Private revelations

[laocmo]

Private revelations are granted by God, at His discretion and for His purposes. Many are never reported; the fruits of the experiences are intended to be shown in the lives of the recipients, benefiting others indirectly.

Once again, since it hasn’t been answered, just how are we supposed to separate the true revelations from the non-true? Some bum on the street full of Mad Dog Red says God told him the world will end, we dismiss him. Carlos Castaneda high on peyote writes something about his revelations, we dismiss him. But if someone like the author of the Book of Revelations whose writings appear very much like those of someone affected by LSD, we put them in the Bible. At Fatima a supposed revelation that there would be a new and more terrible war than WWI would come about worried a lot of people. Anyone who has read the history of that first war and the harsh punishments meted out to Germany after it, could be assured the German state would sooner or later go to war again. Personally I accept no revelations, and those that seem to come true are nothing but good guesses.

Always seemed odd to me that if God, Mary, etc. felt something was important enough to be a revelation, they gave it to some individual rather to all of us. I would never trust an individual revelation to be anything but something created by the individual’s stressed, sick, or impaired mind.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

Always seemed odd to me that if God, Mary, etc. felt something was important enough to be a revelation, they gave it to some individual rather to all of us. I would never trust an individual revelation to be anything but something created by the individual’s stressed, sick, or impaired mind.

God works in funny ways. He sent His Son, but instead of waiting till the year 2000AD, when the news could have been sent around the world in a flash, He sent Christ to a stable, in a backwoords village, in a backwoods nation, which was subject to a powerful empire.

He didn’t even bother sending Christ to the Emperor. The first anybody knew about it was when a bunch of shepherds, lowest of the low in the Jewish pecking order, were told about Christ in a manger.

It took quite a long time before the rest of the world got to know about it in any depth. How about the Aboriginals in Australia, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, American Indians, South Sea Islanders, Zulus in Africa, Eskimos in the Arctic? Hundreds if not nearly 2000 years before some of them even heard about it.

I know you wouldn’t work that way. You’d get a top class PR committee together, a handful of marketing gurus, line up a satellite TV network, and when Christ performed his first miracle, there’d be more talking heads on the idiot box than we’d know what to do with. In a week we’d all be sick of it, like the endless reruns of 9/11, and go looking for a good movie, to get our mind off it.

But God doesn’t work that way. He sent Christ as a babe to a bunch of shepherds, and He sent Mary to three virtually illiterate kids in Portugal at a time when all the big and self important powers were tearing themselves to shreds on the battlefields of World War I, and immolating the male youth of their nations.

Matthew 11:25 -26 NIV

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and **revealed them to little children. ** Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.

 

[laocmo]

God works in funny ways. He sent His Son, but instead of waiting till the year 2000AD, when the news could have been sent around the world in a flash, He sent Christ to a stable, in a backwoods village, in a backwoods nation, which was subject to a powerful empire.

We often say God works in mysterious ways.That always seemed to me to be a poor excuse for His glaringly inefficient, unorganized, aloof, amateur manner of getting his point across. If God is truly the all powerful all knowable being He is claimed to be. He would have to act in a way so as to get his point across as effectively as possible. Throughout the scriptures He has acted like a spoiled egotistical tyrant. He apparently loves barbaric sacrifices, traumatizing one of his faithful by asking him to sacrifice his son. And sending his own son to die to satisfy his hurt feelings due to the sins of his created people. This is not a God I can respect.

 

[fhansen]

We often say God works in mysterious ways.That always seemed to me to be a poor excuse for His glaringly inefficient, unorganized, aloof, amateur manner of getting his point across. If God is truly the all powerful all knowable being He is claimed to be. He would have to act in a way so as to get his point across as effectively as possible. Throughout the scriptures He has acted like a spoiled egotistical tyrant. He apparently loves barbaric sacrifices, traumatizing one of his faithful by asking him to sacrifice his son. And sending his own son to die to satisfy his hurt feelings due to the sins of his created people. This is not a God I can respect.

People often act like “spoiled egotistical tyrant”, in ways small or great. And I think we tend project our own values and opinions onto God-so that much in the OT is actually simply man’s ways, as he’s also being patiently guided towards a much better way, culminating in the revelation of God as being love, love as being the highest value. God didn’t merely send His own son to die, because that was God, Himself, suffering humiliation, torture, and death of His physical body on the cross, revealing a love and also a humility, amazingly, that contrasts sharply with some of the OT concepts.

The catechism teaches that man conceived a “distorted image” of God with the Fall, a distortion that continues to this day IMO. The purpose of the Incarnation, with the advent of Christ, was to correct that image, when the time was ripe in human history, after man had crossed enough bridges, operating from his fallen state, doing what was right in his own eyes (Judges 17 &21) even as he may or may not have paid lip service to God. Light has increased in this world since that time, as man is ready to receive the revelation and grace offered, while darkness remained or even increased as well. We have pretty much total freedom here; we play God-or the devil-and the results may be Mother Teresa or it may be ISIS, or it may like most of us who do way less than we could do to correct injustices while blaming God for doing not doing all He could do. He wants* us* to decide-to be His hands-or not.