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[Millionaire]

Why would God "have to" do any of that? He set up the entire system/scenario in the first place. Right? We "sin" because he invented sin. He knew the serpent was in the garden and knew Adam and Eve would fail. If not then what kind of God is he?

[jimwalton]

If justice is a real concept, then injustice is also a real state. Sin created an imbalance in the universe that had to be righted, and it had to be righted in an effective way, not just in any way one chooses. The imbalance caused by sin resulted in death, so that's the hand of cards with which one has to play. Death has to be approached by the characteristics of death and the dynamics of death.

God didn't "set up the entire system." Justice is part of his immutable nature, and so rebellion against justice creates a situation that he didn't set up—one of the absence of justice, an inevitable result of removal of justice from a situation. It's also not true in the least that "[God] invented sin." Sin is a state of rebellion against God, against His desires and wishes, created by the free will of creatures that were capable of choosing wrong. Since God is uncreated, anything God creates is, by definition, not God. Therefore anything God creates is, by nature, capable of being and behaving less than God would. God didn't create sin at all; we did. God is incapable of creating sin.

> He knew the serpent was in the garden and knew Adam and Eve would fail.

They, unlike God himself, were capable of being broken. God knew that, because by definition and nature they were "not God." He was clear about what was right and what was wrong, and what the consequences would be of choosing wrong. He could not very rightly give them free will, and then say, "But you can only use your free will to choose the good." That's not free will then. So he gave them the capability and the reason to choose rightly, and he warned them of the consequences for choosing wrongly. In addition, he established both a plan and a mechanism to recover whatever they lost if they made the wrong decision. So what kind of a God is He? He's good, compassionate, merciful, caring, forgiving, and wise.

[Skating the Waltz]

A god who deserves our respect could have found a much less brutal way to forgive our sins. This 'sacrifice' only happened because god chose that scenario. He could have arranged a far less painful task for Jesus without the need for torture and death. Yet he chose not to.

[jimwalton]

You think God gets to arbitrarily pick something. If justice is a real concept, then injustice is also a real state. Sin created an imbalance in the universe that had to be righted, and it had to be righted in an effective way, not just in any way one chooses. The imbalance caused by sin resulted in death, so that's the hand of cards with which one has to play. Death has to be approached by the characteristics of death and the dynamics of death. Sin causes suffering, and the payback for sin is death, so you can't necessarily deal with it by eating a piece of candy and taking a stroll in the woods and looking for double rainbows. The absence of good is evil, and you have to deal with evil as evil, not just make up some way to handle it. The result of sin was injustice, pain, and death. You can't just make up a much less brutal way to deal with it. God's only choice was to deal with it or not, not how to deal with it. Thankfully he chose to deal with it, to great expense to himself, than to walk away and leave us to our own brutal and fateful devices.

[The Bagel Man]

Your whole post ("To me worship is a recognition of who God is and a response to what he has done....") is hard to read. You really want it not to be a bigoted and egotistical request, but you have to appreciate from the outside looking in, it really is. Like a woman defending an abusive husband.

[jimwalton]

Oh, not at all. It shows the trends depth of your misunderstanding of God and the Bible. And, as you admit, it is tough to understand a religion from the outside looking in. I have studied Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and Islam, but studying them from the outside is nothing like knowing and experiencing them as an insider. It's like American analysts telling us what Afghanistan is like. No, we really do need an Afghani to tell us what it is REALLY like. There's a vast different between analysis from the outside and experience from the inside.

Speaking about God's worthiness of being worshipped is nothing at all like a woman defending an abusive husband. For you to even be thinking in that direction shows that you have grotesquely distorted impressions of what the Bible teaches and fanciful caricaturish images of God. There's nothing about God in his revelation to us through the Bible that can be construed of as abusive unless you have a deformed understanding of what the Bible says. I usually get things like rape, infanticide, genocide, misogyny, hell, slavery, blah blah, all of which are accused by people who are "outside analysts" who haven't really pursued what the Bible says, but are content with a stereotypical image that can be easily attacked and ridiculed, too often skimming Internet links rather than doing real research. Sorry, but I don't buy your analogy of abuse. Let's talk further, and about your real concerns.

[Skating the Waltz]

Jesus died for the sins of christians so they can escape punishment for their own actions. How is that justice? And what about people who have not 'sinned?' No-one needed to die for them.

[jimwalton]

There are different kinds of justice. For instance, if I have a debt and someone voluntarily steps in to pay it for me, that's just fine. His money is as good as mine, the debt is paid, we all walk away happy. "Justice" is done. But if someone rapes my wife, and a homeless guy steps in and says, "I'll go to jail instead of the rapist. At least I'll get a free meal and a roof over my head," that's not justice. Sure, there's somebody in prison for the crime, but that's not justice.

The Bible speaks of salvation by substitutionary atonement more in the sense of the first one than of the second. The debt of sin was paid by the blood of Christ, and so the account is now balanced. Ever since the beginning of the Bible, substitutionary payment was not only allowed, but even commanded. That's the point of the whole sacrificial system: it's acceptable for someone (or something appropriate) to pay for the sins of another.

Did Jesus die for the sins of Christians so they can escape punishment for their own actions? Absolutely. Like a monetary debt—if I could pay it myself, I would have. But I'm unable to pay the debt of sin, because I'm the guilty one. A guy commits a murder, the jury convicts him, and the judge sentences him to life imprisonment. It does absolutely no good for the convicted man to say, "I'll serve the prison term instead of myself so I can go free." That's utter nonsense. We can't pay ourselves out of our own penalty. We need someone else, who is innocent, to step in an "pay the debt" for us. That's what Jesus did, and it's just.

What about people who haven't sinned? There is no such person. We've all sinned. At some point or another we've all lied, been inappropriately angry, been inappropriately proud, or greedy, or jealous, or unkind. There is no one who is innocent.

[Millionaire]

> God is wise

I'm going to assume that all the "bad" stuff in the OT is part of him being wise. I think you know what I mean. Things like drowning the entire world and having women and children killed.

[jimwalton]

There are many grotesque misunderstandings about such things. People don't seem to understand that there's far more to the Bible than there seems on the surface, but many people I talk to here on the website insist that we have to take the Bible on words alone (no contexts, literary elements, cultural factors, etc.). I think it allows them to be comfortable burning a straw man, or giving approval to a cardboard visor (Don Quixote). And when I try to engage them about the depth of the Bible, they want none of that. They can only be comfortable with 1" of meaning and don't want to be confused by depths of what the Bible is really all about.

You aren't like that, based on our previous conversations. The book of Job (where it is most obvious), along with the rest of the Bible let us know that the world doesn't operate on the basis of justice (the retribution principle—the good get rewarded and the evil get punished). It's an inadequate and self-defeating way of life here on earth, given our situation. People keep wanting life under God to be based on fairness (problem of evil, the Flood, etc.), but it's not. There are plenty of elements of justice in it, but the Bible is clear that true justice will not come until the afterlife.

The world does work, however, the Bible teaches us, on the principle of wisdom. By that I mean that God is using the elements and circumstances of life to accomplish purposes, not all of which are understood by us. Life has more, I'll venture to say, a teleological foundation than a judiciary one.

As far as "drowning the entire world," first of all, I don't believe the flood was global. There's nothing about that that makes sense, except reading the terms 1" deep. Secondly, the event must have taken place before 10,000 BC, and possibly even far earlier. The population of the earth was minuscule, and of the region affected by the flood, even smaller. Third, the only record we have of the moral condition of the population at the time is a biblical one, so people who wish to claim that innocents were killed have a hard row to hoe coming up with evidence. Fourth, there were purposes at work in God's action that superseded our notions of justice, but none of those purposes were ultimately unjust. That would have to be the subject of further and future conversation if you need that explained.

As far as having women and children killed, if you're talking about the Flood scenario, I've already addressed it. If you're talking about the alleged "genocide" of Canaan under Moses and Joshua, that is a prodigious misunderstand of ancient cultures and their warfare rhetoric. I have a lot to say on that, but it's a large conversation and would have to be a separate conversation (which I'm willing to have, but I don't want to just put up a wall of text unless you want to go there). I'm not trying to be oblique, but just honest.

We would have to pursue these matters one at a time to deal with them honestly. It's up to you.