ThePainefulTruth
Romantic-Cynic
Over the years I’ve heard a number of religious personalities from different so called Christian religions say that God loves everyone, He loves people no matter what. The last time I heard that was very recently.
But from a Christian perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. Christians base their belief in the Bible, and the Bible contains a number of laws and principles that God himself requires people to follow. If it wasn’t important how people behave, He wouldn’t have bothered in the first place.
Nice post. But you're using logic. By their "logic", God loves people who burn in eternal hellfire.
One can talk about forgiveness, which is mentioned frequently in the Bible, but forgiveness applies when people repent and stop doing whatever they were doing wrong. If someone acts against God’s principles, apologizes and then goes back to doing the same thing, would it make any sense for God to overlook their behavior and just love them anyway?
According to what I’ve learned in the Bible, I don’t think so.
As you say, someone has to genuinely repent in order to earn forgiveness or salvation, and the first one who must forgive us is our honest selves. If we're not genuine, we're the first to know.
Christians all the time claim that we must love and forgive others, no repentance required. You don't even ask for it. And look at what Paul said about repentance, only faith in Jesus is necessary, that we don't even need to try to be good.
"But didn’t he earn his right to heaven by all the good things he did? No, for being saved is a gift; if a person could earn it by being good, then it wouldn’t be free—but it is! It is given to those who do not work for it. For God declares sinners to be good in his sight if they have faith in Christ to save them from God’s wrath." --- Romans 4:4 (Living)
You could, for all intents and purposes, call this spiritual welfare, and I think multi-generational welfare recipients actually do think this way, if you want to call it thinking. More like emoting. I think you actually summed it up very nicely:
"I understand that from the perspective of people who don’t like to obey anything except their own whims it must be cool to belong to that kind of religion. The ideology of “do whatever you feel like and God will love you anyway” makes things easier, doesn’t it?"
They believe whatever justifies wherever their emotions lead them. They don't believe in anything but that their ego is god.