What You Believe
Part 4
God Has Rules For Us
Rules, laws, commands -- call them what you will. God demands that you do certain things, and that you don't do certain other things. He has communicated this list to mankind through The Bible. The actual contents of the list are up for discussion, but I think there is universal agreement here that God has such a list.
I think all Apostolics would agree that one of God's requirements is to
believe. We must believe what people have written about God. Actually, make that what
certain people have written: the ones who wrote the Bible, of course! And we must believe it, even if we can't find evidence that it is true. Like Jesus told Thomas (see post #1
), we will be blessed if we believe without seeing. This is not to say that nobody
can find such evidence! Just that, even if you can't, you still must believe. And if you
think you see evidence
against it, you
still must believe.
The rules have changed, over time. There used to be a God-given list of forbidden foods, for example. And mixing types of thread in clothing used to be a sin. And it used to be that you could be forgiven of your sins by killing and burning an animal. Now-a-days, I don't think there are Apostolics who feel compelled to follow all the rules that ever were -- just the ones that haven't been repealed (whatever they are!) and the ones that have been added.
Some people think it's crucial that we all understand
exactly what is on God's list of dos and don'ts. That makes sense, actually. If we disobey something on the list, even if we didn't know it was there, we apparently are held accountable for the sin, anyway. Yes, we can sin and not even know it. So yeah, I suppose we better know what the list is! Some think they do know, but it seems that others aren't really sure. They do what they know, and hope for the best. Either that, or they follow all the purported rules they've heard -- just in case!
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