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!

God's Plan "A"...

NB:  The title is a misnomer because God only has one plan and it will take place (cf. Isa. 14:24,27; 46:10; Job 42:2)--He needs no Plan B!


Doris Day's song "Que Sera, Sera" in which she sings, "...What will be, will be, The future's not ours to see, What will be, will be, Que sera, sera..." is a resignation that you have to have a philosophy of a "stiff upper lip" or "grin and bear it,"no matter what--let the chips fall where they may! You must become more adaptable and learn to roll with the punches, they say.  But we have a loving God who knows us personally and is involved on a personal level with us as individuals, and we don't have to be stoical, but can cheerful and rejoice in all circumstances, knowing that we can bring glory to God and "all things work together for good" as it says in Romans 8:28.  God will never overwhelm us and let us be tempted above our ability to resist: "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you..." (Isaiah 43:2, ESV).  "...[H]e will not let you be tempted beyond your ability.." (1 Cor. 10:13, ESV).

We don't have to be discouraged that we have messed up our lives beyond repair because God is in control and took all our shortcomings and failures into account when He thought up our destiny out of the top of His head before we were created.  We don't have a fate that cannot be altered by our volition, but a destiny that we will willingly comply and cooperate with to complete.  If our destiny is to be a maestro, we must work at it with all our might.  David says in Psalm 31:15 (NASB):  "My times are in Your hand...."  Another rendering would be "My future is in [God's] hands."

Everything happens according to God's timetable and timeline, not ours; for this reason, we ought always to be patient, awaiting His time:  "There is an appointed time for everything  And there is a time for every event under heaven...He has made everything appropriate [or beautiful] in its time..." (Ecclesiastes 3:1,11, NASB).  We have a future and a hope according to Jeremiah 29:11 (NASB) because God has a specific plan tailored for each of us:  "For I know the plans that I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope."


It is beyond comprehension, but in God's profundity that we cannot ever fully apprehend (even in eternity), that God wrote out in his plans all the days of our lives just how they should transpire:  "...and in Your book were all written / The days that were ordained for me, / When as yet there was not one of them" (Psalm 139:16, NASB).  This may be termed the providence of God and the Puritans referred to it quite frequently, and even Lincoln did after his conversion, but it was not rhetorical but another way of referring to the sovereignty of God over all details, small and great in our lives.

John Wycliffe's tenet:  "All things come to pass of necessity" and Ephesians 1:11, says, "He accomplishes all things according to the counsel of His will," or "...works all things according to the counsel of His will" (NASB). Nothing happens that God does not direct or permit (He knows even what could be and took that into consideration), using either vessel of honor or dishonor--the good or the evil.  It seems like He uses evil more, but there is so much more of it to make use of!   God's will be done, with or without our cooperation, either willingly or unwillingly, because He is sovereign, and He wouldn't be God if He weren't in control of everything, and that means there are no maverick molecules in the cosmos beyond His sovereign watchful eye.

God has no Plan B (in fact we shouldn't even label His plans, for God needs no backup plan) and we didn't mess Him up. frustrate, or thwart Him by our sin or evil, but He works through and despite it.  In the kingdom of God in eternity His will be done on earth as it is in heaven (willingly and cheerfully).  It is never too late to do God's will or "get your act together" if you will pardon the expression, and get with the program!  The eleventh-hour prophet can accomplish as much as the one who has worked all his life if God is with him.     Soli Deo Gloria!

Protestant In Name Only

Dare to disagree and express your views or interpretations!  Dare to be different and be a Daniel who stood up against the whole government and defied it or like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who attempted an assassination of Adolf Hitler as a double-agent, and was martyred by the Nazis for his faith and dissent.  They were Protestants in spirit who learned to think for themselves and didn't blindly follow the leaders but knew their God personally.

Will the real Protestant stand up, and be counted, please! Protestants are called that because they protest!   Protestants are born to question authority and to check things out for themselves, not taking some one's word for it, no matter who he is; having a personal and not a second-hand knowledge of the Lord.  It's time to show your Christian colors! What then is the essence of being Protestant and why is this an issue in today's evangelical church?

The issue is how can we end up being Catholics in practice while calling ourselves Protestant.  The branch of Christianity known as Protestant includes a lot of denominations, but they tend to all agree that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone (this is known as sola gratia, sola fide, and solus Christus in Latin as 3 of the five so-called "Five Onlys" of the Reformation), without any merit or work on our part to contribute to it--this is essential acquiescence on soteriology or the doctrine of salvation.  But there is more to it that than:  Martin Luther started the movement in 1517 at the Wittenberg Castle Church door where he nailed his 95 Theses on Halloween, and basically announced to the Church and declared, "I dissent, I disagree, I protest!"  He had been awakened from his dogmatic slumber and was ready to reform the Church.

There has to be room for disagreement in an agreeable and civil manner amount church members or it becomes cult-like as the People's Temple (the "cult of death") of Jim Jones that was based on his personality--the people saw no more need for their Bibles since they had him in person!  We need to be ever vigilant and be Bereans who daily search the Scriptures to see whether these things our pastors and teachers tell us are so.  This is the noble thing to do and God expects it of responsible congregants. Having room for disagreement and agreeing to disagree is healthy and show life in a church body, and is not the beginning of the end.  There is a time to go your separate ways, of course, like Paul and Barnabas disagreeing about Mark's worthiness, but we should be able to work out most disagreements.

The typical Protestant attending church today doesn't study or sufficiently read his Bible, but believes everything his church tells him and follows with a blind faith, not knowing why.  One Protestant said he doesn't even believe in the infallibility of Scripture anymore, but insisted Christ was still his Lord. This begged the question: "How does He exercise His Lordship?"  The person in question said, "By following the teachings of the church." This so-called nominal Protestant has come full circle and is really a Catholic who believes only the clergy has the authority to interpret Scripture and one mustn't question authority.

One distinction of Catholics is that they adhere to time-honored traditions as to have equal authority with Scripture (since the decree in the Council of Trent from 1545-63), while a Protestant is open to new ideas and experimental--not religious or slave to traditions such as the Rosary--and has a personal relationship with Christ as a priest and doesn't need one to make confession to on a regular basis.  There is nothing inherently wrong with tradition as long as it complies with tradition but it can get in the way and become a distraction to the real thing.  Catholics defer to tradition, without question!

We don't want a church that is run by control freaks or old fuddy-duddies who are set in their ways and are satisfied in the comfort zones with the status quo.  Old habits die hard and we constantly need the input of new and young blood to keep a church alive and from dying off and becoming irrelevant. We need new ideas and must never stop reforming the church we attend because one of the slogans of the Reformation was semper reformanda in Latin, or always be reforming. We see ourselves as works in progress and like to say that God isn't finished with us yet, but have a hard time saying the same about our church, that it is also a work in progress and in need of sanctification and reform--Martin Luther knew that he had not finished reforming the Church of its Catholic influence of the Popes. And we should never be "at ease in Zion" (cf. Amos 6:1) or settle in complacency and think we have arrived as a church body and need no improvement.  A church without vision will perish spiritually and this means a view into the future and a plan of attack against the devil and his domain.  Proverbs 29:18 (KJV) says, "Without a vision, the people perish...."   If you aim at nothing, you will get nothing!  Aim high, because you cannot aim too high--it is better to aim high and almost make it than to aim too low.

The questions should always be asked as to what is the attitude toward disagreement and our member's ideas and concerns treated properly, fairly, and biblically. Why?  Because the sole authority for a Protestant church is the Bible and one of the slogans of the Reformation (one of the five onlys), was sola Scriptura or the Bible alone is the authority and final arbiter, not some church dogma or constitution; the whole point of being Protestant is not to be at the mercy of church dogma and have the freedom to interpret Scripture on your own--but with this responsibility comes the responsibility to do it correctly--because with every privilege comes the complementary responsibility that goes hand in hand with it as its flip side.  This goes with any right you have, you also have an obligation as the flip side!  Soli Deo Gloria!

The Plumb Line That Counts

What is the true measure of our spirituality? Is it a numbers game or a matter of statistics (my Bible study has more attendees than yours!)?  Is God pleased with emotion or with faith?  Don't keep score like life is a sport or game!  Don't keep track of credits and debits, if you will, as in a ledger-book mentality!  Should we size up our competition, like some women are wont to do? Should we ever be jealous of someone else's gift (this is called gift-envy)?  Should we compare ourselves with ourselves and see if we fall short of some self-imposed standard of so-called perfection?  Paul says in 2 Cor. 10:12 (NASB) the following in this regard:  "For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding." We can think pretty highly of ourselves if we are the standard (but we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought per Romans 12:3).

But the plumb line, which is used by construction workers to verify a wall is vertical, is the Word of God and the Holy Spirit's power to convict and the ultimate judge is Jesus Himself. We are to mind our own business and not worry or fret about what Christ is doing in our brother's spiritual life the way Peter wondered about John after the resurrection and Jesus said, "What is that to you?"  We don't know the will of God for someone else or their calling and maybe not even our own, no one knows the complete will of God for their whole life--we are to live day by day and one day at a time.

The Word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword... according to Hebrews 4:12.  That is why God's will is not laid down all at once and we are to abide by it and let it be our very life.  Jesus said that we are to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God in the same vein.  The problematic scenario occurs when a weak brother thinks he is superior because of his standards and ends up judging others or looking down on them from his narrow interpretation of Scripture.  In other words, you can always find someone to look down on and feel superior to and make you feel good.

But Jesus is the standard and direction is the test; therefore it is written:  "Be ye perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect."  What direction are you going (you are either gaining ground or losing it, going forward or backward--there is no middle neutral territory where you can tread water, so to speak); therefore, it is likened to walking because you can walk backwards or forwards, but not in one place or standing still!

We are progressing if we are faithful to our individual calling and spiritual gift and fulfill the ministry (yes we all have a ministry of reconciliation according to 2 Cor. 5:18) that God has given us.  Jesus said,  "He who is faithful in little, shall be faithful in much." If we are not faithful in marriage, as someone in our care, how are we to be faithful with bigger and better things?  If God has entrusted you with lots of money, it could be a test to see if the real treasures of the spiritual kingdom can be entrusted to you--for this life is just a staging area, a preschool, a rehearsal, or a trial run for eternity and meant to be lived out in light of eternity.

What amazes me is that there are Christians who are relatively ignorant doctrinally and quite wise in knowing their God and in having a personal "hands-on" relationship with Him from encounters in the "real world."  There are seminary graduates who are literally scholars and hardly know their Lord at all, for it is all second-hand knowledge and little hands on real experience in the trench warfare of real life and have O.J.T. or on-the-job training in the spiritual battle of the Christian pilgrimage to maturity.  The goal is not to see how much we know, but how much we sow!

It may seem like we are unimportant and have a position of lowlife, but in Christ, we have true dignity.  We are all members of the body, and each individual members thereof--each with a unique gift and purpose to fulfill.  No one can say he doesn't need another member of the body!  What matters is not what part we are, but whether we are faithful and do it in the Spirit or not--God isn't against works, just against ones done in the flesh.  When we sow it is a win-win situation for us because whether the person accepts or rejects, we are obeying God and doing our part to fulfill the Great Commission.  One may plant or sow, another water or cultivate, and finally another may reap the rewards; however, remember God gave the increase and we owe it all to Him.

We are to be faithful in what we do know and not think we have to know all the answers or have expertise in the Bible to be mature because the Bible wasn't written to increase our knowledge, but change our lives.  Much of our learning should be trial and error and, even though it is best to learn from the Bible, we may end up learning the hard way by experience or the school of hard knocks. Paul said that he doesn't even judge himself, and he is correct because only Jesus sees the Big Picture of our whole contribution to His plan for our life.  This is why it is said that some who are first shall be last and some last, first, simply because we are not in a position to judge or measure our brothers and see their progress, and some are getting their reward in the here and now, while others will go to their reward in eternity.

Jeremiah 23:29 says that God's Word is like fire and a hammer because it can penetrate our souls and see the real person we are; likewise Hebrews 4:12 says it is like a two-edged sword because it can pierce between our soul and spirit.  The Bible is not true, it is truth and there is a distinction.  Only truth transforms, not being true. Jesus didn't say He was true, but truth.  Knowing Him is knowing the truth, and it is knowable in spite of Pilate saying, "What is truth?"  Absolute truth exists and we are to realize that it is our life and it is life-giving.  As we read the Bible, it reads us!  We are revealed for what we are and cannot be ingenuous to the Truth.

Case in point:  One believer may seem to be doing demeaning and servile work, but God is only testing his humility and meekness!  Remember, the way up is down!  John the Baptist uttered:  "He must increase, I [my ego] must decrease"  (John 3:30.  Our crosses pale in comparison to others and no cross means no crown.  The test of your greatness is not how many people serve you, but how many people you serve!  In God's economy, the world seems topsy-turvy!  It is said that the poor of this world will rule the rich in the life to come--there is some truth to that, for it is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, so don't get too attached to it or at home--this is not our home.

 Our judgment will be at the bema or the Judgment Seat of Christ in eternity where our deeds done in the flesh will be judged, no our sins, not at the judgment of the condemned at the Great White Throne Judgment after the 1,000-year reign of Christ.  Find peace in the fact that the only canon that counts is Christ's; it doesn't matter what others think--Jesus' plumb line is the only one that validates and as the final or ultimate arbiter.

If we get away from the Bible we are entering dangerous territory where we don't have the enlightening ministry of the Spirit in our lives and will experience many unnecessary pitfalls due to our negligence--believe me it doesn't pay and you can't ever make up for lost ground--opportunities lost can never be regained.  "A wise person is hungry for the truth, while the fool feeds on trash" (Prov. 15:14).  We should aim to love the Word of God and make it our joy and delight to feed on it as Jeremiah did:  "...And Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart..." (Jeremiah 15:16, NASB).  Thy Word was found, and I did eat it, and it became to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart."  The psalmist in Psalm 119:97 says that he loves the Word so much he meditates on it all day long!  

Our growth parallels our relationship to the Word as to how we allot our time according to the opportunities given us.  Some people love Shakespeare, but it is quite another thing to love the Word of God enough to want to be in it on a regular basis--but this takes maturity and is not an automatic fruit of salvation,  The infant believer longs for the pure milk of the Word (cf. 1 Peter 2:2). "Those who love Your law have great peace, and nothing causes them to stumble" (Psalm 119:165, NASB).  Soli Deo Gloria!

The Necessity Of A Biblical Worldview

NOTE THAT THIS BLOG PERTAINS TO WORLDVIEW AND IS ALSO POSTED ON MY OTHER BLOG @ www.christ-centeredworldview.blogspot.com/    IT IS A SAMPLE OF MY WORK IN THIS FIELD.

"Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred..." (1 Chronicles 12:32, NASB).

"... [A] people without understanding shall come to ruin" (Hosea 4:14, ESV).

C. S. Lewis, the literary apologist who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, said we must defend our worldview and not lose by default or neglect---in other words, we must have the answers and be prepared for spiritual battle. Lewis also says "[we] must show our Christian colours, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.  We cannot remain silent and concede everything away."  We must dare to be "Daniels" willing to get into the action and not stand aside and merely passively observe.  We cannot remain neutral, for that is a stand against Christ and His truth. Matthew 12:30 says:  "He that is not with Me is against Me."

The Judeo-Christian mindset has not failed, it has not been defended, but abandoned.  The dual problem is that many do not know why they believe, nor even what they believe! Our mission: Get the truth out there and propagated in a culture that is convinced that "truth is a short-term contract," but there is absolute truth!  But it is not all relevant. We must all be responsible to disseminate what light God has given us. The ramifications of being remiss or negligent are a nation devoid of divine viewpoint and being hijacked by fanatical or fringe movements, using God to promote their agenda, and possibly even the ultimate surrender to secular thinking, and the elimination of Christian input in toto into the public square could transpire, i.e., be muzzling our freedom of speech!

What is a worldview (commonly referred to as Weltanschauung, the German terminology)? Opinions are something you hold, while convictions hold you:  It is the sum total of your convictions and why you see a life worth living or something worth dying for. It has been said that it usually answers the queries:  "Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Your worldview helps you explain God (or explain Him away), your world, and the relationship between the two as to how they relate individually and as a society. In sum, your outlook on life.  In essence, we have a theory of the world and God, and how we relate to them, according to the dictionary. This is a vital discipline because kids are going to college ill-prepared when there's a war of ideas going on, and too many need to get their thinking straightened out (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5:  "... [Bringing] every thought [or viewpoint] into captivity to the obedience of Christ").  So how do you interpret reality?

To answer these questions from the viewpoint or perspective of Secular Humanism, they leave God out of the equation and explain away the supernatural, only believing in the observable and rational, and leaving the universal language of science and consensus to figure out all the answers.  Science has become a religion--or "scientism" and making value judgments, (as Carl Sagan, the 1981 recipient of the Humanist of the Year award, according to my source, said, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be"--this is out of the realm, scope, and domain of science).   More people believe in the theory of evolution (which is unproven and "unprovable") as religious dogma and scientific fact, and this is the Big Lie. Dr. Karl Popper says that evolution does not fit the definition of a scientific theory.

But Evolution is the building block of Secular Humanism and this belief system has no place for God in the Picture. This is the predominant worldview today in academia and we cannot remain silent and concede everything away, according to C. S. Lewis, again. Humanism has been around since antiquity and was known as "man as the measure of all things" (define and begin all reality with man, not God) and it was called Homo mensura--deifying man and dethroning God. They see all religion as just chasing some "pie in the sky," and believe in living for the "here and now," without living in the light of eternity.

According to scholar and theologian Carl F. H. Henry, Christianity speaks to all academic disciplines and is relevant to all facets of life, not just having a personal relationship with God. There is a struggle for student allegiance in the school system and atheism has been declared a religion by the Seventh Court of Appeals in 2005. Humanism was defined in a book Religion Without Revelation by Julian Huxley. In A Common Faith, John Dewey sees the Secular Humanist movement as having the elements of a religion. They say that children's minds should be kept open, but they proceed to brainwash them.  A. Solzhenitsyn has said that "man has forgotten God," and Friedrich Nietzsche (the patron saint of Postmodernism) said "God is dead." meaning that He is "no longer believable."  Will Durant has well said, "The greatest question of our time is whether man can live without God." A current politician has said he would "keep God out of it."

You either must begin with man and explain the cosmos, or begin with God and explain the cosmos. This begs the question:  What was in the beginning?  "In the beginning God," or "In the beginning matter."  Which created which? Do matter and energy have inherent power and intelligence to fix all the more than 50 constants in our cosmos and make life suitable for us, known as the Anthropic Principle, or the fine-tuning of our planet for human life?  Athanasius, one of the Church Fathers, said that the only system of thought that Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point. The false assumption that science makes is that Christianity is anti-science:  In fact, it made possible modern science in the first place and is the "Mother of Modern Science!  Many good scientists have been and are Christians.

Shakespeare said it well, concerning our meaning in life apart from God in Macbeth as he mused about the entirety of living:  "...['Tis] a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."  R. C. Sproul said in the same vein:  "With God we have dignity and without God we have nothing."  When you insert God into your thinking you can explain reality and find meaning to it. Bertrand Russell restated it well, "Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless."  Life is nonsensical without reference to God!

The biggest challenge Secular Humanism faces is the word "purpose" (and its corollary "meaning"), or the study of it known as teleology (from telos for a purpose).  The word seems almost theological to them in nature.  There is indeed a war of "isms" and the battleground is the mindset of a whole generation that is apathetic toward them in their interpretive framework.  The bottom line is that these "isms" have consequences.

It was the proponents of Secular Humanism that bemoaned the fact that children's minds weren't kept open when evolution was a forbidden subject in school; now they refuse to even let Creationism have equal time, though there is plenty of evidence, so that lack of evidence presents no excuse for denying it. We need to keep God in the public arena and defend the Christian worldview in the public square wherever possible, not letting Secular Humanism eradicate it or make it irrelevant. (They believe religion is acceptable as long as it is "privatized.")

"If there is no God," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum goes, "everything is permissible," and up for and up for grabs, and we are without a moral compass--if we are animals, why not act like them?  (Morals are then subjective and only a matter of personal conviction.)  Some believe values are just a matter of public consensus--justifying Nazism and Communism!  Listen to the New Age definition of it: "Morality is a nebulous thing; listen to the God within!" And if it feels like the truth, it is. Postmodernists say that it can be right for you, but not someone else. They dodge the morality issues. Compare this idea to the situation described in Judges 21:25 (ESV):  "... [Everyone] did what was right in their own eyes."  All we need to know is that God is the moral center of the universe! A theologian Karl Barth, focused on Christians who are religious, but not righteous--and decried this as a natural fruit of this way of thinking.

We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, ascertaining the truth from the fiction.  "My people perish for lack of knowledge"  (Hosea 4:14).  Note well: "Knowledge is power," said Sir Francis Bacon (cf. Prov. 24:5). "For lack of knowledge My people go into exile" (Is. 5:13).  1 Chronicles 12:32 says we need people who can interpret the times and know what to do.   Our faith is "defensible" and we must meet the challenge and not lose by negligence or default.  If we are versed in our worldview we will realize it outshines every other one.     Soli Deo Gloria!

Mouthing It And Doing It

   "Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to  God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that openly profess his name"  (Hebrews 13:15, NIV).

Efficacious praise is more than lip-service.  It is deeper than the phrase connotes--it is only in actively doing it that one really praises the Lord, not in the mere saying of it:

It is one thing to say "Praise the Lord" and quite another to make good on it or make it a reality. Alleluia is the Greek, and Hallelujah is the Hebrew for "praise the Lord," which is commonly said. This word is commonplace in our hymns and must be understood, not just be an empty phrase.   Has the expression become trite or hackneyed to you, and have little spiritual impact on your spirit?  It is imperative to say "Praise the Lord!"  and in the indicative mood when you realize it--or a declarative statement.  "Praise the Lord!" is a command; while "I Praise the Lord!" is worship (but, for what or why?).  Analogous would be saying, "Thank God!" and then thanking Him in a prayer of thanksgiving for something specific.  Viva la difference! 

But some people just go through the motions in their worship--they have memorized the Dance of the Pious. We say "I love you, let me count the ways!" And we exalt God I worship Him" and mean it from the bottom of our heart; we shouldn't just utter the words thinking that that satisfies (us or God)--we are meant to worship and are only fulfilled in doing it unto our God who made us this way.  Don't just say it--do it! There are many ways to praise the Lord according to Psalm 150 and many reasons to elicit praise.  It is the proper thing to do to offer the Lord His due, and pay homage to the One we adore.  When we learn to respect and honor is one thing; however, to learn, in turn, to apply it to God is another.

How do we praise Him?  Our lives are a witness to His glory and our testimonies are giving Him the honor he deserves.  For only God is worthy of our praise, but man will praise something or someone if not God.  "Let's just praise the Lord!"  We must be discerning to manifest the many ways this can be accomplished.  The Bible says that infants can praise the Lord in Psalm 8, and the firmament shows His handiwork in Psalm 19.  Everything in creation is meant to bring glory to God (Isaiah 43:7 says we were created for His glory!).  God even makes the wrath of man to bring Him praise according to Psalm 76:10!  God indeed allows all to happen for His own purposes and to ultimately bring Him the utmost glory, His chief end.  If you want to see the glory of God, just look in a mirror and see the intricate design that God made and then behold the beauty of the Lord in all creation; for there can be no art without an artist.  God cares a lot about beauty because He made so much of it--is is manifested in manifold ways.

It is one thing to just say the phrase, and quite another to sing it or shout it--that form of expression is inherently praiseworthy.  In other words, it isn't just what we say all the time, but how we say it that makes it meaningful.  An analogy would be the man who just says he loves His wife, but never manifests or proves it or makes good on it in the display. Of course, he ought to say it, but if he means it his conduct will prove it.  Sure the words are important, but we must love not only in word but in deed and in truth.  Likewise, we can say "Praise the Lord" but do we mean it?   As a witness to others, bringing up the fact that you worship God does bring God glory because people are made God-conscious.  I used to hang around a bunch of Christians who constantly used this expression and meant what they said.  It is like saying Amen all the time to acknowledge the truth and agreement with a spiritual truth.  These believers said it with such enthusiasm and expression and the right demeanor that it was contagious!

Let's just think of many things to praise the Lord for His provision; His providence; His protection; His blessing;  His presence; His name!  I could go on, but we thank God for what He's done and just praise Him for what He is and what He does.  Psalm 100 says we are to enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise!   "I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised..." (Psalm 18:3, ESV).  "... Shout unto God with the voice of triumph [for this praises God]"  (Psalm 47:1, KJV).

When we brag about someone or report the good deeds we are praising them, it is about time we do likewise to God and give credit where credit is due,   "Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints..."(Psalm 30:4, ESV).  This means we should worship God in song as well as in our speech--praise is another word for blessing and glorifying someone.  Hail God, in other words!  We worship and adore Him with all our being and want to celebrate it and pass it on.  Once you've experienced authentic praise to God you want to spread the word and pass it on, because it is contagious.   I can relate to David in Psalm 34 (ESV) saying, "I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth."  There is power in praise and it is the way to reach out to God and enter His presence. The most joyful believers are those who have learned to praise unashamedly.

Whenever you turn a person away from the human way of thinking to the divine viewpoint, you have praised the Lord because God is honored by it.  Worship is praise.   "... Praise the LORD, O my soul? I will praise the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being" (Psalm 146:1-2, ESV).  It is paramount that we praise Him in His sanctuary and when we are gathered together in His name; in fact, it is commanded.   Let us extol and lift up the name of the Lord (all that He is and His awesome reputation)!  Worship and songs that glorify Him bring Him praise.     Soli Deo Gloria!

How Low Can You Go?

Salvation is not offered to the highest bidder, or the most qualified, or the most eager, most intelligent, wisest, or moral person; au contraire. Christ doesn't offer to save, He saves!  It goes to the lowest bidder, as it were, the one who realizes he is unqualified, (we can do nothing to qualify or cooperate for our salvation).  We are bad, but not too bad to be saved.  We are as bad off as we can be, but God's grace is as great as can be.  Instead of saying, "God, I'm not that bad after all!" we need to say, "Lord, I have done nothing to deserve salvation, and You would be just to sentence me to hell, but I appeal to your mercy and grace at Christ's expense on my behalf."

Catholics believe we cooperate with God and somehow merit our salvation of which we are qualified by our faith.  Having faith doesn't qualify us to be saved, but means we are saved and regenerated.  God doesn't elect us because we have faith (that would be merit and a conditional election), but unto faith or to grant us faith.  We can do naught to please God or gain His approbation.  Someone has said, "God must have chosen me before I was born because He sure wouldn't have afterward."  If God chooses us because we have faith or in some way are better than others, then it is not a gift, but a reward.  That would be the institution of merit for salvation.  According to His purpose and grace, He saved us, and not because of anything in us that was good, for there is none good.  No one earns it, deserves it, nor can pay it back!

A person must see himself as a vile sinner who is unworthy of grace and in God's hands, at His mercy, to be saved, he must literally throw himself on the mercy of God, realizing he cannot save himself.  His life has gotten out of control because of his sin and he is convicted by the Holy Spirit of his depraved state.  When I say, "How low can you go?" I mean that you must be humbled to get saved and stop thinking so highly of yourself, that you're an alright guy or good man.  Romans 3:12 says there is none good.

We are enslaved to sin and cannot please God, because our righteousness is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).  When we get saved, we are set free spiritually and have a restored fellowship with God that had been severed at the fall of Adam.  Regeneration makes possible a living faith and repentance and we are completely passive in the process:  Our part is to act upon the faith that God gives us and prove it is genuine.  God's gift, our act!  The worse off you see yourself and the least qualified you think you are, the closer you are to the kingdom of God and it is within your grasp.  Ego can get in the way, but we need to swallow our pride and realize that He must increase, as we decrease.

When we realize it is not about "us" then we have made a spiritual breakthrough and know that it is all about Jesus.  Paul strove to preach Christ, and Christ crucified, not himself.  The more one's thoughts are aimed at Christ to glorify Him the more glory God gets and the more involved the Spirit gets.  It grieves Him to dwell on ourselves and be egocentric or self-centered.

By going low I mean your opinion and judgment of yourself in comparison to others in respect of your sins.  The sinner who prayed, "God be merciful to me, the sinner" in Luke 18:13 was on target when he realized his depravity in God's sight.   Paul thought he was the chief of sinners and John Bunyan wrote, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. That's what grace orientation does to you--it makes you feel unworthy and forever grateful.  Jesus said, "He that is forgiven much [realizes it the most], loves much!   Soli Deo Gloria!