Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

Who is God? This is one of the biggest questions anyone can ask.  So many people have preconceived notions of what God 'should' be like (and some get very confused when they find out that the Bible isn't in agreement with their personal prejudices!)  If you want to find out who God is, this is where I would really recommend trying the experiment of reading the Bible without any preconceived ideas.  God is our creator , as is made clear in Genesis.  He made not only us, but our world and our Universe. (Here people tend to get bogged down about evolution vs creationism - they are not mutually exclusive!) God is good (here people get bogged down about why bad things happen if God is good; read more here ).  God is all-knowing and all-powerful (yet again, people get bogged down about whether we actually have Free Will - yes we do; read about Free Will here ).  God hates sin , yet all of us humans are sinners.  Sin is just the most horrible thing ...

I've noticed a disturbing trend lately where there has been a rejection of the Bible/Christianity for the reason that it does not mesh with what that person heard in Sunday School many years ago. The Sunday School version is not incorrect, but we need to be aware that it is a simplified version of the 'real God' for a younger audience. If someone then reads the Bible later on, they (like me) will find that there is a lot more to the Bible than what one learns in Sunday School. The God of the Bible may even seem 'different' compared with what one learns in Sunday School. This is because we are more mature and are learning more of the Bible, not because religion is incorrect or inconsistent. The God that we learn of in the Bible, is, in turn, only a shadow of what we will see when we meet Him face-to-face. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see bu...