Building truth vs. deception

Sye,

Thank you for writing me back.

I see truth like building blocks on a foundation. Everyone has a foundation and from there they build their truth one brick on top of another. If the foundation and the following bricks are not in place, the ones on top would not fit. Amen?

Take the atheist. His foundation is science. Even though he knows that science does not hold to the truth, he likes the way it attempts to self correct. Of course, he never acknowledges the bias in many conclusions and by leaving out God, he never really comes to the truth. The next brick is sin and on and on it goes.

A real true Christian builds his foundation on one thing and one thing only - Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He then sees himself the way God sees him and he is ashamed of his sin. He repents and asks God to take back the legal ground he's given to satan about specific things he's done. Then he asks (you have to ask) for the Holy Spirit to come into His life and create a clean heart in him and he begins embracing the Word of God and building up his faith. The combination is dynamite in his life and some serious power to be set free from sin. The old has passed away. He wants to tell everyone about what has happened in his life. Each of these sentences here are another brick laid on the foundation.

Some Christians get saved by believing that they are forgiven and that God loves them in their sin. They aren't ashamed of their sin at all but perhaps know that it is wrong. They flip flop back and forth over the years in their double mindedness and are as a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. They are ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth because they deny the power of God. The Bible speaks very clearly of this type of Christian that has the totally wrong foundation.

In my life, I have taken hold of truths and found them to be full of error. I was taught certain things and then held to them and when I got to the end, I hit a brick wall because the promised outcome did not occur. In fact, I was standing there with a huge mess on my hands that imvho, was not even in the ballpark of the will of God.

So guess what I did in that day? I took a mental arm and threw all the pieces off the table except my foundation - Jesus Christ and Him crucified and I began again to build truth looking at each piece to make sure it fit. Sometimes that took a while to accomplish.

How many times have I done this in life? A few. :-)

I can apply this to any point in my life. For example, there has been teachings over the years that would say that women should never ever ever ever teach in any regard but be silent because of that one Scripture and they should wear a headcovering as a sign of this. So you step back and look at that and wonder if this is the case. Is this what God is communicating to women on the whole? Doesn't the Word say that your sons and your daughters shall prophesy? Weren't there women of God commended for their ability to share truth in the OT and the NT? Do hats impart righteousness to a woman? Can't we step back and say, well then what was Paul trying to communicate here? See, communication when the person is not here to qualify it, can be a little tricky. That is why you have to see that Paul was a regular kind of guy full of the Holy Spirit. He knew he was getting a lot of revelation but he didn't see himself as the greatest apostle. He saw himself as the least. His writings from start to finish speak of being empowered by the Spirit and no longer under the Law of bondage and he is crystal clear that anyone can have what he has. Hmmmm? How does the above scenario of the silent head-covered woman fit the Law of bondage and fear that Paul was always speaking out against?

So I began to realize that teachers have a tendency to take a verse of Scripture and present it and not present the entire picture. For example, in 1 John 1 John says that it is deception to say that we do not sin. This is one of the key verses used to suggest that God doesn't free us from sin and that in normal Christianity, we sin every single day. But does that premise fit the entire picture? And see that was a huge revelation to me in a number of different areas. It is like quote mining by taking a piece of the words and leaving out the rest because the rest of 1 John certainly does not imply that people sin every day and at the end of the day are forgiven.

I noted this with Mofi. He went on and on for days and days suggesting that God will not throw people into hell's fire for all of eternity because He is all loving and wouldn't do that. To Mofi, they will die a second death, lights out and that is it. I believe that whatever punishment people get, it will be perfect to their situation and I personally want to lean and perhaps ere on the side of fearing the Lord. Jesus spoke more on hell's fire than any other topic including heaven.

If some folks get lights out, praise God. But that is not what I see happening. Anyway, to obtain this way of thinking, Mofi has to dismiss various Scriptures as irrelevant such as the rich man and Lazarus. He claims that Jesus is telling a fictitious story to make a point. I'm not sure what other point could be inferred but to fit his reasoning, he has to take that passage and dismiss it. That is why when people dismiss Psalms because it is poetry or Revelations because it contains metaphors, my red flags go up because I know once again that we have something going on that is going to lead us right down the path to deception. It is a brick that shouldn't be there, iow. And trust me, when you hit that brick wall, trying to figure out which brick shouldn't be there can take time.

So what does all this have to do with the price of tea in China? Well I'll tell you. Let's look at the God of the YEC for starters. The God of the YEC is one that likes to do things in a snap. Bang, bang, bang. It's done. Quickly, quickly, quickly. He throws this world together and then takes a break. The YEC God doesn't have a lot of time on His hands because He's only been around for about 6 days plus 6000 years. Whatever He was doing before that, we know not what but at least we know what He's been doing for 6000 years. If He is eternal, it surely isn't apparent through creation and does this aspect reflect His eternal Godhead?

I keep telling you that light travels at approx 186,287 miles per second. The fact that it is predictable points to a Creator. If there were no laws in this universe, it would point to chaos and then this group would have a leg to stand on. But they don't. If the laws of physics were not in place and in some areas just by a micron, this whole world would not be able to sustain life.

When we look at the stars, we can measure how far that star's light has had to travel to get here. And the biggest mind blowing thing is that we are looking back in time. That is a truth and there is no getting beyond it. They can literally see creation back to a millisecond of time, which to me is incredible.

The galaxy next door to us, Andromeda, is 2.3 million light years away and that is our next door neighbor! I mean there is flat out no getting around that.

There is no other possible Hebrew word to be used than yom for a time period. What you are suggesting when you see it in these other areas is that the readers of the time couldn't figure that out in context. Genesis 2:4 is an example of where yom is used as a time period.

This is from one of the RTB articles

Genesis 1:14-15 (NASB): Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of
the heavens to give light on the earth; and it was so. The verb translated “and it was so,” denotes a completed action. “This completed action phrase confirms that the sun and moon had performed each of the functions commanded in Genesis 1:14-15. It indicates that each of the functions of
signs, seasons, and years had completed at least one cycle. This is an additional indication that the ‘creative yom’ are long periods of time.”35 This cycle of “signs and seasons” could not be completed within the confines of a 24-hour
solar day.

To demonstrate this word phenomenon, I like to use the word "play."

I play with my toys
I play the piano
I wrote a play
I played the fool

I looked this up online to see which word in our language has the most definitions. Apparently the word "set" has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So it is not unusual in any language to have words that have various meanings and sometimes that can be misunderstood. Peter said that a day in the Lord is AS a thousand years. That wasn't to say it was a thousand years but that it's like that. So I have no problem with these yoms being longer periods of time and God days.

I don't agree with everything RTB posits. For example, I disagree with them on the behemoth not being a description of a dinosaur. I think it is remarkable that anyone could describe that creature without seeing it. There have been some other things I don't agree with. I think they need to concentrate a little more on seeing people freed from sin. Actually, I think everyone needs to do that because we are about as far away from that goal as possible in this country.

Getting back to my point though, an old earth creation God is one that is meticulous and fine tunes things. He isn't in a hurry. He displays Himself as the ancient of days of over 13.5 billion years. He has a plan in mind and He takes His time in getting it done. He epitomizes the word "patience." He puts so much thought into each detail of the creation process bringing about these creatures that are like walking gods, us, created in His image. He went through great pains to ensure that this world was perfectly able to support life. Just water being in this planet in three different conditions causes it to sustain life. That is what I like about RTB. They share many exact parameters about this earth that make it so remarkable as to realize that nobody could do this but the hand of Almighty God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.

Just a few things off the top of my head are the fact that bacteria were used to take away poisons from the environment and make them into usable raw materials. I mean it is incredible how many things we have in this life to be used as raw materials to make our lives so easy. And they know that if just one thing went wrong, the item wouldn't exist.

When I step back and take a look at creation, I marvel at the design and beauty of it all. I honestly can't understand how the atheist can't see this when it is so obvious down to the very last detail.

Their problem, if you ask me, is that they know that there is absolutely no way to reconcile the modern day god we have made up in our heads and the world of nature. They simply do not fit. We keep trying to make them do science according to our own understanding and they realize through testing nature that it doesn't fit. The only way to reconcile this is to declare that our God is longsuffering, righteous, holy, and pure and that his foolishness is wiser than man. He did a great job of creating our microdot of a planet and this universe.

Vera