The Uniqueness Of Our Faith

NB:  Every faith or religion is unique but Christianity stands out as one of a kind that contrasts with all others and really isn't even religion by some definitions.  Read and just check out all the differences. 

Some venture to compare Christianity with other world religions and put them in the same category of being merely a faith.  Christianity may rightly be called a faith because that virtue is so vital to its doctrine of salvation by grace.  Christianity is vastly superior and different to the other major faiths if one looks beyond the ethics--for they all teach doing good deeds.  Even George Lucas has concluded that all religions are true--this couldn't possibly be right since they are often mutually exclusive or contradictory and deny what the other proclaims (e.g., Islam denies that God is love or that you can know God!).

People wrongly believe that the Golden Rule or some ethical code is the essence of Christianity--some say their religion is the Sermon on the Mount!  This is a superficial observation that just looks at ethics or morals and not the faith or dogma that demands it.  It is true that faith without works is dead and cannot save, and true faith generates good deeds; we are not saved by good works, though; however, we are not saved without them either, and we are saved unto good works!   But Christianity is not against good works, just those done in the energy of the flesh, e.g., for the applause of man, and for the wrong motive--to gain the approbation of God.

I intend to show that Christianity is a one-of-a-kind faith, and cannot even properly be called "religion."  For religion seeks to reach up to and please God, while Christianity's God reaches down to man and initiates the relationship.  He makes the atonement and reconciles us, we don't offer Him our sacrifices to appease His wrath, mollify, or humor Him.  Religion simply says "Do!" Christianity replies simply "Done!" Salvation is a fait accompli or a done-deal!  The transaction is complete and paid for by God Himself!  We accept Christ's work on our behalf, to do what we couldn't accomplish, to pay a debt we couldn't pay when He didn't owe it.  God is not obliged to save anyone, or it would be justice, but He chooses to save by grace through the non-meritorious virtue of faith, which is a gift to be used to take that step of faith into the light, out of the darkness of sin, alienation, and bondage.

In religion, one seeks salvation by good behavior or good deeds, and one only hopes his good deeds outweigh his bad ones on Judgment Day.  In a works religion, you can never know if you have worked enough or achieved enough--Christianity is not about man's achievement, but God's accomplishment.  You can never be assured of salvation in religion, while Christianity alone offers assurance.  They both believe in good works, but in religion, they are an "in-order-to" behavior, in Christianity works are a "therefore."  We don't do them because we are obligated, but want to.

Actually, this all adds up to religion being a "do-it-yourself" proposition, or a lifting up of yourself by your own bootstraps, like saying, "God helps those who help themselves!"  This is a lie, and the qualification for salvation is to admit you're lost and helpless at God's mercy and you come to Him in faith and repentance.  The condition for salvation is to realize you're not qualified and can do nothing to ingratiate yourself with God--not good works, philosophy, religion, ritual, or morality!

Religion is, therefore, the best man can come up with, but God gave us Christianity by revelation and intervention into history.  People have tried religion and have found it falls short (religion may even work for some, but that's isn't the test of truth).  But Christianity isn't true because it works, it works because it's true!  Christianity is a revealed religion--the myth come true, as someone said, and no one would've thought this up. One spiritual seeker said to a preacher that he had tried religion for five years and it didn't work--the preacher replied he had tried religion for 15 years and it didn't work, then he tried Christianity!  It's an insult to tell the believer that he "found religion," for what he really found is a Savior to meet all his spiritual needs and to fulfill his life and make it more abundant.

Christianity is the religion of miracles and without them, it would fade into oblivion.  Take the miracles out and Christ would be but a footnote in history!   You can remove miracles from other faiths and their religion stays intact--not so with ours.  The problem with miracles is that they only bring about the desire for more miracles!  Miracles don't produce faith, but faith miracles!    Israel was shown many miracles and still rebelled (cf. Psalm 78:32), and Jesus did many signs and they "would not believe," despite them (cf. John 12:37).

Christianity is a faith of history and over 25,000 archaeological digs have verified its references.  Not once has an artifact controverted a biblical reference.  What's so sad though, is that if there's ever a difference in opinion between secular and religious scholars, the world buys into what the secular one says, because they believe religious scholars are biased.  If the Bible has never been proven wrong and has time and again proven reliable, why start doubting it?  The burden of proof is on the person objecting to the validity of a document, and legally they would have to disprove and discredit the Bible's authority and not automatically assume it's dubious. Christianity is a religion of facts, and the Christian with faith need not fear the facts--the skeptic should.  The Bible isn't a "once-upon-a-time" tale but based in history, like no other faith.  Jesus is a historical, not mythical or legendary figure!  Our God is not only the God of history but the very one who orchestrates it all to His will (cf. Eph. 1:11).  History is indeed headed toward culmination at the Second Advent of Christ to conclude time as we know it.  Either the resurrection was the "biggest hoax," according to Josh McDowell, or the most wonderful event known to man--there's no room for any middle ground!

Christianity is the religion of salvation since it alone offers the world a Savior that we must be saved through and He did it all for us, with the gift of salvation ready to be received.  There is only one Savior (cf. Hos. 13:4) and one way of salvation (cf. Acts 4:12).  Man is in a state of rebellion against God:  The Bible properly diagnoses man's problem and dilemma as the sin question and settles it by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  "[H]ow shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?" (Heb. 2:3, ESV); there are severe consequences, and man is responsible to God for rejecting what he does know (cf. Rom. 1:28).  Remember, in a works religion, you are just never sure of your salvation, but Christianity teaches assurance is possible.

Christianity is the faith of prophecy and no other religion's god can tell you the future, while the Bible has over 2,000 predictive prophecies that were fulfilled (333 in Christ's first advent alone), and this is not just a few lucky guesses!  Muhammad tells no prophecy in the Koran, except the self-fulfilling one where he promises to return to Mecca.  The one and only true God knows and tells us the future before it happens.  Not one prophecy has been proven wrong!

Christianity is a faith of grace, a foreign concept to other faiths.  In other religions, one earns his salvation by merit or good deeds.  Faith is unmerited favor; we don't earn it, can't pay it back, and don't deserve it in the first place!  This concept is unique to Christianity and denied dogmatically by other faiths who believe in legalism and salvation by works alone.  With grace, one can be assured of his salvation and isn't dependent on the value and merit of his works for assurance.

The biggest contribution to religion though is probably that Christians address God as Father, and are considered the children of God.  We are adopted into God's royal family and have the honor and privilege of being "family."  We have the right to become the children of God by virtue of faith in Christ as we receive Him as Lord and Savior, even believing in His name (cf. John 1:12).

Lastly, of the contrasts, the Christian life is not just a list of dos and don'ts, but a vital and growing relationship with the Father and the Son by the power of the Spirit.  We grow in faith and our "chief aim is to glorify [God] and enjoy Him forever" (cf. The Westminster Shorter Catechism).  Christians share in the very nature of God and reflect His glory (cf. 2 Pet. 1:4; 2 Cor. 3:18).  The goal and mission is to know God and to make Him known respectively!  Our biblical mandate:  "Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;.." (Hos. 6:3, ESV).

In the final analysis, we are not saved by service, but unto service (cf. Eph. 2:10, saying, "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.").   The conclusion of the matter is that there may be an element of truth in every religion (enough error to be dangerous and inoculate one to the real thing), but the one in which is the personification of the absolute Truth with a capital T, and not a fraud or imitation, is Christianity alone!   Soli Deo Gloria!

In Beginning, God

"Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is useless."--Bertrand Russell, atheist mathematician and philosopher 
"Do you think we are mere animals?  Do you think we are stupid?  (Job 18:3, NLT).

Or, "IN THE BEGINNING GOD...."   It all began with God.   Athanasius said that the only system of faith that Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point!  We must not start with man and explain God, or even attempt to explain away God.  There are only two possible explanations for reality and the world as we know it:  God created it; it evolved and just happened.  Secularist scientists believe that given enough time and chance, anything can happen with matter and energy as the input.

But some things will never happen no matter how much opportunity: could a tornado fly through a junkyard (even if the whole universe were filled with them) and assemble a Boeing 747?  This is called by some (namely, Sir Fred Hoyle) "junkyard mentality."  Monkeys pounding on typewriters forever could never compose a Shakespearean sonnet, even if given eternity to do it.  The chances of life arising by chance are like drawing a six on a die 5 million times consecutively, or like a blind man solving Rubik's cube--absolutely impossible.

What evolution did (and it is the most successful theory every postulated because of its impact on society and scientific thought), was give secularists a way to explain the universe without God in the picture.  Now they can be intellectually fulfilled without believing in God, which used to be the unquestioned default position.  We must begin with God and explain the universe, not begin with man and explain Him away!  Contrary to humanist thought, man is not the measure of all things.

Let me cite a famous philosophical maxim from Rene Descartes, the father of modern rationalism:  "I think, therefore I am."  This is erroneous for several reasons:  Only God can rightly say, "I am!" We can believe we exist, but knowing by virtue of self-consciousness is circular reasoning, and begs the question of how you can know anything for sure--all knowledge is contingent!  Augustine posited that all knowledge begins in faith; he said, "I believe in order to understand."  Just like a child learns things initially by faith. You must assume something you cannot prove to know anything!  We all have some presupposition we are willing to accept without proof.  However, we are always in a state of flux and are becoming something, while God is self-existent and needs no change, for He is already perfect, and cannot change for the worst because He is perfect.

Descartes was right in saying that thinking is the origin, but he was mistaken, to begin with, man or himself; he should begin with God.  Thinking does prove a thinker, though; a thinker precedes thought and thought requires a thinker.  But we were thoughts in God's mind before we were even born.  How does he know that God isn't thinking through him and using him, and how can Descartes conclude he has an independent thought separate from God and isn't merely a machine taking dictation.  God is the origin of all thought!


To Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, to think requires a thinker and that means he exists, but even to doubt he is thinking is a thought and requires a thinker; he concludes one cannot think and not think in the same relationship or manner at the same time so as not to violate the law of noncontradiction, the first law of being.  Without Him, there would be no thought (Logos means "expressed thought" or revelation), because God is the sole primary cause of the cosmos (causa prima).  We are all in the process of becoming, and all becoming requires causation; God is not becoming but merely is in the absolute sense of being that cannot change.  God is the uncaused cause, which by definition is also self-existent; there cannot be an uncaused effect!

Everything has its genesis in Him.  Scientists are always trying to come up with a "theory of everything," a "God-particle" that solves the universe's complexity, reconciling the known forces of nature.  Parmenides, the Greek philosopher of antiquity and forerunner of Socrates, said, "Whatever is, is!"  This is not nonsensical but the origins of contemplating God's nature, which is immutable and cannot change for the better or the worse, since He's is a being (by definition perfect).  Something cannot be and become at the same time; if it is in the absolute sense of God is, it cannot change or not be.  This was his understanding of the first law of being:  the law of noncontradiction.

We say that God is and was and ever will be--He cannot change.  God is self-existent, which violates no laws of science, logic, nor of reason, while we depend on someone or something and had an origin.  The law of causality or cause and effect says that everything that begins to exist has a cause, and something cannot be its own cause.  God is no effect and didn't begin to exist, being eternal without beginning, and therefore has no cause.  God just is and is the only Being who can say, "I am."

There is no such thing in reality as a God-hypothesis, but God is the necessary Being for anything else to exist--everything else is contingent on something, being in time, having a beginning, and to simply say that there is an endless series of finite efficacious causes is nonsense as well as silly, because logically, infinite regress is impossible--there had to be a beginning!  The Bible speaks of our beginning since we are captive to the time/space continuum, but God has no beginning, being the creator of time/space/matter.  There would be no time without space and matter, which He created, and time is merely the corollary of matter and space.  In theological circles they say God is "above and beyond," or transcendent, but they are merely quibbling about His address; however, He has no physical address in space that we can access but lives in another dimension or in other dimensions.  Even if we searched the universe we wouldn't find Him, for He created the universe and is transcendent or above and separate from it.

The first words of Scripture reveal that God has a plan, is in control, and that everything is going according to plan; God cannot fail and has all power over His creation.  We owe everything to God and everything had its origin in God.  Don't jump to the conclusion that everything had a beginning!  If you do, there would've been a time when nothing existed, and there's the self-evident adage that out of nothing, nothing comes (in Latin ex nihilo, nihil fit).  There must be something or someone who had no beginning and didn't begin to exist or there would be nothing now; because there is something now, there must be something eternal!  God is therefore called this so-called "necessary being."

The universe had a beginning, scientists now are nearly all in agreement about the Big Bang (even professor Steven Hawking of Oxford University is aboard).  If there was a beginning, there had to be a Beginner, by logical conclusion.  According to the laws of cosmology, things with a beginning don't just happen by themselves, but are caused--something caused the Big Bang, by deduction. Who pulled the trigger? And more vital: who programmed or dialed all the universal constants of the universe into it, so that it was fine-tuned for life support somewhere?  Explosions by themselves are pure energy and random energy, not usable or kinetic energy, which requires intelligence as input.  Photosynthesis is an example of a plant turning the suns random energy into stored, usable energy.

The missing ingredient to the Big Bang is intelligence or God's mind!  The universe, according to Einstein, seems like one vast mathematical equation of a "Pure Mathematical Mind."  Scientists believe that someday they will be able to explain everything in the cosmos, but this is not the same as sustaining it.  We will not become gods by understanding, but only prove that it contains an intelligent input by God no less.  The universe is one vast thought of God, for John 1:1 says that "in the beginning was the Word," or the expressed thought of God!

There aren't many possibilities for explaining the universe:  In the beginning God; in the beginning matter/energy; in the beginning no God; in the beginning nothing!  We will never know anything for sure unless we begin with God and don't leave Him out of the equation (cf. Prov. 1:7).  The only one that makes any sense if the first premise!  Pure energy has no intelligence and no plan or design, as we see evident in creation.  A design entails a Designer!  If there was a time with nothing, we couldn't have anything now!

If there was no God then, there would be none now either (unless you want to believe God evolved), but this is not in the domain of science to speculate about, just like ethics isn't (you cannot repeat, measure, control, observe, or test God), because God is not visible, audible, nor tangible, cannot be put into a test tube and there can be no laboratory conditions to experiment.  Let's say that with infinite time anything could happen as a given; then if the universe is infinitely old, wouldn't everything be perfect by now as a foregone conclusion?

The more they learn about the origin of the universe the more astronomers believe in God and find that He is the only explanation without committing intellectual suicide--keeping their intellectual integrity intact.  It's time we stop asking questions and start to look for answers, and the Bible is the only reliable source of revealed information.  There is a reason the Bible is self-attesting; if it appealed to some source for authentication, it wouldn't the final arbiter of all truth!  Our religion is a revealed one, not one thought of by man and there were no eyewitnesses to creation, so we need revelation from God!

The Bible doesn't begin, "Once upon a time!" God didn't create the universe for something to do--He wanted to express Himself.  As an example, God takes the initiative and cannot be anticipated.  We begin with God because, where you start virtually always determines where you'll end up.  For instance, secularists assume design is impossible, and conclude there's no design.  They won't let a divine foot in the door.  Purpose is a dirty word to them and the cosmos shows design and purpose at all levels, molecular to a galaxy.  Science assumes there's order in the universe and it's predictable with laws of nature.  The Big Bang was a one-time event and there were no eyewitnesses, we can only know by revelation, and, of course, this theory only begs the question of who pulled the trigger and got the ball rolling.  The theory of an eternal universe is untenable and scientists generally accept this theory of the Big Bang now.

We must be careful, though, to come to the conclusion that we will only believe what science can prove; not all knowledge is in the realm of science (ethics, for one example--you cannot measure 2 lbs. of justice or 3 ft. of love!).  Evolution was the alternative explanation of reality to creation, which was originally a working hypothesis, then championed as theory, then touted as unquestioned scientific fact by academics and scientists alike.  However, we know as a fact that pure energy explodes and doesn't have a plan, beauty, or design--we need the missing ingredient of intelligence to harness energy for productive use.

And so we see that the opening words of Genesis are the basis and foundation of all Christian worldview and dogma, since nothing can create itself, but something can rationally, scientifically, and reasonably be self-existent, therefore God becomes this "necessary being," for if everything had a beginning, there would be a time with nothing existing, and that is illogical (ex nihilo, nihil fit, or, out of nothing, nothing comes).  The only two possibilities are mind over matter or matter over mind--which created which?  This is not just spiritual or religious dogma, but philosophical and scientific reality.  You must start with God in the reckoning, for He is the moral center of the universe; worldviews go awry deifying man and dethroning God with no anchor or standard to live by.

In summation, we realize that there's a reason that the Bible is self-attesting and appeals to no authority, and makes no apology for God or attempts to prove Him, but unapologetically assumes Him and calls those that don't fools--if the Bible appealed to science, for instance, science would be the ultimate authority!  The whole purpose and point of there being a beginning is that there was a Beginner--that's why the secularist has a hard time admitting the truth of the beginning.     Soli Deo Gloria!