Hmm....

I tried to make a point to someone.  I don't know if he understood what I was trying to say.  I don't remember his response.  He struck me as having a better education, both academically and spiritually.  

Anyway, I don't know if I wrote it here or not.

I was thinking about people's demand for a visible God, a God that they can see and touch.  And then I suddenly realized ----- if you (whoever that may be) could see God, would it really change your status with Him?  Would you love Him and respect Him and obey His commands?  Or would you even believe He is God?  There's billions of people in the world.  Up until Moses wrote the Torah, laws regarding incest were not established.  And in the first days of man, it was the only way of reproducing.  So not every man looks the same as another.  Generally speaking, we all look the same.  You can usually identify a human being based on its' anatomy.  But there are variances in our facial features and even the shapes of our heads and other indications that we are not all identical.  And Adam & Eve are long departed from this Earth.  We have no record of what they looked like.  So if God were visible, how would you spot Him?  And if Adam & Eve were duplicated directly by God instead of by our reproductive systems, would we really be able to tell God apart from that of another human being?

That's aside from the fact that God doesn't want to threaten us into submission.  God never makes anyone worship Him.  He may cause one's heart to produce lethal venom, but no one's heart is free of guilt.  We are all responsible for some level of violence, weather it be by inaction (failure to act/selfishness), mean spirited-ness in varying quantities, or physical abuse toward another or murder or somewhere in between those four examples.  God is merciful and he is just.  He didn't give King David the kind of fate he gave the Pharoh circa the events in Exodus.  The Pharoh of that time was a perfect example of unrepentant.  He had the best of everything that could be imported into Egypt, and the best of Egypt itself, and he imposed punishment on the Jews so that they would not overthrow Egypt.  He had power over others and he treated himself and others as if his kingship would sustain him beyond this life.  It's hard for me to understand why someone would reject Christ.  Christians are not always good examples of themselves.  We are called to be representatives of Christ, but we are also human and that fact often ultimately wins over.  To refuse Christ because of the hypocrisy of Christians never made much sense to me.

It seems like I had more to say.  I'll edit this later if need be.  I don't like editing these posts, but occasionally that's really all I can do short of re-writing the entire thing with a couple added pieces.