We live in the Scientific Age. Well that is what the nerds call it anyway. I will confess, we have a great dependency on the very many new scientific findings including all the technology, which is considered science . . . unless it gets too arithmeticish, but even then it is still science. Okay, enough poking, we ARE in the Science Age. We want facts! Meteorologists, aside from religious people, are among the most disliked in our communities because they are so often wrong; we want to the truth not some 20% turned 100% in a matter of 30 minutes. We also love our scientific food facts: the calories, the myriads of fats, what is good and what is not. Facts, facts, facts!
Do you base the truth off of facts? What about God? Absolutes and religion muck-up science one might say. Well that is no answer, that is a deflection, surely we can be honest with this question. Although we live in the Age of Science, we come to depend on how we feel more than ever it seems. As my evolution friends might say, we are relying on our primal instincts. We do not roam the earth dwelling in caves with a club in one hand and the hair of a woman in the other, we’ve progressed . . . but which way?
We eat because we are hungry, not because we know by facts that we absolutely need food; we watch TV and stay on Facebook because we want to, not because it is proven to make our lives better; we make friends, we dump boring ones, we say this or that, we do almost everything because we want to, not because it is factually the most helpful, right?
Feeling are good, really good, but only when they are used appropriately. God gave humans feelings to be able to expound on facts: Your friend just had a successful surgery, it is good news and if you are not malfunctioning you should feel happiness! When you hear of someone you know is in a car wreck it is not good news and you will be sad. But sometimes our feelings do not comply with reality. What about when you receive fabulous news that your spouse actually does not have cancer . . . and you feel nothing. Or when you watch a movie and someone gets brutally murdered and you become happy. Feelings are odd and fickle.
So again I ask, are you trusting in facts? Are you trusting that reality is based upon your feeling your sense? Let me tell you that experience is not science. Experience in our culture is elevated too highly. Now of course I want the doctor who has been in the field for a long time to examine me--unless it is Greg House--, but what I mean is when you base your life on one or two outcomes that others seem to think is not right. We often throw in experience because it is fake science, it is a hoaxed closed observation. We want a result and if an experience appears to give us that result we champion it with 'Aha!'
Do you base the reality of God or his character off of feelings, about what you think, or do you know facts about God? What if the Bible’s facts about God being holy and just and being willing and promising that he will judge righteously those who do not live in obedience to him? Why should he have the right to be obeyed me us, you may ask? Because he made us, and he being the maker of us can tell us what to do. But he is no tyrant, he knows what is best for us. Are you basing God on some bad childhood experience; why not see for yourself who the Bible says God is, that is why it is in our language.
Are you simplistically living by what you feel is right and good? Friend you are then basing not only your entire life but what lies beyond death upon a very unsatisfactory method. Are you sure you are willing to be that certain of something so whimsical? Feelings fly in the face of faith, one may say; God and the reality of faith—an expectation not a crossing of the fingers—stands regardless of what we say about: it is. And it must be reckoned with now or later.
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