The Fundamental Blog

“If anything is a mystery to you and is coming between you and God, never look for the explanation in your intellect, look for it in your disposition, it is that which is wrong.” (Oswald Chambers). The thought here is that God would love for there to be nothing in the way of perfect communion with us so whenever there is something in the way, it must be because of something in us, in our disposition, in the way we see things. This is also the case with a lot of the problems that non-believers have hearing and accepting the truth of God, their disposition gets in the way, their intellect has no explanation and they simply can not believe what makes no sense to them. When I am in discussions with non-believers, and even with believers who are struggling with difficult doctrines, the questions, comments and assaults generally form themselves around the same pattern; IF - THEN WHY?

IF God wants us all to be with Him in Heaven, THEN WHY doesn’t He just make it happen? IF God is a loving God, THEN WHY would He order the genocide of an entire people? IF God cares about us, THEN WHY would He kill children? IF God is perfect, THEN WHY do we have disease? IF blah, blah, blah, THEN WHY Yackity Smackity? In our study of the Bible we need to change the structure of the questions we ask to really appreciate what God is revealing to us. If the question starts with, “IF,” then we are already going the wrong direction. If the question has the word, “WHY,” in it then it will almost assuredly be an exercise in futility. God rarely ever answers the, “WHY,” questions and even were he to do it, we would never understand the answers. “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your, ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” Isaiah 55:8-9.

So let’s dispense with the wanting to know, “WHY,” all the time and accept that though He does occasionally give a reason, the Word of God is to be accepted like the answer from your mother when you were two years old and asked, “WHY?” “Because!” That’s your answer, OK? This becomes much easier to accept if we work on changing the word, “IF,” to, “SINCE?” Whenever we ask, “IF…,” we are phrasing things in a manner that says we doubt what God is saying. If we use, “SINCE,” instead, we are accepting what we have been given as truth, even though we don’t necessarily understand the implications surrounding the issue at hand.

“If God is holy and unchanging then why was it OK for incest in the earlier parts of Genesis but not after the law was given through Moses?” This questions the holiness of God, “Is He really?” and also fires an accusation at the nature of God; “It was OK then but not now huh? I thought God couldn’t change! If the Bible can’t contradict itself then why does it?” When we change the, “If’s,” to, “Since’s,” then instead of accusing God of being a liar, we are indicting ourselves for being unknowing. This is were I come up with, “It’s OK to be stupid!” I have no problem accepting that God is smarter than we are and that there will always be questions to which we will never get an answer. I’m OK with that and I laughingly refer to those questions as being on the list I want answered when I get to Heaven. I’m sure that when I get there I won’t care about the answers anyway, but why, if they won’t matter when we enter eternity, should we be so hung up on them here?

Christianity will continue to be a bag of never-ending questions as long as we demand to understand everything. We need to begin with the realization that we, with our finite little brains, will never be able to fully comprehend the infinite! We are human and that’s the way humans are, we have to deal with it. But once we are able to say, “I don’t care what this book tells me, and even though I may not understand the how’s and why’s to everything it says, I WILL believe that it is the truth because Jesus Christ tells me it is true and the Spirit convicts me to believe it is the truth of God.”, then the light will begin to shine. Will it clear up all of our questions? Absolutely not! What it will do though is show us where we are limited. The Holy Spirit will lead us into the truth of God in Christ Jesus and that has to be enough, because that’s all we get.

The Spirit knows what, and how much we are able to receive and He will give us that much. To give us more than we are able to hold would be like pouring 12 ounces of water into a 10 ounce glass, part would be wasted and it would make a mess in the process. Do I understand the prophesies in Isaiah, with the wheels and the eyes and the wings and the ups and downs and all that? NO! I accept that I must not need it right now though or else the Spirit would have opened my eyes to it. This is exactly the reason we need to stay in the word though; what is not revealed with the first read may come in the next, or the 12th, or the 100th read. What we must understand is that the truthfulness of God’s Word does not depend on whether or not we understand or believe it. If the fact that children are going to bed hungry is something that we do not believe, it doesn’t make it any less true because of our disbelief. And because we don’t understand how God was able to part the Red Sea so that Israel could escape from Pharaoh doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

“IF,” is a word that will keep us bound to an explanation when there is no explanation to be had, and it will hinder our progression toward a deeper faith. Faith is all about believing; “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1 Faith is not a blind leap though, nor is it one without a net. Faith is reasonable when we begin to exercise it, faith grows faith and the faith that is as small as a mustard seed can become the largest thing in our lives if we will allow it to grow. Whenever we don’t, “Get It,” we have to make ourselves understand that either we are not ready to receive it, we don’t need to know just yet, or it’s a shortcoming on our part, we’re not applying ourselves to the task. Our failure to understand is never because God made a mistake. That’s one thing He can not do!

“SINCE,” is the new, “IF,” Christian. So if you’re ready to get serious… I mean, SINCE this is the most important thing in our lives, it’s time to stop doubting God and simply accept that there are plenty of good reasons to believe that the Bible is truth. If we are the ambassadors of our Lord here on earth… wait… SINCE we have received the command to spread the Gospel and SINCE we are the property of Jesus, bought at a price and not our own, then it’s time to quit fooling around with arguments against God and get in step with the Creator of the universe. It is not a matter of, “If God will judge the world.” It’s, “SINCE.” It’s not, “If Jesus is the only way,” it’s, “SINCE.” It is not whether our actions and testimony matter, it’s SINCE we live…


All for the Glory of Christ

I was amazed when I had the opportunity to reach out to a man, (Ted,) who had just gone through the process of having a life-saving procedure completed on his heart, only to find that he was no more awed by the power of God after the event than he had been before hand. We exchanged several letters wherein I tried to emphasize that it was only by the power and providence of God that he was still alive and mightn’t it be that God had something in mind for him to do. Ted insisted that it was science and technical skill, (obviously obtained from someplace other than God), that was responsible for the success of the procedure. As the exchange was approaching the, “pearls before swine,” stage, he said something that seemed odd. He thought that if there were a god, that he should have allowed us to live longer; he thought that 500 years would be enough.

Now Ted is a fairly reasonable man by the standards of the world, but he is convinced that God is a mere fantasy, a crutch for those who are unwilling to accept responsibility for themselves, and that unless God can be proved, there is nothing to convince him otherwise. I asked the un-answered questions; “If you are not happy with the 70 or 80 years that God has given you now, what makes you think that you will be satisfied with 500? Won’t you say, when you get to 497, that you still wish for a few more years past 500? Don’t you realize that you are only putting off the same inevitable death with the same fears that you have now?” By this point the conversation was drawing to a close and I knew that it was simply not his time to hear what the Lord was setting before him, but given an open door in the future, I’ll undoubtedly try again.

You see, science can never do anything toward providing us with proofs for the divine. A.W. Tozer states, “The realm of the Spirit is closed to the intellect … … You see the spirit is the organ by which we apprehend divine things, and the human spirit is dead because of sin. Therefore, the human intellect is not the organ by which we apprehend divine things.” He goes on to point out that the divine is revealed by the Holy Spirit, that there is no other way that we may have any understanding of spiritual things. We can never know God unless His Spirit says to our spirit, “Here He is, come and see.”

The reason that so many people wish for more time is, (I believe), not so that they can do more stuff, finish writing that great novel or even work longer to save the world from this or that. No, they are only trying to run away from the death they know is coming and that they somehow understand that they are not ready for what comes next. Even if they think that all that’s next is eternal darkness and the big dirt-nap, they know they aren’t ready for it. In Romans 1, Paul explains that men are without excuse because the invisible qualities of God were made known to them but, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Amen.” v25. It’s as though the image of God, in which we are all created, knows that there is judgment to face, and that one bit of truth gnaws away at their gut telling them that they have a real reason to be afraid.

If the case could be made that the Bible is the reliable Word of God that Christians believe it to be, then we could show that there explanations to what happens when we, “fall asleep,” and that there is an eternal plan. 500 years is a drop in a bottomless bucket of years when viewed from the biblical perspective. But in order to understand that point you have to be willing to accept that science can not answer the questions of faith. If miracles could be proved then they would not be miracles! The skeptic wants scientific proof of the Divine and that’s impossible. We, finite beings that we are, can not wrap our minds around eternity much less the God who created time, how can we expect to even begin to understand the limitlessness of God? If 500 years seems to be an acceptable amount of time, wouldn’t forever be that much better? What’s more; wouldn’t eternity in the utopian vision that is Heaven be better than the prolonged misery of living in a fallen world for 500 years?

I met two brothers in a VBS program aged 9 and 11. They weren’t all that interested in the whole, “Jesus,” thing and as I struggled for a way to reach them, the Spirit gave me just the thing. I asked the two of them, “What if I could show you that you would live forever?” The older boy said, “Yeah I know, if ya believe in Jesus and do good stuff, right?” “No,” I answered. “No matter what, good or bad, you would live forever, what would you say to that?” “Nah, even my Grandma who went to church and all that stuff died,” Was the response. “OK,” I said, “but if it were true, wouldn’t you want to know?” “Well yeah, I guess so.” Then I sat them down and huddled up like it was a secret that I was about to share and we looked up two verses of Scripture. We read John 3:16 and discussed what the words, “eternal life,” meant for a bit and then we looked at Revelation 20:10 and talked about what, “forever and ever,” meant. I told them that the life we have now, will some day be different, but that it really doesn’t end. It’s all a matter of location; if we trust in Christ to save us from the judgment of God we spend forever in Heaven and if we don’t, we spend it somewhere a lot less fun.

500 years is nothing when its stacked against the Word of God. But as long as we want to claim to run our own lives, that there is no God to give us moral direction, that we can hold out until science proves everything that we need to know; we will continue to live lives in fear of what is next. The fear of the unknown is a terrible thing but it doesn’t have to be unknown; God has explained exactly how the plan unfolds. We are looking at a battle, a war that’s already been fought and decided and we know who wins; all we have to do is decide which side we want to be on! How hard is that? I don’t know about you, but given the choice, I’ll take the winning side, thank you very much!

Returning to Tozer for a moment; I want to share an anecdote from his book, “Mystery of the Holy Spirit.” If you want to argue that science must bear out faith before it’s valid, then consider this for a moment. “There were two scientists talking together and they concluded, ‘We have investigated, searched into, weighed and measured and have determined that the story of the donkey speaking is all false. [Numbers 22:28] The larynx of a donkey could not possibly articulate human speech.’ A Scotsman had been listening and having had all he could take went up to them and said, ‘ Mon, you make a donkey and I’ll make him talk.’” There is a reason that they are called miracles, they occur outside of scientific proofs. And you know, if that Scotsman did manage to make the donkey talk, I bet it would say something that ended up being…


All for the Glory of Christ