Knowledge Of God, Compassion And Salvation

It is the nature of God to be unpredictable, nor does He exist according to ordinary logic. There is a good reason for this. Whenever people think that they have something figured out they try to replicate or control it; which means that, if people ever understand God, they will try to be God themselves and will most likely do a bad job of it – as well as of course trying to replace or compete with God. I do not anticipate that God would want such an outcome, and it is likely that He will deny people the ability to have that kind of knowledge.

On some forms of knowledge there is a prohibition. That is because it can be used for wrong – sometimes serious wrong. Hitler had knowledge of the occult, and he used it for awful things. I used to believe that Biblical prohibitions on such things were a case of a priestry not wanting competition; but now I am seeing more clearly the rationality of these prohibitions.

Compassion and righteousness are both demanded, and sometimes people will practice one to the exclusion of the other. Compassion by itself fails to see where the other person goes wrong; and sometimes the right thing to do to a person is to rebuke them when they are doing the wrong thing. Whereas righteousness by itself becomes judgmental and even hateful, and it creates fanatics who think that they are being righteous in doing harm to other people. In both cases harm is done. The correct solution is to practice both. That way each checks the other's capacity for wrongdoing, with compassion checking righteousness's capacity for hatred and uniformed judgmentalism and righteousness checking compassion's capacity for enabling wrongdoing.

In any number of situations one person takes one role and the other person takes the other role. Needless to say, in such situations the first person is loved and the second person is hated. However the first person is not always doing the right thing. In some cases it is important to confront people; and the person who takes the role of compassion without righteousness fails to do that and creates monsters.

There is a saying that God helps those who help themselves. In fact there is very much a valid mechanism by which Jesus becomes the savior. Jesus leads people away from sin and toward righteousness and wisdom. Possessing such things, people set their lives and themselves straight. Jesus helps by teaching people whatever is missing in their character and what righteousness actually means. Armed with such things, people do in fact help themselves, and they do in fact end up in many cases living saved lives.