please don't think I'm dumb...

[gracesavedme]

I've been reading...various things, but especially the Bible. Mike and I are reading through it. Which has been great for discussion. While I have been a Christian for many years, I have never read through the Bible, front to back. I have started...many times, but then gotten side tracked. Anyway...I have a question. Maybe I will find the answer by

Comments

[davesawyer]

Those questions are difficult to answer in the definite, but I can give my $0.02 on it.

You were onto something there with the humans versus robots. As humans, to "love" necessarily means the need to make a choice. Even in the Garden of Eden, a kind of original heaven on earth, man had a choice to make between God and Satan; otherwise, why would God have created a world with such a tree that could throw man into an existence with sin?

And, ultimately, in the "end" when heaven is on earth, those worshipping God will be there because they made the choice to do so.

So, the way I see it, for God to create beings that truly worship Him by choice (which one could consider "love"), He necessarily had to set the world in motion in such a way that would give humans the chance to choose Him over the alternative, evil, which already existed then. There were already two sides, the other represented by Satan; and, God already had beings that worshipped Him by their very nature: angels.

The difference, I think, is that humans were made for the purpose of worshipping God, but were not wired to automatically do so. They were wired to choose.

Think about your relationship with Mike. God could have easily have answered your prayer for a husband by immediately, out of thin air, creating Mike who was put there on earth for the purpose of loving and supporting you as your husband. But instead, before you even asked, God created Mike who eventually met you, pursued you, and ultimately chose to marry you. It's certainly more meaningful to you that he had a choice, isn't it? Otherwise, would he really be loving you?

All that to say that God couldn't have (at least in our finite minds) just created heaven on earth as it will ultimately end up. The story has to unfold, which at its core is simply man choosing God or Satan. When we use our God-given ability to pick God over any alternative, that's how we love Him.

And then, of course, there's the whole problem of God not seeing things on a timeline of past, present, and future like we do, which totally screws up any thesis on why God does anything.