God as Savior?

So here's one problem with the current Christian conception of God as Savior of all mankind. Let's say my just over one-year-old niece Rayna is sitting in the middle of the street, maybe playing in a tar patch in the center of a Michigan pot hole or something. Now let's say a huge semi-truck and trailor are barrelling toward her at 55 mph. I am standing on the edge of the street and can see the situation as it unfolds. Not only can I see what is likely to happen, I have the power and time to do something about it. If I really want to (and I'm sure I would), I could step into the lane, pick up my beautiful niece, and step out of the lane with plenty of time to stop her from being destroyed by the oncoming truck.

Now let's turn our attention to God. We are the baby in the street. Sin is the oncoming truck. God is the one on the side of the road, watching the situation unfold. He can see the truck coming, knows what will happen if He doesn't intervene, but what does He do? Here is where the Christian speaks up: "He DOES intervene! Why, He forgives us our sin, removing us from the street and saving us!"

This argument is flawed. God does not remove us from the street, He simply offers us a way to leave the street ourselves. To go back to the original analogy, it would be as if I threw my niece a rope so she could pull herself to safety. Will she take the rope? Probably not. But it's there all the same, and if she really wanted to, she could. Couldn't she?

As humans, we cannot not sin. Did you catch that? Let me rephrase: No matter what we do, we as humans will always have some sort of sin in our lives (despite whether forgiven or not). Because of this, we need Christ to save us from our sin. In fact, accepting Christ's forgiveness for our sin is the only way to Heaven, or, concurrently, the only way to avoid Hell.

So Christ's necessity is suddenly dependent upon our sin. If we don't sin, we don't need forgiveness, thus don't need Christ. Christ tells us not to sin, yet fully knows that is something we cannot do, and is in fact something he needs us to do in order to remain relevant.

The problem is that God created a solution in Christ to a problem that He Himself allowed to germinate in the garden. Yes, it was man's choice to wait in the street to embrace that oncoming semi, but it was God who was present at the truck's construction and who let it off the assembly line unimpeded. A question closing in on the blasphemous then, is who is more to blame for sin? The ones who commit it because it's in their nature? Or the one who created both the sin and nature of the ones who commit it?

Christian: "God did NOT create sin!"

So who did? Even if God did not explicitly create sin, he created the opposite, which is basically the same thing. Any time you create something, i.e. light, that creation necessitates the creation of the opposite, i.e. not-light (dark). And if you hold to the opinion that God created all things good, what does that mean for the creation of all things bad?

Oh, man. Here I go. I've lost the path and now I'm ranting. The point is, if anyone in their right mind (my sister, parents, a stranger, anyone really) saw me standing at the side of the road while the semi smashed into my niece, they would blame me for her death and be extremely angry and upset, to say the least. Even if I had thrown her a rope, providing her a way to safety, there would be no consolation for the bereaved.

Yet this is, not exactly, but analogous to what God does, and has done since the beginning of creation. He waits on the side of the street, watching as the truck comes crashing down on top of us. Sometimes, He does indeed seem to intervene and pull us to safety. But at other times, it seems as if He won't even throw us a rope.

Just some thoughts.