People and God through time

Human history can be seen as a series of 'churches', or spiritual mindsets. Not tabernacles or temples or cathedrals, but ways of understanding God, and trying to do His will.

Human religious history can be seen as having had 5 main phases.

The Ancient Church -- what's that referring to?

KumaKristu, isikhathi sikaKhisimusi singenye yemikhosi engcwele kakhulu, ejabulisa kakhulu yonyaka. Kuthiwani ngabantu abacabanga ngakho, kodwa abangenaso isiqiniseko ngaso sonke "isizathu sesizini"?

The Messiah. The Savior. For hundreds - maybe thousands - of years, people were waiting for the Lord to be born. Why?

"The Lord's coming does not consist, as the letter has it, in His appearing once again in the world, but in His presence within everyone." (Arcana Coelestia 3900, Emanuel Swedenborg)

A lot of people are thinking about these things. What does the Bible have to say about them?

Freedom -- what is it really? As far as we can tell, our level of freedom is pretty new, at least in this neck of the cosmos.

What is God like? What sort of being could create and sustain the universe? From atoms to parsecs. For billions of years. And ... why?

"Endowed by their Creator" - in New Christian thought, with two capabilities: spiritual freedom, and rationality.

What happened with the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Was he the Messiah, the Christ, whose coming was prophesied many times in the Old Testament?

To say that each of us has an internal “self” and an external “self” is not particularly revolutionary. We all have a natural sense that our thoughts and feelings are “inside” us and our bodies and actions are on the “outside” of us.

How does God run the universe?

The Lord can see how the mind of a person is tending, towards evil or towards good. When the tendency is towards evil, the Lord will provide circumstances which allow the person to recognize this, and to bend away from that course on his or her own, with spiritual freedom preserved.

As human beings, we get stuck all the time in conflicts between what we want and what we know. We want to eat that extra piece of pie, but we know over-eating is bad for us.....

Why does the Lord permit bad things to happen? That's the topic of this article.

Maybe it's obvious, but... one of the key things for a true understanding of life, the universe, and everything (hat tip to Douglas Adams) is to think hard and learn as much as you can about the nature of God. Here's a list that will spur your thinking.

The American founders knew that government by the people would only work if the people were a virtuous people.