Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

• Genesis 1:1-2

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

• Matthew 22:29-32

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birthto a son, and will call him Immanuel.

• Isaiah 7:14

“Atheists.—What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult, to be born or to rise again; that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us; want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking! Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock?
“What have they to say against the resurrection, and against the child-bearing of the Virgin? Which is the more difficult, to produce a man or an animal, or to reproduce it? And if they had never seen any species of animals, could they have conjectured whether they were produced without connection with each other?”

• Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (thoughts number 222 and 223)

Blaise Pascal, in his book, Thoughts (Pensées), often has rambling thoughts.  These two thoughts work along the same vein.  They might not be well thought out, but they make you ponder.  Both have to do in part with the virgin birth.

These thoughts were in a chapter entitled, “Of the Necessity of the Wager.”  Pascal’s Wager is fairly simple.  There is one choice in life that everyone chooses.  We could call it a wager.  With a wager, you have to consider the stakes.  In this case, the stakes are what happens next, after we die.  If you accept Jesus as your Savior, you are guaranteed an eternity with God in Heaven.  If you reject God, as atheists do, when you die there is nothing.  So, Pascal’s Wager is that a thinking man should choose Jesus and salvation.  If the Bible is true, you gain eternity.  If the Bible is not true, you are like the atheist, nothing.  In his thinking, it is a no brainer to accept Jesus.  One choice provides a beautiful life, and if wrong, there is nothing lost anyway.

He probably used less words.

But here Pascal looks at the resurrection and the virgin birth.  In a way, he touches on Creation.  If God created the heavens and the earth, could He not create a fertilized egg inside a virgin?  If we come into existence without being consulted first, could we not exist once more?  Notice that in these two quoted thoughts, one sentence ends in a period and another ends in an exclamation point, really not a sentence at all.  Everything else is a question.

Pascal is not driving a point home through apologetics.  Rather he is asking for the opponent in the conversation to have an open mind.

Because we know of it never happening before or since, why not?  Why could it not happen just once?  The believers in the Big Bang believe that something appeared from nothing (which science says is impossible), but they said it happened just once.  Yet, they argue that God could not have done this or that because it has not happened before or since.

In my uncle’s book God’s Physical Record of Creation (by Ruffin I. Rackley) he talks about how we have discovered galaxies that are fairly new and other galaxies that are much older.  My uncle’s conclusion is that God never stopped creating.  Those miracles continue.  So, saying that it only happened once, so I do not believe, is ignoring a universe of evidence.

So, if God never stopped creating, then He could create a fertilized egg in a teenager’s womb.  And He can recreate each of us with a body that cannot die.  When my wife had her vision regarding her death, she was sitting in a hospital bed next to her dead body.  Countless out of body experiences say the same thing.  And some day, people will come back from the dead to prove Pascal’s Wager correct.

You just have not seen everything yet.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.