CaliforniaKid wrote:For God so loved the world that he sacrificed his only begotten son in a bloody spectacle in order to propitiate his own anger toward you and to be able to associate with you without tarnishing his pristine righteous image. Therefore, give thanks.
I believe you love your mother, Chris. I even wager that if you realized the bloody spectacle she endured to bring you into this world you would not be revolted but grateful still that she was willing to suffer a great price, descending into the valley of the shadow of death, that you might live. And afterward was she resentful? I doubt it. Did she punish you for the rest of your life for having caused her so much discomfort and pain and annoyance? No. Why is that? Love.
For the joy that a man child was born into the world that she can claim as her own.
Has she ever for a moment regretted it? I doubt it. She has been thrilled everyday since.
The fallacy in your reasoning is in your missing the entire point of why Christ suffered. Yes it accomplished various measures that seem superfluous to you. But are they superfluous? And there are other objects accomplished and made possible that you are absolutely unschooled of and fully unaware of.
Mosiah 15:7-10
7 Yea, even so he shall be led, crucified, and slain, the flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father.
8 And thus God breaketh the bands of death, having gained the victory over death; giving the Son power to make intercession for the children of men—
9 Having ascended into heaven, having the bowels of mercy; being filled with compassion towards the children of men; standing betwixt them and justice; having broken the bands of death, taken upon himself their iniquity and their transgressions, having redeemed them, and satisfied the demands of justice.
10 And now I say unto you, who shall declare his generation? Behold, I say unto you, that when his soul has been made an offering for sin he shall see his seed. And now what say ye? And who shall be his seed?I hope you hang with me through this to the end and not skip about. It may be just one word here or there that will wrap it up for you.
Eve brought death into the world. What was the result of it? She had her conceptions multiplied unto her. Before she partook of death she was barren, (long story not germane at the moment). Importantly the existence of death not only allowed for the multiplication of conceptions in the sex organs of the woman, it did at the same time provide the potential for the redemption and sanctification of her children, IF an infinite and eternal being in the first place was willing to come into this death world and lay down his life and take it again. For it he will be engendered with the capacity to conceive seed of himself that will both sanctify and redeem, resurrect and exalt.
You and several here could reason for why this is so. Why every reaction has an opposite and equal reaction. Why sin make redemption a possibility. A Redeemer was the plan from the beginning, for Christ was slain from before the foundation of the earth and was called the lamb of God. It is how God is glorified, As the Father witnessed to Christ that he had both glorified his name and would glorify it again.
Which means that when Christ, in truth, that truth which is always present with God, truth of things as they were, and as the are, and as they will be, if it was not true from the beginning that Christ would lay down his life and take it again, nothing further in creation would have been possible. Am I guessing large here or not?
Anyways the redemption of man from the fierce justice of Almighty God is not an absurd vicious and malevolent factor that eliminates God as a possibility. Man is that he might have joy. The witness of me and every other true saint who has partakend of the power of God's new creation, wrought upon us in the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ shouts mightily from every generation of unbounded joy and rejoicing. God wants to conceive his seed. He is not a sexual being and therefore can only conceive his children in this way.
The Father did before what the Son is about in our generation of time. God is not worried about his pristine cleanliness to punish all who would dare to defile. He has been there and suffered the same as Christ in all the horror of a world gone made in spiked envy against perfection and purity and wholesome unbounded love.
Billions and billions of potential seed have a shot at conception but few there be that find it. Should the world mourn every potential spermatozoa that dies off? We live presently with nearly seven billions living beings, each of whom has a shot at becoming the sons and daughters of God. Few there be that will find it. Should eternity mourn or rejoice that a child of God is born of it? That thought might not be sufficient to temper your political outrage of saying it should not be so. Things can only work as what does in fact work. Unworkable realities abound.
As far as the brutality of Christ's passion one purpose it served in its over-the-top drama is in how it assists our faith in him, that it might be perfect. If God himself was willing to suffer then how can we doubt? Of course many do doubt and dismiss the entire affair as superfluous. But for those few who square themselves to the prospect of becoming the children of God, who then are required to submit all their heart, might, mind and strength to the proposition, they follow a love and faith in Christ that Christ gave all. After a manner he PRE-MOTHERED us to make it possible to have faith unto and acceptable sacrifice that the bond and covenant between God and man may be a fixed and true reality. Only such a bond could endure all eternity.
Now, Chris, if your mom did not need to commit to your existence as burdened and pained as she was, and rather you came to life more as a "Well, fiddle-dee-dee, oh my, my my, there you are my widdle woogie boo." such that she could hardly remember you at all in a day or two, what nurture and strength and admonition and learning would you have gotten? NONE. God gave all and he will not forsake us through all eternity.
I feel like I have said enough for anyone to ponder it out and see unto fruition the love of God. We tend to think of God only in a patriarchal sense. This is not true. The entire episode of Jesus Christ draws more perfectly from the female nature that God owns. Yes. He has a fullness of both male and female aspect having a fulness of intelligence greater than all. He did not come by way of the seeds. We do and only in the gospel is man and God bound together. (All LDS non-scriptural adolescent fantasy notwithstanding)