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You may have been listening
when I talked about why Christ came to earth, and the point was that although in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, there
were times when God punished even His Chosen People, the Jewish people, for disobeying Him, or worshipping other gods. But
I countered with the fact that Jesus came to earth in human form with a better way, with His Father’s blessing.
And I’ll go a bit farther with that, with an example. Time after time, especially before David became
King, he would ask God to cut down those who were trying to kill him. He wanted revenge against those mean people.
But that Better Way I mentioned, was that Jesus came to be with us as The Christ, and His Way was “love”
and “forgiveness.” He said that if we fail to forgive those who do us wrong, that He won’t be able to forgive
us for our own sins. And in the book of Matthew, chapter 18, when the Apostle Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive
another person, and asked, “seven times?” Jesus said, “nay I say unto thee, until seventy times seven.”
And of course what He meant was not 490 times, but as many times as he was wronged.
That’s hard. There are people who find that you’re what they term a “softie,” and
they take advantage of you with lies or whatever they choose to get what they want. Even nations are like that. You know the
old saying…”If you want to get things better, get in a war with the United States and lose; then they’ll
take care of you.” Witness Germany and Japan after World War Two…their cities were in shambles from our bombings,
so we went in and made it possible for them to rebuild. But God sees, and I believe we’re the better for our helping
others.
Be Christ-like as much as possible. He’s a good role model.
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