Two things to understand
If there is one thing that I could help people to understand, it would be Yahweh’s love for us as a loving father. (I’ll get to the second thing later.)
When we see Yahweh as the loving, caring father that He is, and see all that He has done and continues to do for us even though we don’t deserve it, then we have the right lenses for looking at life.
When we look at what He tells us in Scripture, it makes sense when we see His love. He tells us don’t do this and do this because He has our best interest in mind. He sees the beginning to the end, and so what we think is horrible He can use for good to accomplish His will in our lives in the end.
Yahweh, as the creator of everything and knows what is best for us. So out of love He says, No, don’t do that or do that.
It’s that simple really.
When He says don’t eat pork, shellfish, etc. and it’s an abomination, why do we refuse to listen?
Yahweh is not like an imperfect earthly father that makes mistakes or has the potential to make decisions based on selfish motives. No, Yahweh orchestrates everything so that we will have the best opportunities to have a relationship with Him.
Don’t mistake it, you will have hardships and consequences for your wrong choices, but He will be there with you through them.
You see, the question people like to ask is: does Yahweh really love us or care about us?
What we really ought to ask is: do I love Him?
The second thing is that we cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. (I wrote a post on this here too.)
No one “makes us” get angry or forces us to make a wrong decision. While we certainly can be pressured into making a decision to do or say something wrong, ultimately we make the choice ourselves.
Where is this in Scripture?
Practically the whole Bible is a story of Yahweh, despite what man does and has done, chooses to give grace and mercy. There are also examples of individuals such as Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Yahushua choosing to do the right thing. They took the highroad despite how undeserving the other party was and despite the pressure they faced.
One of my favorite stories in the book of Genesis is when Isaac dug a well in the valley of Gerar and the herdsmen of the land quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen over it. He didn’t demand that it was his, he just moved on and dug another well. They fought over that one too, so he moved on and dug a third well. Finally, they didn’t try to fight with him about that one, so Isaac finally had a place in the land. (Genesis 26:18-22)
Like his father Abraham, who gave Lot first choice of land in an act of unselfishness, Isaac practiced something we know as “turning the other cheek.” Yahweh had promised Abraham and Isaac the whole land so it would have been easy for them to justify demanding it for themselves. Instead, they chose to do the right thing.
We need Yahweh’s spirit in order to have this kind of love and unselfishness.
Too many people justify themselves and their actions based on what someone else did or something bad that happened to them.
But what if we changed our perspective and realized that we hurt others and are selfish all the time? We may not know how much we hurt others, but we do, and to point the finger at others without acknowledging our own actions is prideful and selfish at the very least.
So, if there were just two things I could help people to understand, they would be:
- Yahweh loves us, even when we don’t deserve it.
- We can only control our own actions regardless of others'.