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A Loving God?

Everyone always looks at the Bible as a loving book.   It is considered God's Word.   It helps us live a better life and serves as a guidebook showing us how to live on the right path.   The characters in it are ones to be looked up to.   Moses, Noah, Abraham, etc. were all righteous followers of God and set good examples for us even today.   However, those who read deeper into the Bible will find more than just the stereotype that I have already explained.   The God of the Bible has many moods.   The Bible has stories of murder, warfare, etc. in which the ones doing the acts are treated as good people that have done heroic deeds.   What are we supposed to make of these situations?   Can they still have good values and be applied to our daily lives to hopefully improve them?   Let us take some examples from the Bible and examine them, while keeping the previous questions in mind.
First, I would like to examine a story almost everyone is familiar with.   This is the story of the Great Flood.   When I think of this story, the first response I have is the thought of "divine destruction", or destruction caused by God.   As we know, the amount of destruction in the Great Flood was overwhelming.   The entire earth was flooded, killing everyone except Noah, his family, and a male and female of every animal.   Is this story, God is the character doing the "killing".   Of course, it is portrayed as a good deed, which is should be.   In the long run, it was good for the world.   He was getting rid of the evil that had arisen in the world he had created.   We can make great use of this in our own lives.   Since God destroyed the world for its evil, don't you think it could happen again?   If God did not allow this kind of evil back then, why should he allow it now?   If you take a good look at the overall condition of the world today, it is definitely not a good one.   There is sin everywhere.   The world is corrupt, which may mean we are headed to another from of destruction of catastrophic...