Proving God

Blaise Pascal said, "What can be seen on earth indicates neither the total absence of God nor his manifest presence, but rather the presence of a hidden God." Isaiah 45:15 (ESV) says, "Truly, you are a God who hides yourself."  Bertrand Russell, mathematician and philosopher wrote Why I Am Not a Christian and was asked what he would tell God if it turned out he was all wrong: "Why didn't you give more evidence?"  The evidence is everywhere, start by looking in the mirror.  Anyone who has witnessed a birth cannot deny the reality of miracles if they are in their right mind and morally upright.  Wherever we look we see the "fingerprints" of God and proof, like Francis Schaeffer said, "He is there and He is not silent."

There are about 5 percent atheists in America and 2 percent Jews, and about 81 percent who claim Christianity.  But people don't know that some atheists are intellectually honest, while some Christians are intellectually dishonest and bankrupt, not being able to defend their own beliefs, much less know what they are.  What we are witnessing is the age of the practical atheist or the person who lives like an atheist, without accountability to God, but adheres religiously to a faith in God that doesn't change is life. Who is he who has blind faith, but the one who doesn't know why he believes and doesn't have an answer for the doubter or skeptic?  The Bible commands us to be ready with the answers.

You cannot worship your way back to God, you cannot feel your way back to God, you cannot work your way back, or even rationalize your way back--the heart has to be prepared and the soil ready for the seed which is the Word of God to germinate and grow by God's power. This is why you cannot argue someone into the kingdom. Paul found this out at Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17) when he preached about the "Unknown God."  Everyone has a basic knowledge that God exists for God has set eternity in the hearts of man (cf. Ecclesiastes. 3:11). Paul asserted in Romans 1 that the evil man has suppressed the truth and once knew God and has fallen and that no one has an excuse--not even the Aborigines in Australia.

Many great thinkers have offered so-called proofs for the existence of God, including the great Greek philosophers who posited a Supreme Good, or First Cause (the uncaused cause re the law of causality or cause and effect), Unmoved Mover, or Logos (logic or reasoning) behind the universe or the cosmos.  The great philosopher Thomas Aquinas tried to rationalize God with many proofs including the fact that there would be no justice without Him. If we are trusting someone's reasoning we are trusting in the finite and not infallible Word of God--all men are prone to error and God is bigger than our power of reason.  C. S. Lewis has said that we couldn't think without a Thinker intending us to think or designing our minds for thought.

That's philosophical (a little philosophy leads you away from God, but a lot brings you back to Him), and now I will present five scientific proofs of God:  DNA, the metabolic motor, and engine or machine of life itself (it can only be produced by life and is also necessary for life) is so complicated and stores so much information, that it suggests design and not accident or fluke and this design implies a Designer; biogenisis, or that life only comes from life, is the eternal regress that only God can solve and knows its origins--spontaneous generation or that life can arise from non-life was disproved 150 years ago by Louis Pasteur and now it is claimed that life couldn't have arisen by chance in The Intelligent Universe by Sir Fred Hoyle, renowned mathematician, and astronomer; the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Entropy states that the universe is running out of usable energy and must have had a beginning--things go from order to disorder and the orderly universe demonstrates some supernatural intervention; the Anthropic Principle of the nature of earth, perfectly suitable and designed in such a unique way for life on this planet suggests purpose in creation because there is a reason for everything, even the dust in the atmosphere that makes rain possible and the moon which makes the tides possible--the earth is fine-tuned for human habitation; and finally the Big Bang or the beginning of the universe implies there was a "Beginner" and it was so dialed with over 50 universal constants that it couldn't have been a fluke but a deliberate design by a designer or Supreme Being--who pulled the trigger? The theory of an eternal universe has been deemed untenable.

But why can't you prove God absolutely through science? God isn't audible, visible, nor tangible--He resides in another dimension unknown to us. You can't put God in a test tube! You can't make laboratory conditions to conduct an experiment because God is invisible and history is nonrepeatable. It would be like using a Geiger Counter to measure voltage. You cannot measure an infinite God or even define Him--we only know what is revealed because speculation is a fool's errand.  The scientific method is irrelevant to knowing God and when science attempts to make philosophical statements such as Carl Sagan said, "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." This is not science, but "scientism" because this is not in the domain or realm of science to make philosophical or religious assertions or proclamations.

The point is that you don't have to stoop to the fool's level by trying to prove God's existence; he knows it and suppresses the truth (Paul said that the sinner is one who rejects the truth). What is the greatest proof is our dynamic spiritual testimony that he cannot deny!  "I was blind, but now I see!" Don't engage the atheist in trying to level the playing field to his way of thinking, we don't have to defend God because He's not on trial--the atheist is!  Nothing speaks louder than the Word itself for God's Word will not come back void according to Isaiah 55:11. Don't waste your time trying to get to God, but reason from God and assume God, just like Scripture does ("In the beginning God...."): Don't be put on the defensive--use the Word as an offensive weapon (it is the Sword of the Spirit)! Why?  That their faith will not rest in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God--it is not our power of persuasion to convert, but the convicting power of the Holy Spirit.

His excuse for not believing is not because he is unintelligent or lacking proof (he has irrational doubt and skepticism for there is adequate proof if he wants to believe). He chooses not to believe and "will not believe" because he is unwilling to do God's will (cf. John 7:17).  Jesus performed many miracles but they "would not" believe--not "could not." He is merely feigning intellectual problems because of moral rebellion and is sending up smoke screens or false issue to get you off track and put you on the defensive with questions you aren't prepared for; but you don't have to know all the answers to believe or to witness and when he sees he's not shaking your faith it will convict him.

The real reason people don't believe, then, is sin and the sin nature or original sin in man that is stubborn and rebellious against God's order in the universe.  Second Timothy 2:25 says that repentance is the gift of God and He must grant it (cf. Acts 5:31; 11:18).  Without repentance, there can be no faith or acknowledgment of the truth.  This verse asserts that repentance precedes knowing the truth!  We don't prove God to someone, we let them find Him out for themselves, just like you don't defend a caged lion when you go into a cage--he can defend himself.  People react rather than respond to the gospel primarily out of conviction and then their hearts are hardened by God (cf. Isaiah 63:17; 6:10).

Jesus made is plain that it doesn't take brains to know God or believe in Him:  He praises the babes and infants for bringing Him praise!  Isaiah 35:8 says that even the fool will not go astray on the highway of salvation.  God is able to open anyone's eyes and do a miracle of grace--the problem is in the heart, not in the mind and we must focus on that.  The heart of the matter is a matter of the heart. Just ask them if they would worship God if you proved Him to them; they most likely won't for they have no intentions of believing, but in finding more reasons to be a skeptic and have animosity for Christ in particular.

We lower ourselves by thinking we have all the answers (we just know the Answerer!); we must depend on the Holy Spirit to convert (we can convert no one) and the seed of the Word.  If we won them by argument, their faith would be based on argument alone, and falter in light of more argument or evidence!   It isn't a matter of debating but in witnessing--our lives sometimes speak so loudly they don't hear what we say--we are a walking a living gospel narrative by our own lives. God has hidden these truths from the wise of the world and revealed them to babes (Matt. 21:16).


The wisdom of the world is foolish to Him, said Paul in 1 Corinthians.  We are only responsible for what God reveals to us and people go to hell for rejecting what they do know and the God they believe in (their own known sin).  Deuteronomy 29:29 says that the secret things belong to God (we don't know all the answers and God wants faith, not knowledge), but those things that are revealed to us belong to us and to our children.  The only reason we know anything for certain is that God has revealed it to us and we are standing on the Rock of Truth, Jesus the epitome and personification of truth itself. The Christian faith is a revealed faith.

You must start somewhere:  In every truth claim you begin with some premise you can't prove but must accept.  Either start with man and explain the universe and God, or with God and explain the universe and man. We all have presuppositions that bias our thinking and always interpret our reality according to our worldview or totality of convictions.  Humanism dethrones God and puts him down while exalting man and putting him on a pedestal or throne as ultimate judge and jury of God when He is man's judge! The Greeks originated the idea of man as the measure of all things (homo mensura), and communists even believe that man is the highest being of man.  The Bible makes no apologies but only assumes this as fact!  The Bible starts with God and goes on from there: "In the beginning God...."

The problem is that man doesn't know his own sin, and we must show it to him, according to Martin Luther.  Sin has blinded the eyes of the unbeliever and his heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). Only God can open his eyes and make him see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.  Man's whole nature is deformed:  his heart or emotions and feelings, his intellect and thinking, and finally, his will which is stubborn and rebellious against God's authority and guidance.

God cares a lot about right and wrong as the moral center of the universe and morality is not nebulous, but as rigid as any law of nature; it is not agreed upon by consensus but exists in its own right--man has the law of God engraved in his heart according to Romans 2:15.  The problem with believing is repenting and likewise, the problem with repenting is believing--man has a dual dilemma!  These two go hand in hand and can be distinguished, but not separated--they are complementary and one is the flip side of the other!  We must have believing repentance, or penitent faith, in other words.   If we want to believe God will convict and convince us; but for those who don't want to believe, no amount of proof or evidence will convert them, for they have their minds made up and don't want to be confused with the facts!

The moral argument for God is one of the strongest for Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, said that if there is no God, all is permissible.  Just like Albert Camus, the French atheist philosopher, said, "The absurd is sin without God."  Without God, we have no objective standard outside of ourselves ("If it feels good, do it") to base moral principles upon.  We are forced to resort to a subjective world, making up our own rules as we go along and just justifying ourselves in the process ("...[E]very man did what was right in his own eyes," Judges 21:25).  Truth and morality are not relative but absolute and exist in Christ.  Morality is not found out by consensus, majority vote, convention, or even tradition--it is based in the Holiness of God and His divine nature which never changes because God is immutable or unchanging.   Soli Deo Gloria!

Extreme Epistemology

According to the correspondence theory of truth (espoused by John Locke), truth is what relates to reality.

How do you know anything for certain?  The Eastern faiths and worldviews see all reality as Maya or illusion, i.e., reality cannot be perceived, and science and the scientific method never could have been developed under such a self-defeating system of knowledge, because we need an ordered, a consistent, and knowable universe that can be studied and made sense of.  Descartes reasoned that he could know he existed:  "I think, therefore I am."  Augustine had said, "If I err, I am." Actually, if you think there must be a thinker to make though, so you can't use thought to disprove your existence.  We need valid reasoning to prove our reasoning is valid:  Jesus is the Logos or reason and logic behind everything.

Only God is capable of giving sound reason, for man's knowledge, by definition, is fallible and error-prone. Even science changes its truth claims--it's a moving train of knowledge (the world is no longer flat!): In 1861 the French Academy of Science listed fifty-one so-called scientific facts that controverted the Bible! Today none of these "facts" are believed.  It is a principle of science and philosophy that to arrive at the truth you must admit you could be wrong--science today is biased!

It is self-defeating to say you cannot know anything (how can one ascertain that?) because then you are rejecting knowledge and knowledge begins with knowing God according to Proverbs 1:7  "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise instruction and learning." You don't know diddly squat without starting with God and Him as the reference point, without making yourself judge, jury, and ultimately God Himself.  If you say:  "I know I know nothing for certain," you have contradicted yourself, and this statement has no truth claim whatsoever.  How can you know for certain that you can know nothing for certain?

The unbeliever ultimately has to admit that he could be wrong, and his worldview comes tumbling down.  It is said that we can only know something from sources:  Reasoning ability and revelation from God.  Deuteronomy 29:29 (ESV) says that God has revealed the truth to us in the Bible and He still has secrets we cannot know:  "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law."

How does one account for knowledge and truth without God?  We don't try to reason to God but from God as the starting point, not finishing point.  Don't insult God by putting Him on trial by catering to the person's demand for evidence--we don't have to prove our God because God has made Himself known and this is evident--they are all without excuse.  Just how can you make sense of anything without God? Children's inquiries cannot be satisfied without bringing Him up, and you practically have to indoctrinate or brainwash them not to believe. You cannot prove A without it being true, known, and logical.  These three (truth, knowledge, and logic) assume and only make sense with God!  "...[A]s the truth is in Jesus" (cf. Eph. 4:20).

Everything we know is based on presupposition and faith because to know anything you must know everything.  Both the believer and the unbeliever have faith and is it evident unbelief takes more faith, due to the evidence.  God is not going to force one to believe, He desires faith to please Him. To know A you must know B, and to know B you must know C, and so forth ad infinitum.  All our knowledge is contingent then. This is called infinite regress and only God knows where it ends because He is omniscient.  The only way we can know anything is if it is revealed to us, and this is the Christian worldview--Jesus is the incarnation and personification or embodiment of truth and came to bear witness of the truth, as he answered Pilate who asked, "What is truth?"  People interpret their reality and information according to their worldview and presuppositions.

It is no use giving evidence to a person that doesn't want to believe because this makes him the judge of God. One gives evidence to a jury in a courtroom.  How can one make truth claims when denying the source of truth (Jesus, cf. Eph. 4:20).  "I don't know anything!" I can say: "How do you know this?  Are you certain?"  "Yes, I am certain I cannot be certain!" This kind of nonsense is what atheism leads to.   Don't assume the unbeliever knows anything because without God he can't.  But he does know something, and this is proof he knows or knew God. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Fools are those who deny God and know better.

All of creation speaks of God:  They believe a lottery winner winning too often is the result of it being rigged, but the sunset isn't rigged.  The whole creation is rigged and couldn't exist without God. "In Him, we live and move and have our being."  They suppress the truth in unrighteousness, but how can they do this if they don't know the truth?  If you look in the mirror you are seeing a miracle!  Life is no fluke, it is rigged and couldn't have happened without God's intervention and creation.

Who is to say God can't use circular reasoning, because He is self-attesting or self-authenticating, and to appeal to some other authority would be to lose His ultimate authority.  You might say: "I use my reason to believe reasoning is the best way to arrive at knowledge because it sounds reasonable--that is circular.   But God is the Author of logic and we cannot "out-logic" or out-reason Him.  God, not Aristotle formulated the rules of logic.

People beg the question when they claim they know something apart from God:  I know I exist because of my own consciousness!    The fact remains, we can know something for certain:  All that God has revealed to us according to Deut. 29:29 "...[That] which is revealed belongs to us...." People use science to disprove Christianity when science depends on the Christian worldview.   When people reject God, they are making themselves God and setting up an outside moral authority above the Bible in their own reasoning.  If there was no intelligence behind the cosmos and consequently our brains were not designed for thought but are only the byproduct of atomic reactions how can we trust our own thinking?  C. S. Lewis said, "...[How] can I trust my own thinking to be true?  But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else.  Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."

Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?" Jesus came to bear witness of it and he who is of the truth hears His voice.  "And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ.  This is the true God and eternal life"  (1 John 5:20, NASB).  Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life..." (John 14:6).  Soli Deo Gloria!

The Ultimate Red Flag

Polls show that only about five percent of people disbelieve in God and this has been consistent since Paul preached at Mars Hill about the Unknown God.  Man is an incurably religious being (Homo religiosus) and must worship something and theism of some kind is universal; there is a vacuum that only God can fill according to Blaise Pascal. There have always been atheists and agnostics, but today we have anti-theists who are militantly and vociferously against God and Christianity in particular and are embittered by some bad experience and on a mission. 

Atheists deny a righteous Judge, a supernatural Creator, and a divine Lawgiver.  However, life is no fluke of nature; God is the moral center of the universe and without a Judge, there is no justice; and God is holy and must judge sin according to His laws. The Bible clearly says that the "fool has said in his heart that there is no God."  Jesus said the Pharisees were "slow of heart to believe," (cf. Luke 24:25).    The Bible assumes and never attempts to prove God's existence: "In the beginning God..." and "In the beginning was the Word." Even the ancient Greeks believed (Heraclitus) that this ancient "logos" always existed and all things are through this "word" or "logic."

The point of creation is that it implies a Creator, and if there ever was nothing, then, said the Greeks, nothing could exist now--nothing comes from nothing!  There are only two possibilities then:  "In the beginning God," or "In the beginning matter/energy."  Science now affirms a beginning to our cosmos called the Big Bang but doesn't know who or what pulled the trigger to get everything in motion and dialed its some 50 universal constants. 

But according to the Second  Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) all matter and energy go from complex or order to simple and disorder and run out of energy in any usable form (we are headed for an ultimate heat death of the entire cosmos someday without any usable form of energy). If we figure out how to intelligibly create life in a "prebiotic or primordial soup" then it only proves that it takes intelligence to create it. Sir Fred Hoyle wrote The Intelligent Universe to demonstrate life couldn't have originated by chance.

We go from logic to confusion or from cosmos to chaos without the energetic input of a mind in action. There could be no science without cosmos and divine order.  You must appeal to some ultimate authority (God) or you are making your own reasoning the ultimate authority and this is per contra reason itself. The chief function of reason is to show that some things are beyond reason! Logic was in the beginning (logos) and is universal, immaterial, immutable, and eternal, of which God is and so you cannot use logic to disprove God.  If truth or the cosmos (the orderly scheme of nature in the entire universe) changed our world couldn't be studied as a science.

Modern science believes everything is mechanical and that matter/energy is all that exists--denying the mind or Higher Mind (God-hypothesis). We are not just a brain encased in a body, but soul, spirit, and body joined together, to be separated upon death, and have an immaterial element that cannot be destroyed.  We don't just have a brain, but a mind that is the real us, and this implies a Higher Mind--something beyond "Mother Nature," just like a person existing implies a higher personality from which it came (God cannot be of a lower nature than or inferior to His creatures). "Mother Nature has no inherent power contrary to the Gaia hypothesis of New Age thinking today.

We could not think, if there was no God, because He is the ultimate Thinker, because thinking requires a thinker:  "Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." We can verify our own existence this way and that we are self-conscious individuals and aware of our surroundings.  The divine order of creation is as follows: Thinker, thought, action, matter/energy.  In the same vein:  Design implies designer and art implies artist.  William Paley, an Anglican apologist, said that if you found a watch in the forest you wouldn't assume it had made itself or had always been there--the analogy is that we are more complicated than watches.  You must begin with and assume reason and logic exist, to have a reasonable and logical conclusion. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (cf. John 1:1).

The weak point or Achilles' heel of believing in evolution is that you can't account for the origin of life itself:  They believe and understand its impossibility, but believe that somehow this miracle took place and despite the laws of nature it must have happened, because, God forbid, the opposite cannot and must not be true--that there is a Creator.  This is what is ironic in my opinion:  They believe in this monumental miracle of nature (spontaneous generation was disproved 150 years ago by Louis Pasteur and biogenesis is the principle that life only comes from life--this begs the question of where did the first life come from and back to our original dilemma of the origin of life without God), but, even though they posit evolutionary life as established and unquestionable, they deny that a resurrection of the dead could happen to the Son of God Himself, who is the Author of life!

There is another problem of evolution or denying God because you have to believe in "matter over mind" or that matter has some power or cosmic energy inherent to create life and design itself and give itself purpose and meaning.  We deny truth by denying God, because truth is what conforms to His mind, the Author.  Jesus claimed to be the Truth, so it is knowable, absolute truth and even Augustine said, "All truth is God's truth."  Christians have nothing to fear from scrutiny and the truth. There can be no knowledge, truth or logic without God because that is what God is to any system of proof--so you cannot prove anything without assuming God and that there are truth, knowledge, and logic. 

C. S. Lewis said, "Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."   God is the originator and inventor of thought and logic. To claim something is nonsense, you have to believe in sense or absolute truth! You can't make sense of the cosmos without God.  Either you start with man and explain God or you start with God and explain man! The only system of thought that Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point and humanism tends to deify man and dethrone God and believes man is the "measure of all things" (Homo mensura).

Note that the burden of proof is on the infidel.  Don't believe you have to prove God:  It takes faith to be saved. We are not to attempt to prove God (God is not on trial, we are), but make Him known enough to take a leap of faith--we don't stoop to their level.  We go in the direction of the preponderance of the evidence like a jury that doesn't know all the facts to make a decision.  You don't need all the answers to have faith!  The evidence demands a verdict and the unbeliever should be challenged to realize that we haven't kissed our brains goodbye.  

For the person that doesn't want to repent and has moral objections, no amount of evidence will convince him, but for the person who is penitent and believing and wants to do God's will, a proof is necessary--it is a work of God.  "If any man wills to do His will, he shall know ..." God wants us to take the leap of faith to get saved, not become intellectually convinced--it is not belief in the mind, but in the heart.  Our faith must not rest on the power of persuasion, as Paul found out at Mars Hill, but in the power of the Holy Spirit as Paul strove to just know Christ and Christ crucified. We are not sold on an idea or way of life by a salesman!

It is true that Jesus is the Answer and Solution to all our dilemmas.  We don't know all the answers, but we know the Answerer.  "All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"..."are hidden in Christ" (Colossians 2:2-3).  With Christ as the starting point and reference, everything is rational.  Christianity is not rationalism, but it is rational.  All thought was originated from the first thinker, God and we know that something besides matter and energy exists: Something immaterial and takes up no space, yet has power over our body to command it--thought. We should never answer a fool according to his folly (not acknowledging God),  but catch him off guard, lest we become like him (Prov. 26:4), and never attempt to prove God  (however, we demonstrate their folly or foolishness) or put God on trial,  but boldly proclaim the gospel, because it is what has power according to Paul in Romans 1:16:  "...[For] it is the power of salvation to everyone who believes...."  If we lose our fulcrum of the power of the gospel and stress our wits or cleverness in the persuasion, the Holy Spirit cannot work, for He uses the Word as a seed, not the wisdom of men.

The fulcrum or weak and pivotal point of advantage is the Bible itself as the ultimate authority and if they say prove its authority, you say, "No, you prove it: Read it and it will read you! God honors His Word.  A lion needs no defense, it can defend itself.  Well, they say:  "Prove God exists!" No, tell them, "No, prove God doesn't exist!"  If he doesn't have evidence, then he has blind faith, not knowing why he believes. They can't prove the designer of a watch never existed! "For what can be known of God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them" (Rom. 1:19, ESV).  You aren't always preaching to the choir:  You should realize the futility of trying to convince someone who doesn't want to believe in God or doesn't see his need of preaching--he just wants to get more reasons to disbelieve or thinks he's got it together. No, you prove He doesn't, the burden is on the unbeliever who is going against the grain and tide of humanity's common faith through the ages. You can't prove God doesn't exist and no one can cite any evidence for this. You cannot prove a universal negative, any more than you can assert there are no green men--you'd have to be everywhere simultaneously! In other words, you would have to be omniscient and omnipresent, knowing all and everywhere, or you would have to be God to disprove Him or be an atheist

For the person who claims he has intellectual problems or issues, pride is not absent (these are known as smokescreens to divert the real issue of Jesus Christ's relevance), he really has moral problems and doesn't want to alter his lifestyle or change his way of life, i.e., repent. John Stott said, "We must cater to intellectual integrity, but not pander to intellectual arrogance."  Mostly they don't want to believe but are just engaging in some power game or mind game to win an argument and make you feel bad.  No one is going to come up with some "smoking gun" evidence to make Christianity come tumbling down after two millennia. The trouble with people is not that they can't believe, but don't want to.  Mark 9:24 says that a doubter (doubt is an element of faith, and not its opposite) said, "I believe, help thou mine unbelief." God gives faith to us as a gift and, if we are honest and seek Him, He will increase it.  Faith comes by hearing of the Word of God according to Romans 10:17.

Scripture says there is no excuse to disbelieve in God because He has given this knowledge to all: You have to practically brainwash or indoctrinate a child to stop him from believing in God. "For when they knew God.." shows they once knew and stayed because they didn't acknowledge God or give Him thanks. and exchanged the "truth" about God for a lie. (Cf. Rom. 1: 18-28).

The Bible is the ultimate authority and only standard to appeal to; it is self-attesting or self-authenticating because if we appealed to any other authority it wouldn't be the ultimate authority anymore but our authority of verification would be.  We just say that "It is written" to answer Satan and to stop him in his tracks. If he says he doesn't believe the Bible, ask him why or if he's read it, and if he has, what its main point is (salvation through Christ) to make him realize the foolishness of his ignorance, for he cannot even account for the concept of knowledge without the necessity of God. Without God we wouldn't have such entities as love, justice, righteousness, fair play, trustworthiness, courage, mercy, grace, altruism, sacrifice, purpose, significance, meaning, good faith, goodness, hope, honesty, intuition, wisdom, or even truthfulness--where else would they come from and one must admit they have always existed and always will:  Does beauty remain after the rose fades? Note that God is love and also good, and the Word personifies Wisdom in Proverbs 8.  Ponder this: Whence rights?  As one secular humanist said, "When, one wonders, in evolutionary history did hominids first acquire natural rights?"  But we acknowledge God as conferring our rights as unalienable.

If the fool repents, God will convince him, for it is written in 2 Tim. 2:25 (ESV):  "...God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth."  Repentance leading to the truth is the gift of God.  This kind of proof the Bible refers to is ontological (we feel a tug towards God and have an innate knowledge of Him) and we don't have to convince the sheep, for they hear His voice, not necessarily our argumentation (John 10:27).

Our ultimate efficacy depends upon our dependence on the Holy Spirit and our testimony that he cannot refute, not our own brilliance--which may convince minds but not win over hearts.  If we just win an argument (and you cannot argue someone into the kingdom) then we will be able to boast that we converted them, not the Holy Spirit. God confirms Himself to us by our experience in Christ that is based upon the objective historical fact of the resurrection, not something mystical, and this is called a "properly basic belief" and is the verification of God:  "His Spirit bears witness with our spirit..." (Rom. 8:16).  Apart from a work of the Holy Spirit no one will believe, God must prepare their hearts for the gospel message.

By saying you don't believe in God is calling God a liar (because the Bible says so), and making yourself the authority and putting God on trial, rather than yourself.  God will judge man, not man God and man answers to God and not God to man.  We all have faith and have presuppositions to our knowledge (which couldn't exist without God), but it takes more faith to be an atheist than a believer and the evidence is stacked up against his disbelief; hence, it is harder to be an unbeliever than have faith as Norman Geisler said, "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist." Atheists begin with the existence of reason to use reason to disprove God--how ironic!  The Bible assumes God unapologetically, and we should follow suit in faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.

To conclude:  Paul wrote that "faith comes by hearing, and by hearing of the Word of God," not by argumentation: You cannot argue someone into the kingdom!  If you want to believe, you don't need evidence and if you are stubborn and don't want to, no amount will convince you.  There are positive, informative, telltale reasons to have faith and to be intellectually honest, and they fit the facts better than doubt.  We are not commissioned to win arguments but souls by speaking the truth in love, and witnessing for Jesus by our testimony and the gospel message itself--plant seeds not arguments or controversies!   Soli Deo Gloria!

Maintaining Our Integrity

Robert Mueller III says, "If you have your integrity, nothing else matters; if you don't have your integrity, nothing else matters."

The context of Job is the premise that God always rewards good and punishes evil.
But we know that God prospers the wicked as well as the righteous, and the righteous suffer.

Job did just that in Job 31 where he delineates just how "righteous he is."  He actually doesn't think he deserves all this torture, suffering, and trials he is undergoing without knowing why.  His friend says he isn't getting less than he deserves and Zophar says, "...Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves" (Job 11:6, ESV).  He sounds blunt and cruel but none of us get what we deserve if God meted out justice.  He restrains Himself in mercy to all and awaits eternity to demand payment for sin. Self-righteousness is one of the sins that repels God and Job was full of it, actually challenging God to come up with a case against him.  He stood fast to his personal integrity and fell into Satan's trap of pride that wouldn't let him admit he was wrong.

The problem with his friends was that the popular doctrine was that all suffering was caused by sin and we only got what we deserved in life, good or bad (sort of a belief in karma).  The purpose of the story is to justify the ways of God to man and show that God doesn't have to explain Himself or answer to us, but we to Him.  God never answered Job's queries and made Him realize that what mattered was that He is God and Job is a man.  Job also realizes no one, including him, has a monopoly on wisdom and he has a lot to learn. There are behind-the-scenes reasons for suffering and God doesn't have to reveal His ways to us ("The secret things belong to the LORD our God..," says Deut. 29:29). The closer we get to God the more we become aware of our shortcomings and sins and see how unworthy we are (as Job finally confessed in Job 42:6). Samuel Rutherford said to pray for a lively sense of sin, the more the sense of sin the less sin.

Job suffers the consequences of challenging God and gets humbled, but we must all realize that we are not getting what we deserve and God is only showing mercy to us in sparing us the suffering we deserve.  We are only ready for the grace of God once we have experienced the reality of mercy and put in our place, knowing that we don't want justice but mercy and grace.  The reality of God's economy is that the way up is down and that we must confess with John the Baptist in John 3:30 saying, "He must decrease, I must decrease."  James 4:8 says that "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

Job's spirit was broken by his trial and sometimes it takes a breakdown or coming to the end of ourselves to find God ("O that I knew where I might find Him," he says in Job 23:3).  When we start thinking we deserve something or God owes us, we are no longer grace-oriented and lost track of God's grace that everything we have is from God and we are only stewards of his bounties.

Job teaches us we that adversity builds character in the crucible of life because the same sun melts the butter, hardens the clay and with the same event one becomes bitter and another better. Man's highest good may come from his deepest suffering.   When Job asked,"Why?" God only answered "Who?" and revealed Himself to him.  We are to have faith in God, and this pleases Him, not to second-guess Him and try to figure Him out or wonder why something happens.  All suffering is providentially allowed and must be to God's glory, and have our best interests in mind and nothing can happen to us without His permission because there is a hedge of protection around us to protect us from Satan.

To conclude:  God is the causa prima or sole primary cause of the universe and we are all His vessels, either of honor or dishonor.  Satan and his subservient minions are subject to His Lordship and command and serve God too and cannot do independent mischief.  They are merely his unwitting pawns doing God's will. God is not evil, but uses evil vessels as second causes to accomplish His will.   Soli Deo Gloria!