Bible Interests
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Let's pretend I am a 14 year old boy and my parents gave me permission to freely search the internet. So I do. I type in the word God and hit enter. Google gives me a list of suggestions, so I make selections and read for two hours.
The selections were :
Considering only a month has gone by and I'm a kid and I don't go to a church yet and .... I just kind of hang back in waiting. Eventually though, I have a moment and I tell myself, yes, I do believe. Is this "belief moment" derived from my previous thoughts and investigations, or is it of God having infused in to me a grace for the new belief? Now lets go back to Abram, before he was Abraham, and look at the types of stimulus and information he had so as to make a comparison to what I just described above. What did Abram experience or look at or touch or hear from his environment and culture that would have compelled him to his belief? Genesis 12:6 tells us, " Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. And then, "17 But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. 18 So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go.” And also, "14 The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, 15 for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. And in Genesis 15:5-21 "5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness. 7 And he said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. 12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. 13 Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” 17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.” Abram actually lived experiences I was only be able to read about, and after physically experiencing many encounters with God, Abram believed. The reason I am making this such a big deal, is because Abraham was physically doing something and actively aware that his belief in the one "true" God was increasing, to the point that he fully believed and it was credited to him as righteousness. Abraham was in the process of coming to believe, and then, he fully believed. Understanding what happened here is critical for understanding how we describe our personal belief and whether or not we were" infused with the grace to believe" or whether our own inclinations to believe solicited graces from God compelling us to believe. Can we start believing without God's interventions and come to a full belief, or do we need God to "plant a seed of belief" ? Does it appear as though these stories in Genesis are compelling us to understand the concept of obey- if we obey, our belief will increase? In order to obey, does one "do" something? Could this also be called a "work"? So if while obeying (having faith) we are "working" in obedience to God, can we assert that while believing and obeying God we merit some graces, because it seems that Genesis 12 and 15 are saying just that? Another reason for this apparent compulsion to identify how and when someone is "justified" stems from Calvin's concerns to identify the "elect" and Luther's concerns to label us "dung hills, incapable of meriting anything from God". Both profess that we have to either be one of God's elect, or we have to receive the gift of grace to get the ball rolling if we are to become"justified". It seems to discredit that Abram was able to initiate anything on his own for coming to believe that God was the one true God. This all revolves within the concept of predestination and whether any of us can exercise free will. I wrote earlier on predestination, and I hinted at the notion that the probability for something to occur (as viewed from God because He knows our gifts) is interwoven with one's free will; we start choosing something, and then God gets involved. Do we have to "start" believing in God before anything else in order for God to bring any grace to us, because this question hovers around the debate between "faith alone" versus "faith and works"? |
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