This is an Open Thread. That means I invite everyone to comment here in answer to the question, What’s hard for you to believe in the Christian Bible? I want to write a post about that after I see some comments. I have an unfinished online book called ACTS 15 at zzzzzzz.substack.com/p/acts-15-truth-unity. I want to add the new post to the book. So please feel free to comment. Following are some topics I plan to discuss, as I find some of them hard to believe and I know others find some hard to believe too, but feel free to add any other topics you want that you or others find hard to believe. THANKS MUCH FOR ANY HELP.
UNFORGIVABLE SIN
TRINITY
JESUS' RESURRECTION
PEOPLE COMING OUT OF THEIR GRAVES
ETERNAL HELL
IMPERVIOUS TO POISON
OLD TESTAMENT STORIES
Terry Trombley Writes Terry’s Substack (https://terrytrombley.substack.com)
https://martinmawyer.substack.com/p/champion-swimmer-riley-gaines-ambushed/comment/14380620
What is lacking in your list of topics referred to there is Human expectation of the insatiable need of God for a unique communion of intimacy with each individual. Most Christians not only lack the expectation of this capacity endowed to every one of us but flee in personal terror from the possibility or even the suggestion of such a consummate and sustained vulnerability to God. They do so even though Jesus Himself was fthe most the most vocal and eminent practitioner of this capacity. If mere emulation of Jesus was sufficient for our entry into Heaven rather then our participation in His Sonship with respect to God the Father, this would be fine, but it is not. To the awe and terror of a great many Christians, God is not distant at all, but is an immediate participant who occupies and inhabits every cell and molecule of His creation including ourselves. Demon possession? Why not possession by God within those in whom He has found a suitable home where He alone is enshrined. Can we really believe that we could be inhabited by the Unfathomable God without consequence? Instead of allowing His embrace of us in intimate communion, most of our faithful flee to the protection from that intimacy with God into the security of Scriptural evaluation and our Churches founded upon it when it is not our Churches that perfectly define Scripture but the convictions of God Himself. Are we to believe that God, who says He is everywhere cannot speak for Himself in the hearts of Men? I think not.
It is becoming quite commonplace that our churches of today have no expectation either of personal intimacy with God, which is the one state from which genuine knowledge of God, of Scripture,. and of ourselves arise. This is the result of their pitifully low expectations of our Unfathomable God who is so often regarded as a superior man who must "logically" follow our version of the rules, rather than those that originate from within Himself constrained only by the source of all truth which is His own nature. God is the true origin and source of what must constrain us, but what also imparts life to us if we allow. His constraints provide genuine human freedom since human nature arises uniquely and solely from that of our Creator. If the god we choose to worship can allow us to live in denial of our own genuine nature, uniquely derived from His own without consequence as a result, he is really no God at all.