One thing that makes the concept of "God" hard for us to swallow is our lack of ability to comprehend. Heck, I'll keep it simple. Lets look at Omnipotent (All Powerful). God is that, right? Well, the very word is a paradox! If something is Omnipotent, can it dig a ditch wide enough that it can't jump across? Can he lie? Before God even enters the scene we have set Him up for failure! We say he is something that can not exist in our limited understanding of our existence. Obviously, if an all powerful God exists, he is beyond our comprehension. We try to give him 'ranks' or ascribe abilities to him like he's some God from a Fantasy Role-playing Game. We try to quantify him with human words.
Lets be honest. Life on this earth is hard. Many people (myself included) have had a hard time coming to grips with suffering in this world. There are so many good questions. How did a perfect Heavenly Father (God) create imperfect children? *Man* that is a good question. You better believe there was a time in *my* life when I had to ask myself that question. The answer that I finally came up with was based around two concepts: Free Agency and Growth.
Free Agency is defined (when I speak of it now) as the ability to make your own choices and decide what you want to do. God gave us free agency. In doing so, he introduced into the world many of the problems that we see all around us. Yes, I understand that there are natural calamities and the like. Many of these have nothing to do with decisions made by mankind, but at the same time *many* of them have everything to do with the decisions that we make (on both a personal and global scale).
Growth is (in this case) the ability we have to become more like God. In order for us to grow stronger, we need to have opposition. Think of strengthening muscles... you need resistance. Well, we need resistance to grow stronger in more ways than just that. The resistance we face here on earth helps us to grow stronger (if we make the right choices). A verse in the Book of Mormon states:
"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad."
Once again, I think that we try to put God in a cubbyhole (we humans love our cubbyholes) and say exactly what he can or can't do. We try to quantify him. We say, "He's perfect, so everything he makes must appear perfect in our eyes." We say, "He's all-powerful, so he can do anything." We say, "He's doesn't make mistakes, so how come there are earthquakes?"
I'm sorry for getting really deep here, but I'm trying to explain my take on a *hard* issue to come to grips with. The problem is not with God, but with our limited understanding of things like "Eternal", "Perfect", and "Omnipotent". We have these words that we tack on him. Why would he use those words to describe himself in the scriptures? Well, what other words would you recommend? We try to say what he can and can't do. That doesn't work with things that are beyond our comprehension. What is Eternal? What is Forever? When did it start? If God made everything, what made God? Or even if you are an atheist! Where did matter come from? What was it before it was matter? What was it before it was that? Where did it come from? We, as humans, have a really hard time grasping these concepts (that is, we *can't*). That leads me to the root of every religion: Faith.
We can't prove (or disprove for that matter) *anything* that is beyond the scope of our mortal existence. Even the atheists are out of luck in this category. Ever tried proving that there is NO God? We need to work on belief. I see where the people who say we are saved by our faith are coming from. Coming from the right perspective they are completely correct. Faith is the key to *any* religion.
What *I* believe is that God, our Eternal Father has spirit children. I am one of them. So is Jesus Christ. Jesus is SO much more though, because he is "the only begotten in the flesh", or in other words, he is the son of God not only in spirit, but in the flesh. He sits on the right hand of God the Father. My parents were (hehe) "less" than godlike. I believe that a few hundred years after the crucifixion of Christ, there was a "falling away" of sorts. The complete undiluted gospel of Jesus Christ was taken away from the earth for a time, as was prophesied in the bible. This period of darkness was not all bad. Much was done to prepare the world for the restoration of the complete gospel over the centuries. The reformation was very much inspired by god. It led to the Restoration. The first step of the Restoration was when God the Father and his son Jesus Christ both appeared to a 14 year old boy by the name of Joseph Smith. He was an instrument in their hands in bringing to pass the restoration of the gospel upon the earth, part of which included the translation of the Book of Mormon into English as he was guided by heavenly powers. His belief was such that when the time came to denounce his claims or die, he chose the latter. Most importantly, I believe that Jesus Christ is our savior. My savior. You, me, everyone. He loves us in a way we can only begin to comprehend. Sure we try to give it names and try to use words like "eternal" to describe it, but it's a pretty sad attempt to describe something we just can't understand.
Some would call me pompous. I would disagree. Pompous would be for me to say, "This is what I believe and everyone else is hosed." That is not my stance, nor is it the stance of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We believe that everyone will have an equal chance to accept or deny Christ and his gospel (gospel, by the way, means "Good News"). You may say, but I already *have* everything I need. Good for you. Congratulations. I'm far from it. I try to become more like God all the time. I fail more often than not, but Im working on it. I believe I have faith, and that is what drives me to try to be more like Him. It's a lifelong pursuit. No, it's more than that. It's an eternal pursuit.
Wow. Sorry to 'wax philosophical' on everyone. I wasn't trying to get preachy, I promise.
. I just started going and before I knew it I had written all this.
Cheers.
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