Blog@GraceJunction

Hi Imran,

It has been two months now since I have been discussing Christianity with you and I must appreciate that you are a true seeker of the truth. Not only have you been patiently hearing all my arguments but also getting deeper in your search for God by asking me questions and raising doubts. And all this, not to prove yourself right or put me down, but because of your desperate search for the one true God. Now continuing from where we left last time, I want to tell you that anyone who wants to seek God should start with Christianity first.

Well, most people think that religion is normally a blind leap in to nowhere, something that is hardly objective and leaves much to the subjective experiences of each believer. But Christianity is unique in this aspect also because it is the only religion that lends itself to the test of history and facts. It is bold enough to say that its entire structure hangs by the one thread of resurrection of its author, Jesus Christ, from the dead. Paul the apostle, who wrote much of the New Testament Bible, says that if Christ did not come back from the dead then the entire Christian message is in vain and so is the faith of all the Christians. He says that if Christ has not raised from the dead then we Christians are to be pitied more than all men.

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Hi Imran,

In response to my mail on the subject of Trinity you had posed a few questions which I intend to answer in this mail. I appreciate your sincere efforts in finding the truth about God and his nature. You wanted to know if Jesus ever claimed to be God. That is a very common question that I receive from many people because Jesus is often considered to be a prophet, moral teacher, a social revolutionary, a zealot, a spell binding preacher who could heal but not God.

However, the scriptures tell us that Jesus does things only God can do, exercises the rights of a deity and also makes direct claim to be God in flesh. In the Bible, before Jesus’ ministry here on earth, God calls himself as ‘I AM’. In Exodus 3:14 it says, God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you were forced to parachute yourself on to the Alps with a bottle of water in your hand. As you touch ground, it starts snowing heavily and so you take cover inside a cave. Keeping down the bottle in your hand, you clean the snow off your attire and then go out to gather rest of your gear. When you return in a few minutes, you observe that the bottle of water has frozen. What was water in liquid form is now ice. You panic and frantically try to search for someone who did this act, but there’s nothing in the cave. Eureka ! you cry out, nothing can convert water in to ice, and you write a book on the theory of everything  and try to explain that God is now fully kicked out from the equation.

This is exactly what Stephen Hawking’s new book “The Grand Design” is trying to explain mankind, about how everything that is, has come in to being. Stephen’s book although has not ignited physics, as the theory proposed by him is just an old idea in a new garb. It is a simplistic approach, yet in our secular age it is one that seems to have resonance with a skeptical public. The reason the book has sparked lot of discussion is the philosophical conclusions that he is drawing from his proposed theory. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Imran,

It was a great discussion that we had about world religions last night. But you had this objection about my Christian belief that we really believe in only one God. As per your understanding we believe in three different God’s namely Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I could not spend much time explaining that to you in the chat room because I would not have been able to explain it adequately and also I had to rush to meet someone.

Trinity is the word that denotes this Christian doctrine that God exists in a unity of three distinct persons. Each of them is distinct but identical in essence. In other words each is fully divine in nature but each is not the totality of the other persons in the trinity. We call them ‘persons’ because it says about their individuality and self awareness. Because each of them has a will, loves and says ‘I’ and ‘You’ when speaking. But here is the Christian stand on your objection. Included in the doctrine of Trinity is a strict monotheism which is a teaching that there exists in the entire universe a single being known as God who is self existent and unchangeable. So when some critics call Trinity as a polytheistic approach they are making a judgment arising out of their lack of knowledge on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

In the general sense a word signifies an utterance of the mouth, or a speech; and as a speech is a thought of the mind uttered by means of words, therefore a word signifies the thing that is being thought; and from this, in the original tongue, everything that really exists, and is any thing, is called a word. But in an eminent sense the Word is Divine truth, for the reason that everything which really exists, and which is anything, is from Divine truth.

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Dear Troy,

We got your mail yesterday evening and it was such a relief to know that you are settling in to the new surroundings of your engineering college. We missed you so much as this is the first time you have gone away from home for such a long time. Nice to know that you have been allotted a room in the college hostel and that you have a new friend who is also your room mate.

Mom is glad to know that you have been reading the Bible daily and praying. But it seems you have been having difficulty explaining to your friend why the Bible is a reliable piece of literary work. In your mail you raised three concerns which were also bothering your friend. It reminded me when I was a college student and I would raise the same questions to my friends. But I have had the privilege of spending a lifetime as a historian committed to the task of researching the authenticity of many literary works, not just the Bible. So allow your dad to put on his historians cap for a while as I try to address your concerns on the Bible.

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‘Grey Divorce’, as it is increasingly being called, is on the rise. Couples who remain married for decades together are seeking divorce! This trend has been around for a while now but it has once again come under focus with Al Gore announcing a separation from his wife of forty years, Mary “Tipper” Gore!

The Gore divorce annoucement came as a shock to the Americans especially because just about two weeks earlier they had celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary and 40 years is a really long time! As a couple they have survived emotional upheavals, the likes of which few could imagine. During their stint for the White House, and earlier even as ‘Monicagate’ loomed large over Al Gore’s political future too, they created the public image of a couple deeply in love. Read the rest of this entry »