The Incongruent Believer

How many times have you heard in folklore, read in a book, seen in a movie, or even witnessed in your own life someone trying to make a contract with God? It normally takes the form of "God if you get me out of this situation, I will never do wrong for the rest of my life" or something like that. I find it interesting that people in fiction or in real life acknowledge that they knew there might be a God around but have refrained from testing that knowledge, in a sense ignored God, until they find themselves in a sticky situation. The other scenario we might find is when someone needs something or needs guidance making a plea to God like, “God, if you make this happen for me then I will go to church for the rest of my days.” One might be forgiven to think that this kind of contracting with God is found in the latter verses of Genesis 28 where following a dream Jacob makes this vow, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat an...

Man fathers children with his two daughters, shock, horror! Upstanding member of the community found to have married his half-sister; people are stunned! Although these sound like headlines from a tabloid newspaper, they are actually facts (with a little bit of sensationalism added by me for effect) from Genesis 19:36 and Genesis 20:12. We have all probably read these passages dozens of times, yet I have no doubt we haven’t let those facts sink in, either because they are not palatable considering they are in God’s word, or we don’t focus on what we are reading at the time, or that God has not chosen, through His Spirit, to make them known to us. When it comes down to it the word of God, as expressed in the Bible, is as shocking as an 18 rated Hollywood movie, perhaps it should have a warning banner on the front similar to that we see on Sky: What we read in those blessed pages may assault our twenty-first century sensibilities, even to the point that we subconsciously refuse to ...