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As you watch TV, listen to your favorite music, or just play a fun video game, you may find yourself asking these questions:  Why does it matter what I watch?  What difference will my choice of music really make?  How could the media possibly effect me?  We can either decide to conform to the world, or to stand strong in our faith.  Take this study to see what you do.

Are you depressed yet? These headlines appeared recently on cnn.com. If we look again tomorrow, we will find several others just as depressing. Headlines like these keep some people from believing in a good God. “If there is a God, and if He is good,” they ask, “then why are 2.1 million children dying of AIDS? Doesn’t God care? Or is He too weak to do anything about it?”

The Old Testament certainly does not portray a weak God. “See the day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it.” (Isaiah 13:9) Some people read the Old Testament’s descriptions of the wrath and judgment of God and protest. “If God is good, why does He threaten such terrible punishment against those who break His laws? How can a good God condemn any man to hell? Can’t He just forgive and forget?”

With these two arguments, it would seem that God cannot win. Either He is too weak to do away with evil, or He is too harsh in His punishments of sin. What is God to do? These arguments do not come with easy answers. But they do come with answers.

Two pictures of God?

When we compare the Old Testament and the New Testament, it sometimes seems like we read about two different gods. The Old Testament seems to speak of wrath and judgment against sin, the New Testament of love and mercy. But Yahweh is one! He is unchanging, and therefore always just and always merciful. Somehow these two opposites beautifully co-exist in the character of God.

The New Testament does not hold a monopoly on the mercy of God. A verse in Isaiah describes God’s judgment as “his strange work,” and “his alien task.” When God speaks words of judgment, He does so in mercy. He aims to turn his wayward people from their idols back into His waiting embrace.

Just a few passages after predicting God’s fearful judgment on Jerusalem, the prophet Micah says this: “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.” (Micah 6:18) The Hebrew word translated “delight” literally means “to laugh at.” God delights to show mercy just as we delight in the exuberant joy of a child receiving a gift.

A.W. Tozer explains it well:

Both the Old and New Testaments proclaim the mercies of God, but the Old has more than four times as much to say about it as the New. We should banish from our minds forever the common but erroneous notion that justice and judgment characterize the God of Israel, while mercy and grace belong to the Lord of the Church…Wherever and whenever God appears to men, He acts like Himself. Whether in the Garden of Eden or the Garden of Gethsemane, God is merciful as well as just.

Tozer points us to two gardens, one known for the ultimate problem, and the other, for the ultimate solution. In both these gardens God demonstrates justice and mercy. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve disobeyed the commandment of God. With that choice sin entered the world, and with it, sin’s consequences: pain in childbirth, struggles between the sexes, a cursed earth that brings up thorns and thistles, toilsome labor, and finally death. When we watch the news or read the newspapers or even experience suffering in our own lives we experience these consequences.

So where is the mercy?

God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden so that they could not also take and eat from the tree of life and live forever. Without the possibility of death, mankind would live forever separated from God. God’s punishment for sin provides Adam and Eve and their descendents (us!) with the possibility of reconciliation to Him—through the death of a perfect man, Jesus Christ.

In the Garden of Gethsemane we see God making humanity’s mistakes right. There was only one way to do that. In that garden the one Man who could stand before God in righteousness, prayed “not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42). God’s will required justice, and God’s penalty for sin is death (Romans 6:23). Like any honest judge who must convict the guilty man of his crime, no matter how compassionate he might feel toward the repentant sinner, God cannot allow sin to go unpunished. And I would not want Him to allow this.

If the U.S. government had no system of justice, what would happen? Evil men would be free to wreak havoc on the innocent with no fear of penalty. We need a strong force of honest men and women to keep the peace in our country. We need a strong God to keep the peace in our world. Without God’s punishment of sin, evil wins.

The murder, the drugs, the corruption, we see on the news each evening is not evidence of God’s weakness or non-existence. It is evidence of humanity’s sin. The proclamations of judgment we see in the Bible are not evidence of a cruel or unreasonable God out to annihilate the world. God proclaims judgment to show us our need for mercy. Again Tozer has it right when he says, “Were there no guilt in the world, no pain and no tears, God would yet be infinitely merciful; but His mercy might well remain hidden in His heart, unknown to the created universe. No voice would be raised to celebrate the mercy of which none felt the need. It is human mercy and sin that call forth the divine mercy.”

After God created the world, He looked at His work and proclaimed it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Then Adam and Eve introduced sin into the very good world that God had made. Now when we look around we only see glimpses of God’s very goodness—the miracle of a baby’s laugh, a sunset that makes us catch our breath, a fireman running into a collapsing tower to save a stranger. But we also see a game warden killed after a traffic stop, a girls’ school burned down, and a 10-year-old girl whose life ended too soon.

When we look at the evil in the world we long for God to make it right. We long for His justice. The Bible tells us that justice will come. God will unleash His wrath and judgment on the evil in this world. He will make all things new so that once more He can look at the work of His hands and proclaim, “It is very good.” This is the mercy of God. He takes humanity’s wrongs and makes them right. He offers forgiveness to all who choose it. He has made the ultimate sacrifice, giving His only Son over to death so that He can offer life to all those who believe. Justice. Mercy.

So for now evil lives in the world. Our headlines prove that. But one day in the future, the headlines will read differently. “God makes His dwelling place with people” “God wipes away every tear” “Death is no more” “No more mourning nor crying nor pain” Then He who is seated on the throne will say, “Behold, I am making all things new…It is done!” God has told us the end of the story. He asks only for our trust as He works to bring our happy ending to pass.

Still questioning why there is suffering in the world? Read our article to get more insight

Would you let go of your child if it meant giving them a better life?

These kids come from neighborhoods where guns and drugs, gangs and violence are the norm.  They move into a group home with a focus on academics, healthy living and community service.  For boys and girls who complete the program 100% of them go on to college.

It is an incredible opportunity, but as I watched the show I couldn’t help but think of what it costs these parents to let their children go. Boys and girls can enter the program as young as 12 years old.  How do you let your 12 year old go and live with someone else? What depth of selfless love does it take to help them pack, to let them move into a world that you yourself do not live in?

I was in awe of these parents.

Every parent wants the very best for their child but not every parent has the same resources to make it happen. There are good schools and bad schools, families with plenty and families that struggle to put food on the table.   What these parents had in spades is love and also hope.  They believed that their kids could have a better life and they were willing to break their own hearts to give it to them.  You can’t eat hope, but you can live off it, for a little while at least.

I remember hearing in biology class years ago that hope can, literally save your life.  There was an experiment done years ago involving rats and buckets of water.  The first group of rats were left to swim in the water until they died of exhaustion.  The second group was left to swim, then taken out and allowed to rest and then put back in the water.  The second group swam hours longer than the first and scientists concluded that it was because they had hope that they would be allowed to rest again.

For these parents, they have hope that their daughters will grow up to be strong women, that they will go to college and become anything they want to be.  That hope is so strong that they wipe away their own tears and let their children go.  That’s a powerful hope.  What do you hope for?

Read Sandra’s story of finding hope and a future and the day that changed everything.

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Ever run into a self-righteous loudmouthed Christian online?

Jonathan Acuff is the author of Stuff Christians Like, a blog that pokes gentle fun at Christian culture using humor and perceptive critiques. His post today for CNN is provocatively titled: “My Take: Why Christians are jerks online.” He identifies two reasons he sees as being major contributors.

The first is the separation of online and offline personalities. Online, people can become effectively anonymous. This anonymity removes most of the consequences from our actions. It’s a lot easier to make a caustic comment when you don’t have to witness the hurt it caused.

The second is that sometimes arguing about trivial things (like popular music or having a sip of wine with dinner) is easier than discussing real, heartfelt topics and loving one another. Acuff points out how paradoxical the idea of a “Jerk Christian” really is:

Much like “Christian hate mail,” being a “Jerk Christian” defies logic. …  In Matthew 22 someone asks Jesus, “What is the most important commandment?” The answer is simple: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Before I became Christian, I grew up in a secular home, and I generally had the mindset that Christians were all just hypocrites. Later I realized that the “being a jerk” problem is not a unique Christian problem, it’s a human problem. Despite good intentions, everyone fails sometimes, and acknowledging this should cause us (whether Christian or not) to be gracious to those around us.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for the problems Christians cause, and my own lack of grace when I’ve posted online, which doesn’t accurately reflect the type of people Christians should be. I wish I, and we, could better love our neighbors.

Yet, despite the failures of God’s followers, there is hope. I’m strengthened by the fact that just because people cause problems, that doesn’t that mean that God is not great. I hope that my sometimes less than stellar behavior, and those of other followers of Christ, does not push people away from God, but somehow can be a reminder that we all face the same problem: The hypocrisy of our own hearts. Acuff ends his post by saying:

Jesus came for the mess-ups like us. Jesus came for the failures. Jesus came for the jerks. (That’s not in the King James version of the Bible, I remixed it like Timbaland.) And the truth is, grace is the antidote to being a jerk online.

I wholeheartedly agree, and hope that I will take this message to heart.

Have you ever had a bad experience with someone and their religious views online? Or have you realized that you were the one being less than gracious? Let us know below.