What’s the truth?

resurrection111

TODAY we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. There are no comparable events in history.

Days before the body of Jesus went missing, Pontius Pilate, a Roman bureaucrat stuck between a rock and a hard place, looked at Jesus standing before him and asked: ‘’What is truth’’.

No answer to the question is recorded, because Jesus probably didn’t give one. He must have thought His life and imminent death were answers enough.

Not that many understood it at the time. Even his disciples were confused. Why did He have to die?

Why didn’t he conquer the Romans and establish His kingdom on Earth? Why didn’t He just comes to the planet and say, “I love you and if you want, I’ll forgive you and you can live with Me in Heaven when you die.”

It was never going to be that easy. The grace we live in didn’t come cheap.

13 thoughts on “What’s the truth?

  1. wishing people a Happy Easter discriminates against real Muslims who know the truth about Jesus – have you no concern for their feelings?

    Asad Shah would be alive today if it weren’t for reckless Easter celebrations and offensive public holidays that discriminate against atheists and Muslims in a Muslim neighbourhood.

    If Christians could just be more discrete and keep their faith secret Asad Shah would still be alive and well today, serving up the real news for eager customers.

    ode to Fairfax.

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  2. Before the Second World War, when all things looked grim, King George VI spoke to the world on Christmas Day 1939: “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’” After the war, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer surveyed the ruins and said to Billy Graham, “Outside of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I know of no other hope for mankind.” Those words of King George VI and Adenauer are needed even more now. Few things are as dire as a looming war. Nothing is as dark as the grave. Jesus alone knows the way out of that dire darkness. That is the message we must believe, live, and embody. Then our young can mount up with wings as eagles—and see the world of hope through his eyes.

    Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/11/19/ravi-zacharias-reveals-the-one-thing-that-fills-him-with-hope-for-the-future/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link

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  3. On the infidels website I found a rebuke of a theological article.
    I found it interesting as the author believes atheism is not a world view. I would say the former USSR and other regimes, like China, would disagree. His whole article is based on a false premise using a Christian author.

    “Zacharias next declares that atheism is a worldview (p. 17). However, as Christian philosopher Ronald Nash points out, “A well-rounded world-view includes what a person believes in at least five major topics: God, reality, knowledge, morality, and humankind.”[3] Since atheism does not entail any beliefs about epistemology, ethics, or humankind, atheism is not a worldview (though it is an important part of many worldview).”

    Atheism declares there is no God. This then is a different “reality” to the Christian. It looks at “knowledge”, “facts” and “evidence” differently. It states “man” is the author of their own destiny, not God. There is no absolute morality. Thus atheism is a world view. See his details about each below. Atheism definitely has something to say on each area.

    Plus the author, if they actually read further would have discovered that the devil is in the details.
    Dr. Ronald Nash, emphasises that in order to interpret and judge reality, we must have a cohesive worldview which in some way forms a system. The world view topics being the necessary ingredients of a cohesive worldview system. What we believe in each of these areas must be compatible with what we believe in the other areas, or our worldview is inconsistent. If our beliefs are contradictory, we do not have a reliable worldview.

    BELIEFS ABOUT GOD
    What does your worldview say about God? Does God exist? Is there one God? Many gods? What is God’s nature? Personal and loving? An impersonal force? Whatever your belief about the concept we call God, it will shape your total worldview.
    BELIEFS CONCERNING ULTIMATE REALITY
    Is the universe eternal or did it have a beginning? Was it created by an almighty, transcendent God who continues to sustain it, or was it a product of mere chance? Is the natural world all there is? Is there design and purpose in the universe, or is it a product of chaos and chance? Are supernatural events possible? Do spirit beings exist?
    BELIEFS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE
    Is knowledge about the world possible? Is sense experience reliable? What
    is the place of reason in discovering knowledge? Can we know God? Is truth absolute or relative? Can faith and reason coexist? Your views about how one gains knowledge are crucial to your development of a coherent worldview.
    BELIEFS ABOUT ETHICS
    What is the basis upon which one determines whether a certain act is morally right or wrong? Is morality a cultural factor or a universal value? Are moral values objective or subjective? Are we accountable for our actions? How
    you answer these questions will reveal your ethical beliefs and inform your worldview.
    BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE
    Are humans merely physical beings and the product of evolutionary processes, or are they complex, created beings possessing body, soul, and spirit? Are they determined or free? Is this life all there is? Do humans survive after death? Will they spend eternity in heaven or hell? What is the human nature like?

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    • Applying the four tests of a worldview (reason, outer experience, inner experience, and practice) to the five New Age beliefs:
      1: TRUTH IS RELATIVE (WORLDVIEW OF THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE)
      2: THE SPIRIT WORLD IS REAL (WORLDVIEW OF ULTIMATE REALITY)
      3: WE ARE REINCARNATED BEINGS (WORLDVIEW OF HUMAN NATURE)
      4: CHRISTIANITY IS OPPRESSIVE (WORLDVIEW OF ETHICS)
      5: I AM GOD (WORLDVIEW OF GOD)

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  4. Atheisms world view

    BELIEFS ABOUT GOD “What the Bible says is irrelevant to an atheist.”
    BELIEFS CONCERNING ULTIMATE REALITY “Because there is no physical evidence for the existence of God, therefore, He and your theology is irrelevant to my worldview.”
    BELIEFS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE “I view the world the way I view the world. Theology has next to nothing to do with it.”
    BELIEFS ABOUT ETHICS ” I do not require God to be good” (what is good without God?)
    BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE “A lack of belief in God has very little to do with how one views the world.”

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    • BELIEFS ABOUT GOD – Don’t have any

      BELIEFS CONCERNING ULTIMATE REALITY – ditto

      BELIEFS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE – don’t’ have anything to do with atheism.

      BELIEFS ABOUT ETHICS – ditto

      BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE – ditto

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    • Who do you ask this — What’s the truth?
      The deluded who claim to know it or Scientist doing ever increase research and hard thinking from a position they do not know the truth.
      Keeping in mind we exist in a ten dimension universe and only four we experience.
      The other six we will never be able to fully comprehend or understand.
      So when anyone says they know the truth they are talking crap

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  5. The truth that Jesus spoke may not be the truth the Church pushes. Here is an opinion from

    “In almost all of history, the vast majority of people understood the view from the bottom due to their own life circumstance. Most of the people who have ever lived on this planet have been oppressed and poor. But their history was seldom written except in the Bible (until very recently in such books as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States). Only in modern times and wealthy countries do we find the strange phenomenon of masses of people having an establishment mentality.

    “This relatively new thing called “the middle class” gives many of us just enough comfort not to have to feel the pinch or worry about injustice for ourselves. Most of us in the Northern Hemisphere have a view from the top even though we are nowhere near the top ourselves. The mass of people can normally be bought off by just giving them “bread and circuses,” as the Romans said. Many Americans can afford to be politically illiterate, hardly vote, and terribly naive about money, war, and power. One wonders how soon this is going to catch up with us.

    “Only by solidarity with other people’s suffering can comfortable people be converted. Otherwise we are disconnected from the cross–of the world, of others, of Jesus, and finally of our own necessary participation in the great mystery of dying and rising. In the early Christian Scriptures, or the “New” Testament, we clearly see that it’s mostly the lame, the poor, the blind, the prostitutes, the drunkards, the tax collectors, the sinners–those on the bottom and the outside–that really hear Jesus’ teaching and get the point and respond to him. It’s the leaders and insiders (the priests, scribes, Pharisees, teachers of the law, and Roman leaders) who crucify him. That is evident in the text.

    “How did we miss such a core point about how power coalesces and corrupts, no matter who has it? Once Christians were the empowered group, we kept this obvious point from hitting home by blaming the Jews, then heretics, then sinners. But arrogant power is always the problem, not the Jews or any other scapegoated group. When any racial, gender, or economic group has all the power it does the same thing–no exceptions. Catholics would have crucified Jesus too if he had critiqued the Catholic Church the way he did his own religion.

    “After Jesus’ death and resurrection, the first Christians go “underground.” They are the persecuted ones, meeting in secrecy in the catacombs. During this time, we see a lot of good interpretation of the Scriptures, with a liberationist worldview (i.e., a view from the bottom). The Church was largely of the poor and for the poor.

    “The turning point, at which the Church moved from the bottom to the top, is the year 313 A.D. when Emperor Constantine supposedly did the Church a great favor by beginning to make Christianity the established religion of the Holy Roman Empire. That’s how the Apostolic Church became Roman Catholicism. As the Church’s interests became linked with imperial world views, our perspective changed from the view from the bottom and powerlessness (the persecuted, the outsiders) to the view from the top where we were now the ultimate insiders (with power, money, status, and control). Emperors convened (and controlled?) most of the early Councils of the Church, not bishops or popes. The Council in 325 was held at the Emperor’s villa in a suburb of Constantinople called Nicea, where the highly abstract Nicene Creed was composed, in which the words love, justice, and peacemaking are never used once. The Nicene Creed is a far cry from the “creeds” spoken by Jesus three centuries before.”

    Adapted from Richard Rohr, Scripture as Liberation
    and Gospel Call for Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) in CAC Foundation Set (CAC: 2007),

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    • “After Jesus’ death and resurrection, the first Christians go “underground.” They are the persecuted ones, meeting in secrecy in the catacombs.

      It should be noted that Paul being a Roman citizen was free to move around initially. He did not have the restrictions the others had.

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      • “The top was where most clergy henceforth resided or set their sights. That has been the perspective from which much of our preaching and Scripture interpretation came: white, European, uniquely educated, mostly comfortable, usually celibate males.”

        “When history and religion are exclusively taught from the vantage point of the people in power–which is almost always the case–we can’t see the reality right in front of our noses. We live out of a bias that is unrecognized: privilege and easy access to privilege. This is what St. Francis, for example, was trying to reform.”

        (Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 37;
        and Richard Rohr’s interview with Romal Tune, “Richard Rohr on White Privilege,” https://sojo.net/articles/richard-rohr-white-privilege. )

        Saul was not only a Roman citizen, but from a wealthy family. He couldn’t see reality right in front of his nose. Then he was called, and called to suffer, according to Acts 9.

        10 In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. The Lord called to him in a vision, “Ananias!”
        “Yes, Lord,” he answered.
        11 The Lord told him, “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying. 12 In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight.”
        13 “Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. 14 And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.”
        15 But the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

        Paul of course was a new man.
        1 Corinthians 11:22
        “Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!”

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  6. Who do you ask this — What’s the truth?
    The deluded who claim to know it or Scientist doing ever increase research and hard thinking from a position they do not know the truth.
    Keeping in mind we exist in a ten dimension universe and only four we experience.
    The other six we will never be able to fully comprehend or understand.
    So when anyone says they know the truth they are talking crap

    Like

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