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FightingFat
Guest
God is all powerful and eternal right? So why is he a jealous God? Why does he desire for us to worship him? Why does he need us at all?
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Darrel
Guest
What can anyone give to God that he is not in a position to produce? If we ‘choose’ to love and be loyal to him that is something we can give and he can recieve. Just my 2 cents.
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barsapp
Guest
Because he wants to save us; he doesn’t need us at all, we need him.
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puzzleannie
Guest
He does not need us at all. He desires our worship and love because He is all good and all just. Perfect justice demands recognition and worship of perfect Goodness and Love. He desires us to be in union with Him, which is accomplished when we recognize and cooperate with His perfect goodness and love, and accept that love. We have a free will choice to do so, but He is not diminished if we choose against Him, because God is perfect and complete, and can neither be added to nor detracted from.
FightingFat:
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auhsoj88
Guest
God is a jealous God becuase he desires we put no other gods before Him; even if He knows these other gods don’t exist. As Christians we become one flesh with him (members of his Body at baptism). A spouse can become jealous and upset if the other commits adultary! God’s jealousy is of same .kind!
God bless
God bless
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trustmc
Guest
Good question. I used to think that God had a problem with narcissism for wanting us to worship him. But I learned through my relationship with him that he simply doesn’t need our worship.
Worship of God is for our benefit, not his. When we bring ourselves before the Creator in worship, we learn more about him, and in turn he teaches us about ourselves, who we truly are, what we were created for and our purpose in this life.
Showering us with these gifts bucks the very definition of narcissism.
Mike
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StCsDavid
Guest
God only knows for sure. One of the reasons I strive to stay in His graces is so I can one day ask him that very question when I get to Heaven…assuming I even care at that point as I’ll be so blissfully happy His motives for a lot of stuff just may not matter to me anymore.
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FightingFat
Guest
Thanks for the answers friends. How do you think this relates to God sending Jesus to us and his humbling himself to share in our humanity, life, suffering and even a brutal death?
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Mystophilus
Guest
If God is genuinely omnipotent, then God needs nothing, including us.
I would suggest that God’s reason for enjoining us to worship has more to do with the character of the object of that worship and the concomitant moral system involved in worshipping such a deity: behaviour as the entelechy of worship. Rather than a tyrant whose inferiority complex demands constant reaffirmation, God call us to worship a loving and merciful God, because, in so doing, we shall strive to be loving and merciful ourselves: “our benefit, not his”, as trustmc said.
The connection between this and the Incarnation is the fact that Jesus’ life and death were the archetype of human existence: “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). By being perfect, God demonstrates how we should be, and then Jesus demonstrates that a human can do it.
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48, which, I should add, is exhortation rather than instruction: God cares more for the genuineness of the effort than for the actual success.)
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Magicsilence
Guest
wow, nice post.
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FightingFat
Guest
I agree, rather impressive stuff!
:clapping:
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barsapp
Guest
God does not want us enslaved, alone, lost, desperate, ignorant, blind… This is why the Second Person of the Holy Trinity incarnated: to be “God with us”, Emmanuel (Mt 1, 23).
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trustmc
Guest
FightingFat, your question appears to be twofold. The first may be stated as:
FightingFat:
However, in the real world God does one better – in fact, infinitely better. Not only did he incarnate himself in the person of Jesus Christ, but he marked the two ends of his earthly life in phenomenal ways to demonstrate his divinity: a virgin conception and a resurrection from the dead. And far from espousing warm and fuzzy teachings, he made such radical and divisive claims to being the only way to heaven. He then backed up his claims by demonstrating his ability to manipulate the elements, heal the incurable, and resurrect the dead.
Despite the striking contrast between the Gospel and Hollywood, one might still appreciate that the embellished gods played by Burns and Freeman, and the authentic God-man, Christ, shared at least one purpose: to offer God to man in a form with whom man can relate – or put more precisely, to offer us a means by which we can finally have a loving, interactive and personal relationship with Him. Without his human form, man is incapable of such a relationship. Veiled in flesh, the eternal God, who would otherwise overwhelm mankind if he presented himself in his eternal glory, becomes personal. God, having transcended the eternal gulf between us and Him created by our transgressions, finally bridges that gap. When we worship God, we build up our relationship with Him.
As for your second question:
FightingFat:
Ask yourself this: What good is a relationship with God if we are destined to die for our sins and be eternally separated from him thereafter? God doesn’t want our relationship with him to be temporary. As an eternal being, he desires an eternal relationship with his beloved children. Since death is the lot of every sinner, then death was warranted by Christ to ensure that our relationship with him has the possibility of becoming one that is never-ending as revealed by his resurrection. His death may take the place of the death penalty each one of us is due when we choose to place our faith in the God who died for us. This “switch” is freely offered as a gift, and we are free to accept or reject it.
Bottom line: God’s incarnation in the person of Christ made it possible for us in our current mortal state to have a relationship with him that is facilitated by our worship of him, while his death and resurrection make it possible for that relationship to extend into eternity.
Mike
To answer this you may want to consider two of Hollywood’s recent cinematic versions of the gospel. Depending on your age, you might remember the movie Oh, God! starring George Burns as God. If not, then you might have seen the more recent movie Bruce Almighty in which Morgan Freeman also plays the part of God. In both movies God is “revealed” in human form so that he may communicate, interact with, and even build a relationship with the leading characters. Additionally, the God characters appear out of thin air, perform a few miracles and espouse some warm, innocuous teachings. And no more quickly than they appear do they vanish at the end of each movie, leaving the rest of the characters changed, but nonetheless in their former state of “aloneness.”
However, in the real world God does one better – in fact, infinitely better. Not only did he incarnate himself in the person of Jesus Christ, but he marked the two ends of his earthly life in phenomenal ways to demonstrate his divinity: a virgin conception and a resurrection from the dead. And far from espousing warm and fuzzy teachings, he made such radical and divisive claims to being the only way to heaven. He then backed up his claims by demonstrating his ability to manipulate the elements, heal the incurable, and resurrect the dead.
Despite the striking contrast between the Gospel and Hollywood, one might still appreciate that the embellished gods played by Burns and Freeman, and the authentic God-man, Christ, shared at least one purpose: to offer God to man in a form with whom man can relate – or put more precisely, to offer us a means by which we can finally have a loving, interactive and personal relationship with Him. Without his human form, man is incapable of such a relationship. Veiled in flesh, the eternal God, who would otherwise overwhelm mankind if he presented himself in his eternal glory, becomes personal. God, having transcended the eternal gulf between us and Him created by our transgressions, finally bridges that gap. When we worship God, we build up our relationship with Him.
As for your second question:
The brutal death was necessary to complete the process of building that bridge. You see, in the beginning God sets up the system of justice in which the penalty for committing a sin is eternal separation from Him, or more precisely, death.
Ask yourself this: What good is a relationship with God if we are destined to die for our sins and be eternally separated from him thereafter? God doesn’t want our relationship with him to be temporary. As an eternal being, he desires an eternal relationship with his beloved children. Since death is the lot of every sinner, then death was warranted by Christ to ensure that our relationship with him has the possibility of becoming one that is never-ending as revealed by his resurrection. His death may take the place of the death penalty each one of us is due when we choose to place our faith in the God who died for us. This “switch” is freely offered as a gift, and we are free to accept or reject it.
Bottom line: God’s incarnation in the person of Christ made it possible for us in our current mortal state to have a relationship with him that is facilitated by our worship of him, while his death and resurrection make it possible for that relationship to extend into eternity.
Mike
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Mystophilus
Guest
You’re very kind.
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