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Originally Posted by Saaf_laandon_mo
So is the God of the OT different to the God that Christians follow now? When you say that Jesus was more of a liberal, he would still have been preaching God's message right? HAs God evolved over time. To say he has might be the same as suggesting he was not perfect at the beginning? Can that be possible with someone as great as God?
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God hasn't evolved over time, but it has been necessary for our understanding of him to grow to the point where we recognised our need of him and were able to accept his solution to the problem of sin, the solution being Jesus.
God is a God of covenant agreements between himself and his followers. An early example is that between himself and Abraham. Later came the Law of Moses, given by God to the nation that decended from Abraham via Isaac and Jacob. After that came the New Covenant, detailed in the New Testament, in which believers are born again by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, and as a result have God's law "written not on tablets of stone but on the 'tablets' of their hearts".
All the Old Testament dealings between God and people were intended to lead to Jesus and the covenant that he brought. Throughout the operations of those covenants people came to understand more of the character of God, but God himself was always consistent throughout. God couldn't give the Law of Moses to Abraham because that Law required the existence of a functioning nation to operate it. And he couldn't give Jesus to the young nation of Israel because the Law of Moses needed time to do its work - namely, to show them the impossibility of living up to God's righteous standards by their own efforts.
The Bible is a bit like a polaroid picture of God. The more time and daylight you give it, the better the image, but the final state of the Polaroid is still a poor substitute for the real thing. Mind you even in eternity, we won't ever get the full measure of him.
Jesus absolutely upheld the righteous requirement of the Law of Moses, a Law which had long ago established the principle of a sacrifice being made as the penalty for sin. Jesus made himself that sacrifice - a sacrifice so holy that it never needs to be repeated, unlike the sacrifices in the Law which had to be made regularly.
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In regard to my comment about more religious people judging athiests than the other way round - you only have to look at the messages outside churches on billboards, being preached in churches and mosques and other places of worship that this is the case. Apart from that thing we had with the athiest ads on buses when was the last time you saw a big billboard saying Reliogioous people are not going to Heaven? The scale of organised condemnation of non believers is far greater than the other way round.
By the way I'm not having a go at Christianity. I am saying this last point is common is true with all religions.
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Christianity is an evangelistic religion. If you want to go about promoting a religion that claims to be the exclusive truth, it's inevitable that your message will end up claiming that other religions and philosophies are
not truth. I accept there are good and bad ways of going about this, but it's not something that should be shied away from.