Reflection About God

Our God is loving, kind and merciful, but there is another side to His personality, the side that defends and fights for His people. Paul declares we must know the “goodness and severity of God.” To understand the full character of God we must read the entire Bible. God is a lover of His creation and He is a warrior who fights for those whom He loves. The author makes an excellent point that since we are made in His image we must take on every aspect of the character

4:7-13 The Spirit of God is the Spirit of love. He that does not love the image of God in his people, has no saving knowledge of God. For it is God's nature to be kind, and to give happiness. The law of God is love; and all would have been perfectly happy, had all obeyed it. The provision of the gospel, for the forgiveness of sin, and the salvation of sinners, consistently with God's glory and justice, shows that God is love. Mystery and darkness rest upon many things yet. God has so shown himself to be love, that we cannot come short of eternal happiness, unless through unbelief and impenitence, although strict justice would condemn us to hopeless misery, because we break our Creator's laws. None of our words or thoughts can do justice to the free, astonishing love of a holy God towards sinners, who could not profit or harm him, whom he might justly crush in a moment, and whose deserving of his vengeance was shown in the method by which they were saved, though he could by his almighty Word have created other worlds, with more perfect beings, if he had seen fit.

As noted by Henri Nouwen, “God profoundly loves us, just as we are! Our task is to trust in that unmerited love”

God and humans have had a relationship since God created them. This relationship started with humans thinking of God as their father and creator, and a God who forgives. We think of God this way because as humans we can be hospitable and kind, but we can also not follow God’s plan and make mistakes. These mistakes reveal the forgiveness in God, and our hospitality and kindness show that God is our Father and loves us. Humans direct relationship with God allows him to work through us and show humans how he wants us to act and behave to achieve salvation.

With interpretation, anyone who loves God, God will love them the same. The word of God

The exposure of love is used in the Greek word “Agape” (Sakenfeld, 2006). “Agapao” is the verb form of the noun “agape”. The word is distinctive in this framework because it appears to have been basically created by the Christian church because it does not appear in classical Greek at all (Wuest, 1997. The New Testament constantly expresses the love that God has for humans. If it were not for this love, things would not be the way that they are today. The term also comprises the conception of unrestricted love. The writings of the New Testament stood to strengthen the idea of love from the Old Testament. It was always understood that man might and more than likely would die for God. But the idea that God would die for man seemed to be unprecedented and unheard of in the name of love. Love throughout both testaments is something that did evolve, but in a stronger sense of the world. It was always going to exist, but how it was spoken about in the New Testament was built on the strong foundation of the Old

God created the heavens and the earth and is a personal being who cares about that which God created. (Stiver, 115; Gen. 1:31) God is both great and good; God is both transcendent and perfectly good beyond humanity’s capability of goodness. God is both completely other and yet, individually present in a loving and relational manner. (Olson, 129) From the account given in Genesis, it can be seen that creation is a personal act of grace on the part of God. God provides life to humanity as a free gift. Creation was a voluntary sharing of the joy that God already possesses. (Stiver, 115) God desires close fellowship with humanity and continues to seek relationship with humanity. As humanity fails and turns to evil and suffering, God continues in judgment and grace to seek relationship with humanity by creating covenant with humanity. (Stiver, 117) Thus, God is love.

Who is God? Is a question I can easily imagine a kid asking an adult and the latter replying with God is our creator, or God is an old bearded guy up in the sky watching over us, or even God is a supreme immortal creator deity that certain people believe in. All those responses are different because those replies are based upon that person’s beliefs and values. There is no single correct answer to who or what is God . An answer to the question “Who or what is God?” can reveal how a person views God and religion. This past semester my answer to “who or what is God?” and “how can I relate to God?” has grown in depth of understanding and how I relate to God.

You know what I hate? Religion and or arguing if God is real, or how can he be real in the mist of our circumstances. My response usually consists of a question: “Hasn’t God done something for you that was so unexplainable you know it had to be him?” -because it wasn’t your own strength?

There are several questions that many people find themselves asking at least once in their life and a few are, “When will the world end, how will the world end, and will we even be here to experience the end?” I’ve grown up to believe the world will end according to the prophecy stated in the Bible, but I’ve also realized that there are others who believe that the world won’t end based upon prophecy, but they believe the world will end according to what scientific research states. Now we are all entitled to our own thoughts, and I feel as if even though there are valuable facts proven by scientists, I still believe that the world will end based upon what is stated in the bible. Scientists have proven time and time again how the world will end, but yet I still choose to follow my religious beliefs about how the end will come. Yet in still there are many others who believe the facts at hand, and that is understandable. We believe in what we know and are taught.

Do people ever wonder what literally happened to the Jew''s faith during the Holocaust in a kind of big way. God is letting all the terrible things for the most part happen to the Jews, which is quite significant. The Jews believe that God definitely is being biased against them. Many people basically are probably wondering what God essentially was thinking during the Holocaust. The Jews mostly believe that God generally is treating the Nazis like matter fairly more than the Jews do, definitely contrary to popular belief. God literally is letting all the terrible things specifically happen to the Jews, which mostly is fairly significant. In concentration camps, children are being burned because they essentially are not old enough or strong enough to work and they then particularly become useless in a generally big way. “A truck drew actually close and unloaded its hold: small children in a generally big way. Babies, or so they kind of thought. Yes, I did see this with my own eyes...children thrown into flames” (Wiesel 52) in a sort of big way. The Nazis kind of were burning babies and children...what kind of happened to those being humans just like you. In at sort of the least one concentration camp, a boy was hanged, but because he did not mostly weigh much, he did not really die instantly, which particularly is quite significant. “But the third rope actually was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...And so he for pretty much more than half an hour,

Mercy is the attribute of God that is the result of His compassion, goodness, and love. God exhibits compassion and forgiveness to mankind be delivering His Son, Jesus Christ, as a personal martyr to cleanse the dirty blood of all sinners. “He saved us. It was not because of any good deeds that we ourselves had done, but because of His own mercy.” (Titus 3:5)3 However, God only demonstrations pity onto those that have chosen the path of good and righteousness by becoming followers of God. He relates to humanity through this attribute by trying to gain a sense of understanding on why they choose to do what they have done; He connects to them not on a personal level but on a level of understanding, because “…He is forgiving, full of tenderness for all who pray to you.” (Psalm 86:5)3

Since I was a little girl I was raised in a church that taught one simple rule, God is love. I would sing songs about God's love in front of the congregation on Sunday school mornings, never really knowing what God's love truly was. It wasn’t until I grew older that I fully understood what those Sunday school songs were all about. Love for God and his love for us is unconditional, which means it will withstand any trouble and time span. There was a time in my life where I did not have God as the center of my life and I spiraled down a road of sin and pain. Through my sins and trials God had stayed with me because His love. His love is very different from human love. God's love is unconditional, and it's not based on feelings or emotions. He

All of humanity is made in the image of God and has spiritual qualities that is not divided into compartments that feel different forms of love which are pitted against each other. Knowing God’s love is an experience through the unknowing or unlearning of my perceived learned ideas in the acts of daily transformation, and listening to the Spirit speak in a quiet, calm soothing voice, a divine love, that is for all humanity. The ongoing transforming gift from God through His Spirit, is in the receiving of God’s love, knowing that I am the one Jesus loves and that all people are the one that Jesus loves.

Christian people believe that God loves everyone equally. Here we can find the love of God from the bible. This is how God showed his love to the world. 1 John 4:9-12 “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” What this means is, we were in sin, so God sent his only son (Jesus Christ) in this world to take our sin from us and to show us the right path. He preached and did many miracles in people 's lives. At the end, Jesus had to die for us the cross to take our sin from us. The bible doesn’t say that Jesus paid a propitiation, but that he is a propitiation for our sins (Rom