LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? — Psalm 15:1
One time, I was sitting in an office with several members of my team, and we were reviewing resumes. Quite a few people had applied for a job with our company, and we were tasked with finding the best candidate. At that time, the job market was a lot more difficult than it is today. People were aggressive in their search for jobs as jobs were scarce.
On one side, we set out the job description. While we knew what the job entailed, we were not able to recite from memory the qualifications of the job. They were required to be a licensed healthcare worker in this position. That required specific training, including a college degree. Another qualification listed was a specific length of experience. We were able to take the many resumes and compare them to the qualifications.
As we dug through the pile of papers, we found that no one was qualified for the role we were hiring for based on the qualifications. The requirements of the job as listed were extremely high. No one held the required training, education, and experience.
In this Psalm, David asks a question that should cause us all to reflect and encourage us. at the end of this verse, he asks, who shall dwell in thy holy hill? The question is essentially who is qualified to dwell with God in His holy place? If we look over the qualifications, we will all quickly see that none of us are qualified!
Nothing of ourselves qualifies us for Heaven. Thankfully, the story does not end there. While we may not be qualified of ourselves, we are qualified through the blood of Jesus Christ! God is not looking for money, training, licensure, or anything else. He is simply looking for the blood of Jesus.
Don’t get discouraged when you look at yourself and see sin, fault, and failure. Those are all things of this world. God is looking at your heart. He’s looking to see if the blood of Jesus has been applied. If it has, He says you are worthy and more than qualified!
Jared Dyson
Another Well Ministries
"You're free to do whatever you want. But if you do the things I don't like, you'll be tortured forever. But don't blame me, I just setup the entire system."
That sound like freedom to you? Sounds like desperate fear tactics to me.
I'm curious, if the bible were proven true to you would you change your thoughts?
To whom would it be proven? If I am the subject then by definition I would be convinced by proof. But I suspect my standard of proof is different than yours. I don't think any history book can be proven to be true, only corroborated with evidence. History is a Mystery.
Furthermore, each statement stands alone. If I tell you one truth and two lies, will you believe the lies? I hope not.
And why would the creator of the universe use an old book to talk to you? Seems like he should be able to speak to you thru any medium, no? Dreams, poetry, visions, music, love, pain...
As far as proof, my question was flawed. Of course if something was proven true to YOU it would be inevitable to you so no fighting against it. You are right about history and the Bible IS corroborated with evidence. Many non-biblical historians recall people and events in the Bible. Archeological findings support people, places, and events in the Bible. Many other fields of scientific study support biblical claims of cosmology, biology, physics, mathematics, etc., and especially creation over the deeply scientifically flawed theory of evolution.
My point was trying to determine if your heart is just dead set against a higher power that calls us to accountability whether He is real or not. God created us out of love and the desire to have a relationship with us. We are created in His image so we could have a glimpse of what He is like. However, we can only learn more about Him by seeking Him. Imagine expecting and baby to have an intellectual based emotional relationship with you. Imagine that baby thinking he is on par with you and knows enough about life to set the rules of engagement of his desired relationship with you. The baby is not only incapable but completely out place with any of its own expectations as it just doesn’t have the knowledge base to do so. Yet we still care for them and give them what they need because we love them. However, they mature to our way of understanding as we teach them and as they grow and learn. God does the same for us when we seek Him. The wisdom God has left us coupled with our intellectual spiritual nature, having been created in His image, we can have a personal relationship with Him. I mentioned love, He gave us free will to choose whatever we wanted. We could choose to follow our fleshly desires all the way to hell if we want. It’s our choice. He gave us the book, His word, to enlighten us to a better path. One outside of our animalistic nature so we could actually want to have a relationship with Him instead of just being mindless robots following some program of obedience. How do you have a meaningful relationship with a mindless robot? You don’t. Yes He can do all the work for us and open the sky and wave hi and make water appear in your mouth when you are thirsty but how would you grow and learn without any adversity on your part? How would you have any meaningful relationship with a God like that. You would be nothing more than a baby with no understanding dependent on its parent. This is why He communicates to us personally, metaphysically, through His word to our our hearts and minds.
Having a personal relationship with a God that knows you so well to know the number of hairs on your head, the inner intricacies of your heartbeat, the desires of your heart, thoughts in your head, who can communicate to you in your innermost private thoughts, etc. Having a relationship with a God like that is invaluable and never ending. He is the best teacher, the best therapist, the best advisor, the best companion.
People often equate following God to following rules. That is not the case. He is a personal God that renews your mind and heart to an enlightened intellectual base of existence. We all live in a failed state of being compared to Him, the all powerful perfect God. Yet our imperfection, our sin, separates us. He wants to bring us closer to Him to the enlightenment of a better existence. One with joy and understanding and confidence. He provided is a path to Him. One that metaphysically changes who we are and how we think. He became one us and experienced what we experience and lived a perfect human life only to be killed by us due to our clinging to rules and religion instead of just seeking Him. His sacrifice paved the way back to Him.
He is a God of such high righteousness and justice that the laws of His nature have them embedded in them. This is why faith in Jesus is the only way to redemption. God became human to save us humans by interceding and becoming our mediator at the time of judgement. We are not expected to be perfect, we cannot be, we are only expected to acknowledge that we are not perfect and need God to redeem us by accepting His spirit to live in us creating a symbiotic relationship this wielding influence over us and making us better and us knowingly being better for it.
Just as Christ died for us, to give us eternal life, we must die to ourselves, to our animalistic minds and desires to gain everlasting life with Him. It’s the ultimate trial for the ultimate prize, everlasting life. If you created eternal beings how would decide which ones get to live with you? The mostly decent ones who learned how to trust you, who proved worthy of your trust, and constantly worked to become better beings or the crazies who don’t give a shit about anyone else and do whatever they want and expect you to deal with it?
If you think evolution is false, please explain dog breeding. Toy chihuahuas and St. Bernard's? And your children look like both you and your spouse, don't they? And do you know that AI uses the principles of evolution to learn things? Many children, only some survive. That's actually what you say God does, he has many children but only some get eternal life.
But I don't believe God is picking his favourite creatures to have eternal life. The idea that God needs or wants something seems flawed to me. He is perfect, and so he is perfectly fulfilled, how could anything I do anger or delight him?
And if you're going to be serious about philosophy, metaphysics, religion, whatever you want to call it, you have to have some method of discerning truth from falsehood. Merely repeating an eloquent sermon is not enough to find truth. You must want truth more than a starving man wants food, more than you want to be right, more than you want to survive, be loved and accepted or to have great sex. You must be willing to give up everything, including your thoughts, beliefs, personality traits. Your very identity will burn away in the search for truth.
Most people don't really want truth. And that's OK. God loves all his creatures, no matter what books they like to read.