As I recall, the claim that whatever they asked for would be granted was addressed to Christ's disciplines, and it was what was asked for in His name. Not just citing His name; in it. These were men greatly committed to His service, who dedicated their lives to that service. Just as Jesus didn't fly around on a magic carpet or otherwise serve himself with miracles, judging from Scripture, I don't think the disciples/apostles did, either. Those they, too, appeared to perform miracles, most of them were martyred, for example.
This thread has become a perpetual rehash of what it was doomed to be from the original post, irrespective of the original poster's intent. Before I got into scuba diving, I spent a lot of time on a turtle forum, which also had both a pub (gotta have a red light district, I guess) and a debater's section where people who enjoy fighting could have at it. And some topics, like religion & abortion, inevitably followed the same pattern. Each can post their view. Then somebody asserts as a fact what the other side finds an offensive untruth, or a snarky insult, retaliates, then multiple pages of posts ensure in the mighty struggle for the last word.
Since people have been linking recommended readings, I have one -
Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, a brilliant man, an atheist who converted to Christianity and whose stories provided us the Chronicles of Narnia.
God taught us in
Romans 1:20 that:
Doubtless scornful derision and refuting will follow, yet peoples & cultures across the world & history have responded to this testimony with worship of a divinity, at least. I thought of this because it is repeatedly claimed that there's no 'evidence' of God. Without God there'd be nothing, so in that sense, everything is evidence. The amazing order in creation. The subjective conscious experience of Life, so different from an artificial intelligence on a computer that 'acts like' sentient life but doesn't experience it as we do. The irreducible complexity argument that just as a million monkeys banging on type writers for a million years would never randomly bang out a Shakespearean play, a functionally coded genome for a viable organism probably didn't 'just happen.' If whatever God does is written off as 'part of the natural world' or 'I don't believe it ever happened,' it should surprise no one some will be frustrated that they can't find any evidence.
As though the tiny (from a universal perspective) wad of gray matter in our heads were the only substrate capable of harboring higher intelligence, that the sum total of all that was prior to the creation could not have such, and that Man, purported to basically be an over-achieving pack of tool-using monkeys has so figured out the universe that he is now 'the measure of all things,' and only what he can demonstrate by his methods to his satisfaction will be acknowledged to exist. What arrogant pride! From childhood, much of what we learn in life we learn by faith, if only faith in the report of someone who witnessed events or did the research. The Bible is a testament of these people - hence the Old and New
Testaments.
God has demonstrated Himself by blatant miracles to many people many times over millennia, but some of you won't believe their testimony. This same God whom some of you believe were He to exist would be unconcerned about humanity is apparently expected to show up on demand and submit Himself to double blind placebo controlled lab experiments to do…what exactly?
Would our atheists fall to their knees & worship Him then? Or decide He was an alien or didn't have the right to rule over us?
Posts in this thread haven't just included denial of God's existence, but overt scorn and contempt. If people intensely dislike God as what they believe to be a fictional character, how will they react to undeniable confirmation of Him? Some posts presume to judge almighty God and basically condemn Him by the 'moral standards' of a human.
It seems to me God has presented Himself to the world well enough that humanity gets introduced to Him, and those who wish to seek Him out earnestly may do so, or should be given that chance (hence the urgency of the Great Commission), yet God has not in the day-to-day imposed Himself in such a way as to be overbearing on us. So we have the freedom to choose.
Richard.
