God gives us a choice to believe

I've been reading Dennis Prager's "The Rational Bible," the commentary on Exodus.

I've never read a commentary before, and to be honest, I've never really understood how to study the Bible. I've read the Bible, but when people said "I studied the Bible," I didn't get how to do it. I didn't know how to ask questions or how to get answers. So having a commentary to read through to have someone go through the meaning of verses one by one has been quite fascinating to me.

I have written some thoughts and questions down as I have read, and in chapter 10 of Exodus, I was reading about how God's plagues can be rationalized away with "natural" reasons, if people want to.

Prager wrote, "The choice the Egyptians had to make --- coincidence or God? --- is the same choice we all have to make.  Do we regard everything that happens, even existence itself, as a coincidence, or is God involved?"

I wrote in the margin that this is one of the ways that God gives us free will. Humans are allowed the choice to believe in God. He shows us instances of himself, but it doesn't smack us in the face with it in a way that takes away our choice to believe in him. We can choose whether to have faith or to reason away his existence and his impact.

Then flipping through Instagram that same day, our youth pastor and friend posted a photo from a youth conference he was at. It was a picture of a PowerPoint slide that read, "God has put enough into this world to make faith a most reasonable thing, but he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by reason alone." (Stuart Hall)

It was one of those moments when you know God is trying to tell you something, when you see the same thing in multiple places randomly and just know God is using that to teach you something.

I've also been reading "The 10 Most Common Objections to Christianity" by Alex McFarland, and the reasons that people don't believe often do make sense. We can explain our beliefs, and we can prove many things, but there is an element of Christianity that takes faith. There is no way around it. God is too big. God is too unknown. Our brains are too limited.

We can't have all the answers. We can't have everything laid out in front of us. God, in his love, has given us free will, and he has given us the choice of whether we want to believe in him. He doesn't force us to love him.

And to end with another Instagram post I saw today, "Jesus died for you, knowing you might never love him back. That is true love."

We have a choice. And he's there when we choose to believe.

What a great God we have.