The Fruit of Faith and Compassion God Brings from Our Sufferings
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2023
- God told Israel repeatedly, "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt." Why? For both a vertical (God-directed) and horizontal (neighbor-directed) reason.
Thank you for this word of Gospel in the Torah!
Good job 👏
Thank you brother Chad, I listen. But I don't see a particular divine connection to these teachings of compassion. First, empathizing with the suffering of others is a universal human trait across all cultures and continents, where scripture and monotheistic belief has nothing to do with it. Second, the Old Testament is a poor read when it comes to divine compassion, because God described there wipes out whole populations including little children who offended no one. Moses pleads with God to break his pattern of mass vengeance and carnage, and to at least spare the Israelites. That Moses in Exodus had to talk God out of it and God then saying "OK you convinced me this time" is not reassuring.
New Testament belief leads to our self-serving attempts to put happy and revisionist glosses on genocides by God himself. It leads us to largely ignore the deeply unsettling Old Testament punishment regimes Jesus reaffirmed. Break the commandments and God will kill you, your wife and kid is something we Christians want to pretend Jesus did not reaffirm. Damnation and hellfire have gone out of mode, we are taught by congregation developers to be selective readers. But I'm not. I got the message-- do exactly what Jesus said or reap a dreadful afterlife. The Israelites getting freed from slavery is not the message, getting wiped out in Europe by the millions is. The best I can tell Old Testament compassion is not related to your fate or mine. It is related to how to avoid the next mass extinction event by God.