Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

• Isaiah 55:8

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

• Romans 1:20-32

“My troubled thoughts prompt me to answer because I am greatly disturbed.

• Job 20:2

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

• Psalm 13:2

Listen to my prayer, O God,
    do not ignore my plea;
    hear me and answer me.
My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught
    because of what my enemy is saying,
    because of the threats of the wicked;
for they bring down suffering on me
    and assail me in their anger.

• Psalm 55:1-3

“Thoughts—All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects!
“But what is this thought? How foolish it is!”

• Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

Blaise Pascal, in his book entitled “Thoughts” talks about thoughts, a thought on thoughts, as it were.  And he even critiques his thought by calling it foolish, but is it?  He used a circle logic, or maybe a divergence.  There are two kinds of thoughts, maybe three.  There are wonderfully glorious thoughts.  There are evil thoughts.  And there might be some thoughts like, “The house would look better if I painted it grey.”  That color does not elicit good or bad feelings.  Unless you really hate or love grey.

We should praise and glorify God with our thoughts and actions, but we should glorify God just because we have the capability to think.  The secular progressives do not want us to think because we would see their policies are nothing but a house of cards that favor only the politicians themselves, and of course, their cronies.  We should fight for the right and the correct truthful information so that we can think for ourselves.

But then there is evil thought.  Jesus talked in the Sermon on the Mount about how hate and lust were equal to murder and adultery in the eyes of the Lord.  Other thoughts can be considered sin when they do not support our Faith (Romans 14:23b).

So while Pascal thought his thought which led to two different conclusions a foolish thought, I disagree.  We need to be ever more diligent to focus on the wonderful and incomparable and try to focus on Jesus so that the ridiculous and vile never enter our minds.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.