We are born, grow old and die of our last disease.
Such is the nature of entropy.
Such is the nature of mistakes in DNA replication.
Such is the base nature of what we were born with physically and born into spiritually.
We are born into a broken world.
What do you currently think about what God is like?
I phrase it like that, with two “whats”, because our thinking is often without thinking. We already have concluded what God is like, and we live in our preconceived ideas without reexamining if they are valid or correct or true or right.
Our past experiences now shape our current thinking.
So, do you think that God can not wait to punish us?
Do you think God is a corporal disciplinarian who thinks, “The only way they truly learn to be good is if I can punish them.” And is God actively looking for the opportunity to do so?
Is all of life merely cause and effect? Justice and punishment? You only get what you deserve? You only reap what you sow?
Where does mercy sit in these ideas, or love, or fatherhood?
Or is God as a Father proof of his neglect, aloofness, harshness, judgmentalism, strictness, abuse?
We may not speak these things, but we may still think them. When stuff goes sour, when life hurts, these thoughts may bubble back to the surface.
Our past does dictate our presence and plots our future. Today we need to make tomorrow’s past based upon overcoming what we already think God is like, with learning what God is like.
The core of the Bible is a resurrected Jesus.
What we did with God’s gift to mankind was to beat him, strip him, falsely try him, scourge him and crucify him.
What God did with what we did was to tear open the holy of holiest, expose the mercy seat of God to all of humanity, raise Jesus from the dead, and give the gift of eternal life.
We are asked now to live and walk like Jesus did.
Not to meet insult with insult, or fist with fist, but as Father God has already been towards us with love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control, so he wants us to do the same with all we meet.
And this is where the rubber hits the road. We do not do these things in the abstract, as some quarter strength exercise. We do them with the real experiences of life as it is lived by every human. In sickness and health. In riches and poverty. Through the easy and the hard. In better and worse, until we are promoted into eternity.
The more I learn about God the more I realise how little I and others actually know on the subject. The very reason we rely on faith, for even the disciples had trouble grasping Jesus’s message, with him in their presence.