What Sin Looks Like To God

AI is an amazing thing. There are now apps for your phone that will allow you to describe something and the AI will try to draw what you described. These two pictures below are the results when asking the AI what evil looks like to God. All sin is evil. If these two individuals showed up to your front door would you let them into your house? I'm guessing probably not. Yet this is an interpretation of what God might see when he looks at us without Jesus. Why then would we expect to stand at the gates of Heaven in front of a Holy God looking like this and be let in to a perfect, sinless paradise? Everyone sins. Everyone has looked like this to God at some point in their lives. Everyone in heaven once looked like this to God

22 This righteousness is given through faith in[h] Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. - Romans 3:22-24

. Remember these are just interpretations of an artificial intelligence. The reality is much much worse. The good news is if we are in Christ God no longer sees our sins, but His own righteousness when He looks at us. 

What does God see when he looks at you? Repent and Believe and He will see His own righteousness reflecting off of you. 

 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. - 2nd Corinthians 5:17-21

 

God's hand on our lives

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
    and do not lean on your own understanding.

-Proverbs 3:5

It's been quite a long time since I've posted here. I think blogs in general are becoming a thing of the past. Maybe not. I'm going to take this opportunity to share events in my life where I could recognize God's hands. My wife has a condition called Moya Moya disease. To put it briefly it's a condition that causes her carotid arteries to grow closed. That may be an oversimplification but the important thing to understand is that it hinders blood flow to the brain. In 2016 she had a mild stroke on the left side of her brain. It wasn't major and she recovered from it rather quickly. However, in 2019 it was much worse. In August of that year she began to complain about terrible migraines. I wasn't terribly concerned at first because with her condition that's not unusual. As time passed she started showing signs that it might be a big more than a migraine. At the time I'm sorry to say we did not have a home church. Knowing that she needed prayer I went to prayerrequest.com and posted the prayer request. I said basically that we did not have health insurance and I feared her condition was getting worse. Someone responded saying that he prayed the Holy Spirit would guide us to a teaching hospital.  

When it became unmistakable that this wasn't a simple migraine I took her to the ER. The confirmed that she had in fact had a stroke, this time on her right side. They kept her for 3 days and sent her home with some cholesterol medication and Asprin.  To be honest they weren't very helpful. We went home and her parents came up from the Atlanta area to check on her. When it was clear that she was in no condition to be left home alone while I was at work her mom offered to take her back with them for a couple of weeks for her to recover. 

When she was at their house she began to get worse. The strokes were not finished. Her parents called me to tell me that her condition was getting worse and that they were taking her to Grady hospital because not only did they have one of the best neurology departments in the country, but also they were.... a teaching hospital.  As soon as I heard her dad use those words I knew that that was the hospital she was meant to be at. I knew she was guided there by God, and I knew she, for the moment, would be ok. 

She was there for many months. She then went to rehab for a couple of weeks where she did quite well and eventually went home with her parents where she continued to improve. 

I of course was not content to be here while my wife was 6 hours away in the Atlanta area, so every weekend I drove all the way down there to spend the weekend with her, both when she was in the hospital and when she was at their house. This put quite a bit of wear on my vehicle, but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was I was up here and she was down there. 

Around January of 2020 I went down for our anniversary. We went out to celebrate and got in my vehicle to head back it felt like I had hit something backing up. I thought for sure I had backed in to someone else's car. I got out and looked and there was nothing there. I got back in and but it in reverse and it wouldn't move. My transmission had broke. It would go forward but not reverse. I took her home and drove myself back home a day early because I didn't want to be stuck down there if the transmission were to break completely. 

I had to learn how to drive a vehicle, and how to park a vehicle, with no reverse. I learned that in my own driveway if I pointed the nose towards the north-west I could put it in neutral and roll back into my driveway. In order to do that I had to drive around the block. 

What was supposed to be 2 weeks to recover turned into a year, but she was finally well enough to come home again and be left alone while I was at work. 

One day as I was making the trip around the block I noticed something I had never noticed in my 9 previous years of living in this neighborhood. Back in the neighborhood there is a church. It's actually inside the neighborhood. It's back behind some trees. I had seen the metal building before but from behind the trees it looked like a storage building, but that day the trees were just out of the way enough for me to notice the steeple. I can't explain it, but when I say I noticed that there was a church IN the neighborhood, it was more than just noticing. It was as if God himself pointed at it and said, "Look. Over there is your church". I came home and told my wife and she was eager to visit. 

We visited and quickly fell in love with it. Not long after we started attending regularly  I was asked to be a church councilman which is similar to a deacon. I accepted. We had found a home church.

So in summery, I trusted God with my wife's health. He guided her to a the hospital she was suppose to be at and on the road to recovery. He used the wear and tear I was putting on my vehicle due to her stroke to make sure I would notice that church. His hand was on the situation from start to finish in a way that was recognizable. He used what was a hard and scary time to show Himself and to bring us closer to him. It's hard to hear his voice and trust him when hard times come up, but He proved himself trustworthy in this situation. 

The Affordable Care Act.

People are actually complaining because the new administration and congress is seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This law has been an absolute disaster. It has not made health care more affordable. It has increased the cost of healthcare for millions of Americans.

I'm divorced now, but before the ACA was passed I was not. My employer provided a great plan through Blue Cross/Blue Shield that included vision and dental. My employer could afford this plan without any problems, then the ACA was crammed down our throats. Eventually that plan started including a deductible I didn't have before on name brand prescription medication. This is something my ex-wife depended on. Every year we had to purchase her name brand medication (that had no generic) a week at a time until the deductible was met. Finally the plan became too expensive for my employer to afford, and he switched us to a little, unknown company that didn't have their act together. That was a nightmare. Finally, because that company was so terrible we went with a Humana plan. This plan had a huge deductible and no vision or dental. Let me also point out that none of these plans after the Blue Cross/Blue Shield covered her trips to her pain doctor, and we had to change pharmacies. I now have changed plans again, but the reasons are unrelated to the ACA.

My parents who are retired have a similar problem. They had to pay musical doctors and pharmacies, and being retired they're having a very hard time affording the plan they are forced by law to buy.

And now comes my current fiancee who has fallen through the cracks of the ACA. She did not make enough money to qualify for assistance through the ACA, nor did she make enough to be required to purchase a plan. Even if she had been required to purchase one it would have been way out of her  ability to afford one.  Her employer also did not provide any health insurance. Now she is uninsured, can't work, and has a life threatening disease that requires surgery that she can not afford. The ACA has failed her.

These are my personal experiences with the failure that is the ACA, but if it is such a failure why are people freaking out about it being repealed? It's because they are afraid they are going to lose the plan they have purchased through the market place. You see, with every liberal program that is sold to the public as something that's supposed to help people, it's almost never about helping people. People had insurance before the ACA. It's about making you dependent on the government. You are  now required to go to the marketplace and buy a policy through the government. You now depend on the government to provide that service. Now that you are dependent on the government to provide that service you will fear politicians who will want to remove that government service, so you vote the other way, usually for the politicians who established, or are for that service.
That's all these government programs are designed to do. They are power plays. They are designed to keep them, and their colleagues in power by making you dependent on them to the point of fearing the loss of that dependency. It was never about helping people, it was about helping themselves.
The ACA was designed to make you dependent on the government and then to fail so they could come in with even more liberal, socialist policies that would make you even more dependent on the government, and make you even more fearful of losing those programs. The ACA should have never been passed.

I said this in a previous blog, and I will say it again. The government does not care about you. Government programs are not there to help you. They're there to help them by keeping them in power by exploiting your fear of losing those government programs. That is a common theme of liberalism, and socialism. You become so dependent on the government that you fear living without them.  Eventually you will be so afraid you will be willing to compromise anything, including your freedom, to keep that which you are depending on to survive. These politicians know you will not normally give up your freedoms, so this is how they chip away at you until you become willing. They make themselves necessary, make you dependent on them, and exploit your fear of losing them.

Democrats don't care about you.

I think it's become more and more obvious lately that Democrat lawmakers and politicians don't care about you. Their policies are designed to look like they benefit the people on the surface, but they do not. They're designed to get people hooked on them, to create a dependency in order to insure those people continue to vote for them in every election. They are designed to get power and hold on to it. They don't care that you are stuck in the ghetto. They want you stuck in the ghetto. As long as you depend on them to provide the ghetto to you you will always vote for them. As long as you depend on them for your food stamps and your welfare check they can always count on your vote. They want you to depend on them. They want you to live in poverty. If you were to someday not need those things then you wouldn't need them. They have made themselves necessary. They don't care that you live in a high crime area. That just gives them more excuses to pass more laws to make themselves more necessary. They're vilifying rich people so you will be angry at them for being rich, but the rich people provide jobs. They want you mad at the rich to justify their policies of taking money from the rich and giving it to you. The rich then have less money to provide you with a job, and so you remain unemployed, and remain dependent on the government. And so you vote for them again, because they have made themselves necessary to you, but your life doesn't matter to them, only your vote. 

They're trying to control you.

I haven't posted in a while. What I have to say may sound like a conspiracy theory nut job thing to say, but I believe it to be true. The government is trying to control how you think and feel using the news media. The recent events in the news make it too clear. They want you to want gun control. It's the only way it's going to happen. They want there to be racial tension because when we are divided we are easier to control. Think about it. On Thursday, 7/7/2016 everyone was thinking about how Hillary Clinton committed numerous crimes and the FBI let her off the hook. By that evening everyone was thinking about cops shooting minorities, or about the shootings in Dallas. Hillary went to the back of everyone's minds. It's not a coincidence.
 There are 5 things you don't see in the news:
1) When cops, white or black, kill white people. It happens. It doesn't gain national attention by the MSM.
2) When a cop is able to subdue a black suspect without lethal force.
3) A cop killing a black man who is a doctor, lawyer, professor or otherwise professionally dressed.
4) When a citizen with a legal firearm takes down someone seeking to use their illegal firearm to harm others.
5) When a black cop kills a black man.

These 5 things, though as common as anything else you see gaining nationwide coverage, are missing from the main stream news media. They don't gain nationwide coverage. They don't fit the narrative that guns are bad, cops are racist, and black people are targeted more than whites by police, and that compliant black or white people usually, but unfortunately not always, don't end up shot to death. This is done either by selective reporting, that is only reporting tragedies that fit their narrative, or by those who are seeking to control your mind deliberately engineering a tragedy that fits their narrative in order to have the news media report it. Yes, I believe the government engineers mass shootings to give you a favorable opinion of gun control. An unarmed people is easy to control. The population is being played by people seeking to control it.

A Third Party Candidate Can't Win

At least, the way our Electoral College works a third party candidate can't win. To back this up you only have to examine the 1992 presidential election. Here's a nifty chart I borrowed from Wikipedia.

In order to win the presidency you must first gain enough electoral votes from the states to add up to 270 votes before the other guys do. Unfortunately this seems quite impossible for a 3rd candidate. Even a popular one like Perot did not have enough electoral votes to even carry one state. In fact all he served to do was to split the anti-Clinton vote between two candidates. States like Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, which are commonly red states, went to Clinton in 1992. Does this mean that these states magically became full of Democrats just in 1992 when they are commonly red? Not at all. It means that the people who didn't want Clinton to win in those states were busy being split over two other candidates. Now these states alone, even if removing Perot was enough to carry Ohio, would have not been enough. But if you look at the popular vote what would have happened if the 18.9% of people who voted for Perot had voted for Bush instead? It probably would have made enough of a difference in the blue states to make them red. That would have been roughly 60million for Bush and 45million for Clinton. It makes you wonder how that would have effected the outcome of the electoral vote as typically it reflects the popular vote. A third party candidate does nothing but split the vote. Period. A third person can not get enough electoral votes to carry enough states to equal 270 votes. Even if a third person was poplar enough to carry some states the most they could hope for is prevent anyone from getting 270 votes in which case the House of Representatives would make the final choice. Only then could they hope to win.

So what do you do? You don't like either candidate! Well, did you vote in the primary? For the time being the primary seems to be where you go to vote for who you want to be president and the general election is where you go to vote against who you don't want. And just simply not voting has the same effect as voting third party. If the Republicans who sat home and didn't vote, and the Gary Johnson voters had voted for Romney in 2012 it would have been neck and neck and Romney might have won. Obama would not be president and we'd all be better off. It would seem the two party system and the electoral college go hand in hand. If you don't like your party's candidate the primary is where you go to change that next time. That's where the real fight is. It worked in 1980 and we got 8 years of a great president.

Jesus is the ONLY way

I'm not posting this to be hateful to other religions, but to speak against one belief in particular. There is a belief among some that all "religions" are valid and are different paths to the same God. That of course is untrue. If there were ANY other way to bring you to heaven other than sacrifice Jesus on a cross don't you think God would have spared Jesus from that sacrifice? Of course it was the only way.
Also, the way Jesus gave is not a "religion" in the same way other beliefs are "religions". A religion is a set of rules and works in which one must struggle to follow in order to win favor with God, and hopefully the right to enter heaven. This of course is not the way Jesus taught. Jesus did everything that needs to be done. All we have to actually do is repent and have faith in him. There's nothing we can do to pay the sin debt we have earned. Only Jesus was able to pay our infinite sin debt.

 Let's see what scripture says:

John 14:6

⁶ Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Here Thomas has just asked Jesus how to get where Jesus is going (heaven) and Jesus answers him. Here Jesus states without question that there is no other way there but through him. 

Acts 4:12

 ¹² Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

These are the words of Peter. A man had been healed by Jesus's followers and Peter had been asked by what power had the man been healed. Peter proclaimed to them that asked that it was Jesus, the only name given for salvation by God. 

Galatians 1:6-9

⁶ I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— ⁷ not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. ⁸ But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. ⁹ As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

Here Paul warns that if anyone preaches a message other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whether it was a man or an angel, then that person is cursed. Strong words I know, but there can be no mistake here. Paul is stating outright that there is no other way but Jesus and if anyone preaches another way then they are accursed. Many other beliefs state that they believe their way to be true because an angel visited them, or their religion's founder, and taught them the way. Here Paul states outright that even that angel is cursed of God and is lying.

Once again I do not hate people of other "religions". I simply want to refute the claim that all "religions" are paths to the same God. Again, if there were other paths to God then God would not have put Jesus through being hung on a cross for our benefit. If I am to call myself a Christian, and trust my eternity to every word that came out of the Lord Jesus Christ's mouth, then I must trust every word. And Jesus said it himself that there is no other way. This is good news though! It's better to have faith in Jesus and KNOW you are going to heaven then struggle through a set of do's and don'ts and ceremonies and rituals and rules and hope that you have followed them all well enough to find favor with God and be rewarded. God is good to provide this one and only way to Himself.