I have mentioned in another post that I believe in Free Will. I mentioned that I believe the purpose of our free will is to make a choice to either accept or reject God within this lifetime, and that everything else is secondary. But I will now mention what I believe to be the most powerful and yet possibly ignored power of this freedom we have been given.
I'll point out an instance from the Bible which backs up this belief, but first I'll introduce it with a scene from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel "Mort", where the skeletal Death has just hired his young apprentice, and taken him out for a curry in the middle of a busy city...
The other diners didn't take much notice, even when Death leaned back and lit a rather fine pipe. Someone with smoke curling out of their eye sockets takes some ignoring, but everyone managed it.
"Is it magic?" said Mort.
"What do you think?" said Death, "Am I really here, boy?"
"Yes," said Mort slowly. "I... I've watched people. They look at you but they don't see you, I think. You do something to their minds."
Death shook his head.
"They do it all themselves," he said. "There's no magic. People can't see me, they simply won't allow themselves to do it. Until it's time, of course. Wizards can see me, and cats. But you're average human... No, never." He blew a smoke ring at the sky, and added, "Strange, but true."
Humans in the real world, like the fictional ones in the Discworld, have the ability to see something right in front of their own eyes, and choose to believe it is either not there, or not what it appears. This suddenly becomes quite important when you realise that it shatters the old saying "Seeing is believing."
Seeing is seeing. Believing is optional.
I have been in a good discussion before, and many religious believers have probably been in the same position, where the other person says "If God is real, and wants me to believe in him, why doesn't he come down and introduce himself to me face to face?" A call for a miraculous proof is a common call, and a very old one too.
My reply to the physical-proof request is that it is a pointless one. The claim that "If I see God, I will believe in him," is not true. If the person has already, in their free will, made the ultimate choice to reject God instead of accept him, then any miracle or apparent spiritual presense that they see will be something that they will deny or explain away by default. A photo is faked. A video is edited. Jesus isn't standing in front of me, it's just a really good look-a-like.
The example of this in the Bible is one of the Pharisees vs. Jesus scenes, in chapter 3 of the gospel of Mark:
The next time that Jesus went into the meeting place, a man with a crippled hand was there. The Pharisees wanted to accuse Jesus of doing something wrong... He told the man, "Stretch out your hand." He did, and his bad hand was healed. The Pharisees left. And straight away they started making plans with Herod's followers to kill Jesus.
Notice that the Pharisees were already looking for the negative things about Jesus, and when he performs a miraculous healing right in front of them, what is their response? Awe? Worship? Shouts of "This must be God's work"? No, they get even more annoyed! So much so that they want Jesus dead.
If a miraculous healing happened right in front of you, would you pass it off as a trick of the light or would you think that God was doing some amazing stuff? Would you accept what you see as truth, or would you choose to believe your own lie?
See another post about choice...
Image source: http://www.good.is/post/ignore-this-sign/
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