Barton Jahn's Blog, page 9

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Journeys of Faith Transcend Above Normal Life 2

The divisive issue in the Garden of Eden was not only about disobeying the commandment of God…but also about the derailment of the essential…tragically irreplaceable…of building a personal relationship over time between Adam and Eve…and God.

Adam and Eve could have answered the serpent in an informed, insightful, worldly savvy way: “What you are saying to us is interesting and appealing, but there is no hurry in this matter. We will discuss the pros and cons in what you are suggesting…with God…think it over…and get back to you in a few days.”

Adam and Eve did not trust the word of God…His character and truthfulness…long enough in time…over the course of a few short days…to wait and speak with Him before charging straight through into disobedience and self-destructive, independent self-sovereignty…which has plagued the human race ever since…and is problematic in my own journey of faith from time to time.

This is why a God-invented, God-composed journey of faith has this component of gaps between what we can accomplish in the worldly conventional zone of “occupy till I come” normalcy…and what we cannot do on our own…that creates a divinely crafted environment…spread-out over time…where we need God to intimately participate and intervene in the course of our lives.

This is what we universally see in the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…brilliantly transcendent above anything within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Setting up the unique circumstances whereby we can have a personal relationship with the living God…who created the heavens and the earth…can only be crafted by God.

We cannot…on our own…craft or contrive a similar quality of life-altering, beneficially inspiring dependence upon God like we see in the life-scripts of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Hannah, Ruth, David, Esther and Mordecai, Jeremiah, Elijah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Peter, James, John, or Paul…to name only a few from the Bible.

This component of the gap between what we can do in the realm of worldly conventional normalcy…and what we cannot accomplish without divine help from God…such as produce a son of promise Isaac…or become governor of Egypt as a Hebrew…or deliver the Israelites from Egypt via the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea…all the way through the Bible up to the calling of Paul to become a missionary evangelist for the faith he was previously seeking to destroy…all of these things are totally and completely outside of humanistic imagination and invention.

This gap…beautifully and succinctly described in Hebrews 11:1…that is common to every biblical narrative story of faith…can only occur within a context that is itself divine…that is above our capacity to imagine, invent, or contrive within the narrowly restrictive realm of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Now is the time in human history to recognize that this is quite remarkable.

Now that modern science understands the unique role of information in the complex, functionally integrated, and coherent systems we find in the microscopic molecule DNA, in the Big Bang creation of the universe, in the Anthropic Principle that identifies the fine-tuned mathematical constants in the equations of physics and chemistry that allows for complex life like ourselves to exist, and in the twenty-plus conditions in our solar system that makes life on earth possible…it is also now time for a more straightforward, broader, and insightful appraisal of human nature.

Human beings were created with an incredibly sophisticated capacity for moral reasoning and judgment…with the unimaginably privileged capacity to enter into a relationship with the God who created our universe and this amazing earth we inhabit.

The central issue under consideration in this current world environment…is that we were created to be in a personal relationship with God…which is the core of the Christian gospel salvation message…of the good news that Jesus Christ is alive and risen from the dead…and that this God-created capacity enables people to receive Jesus Christ into our lives…by grace through faith…and to step-up into God-crafted journeys of faith as entirely new people in Christ…filled with purpose and meaning beyond our wildest imagination.

Going our own way apart from God is going the wrong way.

No topic could be more important in the fields of Christian apologetics and Christian discipleship today…and in the world at-large.

One of the beautiful discoveries of our modern era…is that the narrative stories of faith in the Bible were not written by us.

They were recorded by human writers…but the storylines were not written through human literary imagination.

The contrasting dichotomies of the two worldviews of autonomous self-sovereignty…and the cross-of-Christ centered narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…could not both be the products of human imaginative fiction-writing…could not both conceptually originate out of the atheistic worldview of naturalistic materialism.

The amazing separation…the two-edged sword that divides truth from error from the Christian perspective…thousands of years old now but coming into clear focus in these upcoming last days (Dan. 12:10)…is that we either by free-will choice enter into our God-composed adventure of faith life-script as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith…designed to create a context for a personal relationship with God…while achieving something monumental and positive for mankind…come what may…or we try to convince ourselves or God into doing things our way…to talk ourselves or God into doing things according to our plans.

Anyone who has ever themselves been engaged in a God-composed journey of faith life-script…a genuine calling of God…knows the difference between these two options…and has faced the choice of continuing on…in our walk of faith following Jesus Christ…in the narrow way that He has laid-out for us…or to take the opposite course instead…of attempting to talk God into doing things our way (Gen. 17:17-18; Jn. 3:30; Gal. 2:20).

The complexity, sophistication, and intellectual maturity of this two-worldview dichotomy…far surpass any humanistic or naturalistic explanation.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Journeys of Faith Transcend Above Normal Life 1

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (Jn. 8:36)

Sometimes a journey of faith following God has a life-script that includes the sacrifice…the giving up…of a fundamental component of worldly conventional normalcy…something we otherwise expect to be a normative part of our lives…that becomes an integral part of the cost of taking up our cross to follow Jesus.

Pieces and parts of worldly conventional normalcy, however, are not intrinsically bad in themselves.

“Occupy till I come” (Lk. 19:13) is commendable and admirable in terms of the everyday tasks involved in running well the household manor estates in the temporary absence of the owner away on other business…in this parable. The many admonitions to right and correct living in the New Testament letters to the early churches spells out what it means to “occupy till I come.”

But journeys of faith following God are designed to transcend above worldly conventional normalcy in the most positive way imaginable…necessitating parts of worldly conventional normalcy to fall away in the process.

Certainly, if we are one of the rare few called by God to be a medical missionary doctor in the deepest remote regions of the Amazon rainforest, as a practical matter we will have to leave our Mercedes-Benz or BMW automobile behind…there being no paved roads in the rainforest.

The classic biblical verse “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) is a spiritual truth of such depth that it falls far outside of humanistic contemplation and understanding. It describes the unique gap that only God can create using life events and circumstances…the gap between what we normally can and cannot do according to our human abilities…that produces a beneficial dependence upon God…far outside of our worldly conventional control and sovereign capacity over the normal activities within “occupy till I come.”

Abraham…the “father of faith”…waiting for the birth of the son of promise Isaac…is a perfect example of not “seeing” for a period of time the fulfillment of the promise through faith in the trustworthiness of the word of God…”the evidence of things not seen” created by the gap in time between God’s initial promise to Abraham and the actual event of the birth of Isaac…years later.

This is the first biblical example of a detailed, God-scripted and divinely created scenario for biblically defined faith to actualize.

“Faith…is the evidence of things not seen” that creates a gap in time between God’s promises large and small…and their fulfillment in the future…is the inverse opposite of the reality of Adam and Eve impulsively jumping at the chance to gain a knowledge of good and evil by hastily eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden…a decision they made independently of God…against His initial commandment…and without His further instructive council and input.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

God Has Our Back 2

A real journey of faith following the living God…as recorded in the Bible…is inconceivable and incomprehensible to a person committed to following their own way according to self-rulership.

This dichotomy of worldviews…two different approaches to life as unmixable as oil and water…should be an obvious red-flag jolt to anyone involved in the debate over the existence of God.

The fundamental first question…like the Big Bang (herein defined in this book as the divine creation of the universe ex nihilo …out of nothing…according to Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning” around 13.7 billion years ago), the Cambrian Explosion, the body-plan architectures and varied lifestyles of living creatures, and DNA…is what or who is the source of the completely novel and innovative, alternative worldview of a God-composed journey of faith life-script starting with the life of Abraham…continued through all of the biblical narrative stories of faith?

What explains the origin of this consistent storyline pattern in the Bible of the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42)…continuing down to contemporary Christian experience in our modern times…that is so utterly contrary to the conventionality of the accepted life-approach of going our own way in self-reliance and self-autonomy?

In modern speech…a biblical-quality adventure of faith…if it is fiction…if it is false…then it would be a “non-starter”…it would have no “there/there.” It would be without tangible, supportive substance.

If there is no active engagement between God and people…then there is nothing extraordinary, unconventional, or supernatural to write about.

This is why God-composed adventures of faith life-scripts…having God displacing our ways with His higher ways…are non-existent in other religions, philosophies, and worldviews…outside of the Bible.

This is why biblical adventures of faith fall far outside of and above the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This dichotomy of two distinct worldviews…delineated exclusively in the Bible…and miles apart in their practical application to human purpose and meaning in life…is a major, commonsense apologetic argument for the divine origin of Old Testament Judaism and New Testament Christianity.

It is never raised by atheists and skeptical critics…because they cannot even see it as a target to attack in scripture…as a debatable talking point.

It can only be raised by Spirit-born and led Christians who have themselves been in the danger zone of faith in a “shooting war” that has real consequences in life…because people personally led and taught of God are the only people on the planet aware of this reality.

The idea that God-scripted life-plans fall so far outside of conventional thinking…is itself a compelling and persuasive argument for the truth of their divine origin…because this unique genre is inexplicable as humanistically invented, literary fiction.

If Christians do not see the unconventionality of the cross of Christ skillfully embedded within the script of every biblical narrative story of faith…because they have not experienced God having our back in a crisis…then this positive and compelling apologetic argument for the divine origin of an adventure of faith…completely unknown outside of the Bible…will not be made.

It will be missed in the competing marketplace of ideas.

This is the dual choice we all have…as cognitive beings having free-will…to follow God down an adventurous path of discovery…or to go our own way in conventional normalcy and thinking.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

God Has Our Back 1

“But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” (1 Cor. 2:10)

God has our back in a crisis. The only way we would know this for sure is by actual experience…by being in the middle of a shooting war.

This has to be true…because it cannot be fiction. It does not hold up as fiction. Once it rises to the level of becoming recorded in writing…put down on paper…it enters the arena of being universally testable and falsifiable over time.

The interaction between the living God and David….memorialized forever in David’s 23rd Psalm…is true because it cannot be otherwise…it cannot be fictional writing. Once David writes about walking through the valley of the shadow of death with God at his side…then fiction-writing as the source of its inspiration and origin becomes nonsensical.

The uniquely biblical concept of the living God participating in our lives to this extent of personal interaction…at the very center of our life-scripts…is too far outside of the default, conventional worldview thinking of sitting atop the thrones of our lives in self-sovereignty…to make the huge leap across to the other side of the spectrum in placing our lives on-the-line in sacrificially following by faith the living God.

According to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking, David should be telling us how great and powerful he is…not about successful faith in God…because self-adulation surrounding his achievements would be the normally expected outer limits…the extent of his possible experience.

What would be the point…the motivation…the inspiration…for David making this Psalm 23 up…if the actual boundaries of human experience stop at the edge of self-sovereignty, self-reliance, and autonomous individualism?

Following God into an adventure of faith would not hold water for any period of time within actual lived experience…unless God is real…and that we can experience His active participation in our lives.

Religious “faith” that is still rooted in self-reliance and self-rulership is not biblical faith. Biblical faith will connect us with the real God…who according to the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…will displace our ways with a higher life-script that reflects His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9).

This is the root of what was so threatening to the religious leaders in Jerusalem in the first-century that led to crucifying Jesus Christ.

The religious leaders in Jerusalem were exposed by Jesus as being blind hypocrites.

They said they were the authorized representatives of God (Jn. 8:33, 39, 41) when in fact they were the deadliest enemies of biblical faith.

They were firmly committed to the default worldview of self-sovereign self-rulership…of maintaining complete control over their lives…to the point of instigating the death of Jesus through Roman crucifixion…in order to remove the threat of having to surrender this self-guided, self-sovereign status quo (Jn. 11:47-48).

They knew roughly about biblical faith…had been exposed to it as they studied the Hebrew Bible…but did not want any part of it themselves (Lk. 11:39-54).

This is a component of the “mystery” of iniquity…the conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty in our lives that produced the radical outcomes of the cross, the resurrection, and our salvation.

The risk-factor involved in the novelty of voluntarily and willfully walking through a genuine journey of faith following the living God…is on its own a powerful and persuasive evidence that supports the divine origin of the Bible…because as human invented literary fiction…the concept of God-sovereignty displacing our self-sovereignty cannot and would not exist…for any length of time in real practice.

Minutes, hours, or days of actual tested experience would quickly expose this concept…if fiction…as empty fantasy…and be discarded as functionally worthless.

If God is in actuality “not home,” then His brilliantly imaginative solutions in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that soar above human creativity and invention…would not only be inaccessible as real experience…to be recorded as life-history on paper…they would be beyond the creative imagination of human contemplation altogether.

David…or someone else inventing the 23rd Psalm…as fiction writing…has no motivational or conceptual legs…it does not take us anywhere within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Introduction 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

Introduction 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are We Ready?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Apologetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biblical Journeys of Faith are not "Religious"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pushing Power Downward

From The Second Half of the Cross

The tragic irony in all of this, on a truly galactic scale, is that God does not mind sharing power. God is not only willing, but anxious to impart spiritual power to human beings (Lk. 9:1-2). It is God who created us with the capacity for abstract thought, logical reasoning, and moral judgment.

A walk of faith through a life-script of varied situations and circumstances, carefully designed and orchestrated by God, is a guided apprenticeship in the right use of personal freedom and power. The examples of the people of faith in the Bible are a demonstration of God’s enlightened management approach of pushing power downward into the lives of His faithful servants.

The management approach of pushing power downward, as a method of training, is an extraordinary trait to find within the character of God. The God who created our universe is an unequaled perfectionist. In our human experience, one of the most difficult things for a perfectionist to do is to delegate. Yet God works in partnership with Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Deborah, Gideon, David, Esther, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and others through unique and unusual story-lines in the Bible in order to give them the opportunity to experience the right use of power under direct apprenticeship to God.

God composes creatively different life-scripts, calls people by His Spirit, and orchestrates adventures of faith so that people can grow and stretch into the potentially Christ-like people that God intended us to be when He created us. The fact that God enlists people into all sorts of varied enterprises in the Bible, which He could undoubtedly do infinitely better solely by Himself, tells us there is a profound purpose behind God joining Himself with us along a walk of faith through life.

The writing of the Bible is a clear example of this concept of God pushing power downward. The Bible has nearly 40 different authors, writing over a span of 1,500 years. These writers were prophets, kings, shepherds, fishermen, a physician, and other common people with varied backgrounds. They wrote from different geographical locations, about different challenges and circumstances, and through the lens of different cultural settings. The fact that these men produced a consistent and cohesive message has enormously persuasive apologetic value in arguing for the divine inspiration of the Bible.

But it also demonstrates God’s willingness and ability to spiritually joint-venture with people to produce something as lofty as Holy Scripture. Jesus says in Matthew 5:18 that the scriptures are so precise that not one jot or one tittle (Hebrew punctuation marks) shall pass from the Law until all be fulfilled. Jesus says in John 10:35 that the scriptures cannot be broken.

That God can and would enlist human participation in the writing of the inspired word of God called the Bible, which mirrors accurately in written words the actual living expression of the Word of God embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, tells us plainly of God’s intention and ability to push power downward effectively into the hearts and minds of faithful men and women of God.

The fact that God created us with this “in-His-image” capacity is the clearest evidence of His loving desire to interact with us on the elevated plane of being able to responsibly, thoughtfully, and rightly use power.

At the outer limits of divine perfection self-centeredness goes away. One stereotype in the business world is of the manager who keeps information to themselves. In any organization knowledge is power. But the servant-leader approach informs, trains, and empowers others. The servant-leader creates business reports and sends out memos with the aim to share information.

The servant-leader approach is a management philosophy of proactive thoughtfulness intended to liberate subordinates from complete dependence upon the all-informed and all-knowing manager.

The servant-leader, who manages to get people involved in the goals of the enterprise through personal participation in decision-making through shared leadership based upon trust, when done wisely usually creates highly motivated, enthusiastic, and committed workers. The servant-leader approach is the exact opposite of the autocrat who keeps all of the information and knowledge, and therefore the power to themselves.

Lucifer wants to live out his dream of being god at the expense of others. Lucifer’s approach is egocentric and requires the sacrifice of others to achieve his goals. By contrast God wants to fulfill His will and way by enabling others to actualize their created potential through free-will participation, a personal relationship, and wise and prudent delegation of authority. God’s approach is based upon unselfish divine love that will sacrifice Himself on the cross for the benefit and well-being of others.

The Bible set into words, and the journeys-of-faith callings portrayed therein, are the epitome of perfect unselfishness pushing power downward. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is this expression in living form. The gift of the Holy Spirit leading and guiding us into all truth from within our born-again spirits is at the height of well-intentioned thoughtfulness in the deepest moral sense.

A God-composed biblical journey of faith is an individual one-on-one training mission. God’s program is to set-up the circumstances unique to each one of our lives, whereby we can learn through first-hand experience to reach the point in wisdom that we knowingly and willingly choose the right, the noble, and the commendable course of conduct as a natural response of our improving Christ-like characters.

God wants us to grow into mature sons and daughters of light, who can react in partnership with His Spirit to every situation in this fallen world environment with the quality of character that will produce joy and peace for ourselves, for others, and for God, now and for all eternity.

Lucifer’s classically deceptive temptation in the Garden, that people apart from God could become “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), was of the most destructive and diabolical nature. Lucifer had nothing to offer that was genuine on its own merits. Lucifer saw the good thing that God had intended for mankind, seized the opportunity, and actually stole God’s idea, corrupting it for his own purposes.

By preemptively stealing God’s creative idea of a journey of faith, before God could establish a solid relationship with Adam and Eve, Lucifer effectively short-circuited the beneficial intentions of God’s program.

By replacing God with “self” in the spiritual equation, Lucifer created a counterfeit “journey of self” to match his own fallen attitude of self-worship, that is completely out-of-sync with the original plan of God for mankind.

This is why the temptation in the Garden was a deception and a lie, rather than a commendably viable alternative approach to life. Lucifer stole and corrupted God’s idea of a joint-venture walk of faith with Him, making it into an autonomous and solitary “walk of self,” because Lucifer does not have a better plan of his own other than rebellious revolt fueled by pride-filled ambition. In reality there is no alternate plan for life in all of existence.

The “walk of self” is merely a lower, fallen, corrupted version of the higher walk-of-faith fellowship that God created us with the capacity to enjoy. The current, worldly conventional modern-day version of a “walk of self” displaces the walk of faith that God designed for us as the vehicle whereby we could get to know Him.

By getting the human race to depart from God through his upside-down deception of making rebellion as autonomous individuals appear as if it was commendably liberating, Lucifer effectively erased the apprenticeship training program that God had planned for us. By going-it-on-our-own apart from the Holy Spirit, we shortchange ourselves from the character lessons that would enable us to happily and responsibly exercise our God-given capacity to learn to use power rightly for the good of ourselves and others.

Lucifer wanted power for its own sake, without being accountable to God or anyone other than himself. By getting mankind to join his rebellion against God, Lucifer has instilled this same lust for power within the character of fallen mankind. This explains why there is so much push-back against the gospel message of repentance, spiritual rebirth, and surrendering our will and way to God.

Being broken upon the living Stone that is Christ (Mt. 21:44) means giving up power. But what is so sadly deceptive about sin, is that in willingly giving up self-sovereignty, the Spirit-led Christian is really only transferring power over to Jesus Christ, who intended all along to give back this self-same power to us, repackaged in a beneficially crafted individual journey of faith.

This ingenious creation of a walk of faith is a divinely guided set of life circumstances, originally designed to enable us to learn to use the power of our individual gifts and abilities properly.

The irony is that it is Jesus Christ who created mankind with the express capacity to be able to use spiritual power rightly and correctly. Sitting upon the throne of our lives in spiritual rebellion frustrates the loving intention of God to fulfill our created purpose.