The Great I am

 Anyone with an epiphany is never at the mercy of someone with a theory.

Are we to be judging God?

Who Causes Suffering?

 If there is a God, then why does He allow suffering to exist, since He is Existence Himself? My quick answer is because we, many of us at least, insist on it. Why did we insist on it? My view is because not a few gave themselves over to the chief spirit of suffering, the devil of doubt and destruction.

 So how did we do that? We were born into it, as children of suffering. How could that be true? Why would not God intervene? There was originally no need for Him to intervene since all existence is good. We ourselves intervened instead. 

We became convinced that knowledge of our own, the knowledge of good, and as it turned out, evil, would be better than God's given knowledge. So, it did turn out that our new knowledge included not only knowledge of good, but something new, the knowledge of, evil.

Knowledge not a one-way street

Much evil knowledge seems good until one gets deeper into it and then find the seeming good, changes, changes into destruction. All I can tell myself now is that since I do not have access to all knowledge, I have to trust someone I believe has. 

Why would I do that? I found the more knowledge I gained included knowledge of more questions I did not know ever even existed. So, my knowledge turned mostly the knowledge I was more ignorant of than when I was unaware the extent of my ignorance.

The daring leap

So now that our knowledge includes evil, knowledge some of us assume is based on what is only presently known. This forces them to take the only action they can take under the present circumstances of which they are limitedly aware. I find my conclusion of all these complications is that I may have been maneuvered into the unenviable position of judging God. I suggest a hasty retreat. So, I take Job's position of trusting God no matter what. Maybe this is what actual believing is, believing in an incredible God worth believing. 

Was Jesus Murdered?

This strange idea, mentioned in Manna today, says Jesus was murdered. In John 10:17-18, Jesus speaks otherwise. I am concerned that so many, and in teaching positions as well, are so unaware of the commandments of Jesus. 

They seem to think the parables, wherein many commandments are revealed are what, for whom, somebody else? We can ignore the parables?  

But one fact is revealed by this particular murder view thing. A lack of awareness of that everything seen came from the unseen, even as high up as the pulpit itself. Look at myself as well, regarding the incarnate post. 

Quoteblokes redux

I believe we should not only believe what we believe but also speak what we believe, just as God spoke the world into existence. So just as the Son does what His Father does, we should do the same. We should do as the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us individually and privately, not through any third party. I suppose also I am a witness to what I believe and writing it down firms the sayings of God, the Holy Spirit, in my spirit.

Faith and Lies

Faith is what the 

World calls a lie

Whenever I am asked, how I am I doing, I like to say I am doing wonderful, marvelous, fantastic! They say, isn't that great. Then I follow up with the only thing that bothers me is, I lie a lot. Nothing better than an old joke. 

The scriptures, in Hebrews I think, defines faith as, saying things that are not, as though they were. The world, even some Christians, call that a lie.

Words are powerful

The world goes by the seen, they have little respect for the spirit. However, God spoke the world into existence by saying, and His faith brought it into the seen. Everything unseen came from the seen.

The Shrinking Saved

According to polls as well as my experience, here in the States, church attendance, membership, and believers in God are shrinking and shrinking. I would have liked to have known this early, like when I was deciding whether or not to believe in Sainta Claus, I learned then from our pastor that the stories in the Bible were not true, only the meaning was true. 

Notice the word meaning? Why was that word meaning not spiritual instead? Later I learned the adults only believed in God, for the sake of the children. All the while adults were sprinkling their talk with words like pulpit talk, meaning pretend talk. Then I learned that something in the Bible was not for today. 

It goes on from there. I wonder where it stops? Maybe Jesus did not even exist. Homer with one surviving book thanks to the Alexandrian fire existed, but unbelievable numbers of books about Jesus called His existence into question. 

Maybe Jesus is just not for today. It was not until I was an atheist in college, with a course in logic under my belt, and learning the list of fallacies, that the seeds of doubt about all this pinball thinking would begin a slow-motion exploding revelation in my mind. 

Click featured link

Why is His name Jesus?

Persuasion Over Rated

Either the mind rules the body

Or the body rules the mind

I do not think it possible to persuade anyone of anything they were not already persuaded of in their spirit or in some other status of, hopefully, their mind directing their body. This means, if true, they alone are responsible for what they believe.  This, no matter how dense the crowd they gave their surrounding will to while in the crowd.      

Case of mistaken identity

Does this make sense?

I do not care how articulate anyone is, it baffles me how anyone can debate whether there is a God or not, all the while never once identifying what their definition of who God is. If this does make sense to anyone then they are merely not convinced who God is, in my view. There are some others who are certain that there not only is no God, but we are all organisms. I first encountered this position in college. This view likes to think everything is a science, so they reduce everything to a formula equaling everyone is the same. But it turns out some are not so identical as others. These will tell the same people what to do, apparently so they will be useful, useful to those who are not so identical. Our key word is same. But if one does not believe in God out of the box, then how can you have a definition? 

John 17

The Hour has Come

The night before going to the Cross Jesus prayed what is called the high priestly prayer. Of all the books in the Bible the most central chapter is the red-letter chapter John 17. It is on the same par as John 3:16 is the most central verse.

We are One

The theme that God is in Jesus and Jesus is in God, and God is in us, and we are in God is stressed over and over. I'd like to count how often sometime. My mother read this chapter every morning. John 17 is the first thing you read looking at her cenotaph. 

One last time on time

Life is like a butterfly

Time is fooling us all even as I speak. Wasting time, my more grievous sin, is also the theme of the prison movie Papillon. This life is often characterized as a prison. Sartre, for instance, titled one of his books No Exit. 

Life and prison are alike in some respects. Quite a few of us do not want to be released when our time is up, maybe because the longer one lives, the more likely we become institutionalized, comfortable where we are. 😉

Gaining hope

However, I am coming out of this cloud reading the Bible regularly (see Manna) and my feeling is, I am going to crash out soon. As a reminder to myself, next is looking this moment like... "a case of stolen identity". 

Always hope for the next generation

If one is concerned with the current generation's appearance to be largely led around by their sniffling intellectual noses, have no concern. I'll always remember one of my BU professors commenting that approximately every 25 years (considered a generation) that each one overthrows the previous generation to go off on a different tangent of their own altogether. So, there is always hope for renewal... for everybody eventually.... for a while at least. How quickly will everything pass. Time is always moving toward something new and if one does not like it, we have to remember that to go up the steps we have to put one foot down to get to the next step up.