God Calls Everyone To Apologise - Do You Have To Believe In God?
God is completely holy and pure, without even the slightest shade of wrong/evil/sin in Himself.
God is the Originator of purity, love, patience, honesty, etc... And that is how He made this world.
It is not something that God just decided to do, to make things hard for us, it is who He is. He can never be or do anything else. All His laws are there to protect His character and us.
These things were built into the whole universe, and built into humans when He created them.
He cannot do anything that contradicts Himself. You could call it the ‘Unchangeable Laws of the Universe.’
So, the God of the Bible is the Great Creator God of the whole universe, as well as the creator of the smallest part of an atom, which is invisible to us.
Who Is God? What does the Bible, His Word say?
“The LORD is high above all nations; His glory is above the heavens. Isaiah 42:8
“For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” Deuteronomy 4:24
My name is the LORD! I won't let idols or humans share my glory and praise. Psalm 113:4
"Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth; Yours is the dominion, O LORD, and You exalt Yourself as head over all. 1 Chronicles 29:11 And all the angels were standing around the throne ... And they fell before the throne with their faces to the ground and worshiped God. Revelation 7:11
The Lord said to Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much...But of course, you know all this! For you were born before it was all created, and you are so very experienced!... “Can you direct the movement of the stars— binding the cluster of the Pleiades or loosening the cords of Orion?... Then the LORD said to Job, “Do you still want to argue with the Almighty? You are God’s critic, but do you have the answers?” Then Job replied to the LORD, “I am nothing—how could I ever find the answers? I will cover my mouth with my hand. I have said too much already. I have nothing more to say.”...the Lord said “Will you discredit my justice and condemn me just to prove you are right? Are you as strong as God?... Then Job replied to the LORD: “I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you. You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’ It is I—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me... I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” Job 38:4,21,31, 40:1-5,8,9, 42:1-6 God blesses those people who depend only on him. They belong to the kingdom of heaven! Matthew 5:3
Just like Job, most people today, have only heard about God, they had never truly met Him.
Why do we arrogantly demand answers from the Great God, to our feeble questions? Of course, the big questions we have of universal justice are valid, but not to the point where we can demand that the Almighty Creator God give us an account of His seemingly unjust handling of life.
God not only owns the universe, but He also owns us too, and all He wants is what belongs to Him. His command is to love and serve Him in return. It can be hard to swallow, but this world is His toy, and He can make it however He likes. If you or I made it, we could set the rules. God says:
Deut. 6:5 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. 6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. NLT
God could have taken all the danger out of this life, by making us all obedient robots. But He wanted beings that had ‘choice’ and would choose to love Him. A being something like Himself.
The things we do wrong/evil/sin, they utterly violate God’s nature and holiness, and again, you could say a violation of the ‘Unchangeable Laws of the Universe’ - the ordered universe He created. These things have separated us from God.
Even the things we consider ‘little’, like: thinking hateful things about someone; not forgiving someone that hurt us; pride; resentment; white lies; being ungrateful to God, not serving God, ignoring God our Creator. etc... All these things are a violation of the perfect purity, holiness, ownership, and leadership of God. Each time we do them, it is ‘giving the Holy God a slap in the face.’
In the Bible, God says in His Law, that it is wrong to steal, have you ever stolen anything in your life? He also says not to covert things that belong to others. Have you ever had a strong desire to have a friend's life or stuff? He also says not to use His Name in vainor flippantly. Have you ever blasphemed? God also commands that we honour our mother and father. Did you ever talkback to your mother and father?
You see how God's holiness is so much more serious} than we have understood it to be. We really need to understand how bad we really are and how far we have fallen from God's Holiness.
The Bible tells us how bad:
Jeremiah 17:9 "The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked.
Who really knows how bad it is? 10 But I, the LORD, search all hearts and examine secret motives. I give all people their due rewards, according to what their actions deserve."
God knows about everything, and ALL wrong/evil/sin MUST be put right – a time will come when ALL evil MUST be judged or you could say, reconciled to be in harmony with the ‘Unchangeable Laws of the Universe’. This is also when followers of Jesus Christ are rewarded with heaven.
People wrongly blame God for the things that go wrong, but it is not God’s fault. He made everything perfect, Adam screwed up and we continue to screw up. God CANNOT just come in and make everything nice for us. The order or process of things that God set in motion, must be completed, even though they have been corrupted by Adam and Eve.
However, God provided a way for all our wrong/sin/evil to be paid for, before the audience of all creation/the universe – before God, mankind, angels, Satan & the demons.
Of course, that was the crucifixion, death, burial and the resurrection of His Son, Jesus.
Jesus was the Pure Sacrifice for all evil. No other method could paid for our evil. The Bible says:
Romans 3:23 Everyone has done and thought wrong things and is far away from God's saving presence.
So, ‘being a good person’ and doing good things cannot save us from the penalty of our own wrong behaviour and thoughts, only Jesus can. If all we do in life is be a ‘good’ person and go to church, we are not saved and will not get into to heaven. Which means, we will go to hell:
Romans 6:23 For the penalty of doing and thinking wrong things is death (hell)...
This is why attending a funeral of a non-Christian troubles me deeply. This is also why my main priority in life is telling people about who God really is. To tell those who never go to church, and to those who do go to church but never properly understood, what it was about. The misunderstanding of God is common, and is either because the preaching they heard was unclear or it was compromised by traditions of men, and trying to make the Eternal, Unchanging God appear as though He is just a nice, cuddly, teddy bear type god, who could not possibly send anyone to hell.
Constantly I hear people argue “How can God be like that?” But, one cannot understand the Eternal God by using our standards of expectation and behaviour. He truly is ‘out of this world’ and He tells us who He is and how He rules with the Bible. Expecting Him to abide by our rules, only gives us a wrong view of God. Jesus answered these types of question with "Your mistake is that you don't know the Scriptures, and you don't know the power of God.” Mark 12:24.
The ONLY way to ‘get a ticket to heaven’ is to realise how bad/sinful we really are before a Holy God, and to tell God that we are so sorry for all our wrong/sin/evil, and then to give up our own life, live for Him, and follow Him for the rest of our lives:
Luke 9:23 Then Jesus said to all the people: If any of you want to be my followers, you must forget about yourself. You must take up your cross every day and follow me. CEV
Jesus never said ‘Be a good person, do good works, and you will be with me in heaven.’
No, this is what Jesus said about being forgiven:
Luke 18:9 Then Jesus told this story to some who had great confidence in their own righteousness and scorned everyone else: 10 “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a despised tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else. For I don’t cheat, I don’t sin, and I don’t commit adultery. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! 12 I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ 14 I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” NLB
The Pharisee in this story does not do the so-called ‘bad sins’ yet he was not forgiven by God.
The tax collector did do ‘bad sins’ but was forgiven by God, because he truly apologised.
It is a humbling thing to admit we have been wrong/sinful/evil and to surrender our lives totally to God. But we must if we want God to forgive us of that wrong and save us from hell – the consequences of our wrong living. We must come to God humble and helpless. Jesus said:
Matthew 18:2 Jesus called a little child to him and put the child among them. 3 Then he said, “I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. NLB
Just doing good things for God will not save us:
Ephesians 2:8 God saved you as a gift when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 9 Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.
So, we are forgiven when we confess our sins, repent and believe. Not by the ‘good works’ we do for others. We cannot be saved by doing ‘good works’ for God either. We must confess (admit our own personal evil), repent (change our ways) and believe (in the Bible, this word means ‘to believe who God is and to live for God’. It means doing what you believed) in God.
1Peter 3:15 Honour Christ and let him be the Lord of your life.
In other words; Jesus Christ becomes the boss of your life. We are then to live the way the Bible instructs - live for God, reading the Bible, praying daily and calling others to apologise to God as well.
You can read a Bible here, start with the book of Mark: https:/bit.ly/3j1cmbe or https://www.sermoncentral.com/bible/new-living-translation-nlt/mark-1?passage=Mark+1
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