Barton Jahn's Blog - Posts Tagged "apologetics"

Part 2

Atheists and skeptics cannot see the displacement element within biblical journeys of faith…first because their starting worldview bias of unbelief so thoroughly blinds them they cannot see the data…and second this concept does not exist anywhere within the expanse of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to draw meaningful comparisons with.

This is why the concept of biblical faith…of God displacing our ways with His ways according to the cross of Christ…falls outside of the field of comparative religious studies…because the starting premise of comparative religious studies is that all religions have a humanistic origin.

But the critical point I want to make here is that Satan does not want to get anywhere near this central biblical concept of the inducement of God-sovereignty into people’s lives by means of the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…this uniquely inexplicable transition from worldly conventional self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…that is built into every narrative story of faith in the Bible.

Satan will not attack this exclusively biblical concept outright and directly…because he does not want it out in the open. This is an element of cunning malice and diabolical deception that has yet to be fully unearthed and articulated within the apologetics arena…because it will not originate from the direction of philosophical atheism to be responded to in the “normal” way in the Christian apologetics reactive mode.

This specific argument for the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible…must originate from within Christian experience and theology.

There are two halves to the cross. Salvation by grace through faith…through the blood of Christ shed on the cross…the first half…is the way into the second half…a divinely composed journey of faith for new covenant Christians (Jer. 31:31-34).

Ephesians 6:12 tells us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Satan has been working to prevent people from entering into the kingdom of God…for thousands of years…through the use of cunningly deceptive arguments and the most alluring enticements of worldly wealth, power, and fame (Mt. 4:8-9; Mk. 8:36).

But Satan also does not want the second half of the cross...the displacement of our ways with God’s ways…out there in open debate for consideration.

Satan cannot attack the displacement element that produces the context for God-sovereignty to actualize in people’s lives…in open debate coming from the zone of philosophical atheism as has been typical in the past…because this concept does not exist anywhere in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Acknowledging its existence indirectly validates its divine origin.

It cannot be brought lower…reduced down into the horizontal zone of worldly conventional thinking…without giving away the clear inference of its divine origin…because nothing in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking relates to this unique concept.

I have the greatest admiration for the Christian apologists who debate world-renowned atheists in an open public forum. I liken this to the steely courage and confidence needed by concert pianists or violinists performing concertos live on the stages of Carnegie Hall or the Hollywood Bowl…or to the confidence that major league baseball shortstops must have upon taking the field to start the game…knowing that the first pitch may be a groundball hit deep in the hole between third base and shortstop…necessitating getting to the ground ball…catching it…and then turning to throw a “bullet” across the infield diamond to get the speedy lead-off hitter out by a step.

The breadth of the preparation and the mastery of the subject matter are to be admired on both sides of the argument regarding the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible.

But I think the most important elements are missing in the debate. Both halves of the cross…the humility of Jesus that gets Him all the way to the cross…and the worldly infuriating component of the gospel message that jettisons worldly conventional normalcy and thinking overboard…along with the galactically unconventional process of a biblical-quality journey of faith that introduces God-sovereignty into our lives through the second half of the cross…uniformly portrayed throughout the Bible…is in my view almost irrefutable evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible…because its origin cannot come from human literary invention.

This is the main thesis put forward in this book…out in the open and accessible to commonsense contemplation.

From my book God Didn't Create Robots---Commonsense Christian Apologetics

God takes us down a deserted road we would never travel by our own choice. No person purposely chooses the path leading to a broken heart…even if this is the best possible thing that could happen to us and for the benefit of others in our Christian ministry.

If we were fortunate enough to be grounded in orthodox biblical teaching as young Christians about the cross…and have realistic expectations about the costs of true discipleship…we still really do not…cannot…understand exactly how the life-long transition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty will break our self-centered will-and-way…and eventually break our hearts…for our eternal benefit.

We typically discover this final capstone development so deep into our adventure of faith storyline that when our last remaining trace of self-centeredness…even commendable self-centeredness when wrapped around the fulfillment of a positive future promise of God…when placed on our own cross alongside the cross of Jesus…we are so committed at that point in our faith-journey that we can do no other…than to go forward.

This I think is a part of what the prophet is saying in Jeremiah 20:7-9 and 20:14-18.

This I think is what Jesus the Son of God is crying out from the cross when He says as recorded in Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus the divine Son of God…who has for all eternity been perfect goodness and pure brilliant light…experiences for the first and only time the taking upon Himself of the huge mass of human sin…past, present, and future…as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…the rebellious rejection that is a part of the sin directed against Himself as the king and ruler of heaven and earth…but also this temporary separation between Himself and His Father caused by this massive infusion of mankind’s self-centeredness (Isa. 53:6)…a dual cause of separation which on the cross breaks His heart (Jn. 19:34-35).

It is not the self-centeredness of Jesus that is put to death on the cross…it is our self-centeredness applied to and absorbed by Him. The life-script and the character of Jesus Christ the Son of God have no self-centeredness. The God-composed life-script for Jesus was conceived and actualized entirely for our benefit.

One of the most insightful verses in all of scripture reads: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk, 22:42).

Here God amazingly shows us that He can write a life-script for the second Person of the Trinity…the divine Son of God Jesus…that actually challenges Himself in the precise area where we need the most help…the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty.

But equally important, this Luke 22:42 verse tells us that Jesus had an alternate preference for exploring the possibility of another, different approach to accomplish the salvation of mankind…different from the upcoming ordeal of the cross the next day…a personal preference that nonetheless the Son of God perfectly and instantly subordinated to the will of the Father…in essence surrendering and relinquishing any alternate options or changes to the ancient plan of salvation…co-written by Jesus Himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit eons of time in the past…established before the foundation of the world.

This incredible interaction between Jesus the Son…and God the Father…tells us that in order to qualify Himself as the sole competent leader of our expeditions of faith into the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil…that Jesus not only understands the subtleties of our difficult transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…but that He also intimately understands the heart-breaking process of the death of our self-centeredness…having absorbed our self-centeredness in mass on the cross…a self-centeredness that was and is completely foreign to a perfect God.

The concept that God could experience sin and a broken heart by absorbing ours as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin…that He could manufacture for Himself an unimaginable Passover scenario whereby He could grasp the difficult rejection of self-centeredness in-the-moment on the cross from billions of human beings (my speculative musing)…self-centeredness that universally plagues the fallen state of humanity…by ingeniously crafting the series of events that would test this very thing (Lk. 22:42) in His own life in a human body through Jesus Christ the Son of God…is remarkable.

That God could pre-qualify Himself to be our Guide and Leader of the expedition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty…a route God never personally traversed prior to the incarnation of Jesus Christ…is a concept…an idea…that exists in the reality of our contemplation…and that by its very existence leaves the philosophy of naturalism miles behind.

The complexity of the information content in the life-script of Jesus Christ…and the novelty of its creative originality (Jn. 21:25)…makes a compelling case for its divine composition.

Pre-programmed robots could never have the capacity to make free-will choices and autonomous decisions. An inanimate rock boulder on a steep hillside does not choose to break-free and fall.

We choose to build a suspension bridge across a deep ravine. At the Saturday family picnic at the park…we choose to put mustard, or catsup, or pickle relish on our hot dog…or all of the above or none of the above.

We possess the incredible capacity for qualitative, discriminating, evaluative decisions and choices in an enumerable quantity of varied life situations.

But we do not voluntarily choose to have a broken heart by way of the cross.

This is another compelling commonsense argument for the divine origin of the Bible…and the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith.

There is zero motivation for any human writer to imaginatively invent this element of a broken heart inherent within a journey of faith…coming from the frame of reference of the contrary worldview of conventional normalcy and thinking that is based upon the pride of the appearance of outward success, self-adulation, and self-assurance…traversing in the opposite direction from brokenness.

As Abraham travels with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah…to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering…the heart of Abraham is broken.

But this deep into his faith-journey following God…Abraham cannot turn back. Abraham has already seen first-hand the truthfulness of God’s word and the faithfulness of His promises…and in this final test of faith regarding Isaac his beloved son…Abraham was ”Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. 11:19).

Does God allow Abraham to follow through and to kill his son Isaac as an offering for sin? The answer is no. That was never God’s intention.

Instead, God gives to mankind a prophetic foreglimpse of what He will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill as His own Son Jesus dies on the cross as a righteous payment-in-full for the offenses of our sins.

Through the faith freely chosen and actualized by Abraham…he suffers a broken heart…in unknowing unselfishness at the time…for our benefit…in choosing to believe in and trust God…contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This God-composed life-script for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…contained a broken heart at the precise point where self-sovereign self-rulership meets up with divine unselfishness…brilliantly scripted for the benefit of others and for Abraham…above anything Abraham could have imagined at the time.

This curiously unconventional theme of a broken heart is ingeniously repeated in some variation or another in every positive story of faith throughout the Bible…for Joseph prior to Pharaoh’s dream, for Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11), for David at Ziklag, for Ruth after her husband’s death in Moab, for Esther and Mordecai (Est. 4:16), for Daniel in the lion’s den, for Peter at the night trial of Jesus, and for Paul after his tumultuous rejection in Jerusalem and before the Sanhedrin council…to name only a few biblical examples among many.

A broken heart…as a non-automated, non-robot…placed somewhere along the path after entering in at the narrow gate of Matthew 7:13-14…not only differentiates the biblical adventure of faith from all other religions, philosophies, and worldviews…but also validates the divine origin of God-composed adventures of faith as recorded in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Nothing and no one other than God our Father could or would take us to the place of heart-brokenness where an advanced, beneficially usable knowledge of good and evil can be found…a place He Himself has painfully been in the heart-breaking and uniquely unprecedented experience of taking upon Himself the sins of mankind through Jesus Christ the Son of God…on the cross at Calvary.

But why the universal need for a broken heart along the way of our journeys of faith?

I think that as we…over time and experience…mature into seasoned Christians…like the exterior conflict of the cross of Christ set on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem two thousand years ago…when the self-centeredness of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking crashes up against the unselfishness of God-sovereignty…the result is a broken heart.

The thing that raises this discussion above any possible human creative invention…is that in a God-composed adventure of faith life-script containing the main ingredient of God-sovereignty…people of faith do not give up their self-autonomy. In a blender-mix that only God could create…the contrary ingredients of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty come together into a divine mixture in which neither is violated.

God created human beings in His image with the invaluable capacity of free-will. The very last thing God wants to do in our personal relationship with Him is to remove the very free-will component of our individuality and autonomy that differentiates us from an automated robot.

Only God can blend together the two disparate parts of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty into a functionally coherent, biblical-quality adventure of faith storyline that eventually produces brokenness…a broken heart.

The part of this discussion that begins to approximate the brilliance of the complexity and functional coherence we find in the structure of DNA…is the point in time along an adventure of faith when the mature Christian realizes that the costs of unselfish service in our called-out ministry equals or may even appear to exceed the perceived benefits in-the-moment (Lk. 22:42)…causing us to evaluate and question the value of going forward.

This is the point in time in Christian discipleship and service when we finally give up on any further self-efforts or self-contrivance…and surrender our own will-and-way to the higher ways of God…bringing the two together into a single joint-venture of mutually shared purpose and direction (Psalm 23).

When God takes us to the place where self-centered self-sovereignty and divinely unselfish God-sovereignty collide…our hearts break…but in actuality God is giving us something better…a piece of His divine character.

When God displaces the normative life Abraham would have lived in the city of Haran…with a higher life-script that Abraham would not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination…God is giving us something immeasurably and incalculably better…the necessary character trait of selflessness…to thereby be able to successfully navigate through a knowledge of good and evil…for all eternity.

This is why our heart breaks…because the rebellion component of going our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) is dying on our cross so that our way can become one with God the Father’s way (Jn. 12:24-25).

Jesus confronted and overcame this very thing with perfectly executed faith in the Garden of Gethsemane…even though this may be one of the most difficult things God has or ever will do…and cost Jesus a broken heart on the cross as He absorbed within Himself this huge mass of sinful actions…along with the hundreds of millions of broken hearts like my own as people not only repent of their sins…but also make the perilous transition from self-centered, self-sovereign rebellion to God-sovereignty along the course of their journey of faith…all procured completely and perfectly through the textbook definition of unconventionality as demonstrated through the cross of Jesus Christ (Mt. 21:44).

This cannot possibly be the product of human creative invention. It is too sudden…too complex…and too functionally integrated within an entire coherent worldview of biblical quality faith…that is violently antithetical and repugnant to the contrasting, competing worldview that has us sitting atop the thrones of our lives…apart from God as independent agents…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Like the question posited in chapter one about how difficult it is to get a perfect Person Jesus Christ to the cross…a similar question arises here as to how difficult it would be to break the heart of God? This again is not as easy as it sounds.

Only if God has to go before us through the earthly life of Jesus Christ the Son of God…incarnate in a human body…to fully experience out ahead of us everything that will challenge us in redemptive salvation and a transforming journey of faith…to honorably and commendably dispel the notion of being a distant, armchair, uninvolved God…can God help us to master the lesson-plan of relying upon God-sovereignty in our pursuit of an understanding of the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13) while at the same time maintaining our God-created and God-given capacity for free-will moral reasoning.

The only thing that could break the heart of a perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful God…is to lovingly and unselfishly…according to the highest precepts of righteous judgment… to take upon Himself the penalty for the imperfect sins of mankind…and in the process experience momentarily the separation between Son and Father…that Jesus expresses from the cross…”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34)…and then to say minutes or hours later: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”…”and having said thus, he gave up the spirit” (Lk. 23:46) in perfectly executed faith and trust.

Brokenness is certainly not a new concept to Christianity. Many books, commentaries, sermons, and great Christian hymns have brilliantly covered this subject. A recent example in church history is John Bunyan the author of the classic book A Pilgrim’s Progress…its huge worldwide impact in part the product of the high cost of a broken heart…being written from a jail cell…separated from his loving family.

But I wonder how many people have written about the apologetic value of brokenness…of the complexity of its information content…of the originality of its relationship to God-sovereignty as a universal component in biblical faith, and the sheer fantasy of this being a humanistic literary invention given its utter contrast with the pride of the worldly conventional thinking of placing “me, myself, and I” first in everything?

When skeptics assert that the biblical narrative stories of faith are fictional nonsense…what they themselves are saying is itself nonsensical.

These biblical stories are too far advanced…have progressed too far along…are too complex and functionally integrated to be fiction.

Skepticism that classifies the biblical stories as mere fiction display a shallowness and shortsightedness of analytical thinking that disqualifies their claims…that reveals a scholarship that not only does not dig deep enough…but does not even scratch below the surface.

The interaction between people of faith and a God who crafts life-scripts of events and circumstances having the pinpoint accuracy to procure broken-heartedness as a beneficial by-product of the move from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…has taken us so far beyond human literary invention as to render the proclamations of atheists and skeptics about the origin of the life-stories of the biblical characters…to be nonsensical.

From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics

If we are looking for convincing evidence to differentiate the biblical narrative stories of faith…from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to make the case that these biblical life-scripts could not be the product of human literary invention…another telling argument in this direction is the diametric opposites of our ways versus God’s ways as depicted in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Anyone who follows the biblical God deep enough into their adventure of faith eventually runs experientially into the jarring realization, at some point in time, that we want to do things…even the big things like the fulfillment of the supernatural promises of God in our lives…our way.

This is one of the fundamental aspects of the Bible that creates a clearly delineated fork-in-the-road…a radical departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This is an aspect in our Christian discipleship that takes us on a unique journey far from conventional thinking and norms.

Abraham naturally has his own ideas about how he will become the father of descendants as numerous as the stars in the night sky…and his ideas do not include waiting 25 years for the birth of Isaac…the son of promise.

This important piece of information God left out of the initial calling of Abraham…for the best and highest reason imaginable…to set up the unique context for biblical faith…to actualize.

According to contemporary Christian jargon…doing something our way outside of the council or participation of God…is popularly called an “Ishmael”…doomed to failure.

Abraham and Sarah trying to help-out God in fulfilling God’s plans and promise…by bringing Hagar into the picture and thus producing Ishmael…actually goes against-the-grain of the best and highest outcome in this Abraham storyline…in at least two ways.

First, the main goal…the outcome that the life-script of Abraham hones-in on…is not the start of a large family-life according to worldly expectations and aspirations…but rather for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…of biblical faith that by commonsense definition requires elements of patience, trust, and faith.

But faith and trust in who and in what? Not in himself…not in his plans…not in his ideas…not in self-realization and self-reliance. This is the dividing point…the departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…that is unique to the Bible.

Certainly the God-composed life-script for Abraham and Sarah could have had Sarah becoming pregnant soon after their arrival in Canaan…with several children following thereafter…producing a conventionally normal family life…in which it could be said of Abraham and Sarah: “and they lived happily forever after.”

But this is not the life-script for Abraham and Sarah. Normal marital relations are not working. The promised descendants…as numerous as the stars in the night sky…are nowhere in sight.

This is where the second main theme of the story comes into play. In a God-composed journey of faith life-script…God writes into the plotline of events and circumstances a dependence upon Himself…that has an outcome…a goal…that requires supernatural intervention…every time throughout the Bible.

This is the point where our ways and God’s ways divide. This is where self-sovereignty separates from God-sovereignty. This is where the biblical narrative stories of faith depart from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This is one of the compelling reasons why the biblical narrative stories of faith could not possibly come from human literary invention.

Bluntly stated…we want the promises of God to be fulfilled in our lives…our way according to worldly conventionality…and they can’t be if they are to have any eternal value.

This rude and shocking reality is not only for our eternal benefit…but also for the benefit of others as God works out His plans through us to unselfishly minister to other people…as in the case of Abraham and Sarah…to produce physical and spiritual descendants…in fact as precisely promised by God…as numerous as the stars in the night sky.

Abraham and Sarah simply cannot produce Isaac…by themselves…according to conventional norms and thinking…on their own. This is by purposeful design. Like it or not, they need help from God.

A journey of faith composed by God will have this difficult and frustrating element…downright annoying at times according to our horizontally conventional thinking…of dependence upon God…involving some goal or outcome beyond our reach…usually beyond our initial imagination as we begin our faith journey…that requires God-sovereignty rather than self-sovereignty…to actualize and bring these outcomes into empirical reality.

From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics

As a near-to-last point in this opening introduction…if we have a conflict or an issue with some colleague at work…and we discuss this with a friend who thinks well of us…that friend will give us the supportive benefit of the doubt upon hearing the details.

But a person who is a friend, yet who may not think as highly of us, may automatically take the side of the other person in the dispute…upon hearing the details…and begin to question our handling of the situation…in a knee-jerk, critical fashion…not giving us the benefit of the doubt…thereby exposing their true lower opinion of us.

The biblical narrative stories of faith are filled with people giving God the benefit of the doubt in their adventures of faith.

Every positive person of faith in the Bible has a personal relationship with God that has the universal element of giving God the benefit of the doubt…even amidst difficult and challenging events, and the negatively trending direction of outward appearances.

Biblical characters that immediately come to mind in this regard are Abraham going to Canaan (Heb. 11:8), Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison desperately holding on to the promise of his two earlier dreams received years before in Canaan (Gen. 37:7, 9), and Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11, 4:20).

Jeremiah has a continual, ongoing dialogue with God about the stubborn unbelief of the Jerusalem leaders. Elijah complains bitterly to God about the overwhelming pushback and resistance he is encountering in his calling as a prophet in apostate Israel under the rule of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.

Other notable people who gave God the benefit of the doubt through difficult challenges are Joshua, Samuel, Job, Ruth, Hannah, Esther and Mordecai, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of the minor prophets…to name only a few in the Old Testament.

The Psalms in the Old Testament are filled with people having a personal relationship and dialogue with God…giving God the benefit of the doubt to come through for them in the middle of challenging difficulties.

David’s famous 23rd Psalm is all about giving God the benefit of the doubt.

People of faith in the New Testament actually spent face-time in person with Jesus the Son of God (Jn. 1:14)…and gave Him the benefit of the doubt amidst pushback and resistance to His message and ministry…pushback of deadly intensity (Jn. 11:8, 16).

This idea of the people of faith giving God the benefit of the doubt during the course of their journeys of faith…giving to God the value and worth that putting trust and faith in another person entails…has enormous commonsense, apologetic value as an argument for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible.

This has apologetic value by virtue of its existence as evidence of genuine relationships…very subtle yet solid evidence that holds water because the benefit of the doubt is there…integrally and inseparably embedded within the events and circumstances of the storyline scripts. This evidence would not exist at all in the storylines…if it was not in fact a true indication of the real connection of personal relationships between people and the living God.

This subtle element is baked into every biblical adventure of faith…and cannot be homogenized out without damaging the storylines.

This component of giving God the benefit of the doubt is a powerful clue that these relationships…these stories of faith…are real.

A moral concept as subtle yet as powerful as this could not be the product of collusion on the part of the 40 different authors spanning 1,500 years in the writing of the Bible…universally giving God the benefit of the doubt from Genesis through Revelation…from beginning to end…without the slightest hint of progressive evolution or creative development in the portrayal of biblical faith…as would be expected with a humanistic origin.

The life-stories of Abraham through Paul in the Bible…all depicting biblical faith having this common ingredient of giving God the benefit of the doubt…as religious fiction invented by human writers inspired out of the narrow realm of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking alone…as an explanation for their origin…is again nonsensical.

Like the massive infusion of creative information that entered into the natural world to form the complex living creatures during the Cambrian Explosion of 530 million years ago…inexplicable as a materialistic or naturalistic event…the correct answer to the question of the origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith is that they are a divine creation of God.

The complex and functionally coherent information that enters into the human experience…suddenly and instantly in the form of a God-composed adventure of faith…starting with Abraham…is the action of an independent agent God…providing commonsense apologetic evidence for both His existence…and for the truth of the Bible.

No one can write a fictional novel or short story without revealing something of themselves in the storyline.

In the biblical narrative stories of faith…God not only reveals His divine authorship through His supernatural participation in the storylines in a way that is outside of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…by introducing the way of the cross…but also exposes something of Himself in revealing His intention to introduce Himself to the people of faith in each biblical storyline…and in the process reveal something of Himself to us today…through the context of life-scripts designed to create the incredible opportunity to exercise the benefit of the doubt in the living God.

Mechanical robots cannot fathom the concept of respect. Neither can robots plumb the depths of giving someone the supportive benefit of the doubt of placing faith, trust, and dignity in another person…extending the gift of value, worth, and validation to that person.

Our non-robotic, analytical capacity for moral reasoning and free-will choice…wrapped within our physical living bodies having all of the marvelous abilities and talents we possess…may be the single-most, top-tier apologetic evidence for the existence of God…easily accessible to commonsense contemplation.

As I read the biblical narrative stories of faith in both the Old and New Testaments…I see basically two things happening in terms of journey of faith life-scripts, direction in the lives of Christians, eternal purpose and meaning, and God speaking to us.

The first is the calling of people like Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, David, Ezra, Nehemiah, Peter, and Paul…who had major promises of God…or very clear missions, goals, or final outcomes to aim for…given to them by God as guidance and hope-filled inspiration at the very beginning of their difficult and challenging journeys of faith.

We naturally tend to write-off these spectacular callings as if they only apply to the superstars of the Bible…too far above our experience to be a viable pattern to apply to our own lives…on a much lesser scale.

Becoming the “father of faith,” becoming the governor of Egypt, liberating the Israelite slaves from Egypt, conquering militarily the Promised Land, becoming king in Israel, rebuilding the walls and the temple in Jerusalem, and becoming the premier Christian evangelists to the Greco-Roman world in the first-century…these are things that seem too big for most of us…and therefore the concept of the displacement of our ways by God’s higher ways in conformity to the cross of Christ…and the gap that is created in a God-composed adventure of faith life-script having a humanistically unattainable goal according to the definition of faith described so brilliantly in Hebrews 11:1…can both be lost in the magnitude and grandeur of the callings of the storylines of these biblical characters.

These displacement and gap elements in the biblical narrative stories of faith could hypothetically seem to raise the bar…the standard…too high for the average Jew in Old Testament times…and the Christian (Jewish Christian or Gentile) in New Testament times.

The recognition of the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways and thoughts…and the gap in a journey of faith that separates what we can do from what we cannot do…setting up the context for genuine biblical faith to actualize…this could potentially cause an anticipation and expectation problem for many Christians who are faithfully following God and going about their normal Christian practices of prayer, reading and studying the Bible, being active in fellowship with other Christians, and sharing their faith with others…simply because God has not spoken directly to them regarding a specific calling upfront like the examples of the major biblical characters listed above.

But the second thing that I see that is happening in the Bible…probably more often…is that God also works unseen in people’s lives who are trying to be faithful and do the right things…even though God does not at first reveal directly to them…by speaking to them in the Spirit…a major promise, missions, or goal upfront at the very beginning of their journey of faith.

This second type of biblical character can see God’s hand at work over time in hindsight…part-way through their journey of faith…or looking backwards after it has finished and all the dust has settled.

Examples of this type of experience with God…in the biblical narrative stories of faith…might include Ruth, Hannah, Esther and Mordecai, the three Hebrew young men in the fiery furnace of King Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel, and the ten apostles other than Peter and Judas Iscariot.

Ruth is interesting in this regard…in that she does not even know that by marrying Boaz, she has become part of the royal line that produces the future King David in direct line to Jesus Christ the Son of God…born far ahead in the future in the first-century A.D. How could God…in this case…reveal more information to Ruth in-the-moment…without possibly jeopardizing giving away the future plans of God for mankind in the kingship of David and the royal line leading to Jesus the Son of God and eternal King in heaven?

In fact, I think that every positive biblical character did not have a full and complete understanding of the unique and critical role they played in the unfolding saga of God’s eternal plans and destiny for mankind.

It is safe to say that there is not a single person on the planet today that has a complete macro and micro grasp of the higher ways and thoughts of God.

The point I want to make here…as has been repeated many times throughout this book…is that as Abraham gets his calling from God to go from the city of Haran to the Promised Land of Canaan…with each step that Abraham takes God is displacing whatever normative plans Abraham might have otherwise had back in Haran…with a new life-script beyond anything Abraham could or would have dreamed up…beyond anything Abraham could self-compose, contrive, or self-orchestrate.

This worldly unconventional element of displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…illustrated in the biblical narrative stories of faith according to the two general patterns described above…contained within God-composed journey of faith life-scripts starting with the detailed and highly specific life-story calling of Abraham and continuing throughout the Bible all the way through to the New Testament first-century…down to our current “church age”…is in my view as big as anything else in the history of mankind.

This is as big as the discovery by Copernicus that the earth revolves around the Sun, or Einstein’s theory of general relativity, or the discovery of Edwin Hubble of the Big Bang expansion of the universe, or the discovery of antibiotic medicines to combat disease, or our discovery and understanding of DNA…the “language of life.”

This biblical concept is as big as the American Declaration of Independence…the American Constitution…the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery…the women’s suffrage movement…and the victory over despotic tyranny during World War II.

This biblical concept of the displacement of our ways with God’s ways…and the gap we see in genuine biblical faith between what we can do and what we cannot do on our own…integral and fundamental to a journey of faith following Jehovah in the Old Testament and Jesus Christ in the New Testament…is as big as the discovery by Martin Luther that “the just shall live by faith” rather than works-salvation through pilgrimages, relics, and indulgences…and the monumental realization that common people should have access to the Bible translated into their own languages…that started the Protestant Reformation.

The concept that the living God…the brilliant Creator of the universe…can play a pivotal role…indeed take the lead in crafting and shaping a journey of faith for each one of us…that bears the stamp of divine imagination and innovative creativity in being 100 percent contrary to the opposite worldview of pursuing…on our own…our self-validation and acceptance according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…entirely outside of the zone of human literary invention…how can this eternally valuable and applicable biblical concept not be as large or larger than any other concept or event in the history of mankind?

1 John 2:17 reads: “And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”

Another compelling apologetic evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible…is that the biblical narrative stories of faith starting with Abraham in the Old Testament…do not align with what we normally want in life according to worldly conventional thinking.

But equally revealing is that the callings of God in the Bible are not “religious” in nature.

According to modern conventionality we want the best education, a great job that we enjoy working at…with a high salary…so that we can afford to travel and take vacations…and to purchase the things that we want.

We want to buy a house in a good location, have a loving marriage, raise a family, have friends, enjoy hobbies, play sports, have good health, drive a nice automobile, send our children off to college at Harvard, NYU, or Oxford, have a secure retirement, and avoid warfare and natural disasters.

There is nothing wrong with any of these goals and aspirations. They are commendable and admirable when translated into any culture starting in ancient times going forward…progressing up to today.

But these goals, dreams, aspirations, and sentiments are not anything like the underlying themes of the life-scripts of the biblical narrative stories of faith. They are in two entirely different zones of reality.

This should raise some red-flags…get our attention in the apologetics debate now centuries long and still going strong…in determining the origin of these biblical narrative stories of faith.

Becoming the “father of faith” by traveling from one city to a new region that in the future will be called the Promised Land (Heb. 11:8)…according to the promise of God to Abraham that He will start a new nation of people through Abraham as numerous as the dust of the earth…does not fall anywhere within any ancient version of the list of what we normally want in life…described above.

Being sold into slavery into ancient Egypt…in order to begin a novel and innovative graduate MBA program lasting 13 years in business management and leadership training for Joseph within a God-composed journey of faith life-script…that eventually leads to becoming a divinely inspired, first-rate governor of Egypt during the crisis of a great famine…again does not come anywhere near the list of normal goals and aspirations listed above.

How about the backstory of the uniquely innovative preparation for the calling and mission-plan of Moses…initially educated and trained for leadership at the highest level in Egypt…yet spending 40 years in exile as a shepherd of sheep on the hillsides of Midian…prepared to become the deliverer of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt…and the “shepherd” to lead his people across the desert and to the boundary edge of the Promised Land?

We will not find this life-script theme of extraordinary goals and grandeur-of-mission on any conventional list of things we normally want in life.

Would anyone normally want to be the king of Israel in ancient times like David…if it involved the arduous route of 13 years of near-death escapades fighting the Philistines and evading the deadly opposition of King Saul? We might if we were David…but the narrow way God designed for David is not on the list of things defining a conventionally normal life.

The life of the apostle Peter is a great example of the contrasting dichotomy of self-sovereignty according to worldly conventional normalcy…versus a totally different life-script according to God-sovereignty.

Jesus sees the future potential in Peter to lead the early Christian church in Jerusalem…just as God sees a hidden potential in all of us…because He created us.

But after the resurrection of Jesus…and before His ascension…Jesus does not instruct Peter, James, and John…and the other disciples to sign-up to attend rabbinical school in Jerusalem and then fit-in with the Jewish religious community.

Peter is called to stand up on Pentecost to powerfully preach Jesus Christ as Savior and Messiah to thousands gathered in Jerusalem…through the power of the Holy Spirit…at the risk to his life in the very city where a short time ago Jesus was crucified.

Peter and John are then enlisted…through the cascade of events following the miraculous healing of the crippled man at one entrance into the temple called the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:2)…to stand and testify before the august and intimidating Sanhedrin Council in Jerusalem…again at the risk of their lives…and boldly proclaim Jesus as Savior, King, and Messiah…to the very religious elites who rejected Jesus and instigated His death on the cross…only weeks earlier.

This is not horizontally conventional normalcy, recommended for human living…by any definition.

The calling and mission-plan for the apostle Paul is about as far from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking as is possible.

The incredible mixture of high scholastic erudition…being taught by the renowned rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem…and the contrary ingredient of radical humility obtained by Paul in the supernatural revelation of Jesus as the Christ…in a blinding light on the road to Damascus…producing an indispensable ingredient of humility in Paul’s evangelical mission to the polytheistic, idol-worshipping Gentiles in the Greco-Roman world of the first-century…is premeditated, advance preparation that has the end-goal of creating new Christian churches…and writing his New Testament letters…that does not exist anywhere within the contemplation of ordinary, commonplace, worldly conventional aspirations (1 Cor. 4:9-13).

None of the callings of God recorded in the Bible are on the list of things defined by worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…as things we want in life…as things that people are normally pursuing in life.

Jesus said in The Sermon on the Mount: “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than food, and the body than raiment?” (Mt. 6:25).

This is a commonsense Christian apologetic argument for the uniqueness of the biblical narrative stories of faith…which actualize…in some measure and on some varied level…the altogether unique concepts of The Sermon on the Mount…above and outside of…and in many cases in total contrast…to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

These biblical narrative stories of faith would never be the product of humanistic literary invention.

How could…or would…a human literary genius invent the concept of God-sovereignty in the life-scripts of the positive people of faith recorded in the Bible?

How could any human being invent this unconventionality? It must originate from the viewpoint…from the direction…of God alone. Any other explanation is shallow and nonsensical.

We do not see first, second, and third-graders in elementary schools out in large numbers picketing their schools on the weekends…with signs reading: “Down With Division”…or: “No More Multiplication”…or: “Forget Reading…Play Video Games”…while shouting chants of “Unfair” and “Heck No…We Won’t Go!”

Children at that young age have no idea of the importance of reading, writing, and mathematics for their upcoming adult lives. Grown-ups set the agenda for our early childhood education…and as children we go along with this through childlike faith placed in our parents…our teachers…and in grown-ups in general.

There exist no other practical options in childhood education. Adults are by default simply in the position to know more than children…to have the knowledge and the facts…in this critical area of what we need to learn as children…to get from where we are as children to where we need to get to…as we grow up into adults.

How is it that we would then assume to know anything about godliness? Godliness belongs exclusively to God. It is not found anywhere within conventional human living and thinking.

Godliness must come from top-down…not from bottom-up.

Godliness is defined and actualized through the biblical narrative stories of faith…coming from the singular perspective of God.
Biblical Narrative Stories of Faith are not “Religious”

An amazing thing about the biblical narrative stories of faith…for the most part…is that they are not religious in nature. This should also get our attention.

The Old Testament lists 613 laws…including the Ten Commandments…and has religious observances and celebrations like the Passover. Male circumcision begins with Abraham and Isaac. The Old Testament has the animal sacrifices in the temple conducted by the priests.

The New Testament has the Lord’s Supper communion for believers.

But the biblical narrative stories of faith themselves are not built around anything like pilgrimages to “holy sites,” or the veneration of relics, or the sale and possession of paper documents like indulgences insuring salvation, or elaborate religious rituals like a universal practice of praying toward a geographical location every day (Dan. 6:10).

The biblical narrative stories of faith provide no opportunity for salvation through the self-effort of “good-works” and the “self-realization” of religious practices and rituals.

Through God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…God goes boldly into the realm of human life…cutting across the grain of the conventionality of our standard dreams, goals, and aspirations…according to His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9).

In the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness it is recorded in Luke 4:6-8:
6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
7 If thou therefore will worship me, all shall be thine.
8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

“Worshipping only God”…tells us that the world still belongs to God. Worshipping only God is the correct optional choice for human beings…and it is an option we can willingly choose.

God can craft life-scripts having events and circumstances that cross-over into human life in any way that He chooses in order to set up the context for biblical faith to actualize.

Judging from the narrative stories of faith in the Bible…this novel and innovative approach goes much deeper than the religious rituals designed for worship.

Becoming the “father of faith”, the governor of Egypt during a great famine, the deliverer of the Israelites from bondage as slaves in Egypt, becoming a godly (yet imperfect) king of Israel like David…being a prophet like Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, or one of the “minor” prophets, restoring the walls around Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple…like Ezra and Nehemiah…becoming the leader of the early Christian church in Jerusalem like Peter…or being called-out to be the premier evangelical missionary to the first-century Greco-Roman world like Paul…all of these things fall right in the very heart of human living…yet transcend above and outside of “religion” in a way that is entirely unique to the Bible.

These journeys of faith inexplicably have little connection to religious practices and rituals…an odd and elevated feature which looking back in hindsight we might expect to find in life-scripts leading toward “spiritual adulthood”…composed by a “grown-up” God for us…who obviously knows more about godliness than we do…and has set-out a course for life and for study for each of us…taking us through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ…through the narrow gate of Matthew 7:13-14…described in The Sermon on the Mount.

Finally, when atheists and skeptics assert that scientific investigation cannot include any mention or reference to the supernatural…they are not saying anything new, insightful, or profound.

The modern Scientific Revolution started about 450 years ago…generally credited to Francis Bacon…with the express goal to dispel and refute the errors of folklore, superstition, old-wives tales, and witchcraft…using an entirely new and novel concept of obtaining empirical facts about the natural world through observation…and the testing of hypotheses through repeatable experimentation.

The unimaginable and unexpected irony in the twenty-first century is that modern science has not only scrubbed away unsubstantiated folklore and superstition…but it has also scrubbed away Scientism…the crown jewel of the atheistic philosophies of naturalism and materialism.

The current Age of Information has added information as a third fundamental property in nature alongside matter and energy…thus raising the question of where did complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated programs of information come from.

The pursuit of answers to this question have basically eliminated as a plausible consideration the gradualism of successive, incremental, trial-and-error, unguided, random chance search strategies as an explanation to produce complex functional systems…in the non-living and living natural world.

By discovering in recent decades the massive amounts of coherently integrated systems of information in every area of the natural world…science has come full-circle in re-introducing the need for an intelligent designer God to explain the origin of all of this information.

In the process of attempting to explain the origin, existence, and functional coherence of this complex information…this search automatically refutes the concept of Scientism…that “nature” is all that there is…the basis for the atheistic philosophies of naturalism and materialism.

Scientism is too simplistic in this Age of Information to “hold water.” A plausible explanation for the origin of information…like the ink that is intelligently arranged on paper to create the headlines for the New York Times newspaper each day…to convey information…falls outside of the materialistic explanation of how ink chemically bonds to paper.

Likewise, when atheists and skeptics assert that the Old and New Testament stories of faith in the Bible are imaginary myth…are the creation of human literary invention…this requires a defense of these biblical narrative stories based on the parallel to our Christian experience today.

If after closer scrutiny, these biblical narrative stories of faith demonstrate a radically divergent contrast with the normalcy of worldly conventional thinking…in contrast with the autonomous nature of going our own way as junior gods sitting atop the thrones of our lives…then the notion that these Bible stories of faith are myth is also eliminated as a plausible consideration to explain their origin.

This realization that the biblical narrative stories of faith are too complex, too sophisticated, too brilliantly unusual and original, and too contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to be the product of human literary invention…has enormous implications for answering the fundamental questions of why we are here…and what is the meaning and purpose of our existence.

If commonsense Christian apologetics discovers within the biblical narrative stories of faith the necessity of the script-writer God as the only plausible explanation for their composition…to compliment the scientific discovery of the necessity of an intelligent designer God as the only plausible explanation for the existence of complex systems of information in the natural world…these two realities of rational thinking coalesce into a positive force for truth…that in the humble opinion of this Christian author…is making a compelling case for the existence of God, the truth of the Bible, and Jesus Christ in fact being “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6).

If we extend and apply the concept of the initiation of God’s callings…to the contemporary Christian church…what might this mean for Christians in the upcoming end-times?

If the Christian church is not raptured pretribulation…but instead is raptured at some point in time after the colossal end-times spiritual battle begins…Christians will find ourselves right in the middle of the Joel 2:28-29 prophecy that says God will pour out His Spirit upon the earth.

At Pentecost, Peter did not prepare in advance his speech to the crowd gathered in Jerusalem that day…that converted thousands of people (Acts 2:41). This speech was already inside Peter waiting to be energized by the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Likewise, Peter and John did not foresee the miraculous circumstances that led to their standing before the august and intimidating governing body the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem…and therefore had no opportunity to politely excuse themselves or to otherwise wiggle their way out of what turned out to be an explosive and pivotal moment of Holy Spirit boldness that severed the new Christian church from the old leadership in Jerusalem (Acts 4:5-22).

Certainly Stephen did not premediate what he was going to say before this selfsame Sanhedrin council some short time later…as he is carried away into totally liberated and self-abandoned boldness of speech that is characteristic of this time period in the formulation of the early church…and that is described as the latter rain to be poured out upon the earth during the end-times (Joel 2:23; Zech. 10:1). Stephen had these words already within his mind and heart…waiting to be expressed at the right time and place (Acts 6:15).

When the end of time actually arrives…when human redemptive history comes to a close at a definite point in time…worldly conventional normalcy has no relevance. The commendable and admirable instruction to “occupy till I come” (Lk. 19:13) that has applied for past centuries universally for all Christians…no longer has meaning and purpose.

When the actual end of time is in view…the salvation of lost souls becomes the immediate imperative. Evangelism is the first priority for Christians in the end-times (Mt. 24:14). What color to paint the kitchen, who to elect city mayor, and where to go on vacation next summer all become superfluous…for Christians and non-Christians alike.

This end-times prophecy of God taking the initiative…like He does with all of His callings…to pour out His Spirit upon the earth according to Joel 2:28-29…may transform every Spirit-born Christian on the face of the earth into bold evangelists like we find in the early church…carried along by the energy of the Holy Spirit and unable to contain themselves like the prophet Jeremiah described (Jer. 20:9).

So the question is…are we ready? Have we done our part? Do we have a testimony to share of God’s grace and mercy in our lives? Do we know Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord? Do we have a walk of faith with Jesus, and can we point to a transformed life as our evidence for the presence of God in our lives? Do we spend time reading the Bible…memorizing scripture…mastering the issues? Do we possess the basics that the Holy Spirit can move upon in an instant to craft powerful words of life to give to the final lost souls on earth as the clocks ticks towards the final end-point in time…and the surrounding cascade of momentous events of biblical-proportion escalate and intensify?

This concept of the divine origin of journeys of faith…containing the cross of Christ embedded at the core of every storyline…speaks volumes as to what we can look forward to from a biblical perspective of what God can do and what believers can accomplish…above and outside of the limited confines of skeptical unbelief found within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This is one of the main themes in the Bible that argues for its divine origin…and should therefore be expected to continue at an even more accelerated and enhanced rate…anticipated by waiting and watching Christians (Lk. 21:28).

Introduction 1

“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Heb. 11:6)

I once had a lively discussion with a borderline agnostic/atheist who said that he did not dismiss the idea that God existed…but that to believe and have faith he needed more objective, foolproof evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible and Christianity.

In pondering our talk afterwards, I thought of all of the evidences that are out there in the observable world…easily accessible through commonsense contemplation…that in the hands of a skilled litigator in a courtroom…for example…would not only convince most jurors of the existence of God…but also of the divine origin of the Bible and its message.

There are dozens of categories of very persuasive arguments for the existence of God…many of which contain the obvious “miracles” we experience and see all around us…that we accept as “normal” and take totally for granted.

A few of these obvious, commonsense evidences might be the “miracle” of sexuality…or digestion…or our respiratory system…our constant heartbeat…or our balanced and symmetrical locomotion and motor skills…or the generally brilliant assembly and integration of all of our body parts…all of which shout-out for ingenious design rather than random chance assemblage.

Another obvious evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer God…easily accessible to ordinary, commonsense consideration…is the universal cuteness of any infant---a human toddler, a lion cub, a Labrador puppy, a baby elephant, young ducklings swimming after their mother in a pond…displaying the most sublimely complex and artistic information content in action…yet totally inexplicable and unnecessary under a Darwinian naturalistic framework…having no survival-of-the-fittest value whatsoever…but otherwise easily recognizable as a product of intentional, whimsical, premeditated design.

Certainly the mystery of the origin of human speech and the natural inclination of youngsters to acquire, understand, and accurately differentiate subtle concepts in language and communication…at a phenomenal rate of speed…is a reality far too complex and incredibly integrated to be lightly and uncritically accepted as the result of gradualistic, chance descent-with-modification…rather than conscious, deliberate design at a brilliantly creative, extremely advanced level.

In sports…our incredible facility to be able to play professional ice hockey in the NHL…to run back the opening kick-off 100 yards for a touchdown in college football…to hit a 95-mph fastball 400 feet over the left-field fence for a homerun in baseball…to play tennis, ping-pong, badminton, volleyball, run the 100-meter sprint in track & field, run a marathon, compete in the Tour de France bicycling race, surf the Pipeline on the North Shore in Hawaii, and score a goal in World Cup soccer…these amazing human activities we tend to take for granted.

Yet these are physical acuities that are so advanced, so complex, so finely tuned, and so functionally integrated…that to ascribe their origin to blind, mindless, indifferent, naturalistic, trial-and-error processes as asserted in the theory of Darwinian evolution…when we see and observe nothing incrementally progressive or transitional in a major, creative sense anywhere in the natural world…currently or in the course of natural history…seems on its face to be nonsensical.

Certainly the existence of the moral framework that permeates all of the social interactions between people…which we take totally for granted… needs explanation.

Such things as romantic love, friendship, loyalty, bravery, humor, forgiveness, standing up for the right thing even when it costs us something, giving value to other people through respect…and the flip-side---lying, cheating, prejudice, selfishness, injustice, and evil…in the hands of a skilled debater could be persuasively argued to be far beyond the creative naturalistic reach of material particles and energy…given that particles and energy demonstrate no observable capacity for creating complex and functionally integrated systems, concepts, or information.

Add to this the mind-boggling Age of Information explosion of the last two or three decades…in which intelligence has been linked to the origin of information wherever we find complex and functionally integrated systems in human creations…in computer software language codes, literary books of every genre, and inventions of every type.

This corresponds to the information-rich systems we find in the natural world such as the Big Bang creation of the universe, the fine-tuning of the mathematical constants in the laws of science that enable the existence of complex life like ourselves---in the Anthropic Principle, the sudden appearance of new complex life-forms during the Cambrian Explosion, the complexity of information in the DNA code, the orderliness and the intelligibility of the laws of science, the integrated homeostatic systems in the human body, and the intricate body-plan architectures and lifestyle habits of every living creature…to name only a few examples.

Curiously, in the area of the fine arts…we see the seemingly universal necessity of the finale-outcome of good overcoming evil…of the “good” cowboys wearing white hats rounding up the “bad” cowboys wearing black hats…fundamental as a satisfying through-line within the storyline fabric of movies, theater plays, and books.

Oddly this comes from a modern popular culture that otherwise…outwardly at least…claims to avoid the acknowledgment of the concept of biblical sin…the universal imperfection we all share…and that we all try to minimize and to overcome.

How can the existence and complexity of good and evil…sliced-and-diced in every which way in enumerable, fictional storyline settings and conditions…of unending fascination and interest to the human psyche…how can the plausible explanation for the existence of this complex reality…be the sole product of material particles and energy…according to the philosophical worldview of naturalism?

The classic truism that “if we were all angels, we would not need laws and government”…separates human beings from the rest of the living natural world by the unbridgeable and distinctively discontinuous gap of moral reasoning.

The mere existence of the word forgiveness in our vocabulary and in our dictionary argues for a transcendent capacity for moral reasoning and intellectual judgment far above the rest of the natural living world.

The origin of the concept of falling short of some independent standard of behavior and thinking…requiring us to ask forgiveness from other people we have harmed or offended…in a materialistic Darwinian worldview…has no survival-of-the-fittest value.

It is difficult to theoretically ascribe to the capacity of material particles and energy…the advanced potential for creating sophisticated, intellectually functional end-points such as forgiveness from one person to another…in the highly advanced and complex reality of moral reasoning and interpersonal relationships.

Introduction 2

A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one small factoid…again amongst hundreds of thousands of similar everyday commonsense examples that could be persuasive evidence argued in a court of law…in favor of the necessity of an intelligent designer God…is the existence of our navel…our “belly button”…the umbilical cord between mother and baby that is severed and tied at childbirth. Every human has one.

Is there a plausible series of sequential, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as an intermediate bridge between the first dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start of a materialistic creative progression…to cross the gap to a totally functional assemblage producing a viable fetus reaching the point in time of nine-month maturity and a healthy childbirth…whereupon the umbilical cord is cut-off from the placenta and tied into a knot?

Commonsense reasoning tells us that this one feature…amongst millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features in the human body…of a functional umbilical cord with all of its complex processes…must be up and running at just the right time in the embryonic development process of the human fetus occurring within the mother…for successful human reproduction to occur.

This requires intelligent design of the most sublime quality…not trial-and-error iterations having enumerable failures.

The quantity, quality, and the accuracy of the biological information codes and specifications…extrapolated out to every part of the human body to produce a functional living and reproducing organism having all of the features we possess…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.

The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced a deep and detailed understanding of how things work…in our own bodies such as how we produce speech, how we hear, and how we see…extended out into all of the areas of scientific inquiry from the microscopic atomic level to the galactic scale of the astrophysics of our universe.

This information content is now so vast…that a previous naturalistic explanation for the folding of amino acids into proteins did not even exist 100 years ago at the start of the twentieth century…because this area of microbiological knowledge had not even been discovered yet.

The current discoveries in science…with the new awareness of their accompanying explosion of information content…in highly complex and coherent systems…undermines all theories based on the simplistic methodologies of mindless, random chance, trial-and-error search strategies.

What could pass as an “explanation”…as a placeholder for ignorance 50 or 100 years ago under the guise of naturalistic philosophy posing as science…is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and magnitude of complex and integrated systems of information that fall outside the chance probability of mathematics.

A naturalistic, Darwinian explanation for the complex phenomenon we now understand better in the living and non-living world…no longer “holds water” in this new Information Age.

As a non-scholar layman in the areas of theology and biblical studies…along with millions of other common Christians around the world simply following Jesus within their journeys of faith…I sense that the centuries-old paradigm conflict between philosophical atheism and Christianity is at a balanced apex…at a tipping-point where the evidences for theism may now begin…if they have not already…to surpass the now behind-the-times logic and arguments against supernaturalism and the miraculous in the Bible.

The Big Bang creation of the universe philosophically opened wide the door for intelligent agency…introducing in the first split-seconds of creation all of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics… along with time itself…and all of the material particles in the right quantities and proportions to produce the universe we now observe today…out of absolute nothing…sometime around 13.7 billion years ago.

If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…ex nihilo…along with the accompanying physical laws out of nothing…then the philosophical objection by skeptics that God cannot introduce creative life and “miracles” into the natural world…a natural world incorrectly viewed by some as a “closed system” up until a few decades ago…is now debunked by the discoveries of modern science through the identification of massive amounts of complex and functionally integrated systems of information…everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world.

The concept of an independent agent…God…injecting vast amounts of complex information into our world utilizing creative foresight…such as the DNA code…the unimaginably brilliant folding of amino acids into proteins…and the body-plan architectural information stored somewhere in the embryonic developmental structure of the living cell that builds cells and tells them their unique function and location in the dividing and expanding embryo…is very similar to our own use of accumulated information and creative foresight in the planned and premeditated assembly of houses, automobiles, airplanes, laptop computers, and pharmaceutical medicines.

Daniel 12:10 tells us that skeptical unbelief will be with us in this world…all the way through the end-times.

Daniel 7:15-25 and 8:23-25 infer that the “mouth that spake very great things” (v. 7:20) will wear-out the best of the great Christian apologists…the saints of the most High…in the last days…taking the arguments as far as we can…until God steps in to decisively expose for all time the subtle and elusive deceptions of the “son of perdition” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3…in a way that we cannot currently foresee.

There is a delicate balance between belief and unbelief…must continue until the end of this present world.

Our part is to faithfully share the gospel message…and then let the Holy Spirit do His work of persuasion and conviction in the hearts and minds of people (Zech. 4:6).

The aim of this post is to make the argument for the importance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…under attack from many angles for hundreds of years.

This attack has successfully undermined for some modern-day Christians the recognition of the existence of the divine life-scripts that comprise these stories of faith…that could only be written by the same God who created our incredibly fine-tuned and information-rich universe.

The issues argued in this blog are among the most important in all of human history.

The integrity of the biblical narrative stories of faith means something.

If it can be shown that these biblical stories of faith could not come from human literary invention…but must have a divine origin of imagination and composition…this accomplishes two important things.

First, it restores the credibility of the participation of God in people’s lives.

Second, it again clarifies for Christians today the God endorsed and sanctioned route for Christians to impact our culture…as the light of the world…as pillars of the earth…in the supernatural way that God intended.

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts stand at the pinnacle…at the peak…of what is possible in human experience. They exemplify the finest, best, and highest aspirations attainable in a human life.

Once Christians see the common through-line theme of the cross of Jesus Christ skillfully embedded within every biblical narrative story of faith…which could never have come out of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…this then clarifies what God is trying to pattern for us…in and through our own journeys of faith.

These plans of God were prophesied and articulated long ago through the prophet Jeremiah…of new covenant relationships between God and believers in which every Spirit-born person will personally know God from the least to the greatest (Jer. 31:31-34).