Barton Jahn's Blog, page 3

The Real American Dream

The temptation in the wilderness…of Jesus…regarding the attractive appeal of the kingdoms of this world, and the power and glory of them (Lk. 4:5-8)…as the sole conventionally recognized and popularly understood means to solve the problems of this world…should not be automatically disqualified…as not being commendable and admirable…just because it comes out of the mouth of Satan.

The cleverest and most appealing of the destructive temptations by Satan contain a kernel of partial truth…being half-truths that have some measure of positive value…their destructive nature being in that they rob the intended target of realizing the full benefit of the half-truth being deceitfully offered…having a final, hidden outcome that intentionally and knowingly falls far short of the misleading promise conveyed…like unknowingly accepting a one-hundred dollar bill from a counterfeiter…only to find out later at the grocery store that it is worthless.

The precisely targeted temptations by Satan in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:1-5)…of Jesus in the wilderness (Lk. 4:1-15)…and now being put forward in this present time…attempt to get people to lower their sights to aim for things below their created potential…to aim for lower goals that miss the mark of people’s divinely intended destinies.

If human beings are created with the privileged capacity to be able to have a personal relationship with our Creator God…to know Him from the least to the greatest (Jer. 31:34)…then one of the most misguided tragedies in this life would be to become side-tracked by alternative goals that distract, frustrate, and dilute the fully realized human life-script…of enjoying a walk with God through life…that actualizes into reality this intimate personal relationship with God.

The destructive intentions deceptively hidden within the temptations by Satan…are masked within the details of choices and suggested courses of action…that have the outward appearance at first glance…of being reasonably beneficial and sensible.

By taking these classic temptations apart piece-by-piece…”sunlight being the best disinfectant”…what is revealed is the real truth about God (Jn. 10:10).

For example, the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5)…hopelessly falls short of its implied benefit…misleadingly falls short of the whole story…because simply knowing about good and evil alone…without the dual accompanying divine capacities of timeless foresight and absolute perfect character…leads to the despair of failure…leads to the frustration of not be able to fully achieve consistent success…of not being able to produce and maintain the trouble-free life of secure happiness…elevated safely above the vulnerable zone of being corruptible and mistake-prone.

In a nutshell, this is an accurate description of flawed human nature. In essence, this is a fundamental explanation for the imperfect record of human history.

Our modern culture denigrates the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as a human invented, literary myth…but the highly sophisticated theme here is so far above and outside of the boundaries of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…differentiating the deeply profound concepts of self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty in the course and direction of human life-scripts…that to lightly dismiss this Garden of Eden temptation story as having a human imaginative origin…in my opinion is being naïvely uncritical and short-sighted.

No human literary writer…at the time of the writing of the book of Genesis…or in modern times today…could or would get within ten miles of this story…could or would invent this account of the downward fall of mankind in freely choosing to go our own way…independently going about our own lives being the foundational keystone of humanistic self-sovereignty…the diametric opposite of following the counsel and input of God our Creator within a walk of faith.

Obtaining the knowledge of good and evil alone…on the cheap in the Garden of Eden by merely eating a particular fruit from a tree…is like someone giving us an automobile for free that has no motor. It may be beautiful on the outside…but it is not functional in terms of getting anywhere.

That “knowing good and evil” alone would be a positive thing for mankind…is a classic example of being a half-truth…having an end-point outcome that does not fully deliver as advertised.

The only way that “knowing good and evil” successfully operates for autonomous human beings…walking within our own self-composed life-scripts apart from God…is if we also innately possess the timeless foresight to see into the future to make correct decisions ahead-of-time…and possess the absolute perfect character to always without exception choose the right course of action for the optimum benefit to ourselves and to other people.

Without timeless foresight and absolute goodness…”knowing good and evil” becomes a Catch-22 dilemma of only being able to recognize, appreciate, and second-guess our past bad choices and mistakes…in hindsight…after-the-fact in the reactive, cleanup mode.

Not having the benefit in-the-moment…of being able to see ahead into the future the final outcomes of our decisions, choices, and actions now in the present time…and not being able to divinely separate and parse the subtleties of good from evil…at the proactive, preventive, and trouble-free level of perfect character…is a reality of human life.

But acquiring the knowledge of good and evil alone…as non-divine human beings…does indeed work extremely well…if this deficiency in our nature is repaired by the addition of a personal connection with our Creator God…who does possess the divine attributes of timeless foresight and absolute perfect goodness…a reality that is brilliantly patterned for us in the life-scripts of the worldly unconventional, biblical narrative stories of faith.

The tempting appeal of independently acquiring for ourselves one of the legs of the three-legged stool required as a first-start to becoming “as gods”…the three legs of the stool being at a minimum the knowledge of good and evil, timeless foresight, and perfect character…this hasty and rash decision by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to accept the proposal made by Satan speaking to them in beguiling words through the spiritual apparition/holography of a beautiful serpent (2 Cor. 11:14)…carries with it the unimaginably destructive, hidden by-product of going our own way (Isa. 53:6)…of departing on our own from the clear command of God not to eat the fruit from this particular tree…thereby separating Adam and Eve from the vital personal connection to God that they and we need…the connection to fill-in the missing input of divine foresight and absolute goodness into the equation of life…that they still lacked after acquiring this knowledge of good and evil.

A thoughtfully questioning and worldly-savvy Adam and Eve might have more wisely answered back to the serpent: “What you say sounds good and appealing on the surface…but there is no rush…we will first discuss this with God, think about it, and then get back to you in a few days. Also, we know God just well-enough now to trust His judgment...and will ask God to elaborate further on why He told us not to eat this fruit…and why someone would be suggesting we do otherwise…as if there might be another alternate reality we are missing-out on in this Garden of Eden…that is independent of and contrary to the council of God…before making our decision regarding this new option you present.”

The absence of all of the information needed to make a thoughtful decision…of not having the whole picture…identifies this temptation in the Garden of Eden as having such a malicious and destructive intention…that its subtlety of being masked within a half-truth containing some limited measure of appealing value…enables us in hindsight to be able to categorize this temptation by Satan as being an injuriously deceptive evil…on a monumental scale as demonstrated every day in the front pages of newspapers around the world…of people having a knowledge of good and evil but being incapable…as less-than-divine gods…not possessing all of the tools needed…to divinely control life-events consistently towards favorable outcomes.

The temptation in the Garden of Eden…essentially gave us a bank account with a checkbook full of checks that we are unable to cash…gave us a brand-new automobile without an engine.

Applying this same line-of-reasoning to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness…the pivotal turn-about here is that Satan did not know…that this time he was the one who was partially uninformed…at the time of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness…about the premeditated and timeless plans of God for Jesus to be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin (1 Cor. 2:8).

Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 were brilliantly hidden in the Old Testament scriptures as prophetic, predicted events to be fulfilled centuries later in the future… as were actualized into reality on Calvary Hill and on Easter morning in Jerusalem…about three and one-half years after this temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

Satan is a created being…and does not possess the divine attributes of divine foresight and foreknowledge. This time around Satan himself was not “with-it” and divinely savvy to know in advance the precise plans of God for the redemption and salvation of mankind.

The temptation to Jesus in the wilderness…of using the power and glory of the kingdoms of this world as the means to fix humanity’s problems was not an off-target, misdirected temptation…not a random, shot-in-the-dark outcome of Satan’s not fully knowing in advance of the precise details of the life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God…in a human body here on earth.

But in crafting this deceptive temptation of Jesus in the wilderness…what separates itself out here…that tells us a great deal about the real truth about God…is that Satan this time was the one who did not possess all of the information.

The biblical narrative stories of faith…including and especially the life-script for Jesus Christ…demonstrate that only God has the complete picture…that only God has all of the information…along with timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness.

Satan was unable to comprehend and to interpret the Passover…of the blood of a lamb applied to the exterior top and sides of the entry doors to the dwellings of the Jews in Egypt (Ex. 12:7) that effectuated the plague of death…the “destroyer”…to safely passover the houses of the “children of Israel in Egypt” (Ex. 12:27)…re-enacted by Jews every year thereafter as the Passover celebration for roughly 1,500 years.

Satan was unable to grasp and to anticipate the Passover as a foreglimpse of the prime mission of Jesus Christ the Son of God to be that very Passover Lamb of God.

If Satan had any foresight and advanced knowledge into the true mission-plan of Jesus…at the time of the temptation in the wilderness…he would not have wasted one of his three temptations on the idea that Jesus of Nazareth would be susceptible…would lower His sights…to the enticing allurement of using worldly power and glory as a shortcut to achieve His destiny.

The offer of this worldly conventional means by which to save the world…that might presumably tempt Jesus…again clothed as a deceptive half-truth but lacking the complete picture…intended for Jesus to take the quick and easy worldly path to accomplishing His mission…whatever that was as understood by Satan at that moment in time…the underlying destructive intention was to subordinate Jesus to Satan’s authority (Lk 4:7)…the main goal of this temptation in the wilderness.

To sacrifice His unique role and singular opportunity as the Son of God in a human body…in order to accomplish the saving of the world by taking its repair into His own hands by using the standard, worldly conventional means of political power, glory, and influence…to Satan’s thinking might be appealing to Jesus…as a misguided form of self-sacrifice…at that critically opportune time of physical weakness after fasting in the wilderness (Lk. 4:1-4).

But Jesus emphatically rejects this tempting proposal put forward by Satan…choosing instead the elevated life-script composed by Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit…before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8)…because Jesus Christ knows His own life-script calling and mission-plan…because Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God in a human body…possesses all of the information ahead-of-time (Lk. 2:49; Mt. 9:6, 9:28, 12:40, 26:53-54; Jn. 18:36-37, 19:10-11)…being in direct communion and communication with God the Father at all times (Mt. 11:27; Jn 3:34).

The unique life-script for Jesus Christ to become the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sin…elevated and transcendent far above worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…and thus outside of the contemplation of Satan at the time of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness…was foreglimpsed in the aborted sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:8)…foreglimpsed in the yearly Passover instituted at the time of the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt (Ex. 12:1-28)…and foreglimpsed in the brazen serpent lifted up on a pole by Moses during the Exodus (Num. 21:8-9; Jn. 3:14).

The extraordinary revelation here that illuminates the real truth about God…as it relates to our free-will choice to follow God or to go our own way…is that Satan at the time of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness…was incapable of envisioning and comprehending a higher, transcendent mission-plan for Jesus the divine Son of God to absorb within Himself the sins of the world…as the Second Person of the Trinity to accept our punishment for sin…to experience death on our behalf for the one and only time in all eternity…and to be bodily raised from the dead by God the Father after being buried in a cave for three days…thereby having the legal justification to possess the keys to hell and to death…and to be able to offer salvation and eternal life freely to any and to all who will place their faith in the Passover Lamb of God…Jesus Christ.

Satan cannot rise above his own limited capacity and character…in crafting his temptations for Jesus Christ of Nazareth…and for human beings…and this is where God can outpace and out-run Satan…as demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of faith…and in God-composed journey of faith life-scripts for Spirit-born Christians today.

Before encapsulating all of this…more needs to be said about the American Dream.

In the highest and most ideal sense the American Dream can be described as the opportunity to realize our innate potential through the exercise of individual freedom, economic freedom, and personal responsibility…within a political system of rules and laws that is a democratic republic based upon representative government ruled by “we the people” and not by the tyrannical whims of a hereditary monarchy…periodically electing our leaders through popular vote…that creates a fair and open society where people can advance socially, culturally, and economically…as free from prejudice and corruption as is possible…thereby producing the best human generated social environment for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Slightly lower down the vertical spectrum-line of this higher ideal…is the more basic and worldly-practical motivation of the varied immigrants coming to the United States from other countries…wanting to experience this higher ideal of personal freedom and liberty within an open society…but mainly focused initially upon the expedient goal of securing economic stability through better employment opportunities available in America…historically fleeing from political oppression, culturally closed societies, or local natural disasters causing economic depressions…in their home countries.

The contemporary American Dream might therefore generically be defined as going to college, getting a good paying job we like working at, having a happy marriage, raising a family, owning a house in a nice neighborhood, having friends, enjoying hobbies, playing sports, advancing in our careers, participating in beneficial and fulfilling social work, sending our children to college, being able to financially afford driving nice cars, enjoying good health, taking European vacations, having a solid stock market portfolio, and providing for a secure retirement.

What is important here…in our attempt to understand the real truth about God…is that it is beyond imagination to hypothesize an American Dream scenario…translated back in time to match the first-century culture of the Greco-Roman world…for the life-script of Jesus Christ the divine Son of God.

The comparison of apples to oranges as an analogy is inadequate.

An American Dream life-script applied to Jesus Christ does not fit…even at its highest and most idealized sense…because the biblical narrative stories of faith transcend above the worldly conventional normalcy and thinking of the American Dream…in any era…past or present…especially for the life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Returning to the example of the temptation in the wilderness…it was only after the resurrection of the perfectly sinless Jesus Christ on Easter morning…that Satan realized he had been outsmarted and out-maneuvered by the elevated, transcendent life-script of Jesus designed for the redemption of mankind…on the cross of Calvary…that only a blemish-free Jesus of Nazareth could procure for us…the God/man substitution in our place as the just atonement for our sins.

Attempting to fix this world through the means of the power and glory of the kingdoms of this world…through standard politics…has no overlap…has absolutely nothing in common with being the singular Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for mankind’s sins.

The biblical narrative stories of faith likewise have elevated life-scripts with callings that have nothing to do with pursuing the American Dream.

This is what distinguishes the Bible from all other religions, philosophies, and worldviews.

The consistent and repetitive theme of God’s higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9) integrated into the life-stories of the people of faith in the Bible…is a compelling evidence for the divine origin of these unique life-scripts…but also provides a major clue into the purpose and meaning of human life.

Mistakenly lowering our sights upon the bottom portion of the American Dream…acquiring materialistic things alone…again illuminates and elucidates the real truth about God.

Satan does not care about human well-being…as deficient junior-level gods possessing only the knowledge of good and evil…but lacking divine foresight and absolute goodness.

In the biblical narrative stories of faith…and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross at Calvary…God reveals the bend-over-backwards…self-sacrifice at-all-costs…love-filled value and worth He places in our relationship to Him.

The American Dream subtly morphs into a deceptive half-truth when it focuses solely on the financial materialism of acquiring things…when it descends into the covetousness of amassing worldly wealth as its primary goal.

The God-created human capacity to pursue the higher ideals of the American Dream…as specified and included within a detailed God-composed journey of faith life-script…having positive direction and momentum…becomes knocked-off course, slowed-down, and diluted by the distractions that worldly conventional normalcy and thinking present in the form of goals and aspirations focused entirely upon the lower bottom-third of the American Dream…upon materialistic things alone.

What is criminally deceptive here is that all that Satan has to offer in his limited capacity…is a blanket, generalized appeal of the pursuit of materialistic things…according to the worldly conventional normalcy and thinking of the lower third of the American Dream…being offered across-the-board equally to every person…because this is the outer boundary-line of what Satan is capable of envisioning for human beings…the enticing worldly pride of self-validation through the obtaining of the ownership of material things.

Only God possess the divinely timeless foresight and absolute goodness…to compose life-script journeys of faith tailored precisely to the unique talents and abilities He has created within each individual person.

Being tempted to go our own way according to standard worldly thinking and normalcy…is a form of robbery…designed to prevent people from actualizing their highest potential…from realizing our created destinies that only God our Creator would or could have the complete knowledge of.

Jesus could have decided to use the power and glory of the kingdoms of this world to solve the political, economic, and cultural problems within the contemporary context of the first-century.

But this alone would not have re-established…have repaired…the temporarily broken relationship between God and people…lost years ago in the Garden of Eden.

Whether Satan understood all this…I personally do not think he did.

The cross at Calvary takes us back to the Garden of Eden…where we can start-over again by each of us individually saying: “I’m sorry…I messed-up…I want you God in my life…I will look upward to Jesus Christ as my Savior and King from now on” (Num. 21:8-9; Mt. 4:17).

God is love…He just is. God loves us…He just does.

Satan hates God and he hates us…I don’t know why.

Finally, when a dashingly handsome young man courts a beautiful young woman to be his wife…the suitability of the young man’s fortune…his financial status and ability to support a family…must be considered by the young woman.

We see this reality exhibited in nature by the male bird “displaying” his brilliant colors or his song pattern to a prospective female bird…and in the violent head-butting to establish the dominant male in a herd of North American bison…or in the horn-butting competition between mountain goat males…determining who can mate with the females in the herd.

Yet Jesus Christ offers His forgiveness, redemption, eternal life, and the fresh new start of a personal relationship with God…through the lowest imaginable status of the cross on Calvary…the lowest definition of failure in terms of worldly success, power, and glory.

The apostle Paul…in taking the gospel message to the Greco-Roman world in the first-century…battled against this negative perception coming from the standpoint of worldly convention normalcy…calling it the “offense of the cross” (Gal. 5:11)…many people then and today thinking that a divine “god” could not be executed by Roman crucifixion.

Jesus has nothing to offer in terms of the lower third of the American Dream…as translated into the past or present.

If Jesus enlists us into becoming the “father of faith” like Abraham…or governor of Egypt like Joseph…or deliverer of the Israelites from Egypt like Moses…or to become the king of Israel like David…or to be the premier evangelical missionary apostle to the larger Greco-Roman world in the first-century…like His own unique life-script…then these callings and missions will go through the cross.

This description of the essence of the biblical narrative stories of faith…separates-out and illuminates the parts of the American Dream…according to Christian thought that differentiates the ideal at the top of the American Dream…from the open and blatant covetousness exhibited in the pursuit of material wealth alone…at the bottom of the American Dream.

This corruption by Satan of the higher ideals of the American Dream…higher ideals and aspirations subsumed within a God-composed journey of faith as portrayed within the biblical narrative stories of faith…is consistent with the temptations in the Garden of Eden and of Jesus in the wilderness…designed to rob people of the fullness of achieving their divinely intended and created destinies.

Human beings possessing the knowledge of good and evil…are complete and whole when connected to our Creator God who possesses timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness.

The real American Dream points us straight toward the biblical narrative stories of faith…and the true living God who possesses all of the information regarding our created purpose and destiny in life.

The Real Truth about God

In my preparation to become a field superintendent in building construction…my chosen career…I spent a large portion of my early-to-middle twenties working in as many different building trades as I could…such as residential framing, finish carpentry, remodeling, residential drywall, commercial drywall, commercial lather on a 22-story high-rise in downtown Los Angeles, mason’s tender on the masonry block portion of the construction of a supermarket store, and laborer on a large department store in a shopping center in Homestead, Florida, for three months during my summer break in junior college.

From ages twenty-eight to thirty-one I broadened my experience by working three years in residential construction customer service for a large builder…first as a repair-person and then as head of the department.

I then furthered the advance preparation of “paying my dues”…of “learning my craft”…by working as an assistant superintendent for two and one-half years in production tract housing…before becoming a superintendent in my middle thirties…completing a bachelor’s degree in construction management at age 38 by attending night classes.

Because my goal from the beginning was to become a construction field superintendent…during these years as a tradesman, in customer service, and as an assistant superintendent…I took detailed notes and made rough sketches of what to do and what not to do as a jobsite superintendent…to be able to influence the work…at key milestone points…to run more smoothly and as error-free as possible.

These notes and sketches became the material for four books published by McGraw-Hill (1995-98)…on how to avoid problems, crashes, and collisions between the various building components…in housing construction…which I began writing and illustrating at age thirty in 1982.

This is not unlike many careers where people “work their way up from the bottom” in order to learn their craft…before moving up into a supervisory/leadership position.

I should disclose here that I became a Christian at age 18…and received a very clear and supernaturally confirmed calling two years later…to become a construction superintendent…which would take-up too much space here to describe adequately and in detail.

My personality is such that I would describe myself as being a rather slow and deliberate thinker. I usually need to “go once around the block” before I figure things out…in nearly everything in life. I am not an instantly “savvy” or “with-it” person by nature…needing first to experience or observe something in action before it clearly “sinks in.”

I would guess that this is true for many people.

The inspired approach of making an early investment of first-hand, varied building trades experience upfront…worked well for me…because when the time came to be a full superintendent in charge of my own projects…I had developed a good sense of how to proactively think-ahead to organize and schedule the work.

But equally important, I had also built-up over the years a personal database of close to two-thousand problems and issues to avoid…which if eliminated upfront through constructability analysis and by using detailed checklists sequenced to each successive phase of the work…removed these subtle debugging problems altogether before they had a chance to enter unnoticed by stealth into the construction…which otherwise would create the seemingly inescapable, repetitive daily syndrome of “putting-out-fires” that plagues the jobsite management of many new construction projects.

How this all relates to this book about the real truth about God…is that this approach of advance preparation toward a very specific and well-defined future goal…in my work career…also informs part of my understanding of the underlying purposes and intentions of God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Most importantly…this informs a unique worldview having purpose, meaning, and hope for human life…that when understood in its novel, elevated, and unconventional aspects…turns out to be light-years ahead of any atheistic, naturalistic philosophy for life.

If our very short-length lives here are intended to be an experiential preparation for the upcoming reality of eternal life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…this then turns upside-down all standardized priorities within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 6:33).

It more accurately defines the true spirit of God-composed journeys of faith. It more accurately defines the essence of the Christian life.

Some of the most unconventional, non-worldly verses in the Bible…that describe the elevated outlook of the people engaged within their God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…can be found in Hebrews 11:12-16:

12 Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.

13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.

16 But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts are intended by God to create the context for the advance preparation of Spirit-born Christians to enter into the kingdom of Jesus Christ…now and in the heavenly world to come…by being part of the active solution of fixing specific and wide-ranging problems here in this world…sometimes solely and simply by becoming a better person “in Christ” right where we find ourselves…through the divine foresight, insight, and premeditated planning of God.

This is what I experienced in my divinely orchestrated apprenticeship in preparation to become a building construction superintendent…imperfectly performed by me at many points along the way…yet perfectly planned and managed by God in its conceptually insightful program…and in its uniquely innovative, final outcome.

Should the goal in life be to acquire material wealth, elevated social status, personal acclaim, and financial security…or should our goal be to walk within a journey of faith with God…allowing Him to reveal to us the talents and abilities He created within us…in unselfish service to other people and to the world-at-large…while leading us into the all truth of John 16:13 as preparation for eternal life in the upcoming kingdom of Jesus Christ?

The biblical stories of faith are not about elevating individual people upward into being the focus of praise and adulation…but instead focus upon achieving something…a particular positive goal or task…not lifting up someone.

The positive characters in the biblical narrative stories of faith focus upon achieving the tasks at hand…which in-the-moment are bigger than themselves…requiring God’s help.

The biblical narrative stories of faith tell us that God’s ways are higher than our ways.

The end-point goal that God is aiming for…as demonstrated in the biblical narrative stories of Abraham through Paul…is not the acquisition of material wealth, popular acclaim, and financial security (Mt. 6:19-34)…not even the pursuit of basic survival in a difficult world…if that is our bottom-line, minimum definition of success…but something entirely different.

The end-point goal of God is higher…to compose and bring into being specifically tight life-scripts designed to benefit mankind…to fulfill to the highest extent the innate potential of those people called by God into their unique tasks, from the viewpoint of eternity…and at the same time to reveal to these people of faith and to the world-at-large…the real truth about God.

I have several books published on how to avoid making costly mistakes in building construction…through proactive debugging…yet not everyone buys these books, reads them, and puts this concept of advance personal preparation from the bottom upward…into practice.

Yet this divinely crafted experience about how to best acquire the raw data through first-person basic field research…in this case specifically on how to best manage construction jobsites…informs me about the real truth about God…that if our worldview priorities match the outlook of Hebrews 11:12-16…and we are willing to give God the benefit-of-the-doubt regarding His leadership skills to the point of picking up our cross to follow Him…then God can plan-out a course in our careers, our personal lives, and our ministries to the larger world…that far exceeds anything that we can or would come-up with on our own.

Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead the third day…to restore our relationship with God…to clean us up in terms of a new spiritual re-birth that creates the capacity for us to hear God’s voice…and to walk within a journey of faith…precisely so that the kingdom of God within us can not only prepare us for a future in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…but also so that God…through us…can fix a small part of the world around us to the extent of the outreach of our capacity and influence.

This tells us something about the real truth about God…which could not have originated through human literary fiction.

This concept…this worldview…of “seeking a country”…of “desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly”…could only originate from the God of the Bible who has the loving and brilliantly insightful capacity to create individual apprenticeships designed to prepare us for a future eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…starting now with our lives here.

If this concept of God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts as articulated in the biblical narrative stories of faith…beautifully summarized in Hebrews 11:12-16…that establishes and highlights the worldview that this life is a preparation for the upcoming life in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…to desire a better, heavenly country while living and participating in this current world…this then exposes the contrasting opposite worldview of going our own way (Isa. 53:6) as the worst possible misdirection to take.

If one of the main goals and purposes of this life is to discover the real truth about God (Gen. 3:1-5; Ps. 32:8; Jer. 33:3; 1 Jn. 2:17)…then going our own way in autonomous individualism…will not get us there.

Through my career path in building construction…I discovered the reality of a God-composed journey of faith life-script…in which God knew through foresight the precise end-point to aim for…and was able to open the right doors at the right times to create the opportunities…to reach a final destination that I could not have planned or orchestrated on my own…with anywhere near the success that God’s higher ways and thoughts for my life achieved.

This has real-world application to the question raised later in the book about the relevance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…to our modern lives today.

The concept that God can compose life-scripts for us to prepare us for an eternity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ…and that as our Creator God He is the only person who could possibly know in advance the final end-point this preparation should aim at…is in every sense of the words…timeless, brilliant, and modern.

This concept of the higher ways and thoughts of God applied in our lives through God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…tailored specifically to every person who will follow God in faith…lies at the heart of the real truth about God.

Finally, God does not want to control…to over-manage…our lives. God created human beings with an incredible capacity for intellectual reasoning, moral judgment, and free-will choice.

The last thing God wants is for people to be like robots.

God simply has divine foresight…and resides at the top-most point on the vertical spectrum-line of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light.

God wants to joint-venture with us in a personal relationship. The half that God brings into the relationship is His divine attributes of perfect love and divinely timeless foresight.

If God can see 15 years into the future for a 21-year old young man just starting his career in building construction…to inspire and inaugurate a program of observing, recognizing, and recording construction problems as they occur…with the long-range goal to be able one day in the future to eliminate these problems proactively through the same quality of foreknowledge that God exhibits through divine foresight…demonstrated in the life-scripts in the biblical stories of faith…then God can do this for every imaginable career, calling, and life-plan “under the sun.”

God can insert the same divine quality of advance inspiration to the biochemist researcher looking for the cure for cancer…to the high school English teacher trying to find the best teaching method to inspire her students…to the defense attorney to find the best legal argument to acquit his innocent client…to the stay-at-home mom raising three children looking for the optimum approach to being at the top of her game as multi-tasker in-chief.

If God is this “savvy” and “with-it” to know about the unmined and untapped area of debugging building construction…to set-up a program for me to begin observing and recording this obscure information years before I would actually need it as a jobsite superintendent…then God is also current, proactive, and relevant for every other imaginable career and enterprise.

This is a small part…yet a well-defined insight…into the real truth about God.

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Heb. 13:8)

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” (Jn. 10:10)

How has God moved in your life?

I hope this post was an inspiration, and encouragement, and a blessing to you.

The Real Truth about God

The Perfect Savior

“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Heb. 4:15)

In all of the accounts of the intense opposition from the religious and political leaders…the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and lawyers…that Jesus reacts to as recorded in the four New Testament gospels…in His miraculous examples of healing and deliverance…of preaching to hundreds and thousands of people…in His interactions with His disciples and the common people…we see what we would expect to see in the moral attributes and traits of virtue in a person claiming to be the divine Son of God and long-awaited Messiah…truth, honesty, kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, and uncompromising courage…to name a few…that give Jesus a grade of A-plus…of perfect 100-percent test scores across-the-board…within the broad array of moral concepts we can use as standards for judgment.

We can agree with Pilate the Roman governor in Jerusalem…after examining Jesus: “I find in him no fault at all.” (Jn. 18:38).

But the one area where we can…with solid confidence… conclude that Jesus Christ is operating at the cutting-edge of divine perfection…above anything that any other human being has ever been able to achieve…is that Jesus Christ is living-out His God-composed life-script to be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin…to the outer limits of absolute perfection.

The life-script mission of Jesus Christ would require perfect adherence…without any gaps of inconsistency…to the uniquely biblical, moral concept of God-sovereignty…Himself being the Second Person of the Trinity…which would be humanly impossible for anyone other than the messianic God/man Jesus Christ to actualize.

Every positive person of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible…other than Jesus Christ…have God-composed life-scripts that take into account…that have built-in allowances for human error (Rom. 4:6-8)…for the fact that all of these people are morally imperfect and are not perfectly virtuous…morally imperfect like the rest of us…in the many categories of the broad array of moral concepts…but also in their inability to perfectly follow…without stumbling and bumbling at certain points along the way…within their God-composed life-scripts…in pursuit of their divinely created callings and destinies.

If the biblical narrative stories of faith can be described as God’s attempt to give us something of Himself…to enable us to experience first-hand the expression in-and-through-us of some portion of His divine character…as actualized through the events of God-composed life-script storylines…we can also see that this extraordinary program entails our imperfect performance.

Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Esther and Mordecai, Ruth, Hannah, Daniel, Peter, and Paul…none of these people are morally perfect and sinless…and their life-scripts are based upon Holy Spirit empowered grace-through-faith…and proceed according to their individually exceptional gifts and abilities…plus the creative imagination of God their Creator…as life-script Writer.

These biblical life-scripts are not based upon the self-realization of autonomous individualism built upon the attempt to save ourselves through the self-performance of good-works…that as entirely human-driven and human-directed…would and must fall far short of moral perfection and sinless virtue.

But the God-composed life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God…intentionally exploits and utilizes to the fullest His uniquely divine nature to the maximum extent…to be able to perfectly succeed in the one area wherein God knows we will have the most difficulty…the area that is the definition of sin…and that the cross on Calvary Hill focuses upon…the area of God-sovereignty versus self-sovereignty…of following God’s leading in our lives…compared instead to going our own way in shortsighted self-rulership (Isa. 53:6).

God singles-out and highlights this key element within the broad array of moral concepts…honestly and candidly revealed in the difficulty that Jesus has in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion.

Matthew 26:36-46 and Luke 22:39-46 record…that in the Garden of Gethsemane…the night of His arrest and preliminary trial…that Jesus asked His disciples to “watch and pray”…that His soul was “exceedingly sorrowful”…that He received the assistance from an angel from heaven to strengthen Him…that He went back a second time to “pray more earnestly”…and that He sweat “great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

The remarkable words of Jesus spoken that night: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk. 22:42)…tells us that God has brilliantly written a life-script for Himself…for the second Person of the Trinity living in a human body…that manages to challenge Himself in the one humanly unreachable zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue…yet still comprehensible within our capacity for moral reasoning…in the unconventionally inconceivable test-case scenario in the Garden of Gethsemane…of God-sovereignty consistent and indivisible within God Himself…within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

If Jesus does not say in perfect faith…without skipping a beat: “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done”…but instead decides to go in another direction other than the cross the next day…at that precise moment in time God-sovereignty would have been split in two…introducing autonomous individual rebellion into the God-head of the Trinity…Jesus the Son of God going His own way apart from the Father…and away from His ancient destiny as the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8).

This unimaginably unconventional development…of the testing of divinely sinless unity-of-purpose consistent between God the Father and Jesus the Son of God…of unerring fidelity to the one right course of action no matter how difficult it is or how high the cost…in the Garden of Gethsemane…separates out God-sovereignty as the most important and the highest of issues in all of reality…because all of the other moral concepts and virtues are secondarily derivative to the primary concept of God-sovereignty…of following God’s leading in our lives…rather than going our own way as autonomous independent agents (Isa. 53:5-6).

The blood that Jesus Christ shed on the cross is not just to improve our moral performance in the areas of honesty, integrity, tolerance, and the capacity for unselfish love…because the ancient goal…the prime target…the foremost, primary reason for the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…is to focus and home-in on the remedy and removal of sin.

If God is not internally consistent in this fundamental moral concept of freely choosing God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty…in Gethsemane and at Calvary…within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit…then justifiably God could not ask us to make the difficult, Holy Spirit assisted transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty in the course of our lives (Jn. 3:14-21)…of allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 46:9-10; Jn. 12:24)…to achieve in some measure in our lives this same divine unity-of-purpose (Jn. 17:21)…after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith.

God identifies for us in the Garden of Gethsemane…that Jesus Christ is operating at the apex…at the highest pinnacle of morality and virtue…when God reveals with incredible honesty and candor His own difficulty…performed at the far outer-edge of virtuosity…the unique and singular challenge in all of time…past, present, and going forward into eternity…of offering Himself as the loving sacrifice for our sins…in order to restore our severed relationship with Him…on the highest terms of true and right justice yet at the greatest cost to Himself…the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection three days later.

Because this entire scenario of truth, challenge, and drama soars far above the capacity of human literary fictional invention…in my opinion…this answers the question of how we would know with certainty that Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins…being morally perfect and having sinless virtue.

A popular defense of the Bible and Christianity…should start at some point…with the biblical uniqueness of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ…paramount in importance and at the very zenith within the broad array of moral concepts.

God-composed life-scripts for the people of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible…eventually over time lift them up into the victorious positions of becoming overcomers (1 Pet. 5:10)…but not in the worldly conventional sense of self-validation and worldly pride…that is centered upon oneself.

God’s elevation of people into high positions…Abraham the “father of faith”…Joseph the governor of Egypt…Moses the great prophet and deliverer…Joshua the military leader…the Israelites conquering their homeland…Peter the leader of the early Christian church…and Paul the missionary evangelist to the first-century Greco-Roman world…to name a few…are for unselfish service to other people…and not for self-validation and personal achievement.

God-composed life-scripts in the biblical narrative stories of faith…are designed to fix things…to the most radical extent required…at all costs…at the micro-level in the moment…and at the macro-level over the long-range duration of human redemptive history…extending into eternity.

The biblical narrative stories of faith are about enabling God to set-up and manage a program throughout human redemptive history…that allows God to actualize events and circumstances into reality…to fix our world and our lives…from the viewpoint of eternity (1 Jn. 2:17).

This is an elevated program…that will run above and often contrary to the culturally accepted direction of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 5:3-12, 6:25-34).

This element of elevated unconventionality explains Abraham waiting in faith for the birth of Isaac…Joseph’s unusual MBA preparation in the house of Potiphar and the prison of Pharaoh…the Israelites in bondage in Egypt…and the advance preparation of Moses as a shepherd of sheep in Midian.

It explains David being pursued for his life by the jealous King Saul…Peter utterly failing in the courtyard of Caiaphas during the night trial of Jesus…and the incredible conversion of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus…creating the radical humility needed for a highly educated Pharisee to take the gospel message that Jesus is the Messiah to the larger Greco-Roman world…without looking down his nose in disdain at the polytheistic, idol-worshipping Greeks and Romans of his day.

These are the scenarios composed by God to fix our world and the problem of sin in our lives…from an eternal perspective.

The brilliantly creative capacity of God to get His arms around the vast stretch of human experience…of Jesus maintaining consistent fidelity to God-sovereignty in the midst of the lowest failure and the highest success… allows every person of faith that accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, King, and Tour Guide through this life…to get to know God personally from the least to the greatest…as prophesied roughly 2,600 years ago by the prophet Jeremiah…in anticipation of new covenant believers (Jer. 31:31-34) not offended by Jesus on the cross…all energized by God-sovereignty rather than being fueled by the pursuit of individual achievement according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were in service to mankind…at the peak and pinnacle of moral perfection…the purest essence of virtue.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were and are radical measures in the extreme…designed by God to fix the human problem of sin…fundamentally defined as going our own way in autonomous individualism.

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith…creating similar unity-of-purpose partnerships between God and people…is the antidote to the individual autonomous rebellion of going our own way.

When this uniquely biblical reality is separated-out and highlighted from amongst the broad array of existing moral concepts…this provides a compelling basis for accepting Jesus Christ into our lives…for accepting a God-composed journey of faith applied and interwoven into the course of events in our lives.

This humanly inconceivable, acid-test of the consistency of God-sovereignty within the Trinity…faithfully and seamlessly exhibited by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary Hill…also actualizes within the biblical narrative stories of faith…and actualizes within the God-composed life-scripts for Spirit-born Christians today.

This validates the argument that the Bible cannot be the creative invention of human literary imagination.

This also provides us with a huge reveal…a unique and innovative tell…of the real truth about God.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Gethsemane

“I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20)

The idea that God is the author of life-plans that lead to situations and circumstances requiring complete dependence upon God, with successful resolutions generating the broadest possible spiritual benefits, is a theme that runs throughout the Bible.

The life-plan of Jesus Christ the Son of God, which culminates in the crucifixion and resurrection, is the perfect example of this concept.

Hebrews 5:8-9 reads “Though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.”

The lessons that Jesus (the second Person of the Trinity) needed to experience first-hand for Himself through a life lived in a human body here on earth, in order to become the qualified leader able to help us to repent, trust, and surrender our lives to Him, came to a focal point at the events surrounding the crucifixion.

We discover in God’s own plan scripted for His Son Jesus at the cross, that circumstances were so challenging that Jesus had to exercise perfect faith, trust, dependence, and reliance in God the Father, approaching the limits of His own divine capacity, to achieve a successful outcome.

The fact that the scripture quoted above says that Jesus learned obedience by the things that He suffered, tells us that Jesus went through the experience of dependence and reliance upon God the Father, just like we do. Even the Son of God, when living within the limitations of a human body, must confront and deal with the same issues we do (Heb. 4:15).

Humans cannot fathom the depths of God’s divine love. The agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is partially a mystery (Mk. 14:34). But God included in the New Testament gospels this record of the struggle of Jesus in Gethsemane, with honesty and candor…for a reason.

This author does not claim to fully understand the duality of the divinity of Jesus Christ and His human nature, which forms the bond between His earthly experience and our personal walk of faith, for all eternity.

I do not claim to understand the dynamics of the Trinity, in which God is one, yet three distinct Persons enjoying loving friendship in unity from eternity past.

Jesus Christ the Son of God cries out from the cross “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” More painful than the crucifixion, was the momentary separation of Jesus from the Father…possibly experiencing the oblivion of total spiritual darkness…as a result of absorbing within Himself as the Passover Lamb of God…the sins of the world.

Hebrews 2:9 tells us that Jesus tasted the bitterness of death for every man, so that we would never have to experience this intense agony of separation from God. Jesus tells His followers that He will never leave nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5). Because of the sacrifice of Jesus in Gethsemane and at Calvary, born-again Christians will never have to say, over the long expanse of eternity, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yet however we try to reach a balanced comprehension of the divinity and humanness of Jesus, this account of the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane tells us that Jesus approached the Father for strength…just as He did on several occasions…retiring alone sometimes all night to pray (Mt. 14:23; Lk. 6:12).

God is telling us in this Gethsemane account that Jesus did not attempt to go it alone in self-reliance in facing the upcoming ordeal of the cross. God is telling us with tender, frank, and forthcoming honesty about the depths of His own struggle in this balanced-on-a-razor’s edge, monumentally volatile plan of salvation through the cross and the resurrection, designed for our redemption.

We therefore find that in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night before the trial and crucifixion, that Jesus experiences difficulty with the completion of His calling and must rely upon the Father for the strength and endurance to be the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Even though Jesus knows from childhood that this is the future destiny of His earthly life, when the moment finally approaches, the highest features of divine character are pushed to the limits (if that is possible with God in a human body) of Jesus’ own endurance in offering Himself for the sins and transgressions of mankind.

This is one explanation for why Jesus said with relief and triumph just before He died on the cross: “It is finished.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, God reveals to us openly and candidly that His own plan…devised to transfer to the second Person of the Trinity the weight of the sins of mankind through the Son of God’s atonement on the cross…was not all that easy…even for Jesus.

Otherwise Jesus would have breezed through the Garden of Gethsemane without saying his soul was heavy unto death, or having to pray “more earnestly”, or asking the Father to remove this cup of suffering from Him, or sweating drops of blood while praying, or having one of the great angels from heaven (possibly Gabriel), visit Him for comfort and support.

In this life-script that God crafted for Himself, we see a level of moral character that instructs us as to the heights of what we can expect in our own spiritual journey.

God does not ask us from a comfortably safe distance to step into the risk and adventure of the Christian life. God will not challenge us to the core of our being in terms of character, faith, trust, and reliance upon God, that in times of persecution may even cost the Christian his or her life, without Himself having also shared this similar experience.

God composed and orchestrated His own life here on earth in such a way that, in regard to all of life’s critical issues, He challenged Himself through the experience of the cross. This sets the example for us to have a foreglimpse of what is involved in a walk of faith with God.

Because Christ lives within the believer’s heart, we have the one and only Person helping us “from the inside” who has successfully been through the cross and resurrection experience ahead of us.

However we interpret the many sides of the agony of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, in trying to understand the limitlessness of the divine love of God, one important lesson stands out. If God is going to ask me to give my all, and He is offering His help in this regard, then I must have confidence that He has actually been there Himself ahead of me.

I must have absolute confidence that my Guide through this adventure of faith…truly knows the best possible route to take.

In some way that we can only begin to discover through our own God-composed biblical walk of faith…both the human and the divine sides of Jesus Christ gave His all in Gethsemane and at Calvary…in exhibiting unselfish love and pure righteousness in the face of enormous opposition…in order to pre-qualify Himself to be the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6).

One of the accounts of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane…is recorded in Luke 22:39-46:

39 And he came out, and went, as he was accustomed, to the Mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him.

40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation.

41 And he was withdrawn from them a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed,

42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.

43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven strengthening him.

44 And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

45 And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow.

46 And said unto them, Why sleep ye? Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.

Luke 22:44 says that Jesus prayed “more earnestly.”

This is a remarkable statement.

We would naturally think that the initial earnest prayer of Jesus regarding any issue would always be entirely adequate the first time, seeing that He is the eternal, perfect Son of God. The fact that Jesus (God) had to go back a second time and pray more earnestly, tells us just how difficult it was to absorb within Him the huge mass of the sins and transgressions of mankind.

We see in the divine approach that Jesus takes in the Garden of Gethsemane toward this great challenge, a pattern for how we are to confront the difficulties and challenges in our own lives.

Jesus was spiritually battling and overcoming the world’s sin, which is based upon rebellion and self-autonomy in mankind, by using the opposite, counter-balancing weapons of surrender, dependence, and reliance upon God the Father’s way instead of His own way (Lk. 22:34).

It took the direct opposite attitude of living for oneself, of putting one’s own interests first, of side-stepping a difficult situation, of saving one’s own skin, and of running away from a challenge…for Jesus to cancel out the sum total of mankind’s sin…and fulfill His role as the Lamb of God sacrifice for sin.

This is the part of the first-advent, messianic scenario that the self-absorbed Lucifer totally miscalculated.

This is how God used the short-sighted blindness of evil, rooted in self-centeredness, to turn the lowliness of the cross into the exalted glory of the resurrection…for our benefit.

This is precisely why the cross of Christ, for man, is the way back to God (Isa. 53:6).

The way back to God is not through self-autonomy or self-direction, using our God-given natural gifts and abilities independently apart from God. These are the “fallen” tendencies that got us into trouble to begin with in the Garden of Eden, that actually separated us from a relationship with God and that Jesus is redeeming us from on the cross.

In Isaiah 14:13-14, it is the “I will” portions of Lucifer’s statements “I will ascend into heaven” and “I will exalt my throne above the stars of God,” that is the official start of sin in the universe.

Lucifer, like many of us today, thought he knew better than God.

This is where the “I will do this and I will do that,” self-serving, God-less attitude comes from.

By contrast, the example that Jesus sets for us with enormous personal difficulty in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the way that He opened up for us in life through His own painful death on the cross, is based upon the words: “nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.”

Lucifer and unregenerate mankind, by contrast, hate the idea of submitting themselves to the loving and unselfish rulership of God in their lives…to such an extent that they will actually go to the extreme measure of attempting to kill God Himself to get rid of this idea.

When God willingly allowed Himself to be crucified through the Second Person of the Trinity, through Jesus the Son of God, He unmasked the truly evil character of the go-it-on-our-own-without-God approach to life.

Stubborn pride is that strong within self-autonomy. It will refuse God any participation in our lives if this participation infringes even a little upon our own will and way.

This is why the world pushes Jesus Christ away. This is why the gospel message of love and forgiveness is so inexplicably offensive to the world.

This is the central issue at the core of our existence. When we are operating as our own god, atop the throne of our lives, we are lost.

This is the root cause behind humanity’s problems.

This issue cost Jesus Christ His life, on our behalf, through the cross. It will likewise cost us death to our self-in-charge natures when we choose to follow Christ.

An essential part of becoming born-again in the Spirit is not only acknowledging Jesus Christ as Savior, but also restoring Him to His rightful position as Lord in our lives.

In the motion picture Ben Hur, staring Charlton Heston, toward the end of the movie Judah Ben Hur, his future wife Esther, and his mother and sister are sitting on the side of a long stairway as the condemned prisoner Jesus is ascending the steps carrying his cross.

Judah Ben Hur’s mother Miriam, and his sister, Tersa, both have contracted leprosy. Esther had thought to bring the two women to hear Jesus preach, and thus give them the hope that there was a life after death, free of leprosy. But instead of being able to listen to the teaching of Jesus as they had hoped, all four were surprised to find that Jesus had been tried, condemned, and sentenced to death by crucifixion.

As Jesus approached them carrying his cross, Esther asked in amazed astonishment “how can this be?’ How could the religious rulers in Jerusalem and the Roman authorities have condemned Jesus, a teacher of righteousness and the healer of so many people, to something as unthinkable as execution by Roman crucifixion?

At the cross…is where the stark contrast between the vulgarities of human sin…crashes up against the divine love of God. Mankind at that moment was unwittingly displaying its own worst condition.

In open view, for all to see, was the futility of man’s wisdom and works when they exist apart from God, as mankind was performing the most embarrassing indignity possible in putting to death its own Creator. Nothing remotely imaginable could be more wrong than this.

To God’s everlasting credit, this very same misguided and inexcusable action by the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and Roman rulers, was providing the means for salvation and eternal life to mankind through a divine atonement for man’s sins.

At that moment in history, the two opposing viewpoints and lifestyles available to all human beings through the freedom of choice…self-autonomy apart from God leading to sin, and fellowship with God leading to holiness…violently collide with deadly impact at the cross of Christ.

If ever there was a persuasive and clearly demonstrated argument for the wrongness of man going his own way apart from God, the cross is that argument. Man’s actions on that day condemned not Jesus, who had done nothing wrong, but the practice of a religion that conspires with a “civilized” Roman judicial system that can both be so far off-the-mark that they end up killing the God and Creator of the universe.

If ever there was a well-stated, practically demonstrated argument for trusting and relying upon a capable and loving God to show us the correct approach to life, the cross is that argument. Salvation, redemption, and a new resurrected life of love and peace is made possible by God through this enormous blunder by mankind in putting to death the Creator of life itself on a cross fashioned crudely out of two large, heavy pieces of wood and some metal spikes.

That God is intelligent and well-intentioned enough to take the worst action in all of human history, in all of eternity, and turn it right-side up into the very means to provide forgiveness, cleansing from sin, and re-birth into a new spiritual life of joy and peace…is something so sublimely powerful it may take a lifetime in heaven to comprehend and appreciate.

On one side of the cross was the enormous tally of all of history’s offenses, misdeeds, sorrows, injustices, and shortcomings that are a result of fallen mankind going its own way apart from God. On the other side was the contrasting approach of Jesus using surrender, faith, dependence, and reliance upon the Father’s uniquely ingenious plan to cancel out the weight of this massive debt of human sin.

No wonder Jesus sweated great drops of blood when finally confronted with the insurmountable task of nullifying this great mass of self-centered rebellion, using only His own spotless and blemish-free life, and a lamb-like surrender and reliance upon the will of the Father. No wonder Jesus had to return moments later to the same spot in the Garden of Gethsemane to pray a second time “more earnestly” (Lk. 22:44).

At the cross is where Christians must take their cue to strike out on the path of faith and trust in God, to match the stories of the lives of people of faith as patterned in the Bible.

Self-autonomy, self-reliance, and self-direction are on the wrong side of the cross, in the territory of man-made religion, in the camp of the spiritually blind religious leaders and the worldly-minded Roman authorities who crucified Jesus.

C.S. Lewis said that we are not just imperfect people who need growth…but we are rebels who need to lay down our arms.

Laying down our arms occurs when we repent of our sins, recognize our need for God, and accept Jesus into our lives.

But this is not a one-time event at our Christian conversion. The Christian life as a disciple involves a desire, a bend-of-the-heart toward daily surrender and yielding to God. It involves placing Jesus Christ at the top of our priority list. That is why Jesus said we have to pick up our cross daily (Lk. 9:23).

For the Christian disciple, the attitude of “I want to do things my way,” has to be crucified on the cross.

The calling of God for our lives, which displaces our own self-in-charge nature, establishes a Godly context, a clear set of goals, and a very specific arrangement of situations and circumstances, which fashions a path of faith within the course of our lives where the old rebel in us has increasingly more difficulty expressing itself.

A genuine walk of faith set-up by Jesus Christ creates constructive and positive things to do that lead to personal growth and ministry to others, absent the rebellion of self-sovereignty.

When Moses received his calling at the burning bush, and obediently set off toward Egypt to deliver the Israelites, he began living in the non-rebel mode.

After Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, it was the action of following Jesus within this new context of being the missionary evangelist to the gentile world, which enabled Paul to now live as a non-rebel.

When Jesus said to Peter in Luke 22:32, “And when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren,” it is within the actual context of strengthening the newly born Christian church in Jerusalem that Peter is fulfilling his calling…in living as a non-rebel.

This is why the genuine gospel message of repentance, salvation, faith, trust, and transformation into a new person “in Christ” is so important. The “truth that will set us free” is the life following Jesus in non-rebellion to His leading.

This is why we follow a crucified Son of God. The will and way of Jesus was crucified to the will of God the Father, in the Garden of Gethsemane and at Calvary, for the benefit of all of mankind.

Jesus went before us in this regard. The fact that Jesus Himself was without sin, tells us that the way of the cross is perfect.

This is one of the key character attributes which qualifies Jesus to be our leader. We learn daily how to “lay down our arms” and become a non-rebel, in terms of our relationship with God…by following the sinless, perfect non-rebel in this regard…Jesus Christ.

Every born-again Christian can examine themselves as to who is in charge in their lives…self or Jesus Christ.

Every Christian can enter into their personal “prayer closet”, get on their knees, lift their arms up to God, and ask God to assume a greater role in their lives.

Every Christian can ask God in prayer to open up their spiritual eyes, and unclog their spiritual ears, so that they can see and hear God better in the specific ways that God would like to lead them.

If it is possible for God to weep in heaven, this is the type of sincere request from His saints that will probably bring tears of heartfelt joy to God’s eyes.

Our walk of faith…our purchase of the knowledge of good and evil through a God-composed journey of faith life-script…means that much to God.

Jesus died and rose again that we might have an abundant life through this living journey of faith…now and forever.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie 2

When some modern scientists confidently assert that Darwinian evolution is a fact…in their books…they are doing so not as a result of the empirically factual evidence…but as a product of their worldview.

Darwinian evolution must be split into two parts…microevolution and macroevolution.

At the time of the writing of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species in 1859…microevolution was then and still is today a non-controversial fact…demonstrated in the artificial selection by humans of the variant traits put-out in a host of living things…from dogs, horses, cattle, and sheep…to agricultural crops of corn or wheat…to rose bush flowers of different shapes and colors…that can thus be intentionally altered to produce radically exotic varieties…far exceeding what nature produces that can successfully survive in the wild.

When scientists confidently assert that evolution is a fact…if they mean by this that microevolution alone is a fact…then they are entirely correct.

Macroevolution…on the other hand…is the idea that the concept of microevolution can be extended and extrapolated into the existence of genetically open borders in ancestral and current living things…putting-out variant traits extreme enough over long periods of time…to be able to turn a fish into a bird…without foresight or a premeditated end-point in mind.

Without foresight or direction…the concept of macroevolution producing the vast diversity of life…arriving at well-defined architectural body plans and lifestyle habits…in essence…is equivalent to the book writer’s random-chance search for a meaningful story through an eyes-closed approach while hitting keystrokes on their laptop computer keyboard.

This cannot be repeated or articulated enough times in our modern culture.

What is also not clearly explained or articulated by Darwinists is that this macroevolutionary program of a random-chance search strategy…of genetic accidents putting out variant traits chosen by natural selection…could by mere random chance…type-out for the final two or three chapters a comedy, American western, romance, biographical history, cookbook, or cold-war spy-novel ending…rather than the sought-after, suspense-filled, who-done-it murder mystery book ending.

Yet in the natural world we see living things that have incredibly fine-tuned end-points of unique definition…possessing the essential capacities for survival and reproduction…within enormously varied ecological environments.

We do not see living things that have made a momentary wrong turn in their development…requiring a course correction that is obvious…from deleting the chapter ending to the book that was erroneously comedic…to get back into the correct groove toward producing by a random-chance search for the murder mystery ending to match the first four-fifths of the book.

Not only do we not have libraries full of books having their final two or three chapters consisting of nonsensical gibberish…we do not see in our current natural world even the slightest hint of living things part-way in development or in transition toward something else.

And like the murder mystery story having the wrong comedic ending…of having a failed attempt at achieving function…we do not see inconsistent monstrosities in nature like grizzly bears having lion heads, or leopards having wings that can fly, or the top-half of humans having two arms connected to the bottom-half bodies of horses having four legs…as we might plausibly expect in a program of common descent.

Darwinists assert that the genetic changes of macroevolution are too small for us to be able to detect within one human life-time.

This assertion is not valid.

Every living thing in the natural world appears at this present time to be at their functional end-point of development…beyond which even our imaginations cannot carry us further.

To suggest that we cannot find anything amongst the billions of life-forms on earth…that would be caught mid-stream in our current snap-shot in time…part-way along a pathway of continued development toward some easily discernable final end-point culmination…simply points-out the extremely difficult tightrope that Charles Darwin postulated…in attempting to come up with an explanation for the origin of species and the resulting diversity of life…through a wholly naturalistic process.

When contemporary scientists look at the obvious design in the natural world…and come away with only a materialistic, non-theistic conclusion…they fall within the same category as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden choosing going our own way…and stand foursquare alongside the Pharisees and scribes in first-century Jerusalem…that upon hearing the evidence for Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead…were not influenced or deterred in the slightest from proceeding within the status quo of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Going our own way (Isa. 53:6) cannot be imported into God’s kingdom of heaven…upsetting and plaguing peace and harmony…for all eternity.

When scientists look at the natural world…then confidently write in their books that evolution is a fact…not only is this a semantics error in not differentiating between micro and macro evolution…but this is a conclusion that originates from their overriding worldview of going our own way…and not as a result of scientific fact-based evidence.

The atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism allows us to remain in the worldview of going our own way…of attempting to figure-out the natural world through scientific investigation…on our own…without God.

Starting in 1859, with the publishing of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, of course the going our own way mindset would latch onto the humanistic component of macroevolution.

This would be the obvious result.

Before 1859, design permeates our thinking. After 1859, common descent takes over.

But this change in worldviews is not a result of the discovery of new scientific fact-based evidence…but rather a broad philosophical opening for going our own way to predominate.

Macroevolution, to borrow the subtitle of the 1985 book by molecular biologist Michael Denton…is “a theory in crisis.”

The negative exposure of the worldview of going our own way…in the Garden of Eden…in first-century Jerusalem…and in our modern-day culture in the scientific investigation into the natural world using naturalistic materialism as the operative worldview…that this exposure is offensive to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…is a fundamental problem for our modern world.

The fundamental problem here…as big as it can possibly get…is that this element of extremely divisive offense to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…of critically exposing the negative downside of going our own way…comes to us by the deliberate intention of God (Rom. 9:33; Gal. 5:11; 1 Pet. 2:7-8)…lovingly for our benefit…taking place at the highest pinnacle of moral character.

The tragic scene of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the hill of Calvary is a divinely surgical separation of self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…into two violently opposing camps…that only God could and would orchestrate…playing the central acting role…for our benefit for the highest reasons imaginable.

Some scientists will hang-on to the Darwinist model of small genetic changes producing variant traits that natural selection will choose to produce the vast diversity we see in the living world…as their guiding worldview for as long as they can…because of the underlying reason that this approach…on a fundamental level…enables the self-sovereignty of going our own way to be our free-will choice…as opposed to God-sovereignty as our worldview…along with the recognition of design included in our scientific investigations.

But everyone should understand that the macroevolutionary explanation for the complexity, specificity, and functional coherence of the living world…is as improbable as Agatha Christie composing her murder mystery books through blind random keystrokes…with eyes closed sitting at her computer keyboard.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie 1

A murder mystery fiction novel has a precise combination of letters comprising words, spaces between the words, paragraph indentations, commas, semi-colons, periods, good grammar, and artistic compliance with the general rules for characterization, pace, and suspense…for the literary genre of a murder mystery novel.

Any final editing and revisions that occur during the writing of a murder mystery fiction novel…are done through the work of intelligent agency…through the creative good-sense and judgment of the book author and the book publishing editors.

These minor editing changes that are made may involve spelling error corrections…or the replacement of a few words here and there with other words that are better…or some improvements in sentence structure in a few locations.

But major changes to the plotline that alter the essence of the story…such as a new ending to the book as to who committed the murder(s)…requires a rewrite of the text that involves new paragraphs, entire new pages, and possibly the replacement and addition of whole new chapters.

The nonsensical idea of introducing blind, unguided, trial-and-error, accidental changes to the text in the form of random individual letters and words inserted within the final three chapters in-progress…of an Agatha Christie murder mystery novel…as an alternative method to intelligent literary creative design…in the hopes of arriving at the best possible story ending…is not feasible in terms of the time investment or the potential for failure.

Any purely mechanical approach of blind editing using individual letters and words…one at a time…in an unguided series of random-chance, accidental changes…would introduce a near infinite possible combinatorial space of nonsensical gibberish…a sea of meaningless letters and spaces…of failed attempts…surrounding the one best island of meaningfully arranged words and punctuation comprising a functional ending to the story…lost in this sea of chaos.

The absurdity of Agatha Christie sitting down at her laptop computer (or typewriter) with eyes closed…randomly hitting keys for several hours each day in the blind-chance of producing an ending to one of her books…is immediately apparent to us as a fruitless search strategy that would never result in a brilliant ending to a murder mystery fiction novel.

What is instantly clear to us…in this example…is that nothing replaces the intelligence factor of human writers as the means to creatively write a murder mystery novel.

What is instantly clear to us is that the ending to a murder mystery fiction novel…has an extremely narrow target…in both the storyline itself, but also in the high skill-level the book author utilizes in their arrangement of words and sentences…that tells the optimum story.

What is also apparent after reflection…is that a purely random search strategy of blindly hitting computer keystrokes…along the way toward completing the final two chapters to the murder mystery book…might instead pop-out an unwanted comedy ending…or the ending to an American western…or a romance…or a historical biography…or the ending to a cold-war spy novel.

A search strategy based upon random-chance by definition has no pre-determined or premeditated end-point goal…and cannot use foresight to direct the process to get there.

This has a huge and fundamental application to an understanding of a popular defense of the Bible and Christianity today…for our modern culture today.

Charles Darwin proposed an entirely naturalistic explanation for the origin of species and the vast diversity of life…requiring no guidance, foresight, or premeditated end-point targets coming by way of the aid of an intelligent designer God.

By choosing this route…Darwin created an extremely narrow tightrope to walk for the boldly innovative, theoretical extrapolation of microevolution to macroevolution.

The bottom-line here is that Darwinian macroevolution is many times more improbable than writing a fiction novel using blind random keystrokes at a computer.

In the theory of macroevolution, Darwin said that the genetic changes that produced variant traits that could be chosen by natural selection…to enhance reproduction, survivability, and to push forward the diversification of living things…Darwin said that these genetic changes had to be very small and numerous…accumulated and coherently integrated through the power of natural selection…over long periods of time.

The changes that generated the origin of new species and created the vast diversity of life…according to Darwinism…had to be micro in size and enumerable in number…because large physical changes…single big leaps forward in development…called saltations…would be tantamount to miracles…thus inviting an intelligent designer God back into the mix…the opposite of the purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of new species that Darwin was proposing.

To have a purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of new species and the diversity of life…to bring the field of biology into the realm of empirically accessible, modern scientific study…the theory of macroevolution must walk the narrow tightrope between small enough changes…micro bite-sized so that some naturalistic mechanism could produce them through chance or necessity rather than through theistic intelligent creation…yet not so large in noticeably physical variant traits…being put-out for natural selection to choose from…that would require miraculous assemblages of genetic variations…that would fall outside of chance or some other chance-necessity based mechanism to produce.

Darwin’s method…his naturalistic mechanism of accidental mutations of genetic variations putting-out variant traits chosen by natural selection…to produce the vast diversity we observe in the living world…must in essence remove the intelligent designer element altogether of the murder mystery book author Agatha Christie…and instead place our book writing and editing hopes entirely upon the capacity of blind, unguided, random-chance, accidental insertions of non-sequenced, incoherent, and meaningless letters and spaces…to eventually through trial-and-error produce a brilliant and captivating ending to the murder mystery book.

The point here is that the immense difficulty in achieving a plausible explanation for the diversity of life…using small enough changes to be able to stay within non-theistic, naturalistic mechanisms…from the origins of the first life on earth around 3.5 billion years ago to the present day…mechanisms being diligently sought after by scientists now for 160 years without success…is actually equal to or more difficult in terms of mathematical improbability than the nonsensical example of the author Agatha Christie sitting at her computer with eyes closed…randomly hitting keystrokes in the hope of producing an ending to one of her murder mystery fiction novels.

By not being able to foresee in the future the discoveries of Einstein, Hubble, Watson and Crick, and a host of Nobel Prize winners…elucidating the complexity, specificity, and coherent integration of systems of information comprising living and non-living things in nature… Charles Darwin in essence…by choosing the naturalistic route of micro-sized changes only…is allowing no major rewrites or alterations to the story…but only the smallest additions or changes to single letters or individual words…through the process of blind, random-chance…which is clearly a nonsensical approach when viewed in the context of book writing…a context easily understandable by everyone.

The random alteration of some amino acids around the outside perimeter of a medium-sized protein molecule…performed in controlled scientific experiments in laboratories to determine how difficult it is to produce a new functional protein by chance…results in a finding…that due to the unimaginably complex properties of attraction and repulsion of amino acids that produces the highly specified folding into the correct three-dimensional shapes of functional proteins…prohibits any easy exchange of one amino acid for another in a medium-sized 150-amino acid protein.

An easy exchange of perimeter amino acids in a functionally folded, three-dimensionally shaped protein…is crucial to the plausibility of a chemical evolution process in support of the notion of genetic mutations putting-out variant traits to generate the vast diversity of life…of being the engine behind the origin of new species.

This difficulty of producing new functional proteins through the chance substitution of amino acids…in a scientific laboratory…is mathematically equal to or more improbable than Agatha Christie successfully using blind and unguided small revisions to the final two or three chapters in her murder mystery book And Then There Were None…with eyes closed typing random keystrokes on her computer keyboard.

The exceedingly low probability chance…of making a random transition from one functional protein to another functional protein…by replacing a few amino acids with other amino acids at the outside perimeter of one successfully folded, functional protein to create a new protein…is one successful chance out of 〖10〗^74failed attempts.

If the Darwinian explanation falls apart at the level of the difficulty of protein folding inside living cells…in an area of study that we can empirically test unequivocally in a scientific laboratory…then the entire program of macroevolution falls apart at this crucial lynch-pin of connection…in the sequential explanatory mechanism of how macroevolution supposedly puts-out enough genetic variation to produce the vast diversity of life we observe today.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

My Testimony 3

My Conversion Story

At age 17, as a junior in high school, I almost made it into the ranks of professional surfing in Southern California.

I got fourth place in a 2A/3A junior-age division surfing contest in the old WSA (Western Surfing Association)…which if I had gotten first-place would have allowed me to have an automatic entrance into the professional contests as 3A regional junior champion.

I was in the Windansea Surf Club in the junior division…ages 15-17… and was a member of the Greg Noll surf team…a legendary big-wave surfer from the 1960’s and a successful surfboard manufacturer.

When I was 18, I worked at the Greg Noll surfboard factory part-time while a senior in high school and the summer after graduation…selling surfboard foam blanks, fiberglass, resin, and fins to people making their own homemade surfboards in their garage…which was popular at that time.

Two of the guys on the surf team ran into me at the surfboard factory while I was outside watering the potted plants…in late July of that summer…and began to tell me about their becoming Christians…about the house near the beach where I surfed that was a “house church” long before there was such a thing…and gave me some Christian tracts to read and asked me if I was interested in going.

I listened politely and took their literature…but said I was not interested. They probably walked away thinking that I was a hopeless case…unreachable in my carefree worldliness.

I am sharing these details to show that my mindset was not anywhere near the stereotype that atheists paint of Christians…inaccurately projecting their own viewpoint of skeptical confusion on to other people.

I was a fairly normal and well-adjusted person focusing on surfing as the main interest in my life…not unlike many other young men at my age living near the ocean.

The personal story I am about to recount has been and is today being repeated for hundreds of millions of Christians around the world…with variations as to their individual backgrounds and how they came to Christ.

After this discussion at the surfboard factory…over a two-week period something unexpectedly new changed inside me. Even though I had no idea what I was getting myself into…thinking I would be walking into some social clique-ish type gathering with boring people I could not relate to…I surprisingly decided to go…by myself… on a Sunday evening.

I knew where the house was…on a large corner lot across the street from the ocean. I had walked by this house many times on the way to the “village” for donuts or hamburgers…after surfing just down the beach a short distance away.

This house had a very large living room with a high ceiling…which seated around 125 people sitting on fold-out chairs…with young people sitting on the fireplace hearth and on the stairs, and overflow people in the hallway.

As I walked in the front door…I found a seat in the back where I could navigate a quick and easy exit if I did not like the service.

When I first sat down I immediately noticed something different. The people already there ahead of me were seated quietly…not up and walking all over the room visiting with friends before the start of the service.

When the music and singing started, I noticed that people were enjoying the experience and genuinely glad to be there…and not looking at their watches with thoughts elsewhere on getting home later to watch the end of a baseball game on television…or their favorite TV show they were missing.

When the message started…I could not tell you now in hindsight what it was about. All I remember is that God opened up my life before me…and showed me on His score-card how I was doing. I did not sense condemnation or judgment on His part…but a very real offering of a new life option that I had never before contemplated.

During the preaching of that message…I encountered two new revelations that changed my life…first that God existed…and second that He knew all about me.

God knew all about my flaws as a person. But I sensed a supportive optimism in His evaluation and intimate knowledge of me…that offered hope in a new future me that was encouraging on a level I had never previously experienced. God had faith in me…despite my checkered past and numerous shortcomings.

As God opened up my life before me…He separated the two realities regarding me into two parts…that I was not aware of until that moment in time.

God showed me on the one hand what the world thought of me…and what it would continue to think of me going forward…having the worldly conventional acceptance of a blond-haired, blue-eyed California surfer who was well-known and well-liked…enjoying my life on my terms and according to my standards…because that was all I knew about.

Then God showed me His more discerning and insightful assessment…as my Creator…of how I was falling short in so many areas…being self-centered, unthoughtful of others, lazy in school and not using my God-given intelligence, and basically without any plan or direction for my life other than fulfilling the first priority of me, myself, and I…so universally prevalent and socially acceptable in the world…a world ignorant of God’s higher ways and thoughts.

Until that night…and meeting God for the first time…I had no idea there was another option…that there was another way.

Again, I did not sense any condemnation from God…just an honest and insightful appraisal of the direction I was going…from the informed perspective of the one single Person who would have the inside information.

One of my first reactions was: “oh no…I am undone…I am exposed as the imposter I am presenting to the outside world…when I am really something else not very commendable or admirable.”

At the beginning of the alter call…looking back now…I can remember having the sense that God at this point actually stepped back…and more or less said: “now that you know the truth…you can continue onward in the way that you are going but you will always know from here onward that it is a lie…or you can ask Me into your life and I will make you into a new person and lead you into becoming the person I created you to be.”

While heads were bowed and eyes closed…I sat momentarily on the fence…knowing that a decision for Christ would alter my life forever…and that it would cost something in that I would have to give up some if not all of my past lifestyle.

I remember that I was the fourth out of five people to accept Christ that night by raising my hand…and the procedure which I like the best…is that I did not have to go forward to be singled-out along with the other four new believers…but that all of the people in the room stood and said the sinner’s prayer together as a group.

I believe that God has eternal foreknowledge and foresight…living in a timeless environment (Isa. 46:9-10). As God stepped back…to enable my free-will to choose Him…He knew beforehand that my response would be yes.

But this is one of the realities that compellingly argues for a divine origin of the God of the Bible…having a complexity and integrated blend of God’s timeless existence…coordinated with human beings living in the four dimensions of space and time…that is the diametric opposite of being simplistic or simple-minded.

God’s foreknowledge and my free-will came together that night so many years ago now…in the mystery of the creation of a new creature in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) that is beyond human literary imagination to invent.

This is why I have included this essay in my book.

As previously said above…this is the common salvation experience of tens if not hundreds of millions of born-again Christians across the globe…with slightly different circumstances but the same result…of meeting the living God for the first time and being changed forever.

If atheists and skeptics want to characterize my salvation experience as a delusion…so be it.

What happened next is what separates my experiential perspective…from the viewpoint of atheists and skeptical critics of the Bible.

Over the next two weeks I felt a very real release from the weight of my past failings and shortcomings…the uncertainty of the future no longer being a nagging concern…my spirit rejoicing with the angels in heaven that another lost soul…me…had obtained eternal life…had escaped spiritual darkness and entered into light.

I literally became a new person. The internal reformation was an unmistakably supernatural event.

It was not a personal epiphany…not self-realization…not an intellectual recognition of a system of thought I agreed with...and not some satisfying of a previously unseen internal deficiency I needed to remedy through self-reform or wise outside human council.

This salvation experience had its grounding…its roots…its substance…in meeting the living God on a personal basis…for the first time in my life.

What will infuriate some atheists and skeptics…if they even grant any credibility to my testimony…is that this does not fit within the stereotype of the person raised in the church and partially brainwashed by its teachings.

I was not only an unqualified sinner…lacking any good-works merit to attract the positive attention of God to be singled-out for salvation…but I was not even searching for God.

I didn’t find God…He found me. I wasn’t searching for God…He called me and I simply responded to His invitation.

When a person discovers that God actually exists…and that He is the God of the Bible…this changes the outlook on everything.

When I started reading the Bible for the first time in my life at my conversion…because I then had been introduced to the living God…had been spiritually born-again…and was living in a new walk of faith following Him…the supernatural in the Bible was not a problem for me.

I knew from that time forward…on independent grounds…that the supernatural was real.

If God could transform me…like He did…then He can raise Jesus from the dead to be the Savior of the world…or perform any number of other miracles recorded in the Bible.

I was not reading the Bible as mere human literature…like we do in university religious studies classes. The Bible came alive as the Word of God…unlike anything I had known previously or since then.

I have no idea in terms of absolute mathematics, physics, and chemistry how God opened up the Red Sea for the Israelites to safely cross on dry land…or the composition of the manna that fed the Israelites on the exodus to the Promised Land…or how God can make the lips of a donkey move while generating clearly articulated words understood by the prophet Balaam…when donkeys do not possess vocal chords that can produce intelligible speech…or a number of other supernatural events that atheists and skeptics choke on…in the Bible.

I am not sure that these one-time, non-repeating events will ever be understood through the human enterprise of scientific investigation. The God created reality of the orderliness and intelligibility of our natural world may not extend into the transcendent capacity of God to perform the actions of miracles that fall outside of the normal experiences and observations of everyday phenomenon.

My Christian Life since My Conversion

Space will not allow telling about my clear calling into a career in building construction…how I began writing books on housing construction at age 30…being a C-minus student in the two required English composition classes I took years earlier in junior college…and after 13 years of drawing illustrations and writing the accompanying text…I got the first of four books on building construction accepted for publication by McGraw-Hill (1995-98 under Bart Jahn).

I could tell about the origin of my seven Christian books…this being my seventh…and my struggle to accurately listen in the Spirit to what God was telling me through my life experiences and reading of the Bible…as a non-scholar…to articulate into words…sophisticated ideas and concepts that I still feel ill-equipped to tackle.

My goal in this testimony is to offer the contrary rebuttal to the atheistic viewpoint that assumes that God does not exist…critiques the Bible and Christianity in this same shortsighted light…and then assumes that Spirit-born and Spirit-led Christians approach the Bible and their personal journey of faith…in a similarly doubtful and uncertain way.

This has not been my experience…or the experience of the many Christians I know.

I may not be practicing my Christian faith at the high level of the analogy of playing tennis at the professional level as at the U.S. Open. An outsider critiquing my life may or may not see a “professional” Christian in action.

But my experience is real and genuine…and is based upon a personal relationship following God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit.

I cannot emphasize enough the rebuttal to the false charge that faith in the God of the Bible…is a delusion. My personal relationship following Jesus Christ within a God-composed adventure of faith…is not a product of group-think or conformity to organized churchianity.

I hope the complex, specified, and coherently integrated information in the topics discussed in this book…is itself plausible and compelling evidence of authenticity as to the genuineness of the existence of God, the divine origin of the Bible, and the truth of Christianity…played out through God-composed life-scripts for imperfect people like myself.

I want to close out the book with the following verses from Romans 8:35-39:

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

39 Not height, nor depth, nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

My Testimony…Part 2

My Background Growing Up

As I said earlier, I was not raised in a Christian or church-going family. I cannot think of a single friend of mine in grade school or high school…whose family attended church. I can honestly say…looking back…that I did not know a single person in my childhood…or teenage years…who openly claimed to be a Christian and a practicing follower of Jesus Christ.

Christianity was simply something that was not a part of my life growing up.

My parents were divorced when I was eight years old. Before then we did as a family occasionally attend a mainstream denominational church…but after the divorce my mother felt ostracized in that church…so we moved over to a different denominational church nearby.

But throughout my early childhood, my recollection was that our attendance was spotty…was never regular…and had no impact upon me in terms of having any comprehension of the Bible, Christianity, or of God.

When at age eighteen I heard the Christian gospel message for the first time…and was contemplating what to do during the alter call following the message…if someone would have offered me a million dollars to recite one Bible verse from memory…I could not have done it.

At the end of that first service after asking Jesus Christ into my life…I was given a paperback copy of the New Testament as a gift. It took me about two weeks of reading the gospels in the New Testament for the first time…to figure out who Jesus was and where He figured into all of this.

I was so uninformed on that first night upon hearing the salvation message…I asked God into my life…having as yet no clear idea as to who Jesus was.

I basically came off the street into Christianity…having no previous background of “brainwashing” in any sense whatsoever…either pro or con…to inform or influence my decision for Christ.

At that time…I was also not looking for God…not searching for purpose and meaning in life…and thoroughly disinterested in religion of any sort.

I was simply too self-absorbed as an up-and-coming teenage competitive surfer in Southern California.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was always a good athlete growing up. I was in the “top ten” each week in batting average and in pitching earned-run average in Little League baseball when I was eleven and twelve…published in the weekly newsletter distributed at the ballpark…and played third base in the All Stars at the end of the regular season (a position I did not like).

I will always remember the sensation as an eleven-year old taking the mound as the starting pitcher on a Saturday morning…looking around at the freshly mowed grass…the outfield fence with all of the local sponsor’s advertising billboards…the parents in the bleachers…picking up the brand new baseball and applying rosin powder from the rosin bag…digging out some of the dirt in front of the pitcher’s rubber with my shoe cleats…throwing several warm-up pitches…seeing the umpire sweeping off home plate with his hand-held broom…the first batter stepping into the batter’s box…winding up and throwing a fastball down the middle…hearing the pop as the ball hits the catcher’s mitt…seeing the umpire throw out his right arm…and yelling steeeeeeee…rike one!

These are some of the fondest memories from my childhood.

In Little League baseball…when I was nine years old…my older brother Brian made it on to the major league Red Sox team.

In those days, one nine-year old was allowed on each major league team of ten-to-twelve year olds…and for the logistics benefit of the mothers and fathers coordinating the taxying of two or more sons to various games and practices…for convenience they would place the nine-year old on the same team as the older brother.

So at age nine I was a “major leaguer”…one of only two kids in the fourth grade in our elementary school class that year to achieve this lofty designation…thanks solely to having an older brother who was eleven…and who had made the team.

In the next year when I was ten…my brother and I played on this Red Sox team that became the Little League equivalent of the Bronx Bombers.

We had a left-handed pitcher Glen Thompson with an ERA below one, a catcher Dave “Fudge” Ptak who hit the most home runs in the league that year, and my older brother who batted 590 and was second in the league in batting average that year behind Skip Jarvis who batted 615…who lived down the street from us…was the same age twelve as my older brother…and was part of the local crowd I played sports with at that age. I was the starting second baseman…my favorite position.

I will never forget our baseball coach that year…Ed Grabowski…who taught me and my brother how to play baseball. Our team had eighteen wins and four losses…and was the best team that year. At the awards banquet…as a ten-year old…the championship trophy I received seemed half my height.

I grew up in the same area…and went to the same schools with the same kids from grade school through high school…although our high school had 3,000 kids and there were 850 seniors in my graduating class.

I was moderately good looking in high school…and had some cute girlfriends. I went to the high school dances and proms…and as a freshman went to some of the “away” football games with my girlfriend on the school bus…when I was not out with my drinking buddies.

Because of having a single parent…a full-time working mother…I had a lot more freedom than kids from two-parent homes…but there was a line beyond which I did not cross…out of respect for her.

But I was way ahead of most of my peers in high school in a somewhat moderated, near-the-edge of notoriously scandalous behavior…having a black sheep reputation of exploration into debauchery and worldliness.

When I walked into that home church on a perfect summer evening on Sunday, August 10, 1970…and became a Christian that night…I had already experienced things that many of my age-group would explore and discover in their upcoming college years and beyond.

At age 18, no one would accuse me of being sheltered, naïve, or religiously brainwashed.

Being a “latch-key” kid…I was worldly street-savvy beyond my years.

That is my general background growing up. I knew a lot of young people from playing baseball and at the beach. I was relatively popular…had a wide-circle of friends…was relatively normal in a worldly sense in the high school party-scene and the drinking of alcohol…but did not do drugs…even though they were all around me and easily accessible…because of my surfing.

And at the time…I was not looking for God…and could not have cared less about Christianity…or anything to do with Jesus Christ.

This should give the reader a broad outline of what I was and where I was coming from…before I became a Christian.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

My Testimony…Part 1

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. (1 Pet. 3:15)

Atheists and skeptical critics of Christianity…in their books…often attempt to universally stereotype Christians as being socially and culturally brainwashed through childhoods in which religion was introduced at an early age…which then forms a persistent and lasting belief in a God who does not in fact exist…a conditioned belief in religious precepts, moral rules, and rituals that have no basis in reality.

What is implied and inferred here by atheists is that Spirit-born Christians specifically…because of the doctrine of repentance from sin…and salvation alone through the cross of Christ…thereby admitting our need for God which is abhorrent to humanists…are a factually deluded group of losers in a worldly sense…who were misled as children through no fault of our own…and who must now as adults throw off the crutch of religion that we are leaning upon to get through life…and think our way free from myths and children’s bedtime stories…into the modern, rational, and liberated mindset of atheism.

I would counter by saying that no matter how successful some people are in this life…however we define success…worldly or otherwise…that every person without exception is to some extent a loser…someone who falls short…in that no single person alive today can claim to be morally, ethically, intellectually, athletically…or in any other way…absolutely perfect.

Every sane person on the planet would admit to being an imperfect person.

We all share this universal trait of imperfection…in common in varying degrees…which makes no sense coming from the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism.

Genetic mutation, variant traits chosen by natural selection, geographical isolation, reproductive barriers, the separation of genetic pools, and any other microevolutionary process…could not create the universal recognition and awareness of moral imperfection in human beings alone…according to a higher standard of right and wrong that transcends above the ability of materials particles and energy to create.

But that is a subject for another book.

Atheists and skeptics often tell their personal story of having religion crammed down their throats during their childhood…at home or at school or both…and then being liberated by science or free-thinking philosophy in their middle to late teens…abandoning a faith that was never personally real for them as individuals.

The basic problem here is that atheists and skeptics do not believe that God exists at all.

This program of thinking necessarily downgrades all religions equally into the zone of having man-invented gods and religious precepts…that therefore have no objective authority…no transcendent standard outside of human inventive imagination…upon which to base a reliable worldview…a sustainable game-plan for life.

In the clever, pragmatic, and worldly sensible program of humanism…we make ourselves into autonomous gods.

In this essay, I would like to offer my own alternate experience…which was and still is to this day…supernatural to the core…based not upon adherence to a religion…but instead founded upon the rock-solid certainty of a calling of God…a journey of faith…after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith.

This experience informs my interpretation of the Bible, my acceptance of miracles, my rejection of the philosophy of naturalistic materialism, and the high value I place in the biblical journeys of faith.

It forms the basis for the writing of this book…my other six books on Christianity…and my eight books written…so far…on building construction.

What is really sad…from my perspective…is that people like Richard Dawkins write books saying that belief in the God of the Bible is a delusion…when as atheists they have no idea what they are talking about.

If we scrape the meringue off the top of a lemon meringue pie…we are left with only a lemon pie. If we scrape the cream off the top of a chocolate cream pie…of course we are left with only a chocolate pie.

If we remove God off the top of the reality of life…out of our worldview…then we are left with the philosophy of naturalism…that our natural world is the sole explanation for the origin and continuance of the phenomenon we observe and experience in this life.

Atheists downgrade the Bible and Christianity into the zone of man-made, make-believe religion…which when critiqued through the equation of naturalism can only spit-out naturalistic answers.

The atheistic program is rigged from the outset. The last people qualified on earth to opine on the divine origin of the Bible, the existence of God, and the transcendent message of Christianity…are atheists.

Atheists and skeptics are welcome to write books critical of the Bible and Christianity.

But their beginning negative bias that God does not exist creates inescapable garbage in/garbage out research programs…an example of confirmation bias applied over the entire database of issues being examined…that cannot rise above the over-arching paradigm of their starting worldview…that invalidates their ultimate conclusions.

I am not a Christian because I was raised in a Christian home…or attended church growing up…or hung-out with friends who were believing Christians. I did not attend a Christian elementary school or high school. I was not convinced of the truth of the Bible and Christianity through apologetic arguments presented to me as a teenager. I did not have an older Christian man or woman, relative or acquaintance, as an attractive role model to follow.

I am a Christian because I met God…the real God…the creator of the universe…personally.

This obviously lifts the discussion into a zone where atheists and skeptics cannot enter…because at the outset their worldview says that God does not exist at all…and therefore I cannot possibly know God on a personal basis…and am honestly mistaken or deluded.

In this essay, I want to first briefly establish a context for any honest truth-seeker evaluating genuine Christian experience.

If a researcher wants to honestly and reasonably evaluate the game of tennis…for example…the worst approach would be to intentionally visit the local tennis courts at a nearby high school on a windy Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

There the researcher would find novice beginners miss-hitting the tennis ball over the rear chain-link fence…or hitting it sideways into the adjacent courts…shouting “sorry” and “a little help” to adjacent court players being asked to return the errant tennis ball every five minutes.

If a person wants to observe real tennis…the place to go is to professional venues to watch tournaments…in person if possible…such as Wimbledon, the French Open, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open, or tournaments at colleges and universities.

The place to go to evaluate real Christianity…is the Bible. The gospels, the book of Acts, and the letters to the first-century Christian churches…give the genuine and authentic…God-authorized…examples of the Christian faith, doctrines, and practices when energized by the Holy Spirit.

The biblical narrative stories of faith describe people experiencing a personal relationship with God…which passes unnoticed as non-factual data…far underneath the perceptual radar of atheists analyzing the Bible…because the working hypothesis for the skeptic is that God does not exist.

There are Christians around the world…that accurately represent and define the pinnacle…the peak…the apex of Christian character, service, and ministry to other people…according to their precise callings of God.

But these select people…like the professional tennis players…are relatively few in number.

We certainly can find high-quality Christians equivalent in our analogy to college and high school team-level tennis players…but the largest number of Christians would be categorized alongside the large number of casual weekend tennis players learning the game…and miss-hitting the ball.

But the point of having public tennis courts spread-out all over the globe…is to make the game of tennis available to all…beginning novice or expert.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Some Closing Thoughts…Two

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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