The One Who created everything and Who gave His Word, did all He did with a purpose and out of love.
The Bible teaches us that
“God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
Everything God does is motivated by love.
Out of love created man in His image also with the intention to have a good relationship with man. He wanted man to fit His creation and to have a nice and great life in a peaceful world. He did not have the intention that His creatures would have to suffer. But because of the rebellion of the first human beings, out of love God did not destroy them but gave the world into their hands. Man was allowed to make something of the world God had given in their hands.
Think about this:
If you had the power, would you remove all the suffering and injustice in the world?
When there is enough empathy in you and when you some part of the love of God in you, you would.
What about God?
God didn’t stop humans when they chose to rebel and do what is bad. As a Father He told His children that they had done wrong. He has the power to start all over again or to create new beings. But He gave His human beings the chance to create their own world. He even allowed them to do it in their own way.
So when something bad happens, we should remember that God didn’t make it happen. It would be unfair to blame God.
He has the power, and because he loves us, he will remove all suffering and injustice. There is a very good reason why God has not yet stopped bad things from happening. In later postings we will talk about that and show you that it is part of God’s love that man got so much to say about the world and was or is so free to do with the world, what he wants to do with it.
You can be sure that God loves us and that He is never to blame for our problems. In fact, He is the only One who can solve them. — Isaiah 33:2.
God is an exceptional eternal Spirit Being, set apart or holy. (Isaiah 6:3) Everything He does is pure, clean, and good. We can not say we can trust every other human being. But with God we can find Someone Who keeps to His Words and promises. So we can trust him. Humans are not like that. They sometimes do wrong things. And even the most honest ruler does not have the power to repair all the damage that bad people do. No one has as much power as God has. He can and will repair all the damage that has been done by bad people. He will remove all evil forever. — Read Psalm 37:9-11.
One day the world shall be convinced that He alone has the solution for us, to live in a restored world with a restored good relationship with God.
Concerning the authority of the Holy Scriptures there has bean much debate. Let us have a look on what is written about the Power of God’s Word and its authority in a well-known encyclopedia of the Bible.
The Power of God’s Word.
The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States Library of Congress, demonstrating printed pages as a storage medium. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Bible remains the most extensively printed, widely translated, and frequently read book in the world. Its words have been treasured in the hearts of multitudes like none other. All who have received its gifts of wisdom and promises of new life and power were at first strangers to its redemptive message, and many were hostile to its teaching and spiritual demands. In every generation its power to challenge persons of all races and lands has been demonstrated. Those who cherish the Book because it sustains future hope, brings meaning and power to the present, and correlates a misused past with the forgiving grace of God, would not long experience such inner rewards if Scripture were not known to them as the authoritative, divinely revealed truth. To the evangelical Christian, Scripture is the Word of God, given in the objective form of propositional truths through divinely inspired prophets and apostles, and the Holy Spirit is the giver of faith through that Word.
View that the Bible is the Word of God and as such should be believed and obeyed.
Image from the Book of Kells, a 1200 year old book. Category:Illuminated manuscript images (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Western civilization is in a severe “authority crisis” which is not confined solely to the realm of religious faith, nor is it specially or uniquely threatening to Bible believers. Parental authority, marital authority, political authority, academic authority, and ecclesiastical authority are all being deeply questioned. Not only particular authorities — the Scripture, the pope, political rulers, and so on — but the concept of authority itself is vigorously challenged. Today’s crisis of biblical authority thus reflects the uncertainties of civilizational consensus:
Who has the power and the right to receive and to require submission?
Revolt Against Biblical Authority.
As the sovereignCreator of all, the God of the Bible wills and has the right to be obeyed. Judge of men and nations, the self-revealed God wields unlimited authority and power. All creaturely authority and power is derived from that of God. The power God bestows is a divine trust, a stewardship. God’s creatures are morally accountable for their use or misuse of it. In fallen human society God wills civil government for the promotion of justice and order. He approves an ordering of authoritative and creative relationships in the home by stipulating certain responsibilities of husbands, wives, and children. He wills a pattern of priorities for the church as well: Jesus Christ the head, prophets and apostles through whom redemptive revelation came, and so on.
The inspired Scriptures, revealing God’s transcendent will in objective written form, are the rule of faith and conduct through which Christ exercises his divine authority in the lives of Christians.
Revolt against particular authorities has in our time widened into a revolt against all transcendent and external authority. The widespread questioning of authority is condoned and promoted in many academic circles.
Philosophers with a radically secular outlook have affirmed that God and the supernatural are mythical conceptions, that natural processes and events comprise the only ultimate reality. All existence is said to be temporal and changing, all beliefs and ideals are declared to be relative to the age and culture in which they appear. Biblical religion, therefore, like all other, is asserted to be merely a cultural phenomenon. The Bible’s claim to divine authority is dismissed by such thinkers; transcendent revelation, fixed truths, and unchanging commandments are set aside as pious fiction.
In the name of humanity’s supposed “coming of age,” radical secularism champions human autonomy and creative individuality. Human beings are lords of their own destiny and inventors of their own ideals and values, it is said. They live in a supposedly purposeless universe that has itself presumably been engendered by a cosmic accident. Therefore human beings are declared to be wholly free to impose upon nature and history whatever moral criteria they prefer. In such a view, to insist on divinely given truths and values, on transcendent principles, would be to repress self-fulfillment and retard creative personal development. Hence the radically secular view goes beyond opposing particular external authorities whose claims are considered arbitrary or immoral; radical secularism is aggressively hostile to all external authority, viewing it as intrinsically restrictive of the autonomous human spirit.
Any reader of the Bible will recognize rejection of divine authority and definitive revelation of what is right and good as an age-old phenomenon. It is not at all peculiar to the contemporary person “come of age”; it was found already in Eden. Adam and Eve revolted against the will of God in pursuit of individual preference and supposed self-interest. But their revolt was recognized to be sin, not rationalized as philosophical “gnosis” at the frontiers of evolutionary advance.
If one takes a strictly developmental view, which considers all reality contingent and changing, where is the basis for humanity’s decisively creative role in the universe? How could a purposeless cosmos cater to individual self-fulfillment?
Only the biblical alternative of the Creator-Redeemer God, who fashioned human beings for moral obedience and a high spiritual destiny, truly preserves the permanent, universal dignity of the human species. The Bible does so, however, by a demanding call for personal spiritual decision.
The Bible sets forth the superiority of humans to the animals, their high dignity (“little less than God”—Ps 8:5) because of the divine rational and moral image that all bear by reason of creation.
Print 3330 in volume 27 of the Bowyer Bible in Bolton Museum, England. From page 12 of Volume 1 of “A-Z of Artists in the Bowyer Bible” by Phillip Medhurst. Photo 4 of 117. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the context of universal human involvement in Adamic sin, the Bible utters a merciful divine call to redemptive renewal through the mediatorial person and work of Christ. Fallen humanity is invited to experience the Holy Spirit’s renewing work, to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, and to anticipate a final destiny in the eternal presence of the God of justice and justification.
Contemporary rejection of biblical tenets does not rest on any logical demonstration that the case for biblical theism is false; it turns rather on a subjective preference for alternative views of “the good life.”
The Bible is not the only significant reminder that human beings stand daily in responsible relationship to the sovereign God. He reveals his authority in the cosmos, in history, and in inner conscience, a disclosure of the living God that penetrates into the mind of every person (Rom 1:18–20; 2:12–15). Rebellious suppression of that “general divine revelation” does not wholly succeed in suspending a fearsome sense of final divine accountability (Rom 1:32).
Yet it is the Bible as “special revelation” that most clearly confronts our spiritually rebellious race with the reality and authority of God.
Title page from the Great Bible published by Grafton and Whitchurch in 1539. It depicts an enthroned Henry VIII receiving the Word of God and bestowing it upon his bishops and archbishops (top third), who in turn deliver it to the priests (middle third). Finally, the laity hear the Word and loyally recite, “Vivat Rex” and “God save the kynge” (bottom third). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the Scriptures, the character and will of God, the meaning of human existence, the nature of the spiritual realm, and the purposes of God for humankind in all ages are stated in propositionally intelligible form that all can understand. The Bible publishes in objective form the criteria by which God judges individuals and nations, and the means of moral recovery and restoration to personal fellowship with him.
Regard for the Bible is therefore decisive for the course of Western culture and in the long run for human civilization generally. Intelligible divine revelation, the basis for belief in the sovereign authority of the Creator-Redeemer God over all human life, rests on the reliability of what Scripture says about God and his purposes. Modern naturalism impugns the authority of the Bible and assails the claim that the Bible is the Word of God written, that is, a transcendently given revelation of the mind and will of God. Attack upon scriptural authority is the storm center both in the controversy over revealed religion and in the modern conflict over civilizational values.
Elwell, W. A., & Beitzel, B. J. (1988). In Baker encyclopedia of the Bible (pp. 296–298). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.
Relating to God 