My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
—Isaiah 55:8-9—
The gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it,but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.
—Paul to the Galatian Christians in what we now know as Galatians 1:11-12—
An unenlightened mind is one never exposed to the truth of God.…The Christian faith is always equated with truth. And truth is always the opposite of error (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12). People who have not yet believed are called by Paul as those who “reject the truth” (Romans 2:8). It follows that these statements would be meaningless unless there were a way to establish truth objectively. If there were no such possibility, truth and error would, for all practical purposes, be the same.
—Paul Little1—
Key point: Christianity is so preposterous to natural human instincts, it could not have originated from any human source; therefore, it had to come from God. At the same time, it is reasonable and rational; it makes sense. God is a God who welcomes intellectual inquiry. He offers adequate, though not exhaustive, answers; and He invites us to know Him intimately.
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Early in the Book of Isaiah we read of an invitation from God, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
“Come now, and let us reason together,”
Says the Lord,
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
They shall be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They shall be as wool” (Isa. 1:18).
The Hebrew word translated reason carries a number of meanings, including “to prove or to show to be right, to convict or to convince, and to judge or decide.” Significantly, it also can mean “to chide, reprove, correct, or rebuke” — things that are necessary if an individual is going to repent of sinful ways and live for God. Yet the Hebrew word also means just what the English translation in this verse conveys: “to reason or to reason together.”
Christianity is a reasonable faith. God does not forgive sins arbitrarily, in ways that follow no pattern or in ways that make no sense. At the same time…
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Copyright © 2018 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
1Paul Little, Know Why You Believe, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 21.
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