Barton Jahn's Blog - Posts Tagged "christian"
We Cannot Do It All
We cannot have everything we want, simply because as a practical matter we cannot do everything we want. Time and physical reality forces us to exclude and make choices.
We cannot both live in the county and in the city, travel the world and go to college, find time to read all of the books we want to read and lead an active social life, become expert in two or more sports, pursue a happy marriage, have children and a family life, serve on the local school board, volunteer for weekend charity social work, spend as much time with old friends as we used to before marriage and children, write books, and be active in social media, all at the same time.
Life is not only about what we do, but also about what we choose not to do. Some things have to be cut out.
It has been said that a sculptor creates a masterpiece in marble by the pieces that are chipped away. The finished marble statue is created by the material that has been removed from the rough-hewn block of stone marble. There is a final outcome envisioned within the artistic eye of the sculptor, but the actual carving process to reach the end-product involves the chipping away of the excess, waste material.
The cross of Christ element in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith is unique to all religions, philosophies, and worldviews.
As Abraham walks from the city of Haran towards Canaan, with each step he takes Abraham’s personal plans for worldly conventional normalcy are being replaced by the higher plans of God, beyond anything Abraham could imagine.
The fact that the Master Sculptor was chipping away the worldly normative life-plan of Abraham, the father of faith, over 5,000 years ago is massive evidence for the divine composition of this opening journey of faith narrative in the Bible.
You cannot be Abraham and be anything else at the same time. A focused life excludes other things.
No humanistic writer would ever invent the concept of chipping out the marble from the block of conventional worldly normalcy to replace it with a risky, God-led journey of faith containing the cross as its central theme.
Understanding the fact that a biblical-quality journey of faith excludes our own way is critical for today’s disciple of Jesus Christ.
We cannot both live in the county and in the city, travel the world and go to college, find time to read all of the books we want to read and lead an active social life, become expert in two or more sports, pursue a happy marriage, have children and a family life, serve on the local school board, volunteer for weekend charity social work, spend as much time with old friends as we used to before marriage and children, write books, and be active in social media, all at the same time.
Life is not only about what we do, but also about what we choose not to do. Some things have to be cut out.
It has been said that a sculptor creates a masterpiece in marble by the pieces that are chipped away. The finished marble statue is created by the material that has been removed from the rough-hewn block of stone marble. There is a final outcome envisioned within the artistic eye of the sculptor, but the actual carving process to reach the end-product involves the chipping away of the excess, waste material.
The cross of Christ element in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith is unique to all religions, philosophies, and worldviews.
As Abraham walks from the city of Haran towards Canaan, with each step he takes Abraham’s personal plans for worldly conventional normalcy are being replaced by the higher plans of God, beyond anything Abraham could imagine.
The fact that the Master Sculptor was chipping away the worldly normative life-plan of Abraham, the father of faith, over 5,000 years ago is massive evidence for the divine composition of this opening journey of faith narrative in the Bible.
You cannot be Abraham and be anything else at the same time. A focused life excludes other things.
No humanistic writer would ever invent the concept of chipping out the marble from the block of conventional worldly normalcy to replace it with a risky, God-led journey of faith containing the cross as its central theme.
Understanding the fact that a biblical-quality journey of faith excludes our own way is critical for today’s disciple of Jesus Christ.
The Cost of Following Jesus
In Luke 22:33 Peter says to Jesus: “Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death.” Jesus then famously answers: “I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shall thrice deny that thou knowest me” (Lk. 22:34).
But in addition Jesus could have answered Peter: “You will not in the long-term forsake me…but it will cost you something…it will cost you giving up doing things your way.”
Instead of prison and death for Peter at that time…the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were about to engineer the greatest event in all of human history…maybe the greatest in all of eternity…the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the redemption of sinners willing to repent…that would procure for believers eternal life and liberation from the bondage to sin…far above any plans of Peter to protect Jesus from physical harm…no matter how commendable Peter’s intentions might be.
The higher plans of God simply displaced and swept away the contrary thinking of Peter regarding the humanly unacceptable disclosure of Jesus to the disciples that he would soon be arrested and killed…incomprehensible to Peter at the time…but clearly understood by Peter after his fall in the courtyard of Caiaphas, the crucifixion and resurrection, and Peter’s personal interview with the risen Christ.
God’s ways truly are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:8-9)…which is an affirmation within the life-scripts of the people of faith within scripture that the Bible has a divine origin…which as a spiritual reality cannot be duplicated as a counterfeit. Because the ways of God reside at the top-end of the vertical graph-line spectrum of goodness and light…the top part of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light that God exclusively owns…no humanistic writer could or would invent the huge gap between Peter’s lack of understanding that fateful night in the courtyard of Caiaphas…and God’s plans for the salvation for mankind.
On the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-16)…Jesus in essence says to Paul: “Yes, I will lead you into the all-truth of John 16:13 beyond what you could have imagined…but it will cost you something…it will cost giving up doing things your way.”
This is the narrow gate that the multitudes walk past and miss on their way to the destruction of unbelief and self-sovereignty.
This is the cross of Christ that people living within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking cannot see in the narrative stories of faith in the Bible.
This is another of the compelling arguments for the divine origin of the Bible.
But in addition Jesus could have answered Peter: “You will not in the long-term forsake me…but it will cost you something…it will cost you giving up doing things your way.”
Instead of prison and death for Peter at that time…the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were about to engineer the greatest event in all of human history…maybe the greatest in all of eternity…the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the redemption of sinners willing to repent…that would procure for believers eternal life and liberation from the bondage to sin…far above any plans of Peter to protect Jesus from physical harm…no matter how commendable Peter’s intentions might be.
The higher plans of God simply displaced and swept away the contrary thinking of Peter regarding the humanly unacceptable disclosure of Jesus to the disciples that he would soon be arrested and killed…incomprehensible to Peter at the time…but clearly understood by Peter after his fall in the courtyard of Caiaphas, the crucifixion and resurrection, and Peter’s personal interview with the risen Christ.
God’s ways truly are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:8-9)…which is an affirmation within the life-scripts of the people of faith within scripture that the Bible has a divine origin…which as a spiritual reality cannot be duplicated as a counterfeit. Because the ways of God reside at the top-end of the vertical graph-line spectrum of goodness and light…the top part of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light that God exclusively owns…no humanistic writer could or would invent the huge gap between Peter’s lack of understanding that fateful night in the courtyard of Caiaphas…and God’s plans for the salvation for mankind.
On the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-16)…Jesus in essence says to Paul: “Yes, I will lead you into the all-truth of John 16:13 beyond what you could have imagined…but it will cost you something…it will cost giving up doing things your way.”
This is the narrow gate that the multitudes walk past and miss on their way to the destruction of unbelief and self-sovereignty.
This is the cross of Christ that people living within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking cannot see in the narrative stories of faith in the Bible.
This is another of the compelling arguments for the divine origin of the Bible.
David
“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” (2 Cor. 4:17)
From The Second Half of the Cross
The Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes of Jesus day were no longer the spiritual children of Abraham, because they held on to their self-will instead of submitting it to God. Like people of our own culture, they were afraid of the uncertainty of relinquishing their hold over the destiny of their lives into the trust of God’s care. Instead these Jerusalem leaders created their own form of religion based upon rules, regulations, and the performance of self-works rituals that replaced the living but more risky faith of submitting their lives to God.
We see this pattern throughout history in all man-invented, perfunctory religious experience. People will do almost anything to avoid having to give up their self-will to God, because deep down inside they are afraid. People are afraid to take the risk that God’s way might actually be better, because of the element of uncertainty of what God might do with their lives.
There is security in staying with what we know, rather than venturing out into a perilous journey of faith with Jesus Christ into the unknown. There is a sense of security in not letting go of the power we have over our own lives. This is the case, even when the recipient of this letting go of the power of self-sovereignty…Jesus Christ our Creator God…will lovingly re-direct this self-same power back down towards us in a more intelligently designed and beneficially purposed adventure-of-faith life-plan.
This is why many people have to reach the bottom depths of failure and suffering, to have nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go, before they will turn to God for His help. Sadly, Jesus Christ is often the last resort when He should be the first and most sensible beginning option in discovering our true purpose in life. That many people stubbornly hang on to their own self-in-control natures, to the ruin of themselves and often those around them, is one of the central, core problems with the human race.
David has to face Goliath in a life-and-death struggle at the beginning of David’s career, not because God sets up these types of contests for His own enjoyment, but because we must learn real faith and trust in God to see us through challenges when failure and falsification of God’s character are live possibilities. In a biblical quality journey of faith we sometimes barely make it through the tightest of choreographed and integrated circumstances because this is one way amongst several ways that God uses to authenticate His direct participation in our lives.
Miraculous or near-miraculous deliverance through supernaturally choreographed events is one tool in God’s tool-kit to separate His ways above worldly conventional normalcy. We see this repeated throughout the narrative stories of the Bible for an eternally valid reason. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) because without a context of circumstances requiring committed faith in the face of discouraging appearances, God cannot reveal to us His very real presence in our lives in stark contrast to the subjective, humanistically generated false experience of self-works “religion.”
The story of David’s anointing by Samuel, and his calling, exploits, and tribulations in route to the kingship of Israel is not a man-invented myth because the component of the active participation of God in David’s story in beyond the reach of the creative imagination and invention of human writers. An adventure of faith like David’s is unique to the Bible.
David can write the 23rd Psalm because he actually followed God through the valley of the shadow of death. David learned first-hand that he did not have to fear evil, when God was with him.
Five of the most important words ever recorded in all of literature are: “for thou art with me” (Psalms 23:4). The contrast between the God-composed life of David, living on the knife’s edge of danger in faith and trust in God, and the self-led life in pursuit of security and self-preservation that will not venture out into the risky territory of faith in God, could not be greater.
The reward for David’s faith and trust is that he became Israel’s greatest king and fulfilled the purpose of his life (Psalms 139:14-18), and in doing so he came to personally know his Creator God.
From The Second Half of the Cross
The Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes of Jesus day were no longer the spiritual children of Abraham, because they held on to their self-will instead of submitting it to God. Like people of our own culture, they were afraid of the uncertainty of relinquishing their hold over the destiny of their lives into the trust of God’s care. Instead these Jerusalem leaders created their own form of religion based upon rules, regulations, and the performance of self-works rituals that replaced the living but more risky faith of submitting their lives to God.
We see this pattern throughout history in all man-invented, perfunctory religious experience. People will do almost anything to avoid having to give up their self-will to God, because deep down inside they are afraid. People are afraid to take the risk that God’s way might actually be better, because of the element of uncertainty of what God might do with their lives.
There is security in staying with what we know, rather than venturing out into a perilous journey of faith with Jesus Christ into the unknown. There is a sense of security in not letting go of the power we have over our own lives. This is the case, even when the recipient of this letting go of the power of self-sovereignty…Jesus Christ our Creator God…will lovingly re-direct this self-same power back down towards us in a more intelligently designed and beneficially purposed adventure-of-faith life-plan.
This is why many people have to reach the bottom depths of failure and suffering, to have nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go, before they will turn to God for His help. Sadly, Jesus Christ is often the last resort when He should be the first and most sensible beginning option in discovering our true purpose in life. That many people stubbornly hang on to their own self-in-control natures, to the ruin of themselves and often those around them, is one of the central, core problems with the human race.
David has to face Goliath in a life-and-death struggle at the beginning of David’s career, not because God sets up these types of contests for His own enjoyment, but because we must learn real faith and trust in God to see us through challenges when failure and falsification of God’s character are live possibilities. In a biblical quality journey of faith we sometimes barely make it through the tightest of choreographed and integrated circumstances because this is one way amongst several ways that God uses to authenticate His direct participation in our lives.
Miraculous or near-miraculous deliverance through supernaturally choreographed events is one tool in God’s tool-kit to separate His ways above worldly conventional normalcy. We see this repeated throughout the narrative stories of the Bible for an eternally valid reason. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) because without a context of circumstances requiring committed faith in the face of discouraging appearances, God cannot reveal to us His very real presence in our lives in stark contrast to the subjective, humanistically generated false experience of self-works “religion.”
The story of David’s anointing by Samuel, and his calling, exploits, and tribulations in route to the kingship of Israel is not a man-invented myth because the component of the active participation of God in David’s story in beyond the reach of the creative imagination and invention of human writers. An adventure of faith like David’s is unique to the Bible.
David can write the 23rd Psalm because he actually followed God through the valley of the shadow of death. David learned first-hand that he did not have to fear evil, when God was with him.
Five of the most important words ever recorded in all of literature are: “for thou art with me” (Psalms 23:4). The contrast between the God-composed life of David, living on the knife’s edge of danger in faith and trust in God, and the self-led life in pursuit of security and self-preservation that will not venture out into the risky territory of faith in God, could not be greater.
The reward for David’s faith and trust is that he became Israel’s greatest king and fulfilled the purpose of his life (Psalms 139:14-18), and in doing so he came to personally know his Creator God.
Purpose and the Cross
The best example to illustrate the perfection of the purposes of God is the life-script of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. What is seamlessly perfect about the divinely composed life-plan of Jesus is that it is absolutely unselfish. Jesus is not leisurely sailing the Mediterranean Sea with people waiting upon Him to satisfy His every need. Everything that Jesus does is for us. Even though the suffering of the cross adds a new perspective to God’s reality that He never experienced before (Hebrews 5:7-9), there is no redemptive value for Jesus Christ on the cross, because Jesus does not need redemption from sin. Jesus is the perfect Lamb of God sacrifice for the sins of the world. The sacrifice on the cross is for us.
What is astounding is that God is so brilliantly creative that He can compose a life-script for the perfect Son of God Jesus Christ, which actually contains an element of challenging difficulty. God knew that we would have difficulty with the second half of the cross that requires our self-in-charge nature to be set aside so that God can effectively work with us. Jesus says in Luke 12:50 “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished!” (KJV), not because, like us, Jesus is in need of character growth through adversity. Jesus is already divinely perfect.
In Luke 22:44, it is recorded that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane went back a second time to “pray more earnestly.” This is beyond our comprehension. We would normally assume that everything Jesus did, especially prayer, was perfect the first time. In Luke 22:42 Jesus prays “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” How can God be so brilliantly creative to be able to write into the earthly experience of the divine Son of God Jesus, the element of difficult challenge which is totally foreign to the perfect nature of God, just so He could tell us He personally understands our own difficulty in picking up our cross in order to follow God? Even within the absolute perfection of the ways and purposes of God, the life-script of Jesus manages to contain God-challenging elements of difficulty written-in for our future consolation and encouragement. This touches me at the capacity of my intellect and the depth of my heart.
It is the precise and intricate ways and purposes of God that enlists our own in-built facility for purpose, which can be integrated by God into any set of current life circumstances and events. Whether we are a heart surgeon, congresswoman, appellate court judge, school teacher, auto mechanic, pastor of a small-town church, writer of Christian books, or housewife raising children, God can overlay and integrate His higher ways and purposes into our lives if we will surrender and yield our self-wills to Him in faith and trust. The deliverance and salvation of God within the challenges of life, expressed so beautifully throughout the Psalms, takes place within the plans of God, and not our own. Innate purpose translates into reality at the highest most glorious level when orchestrated and directed within the framework of a God-composed journey of faith.
Sometimes purpose and worldly conventional normalcy do not mix. Sometimes we cannot have both the risk-filled pursuit of truth and the security of conventional normalcy simultaneously within the dynamics of this broken world. Jesus, the Lamb-of-God sacrifice for the sins of the world can only die and be resurrected if His generation rejects and crucifies Him. Only God can knit together a meaningful and purposeful tapestry of the commendable aspects of the Protestant work ethic with the worldly incomprehensible, biblical journey of faith through the cross of Calvary.
All of the people of faith in the Bible gave up some measure of worldly conventional normalcy in following God’s life-script for them. This separates out and elevates the quality of purpose and meaning into a higher zone that only God can orchestrate. This highlights the wisdom of God in the area of purpose, and like the scriptural example of God composing a life-script for Jesus that contained challenging difficulty for our consolation, it reveals an imaginative creativity that is at the edge of perfection regarding brilliantly directed purpose. If even our hardships work an eternal glory in us that we cannot fully understand in the present moment, orchestrated, managed, and moderated by a loving and brilliantly wise God at the limits of perfection, this should bolster our faith and confidence when outward appearances seem close to hopeless.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible tell us that God knows precisely what He is doing, dovetailed perfectly with the type and measure of purpose He has placed within us. Laws, rules, precepts, psalms of praise and encouragement, prophetic warnings, and historical events all occupy their place in the revelation of God to man. But the biblical narrative stories of faith demonstrate in action the will and ways of God within life-events to reveal His craftsmanship in the management of our journeys of faith and discovery.
What is astounding is that God is so brilliantly creative that He can compose a life-script for the perfect Son of God Jesus Christ, which actually contains an element of challenging difficulty. God knew that we would have difficulty with the second half of the cross that requires our self-in-charge nature to be set aside so that God can effectively work with us. Jesus says in Luke 12:50 “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished!” (KJV), not because, like us, Jesus is in need of character growth through adversity. Jesus is already divinely perfect.
In Luke 22:44, it is recorded that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane went back a second time to “pray more earnestly.” This is beyond our comprehension. We would normally assume that everything Jesus did, especially prayer, was perfect the first time. In Luke 22:42 Jesus prays “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” How can God be so brilliantly creative to be able to write into the earthly experience of the divine Son of God Jesus, the element of difficult challenge which is totally foreign to the perfect nature of God, just so He could tell us He personally understands our own difficulty in picking up our cross in order to follow God? Even within the absolute perfection of the ways and purposes of God, the life-script of Jesus manages to contain God-challenging elements of difficulty written-in for our future consolation and encouragement. This touches me at the capacity of my intellect and the depth of my heart.
It is the precise and intricate ways and purposes of God that enlists our own in-built facility for purpose, which can be integrated by God into any set of current life circumstances and events. Whether we are a heart surgeon, congresswoman, appellate court judge, school teacher, auto mechanic, pastor of a small-town church, writer of Christian books, or housewife raising children, God can overlay and integrate His higher ways and purposes into our lives if we will surrender and yield our self-wills to Him in faith and trust. The deliverance and salvation of God within the challenges of life, expressed so beautifully throughout the Psalms, takes place within the plans of God, and not our own. Innate purpose translates into reality at the highest most glorious level when orchestrated and directed within the framework of a God-composed journey of faith.
Sometimes purpose and worldly conventional normalcy do not mix. Sometimes we cannot have both the risk-filled pursuit of truth and the security of conventional normalcy simultaneously within the dynamics of this broken world. Jesus, the Lamb-of-God sacrifice for the sins of the world can only die and be resurrected if His generation rejects and crucifies Him. Only God can knit together a meaningful and purposeful tapestry of the commendable aspects of the Protestant work ethic with the worldly incomprehensible, biblical journey of faith through the cross of Calvary.
All of the people of faith in the Bible gave up some measure of worldly conventional normalcy in following God’s life-script for them. This separates out and elevates the quality of purpose and meaning into a higher zone that only God can orchestrate. This highlights the wisdom of God in the area of purpose, and like the scriptural example of God composing a life-script for Jesus that contained challenging difficulty for our consolation, it reveals an imaginative creativity that is at the edge of perfection regarding brilliantly directed purpose. If even our hardships work an eternal glory in us that we cannot fully understand in the present moment, orchestrated, managed, and moderated by a loving and brilliantly wise God at the limits of perfection, this should bolster our faith and confidence when outward appearances seem close to hopeless.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible tell us that God knows precisely what He is doing, dovetailed perfectly with the type and measure of purpose He has placed within us. Laws, rules, precepts, psalms of praise and encouragement, prophetic warnings, and historical events all occupy their place in the revelation of God to man. But the biblical narrative stories of faith demonstrate in action the will and ways of God within life-events to reveal His craftsmanship in the management of our journeys of faith and discovery.
Contemporary 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.
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.
A Broken Heart
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.
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.
God Didn't Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
Introduction
“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.
In better hands than mine (except when I have the anointing of the Holy Spirit…like Peter before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:8-12 or Philip in Acts 8:26-40…which can be experienced by all Spirit-born Christians for sharing our faith in Jesus Christ with boldness and conviction)…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 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…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…possessing the most sublimely complex and artistic information content…yet totally inexplicable and unnecessary under a Darwinian naturalistic framework…having no survival-of-the-fittest value whatsoever…but otherwise easily understood as a product of intentional, whimsical, premeditated design.
Certainly the mystery 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, pin-pong, badminton, volleyball, run the 100-meter sprint in track & field, run a marathon, complete the Tour de France, surf the North Shore in Hawaii, and score a goal in World Cup soccer…these are physical acuities that are so advanced, so complex, so finely tuned, and so functionally integrated…that to ascribe their origin to gradualistic, random chance, trial-and-error processes as asserted in the theory of Darwinian evolution…when we see and observe nothing incrementally progressive and 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…all of which 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 capacity for creating complex and functionally integrated systems or concepts.
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 codes, literary books of every genre, inventions of every type…which correspond to the information-rich systems we find in the natural world such as the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, the Cambrian Explosion, the DNA code, the laws of science, and the 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 unavoidable necessity of the inclusion of the overcoming of 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…coming from a modern popular culture that otherwise outwardly claims to avoid the acknowledgment of the concept of biblical sin.
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 mere existence of the word forgiveness in our vocabulary and in our dictionary argues for a transcendent capacity for moral reasoning and intelligent 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…and ascribes to the capacity of material particles and energy a broadly theoretical, God-like potential for creating premeditated end-points such as forgiveness…in the realm of moral reasoning.
A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one amongst tens 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, progressive, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as a functional, intermediate bridge between the initial trial-and-error dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start…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 possibly millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features…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.
The 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…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.
The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced such 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…that the 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 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 Age of Information.
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 archaic 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 14 billion years ago.
If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…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.
“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.
In better hands than mine (except when I have the anointing of the Holy Spirit…like Peter before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:8-12 or Philip in Acts 8:26-40…which can be experienced by all Spirit-born Christians for sharing our faith in Jesus Christ with boldness and conviction)…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 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…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…possessing the most sublimely complex and artistic information content…yet totally inexplicable and unnecessary under a Darwinian naturalistic framework…having no survival-of-the-fittest value whatsoever…but otherwise easily understood as a product of intentional, whimsical, premeditated design.
Certainly the mystery 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, pin-pong, badminton, volleyball, run the 100-meter sprint in track & field, run a marathon, complete the Tour de France, surf the North Shore in Hawaii, and score a goal in World Cup soccer…these are physical acuities that are so advanced, so complex, so finely tuned, and so functionally integrated…that to ascribe their origin to gradualistic, random chance, trial-and-error processes as asserted in the theory of Darwinian evolution…when we see and observe nothing incrementally progressive and 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…all of which 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 capacity for creating complex and functionally integrated systems or concepts.
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 codes, literary books of every genre, inventions of every type…which correspond to the information-rich systems we find in the natural world such as the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, the Cambrian Explosion, the DNA code, the laws of science, and the 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 unavoidable necessity of the inclusion of the overcoming of 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…coming from a modern popular culture that otherwise outwardly claims to avoid the acknowledgment of the concept of biblical sin.
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 mere existence of the word forgiveness in our vocabulary and in our dictionary argues for a transcendent capacity for moral reasoning and intelligent 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…and ascribes to the capacity of material particles and energy a broadly theoretical, God-like potential for creating premeditated end-points such as forgiveness…in the realm of moral reasoning.
A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one amongst tens 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, progressive, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as a functional, intermediate bridge between the initial trial-and-error dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start…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 possibly millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features…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.
The 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…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.
The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced such 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…that the 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 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 Age of Information.
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 archaic 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 14 billion years ago.
If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…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.
In This Book
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
In this book, I attempt to add some commonsense Christian apologetic arguments into the ongoing debate. Some such topics are:
First, is there a persuasive rationale to explain the humility of Jesus…above and outside of the standard and perfectly valid explanation that this is simply part of the divine character of God?
Is there an ingenious, underlying theme within the humility of Jesus that transcends far above the imagination of human literary invention…and at the same time serves as inspiration for Christians?
Does the humility component of the life-script of Jesus Christ surgically divide out and expose the negative aspect of rebellious self-sovereignty…resulting in the totally unjustified rejection and non-valuing of the Son of God Jesus…in a way that forever separates out the moral downside of: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6)…as demonstrated clearly through the cross of Christ at Calvary (Jn. 15:18-25)?
Second, how would anyone other than God compose a life-script for a perfect person Jesus Christ that gets Him to the cross? Is this idea far too original and innovative…as to fall clearly outside of human literary imagination…and therefore be divine in its origin?
What faulty, highlighted aspects of the human character would be accurately identified in this divine life-script composition…that would infuriate worldly conventional thinking to such a degree in first-century Israel…that would get a perfect person Jesus all the way to the cross…and not to mere house arrest, exile, or censure?
Third, how could anyone other than God compose a life-script complex enough for Jesus Christ the Son of God…that results in His broken heart on the cross (blood and water coming out of His pierced side…a modern medical description of a ruptured heart…John 19:34)?
How do you break the heart of God…as humanistically invented literary fiction…without at the same time violating the very thing that worldly conventional normalcy and thinking detests the most…that wants to sweep under the rug and ignore at all cost…the acknowledging of the existence of human sin and self-centeredness… heartbreakingly absorbed as a mass of evil and human wrongdoing…by Jesus on the cross as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin?
Fourth, where does the delicate balance of belief and unbelief come from? Why isn’t this balance overwhelmed in favor of one direction or the other?
Fifth, what explains the odd existence of the two main contrasting worldviews…self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty…for human beings alone?
This dichotomy clearly does not originate from nature. Lions display only one lifestyle habit…there are not two different competing approaches to being a lion. The same goes for every living creature in nature. For every living creature each lifestyle habit is distinctly unique…but uniform throughout that creature type…for lions, cheetahs, leopards, tigers, elephants, giraffes, alligators, and zebras, for example.
Yet humans have two optional worldviews to freely choose from…self-sovereignty or God-sovereignty…both radically different in the course and purpose of our lives. The complexity of the differences that divide these two worldviews is far beyond any plausible explanation of their origin by way of the naturalistic, gradual trial-and-error evolution of material particles and energy as asserted in the theoretical framework of Darwinism.
In this book, I attempt to add some commonsense Christian apologetic arguments into the ongoing debate. Some such topics are:
First, is there a persuasive rationale to explain the humility of Jesus…above and outside of the standard and perfectly valid explanation that this is simply part of the divine character of God?
Is there an ingenious, underlying theme within the humility of Jesus that transcends far above the imagination of human literary invention…and at the same time serves as inspiration for Christians?
Does the humility component of the life-script of Jesus Christ surgically divide out and expose the negative aspect of rebellious self-sovereignty…resulting in the totally unjustified rejection and non-valuing of the Son of God Jesus…in a way that forever separates out the moral downside of: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6)…as demonstrated clearly through the cross of Christ at Calvary (Jn. 15:18-25)?
Second, how would anyone other than God compose a life-script for a perfect person Jesus Christ that gets Him to the cross? Is this idea far too original and innovative…as to fall clearly outside of human literary imagination…and therefore be divine in its origin?
What faulty, highlighted aspects of the human character would be accurately identified in this divine life-script composition…that would infuriate worldly conventional thinking to such a degree in first-century Israel…that would get a perfect person Jesus all the way to the cross…and not to mere house arrest, exile, or censure?
Third, how could anyone other than God compose a life-script complex enough for Jesus Christ the Son of God…that results in His broken heart on the cross (blood and water coming out of His pierced side…a modern medical description of a ruptured heart…John 19:34)?
How do you break the heart of God…as humanistically invented literary fiction…without at the same time violating the very thing that worldly conventional normalcy and thinking detests the most…that wants to sweep under the rug and ignore at all cost…the acknowledging of the existence of human sin and self-centeredness… heartbreakingly absorbed as a mass of evil and human wrongdoing…by Jesus on the cross as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin?
Fourth, where does the delicate balance of belief and unbelief come from? Why isn’t this balance overwhelmed in favor of one direction or the other?
Fifth, what explains the odd existence of the two main contrasting worldviews…self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty…for human beings alone?
This dichotomy clearly does not originate from nature. Lions display only one lifestyle habit…there are not two different competing approaches to being a lion. The same goes for every living creature in nature. For every living creature each lifestyle habit is distinctly unique…but uniform throughout that creature type…for lions, cheetahs, leopards, tigers, elephants, giraffes, alligators, and zebras, for example.
Yet humans have two optional worldviews to freely choose from…self-sovereignty or God-sovereignty…both radically different in the course and purpose of our lives. The complexity of the differences that divide these two worldviews is far beyond any plausible explanation of their origin by way of the naturalistic, gradual trial-and-error evolution of material particles and energy as asserted in the theoretical framework of Darwinism.
Proof does not Produce Biblical-Quality Faith
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
Coming back to my discussion with the agnostic/atheist man insisting on objective, visual, foolproof evidence for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity…for Christians the answer to this issue is both easy and difficult.
If Jesus a few days after the resurrection walked down the middle of main street and right into the temple in Jerusalem…then like doubting Thomas all of the common people along with the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes could examine His wounds and observe His resurrected new body…and accept as proof that Jesus is the promised Messiah and the Son of God.
But accepting the visual evidence…producing absolute knowledge like two plus two equals four…or the existence of the noonday sun…accepting the evidence that Jesus is the divine Son of God is not the same as being willing to follow Him.
The Pharisees and scribes would have looked at the resurrected Jesus…talked with Him…examined His healed wounds…and then said: “Great…good for you…nothing has changed in our minds as a result of this newest miracle of yours…we still choose not to follow you…we will continue to go our own way”
For some unscrupulous and dishonest merchants selling their wares in the town marketplace…two-plus-two does not equal four…but five…a practice of “deceitful weights” denounced in the Old Testament in Proverbs and by the prophet Micah (Prov. 20:23; Mic. 6:11).
Having a system of standard, empirical weights does not prevent the willful and determined abandonment of integrity through the misuse of deceitful weights…a successful yet dishonest practice designed to work around…to circumvent…to ignore the real facts (standard weights) in business transactions.
Absolute knowledge by visual, empirical observation does not address the basic problem…does not displace, remove, or shift the mindset of self-sovereignty…over into God-sovereignty.
Jesus walking into the temple in Jerusalem after His resurrection…offering absolute proof of His divinity in physically rising from the dead…surprisingly does not change the inner man…does not equate to everyone freely choosing to make Him Lord and Master of their lives.
After the resurrection…revealing Himself to the Pharisees and scribes would not have produced biblical faith…defined as willingly allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways…as ancient in Jewish history as the calling of Abraham to leave Haran and go to Canaan…as basic to Judaism as it gets…and fundamental to the Christian concept of picking up our cross to follow Jesus.
Choosing to follow God…by purposeful, intentionally creative design…will always be a free-will, take-it-or-leave-it option…in first-century Jerusalem, in the present-day, and for all eternity in heaven.
This is the remarkably sublime beauty of the free-will, free-thinking, moral reasoning, non-robots that God created humans to be…with or without absolute, visual, foolproof evidence of His existence (Jn. 20:29).
The spiritual mystery of autonomous rebellion is therefore one of the key moral issues under examination in this life and this broken world.
A person does not have to be a scholar to see in the Bible and to experience first-hand…that God initially takes people having hidden potential…yet at the start of their calling are broken, lost, and aimless in life (Mt. 9:10-13)…and through the divinely supportive respect and acceptance over time of salvation, redemption, and the life-altering insertion of a God-composed adventure of faith…aided and energized by the Holy Spirit…turns them into something vastly better than they could have previously imagined.
This is one of the main themes of the Bible. Some people will accept God’s lead and follow Him into their destinies…others will push God away and follow their own course.
This in itself should be a telling argument against the random-chance naturalism of self-sovereign worldly conventional thinking…by virtue of the sheer inexplicability of the origin of the concept of biblical faith and its persistent longevity.
Naturalism, if true should produce one monotonous, homogeneous human mindset…belief or unbelief…one lifestyle habit per creature type…like the rest of the living world.
This should tell us…that as human beings…we are different (Gen. 1:26-27).
The complexity of the information content, the innovative originality of the main concepts, and the utter crash and collision with worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…makes a compelling commonsense apologetic case in itself for the divine origin of the journeys of faith recorded in the Bible…above and beyond humanistic literary invention.
Coming back to my discussion with the agnostic/atheist man insisting on objective, visual, foolproof evidence for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity…for Christians the answer to this issue is both easy and difficult.
If Jesus a few days after the resurrection walked down the middle of main street and right into the temple in Jerusalem…then like doubting Thomas all of the common people along with the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes could examine His wounds and observe His resurrected new body…and accept as proof that Jesus is the promised Messiah and the Son of God.
But accepting the visual evidence…producing absolute knowledge like two plus two equals four…or the existence of the noonday sun…accepting the evidence that Jesus is the divine Son of God is not the same as being willing to follow Him.
The Pharisees and scribes would have looked at the resurrected Jesus…talked with Him…examined His healed wounds…and then said: “Great…good for you…nothing has changed in our minds as a result of this newest miracle of yours…we still choose not to follow you…we will continue to go our own way”
For some unscrupulous and dishonest merchants selling their wares in the town marketplace…two-plus-two does not equal four…but five…a practice of “deceitful weights” denounced in the Old Testament in Proverbs and by the prophet Micah (Prov. 20:23; Mic. 6:11).
Having a system of standard, empirical weights does not prevent the willful and determined abandonment of integrity through the misuse of deceitful weights…a successful yet dishonest practice designed to work around…to circumvent…to ignore the real facts (standard weights) in business transactions.
Absolute knowledge by visual, empirical observation does not address the basic problem…does not displace, remove, or shift the mindset of self-sovereignty…over into God-sovereignty.
Jesus walking into the temple in Jerusalem after His resurrection…offering absolute proof of His divinity in physically rising from the dead…surprisingly does not change the inner man…does not equate to everyone freely choosing to make Him Lord and Master of their lives.
After the resurrection…revealing Himself to the Pharisees and scribes would not have produced biblical faith…defined as willingly allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways…as ancient in Jewish history as the calling of Abraham to leave Haran and go to Canaan…as basic to Judaism as it gets…and fundamental to the Christian concept of picking up our cross to follow Jesus.
Choosing to follow God…by purposeful, intentionally creative design…will always be a free-will, take-it-or-leave-it option…in first-century Jerusalem, in the present-day, and for all eternity in heaven.
This is the remarkably sublime beauty of the free-will, free-thinking, moral reasoning, non-robots that God created humans to be…with or without absolute, visual, foolproof evidence of His existence (Jn. 20:29).
The spiritual mystery of autonomous rebellion is therefore one of the key moral issues under examination in this life and this broken world.
A person does not have to be a scholar to see in the Bible and to experience first-hand…that God initially takes people having hidden potential…yet at the start of their calling are broken, lost, and aimless in life (Mt. 9:10-13)…and through the divinely supportive respect and acceptance over time of salvation, redemption, and the life-altering insertion of a God-composed adventure of faith…aided and energized by the Holy Spirit…turns them into something vastly better than they could have previously imagined.
This is one of the main themes of the Bible. Some people will accept God’s lead and follow Him into their destinies…others will push God away and follow their own course.
This in itself should be a telling argument against the random-chance naturalism of self-sovereign worldly conventional thinking…by virtue of the sheer inexplicability of the origin of the concept of biblical faith and its persistent longevity.
Naturalism, if true should produce one monotonous, homogeneous human mindset…belief or unbelief…one lifestyle habit per creature type…like the rest of the living world.
This should tell us…that as human beings…we are different (Gen. 1:26-27).
The complexity of the information content, the innovative originality of the main concepts, and the utter crash and collision with worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…makes a compelling commonsense apologetic case in itself for the divine origin of the journeys of faith recorded in the Bible…above and beyond humanistic literary invention.
God does Things His Way for our Benefit...Part 1
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.
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.
