What can be known about God?

[W2L]

Thrives on a challenge.

Plays along to make the enemy think they have won, only to snatch victory from underneath the nose of his enemy towards the end.

Purpose driven prophesy way markers as indication of the multitude of battles being fought and won.

Sometimes deliberately plays a hand to loose, so to invigorate the enemy to think he has a winning chance.

Looses battles deliberately to swing it 180 degrees towards the end where it counts.

Loves to demoralise the enemy to the point of self defeat and self retirement.

Believe me when I say that Satan is the most demoralized enemy of God who has self defeat written all over his face. Satan wants out and the final script to the saga is where Satan is compelled to do what he needs to do to get out of his nightmare, rather what he needs to do to prolong his stance against God.

Satan no longer wants to play ball with God and he wants closure.

Having said that, now who wants to play ball against God ?

Do you really want to know God more than Satan does?

Not wise to do so.

Stick with knowing his love through his Son Jesus Christ.

Thank you as well.

 

[Hawkins]

Thoughts?

Bible was written as human accounts of testimonies ultimately from eyewitnesses chosen by God Himself. He showed who He is through His eyewitnesses and for them to write down about who He is. He thus is what the Bible says who He is.

So it boils down to how correctly you can know about Him through the Bible, you need guidance from the Holy Spirit to achieve this.

 

[Duke fan]

You can know His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and a Savior according to John 14:6.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

You can know His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and a Savior according to John 14:6.

"Can" as written in Scripture, yes.

A true possibility. Few ever realize this. Multitudes NEVER do.
Thus
the many warnings in Scripture, from Yahweh and from Jesus and from the Apostles -
Judge yourselves daily, so that (or to prevent) anyone being lost/ deceived/ falling short through the deceitfulness of sin....

 

[now faith]

^^^^Still theology.[/QUOTE

Theology is presumption based on ignorance of fact.
Not that A person is ignorant for seeking deeper meaning of God's Word.
Theology and Scientific Theory in some instances are similar.
They both lack Spirtual awakening, often to be confirmed.
In Theology it is vital that the Theologians understand that God is a Spirit.
In Scientific Theory, the practitioner for the most part will not consider God at all.
If they would consider a creator in a open minded manner , their conclusion would not take many years of reserch trying to prove their theories.
Both Theologians , and Scientists are limited , by what they have been taught to be true, rather than looking outside the box.

 

[now faith]

You could say all Theology is based on Philosophy, and Philosophy is based on the individuals preception of of life.
The foundation of Philosophy then becomes limited to personal experience.
This is circumstantial truth.

 

[Paul G West Sr]

Thoughts?

W2L,

Here's a list of things I wrote about God in my book "It Seems To Me". I had to remove much, due to the limitations of the forum:

1. Our God is selfish - Oh, did I ruin your reverie; your lovely state of rapture about our "Good God"? Sorry 'bout that! However, it is true - God is selfish, and it is OK. In fact it's wonderful! God deserves the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness is only sinful for man, not for God! That leads me to ask, would God say to us "do as I say, not as I do?" Yes, of course He would, and that too is OK for our most wonderful, glorious God to ask of us.

3. God is love - And He loves all people, especially His believing children, but God is also Just; He sends people to Hell! Unfortunately for many souls, a lot of Preachers do not give the full message of God's justice! In the end, God's justice trumps His love. He wants us all in Heaven with him, wishing no one would go to Hell, yet He allows people to refuse His grace, and send themselves to Hell! We are so flooded with messages of God's love, that we do not live with the wisdom God wants us to have about Him, that wisdom is about His Justice!

4. God is good - In His/Their goodness, He/They:

Made a way for our return to righteousness (which is in Him!), after man's fall from The Garden of Eden. If He/They were not good, we would all be headed for Hell, not only the Unbeliever but also the Believer! The level of righteousness that God requires of Believers, in order to be His Children, is far too great for any man to achieve on his own. That implies error on God's behalf in creating us! Did He error in creating us? No way! Even more important to God than creating us as perfect beings, was that we would be free in choosing to love Him. What a hollow, worth-less love it would be to Him, for us to have little or no choice in loving Him.

5. God is Just - God's justice, in the very end, must (by His plan), overrule His goodness! When he examines non-believers, at The Final Judgment, they can only be sentenced to Hell because of His unchangeable, just nature (His justice). God, Inflexible? – YES! Could the inflexibility of God suggest that God is limited? – YES! But, this limit (inflexibility or “unchangeability”) in God is not a sign of weakness! Instead, it is a sign of decisiveness on His part. It was a decision, before the beginning of time, to limit His own goodness. He decided to allow His just nature (His justice), to overrule His good nature (His love), at the final judgment of mankind.

6. "God wounds and God heals!" - Deuteronomy 32:39 says, "Now see that I, even I am He, and there is no God besides me; I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal: Nor is there any who can deliver from my hand." This is one of the most shocking texts in the Word of God! If "God is good", how does that fit with "God wounds…"? I was taught for seventy years that there are no confusing/obfuscations in the Word of God, yet I find many divergent facts, like God kills and makes alive! What about this next fact:

7. "God creates good and evil!" - Isaiah 45: 5-7 says, "Who has commanded and it came to pass, unless the Lord has ordained it? And Lamentations 3:37-38 asks, "Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?" Again, I am blown away with the conflict, that "God is good", yet He creates good and evil! It is easy enough to see why people walk away from the church and from God! Our logical human minds are a detriment to being fully committed to God and to Christianity. If our church leaders & Pastors would only teach the whole truth, about these conflicts, I believe our faith would be more real, and stronger because of it.

8. God is longsuffering - as it says many places in scriptures, but He is not forever-suffering! In the very end His justice prevails over His longsuffering, as most humans do, in fact, go to Hell! His longsuffering is not unlimited! It seems to me that God stills suffers with every one of us! We sin until our dying day, and our sin causes Him to suffer. It is the price He knew He would pay by giving us choice, when He created us.

9. God is Holy - Wholly Holy, as it says many places in scriptures. He cannot co-exist with evil. There is something awesomely mysterious in God's Holiness. "Inexplicable" is a better word, but God uses the word "mystery" in the Bible, so I choose to use it here. God's holiness is unreachable/untouchable perfection. Nothing man has touched on earth is truly perfect. Yet, we will know God and will belike Him in Heaven, even perfect. God said, "be ye perfect, even as I am perfect." He didn not say when or how we would be perfect, but those who know Him, know the how is by what He will do in us, and to us. And the when is at least in Heaven. We'll never be perfect in this life, at least not in the way that He thinks of perfect.

10. God is right - because He is God, and He is God because He is right, totally right (that is righteous). No one else can be totally right! Man can choose right actions, but only God is right by His nature; by Who He is. He is perfection in every way. One day my meditation lead me to the definition of righteousness, and I realized when we are talking about an attribute of God, we are talking about extremely complex matters, far above our heads. God is so many things, such as love, sweetness, perfection, and honesty. I'm contemplating His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc. Then there is His purity and perfect integrity. God is peace-loving, and what about things like provider and protector and His cherishing us, It seems to me that He takes pleasure in us, His greatest creation, and that He takes joyous observance of us, especially when we attempt to be righteous, like Him? Then there is also His forbearance (longsuffering) in spite of our wickedness. I suspect He is sometimes even prideful regarding us, when we actually glorify Him before others. Perhaps He even longs to be with us, as He will be someday. Pride is sinful for us, but like so many things, pride is not sinful for God. Nothing can be sinful for Him; He is absolutely perfect!

11. God is jealous - And He is justified in His jealousy. Jealousy is not a sin for God. He has a right to be jealous, because we (as with everything in the universe) belong to Him. He made us, and we owe our very selves to Him. If we care for anything more than Him, He is jealous. For us to have, or to do anything for ourselves, is wrong - outright sinful! However, all that we do for Him is godly. It pleases Him, and it benefits us. You may wonder, how it benefits us? The first thought should be, that He blesses us here in this life, as a benefit, because of our service to Him. Please, do not think I am saying that it is sinful to enjoy life, I suspect God enjoys our enjoyment of life. It prepares us to live for him, and He can be right in the middle of every moment of our joy-filled life!

12. God is worthy - Worthy of our love, adoration, obedience, hope, faith, worship, etc., primar-ily because of Who He is, but also because of what He has done, and also what He will do. He is worthy because of His personal involvement/help to us, as we live our daily lives! He is worthy by His Omnipresence, by His perfection, His Omnipotence, His purity, His Omniscience, His creativity, His majesty/beauty. I'm sure I have only scratched the surface. He is infinitely worthy!

13. God is active. He not only exists, watching His creation, but He is also involved in His creation. He didn't create everything and walk away. He decided to be involved in our lives, and in His universe. It seems to me that God actively operates the universe. He is involved in physics, there is no such thing as gravity, God operates in gravity! He controls everything in the universe, except our wills. It seems to me to be the most amazing fact of all, is that He gave us free will, and He did so knowing the impact that our free will would have on the universe! God wants us to choose Him with our free will, not to be puppets of His creation, and it wouldn't be a free choice if He had any control over our wills. He has an eternal plan to achieve His own Glory, and that plan includes our eternal worship of Him, as well as our involvement in His plan. Yet He has given us the power to opt-out of it all. Jesus "stands at the door and knocks"! He doesn't come by once in a while to check-up on unbelievers. He stands at the door 24/7, day after day, after day, after day, knocking and waiting for us to realize that we cannot do this on our own. We cannot find another way to Heaven, or earn the salvation He is so ready and willing to give.

14. God's is Gracious - Grace is a word that is misused in the world. It can apply to simple kindness, or longsuffering in a person, and it can be used to describe a woman walking, or a structure. God's grace is an all-important word describing God's willingness to continue His interest in His filthy, sinful, unloving people! Grace sets God apart from every other living being in the universe. For someone so magnificent, righteous, holy, omnipotent, omniscient, full of glory, to even turn His attention to mankind is and implication of His Grace! It seems to me that grace is the attribute in Him which permits his love for us, as well as His mercy toward us. His grace seems to be even more foundational than His love! Those two things direct His judgment of us, and allowed His Son, Jesus Christ, to forgive and redeem such lowly, filthy creatures as us.

15. God is power, force (The Force - In Star Wars parlance?), energy - Based on Colossians I:17, I believe God/Christ, is/are gravity; He/They are centrifugal force; centripetal force; atomic attraction, chemical attraction, Matter and Anti-Matter, action and reaction, "Ying and Yang", ebb and flow, and every other kind of force. It seems to me that Airplanes do not fly by aerodynamics, Jesus holds them aloft. Wings and propellers, and lift, are Gods way of allowing us to "fly", without recognizing Him in the activity. They are God's way of allowing us to think we are doing it!! Words like "gravity" and "flying" are the names we have given to God's involvement in His creation. We had to call it something, why not flying? Surely, even the mathematics we use to prove the observation we call flying (supposedly caused by thrust and "lift") is really God's method of making provision for man to fly, yet DISBELIEVE in Him! Without the math, we would be forced to believe in Him, and He has no desire to force us to believe. I've come to believe that H2O can be better expressed as H+God+H+God+O = And that God even raises and lowers our chests, so that air is drawn into, and expelled, from our lungs.

16. God is in, and into, miracles - Yet, with every miracle, God provides a way for man to DISBELIEVE! Without coincidences and "reasonable explanations" of events, man would have no choice but to accept God, but God wants lovers, not mere assenters! He wants and deserves adoration, not mere acceptance. With every miracle, God provides a way for man to ascribe it to a "reasonable explanation". It is so Godly of Him to give man the opportunity to deny Him, even in His miracles.

17. God is Mega-Glorious - He is glorious in What He is! He is glorious in Who He is! He is glorious in what He has done! He is glorious in His Plan for man, and His Plan for the universe! He is glorious in the execution of His Plan for man, and for the universe! Things are proceeding exactly according to His plan. He is glory, personified!

18. God is vengeful - Hebrews 10:30 - Vengeance [belongeth] unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. The other day I spoke to someone before thinking, saying, "God will not destroy the people at Armageddon out of vengeance", but He reminded me later, that indeed it will be for vengeance that He destroys the remaining world at that time. In Revelation, the Martyred Saints were crying-out for vengeance from under God's Throne, saying "How Long Lord, will we have to wait for vengeance"!

19. God hates. Proverbs 6:16-19 - These six [things] doth the LORD hate: yea, seven [are] an abomination unto him:3 17 A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,4 An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, 19 A false witness [that] speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

20. God is independent (I'm not sure I agree with this one. A friend of mine submitted this - attribute of God that would be considered sinful for us). It would indeed be sinful for you and I to regard God as someone we do not need. While I agree that it is sinful for us to say that we do not need God, It seems to me that God does indeed need us! Not because He is weak in any way, but because He decided to need us. He decided to run His world with our help and not to do it without our help! He told His disciples to go into all the world teaching the gospel and baptizing in His name. He could have saved people another way, but He chose to involve us in His Great Commission. In that way, God needs us to play our part.

21. God discriminates - He chose Isaac over Ishmael, He chose Abel over Cain, He chose Jacob over Esau, He chose Joseph (Jacob's last-born, over Jacob's first-born), He chose all who would become believers over all who would not become believers, before the foundations of the earth! It seems to me that God looked forward in time and chose millions of people who would choose Him, and ignored billions of people who refused to choose Him.

 

[1213]

Thoughts?

We can know everything Bible tells and also that what can be seen from His creation.


God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
John 4:24

He who doesn't love doesn't know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:8

 

[Paul G West Sr]

We can know everything Bible tells and also that what can be seen from His creation.


God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
John 4:24

He who doesn't love doesn't know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:8

One of the most interesting ideas that I believe God gave me is that People can indeed know Jesus by his creation.

This comes from the scripture that says, "No one comes unto the Father except by Jesus Christ", which implies that all those who die without ever hearing of Jesus, will go to Hell! Now, while this indeed might be true. I do not ever want to go against common teaching, because I am not seminary trained, I felt instructed within my heart (by The Holy Spirit) that people know Christ through His creation. The Bible says He created everything an nothing that is nothing that was created that wasn't created by Him. That suggests to me that people can come to Christ through His creation.

Romans 1:19-20 makes it quite clear that no man will have an excuse about God, because they know the truth through the creation. Here's the way Eugene Peterson's THE MESSAGE puts it:

"But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse."

Some of this could be my own need to see the maximum number of people safely in God's family. Hell is so horrible to me that I couldn't wish it on anyone, not even Hitler. Living or dying is not important to me. Only belonging to Jesus Christ and living with Him eternally is important.

 

[Paul G West Sr]

How did you come to your understanding?

Of course Turkeys can fly!

 

[Tone]

Thoughts?

Whatever one hears...

 

[1213]

..This comes from the scripture that says, "No one comes unto the Father except by Jesus Christ", which implies that all those who die without ever hearing of Jesus, will go to Hell! ...

I don’t think there is reason to believe that people who have not heard of Jesus goes to hell, because:

For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without the law. As many as have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it isn't the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified (for when Gentiles who don't have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying with them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else excusing them) in the day when God will judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ.
Romans 2:12-16

Jesus has given the condition, which is:

These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Mat. 25:46

I think person who has not heard of Jesus, can be counted righteous, if he acts righteously.

.

 

[now faith]

I believe Paul was speaking in present tense, after Christ Had been the last sacarifice for mankind.
There were many who knew God in the Old Testament , drawn by God's Spirit to salvation .
Some just as they rejected Christ Rejected the Holy Spirit after being drawn by God Father, Son , Holy Sprit.
One account was Rahab, She knew of God's great Power and acted out of a knowlage She felt in Her Heart.

 

[Paul G West Sr]

Of course Turkeys can fly!

We had 150 foot Ponderosa Pines, where many turkeys roosted every night at certain times of the year. The would fly from one bank (hill) to a lower branch in a Ponder, then work their way up to 90 - 115 up, usually in nearby trees.

 

[now faith]

I raised a Turkeys once, 2 toms and one hen.
The toms became agressive toward Roosters, I had a mix of Game, Road Island reds, and White Rock chickens.
The Game Roosters, and the Road Island red Rooster would chalenge the Tom Turkeys.
Not much of a challenge , the Toms would slap the daylights out of the Roosters.
I made a pet out of the hen, since she did not flog me like The Toms if I wasnt looking.
One day she just up and flew away, I watched her take flight and as high up as I could see she disappeared.
I do not know if the Tom Turkeys can fly, mine were big and never had the opportunity as the holidays approached.
I honestly wondered why I just didn't go buy a butterball, due to the prep work.

 

[Paul G West Sr]

I raised a Turkeys once, 2 toms and one hen.
The toms became agressive toward Roosters, I had a mix of Game, Road Island reds, and White Rock chickens.
The Game Roosters, and the Road Island red Rooster would chalenge the Tom Turkeys.
Not much of a challenge , the Toms would slap the daylights out of the Roosters.
I made a pet out of the hen, since she did not flog me like The Toms if I wasnt looking.
One day she just up and flew away, I watched her take flight and as high up as I could see she disappeared.
I do not know if the Tom Turkeys can fly, mine were big and never had the opportunity as the holidays approached.
I honestly wondered why I just didn't go buy a butterball, due to the prep work.

There are many lesson to learn in farming, ranching, etc. It's not as easy (or romantic) as you might think. As with most birds, they cannot fly up at a steep angle. Even bats will fly in circles to come up 150 feet out of Carlsbad Caverns. The hole (cave) in the ground is probably a hundred yards across, but when they come out at twilight, they fly in a really big circle and rise circle by circle until they are out of the cave. The marvelous exception, of course, is the Hummingbird. Oh, I found our why they hum.... they don't know the words.

 

[now faith]

Lol, Green acres is the place for me, farm living is the life!

 

[Paul G West Sr]

Lol, Green acres is the place for me, farm living is the life!

Oh yes, Zha-Zha Gabor, and Eddie Albert. It was a funny show!