Week 2 - Character of God

So this week we learned about the Character of God. There were a couple things that I think really stood out to me. First, God never intended death. When we look back at Adam and Eve, God planned to have an intimate relationship (even with physical interaction) in the Garden. Water didn't have the strength to wash people into the ocean, or kill people, death just didn't exist. I think it is hard to understand sometimes, but that was God's plan. He wanted us to have such a crazy relationship with him that we never died and that we could always just chill and love on him. Everything changed after The Fall though. Death started to exist, but that doesn't mean that God wanted death. Because of his love, he gave Adam and Eve free will and ultimately they used that to make the wrong choice, and death was introduced into our world. If you look at the history of Israel though, God was constantly trying to regain relationship with us that he once had, and obviously that reaches the pinnacle with Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection. God created so many different sacrificial laws to atone for sins, and he created the ten commandments so that we knew what not to do and what to do, there were priests who could intercede with God on behalf of the Israelites, there was The Holy of Holies where the priest would come into the presence of God in the temple once every year (if I am not mistaken). All of this I think points to God wanting that relationship back because of the crazy change after The Fall. Back to my point though, God never intended death. I don't think there is punishment for people anymore. I don't think God kills people because they did something bad (maybe there are examples, but I don't think so). On the cross, Jesus took all of our sins, and all the "punishment" (which if you look back in some verses that say God "punishes", the Hebrew translation often has a varied meaning, some that give a much different meaning than punishes) on the cross. This doesn't mean there aren't consequences. Of course there will be consequences if we sin! I mean, look at robbery for example. If there was no consequence in robbing a store, why wouldn't we do it? Sin is the same. Of course there is a consequence, but God tells us what we can do to glorify him, and he assures us that he loves us. A key verse about the Character of God is Exodus 34:6-7.  So I think that kinda combined a bunch of different things about the week that I learned... so I'm going to finish at that, but if you want to talk more about Character of God, I would love to ;D