Truth About God :: essays research papers

Truth About God"You are just like your fathers You always resist the Holy Spirit Wasthere always a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those whopredicted the coming of the Righteous One." - Acts 751-52The Jews have always been afraid of the radicals of God. They have alwaysdwelled in the safeguard and understandings of the past and fear the effects ofthese radicals. But when these radicals like the prophets arrive, theypersecute them because they are uncertain about the truth. An example is whenthe Jews didnt want to believe Stephen in Acts 756-58, " Look, he said, Isee heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. At thisthey covered their ears and yelling at the poll of their voices, they all rushedat him, dragged him out of the city and stoned him."A lot of potshots have been taken at the Church over the years. In painof its obvious imperfections, the Church is the means that has been chosen tocarry the message of the Go spel to the world. One wonders why a better systemcould not have been devised. then one realizes that any system that has peoplein it is going to be imperfect.Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago that it was in prisonwhere he learned that the line separating faithful and evil passes not through with(predicate)states, not through classes, not through political parties, either, but rightthrough every human heart and through all human hearts.When we give ourselves serious evaluation, we find things hiding in ourhearts that, if we could choose, we would remove. Our hearts have beendescribed as "a zoo of lust, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a haremof fondled hatreds." Yet the Church, by its very nature, must be made up of thelikes of us."Imagine yourself as a living house," wrote C. S. Lewis. "God comes in torebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. Heis getting the drains right and stopping the leaks i n the roof and so on. Butpresently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably anddoes not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to?