by freemindfade 13 Replies latest watchtower bible
Can anyone give me one or more scriptures in the first 5 books of the bible that would describe YHWH the tribal desert god as loving, kind, merciful, etc?..
And by loving I don't mean, "in order to release all the jews from slavery god @$$blasted the Egyptians with ten plagues because he was so loving to his chosen race".
Genesis 1:29
"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed..."
Described by whom?
Ex. 34:6,7
Jehovah was passing before him and declaring: “Jehovah, Jehovah, a God merciful+ and compassionate,*+ slow to anger+ and abundant in loyal love*+ and truth,*+ 7 showing loyal love to thousands,+ pardoning error and transgression and sin,+ but he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished,+ bringing punishment for the error of fathers upon sons and upon grandsons, upon the third generation and upon the fourth generation.
Eh, freemindfade, that came later...from the minions. You are I know better than that - we aren't minions. God told us so - right at the beginning, way before anybody else decided to get in there and lie to us about what our daddy told us way back then! Lol!
:)
Good find, it doesn't really give an example of his being so though.
"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed..."
Including the poisonous ones so... not so much.
I am new to this forum, an ex JW who left in 1999. Being of Jewish stock I may have an answer for you. But it will require that you understand Scripture from a Jewish perspective.
There are two things to learn from Torah, one being the central theme found in the Shema of Deuteronomy 6.4-9 and the other being the command to love one's neighbor found in Leviticus 19.18. Jews take these two things seriously. They even recite Shema daily in prayer and keep it written in a scroll nailed to our door posts as a custom.
But one of the things about Jewish teaching is that straightforward it is NOT. Just like Job who asks the universal question about suffering and gets God to answer him with only more questions, Jews were never very direct about supplying answers in the Scriptures.
For Jews, Scripture is the product of religion and not the foundation or starting point. What Jews believe and teach created Scripture in the first place, and current teaching shapes its definition and meaning for the modern Hebrew. This is unlike the JW belief that one's doctrines must be based on Scripture. For Jews what is Scriptre had to be based on and reflect the doctrine that was current at the time.
Shema for Jews has been and currently teaches us that God is all you are asking for in a single Scripture text. God demands our love in Deuteronomy (the last book of Torah) because at the beginning of Torah we learn that we were created to reflect the image of God in Genesis. In the middle of Torah, Leviticus, we learn this also includes loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. It's indirect, I know, but it is sandwiched this way on purpose. All of Torah is seen by Jews as a command to be as loving, merciful, and just as God who created us in God's image.
While I will admit that I am not a Temple-attending Jew or an official member of the synagogue, I did learn a lot after my time with the Witnesses. I learned enough to get that "bad taste" of seeing religion and the Bible as something the Witnesses have any real claim to. The above was part of learning my heritage, learning that Scripture is not the basis for Jewish belief about the God of Abraham nor a complete standard or source of truth (at least for Jews). If the God worshipped by the Jews is real, then their view that God is much more than what is limited in written pages must be true as well.
