Seeing the Power of God

God's Word is a fiery, exploding, all-pervading, and living message that should cause us all to fall down to the ground and tremble… yet that is rarely the experience for so many dispirited people of God!

Some people believe questioning the Bible, the direction God is going, or even God himself, is blasphemy. Some think it's a sign of disbelief.

Daniel Thornton believes his son, Rusty Thornton, is lost without God and takes him to a faraway place in the early 1950s near Spicewood, Texas where he would never come in contact with people. He has an old King James Version of the Bible and begins to try and cure his son's affliction of skepticism.

Rusty Thornton remembered nothing before his eighteenth birthday. The first book he read after learning to read and write was on Hinduism. His father didn't know how such a book ended up in his library. He took it and hid it from his son but not until he had read it from cover to cover. Was it too late for his son? Did what he learned about Vishnu and Krishna absorb his entire thought process where he never recognized Jesus Christ as the one and only son of God? Who's right, Daniel Thornton or his son?

Rusty questioned his ability to communicate with animals. Was it a God-given talent? Why can't he remember anything in his life before his eighteenth birthday? Who is his cousin, Carolyn Thornton who comes strangely into his life on his twenty-first birthday? Who is the stranger, Billy Joe Briscoe who is hired to become Rusty's companion and teach him about Jesus Christ and the Bible?

"Is it wrong for Christians to Question God?"

One should not ask a question of the Lord because they think they know better than Him. One should never question God's authority, a big No, No! We should never ask questions of God to try and stall our obedience to the Lord.

If we are questioning the scriptures in the Bible because we desperately want to know the answer we are searching for, then that should be okay.

In the mind and thoughts of Rusty Thornton, it is perfectly fine to do so!

Snippets from Seeing the Power of God:

"My father taught me that God is merciful and caring for all human beings. Yet what I read in the Bible here," he turns a few more pages, "can hardly be so if this is true."

He stopped turning the pages at the Book of Joshua and began reading aloud, "Jericho is shut up. God instructed Joshua how to besiege it!" He paused a moment, torn by conflicting emotions.

"Does that make any sense to you, Billy Joe? It causes me to have grave concern over God's plans. If he is for sure the Creator of all things, how could he possibly instruct one of his own human beings, his own creation, to besiege a city that's filled with others of his creation and kill men, women, children, and animals… all his creations?"

***

"Let me ask it this way of you, Billy Joe. If God has the power to take out Satan and love us, why doesn't he do it? Why did the Lord have to come down and die on the cross to save us from the grasp of Satan who was a creation and subject of God in the first place? Why does Satan still exist if he has disobeyed God more than anyone else?"

***

Rusty Thornton wanted to know what someone who died saw in the afterlife.

"Many say," Billy Joe jumps in and mixes up the conversation, "that when you die, you will meet a skeleton holding a scythe. Some say you go to Heaven. Some say you go to Hell. Others say you are reincarnated or that you turn into a ghost. Some even say that you sleep for all eternity.

The problem with death, my dear friend, is that we will never know until after we die."