Students Question God Part 1

Last week I asked a select group of students to write down questions they have for God or about God or about religion in general. I am going to take the next 10 entries or so to address their questions.

The one that came up more often than all the rest was "does God hate me?" But they were worded more like:

Does God hate me because I am gay?
Does God hate me because I doubt that Jesus is the only way?
Does God hate me and want me to go to hell for the bad decisions I have made?
Does God hate me because I smoke?
Does God hate me for being dumb?

Simply put to all of them, no, God does not hate you. God is love and God loves you simply because He created you. God does not hate anyone. There are no conditions for his love. God loves the worst sinner. God loves the most holy saint. God loves everyone in between. Anyone who states that God hates certain people does not understand the basis of Christianity in it's purest form.

However, let us not confuse love with approval of our choices. He loves us but would always want the best for us so there are things that He does not approve of us doing. Just like a parent loves a child but may not approve of him hitting another child.

Here are a couple of quotes about God as Love from C. S. Lewis that I really like:

"He [God] has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. .... Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; ... mere "kindness" which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love."

"You ask for a loving God; you have one ... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, not the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the CONSUMING FIRE HIMSELF, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes..."

"The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."


I want to close with 1 John 4

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. ² By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, ³ and every spirit that does not confess that^[a] Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.

⁴ You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. ⁵ They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. ⁶ We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

¹² No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. ¹³ By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. ¹⁵ Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. ¹⁶ And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides
¹⁷ Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. ¹⁹ We love Him^[b] because He first loved us.

²⁰ If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can^[c] he love God whom he has not seen? ²¹ And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.