God

Part I: God Is Amazingly Huge

If God is real, and I totally totally believe that He is, then He's completely huge.

Like where they have those old Godzilla movies, I used to watch and wonder how could Godzilla be big enough to walk across the ocean. Or once I saw a cartoon where a cat and a dog and a mouse got this growth fornula (I forget where from) and they kept drinking it do that they'd each be bigger than the other two, and in the end they were so big that the buildings were like anthills. Or once in a comic book the moon cracked open and it was a glowing space bird, and if you think about how absolutely amazingly enormous that is, just think about how big the space bird was who laid the egg.

And as huge as those things are, God is even huger.

OK, they say there are mites that live on our skin and hair that you can only see with a microscope. They're not even like fleas; they're like fleas on fleas. Then imagine a full-grown glowing spacebird being that small to something else, and then magnify that thing by 100 billion gajillion times, and if you can imagine that, then you might possibly be able to conceptualize one 100 billion gajillion hexadecaquadrillionth of how enormously gargantuan God is.

You know how there are people who build computers from scratch? And they're all so weird, and they know all the processors and chips and how they all work and how they all fit together. Or how like Goober once took apart a whole car and put it back together on The Andy Griffith Show? Most folks can't build computers or put cars together even if they can drive and use the internet and whatever. But even though computers can be bigger than people (and even though most of them aren't), a person's got to be at least as smart as a computer to put one together, like you can't make a computer play chess if you can't play chess.

So imagine how enormously huge God is, intellectually. I mean even the brilliantest computer genius in the world can invent computers to do all the math there is, still can't invent new numbers. Imagine all the stuff there is in the universe, all the matter and energy and subatomic particles, and all the forces like entropy and time and gravity and chaos and even life, and what life is and how living things behave, and chemistry and math and geometry, and then throw it all away and like there is totally nothing, ok? And now imagine that you have to think up all that stuff.

If you're honest with yourself, you have to realize how totally impossible that would be to do. But if you're an idiot, and almost everyone is, then you're probably thinking that it wouldn't be so hard to do because you already know what all that other stuff is, because God already invented it.

Think about the smartest person you ever heard of, maybe Einstein or Newton or Edison, or maybe that guy who said that the earth was round. Some of those guys were really really smart. But even the smartest one of those fellows just put things together in a new way, or made observations about crap that was already there. In other words, there's a limit to how smart we can be. Too bad there doesn't seem to be a limit on how stupid we can be.

Back in the old-timey days, folks didn't think of God like this. It used to be that every little town had its own little God, kind of the same way if you go to England or France today and every town has its own kind of cheese. They didn't think in terms of a Big Creator-God; their gods were more like guys who come to your shop and say if you pay them enough money they won't burn it down. So they killed chickens and goats and stuff.

What might give you some idea of how overwhelmingly massive God is, try to imagine how small atoms and molecules are, and how enormous the sun is, and how there a gajillion suns in the galaxy and a bajillion galaxys in the universe, and God made all of them. And He named them all and He knows them all and they all dance in these endless interlocking pirouettes of gravity and time and momentum.

That's how big God is.

Part II: God Is Totally Totally Good

When you try to think about someone who's good, you'd probably think about Mother Theresa or Gandhi or maybe Billy Graham. And then maybe you'd think of what they did with their lives or whatever, feeding the hungry or consulting with Presidents or just giving the British a pain in the ass. But the thing is, none of them did anything new. Folks have been feeding the hungry since there have been hungry folks to feed, Gandhi just told people to turn the other cheek, and Billy Graham might be an exceptional preacher, but in the end he's not preaching anything new, or anything that hadn't been preached for thousands of years.

All I'm saying is, there's nothing new. I mean, there's right and there's wrong and it pretty much just is what it is. There's no new morality. There's nothing more right or more just than what was right or just 6,000 years ago.

And that's exactly why, when someone tells us to think of a good person, we might think of Gandhi or whatever, and then we might think of what they did in their lives, but then the very next thing we think is "Big deal!". Admit it. You thought it. So what? What did they ever do that was so great?

And you were right. None of those folks did anything that anyone else couldn't have done. So why didn't anyone else do those things? Because, we're idiots.

Think about it this way. When you go to school, you learn your ABC's, which is really great. And then you learn words, and then sentences. You learn to count, then addition, then calculus and whatever. Pretty soon we're building gigantic computers and going to the moon. This is how we learn and progress.

But when we go to Sunday School, we learn the Ten Commandments, that it's wrong to lie and steal and screw around, and after that everything else we learn can just be boiled down to the lesson that it's good to do right and it's bad to do wrong. And maybe the reason there's nothing new for us to learn is because we still haven't got that one down yet. What I mean is, maybe God hasn't taught is calculus yet because we still can't count to ten.

So, say somebody tells you that Mother Theresa was good. You might think, ok, she fed lots of people and helped the poor. But if someone says God is good, you think

Yeah, ok, whatever, or
Why is He so good? What did He ever do?

It's hard to talk about God being good for just this reason: Because everyone always says, if He's so great, why is there suffering in the world?

People want everything. They want total freedom to do whatever they want, and no responsibility. I mean, what if God said, ok, no more suffering in the world, but ya'll will have to obey the Ten Commandments all the time, forever. First of all, folks would probably say "Forget it!" And even if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to keep all the commandments anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

In a way, this kind of is what God promises. And, in a way, this is kind of what people say to Him.

People who complain about suffering in the world are like kids who can't keep their rooms clean and then complain about the dirt.

Anyway, what we think of as "good people" aren't good in the same way that "bad people" are bad. Good people are usually good just for its own sake, or to help others, or to serve a higher purpose. Hardly anyone ever does wrong just for the sake of doing wrong, or to serve any purpose but themselves.

Think of it this way: you remember the Super Friends and the Legion of Doom? The Super Friends were super so that they could make the world a better place or whatever. But the Legion of Doom wasn't evil just to make the world worse. They didn't care about the world at all: They just wanted money, power, sex (I assume), and revenge against their enemies.

Another reason folks don't want to hear how good God is, is because they don't think much at all anymore about what good is. They don't think that good is perfection and that bad is anything less than that. In fact, they do just the opposite: They think of the absolute worst person they can, and say "I'm not as bad as that guy." It's like there's no "good" and "bad"; there's "bad" and "worse" and "not as bad as that".

And there's one more really big reason that we don't want to know how good God is. It's because we don't want to know how bad we are. It's not hard to understand, even though most folks don't undrstand it.

So here it is.

Everybody's bad.

Everybody lies, everybody cheats, everybody wants things they shouldn't want and does things they know are wrong. So the lesson isn't that I'm just as good as Billy Graham; it's that I'm just as guilty as Ted Bundy. Just look at some of the "good people" in the Bible: The Apostle Paul persecuted and killed Christians, King David killed a man so he could have his wife. All those folks were just as rotten and foul as Judas or that Pharoah fellow. In fact, there's only two people that the Bible didn't record any dirt on, and one was Jesus and the other was Daniel. And Daniel did wrong, too, I just reckon it wasn't all that interesting.

It's like when you have kids. You don't do everything for them and give them whatever they want. Maybe at first you do, but eventually you do less and less or they'll never learn to do things for themselves. The alternative is to have mindless robots.

OK, have you ever seen a parent of a kid who is a junky? And the parent gives the kid money every few weeks and the kid promises to do better but in a day or two disappears again with half the silverware and $6000.00 in bearer bonds? And the junky kid blames everyone else and the parents wonder where they went wrong. See, we're all like that junky who can never get straight. That's how our whole lives are.

I think anyone would like to be closer to God, if they didn't think that that meant being dead. Who wouldn't? Of course it does mean that you're going to have to stop cussing, and lying, and kicking that dog through the hedge. And a lot of other folks are going to hate you who might otherwise not. Folks don't want to do that. They want to hear that everything's ok, you're cool, you're doing fine; not that you're a sinner and the way you live your life isn't going to bring you any closer yo God.

We don't think of God as being like a father who tells us not to lie or steal and then whups our ass when we do it so that we learn not to lie or steal. We think of Him as being like a Grandpa who tells us not to lie or steal and then winks and tells us its ok and gives us a piece of candy if we do. And how bad is it, that God is good and we're all bad and always were and never get any better? Well, the Bible says it's even worse than that: It says that all have sinned and come short of God's glory, and that the best we could offer Him is as filthy rags.

That really sucks.

Part III: The Way God Is

When you read the Bible, or even when you don't read the Bible and all you know about it is what you overhear other folks talking about, you really get two distinct impressions of Who God is and what He's like.

The first, of course, is the one everyone likes, and that is that God is love. Everyone likes to be loved even when they're cynical and bitter and misanthropic and roll their eyes every time someone uses the word "love" in a sentence, unless it's used in conjunction with other words like "hot" or "monkey". When someone says "God loves you", usually you think he's a freak, and I have to confess that even while I acknowledge that I believe it's true, I would probably think he was a freak, too. Usually when someone talks to me, whether it's about God or bigfoot or even just the weather, I assume that they're profoundly retarded.

Anyway, back on topic.

The Bible does make it clear that God loves us. It kind of spells it out. I like to think that God even loves us in ways that we can't understand, because for one thing, that means that I don't have to explain it any more than that, but also because if you limit it just to what you understand about it, for most people that involves sex, obsession, or some kind of restraining order. And it's not like that.

When a person tells me they love me, it doesn't usually impress me much, because they could mean any number of things and it's impossible to know how to take it without a common frame of reference, so unless it's someone I'm really close to, my reaction is usually along the lines of "That's great! But keep it to yourself!" But when God loves you, if you believe it, it kind of changes things. Even if, like me, you don't exactly know what that means.

Like, a preacher or a sunday school teacher or that weird "love someone" lady on the radio late at night, always talk about "love love love" all the time, you know. God loves you. God accepts you just as you are. God reaches down to you, however low you've sunk. It's all right there in the Bible, you know, even how Jesus hung around with all the whores and tax collectors. And whoever asks, receives. And whoever seeks, finds. And how your faith is counted as righteousness, and then there's mercy and forgiveness and redemption.

Now this is important stuff. Don't miss it. If you were advertising for God, this would be your selling point here. You'd put this on the billboards, and talk about it on commercials. Whoo hoo.

So God is love and that's great, but there's something else.

It's death, wrath, anger, judgement, the Great Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, all that stuff in Revelation. It's not pretty, and folks don't like to hear about it, but it's all right there in the Bible, how God is sinless and man is not, and sin is displeasing to Him and can't stand in His Presence. Preachers preach on it, some of them like every single week. They get up on their pulpits and roll up their shirt sleeves and wave their arms around, and some of them even start crying. And believe me, if you're sitting in church waiting for him to finish up, and the preacher starts crying, you might as well settle back, because you ain't getting lunch on time.

Now, you can listen to either one of these preachers: The one talking about love and hope, or the other talking about wrath and judgement. And odds are, if you're persuaded at all by their preaching, you're not going to want to much hear what the other one is saying. You're going to think, that other guy's got it all wrong. He's missing the boat. And yet they're both talking about the same God and the same Bible, and sometimes they're even telling the same exact stories. You could hear one say that God hated the sin in the world and sent the Flood to destroy everything, and that would be true, if you believe the Biblical account. But the other guy could just as easily say that God loved Noah and spared his whole family and there was a big rainbow and they sang "Kumbaya" and everyone was happy, and that would be true, too. Except for the "Kumbaya" part.

Now, you could say that all this is just a matter of perspective, like it's a bottle-being-half-full kind of thing., but I don't think that's so. I think, if you're just hearing or believing one of these things and not the other, then you really are missing the boat. Maybe it kind of goes back to God being enormously huge, because I think that God is both of these things at once. In a way, I think it's kind of like the "balance" thing that some Eastern religions talk about, like maybe you shouldn't concentrate too much on either one of those things, or you lose your focus. Not that I'm saying Buddha or anything is just like Jesus; I'm just using that as an illustration. Anyway, it's what I think.

Part IV: I Fought The Law & The Law Won

A long long time ago in the old-timey Bible days, back when the Nation of Israel was wandering in the desert, God handed down to Moses the Ten Commandments. These were mostly a bunch of "Don'ts", like Don't Lie, Don't Steal, Don't Screw Around. But even the ones that said "Do" weren't a lot of fun, kind of like when you're little and your parents tell you sit up straight, or comb your hair, or spit that out. Anyway, these were God's Chosen People, and the Ten Commandments were the first part of what would come to be known as The Law. That's The Law, in Capital Letters.

Now, you'd think that being God's Chosen People would make them feel like something special, and that receiving His Law would be like a really great prize. But I don't think that's how they saw it. I think they reacted more like you would if, say, you're in hot water at work and your boss gives you a really ugly tie for Christmas: You know you'll never use it, except maybe to keep him happy, but you can never tell him how much you don't like it. So you just kind of grimace and go "Oooo, yeah, it's....real, um...niiice..."

The Law was kind of a funny thing, and on the surface of it, included a lot of things that we might find strange. There were the Ten Commandments, of course, which talked about how they ought to live, and treat one another, and behave towards God. They also had a lot of dietary laws, like with the clean and unclean animals, you know, the whole Kosher thing, although I don't know if that's what they called it back then.

It also included specifications on how to build the Temple. Inside the Temple was a big sheet made of heavy cloth like a foot thick and hung up crossways dividing the Temple, kind of like how on TV people might get mad at each other and divide the room in half and say "This half is yours, and this is mine." Behind that curtain was the Holy of Holys, what they called the Tabernacle. I'm not sure what a Tabernacle is, but anyway, if you stepped back there they believed you were standing in the very Presence of God. In a way then it kind of was like those TV shows, with one half being God's side and one half being man's. The only people allowed back there were the High Priests, the Tribe of Levi, so they took it all pretty seriously. It took them a long time to build it, even though they had the plans, and I'm not sure what they all thought about that, but I imagine it would kind of have been like Jodie Foster in that movie Contact, when the aliens sent her plans to build this machine, and she didn't quite know what it was but she reckoned the aliens were smarter than her so she went ahead and built it anyway.

All this might not seem like quite enough, so they had one more thing. It was called a sacrifice. Sacrificing animals wasn't anything new, even the pagans did it, and it had even been a part of their own tradition as far back as Cain and Abel. But this was a little different. The Law provided for a number of sacrifices on several different occasions, but the really big one was the lamb. The sacrificial lambs had to be physically perfect, without blemish (I guess that means spots and moles and stuff, I don't know too much about barnyard animals), of a certain age and size, and they sacrificed these lambs to take away their sin.

I don't think they really understood it. To be honest, I don't really understand it all. But they say it worked like this: Because God is sinless, and man is totally totally not, and no sin can stand before Him, He worked out this business of sacrificing an innocent. The blood sacrifice, as gross and as brutal as it sounds, was what He required of them.

I told you it didn't make much sense. But you know how you might go to a fancy restaurant and to get in you have to have on a tie? And sometimes they might have ties there that you can borrow when you come in, just in case you don't have one? It's sort of like that. Or maybe not.

It sounds really elaborate, and it was. The Law was very rigid, and strict, and it didn't leave a lot of room for being creative. Certain transgressions required certain punishments, and certain things you did had to be done in certain ways, and it was all right and wrong, black and white, clean and unclean, and you had to keep all of it and stay on top of everything.

But it's funny, in a way, how the Law turned out. You'd think that something that came directly from God would make it easier for us. But you know, when someone says to me "You shouldn't ought to lie," I don't think "I don't lie" or "Yeah, that's a good thing," instead, I think of all the times I lied even just today. When someone says "You shouldn't ought to covet your neighbor's wife," I don't think about how good a thing that is to do, instead, I think about how good-looking my neighbor's wife is. Like when you see a sign that says "Keep Off The Grass," even though you never might have even thought about walking on that grass and you're not even headed that way, don't you just want to go step on it anyway?

Or think of it this way. Think of someone who doesn't know God, or someone who's made a mess of their own lives, crying out to God and saying "God, make me like You!" And then God saying "OK, you wanna be like Me? These ten things are all you have to do." And then you would be like "Screw this!"

I mean, the Law was impossible to keep. And it sure wasn't fun, with all the do's and don'ts, and they had to keep on top of that sacrificing business, all the time. And it didn't so much make anything better, maybe, but it did kind of show them what God was like, and anyway Christians believe that it pointed the way toward "things to come".

Part V: The Gospel According To John (J. Doolittle)

Disclaimer: If you're one of those who thinks you should just read the Bible in church, you'd best skip this section. And most of this stuff I know pretty well, but if I've messed anything up it's just because I wrote it off the top of my head. Obviously, I'm not a preacher or anything.

......A couple thousand years passed.

In Israel, there was a time of Kings, a time of Judges, there were prophets and wars and upheavals. Israel itself was split into two kingdoms for a while, and every time an empire rose, they marched right in and took over. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and finally the Romans.

Relatively speaking, the Romans weren't so bad. When they took over a place, they sent in governors and troops and what not, but they left in place whatever government was already there, more or less. They didn't care what religion you were or what language you spoke or how you cut your hair; they really didn't even care if you liked them or not, as long as you paid your tribute to Caesar. They didn't enslave anyone or slaughter people for no reason or herd them all into relocation camps. As far as world-conquering dictators go, Caesar wasn't such a bad sort.

The Israelites still kept their law and their Temple made their sacrifices and all that. The problem, I think, is that all of this stuff was supposed to mean something, and whether they forgot it, or never quite figured it out, or just plain didn't care, I don't know. I guess they just figured, God told us to do this stuff, so we'll do it. On the one hand you had these folks called the Pharisees, who were kind of a ruling class, very legalistic and strict and judgemental. On the other hand you had the Sadducees, who were kind of the liberals, the intellectuals, who questioned and debated or just just outright denied every little point of the Law. Basically these guys were the ruling class, the privileged, well-educated.

This was the situation when Jesus came onto the scene.

Now, if you've ever seen a movie about Jesus, it probably started off with a little bit about the Christmas story and the manger and all that, and then skipped ahead 30 years to where He's starting His public ministry and folks are standing around scratching their heads and saying "Who is this guy? Where did He come from?" But I don't think it was like that. The whole point of the Christmas story is that He was born just like a regular guy. Luke said that Jesus "grew in stature." so folks knew Who He was. They knew His family and all that, and when He started preaching they were like "Isn't this Jesus of Nazareth?" To you and me, it sounds like a big deal, but back then, to them, it was like "Isn't this Joey from Nebraska?" Not because they didn't know him, but because they did. He was a guy from the neighborhood.

Now, folks in Israel were used to dealing with prophets. I mean, they didn't see prophets all the time, but they knew what a prophet was and knew that from time to time one came along. In fact, they'd just been seeing John the Baptist preaching in their streets not too long before this. Prophets walked around saying "Thus sayeth the Lord, thus sayeth the Lord" all the time, just so you didn't get the wrong idea about Who they were representing. They always preached judgement and repentance and wrath. Folks in Israel knew what a prophet was, and how to deal with them, but they didn't know quite what to make of Jesus.

For one thing, He didn't talk like a prophet. He didn't say "Thus sayeth the Lord," when He spoke, He said "Verily, verily, I say unto you...." which to us seems kind of strange. We might think it's just an affectation, an expression, like saying "I'm telling you, man" but it was more serious than that. The things Jesus was speaking about were like God and eternity and the Law, and these folks took that stuff very seriously. Not like today, where everyone has and opinion and no one really cares anyway. These folks based their whole culture around this stuff, and spent their lives studying it, and here comes this Guy speaking with authority. We hear "Verily, verily, I say unto you...." and we wonder what does verily mean and why say it twice in a row (it means "truly," by the way), but they didn't so much hear the "verily" as they did the "I". When He spoke about spiritual things or Godly things, He wasn't speaking as or claiming to be a prophet, He was claiming to be God. And they didn't miss that.

Now, Jesus did preach judgement and repentance, it's true. but His overall mesage spoke about things they probably never gave much thought to, like faith and mercy and love and forgiveness. The law didn't provide for any of these things except for maybe the occasional brutal, bloody sacrifice.

And then, to top it off, He criticized them. He told them that they had it all wrong. You folks hear "Don't murder," He said, and so you don't actually murder, and yet you're so full of hate and rage that you're just as guilty as if you did. You hear "Don't commit adultery," and so you just stare at every thing in a skirt and undress her with your eyes. So you avoid the act, but you carry it around in your heart and that's where the sin is.

Now think about it for a minute. These were God's Chosen People, God gave them the Law and as far as they knew they'd been keeping it. And now, Jesus is telling them something new: Not that the Law doesn't matter, or that it's not valid, but that it's simply not enough.

Say you're Stephen Hawking and you know more about theoretical physics than any other man alive. And say you just found out that that everything you knew about theoretical physics was just Chapter One. Wouldn't you be pissed? That's kind of how it was for these guys.

Anyway, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were. They hated Jesus so much that they almost forgot to hate each other. This one time, this group of them approached Jesus and said "So, should we ought to be paying taxes to Rome?"

They didn't ask out of curiousity, and it wasn't just thought up on the spur of the moment. They'd been debating this very point for years. You see, the Pharisees hated the Romans because they were Pagans, and they wanted nothing to do with them, and anything they might do to help the Romans was seen as treasonous. The Sadducees were wishy-washy and wanted to get along with the Romans, and I guess kind of felt like the Romans were there whether they liked it or not. So if Jesus says yes, pay taxes, then the Pharisees brand Him a traitor to the Jews, and if He says no, the Sadducees get him in trouble with the government.

Jesus showed them the image of Caesar on this coin, and said "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Basically, that they were arguing politics and forgetting about the stuff that was really important. But more than that, by pointing to the image of Caesar and saying it was Caesar's, He was telling them something: As anyone who ever went to Kindergarten in sunday school, man was made in God's image, and our very lives are what God is due.

Anyway...

So Jesus goes around upsetting folks; some people love Him, some people hate Him, and some just totally freak out. And at one point some Pharisees bring a woman into the Temple courtyard to stone her to death, and they tell Jesus that they just caught her in the act of adultery. They say now, the Law says that she should be put to death, what do you say? They wanted Him to contradict the Law, so He would hang Himself. But He didn't answer right away. He leaned over and wrote something in the dirt. So they asked Him again, and He says "Let he among you without sin cast the first stone." and then went back to writing in the dirt. Everybody felt so guilty after that that they left. All but the woman, and He just told her "Go, and sin no more."

He was always telling people "Go". Go, sin no more. Go, spread the word. Go, baptize in My name. Get thee behind Me.

Now it's true that the Law says that adulterers were to be put to death. It's in Leviticus 20:10 if you want to check it out. But if these guys caught her in the act, then they sure didn't catch her alone. You can't adulterate all by yourself (I think there's another word for that). I wonder where the guy was? Maybe he was a buddy of theirs, or maybe they let him go, or maybe he was even standing right there with them. The point is, they claimed to be so worried about the Law, and they weren't even following it. The next thing I wonder is what He was scratching in the dirt. It says it in the Bible (John 8:1-11). It even says it twice. I wonder was He just writing the names of their girlfriends? Like one guy might have looked down and seen Him writing "Betty Jo Johnson" and then been all "OK, see you guys later."

The point is, He accepted the woman, He forgave her. He asked her, Who is there here to judge you now? And she was all, "Well....no one, I reckon..." and he was like Then I won't judge you, either. But He did one more thing, and that is, He said "Go, and sin no more." He didn't say Don't worry about that adultery stuff, you make up your own mind about that. She knew what was right and what was wrong. He didn't let her off the hook. He accepted her, just as she was, but then he let her know that He had requirements of her. There wasn't any mistaking that.

They went back and forth like this with Jesus a long time. What they really wanted was to kill Him, but they couldn't do it under the Law. They were kind of like those kids on the cereal commercial, going "Iiiiiiiiiiii'm not gonna kill Him, you kill Him!"

See, God had promised a Messiah a long time before this, as far back as the time of Isaiah and Daniel. The thing was, most folks expected a warrior, a King, someone who would drive out the Romans and restore the Kingdom. And for another thing, Jesus never came on real strong like "Hey, I'm the Messiah, follow Me!" He just said "Follow me" and let folks figure out for themselves Who He was.

Well, finally, they all had about enough, and they went and took Jesus to the High Priest. He said, are you the Messiah? And Jesus said, You said it. So, like, people who follow Me say it, and now the people trying to kill Me are saying it. In other words, there wasn't any mistaking Who He was and what they were doing. So they turned Him over to the Romans. Now, the Romans didn't want to kill Him. They didn't see anything wrong with a guy saying He was a god. They had a hundred gods anyway, what did they care?

Now, ya'll know the story. They crucified Him.

Now, remember in the Law, the whole lamb thing? Remember how it had to be perfect, without blemish? This is how come they call Jesus the Lamb of God. And remember that big old curtain in the Temple that divided God's half of the room from man's half? When Jesus died, the Bible says, this curtain ripped right down the center, so that there wasn't anything separating God from man any more. That was it.

Now, if you believe this stuff, or even if you just understand it, then maybe you understand why He died like that. Remember how I said that God is love, but God is also judgement? Well, because he loves us, He took the judgement on Himself. Anyway, this is what I believe, and what Christians have believed for centuries.

Now, as if it's not enough that He died, He also did something else. He came back. You know, before I understood all this, I didn't really get this part. If all this stuff about the Law and the sacrifice is true, and if He became the ultimate sacrifice Himself, why did He have to come back? Isn't it like a big show or something? I don't know. But somebody once told me that Death just couldn't hold Him. That He conquered Death. That it really was all over.

Any questions?

(From The Mailbag October 2)

...I think it's great that you can believe in something so serious and still laugh about it

Well, sure. Anyway it's how I explain stuff.