Posted on 10/20/2018 6:55:44 PM PDT by OddLane
When I read that songwriter Michael Gungor told his wife, Lisa, “I don’t believe in God anymore,” I experienced a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the same one I’d had a couple of years before when Nick, a 20-something leader in our church, called in a panic. He was having doubts and wanted to talk. I spent hours with him, listening as he poured out his questions and fears. Over the months that followed, I prayed God would reveal himself to Nick, but his doubts hardened into unbelief. He began telling people he was an atheist.
Nick and Gungor seem to be following a well-beaten path to atheism: cognitive dissonance over the church’s stand on sexual orientation and gender; outrage over pain and injustice; doubts regarding the authority of Scripture; and an embarrassing feeling that science has rendered belief in the Bible’s claims ridiculous. If there are reasonable explanations for these conflicts, why doesn’t God just show us? Why doesn’t he come out of hiding? Why doesn’t he come out of hiding and reveal himself to my child, to my friend? Or, if he has, to where can I point them?
The various doubts that tripped my friend before he fell into atheism were all situated on the bedrock of the hiddenness of God. His thinking went like this: Christians say that God requires people to believe in him or they will be eternally condemned; God, if he is good, would assist people in forming that belief by revealing himself; God does not reveal himself; therefore, God is either not good, or he does not exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
This may have tickled God’s fancy...
https://earthsky.org/space/coincidence-that-sun-and-moon-seem-same-size
So let me get this straight...
The eclipse is destined to become a halo?
Romans 1:20
For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense.
Amplified
Going through that is in the category of “perseverance through affliction.” The less bothered we let ourselves be about it, the sooner the enemy gives up on the associated oppression. Scripture can be very helpful here too. One may come to a passage that will speak loudly, and the enemy flees.
Remembering to praise and thank God for blessings you still know about, while asking for the eyes of your heart to be enlightened again per scripture, is also helpful. That will also repel the enemy, because he wants to see you moan and gripe — not praise. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” The fool says “there is no God” and the devil is his coach. Don’t take that kind of coaching.
We are in a creation most peculiarly suited for us. I’ve never thought “the theory of evolution” to be a serious explanation of why it ever got off the ground, because for every “natural” force that might raise it up, there are billions that will flatten it back down. Hugh Ross (www.reasons.org) has studied and outlined it from an “old earth creationism” point of view. Billions of years don’t help what would be a fundamental failure at evolving anything to be anything more than a fundamental failure.
Oddly enough there is a note of truth here. It’s following after the devil, who proclaimed (vainly) that he would ascend higher than God, that can get a soul into such a place. Satan pulled that kind of hoodoo on me, too. It took the form of worrying that there was something more than God that would somehow mess us all up. That has Satan’s calling card written all over it.
This is why scripture says “Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time.” We often don’t want to just wait on God. We want God to get a move on, right NOW. That’s pretty ridiculous when we take into account bible figures who had to wait many decades before God readied them to spring into action. Moses was 40 years old at his first failed try at redeeming the Hebrews and wasn’t actually set into action until he was 80 years old. The Daniel who was saved from the lions in the den was approximately in his eighties. When the world says “You’re past your prime,” then God often has a way of saying back to that world, “Oh yeah?” Because spiritual strength often peaks at a late age.
That said, it’s gratuitously cruel to say “get a life.” The Life is already had, in Jesus. One should care about the suffering brother, to restore his walk to a right relationship to Jesus.
Not to gee-whiz you about me, but about Him — we are fearfully and wonderfully made. He ought to know about what our best doctors know as dopamine receptors — He designed them into these marvelous things we call brains. If He ever showed us the design book for a brain we probably couldn’t even really understand it, let alone its “soul interfaces.” Dopamine receptors? Do you mean that particular set of dopamine receptors which the angels knew as spec ABC, part D, subsection E, paragraph F? Our knowledge is so crude. It’s like saying oh, a hand is made of fingers.
We all should be concerned. I hope that was just a flippant joke, not really the end of the consideration of the matter. As the world gets more and more evil and more and more packed with the agents of God’s enemy, we are going to see more problems like this. “Coasting Christianity” is so yesteryear. And why should we think otherwise, when God promised that when the power of darkness comes in like a flood, the Lord will raise up a standard?!? Did you think somehow He’d keep that promise without getting His believers involved? And sometimes that looks like one big narsty challenge at first. We may not believe or have confidence in keeping our spiritual strength till we’ve seen what kind of mountains will move.
Many physical perceptions may influence soulish reasoning, which might in turn influence spiritual life, but they don’t depend on each other, independently from God.
Faith is only as hard as we make it.
Every human being is condemned to the Lake of Fire and eternal damnation, but we all have the opportunity for salvation through faith in Christ and what He provided on the Cross. Condemnation precedes salvation. His condemnation was a perfect decision.
Judgment of all human sin happened at the Cross. Forgiveness, at the moment when we face Him and confess our sins to Him through faith in Christ’s atonement on the Cross. When that occurs, He is free in His volition and integrity to give us a regenerated spirit.
Our faith in Him isn’t hard. It’s the simplest thing possible, but only becomes as difficult as we make it.
The detail of how would surely involve a myriad of things. A few months ago I heard a testimony from a retired Salvation Army captain, a gal who had given up smoking when she believed on Christ many decades back, and was helped through the temptation by others in the Salvation Army. What did God do? Well, He desires “wisdom in the hidden places” (the places we do not understand, and would never be able to understand, and would not need to understand). We can count on our Creator to understand what redemption entails. Like I commented as some great revelation (ha ha ha): “God ain’t stupid!!”
We’d all be lost along with the Evil One, suffering in the hell that was originally created for him and his demons, if God hadn’t provided a way of redemption and escape for us. It was His gracious desire to extend this possibility to mankind.
Without redemption, we couldn’t even want to live in heaven. We would suffocate on its purity and be aliens in nature to it. We would sooner want to be in hell. In the lone account the gospels give of a person in Hades, that person isn’t begging to get out. That person is begging to bring someone else in to serve him. He wants to be a master, not a servant.
A servant’s love for God is evidence of the heavenly transformation that God bestows upon those who freely accept His gift through believing.
Yes and No:
“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
- John 1:18
Well put. This is my experience as well that God is constantly revealing himself. He often knocks me right over the head!!! lol. I’m very grateful for it. There have been times He hasn’t been so obvious (at least I couldn’t see.) But life unfolds and years later sometimes things becomes clear about the desert times.
The article lacked a key distinction; that between material and immaterial realities. God is pure spirit. He is not found in the study of matter, at least not directly. By studying quantum physics we will not necessarily get closer to God, even if we marvel at what He has made.
As others have said, the Incarnation of God the Word made God manifest to us. His yoke is easy. If we cooperate with His Grace we will grow in holiness and become more aware of His presence. Gratitude and humility are great motivators. Without Jesus Christ, who is the Way the Truth and the Life we would be most certainly lost.
But given Christ and the graces He has given us, we can find God. We can find Him in our hearts. He is waiting for us. St Theresa of Avila speaks of God as living in our castle. He is in the innermost room, and we must seek and find Him. Her book the Mansions describes the levels we must go through on our path to God.
"G-d is a big meany" is not a reason to accept the idea that all reality reduces to matter in motion. And the latter idea will not support a moral code.
Hugh Ross,,
He wrote several books,
I recall one analogy
Which explains “Time.”
.
‘So all things Don’t happen at once.’
I still have those books here,
somewhere.
Thanks for the ping! It was interesting to contemplate time and the viewing and measuring of the largest and smallest parts of creation etc, but as we have noticed in other conversations, I am reminded again that there is nothing new under the sun. When Job asked God to explain Himself, the answer Job received sounded quite a bit like this article. See Job 40. It reads differently, but its all there.
Thanks GOP Poet (brother or sister). It is wonderful that God not only speaks but reveals Himself in all things if we take the challenge to believe, see and listen! Have some lumps myself on the head - should have some boot prints up the nether regions too but God is so gracious!
When I read that songwriter Michael Gungor told his wife, Lisa, “I don’t believe in God anymore,”
I watched Lisa Gungor's video. I found it shallow. You're surrounded by wealth, but look a bit further and the world's not as it should be.
Well, buckle up kid. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
The bible answers all of this. A Christian can’t set the bible down and just try to imagine how God should be.
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