The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Psalm 46: 7; 11
"It is common sense that the true God would only reveal Himself to sincere and earnest seekers who want to know Him in truth in order to obey Him. The first prerequisite to knowing God is the willingness—indeed, the passion—to know Him as He really is, not as one imagines or would like Him to be. It is no less idolatry to create an imaginary god in one’s mind than to make one out of clay, wood, or stone.
So, who is the true God who proves Himself by unfailingly foretelling the future in the Bible? The Bible identifies Him as “the God of Israel” 203 times, “the God of Jacob” 28 times, “the God of Abraham” 17 times, and “the God of Isaac” 13 times.
[Note: We can add God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob at least 9 times in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. He is called God, The Holy One of Israel nearly 300 times in modern scripture.]
[Note: Not a specific ethnic group, but He is also God of the whole earth 3 Nephi 11:14]
These designations are foundational to everything the Bible teaches, including the very character of God. To profess to believe in God and at the same time to hold a prejudice...against Israel, turns these clear biblical identifications into meaningless titles. If you are seeking a God who can be trusted, be sure you know the God who never slumbers nor sleeps— He is the Lord God of Israel."
By Ron Ross, BFP Israel Mosaic Radio Host
It would not be problematic to dispute some military aquisitions in the middle east and simultaneously be a follower The God of Abraham, Jacob, Israel, Isaac and the whole world, if the nation which occupies parts of the middle east has departed from the true meaning intended by the original prophets who founded the faith.
ReplyDeleteTo avoid self-imagined nonsense from best-effort interpretation of scriptures, and get to true meaning without the predjudices of the self, I try to think of the cultural constraints of the writers due to their living in the age of goat-herders and then reverse their expected predjudices and then aim to similarly reverse-engineer my own expected predjudices.
Procedurally as a mathematician, tabulating modifiers results in an estimate of a transformation which can be thought about to provide an estimate of the reverse transformation. I'm good at those but note the maths can get completely stuck where there is insufficient information and that history is not as simple as camera lens correction functions.
Now, trying to estimate the predjudices of some goat-herders and nomads which would colour their expression of pure belief, though impossible to complete, is what I aim for through prayer. And then as a matrix mathematics operation can sort out the true colour of a pixel of a camera image if the light used in photography were a little bit tinted, and can sort out some blurr from imperfectly set lenses in the Hubble Space Telescope, one ends up with a corrected estimate of the meaning to the very most saintly which led to their proclaiming what was written and handed down to us.
If that sounds like a lot of thinking work to do, yes it is. The languages of mathematics do indeed offer some insight towards finding out what those believers must have meant all those thousands of years ago, but I'm still refining the coefficients in the estimates and never will stop doing so.