[awareness]

Originally Posted by ABrotherinFaith

I really don't know if you're pretending not to understand the question or if you genuinely don't understand it!

Thanks bro ABinF for your kind reply.

You asked : "How would you, today, know God if the Bible didn't exist?"

And that brought forth my personal testimony on how I came to know God.

My question was not about YOU specifically, not about how would you have come to know God.

My bad. I obviously failed to read your question deeply enough.

It was about how, if there were no Bible, would you or ANYONE ELSE know who God was. Anyone else includes the Southern Baptist preacher, choir, minister, brothers and sisters, kids hanging round the door, etc.

Well God has His ways. And nothing is impossible for him.

But you drive a hard argument. There's no denying the Bible has had a profound impact on history -- some good, some bad -- and even is having a profound impact on the present -- again, some good, some bad.

My point is, and I suspect you know this, that without the Bible no one today could know God.

Have some faith bro ABinF, in God. God can reveal Himself without the Bible. Case in point is the Native Americans, who had no Bible, nor knew of Jesus even, but had the Great Spirit. Don't you think that was God revealing Himself to them?

Not only that, but it is the way He has chosen to reveal Himself to us.

Yes, A way. For example, I know brothers and sisters that before they came to the Lord were being led by the Lord, without any Bible being involved.

We do not have an oral tradition or paintings or video or anything else to go by as far as a source is concerned. We have what we have because of the sovereignty of God.

I think I get what you are saying, that, we only have what we have, the Bible. And thank God for that. And thank Him also for protecting other writings too. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Coptic Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in 1946. If God protected the Bible, as some claim, He protected these as well. And lots of other wrings from back in those ancient days too. Just do a search for "Apocryphal books" for samples, and further reading and study.

Of course someone could tell us about God, and we could believe, but without the Bible our believe would be quickly subject to our own whims. It would have nothing to ground it.

But I don't see the Bible as resolving this "our own whims" problem. If anything, history has shown, it exasperates it.