Job is the man! It took you one word for him to ask the question and forty-two chapters to not get an answer. From beginning to end he’s the man. His friends, men with meaning on their lips, spoke words that evaporated in the heat of his defense. Not one word came close to him. Not one shred of meaning struck home. The unanswered question was his pillow upon which he laid his beleaguered head. It was the air he breathed. What’s the point of sitting on a dung-heap? Exactly! What is the point? He never did learn the point. Answers answers everywhere, flinging by his ears, and not one entered into his festering brain to settle his enormous pain. Not one. He insisted on living in the ugliness of faith, dark, lonely and uncertain. He is my resistant insistent reminder to reject the answer and the made point. Job is the man!
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David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
I wouldn’t tell a child they were perfect either, but then i don’t think someone has to be perfect to be perceived as good. I don’t see why you can’t just take people as humans who are not perfect, but not intrinsically evil either. I suppose it’s because y ou have this idealistic standard of a perfect god, but that isn’t a human being and a human being who was like that would probably be quite unbearable. And no, I don’t think Jesus was perfect, except maybe in the older sense of the word as ‘whole’ or ‘complete’. Perfect in the Bible does not mean morally perfect. I think most people are aware of the dangers involved in striving for perfection.
The naive best you can say, Tiggy, from observation alone and not from theology, is that human beings are neither good nor evil, since they do both. However, even this is flawed, seeing as their acts of ‘goodness’ are usually self-serving (re: the non-existence of altruism), and they don’t have to just DO evil to be evil, they just have to be apathetic or passive in the face of evil (i.e. humans regularly commit sins of ‘omission’ as much as ‘commission’, they regularly focus on their own comfort rather than the glaring problems of others).
So, JUST from observation, even the ‘lovely’ human beings constantly do much more evil than good, or even just act in compliance with evil systems as opposed to fighting for good.
However, WITH theology, of COURSE I’m going to judge human beings by God’s standards. Again, we are evil because we sin, and sinning is falling short of the glory of God. I’m not going to define good and evil according to humans, since that would kill moral realism, and most Christians (most people, in fact) would not be willing to let that happen. Human beings don’t get to subjectively define objective standards, nor are they allowed to define what is and isn’t sin – theologically speaking, those rights are God’s alone.
AGAIN, though, we seem to be repeating ourselves. So I’m out of here
Blessings
seeing as their acts of ‘goodness’ are usually self-serving (NathanL)
But how do you explain it when its not self serving? In the moment of an act when someone gives their life for another, is the person not “good”. And remember, life is but a series of moments. Past and present are but an illusion, neither one can you hold in your hand. Round and round you go, where you stop, nobody knows. I agree with you when you say we are repeating ourselves. I just like the fact that most people I see repeat the good shit and not the stuff youre neck deep in.
blessings
I’m not sure I understand this post. To me, Job was as sinner. Job’s “friends” tried to explain his sin, but in committing it themselves, it was invisible to them. It took God to actually explain it to him, after which he repented, and was forgiven.
Good and evil if they are not hinged upon an external truth are defined by the conscience of man. Evil is the corruption of good. Good is creation doing what it is designed to do. If we as humans are evil, it is because we are born without knowledge of the purpose of our design. We are born without God.
By the way… If we reject all answers, we will not find the right one.