Wretched human being
The world is made up of relationships. The relationship was God’s plan. But the relationship was broken by human crime. Sin broke the relationship with God first, and the relationship with nature was broken like dominoes. Theologist Graham Goldsworthy says.
God created all things to relate to each other in the way God himself has decided and to relate to God. This means that the whole world has been built in an orderly manner.
But we cannot see enough of the full nature of this order now, because of the confusion caused by sin. The disorder created by sin is referred to as death in the Bible.
However, Jesus Christ recovers life by restoring all relationships. And through the Gospel, we can see the nature of the problems by looking at how God deals with them.
After all, the Gospel shows us that all of these broken relationships in the world are the result of broken relationships between God and us.
Calvin says that we have a miserable world. It is the same misery as the son who left the house in Luke 15:11 to 32. A father had two sons who lived in a Jewish village.
Then one day, the youngest son asks his father, who is alive, for a miscarriage. After the inheritance, his son lived a life of profligate profligateness in a foreign country and lost all his fortune. In the end, it is a story of falling into a double life, realizing it late, and returning to his father.
Calvin describes this as the molestation brought about by the shame of our nakedness after taking away the divine costume. The main elements of this misery are our original sin, our actual sin, and the wrath of God.
Zacharias Ursinus‘s 『The Heidelberg Catechism』 says, “The term misery is more comprehensive than the term sin because it includes the evil of guilt and the evil of punishment.
The evil of guilt means all sin, the evil of punishment means all suffering and suffering, the destruction of our rational nature, and all sins that occur as a punishment.”
But it’s not unusual for humans to realize their misery. However, it is clear that God allows us to choose the land to give grace to humans.
In his sermon, Jonathan Edwards says that it is God’s way to make people realize their misery and worthlessness before you give them compassion and love. He breaks it down before you build us.
God lowers it before you raise it, which is why the teacher has to choose his mind for the sake of the learner.
It’s also a way to achieve spiritual salvation. God first makes people think about and realize what sins they have committed.
Prior to God’s grace and compassion, the inner side of the saints must be combined through thorough awareness of sin. For this purpose, God sometimes uses evil for good purposes.
The sin is hidden while the sinners don’t realize it, Edwards says. The law reveals this hidden sin. After making the sinner realize, God makes the sinners realize the terrifying danger they face due to the sins they have committed.
God allows us to see their sins and realize how scary their sins are related to misery. This realization is said to be two things: one realizes that he is unpleasant in front of God and the other is in front of God’s anger because of his sins.
Before God shows them the covenant of grace, let them know their sins and dangers first. Guilt consists of two elements. It is conscious of the sense of sin, of the relationship between sin and punishment.
The light that acts on the sinner makes us realize that we deserve to go to our own hell and let us see God’s awe and fictitious greatness.
So knowledge of ourselves not only wakes us up to find God but also guides us as if we turn it off by hand, John Calvin says.
In summary, the realization of human misery among general grace leads to the pursuit of God, the wisdom brought by the pursuit of God gives us the awe of God, and the fruit born by the heart of respect for God is a life of reverence.
The teaching of Christianity is that the life of reverence is the life of a believer, and the life of the believer is a life that pleases God that man should pursue.
So we find one important error that appears in modern spirituality… It is that God is a man who has infinite compassion, love, and grace, but he is also an infinite and incredibly dangerous man who is holy and righteous.
These properties are united in perfect harmony in God’s character, and those properties are a major component of honor, Jonathan Edwards says.
In this regard, by emphasizing only his compassion, love, and grace, excluding holiness and righteousness in the modern spiritual movement, his attitude of treating God like a friend is pride.
It is the right attitude towards the legislator that is expressed with awe worthy of authority. God’s love is holy love. So those who discover God’s love also discover other aspects of God, says Jonathan Edwards.
Here again, it indicates that people like him are those who do not fully know God’s love. This is because those who are truly bound by Christ and truly realized Christ with their soul are ready to realize God’s love and compassion by discovering God’s fear and righteousness.
When souls tremble and feel despair that they don’t know what to do on their own, salvation is ready to receive good news.
The man said God doesn’t exist
The fool says in his heart,
NIV, Psalm 14:1
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good.
Then, everyone who sees nature in this world deserves to recognize and acknowledge God’s existence. Among them, it is more natural that scholars who are closer than anyone else to the principles and principles of the natural world should be better aware of the existence of God in the natural world.
But why are there more people who confront God? Then you will see and know God clearly through the phenomena that appear in the natural world, why can’t you? On this question, I will replace it with the teachings of Augustine.
However, some of the changes and changes of things continue to appear routinely and regularly, so they are according to God’s orders and do not make us wonder. This is the natural order seen in the sky, earth, and sea. The changes that take place there are very short, and generally not very long. (intermediate omitted) There are many foolish people who are amazed at this phenomenon, but those who study the world understand, and as the same phenomena are repeated over the generations, and the more people know, the less the wonder. (intermediate omitted) So vain philosophers freely attribute it to another cause. They point to the wrong cause because they do not know the best cause, that is, the will of God, because they do not study objects and movements, but are based on ideas that arise from prejudice and error.
By nature, every human being has a Sense of God or Awareness of Divinity, and there are things in the creative world that know God. But instead of paying more attention to their minds and desires, humans try to turn a blind eye to the Sense of God or Awareness of Divinity in them.
People like this who don’t think about their personality and anything at the center of their existence are stupid. If you don’t consider that there’s no basis for their decisions and actions, you say you’re a fool. Because Augustin says, “Everything that people do to move their bodies is the result of God.”
Strictly speaking, it is also because of the laziness of their reason that they see and deny God’s glory that appears so clearly. It is that there is no understanding and no thinking ability. Everything in nature constantly presents problems to humans.
However, humans do not show the attitude that humans should show by turning a blind eye to the essential questions thrown from the inside and outside of humans. Therefore, as humans turn a blind eye to essential values and find the joy of life in non-essential values, the psychological pain of feeling urgent even if they fill them becomes a vicious cycle.
This leads to mental illnesses in modern times, such as depression and Noiroze, which Carl G. Jung described, “Noiroze is always the result of avoiding the pain you deserve to suffer.”
Dr. Scott Peck says it makes the effort to avoid more pain in the end than the very pain that we try to avoid.
God constantly asks provocative questions to humans. It’s a provocation to find yourself. It is for this reason that he promised that he would meet him no matter what.
Fear is the biggest obstacle to finding this God. John Stott says, “Fear is the greatest enemy of truth.”
That’s because when humans find and meet God, that knowledge requires clear determination from humans. You must reflect on your past lives, repent, abandon your will, and live the life God demands.
Such a life is a reverent life that resembles God, abandoning the life they have lived according to their desires so far.
So in order to somehow avoid this burden, humans themselves have come up with refuges such as psychology and evolution, and comparative religion.
Such things are only opinions made by humans and not true knowledge. That’s why the virtue that man is required to find God is humility, diligence, honesty, and obedience, says Rev. John Stot.
However, it is difficult to know the clear glory of God that humans pour upon us with such a combined attitude.
Because humans don’t try to give up on themselves easily. In this regard, Puritan pastor John Preston said, “The creatures that have found something within themselves try to stand on their own ground, but they will not be insignificant.”
In conclusion: From Non-Faith To Faith
Pastor Martin Lloyd Jones says distrust is “very active and active”. It refers to a form of soul that has a very definite form of thinking.
They also say that distrust is “always changing and contradictory.” The state of disbelief is another characteristic of “not knowing satisfaction.” In the end, distrust is that only 10 percent of the light is considered true light, and you end your life without moving forward.
This is the greatest tragedy of disbelief, and the greatest tragedy of disbelief is to be blinded by the glorious truth. As such, distrust blocks the best and the best benefits.
Here we realize one important fact, which is that because of these unfaith factors, we humans never know God on our own.
In this respect, Calvin is absolutely right when he says that the Holy Spirit is light. Through this light of the Holy Spirit, our intelligence brightens and our will becomes firm.
Bright understanding and firmness will lead to the fact that God’s truth is clear and that he can achieve what he promised with his holy words.
All the promises of God are concentrated in Christ and are confirmed in this Christ. Because these promises have been kept and achieved in Christ, Christ is clearly an eternal object of faith.
Our faith meditates on all God’s abundant mercy within this object. Now we can see from the apostles how Christ has obtained this significance for us and what this significance is.
We must lie before the words of revelation in order to obey them completely and entirely. We know and believe in him not because we found him, but because he found us first.
We get to know him through his revelation, which is entirely to blame for his grace. The true fact of God’s revelation means that humans cannot actually believe in God on their own.
What humans can believe on their own is not God, but only gods. So Henry Scoogul says, “The faith in a man’s soul is the direct history of God.”
No faith can be created by all the efforts of our nature alone, no supernatural help. Before the holy thing is created and the shape of Christ is achieved in us, the Holy Spirit must first come to us, and God’s ability must cover us.
But it has to be accompanied by human humility, and although we are clearly involved in the infinite force that causes these powerful changes in the soul, we have to prepare what we can prepare ourselves. When we do our best, we have the greatest reason to expect God’s help, he says.
The word of God is the word of his grace. This word of grace is a son of God, a son of a man, a true God, a true man, Immanuel, a meeting with Jesus Christ, the God who is with us, and the Christian faith is a meeting with this Immanuel, a meeting with Jesus Christ, and a meeting with God’s living words within him.
Faith relies on God, the founder of life and eternal salvation, which saves us from all evil and follows all good.
To believe is an act of intelligence that normally approves evidence. To believe is an act of intelligence that usually acknowledges evidence. However, as a result, a will is influenced, and this proven good is accepted through will, so faith can be rightly referred to as an act of will.
He is a human being who has the property of confronting God, but if man responds to God’s grace in the right manner, he will surely meet the Trinity God.
God spoke and did this through Jesus Christ. It’s called “The Gospel,” “Good News.” It is the best declaration of what God has achieved in Christ for man.
When we meet the best declaration, we will never be able to suppress the urge to jump into God’s arms. Such an impulse is bound to be accompanied by Augustin’s following confession.
Oh, Lord, you are great and deserve great praise. Your ability is so great and your wisdom is incalculable. So I want a human being who is a part of your creation to praise you. Humans live with the evidence of their own finiteness, the evidence of their own crimes, and the evidence that they defeat the arrogant. But this human being, a part of your creation, wants to praise you. You move our human minds to praise and enjoy you. You created us to live for you, so we don’t feel comfortable until our hearts rest in you.
