God and the World
Knowing God includes the knowledge about the world God created. Without knowing the world, a person has partial knowledge about God. Church life has limit to experience God the Creator who “loved the world.” What are in the world God loved? What can we do to make the world pleasant to the eyes of God? However, churches have taken a wrong direction and separated themselves from the world. They condemned the world as evil, and never questioned why they labeled the world God once loved as evil. Did God love the evil world? Did the world became evil, and God doesn’t love it anymore? This mainly resulted from the teachings of the early church fathers, who undermined the sovereignty of God the Creator and obsessed with preserving religious church life. God still loves the world where we live in. Jesus was sent for it. We are sent for it. Therefore, knowing the world is as important as knowing about church life because it is a part of knowing God. How can we know God without knowing the world we live in?
It is easy to identify who are in the world. Anyone who is not in the church membership. They are poor elderly, homeless, disabled, orphans, singled, LGBTQ, and religiously discriminated. The universe is in the hands of humans, but there are abuses after abuses in every corners of the world. Natural resources are replaced with profit making resources. Animals are abused. Relationship and human rights are abused as well. This reminds us of the state of precreation, void and despair. This is the reason God sent Jesus, and us to the world, to heal the world, to bring peace and hope to the world.