Recently, I listened to a news segment (Sunday, I think) about the sun. I didn't hear the entire presentation because I didn't like the person presenting it. I did catch a small part of the conversation, the part about the sun exploding eventually, but the voice of authority said the sun wouldn't explode for another 5 million or billion years. I said to myself, who really knows?
We put our faith in scientists because they speak with authority, they do experiments, they gather the facts that come from those experiments. When they try to fit the pieces together, they are just human beings trying to justify their views. What they present to us is one opinion, one theory, one idea about the issue they are pursuing. We have been trained to think of science as facts that can't be changed. What science is, really, is a reflection of the times it exists in.
Why did I shrug at the idea of the sun taking so long to explode? Because no one really knows what is happening inside the sun, how it is aging, what will happen when it weakens enough to explode and die. Do we know what is happening to our ozone? Not really. We guess. We make theories. We try to understand what it will cause and how long it will take, because the ozone, and the sun, are tied to our existence. We can't live without them operating properly. They are damaged, but can they be fixed? The Bible says that Man will destroy himself this time, GOD will not do it.
We lift up doctors in the same way. And professors at universities. And people with lots of money. We see them as being more than us, but they are learning new things in their lives, just as we do. Pastors can be fooled into thinking they know more than they do... and become imprisoned by those views. We keep learning until the day we die, and if we keep learning, it means our thoughts and views and opinions can change. We never know everything, we only know what we have learned up until today. Tomorrow we may learn something that will change everything we ever thought was true. That is kind of what happens when people discover the salvation of Christ.
It is hard to find the Truth, the big T truth. We can spend all of our lives searching for it, and then find at the end we still don't know everything we want to know. I have heard sermons about the difference between the Christmas we see in marketing campaigns and the real events in the Bible. We prefer the fun versions, the great decorations, the emotions that make one of our celebrations worthwhile. If the Truth interferes with those beliefs, we don't want to know it.
There are some truths in the Bible that can't be ignored,
and won't go away because we don't want to think about them.
Discovering what GOD is trying to share with us is not always easy. We can listen to a great variety of sermon views, we can read it ourselves, think about a topic at great length, and still not find a final answer about some topics... like how to honor the Sabbath, or what foods to eat, or how/why Judas suddenly had Satan "enter him" so he would betray Christ to fulfill the Word. (1) What is a firm truth? What is a flexible concept? And, what are the consequences of our choices? Even the commandment not to kill has a different definition for war than it does for murder. You have to find your own answers.
Your voice of authority needs to be GOD. He is the only one that matters. He is the one that has the right answer, the truth, the details about the future. If GOD wants the sun to explode, it will explode, at any time He wants it to... make sure you sift your information sources through the eyes of GOD... not the eyes of Men.
In Christ,
Deb
(1) John 13:27 KJV :: And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. -- https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=entered+into+him&qs_version=KJV
