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Sounds of Sinai |
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Feb 11, 2007
God and Man
Frequently, a human will take God’s foot print or shadow and use that incredibly limited piece of information to define God. Or people will take the “agreeable” information about God that they approve of or “like” and leave out the rest and define God as they “want” him. This is why the scriptures says we must worship in spirit and in truth.
Men of God have had God reveal some things, which I believe were mostly personal revelations, that they have preached as a general message to the church. Examples are give all you have to the poor, sow and reap riches, banish sickness be well, etc. When this happens, there is a clear sense of distortion or something missing. It rings with truth in it, but it feels so very incomplete when trying to apply it generally. A personal revelation is very appropriate to the person it is for. God does want some people richer and some poorer, some to go through a season sickness and other wellness, etc. A wise man confirms the truth he hears as it applies to himself.
Satan is the most adept at misusing truth. Partial truth or incomplete truth can be used to hide a self serving lie. There are “artificial” butters that are made 95% of “stuff” and 5% of butter. It is well understood that it is hard to fool people if something is just 100% “stuff” and contains nothing of the “real” thing.
A simplistic definition of philosophy is the search for truth in the absence of God. If God is brought into the equation, then man is put into his place. God is truth. We must have God out, to elevate man to the “finder” of truth or better stated the “definer” of truth. It is a game filled with vanity and if you will, an insult to the God that is present but declared absent by the “truth” seeking fool.
Remove God and there are only three kinds of truth to find - going inside, going outside or relating the two.
Going inside is simply expressed in the statement, I think therefore I am. Beyond the awareness of self and an explanation of what self is, everything else is a conception or perception of self thus very egotistical. Whether something is perceived to exist or actually exists whatever that is, becomes moot because life is lived by perceptions only. It is all about me.
The opposite is that I don’t exist outside of all that does exist and I am just a tiny collection of pieces of the whole bunch of pieces that is existence. By the built in forces that push pieces around, I am collected and animated and then I am dispersed. The “I” referred to in the previous sentence is a randomly associated set of animated matter loosely connected for a period of time thus giving it some momentary sense of identity. Energized matter in undefined motion with momentarily collected patterns at any point in time is all that exists. The self is a pointless momentary curiosity.
The last kind of “truth” is the one that excites most philosophers. It is an attempt to define who man is and what existence is and how the two are related as to purpose. So efforts are made to catalog what a man is, catalog everything that is around him and define the rules of interaction. Philosophy becomes an argument about which rules exist, what is the level of importance of each rule as if it has purpose or value.
I will argue now as if there were no God to provide the answer.
Purpose implies a perceiver of truth or reality which we will call a thinking man. By definition his perception of all things external comes through senses and is processed by mental awareness. Clearly by this observation we have three places where we can be completely misled about reality. The difference between what is happening right now and happened in the past, our ability to get information through our senses about that reality and our ability to process what our senses are telling us.
I look outside and see the “sun shining.” I like its existence because it makes me warm but it doesn’t exist. How can the sun be shining and not exist? Because it disappeared 4 minutes ago though I can’t tell you how. Of course I won’t “know” that it disappeared for another 4 minutes (unless gravity travels faster than light) because that is when its shining will stop for me. I am living as if the sun still exists until the shining stops. Because everything I trust as existing comes through senses and it takes time for any information to travel from reality to my senses, I am never connected to what really exists but always only what “used to exist” and maybe still exists.
If I have lived my whole life in a cave, the sun has never existed. If I live in a land where it is always cloudy the sun exists differently than if I can see a bright circle in the sky. Immediately, we react with our natural tendency to say that only one person’s knowledge of something is not acceptable for everyone else to say if something exists or not. But what if all men’s sensory perceptions are the same and wrong. If our senses fool us or are inadequate, the world around us is not really what we think it is. At best our knowledge of what is around us must be considered incomplete and maybe significantly incomplete and only a fool should rely on such faulty or limited information.
The last is the trickiest. Due we trust our experiences or that of others. Our senses have provided us information. People hear sounds that aren’t there or are they - because no one else can hear them. People see things that aren’t there or are they. When information comes into us, we make judgments about the “reality” associated with that information. We entertain ourselves by going to a movie and have screen “reality” replace real “reality” to the point our hearts pound and we have tears. Can we trust what we “think” is real, is real? Ask an insane person. Go ahead and argue with them because I assure you they will “know” what is real including the worm eating your face.
Let me stop being that fool that walks and talks as though there is no God. God makes all things real as he is the “I am that I am” The word “am” is the existence word. In a spiritual world everything is right now and eternal. It is not distorted by perceptions and sensory distortion and mental deception and etc. In the center of every man, the inner man, the spiritual man, is the place where the reality connection occurs. That is why we first live in a spiritual world and navigate in the fog of our mental and physical world. We move with confidence through that sea of confusing perceptions because we are anchored in the eternal truth in our spirit where we connect directly with God.
You should have one clear reaction to this little writing about truth. What desperate creatures we are to be connected to our God and feel completely comfortable and secure with our place in reality for this second, this day, our life and eternity. For he is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end and in him all things have come into existence and maintain their existence. He defines all purpose and gives all meaning. The pursuit of truth without God which drives philosophers to sad and silly places after a lifetime of pursuit are settled in an instant’s awareness of “The Truth.” God is embraced in the core of our being with childlike acceptance.
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