Why Doesn't He Give the World a Sign?

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My cousin is feeling spiritually disparing at the moment. We were having a conversation, when the topic of "“why doesn’t He just give us a sign so everyone believes” came up, and I wasn’t able to give him an adaquite (Sp) explination of why.

Please do not say “Don’t question Him,” he is not in the kind of “spiritual shape” to believe that.

Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
God has revealed Himself enough so that everyone who wants to find Him will, and everyone who doesn’t, won’t.
 
Faith is a gift, yet God has promised us that “If with all your heart you truly seek me, ye shall ever truly find me.” (That scripture number slips my mind this moment, but I can look it up.) He wants us to find and love Him even more than we desire it for ourselves. We need to believe this even when God feels far away to us; our faith must go far beyond our emotional ups and downs.

At the same time, you can imagine that the sort of universal, thunderous sign of His presence that would cause all men to believe in Him (and which is indicated to happen at the end of time in the Book of Revelations) would be so compelling that there would no longer be a free choice involved. God wants us to come to Him on our own free will, not because we are forced to acknowledge Him.

In a sense, all of the world, all of the love and the beauty in our lives, are constant signs of His presence.

I will say a prayer for your cousin. Best wishes–
 
He did give us a sign: tell your cousin to look at a Crucifix.
 
Throughout the Old Testament we see how God elects his own, special nation, the Jews, and how he chooses to reveal himself to certain chosen individuals. Finally, The Word is Made Flesh - Incarnated - and dwells among us until his death on the cross, and his resurrection - which was His supreme gift to us all - and ascended into heaven after passing on his ministry and his church to the Apostles.

" The Christian dispensation, therefore as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of Our Lord Jesus Christ (I Tim. 6:14 and Tit. 2:13)." Dei Verbum para 4.

God has revealed himself and there will be no further revelation. Stark maybe, but it is what Church believes and teaches. Up until our own time (and beyond probably) we, His Church, are still trying to understand what all this means and so, in that way, revelation continues since we are fallen creatures and our Sin prevents us from understanding some of what God meant when he sent his only son to us.But only in that sense.
 
For the present generation, it has been worked out that the chance of humans occuring by chance, starting from the big bang, is so small that many scientists have been quoted saying :

“Statistically, its (literally) impossible for us to be here, yet we choose to believe the impossible”

Is that proof or what!!

From the horses mouth as they say.

For me, all the proof i need, is the sun rising and setting each day with such amazing colours.
 
If a person doesn’t want to believe then they will deny God even if he came and sat beside them. The unbeliever would find some way of rationalizing away the proof.

Also, if God was too obvious then our belief in him would not be a work of faith. That is why free will is important. If he proved himself to us, then we wouldn’t have free will to reject him and ironically we wouldn’t have free will to accept him. Does that make sense?

As far as miracles and signs…wasn’t Fatima a sign? I think any foray into science proves God’s existence. There had to be an intelligent designer behind atoms. Doesn’t it seem odd that protons-which are all positive charged-gather together in the atom’s nucleus instead of being repulsed from each other?:hmmm: God had to design the atom.
 
God could truly reveal Himself to us in a way that 99.99999% of people would instantly believe - but he doesn’t want our love that way. He wants us to choose him.
 
Albert Einstein said “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

There’s a lot of truth there. What sign could God give that everyone would believe? How about rain? No one can live without water. How blessed are we that it just falls from the sky?

But of course rain is commonplace. It’s easily explanable by natural laws. So it’s not considered a miracle or a sign. Arguably, if God were going to give a sign for every person to see, he wouldn’t start doing it today, he’d have started years, centuries, even millenia ago so that every person had to opportunity to see it and believe. But anything that’s “always been that way” isn’t going to convince someone looking for a “knock your socks off” miracle.

So should there be a new and novel sign for every generation? Should it be something so crazy and unexplanable that scientists haven’t a hope of writing it off as anything other than a divine event? Well, as a counter argument to that, I’m reading an interesting book “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” that argues that a pre-requisite for the development of science was a rational view of a world that operates based on consistent and understandable laws. His point is that in cultures that believed that the universe was chaotic, unpredictable, and governed by the whims of inscrutable spirits, no pursuit of science could ever flourish. Perhaps God has his own reason for creating a universe that obeys seemingly discernable laws. Maybe part of the reason is to encourage humankind to understand and learn and appreciate those laws. I don’t want to get too far afield here, but if we lived in a world with regular, unexplainable, undeniable, universal, in-your-face miracles, how would that change our society? Would we be more religious and faithful? More superstitious and afraid?

Is there a middle ground between miracles so common-place that they are ignored and miracles so earth-shattering that they’d utterly transform society and culture as we know it? Who’s to say that’s not happening today? Unless and until it happens to you, if you hear about it at all it’d just be some rumor about an apparition in Europe, or some guy claiming to raise the dead in Africa, or a weeping statue, or a lady in Jersey who found a potato-chip that looks like Christ.

The final question, then, is if any of these supernatural signs are real, why can’t one happen in front of your cousin? The unsatisfactory answer is that God just doesn’t run things that way. I had a friend who was also really caught up with signs. One week she’d be absolutely elated about some sign she believed in that confirmed the direction of her life. The next week she’d be in despair because God had been silent and she felt adrift. Week to week her happiness and to some extent the strength of her faith was dependent on these external emotional experiences. She needed that high to keep her going. The evidence of the world, and of scripture, shows that God prefers a faith that doesn’t depend on signs and wonders.

–Bill
 
*“Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not despise prophecy. Do not extinguish the Spirit.” "… “test all things”… “Hold fast to that which is good.” *

God has sent us many signs, but we always seem to pay them very little attention. The miracle of the sun at Fatima was the most stupendous Christian miracle ever since the ressurection of Christ, yet even that people now pay little or no attention to. Even though the Church has approved it so much so that even 5 popes have spoken great favor about it.

Father Joseph de Ste. Marie a professor of the Teresianum here in Rome points out that in Ephesians 2:20, the Church is established upon the foundation of the Apostles and he points out that it is also founded on the prophets.

Three Kinds of Revelation

It is the role of the hierarchy to test, to find out, to determine whether a message comes from God. In fact, the Fifth Lateran Council, which took place around 1515, defined a solemn definition of the Catholic Church which says that the final interpretation of prophecy is left to the Pope of Rome. There are three kinds of authentic revelation recognized by the Church.
They are:
  1. **The public deposit of Divine Revelation ** contained in Sacred Scripture and Holy Tradition; To not believe in the public deposit of Divine Revelation is a sin against the theological virtue of Faith.
  2. Private revelation. That is, if I were to have a vision of Our Lady, which I’ve never had, which certainly I am not worthy of, but if I were to have had one and She told me to pray 15 decades of the Rosary, for myself, that would be a “private revelation” to me. Certainly, no one except myself, should be expected to believe this private revelation. But as Bishop Graber of Regensburg, Germany, has pointed out a number of years ago, there is a third kind of revelation and that is what he called
  3. “Public Prophetic Revelation”. And that is distinct from private revelation and distinct from the deposit of faith. That is what St. Paul is talking about in Thessalonians and Ephesians. As St. Thomas Aquinas points out in the second of the second part of the Summa Theologica, question 174 Art. 6 (note especially ad 3) *“God sends prophets to every generation, not to give a new doctrine but to remind the faithful what they must do to save their souls.” * And there is a moral obligation to believe in public prophetic revelation. It was for this reason Pope John Paul II rightly declared that Fatima: *“imposes an obligation on the Church”. *
Fatima is public prophet revelation. Certified by both the stupendous miracle of the sun and the Church itself.

Sacred Scripture Teaches us About Signs and Miracles

But apart from this human prudence, I would like to dwell upon some other reasons that we find in Sacred Scripture. Our *Lord was asked by the Pharisees to work a miracle. They said, "work for us a *sign in the Heavens ** and we will believe You. We will follow You." Our Lord said: *“I will not do that. The only sign you will have is the sign of Jonas. That is the Son of man, after being three days in the bowels of the earth, will be raised up to life again.” * But these Pharisees said they would believe had He worked a sign in the Heavens. Now the very sign that was refused to the Pharisees was the sign that Our Lady obtained from Her Son to prove to the world that this message indeed comes from God.

"As Low as Hell"
There is an obligation when we have a sign from God. This obligation is also spoken about by Our Lord. He says, in Scripture, *“and thou Capharnaum and thou Bethsaida, do you think that you’ll be raised as high as Heaven?” * Our Lord answers His own question of these two cities, Bethsaida and Capharnaum, *“No, you’ll be cast as low as hell.” * Very strong words.

Here are two cities that He says will be cast as low as hell. Why does He say that? He explains Himself. He says: *“Because if the signs worked in you had been worked in Sodom and Gomorrah, those cities might have done penance and stood to this day.” * … Sodom and Gomorrah, as you know, had fire rained down on them from Heaven because of the sins of homosexuality. And yet Our Lord says those cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, that Abraham could not find five just men in, those cities might have done penance had they seen the miracles, had they seen the signs that Our Lord worked in Capharnaum and Bethsaida. And so to refuse to acknowledge such signs as Our Lord worked in Capharnaum and Bethsaida by not listening and obeying, is grounds for being cast as low as hell. These are Our Lord’s own words.

Many believe that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was the sign in the Heavens that the pharisees asked for but were not given.

Mark
 
Dear friend

Simply waking up in the morning is a sure sign of God’s Love for you.

God Bless you and much love and peace to you

Teresa
 
If you want a message from God, read the Bible!

If you want to see a miracle, go to Mass!!!

It’s that simple.

NotWorthy
 
The empty tomb is the greatest sign given by Christ and the only one that he says that he will give.

Mat 12:38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.”
Mat 12:39 But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Mat 12:40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (DRB)
 
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