From a donor. Rather long, but worth it.
Thank you so much for GotQuestions. The first time I attempted to read the Bible (John/Romans/Matthew/Torah) I became easily frustrated and gave up, simply because I could not understand the concepts presented due to translation and modern day language gaps (NIV), as well as a lack of knowledge about how anything worked from a biblical sense. Naturally I gave up because I didn’t feel I was comprehending anything and was only left with frustration. I was “blinded, deafened and harded.”
About 3 years later I was pulled back into the Bible, but this time equipped with GotQuestions to help explain larger Biblical concepts and Godvine commentary from Clarke and Barnes to help explain individual verses. I read the same books over again, but this time around was 100% different thanks to GotQuestions and Godvine.
I finally received the Spirit after reading my first GotQuestions article about how blood sacrifices actually work. I’m the type of guy who needs to understand *how* things work before I can put all my trust and faith into that thing. My whole life, christians around me told me (I’m a Jew by blood) that I should accept Jesus because “he shed his blood and died on the cross to pay for my sins.” When asking, “But how does that pay for my sins?,” and receiving the same response over and over (like even they didn’t really understand how it worked): “Because he shed his blood on the cross to pay for your sins,” it never made much sense to me. Like I was saying earlier, I was pulled back into the Bible, reading the same books as before. I eventually made it back around to Leviticus, and with all of the blood sacrifices I had read about in the previous books, I finally said to myself, “What the *heck* is the deal with all this bloodshed and sacrifices and *why* would God require all this me ss?!” So I finally Googled the importance of biblical blood sacrifices and was lead to GotQuestions. While reading the article, it explained – in today’s modern english – *how* blood sacrifice works and *why* it was required. It finally clicked, and suddenly aaallll of the words from all of the previous Books I had read started to instantly make sense, and I truly fell for Christ right at that moment. I still had/have many questions, but my faith was instantly sealed at that moment.
You know that feeling when you hear/see something beautiful and you feel a little explosion of goodness inside of you and it makes the hairs on your arms and neck stand up? Right when I read that article and it finally clicked, I felt that sensation, but much, much bigger. All of the sudden I felt that explosion inside, but it wasn’t just fixated in one part of my body. The sensation was literally (I joke not) moving around my whole body – down my chest, into my left leg, up to my stomach, into my right arm, back down my chest and into my right leg – all over my body for at least a minute (which is actually a pretty long time for one of those types of sensations to last). I was initially sitting down when everything clicked – but not for long. I had no clue what was happening to my body physically. All of the sudden (and I joke not) I started involuntarily breathing in very deeply and heavily. I felt the need to stand, so I did, and the breathing pulled me to an upright posture that I had never felt before – confident. All of the sudden the hot, humid Summer air of Florida started to smell fresh and pure, like that first morning of Fall when you first go outside and the air is clean and fresh. I’m slowly walking back and forth, feeling all of these sensations at once, with the words of the previous books re-running through my head, being decrypted by my newfound knowledge and finally adding up…making sense.
Thank you again for your service.
