What persuades one person will not persuade another and it doesn’t matter whether we think of truth or error in making this point. The human being is capable of knowing truth but as a species we are prone to making mistakes and not seeing that we are wrong. In spiritual terms this is tragic because we can end up believing the wrong things all our life.
The situation into which we are born cannot be changed; if we had been born in a Muslim country we would have been Muslim; if we had been born in India, we would have been Hindu; the same point can be made for eastern religions, tribal religion and Christianity in its various guises. This situation compounds the tragedy we have because we may be ‘of the dead’ and be totally unaware. (Of course, this is a general truth.)
However, this might not be such a dangerous and tragic world spiritually were it not for the fact that God requires of us both belief and love. If acceptance and eternal life were a matter only of love, then the moral code of ‘Love God and love thy neighbour’ shared by many religions would not create the tragic situation that we have today. It is because there is one God and he requires us to believe what he has actually said that we are born into a dangerous world.
In the 1970s, two books were published in the UK entitled Knowing What You Believe and Knowing Why You Believe. The book titles carry essential advice, but it is essential to also know ‘what you do not believe and why you do not believe’. Belief is the more difficult virtue to practise; love springs naturally and it can be moulded by Christian ethics—it has direct relevance in relationships which are things we naturally like. Commitment to a set of beliefs is less relevant to daily life and so the commitment can wane and mutual tolerance can take over as this fosters what we value most—our relationships with one another.
The potholes and obstacles to right belief are already there in the road; we cannot remove them by wishful thinking. The best we can do is to be self-aware about our own nature; examine teachings to see if they be ‘of God’ and talk to one another about what is true and false. Our greater failings lie not in the failure to love but in the failure to believe and hold to the Truth.
What is a Bible Student?