Category Archives: Contradictions

Does God listen to humans?

Yes, he does it all the time

The Bible is full of stories where God listens to humans and does what they ask.

More than once, when God was tempted to destroy all of Israel except Moses, Moses pointed out some reasons he shouldn’t do that. And God decided to let his people live. On the journey to the promised land, the Israelites said they wished they had meat, and God heard them and gave them meat.

When Moses, Aaron, and Samuel called on God’s name, he answered them. When Samuel cried out to God because the Philistines were attacking Israel, God answered him and scared the Philistines away.

When David asked God to stop killing innocent people instead of punishing the person who had displeased him, God answered his prayer and did as he asked. (But only after David made him a sacrifice.) God didn’t ignore David; he listened to his cries for help.

When Solomon expressed his desire for the temple he built to be God’s home forever, God heard him and agreed to what he said. And just as Solomon asked, he promised to listen whenever people prayed toward that temple.

When God made Jeroboam’s hand shrivel up and Jeroboam asked a prophet to ask God to fix it, God did so. When Asa asked God to help him defeat the vast Cushite army, God struck them down. When Manasseh the evil king of Judah was captured by the Assyrians, he repented and prayed, and God let him go home. Hezekiah had Isaiah pray for God to listen to the Assyrians mocking him, and God responded by sending an angel to kill a bunch of Assyrians and scare the rest away.

When the Arameans tried to kill Jehoshaphat of Judah because they mistook him for the evil king of Israel, he cried out and God rescued him. Later, Jehoshaphat told God that a hopelessly vast army of multiple nations was attacking Judah. He pointed out that it was God’s fault that those nations were there, and that God was expected to save his people from disaster when they cried out to him at his temple. So he did.

Elisha prayed for God to bring a boy back to life, and to manipulate what certain people could or couldn’t see, and God did everything he asked. When Jeremiah spoke to God on behalf of other people, he turned his wrath away from them. Jonah was eaten alive by a fish, but then he called to God for help, and God listened and answered his cry.

God listens and complies even when you might think he wouldn’t

In the days of the judges, whenever Israel was taken over by their enemies, God would hear the people lamenting their oppression and would send someone to save them. Even after he claimed he was never going to save them again, he couldn’t help sending someone to rescue them when they asked him to.

The Israelites asked for a human king, and even though God was displeased, he listened to them and gave them a king. And when Samuel called on God to send a storm out of season as a sign of his disapproval, God did just what Samuel said. Then when the king needed to know why God had stopped helping him, he asked God to communicate through various instruments of divination to indicate who had done wrong, and God complied.

Abraham repeatedly asked God to spare the city of Sodom if he could find enough righteous people there, and God wasn’t bothered; he agreed every time. And when Amos objected to the things God was planning to do to his own people, God canceled his plans.

When God heard how upset Hezekiah was that God had decided he would never recover from his illness, God changed his plan and let Hezekiah recover. When Ezekiel pointed out how abhorrent God’s orders were, God changed his command to make it a little less horrible. When Jesus told a Canaanite woman that helping her would be like throwing the children’s bread to the dogs, she pointed out that even if you accept that extremely questionable analogy, it doesn’t actually show that she shouldn’t get anything, and so Jesus agreed to help her.

When Gideon was skeptical and asked for miraculous proof that God was really speaking to him, God supplied the exact signs Gideon requested, twice. When Elijah wanted to show people that his God was a real God that would perform miracles on command in order to prove his existence, God cooperated and sent fire from heaven.

When Elijah wanted to murder a hundred men just because he could, God cooperated and sent more fire down from heaven. When some soldiers from Israel cried out to God to help them defeat their enemies, God helped them defeat their enemies. And then when some soldiers from Judah cried out to God to help them defeat Israel, God helped them do that, too. When Naaman asked to be allowed to bow down to an idol, God told him to go ahead.

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How many men were possessed by the Legion of demons?

Three of the gospels tell this story: Jesus crosses a lake and meets a violent man who is being controlled by a group of demons, who call themselves Legion. The demons assume Jesus is there to banish them and torture them. But they convince him to just send them into a herd of pigs instead. The man regains his sanity, and the pigs kill themselves. The locals make Jesus go away so he’ll stop pointlessly destroying their livestock. And everybody forgets about the demons, who are now homeless and on the loose.

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Will there be death and curses in the new heaven and earth?

The Bible says after the world ends, God will create a new heaven and a new earth. Things will be different then: There will be no more death, pain, sadness, etc. And there will no longer be any curse, such as the painful curses God inflicted on humanity when Adam and Eve sinned.

God will dwell among people, so they can see his face. But wait… No one can see God’s face and live! So I guess everyone who serves at God’s throne in the new Jerusalem is going to die.

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Why did God leave some nations among Israel?

According to the Bible, when God brought the people of Israel into what would become the land of Israel, there were other nations already living there, so God had to get them out of the way. He thought those nations were terribly wicked, so he drove them out and destroyed them. Except he didn’t get rid of them completely. He let some nations survive and continue to live in the land among the Israelites. Why did he decide to do that? The Bible gives four reasons, but they can’t all be true…

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Should we follow God’s example?

The Bible says we should follow God’s example. That makes sense, because God is perfect, and everything he does is right. God is love, and we should walk in the way of love. We should be holy as God is holy, and perfect as he is perfect. We should speak the way God would speak. We should think like Jesus and follow his ways.

Paul taught his followers to transform themselves and become like God, because God wants his people to become like him. Paul followed Jesus’s example, and we should follow Paul’s example, so that we end up following Jesus’s example too.

How can we follow God’s example, though? I mean, if we can’t see God, how can we know what kinds of things he does, so that we can do the same? We can find out what God does by reading stories about God in the Bible. That includes stories about Jesus, since according to the Bible, Jesus is God.

So, here are some things we should do in order to follow God’s example, according to the stories about God in the Bible:

…Wait a minute. Those are all things the Bible says we shouldn’t do!

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Should people give everything to the poor?

Yes.

Righteous people give without sparing. God rewards those who give to the poor by making sure the givers lack nothing. If you invite guests over for a meal, never invite your friends and relatives; only invite poor and disabled people.4 One of the requirements to gain eternal life is to sell everything you have and give the money to the poor. If you do that, you will be perfect, and God will reward you in heaven. Even if you’re poor yourself, you must work your way out of poverty, just so you’ll have something to give to the poor.

But if you refuse to listen to the pleas of the poor, your own pleas will be ignored and you will be plagued with curses. If you ever keep anything to yourself when poor people want it, the love of God is not in you, and you deserve to lose an arm.

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Is Jesus’s kingdom of this world?

After Pilate asked Jesus if he was the king of the Jews, Jesus stated that his kingdom was not of this world at all; it was “from another place”.

But Jesus contradicts this in one of his parables, in which a man tells his harvesters to pull the weeds out of his field before harvesting the wheat. This represents Jesus sending angels to weed all the evil people out of his kingdom at “the end of the age”.

If pulling the weeds out of the field represents taking the evil people out of Jesus’s kingdom, that kingdom must be represented by the field (or part of it). And what did Jesus say the field represents? The world.5 So Jesus’s kingdom must be in this world.

Continue reading Is Jesus’s kingdom of this world?
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