FROM WHERE DOES MY HOPE, TRUST, AND PEACE COME FROM?
- Atonement: covering whatever outstanding shortcomings I have, to protect me from whatever unknowns to come in this life or the next.
- Repentance: Doing what God created us to do, feeling personal fulfillment and His pleasure in that. God ultimately wants us to live according to our design and help Creation meet its design. When we do that to the best of our ability we feel fulfilled and connected to God (knowing we’re doing what God created us to do, which pleases Him), which gives us confidence in ourselves and status before God. Living in obedience has inevitable mistakes and shortcomings which requires repentance, so true obedience and being more and more aligned to God’s design is a life of constant, humble repentance.
- Relationship: Feeling God’s smiling face of love toward me, and feeling that love back for Him which comes with a desire to do His will, which is Repentance.
- Revelation: Trust in objective things outside of my own conception. Whatever assurance can come from the more mysterious, debatable things of my own experience of God (Relationship), my own deeds (doing what seems right in my own eyes), the assurance that comes from things outside of myself that are a more objective truth is the greatest assurance. The Bible (Divine Revelation) which records experiences that reflect the nature of God from thousands of people for over a thousand years is something I can put my trust in that isn’t just my own making or isolated experience. And the ultimate assurance of Atonement comes almost exclusively from Divine Revelation. And wherever the Bible is debatable, nature (Natural Revelation) is the least debatable thing in the universe. When I study nature, my own experiences in life, and the timeline of history, in spite of whatever debatable interpretations men have of the Bible, I see a God who is good, who desires us to be here (loves us), created us for a purpose, and has some good plan for our individual lives and the life of Earth as a whole. The testimonies of people who have encountered God in Heaven through Near Death Experiences also confirm this.
AS IN THIS LIFE, SO IN THE NEXT.
Judged in the next life for how I lived my earthly life. The judgement I already experience in this life is a reflection of the same Judge and judgement I will experience in the next life once my whole life can be judged as a whole.
- All men are without excuse because all men have REVELATION to respond to with how they live their lives.
- Revelation naturally leads someone down a path of understanding and pursuing God in a RELATIONSHIP, knowing His goodness, His will, and feeling His blessings and love for them.
- Relationship leads to loving God with all your heart, which leads to you loving yourself and your neighbor – which is all God’s creation around you, which is the very thing He designed you to take care of. Obedience to Revelation that is empowered by Relationship will always have its mistakes, and so real, lifelong obedience is being in a state of constant humble alignment to God’s design, which is REPENTANCE.
- Whatever hope, trust, and peace can (and should) come by Revelation or Relationship or Repentance alone, we are still prone to worry about being safe in spite of our mistakes and shortcomings before a perfect, infinite, invisible Judge in this life and the unknown life to come. The ATONEMENT of the Jews (which culminated in the atonement of Christ) is the gift given by God to humanity to assure them of their protection, safety, love, and blessings in this life and the next life in spite of all the unknowns.
– All of this is the Covenant God gave to humans, into which all men can enter into.
Realizations 