In the Beginning: Re-Evaluating the Rule Maker

 Imagine you are with God at creation and can watch it all unfold......

God, is all knowing, all powerful. He has been and always will be.  He is getting ready to create the universe. He can do whatever he wants to being God. Anything! Being God, his imagination and power is endless. He knows what has happened and is going to happen. He is God. 

 Its up to him what is sin and what is not. Its up to him if there is a heaven and a hell. The concept didn't even exist until he thought it up. So he creates a world with a Garden of Eden. In the Garden, this all knowing God who has all power, puts a Tree of Knowledge in the center knowing what will happen. Eating from that Tree of Knowledge will bring sin  (a concept only he could create) into the world. He puts a man and woman in the garden. They eat of the tree like he knew they would. He kicks them out because they violated a command that he created knowing full well they would chose to violate it. 

This all powerful God, who is capable of anything, creates only two people and tells them to be fruitful and multiply. They have children, but the only way they can have children is to commit incest. This idea from an all knowing, all powerful God. So they do. They have sex with their sister, their brother, their mother, their father until the world is populated. 

God gets angry with them for doing wrong. He has yet to tell them what doing right is or give them any rules that he has created, but he knows that being all knowing. So he destroys them. All of them. For committing sins they have yet to even be told about by a God who made up the rules even though he could have made other rules. Only the people and animals who can fit on an ark survive. So again, they must commit incest in order to repopulate. 

At some point God creates a heaven and hell.  All those inbred people he got angry at, went there. All the worlds population, but a guy named Noah who built a boat and his family. 

Finally God decides to give 10 commandments for people to follow once the earth is finally repopulated by incest. Those who didn't follow the 10 commandments would go to hell unless they killed an animal every year. If they did, their sins would be pushed back until next year when they would have to kill again.  

 Then he gave the Israelites a HUGE bunch of rules in Leviticus that no human could follow completely so that they would be better and different than the heathens around them (who also must have come from incest and Noah's lineage). Some of those rules include a list of people worthy of being stoned. So not only do the people who don't do exactly as God says go to hell, so do the entire population of heathens because they aren't given the rules.

 Many times throughout the OT God kills off populations of people because they make him angry. He destroys cities saying the only holy man in the city is one who is willing to give his daughters to be gang raped. He kills a man for refusing to impregnate his sister in law. He orders men, women, children killed because they are the enemy of the people he picked as his favorite.  He even kills off more than 40 boys who made fun of a bald guy by sending bears to maul them to death. So those kids go to hell for doing something every child in the world has probably done. All those people are sent to hell by an all knowing, all powerful God who made up the rules and determined the punishment.

Fast forward to the NT. This God, who created the universe exactly the way he wants it, makes up all the rules, makes hell and heaven, knowing full well what will happen, decides that the animal sacrifices are no longer sufficient, so he (who makes up the rules) decides to send his Son. His rules are now that his Son must die in the most horrible way, feeling every ounce of pain, so that he (God) can forgive people for sins he made up, with a method he created, knowing full well that he would be torturing his son later on because of the rules he made up. 

 So while Jesus his Son is dead, he (Jesus) goes down to the hell his Father created to talk to the people who ended up there because they didn't know the rules unless they happened to be Jews. They have suffered all this time, so Jesus gives them a chance to get out of hell.

The rules have now changed.  Because Jesus died, getting into heaven is supposed to be based on grace and not works. However, you DO have to do a work, and that is to accept Jesus as your savior and poof! you get a ticket to heaven. But not really, (depending on your denomination). You can fall from grace, or not, depending on who you ask. But no one knows for sure because the all knowing, all powerful God didn't make it clear even though he says he is not the author of confusion. 

Meanwhile, those people who never heard of Jesus go to hell (or again depending on who you ask, they don't because they can't be held accountable for what they don't know). So assuming that if they don't know, they will not be held accountable and get to go to heaven, the churches decide to tell everybody (its called evangelism and/or missions).   Now instead of being guaranteed a place in heaven because they are not held accountable, they will now go to hell unless they believe and confess that Jesus was the Son of God, died for their sins, and rose from the dead on the third day. 

Now, those who question this idea of God after using the mind given to them by this all knowing God, who had to know they would question, are now considered sinners. To them, using the mind given to them by God, this literal interpretation of the bible makes no sense. So this God, who knows all there is to know, who could explain it and reveal it clearly, does not, but sends them to hell instead.

 
So if you don't do exactly as God has said (even though no one agrees on what that is), you get to go to hell that he made when he knew WHO would burn forever. However if you, who have lived an evil life, make a deathbed confession saying the words as required, you can go to Heaven if you really mean it. All the while, the people who have lived a life of caring for others, showing kindness, mercy, and grace to all, will go to hell, because they didn't say the "magic" words or do the "right" thing. They are not qualified for the kindness, mercy and grace they showed others. 

All because an all knowing, all powerful God, set up the rules that way and knew the final result.

 

PLEASE TELL ME HOW THAT MAKES SENSE.