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Questions, questions, questions. If you have not asked yourself anything lately then this is the chapter for you. Within the first six pages Bell asks over 50 questions. I know that this is his way of bringing the conversation to life and to draw you in to the book, but by the end of the chapter he has ask well over a hundred question. I know that some of them might be the same question over and over again, but he is asking…and asking. It make me think about about a conversation I had today with a friend, about how some time you have to keep pushing to get an answer. Personally I think that is what Bell is doing here, I think (speculation) he is pushing us to questions and not just the ones that he is asking, but the ones that have been bouncing around in our mind. The big question he is writing on is the idea of God’s Love, but one can help to thing of questions after being asked so many and certain ones repeatedly.
Here are just a few that I found hard to ignore:
Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?
Having a youth pastor who “relates better to the kids?”
God choosing you instead of others?
Questions like these are the ones that we(believers) might over look, but are the ones that keep the world starching their heads, pulling away.
How could God do something like that? How could He, a loving God do such a thing?
Well for me it comes to ones understanding of love. For me love is a choice, more importantly, MY choice that no one can take from me, because if is taken then it can never be true. Think about it, think about the person you love the most in this world? For me it is my wife, who I choose to love. No one is holding a gun to my head making me love her, because she would shoot them first, but also because that wouldn’t be love it would be control, forced, and not my own. I think that this applies to this too.
In the first question Bell, God uses the word punish. But could it also be true that it was the choice of the person to not accept?
In the second set of questions, I am still thinking about the first line, while the second line is something that I could never stomach. The idea that God chooses some “elect” and damns the rest. I hold true that God is calling to ALL! We have the choice to either except or reject, simple. Just like a invitation to a wedding, I receive the invite but only I can choose to attend the celebration.
There are two other large paragraphs that I am going to summarize based on the fact that I do not want to type them out.
So it doesn’t matter what type of person you are as long
as have prayed a prayer or believe the right thing?Then believers wouldn’t be motivated to do anything, because one day they are going to be with Jesus. Neglecting this world leaving, starvation and destitution. This might lead to outsiders have nothing to do with them.
True, at least to a point this is the reality of how the world views the church and how we view the world. Some where along the way for a vast majority of people who believe, this planet is nothing more than a holding tank. A place we “have” to be. When reality is this is the place we are called to cultivate and restore. We are the stewards of the world, it might be time that some of us do a better job.
Do you know anyone who grew up in the church and then left once they were older? Everyone is concerned for them and their spirituality – often they should be. But sometimes their rejection is sometime to what they saw in the church and were taught about Christianity was not right and that is why they left. Because the very things that they were being taught were the things they felt Jesus would reject?
This is something that I can agree with to a point. I hold that one needs to accept the Jesus is the Son of God and ones means for salvation and right relationship with God. But I completely can connect with the reality of someone leaving a church or a group of individual base on what they are teaching/representing. It easy at times to get caught up in perpetuating an idea as truth, when some one else has helped you through your life with that idea; however, it does not make that idea the gospel.
So chapter one some good questions, and some tuff questions. Some a little open ended, but nothing to out there for me personally. I am not claiming to have all the answers, or to be representing anything other than my personal opinion and perspective.
love.
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