It’s been a while…

We were up in Minneapolis/St. Paul for the Bears vs. Vikings game. Bears win, crushing the horn blowing, blah blah blah Vikings (I am not a fan of the Vikings or the Packers). On the walk to the car after the game we passed a couple of fire and brimstone megaphone screamers. There was a nice young atheist screaming back at the megaphone. I don’t agree with either.

Christ didn’t scream. He got pissed a couple of times, but he doesn’t come off as a screamer. He come off as a decision/consequences guy. Facts laid out with the pro’s and con’s. If the fire and brimstone want to focus on the consequences more than the love wrapped around the decision, they aren’t the first.

The atheist surprised me when he went further off the deep end when I pointed out that hell was real and does exist and that neither of us could prove our point. He had to be restrained by his friend when I chided him for his lack of tolerance. His comment that anybody that believes “that stuff” doesn’t deserve tolerance said it all.

We tend to bask in the ignorance of knowledge and ridicule the knowledge of faith.

Matthew 7:3 New Living Translation (NLT)
3 “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?”

At the end of the day, we can’t prove the existence of heaven and hell, nor can we disprove it. What we can do is focus on the proof that we have. The bible has far more insight into man than man does. We’ve been here before and we know what the outcome will be. It’s happened time after time.It’ll happen again. The more I study the bible, the more I become convinced of its truth. I wonder if the atheist I ran into has bothered to study the bible, or anything for that matter, deeply.

Colossians 1:19-23 (NLT)
19 For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
21 This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. 22 Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
23 But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News. The Good News has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed as God’s servant to proclaim it.

Colossians 2:8-10 (NIV)
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. 9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10 and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.