Beyond Belief – What Does God Have To Do with My Longings?

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

Another way you might say this to me is: OK, so maybe you have provided some logical, philosophical, and even scientific arguments for the existence of God, but so what? Why should I care?

Here’s the short answer: because God is the one who made you and gave you those longings, so He is the only one who can truly fulfill them.

Now for the longer (but hopefully not too long) answer, continuing this series on Christian apologetics (being ready, willing, and able to explain your faith to someone who is seeking to understand it, or to someone who is questioning your sanity for believing in God).

Things Are Not the Way They’re Supposed to Be

I’ll start by pointing out that with all of the unrest in the world and in our country, you don’t have to watch the news for long to conclude that things are not the way they were intended to be. I think most of us have the innate sense that this is so, for to see it otherwise is to be totally devoid of hope, and people like that don’t last very long.

You may be asking the question right now, Well, if there is a God, why doesn’t he fix it and make things so they are the way way they were intended to be? If you are, then you might have missed my post last week, Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in a God that Allows Pain and Suffering? Please take a look to see how I grappled with that question.

So where would we get this sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be? There is no scientific explanation for why we would ever think that. The only rational explanation is there was an Intelligent Designer (i.e., God) who designed us with the ability to recognize that things are not as they should be, who embedded in us longings for a better world, a better way.

Longings? What Longings?

We all long for beauty. Of course, what we find beautiful varies from each one of us to the next–poetry, sunsets or sunrises, music (but what type? Classical, jazz, polkas, rap?) paintings, a kind person, an attractive person, flowers, photography, and so on–but the yearning for beauty is universal. We also long to understand the answers to deep questions like “What is the meaning of life?” and “Why am I here?” We want to be loved unconditionally for who we are. We want to belong. We long for truth and closure.

So, that’s a short list of common longings. I could go on, but I won’t, in hopes that you get the idea and that this has stirred examples of your own.

How Do We Scratch Those Itches?

Well, that’s the root cause of so many problems in our culture today: into the void caused by these longings, we pour all kinds of garbage, encouraged by social media and popular entertainment, but sponsored by the evil one, who comes to steal and kill and destroy. To be clear, there may not be anything wrong with some of the things we use to try to fulfill our longings. The problems are ignited by trying to force these good things to become the ultimate things to satisfy our yearnings. Things like friendships or relationships (a tendency of my younger daughter), intellect (a tendency of my son), food, movies, career, sports, and so on.

What’s even worse than those tendencies, though, is when people seek to address their longings in harmful ways. Examples include drugs, alcohol abuse, violence, pornography, etc.

Regardless of how we try to address our yearnings with worldly tools, the end result is the same: they remain unfulfilled, leaving us feeling lost and broken. Why is that?

Because God designed us with longings that only he can fulfill. That’s the “so what?” here. It’s how God is connected to our yearnings. Here’s how CS Lewis put it:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (pp. 136-137). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

How Can God Fulfill My Longings?

The answer to this is encapsulated in Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman, as described in John, chapter 4. According to the culture of the day, Jesus should not even have been speaking with this unnamed woman because she was from a different ethnic group and she was a woman. And yet he did it anyway (showing us, incidentally, that we should not be racist and that men are not better than women). In this conversation, Jesus answers the question of how he (by virtue of his place in the triune God) fulfills our longings:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Jesus, in John 4:13-14 (NIV, emphasis added), borrowed from YouVersion

Also, thinking back to my short list of longings earlier, there are additional scriptural references that show how God can satisfy them. Rather than include a bunch of words describing each of them, I’ll list some of those verses here with a link to them in YouVersion (a free online Bible with many different translations). You can and should check them out for yourself if you are unfamiliar with God’s love letter to us (all quotes are from the NIV):

The Bottom Line

Here it is in summary. God made us for relationship with Him. He planted seeds in our hearts that would turn us toward Him–our longings. But we have tried to fill these with many worldly things, some good and some bad (but even the good things are not good if we try to put them in God’s place in our lives). Regardless of that, no matter how many things we have put in God’s place to try to fulfill our yearnings, God still loves us and wants to be in relationship with us. So He sent us Jesus (God the Son) to show us the way to fulfill our longings, by entering into relationship with Him, and to save us by taking the punishment we deserve for putting all these other things in place of Him.

If you think God is angry and wants nothing to do with you, you don’t know God–you have been believing the lies from hell and social media. If you think you need to “clean up your act” before God will accept you, you don’t know God’s grace, mercy, and forgiveness. If you think all the things you’re pursuing besides God to try to fulfill your unfulfilled longings will do the trick, you don’t know yourself or God. If you think church is a place where you will be judged, then either you’ve been to the wrong church or you’re believing the lies from hell trying to keep you away from God.

For your own good and personal fulfillment, don’t believe any of the garbage you see on TV or read about in social media about God. Investigate Him for yourself using the Bible and other positive, informed resources (like the blog posts in this series) to form your own ideas and opinions. Jesus is knocking on the door, patiently waiting for you to open it. If you let him in, he will fulfill all the mysterious longings of your heart.

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Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in a God that Allows Pain and Suffering?

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

I’m getting close to the end of the topics I have wanted to cover in this series on Christian apologetics (being able to explain our faith in a logical manner to someone seeking to understand it with an open mind and honest intellectual curiosity). This topic needed to come later in the series because it builds on several of the previous themes. In light of what has happened in Ukraine this past week, it seemed like a good time to tackle this tough question.

Note: This image may be subject to copyright. It was displayed in my church service this morning, so that’s where I got it. The closest I could find online (to try to find an appropriate attribution) was a video on Sky News with a caption that reads, “A woman prays at the mural for St. Michael, the protector of Kyiv, as the capital prepares for Russian infiltration.”

I should start off by saying that this topic is certainly challenging to cover in a (hopefully) brief blog post. CS Lewis has written a whole book on this theme called The Problem of Pain. He, of course, does his usual masterful job of addressing the subject in a logical and thorough way, so if you’d like to dive deeper than I am able to in this article, I encourage you to pick up a copy.

Where is God in Global and Individual Suffering?

When we talk about suffering, at the forefront of our minds right now is the situation in Ukraine. Sadly, there have been many wars before this that have caused misery at the global level. To add to this, each of us undoubtedly has tragic tales of individual suffering. In the last 10 years, I have lost both my mom and mother-in-law, both of whom are very important to me. My sister-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly a year ago. As I write this, a dear friend of mine is losing her decade-long battle with cancer.

These situations and countless more like them can and should make those of us who are already followers of Christ wonder why God allows us to suffer. To wonder something like this is human, and it does not catch our Creator by surprise.

So, it’s certainly understandable why someone who does not believe in God to explain their disbelief with a logical argument that goes something like this:

  • There is evil in the world
  • You claim there is a loving, all-powerful God. If he exists, he should eliminate evil
  • If he can but he won’t, then he’s not really loving
  • If he wants to but he can’t, then he’s not really all-powerful
  • Therefore, I reject your notion of a loving, all-powerful God

I have to admit, this is a tough one. I hate pain and suffering as much as the next person. While I do believe in a loving, all-powerful God, I also find it hard to believe that he allows such widespread, systematic evil to exist. He could easily eliminate dictators and cancer, but he does not. Why not?

Honest Answer

The short and honest answer is, I don’t really know. But at the same time, I do not see my lack of knowing as a valid reason to disbelieve God when everything else in my experience, plus all the logical arguments I’ve outlined throughout this series, so conclusively point to a God who created us and loves us sacrificially, to the point where he himself was willing to suffer in order to draw us near to him.

Earlier in the day, I enjoyed a delicious apple. I do not fully understand how a little seed from the apple can go into the ground and eventually become a tree. Nor do I understand how that tree can spontaneously produce apples when there was previously no indication that it would do so. However, in spite of my lack of understanding of these things, I still enjoyed the apple.

Similarly, when I walked into this room, I flipped the switch and light came on. I have a rudimentary understanding of how electricity works, but I certainly couldn’t tell you any of the technical details about how that electricity was generated, how it came to be in my house, or how it is converted into light. And yet, when I flipped the switch, I had complete faith that the light would come on.

In other words, we don’t have to fully understand something in order to have faith in it or enjoy it. God knew there would be things he did that would make no sense to us, so he gave us a pass when he said:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV)

Having said all that, let me summarize how I have attempted to reconcile in my own mind the existence of a loving, all-powerful God with the existence of evil and the resulting pain and suffering.

Free Will Means the Ability to Choose

When God made us, he wanted to give us the choice whether or not to believe in him and love him. If he didn’t do this, he could not have considered whatever feelings we may have had toward him as “love” since whatever you do out of compulsion could not be counted as love. A dictator may foolishly believe his subjects love him because they obey him when in reality they do so out of fear. They must obey him or they may be executed. That is certainly not love.

So God gave us free will–the ability to choose to believe in him and love him.

Or the ability to choose to reject him.

God is good and the source of all goodness within us since he made us. Choosing to reject him means also rejecting, either momentarily or habitually, the goodness he built into us. The absence of goodness is evil. In this way, evil itself is not a created entity–it is just the absence of goodness, in the same way darkness is not something created, but rather it is simply the absence of light.

This at least addresses the question some non-believers ask: Why would a benevolent God create evil?

The answer is, He did not. He gave us the ability to choose to reject goodness, which is the definition of evil.

But Still, How Can God Allow Pain and Suffering?

I have a few things to say about this.

First, sometimes our pain and suffering result from our own bad choices. As a parent, I tried to teach my children how to avoid painful lessons I had learned the hard way in my life. In this, I was only partially successful. Each of them, to some extent, has had to make mistakes for themselves before they would learn from them. The two younger ones continue to make dumb decisions, which has led to painful consequences for them. I did not want them to make these dumb decisions because I knew the pain they would cause. But they are adults, so I have to allow them to make those decisions.

How much more, then, does our heavenly Father not want us to make dumb decisions because he knows the pain they will cause. But he gave us the free will to choose to make those dumb decisions, so he has to allow us to make them.

Also, here I’d like to pull in one of the many good quotes from the CS Lewis book I mentioned earlier, The Problem of Pain. Before I do, though, I should preface it by saying that I do not believe that God causes all pain, although he almost certainly does some of the time to teach us important lessons. It may have been painful in some way for my kids when I scolded them for running into the street without first looking for oncoming cars, but it was obviously worth it to avoid the far greater pain that could result from them not learning that lesson. Having said that, here’s the Lewis quote:

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

In other words, sometimes pain is the best teacher.

Second, what about when other people make evil choices that impact me? Why doesn’t God intervene to save innocent people?

This is obviously the question people may be asking about what Putin is doing in Ukraine. But it is not a new question.

It’s a tough question, to be sure. The best answer I have is that if God intervened every time someone made the choice to do evil, it would cease to be a choice for that person. Walking back through what I mentioned earlier about free will, we see that to do that would essentially mean eliminating that person’s free will. And since we all at one time or another make bad choices, we can quickly see that this would lead to the elimination of free will altogether.

Finally, what about other unnatural causes of death, like cancer? I addressed this in a post I wrote a year ago in response to the untimely death of my sister-in-law. It was called Gone Too Soon. As I admitted at the time (and still stand by that admission), it may not be all that comforting, but here’s a summary. Basically, we view this kind of suffering from our finite perspective. We suffer because a loved one has been yanked from our grasp. But from God’s infinite, eternal perspective, it could be that our loved one is no longer suffering. They may be in paradise with him in a restored, healthy body.

There are no verses in the Bible I can point to that support this last point; it is only a guess on my part based on the loving God I have come to know and worship.

Take Heart

Let me close by pointing out that God hates suffering at least as much as we do. Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus had died. Not because he missed him (since he was about to raise him back to life) but because this isn’t the way he had intended for things to be. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before he was to be tortured to death, Jesus begged his Father to find another way to redeem humanity. Prior to that, Jesus had been homeless, hungry, betrayed, and humiliated. We should find some consolation in the fact that our God loves us enough to enter into our messy world, and as a result, has himself suffered in every way imaginable. As Jesus told his disciples, so he also tells us:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

John 16:33 (NIV)

Jesus never promised that our lives would become easy once we become his followers. In fact, he told us that we will have trouble. He only promised that he will be in the boat with us when the storms of life come our way.

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Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in Christianity When Religion Poisons Everything?

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

In 2007, atheist author Christopher Hitchens published a book called, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. This reflects a sentiment that is common in our secular society, effectively asserting that the world would be a better place if everyone were secular and there was no such thing as religion. Continuing this series on Christian apologetics (explaining your faith to those examining Christianity with honest intellectual curiosity), I am going to (briefly, I hope) explore a few aspects of this assertion that religion poisons everything.

How the World Has Benefitted from Religion

I acknowledge that throughout history, people have done bad things in the name of religion–the Crusade, the Inquisition, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. But for the most part, the deities or human leaders of the major world religions have not asked people to do those bad things. Instead, aberrant behaviors such as these result from broken people misinterpreting the guidance from their holy texts or leaders, or simply from abusing their position to gain wealth or power. Nowhere in the Bible or the Koran are these atrocities commanded or even suggested.

It’s also worth wondering aloud why the focus of secularists is only on the bad things done in the name of God or faith. Is it possible they are advancing an agenda rather than earnestly considering the relative pros and cons of all major faiths in general or any single faith specifically? Atheism, after all, is really just its own set of beliefs and assertions about God.

In fact, it is really rather short-sighted to claim that religion has only had negative impacts on the world. On the contrary, the world has benefitted greatly throughout history due to the five major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism). There are countless examples of this, but in the interest of brevity, let me pick just a few summaries.

First, according to the non-religious site Biography online, in an article entitled, “Benefits of Religion“, some ways in which the world is a better place because of the major religions include:

  1. Teachings of goodwill and the golden rule (do unto others)
  2. Promoting ethics and good morals in political life
  3. Inner strength and courage to do the right thing
  4. The message of forgiveness
  5. Religious art/music
  6. Sense of community and belonging
  7. Selfless Service

Also, societies are generally healthier, happier, and safer because of the existence of religion. According to an article by Luna Greenstein on the website for the organization National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI):

Religion gives people something to believe in, provides a sense of structure and typically offers a group of people to connect with over similar beliefs. These facets can have a large positive impact on mental health—research suggests that religiosity reduces suicide rates, alcoholism and drug use.

Luna Greenstein, National Alliance on Mental Illness, December 21, 2016

Further, there are economic benefits due to religion. In 2013, then-contributor to Forbes.com Jeffrey Dorfman, Professor of Economics at The University of Georgia, wrote in his article entitled, “Religion Is Good For All Of Us, Even Those Who Don’t Follow One“:

How much does all this add up to, in terms of economic gains? According to Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology, the American economy benefits to the tune of $2.6 trillion per year thanks to being a quite religious country. That is about one-sixth of our total economic output.

These gains, found in his recent book, America’s Blessings, derive from the extra human capital, lower unemployment among the religious, fewer crimes being committed, and other benefits listed above. Some of the benefits are direct gains that show up in economic statistics. Others are monies saved (for example, by not imprisoning as many people), so they do not actually contribute to GDP or other visible statistics, but they save society money. Religious people are keeping our tax rates and insurance premiums lower than they would be otherwise.

Jeffrey Dorfman, Forbes.com, December 22, 2013

Secular Society Is More Poisonous Than Religion

As society has tended more toward a secularist philosophy, supposedly progressing beyond “primitive and barbaric” religion, let’s see how things have gone. We don’t have to look any further than three secular leaders in the last 100 years of “progress” to find people who have been responsible for far more deaths than all religious atrocities in the history of the world:

  1. Adolf Hitler: “By genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, “euthanasia,” starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people, most likely 20,946,000 men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, and many others. Among them 1,000,000 were children under eighteen years of age.1 And none of these monstrous figures even include civilian and military combat or war-deaths.” R.J. Rummel, University of Hawaii (emphasis added)
  2. Joseph Stalin: “Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin’s regime were 20 million or higher.” Wikipedia (emphasis added)
  3. Mao Zedon: “But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.” Ilya Somin, The Washington Post, August 3, 2016 (emphasis added)

For those not keeping up with that morbid running total, that’s 80 million people, conservatively.

And religion is the poison?

Following Christ Is Not a Religion

Moving on, in previous posts, I have made points relevant here as well:

  1. Lumping all world religions together as though they’re basically the same, as many secularists and atheists like to do, shows a complete lack of understanding of any of those faiths (see this section of Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe Jesus Is the Only Way to God?). Intellectually, this is either disingenuous or just plain lazy. Similarly, those who say “We believe in science” as a sort of inane rebuttal to religion, as though science and religion are mutually exclusive, are also admitting that they have no grasp of science or the scientific method (see Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in Jesus and Science?).
  2. Jesus did not come to earth to start a religion (see Beyond Belief – Did You Know Jesus Came to Start a Relationship, Not a Religion?). He came to show people how to restore their relationship with the triune God (which includes himself) and, since we are incapable of living without sin, to redeem us by taking the punishment we deserve. He wants everything we do to be motivated by our love for him or by our love for our fellow humans, which is to be at least as powerful as the love we feel for ourselves (see Matthew 22:37-40).
  3. Similarly, holding Christ responsible for every aberrant act of Christians makes no sense since Jesus did not ask or command people to do terrible things or behave badly (see Beyond Belief – Did You Know Jesus Came to Start a Relationship, Not a Religion?). This would be tantamount to throwing my wife and me in jail if one of our kids broke the law. And yet, even the great Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi fell into this trap:
Mahatma Gandhi, borrowed from AZ Quotes

Along the lines of the list above pertaining to how all the major religions have improved life on this planet, there’s a whole Wikipedia article describing the wide variety of ways Followers of Christ have made positive impacts on the trajectory of the world. In the interest of brevity, though, I will provide the link instead of trying to summarize the entire article: Role of Christianity in Civilization. All you have to do is ask yourself: whenever there’s a natural disaster or any other sort of crisis, which group of people generally gets there first to help those who are suffering? The church–Followers of Christ being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world.

So instead of holding Jesus responsible when his followers behave badly, people honestly investigating the veracity of following Christ should instead familiarize themselves with the things Jesus did command his followers to do, which included:

  1. Many of the beatitudes, from the start of his Sermon on the Mount, describe the kind of attitude we should all have in relation to God and others–for example, be merciful and pure in heart; be peacemakers (Matthew 5:3-11)
  2. Not only should we not murder, but we shouldn’t even be angry with one another (Matthew 5:21-26)
  3. Not only should we not commit adultery, we shouldn’t even look lustfully at someone other than our spouse (Matthew 5:27-30)
  4. Be trustworthy (Matthew 5:33-37)
  5. Don’t retailiate; instead, forgive and go above and beyond what is expected in helping one another (Matthew 5:38-42)
  6. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43-48)
  7. Give to those in need (Matthew 6:1-4)
  8. Forgive others the way God has forgiven us (Matthew 6:14-15)
  9. Do for others as you would have them do for you (Luke 6:31)
  10. Love others sacrificially, the way he loved us (John 13:34, John 15:12)

These commands obviously set the bar for appropriate behavior quite high. Do I meet them? Not on my best day! Does any Follower of Christ meet them completely? Nope.

So then, why bother trying, if nobody can meet such high standards??

Here is where Gandhi got it right: because this is the way Jesus acted, and if all of his followers did the same, the whole world would be Christian.

And here’s the really great news for me and for all Followers of Christ: Jesus has done all of the really hard work–all of the impossible work–for us. He lived a perfect life because we cannot. He died the punishing death we all deserve, sacrificing himself for us so that we could be restored into the relationship with God that he originally intended for us.

And here’s the truly amazing thing that so many people–those who are not followers of Christ–fail to grasp: God offers this extravagant gift of grace to them as well. Sadly, they do not recognize their need for it. My urgent prayer for you, if you fall into this category, is that you will realize this before it’s too late.

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Beyond Belief – The Truth

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

My wife gave me feedback that my last blog post was too long. I appreciate the feedback, and I have been concerned that the posts in this “Beyond Belief” series were too long, so I told her that my next post would be shorter.

I crack myself up….

(P.S. God bless you today!

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Jesus the Carpenter, John 8:32 (NIV)

The truth is there, hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to find it. All you have to do is look for it with honest, intellectual curiosity. Seek, the Teacher told us, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to the adventure of a lifetime.

David the Carpenter
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Beyond Belief – Did You Know Jesus Came to Start a Relationship, Not a Religion?

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

Two posts ago (“Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in Jesus and Science?“), I received the following comment from a blogger known as “Catxman”:

But then there are disasters that happen — large-scale and personal. The average person, stricken by a personal calamity in his life (death of a loved one, etc.), may shout out, “Why, God? Why have you done this to me?” The assumption seems to be that God is deliberately choosing every act on the planet. It probably is more accurate to guess that, if there is a God, he lets the cards fall where they may and steps back from their action.

—Catxman

There are a few things I wanted to talk about regarding this feedback, so that’s why I’m addressing it in a post of its own. First of all, I really appreciate the raw honesty of this reply. It doesn’t matter whether or not I agree with it, I appreciate the fact that he provided it. Now, on to the things I want to discuss relative to the comment, which I hope I do with the utmost respect.

Does God Exist? Oh Wait, What Was the Score of the Hockey Game?

Let me first start with the last part of the comment: “It probably is more accurate to guess that, if there is a God, he lets the cards fall where they may and steps back from their action.”

The implied question in the phrase “if there is a God” is the most important question each of us has to answer in our lifetimes. Why so important? Because the answer we give determines where we will spend eternity–with God in heaven or separated from God in hell. And as I’ve pointed out in previous posts, God would rather have everyone with him in heaven, but he gave us the free will to make our own decisions, including whether we want to be with him or separated from him.

Because how we answer the question of God’s existence is so important, I am frankly surprised how many people leave it hanging out there unanswered without bothering to investigate answers with honest intellectual curiosity. Most people spend a lot of time looking things up that have no eternal consequence: sports scores, stock prices, movie times, answers to trivial questions like what did this Hollywood star or politician or social media influencer say about this or that? In the long run–and I mean, in the really long run, as in eternity–who cares? And yet, people Google these things for hours, while at the same time spending little, if any, intellectual energy trying to figure out whether or not God exists.

Based on the criticality of your answer to this question, my hope and prayer for “Catxman” and anyone who is grappling with it is that you will spend the time and energy required to investigate and find the answer. There are many ways you can do this. I created a post earlier in this series that can help get you started: Beyond Belief – How Do We Know God Is Real?

But Wait, There’s More!

Now that we have addressed the most basic, urgent, and important question (“does God exist?”), I need to clarify something further, and I hope this is not diving too deep into theological concepts because there are distinctions that are important to understand. As it turns out, it is not enough to believe that there is a God. That is just the starting point. Let me explain. I’ll start by defining various terms you may have heard regarding various beliefs about God: atheism, deism, theism, agnosticism, and Christianity. Then I’ll explain why this matters.

Anyway, the first four beliefs are summarized nicely on Infoplease:

A theist believes there is a God who made and governs all creation; but does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation.

A deist believes there is a God who created all things, but does not believe in His superintendence and government. He thinks the Creator implanted in all things certain immutable laws, called the Laws of Nature, which act per se, as a watch acts without the supervision of its maker. Like the theist, he does not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, nor in a divine revelation.

The atheist disbelieves even the existence of a God. He thinks matter is eternal, and what we call “creation” is the result of natural laws.

The agnostic believes only what is knowable. He rejects revelation and the doctrine of the Trinity as “past human understanding.” He is neither theist, deist, nor atheist, as all these are past understanding.

Infoplease (emphasis added)

I have written at length in various posts about atheism. I believe that anyone who honestly examines the evidence with an open mind can only reach one logical and philosophical conclusion: that God is real. There are many people who have set out on this intellectual journey–even those who intended to prove that Christianity was a bunch of nonsense–who actually arrived at that conclusion. Some notable examples I’ve mentioned previously include journalist Lee Strobel and Oxford professor and author, C.S. Lewis, who ended up referring to himself as the most “dejected and reluctant convert” in all of England.

As you can see from the definitions above, it’s a long way to go to get from atheist to the point where you believe in God. Similarly, it’s an equally long distance to travel to get from believing there is a God to becoming a Follower of Christ. We will unpack that as we go.

Detour – Warts Growing on Christianity’s Face

Allow me to take a couple little detours here for a moment. First, I know I have pointed, both here and in other posts, to people who have taken the intellectual journey to determine whether they believe in God’s existence. I use them as examples of the investigation anyone should undertake if they wish to receive a certain level of informed certainty. You may push back on me, pointing to one of many examples of Christians behaving in ways that are contrary to what you would expect or hope. Catxman, for instance, said in his post “A NEW MESSIAH, A NEW PROPHET“, that “Christianity has a ton of warts growing on its face these days.” He points out the “mega-millions mansion of Joel Osteen” and includes other observations about Osteen that are not suitable to repeat in polite company. Another wart he mentions is the existence of cults that call themselves Christian but diverge from the teachings of Christ.

These concerns are perfectly valid. What I say to challenges like this is that we should not blame Christ for the inappropriate behavior of his followers. This is not an excuse, but a fact: we are all imperfect people with, as it turns out, imperfect understanding of important things like the Bible and, more specifically, Christ’s instructions to us. Such an imperfect understanding has led numerous people throughout history to do a lot of horrendous things in Jesus’s name–much worse than what you may think of Osteen’s ostentatious lifestyle or cults spinning off of Christianity. The crusades provide an easy example. Nowhere in the Bible do we see Christ telling us to go kill other people who do not believe in him. Nor does he provide such an example. On the contrary, Jesus is loving toward people who do not believe he is who he says he is. He is patient with them. He shows them endless patience, grace, and mercy. He prayed for the people who were killing him.

So if you are looking for examples of behavior, look at Jesus. He is what God looks like. You should not allow the behavior of imperfect humans to distract you from the important question about God. This has been a stumbling block for my younger daughter, so I continue to pray that someday she will be able to look past their bad behavior to see that’s not the way God intended for us to be.

Secondly, the other point I’d like to make on this little detour is that through this series, my intent is not to say that the only path to Christ is via intellectual exercises. There is definitely an emotional response required when you reach a certain point in your journey, passing beyond intellectual belief to faith. Some people can get there without a thorough intellectual investigation, and that is perfectly fine. Others–especially those who point to science or other reasons for not believing in God–need to do a deeper dive into the evidence before they can get there. And that’s fine, too. The point is that you need to do whatever you need to do to get yourself to the point where you make a specific decision to believe (or not believe) that God is real and interested in a personal relationship with you. A default answer is not good enough, not for a question this important.

Agnosticism – Believing Only What You Can Know

That brings me back to the definitions of the various ways of viewing God. Next to atheism, the other view that’s a complete mystery to me is agnosticism. If you limit your beliefs to only what is knowable, there are far more things you cannot believe in than just religious views. What makes something beautiful is unknowable, so evidently you cannot believe in beauty. Can anyone know what makes us love another person? Or what gives us hope? This must mean you can’t believe in love or hope. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, our natural instincts are for self-preservation. So how can you explain why many people perform selfless acts, putting others above themselves, even to the point of death? This must mean you cannot believe in selflessness then.

What’s even more difficult to understand is the idea of Christian agnosticism, a view to which my son claims to subscribe. But here’s the problem with this viewpoint: in order to call yourself a Christian, you need to believe all the teachings of Christ, who proclaimed himself part of the Trinity. But the Trinity is beyond human understanding, so it can’t be part of any agnostic viewpoint. Thus, the term Christian agnostic really is an oxymoron. It is perhaps a form of intellectual laziness–an acknowledgment that the question of God’s existence might be an important one, but a lack of willingness or energy to investigate to determine whether or not it’s true.

And here’s the thing: Jesus never gave us an option to sit on the fence about who he is. Either you believe everything he said and accept him as Lord and Saviour or you believe nothing he said and reject him as a fraud. He forces us to make a choice. And not to decide (as Christian agnostics would prefer) really is to decide. If you do not accept him, you have rejected him.

Deism and Theism

I’d like to return now to the comment from Catxman to cover a couple more thoughts that basically highlight deism and theism:

The assumption seems to be that God is deliberately choosing every act on the planet. It probably is more accurate to guess that, if there is a God, he lets the cards fall where they may and steps back from their action.

–Catxman

The first part of this quote is essentially what theists believe–that there is a God who is running the universe. However, because they do not accept the doctrine of the Trinity (i.e., they do not believe in Jesus), that means they do not believe in a personal God. This in turn implies that they believe that God is “out there somewhere” and cannot really be bothered caring about what happens to each of us individually.

Setting aside the “if there is a God” part of the second sentence (which I dealt with earlier), this sentiment leans more to the deist point of view, which basically says that God created the universe and then walked away from it to let it run its course. Whatever happens, happens. He may not know what happens, and he certainly doesn’t care.

While both of these points of view are closer to the truth than atheism, they are hardly more comforting. In fact, they are probably more disturbing than the bleak opinion that there is no God at all, since accompanying these viewpoints is undoubtedly also a picture of a judgment at the end of our lives being made by a vengeful, angry God who would like nothing more than to cast us all into the fiery lake of hell. Yikes! No wonder people who have such a view of God prefer not to think of him at all!

A Better Way – a Personal God

Thankfully, there is another option. Jesus, as the fulfillment of all the prophecies about the coming Messiah in the Old Testament, shows us a God who is neither distant nor uncaring. On the contrary, Jesus shows us a God that is, to be certain, disturbed by the mess humanity has made of itself, but instead of shrugging his shoulders and doing nothing to help us make it right, he devises a plan to rescue us. This plan involves having one part of the Trinity–Jesus, the Son–leave heaven to become a regular person for a while. This is the very definition of a personal God.

To that point, Jesus walked among us so he could enter into a relationship with us. He ate dinner with regular people. He camped with his buddies. He had compassion for and healed sick people. He taught ordinary folks right where they were, not requiring them to put on fancy clothes to come to the temple to hear him speak.

The only thing he did that even remotely resembled a religious ritual was to teach people an example of how to pray (known as “the Lord’s Prayer”). And he did this not to provide a formula to get God to do what we want, but to show us that when we talk to God, it’s supposed to be a conversation. I mean, he started it off with the loose equivalent of “Hey Dad”. Of course, he did many other things that have turned into religious rituals, but that was not his intent.

Religion vs. Relationship

All this is to say that Jesus did not come here to start a religion. He came to renew our relationship with God, since we had strayed so far from the way he had intended it to be. Genesis 2 describes Adam and Eve hanging out with God in the Garden of Eden. They truly seemed to enjoy each other’s company.

But the evil one tricked Adam and Eve away from this fellowship with God. And over several millennia, Satan had dragged humanity farther and farther away from Eden. Farther and farther away from God. So far, in fact, that when Jesus came down to walk among us and show us the way back to God, most people failed to recognize him. And many people today are still making the same mistake, with dire eternal consequences.

What looks like a religion to us–what is commonly referred to as Christianity–is mostly a set of rituals that are human interpretations of what we think Jesus told us to do. I am not saying there is anything wrong with fellowshipping with other Followers of Christ (which includes what people usually call “going to church”). What I am saying, though, is that we must not take a good thing like that and make it the ultimate thing. We must not trade a relationship with God for religion, for that is the very thing God wants us to avoid. In fact, that was pretty much the only thing that made Jesus angry during his time on earth–religious people over the centuries had morphed what had started as a relationship with God into a set of hundreds of rules, which were impossible for any ordinary person to follow.

That’s religion.

Picture this instead: Jesus sits across the table from you, his piercing gaze disarming you. You’re having dinner with him the night before he is going to be executed. He hands you a piece of warm bread and tells you that it’s his body, and asks you to remember him whenever you have a meal like this. Maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you right now, but you take it and eat it. Then he hands you a cup of wine. It’s his blood, he tells you, which he is spilling for you, to show you the way back to God. He asks you to think of him whenever you drink wine like this in the future. Also a mystery at this point, but you shrug and drink it anyway. He looks you straight in the eye and tells you he has really enjoyed his time with you–that he loves you, in fact–but now he has to go.

That’s relationship.

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Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe Jesus Is the Only Way to God?

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

Continuing our series on Christian apologetics (being able to explain and defend our faith to those seeking to understand it or complaining about how outdated and ridiculous it is), let’s turn our attention today to another stumbling block some people have with the claims of Christianity: the assertion that Jesus is the one and only way to God the Father. In today’s relativistic society, which has hijacked pluralism to its benefit, such a claim is viewed as narrow-minded, ignorant, and arrogant.

What do I mean by that? According to Meriam-Webster.com, one of the definitions is:

A state of society in which members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups maintain and develop their traditional culture or special interest within the confines of a common civilization

Meriam-Webster.com definition of Pluralism

What this means is that everyone should be able to coexist peacefully regardless of whether or not we agree with one another. Remember those good old days? Republicans and Democrats used to be able to have thoughtful conversations about politics without resorting to hateful vitriol. Christians used to be able to discuss differences between their denominations while still respecting those differences. Same thing across religious boundaries. Sadly, not any more.

But it gets worse, thanks to relativism. In today’s relativistic culture, people reject any claim of absolute truth (which I discussed in more depth in a previous post in this series, “Beyond Belief – Do You Believe in Truth and Morality? Absolutely!“). Of course, they miss the irony in the fact that rejecting a claim of absolute truth is itself a claim of absolute truth.

What’s the difference between relative truth and absolute truth? Here are some examples of each.

Relative Truths (also known as Subjective Truths)

  • Chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla ice cream
  • Dogs are better pets than cats, rodents, or reptiles
  • Ice hockey is the most exciting sport
  • The Colorado Avalanche are the best team in the NHL and will win the Stanley Cup
  • (those were some easy ones to warm up…)
  • Donald Trump was the best President in my lifetime
  • Donald Trump was the worst President in my lifetime
  • Joe Biden is the best President since Donald Trump
  • Joe Biden is the worst President since Donald Trump
  • Jesus was a great moral teacher
  • There are many different paths that lead to God
  • As long as I’m a good person, I should be able to get into heaven
  • All of the world religions’ core beliefs are pretty much the same

Absolute Truths

  • The sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west because of the direction of the earth’s rotation
  • The speed of sound in room-temperature air is about 1125 feet/second or 343 meters/second
  • The speed of light is about 186,000 miles/second
  • The earth is the third plant from the sun, which is about 93,000,000 miles away
  • An object dropped at sea level acclerates at 32 feet/second2 or 9.8 meters/second2
  • (those were some easy ones to warm up…)
  • There is a personal God, who created us to be in relationship with Him
  • Due to humanity’s fallen, sinful condition, which was brought about by Adam and Eve listening to Satan in the Garden of Eden, God devised a plan to reconcile us back to him
  • God’s plan to bridge the gap between us and himself that was caused by our sin was to send Jesus–the Son within the trinity–to take the punishment we deserve
  • Because of this, accepting Jesus as Lord, and thus accepting his gift of forgiveness, is the only way to be reconciled to God

Relative truths used to be known as opinions, but in this relativistic society, people say things like, What’s true for me is true for me, and (maybe) what’s true for you is true for you. You get “brownie points” if you believe your truths very earnestly and vocally.

But here’s the thing: if I get behind the wheel of a run-down car with all kinds of warning lights flashing, it doesn’t matter how earnestly I believe that car is safe. The brakes or engine or something else may fail, regardless of how strongly I believe that should not happen.

Absolute truths, on the other hand, are verifiable. They are true whether you believe them or not. They are true whether you understand them or not. More on this later.

How Relativism Has Poisoned Pluralism

Pluralism was and is foundational to the fabric of this country. It’s on our currency: “e pluribus unum”–from the many, one. The idea is that everyone could live in community with other people regardless of whether or not everyone held the same religious or political beliefs and without regard to any other differences. Even though this hasn’t always gone as well as it should have, it nevertheless enabled this country to soar to prominence on the world’s stage in a comparatively short period of time.

But one key aspect of pluralism that is overlooked these days is that we don’t all have to agree on everything in order to do life together. Unfortunately, this sentiment is eroding quickly, set ablaze by protests and hateful political speech (from both sides of the aisle), with fuel added to the fire by cowardly social media posts.

Taken one step further, relativism has poisoned pluralism by making it seem as though all views are equally valid. Now, when it comes to flavors of ice cream and even political ideologies, a case could be made that at least most views are equally valid (although, I have to admit it would be challenging to convince me that views on either extreme end of the political spectrum are healthy for any society–but, I digress). However, when it comes to religious ideologies, all views are not equally valid.

And this brings me to the main point of today’s episode–talk about a long introduction!

Jesus Is the Way, the Truth, and the Life

How can you claim something like that, you narrow-minded, ignorant, arrogant Christian?? Jesus never really claimed to be the only path to God!

Well, I can claim it because it’s what Jesus said about himself, including that he is the only way to God:

Borrowed from YouVersion

“No one comes to the Father except through me.” Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that….

And just in case you don’t want to take Jesus’s word for it, you can see what the Apostle Peter said about Jesus when speaking to the group of Jewish religious leaders known as the Sanhedrin:

Borrowed from YouVersion

Or if you prefer the Apostle Paul’s writings, see what he said to his son in the faith, Timothy:

Borrowed from YouVersion

Now let’s go back to my last several examples of absolute truth:

  • There is a personal God, who created us to be in relationship with Him
  • Due to humanity’s fallen, sinful condition, which was brought about by Adam and Eve listening to Satan in the Garden of Eden, God devised a plan to reconcile us back to him
  • God’s plan to bridge the gap between us and himself that was caused by our sin was to send Jesus–the Son within the trinity–to take the punishment we deserve
  • Because of this, accepting Jesus as Lord, and thus accepting his gift of forgiveness, is the only way to be reconciled to God

I got even bolder by then asserting that these things are all verifiable. How? you may be wondering. The first part of the list was a bunch of scientific facts that most likely none of us would dispute even though probably none of us could personally verify any of them. Well then, how can we believe they are true? The answer is simple: with some careful, intellectually honest investigation, we would be able to locate enough research findings from credible sources to substantiate that those facts are very likely true.

Well, the answer is the same regarding the second part of the list. Each of the facts in that list come straight from the Bible (if you’d like to check them out and need help finding them, leave a comment and I will be happy to show you where to find them). How do you know the Bible is true? Good question. Please see my post in this series on that topic, Beyond Belief – How Can You Possibly Believe the Bible Is True? The Bible has more historical and archeological validation than the foundational document for any other world religion as well as many other commonly accepted historical documents.

Can’t I Believe Christianity *and* Other Faiths, Too?

Let’s go back to an idea I listed as a relative truth: All of the world religions’ core beliefs are pretty much the same. Even though some people claim it as an absolute truth, it is as ridiculous as it is unverifiable. There are fundamental beliefs in each of the world’s five major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam) that stand in direct contradiction to beliefs in one or more of the other religions. For example, Christians believe in eternal life, but Buddhists believe there is no life after death. So there is no reasonable, intelligent way to try to smash all of the world religions together into a single box. Any devout practitioner of any of those religions would tell you the same thing–you can’t possibly combine their faith with any other religion.

So the short answer is, No, you can’t believe what Jesus said and any of the other world religions at the same time.

But What About People Who Have Never Heard of Jesus? Does This Mean They Can’t Go To Heaven?

These are very good questions. You can add to them, What about children who die young or while in their mother’s womb? Unfortunately, there are no good answers to these questions. In fact, these topics are debated–sometimes hotly–within the Christian church. But just because no human being has good answers does not mean there aren’t any. Without a doubt, God has good answers. He never promised to make everything abundantly clear to us, at least not on this side of heaven. In fact, he pretty much guaranteed that we would not understand everything about him when he said:

As the heavens are higher than the earth,so are my ways higher than your waysand my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:9 (NIV)

Having said that, though, I can tell you that God would rather not exclude anyone from heaven, and certainly not because of where or when they were born or how young they were when they died. We can see this by the way Jesus interacted with people–and if there’s something we don’t understand about God, it’s always a safe bet to look at Jesus as a way to try to understand God. Jesus touched untouchable people. He hung out with tax collectors and sinners. He knelt down in the dirt to be face-to-face with a woman caught in adultery as he saved her in a most unlikely way. He pointed to a hated Roman soldier as an example of faith above the religious leaders around him. He prayed for the people who were torturing him to death.

Does this sound like a God who wouldn’t have a plan for saving people who never heard the Good News of Jesus Christ?

I believe–and this is just my belief, so please don’t ask me for details regarding this transaction, or where to find it in the Bible–that somehow, before God determines the ultimate destination for each person who never had the opportunity to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ, he gives them the chance to hear the message of the Gospel in a way that they would understand. Since God knows our hearts, he will be able to discern if they truly accept the gift of grace being offered. And if they accept it, they are granted access into heaven. Those who reject it, like the people who hear the Gospel during their earthly life but reject it, will spend eternity separated from God–that is, in hell.

The one little hint about this to me is the Parable of the Vineyard Workers, which Jesus tells in Matthew 20:1-16. This is the story where workers who were hired one hour before quitting time get paid the same wage as people who worked the entire day in the hot sun. Among other things, Jesus tells us that story as way to say, The decision about who goes to heaven may not seem fair by your standards–deal with it. In other words, those of us who have spent many years following Christ may have a tendency to think it’s not fair that someone who truly accepts Jesus as their Lord and Savior moments before their death, or even in the instant they pass from life to death (for those who did not have the opportunity to hear the Gospel during their earthly life), gets the same heavenly reward as we get.

But through the vineyard owner in the story, Jesus poignantly ends the parable with this question: are you envious because I am generous? (Matthew 20:15, NIV).

So even though we are accused of being narrow-minded, ignorant, and arrogant when we make what seems to be an exclusive assertion that Jesus is the only way to God, we are only restating the generous offer that God makes to everyone. Jesus is the way to the life–now and into eternity–that God makes available to anyone who will accept this beautiful, priceless gift.

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Beyond Belief – How Can You Believe in Jesus and Science?

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

There is a common thought in modern western culture these days that is so pervasive as to be accepted as fact in many circles: religion is superstition, myth, or something contrived to aid simple-minded people in trying to understand the world around them. And what is the modern counterpart most commonly pointed to as the knight in shining armor that ushered in the golden age of enlightenment and which showed intelligent people that there is a better way to understand the world? Science. For example, Dr. Jerry Coyne, atheist professor, author, and evolutionary biologist, said:

Science and faith are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth. And while they may have a dialogue, it’s not a constructive one. Science helps religion only by disproving its claims, while religion has nothing to add to science.

Dr. Jerry Coyne

The trouble with assertions like this in modern culture is that they become accepted–without being challenged or even examined particularly carefully–into the vernacular as established fact. If you do challenge it in intellectual conversation, you are generally scoffed at because of your irrationality. The irony is lost on those people, though, that a failure to examine such assertions is itself irrational. I would be interested to know how much Dr. Coyne really studied the form of inquiry associated with religion. Did he do so with an open mind, willing to reshape his mindset if the facts supported a point of view different from his preconceived notion? I can guess the answer.

Here I should reiterate something I’ve stated previously. I am emphatically not saying that I have a problem with science or scientists. I am not here to prove that only religion is the source of truth or that science is the devil’s playbook. What I am here to do is to challenge the assertion that you cannot believe that both science and religion point to important truths in our lives.

First off, there have been throughout history, and there continues to be today, very intelligent scientists who have also been Christ-followers, from Blaise Pascal (brilliant 17th-century mathematician and philosopher) to Dr. Francis Collins (brilliant modern-day physician and geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and was head of the National Institute of Health). However, to be fair, and lest we fall into the same logical trap of Dr. Coyne and others who accept unchallenged assertions as fact, it’s also important to note that exceptions to an assertion do not prove it to be incorrect. In other words, no matter how many intelligent scientists I can point to who are also followers of Christ, that does not disprove Dr. Coyne’s assertion that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible.

Instead, we need to turn to science and religion themselves. I believe that there are at least 4 different scientific disciplines that are not only compatible with Christianity, but even go so far as to support and substantiate claims of the faith. Let’s take a look at those in the following sections.

Archeology

As I mentioned in a previous post in this series, “Beyond Belief – How Can You Possibly Believe the Bible Is True?“, archeologist Sir William Ramsay actually set out to disprove the Bible, but ended up converting to Christianity after finding extensive archeological evidence supporting claims in the Bible. Also, in his 1959 book Rivers in the Desert, a History of the Negev, noted Jewish archeologist Nelson Glueck said:

It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible.

Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert, a History of the Negev

Since I have already covered this elsewhere, in the interest of time, let’s move on to the next one.

Cosmology

Cosmology is the science of the study of the origins of the universe. Referring to what has become a widely accepted belief by most scientists, that the universe had a single beginning at a point in time, Dr. Alexander Vilenkin, Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, stated:

With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

Dr. Alexander Vilenkin

Why is this a problem? Well, it’s only a problem if you’re an atheist. If it’s true that the universe had a beginning–and science seems to be nearly unanimous in acceptance of this assertion–then there must have been something that started it. This logical argument has come to be known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which states:

  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause behind it.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Journalist and author Lee Strobel gave a talk describing this very well. What kind of force, he asks, can bring a universe into existence out of nothing?

  • It must itself be uncaused, because you can’t have an infinite regress of causes
  • It must be immaterial–or spirit–because it existed before the material world existed
  • It must be eternal because it created time
  • It must be smart and powerful because of the precision and power of the creation event
  • It must be personal and have a personal will, because it needed to make the decision to create

This is a pretty good start at describing God. Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr. Arno Penzias put it this way:

If I had no other data than the early chapters of Genesis, some of the Psalms, and other passages of Scripture, I would have arrived at essentially the same picture of the origin of the universe, as is indicated by the scientific data.

Dr. Arno Penzias

Moving on, then, to the next scientific discipline.

Physics

As Lee Strobel states:

The laws and constants of physics conspire in an absolutely unexpected and extraordinary way to create a world where life is possible.

Lee Strobel

There are about 50 different physical cosmological constants that govern our universe and our world–gravity, for example. Each one of those constants had to be fine-tuned to a very specific value in order for life to exist. If gravity were just a little bit weaker, everything trying to inhabit this planet would have just floated away; if it were a little bit stronger, it would have squashed everything that tried to come into existence. So with 50 different variables at work, there are trillions of different combinations of all of those values–but only one set of them would allow for this planet to exist, and for life to thrive on it. The precision required for this world and this universe to exist the way it does is beyond the realm of possibility that it could all have happened by chance.

As stated by Dr. Vera Kistiakowsky, former professor of physics at MIT and former president of the Association of Women in Science:

QUOTES BY VERA KISTIAKOWSKY | A-Z Quotes
Borrowed from azquotes.com: https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-the-exquisite-order-displayed-by-our-scientific-understanding-of-the-physical-world-vera-kistiakowsky-58-72-47.jpg

Let’s turn to the final scientific discipline to take a look at its cogency with a belief in God.

Biology / Genetics

Earlier I mentioned Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project. He wrote a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. And that’s exactly what DNA is–it is an intentional code, a language, that uniquely defines each of the 7+ billion people who inhabit this planet. To think that the way the 4 characters representing the chemical alphabet that make up our genes are combined in a unique way for every single person could have happened randomly is too far-fetched. Each of the 100 trillion cells in our bodies contains exactly the same sequence of those characters.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer put it more concisely and accurately in his book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. A former geophysicist and college professor and current Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, he put it this way in the book:

With odds standing at 1 chance in 10164 of finding a functional protein among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability is 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of ten) smaller than the probability of finding the marked particle in the whole universe. Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe.

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Now that’s a lot of trillions!

Conclusion

In conclusion, far from being incompatible with faith, we have seen several different scientific disciplines that seem to point to our Creator. Any honest, intellectually curious person willing to examine the evidence with an open mind and the scientific method should reach the same conclusion. Dr. James Tour, a leading molecular scientist from Rice University, said:

I stand in awe of God because of what he has done through his creation. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science it will bring you closer to God.

Dr. James Tour

I’ll close with one more little story. Dr. Antony Flew was a professor at several universities, including Oxford, and a lifelong atheist. However, in 2004, he shocked the world when he reversed the beliefs he had held for more than 50 years. In 2007, he published a book called There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. In this book, he said:

I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.

Dr. Antony Flew, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, borrowed from Goodreads.com

After reading this article, I hope you will understand why I and so many people like me believe there is a cogency between faith and science. It seems to be the only logical conclusion.

Let me close with two more quotes from Dr. Francis Collins:

Pin on Intelligent Design
Borrowed from interest
Francis Collins Quotes (54 wallpapers) - Quotefancy
Borrowed from quotefancy.com
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Beyond Belief – Is Jesus Really Divine?

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

Let me start today with a prayer that I will speak (write) respectfully and truthfully regarding a comment I received on a post I made a couple months back, earlier in this series on apologetics (explaining your faith to non-believers in a way that makes sense): Beyond Belief – What the Heck is the Trinity? Is God Three or Is He One? Some of the pastors at my church (New Life Church) pray before their sermons that God will allow them to get out of the way so that the words of their mouth reflect God’s truth, and that’s my prayer for the words of my hands here as well.

OK, so I know I touched on the topic of the divinity of Jesus in the aforementioned post on the trinity, but it is because of this comment that I want to come back to the concept in a little more detail. To give you some context, I originally thought I would post a response about this last week. After prayerful consideration, though, I felt like God was leading me to write the post I did. Further, I had 3 concerns about addressing this comment, which I’ll address one-by-one:

  1. Back to a previous post about pride, I was concerned that my motivation for addressing the comment was about me and my need to be right. God and my wife have helped me grow considerably in this area, but it has always been a thorn in my flesh. I didn’t think that was my motivation for wanting to respond, but I also originally thought it would be best to stay away from it just in case. Now, however, I feel like God has kept bringing me back to this topic, figuratively barfing me up on the shores of Nineveh the way he did to Jonah.
  2. I think one thing that may be turning non-believers away from the church and making them not want to even investigate the truth of Christianity is all the Followers of Christ behaving badly on social media and in everyday life–have you ever been cut off or even flipped off by someone with a fish symbol on their car (yes and yes for me, sadly)? The last thing I wanted to do was perpetuate that by being seen as arguing with someone over doctrine. However, what I kept coming back to over this week is that the divinity of Jesus is central to being a Christian. If this were about what happens during communion or infant vs. adult baptism, I would have left it alone. However, if you cannot accept the divinity of Jesus, then your faith is not a Christian faith. God reminded me this week how at the start of my faith journey, I was almost tricked by the evil one into becoming a Jehovah’s Witness–a faith that dances around the edges of Christianity, but never quite gets there since they do not acknowledge that Jesus is part of the Triune God. I will unpack this in more detail in this post.
  3. The comment was made by a blogger with the handle “belgianbiblestudents“. I looked at the blog, and it seems that this person or group of people are fairly well entrenched in their beliefs. Meaning, I felt like there would be little (if any) advancement of God’s Kingdom by rebutting the comment since it seems highly unlikely that my words will move him/her/them to change their minds. However, God brought me back to my situation. When I was exploring the truth or fiction of the trinity, there was no such thing as the internet, so it did not impact my investigation. However, today’s world is totally different. What God reminded me of is that it may not be for me to know if or how or when my words may impact someone. It could be that one of these students invites me over to Belgium (I wish! or maybe more possible, suggests we get on a Zoom call) so we can discuss our interpretations of the Bible. Or more likely, someone else next week or next month or 10 years from now is grappling with that very same problem and God leads them to this blog post, and through His grace, He opens their eyes to the truth. I don’t know, and it’s not for me to know.

OK, so here we go. First I will quote the comment, then respond to it.

You write about the Trinity “This is one of those aspects of Christianity that is both foundational and, at the same time, just beyond our ability to fully comprehend.” but it is something incomprehensible because such a false teaching makes no sense at all and contradicts the Biblical teaching that there is only one God Who is one and no man can see, while Jesus has been seen by several people and is not eternal and has been declared by God, who does not speak lies, as His beloved son.

God has never presented himself to mankind as Jesus, nor has Jesus ever demanded equality with God nor said he was God. Contrary, whilst God is an eternal Spirit, Jesus had a birth (a beginning) and really died (God cannot die) After his resurrection he clearly said he was no spirit (like his heavenly father is a Spirit).

In Scriptures is also clearly indicated that Jesus was first lower than angels, but Jehovah God was, is and always shall be the highest. Jesus is now sitting next to God, i.e. not on God’s throne, but at God His side. The Bible tells us also that Jesus is now a highpriest before God and the mediator between God and man. In case Jesus would be God he can not be those two previous mentioned characters.

You indicate that it does not matter to what sort of god we address ourselves. But it matters very much. We may only have one God. Jesus prepared the way to come directly to that God and as such, recognising Jesus act, we should come close to his and our God Who is One and not two or three.

Belgian Bible Students

The way I would like to address this is by unpacking what the Bible says about God and Jesus the Messiah, starting with the Old Testament (what God the Father said about this), the Gospels (what Jesus himself said), and the rest of the New Testament (what Paul and other people who knew Jesus said about him).

What the Old Testament Says

To begin with, one thing that some people point to when refuting the trinity is Deuteronomy 6:4, which is also known in Judaism as the start of the Shema prayer (one of only two prayers commanded in the Torah):

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Deuteronomy 6:4 (NIV)

So if God is one, how can anyone sensibly think there is such a thing as a Triune God? Don’t those stand in conflict? No, not at all. For one thing, one of the most common words used for God in the Hebrew Testament is “Elohim“, which is a plural word, not singular. Also, going back to the very beginning of the Bible for another interesting reference to a God who is plural:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Genesis 1:26 (NIV, emphasis added)

Hmm, interesting that God is referring to Himself in the plural pronouns, “us” and “our”. If God is not also plural in nature, who is He talking to or about? Who else’s image besides the singular God would He be referring to?

Does this mean that the entire Bible must be false due to this apparent contradiction? No. It means that God is one in essence, but represented by more than one person.

Here’s a similar example from the Hebrew Testament:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Isaiah 6:8 (NIV, emphasis added)

We can also turn our attention to Hebrew prophesy, of which there are many examples that point to fulfillment in Jesus. Don’t worry, I won’t list them all, just this example, which helps substantiate the case from God’s word:

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 (NIV, emphasis added)

So wait a minute, Isaiah–are you saying that a child, a son, will be born, and he will be called Mighty God, Everlasting Father? How would that possible for those who will not acknowledge that God is one in essence but represented by more than one entity–a Father and a son in this verse? I could go on, but I am already running long here. Not to mention bringing the Holy Spirit into the equation–but the comment seemed to be more focused on the non-deity of Christ, so I will stay targeted on that. Let’s move on to the Gospels, taking a look at the things Jesus said about himself.

What Jesus Says in the Gospels

Jesus made quite a number of claims about himself, many of which were considered blasphemous by the Jewish leaders of his day–meaning they felt he was equating himself with God. Ultimately, this is why they had him executed.

The Jews who were there gathered around him, saying, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

John 10:24-30 (NIV, emphasis added)

Here we see Jesus’s teaching style–he prefers that we grapple with tough issues and questions, so he rarely states anything bluntly or plainly. So let us not think that because he never directly says, “I am God,” that he does not mean that in other things he says. In this very passage, in fact, he says, “I and the Father are one.” Even though he is not directly saying that he is God, he is essentially making the same claim indirectly. There are many other such examples. Before I list some of those, though, let me address one place where some people–those who claim that Jesus never believed he was God–point out that they believe Jesus is stating that he is less than God:

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

John 14:26

They say that since the Father had to send the Holy Spirit, Jesus is conceding that he could not send the Spirit himself. However, the Apostle Paul clarifies this in his letter to the Philippians:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his
own advantage
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

Philippians 2:5-7

OK, I know I’m jumping ahead a little bit to the section where we review important things other Biblical authors said about Jesus, but I wanted to address this directly. Here we see the explanation from Paul that Jesus chose to assume a lesser human nature so he could walk alongside us into the mess of our lives. Ours is the only system of beliefs in which the worshipped god set aside his royal robes and godly powers to become one of us.

Now, back to other bold claims of deity Jesus made about himself (all references in NIV):

  • When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12. This is something a first-century rabbi would never have claimed about himself unless it were true, due to the blasphemous implication.
  • Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
    “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
    Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. John 6:32-35 (emphasis added). The second statement coming after the first one points to the fact that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying–he is the bread of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
  • “Very truly I tell you,”Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. John 8:58-59. Why are they trying to stone him? Because he used the same words to refer to himself as God used when speaking with Moses through the burning bush (see Exodus 3:14).
  • Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? John 14:9 (emphasis added).
  • Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”
    “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” John 10:31-33. Yet another example where the Jewish leaders in Jesus’s time wanted to execute him because they understood clearly that he was claiming to be God.
  • Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”
    “I am,”said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Mark 14:61b-62. Jesus here, being the Old Testament scholar that he was, was referring directly to himself in his quoting of Daniel’s prophesy in Daniel 7:13-14 (“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.”).
  • “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” Matthew 28:19. Notice that Jesus does not say baptizing them in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Meaning that although they are different persons, they are collectively part of the Triune God, therefore they share the same name.
  • When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” Luke 5:20. Jesus would obviously have known that only God can forgive sins.
  • Jesus declared his omnipotence by raising Lazarus (John 11:43). He declared his omniscience when he said to Peter, “This very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times” (Matthew 26:34). Jesus claimed his omnipresence by telling his disciples he would be with them “to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). He also would have known that these characteristics are only associated with God.

What Other New Testament People Said

I will try to be brief here, but there is plenty of material to choose from (just read all of Paul’s epistles!). Let’s start with what his disciple, Thomas (usually referred to as “Doubting Thomas”), said about Jesus. The first time Thomas encounters Jesus after his resurrection, Jesus invites him to place his fingers in his wounds. In John 20:28, Thomas says to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus would have known that it would be considered blasphemous not to rebuke Thomas, but instead of doing that, Jesus commends him, saying, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Moving on to one of Jesus’s closest friends and followers, Peter. Jesus asks his disciples who the people say that he is. After they answered, he asks a more pointed question, which Peter answers. “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Mark 8:29.

Here are some other references (all NIV):

  • “…while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ…” Titus 2:13
  • In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1
  • The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. Hebrews 1:3
  • Paul consistently refers to Jesus as LORD, using the Old Testament reference “YHWH” (see Romans 10:13, 1 Cor 1:31, 1 Cor 2:16, 1 Cor 10:26, and 2 Cor 10:17 for a few examples)
  • Paul makes frequent references to the pre-existence of Jesus (1 Cor 8:6, 1 Cor 10:4, 1 Cor 15:47, 2 Cor 8:9, Galatians 4:4, to name a few examples)
  • Paul refers to Jesus as Creator in 1 Cor 8:6: “yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”

I know I have not covered every point made by Belgian Bible Students, but I think and hope that I have at least been able to address the central idea of the divinity of Jesus.

Now the thing I wonder is, how can you believe some of what Jesus says, but not all of it? You need to believe that Jesus was and is who he says he is–divine Lord who is part of the Triune God–or else you need to regard him as either a crazy person or an evil liar, so you should not believe a word he says. Jesus did not leave us any middle ground on this choice, nor did he plan to.

So what about you? Who do you say that Jesus is? May God bless your decision since it’s the most important one you will ever make, and the only one with eternal consequences. Choose wisely!

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Beyond Belief – Is There Really Life After Death?

Posted on January 10, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

With Christmas, New Year’s, and the associated celebrations now squarely in the rearview mirror, let’s return our attention back to the series on Christian apologetics (defending or explaining the faith in a way that makes sense to others who don’t have the background) we started last year. This time, I’d like to address the question of whether there really is an afterlife, or is this concept simply made up as wishful thinking? Is heaven for real, as the book by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent claims it is?

There’s something I’d like to point out as we get started that really applies to many of the topics we have covered and will cover in this series. There are people who do not believe in God or heaven because, they say, we cannot scientifically prove that they are real. And I know I have on occasion sneered at science as an ersatz god, but I should clarify that I do not have any problem with science (I do, after all, have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science).

The problem comes when people revere science as the ultimate source of truth. In actual science (not what some people call science without actually understanding science or the scientific method), the burden of proof is bi-directional–if you cannot prove the “A” is true, it does not necessarily follow that this makes “B” true by default. You must prove that “B” is true on its own merits, or else you cannot conclude that it is true. In other words, while it’s true that you cannot prove that God and heaven are real scientifically, that does not necessarily mean they are not true, as some people assume.

Today’s culture seems to believe that the burden of proof lies with Christianity to prove that its claims are true, but people who buy into this fail to realize that they are ignoring the scientific method since you also cannot prove scientifically that God and heaven are not real. As a discipline, science is inconclusive on these topics. Thus, anyone wishing to perform an honest intellectual investigation into the existence of God and heaven must turn to other disciplines for answers, such as philosophy, theology, history, archeology, psychology, and so on.

Having established that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of heaven, let’s move on. As we all know, there are plenty of stories like that of 4-year-old Colton Burpo told in the book I mentioned above, Heaven Is for Real, in which someone is clinically dead, has an out-of-body experience, and is brought back to life. They often have stories to tell that include specific details that are difficult to explain away scientifically. But I’m not going to get into all that.

Instead, we’re going to look at the words of Jesus himself. In previous episodes, we’ve laid the foundation of the historicity and factualness of the Bible, that it’s more trustworthy than just about any other ancient historical document. We’ve also established several facts about Jesus, including his deity as part of the triune God.

This passage is found in Mark 12. A group of Sadducees, the most powerful of the Jewish religious leaders, had approached Jesus with a riddle:

Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. At the resurrection, whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

Mark 12:18-23 (NIV)

These guys think they’ve really tricked Jesus with this one. But they don’t know Jesus very well. Here’s how he responds:

Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”

Jesus, in Mark 12:24-27 (NIV)

I have to admit, the first part of his response is a bit puzzling, but I don’t want to skip past it just because it’s challenging (if that were the case, I would not have started this series on Christian apologetics in the first place!). But since this isn’t central to today’s message, let me try to explain it briefly, then move on. Here is my understanding of this. The Biblical purpose of marriage is to procreate, and that’s also the reason for the section in the Mosaic law the Sadducees referred to (to keep family lines going). In heaven, though, there is no need to procreate since there will be no death, so we will be like the angels in that we will not be married. However, I do believe that in heaven, we will continue to have (or resume) deep, close personal relationships with our spouses. So it will be like we’re married. Fair enough?

OK, so moving on to the part where Jesus corrects their understanding of the dead rising. He refers to the story of Moses speaking to God in the burning bush told in Exodus 3:6. You’ve gotta love his last two statements. God is the God of the living, not of the dead. Then, You are badly mistaken! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to end an argument that way!

So, according to Jesus, if you do not believe in life after death, you are badly mistaken.

Another thing I wanted to bring up here is a compelling observation from C.S. Lewis regarding the afterlife in Mere Christianity. There he says that many people may not really feel a desire for heaven because they have not been properly educated about it. Our education, he says, tends to fix our minds on things of this world. Thus, people may fail to recognize that some of the longings they have cannot be satisfied by anything in this world. They may try to fulfill those longings in multiple ways, but everything comes up short. Lewis points out that there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact and one right way.

The first is what he calls “the Fool’s Way”, in which the person feeling this emptiness puts all the blame on the things s/he tried to fulfill the longings with. If, for example, s/he had married a different spouse or pursued a different career, then he would not be feeling so empty. The person’s emptiness is entirely the fault of the person they chose to marry or the career they picked for themself.

The second is “the Way of the Disillusioned ‘Sensible Man'”, in which the person gives up on their longings and thinks it rather silly and childish that they had those longings in the first place.

The third is “the Christian Way.” Instead of trying to summarize it, let me instead include Lewis’ brilliant observation:

The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’

Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (pp. 136-137). HarperOne. Kindle Edition

I have another thought along these lines. In my Bible study group this evening, we discussed Psalms 23 and 121, both of which state rather poetically and confidently how God will protect us from harm. One person in our group pointed out, though, that God does not always protect us from harm, so he can see how people would find this misleading. Sometimes Christ-followers die in random accidents, and some are even killed because of the work they are doing for God’s Kingdom. Where was God’s protection for them?

To me, this comes back to a difference in perspective.

From our worldly view, God was absent, or maybe distracted (running the universe must be a busy job, after all). This causes us to shake our angry fists at God–Where were You when my loved one died? So much for this promise of Your protection! This crisis of faith can, at best, cause a prolonged period of desert wandering for a Christ-follower or, at worst, even cause people to turn their backs on God altogether.

However, as I mentioned in a post almost a year ago (Gone Too Soon), God’s perspective is focused on eternity. While He cares about what happens to us every day, He cares infinitely more where we will spend our eternity. So if we have to endure pain and suffering and persecution in this life to direct us onto a path where we spend eternity in heaven, that’s OK with Him. He does not necessarily protect us from scrapes and bruises, or even from disease and death–but He does protect us from the evil one, who tries daily to tempt us onto the enticing, wide path that leads straight to hell. I know it may not be very comforting, but when you compare the relatively short duration of our lifetimes to eternity, this does seem to be the better choice.

How does this support the case for the existence of heaven? If we look at God’s promise of protection from our earthly perspective–meaning, if this life is all there is–then you could only conclude that God is a liar and the Bible is complete rubbish. However, considering the preponderance of evidence we’ve seen that God is real and that He loves us, and that the Bible is trustworthy, we must search for a different logical conclusion. The only other option is that God is true to His promise of protection, but it must be in a way that looks different than what we would think. We look for physical protection, but what God offers is spiritual protection.

Let me close with this final thought: there is life after death, and it goes on through eternity. The question is, where will you spend it?

If you have chosen to live apart from God, He will grant you that into eternity and allow you to live in hell forever. That was your choice, not His. Hell is for real, too.

On the other hand, if you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, receiving the gift of grace and mercy and forgiveness He so freely offers, you will spend eternity in heaven. All of the best moments you’ve ever experienced in this life combined are only a shadow of what eternal life will be like if that’s the choice you’ve made. I’m so thankful to God that He dragged me, kicking and screaming, onto this narrow path. I pray you’ve allowed Him to do the same for you.

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The Choice for 2022 and into Eternity: God or Pride?

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter

In today’s episode, I had planned to return in one way or another to the “Beyond Belief” series on Christian apologetics, but then over the course of the day, I became convinced that there was another topic I needed to cover before I do that. First, before church this morning, my wife and I got into a bit of a spat that I think I can attribute largely to me letting my pride cloud my judgment about our interactions. Next, for the sermon at church, Pastor Andrew Arndt’s message on prayer included the challenge to remain hungry for God even when things are going well, not just when our life is a mess. Finally, I’m rereading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and today I came to Book 3, Chapter 8, which is entitled, “The Great Sin”. You’ll never guess what that sin is–oh wait, you probably will. You’re right, it’s pride.

So I figured that if God, my wife, and C.S. Lewis all conspire to cause me to grapple with something, I really should pay attention!

OK, so let’s go back to the beginning and journey together to the point where I reach the assertion that this choice we make every day in this new year has eternal consequences. Regarding the situation with my wife this morning, I don’t need to write a lengthy explanation about whether I was right or wrong, or anything silly like that. Why? Because it doesn’t matter whether I was right or wrong. Here are my biblical marching orders as a husband:

Borrowed from YouVersion

Pretty simple, right? Not easy, for sure, but simple. Now let’s look at how much Christ has loved the church, as described by the Apostle Paul:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

Philippians 2:5-8 (NIV), borrow from YouVersion

What this means is that, if I am to love my wife the way Christ loved the church, then I need to relate to her out of a place of humility, not pride. That’s why it doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong–that’s my pride doing my thinking for me. Humility puts my wife above my need to be right. Again, not always easy, but very simple.

Moving on to Pastor Andrew’s challenge to remain hungry for God regardless of the circumstances of our lives. Whenever things are not going well, especially in times of desperation, as followers of Christ, it’s natural for us to turn to God in prayer. And, of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Then what’s the problem?

The problem comes when we drift away from God in times of plenty, when life is going well. The reason this is a problem is because God wants to be in a relationship with us–He doesn’t want us to treat Him like a genie in a bottle. That’s not a relationship, it’s a good luck charm. When I have a difficult request for someone I love, I will ask for that favor because of the trust we have established through our relationship. That’s like a prayer. But if I really wanted a red Ferari, and if I were superstitious, I might toss a coin in a fountain whenever I encountered one. That’s a wish, and it’s meaningless.

And yet we all have that tendency. When life is good, we are inclined to think, Look what I did! There’s even an odd little Bible story in Daniel:

All this happened to King Nebuchadnezzar. Twelve months later, as the king was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”

Even as the words were on his lips, a voice came from heaven, “This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your royal authority has been taken from you. You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.”

Daniel 4:289-32 (NIV), borrowed from YouVersion

Although I don’t believe that every time any one of us feels as prideful as King Nebuchadnezzar, God will take everything away from us and turn us into vegetarians, I can’t help but wonder if God doesn’t occasionally allow challenges to come our way simply as a reminder or instigator to turn back toward Him. But whatever the case, if we take a moment to reflect on our tendency to lose our hunger for God when life is good, I think we will realize that the root cause of this is pride. We want to take the credit, not give it to God. Or, maybe worse, we just don’t even give God another thought, now that we have gotten our “wish”.

There’s another, even more frightening story in the Bible about the outcome for someone who was too prideful. Ezekiel 28 tells about how Lucifer, a beautiful and powerful angel, became so enthralled with himself that God threw him out of heaven, saying:

Your heart became proud
on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom
because of your splendor.
So I threw you to the earth;
I made a spectacle of you before kings.

Ezekiel 28:17 (NIV), borrowed from YouVersion

Yikes! I definitely don’t want to be like that guy!

And yet, every time we say to God (whether we mean to or not), “I’ve got it from here,” our pride is directing us away from God and into the waiting arms of the evil one. Whenever people in our modern culture pity us for our outdated (so they say) belief in God, their pride is allowing them to believe man-made notions about God over God himself–another detour directly into Satan’s cold embrace.

This is why our decision between God and our pride has such eternal consequences for each of us. C.S. Lewis summed it up quite starkly:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, borrowed from GoodReads

The Way Out

This being a blog meant to encourage others, I can’t in good conscience end this episode on such a bleak note. Thankfully, God is always eager to shine light into the darkness for us.

So the question is, How do we avoid the pitfall of pride, which has sucked in the likes of angels and kings?

Well, one simple way to get started on the path around this dark pit is gratitude. When things around you are going well, thank God for your blessings! Do this every day in 2022 and your heart will be in a much lighter condition on this date next year than it is now.

As I mentioned in my article near the Thanksgiving holiday, there is really no point in expressing gratitude to “the universe” since it doesn’t care whether you live or die, let alone what kind of blessings you may receive. Expressing gratitude means acknowledging that someone apart from yourself–someone you are in a relationship with–is responsible for one or more of the good things in your life. And thanking God for the blessings He gives you is never a bad way to start a conversation with Him.

I have some shirts I really like that say “Life is good” on them. As much as I enjoy them, though, I wish I could modify them to say, “Life is good–THANK YOU, GOD!” instead!

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