Part 3: It’s time for you to Forgive God

Not that God needs to be forgiven, but since forgiveness is something we need to do in order to heal, then yes, for your sake, you need to forgive God.

Forgive God for not being the kind of God that you wanted.

· He didn’t reward you for being good.

· He didn’t answer your prayers. (Sorry, but silence is not an answer)

· He didn’t punish evil doers.

· He allowed children to die.

· He let evil people succeed.

· He didn’t give you a sign when you begged for one.

· He didn’t spare your loved one from getting sick, or suffering, or dying.

· He didn’t heal you.

· He lets natural and manmade disasters happen. All. The. Time.

I know, this makes God sound like a jerk. I mean, the Old Testament God was angry with us. Sometimes it seemed like He hated us. He killed people just for touching the Ark of the Covenant. He destroyed cities because everyone there was a perv. He flooded the earth and only saved one family. And forget about poor Job… He made life pretty miserable for him just to win an argument with Satan. (I know that wasn’t the reason… relax!)

But the thing is, before Jesus, we could only relate to God through His Law. Our behavior was paramount. So much so that the Jewish Priests had to perform blood sacrifices with unblemished animals. It was quite the process back then! And here we are, supposedly all enlightened and what not, but we’re still trying to relate to God through our behavior, still trying to deal with sin, still going through all these rituals and passages to try to make things right.

So long story short, Jesus came, fulfilled all the requirements of the Law, and everything was settled right there and then at the Cross. Done. Complete. All the Law, all the Prophesies. Including all the stuff in the book of Revelation – sorry for the digression, but quick note here – John’s Revelation took place on the Day of the Lord – at the crucifixion. John was the only apostle there and his vision of all the things took place during Christ’s ministry and ended on THAT DAY! Crazy, right?

Oh, I know there is a bunch of add on junk in that book, and before you freak out about me saying that things were added (and probably taken away) take a deep breath and calm yourself. If you are one of the people that believe that no one would ever be so dishonest as to alter the verses of the Bible to suit their own purposes, then I don’t think you can be helped. Your naivety could only be described as boundless. You have to know that Bible verses were changed. Scripts were added and taken away, not by God, but by men. To suit their purposes and believe me, knowing what I know of supposedly “godly men”, almost all of the monks, priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, etc. believed that they were doing the right thing. “This has to be an error,” they probably mused, “Let me just fix that right up!”

So, without trying to sum up everything wrong with the Christian doctrine and Christian culture, let me jump back to the part about forgiving God:

If you are honest with yourself, you have a beef with God. You were told that if you do X, then God will do Y, because that’s how it works. But you’ve seen firsthand that it doesn’t work that way. Good things happened and you were all “Praise God!” and then crappy things happened, and you probably said, “God is trying to teach me something!” or “I must have done something wrong, and God is punishing me.” And before you knew it, the seeds of animosity toward God were being watered in your heart. You probably agonized over whether you were “on the right path” or “following God’s will” and giving yourself a gazillion spiritual tumors trying to figure out where you went wrong and how to fix it and rinse and repeat. That’s why so many Christians screw up and backslide and recommit their lives to Christ, and fall again, and repeat the process and to outsiders looking in, it looks like the whole thing is a farce. And they’re kinda right.

I was hoping that this essay would be more of a gentle remonstration rather than a scathing rebuke. I just hate to see people suffer and bump into walls blindly. I also hate that I wasted a couple decades of my life trying to make Christianity work in my life. The argument can be made that despite its wanderings from the Gospel, that Christianity has done a lot of good in this world. Yeah, probably. But that was people doing good, not a religion. Because good was also done by people of different faiths and that includes atheism, which is just as much of a faith as Christianity.

Remember when I told you that there are more than 46,000 Christian denominations? Which one is right? The contradictions are boundless. Just like between Paul and Peter. Those guys disagreed on so many levels and the contradictions between Paul and the Peter/James/John crew is huge! (Oh ho, don’t worry, I won’t go into THAT!! Remember, the place to argue is www.gospelrevolution.com)

God may not be the God you thought He is. We’re all, “Our Father in Heaven…” and view Him as that stern parent. The Patriarch. The Rule-maker. The One we’re supposed to obey and try to please. On our own merits, we can’t please Him. What are our good deeds? Filthy rags, man. It’s impossible to have a healthy relationship with a God who is measuring us against perfection.

If you start looking at God as already being pleased with you, you’re at a much better starting point. If you are aware that there is no more division between you and God, that He is completely and totally on your side, then just imagine what you can do with the life you have!

“But” you may say again, argumentative bugger that you are, “Does that mean that we can do all sorts of wickedness and horrible things and basically be terrible, awful people and God will still be on our side?”

Yeah. You can. You’ll still be righteous and perfect. But do you really want to do all those things? Maybe a few of them, sometimes. I know I do. But if you know that God is in you and you are in God and you are One and inextricably fused together… you may be surprised to learn that you don’t want to do all sorts of the wicked and horrible things because you know the kind of harm that you do to yourself. Your spirit is saved, 100%. You are Heaven bound whether you believe it or not. But your soul… that takes some work. (Yes, there is a difference between your spirit and your soul!)

I guess I should clarify so please allow me this super quick digression – we are all comprised of a body, soul, and spirit. Body – that part is obvious. Soul – that is your personality, your thoughts, your feelings, your mind. Spirit – that is the part of you that gives you life. Your eternal being, shorn of all the things that hurt and hinder you – the ego, the desires, the weaknesses. Your spirit is now pure, eternally changed through Jesus Christ.

Back to the soul – specifically, saving your soul - that takes work. A change of mindset? Yes, bigtime. Meditating on God, learning about Him, learning about all the benefits and gifts and strengths and power that He gave you? Yes, that stuff too. If we strive for salvation for our souls, then we’re going to have work for it. In fact, we have to work for it through fear and trembling. But I know it’s worth it! I know that being a better person, with a greater capacity for love, for compassion, for wisdom, and for more knowledge of God is definitely a worthwhile pursuit.

You don’t have to forgive God, obviously. But you should take a huge step back and really give your whole relationship with Him a review. Be open to the possibility that you may be wrong. You really are allowed to change your mind. Show me someone who has never changed their minds and I’ll show you someone who has never grown or learned anything.

Heck, while I’m at it, you don’t have to forgive me either – especially since I’m not asking for it. I hate to bring it up, but for every person that is a decent, forgiving, understanding, and loving Christian, there are a 1000 self-righteous, judgemental, ignorant asshole Christians. Some may argue with me and say that I’m completely wrong and the number is probably more like 1 in 10,000. Maybe. I’m open to changing my mind.

I hope you are too.

PS: I almost forgot: So, what would have happened to that guy who died? That worst person in the world, pedophile, rapist, etc. No one really knows of course, but I imagine it might be something like this:

After being put to death for his crimes (in my imagination, pedophile rapists get the death penalty). In the moment of his death, he was instantly transformed into a being of light, suffused with God’s love, overwhelmed with sensations of peace, and joy, and maybe above all, gratitude. No longer the pedophile, the rapist, the most horrible man on Earth. He was revealed to be a true child of God, magnificent and humbling at the same time. Shorn of all his wickedness, his evil deeds and disgusting desires. Free of the abuses and pain that he endured and inflicted, free of hatred for others and for himself. He would finally be aware of God’s existence and more emphatically, God’s love and specifically, His love for him. In that moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he became his TRUE self. If there was anyone who truly loved him, it would be at that moment that they would see him and exclaim, “Ah, there he is!”

To those that would wish that he was punished, tortured, burned for eternity - they would be disappointed, but hopefully they would accept that God’s love and the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for ALL of us, exceeds any of our selfish and petty ides of what justice is.

C.S Lewis summed up the ending for this fictional man and for every one of us better than any other I can think of:

“… but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which ever chapter is better than the one before.”