The Parables: The Million Dollar Question

By
   These parables threw me in for a bit of loop. These are the types of things I need to sleep on before answering, but here we go. The main question Flew presented at the end of his parable is what would have to happen in order for you to disprove the love or existence of God? It's a brilliant question, and deeply provocative. Everyone can agree that this world is messed up. People can do some very beautiful or very ugly things to each other. It's easy to point to anything good and say "God did that. God is so good." But what about all that bad stuff? God is in control, right? Right? This world isn't perfect, but God is, isn't He? This is one of the tensions of this world that Christians must deal with. We live in the stage of the "already, but not yet." This means that Jesus won victory over sin and death, but we are still living on this sin rotted lump of rock. I see God's goodness every day when I laugh with my friends for the sixth time over something that shouldn't still be funny. I see it in the dark clouds that carry life giving water to the ground. But then there are those times I come face-to-face with the reality of sin. I see it in the heartbreak of the families of the Florida school shooting. I see it in the way people treat those who are different from them. I see it when my water bottle tips over and fries my laptop, as it just did. The point is, it would take something supernaturally huge to make me stop believing in God's love. I can question it and wonder what He is doing, but it's always there. I don't understand what God does all the time, but I know He's good. The hard part comes in trying to explain it to others, which is the point of the second parable. How do you get someone else to trust in someone that you don't always understand? This is the million dollar question of this parable. In short, you can't. Only the one who is being questioned can get someone to trust them. You can vouch for their character, but trust is something people have to earn for themselves. You can throw all the evidence of God's goodness in someone's face, but it is up to them to trust Him. That is my two cents worth.

P.S. I commented on Will and Phillip's posts.

Comments

  1. Ethan LafontFebruary 19, 2018 at 6:22 PM

    I appreciate your portrayal of the earth as a "sin rotted lump of rock" haha! I appreciate your last point when you spoke about how we as humans cannot get someone to believe in God. Part of the humility that Christians must have lies in the fact that, no-one person convinced us that God was real, but rather God revealed himself to us and His Spirit convicted us and brought us to him. Beautiful thing in realizing even though we can't do it, God's there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Zelda PeachFebruary 19, 2018 at 6:48 PM

    I love this post Sophia! I relate to these words in so many ways. As for the second parable, you are right, you can't get somone to trust in someone as trust is a personal thing. I can't wait to talk about this all some more tommorow in class.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael TurnerFebruary 19, 2018 at 8:49 PM

    Unfortunately for the second parable, it is impossible for US to get a person to trust in God; especially since we do not fully understand him. We simply plan the seed as compassionately and logically as we can and wait for God to move in his or her heart. As for your portrayal of the world, indeed it is a crazy and often times bad place. Yet, the underlying beauty of it all calls to the spirit within us as a beacon of divine creation and love to those willing to seek it out.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ty GoramFebruary 19, 2018 at 10:00 PM

    I completely agree to this in every aspect. The idea you mentioned about the evidence of God's goodness and people needing to trust him reminds me of that phrase "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Brenna StringfellowFebruary 19, 2018 at 11:16 PM

    I loved reading this! It really related to the way I felt about what I read as well. I agree I do see God in everything I mean it is all of what he created but the bad stuff is what is so hard to help others understand. We say " Oh just keep trusting God" when at the same time they could be thinking "Why should I trust God if he let this happen to me?" It really is the overall struggle of what Christian's deal with when they are helping someone who's faith is not as strong and it is being tested.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Honest Reaction to Reading "Honest to God"

By
Originally I said in my last blog post that I liked this book, but I have sort of changed my mind. It is not that I hate it or anything, it is just weird and I don’t really agree with what John Robinson is saying most of the time. I appreciate that he is trying to write something different and new, but my problem is that some of the ideas are just a little too radical for my taste, and I disagree with him a lot. In the seventh and last chapter of the book, Robinson himself acknowledges his radicalness and writes about how he knows that this type of thought on religion is controversial. He goes on to write how all great thinkers were seen as controversial when they first started and says, “Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god”. To further prove this point, he uses the example of how Socrates was condemned as an atheist for not believing in multiple gods, and while it is true that Socrates was a great philosopher who was not seen as so when he was alive, I ...
Read more

Raphael and a man walk into Eden...

By
I'll just start off by saying Raphael is one of the three named archangels in Scripture we hear the least about, and I thoroughly enjoy just reading and seeing his name pop up. Regardless, I want to touch on Adam's recounting of his own..."birth". Take that with a grain of salt as Adam was not physically born, but rather he simply became. In truth, we should all be able to give a similar account to their first memory of consciousness and fully aware. Adam was created, but he realized he could walk, talk, and speak without first learning. Imagine being able to think clear thoughts in your native language and be a functioning individual right out of the womb. It's an incredible thought, and Adam can give a recall of this like it were yesterday...which it might have been, who knows? Aside from that, Adam could even give an account to Eve's creation. The Bible says nothing pertaining to this matter so this is where Milton does a bit of adlibbing and writes around ...
Read more

Extra blog

By
OK so, honors project! Honestly I really loved it as a whole. I said this already in the video, but I feel like I personally could've done better. I just feel like I didn't have enough time to completely process some questions and be able to give my best responses. I really enjoyed reading the O'Connor piece, which I think was everyone's favorite anyway. I love narrative stories like that, but honestly I'm glad I got to be in the Russell group. I feel like that group was the easiest to argue and answer from, honestly. As a whole, I would love to do a project like this again in later semesters. It was a lot of fun and time FLEW by.
Read more