The unique view of religion is that man’s eternal destiny is determined by the style of behavior during man’s physical life-time. The style of behavior was classified as good or bad; good behavior for the reward in the Paradise, bad behavior for punishment in Hell. But the way of judgment is not clear, rather whimsical, relative and never logical. It is a strict taboo to do any scientific research on religious subjects. Religion is absolutely against science and logic. By scientific and logical research, religion will be evaporated into nothing. God or gods in religion are locked up into a confinement, and it is prohibited for men to get access to Him or them to speak or reason with them on equal status. Men are under permanent obligation to produce anything good, even out of bad mentality, which is logically improbable. According to the Bible, a righteous man cannot produce anything bad, and vice versa; any man of bad mentality cannot produce anything good anyhow. The religious urge to produce good behavior is just the urge to violate the will of God from whom the Truth should come out.
It is nothing but the wise Serpentine advice to estrange and to keep men His creatures away from God the Creator the Father permanently.
By religion, God is totally misunderstood by men, and any possibility for men to seek after Him realistically is prohibited. In this sense, theology, the study of God, must be a graceful act of God toward men His own creatures. By theology, men can seek the revelation of God. By the theology of Jesus’ Cross, men can understand and meet God personally as the Father. Theology itself, man’s study of God, is the gift of God, which must be made possible through the satanic walls of estrangement, ignorance, prohibition, taboo and human traditions that had been tightly intermingled with religion. Men must be freed from religion first to have the knowledge of God. Men need to resist the concept of religion and its specifics to seek after God. But unfortunately, men cannot stand against their traditions for themselves. To be free from tradition is impossible without God's initiative intervention. And once He intervened, He will surely be found by the seekers.
Theology presupposes two facts: 1) Men are spiritual beings so that God who is a spirit can be related with men as in the father-and-son relationship. 2) The perfect love of God serious, positive and powerful enough to initiate the whole process of His revelation to the eyes of the fortunate seekers.
Positivism of theology is that: everything in theology is about God, not men; who He is, what He did and do, and how, etc.. It should not imply any concept of obligation for men as it does in religion. It’s the source of wisdom for man to possess; never a norm for any physical applications.
Salvation was God’s task all the way from initiating and planning through performing and finishing. There is salvation where God is, but there is only eternal destruction where men are. Whatever men do, good or bad, eternal destruction is destined by the universal event of the first death through the first couple, Adam and Eve. Men just need to research the deeds of God carefully, understanding the meaning of His activity.
A dead body can't feel or have any desire, because it is just a corpse. A normal man, being dead in his spirit, cannot have any spiritual feelings or desires. Man’s seeking of God is just the result of His initiative calling of men. It is not that men sought after God, but that God the Father sought after men, all men because all men are made qualified for His Fatherly seeking in His sight by the death and resurrection of Jesus. God’s calling of all men through Jesus is a universal event transcending the concept of time and space. If a man turns his sight into himself instead of believing the good news and saying “thank you!” he must be snared onto the trap set by the inner god the Serpent who is growling in the depth of human mind, the subconscious.
A lost child can be met successfully by its parent, not by its crying or wanderings but by its parent's desperate and effective efforts. Not to speak when kidnapped.
If Jesus didn't get victory over religion by his conquering death, or by his resurrection, the subject of theology couldn't be on the list to be studied anywhere in the world. It was necessary means for God the Father to reach His children down on the earth. By the death and resurrection of Jesus, men could be met by God.
Men seeking after God, which is the very theme of theology, had been made possible as the result of the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
All the born-again believers, the children of God, are just the produce of the initiating Words of God for His second creation, which has nothing to do with any human ideas good or bad, negative or positive.
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And God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good :( Genesis1:4)
EXISTENTIALISM AND THE CROSS
In existentialism of philosophy, death is the only real subject in all human matters. Whatever men may do, it is just peripheral, temporary, relative and conditional. Nothing except death will last till the end. Death turns everything else in human knowledge into nothing eventually. And realistically speaking, the concept of death itself should turn to be nothing after the moment of death, together with the existentialism or the philosophy itself. There could not be anything like ‘the purpose of life’ meaningful enough everlastingly. Once men do not or cannot give any purpose of life to animals, man’s life cannot carry anything like that either.
The death in existentialism could be equal to the death of Jesus in conception and in theology. Both are at the top of all that a man could think of in significance. Nothing can be compared with them in gravity. The event of the Cross, which means the death and resurrection of Jesus, is the culmination of all stories, happenings, and events in human history as far as God's purposeful involvement into human history is concerned.
Jesus put down his life very reluctantly, yet voluntarily, or obediently. He could submit his own will under God’s will because he had the wisdom of knowing Him and His will. He understood the reason, the necessity and the results of his death according to His will. He had to enter the cave of death himself in order to conquer it for the eternal benefit of men. It was the long desire of the Creator since the fall of Adam and Eve.
Both the death in existentialism and the death of Jesus could not be the same if the death of Jesus had not been claimed for the sin of the world as the once-for-all substitution. He died the common death of all men in order to deliver them from death. Jesus' death replaced man's common death so that there should be no death in human destiny any more.
Death in existentialism is just like the Black Hole in the universe, which devours up every star into peach black. Existentialism itself is to be devoured by death at the end. There should be no hope in existentialism. But, there is hope when that death in existentialism is transferred into the death of Jesus. His death includes all deaths of all individuals. All human beings are to be devoured peach black into the death of Jesus, the Cross. The aftermath, the rest is never silence, but it’s “Resurrection!”
Existentialism should end with death, but Jesus shouldn't. He had overcome the death. He went into the cave of death and, never being devoured by it, but conquered it. His victory over death-his resurrection-was the very thing that men desperately needed, yet had never expected. It was God’s new creation of new life out of death; a man with eternal life out of the dust, the natural man with dead spirit.
When Jesus explained his disciples about his own death and resurrection, none of his disciples could understand what he was talking about at all. The concept of resurrection after death was something that couldn’t be fit for the capacity of thinking within their brains, which was just typical for all human beings in general. More than anything else, it is undoubtedly clear that Satan the Serpent himself didn’t know the possibility of resurrection, either. If he had ever imagined that Jesus might rise from the dead, he wouldn’t have manipulated to kill him. He might have developed any other way without getting rid of Jesus out of human world that could ruin the work of God eventually.
Just as Jesus had identified himself as all human beings in his physical death on the Cross, his resurrection was also not just for himself