The meaning of Christ's birth

This question is a big question, but as a Christian, sooner or later you will have to face this problem, so it is more appropriate to confess it obediently.

As a novelist who likes to gossip, as usual, time is set back to the origin of time.

Different Views on the Creation of the Universe

It is like this, there are two kinds of people in this world, one kind of people think that this universe just appeared out of thin air, there is no reason, anyway, the big bang happened.

Another person believes that there is a reason for the existence of the universe, and there may be various theories as to how it happened, but in short, at the source of creation, there is a reason for existence.

For Christians, the big bang is a very theological explanation that the universe was created when God said there was to be light .

Of course, there are also people who don't want anything. We will ignore such people for now and discuss them later.

As for the idea that the universe is eternal and just keeps circulating, we will talk about it later. Anyway, the theory of circulation is unscientific—it also means that reincarnation is unscientific.

In short, your cognition of this starting point is very important. Don’t underestimate this point. It will affect your outlook on life. Even if you don’t realize it yourself, your view on the creation of the universe will indeed affect your self cognition, because this It has to do with whether you think people have value, and of course whether you have value in yourself.

If you think that the creation of the universe has no purpose, then there is no meaning at all, then your life is equally unnecessary, everything is just a random distribution of matter and energy...

It's not that such a person is useless. Sometimes this kind of person tries very hard to prove something, but in the end, it doesn't make any sense at all, because the whole universe is meaningless, because he himself denies "meaning" in cognition. Value, then how could he find meaning, he will only be in vain for a lifetime.

However, if it’s just his own futile efforts, it’s just a tragedy, but many of these people will turn himself into a meaning, or simply put himself as a god, because his “meaning” has no reference coordinates, so he regards himself as a meaning. origin. This kind of person is very harmful to the world. Most of the atheists or Zuo Jiao are such people (although Zuo Jiao may also think that he has faith, but if you ask him about his theology, you will find that he thinks of himself)

But if you think that the universe has meaning, the problem is not so simple, because in the field of creation "before", it is the field of theology, so what your theological knowledge is is also crucial.

The theology here is not a question of whether you read the Bible or not, but a more primitive fundamental question: what kind of God do you think you are.

Definition of God

We must first distinguish several points of view. Objectively speaking, the world either has a creator, or there is no creator. There is no ambiguity between these two questions. If there is, there is, and if there is no, there is no. The former represents that the creation of the universe is purposeful or has a reason, and the latter represents that the creation of the universe is completely coincidental.

The god I am talking about here refers to the creator, who not only created the universe, but also created it together with the rules of how the universe works, such as gravity, atomic structure, the speed of light, time, DNA, or someone who loves to eat coriander.

The gods in many religions, such as Taoism or the Greek gods, are all "created". The classification on my side is completely unqualified to be called a god. Only the one who "sets the rules" in the first place is called a god.

So when you believe in a Creator, when you understand that everything in the universe, including your thoughts, is created, then what follows becomes

What was the purpose of the universe created?

At this time, the disagreement comes again. If you believe in those gods who are also "created", for example, Mazu was originally only a human being, then what exactly are you believing in? In fact, you don't believe in anything, because you also don't know the meaning of existence, because you went to worship an object you don't know. I'm not talking about whether you have heard his story, but you actually know it well. What you worship is "nothing", or in other words, your so-called belief behavior is actually a commercial behavior, you just want to exchange something, because you have not thought about the meaning of the existence of the universe.

Of course, if you worship a stone or a big tree, the situation is the same. This kind of worship is a commercial act, and has nothing to do with respecting nature. It is a glorified argument, and in fact it is a commutative theory.

I'm not saying that the commutative theory is not good. After all, the business model is a natural behavior, and its essence is not bad. This is the starting point.

As mentioned above, the real creator is the one who sets the rules for the operation of the universe, and the only logical explanation is that there must be only one creator, or “multiple homogeneous”, because they must not have different ideas, have the same ability. If there is a difference, there will be "imperfection," because perfection must be unique.

This is not to say that the Creator is perfect, but the word perfect originally only applies to the Creator, and to the creatures, the Creator represents "everything."

Today, if you are a designer of a computer virtual game world, at the moment of your first boot test, the game time begins, you become the maker of the rules of the game world, you are the real god of the game world (by the setting in the God is actually just a creature), and you represent perfection to everything in the game world, because only you can ignore the rules in the game world, you have a golden finger, no, you are a golden finger. The characters in the game are limited by various settings. Even the gods in the game have mana settings and can be killed by demons.

But you don't have to worry about it, you can ignore all the laws and do whatever you want.

This is the Christian view,

The true God is the creator, the rule maker.

But the question remains the same, why did God create the world? What is the purpose of this universe?

The answer is actually not difficult to imagine, if God is the only, or homogeneous many (such as the theology of the Trinity), then He wants to create a richer output in His perfection, and the only way is to create a "with self-like, and has free will.”

A being who has the ability to judge for himself, independent of him, and can make him "surprise".

At this time, angels appeared... Yes, let me say angels first, not humans.

Let me explain first, this part is just my own conjecture, not the content of the Bible, but it fits the novelist's setting very well, you can listen to it.

In fact, we can see that the first person in the Bible to show free will was the serpent (Satan), who was originally an angel and even accompanied God in the form of the sons of God (see the book of Job ). It can be noticed that the angels did not appear in the process of God's creation of the heavens and the earth, because the description of the creation of the heavens and the earth in the Bible all refers to the material world, but the spiritual world must have existed earlier.

I think that angels are "believers" who were raised by God in the previous creation process. In other words, the new heaven and new earth in Revelation is not the end, but another beginning. Some of those who enter New Jerusalem will be the angels of God's next creation process and will be sent.

If you have seen The Lord of the Rings , the Silmarillion and The Chronicles of Narnia , you can understand what I am talking about. After all, I also learned the concepts from these two masters of theology. In short, let’s refer to them first.

God's ultimate goal is a partner

In short, the ultimate goal of the Creator is to find a " mate ", a being that "matches Him", so the Bible always talks about the bride of Jesus.

Because the Creator's greatest goal is a mate, his counterpart (note that the biblical word is always "matching").

That's why I describe the loneliness of the Creator in the novel "The Way Back". His greatest goal is to find a partner, so the Bible begins with the union of mankind and ends with the wedding of God .

It is not difficult for you to notice that the people in the world who are most obsessed with the value of marriage are not others, but Christianity (of course, what is the core value of marriage, this can be discussed again, the Phariseeization of church doctrine is not a good phenomenon, but it does not mean that Love, contract and loyalty are meaningless, they are two different things).

If you understand that God’s expectation for human beings is to become an existence that can match him, you will find that this is incredibly difficult. Can you imagine an AI in a virtual world being upgraded to become an existence equivalent to a programmer?

By the way, those who are interested can read the Alice chapter of Sword Art Online, it is really super interesting and full of theological hints. Of course, you can also watch Ghost in the Shell or The Hacking Mission. In short, these popular fantasy science fiction stories have long been set in the Bible.

Anyway, just know that, from a Christian point of view, God created the universe to create his own match —not one, mind you, there can be infinitely many, because God is a homogeneous majority. (Although the Holy Managers use the church to refer to the bride of God)

Or maybe there is only one, which is more natural if you look at it from a multiverse perspective.

Okay! The above is the background explanation, it has been long and long, and I haven't talked about the meaning of Jesus' birth...

But we have to move on to something else, which is the universality of God's revelation.

God was not revealed only to the Jews

This is the case. Although human civilizations have different values, even cosmology and religious beliefs, there are some things in common. For example, you shouldn't kill people, you shouldn't steal, and lying is not good... We have many common beliefs, Where did this come from?

Are you saying that socialization comes naturally? This is of course an explanation, but such a "single" belief is unlikely to arise naturally.

In other words, there is some kind of "interference", which tends to be single.

I mean that God revealed his existence to all human beings in the process of program evolution, or that God has revealed himself in the most primitive human community (that represents the primitive people of East Africa).

All of these revelations imply the emergence of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and original sin .

I emphasize again, most people think that original sin is a curse, but I want to emphasize that the trial of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is exactly the value of free will, otherwise God can directly come back, the reason why He left the sinful The ability to choose lies in the fact that He sees the potential of human beings from it.

I believe that God has revealed to human beings all over the world, but the environment and cultural background of human beings in different places have brought different views of the universe and God, so He intends to find one to demonstrate.

So He chose Abraham to start the plan, and the climax of the plan was Jesus.

Jesus was born to reveal how humans can reconcile with God, because God himself came into the world in the form of a human Avatar, who limited his abilities in order to experience all the pain that humans have gone through, especially death that he himself had no chance to experience. Then through resurrection, tell us where the hope of mankind lies.

Only when we are born again in Christ do we qualify to be the bride of Christ.

Yeah, so if you're still homophobic, I really urge you to think about how a man can become the bride of Christ, even though Jesus also said that there will be neither marriage nor marriage in heaven, because that's a completely different concept, and the point has always been It's love and loyalty (remember it's love and loyalty, don't ignore loyalty, and there's no sex in it, don't get me wrong).

Of course, everyone may think, why should God come in person? There are several reasons for this. One is that even if he looked to Abraham as a model, he saw that things were always screwed up - God's omnipotence was naturally sealed by himself when he "expected the unexpected", which is his right to The love of creation, because that's called freedom, if you expect God to help you do everything, is that called free will ?

You must know that God's omnipotence and omnipotence can also appear on "restart". In other words, if God really used the way of rewinding time to deal with crashes or delete bugs, "you won't know."

Christ was born to demonstrate to us

God chose Himself, and when we couldn't rise to the level of matching Him, He first came down to Himself, took our image, and told us what to do.

So he went out and challenged the establishment, debated them, challenged their boundaries, provoked people to think about theology, showed himself how to love people more, how to love God more, how to live more godly, and how to die.

and how to resurrect.

Please note that I have added "more" in many places above, because what Jesus demonstrated was not "do it", but "you can do it better", so He wants to earn more than 5,000, and He wants to prepare oil Be a little more prepared, but be aware that God's requirements are not commutative "good will pay off" (it's really cheap, really), because we can see that Jesus didn't have much money to give to the temple (remember that at the time He wanted to burn a cow and a sheep, but we didn't see the record of Jesus offering sacrifices), he didn't have much money to give to the poor (although he invited everyone to a running water feast a few times), and he didn't even spend much time on behalf of others Baptism (actually nothing in the Bible says that Jesus baptized people, so maybe it wasn't done at all).

The most recorded part of the Bible is the part of Jesus' doctrinal teaching, because the study of theology and the preaching of theology are the most important parts, because it is the most important thing to let more people understand the gospel, the "true gospel".

Justification by faith is not justification by doing good deeds . No matter how much good deeds you do, as long as you believe in the wrong one (not religion, but your understanding of the nature of God), it is still useless. Therefore, Christian values are not causality (although causality is not). theory is a small part of Christian values).

Of course, what is the "true gospel"? He wants us to be His matches - which obviously doesn't mean we have supernatural powers or how many good things we do in this world, because He doesn't need us to do that at all, He wants our souls to reach His heights.

We can see that Satan is an example of a challenge that fails. Interestingly, Arthur Clarke's novel has this point of view, but in fact a religion that "just wants to get rid of the rules of the world" - that is, Buddhism is also an example of doomed failure, because Sun Wukong can't jump out of the palm of the Buddha, but the creation The same cannot escape the palm of the creator. If you say that those Buddhas were taken directly by God just like Elijah, it might be a bit interesting, similar to finding loopholes in internal programs to go to the external network, like the puppet master of Ghost in the Shell.

But what if there is no Internet? At least scientific evidence shows that we are in a closed universe. Even if there are multiple universes that can run, it is still under the Creator!

It can only be said that it is a point of view that is distorted from the setting (but this escapism point of view is used by many novelists, such as Sophie's world is an example).

Become a match for the Supreme

Speaking of it, it's arrogant to want to be God, but it's interesting that the Bible always wants the church to be the bride of Jesus—in fact, we want to be God's spouse, married to the Holy Spirit.

But also note that because the Bible calls God the Father, we are God's children.

In other words, in this relationship, we were originally created, and this remains the same, so we have childhood, but God expects more from us, the bride.

Raise yourself spiritually enough to be a match for God. Naturally, you cannot be arrogant, but you must love Him wholeheartedly, because you only need to see how God loves the world and human beings, and then you can understand that arrogance itself is absolute. It is impossible to reach the heights of God, because He even puts Himself in, subjecting Himself to the laws of this world. It's like the game designer went into the game by himself, but chose a character with very low points (according to the biblical description, Jesus is even a faceless, completely passerby), and there is no cheating character, although facing the same weak characters Use a golden finger to perform advanced healing, but mainly use this character to challenge all the strong players in the game and make them all angry, just to tell everyone that I love you very much, please do the same to commemorate me.

He even wants us to remember Him...

Don't forget him because he came into this world. To save us, and He has already saved.

Already, not only the past perfect tense, nor the present perfect tense, but actually the future perfect tense, because the rules are set by God himself, and He will complete it by himself.

hallelujah.