Attribute of God ..2

 “stars re-aligning to spell “I am God” in the sky....

When I immediately moved from the subjective conversion experience based on a few verses of the bible, I need to find the anchor of belief. It must be more concrete that the vague experiences people shared, more precise than the denominational idiosyncrasies and more timeless than the current published books. It must be relevant to my daily life and diverse enough to cover challenges I faces. There is a need of my philosophical test of the existence of an intelligent creator. If there is such a God, He must speak out!

To me He did! He inspired and coordinated the Bible. Below are some of the facts about the bible, that when pulled together showed evidence of divine intervention.

1. The sixty six books that complied together made the bible were written over 1600 years. Not a coordinated effort of one or two life span.

2. Written by over 40 different authors from varied walks of life. This includes kings, peasants, philosophers, fisherman, poets, statesman, doctor, tax collector and scholars (and a few more).

3. Written in different places (Asia, Africa and Europe) and circumstances.  Moses in the wilderness, Jeremiah in the dungeon, Daniel on the hillside and in the palace, Paul inside the prison walls and John in the island of Patmos.

4. It was written in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.

5. “ The writings include a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries, in additional to the distinctively Biblical types of prophecy and apocalyptic.

For all that, the Bible is not simply an anthology; there is unity which binds the whole together. An anthology is compiled by an anthologist, but no anthologist compiled the Bible.” FF Bruce

Biblical authors spoke on hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story: “God’s redemption of man”.

To me God did spoke out. He did it in black and white. That’s anchoring. 

Attribute of God ..1

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence." 
" 
— Immanuel Kant

  

As I reflect on why I came to believe in Jesus Christ as a teenager, I had to struggle not to superimpose with the sophistication of my present thinking as an adult. This will not capture the truthfulness of that crucial moment by giving reasons and justifications for my decision when they were not there at the point of belief. Although these I later found it to affirms that the experience was valid and resonates with the study of the Bible. In that crucial moment, what I needed to know to believe was there, and all that I knew at that moment need not be corrected.

Two significant strands (attribute of God) of thought impacted me.

The Holiness (as regards to moral purity) of God.  Rather than rejecting this to stamp a wanting to be fully autonomous, not having to contend with a moral requirement (that I failed), I find this truth to be a solace in an uncertain cruel world. This cruel world I find even within myself, and how I hurt others externally. I may not be the worst moral failure, but to me I am. As the Bible put it ‘all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God”, I am that.

The second strand is “God is love”, and in His plan He provides a way for reconciliation, of forgiveness through the suffering, death and resurrection of the historical incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It was not the theology of the event, but an act that define the extent of God’s love and charity to even me who am undeserving.  

I responded to this love in thankfulness.

Ps

Can I suggest you also consider this presentation by a Nobel Prize winner

Francis Collins
California Institute of Technology
5 February 2009

Why do we have a moral law within us? Francis Collins, renowned scientist, director of the National Institute of Health, and former director of the Human Genome Project, explains how this puzzle impacted his journey to faith. From The Veritas Forum at Caltech, 2009.

By going to www.veritas.org and create an account(free) for yourself. 

Certainty of Science part 2

God or leprechauns..we could never be certain they don’t exists. Science cannot disprove their existence. But the implication of the possible existence of God is weightier. In my observation, it comes out in the academic world in debates and thesis, not counting the amount of books written.  ‘...eternity had been set into our heart’ (the Bible Ecclesiastes 3:11), and it gnaw into our private thought. We can choose to position ourselves to reject it, but we just cannot dismiss it. It does come back again and again.

We can try to drown this thought by structuring our lives with seemly more urgent issues and concerns of the present. It will still creep in.

We try to claim of having intellectual integrity by not accepting what we cannot manipulate or replicate in the laboratory. Then we have a long list of other important things that we had accepted as real to reject. We even have to contradict the philosophy of science that we hope will support our claims. So much for intellectual integrity!

What we perhaps can only claim is the selfish lack of revelation by the transcendence. If IT would not show up, don’t expect me to conclude.

Before that we should explore and test the claims of revelations in the belief systems that exist.  We need to define even the concept of ‘revelation’.