Barton Jahn's Blog - Posts Tagged "creationism"
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.
God Does Things His Way for our Benefit...Part 2
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
God doing things His way…displacing our way…is a uniquely biblical concept that will infuriate and enrage people committed to self-sovereign self-rulership according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty is in part what got Jesus Christ all the way to the cross. The religious leaders in Jerusalem did not want to do faith God’s way. They wanted to do faith their way.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the most emphatic demonstration of this chasm separating self-sovereignty from God-sovereignty.
We need at this point a few more biblical examples before moving on to explain why this is the case…and why this is an important commonsense apologetic argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity and the Bible.
Joseph in Egypt appears…towards the end of his 13-year, God-composed MBA program in management and leadership…to be at the point just before the revelation of Pharaoh’s dream that propels Joseph to the top of Egyptian society as governor…to take matters into his own hands…to again like Abraham and Sarah attempt on his own to help-out God…a God who seems at that point in time to be asleep in fulfilling the two earlier prophetic dreams given to Joseph as a teenager back in his homeland Canaan.
In attempting to enlist the help of the butler and baker to speak to Pharaoh upon their release…on behalf of Joseph to plead his innocence (Gen. 40:14-15)…Joseph is revealing at this late period in his preparation…unknowingly to Joseph…to soon become governor of Egypt…to help-along the fulfillment of his earlier prophetic dreams by doing things his way…by gaining control of the course of his life.
I do not know what plans Joseph may have had in mind after successfully obtaining his release from prison through the positive intervention of the butler or baker…but this action would have totally spoiled the life-script purpose…the outcome that his God-composed storyline honed-in on…to become governor of Egypt and save a large number of people from starvation during a widespread famine…but also to create a regionally catastrophic context big enough to bring his family into Egypt according to the long-range plans of God…outside of the narrowly focused contemplation of Joseph at the time.
Here again, the outcome of a God-composed journey of faith required a supernatural solution beyond the reach of Joseph to imagine, contrive, or actualize into being.
Skipping ahead to the New Testament, Peter had his own ideas about preventing the religious leaders in Jerusalem from harming Jesus…a mindset completely admirable and commendable according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…but as off-course and misguided as is imaginable concerning Jesus Christ the Lamb of God “slain from the foundation of the world”…destined from time immemorial to be the Savior and Redeemer of mankind through the cross on Calvary Hill.
That Peter goes out from the courtyard of Caiaphas the high priest during the night trial of Jesus…and weeps bitterly over his failure to stand courageously alongside Jesus during this ordeal…only points out the stark difference between our ways and God’s higher ways…higher ways in total contradiction to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 16:21-23).
The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a clear evidence that God is going to do things His way…for the highest and best reasons…even if no one at the time understands what is happening (1 Pet. 1:3).
The calling and ministry of the apostle Paul has to be one of the most brilliant examples of this fork-in-the-road departure from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…validating by innovative originality and foresight its divine origin.
The entire conversion and subsequent ministry of Saul/Paul to become the Christian missionary evangelist to the first-century Greco-Roman world…is based upon the most radical transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…possibly recorded in the human history of the world.
Paul is persecuting the early Christian church according to his way…his ideas for the purity and survival of his Jewish religious tradition…totally unaware until Damascus that Jesus of Nazareth is in fact the Messiah and Savior…the divine Son of God.
In a split-second of time…God instantaneously flips the highly educated yet culturally prejudiced, rabbinical Pharisee Saul/Paul into a new, different person now having the deepest personal humility in relation to the polytheistic, idol-worshipping Gentiles he will soon be sent out to evangelize through the powerfully persuasive perspective of his own personal conversion experience.
By an ingenious stroke of God…Paul is now both perfectly suited and qualified to take the new gospel message of hope and deliverance…the real truth about Jesus Christ…both scholastically and experientially out to the larger Greco-Roman world.
From the time of Damascus onward Paul can no longer culturally look down his nose at…and reject along with many of his countrymen…these heathen Gentiles according to the social and religious prejudices of the time…because their false worship of dumb idols as Gentiles cannot possibly exceed Paul’s own, individually misguided persecution of Jesus and the early Christian church.
Paul sees the immense grace and forgiveness of God instantly applied to his own life…now available and being freely offered to the Gentiles through faith rather than the works of the law…like no other Jew of his time with the possible exception of Peter.
No human could or would invent this brilliantly original and innovative life-script for Paul…having the totally unconventional element of God doing things His way.
In this brief account, we have skipped over Joshua, Gideon, Hannah, Ruth, Job, Jonah, David, Jeremiah, Elijah, Esther and Mordecai, Daniel, and Moses…to name only a few…who would probably have preferred at the time to do things their way according to worldly conventional thinking…rather than God’s more risky supernatural way…in their adventures of faith.
God doing things His way…displacing our way…is a uniquely biblical concept that will infuriate and enrage people committed to self-sovereign self-rulership according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty is in part what got Jesus Christ all the way to the cross. The religious leaders in Jerusalem did not want to do faith God’s way. They wanted to do faith their way.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the most emphatic demonstration of this chasm separating self-sovereignty from God-sovereignty.
We need at this point a few more biblical examples before moving on to explain why this is the case…and why this is an important commonsense apologetic argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity and the Bible.
Joseph in Egypt appears…towards the end of his 13-year, God-composed MBA program in management and leadership…to be at the point just before the revelation of Pharaoh’s dream that propels Joseph to the top of Egyptian society as governor…to take matters into his own hands…to again like Abraham and Sarah attempt on his own to help-out God…a God who seems at that point in time to be asleep in fulfilling the two earlier prophetic dreams given to Joseph as a teenager back in his homeland Canaan.
In attempting to enlist the help of the butler and baker to speak to Pharaoh upon their release…on behalf of Joseph to plead his innocence (Gen. 40:14-15)…Joseph is revealing at this late period in his preparation…unknowingly to Joseph…to soon become governor of Egypt…to help-along the fulfillment of his earlier prophetic dreams by doing things his way…by gaining control of the course of his life.
I do not know what plans Joseph may have had in mind after successfully obtaining his release from prison through the positive intervention of the butler or baker…but this action would have totally spoiled the life-script purpose…the outcome that his God-composed storyline honed-in on…to become governor of Egypt and save a large number of people from starvation during a widespread famine…but also to create a regionally catastrophic context big enough to bring his family into Egypt according to the long-range plans of God…outside of the narrowly focused contemplation of Joseph at the time.
Here again, the outcome of a God-composed journey of faith required a supernatural solution beyond the reach of Joseph to imagine, contrive, or actualize into being.
Skipping ahead to the New Testament, Peter had his own ideas about preventing the religious leaders in Jerusalem from harming Jesus…a mindset completely admirable and commendable according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…but as off-course and misguided as is imaginable concerning Jesus Christ the Lamb of God “slain from the foundation of the world”…destined from time immemorial to be the Savior and Redeemer of mankind through the cross on Calvary Hill.
That Peter goes out from the courtyard of Caiaphas the high priest during the night trial of Jesus…and weeps bitterly over his failure to stand courageously alongside Jesus during this ordeal…only points out the stark difference between our ways and God’s higher ways…higher ways in total contradiction to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 16:21-23).
The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a clear evidence that God is going to do things His way…for the highest and best reasons…even if no one at the time understands what is happening (1 Pet. 1:3).
The calling and ministry of the apostle Paul has to be one of the most brilliant examples of this fork-in-the-road departure from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…validating by innovative originality and foresight its divine origin.
The entire conversion and subsequent ministry of Saul/Paul to become the Christian missionary evangelist to the first-century Greco-Roman world…is based upon the most radical transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…possibly recorded in the human history of the world.
Paul is persecuting the early Christian church according to his way…his ideas for the purity and survival of his Jewish religious tradition…totally unaware until Damascus that Jesus of Nazareth is in fact the Messiah and Savior…the divine Son of God.
In a split-second of time…God instantaneously flips the highly educated yet culturally prejudiced, rabbinical Pharisee Saul/Paul into a new, different person now having the deepest personal humility in relation to the polytheistic, idol-worshipping Gentiles he will soon be sent out to evangelize through the powerfully persuasive perspective of his own personal conversion experience.
By an ingenious stroke of God…Paul is now both perfectly suited and qualified to take the new gospel message of hope and deliverance…the real truth about Jesus Christ…both scholastically and experientially out to the larger Greco-Roman world.
From the time of Damascus onward Paul can no longer culturally look down his nose at…and reject along with many of his countrymen…these heathen Gentiles according to the social and religious prejudices of the time…because their false worship of dumb idols as Gentiles cannot possibly exceed Paul’s own, individually misguided persecution of Jesus and the early Christian church.
Paul sees the immense grace and forgiveness of God instantly applied to his own life…now available and being freely offered to the Gentiles through faith rather than the works of the law…like no other Jew of his time with the possible exception of Peter.
No human could or would invent this brilliantly original and innovative life-script for Paul…having the totally unconventional element of God doing things His way.
In this brief account, we have skipped over Joshua, Gideon, Hannah, Ruth, Job, Jonah, David, Jeremiah, Elijah, Esther and Mordecai, Daniel, and Moses…to name only a few…who would probably have preferred at the time to do things their way according to worldly conventional thinking…rather than God’s more risky supernatural way…in their adventures of faith.
God Does Things His Way for our Benefit...Part 3
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
The hard truth I have discovered…along with tens or hundreds of millions of people experiencing biblical faith over the past centuries going back to Abraham…is that in the fulfillment of God’s promises to me in my own journey of faith…a part of me does not want God to do things His way within the elevated zone of the supernatural…I want things to progress more conventionally according to Bart’s way.
The cross of Jesus Christ applied to my life inserts a supernatural participation into the course of my life that brings with it goals and promises of God that are beyond my reach to self-fulfill…requiring all of the improvements of character…patience, trust, faith, surrender, flexibility, and giving God the benefit of the doubt (Heb. 11:1)…that in the process requires part of my way to die…to move aside…to make way for God’s higher ways.
But if we look hard enough…in these biblical stories of faith…God has a long-range plan that is above and outside of horizontally conventional thinking…above the aspirations and expectations…what we think we are entitled to…in terms of worldly conventional normalcy.
Yet the sacrifices made in every biblical narrative story of faith…the departures from normal aspirations and expectations…from Abraham onward…produces good for a large number of other people.
Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac his beloved son on Mount Moriah…stopped just in time by God with a shout out of heaven at the last moment…gives mankind a priceless and confirming foreglimpse of what God will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill…God indeed providing a very special Lamb…His own Son…as a sacrifice for sin.
God’s higher ways for the life-script of Joseph…to prepare him to become governor of Egypt during the great famine…basically displaced 13 years of “normal” life according to horizontally conventional thinking…that Joseph might otherwise think he was entitled to.
Yet this divine insertion of God’s ways…removing altogether whatever alternative “normal” life Joseph might otherwise have lived…was and is a huge benefit to mankind in demonstrating not only the reality of the existence of God…but also the incredible ingenuity that accrues within a God-scripted adventure of faith when we choose God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty.
If we take this same model and apply it to every positive person of faith recorded in the Bible…we find the same overlay of the cross of Christ…God displacing our ways with His ways…for the benefit of ourselves and for a large number of other people.
This is the difficult part about true biblical faith…it involves the participation of the living God who wants to do things His way…for our benefit.
This may be the primary, fundamental explanation underlying the existence of our universe and our world.
If God can come through for me…and for you…in a clearly supernatural way involving fulfilled promises outside of our control…this confirms not only God’s existence beyond a shadow of a doubt…but also His competence in human life script-writing to match the brilliant design we see in the natural world all around us. This priceless discovery then becomes a reality that belongs to me…and to you…for all eternity.
This reality can only occur within the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…inaccessible except through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and King (Mt. 4:17; Lk. 13:1-5; Jn. 8:24).
It does not exist anywhere else outside of the Bible.
This idea of God doing things His way in our lives…for our benefit…above and beyond our understanding at the time (Heb. 11:1)…according to a God-composed life-script individually crafted for us…is so far outside the bounds of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…so offensive and off-putting to the norms of sitting atop the thrones of our lives as autonomous, junior-gods “calling the shots”…that to ascribe this aspect of the biblical narrative stories of faith to be the product of human literary invention…is nonsensical.
The hard truth I have discovered…along with tens or hundreds of millions of people experiencing biblical faith over the past centuries going back to Abraham…is that in the fulfillment of God’s promises to me in my own journey of faith…a part of me does not want God to do things His way within the elevated zone of the supernatural…I want things to progress more conventionally according to Bart’s way.
The cross of Jesus Christ applied to my life inserts a supernatural participation into the course of my life that brings with it goals and promises of God that are beyond my reach to self-fulfill…requiring all of the improvements of character…patience, trust, faith, surrender, flexibility, and giving God the benefit of the doubt (Heb. 11:1)…that in the process requires part of my way to die…to move aside…to make way for God’s higher ways.
But if we look hard enough…in these biblical stories of faith…God has a long-range plan that is above and outside of horizontally conventional thinking…above the aspirations and expectations…what we think we are entitled to…in terms of worldly conventional normalcy.
Yet the sacrifices made in every biblical narrative story of faith…the departures from normal aspirations and expectations…from Abraham onward…produces good for a large number of other people.
Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac his beloved son on Mount Moriah…stopped just in time by God with a shout out of heaven at the last moment…gives mankind a priceless and confirming foreglimpse of what God will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill…God indeed providing a very special Lamb…His own Son…as a sacrifice for sin.
God’s higher ways for the life-script of Joseph…to prepare him to become governor of Egypt during the great famine…basically displaced 13 years of “normal” life according to horizontally conventional thinking…that Joseph might otherwise think he was entitled to.
Yet this divine insertion of God’s ways…removing altogether whatever alternative “normal” life Joseph might otherwise have lived…was and is a huge benefit to mankind in demonstrating not only the reality of the existence of God…but also the incredible ingenuity that accrues within a God-scripted adventure of faith when we choose God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty.
If we take this same model and apply it to every positive person of faith recorded in the Bible…we find the same overlay of the cross of Christ…God displacing our ways with His ways…for the benefit of ourselves and for a large number of other people.
This is the difficult part about true biblical faith…it involves the participation of the living God who wants to do things His way…for our benefit.
This may be the primary, fundamental explanation underlying the existence of our universe and our world.
If God can come through for me…and for you…in a clearly supernatural way involving fulfilled promises outside of our control…this confirms not only God’s existence beyond a shadow of a doubt…but also His competence in human life script-writing to match the brilliant design we see in the natural world all around us. This priceless discovery then becomes a reality that belongs to me…and to you…for all eternity.
This reality can only occur within the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…inaccessible except through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and King (Mt. 4:17; Lk. 13:1-5; Jn. 8:24).
It does not exist anywhere else outside of the Bible.
This idea of God doing things His way in our lives…for our benefit…above and beyond our understanding at the time (Heb. 11:1)…according to a God-composed life-script individually crafted for us…is so far outside the bounds of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…so offensive and off-putting to the norms of sitting atop the thrones of our lives as autonomous, junior-gods “calling the shots”…that to ascribe this aspect of the biblical narrative stories of faith to be the product of human literary invention…is nonsensical.
