Do you believe in God?

The thing is, if you believe there is a God and if you believe that He is Good, then you have a great problem. By admitting His existence and his goodness you must condemn yourself. If God's goodness is not totally and infinitely good, then he is really just another being, higher on the food chain than us. Like a space alien or something. In His goodness are the ideals of all that man aspires for and at the same time readily admits he is unable to achieve. If God is good then He is also desirable above any other thing, and desiring anything other than Him would be a travesty of great ignorance. If God is good, then we MUST fall short of deserving Him, so the thing that is most desirable is also something that is not attainable by us, simply because He is God. If He is Good, then He MUST be just, and if He is just then we MUST be required to be worthy of deserving His goodness in order to fullfill our desire for Him. If God is not totally just or not totally good, then he must cease to be God and that which has the justice or goodness he falls short of must take his place as God.

This is why Christ is so important. Since we admit that we are not God, and He is desireable above all things, then we also must admit that any requirement laid upon us to make us worthy of His Goodness would be impossible for us to achieve simply because we are finite and He is infinite, it would never add up. And in His Justice we must demand that He require this of us, or we must abandon that He exists as God at all. We must either deny that He is God and work to ignore, manipulate, or destroy him, or we must accept who He is and realize that we can never be worthy of Him. Only something that could pay an infinite price could redeem a finite being to infinite goodness. Jesus is God, His punishment was able to pay the price of our shortcomings to His infinite goodness. God says that our simple belief in this fact is credited to us as HIS righteousness. So now our greatest desire can be fullfilled, not by our own works of righteousness, but by the righteous work of the very object of our desire, God Himself! Of course He alone could pay this price, because if the price could be paid apart from God, then, you guessed it, He would cease to be God and must submit to the being that could pay the price.

If there is no God who sets a standard for how we should live we all are forced to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the most persuasive or powerful amongst us. The existance of a God who is good is the existance of an objective moral standard. Without an objective standard, morality can only be defined subjectively. What this ultimately means is that the most persuasive group of intellectuals end up setting the moral compass for the masses. Truth, without an objective standard, can only be defined according to our own ability to rationally interpret reality. Since there are groups of individuals who are more able to convince people that they understand the complicated issues of economics, science, ethics, and other subdivisions of truth, those who are intellectually challeged in these areas must look to these groups for guidance. In the absence of a God who reveals truth to the individual, individuals must turn to the elite amongt themselves to find out how to live.

The simple fact is that there is a God, and He is Good. He created us and knows each one of us personally. He is so good that we cannot in any way earn him, however in His goodness he was able to be both just and the justifier of those of us who long to have our desire for Him fullfilled. Because of His work on the cross He is able to forever be with us and councils us, each and individually, daily on how to live so that we could live in this world the way in which He created it to be lived in. We can truly be dependent on no other human, as the source of all wisdom personally teaches us.

There can be no in-between. A god who is lacking in anyway is nothing more than another being in the universe, and he can be manipulated and possibly even destroyed. A god who did not create the world has no authority over it other than by force. And there cannot be a god who is evil, because evil can only be defined in light of good.

We can't say that there is no God and then demand that people live moral lives, nor can we say that there is a God and not come to terms with the desparity between His goodness and our lack of it.