Fire of Mischief
Why is the Holy Bible a two part collection of stories, free verse poems and historical documentaries? “Can do anything” is pretty much the universal description of God’s abilities. So then, God could have thought the entire book into existence as one seamless instruction book on how to live life and grow with Him? But He didn’t! Why not? Only God knows the answer but let’s look at the probabilities. The “book” part is pretty obvious, if He’d made a video nobody could have watched it for the first 6,950 years. In fact for much of that time, only a small percentage of the population could even read. Taken from both Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, letters and scrolls, it didn’t really have a wide audience appeal either. God’s story is delivered in the only manner that we were likely to receive it, as personal testimonials of fact and prophecy. In fact it’s more than God’s story, it’s our story. We are the perennial doubters of anything informative, even good news, but bad news we turn off like a faucet in draught. But when somebody or better yet several somebody’s give us the same eye witnessed accounts, we begin to buy it as genuine. Of course God knows this since He created us in His image. But there was an even more troubling component, part of the story is prophecy, a sort of spiritual fortune telling. Interesting but let’s face it, anybody with an imagination can whip up a futuristic story and not live long enough to prove it out. It was going to take some serious passages of time before we could distinguish God’s actual prophets from the multitude of fakes with crystal balls and tea leaves.
The two part component of this book is the real selling point. Few enough of us were going along with the story as He inspired it, so God’s (Triune) council, went with the obvious and always planned kicker, the personal endorsement, adorned with a bag of miracles and indisputable actions. This was necessary because we’d become so indifferent and misdirected that we needed somebody to literally pull us out of our own desolate fire of mischief. Sadly, yet very dramatically and gladly for us, God took on this responsibility Himself. Having now had more than 2,000 years to dwell on this incredible story, while biblical prophecy has been accurately proving itself out, we’ve once again grown indifferent and misdirected. This lesson is too important to just drop, so what’s next? We’ll have to decipher the book of Revelation for that answer, the final chapter of our story which everyone was warned not to mess with (Revelation 22:18, 19).
JC Calkins with COMMON SENSE 4 UNCOMMON PEOPLE (share)
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