Jesus

Did Jesus Claim to be God

Jesus

Someone might respond to the above critique of Divine Command Theory by maintaining that since God, assuming there is a God, is the cause of everything, there could be (if the Judeo-Christian cosmological story is true) no goodness or anything else if there were no God. Given the truth of that tale, without God there would be nothing and thus there would be no valuables. But this confuses causes with reasons: confuses questions about bringing something into existence causally and sustaining and justifying its existence. If God exists and if he is what the scriptures say he is, everything causally depends on him. However, even if there were no God who made the world, it still would be vile to torture little children. Even if God had not created people and thus there were no people to be kind, it would still be timelessly true that kindness is a good thing. The goodness of kindness does not become good or cease to be good by God's fiat or anyone else's, or even because of the fact that there happen to be kind people. In terms of its fundamental rationale, morality is utterly independent of belief in God. Atheists can respond to the religious claim that if God is dead nothing matters by asserting that to make sense of our lives as moral beings there is no need to make what may be an intellectually stultifying blind leap of religious faith. Such a moral understanding, as well as a capacity for moral response and action, is available to us even if we are utterly without religious faith. There is no reason the atheist should be morally at sea.

The fact of Jesus being determined to be Gods son was predetermined from the beginning of time. This would not come to pass though until Jesus would actually be born in Bethlehem. The idea of Jesus had existed before that as written in the Old Testament, but his creation would only come after his birth. I liked the comment I found on this subject. God was treating Jesus like a homebuilder would treat a set of blueprints. There is a plan for the house, there is meaning for the house, and the house can be seen in your mind before it is ever created because you have the plan set in motion. But until you built the house it never exists to fill its purpose. (Who is Jesus: Who is Jesus Christ?) I believe God was similar in this aspect with Jesus, God had already determined a plan for Jesus birth, and life and sacrifice and that Jesus would be the blueprint for salvation (De Groot, 1912).

God sent Jesus to earth to save mankind. This is a very recognizable passage from the Bible, but is has a very important message in the fact it holds an answer to the Kingdom of heaven. That answer is Jesus. By believing in Jesus and his life a person can be granted access to ...