So let's take a look at the first commandment.
-Worship God above all things
This seems simple enough- because God created us and everything good for us, we should respect him above all else. Yet for many, this is the most difficult commandment to follow. To respect God above all else is to put him before absolutely everything else in your life. God must be more important than your family, friends, spouse, country, exc. For many it is hard to hear this, but I must stress to you that God's way is the right and perfect way. We must simply trust our all-knowing Father.
To help me understand this, a priest once told me a story about a young girl that went something like this:
A young girl was standing next to the casket at her mother's funeral. The little girl looked at her dead mother, then turned to her father and said, "Daddy, why did God let Mommy die?"
Her father looked at her, picked up a piece of needlework that was close by, and said, "What can you see here?"
The girl looked at the bottom of the needlework, which was matted with knots and ties and tangles, and said, "I don't know."
Her father said, "This is what we see." He then flipped the needlework over to show his daughter the beautiful picture on its front. "This is what God sees."
This story shows that we must trust in God and His ways because he sees all and knows all; whereas we are merely human.
But the young girl's question brings up another- Why, if God is perfect and loves us, does He allow for bad things to happen? The truth of the matter is, it isn't God who made those bad things. It's the devil. And instead of asking God how such a horrible thing could have happened, we should really be cursing Satan for causing the horrible thing. And when something bad happens, we have a choice.
We can pray to God for strength to get us through the bad time. We can ask Him to help us understand why that bad thing happened. We can forgive those who did that bad thing to us. We can praise God that we survived that bad thing.
Or...
We could renounce God's name. We could forget Him and turn away. We could allow the one who caused the bad thing, Satan, to win. By getting us to turn away from God, Satan succeeds in getting what he wanted all along- for us to forget God. I don't know about you, but I am sure not going to let the one who causes all my misery win.
But I'm not saying that putting God above all else is easy. It's not. You have to be strong, brave, and smart. You have to be able to love with all your heat, soul, and mind. You have to have strength beyond modern day strength (if someone punches you what's harder to do, punch them back or smile and walk away?) But the end result of a perfect eternal life will be well worth it.
Eternal adj.-lasting forever; always existing, perpetual; ceaseless; endless
Imagine that our eternal life was a library. Our current lives that we are living right now would not even be as long as a period on the end of a sentence in one of the library books. So we might as well try all we can now so that we may live forever. We may as well put up with a little suffering now to gain eternal happiness. As one of the Haitian prayers in the book God is no Stranger says:
'If we are alive today in spite of hunger, hurricanes, and sickness, we should say, "Thank you Lord. We must be here for a purpose." '
And that purpose is to follow God.
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4 comments:
Ah, cool. Just assume that everything I don't mention I agree with. There's not much that I don't. As People of the Book and such, our beliefs are mostly the same. :)
But riddle me this (oh wow i just quoted Jay-Z in a religious article). If God really does cause all the good things, and Satan cause all the bad things in the world, then no wonder there are so many Satanists around!
Satan must have, then, caused the Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka all those Indonesian islands, the earthquake in Pakistan, the famine in Darfur, etc...wow.
I dunno, I guess this is where we diverge. For me, Satan is the whisperer, who tells me to do wrong, who eggs on my natural desires and makes them overpowering. It is God who makes the good and the evil, the good times, and the bad times, all as a test for us. For you, Satan actually causes stuff to happen and makes bad things, a demigod of sorts. And that's fine. Your opinion. :)
(thanx 4 commenting:)
Not a demigod... not in the least. Satan can never be compared to God, as he and He are so utterly different.
I am not saying that Satan creates the Tsumani's or that God creates the Tsunami's; I think that God created the world as a sort of equation. He made it so that we could, if we so choose, understand how the sun makes our plants grow, how our cells help our body function, exc. God doesn't say "okay, let's have a tsunami today" he just set the world up so that if all the right temperatures and winds gather at the same time, a tsunami would occur.
So inadvertently, yes, I suppose if you want to credit the creation of a tsunami to someone, credit God. But again: we only see the small picture. To many of us, death is sad and depressing. To God, it is the beginning of an eternal perfect life. Everything happens for a reason. So what I'm trying to say is that God doesn't create anything bad. Famines might happen, but who are we to judge that they are bad? God doesn't create bad things, we just have to trust that he is testing us, (as you said). But Satan creates all that is evil... such as impatience, loathing, jealously, temptation, exc. So I guess I agree with you up until you say that God makes evil and bad times: he doesn't. He makes times that we, in our uncomprehending little minds, view as bad.
Hah, the points of contention between us are so minute that this post is going to be very, very short.
Hm...by "Satan creates impatience, jealousy, etc" it seems as though these traits are...un-human? When you want a raise at your job, is it not greed? When you aspire to pass your friend in a race, is it not jealousy? When you are proud of your achievements, is it not arrogance? When you, er, procreate, is it not the natural way of continuing life?
It's all part of the -- uh, in Arabic it's the "nafs"; i guess like your natural desires.
It's Satan that whispers to us, though, that grows these natural desires (which aren't really bad by themselves) into what we call "lust" or "jealousy" or "arrogance": basically what we call "evil."
...ah, fine, this post did run a bit long, sorry. But notice that the only difference in argument is whether Satan ^creates^ jealousy, impatience, etc, or whether he ^inspires^ it!
*What* a difference. :)
I think that as animals, we are all born with our jealously, arrogance, greed and lust. But as humans it is our job to repress those emotions as much as possible unless something good can come of them.
Like you stated before.
*What* a difference. ;)
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