Free will
And this: ased on your reasonings, i am led to believe that you think that if today we didn’t have religion, the world would be a much worse place to live in. why? No, I don’t believe I said this. Sorry… if I miscommunicated. I believe you said that the world would be a much better place if we didn’t have religion. Well, let me approach it this way: I believe that at the very beginning of everything was God…that God not only created everything, speaking it into existence, but making everything perfect and good. This same God created man in His image and gave man free will. With that free will, and with the free will of all of creation, man chose not to believe in the goodness of God, along with the help of something I like to call “doubt”, and since that time, there has been a never-ending “attempt” on man’s part to regain that proper relationship with God. Enter many religions…many attempts by man to ‘reconnect’ with God. But because only God can reestablish a relationship with God, He had to reconnect His creation to Himself. He Himself did this by becoming a man Himself in order to reconnect mankind to Himself. But in keeping with the laws He Himself set up regarding free will, while He made the way, while He did the reconnecting, every man, by faith, can choose that free gift, that free pathway, that free relationship, which cost God everything and us nothing, and be reconnected to God soley and only through faith alone in the shed blood of Jesus and His resurrection. This is THE defining difference between “Christianity” and all the other religions because all other religions are based on man’s good works rather than on the finished work of God Himself in Jesus. Everything hinges on that one truth. So, if the life, death and resurrection of Jesus can be proved to be false, then Christianity cannot be true. As I have said in previous posts, the fact that there are many religions in the world points to the reality that we have that god-shaped vacuum inside each of us and we try to fill it…either with religion, materialism, science, drugs, sex, or whatever, and it is ONLY when the living God enters in to a person’s life, mind, heart, spirit that things begin to make sense. So, I am not sure what I said earlier that seemed to imply that religion has made the world a better place. Quite honestly, the most hopeless, desperate people on the planet are those that are atheists because they truly have nothing to live for….yet they do live because deep inside of them, something cries out that there must be a meaning, and whether they recognize it or admit it, they live out of that place of meaning, which has its ultimate source in God, which they have yet to know and experience and acknowledge.
