Timoshī's Diary

What is it for man to say “I believe.” What are we believing in?

For many, especially those immature in faith, the concept of belief comes with an agnostic to atheist kind of interpretation. A struggle to believe in the persons of God, to believe in His Existence.

For me, I no longer believe, but I know, because I have witnessed Him. This is the first stage of belief, a leap of faith from an existential conundrum of the Divine. But there is further belief to have than this.

For the saint, the concept of belief is less about existence, than it is about trust. To believe is less about proving whether He exists, but more about, if He exists, what is His Nature?

When Christians say we believe in God, we don’t just believe He exists, but that He is Good in His very Essence.

I have spent my adult life pondering the origins of goodness. Where does good and evil come from, what are they, or it, exactly?

I have long held the axiom, being of a mathematical teaching, that God is good. That He is the definition of goodness. That all good comes from Him, because that goodness is itself God at work.

This has developed, both in thought, and teaching from the Divine in more recent years through the Nature of All Things and my intruction from Jesus, that all good is God at work, that we have no power over doing good ourselves, that all good we do is glory to God, from God and of God’s Hand.

That we have no free will.

We have freedom, as I expressed in Nature of All Things, the Divine Revelation of His Divine Nature, and particularly in Nature of Man, the first chapter, but this freedom is in fact an illusion created by God to grant us an image of His Love, His Goodness, in our hearts.

Freedom is not free will.

Freedom is a gift.

Free will is a myth.

That isn’t to say we don’t experience the freedom to choose, the freedom to love, the freedom to do good.

But that freedom is in fact an illusion created by God in the nature of mankind.

What then is evil?

If we believe in goodness, we can certainly say we believe in the opposite of goodness.

But is it an act?

Certainly many theologians would disagree.

The act is sin.

The fruit of sin is evil.

Sin is the willingness, the will, to do wrong to God. To commit acts against Jesus, and His Kingdom, against our brothers and sisters, against His Creation, against God.

Sin though, is not free either.

If it were free, then the opposite of doing good would also be free.

If we have free will, the randomness of being able to choose through our own merit to glorify God and do His Will, or to go against His Will and do the opposite, then not only is it not His Will we are doing but our own mortal will, but basic tenets of Christianity which are written throughout the Bible, including the presence of Jesus Himself through a Virgin Birth simply would never have come about.

Can we say truly, that prophecy can exist and be fulfilled, should one single act of history not have been precisely and minutely executed according to His Will?

Would the enslaved of Egypt have been freed had it not been for Moses?

Would Jesus have been born if it were not for Mary’s ‘Yes’?

Fulfilled prophecy does exist, and therefore free will cannot exist in any human, in any being, in any act of nature, anywhere in Creation, since the dawn of time.

That is not to say we don’t have responsibility to choose the right path.

We are, in this life, trapped by the confines of what we are given.

We are, in this body, trapped by our actions and the path Jesus has chosen for us.

We are, in this soul, trapped by the confines of the decisions made for us, that we carry out, whether good or evil, and we are, destined to be punished and redeemed for those acts, for all eternity.

So back to the title of this chapter, what do we believe in when we say we believe in God?

We certainly, as Christians, believe He exists. We have either a blind faith or a more pronounced and mature faith based on experience in the existence of the Divine.

We believe in One God in Three Persons, the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We believe, in One Church, in Christ Jesus, the Body of Christ.

But belief in any mature Christian, is more than this. We trust in the Nature of Goodness of God.

That He is Our Redeemer, Sovereign Lord, who will save the needy and the oppressed.

We believe He is goodness made manifest, Love.

Hardly any Christian today would willingly say, moreover chastise someone for saying, the Lord does evil.

But we also believe He created All Things, and brought All Things into being?

What then is evil, if not the absence of goodness?

What is it then if not the fruit of sin?

Where does sin come from if not created in All Things, in our hearts, in our own disobedience to God’s Holy Will.

Did He not create All Things, even Satan? Knowing that He would be betrayed and put to death by His own people?

This is the thing, He did create us, and He created our freedom to choose.

If we do not choose what is good now, surely there will come a time in our redemption, for the souls He created and loves, to be taught how to do good in the future?