"Angry?"

I hope you are not angry as you study the Bible. I've been looking around on blogs some this past week. Believe it or not non-believers talk about the Bible and God a great deal. I find that many are very angry. I also find that they are more passionate about their unbelief than many of us Bible believers are about what we do believe. I wish that that passion could be directed toward an honest, open-minded study of the Bible.

Why do people get so angry? I've heard a lot of reasons. I read them because I would like to help unravel the misconceptions about the Bible and what it says. Some are very angry because God does not just fix everything with the snap of a finger. Now, if we were robots that might be fair. He could just bring us all into the factory, shut us down and replace the faulty part. The thing is, we are not robots. We are people with free will. Remember when one of us 'disobeyed' his maker and brought sin into the blood of mankind? God did provide a cure (a fix if you like) to all the problems that disobedience caused. It was when He died on the cross. Acceptance of the cure is an individual choice. Just like in the garden.

Another reason I see is: Why does God let so many bad things happen? There are two forces in the world: Good and Evil. There are two persons at work in the world: The Lord and Satan. God is working on His timetable to accomplish the judgment of Satan and to accomplish the fullfillment of his will on earth. We get anxious because we are controlled by time. God has a timetable of His own but He is not hampered by time as we know it.

We as the created cannot just wish God out of existence. He will not make someone believe who does not wish to. Those who know Him, know that he is very polite and will ask before coming into someone's life. The world as a whole is another matter. He has a plan, which has already been written down and he will complete His plan.

I wish I could say it better. I certainly do not want to create more anger. I hope the following statement will help. There is a physical world and there is a spiritual world. When man sinned he lost his connection to the spiritual world of God. Sin seperates. When one becomes a Christian, that connection is renewed and a person begins to understand spiritual things. The Bible becomes more than a story. God becomes more than 'someone up there calling the shots'. God becomes a friend through Jesus Christ. We, as Christians, know what sin is and understand that it must be forgiven or judged. It can be forgiven instead of judged because Jesus was judged and paid the price for our personal sin and the sin of the world. We need only accept Him as that subsitute.

We are studying the Bible from Genesis and hopefully all the way through someday. We will go through and learn how God taught people the need for a blood sacrifice for sin. We will learn that the animal sacrifices were only a token of the blood of Jesus who was the final sacrifice. Come study with me and we can learn together.