My Sunday school teacher hammered into use (figuratively) that we can’t know if Judas’ betrayal was necessary, and in any case, we ought not focus on his perceived sins and shortcomings when we have so many of our own. He said that we should hope that Judas is waiting in heaven, as it would bode well for our own salvation.
This is my opinion, I am not a degreed theologian, and last time I called God on the phone He didn’t see fit to answer…
IMO, God forgives everything. But we still need to repent (which Judas did) and accept the forgiveness; therefore, the question is not whether God forgave Judas (and Caligula, and the Borgias, and everybody else), but whether Judas has forgiven himself. For Caligula, the question would appear to be in the earlier step: has Caligula repented?
I’ve read a translated version of the Gospel of Judas, it’s quite an interesting read and it is a Gnostic text.
As a non-believer it makes more sense to me that in order to be consistent Judas had to be “in on the plan” otherwise he would have gone against the will of any supreme being, which is presumably not possible.
When I was younger, I always thought Judas got a raw deal. I think Jesus and Judas talked it over and Judas had to take one for the team, as it were.
Or, what **Walker **said.
Presumably not. However, I suspect that it is eminently possible to do as you wish for your own ends in complete ignorance of the fact that you are actually advancing God’s ends, let alone any intention to do so, which is the view of Judas’s actions that is more generally supported.
As to the Gospel of Judas, I’ll leave the criticism of it to those better-qualified. I believe there’s been some hereabouts before now.
It is God’s redemptive plan, He knew that we would chose to sin if we went our own way, He allowed it because He had a plan to allow us to come home.
You mean Jehovah’s Witness?- but either way I have never defined myself as such. I do define myself as a follower of Jesus, I don’t subscribe to the doctrines of any single denomination, but think they all have things of God mixed with things of man and it is God that allows discernment for the believer of what is of Him and what is not. I do attend worship at several churches as lead.
The question concerning Judas is actually a very interesting one that has interested theologians for a very long time.
The question actually hinges on the word translated into English as “repent”
If this means just felt sorry for, or regretted then most evangelical scholars and lay people alike would argue that he did not receive the forgiveness offered to him.*
If it means a change of heart/mind/action than he did receive the forgiveness offered.
Also Judas’s betrayal is no worse than our own. We have all rebelled against the God of the universe, and are living lives of sin, none of us deserve the grace and mercy of God. But thankfully by the grace of God he sent Jesus to pay our price for us, thus if we believe on him, and repent (with the concept of changing heart/mind and then followed by actions) we can be saved!
Note: There are some evangelicals who would argue that the feeling sorry for idea is enough.
As hard as it is for conservative Christians to accept, as a commie, liberal, Evangelical Lutheran I believe (on those days I believe anything) that Jesus died for ALL our sins, and that God is a merciful and understanding god who can see our heart of hearts, and makes allowances for our imperfections. And we have plenty of imperfections, not being God, and all. So Judas? Hell, Hitler gets a Get Out of Hell (sorta) Free card. Hell is merely the full understanding of ones imperfections. Adolph started out as a good Catholic (Austrian=Catholic, right?) boy, and if he didn’t wrestle with guilt he must’ve been some sort of crazy, and crazy is an out.
And if any of you breathe a word of this to my pastor I will be embarrassed. I’m his pet atheist and it would make his day if he learned that some of what he preaches has been not only absorbed, but embroidered.
The scriptures state that Judas’s betrayal is worse then our own, because so much was revealed to him much is required. But the grace of God is enough to redeem all.
I did mean that, and I apologise for the mistake.
God knows all things according to your belief, therefore He knew before He created man that he would sin, so there should be no need for redemption.
The way you describe God according to your beliefs, He is a terrible Father who loves to see unnecessary suffering and you give Satan as much power over humans as God. Again knowing all things, He knew Satan would steal a lot of souls, yet God punished man for eating from a tree that He told them not to eat from and let Satan have a lot of power and joy in taking people from Him!
Monavis
Well, according to Dante’s Inferno, Judas is condemned to the innermost Circle of Hell, and one of the 3 guys being personally seen to by Lucifer himself, apparently being eaten, over and over again (the other two being Brutus and Cassius for murdering Julius Caesar, if you must know). One hopes Judas bought himself a real good time with those pieces of silver to make up for it.
You ask me, he got the same raw deal Lucifer himself got - made in a specific way to fail in a specific way for God’s plan to work (or to make God’s point), and then punished for following his nature. But then, you could say that of every man I suppose…
Your last point is really what bugs me about this whole damn thing. How can I reconcile the belief that every individual (and essentially every thing down to the last quark or whatever) is just a cog in the universal machine, and the idea that all these poor souls have to suffer hell for sins that were inevitable from the start? Maybe there’s no reconciliation to do for people who believe in “true” free will, but what is that anyway? We make our decisions according to our nature and the sum of our past experiences, and its impossible to do anything else: if time was to rewind 5 minutes right now and loop forever, I would be writing this exact post forever–I wouldn’t, say, after the 500th loop suddenly write something completely different, and I have no more choice in the matter than a domino in a chain. How can God punish souls with eternal agony for sins that were an inevitable result of events set in motion “in the beginning” by his own hands?
I agree with both of the previous two posts. As an atheist I accept free will, but if I oput my non belief to one side for a moment and accept the exisitence of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, then even if free will still exists, bu virtue of his/her/its omniscience the outcome will be known to the creator in advance and therefore is inevitable.
To relate this to the current topic, God and therefore Jesus must have been aware of Judas’ actions (whether they were planned with Jesus’ consent or not) and therefore they must have been accounted for in the divine plan.
QED Judas, like Lucifer, never stood an chance.
Heh.
God doesn’t know what will happen. He knows what is happening, right now. TO us, it is the future. To him, it is the eternal present. You are assuming he deliberately controlled what he created in order to assure a certain outcome. I assure that Christians do not believe this generally (Calvinists, maybe). God is playing a game of Poker with billions of living beings with the world’s biggest smile. Satan is over there bluffing that he has any cards at all, and we are stuck in the middle eiher playing ouir hands or begging for more cards to play.
That’s really a cute analogy, but it only makes sense if you haven’t understood (or ignore) Kobal and my points, among others. I’ll try to say what I mean a little better: God’s playing a poker game that he designed straight from the ground up. He’s stacked every single one of the cards, by creating the universe exactly the way he did and no different. If you know every single card in the deck and out on the table, you would be able to guess what would happen, accounting for human randomness. If you also knew the humans through and through (say, you created them) then you would know the future. If you knew the exact state of the universe down to the last atom in one instant, and created the very laws that govern it, you would sure as hell know exactly what will happen in the very next instant, and could continue to extrapolate forever into the future.
At the very moment of creation all the domino lines of causality were already put into place; it was just a matter of it coming to pass through the passage of time. My point is that he doesn’t even have to be interfering in the middle of things as they happen, because he already designed every event just in the act of setting creating the universe–every event is caused by the ones before it, all the way back to the big bang (or whatever it was). If he didn’t, he is then less malicious perhaps, but more incompetent.
I fully understand your points. I completely and utterly disagree with your premises and assumptions.
There is no such thing as “human randomness.” Just choice. God gave it to you, and he’ll persuade you to his side, but he will not force you to do anything. It’s your choice, period, to do anything within your power (which is considerable). There’s no predestination, no dominos, no causality. The entire universe is in large part a stage for us to do whatever we want; a nursery or play-room in a manner of speaking. But he universe, Nature if you will, is our sister, and has no authority to command us at all.
I dunno about you, but I make decisions with my mind. In my mind, my knowledge and memories and personality and preferences and moods battle with one another about what should be done - and the resulting action is the one driven by the decision-making factors that are strongest at that moment. Taking account the possibility of a little randomity slightly varying which impulses will win near-tie contests, the strongest impulses will win - meaning that there is basically only one way I can possibly have acted. The battle of impulses is the manner in which I “choose” what to do, but in the end, there was only one possible outcome of that choosing process.
I don’t know of anyone whose mind seems to work any differently than this. If somebody’s did, if they actually had “choice”, their mental processes would be completely foreign to me and I would undoubtedly consider them to be insane.
To the rest of us, though there is choosing, there is only one outcome. A god who knew us “intimitely” would know it too, in advance. (At the beginning of time, if there’s no randomity.) Such a god would hold all the cards.
THAT’S what happened to them? I thought they went extinct the same time as the dinosaurs. But living in Syria had to be a drag for marine cephalopods.
Note: Locrian’s spelling fixed for the sake of the gag.