God is love

[yomotalking]

Yomo,

if I can find the book I was speaking of on the internet, i'll e mail you the address, otherwise i'm gonna have to type it to you chapter by chapter,...........lol.

Your Sister in Christ Jesus

Anne

LOL!

You don't have to do thaT!

[poetically_taken]

God is able to feel every emotion that we feel. If He wasn't able to, wouldn't that make Him less than us? If we were able to do things (like hate) that He can't? I don't know, that's my take on it. Maybe He chooses to restrain those emotions. Reminds me of this quote I heard "It is easy to be angry, but to be angry at the right thing for the right things, that is hard" you oculd probably substitute hate for anger.

Edit: Also, maybe God hates the devil's choices but not the devil himself. Or maybe the devil is so opposite of God that there can't be any sort of relationship, good or bad.

Edited December 22, 2005 by poetically_taken

[SavedOne]

Just wondering if you folks are confusing Love and Hate with the responses of a completely Righteous and Holy God to unrighteousness and unholiness.

[EricH]

One of God's attributes is love. He does not turn it off and on. It is a part of who He is. If He quit loving, He would cease to be God. God has other attributes as well. He is holy, just, righteous, etc.

When God acts, His actions are always conditioned by all of His attributes. If He favored one attribute over another, or suspended one to exercise another, He would not be holding all of His attributes in perfection, and thus He would not be God.

So, when God judges, He does not cease loving. When God forgives, He does not cease being Holy.

[larryt]

I personally do not think God(Elohiym) is capable of hate. I think He can be angry, jealous, annoyed at at things we do, but hating us? No i do not think that His heart is capable of such a thing!

Yomo, God's heart so pure that He must love everything He has created, however, sin began when we first took our eyes off God and thought we could make it on our own. We must have hurt Him so much Yomo!

Your Sister in Christ Jesus

Anne

Hi Anne,

Whenever the topic of "God is Love" is brought up it seems to me that we lose sight of how vast God really is. Is it important that God is Love. Absolutely!!!!!!!! To get a better idea of how vast this God is whom we serve and love I believe we all need a better understanding of all of His REVEALED attributes. Arthur Pink came up with 17 attributes which is a good start. Especially his chapter on the Holiness of God. His book on the attributes of God can be found here. Happy reading.

And Yomo, if you enjoy reading then the home site for the above has a book gleaning in Exodus in which Pink mentions the numbers and their significance for the tabernacle in the wilderness and all the instruments of worship given to Israel had typological significance.

LT

[FollowTheLamb]

This made me think.

Does God hate the devil...

I would say of course.

But God is love.........

So.........I don't understand.......

God is love. But that does not encompass all of who God is. John's point in his epistle in saying that God is love is to encourage us to have the same mind toward other believers, and to show others on earth what God is like. To show others what God is like, we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

See the context? So comparing God is love to God hates the devil is not apprpriate, I believe. It will result in confusion. It's like saying, God like red and apples are red. But oranges are not red, so I don't understand. Does God hate oranges?

Another way to consider that God is love. God loves us, but He also loves justice, holiness, and faithfulness. When we act according to what He loves (the character traits I just noted) He will love us differently than if we were rebels. He will shower His promises upon those tho believe Him, and work against those who rebel against Him--WORKING OUT OF LOVE to bring the sinner back to faith in Himself.

[FollowTheLamb]

No one answered the post from knower777. So I will try it.

"

To see how "loving" this god is, we can always look to the bible to find examples:

Leviticus 25:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying,

44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. 45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. 46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

So here we have this "loving" god commanding (thou shalt have) us to buy, (of them shall ye buy) sell and own each other as possessions who can be willed to our children as an inheritance. This "loving" god plainly states we can even purchase children to keep as slaves.

"

Why did God authorize the acquisition of adults and children as slaves? It was already a common and acceptable practice in the area, so it is not appropriate for us to apply our views upon a people who lived centuries ago. (We may not like the caste system in India, but the people in India accept it as their lot.) Nevertheless, why was this in the account at all? In love, God was putting strict limits on what could and could not be done with slaves. He was showing us a more humane way to treat slaves than existed at the time.

________________________________

"

We next find this "loving" god telling us to kill any children we may have who dare to talk back to us:

Exodus 21:17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.

What could possibly be more loving than that?

"

I don't see 'love" mentioned in connection with this command. I see a God who is protective of the new society He is forming away from Egypt, in the Promised Land. We read of only one occasion when a child had to be put to death for this reason. In other words, the command helped the parents to see why they needed to train their children diligently to honor their parents. What kind of society would we have if every child honored their godly parents?

______________________

"

As a matter of fact, this god is so "loving" of children, he murders them every possible chance he gets:

Genesis:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; 25 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

Genesis 7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

Exodus 12:30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

I Samuel 15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Psalms 136:10 To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn: for his mercy endureth for ever:

Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be , that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

"

We gain a better understanding of the serverity of God's work upon the young ones when we read what the archeoologists found in the ruins of the times above. These people were not like your passive next-door neighbors. They sacrificed their children to their gods by fire, they mated with animals, and practised other abominations. Killing their children would protect the Hebrew people from the effects of that culture, for the children would grow up and affect the people of God. As we see in other parts of Scripture, the nations around them left them alone and feared God when they saw that the God of the Israelites was the true God. We might be upset at reading of a God who kills, but the nations around them had the right idea: fear God! God set up the rules for how the Israelites were to live, and they were to be such a bright light that other nations would want to become Jews too and enjoy the blessings of God.

________________________

"

II Kings 2:23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

"

It seems pretty severe to have children killed who merely called someone bald. But in those days calling someone bald was a REALLY terrible thing to say. The Scripture doesn't say that they died. They sure learned a lesson to be nice to their elders.

__________________________

"

Genesis 22:2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

"

We know God did this to test Abraham's faith. Abraham was extensively trained in faith before God gave this command to slay his son. (See Romans 4 for the behind-the-scenes story.) When Abraham did what God asked, he was demonstrating faith in God-- that is, God promised that through Isaac his seed would come. Since God told Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham thought that God would have to raise Isaac from the dead to raise up the seed. Through this episode we see how great Abraham's faith was--he actually believed God would raise someone from the dead, even though He had never known God to do so. And we know that Abraham did NOT kill his son, right?

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"

Now, I am not a god by any means. I am merely a human being who has made mistakes throughout my life. Yet, in the midst of my mistakes and the arguments I have had with other people I have known, not once have I killed the children of those I have opposed. ...

It appears my ideas of love for humanity differ greatly from the "love" shown by the god of the bible. I hope there are many others here who agree. If the "loving" god of the bible were a human on this earth and committed the acts described above, I would hope we as humans would lock him up and throw away the key for the evil nature of the "love" this god has shown.

"

No, you are not a god by any means. You have no authority to take some else's life. But God created us, so He has supreme authority over all His creation. He may kill and make alive. He may punish quickly or reserve punishment for a later generation. The Gospel story is clear, however, that God is not willing that any should perish.

I notice that you left off one more killing: the death of God's own Son. God does not desire that any perish in their sins. However, the soul that sins must die. So God sent His Son to die in our place. He had already showed acceptance of substitute sacrifices, through the animal sacrifices, remember? So Christ was our substitute. He died so that we would not need to.

Remember that man has not been a very good example of love and mercy. To keep God's judgement in context, please count up the deaths in the Old and New Testaments by the hand of God over thousands of years, and compare them with the millions slain by savage leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other terrible men down through only a few hundred years.

I hope this little study helps bring some help to those who struggle with God's love.