Why did God wait so long to have a special people?

by truthseeker 18 Replies latest jw friends

  • truthseeker
    truthseeker

    I was thinking the other day, why did it take so long for God to have a special people, namely the nation of Israel.

    And when he did choose his people, it's as if God ignored every other culture and nation on Earth only to focus on Abraham, Isaac and there descendants.

    There was no way of learning about the one true God in those days unless you lived near the borders of the Israelite nation.

    If you read the minor prophet books of the Bible, it seems as if God is addressing the whole world, when in reality, people living in other countries at the time would have no idea of these "universal proclamations"

    Why did God not give guidance to these other societies?

  • Bobcat
    Bobcat

    Looking at it from another standpoint . . .

    Imagine seeing your neighbor start to cut his grass. He starts around the front porch area. And as you watch him cut that area, you wonder why he is ignoring the back yard or the sides of the house.

  • confusedandalone
    confusedandalone

    These were the exact questions I asked myself on this very board when I joined... exactly the same questions,

    Isn't weird that an impartial god totally thumbs his nose at an entire planet full of people and focuses on just this one small group of perople who repeatedly ignored him and followed other nations because he made a promise to their forefathers. Most sane humans wouldnt do that.

    As for god giving other people guidance - it would appear that he didnt gvie the israelites very much since they were not the most technically advanced culture of their time. Obvious they were not the most morally advanced either - just ask all those young canaanite preteens that they were allowedd to have sex with. You could also ask those young ladies brothers but he told his people to kill them all.

    The bible makes no sense when you try to apply any form of "sense" to it.

  • Comatose
    Comatose

    The same reason he will kill hundreds of millions of innocent children and babies at Armageddon. Everyone on the planet should go searching for god, see his special people and convert. If you just live your life then you are evil and selfish.

  • Comatose
    Comatose

    Bobcat - I like your line of reasoning. It's comforting in a way. I have deeper issues now though, so it's hard for me to see things in the way you do. But, I'm trying to look at this from the perspective of a person who believes in god and has questions.

    But, to take the illustration further, what if you saw your neighbor pouring grass and weed killer on the sides and back and then mowing the front porch area. Would it not be logical to assume he did not want to deal with the sides and back?

    I can see the line of reasoning that he would get to the other people of the earth in time, but it's the way he had them all slaughtered ruthlessly by the current chosen ones.

  • braincleaned
    braincleaned

    Good post.

    The crime it seems, is to be born in the wrong culture, with its own references of life, like worship.

    It's the same today; according to most christian religions, a serial child rapist/killer can "find Christ" an hour before his execution and be "saved", while a good Hindu husband and father, helping his community all his life, will go to hell because he didn't embrace Christ while having "heard" about him (for the JWs, he will die at Armageddon for also being born in the wrong culture, as well as his wife and children along with him).

    But that's Jehovah all the way. He punished Adam & Eve (and all of humanity) for eating from the tree of 'knowledge of good and bad' — while logically they could not have known what "bad" was before that!

    Gods logic is weird. Before dying they "will know he is Jehovah!"
    Yet dead, nobody can learn a lesson from that...

  • adamah
    adamah

    When you get right down to it, the OT is a pretty narcissistic story of ONE assemblage of people, telling the Jews that Jehovah created the entire World to place in dominion, and gave them the Promised Land for their exclusive use (of course, that served as pretty-good excuse to conduct a genocidal campaign against the 'Canaanites' who had inhabited their ancestral homeland as the indigenous people).

    Of course, the point of Christianity was to internationalize a variation on the theme of Judaism, widening it from the ugly racially-motivated "insider (Jews as the 'Chosen People') vs outsider (all the rest of the World, AKA Gentiles)" thinking, where you HAD to be born-in Jew to have any input before Christianity.

    Not that Christianity doesn't maintain the "us vs them" discriminatory thinking: it's only broadened it to 'believers who accept Jesus in their hearts as their personal Savior' vs 'heathens', where every member of the World population is potentially a convert. Jesus gave Christians the mandate to spread the World of their Lord, Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Earth, placing others under subjugation as they go.

    In a nutshell, THAT'S the entire story of the past 1,000 yrs under "Christian" Nations (eg Spain, England, etc), with the conquest of N. & S. America, India, Asia, etc driven by conquest but operating under the sign of the cross while still following the examples found in the OT with a policy now labelled, "manifest destiny".

  • confusedandalone
    confusedandalone

    The best part is the way God decides to treat those he didn't chose

    Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children. (Isaiah 13:15-18 NLT)

    The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

    My favorite however is when the eloquent PSALMS express the desires of the Bible God

    Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us. He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. ( Psalms 137:8-9 )

    So ultimately you better get down with G-O-D cuz he don't play

  • Comatose
    Comatose

    And again what's the crime here for those nations?

    Well JW like say they were evil demonized people who worshipped disgusting false gods. They had sex orgies. blah blah blah

    The simple fact is they did not know the Hebrew god. They were born and raised and lived in their culture. They didn't know Yahweh and then leave him. They were wiped off the land (according to the bible) and had their preteen and virgin teen daughters taken as spoils of war after their baby boys were slaughtered with no mercy, because they did not know better (according to the only true god who never told them different).

    What horrible people! How shameful to do things they didn't know were wrong.

  • confusedandalone
    confusedandalone

    @Comatose " What horrible people! How shameful to do things they didn't know were wrong."

    Troubling isn't it.

    I so wanted to believe that the BIBLE was from GOD and I so wanted to believe that a GOD cares about everyone - but things just dont add up for me anymore. I forced my self to accept the hodge podge of reasons that god is in the right for having babies thrown on rocks and busted open or for having parents hit their disrespectful children in the head with rocks for being bad but It just doesn't work anymore.

    I was just being dishoest with myself because I didn't want to believe that I was myseteriously in love with a mass-murdering maniac bible god. Afterall he hates animals to... remember they had to kill all the animals because those cows are really sstrong... they may have learned about false worship from their owners and secretly plot to entice the sex mad israeliete males to abandon having sex with te pre-pubescent girls and start having sex with them instead.

    Its these little things that make you realize something aint right

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