Even within a deterministic worldview where it is believed that there is no free will, men are responsible for their … Continue reading Sinners are Responsible for their Sins even in a Deterministic Worldview
Isaiah 39
3Then Isaiah the prophet came to King Hezekiah, and said to him, “What did these men say? And from where did they come to you?” Hezekiah said, “They have come to me from a far country, from Babylon.” 4He said, “What have they seen in your house?” Hezekiah answered, “They have seen all that is in my house. There is nothing in my storehouses that I did not show them.”
5Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the LORD of hosts: 6Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the LORD. 7And some of your own sons, who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”
When I moved to the UK in 2001, I joined a CofE church based in London and was baptised a year later.
For the first eight years, I lived in utter ignorance of the true teaching of Jesus Christ. I hardly read the Bible and my English was not good enough to fully understand the sermons I was hearing. The only two basics I knew well were that God loved me and exactly understood how I felt, and that I needed to shed my old skin but couldn’t.
Even though the battle was full-on, I was still oblivious of the spiritual warfare that was taking place in me. Back then, I wasn’t living exactly the way God intended for me to live but I didn’t think it mattered to Him.
God wanted me to rely on him alone and do away with the idols in my life, but my fear was greater than my faith. I wasn’t aware that God required complete obedience to his Word. I thought because He’s gracious and knew our weaknesses, that He’d accept us as we are as long as we are believing in him and loving him. My false perception of who God is and what is the true meaning of grace has served, unconsciously of course, as an excuse to remain a slave to fear and to the search for comfort. Therefore, my poor choices and my lack of understanding left a huge door for the enemy to barge in.
My lack of biblical wisdom also caused me spiritual blindness and I was unable to see the evil forces that were trying to wreck my life and tear my young family apart. So, I never prayed over the situation the way a warrior should be praying during a battle. I never even involved other people to pray for me.
In a nutshell, I didn’t have, back then, enough mental, psychological or intellectual tools to understand anything outside the senses. Every day, I was becoming more confused and angry with God who, I thought, was not helping me to change things for the better. I wanted to choose my own itinerary planned by my own mind, yet I was expecting God to bless my life and rid me of all my enemies. In fact, in order to understand the whole picture, I needed an internal mental revolution, not just a few facts here and there. Knowing a few Christian concepts might have helped to solve some issues – but would not have been enough to help me shed my old skin, so to speak.
It was regrettable that the 2008 Tsunami along with unanswered prayers blew the little bit of faith I had away. God has finally allowed me to backslide because He saw that I didn’t or couldn’t grow in the faith.
I was overwhelmed by life from an early age, and soon felt the need for a loving saviour. Yet, when I wanted to commit to Allah and began studying the Quran at the age of 12, I decided that God was too cruel to women and children. I then walked away from the Muslim faith to agnosticism, then eventually dialectic materialism. By the age of 15, I was an active communist pupil in my secondary school, as were a large number of pupils and students in the eighties, and the only other thing that occupied my teenage mind, apart from education and politics, was relationships.
One very ordinary afternoon between four and five pm, I was walking back from school, yards away from home, humming a love song to myself while thinking about my friends at school. Then suddenly a voice spoke to me. This voice was internal and external at the same time. It spoke from within but was not the fruit of my thinking processes.
The voice also was not audible, yet I knew the speaker was of male gender and that He was independent of me. He asked me if I believed the metaphysical to be nonexistent! I remember thinking; “this is weird!” A very faint memory, for a second, made me question if this was not the voice of God, but I shrugged this idea off at once.
I, then, answered with an internal frown as a response to this unwanted intervention: “of course the metaphysical doesn’t exist!! Nothing else exists outside the senses. It’s simple.”
The speaker then, to my amazement, set me a challenge. He spoke to me, telepathically, saying: “ I will prove to you that there is more to life than what could be perceived by the senses. You now think that you are going back home to be welcomed by your mother as you have always done for the last ten years. I can assure you that on this occasion, your mother is not at home.”
Being part of a traditional lower-middle-class family enabled my mother to remain a housewife (although we always had to live on a tight budget). Therefore, she was always available to welcome me home when I came back from school. As a result, a key was never cut for me. So, at the age of 15, I had developed enough trust in my mother’s availability and reliability to believe that she will always be there at home when I came back from school.
At that stage of the conversation, I was already a step away from the door. I wanted to say to the voice that this was impossible. My mother never went anywhere before without letting me know first, making proper arrangements for me to be able to access the house, or sending for me to join her wherever she was.
But before I could say anything I was filled with the knowledge, not only of my mother’s absence but also of her location. I knew she was exactly two doors away from home.
What amazes me now as an adult is that although I knew (internally) that the content of the message was true (a fact), I still wanted to think about it rationally as a matter of principle, and put it to the test. This was perhaps due to the intense ideological and dogmatic teaching I was receiving from fellow communist students at the time.
For a few seconds, my hand was literally left hanging in midair, on its way to the doorbell. I had a choice to make; whether to believe the content of the message and my internal knowledge which tells me that my mother wasn’t there (and therefore believe in the existence of the supernatural and of God), or that I continue to disbelieve until I’m proven wrong. I was faced with that choice and I had to make my mind up in a few seconds. My final decision was that I test all information as a matter of principle so that I may seem rational and logical to myself. I then pressed the doorbell.
It felt like the most futile action I have ever done in my life, as I was filled with all the knowledge that anyone would ever need to know that something had happened for sure, yet I still had to test the message. I didn’t just believe that no one will answer the door for me that day. I KNEW that nobody was going to answer the door. This knowledge was above prediction and strong guess.
In terms of the biochemistry of my brain, it must have been a projection of what happens usually in the brain each time we discover the truth supported by hardcore evidence, and seeing it occurring before our eyes.
When we do, “ the sensory inputs we receive from the environment undergo a filtering process as they travel across one or more synapses, ultimately reaching the area of higher processing, like the frontal lobes. There, the sensory information enters our conscious awareness. What portion of this sensory information enters is determined by our beliefs. Fortunately for us, receptors on the cell membranes are flexible, which can alter in sensitivity and conformation. In other words, even when we feel stuck ‘emotionally’, there is always a biochemical potential for change and possible growth. When we choose to change our thoughts (bursts of neurochemicals!), we become open and receptive to other pieces of sensory information hitherto blocked by our beliefs!”1
The problem here was that I haven’t signed up for ‘the change’ and still refused to radically change my belief even after I received the revelation. So, how come my awareness became highly altered so much so that I was able to see the unseen?
After my futile action of ringing the bell, I only waited for a minute or two (just to make a point) before heading directly to the host house. My mother was in a gathering that included all the women and the children of the neighbourhood. She was invited a while ago but completely forgot to let me know. Realising that she didn’t tell me, she decided to attend the party, but sit facing the clock and come to get me when I was due to come home, instead of letting her host down. When she saw me, she was shocked for two reasons, first because she realised that she suddenly lost track of the time only minutes before she planned to leave, and second, because she found that I arrived there early without being able to enquire from anyone else, since all the neighbours were in that house.
I think it is because of the nature of this experience that all its details are kept intact in my mind, while most other information from the same period is forgotten. For example, one of the details I remember about the voice was the particular style it had when asking the question. I concluded that the speaker was not angry or threatening. His knowledge was certainly higher than mine, yet he didn’t judge me. He was also gentle, kind and had a sense of humour. Moreover, if I could put a face to the voice, it would be a calm face, not necessarily smiling, but at the same time not serious either. These details I remembered all my life, though I wasn’t able to notice their significance back then.
After I was proven wrong, the voice never came back to make any demands or suggestions. It never invited me into a particular belief system or told me who He was. It just disappeared for more than 28 years until the year 2011 when I had a very similar encounter but this I will talk about on another occasion.
So, due to my strong attachment to the ideology I believed in, I refused to admit or even think for a minute that my encounter was with a real heavenly being. Now, I regret to think about the wonderful things I have missed by choosing not to trust the voice of God. The battle between the faith of a child and that of an intellectual is still raging. We labour to achieve the latter whereas God wants us to rest and accept the first.
Still, this experience became part of my trusted knowledge. And although it didn’t lead directly to my conversion, it certainly left me with a deep sense of wonder and the realisation that there was something else out there, greater than the senses. This experience stayed with me throughout my life and eventually contributed towards my conversion eighteen years later when I was finally mentally free and ready to accept Christ.
