On My Faith...

Ah, Monday.

The day passes very differently when one isn't actually playing any video games, for example. I finished up the rest of Unspoken Sermons, and have a slightly more nuanced view of the Lord and salvation in general; this is also to be taken into account with the baptismal classes that I am on.

God is Truth; Jesus Christ is God. Therefore Jesus Christ is Truth. The key nuance here is the state of being---Jesus Christ is Truth. Yes, we need to take heart the teachings of Jesus Christ, as well as what his disciples promulgate via the gospel and the various epistles of the New Testament. But the fundamental point should go back to Jesus Himself. Actions, sayings, teachings are manifestations of the Truth that is Jesus---they account for different perspectives to transmit the most important point of all, which is how Jesus is Truth itself. That's why we believe in Jesus, that's why we follow Jesus, and that's why we pay heed to His words.

Jesus was no back-up plan of God the Father---He had always been part of the plan from the beginning. A key theme of Man's fall is due to Man's literal disobedience to God; this is exemplified in both the Old and New Testament writings. Righteousness is not by deeds, but by faith---which explains why old testament figures like Abraham, King David, and King Solomon are deemed righteous despite none of them being perfectly righteous, as only God is perfectly righteous.

But to where is this faith directed at? It is towards God and His righteousness. The failure of Man to obey God's directives features heavily throughout the Bible. Jesus, as both man and God, saves us sinners from our sin of disobedience to God's righteousness through substituting for us in atonement through demonstrating His absolute obedience to God as the representative of the faithful Man. He was obedient to God the Father throughout His life, He glorified the Father, He died as representing Man, and was resurrected from His death into eternal life. Was it punishment for our sins? No... it was atonement, a reparation/satisfaction of the wrath of God that stemmed from our rebellious nature against God. He satisfied the wrath of God as a representative of Man, the way Adam incurred the wrath of God as a representative of Man. In that sense, the sinners (i.e. us) share in the inheritance that Jesus has obtained for us as He was representing us through his crufixion and resurrection.

But being saved is no excuse to continue to sin. We should know better, and more importantly, as God's adoptive children, need to glorify Him through our good works which is reflective of our faith in His Son, and what His Son has done for us. The Law of Moses was good, but there was no exemplary model of being a perfect follower of the said law. Jesus is the perfect follower of the law, and His arrival gave us non-Jews an opportunity to be saved as well.

Did non-Jews in the old testament days get saved also? Yes, if they have faith in God, (see Ruth), but for cultural reasons the old testament texts do not focus on non-Jews---the Jews are the original of God's chosen people.

How am I so certain? Well, it's my faith... and my reading of many different things to also come to a deductive conclusion.

You may disagree---that's your perogative. And we'll leave it as that.

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Then there's CES Letter: My Search of Answers to My Mormon Doubts by Jeremy T. Runnells. That's a piece of work over the many alleged contradictions from Joseph Smith. I'm not here to bash anyone, but just want to point out that there is often a fine line between what people believe in and what is a blatant lie. Especially one that is based on easily countered cultural misappropriation.

Maybe the Bible is bogus and was written post hoc by a bunch of scholars who decided to advance their agenda through unifying a bunch of mythologies. Okay, that's a possibility, yes? If it really is that bogus, then it must be hard to explain why it still retains relevance today, more than a thousand years after the last texts were laid out. The observable action may be thus, but the unobservable prime mover cause isn't, and there's no one to prove that calling it God inspired is wrong.

In matters of the physical world, where we all can agree on a type of objectivity via a third-party entity, the scientific method rules supreme with its powers of causal predictions.

In matters of the non-physical world, where every one experiences things differently, and grand patterns of experiences occur, the rules of proof are less clear because it takes the life and environment of someone in order to experience the same as that person. And at some level, I think we run out of actual capability of handling the complexity required to derive a proof.

We are limited by the meat hardware we run on, literally.

And that's why faith exists. It's a deeply personal conviction. I am convinced that God is, and He is Creator, and Jesus Christ is His Son, and that the Bible isn't bogus.

I can share with you what I believe in, but I cannot offer you a proof/disproof by the scientific method due to the subjective and relational nature.

Only when we are done with this mortal life will it be proven who is the right one. But at that point, the matter is completely out of our hands anyway.

Meanwhile, my faith will carry me through this life with less fear, knowing that God has His plan for me, and that He is in control.

Amen.