobs, cause we're hired and fired on the whims of employers. For that matter, we don't choose how much money we make, we don't choose what health conditions we're born with, whether or not we have friends or family, and most importantly, we don't choose where or when we die. All of these things are decided by other people.

There's no point to having free will if everything we do and all our choices ultimately don't matter. Time is the worst taskmaster. We're all slaves to it, and live and die at its pleasure.

Everything listed there are material things. Some people have way more possessions, wealth, opportunity, etc …. Some have less.

But you have a choice, no matter what your status is in life, to serve God and by extension, people.

What will you choose?

That's the thing though. We're all born into sin, all because of one person's actions. Even Calvinists will admit that people are only saved by the grace of God, not through any choice they made. After all, a heart and mind corrupted by sin are not saved by any of our efforts.

Well, YOU, right NOW, can choose to serve Him and love others.

There is NOTHING stopping you from doing that right now.

And like I said, your very comment displays the issues I have with modern Christianity. Concerned only for the spiritual while disregarding the material.

I may not be God, but you can't make beings with free will and then expect them to act like robots. You can't desire for people to love you and then be surprised when they sin. In the end it's a zero sum game. You can have love or free will, but you can't have both.

The human heart is NEVER satisfied with material goods.

You NEED to study the Book of Ecclesiastes. There, the richest man ever to have lived, the most accomplished, with 300 wives and 700 concubines, who was also the wisest man ever, and had unfettered power, came to the conclusion that it is all meaningless.

I would disagree that the Church doesn't care about helping people in need.

AT LEAST 85% of human beings on planet Earth have it materially worse off than you. So wealth, and opportunity, are relative.

The thing that makes us all equal, is the choice we make to serve and Love God and people.

To love or not IS free will.

And God CHOSE to love US so much, that it took nothing less than the death of Himself, to give us a way to be with Him.

What more could He have done?

All that is here will pass away, His truth will never pass away.

I'm not talking about material goods. Yes, Solomon did have it all. But he also lived in a time and place utterly unrecognizable from ours. And the Bible doesn't regard material wealth and good health as bad things. The Book of Revelation is full of that stuff.

Oh wait, I forgot, Revelation doesn't count cause it's all symbolic.

Solomon's real problem was that he lived in the Old Testament days. He let himself go astray and started worshipping idols.

For the record, I am well aware of how good I have it. But you wanna know what causes the majority of crimes in this world? Poverty, peer pressure, and a whole bunch of other unenviable circumstances. I don't need to resort to theft or prostitution or participating in drug cartels, cause I have money.

I also didn't say that the Church doesn't care. It's their worldview I have an issue with.

And yes, God did send Jesus. However, according to traditional theology, even God must bow down to free will because we still have to make the choice.

He gave us "dominion" in the first chapter, in doing so He obligated Himself to limit Himself to what we invite Him into.

It's not so much a "bow down" as His respect for our dominion.

That's the thing about traditional theology. None of us can ultimately be held accountable for our choices, cause they aren't really ours. They were decided for us when Adam sinned.

Jesus spoke the truth that ALL things are new in Him, ALL means ALL. The old has passed away. You have to get back under some (many?) churches "theology" to get back under the law that Christ freed us from.
He intends we all be in relationship with Him, His "church" are those who are in Him, not a manmade denomination.

I really have never met anyone with the understanding that you have.

I have to plead ignorance as I do not know what Gnosticism is as I do not study man or his materials.

But based upon what you have described Gnosticism to be then I would say that they are closer to the truth than anyone else in this world.

Knowledge is useless if it does not result in or produce the love or charity that Paul talks about in 1st Corinthians 13 or John spoke about in the 1st Epistle of John.

We know that even the evil spirits had great knowledge when they recognized Jesus as the Son of God and asked whether he had come to destroy them. (in the gospels)

Also God said that Daniel's wisdom could not compare with that of prince of Tyrus.

Eze 28:2 Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God:
Eze 28:3 Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee:
Eze 28:4 With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures:
Eze 28:5 By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches:
Eze 28:6 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God;
Eze 28:7 Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness.
Eze 28:8 They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.

Your venture into the realm of God's supreme omnipotence is bordering on trying to depose God.

King Nebuchadnezzar ruler of Babylon and the entire world in the 5th century B.C. was brought down from his place of pride to living like a wild beast in the field for 7 years among other wild beasts.

Really there is not much else to say to those who would try to belittle and put down the One True God of all creation.

I cannot help you only the One True God can help you, if you would only believe in his Son, Jesus Christ. Unfortunately for human beings everything with God is backwards. Faith only comes after you believe.

With God the more you know is the less you know. But with the child of God it is God who holds him up and not he, himself. In other words, what is impossible with man is possible with God.

I would suggest that you read Ecclesiastes 3 to enlighten you to the truth of God's ways.

There is only one will in this world and that is the will of God. You either fall within his will or outside of his will. You can read the bible to understand what are the consequences of falling outside of his will will be.

Faith is all that is needed to please God. But of course most do not know the meaning of faith because they literally have been blinded by their corrupt desires and evil pursuits. They have faith only in themselves and in their own selfish and corrupt pursuits.

God did not come to call those who are well and healthy and have need of nothing. He came to call those who were lost and sick and and needed a Savior.

I am not saying you cannot quote Calvinists or Lutherans or whoever.

But like Jesus told Peter "to mind his own business" and not become involved in other people's business in John 21, so too are we to have our own relationship with Christ and not be bothered about another person's relationship with Christ.

Jesus told John the same exact thing - "Leave them alone, if they are for me, then they are for me", when John was trying to stop others from casting out evil spirits.

A baby will eventually grow into a full grown adult. You too should try becoming a baby before you attempt to somehow morph yourself into an adult prematurely.

The bible states that he that believeth should not make haste. Do not push it, take tiny baby steps, one step at a time, else everything will come out muddled for you, and cause you to start plagiarizing other men's words because of the PHD or Rhode scholarship behind their names.