All About Believing

So many views and opinions have swirled in the last several months surrounding the election and the candidates. I'm sure a new round will begin now regarding barack obama as he prepares to take office. There is that old phrase about opinions and everyone having one. Everyone also has beliefs. Just where do they come from??? How are they validated???

I have been doing some searching concerning properly interpreting the Bible as I think it is something that is quite up in the air still even in our communication age. I found anm article speaking about urban legends that christians believe. I found it quite interesting. It focused on an email which circulated awhile back, many of you probably recieved it, claiming all these incredible *facts* about iraq and the Bible. Most of us do not have time to go researching the veracity of a random email and the way it gets distributed, groupthink can easily occur and we decide that if so many other christians, maybe even family and friends, believe it well then it must be true. The author of the article did research and gave answers to show the inaccuracy and falseness of most of the claims made in the email. The one that caught my eye was the actual location of the garden of eden. Many start from Israel and then seek to pinpoint where the garden was located. Huge problem is that the nation of Israel didnt even exist as such till a long time after the time of adam and eve. DOH!!!

We all have frames of reference with which we form our beliefs. We all have a set of presuppositions and are affected by our social environment as well as emotional and psychological factors. None of us have irrefutable certainty regarding ANYTHING really. We all have to live by faith, even atheists and agnostics. They just live by a faith that excludes God. So many beliefs about end times, spiritual warfare,nature of spirituality and tons more. The Bible gets interpreted in so many ways, and so many of them are taken from a 21st century mindset and point of view. None of the writers of the Bible had any idea of the way our world exists currently. If you take a a certain view of God and inspiration you can come up with a way to make Him fit our existence into the minds of the people then. That really is more a manipulation of God though i would think.

I have wrestled alot and my prayer for the last 3 years has been for God to wrestle with me and give me a blessing and a wound as He did with jacob. I have prayed to discover the intimacy with Christ like paul describes in the book of philippians. Open-ended prayers,allowing for God to answer as He saw fit. My wrestling has had me focus on my own failures and bad choices and decisions over the years and how to overcome them and leave guilt and shame behind. I find the wrestling leading to this area of beliefs and understanding how they develop as well as rightly interpreting Scripture. I seem to be discovering some very long held beliefs may not be correct. Of course I have to be open to my own being wrong and i try to always have that in my mind. We each need to wrestle with God and his Word and work out our salvation. I hope to keep doing that even more. God gave us minds for a reason,He gave us so much freedom I'm sure He doesn't want us to surrender that freedom and creativity in being like Him to try and make Him do everything for us. We learn from failures and mistakes just as we did as children and our parents didn't do everything for us. Just stuff going on inside me now. Don't stop believin!!!