“And now you’re really gonna yell at me!”
Well, I’m not sure that I should not be insulted, though it is very hard to do that. I don’t yell, ever. And I’m not trying to convince you of anything.
I do have one question. What is the basis of your faith. I mean, it did not simply pop into you head one day to believe in God. What ever suggested to you that there is a God?
I’ll be fair and tell you where this is going. Before you can have faith in anything, you must first have knowledge, and lots of it, such as how to read, and and how to understand a language, and what heaps of words mean. After all, if you have faith in God, you must know what you mean by the word, and you had to know that before you could believe in Him, wouldn’t you?
Did you know the words knowledge and understanding appear in the Bible more the three times more often than faith and believe, in all their Greek and Hebrew forms?
(If I had time, I’d show you that what you call faith, just simply believing without evidence, is actually condemned in the Bible, which teaches that one should be faithful in believing what they know through the God-given ability to “understand” the truth by the God-given ability to “reason.”)
See, I did not yell at you.
Hank
I did have knowledge — a very young child's knowledge, based on what I could see in the world all around me. I used to love to explore Nature — the woods and fields and farms near my home. I had a favorite childhood hangout — a little pond in a clearing in the woods that was inhabited by a bullfrog. I used to love to go there. I'd just sit there with my friend the frog, and think and wonder. To me, that place simply had an aura of holiness and peace about it. It was kind of a little chapel in the forest....
Even as I child, I "knew" that the obvious order I was seeing in the world could not have been accidental. Don't ask me how a child can understand such things. The only way I could answer that question would likely not appeal to you. But here goes — it harkens back to what I've already said. There is something seemingly in-built in human nature itself that just naturally "knows" about God, almost as if this awareness was "programmed" into our individual human nature. It will speak to us if we let it.
Anyhoot, I knew God was there, and this long, long before I formally became a Christian. (I was not permitted to receive religious instruction as a child, because my Dad — a Deist — thought of religious instruction as brainwashing.) My "periagoge" or "born-again" experience came much, much later. That's when things got really "personal." But God Himself has always been there; I could see Him revealed in the order of the natural world and all the things in it. The astonishing symmetry of the patterns on the back of of a humble black beetle to me screamed, "look at what God did!" I could feel His Presence....
I can't explain it any better than that. So I'm sorry if this does not satisfy you.
The more knowledge... the less faith is needed..
Less knowledge requires more faith..
No knowledge at all requires ALL faith..
Faith is the currency in the economy of God..
What you have faith in..... is an asset or a liability..
We all are accountants.. Some are laundering Gods currency..
Others are investors..