God's Standard of Purity

[David T]

So it's a cold day and you go to a restaurant ready to get a bowl of hot, steamy soup. Your order comes, you grab your spoon and just as your are ready to take that first spoonful you see a dead mouse in the bowl!
How would you react?
Would you eat the soup anyway? Shouldn't you be accepting and allow for imperfections? Isn't is too picky or intolerant to have strict standards of cleanliness and purity? Anyone can make mistakes, after all the cook is just human, right?

There is a lot in the Bible which reveal that God as Creator has standards of purity which don't allow for corruption or anything less than clean, pure perfection. Is God being too demanding? So often, it seems like God is accused of having requirements which are too high or that He should be a little lax or accept what He would classify as disgusting, gross substandard quality... yet, people don't so easily drop their standards.

What do you think?

God's standard of purity is to never listen to people prattle on about gods stanDard of purity. Clearly they know nothing of God's purity or they would never prattle from book about God's purity.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

How can anyone who murders 3,000,000 + in his own book claim to have High Standards???

Good grief ...

 

[Altfish]

Good grief ...

Have you read the follow up posts?
Good grief does not really do it justice.

 

[Windwalker]

The purity of God is not to judge another's supposed impurity. Anything short of that is sin. It is one's own ego speaking as if it were God, the height of arrogance, and stupidity.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Have you read the follow up posts?
Good grief does not really do it justice.

Your brand of juvenile bible-bashing neither presents nor elicits much that is new to RF. It has all the substance and all the nuance of some ill-tempered kid stamping his foot and yelling: "Your god is a meanie and I really, really hate him!" OK -- nice share.

 

[Altfish]

Your brand of juvenile bible-bashing neither presents nor elicits much that is new to RF. It has all the substance and all the nuance of some ill-tempered kid stamping his foot and yelling: "Your god is a meanie and I really, really hate him!" OK -- nice share.

Oh, you are upset. Sorry about that.

It's awkward when facts get in the way of faith

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Good grief ...

If we say "Hitler killed millions of people," do we really need to explain it further why his standards probably aren't that great for following?

 

[InChrist]

How can anyone who murders 3,000,000 + in his own book claim to have High Standards???

According to the scriptures, God did not and does not murder. If you want to start a thread about the character or morality of God, go ahead. This point of this one is whether or not you have standards when it comes to something as simple as eating contaminated soup and if so why find fault with God's standards of eternal value?

 

[InChrist]

I like how you told this in a story format.

Isn't it more like....

'God' made just one flavour of soup and serves it to everyone? Some people are fine with this but some want a little more salt, some a little pepper, some want a different flavour all together.

but my flavour is the only one, 'God' says!

Okay...
maybe I got carried away with the soup analogy. haha

Thanks for your thoughts!
But maybe you did get carried away with the soup analogy, since the point is really meant to be about one's right or desire to have standards, rather than the choices or flavors offered.

.

 

[InChrist]

God put the mouse in the bowl as a payback for something gross the person did. The person could harden their heart and eat the mouse. Pick the mouse out and throw it away, ignoring the message, or hear the message and try not to do grossness before God so God does not put grossness on their plate, or in their bowl.

My point of the thread really isn't about what God did, but rather about individuals having standards and the right to have or not those standards, including the right of God as Creator to have standards.

 

[Altfish]

According to the scriptures, God did not and does not murder. If you want to start a thread about the character or morality of God, go ahead. This point of this one is whether or not you have standards when it comes to something as simple as eating contaminated soup and if so why find fault with God's standards of eternal value?

Because in the 2nd post of this thread someone said, "Yes, God has high standards." I tried to show that God has no such high standards

 

[InChrist]

In this scenario, is the kitchen outside my control, or did I arrange things so that the mouse would be there before I freaked out at it?

Edit: or did I sit there and watch as they put the mouse in my food and even had other kitchen staff asking me for guidance - "Mr. Customer, there's a mouse in this soup and I don't know what to do. The manager is telling the waiter to serve it anyway. What should I do?" - but all the while I did nothing?

The scenario is simply about your response to the mouse in your soup and your right or not to have certain standards or expectations.

 

[InChrist]

God should practice what he preaches, assume responsibility for his own short comings and the failures of his creation, and hold himself to his own standards. He tells us not to murder, yet he committed genocide more than once in the Bible.

Thanks for your thoughts.

According to the scriptures, God did not. does not, and cannot commit murder or genocide. God certainly does practice what He preaches and holds Himself to His own standards because as a holy God He must and cannot go against His own standards or character of love, justice, truth, mercy, etc. This thread is not a judgement of God's moral character, if you want to debate the morality of God you can start a thread on that subject.

This one is simply concerning whether people have the right to standards with regard to something as contaminated soup and if so, does God as Creator have the right to His eternal standards?

 

[InChrist]

Do we require that the cook kill another animal, or another human being . . . then splash the blood around an altar?

Because that is exactly how god's standard of purity works. . . And it's disgusting.

That's not how it works according to the scriptures, but that is not the subject of this thread.
If you think God's standards are disgusting then you may start a thread about it.
This one is about whether people like yourself have the right to standards and if so does the Creator have the right to standards?

 

[InChrist]

I would leave the restaurant. Sort of like the reasons why I would leave the church when they served up dishes of fear instead of Love.


A dead mouse is not the same thing as "imperfections" whatever those are. It's a health violation, not an "imperfection". Does your God send people to hell for not putting enough salt in his soup to his personal tastes when it poses no health risks?

This is what your analogy should be calling out, not some over the top comparison. It should say, God wants three leeks instead of two, and because you only put 2.5 leeks in there, you'll be strung up at dawn and your body burned for the whole village to see so they will fear him and give him his demands without deviation! Nice customer!


Darned right it's too picky when those standards are things that say God considers it a sin if women cut their hair, wear slacks instead of dresses, has a drink of alcohol, doesn't attend church each Sunday, has a belief or a thought or an idea that doesn't agree with their pastor's, and on and on the list of such legalist tripe spews on. Who exactly is it making up these standards anyway, and what you do find in the OT, or even in the NT, are not injunctions for the culture and time in which they were written, and not "eternal laws" that apply to today?

My experience with these "standards" is that they are pretty much all projections of the sensitivities of the yahoo preachers who cherry-picked them from the Bible to suit their particular cultural sensitivities, for right or for wrong. It's like saying only cherry pies are true pies, and then going on the attack for those who enjoy pecan pies instead, justifying their evil claiming God only accepts that cherry pies are "perfection" (whatever that word means).


Actually, in your analogy, that wouldn't be a mistake. It would be an accident. Unless he deliberately put it in there, in which case it would be considered an attack on the customer to cause harm in which case that was a conscious decision which he would in fact bear responsibility for. Does your God send people to hell for accidents? That's not very loving or fair, is it?


There's a lot in the Bible which reveals the cultural mentality of the men who wrote it, standards which Christians today themselves do not follow. But rather than saying they don't appear in the Bible, they lie to others and themselves through either ignoring them, or saying Jesus got rid of those, but not the ones their group likes to harp on and on about. It's all just insincerity on parade.


It's religious people who are too demanding. God really doesn't give a hoot if you as a woman cuts their hair after reading Paul's comments that it is considered a sin. I'm pretty sure that if God has eyeballs, He'd probably just be rolling them at eyes our silly, primitive ideas of Him, assuming we think we know something about this because we read it in the Bible and interpreted it with our tiny little brains a particular way that somehow makes sense to us in our highly limited minds. I like where the Bible says God is Love. Is it love that leads to us getting our undies in a twist over such trivial things, or is that our tiny little egos projecting itself on the universe as God?


All of these are a projection of our egos on God. The more anal someone is, the more they can tell themselves they are religious, when in fact they aren't at all in their hearts where it really matters. This is what Jesus taught at length. Straining at gnats, while swallowing camels.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I am glad to hear that you would leave the restaurant and that you have high enough standards concerning the food you eat that you would reject a filthy bowl of soup contaminated with a dead mouse! I agree with much of your post. I think you may be confused, though. When I refer to God's standards I'm not talking about clothes, hair styles or such superficial things which the church has so often ridiculously focused on in judgemental ways exactly as you have said.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

According to the scriptures, God did not. does not, and cannot commit murder or genocide.

He flooded the entire world to kill off everything except for a few people and a small handful of other animals. If that isn't genocide, I don't know what is.

 

[InChrist]

I think that we can infer God's standards from what he equipped his creation to do. If we're an expression of God's will, then we can infer that God wanted us to be "sinful" in the exact amount that we are. If he had wanted us to be different from what we are, he could have made us different, right?

Thanks for your thoughts.
No, I don't think He could have made us different without violating the freedom which I believe was priority in His design of us. This freedom also allows for a downside when used in wrong ways, yet God provides a way to be free of sin. Anyway, this thread is not about whether God a faulty Creator, but rather about His right as Creator to have standards.

 

[ronandcarol]

God's standards of Purity and Holiness are so far beyond our thinking.......
when we get to Heaven we will understand and also be Holy and pure. If you are in Christ, the Holy Spirit is working on us daily until we leave this earth. We will go into the grave with a sin scared bodies and be raised with Christ's robe of Righteousness.
ronandcarol

 

[InChrist]

He flooded the entire world to kill off everything except for a few people and a small handful of other animals. If that isn't genocide, I don't know what is.

The scriptures define it as judgement. And, the account reveals that the people were living in extreme wickedness, yet they had over a hundred years of warning, time to change. God never just wantonly kills and if He plans to bring judgement people always have warning and time to be saved.

 

[InChrist]

Yes. God's requirements are both too demanding and frankly immoral. In fact God should not have any requirements whatsoever.

This thread is not about whether God's requirements are demanding or immoral. If you want to make those judgements about God or discuss those issues you can start a thread on the subject.
This is about whether God as the Creator has the right to have standards and it seems you think He shouldn't. What about you? Do you have any standards? Would you eat soup contaminated with a dead mouse? If not, then why is it okay for you to have standards, but you don't believe the Creator should have any? Isn't that a double standard?