Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

Lately, I found myself wondering exactly what I would say to a close friend if I was to explain what the Christian beliefs are.  It is actually pretty simple to explain. God the Creator God is the creator, and created everything in the universe. He also created Heaven. Heaven is a real place, a place of happiness where there is no sickness and no death. The one thing that can separate us from God There is only one thing that can separate us from God: sin. Sin is when we do bad things. God hates sin (he does not hate us , he hates our sin) and does not want to be around it. This is a problem for us, because we all have a sin nature. Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, fell into the temptation of sin. We all have that same nature, so we all sin, even though we try to be good. None of us are perfect. None of us can meet God's standards. A path for us to be saved While this sounds like quite a hopeless situation, it's not, thanks to God. This is why: God made a way fo...

Many of us have a tendency to worry about worst-case scenarios, most of which may never even happen. I have my own struggles with this.  Recently, it was revealed to me that this behavior is just like that of the unfaithful servant in the parable of the talents. Let's take a look at the parable: “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you ...

God gave us life in abundance. He knows and we also know that there will be problems facing us at times. Even though God is good, sadly we do have problems, due to the fallen nature of this world: specifically arising from a) Satan's actions to oppress us and b) other people's actions who may be acting to our detriment. Another possibility too is c) problems we have created through our own actions. The aim here isn't to assign blame  - the aim is to point out that no matter what, we will have some problems facing us at many points in our life, maybe even throughout our lives on Earth. Now, that may seem depressing, but the good news is that we can be happy, even when facing upcoming problems! Here we'll find out how. Note: by all means ask God for discernment and guidance when facing such problems. He may show you a path, a way to fix this problem. If it's the sort of problem you literally have no control over, then worrying isn't going to help - by all ...

While it appears that both Creationism and Intelligent Design have some reason behind their different stances, from where I see it, it seems like Creationism is being used as a political pawn, which is unfortunate. I don't think that all proponents of Creationism are involved in this, but at least in my field of vision in today's world, I'm seeing it be used as a political pawn. I feel that is a danger area, where getting involved in all that might make us like Sadducees or Pharisees, who put political agendas ahead of God's word. The Creationism in and of itself is not the issue: if anything, the proponents are going very literally by God's word, for which they can hardly be faulted. No, the problem lies where atheists claim that evolution is proof that the Bible is untrue. (That itself is a flawed argument - read my other post about why ). Instead of calling out atheists and pointing out that evolution does not tell us one way or another about whether the...

Some Christians believe in Creationism (that the earth was created in exactly six days, and evolution did not occur) while other Christians believe that God designed us through the process of evolution, also known as Intelligent Design. The reason for this divide is because of different ways of interpreting the Bible. Proponents of Creationism believe that the beginning of Genesis should be interpreted literally, taking six 24-hour periods to create the earth and everything in it. Proponents of Intelligent Design believe that the beginning of Genesis should be interpreted figuratively, with the six days representing 6 ages. Let's take a look at that portion of Genesis: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the ligh...

These last few weeks at church we've been learning about healing, and how in order to be healed through faith we must never embrace sickness, for it is very dangerous. This means instead of saying " my headaches" we should say " the headaches". We also should not pray to God asking him to cure the sickness. We can do that, but it's not what will get us results. What will get us results is having authority for the healing in the name of Jesus. Just like the apostles, we too can cast out sickness from ourselves, but we should remember the healing happens only in the name of Jesus (i.e. not by our own name). It is the Holy Spirit that provides this healing. Jesus did not ask God to heal people, nor did the apostles. We need to use that same delegated power. The power is from God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit; we simply use that power from them to provide the healing. But it is much harder for healing to occur when the person has claimed (i.e. embraced) the...

I've covered economics at the End of Days in other posts. But the more I look at the signs of today, the slightly more surprised I am that we will wind up with a restrictive system of identity and banking. I do not doubt that this will still happen at End of Days. Prophecies in the Bible have always correctly predicted what will happen - just not why and how . This is the reason for being puzzled: today, we have moved into a more privacy-aware age. There is more backlash against companies who use our personal data. Although the internet giants like Google, Facebook, and so on are still heavily utilized by people, there is an increasing counterculture of privacy. There are more and more privacy-oriented browsers now available, and people can choose to protect their privacy in other ways (avoiding mainstream social media, using a VPN service, and more).  This subculture is becoming more and more active. It's not just a handful of people here and there. Surely then, as this ...