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
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.
Ok. Here’s the deal, what I’m about to say is not meant as an insult or to belittle you but rather to wake you up and challenge you. You seem lost and ignorant. Ignorant just means you don’t know. Not calling you anything.
First, the spiel about dog breeding and how children look like their parents in defense of evolution is extremely ignorant. Dogs are all of the same species. Parents and children are of the species. There is no cross species transformation happening there. The whole of evolution has like four different parts to it and evolutionists love to lead with the only part that makes sense. Natural Selection. NS is a self evident truth. It’s logical and make sense but it can’t account for a whale becoming a dog or an ape becoming a man. Learn how DNA works if you want to understand how ridiculous evolution is. Look up transcription and how DNA transcribes itself. The probability of any of that happening naturally is too great to consider it a possibility. Math scholars have done the math on the probability of only one protein evolving into existence and there simply hasn’t even been enough time in existence for it to have happened by chance naturally. Literally the universe is not old enough to account for the smallest probability of that one protein to evolve.Now, for DNA to transcribe the are many different proteins needed.
Deciphering truth from falsehood, God is truth. There is no individual personal truth. There is only God and only He is truth. When seeking God, He will put a love of the truth in you. You will want to know more about everything. Especially about Him. You’ve already failed understanding evolution, which you seem to have belief in by your failed defense of it. You believe in something you don’t even understand. A follower of Christ will want to be sure of his beliefs. Not just accept what they hear or see but learn and understand it. The Bible is the preconditioning for the manifestation of truth. There is no other historical record more accurate than the Bible. God made Heaven and earth and us for His own good pleasure. He IS perfect. So when He gives His creation freedom and creation effs it all up by not following one rule His perfect love has to find a way to reconcile the creation with His perfect righteousness and perfect justice as well because His perfect love won’t allow Him to leave behind His creation. He is perfect in every way and must act that way from every perspective. He crafted a plan of epic proportions to save us and it even included Him humiliating Himself for us. What other God loves us so? There is no other. Search all the religions of the world. All the so called gods. There is no other. The God of the Bible is the one and only living God. Seek Him and he put a love of the truth in you and prove over and over again by revealing Himself to you how true and real He is.
God loves all His creatures but cannot have sin in His presence. His perfect Holiness won’t allow it. He loves them so much He died for them to be reconciled back to Him. Because the wages of sin is death. He died to pay our debt of sin and It is us that want to rejects Him. If you’re lost at sea and your boat is sinking you going to die. You are shark food waiting to drop in the soup. Along comes a lifeboat to save you but you are too stubborn to accept the help because you don’t like the lifeboat for whatever reason. Guess what. You just killed yourself. The lifeboat came for you and waited for you to get in but you refused. This is an analogy of what will happen at the final judgement. You ignored Jesus and the lifeboat he brought you. You chose to send yourself to hell. God didn’t send you there. You did it on your own.
What would it hurt to pray and ask God to reveal Himself to you? As long as you are genuinely curious and want to know more about Him, He will stir your heart, begin to reveal himself, and bring people into your life to help you. Or don’t bother and go about your day. It’s all up to you. God bless you fren. 2 Peter 1:2, Numbers 6:24-26
So you think a toy chihuahua and a St Bernard could mate with each other? Consider the mechanics. And even if they could just carry that process further, its not hard to see how if the small dog is small enough and the big dog is big enough, they will be physically unable to mate, and probably uninterested as well. And the definition of same species, if you are unfamiliar, is that two creatures are said to be the same species if they could produce viable offspring.
And I am familiar with the probabilistic arguments regarding creationism and its simply straw man argumentation. Not all things are equally likely to happen, the universe likes to rhyme with itself, things that stick around are usually good at sticking around, and we get more things that can replicate themselves than things that cannot. I recommend using iron man arguments instead of straw man arguments. It will make you more persuasive, addressing the best possible version of your opponents arguments, rather than a watered down version.
And finally, I am not afraid of your threats about the afterlife. I am a child of God. My soul is immortal. I don't need to be saved.