I wanted to discuss with you how hard it can be to believe the Bible. I don’t feel that most believers in Christ have been honest enough about this (myself included)…but such discussions are important. See The truth is we all struggle with faith at one point or another…and it’s not hard to see why.
Consider all the stories you’ve heard or read over the course of your life thus far and none of them were
true from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “PeterPan,” and “Cinderella,” to “Santa Claus!” Story after story has been fictitious and after having heard and read hundreds of written stories and seen hundreds of movies all equal in fictitiousness, it’s no surprise that to most readers, the Bible is hard to digest.
Furthermore, there are a number of myths and legends all around the world with similar stories! I can honestly say that I have struggled with faith in the past especially for this reason. In fact, my personal struggle reached an unprecedented level in 2016 when I almost gave up believing in God
entirely! This happened after I read one too many passages of scripture that seemed scientifically
inaccurate; and then enough was enough! Church folk did not make it any easier by saying “you just have to believe.” I couldn’t just believe! I needed a sign.
So I gave God an ultimatum, which is a funny
thing to do when you actually think about it. Me giving God an ultimatum was like an ant telling me
“You better do this asap…or else!” (…or else what…ant?) But God didn’t flex. He could have destroyed me if He wanted to, but I I’m still here, and I know He’s got His reasons. In 2016, I was ready to walk away from my faith not because the Bible is false. It isn’t! I almost gave up because of an internal, personal problem; MY way of thinking. You see, like everyone who either refuses to believe in God, or quits believing, my mind could not release what I thought I knew long enough to accept what ultimately is the truth.
Had I lost my faith rest assured, I would have misled
others even without knowing it because blind people cannot lead other blind people to the truth. Two hallucinating people in a hot and arid desert will try and lead each other to where they think they see a body of water. Likewise if God is the truth, a person who doesn’t believe in Him can’t even begin to lead anothrr to the knowledge of God. One way or another, we’re all influenced by each other, but on an individual level, we get to decide what we’re going to believe. So you don’t have to take my word for it. Please don’t. All I can share with you is the importance of being well grounded.
Someone can try to tell me an abandoned building put itself together. “Somewhere around 6.8 thousand years ago, the bricks just randomly came together, then about 5 centuries later, the windows, electric wiring, and plumbing began to form and you know what’s
incredible about it? It doesn’t happen too often. The conditions have to be just right for this chance in
3×10 to the 43rd power to happen.” See how silly that sounds? My simple brain knows facts and such an event just can’t happen and a building is infinitely easier for “the universe” to make than anything that has life in it.
“Well…there was an rapid explosion…or inflation of
building materials and all the bricks just happened to fall in the right places.” If I fall for that, it’s a
shame. I should know better; and I do! Therefore, I would never believe that! Two bricks cannot put themselves together let alone hundreds or
thousands. Likewise, throughout my entire life, I have never come across ONE SINGLE COMPLEX SYSTEM that had not been MADE! So when a theory
suggests that the the Heavens and earth are the only complex system in all of known history to not
have a maker, there’s a problem folks, especially if we weren’t around to see that magnificent exception take place!
So I’ll leave you with this. The Bible is hard to believe at least initially. If you’re new to the faith or find yourself struggling heavily with it, here are some
of my top suggestions.
#1) Ask questions. Find someone who may know the answer you seek. Perhaps you might even be able to find the answer online.
#2) Be open to the answers. The answers to our questions might not be what we were expecting. Sometimes they may even disturb us. But if we ask for the answer, we shouldn’t reject it because it was unexpected. One thing I
respect about the Bible is its bold approach in telling the truth…ALWAYS. There are some accounts that are quite troubling, but because they happened and had lessons worth learning, they were included.
#3) Whenever you doubt, also Ask yourself what is
keeping you from accepting a scripture you’ve read. Is it a competing theory? Personal standards? Societal standards and expectations? …etc. Being
honest with yourself and God, and coming to terms with your personal limitations in understanding, can be humbling, but it will take you far spiritually.
…and finally
#4) Any time you have a question, that you could not find the answer to no matter how much you tried, don’t be afraid to approach God about it. Ask God for clarity and wisdom. It may take some time, or He may reveal the answer immediately, but as long as it’s not among the “secret things” that only God can know, He will share His wisdom. Again, we have to be open to the answer.
It’s hard to believe the Bible. The stories are like fables and fantasies. From the very beginning of that collection of books, readers have to suspend their disbelief and accept a 6 day creation, a perfect garden, a woman coming from a man’s rib, a talking snake, a fruit which was the catalyst through which sin, death, and strife entered our world, etc… So yeah! It is very hard to believe it.
But what if it’s only hard to believe because our thinking has been heavily influenced since youth. All the stories you’ve heard and few of them were true. Story after story was fictitious and now after having heard and read hundreds of them and seen countless fictional movies, how can anyone suspend their disbelief when the Bible just sounds like another piece of fiction? Simple. We do it with fact or reality-based science, history, and some imagination. Yes. I said it… IMAGINATION!
While imagination can be used to fabricate fictional events like the Big Bang, It is also a powerful tool for filling gaps in the pursuit of the truth. It can be quite accurate when we properly use evidence. Imagination is the only time machine we need.
As we couple our understanding of science and history with imagination, I also want us to use our spirit sense. Your spirit won’t lie to you if you really pay attention to it. Somewhere, deep down, you know what’s true when you hear it.
Someone once asked me what was the point of something I said when I spoke out against evolution in support of creation. The person who asked me was more concerned about proving me wrong and making me look and sound funny than discovering the point. So he didn’t see it…and a point is an easy thing to miss if you’re not looking for it. It is hard to believe the Bible, but when you read it with sincerity, a strange thing occurs. God helps you to actually get the point! And once you start seeing the truth, you realize there’s nothing like it, that you’ve been seeing the world with fake eyes and that “real eyes” indeed “realize real lies.”
As children many of us were more in tune with our spirit sense, but have exchanged it with the almost autopilot-like intelligence that we call common sense. Now I’m not saying common sense is bad. In fact, it is very helpful (most of the time). However, it is not always the right sense…it’s just the popular one…that’s why it’s common. Therefore, discernment is crucial when choosing to use either common sense or spirit sense.
As you’re reading this, listen to your spirit. I am a huge believer that somewhere deep down, all of us either know the truth or recognize it if we give it a chance. Sadly, a number of things will keep many from truth if they are not committed to finding it. For those who do not have scriptures and have not yet received God’s Holy Spirit, the way to deeply understand truth is to interact with it on a deep level and test it with your spirit sense. You know this world is physical. I don’t have to tell you that. It is very real…and yet, there are components of this reality which have been deliberately hidden from the masses.
But your spirit comes from God. It is an awareness that is distinct from your biorhythmic cycles and brain activity. Because the spirit can be a difficult concept to fathom, let’s seek to understand it by imagining yourself as the driver of a mech suit…or robotic exo-armor unit. For a reason of your imagining, you are unable to interact directly with the world around you when you are outside of the mech suit. When inside it, however, you depend on the processors and sensors in the mech suit to relay environmental information to it such as where the machine is in 3D space, how fast you’re moving (if you’re moving), what the environment looks like, etcetera. The processors and sensors in the mech suit can be compared to the brain of the unit…and you, my dear listener are the spirit. You as its driver represents how the spirit lives in us.
The Spirit (spiritus) or “breath of life” (pneuma or anima) is what “animates” us (Latin “animare”). You are not your brain. That’s why for the rest of this blog, I don’t want you to use your common sense. In most cases, it was given to you by another person or other people. By so-called “professors” even, many of whom profess lies without even knowing it! The Bible tells us in the book of Romans “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise (some translations say “Professing themselves to be wise” for instance, “Oh I’m a scientist… I’m a professor at this school… I’ve got a P.h.D… I graduated from this university,” etc.) they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” -Romans 1:18-21
Dear reader, please allow the Holy Spirit to reveal to your spirit sense what you already know on a deeper level than your brain.
Many believe the Bible clashes with science. This is FAR from true. It only ever clashes with certain pseudoscientific theories that masquerade as science. Like the Big Bang theory…or the theory of Evolution. We should be mindful that scientific theories are often accepted as actual fact without solid proof. Sure, there may be evidence, but there is no proof.
Though Evidence is synonymous with proof, they are quite different. Evidence can highlight a truth, but it can also be contextually false. It can be planted or misused and therefore support a lie. For instance, white powder found in a car can be used as evidence of drugs, but it does not make the owner of the car a crack dealer, nor is it necessarily a drug. It may be bleached flour, or baby powder! If it is a drug, maybe a passenger left it behind. Evidence is not always proof! It can be tampered with. It can be misused.. Proof, however, is definitive. It is concrete, unchangeable, and undeniable.
For instance, …show me the evidence that humans came from primates. Easy…DNA. Did you know our DNA is 96% similar to primates? Plus if you look closely enough, they kinda look like caricatures of human beings who are not as developed. Using common sense, I’d conclude that humans came from the apes.
Now where’s the proof?
[ … ]
Just as I thought…Crickets…and you know why? There isn’t any! What are we going to say? Even Lucy, one of the few fossils of an unidentified anthropomorphic creatures was proven to be a hoax! Her form was given by a assembly of random bones. Proof would mean finding entire villages full of primates who were indubitably on their way toward becoming human. In this case, they don’t exist, so the quest for proof led to the fabrication of fossil evidence. Proof has to be authentic.
The evidence of a relationship based on genetic similarity is contextually false. In other words, even though our similarity to primates appears to validate evolution, it really only supports the fact that DNA is an information language …just like any other. So of course it would be similar to itself.
Yesterday, Mike ate a chocolate coated banana.
Today, Mike ate a chocolate coated strawberry.
How do we express similar ideas? Through similar syntax, similar semantics, and similar pragmatics.
The two ideas involving Mike eating a chocolate coated fruit were similar, not because one sentence evolved from the other, but because we were expressing two similar events using a common language.
Which brings us to an intriguing question. How did God create animals that have common features such as two eyes and two ears. Answer: He clearly used similar genetic sequences for animals with two eyes. Those genetic sequences are like sentences and paragraphs. God expressed similar features like eyes and ears, hearts, lungs etc.through genetic syntax (if you will). Therefore, it is no surprise that all life appears to be related.
Now let’s move on…and talk about history
With respect to history, let’s keep in mind that one of the ways in which the Bible separates itself from other man-made texts is by recording genealogies of people who actually existed from Adam to Jesus. Some other works attempt to do this, but fail miserably. In this sense, it is like a diary or journal left by our great great great ancestors; and quite honestly, when it comes to events in the past, I would believe any great ancestor over my contemporaries who may try to convince me that they were all wrong. After all, how would they know? Were they there? I might believe them about topics related to the present day, but our ancestors lived in those bygone eras and left us recorded accounts (corroborated by world history) and they even left warnings (prophecies revealed to them by God) which many of us are just beginning to recognize today.
Believing the Bible can be a challenge at times but this collection of Holy books has been the single existing resource of unchanging, unwavering, uncompromising, and timeless truth
SOUL HAVEN 