Great to see you again. I now recall the point I was going to make in discussing airline pilots and Secret Service personnel. They are the two professions that are experts at anticipating the future (because the stakes are so high for them). And they do it by looking for clues that tell them about the future that is emerging before their very eyes.
With a multitude of world views, philosophies, and religions competing for our attention, looking for clues can be very helpful in discerning the truth about life here on earth and whatever happens to us after we die. The multitude of religions make competing claims, so they cannot all be true. I have found the following clues to be most helpful in my spiritual journey. .
Clue #1: There are over 150 flood stories in different cultures, most of them describing a family that survived the flood in a boat.
Clue #2: The Chinese language is made of pictographs, and the Chinese word for boat is a ship with 8 people in it (Noah and his family were 8 people).
Clue #3: The Chinese word for flood is a picture of water covering the entire earth.
Clue #4: The Chinese word for forbidden shows two trees, and “God commands” underneath the tree (similar to the two trees in the Garden of Eden).
Clue #5: A cardiologist named Dr. Maurice Rawlings received a lot of patients who were in really bad shape. It was not uncommon that patients would die in his presence. Because of new medical treatments, he was able to bring many of them back to life. He was astonished to discover that about half of them didn’t want to come back because they were having some great experience, and the other half came back to life screaming that they didn’t want to die again because they were in hell.
Clue #6: Within evolutionary science circles, a new movement is emerging – the Intelligent Design Movement. It is a group of evolutionary scientists, some prominent, who have concluded that their scientific research reveals evidence of intelligence, that that we could not have evolved as described by Darwin. So they reject the evolutionist perspective that we are merely animals who evolved from non-life, and have no purpose in life.
Clue #7: In the book “The Math of Christ”, Stephen Bauer describes 40 different Old Testament prophecies that have been fulfilled, and then calculates that the chances that these happened by chance to be one chance in 10 to the 137th power. To get some sense of the magnitude of these odds, if you covered the earth with silver dollars, one of which is painted red, and told your friend George, who is blind, to pick up the red one, the chances of George picking up the red one would be one chance in 10 to the 17th power.
Clue #8: The Bible, written by 40 authors with widely differing occupations from 3 continents over 1,500 years, tells an integrated story that is woven together in a progressive story of human life, with God’s involvement over the centuries, including dozens of prophecies that are fulfilled. This unity is evidence of a common author (the Holy Spirit), who inspired and guided the writing of the books of the Bible, in contrast to other religions.
Clue #9: Christ’s apostles, largely uneducated men, were fearful cowards as they watched Christ’s arrest, torture, and crucifixion. And yet after they met the victorious Christ who had risen from the grave and overcame death itself, they became bold, powerful preachers of the Gospel that took on the Jewish establishment and the Roman Empire, spreading the good news of Christianity to the far reaches of the world, in spite of the suffering and death facing them on a regular basis.
When we follow the clues, they lead to the Lord.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” Matthew 7:7-8
Best regards,
Life in the Spirit 