The Biblical Narrative Part 9 of 10
But God does not include all of the information of this journey of faith, mission-plan for Abraham upfront at the initiation of his calling.
God judiciously leaves out the part of the last-minute, aborted sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:6-13)…setting-up the monumental foreglimpse of the substitutional sacrifice for sin…taking our place (Ps. 22; Isa. 53:5-6)…a divinely crated foreglimpse of the Passover Lamb of God…Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary…roughly two thousand years later (Jn. 8:56).
Without exception, every person of faith in the biblical narrative stories of faith…chooses to follow God…even though not all of them have a clear calling upfront like Abraham…and all do not have a full understanding of everything God is doing in their lives as events are unfolding.
This is the point at which…in the marketplace of ideas…a central tenet in the Bible that has always been there…is pushed forward into the limelight…by the modern results of the human scientific investigation of the natural world…that isolates-out and places it at the front edge of the theater stage…to voice a key truth to the world’s audience…that takes the biblical statement that the just shall live by faith…to its modern end-point fulfillment…that again in my opinion surpasses in magnitude the impact of the inspirational revelation about faith versus works in Christian salvation and discipleship…that was rediscovered and reintroduced into human history by Martin Luther…that ignited the Protestant Reformation.
The key point…the central tenet in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that is activated within God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…is that God displaces our ways with His higher ways…for the highest, noblest, and most unselfishly love-filled reasons…precisely because He alone possesses the best ways of doing things…at the peak and the pinnacle of perfect precision.
Satan’s alluring temptation in the Garden of Eden: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5)…is a half-truth…is a false narrative…is an alluring distraction…to go in the wrong direction.
Humanity now has the knowledge of good and evil…but we lack the key complimentary components of timeless foresight and perfect moral goodness.
Only the God of the Bible possesses all three of these coordinated attributes.
Of course God…given the opportunity…will in loving intentions displace our ways with His ways…when we surrender and yield ourselves to His leadership…because He is the same Intelligent Designer who crafted and channeled the inconceivably vast amounts of information in the natural world…into a coherently functional and brilliantly coordinated system…that astonishes and captures the admiration of prolific intelligent designers like ourselves…the end-point, modern-day conclusion of five-hundred years of intensive scientific investigation into the workings of the natural world.
In 1859, the viability of naturalistic materialism as an explanation for the phenomenon in the natural world…was still an open possibility in terms of the reach of our scientific knowledge.
Today, this is no longer the case.
The evidence from modern science…involving complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that excludes naturalistic materialism and points clearly to the need for design…now amazingly through science is on an equivalent magnitude of revelation to Jesus walking down Main Street and into the Temple in Jerusalem…three or four days after His resurrection on Easter Sunday morning…providing the empirical evidence…sought by atheists and agnostics for thousands of years…yet coming now from the most unexpected direction imaginable…the human scientific investigation of the natural world…conducted independently by ourselves through the autonomy of self-directed research…that leads back full-circle to the eternal truth that was always there to discover.
The God of the Bible has not only revealed to humanity through the openness and intelligibility of the natural world…through modern scientific investigation…the empirical evidence of His existence…but also the inside information into the artistry and competence of His creative abilities.
At the deepest level of the truth of: “love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up” (1Cor. 13:4)…God has created this entire universe, our planet earth, the tens of millions of living species, and human beings created in His image…so that God could set-up the context wherein He can make the case for His competence, reliability, and character…as the eternal King and Ruler…through the most sublime demonstration of self-effacing, love-filled humility in action.
Now like never before…this translates into an elevated appreciation of the biblical narrative stories of faith life-scripts…composed by the same Intelligent Designer God who created the natural world…now supported by modern science in our new understanding in this Age of Information…of complex, highly specified, and ingeniously integrated systems of information…prolific within the living and non-living natural world…which we did not possess 50, 100, or 160 years ago…at the time of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
God judiciously leaves out the part of the last-minute, aborted sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:6-13)…setting-up the monumental foreglimpse of the substitutional sacrifice for sin…taking our place (Ps. 22; Isa. 53:5-6)…a divinely crated foreglimpse of the Passover Lamb of God…Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary…roughly two thousand years later (Jn. 8:56).
Without exception, every person of faith in the biblical narrative stories of faith…chooses to follow God…even though not all of them have a clear calling upfront like Abraham…and all do not have a full understanding of everything God is doing in their lives as events are unfolding.
This is the point at which…in the marketplace of ideas…a central tenet in the Bible that has always been there…is pushed forward into the limelight…by the modern results of the human scientific investigation of the natural world…that isolates-out and places it at the front edge of the theater stage…to voice a key truth to the world’s audience…that takes the biblical statement that the just shall live by faith…to its modern end-point fulfillment…that again in my opinion surpasses in magnitude the impact of the inspirational revelation about faith versus works in Christian salvation and discipleship…that was rediscovered and reintroduced into human history by Martin Luther…that ignited the Protestant Reformation.
The key point…the central tenet in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that is activated within God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…is that God displaces our ways with His higher ways…for the highest, noblest, and most unselfishly love-filled reasons…precisely because He alone possesses the best ways of doing things…at the peak and the pinnacle of perfect precision.
Satan’s alluring temptation in the Garden of Eden: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5)…is a half-truth…is a false narrative…is an alluring distraction…to go in the wrong direction.
Humanity now has the knowledge of good and evil…but we lack the key complimentary components of timeless foresight and perfect moral goodness.
Only the God of the Bible possesses all three of these coordinated attributes.
Of course God…given the opportunity…will in loving intentions displace our ways with His ways…when we surrender and yield ourselves to His leadership…because He is the same Intelligent Designer who crafted and channeled the inconceivably vast amounts of information in the natural world…into a coherently functional and brilliantly coordinated system…that astonishes and captures the admiration of prolific intelligent designers like ourselves…the end-point, modern-day conclusion of five-hundred years of intensive scientific investigation into the workings of the natural world.
In 1859, the viability of naturalistic materialism as an explanation for the phenomenon in the natural world…was still an open possibility in terms of the reach of our scientific knowledge.
Today, this is no longer the case.
The evidence from modern science…involving complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that excludes naturalistic materialism and points clearly to the need for design…now amazingly through science is on an equivalent magnitude of revelation to Jesus walking down Main Street and into the Temple in Jerusalem…three or four days after His resurrection on Easter Sunday morning…providing the empirical evidence…sought by atheists and agnostics for thousands of years…yet coming now from the most unexpected direction imaginable…the human scientific investigation of the natural world…conducted independently by ourselves through the autonomy of self-directed research…that leads back full-circle to the eternal truth that was always there to discover.
The God of the Bible has not only revealed to humanity through the openness and intelligibility of the natural world…through modern scientific investigation…the empirical evidence of His existence…but also the inside information into the artistry and competence of His creative abilities.
At the deepest level of the truth of: “love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up” (1Cor. 13:4)…God has created this entire universe, our planet earth, the tens of millions of living species, and human beings created in His image…so that God could set-up the context wherein He can make the case for His competence, reliability, and character…as the eternal King and Ruler…through the most sublime demonstration of self-effacing, love-filled humility in action.
Now like never before…this translates into an elevated appreciation of the biblical narrative stories of faith life-scripts…composed by the same Intelligent Designer God who created the natural world…now supported by modern science in our new understanding in this Age of Information…of complex, highly specified, and ingeniously integrated systems of information…prolific within the living and non-living natural world…which we did not possess 50, 100, or 160 years ago…at the time of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
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