A little background from my other blog~

So yes, I believe in God and Jesus Christ. I believe He died for us. I however do not claim to know it all, or even half of it. Some days I'm "'high' on Jesus" and other days I miserably try have faith and sit there wondering "what's wrong with me? I can't do this! Christianity sucks!". I've sworn at God (seriously, yes, I have), I've rejected Him (multiple times), I've done all that and more. But at the same time, somewhere down inside me I know God is the God my mother told me about as a baby, a toddler, a young child and now as a young teen. He loves me. A LOT. He's my best friend. How you pray isn't as important as that you try. He LOVES you. He doesn't expect you to be perfect. He doesn't want you to be miserable, or sad. He LOVES you. He doesn't expect you to know everything. He LOVES you. All that matters is that HE LOVES YOU, and the rest will come.
Yet I still struggle. To have the faith I used to have...oh I would do anything for it! To just be content loving God and being loved by Him, confiding in Him, and doing things He'd like.

Oh man, I miss it so much...but I'll shut up now about that. On to what I started this blog for!

HERE I've found an article that gave me some insight to some things. I think I'll give this whole thing another try after this...I'll let you know how that works =)

Here are my favorite parts (basically I'm quoting it all LOL...sorry!):

I had read in the New Testament that "the wages of sin is death." I now realized that "wages" are not a gift or a punishment. They are simply what we deserve, the natural result of our work. On payday you don't go to your boss, get down on your knees and say, "Oh, please, be kind and generous and give me my paycheck." You expect to be paid. It is the natural result of doing your work.

This helped me because: It just sort of confirms what I've always said about my disease. He didn't put this upon me! Yes, He allows it, because of reasons we don't know, but He is not the source of my suffering! And guess what JDMS? Guess what Asthma? Guess what everything-else-that's-afflicting-me? I'm GLAD I've gotten to suffer through it. I am a better person from it. Mary had to suffer through critisism, hate and judgement, but how else would Jesus be born? Look at what good has come from the pain =)

I had always said: "If God created man and man has an evil side to him, then why should God blame man for acting the way He made him?" (In the long run it seemed as though evil were God's fault, not man's).

But as I studied further, I saw that God had created man with freedom to respond to God's love and love Him back. For love to be real, a person has to be free to choose to love (and free to choose not to). For example, I want my wife to freely choose to love me, not to be forced into it.

If God had told Adam, "Here, do anything you ant. There is nothing you can do that would be wrong," then there would have been no way for Adam to express his love and obedience toward God. If nothing was forbidden, then Adam couldn't choose to obey God since there would be no possible way to disobey.

So God gave Adam a choice. He said, "Don't eat from this tree." The moment God said that, the tree became "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." I think the tree was a neutral object from God's point of view. He could just as easily have said, "Don't touch that stick" or "don't pick up that rock." Then we would have had the "stick" or the "rock" of the knowledge of good and evil." Until this time Adam had never personally chosen good or evil. If Adam had chosen to obey, he would have gained a personal knowledge of God. As it was, he chose to disobey and gained an experience of evil.

In choosing to disobey God, Adam died spiritually. In turning away from God's command, Adam's intimate fellowship with God was broken - his "spiritual eyes" went dead and he could no longer experience God.

But guess what? Jesus gave us NEW LIFE! Ta-da!

In the physical realm we know that some damage (such as radiation) can be so profound that a genetic mutation takes place and every generation after that is affected. Something like "spiritual mutation" took place when Adam sinned, and everyone since that time has been born physically and soulishly" alive but spiritually dead - cut off from God.

My first thought was, "This seems unfair. That means I have to suffer for something Adam did thousands of years ago." But I soon realize that there were many times when I had consciously chosen to do things that I knew were wrong. If I hadn't inherited spiritual death, I would have cut myself off from God through my own choices! And I saw that God couldn't just forgive or overlook man's sin - to do so would take away his freedom and make him less than human.

Uh, yeah...that makes a lot more sense now!

I learned that Jesus not only died physically on the cross--He died spiritually. While Jesus hung there, God the Father reached back in time and took the spiritual death that had been generated by Adam and those who came after him and placed it on Jesus Christ. Then (because He created time and lives outside of it) God looked forward in time and took all the spiritual death generated by you and me and all the other men and women who will be born until the end of time and put that death on Jesus too.

Now I could see why Jesus cried, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?" He was experiencing to the fullest the spiritual death generated by countless men and women throughout the ages. He literally experienced spiritual hell on the cross as He was cut off from God, even though He committed no sin and was not deserving of death. He actually died spiritually in our place.

One thing, continued to puzzle me. I could see how Jesus, if He lived a perfect life and therefore was never unplugged from God, could die spiritually for one other man's sin (and it seemed logical that He would have to stay dead eternally). But I couldn't understand how Jesus as one man could possibly die and stay dead for only a few days - the Bible says He was resurrected three days later - and still manage to pay off several billion eternities of separation from God.

I found the answer while I was a student at San Francisco State College. I asked a math major who lived in my dorm about this, and he replied, "You've forgotten that Jesus, though Hew was in human form, was actually the infinite God. If He had suffered spiritual death for even 10 minutes, He would have generated more than enough death to pay for the 100 billion eternities of separation from God. Remember He was giving up infinite life, and infinity multiplied times anything still equals infinity."

Why didn't I think of any of this before?

Why, if Jesus' death paid for all the spiritual death for all the ages, do men still experience separation from God? Then I realized that God still can't violate our free will without making us subhuman. God has gone to great trouble and sacrifice to provide forgiveness for us and to restore us to fellowship with Himself. Forgiveness and a new spirit are free gifts that He offers us. If we refuse His gift, we will continue to experience spiritual death, and when our physical life ends, we will be cut off eternally from God and His love.

Those who accept Christ's death as payment for their spiritual death are given new "spiritual eyes". They are again complete in body, soul and spirit. For the man who has this new nature within him, physical death is no threat. When the soul sheds the physical body, the man himself continues to grow and have fellowship with God through His spirit.

Thank you Allen Scholes for writing this stuff out... This really has given me a new understanding of things... Maybe it's coincidence that at 1:18 AM on a school night I'm still up on the computer (because of feeling the need to be on just a little longer, waiting for "something") and came across your article, or maybe it's God. Either way, you've been a blessing in my life.