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Originally Posted by SerenityLives
Thanks Trapped again for the lengthy response. You sure put a lot of effort into this one! I am grateful, truly am. First off, the scenario I described above was actually a real life example. It was a friend who experienced incest at the hands of her father. Now that I think more about it, yes I don’t believe his apologies were genuine based on what she described- he still minimized the hurt and expected forgiveness right away. On top of that, he still did other things like taking advantage of her financially without apologizing. So I guess in this case, he is not a true Christian.
I think you’ll have to pull up my responses on other threads that God was all-forgiving, I dont seem to remember. But yes, I agree with you on all the above premises. You should be a lawyer
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I'm sorry to hear of the truth of the example. I can't even imagine. The only point I disagreed with concerning the truth of it was that the rapist could be a genuine Christian, which I don't believe he is, like you also concluded.
I hope your friend has been able to find a trauma therapist that knows how to help her process the extreme conflicting internal feelings she must have had to wrestle against as the victim of assault by someone who should have been there to protect her instead, as well as help her put the shame where it belongs - on her "father's" head rather than on her own.
The topic of forgiveness is an important one, and one that probably every human being wrestles with deeply at some point in their life. It seems to me to be the height of injustice that anyone would be abused, mistreated, traumatized, injured, hurt, harmed, damaged, and then be FURTHER beaten over the head by people who tell that broken person that they have to forgive the very act that broke them, from which they have yet to recover. It made God a God who saw a person in pain, and then bent down and broke their leg in response, rather than comforting them.
I struggled with this for years, until I actually looked into scripture. Much to my surprise, there is no "forgive no matter what" when it comes to sins/offenses among believers. There is "love covers all", but that is not speaking about "all unrepentant sins must be forgiven". If someone sins against you, you go to them, they repent and the relationship is restored - love covers all. But past that, it's the opposite - unrepentence carries great consequence for the unrepentant person.
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Originally Posted by SerenityLives
This is according to the bible, although my personal beliefs is that God is all forgiving and I dont think hell exists as an eternal punishment (this is too much of a punishment for a human being who sinned for 100 years). But I’m sure God will sort it out.
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This the quote of yours I had in mind, from post #161 of the LGBTQ thread, when I referenced you believing that God is all-forgiving.