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Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Have you told God that you’re willing to do anything He asks? Have you eagerly invited Him to use you in wild and crazy ways? Have you asked to be one of His radical front liners? Know that God is thrilled when we come to Him with a sincere desire to please Him, and His pleasure is not at all lessened if we instantly panic the moment He takes us up on our invitation. Remember that in the end, it will be just you and God looking back over your earthly life. In that moment, how well you served Him will be all you care about.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When a gunman kills ten children in a school, we’re fools to think every family was sincerely seeking God in their home. Most were not. Sometimes God takes children away to protect them from being led astray by parents who are defying Him. Sometimes He takes children away to discipline parents who have turned those children into idols. Sometimes He takes children away from parents who are doing everything right because He wants to push those parents on to the next plateau of growth.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We never hear the famous “Lord’s Prayer” in its original context. If we did, we’d realize that Jesus never intended for Christians to pray this way. There are many things wrong with this prayer. For one thing, it’s far too directive. We shouldn’t be telling God when to bring His Kingdom. And after Jesus just got done saying that God knows all about our needs, why would we then go on to ask God for food? Is Jesus suggesting that if we don’t ask God, He might forget to take care of us? No, this prayer is not at all what it seems to be at first glance. Jesus isn’t trying to teach people how to pray, He’s trying to drive them into utter despair about their moral depravity. This whole sermon is about making people realize that they are falling drastically short of actually meeting Yahweh’s demands for perfect righteousness. Jesus is hammering the same point of “you’re a moral failure in God’s eyes” over and over again. Each time He comes at it from a different angle. How you think is wrong. How you act is wrong. What you want is wrong. All your role models are wrong. You’re going to Hell, you’re going to Hell, you’re going to Hell. This is what sincere Yahweh followers are hearing and it’s terrifying. There’s nothing beautiful about the Sermon on the Mount. This isn’t “good moral teaching”. This is condemnation. This is “You’re all a bunch of moral scum and Yahweh’s going to throw you into Hell the minute you die.” This is nightmare material, and this prayer Jesus throws out just makes it worse.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now today we like to say that God’s love is unconditional. No, it’s really not. The term “unconditional love” isn’t in the Bible, and God has always hammered the point that His love is extremely conditional. He starts off loving us, but if we don’t meet His requirements for keeping His love, He’ll start hating us instead. He’ll hate us, kill us, and throw us into Hell where He’ll get high off of torturing us for eternity.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Identifying the correct way to respond to God’s wrath in a given moment is a simple matter if you ask the right question. That question is: “As a Christian, where should my loyalty lie?” The answer is: “With God.” This might sound obvious, but it’s not. As a human, your natural tendency is to be loyal to yourself first. This is why Christians pray against God’s wrath—because THEY don’t like the discomfort He is bringing into THEIR lives, therefore they feel justified in telling Him to stop it. This is a very irreverent attitude. As a Christian ALL of your loyalty should be on God’s side. Any prayer which makes it sound like you care about someone else more than you care about Him is a wrong prayer. Let’s look at some examples.

SITUATION: An earthquake devastates a city, causing hundreds of deaths.WRONG: “God, please help all those poor people!”RIGHT: “God, I know You have good reasons for everything You do. Help me to respond to this situation in a way that honors You."

SITUATION: Scores of children are gunned down by demon worshiping terrorists.WRONG: “God, please stop those terrible men and avenge those poor innocent children!”RIGHT: “God, I know that every life is in Your hands and that You are in total control of what happens in this world. Help me to honor You with faith in Your goodness and take away my desire to criticize Your work or elevate my wisdom as higher than Your own.”

Do you hear the difference in loyalty? The wrong prayers insult God by completely discounting the fact that He caused these things to happen on purpose. The wrong prayers elevate the welfare of humans as being more important than God accomplishing His personal agenda. The wrong prayers criticize God with language like “those poor people” and “those poor innocent children.” Where do we get off casting judgment on the victims of so-called tragedies? First of all, if God caused it, it’s not a tragedy. And if He killed someone, He wanted them dead. So we need to dispense with the insulting adjectives and wording that paints God’s actions as negative, flawed, or bumbling. When we pray right, we start by acknowledging that God caused the events, that He wanted the events, and then we ask Him to help us align with HIS agenda.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Christians don’t want a God who intentionally hurts and deceives people. But because God is constantly taking credit for of all kinds of evil acts in the Bible, it’s very hard to create an illusion that He didn’t want babies to get their brains bashed in on rocks or that He didn’t want women to be raped and pregnant women to be sliced open with swords. This is very clearly what He does want when we read what He says.

Samaria (the capital of northern Israel) will be held guilty, for she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, their little ones will be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women will be ripped open. (Hos. 13:16)

Why is all this carnage going to happen? Because the Israelites are defying their God. Yahweh is the One who will be doing these things to them. Yahweh takes full responsibility.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If you are a Christian, you need to understand that you are not a spiritual failure for struggling with pedophilia. God has a POSITIVE purpose for creating this crisis in your life and He will only keep it in your life as long as He feels it is spiritually beneficial to do so. You need to see this not as a punishment or a terrible flaw, but as an opportunity to make enormous progress in your personal relationship with God.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Maybe your father molested you. Maybe some creep raped you. Maybe a priest groped you. Maybe your mother made fun of your naked body. Maybe doctors experimented on you. Whatever happened, you need to recognize that there were two elements to the scenario: there were the middlemen, and there was the Mastermind. God is the Mastermind behind every event that happens on this earth. God is an extremely involved Creator. He controls the movement of every molecule in existence. Human beings did not assault you while God was vacationing in another universe. Demons didn’t overpower God long enough to stick it to you. God did not abandon you into the clutches of evil beings. God chooses and executes EVERY trial that enters our lives. He is WITH US in our trials—controlling their longevity and severity. Evil doesn’t rule this world, God does. These are critical truths that you will need to come to terms with if you are going to experience complete healing on this issue. Fixating your rage on humans is essentially a copout. The humans couldn’t have touched you without God’s help. Complete processing requires that we face the truth about what happened to us, and the truth is that God is involved in EVERY horrific thing that goes on down here. If this is news to you, we have a lot of material that can help you get a handle on this. Here are some articles to get you started:

Seeing God in Our Pain: Part 1
Seeing God in Our Pain, Part 2: Escaping the Trap of Misdirected Anger
Angry at God

You aren’t doing God or yourself any favors by downplaying His involvement in your crisis. Denial only causes us to get stalled and stuck. God wants an intimate relationship with you, and one of the prerequisites to forming a close bond with Him is for you to fully recognize and accept His total sovereignty over all things and His intimate involvement in every area of your life. It doesn’t matter what instruments God used to traumatize you. What matters is WHY He chose to put you through that experience. God always has a POSITIVE spiritual reason for putting us through hellish experiences on earth. Often we can’t see those reasons until we gain some distance from the actual experience. But the point is that GOD put you through this for the sake of drawing you and Him closer together in the long-term. Once you realize this, you can choose to become receptive to the positive lessons the Holy Spirit wants to bring out of this for you. God doesn’t hurt us just to smash us or permanently cripple us. He hurts us to force us away from paths that will harm us, to deepen our understanding of critical concepts, and to lay the groundwork for a deeper bond with Him. Processing past traumas is like slogging through a miserable swamp searching for treasures that are hidden in the muck. If you are willing to work with Him, God is going to help you locate the treasures that He has created in the muck for you. His goal is to move you through and out of the swamp. This is not a permanent stop. This is an experience you are passing through so that you can go on to greater things. God does not put us through pointless trials. Every trial is carefully created by Him to result in very positive spiritual benefits later on.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Remember that the real reason people refuse to accept God is pride. They resent not being in control. If they can’t be as powerful as God, then they want to be able to define how God uses His power. Well, this just isn’t an option for us. God is God and He doesn’t pander to us. If we sincerely want to know the truth, He will show it to us. If we really want to be in a right relationship with Him, He will give us however much healing and help we need to be able to sincerely submit to Him. Many Christians make the cardinal error of trying to woo unbelievers in by denying the sovereignty of God. “I don’t know why that terrible thing happened to you, but I know it wasn’t God’s will.” Rubbish. It most certainly WAS God’s will, and encouraging people to deny this is only leading them into delusions. When God trashes people, it’s on purpose. When He disillusions us, it’s on purpose. When He uses Christians to make “Christianity” repulsive to us, it’s on purpose. Instead of trying to shield unbelievers from God’s wildness, we need to put our energy into remembering that He is a lot wiser than we are.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Now if we’d all been taught right by our so-called shepherds, we wouldn’t have spent a lifetime being intentionally shielded from the fact that our Gods lie to us whenever They feel like it. Yahweh has never hidden the fact that He lies—He does it right in front of us on several occasions in the Old Testament. Also in the Old Testament Yahweh comes right out and says that every nasty thing that happens to us in this world is because of Him. In other words, God does evil. But here again, if you say this to Christians today, they go spastic. Why? Because they’ve once again decided that if God does evil—if He’s really responsible for all the pain and ugliness in this world—then He can’t be good, He can’t be trustworthy, etc., etc. Well, this is just silliness. We humans have made up a bunch of ridiculous rules about what two traits God can’t have at the same time, and now our own rules have us all bound up in a bunch of fear.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

How pathetic is it to end up in Hell because you refused to acknowledge reality? God is greater than you. God calls all the shots in His own Creation. Why do people act like submitting to Jesus as their God and Savior is such an outrageous demand? It’s not like God is asking us to scale Mt. Everest or swim across the ocean before He will accept us. The only thing He is asking from us is an acknowledgement of reality—He’s God and we’re dots. He’s awesome, we’re pathetic. He defines us, He controls us, and His opinion is the only One that counts. What is so offensive about acknowledging these super obvious truths? Well, if we acknowledge the way things actually are, then we are forced to conclude that we are dependent dots who are utterly unimpressive. Where is the glory in being a dot? There isn’t any. Our joy and satisfaction in life comes from delighting in the magnificence of our Creators and living for Their approval.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When the idea of a loved one ending up in Hell makes us feel burdened, sad, and miserable, what we’re often trying to do is one of two things: either we’re trying to share grief that we think God is feeling, or we are mourning for ourselves because we think the loss of our loved one will permanently cripple us. Neither of these things is true. God is not mourning when souls end up in Hell, and we aren’t going to spend eternity pining for the people who didn’t make it to Heaven. We were designed to be fully satisfied by our Creators in eternity. Relating with other created beings is going to be a nice extra, but relating to our Gods will be what really makes our souls feel complete. God has designed Heaven in such a way that you will not miss anyone who isn’t there. In the worst case scenario, if you ended up in Heaven but your child did not, you would not miss him at all. You would not be sad, you would not feel incomplete, you would not be haunted by memories from earth. God has taken care of all of these issues and He promises that for those who submit to Him on earth, Heaven will be a place of eternal joy. Your peace today will come from focusing on the fact that all is well between you and God. If your son is choosing to defy God, that’s something he needs to work out with the Holy Spirit.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If we really understood God’s priorities, we wouldn’t think there is anything sad about souls ending up in Hell for an eternity. Hell is not a bummer to God, it’s a glorious thing. God will not be mocked. He delights in justice. He delights in revenge (see Why God Loves Hell). But while God thoroughly enjoys thrashing His enemies, He is also extremely gracious, kind, patient, and merciful. Before condemning us to Hell, God gives us plenty of chances to come to Him. He educates us about who He is and what He wants. He makes sure we have the internal resources we need to meet His demands for reverential submission (see The Salvation Process: Understanding the Fairness of God). If we really saw how incredibly gracious God is towards every soul and if we were really loving God first, then we would feel furious at seeing souls continue to spit in His face for their entire lives and we would celebrate their demise. Being aligned with God means caring about HIS feelings more than we care about the comfort of created things. Being loyal to God means wanting Him to be revered and honored by every human soul.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

There are many things God says and does which would be sins if we did them. If you shoot someone you’re mad at it, it’s called murder, and murder is a sin. But if God kills someone that He’s mad at, it’s called justice. As the Creator and Owner of all things, God gets to do whatever He wants. He does not abide by any moral code. He is above all laws and rules. So when you hear people accusing God of being evil, they are really saying that if they were to do what He is doing, they would be judged as evil by Him. Many people accuse God of living by a double standard and then they feel justified in resenting Him for it. This is utter nonsense. When a human being manages to uncreate the God who created them, then they can stand in judgment over Him. Until then, we all need to take a big bite of reality pie: we are the dots, He is the King. He does whatever He wants to do and He is held accountable by no one. Towards those who know their place and sincerely care about pleasing Him, God is glad to discuss how frustrating and upsetting His methods can be. He knows He can be confusing and overwhelming, and He has great empathy for our distress. But towards those who are just jealous and bitter because they are eternally outranked by a God who knows how great He is, God has communicated His concern for their miffed pride by creating a nice little place called Hell.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When I see God as the One who directed the rapist to my personal front door, I end up directing the bulk of my rage at Him, and He in turn has the wisdom and power to help me process my experience in a way that will have a positive effect on my insides. When I see God as the Mastermind behind my assault, I then see the rapist as merely the instrument that he was. Of course I still hate the man at first, but since I am now fully engaged with God and looking for Him to help me process my experience, I am going to find that my hate for the human is eventually transformed into compassion. The truth is that God loves the rapist every bit as much as He loves me. I will of course try to avoid thinking about this at first, especially when I need to believe that God is on my side and far more concerned with my pain than He is with that human creep. But the reality is that God is equally concerned with both me and my rapist, He is equally compassionate towards each of us, and He is using our common experience to try and grow each of us to a better place.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is always working with the eternal picture in mind. We humans act with now in mind. If I see a homeless man, my instinct is to try to rush in and fix his life for him. But God is working with that soul and He is using his current circumstances to teach him many important lessons. Perhaps He went to great lengths to drag that man down to the low point he is now at and perhaps He is trying to break some stubborn will in him. If I let my human logic lead me, I will only get in God’s way. If I let Him lead me, my timing will always be perfect and He will use me to greatly bless people. Only God sees the soul of a man and knows what he truly needs. Only God sees the future and understands how every life impacts every other. Compared to God, I am a complete fool filled with wrong instincts and flawed logic. If I really want to help someone else, I MUST listen to God, for He is the only One who knows how to do it.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Suppose a husband walks into his bedroom and finds his wife making love to another man. He gets so furious that he grabs a gun and shoots her dead. This is an extreme form of anger—one that seeks to destroy anything that provokes it. This is the kind of anger God has towards those who die without submitting to Jesus. It is with this kind of hateful rage that God will throw unsaved souls into Hell.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God has no use for fake. Honesty is what He’s after, and honesty is what He wants from you in every stage of the journey. Hating His guts, thinking He’s a monster, deciding He is cruel—these are all very valid places to be. It’s in these pit holes of pain and anger that we really let God have it with both barrels: hurling accusations at Him and throwing out all the pretty platitudes we clung to before. We join Job in saying that the way God runs His game down here isn’t right or fair. He blesses those who do evil while He kicks His loyal friends in the face. He is an Ogre with unstoppable power who gets off on tormenting those who can’t fight back. No, we aren’t going to love that. We can’t. God has wired us to find such a dark image of Him utterly repulsive. We can’t trust or love a God who we honestly don’t believe is good. Sure, we can obey Him out of fear of being punished, but that certainly is a lousy way to live. We weren’t designed to thrive in a state of cowering fear. For us, everything is anchored on confidence in God’s goodness—our peace, our hope, our sense of purpose in life. Once we lose that, we lose everything, and in certain stages of refinement, confidence in God’s goodness is the thing that He rips away from us.

Now we get to that ten dollar question: WHY?! What is the point in God totally destroying our confidence in Him? Why does He morph into some terrifying Monster? Why does He go into death silence mode and refuse to utter one peep of encouragement to us? As usual, the answer is nonsensical: God destroys our trust in Him in order to make it stronger.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Remember that your personal bond with God is ALL that matters—not promises of special blessings or earthly ministries or anything else. The whole point of your existence is to develop a close relationship with your Creator and He is a very jealous Being. He values you so much that He can’t stand the thought of you prizing anything as much as Him. It’s not good enough for God to be first in your heart when He’s followed close behind by a hundred other second priorities. He wants to be way out in front on your priority list: so supremely important that you keep forgetting there’s anything else of value in this world besides Him.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We cannot possibly argue that God doesn’t do evil when He does things which He defines as wrong. God does do evil, yet because He is the One doing it, He relabels evil as good. This is because He judges His own work by His own motivations and by the final outcome. Even though molestation is evil, God considers it good that He arranged for you to be molested because He understands why He did it. Everything God does to you is intended to strengthen your relationship with Him. A strong relationship with God is the best possible thing for your soul, therefore anything God does to draw you closer to Himself is good. It is excellent, in fact. Having you molested was not an indifferent, cruel act on God’s part, because God loves you and He did this to you in order to help you in significant spiritual ways.

How does it spiritually benefit you to be molested? By breaking you out of the delusion that God has nothing to do with the pain in your life. By forcing you to see His hand at work in the worst moments of your life. Do you want to feel more secure in your relationship with God? This is how you get there: not by pretending He is absent when you really need Him, but by realizing that He NEVER looks away from you even for one second of time. Do you want stronger trust? This is how you get there: by seeing that ALL pain, suffering and trauma are brought into your life in the hands of your loving Father.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Right now all of your hateful feelings are being aimed at the man (or woman) who molested you. This is because it is more comfortable for you to blame a person than it is to blame God. By focusing on the human who abused you, you are protecting yourself from having to face some extremely upsetting truths that would require massive changes to your theology. The human who interacted with you was just a middleman. God is the One who you should really be blaming for what happened. The whole thing was His idea. God does not hate you. He loves you. But He is also the only reason you were molested. He could have easily protected you, but He chose not to. Not because He doesn’t love you. Not because He didn’t understand what this would do to you. He understood perfectly, yet He still chose it. These are some extremely difficult and painful truths and most Christians will adamantly tell you that God had nothing to do with what happened to you. But most Christians are not going to do what is best for you. They are only going to do what is best for them.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Jesus’ whole point in teaching was to grind through layers upon layers of hypocrisy and pride until we could see ourselves through the eyes of a holy God: we are all miserable wretches who sin as constantly as they breathe. Jesus did not come to spread good cheer and love and warm fuzzies. This is why it is obnoxious for Christians to go around describing Jesus as some gracious, loving Guy. If that’s really how you perceive Him, you need to reread the Gospels. Jesus was intentionally harsh, rude, and vicious with His speeches. He had to be in order to get through to us. If we had lived in His time, we would have thought we were doing alright, just like the rest of His followers did. Only by coming within range of Jesus’ verbal grenades would we have been provoked into reevaluating our own righteousness.

No one enjoys receiving constructive criticism. Jesus’ criticism would have been ten times harder to swallow because He threw all diplomacy out the window and just slapped people across the face with the crisis of their terrible sin. He purposely made mountains out of molehills to wake people up to the reality that our holy God finds all forms of sin equally offensive. To God, one sharp word is as awful as coldblooded murder, and His punishment for it will be the same. Just like Christians today, the people in Jesus’ time were living by a human definition of sin, labeling the fun sins (like lust, gossip and lying) as far less of a problem than the more rare crimes of murder. Jesus was trying to show them that ALL sins were equally horrible in the eyes of a holy God.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

In a monarchy or tyranny situation, one approaches the ruler with a heavy dose of fearful respect, knowing that person has the power to incarcerate or execute without any trial. In America, our democratic style of government with its division of power prevents one individual from being all-powerful in the eyes of the people. President is the highest office we have and our presidents are mocked and criticized every day without consequence. This makes it particularly difficult for American Christians to grasp what it means to reverentially fear the Lord, but it is a concept we cannot afford to ignore. God demands reverence from us, and we cannot please Him without it. To help us with this, God has provided many accounts in the Old Testament which demonstrate His absolute power over humanity. The plagues and traumas He inflicted on people back then serve to remind us that when we approach God, we are not approaching anything human. While Christians needn’t fear eternal torment in Hell thanks to the work of Jesus on the cross, we still must retain a fearful respect for God in our everyday lives. While we are on earth, we do not exist in a sheltered bubble where nothing is required of us. If we persist in holding irreverent attitudes towards God, treating Him no better than we treat other human beings, He can and will discipline us. He can make our lives quite miserable if need be, and there is no pain He will spare us if it means reviving our sense of reverence.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

In general, Christians do a pretty lousy job of acknowledging God’s sovereignty. Sure, they’ll say He runs the universe. But whenever something really bad happens, they try to pass the buck to Satan or sin or human will. But is God really such a weenie that He can’t keep order in His own universe? Of course not. Don’t let Christians deceive you: God DOES do evil, and He is never blocked, stopped, or overwhelmed by things which His own hands have made. God intentionally crushes, wounds, and deceives. So if you hate God because He’s done something awful to you in life, that’s a reasonable place to be. God created humans with a need for things to make sense. When God trashes us in life and we can’t see any reason why, it’s only natural for us to conclude that there is no reason, therefore God is a jerk. Why would we want to worship a jerk? We wouldn’t. No one is going to want to worship a God who they don’t believe is good in Character.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

To God, the cutting words I let fly out of my mouth in an argument are as bad as molesting any child. There is no such thing as an excusable sin. Oh yes, we justify our sins all day long and expect God to judge us according to our internal motivations and the pressures we were under while we demand that He judge others harshly based only on their final actions. This is hardly Christlike. God knows that humans always have reasons for the things they do—reasons that make sense to them. The child molester keeps assaulting children for the same reason the caffeine addict keeps frequenting coffee shops: both are driven by strong internal hungers that they feel they cannot control. It’s easy enough for us to say “just stop” to the molester, but at the same time we refuse to “just stop” drinking caffeine or watching television because we secretly know we can’t. We’ve become slaves to our biological desires just as much as the molester has and we feed our addictions far more often than he does, yet we still argue that the molester is in a completely different category. This is hypocritical, self-serving judging that will not get us any nearer to Christ. To gain intimacy with God, we must learn to see sin and sinners from His perspective, and we won’t do this until we see Him as the ultimate cause of all pain.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is the primary cause of all pain, and He usually uses some secondary cause to inflict it on us. Humans and demons often play the role of secondary causes. For example, God sees my rapist going on the hunt for his next victim. The man has chosen his course, God has not forced him into it. But God now chooses to lead the man directly to my bedroom instead of sending him to some other woman or entirely blocking his path.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

When we pray for the dead, we are also declaring that fallen people are far more important to us than our Creator. We’re saying, “I know I’ll be in Your Presence in Heaven, Jesus, but that’s worthless to me unless my dead grandma is there also. I know she rejected You on earth, but I think You should overlook that and let her into Heaven anyway.” This is insane thinking. How can we possibly put our glorious God in the same class as fallen, self-centered humans? If we really can’t stand to be separated from people who hate our God, then we deserve to have our salvation revoked so we can join our precious friends and family members in the fires of Hell. There we can all burn and writhe together, soaking up the fellowship of idiots that we just can’t stand to be without.

There is nothing merciful about praying for the dead. There’s nothing Christlike about rejecting Christ’s boundaries, insulting His Person, and suggesting that the mercy He has already extended to someone on earth is somehow insufficient. Let’s be clear: there can be NO SYMPATHY WHATSOVER for those who end up in Hell. Not if we’re serious about honoring God. Not after all that He’s done to make eternal salvation so readily available.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We know that God brings pain into our lives for different purposes, and that for the most part He always acts for our spiritual benefit. We also know that there is one particular context in which God actually takes pleasure in our pain and Hell is a perfect example of this. Within the context of extreme, blatant defiance, we will see God’s loyalty to Himself decrease His general compassion for us and He will act very aggressively towards us. In eternity, God’s satisfaction over humans suffering in Hell is continuous. On earth, we will only see God go into this merciless mode for very brief periods, during which He will inflict very intense human suffering for the sake of His own glory and honor.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Under the Old Covenant, God’s approach was “kill it before it spreads.” Priests were the highest authority in the land before Israel became a monarchy. If you lipped off to a priest after he reprimanded you, you were to be executed. God is a huge fan of the death penalty. Without it, societies run amuck with unchecked violence. If Israel had actually abided by Yahweh’s laws, she would have maintained her reverence for God. But as it was, she ignored His system of justice and let the hardcore rebels in her midst to prosper. Children who showed no respect for authority were allowed to grow up into uncontrollable monsters. Samson was an excellent example of what happens when a brat isn’t disciplined properly. According to Yahweh’s laws, Samson should have been executed many times over. But at the time he lived, Israel was in a state of anarchy and no one cared about justice. So Samson got away with fornicating, brutalizing people, dishonoring his parents, murdering, and spitting in God’s face. The man was one long repulsive string of rebellious acts until God finally took him out (see Samson).

When we look around the world today, we find many Samsons running about. Terrorists are gunning down whoever they please. Children are cussing out their parents. Gunmen are blasting their way into schools and shopping malls. Murderers drift in and out of prison like they’re checking into a hotel. All of this is because our governments have fallen down in their God-given roles as administrators of justice, and to God, justice has always included the death penalty.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

First God defines the concept of righteousness, then He designs us to be the complete opposite of righteousness. He then makes it impossible for us to fix ourselves, and at the same time He demands that we do. The result: a desperate sense of depravity on our side and an understanding that He is right and we are wrong. Excellent. God now introduces us to the concepts of mercy, grace, and salvation. The result: a deep sense of gratitude towards Him which drives us to embrace the role of humble servants. Good. The proper relationship dynamic is shaping up very nicely. After salvation, God refuses to correct our desire to sin. We still find ourselves strongly attracted to evil—an attraction which He is constantly defining as wrong. The result: an acute awareness of our desperate need for Him in every moment. Excellent. If all goes well, we now view ourselves as lowly creatures who are loved by a kind and superior God. God instills an intense need to worship within us so that we’ll continue to see Him as the superior One and also find exalting Him to be intensely satisfying to our souls. This also helps us stay within the bounds of the relationship dynamic He wants.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

This is GOD we are engaging with, not a mere mortal. We relate to Him according to an entirely different set of rules. He is first and there is no negotiating His needs with Him. He gets to be as unreasonable, extreme and particular as He wants. He gets to be possessive and territorial. He is GOD—how can we withhold from Him? He can take whatever He wants, but how much better that we bring our souls to Him voluntarily and lay all of our love down at His feet. What other being has done even a fraction of what this God has done for us? Who could even begin to love us like He does? We cannot simply bathe in the Blood and then go on with our lives as if nothing happened. Our lives ended the moment we became saved—these are HIS lives now and they must be poured out in a way that brings Him the highest honor possible. Ask the Holy Spirit to increase your understanding of God’s consuming jealousy and to give you a double portion of zeal to satisfy it. We exist for God’s pleasure and a few of us are wise enough to see the great privilege that this is. Let’s make the most of it.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Not all viruses are equal. Ebola is one that brings on particularly gruesome symptoms, hence the extra fear associated with it. So if all viruses are created and controlled by God, why did He decide to make some of them so nasty? Because we humans are such a pompous lot, we think that we can do life without God’s help. We refuse to acknowledge our need for Him. Well, if we’ve got it so handled, why are the fatalities of the Ebola virus continuing to climb? If we are so in control, why are months ticking by with no arrest to the spread of this thing? In the news, you’ll find a lot of logical reasons given. For example, there aren’t enough medical supplies and personnel in the area that is getting hit so hard. Well, why not? What’s with the poverty and uneven spread of resources in this world? If we’re such a capable lot, why can’t we learn to share and help each other? If we’re so brilliant on our own, why can’t we contain this thing? We complain that trying to track down all the people who might have come in contact with an infected person is tedious work. But why is it so tedious? Because we’re such wimps, that’s why. We have to constantly sleep and eat or we can’t function. We get fatigued easily. We get annoyed easily. When we’re in tense situations, we get extra huffy and we do sloppy work. We fight with each other and we let things slip through the cracks. And while we’re busy holding conferences and bickering and disregarding safety rules, more of us keep getting sick. At what point will we realize that we’re in over our heads and look to God for help?

Medical supplies and personnel are just a fraction of our problems. We’re selfish little punks who are far too prideful to admit that we have neither the brains nor the resources to stop something that God has started. After all, if we were really as capable as we pretend, none of us would ever get sick. By now we would have found a way to kill off the whole family of Ebola critters. But instead, we’re scrambling to try and come up with some kind of medication that will reverse the symptoms. God is in our laboratories with us, whispering ideas into our minds and controlling how successful our efforts are. But if He should give us an effective cure for this particular disease, will we give Him the glory? No, we’ll pat ourselves on the back. Then God will call upon another one of His viral soldiers to scare us back into an awareness of our limitations.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

There’s no denying the fact that God intentionally withholds information from us. Instead of defending specific decisions, He justifies all of His behavior with the general claim that He is good and perfect and does all things well. God operates on a “the ends justifies the means” basis, and He is the only One authorized to do so. Human beings are not allowed to operate by this principle—if we attempt to do wrong to do right, we are held morally accountable for the wrong. We are bound to the laws God makes, while He is bound by nothing and does whatever He pleases. Where then is our assurance that God won’t run amuck and cross some inappropriate line? God’s perfect character is the only guarantee He offers. Because God is good, everything He does and allows is good by definition.

We might not like the way God operates, but we can’t do anything to change it. Being close to God requires absolute submission to His authority and that means accepting all of His decisions. God is quite clear in the Bible that He constantly does wrong to do right. During the graphic fall of Jerusalem, He called a sadistic army in to rape, torture and kill His chosen people and then He declared the whole thing to be a display of righteous judgment. We struggle with this because we don’t see any positive outcome, we only see the horror in the moment. Yet when we read about another Man getting publicly degraded and tortured to death, tears of gratitude well in our eyes for we know His death brought about the salvation of the entire human race. The cross is rare in that it is one case in which God really gives us a bigger glimpse of the good end result of His using evil. As much as we hate the suffering Jesus had to endure, we would never wish it away for it was that very suffering which saved us. When we compare the suffering of the cross to the good that came out of it, it’s obvious which is greater. And so it is every time God employs evil methods in this world: the final resulting good is exponentially greater. At some point, we must take His word for this.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We have two choices, Christians. We can either persist in this game of denial and deceive ourselves into thinking that we are being loyal to God by refusing to acknowledge His involvement in evil, or we can ask the Spirit to remove the scales of fear from our eyes and help us to face the intimidating truth which is clearly laid out in His Word. By His own choice, God cannot be theologically separated from evil, pain, suffering, torture, sadism, and every other hideous thing we come across down here. The same God who meticulously designed the eternal torments of Hell is standing right there when little girls are sold into sex slavery and He is the One who approves of their captors greatly profiting from their heinous crimes. Likewise, He opens the wombs of those who He knows will abuse and torture their children, while He strikes barren those who would lovingly care for them. No evil is hidden from God’s eyes down here. He not only sees everything we do to each other, He is standing right beside us as we’re doing it, carefully monitoring and limiting the activities of both abuser and victim. Such pictures deeply disturb us. We believe that if we accept the truth about God’s association with evil, we will have the reality of our loving God torn away from us. THIS IS A LIE. The more we accept God’s Truth without modifying it to suit our human needs, the more confident we will become in His love for ALL people, regardless of the horrors He puts them through. God IS good. He does do ALL things well. There is an ocean of comfort and peace to be found in these truths, but we will never unlock it until we are willing to let GOD define who He is and accept His intimate involvement in this world that He made.

Are you ready to go to the next level with God? Will you let Him stretch the boundaries of your theology yet again so that your understanding of Him might become that much more accurate? If we want to really know God, we must stop denying the clear picture He has given us in His Word of His intimate involvement with evil. God and evil are truly inseparable, yet His Character remains totally perfect, righteous and holy. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you better understand this most critical issue. Intimacy with God can only be acquired by the total acceptance of HIS Truth.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

There is enormous pressure in America today to get gay marriage legalized on a national level. Will this plan succeed? The country hates God—that should make the answer rather obvious. Legalizing homosexual marriages has everything to do with spitting in God’s face and nothing to do with equality, bigotry, hate, or anything else. All of this fuss has a spiritual agenda behind it, and this fight is not being led by humans but by demons. Humans are just following their spiritual leaders, because that’s what humans always do. There are only two generals to side with in this war: God or Satan. If you’re not choosing God, you end up in Satan’s camp by default.

Now humans aren’t going to win any stars for intelligence when it comes to these kinds of fights. As soon as a fight gets hyped up by the media, humans tend to check their brains at the door and align with whoever is shouting the loudest. Most people never stop to really think about the issue at hand, they just go with whatever they’re told. This makes Satan’s job very easy, for when he wants you to follow the herd down the road of rebellion, all he has to do is choose the right wording.

Satan: “Do you want to be a bigot?”
Average citizen: “No. That sounds like a bad word. I don’t want to be associated with that.”
Satan: “Then vote for gay marriage.”
Average citizen: “Oh, okay.”

In half a second, Satan’s herding people over onto his side because no one is stopping to ask, “Wait a second. What does bigotry have to do with gay marriage?”

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

The more we rebel against God, the more illusions He feeds us. Humans in this world think they are getting away with defying God. Wow. Did they miss the memo about Hell? Suppose you steal a dollar out of your father’s wallet. Thirty seconds later, he bursts into your room, rips the dollar out of your hand, and beats on you with a baseball bat nonstop for the next eight months. Would you consider yourself victorious? Not hardly. And yet right now there are countless humans and demons who think they are so clever for spitting in God’s face, even though somewhere in their brains they know that He sees everything they’re doing and that He is going to punish them for all of eternity. It doesn’t matter how many years you live on this earth—stacked up against all of eternity, your time down here shrinks down to a millisecond. How stupid do you have to be to think that lipping off to God for a millisecond is worth being tortured for all of eternity? God has been totally up front about what He plans to do to those who defy Him, yet we still defy Him. We’re crazy. Demons are crazy. It is utterly insane to think you can win against the God who holds your molecules together.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

[About Deut. 22:28-29]

This is the verse that we find so particularly troublesome. And of course in our minds, we have already decided that the virgin was some sweet, innocent flower while the rapist was some sadistic creep. So when God commands these two to marry, all we see is Him grinding innocence into the dirt and casting some poor girl into the hands of a cruel abuser for the rest of her days while He turns His back on her tears. Conclusion: God is a jerk.

So what would it look like for God not to be a jerk? The rapist should get executed of course—that’s what most women would say today. In other words, society should treat rape like an unpardonable sin. Well, if women get to make this call, then men should get to throw something in as well. All these married women today who go flirting with other men in public—why should they get to be excused of their adulterous behavior? Just because they can’t physically force a man to have sex with them hardly means they are innocent. Jesus said that lusting over a person in your heart is the same as sleeping with them. Just because women can’t physically overpower men hardly lessons their sins in God’s eyes, for He knows that women are doing the most damage that they can with the tools they have available. If they could easily rape men, they would. But since they can’t, their perverse desire for domination plays out in other forms, such as constantly withholding sex from their husbands as a means of controlling them. The reality is that each gender is constantly looking for ways to inflict misery on the other one.

[...]

So let’s consider things from the rapist’s point of view. A man who rapes a woman is not a lower life form, he is simply a human being with some serious issues. Who in this world can claim they don’t have issues?

[...]

Now you’re a young virgin living on your father’s farm. One day a man comes along, sees you, and rapes you. By the time your fathers and brothers come to your rescue it’s too late. You have been permanently soiled, and thanks to this jerk, you no longer qualify as a woman who is eligible to marry. First time sex is supposed to be a consummation of marriage, but your rapist was trying to steal the fun part without having to pay the price of hard work and commitment. This is where Yahweh intervenes on your behalf. He commands your rapist to marry you. The man is not going to get away with just skipping off and leaving you with the stigma of a woman who has slept around. The man will now have to take you as his wife and share his inheritance with you. And if you’re now pregnant, your child is not going to be left as some fatherless bastard. Because Yahweh makes your rapist take responsibility for what he’s done, He really takes the fun out of rape, which in turn causes a lot fewer men to try it.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Satan has us so deluded about death that we’ve decided it’s rude to tell the truth about it. Imagine if you piped up at a funeral and said: “You know that she’s probably in Hell, right? So instead of talking about how wonderful she was, let’s talk about how we can avoid ending up there ourselves.” Can you imagine the furious reaction you’d receive from the family? Do you see how effectively Satan has got us all stifling the truth? Talking about the truth is considered rude, inappropriate, and obnoxious. But treating death like a choose-your-own-ending situation? That’s considered polite and right. And while we sit around avoiding the H-word, more and more souls are refusing to see death as the terrifying thing that it is if you haven’t gotten right with your Creator

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

We do not go into the medical profession to save lives, but to serve God. Whether our patients live or die, we will be glorifying Him when we are relying on Him as our only Source of wisdom. If we are surgeons, we trust that God will guide our hands. We remember that the power to save a life is never placed within our grasp for even a moment. It is God who saves lives, and we surrender the hands He gave us to be instruments that honor Him. When patients recover and people applaud us, we see their praise as the misdirected thing it is and we give God all the glory in our hearts.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

One of God’s most defining Characteristics is His massive ego. God loves Himself, and He never gets enough of exalting Himself. Everything He does has some Self-serving motivation behind it. God doesn’t create or sustain anything that doesn’t benefit Him in some way.

You are a human. God has designed you with a special ability to bond with Him. He wants to have a personal relationship with you—a joyful soul communion that will continue to deepen for all of eternity. But for this to be possible, there must be some degree of understanding on your side. Making you a selfish, egocentric being was an essential part of God’s plan to draw you closer to Himself.

If you’re going to know God, you need to understand what it means to want the whole universe to revolve around you, because this is what God wants. You need to understand what it’s like to think you’re better than everyone else and that everything you do is justified, because this is how God thinks. Now of course when you think such lofty things about yourself, you’re being delusional, and you will have to be taught better. But your intimate understanding of selfishness is priceless and that is not something that God wants you to grow past. If you did, how would you be able to really grasp what He means when He says that He is the most magnificent Being in the universe and that He is looking forward to the day when every knee bows before Him? If you were not a selfish being, you’d have no clue what He was talking about. You wouldn’t understand His obsession with glory or His outrage when someone worships another being in His place. If you don’t understand the concept of selfishness—really understand it—then you and God would have a very limited relationship. But because God created you with a massive ego and an inability to do anything without a self-serving motive, a wonderful foundation of identity is now available for God to build on. So then, on the one hand, it’s not good to be selfish. It tempts you to make bad choices and it makes it much harder for you to submit to God in the way that He demands. But on the other hand, it’s a wonderful thing to be selfish, for once you do submit to God, you have a much better chance of really knowing Him. All things considered, your ego is one of the greatest gifts God has given you, for it opens the door to a world of understanding that you would never have access to if you’d been designed differently.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God gives love only when it benefits Him to do so. This means that if we are to love like God, we want to also give love only when it benefits God for us to do so. How do we know when God is no longer interested in loving someone? We don’t unless He tells us. But right off we can identify one group of souls who God no longer loves: those who have already died without submitting to Him on earth. This means that if we are to please God in the way that we love, we need to also stop loving those who have died without submitting to Him. To pray for God to have mercy on souls who died without ever submitting to Him is wrong. When we ask God to keep loving souls who defied Him on earth, we are ignoring the fact that His love is conditional and we are disrespecting His boundaries. This is insulting behavior which far too many Christians are caught up in. If someone dies without submitting to God, our attitude should be “they deserve what they get.” Does this sound merciless? It should, because God is merciless in eternity towards those who defied Him on earth.

There’s nothing more obnoxious than thinking we can out love God or top Him in the departments of mercy and grace. So when we sit around weeping over the idea of souls burning in Hell and blast Heaven with prayers to for God to be kind to those who spat in His face their entire lives, we are not acting like Christ, nor are we impressing His Father. Instead, we are insulting Them both for all three of our Creators are pro-Hell and will shed no tears whatsoever for those who end up there. Who is it that is kicking back in Heaven enjoying the smoke of the torment of souls writhing in anguish in Revelation? It’s Jesus—our loving Lord who is a lot more things than just love (Rev. 14:9-11). And who is it that finds it satisfying to lead the souls in Heaven out to take a look at all the souls rotting in the torment of His wrath? Yahweh (Isa. 66:22-24). We would be wise to take heed of Jesus’ warning:

“I’ll show you the One you should be afraid of. Be afraid of the One who has the power to throw you into Hell after killing you. I’m warning you to be afraid of Him.” (Luke 12:5)

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is pro-spanking. That’s why He designed us with extra padding on our rear ends–it gives us a perfect spot to inflict pain without doing physical damage. Every human being is born screaming to get their way. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children self-control and consideration for others–lessons which God says are best taught by painful discipline. As always, in our Satan-led culture, everything God promotes has been twisted into the opposite of what it is. Spanking in America has become a synonym for abuse. Parents are taught to replace biblical disciplinary methods for counting to a million, banning their children to “time outs” in rooms stuffed with toys, and trying to act like a buddy instead of an authority figure. We can choose to ignore God’s principles, but we will still be judged by them. God says that parents who disregard His advice on discipline HATE their children. Strong language, but when God speaks, we know it is true.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Like a new flower garden which slowly evolves from a bed of plain green shoots to a lush display of colorful blooms, God wants your relationship with Him to be in a continuous state of transformation. There is so much He wants to teach you about who He is and who He designed you to be. It has always been about YOU and Him. Your children—as wonderful as they were—simply have no role in your personal relationship with God. It’s not you, God, and the people you love the most on earth. It’s just you and God. This is an intimate marriage—a private love affair filled with bedroom secrets that will never be shared with anyone else. By stripping away a relationship that was very close and dear to you, God makes room for your personal bond with Him to thrive. Even the best, most wonderful gifts in life can get in the way of our own journey with God. When He takes a child, He is saying that at this point in your personal walk with Him, it is better for that soul and you to move apart from each other and continue on in separate directions. Are you willing to trust His judgment?

God loves you infinitely more than you loved your child. Your pain is most serious to Him. He will not spend such costly tears on something trivial. Are you willing to believe Him when He says this was a necessary thing? Are you willing to believe that this new, heartbreaking road He has forced you down really will lead to a far better place than the road you were on before? EVERYTHING God puts you through is for your long-term spiritual BEST. Of course the death of a child feels terribly unnecessary and useless—especially when the circumstances of death seem like some random accident that wasn’t supposed to happen. Yet there are no accidents in God’s universe—only very intentional choices and carefully controlled events.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God is sovereign. Nothing happens in this universe without His approval and intimate involvement. So when we think back on 9/11, we need to see God’s fist slamming down on the United States. Considering what God is capable of, this was an extremely mild event. Considering how America treats God, a mere 3,000 casualties is shockingly merciful. We deserve much worse. We will get much worse. What happened on 9/11 was just a little wake-up call. Yes, it was shocking, but it’s impact was very limited. As is always the case, those closest to the events were the most impacted by them. We saw the usual spike in church attendance, and our anti-God media acknowledged His existence briefly. But at the ten year anniversary of the event, what did we find? A formal ceremony being held in which it was explicitly ordered that there would be no praying to God in public. Hm. Clearly America as a nation did not learn the spiritual lessons she might have learned from 9/11. As a result, she will need to suffer greater trauma, more violence, and she will need more assistance in identifying God as her attacker. None of this will be difficult to do—God already has His next lesson all worked out. But in the meantime, you as an individual Christian don’t have to follow America’s rebellious example. There is plenty for you to learn from 9/11, but now we need to make sure you’re learning the right lessons and not just ingesting deceptions and fear.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If God lies, we can’t trust Him. This is human logic. IT IS NOT TRUE WITH GOD. But it feels like it must be true, for how can you possibly trust someone who deceives you? You can. No, it does not make sense, but many things about the faith don’t. As long as we’re talking about lying, we’re still talking about understanding. When God lies, we feel like we don’t “know” Him anymore, hence the panic. This is because on earth, understanding someone is critical to knowing them and trusting them. If you’re going to enter deeper levels of spiritual maturity, at some point, God is going to teach you to unlink the concepts of understanding and trust where He is concerned.

If we are to go all the way with God, we must learn to focus all of our trust on His CHARACTER instead of His BEHAVIOR. This is a tall order for us humans and making this switchover is a terrifying process. But it’s critical, for God is not human. He is so huge and complex that we can’t even begin to fully grasp Him. He has goals that we don’t know about, and achieving those goals means He is going to act in ways that make no sense to us at all, like cursing the entire human race because one woman ate a piece of fruit. Or like saying He’s too holy to stand the presence of sin, and then having His equally holy Son come down and take all that sin on Himself. Doesn’t make sense. It can’t, and it won’t. If we get stuck in “I have to figure it out” land, we’ll miss so much that God wants to give us. So our need for logical understanding must be ripped out of our cores and we must learn to become satisfied with knowing God is good in Character, no matter how badly He behaves.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Christians tend to get very uncomfortable when unbelievers blame God for bringing tragedy into their lives. Suppose your unsaved neighbor has his daughter killed in a hit and run and the man falls into seething anger towards God, cussing Him out and reaming you out for trying to tell him God is good. Is his theology amiss for accusing God of murdering his child? Not at all. God DID murder the girl and He makes no apologies for doing so. Why then do we Christians start feeling sick to the stomach and make bumbling efforts to try and redirect the man’s anger elsewhere? Do we think it will help the man’s soul to deny God’s sovereign rule over this world? Are we being good witnesses for the Lord by arguing that sin and Satan snuck behind His holy back and did something He hates? This is ridiculous theology, yet over and over I’ve heard Christians try and talk the grieving unsaved out of assigning any responsibility to God for what happens to them.

We can hardly help people know our God when we don’t even know Him ourselves. In Isaiah 45:7, God says “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these.” Clearly God does not find it insulting to be blamed for something He did, in fact He has always made it clear that He’s the One ultimately responsible for all the suffering in this world. Sin itself couldn’t have occurred without God setting up that one special tree in the garden and giving Satan free access to Eve. We Christians need to stop being so threatened by this notion that God is sovereign over all, and we really need to stop talking unsaved souls out of their good instincts.

It is very correct to fully acknowledge God’s involvement when something terrible happens to us, and if He’s involved, He’s the One we should be directing our emotions at. Encouraging people to redirect their anger away from God is like teaching the wife of an adulterous husband to go have it out with his lover instead of confronting the real source of the problem. Such triangulation is a common practice among humans who are trying to cling to denial and preserve the illusion of something they know no longer exists. We Christians have a long history of clinging to the illusion of a God who never gets His hands dirty with pain and suffering—this is a fantasy which the Bible completely disproves, yet we cling to it anyway. God declares that He creates calamity—how much clearer can He be?

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

Why doesn’t Jesus just come to the point and stop with the cute stories? Because there is a large crop of souls who are in His immediate audience that He doesn’t want to understand the spiritual principles He is talking about. Jesus is using parables to intentionally block people from understanding Him and receiving salvation. Now there’s something you’ll never be taught in Sunday School, and yet here it is in black and white. This is why context is so important. Whenever you find someone in the New Testament quoting the Old Testament, look for a cross-reference in your Bible and check out what was going on in the passage that they are quoting from. When Jesus quotes Yahweh’s chilling words in Isaiah 6, the Jews He is talking to immediately understand what He is saying. But today we Christians just blow by this most shocking revelation and say, “Jesus spoke in parables to help make His messages really clear to His audience. What a smart Teacher.” What an absolute crock! Jesus Himself said that He spoke in parables to confuse people and prevent them from understanding Him. The parables were a negative, not a positive. And once you understand what Jesus’ intentions really were, the parables are downright disturbing.

Today we’re so busy quoting “God is love” that we forget that He’s a lot of other things, too. Hateful, wrathful, vengeful, violent, grudge-holding—these are all traits that God has in great abundance as well as love, and all of these traits come to the surface whenever God is speaking to the third group in our list: rebels who He has completely rejected

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

God wants us to experience pain: many, many forms of it. It has always been His intention for the human race to fall into sin and struggle along under the context of a curse. Those who say God hates pain forget who it was that was doing all the cursing in Eden: it wasn’t Satan who came up with the idea of women having pain in childbirth or men toiling in misery. God was the One who brought all forms of pain into this world and cursed it forevermore. Adam and Eve were powerless beings whose act of biting into the flesh of a fruit had no adverse effects on the way the world worked. It was God who chose to make a big deal out of their action, and it was God who chose to use their defiance as an excuse to unleash evil into the world—evil which He demonstrated complete control over by announcing just when and how it would be loosed upon us.

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

So does God hate certain people? Absolutely! To deny this is to reject a truth that God puts in front of our faces all throughout the Bible. When we try to avoid the subject of God’s anger, we remain mystified by the concept of Hell, and we reject the notion of eternal damnation by saying things like, “Hell is only temporary. God doesn’t really enjoy tormenting people. Eventually, everyone will end up in Heaven. Jesus is deeply grieved when souls end up in Hell.” Each of these statements is an absolute lie. God doesn’t hate to torment His enemies. HE LOVES IT. He relishes it and He flaunts it. He finds it so satisfying that He just can’t get enough of it, which is why the souls who end up in Hell will be tormented there for an eternity.

When we are badly taught about God’s anger, we end up thinking that God delights in torturing everyone—that He is getting high off of making our lives miserable on earth. But this is another lie. There is only one group that God delights in tormenting: the group He has eternally cut off. THERE ARE NO CHRISTIANS IN THIS GROUP. If Jesus is your Lord, then God does not delight in tormenting you. Yes, He will discipline you, and if need be, He will give you quite a severe beating. But His love towards you will never falter, and everything He does to you will be out of a desire to draw you closer to Him. This is the power of Christ’s atonement: once you are accepted by God, you are permanently shielded from ever becoming an object of His hate. But if you are not atoned by Christ and you reject the Holy Spirit’s many invitations to repent and get right with Him, then the day comes when the Trinity will decide that you are now a member of that third terrible group. At that point, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and Yahweh will all consider you to be Their enemies, and Their love for you will change into intensely hatred. You will be someone who They delight in tormenting and They will publicly flaunt your misery before other creatures They have made for all of eternity (see Why Hell?).

Anna Diehl #fundie 924jeremiah.wordpress.com

If we’re going to stay faithful to a God who thinks it’s a good idea to maim, torture, and kill us, we need to be darn sure that He is good. But then again, suppose He’s not good? What if God were evil by nature? Then we could all rebel against Him and—go where? It’s still His universe. He’s still in absolute control. If God isn’t good, we are in serious trouble. There are no other options. Peter had this figured out, so when a bunch of Jesus’ disciples got tired of Him and left, and Jesus asked if Peter would do the same, he replied:

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” (Jn. 6:68-69)

Once we learn who God is, we realize that He is the only Truth. He is the only Authority. We might not always like His Truth, and we might not like what He does with His Authority, but if we think we can escape His rule we are deluding ourselves. In this world, Christians aren’t persecuted because Satan got the upper hand. Satan gets his power from God, and God then micro-manages the way that Satan uses that power. This is what God teaches us in His Word: that His control is absolute over every aspect of everything that He has created. This is a truth that the Holy Spirit confirms to our souls over and over again as we read through headlines about Christians being persecuted and slaughtered around the world. So given all of this, what should our response be? Should we be sending up a million prayers for God to stop what He’s doing? Should we be telling God He is wrong in the way that He is using His power? Should we be groaning like those martyrs in Heaven and tell God to get off His duff and stop doing things we don’t like? No, we shouldn’t. This is not a reverent way to speak to the Almighty King. We should be honest with God about how much His choices disturb and upset us. We should be honest about the questions it raises in our minds about how good and trustworthy He is. And then we should ask the Holy Spirit to make our view of God one that is both aligned with His truths and honoring to Him. God is good, He is trustworthy, and He is running this world in a way that is deserving of praise. But He is the only One who can convince us of this these things. We’re not going to get there crying over martyrs and making ourselves sick reading graphic descriptions of torture and sadism. We’re not going to get there worrying about the growing power of religious extremists. We must look to God—the very One who is doing all these things—and ask Him to keep us in alignment with Him. Submission takes on a whole new meaning when we acknowledge God’s involvement with evil. Trust becomes far more challenging. But if we are serious about getting closer to God, we can’t back away from these sobering lessons.