(January 13, 2017 at 1:43 pm)Godschild Wrote: It's not a head ie. mind thing it's a invitation through the spirit, a conviction of one's need for God's saving grace. Until a person is willing to admit he/she is a sinner against God they will not receive salvation. Seeking out the God of the Bible means one is looking for a change in their life, God comes to those who are willing to accept Him. Only those who are saved have protection from the "adversary," only the saved have been delivered from his hands. The lost have always been in the clutches of the "adversary" and can only escape by willing searching out the God who has complete power over him, this is the reason God is the only true God, no other god can save you from Satan's death grip. Playing games in this life about the reality of God has deadly consequences in this life and the next.
This sounds like what someone else mentioned earlier in the thread-- that you must believe first, then God will reveal himself. First, you must decide that you are a sinner in need of God's grace, then you must prepare yourself to accept him. And only then will you be able to interpret the events in your life as God's guidance. It's not that God shows up and reveals himself directly as a reward for blind faith; faith itself makes us see him, whether he is there or not. In the past, God spoke directly to people in his spirit form and performed miracles that people could see. When he presented himself in human form he continued to perform miracles, including the healing of paralyzed and blind people and the restoring to life of the dead. Today he works in ways that are so subtle that it is impossible to distinguish them from coincidence or bias.
Considering what is at stake, if God really wanted everyone to be saved he could easily take steps to make that happen. If he is real, then he doesn't want very many people to be saved.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould