Is God punishing and wrathful or...?

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by lemex

I was wondering, can't a person (just) ask God to find out what they want to know?
Can't God tell a person if they listen? ... Can we go to the source?

You betcha!
Jer 33:3 Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.

This is the confidence we have when approaching God....that He hears us...(and) we know that we have what we asked of him.
1 John 5:14
(Btw, these 2 verses I know by heart changed the direction of my life!!!)

Why, just this morning on TV, Jennifer Lopez said ...
When you don't know the answer to something, be still. It will come to you.

I was ecstatic!!!

[Altair]

Destruction is part of nature. And it's in the eye of the beholder. If I build a house I can say I am being creative, but to the animals living on or in that soil I am the destroyer.

And I don't believe in this 'God'. I do believe all life is ensouled.

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Ghaleon

...The highest Source or All That Is is devoid of evil and is loving in a sense that we know love, it also "Just is"

I have tunnel vision...This was all I saw.
.
.

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by HITESH SHAH

....Mother too gets angry with child if child behaves .. all the time.
Her wrath comes for the benefit of the child .The way mother's wrath too is her unique way of loving the kid , the God's wrath too is way of His love.

That is reasonable, esp when you know that mom is just scolding with love, maybe pretending to be mad.

However, many think of God as very jealous and angry --thus, a monstrous murderer, (unlike the loving human mom above)-
too many passages to bring up re this.


And thank you everybody for finding this in Gen Beliefs. :)

[Unseeking Seeker]

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

You betcha!

Reminds me of the cowboy type slang I used to read in westerns when I was in college!

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

That is reasonable, esp when you know that mom is just scolding with love, maybe pretending to be mad.
However, many think of God as very jealous and angry --thus, a monstrous murderer, (unlike the loving human mom above)-
too many passages to bring up re this.

Miss Hepburn,

I prefer hearing from the Bible that “God disciplines those he loves”…..just too many connotations to ‘wrath’….among them being out of control, etc.

[Starman]

I do not believe that God punishes us rather I believe that we punish ourselves when we go against the natural
flow of what may be called cosmic law. God is above law, everything else is subject to it. What we think,
what we say, and how we act, determines what we experience on our journey.

In eastern philosophy it is called “karma,” and in the Bible it says “you reap what you sow.” On the streets people
say “what goes around comes around,” and so forth. They are all referring to the same thing. Every time I
ignore intuitive feelings which I have, at minimum, I end up with an emotional butt kicking. The judgment of
life is sometimes instantaneous and other times not. It is our nature to suffer when we extend ourselves into
the coarser regions of livingness; as we are very fine beings.

God, that I have come to know, is all forgiving unconditional love. The experience I have had of our spiritual
home is a welcoming beyond belief. It is a feeling of home like no other experience of home, and love overflowing
with no mention, or thought, of past deeds which we may have entered into. In my opinion the love of God, and
the grace of God, is always with us. But we are not always with it.

[ArcticWolf]

Not referring to the God of any particular holy book, but my personal experience of God:

When my God-experience became stronger, when I developed a truly personal relationship with him, the less and less this God-experience resembled the God I had heard about in the Christian churches, this Christian God who is the ultimate judge of the trial of our life and who is mostly interested in rules and how well or poorly we follow the rules.

I don't know everything about God and there are some mysterious, inexplainable sides to him, which infuriate me to no end, but back in the days when I had a close relationship with God, I found God to be wise, loving and just plain good company, like a friend.

I think I've lost some of that nowadays, but it was fun while it lasted.

[ameliorate]

Originally Posted by Ghaleon

The God from the old Testament is not seperate from the god of the new testament. The God of the old Testament YHWH/Jehova is a mix of two Gods, En.ki/Yaldaboath (he goes by many names) and his son Marduk (Satan). The schizopherenic personality is proof where he is mild in temperment sometimes and in others he is this blood thirsty, God of wrath, its basically just En.ki and Marduk taking on the role of Yahweh to the people of Earth.
The so called God of love in the new testament is not who you think he is..he claims he is "All loving" but there is no public record of him having love for humanity, ...

If what you say is true, who would worship a schizophrenic, blood thirsty God???

Also you say that there is no evidence for the New Testament God being a god of Love....yet his son, Jesus, was a role model for this!!!

Originally Posted by ameliorate

Not that I'm a Christian but the God of wrath stems from the Old Testament of the Bible, i.e. directly opposed to the God of Love in the New Testament. How this can be reconciled is something I ask Christians and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. (One reply was that the God of wrath was necessary, Ha!

Ameliorate,

I will give one more unsatisfactory possibility….:). With the expulsion of Adam from Eden the spirit was withdrawn from man. Man no longer had any connection with God….in a sense like not having a DNA connection. Any communication between man and God was initiated by God.

With the withdrawal of this God part from man there was no reason for God to not be wrathful….it would be akin to swatting flies. I regard the sending of Jesus to earth as an indicator of the end of God’s patience…..the great experiment with man was disappointing so a different approach became necessary.