Here's the Thing...
Department:
The thing is, I'll turn fifty-two next month, so I've been having to deal with the sudden realization that my life is almost half over. It's caused me to wonder things like:
The thing is, I'll turn fifty-two next month, so I've been having to deal with the sudden realization that my life is almost half over. It's caused me to wonder things like:
Proof of God's existence is given by the fact that anyone asks whether He exists.
What is the smallest knowable piece of information? I find this consideration a most worthy thought exercise. There are several closely related questions:
What is the meaning of "knowable?"
If, by "information," we mean, "an answer to a question," then must the question be added to the required information content of the answer?
There once was a man who went out one day
To seek and to find his chosen bride.
He knew, once he chose her, that he would then be true
To her and to himself, there was no other course.
For his love, once pronounced, was irrevocable;
He would persist, no matter what, forever without remorse.
Then Moses asked God, “If I go to the Israelites and say to them: The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, ‘What is His name? ’ what should I tell them? ” God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.”
—Exodus 3:13-14 HCSB
Here we see, for the first time in scripture, God giving us His Name.
Editorial Note:
It is an exceedingly beautiful and wonderous paradox: that the sovereign God of the universe has called us not unto blind, rote, or automatic conformity with His will, but unto willing obedience and submission to His will.
...the question is not one of our capability, but one of our willingness.
Last week, in our Fundamentals of the Faith class, I found myself extemporaneously expositing the following thought:
"I believe that God, in His compassionate dealings with those whom He loves, sometimes allows trials to come to the ones He finds especially submitted to His will, who are eager to discover what path He has laid out for them.
Today's question is, "Who is Jesus?"
The following partial list came to mind as I wrote what follows. This is a very thin cross section of the whole answer:
Jesus is the Alpha.
Okay, this is not doctrine. This is not dogma. It's just my imagination... I am putting myself in the place of Jesus, as he faces the cross at Calvary, and even as He is going through the throes of His crucifixion. Please do not think I am being irreverent or presumptuous. I do not pretend to be holy or to identify with the Deity, as Christ surely could.
This is, from the viewpoint of a man (of which Jesus was one) standing before his God at the point of persecution from those whom he loves, my imagined prayer of Christ, who loved others more than He loved life itself...