History's Relation to Oneself

“It is one thing to believe history, another to believe what it means for me.” – Summary Augsburg Confession

There are many people who believe in the facts that Jesus died on the cross. Some believe this Jesus is God.

But it is quite different to trust Jesus – to realize that only by his death can we have peace with God. Many people today trust God’s favor for them without really coming to grips with the reality of God’s wrath against their sin and a true understanding that it is only because of Jesus’ life of perfect obedience and death that they can have communion with God.

We cannot come to God by any merit of our own; it is only because of the merit of Jesus’ shed blood that we can be right with God.

There is often an interesting dialectic in modern culture. We can place our faith in science and logic but not history.

There is an implicit assumption that story or narrative cannot possibly have significance.

An example may be repeating story lines seen through out modern history. If you talk to many "learned" people today they will wish to scientifically model every "idea" to see if it has "truth."

To many modern man only what can be proven mathematically can be trusted. Maybe such a position seems to have some credibility to it.

Strangely I have never seen anyone with this approach with an awareness of human depravity. What is more scientifically model able than the depravity of the human heart?

Actually you will see this in every academic discipline. There are researches with high credibility that suggest the bible is accurate on certain issues.

However psychologist and sociologists push these things aside suggesting they cannot possibly be true.

How is it that sociology a disciple based on mathematics is so opposed to things like traditional marriage. The statistics show that inside the mathematical approach to the world there is hidden a rebelling against God because many answers have already been deemed inappropriate before testing.

Many tests come out and are dismissed as immediately wrong or "something went wrong" and we need to retest if the result seems bad to the mathematical persons sensibilities. Ironically there is great truth to the fact that math can be made to suggest anything one wants.