October 21, 2009
Told You So
It’s amazing to me that you can be friends or fellowship with someone for years and after telling them a tidbit of information, they don’t believe what you’ve said. It would be one thing if you have a reputation of getting facts wrong, but if your track record is speaking truthfully, it just doesn’t seem like a friend would doubt you. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them rushed to tell the apostles that the tomb was empty. “…but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” (Luke 24:11 ESV) So Peter got up, ran to the empty tomb and then went away wondering to himself what had happened. Didn’t the ladies just tell him what happened?
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Gail;
-----Knowledge and emotion are mental experiences held because they’ve been tested and found to be acceptable as true. We each have our own testing processes which, in turn, looks back to the knowledge and emotions we have been holding as true. But belief is neither the knowledge, nor the emotions, it is the acceptance and holding of something as true. When something falls far out of bounds with experience, it becomes more difficult to believe, especially when it challenges the very testing process used for determining its believability. When I was about eight years old I had an experience I could hardly believe, myself. I was on my knees rolling a small super-ball against the wall and catching it as it bounced back. I didn’t want to loose it, so I kept my feet crossed behind me. If I missed it with my hands it would be caught by my legs. But the last time it bounced off the wall was the last time I saw it. As I put my hands out to catch it, it simply disappeared. And it wasn’t like it vanished in a snap. It faded somewhat, reappeared, then faded out of sight no more than two feet before my eyes. Nor did this happen in the peripheral field of my vision. I was looking right at it. There was no reason for it to happen. I know of no physical law by which it could have happened. But it happened. I searched everywhere for it, but never found it.
-----Now, this was hard for me to believe then, and it is still hard for me to believe. To this day I try to reason what happened that evening. There are interesting interactions between the mind and the mechanics of the eye which could explain the appearance of fading and its final disappearance as a purely psychological phenomena. But they do not explain why I did not feel the ball catch in my pant legs, nor why I could not find it anywhere. Everything I experienced said the ball disappeared before my eyes, everything I know says it did not. It remains as the one experience I definitely had, but that I neither believe nor disbelieve.
-----But if it had happened before then, maybe even a couple times before, I would certainly believe it without question. Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Peter neither saw her die, nor saw the actual moment she came to life. But the knowledge and testimony of those who had seen her die, then saw her alive again, was close and certain enough to be believable. And if it were still too hard to believe, the raising of Lazarus should have put Jesus’ power over death totally beyond question. Could you imagine the questions they had for Lazarus? And I wish they had written down his answers! There he was, after being dead four days, walking, talking, and alive! They had experiences by which to measure the believability of Mary‘s testimony. After three years experiencing the things Jesus did, I would expect them to have slapped their knees and proclaimed, “Yah Mary! You can expect anything from that Jesus!” So what was their excuse? I agree with you Gail. It seems rather bone-headed to me.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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