As a sinner, you are incapable of loving God without God's help
So basically complete and utter dependance on God.
Slavery, either to righteousness, or to sin.
Yeah, nah.... Not going to willingly bind myself in shackles. Maybe unwillingly I'm bound, in the case of sin, but I didn't put this upon myself.
When is God going to start to take some of the responsibility for his creation? Why should we always suffer and then be dependent on him for the solution? I did not ask, nor want, to be created. I should not have to shoulder the responsibility of consciousness and morality, when he willingly forced it upon me.
And when I find a solution to this burden (i.e. Suicide) I'm punished eternally for taking it, simply because it's not what God dictates.
That's unquestionably cruel and malevolent. And yes, I don't understand God, his ways are not my ways. But he also knows that I know this, that I am a limited creature with limited understanding, yet he still chooses to punish me and make me suffer unimaginable torture.
Some loving God.
How can predestination and unlimited atonement both be true at the same time? It is a mystery, but that is what the Bible teaches.
See, this is where I start getting jaded.
Anytime something contradictory or seemingly incompatible comes up, it's left to "The mystery of God" without any attempt at trying to reconcile how these contradictions are so seemingly at odds with each other.
It's always left to trust God, and then daily, we are meant to do what exactly? Depend on him minute by minute, day by day, year by year to give us precise instructions on what we are not to do?
Because that's all it is essentially. Don't do this, don't do that. This is wrong, that is wrong. Never in my life have I ever felt more stifled and more in death than I have in the various denominations of church simply looking to serve up a political agenda so completely bereft and disconnected from the Gospel teachings.
It actually angers me. I want to burn these fucking churches down for how unbelivably and undeniably wrong they are. They are HARMING the gospel message and distorting what is true.
I went to the Uniting church recently, and most, if not all of the members there truly believed that there was no hell. That hell is too cruel and too malicious. I kept pushing them to bible verses, I kept showing them again and again, and most of them looked at me blankly as if this was the first time they had ever opened up the book.