God did it

Great Debates
1

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Gen. 1:1

While thinking about this writing, a truth about myself cropped up. I found that I often think and write from a negative/critical point of view. In my search to correct this difficulty, I learned that if we determine something is wrong, love will change our discernment into compassion, rather than criticism. Knowing that, I must continually ask God to remind me about love. This led me to think about my life prior to meeting Jesus. Sad to say, negativism has long been a problem in my life.

My desire is to go through as many of the following pages as I can without railing accusation. Because of this, I’ll give you a candid view of me before knowing God-and how I came to know him. I believe my conversion to Christianity is integral to your understanding of any viewpoint I might possess; so, by giving you the capsule version, I’ll be getting everything out in the open-I can be up front. Maybe then, as I refer back to this chapter for reference, seeing who I really am will assist me in keeping the thoughts of my heart in the right place. With that said, I hope you will forgive my brashness in the next few paragraphs.

The terrible Day of the Lord

I believe that through his son Jesus, the light of the world, our compassionate God is graciously extending his gift of eternal salvation to all-without cost.

He looketh upon men, and if any say, I have sinned, and perverted that which was right, and it profited me not; He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light. Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man, To bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living. Job 33:27-30

In my studies and prayers, I have grown to know that every word in the Bible is the saving grace of God. In fact, to those who believe, the words are God incarnate-life itself. I love knowing that all of the precepts, written down by the Judeo-Christian sages of old, are required for all to be saved. Each of us living, and all who lived, have in various ways fallen short of the Glory of God, but, in the Bible, no matter who we are and where we come from, our individual spiritual needs are met. The Bible covers every circumstance of life. It brings forth our fallen nature, and encourages us to collectively return to the righteousness of our inception. For those who have a personal relationship with God, the Bible incorporates the pathway to the true vision for man.

Close to two thousand years ago, the Revelation of Jesus Christ came to John the apostle in a vision from God. He was told to write what he saw in a book. I read the book. It’s about a place of beauty and wonder, a place full of the joy of eternal life. I believed the book to be true, and I asked God if I could go there. God is kind to answer prayer. Those who believe are raised at his own right hand with his son Jesus. It was revealed to John that God and the Lamb are a temple of light. I have been given to look upon the glorious light and am now a new creature in Christ; my hopes, thoughts and dreams are that everyone will choose the path leading to the temple of God.

For me, the coming of the day of the Lord was a terrible thing. I remember my first desire to read the Bible. It was to gather proof against the hypocritical Christians in the world. I had never read Scripture and I wasn’t positive who God is, but I was sure that what those “Christians” were saying could not be in their Holy Book. Because of the way they acted toward me, I believed the church to be a ruse; they and their Bible were one of the primary reasons I had given up hope in our society. They were playing a big role in the ruining of my life and I wanted them to stop. No person, group, or book, knew the answer to life and death; and I was going to prove it. Then I would find a way to leave the planet. I just couldn’t live any longer the way I felt.

Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Eccl. 2:17

Along with feelings of rejection toward the Christians, I had come to realize the physics community, of whom I longed to be a part, was hell bent to destroy the freedoms we as a social order innately sought. We allowed that branch of science, and their ilk, to hold back knowledge of the physical heavens from the rest of the world. Furthermore, we encouraged the physicists to surreptitiously feed our armies with the means to eradicate mankind. I began to see that the underlying impetus behind the conglomerate effort to know the workings of our solar surroundings was power-the kind that would allow man to rule man. Something was wrong.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the faceof the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Gen. 1:2

Even so, I believed the model held by the physics community to be the greatest of all paradigms; set in place properly, it would not only be a perfect ruling dynamic, but it had the wherewithal to save the world. I just couldn’t figure out why those we entrusted as caretakers of the paradigm did not want God in the equation. Though I personally didn’t think much about a supreme being, the purity of physics required all things be considered. I felt that if anything was left out of our calculations, we could not realize a true paradigmatic statement. That’s when I saw it; the laws of physics were set in a linear historical frame and they broke down by not being able to predict anything prior to what the physicists call a singularity. Theorems of cosmology required that in time past the universe was compressed to a state of zero. This infinite density, called a singularity, reduced man’s highest form of thought to a place of nothingness-where the light is turned off. Without God, we hit a brick wall; linearity needed to be replaced by an omni, that is, eternal frame. Be that as it may, while purporting gravity, the cosmologists saw all the heaven’s energy migrating toward a mass point and condensed into a state of vacuity. And with that, they realized the greatest weapon of them all-the Big Bang. My conclusions were: we were extracting from the heavens the exact method to manufacture great bombs, and by so doing, we had turned away from any relationship we might have had with God. We wanted to rule. The proof: our country was focused on the inevitable attack by those we feared might retaliate against our overt efforts to control their behavior. We didn’t trust God, we built fallout shelters to protect ourselves from our own unrighteous behavior. Just rewards, I thought.

We, the multitudes, kept our heads in the sand because we were supplied with gifts of placation-TV’s, VCR’s, electric mixers, motorized this and that, electric toothbrushes, and the like. Moreover, learning to operate these mechanical niceties kept mass man opiated-we were like babies in a playpen. We were taught to hold these contrivances close to our bosom, and we obliged by curling around them in a fetal position. Some of us protected our homes and workplaces with steel bars for fear of losing our wonderful contraptions. Our country generated enough money in the sales of these gifts in kind to pay for all the research and development we needed for our war machine.

As any bully would, we rationalized armed conflict to be a successful sociological process. After all, look at our efforts in the second world war; pulling together to stamp out tyranny was good! Further, because of the mechanical and electronic skills required for success, we reasoned we could live for a long time in the luxury of the spoils. Instead, we lived in fear of our enemy, and without God.

The indicators, the messages sent to us by our leadership, were that we would continually be drawn together if we kept the war effort going. Each war would be a goal-as though we were playing a game. We started manufacturing bombs and other weapons and put them up for sale to the world at large, always keeping the most sophisticated for ourselves. We devised electronic war games to alter the mind-set of our children in case we needed more than a generation to gain control of the earth. We inundated our little cowboys and cowgirls with electric mini-jeeps and machine guns that sounded real. In the name of God, our offspring would march in the pathways of our deception. We supplied weapons to any war we could find or covertly create. And, as though it were the ultimate game of chess, we used the powerful image of the “good life” in our country to draw the rest of the world’s eyes off what we were doing and what we could see (mathematically) in the heavens.

continued…

2

We utilized our knowledge of the heavenly mechanics to remain one step ahead in the weapons race. We were told it was a race created for the benefit of the people. Like every corporate conglomerate, though, we often realized an urgent need for expansion; with a change of venue here, and another tac there, we finally settled on Star Wars. Listen to the name and purpose of these words-Star Wars. Had we a motto for our growing madness, I think it would have said: bomb everyone who wants to bomb anybody-nuke the nukers. It was clear-cut that as a self appointed nation we alone would decide what’s good and evil on this earth. For a better vantage point, for us to rule with an iron hand, we took our venerable war machine into the heavens-the very place that has the ability to provide peace on earth.

I must have been in a deep sleep. I was so involved in what I thought to be the purity of the academic study of physics and the history thereof, that I didn’t understand our haste to be of a dubious nature. I got caught up in the arms race like most everyone else. When I opened my eyes and saw what I saw, I had to shake my head to clear it, and I said to myself, “Do nothing, you can’t beat it.” I was fearful. We had a bomb facing every direction, not only toward the enemy but back toward ourselves-dictating our actions. We were living in a false peace-aptly called a cold war. It was then I deemed the physics and war communities like unto a man who would enter a large populated room with a hand grenade. He would pull the pin and yell out “All right you so-and-sos, get down on your faces and shut-up.” There would be compliance, then peace, but not heartfelt peace.

I couldn’t find any compassion for academia. I blamed them. I hated them for what they were doing to me and our country. Whoa,-my legs wobbled from my thoughts. I fell to my knees. I considered myself to be like them and I couldn’t do anything about it. In my heart I cried out to know Love. I could go nowhere. The heaviness of my understanding rendered me still.

My most valuable possession, the profound thoughts of the physical community that I believed could never be superseded, plummeted me into a place of melancholic void, a space with no life. Everything known about the heavens was being used to do injustice to man-and I bought into it. I felt that the totality of my being personified death. I was sore-afraid. This penetrating moment of understanding is what I call my great spiritual black out.

Seeing me in this most untenable state, my wife-to-be sought help. She joined a church. We were told to discontinue our living arrangement until we were married. This was the last straw. There couldn’t be more. Devastated and alone-separated from life itself-I was unable to fully comprehend. What is going on, I thought? The very community that professed love was doing their best to break us up. I wanted justice. Revenge crept up inside of me. Those … Christians were saying we were living in sin; what about them I thought. They were greedily protecting their way of life while the greater portion of the people on the earth were starving. Hypocrites!

Obviously, I couldn’t go to the spiritual community. I had no personal relationship with God or them. My inability to see the light in the physical community kept me from any hint of refuge on this earth. I had no place to share my feelings. My depression became so great that I was afraid to die for fear of what forever might be.

O Lord, by these things men live, and in all these things is the life of my spirit: so wilt thou recover me, and make me to live. Isa. 38:16

I screwed up my courage, and proceeded to throw away all of my dreams. I quit work. I left home. I purchased a used copy of the King James Version of the Bible (because it was the oldest) and stormed off to be close to the sea. I armed myself with the destruction of Christianity-their own Words.

In my first attempt, I couldn’t understand a syllable of the King James English. I had read a great deal of Shakespeare, but, there was no sense to be made of this writing. Could it be there was some sort of hidden code? (In retrospect, I was tenaciously clinging to my only understanding-even though I perceived it to have no foundation.) By the grace of God, I remembered I was told to “kneel and pray” before reading the book. I thought it was silly to get on my knees, (what could I do there that I couldn’t do standing or sitting) but I did. “I don’t know who you are God, and I don’t know what to say, but if you’re there please help me to understand.” An awareness of something began to tug at my soul. It kept coming to my mind that I would hear the truth if I tried reading the Bible again.

Many times in the past, questions emerged from within me concerning how man came into being or what made the earth and the stars. In the academic disciplines I had read, the only answer that I could find was: it could have been this, or, according to an ancient writer if this were so, then maybe that happened. In the Bible, the first words said to me were God did it! I clearly understood what was said. I made a choice. Without question I believed for the first time. God took me to the beginning and started me in a direction I innately wanted to go-toward heaven. At that moment, one on one, God created for me the Heaven and the Earth.

My first reading of the Bible was very deliberate. It took six weeks. I stopped only for sleep and prayers of forgiveness for the things I had done. Most of my reading was outside, in a little clump of trees, close to the water, where I could be by myself. Nothing could have kept me from the truth that was unfolding. I had been unctioned to leave the darkness behind. From Genesis to the Revelation, the words of God riveted my soul with the wonder of creation and the knowledge of my wretchedness.

When I met Jesus, I could see myself as one who would throw dice for his garments, and stick a spear in his side to test if he were dead.

I finished the Revelation and immediately returned to the old testament. I sought to understand more of Christ and the Church through the relationship of Ruth to Boaz. When the awareness came, my whole being seemed to focus on our Saviour Jesus and his reasons for allowing the terribleness of the cross to happen. It was then I believed Jesus to be the Messiah. I came undone. I knew that every part of me was known. I felt naked. In my thoughts I was a drunk, a whoremonger, a murderer, a perverted soul with no right to life-Satan himself-and all the host of heaven was watching. The terror was more than I could bear. I cried for God to eradicate me from the earth, to send me to hell for the benefit of those I might endanger.

continued…

3

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Gen. 1:3

Instead of God taking me off the earth, I woke up on the ground prostrate and crying uncontrollably. For a moment I thought a whirlwind had entered me and moved every particle of my physicality around and into a different place. There was mud and grass covering my face and imbedded deep into my fingernails. I was surrounded by Jesus, the light. The book was true. It said, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).

Shortly, I felt the softness of a hand on my shoulder. It was an old lady. She said her name was Ruth. She had come to tell me Jesus is my Saviour-I had been forgiven. She told me she had been watching me for several weeks. She sat on the ground with me and for the better part of the day comforted me with her hugs and exceptional knowledge of Scripture. She assured me that the light I was experiencing was Jesus, and showed me the biblical proof. I asked her about mercy, faith, grace, flesh and sin. I told her my darkest secrets. I asked her why Jesus wasn’t talking to me like he did with Paul. She said, he probably revealed all he had to say to me in the Scripture, but he promised he would visit those who believed. I asked if I could see her again; almost dismissing the thought, she said Jesus would show me the way.

In those few precious moments with Ruth, and for the first time in my life on this earth, I experienced truth, love, friendship, joy, righteousness, and forgiveness. How I long to give those things away as she gave them to me.

The visible light was with me for months. I told everyone about it. Thinking me crazy, my friends began to dissipate. Some of the people in the churches I attended suggested psychological help. I thought all Christians had seen the light. Isn’t it Jesus that sets us apart? Jesus is the light of the world, the firstfruits of the spirit. We are the light of the world, the firstfruits thereafter. When I insisted, I was called Satan. I was told I was transforming myself into an angel of light. The confusion overwhelmed me. I wanted things cleared up so I could at least talk to people who professed they had been saved. As my zealousness began to fade, a gift was strongly implanted in my mind to thoroughly study every word in the Bible, to “prove all things.” I wasn’t going to stop talking about Jesus, so I had no choice. It was difficult for me to comprehend that maturity comes with wisdom and I had little. Down deep inside though, to the marrow of my bones, I was convinced there is nothing more important than God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and eternal life. I couldn’t be Satan-I had been forgiven!

One day I noticed the light surrounding me had begun to recede toward the heavens. In tears, I frantically searched the Scripture to find out why. With great relief, I found passages saying Jesus would return, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you” (John 16:7). “Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebr. 13:5). I trusted him.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Gen.1:4

Blessings

4

Nobody told me there was going to be a sermon. I take it the coffee and cookies are being served in the basement?

5

I’ve moved these posts out of this thread.

6

lightwait, apologies for misspelling your name - I’m trying to keep track of numerous replies here. I take it your answer is a disappointing ‘no’.

ITR, I meant the Chinese Whispers which allows myths to grow, since myths are universal in human cultures. Even then, my last post provided numerous other factors which may well have been important in the growth of Christianity (and Islam and Hinduism and all the rest, only one of which you seem to find a non-divine explanation infeasible for.)
(I’ll get back to you on your two visionaries when I have time - I’ll just say here that TLE and AVP are only two of many, many conditions which may pertain directly.)

7

Bullshit. I used to go to a church where people would stand up and try to top each other with their thrilling stories of conversion. They all follow the same basic formula, after the hundredth time they all sound the same. You have clearly practiced that story a lot, you hit all the high notes. I bet 25 years ago when you were telling that story there was Satan worship involved, right? Nowadays science has replaced Satan as the big bad bogeyman, but the story is still exactly the same. Yawn.

8

I believe in God, but thinking of the Bible literally seems naive. The Bible is a very select book, told and then written by men in a feeble attempt to explain the unexplainable.

9

If I’m reading this tl-did-r screed correctly, because you felt that some scientific research was used for unethical purposes, you turned back to religion, and even managed to freak the converts out.

Hmm.

10

Damn you, physics community! Damn you to hell!

11

Sorry, the coffee and cookies are all gone. We were down here eating, and missed the entire sermon.

12

Zzzzzzzz… huh? Wha–? Oh, another useless sermon.

Where’s kanicbird when we need him? :slight_smile:

13

That’s the big difference between science and religion: sometimes science is used for bad purposes.

14

Science dammit!

15

Cmon, you didn’t need to take up all that space just to tell us that you were very ignorant of science. One sentence would have done it, we’d have believed you.

16

“As for Science versus Religion I’m issuing a restraining order. Science should stay 500 yards from religion at all times.” - Judge Snyder.

*Genesis
2. Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.*

So, God created the Earth before he created light.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The Milky Way is about 13.7 billion years old.

So…either the Bible is wrong right off the bat, since we know stars give off light, or science is wrong after centuries of refinement and peer-reviewed study.

17

It can not be the beginning if god was already there. Tell me about the real beginning please.

18

It’s deities all the way down.