September 03, 2015

Parental Testing

Recently an extended family member had a baby; however, the lack of family resemblance has prompted the young father to ask for parental testing. A similar situation played out when some of Abraham’s descendants claimed God as their Father. Jesus saw that they too lacked a family resemblance and He applied a paternity test. Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:42-44 NIV).

2 comments:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----Mankind thinks it’s so smart it can correct the Lord’s Word. A couple thousand years ago some guys got a bunch of emotional fancies about a God ready to whisk them into an afterlife, and wrote a bunch of superstitions about how man was created, not evolved, (how goofy) and they even made up how old they were when they had a kid and when they died. And when considered all together for adding up those years, this goofy creation event was even dated to 4004BC. Ha ha ha ha ha! And then the whole earth got covered by water! Ha ha ha Ha Ha Ha ha ha ha!
-----The funny thing about what man knows is that man knows all of it only in individual minds. Now, if you stop and think about it, this is really, really interesting. Libraries are full of man’s knowledge. Try to imagine the number of books now written, if you can. Are there what, tens of millions of books in the world? Hundreds of millions? I don’t know. But I do know no one mind contains all that information. All those books are the cumulative knowledge of man, but no man knows anywhere close to its total. So what?
-----So, data is data. Information is just information. “Green“, “tubular”, and “cold” are information. “Pickle” might be perception, or information. It depends upon whether any other information has been brought to bear upon the question. Some other guy taking a bite of the green, tubular, cold thing immediately knows by a severe gag reflex that the “pickle” perception missed out on properly “factualizing” last Fourth of July’s left over Oscar Meyer wiener. One book of the library deeply discusses all the aspects of “green”, “tubular”, and “cold”. And though it can infer the involvement of a refrigerator because of the “cold”, no further inferences can be drawn without more information. Then the taster guy supplies that missing information by trying a bite. His book is now written, Awful Hot Dog. But it’s in French (which trying a bite is what I’d expect from a Frenchman.) And its in France, as well, to where he returned after sampling the green, tubular, cold thing in his cousin’s Brooklyn refrigerator. Of course, his cousin’s book Long, Tubular, and Cold: Analysis of a Pickle is in a Brooklyn library. Brooklyn readers won’t get the opportunity to know the more that French readers will get. Multiply that times billions of different facts written into millions of different books. Each book knows nothing, so a library is a collection of information, not a knowing of that information. Each reader, like the Frenchman, is able to draw perceptions from the smattering of books he reads. But he’s not Spock. So his inability to mind-meld with anyone else sequesters his perceptions within his own, lonely mind. He can talk to others about his perceptions, but have you ever thought about how far short of a perception a sentence is? And putting that idea together with the known attention span of the average person, we begin to understand how unsuccessfully perceptions are actually shared.
-----So, the entirety of human knowledge does not act like an integral whole. It operates more like a smorgasbord, whereupon each eater can stack as much as possible upon his plate, yet still walk back to his table with far less sampled than what is available. What is known is what is on each plate, in each mind -metaphor aside, and that is known by only the one to whom that single plateful belongs. Herein is the opportunity for meddlers to stand by the smorgasbord and drop specifically selected items onto each passing plate. The selection of what they drop tips us off to whom is their father, and to whether they meddle for death or for life. The whole of the smorgasbord says everything about Biblical truth. It just speaks one plateful at a time, and the filling of each plate is open to great artistic license. I’ll have a plate of revelation, thank you.

Love you all,
Steve Corey

Steve Corey said...

PS: And please top off my plateful of revelation with that little cherry that says, “Let God be true though all men be false.” (Rom 3:4) Ahhhh, yessss. That looks delightful!