Can God feel pain?

[davo]

Love includes emotion.

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Abhor

regard with disgust and hatred

IF one holds to “inspiration” then it is hard to question IF the One giving such inspiration can so instruct IF said One knew none of this itself.

What can you give as advise to actually making the step, extending the hand so to speak? (with the understanding that the two of you: being yourself and the one you are having issues with: just don’t get along…)

This is where something like this might apply to a believer…

Rom 12:18 If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.

The reality is such might not always be possible, BUT the injunction to attempt such is there for the believer to as best possible exercise.

1. When I was a teenager, I used to sit in my room alone and feel “love” for my girlfriend with such intensity that I thought my chest would burst. Was that love? I say no. What say you?

Well whatever it is you have come to conclude about such “intensity”… it was clearly an emotion.

[Agnostic_Gabe]

This is somewhat hilarious… I did a good search “Can God feel pain?” and I was brought to my own thread I created a year ago. As I was in the shower thinking again wondering if God feels pain. Does he really care? I then thought of 1st Cor 13 and some the descriptions are long suffering… Either long suffering is not love, and thus not a part of God, or God is not love, and the third most likely scenario that God does indeed suffer because he is love and love is long suffering.

Someone asked “Do we want God to feel pain? and suffer?” Well, that is precisely the reason I think we should answer the question. If God does not feel pain or suffer, than anything I do against him is merely bad for me, not him. That means, in a sense, me loving him is merely self serving and has nothing to do with the love described in 1st Cor 13. It is not love at all, but self interest.

For example - God calls us to “Love your God will all your heart, soul, strength and mind” yet love is:

Love is patient (some translations;long suffering) and kind
love does not envy or boast
it is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way
it is not irritable or resentful
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.

Can I not show patience towards God? Can I not be arrogant and rude towards him? Can I also not insist on my own way? Can I not be resentful towards him?

Yet, one thing I might have learned through my most recent episode is affliction is that I am violated that type of love because:

1. I am not patient for him to complete his work. I want it now!
2. I insist he does it now!
3. Because he does not do it now, I am resentful and irritable!
4. I am being arrogant by believing He is not doing his best for me or anything for me at all

But how can I begin to love a God who can’t really feel any relational pain? What I mean is, that loving a stoic non-movable God who is so resilient that he expresses no emotion, does not flinch, does not feel is akin to talking to a wall. Like, you pour your heart out to him and nothing. At least, you believe it is nothing because you believe perhaps wrongly, that God does not suffer.

But when Jesus gives us the prodigal son parable, we see him leering out looking for his son to come home and is rejoicing (which indicates some form of reversal state of emotion.)

All I am really saying is that it is doing me harm to believe that God has no feelings. Because I don’t know how a relationship can be ever be authentic without the possibility of hurt. I am not saying this is not possible, I am saying I don’t see how it is possible. For me, at this point in my life, believing that God the father feels no pain feels is akin to a great heresy in my mind.

Christianity always stresses how Christianity is a relationship, yet it seems more like a cliché than a real belief especially in light of a God who cannot feel anything. That said, I judge no one in regards to their relationship with God. It is complicated and fragmented. People suggest it really isn’t maybe that would be true if no religion didn’t exist we all sought out God of ourselves via his general revelation, but the amount of “I have the correct theology” out there is staggering. It is almost so staggering that one has to wonder why God allows such confusion.