Is it Truth?

One of my favorite hobbies is radio. I've even written some on this blog a little bit about radio stations I used to listen to when I was a kid. I used to sit for hours listening to the local stations in my area, but I always found it fascinating to listen to AM radio at night. Once the sun set, a whole new world opened up as thousands of stations would start skipping across the horizon and landing on my radio, a hobby a lot of radio enthusiasts refer to as DXing ("dx" meaning "distance"). It was sort of a vicarious experience listening to all of those stations, knowing someone else way across the country was listening to that same broadcast at the same identical time I was. After all, radio waves are akin to light waves in that they travel at the same speed, which we all know as the speed of light.


One Christmas my brother and I received a stereo system as our "joint gift". This is really where all my interest in DXing started, and I would listen and log stations that I would hear at night. Of course, those stations would fade in and out of existence due to different variables, such as changes in the atmosphere, so I'd have to hope for a "window" of time to catch what the station call letters were and where the station was located. Sometimes I'd get frustrated because I'd be real close to getting a station ID or location, and then the signal would start slowly going "bye-bye".


I don't know how I got the notion, but for some reason I thought it would be possible to do something on the radio to bring a station back which began fading out. Our stereo was complete with a cassette player and an 8-track player (yes, an 8-track. We used to play LP's, too- I'm ancient. I guess the younger people reading this are saying, "What's an LP"?, lol). Anyhow, our 8-track player had an eject button and for reason I thought that if I pressed this button periodically once a station began fading out, the stereo would somehow electronically "intensify" the signal and bring it back in, at least temporarily. It was AM radio, after all, and any time I pressed that button, it would cause some interference to the broadcast, so it had to have some effect, or so I hoped. I knew all along that this just didn't make any logical sense, but for whatever reason I kept doing it. Although I suppose in the back of my mind I knew this wasn't possible, after a while, it became more of a habit, and I continued to do it. I more or less reinforced this behavior, and to some degree I accepted it for fact. Of course, there wasn't any way to prove that pressing that button would improve the signal or bring it back. The station may have come back temporarily, but it was due to the atmosphere being cooperative rather than my misguided belief that I was actually doing something to change the situation.


A lot of people approach religion, God, eternity, heaven/hell, just anything spiritually, in that manner- believing in something without verifying the information. They've always heard that God operates in a certain way, or that God is just up in heaven, unconcerned with what we're all doing down here. Or...they believe there's no heaven, or worse yet, that there's no hell. Some people believe there's a heaven, and either, A). we all go there when we die, or B). God determines whether we're going to heaven (or hell) when we die based on how "good" we are when we're here on earth. Basically, people believe what they really want to believe. They want to believe everything that sounds good, but discard everything else that's not to their liking.


Unfortunately, that's a very foolish way to approach something as important as God, eternity, heaven, hell, and other spiritual ideas. We cannot just go on what we believe, what we hope, or what others tell us, about what God expects of us. The only way we can know about who God is and about eternity is to read God's Word, the Bible. It is 100% truth. Some people say truth is "relative". I've never understood that, if truth isn't absolute truth, and all truth is "relative", why call it truth? If that's the case, then truth is no longer truth, it's opinion.


Another practice which is very dangerous, too, is truth mixed with error (if that's what you want to call it, because any truth mixed with error is no longer the truth). I've heard many times from people who believe in God, but who have different opinions on who God is. There are those who believe in a Creator who isn't actively involved in the life of man. And there are those who want to hand-pick the qualities of God. They'll say God is loving, but God is not just because God would never send anyone to a terrible place like hell. There are those, too, who believe in a hell, but that hell is not a place of torment as the Bible tells us. It's only "the grave", and therefore, hell need not concern us. These sorts of "mixed" theories are, in fact, fallacies which can cost us more than we bargained for if we don't check them out first. Although it's true that God is a loving God, He is also just, and He must punish sin. James 2:10 tells us that if we are guilty of breaking one law, we are guilty of breaking the entire law. That doesn't give us much leeway in what's considered living a "good life". The good news is that God is loving, just, and merciful. He has made a way to save us from an eternity in hell, if we're willing to come to Him for help.


Are you going through life accepting what you've heard or come to believe about God and eternity without knowing the information is verifiable? The only way we can be assured of getting to heaven when we die is to do what God tells us in the Bible. The Bible tells us God's will is that everyone who looks to the son (Jesus Christ) and believes in him shall have eternal life, and will raise him up at the last day (John 6:40). By following the Bible rather than our own thoughts (or others' ideas) about spiritual issues, we can get an accurate representation about how to know we can go to heaven. For those of you skeptics who don't believe the Bible is verifiable, and/or don't know if it's trustworthy, please see our page regarding this HERE or HERE. It's the truth, and that's the truth.



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God's Love in One Word...
Jesus.
www.PassTheWord.net