I'm still pondering the things we've discussed so far, and based on the numerous recommendations I've been given here, I've ordered Mr. Packer's book online. It should arrive within a few days.
Reading over all of the posts to date, I'm profoundly grateful for the support and good council I've been given. Thank you all again. I also see that there are a couple of points I should clarify in the meantime for everyone's benefit.
First, at least two people apparently misunderstood what I was saying about "distrusting God" because I failed to edit my post well. The sentences in question should have read: "Whom shall I ask? Certainly not God, who I now must distrust as potentially false." However I omitted the word "must" in my post. What I was saying was not that I presently distrust God - very much the contrary. I meant simply that if I accept the proposition that the God that I know personally is not truly the God of the Bible, then I can no longer ask my God for help, but must instead distrust Him. Aside from the surface ridiculousness of this idea (how can a person raised in the mainstream Christian church, who trusts Biblical God and only Biblical God from childhood, and who prays to God the Father of Jesus Christ, possibly be not knowing the correct God??) I can also report to you honestly that I have very painfully tested this proposition in the past.
In 1985, thinking that I must have somewhere made a wrong turn because of my inability to have any contact with Jesus, despite my easy ability to commune with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, I confided the whole matter to my teachers at the Christian Discipleship school I was attending at the time. After hearing the whole story, the very sincere (but I think misguided) teachers at the school essentially declared my whole Christian experience invalid, and succeeded in convincing me that I must not really be saved or in contact with God or the Holy Spirit at all, but that I instead must be profoundly deceived, or worse. Based on their recommendations, I then actually rejected the ones I knew (and loved and trusted deeply) as God the Father and the Holy Spirit, and accepted that I was indeed deceived, and that there must instead be something and someone else.
The short story is that the result of that decision was a sudden and torturous spiritual death truly beyond all description, and from which I have not yet fully recovered. Allow me to skip the gory details, and just say that today, nearly twenty years later, I have still never succeeded in finding any true god except God the Father of the Bible, whom I knew before. And neither is there any other holy spirit than THE Holy Spirit of the Bible, whom I knew before. Real God is simply the ONLY God - there is only HIM to find! And I had sinned greatly by rejecting Him. So I have now, after nearly twenty years, finally come back to openly acknowledging Real God as my God, and Real God is God the Father of the Bible, the One and only. So you see, I'm perhaps a little sensitive about the suggestion that I do not really know God.
I would like to clarify certain other points as well, about "seeing God", etc., but so that this exposition does not become too long, I'll wait awhile and take it up again later. Perhaps the book will arrive in the meantime.
