The Fundamental Blog

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

The proofs that would show that we live in a theocratic universe are more lengthy than I can go into here, but suffice to say that we do, indeed, exist within a theocratic framework; that means that there exists a governing God to whom all of creation must be attributed. This God is worthy of, and rightly owed the worship of His created beings and as we look around, we can see a multitude of religions and religious schools of thought from which to pattern this worship upon. So which is the right one? Is one substantially different from the others, or do they all amount to about the same thing with their minor distinctions being negligible? Does it matter if we choose a Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyers, Joel Osteen, Charles Stanley, Billy Graham or any other particular presentation style? Aren’t they all talking about the same God and the same path to salvation?

I am not even going to consider the outlying faiths of the eastern and mid-eastern peoples because for this discussion I am confident that we have more than enough to consider simply looking at the ideological splits within the Christian, (or supposedly Christian), communities. What I want to consider is the way we go about finding a worshipping congregation to be joined to, and whether or not our decision making is trustworthy. Do we find a congregation and then learn the tenets of faith, or do we find faith and then learn which denominational faction is the closest to it? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Theology is the study of religion, of faith and God’s relation to the world, a religious theory, school of thought, or system of belief or a course of religious training. Now God, being God, can not change; it is the character and workings of God that we, mere mortal created beings, are struggling to comprehend but it seems that the field of theology has split into two factions. On the one side we find those who are searching for the true characteristics of God in order to explain the workings of the environment in which we find ourselves, and the other side is searching for ways to fit the way we want to view ourselves into a theological system. The first sees the Bible as ancient writings given by God, through the Holy Spirit, to men who faithfully set down the words so that we might have, “The Word of God,” to use as the ultimate reference; the latter is willing to go so far as to, in some cases, alter the texts to express their own points of view.

Now comes the worldling. He is invited to attend a church with some of his contemporaries and as he does, he becomes convicted by something he hears. The more mature Christian would agree that this is the calling of God to faith in the Son because, as it is written, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him…” John 6:44. But the worldling who has no learning, no knowledge of what the Scriptures say, has nothing on which to base the nature of that conviction. He is left to decide whether or not the message which convicts him feels like its right. The problem here is that none of us want to think of ourselves as being the wretched, sinful, deceitful creatures that the Bible tells us we are, we would much rather have our egos stroked and come out feeling better about ourselves than we did on the way in. This is one of the reasons that I repeatedly urge everyone to get into the Bible to see if the message, which too often only tickles our ears, is in fact the teachings of God.

It is not all that common that the seeking person feels the pangs to answer the big questions of life by realizing a creator God, and to learning the wisdom of His Word to see what his right relationship with God is, can and should be. More often, man takes his own, over inflated, impression of himself and looks for something that suits him. Instead of learning who we are and how we are to relate to God, we go out looking for a place that allows us to shape God to fit our needs, but as I said earlier; God does not change! Man is so stubborn that he insists on a faith that will tell him whatever it is that he wants to hear, even though it may have nothing to do with reality.

Take the charismatic faith healer as an example. Can God heal the cripple, give sight to the blind and raise the dead? Absolutely! Does He do it today through traveling tent shows? I don’t think so. I may get arguments about this but I have never seen anyone who was genuinely crippled be healed by some guy smacking him on the forehead and commanding the demon to come out. I firmly believe that in the Apostolic ministries of the first century, the Apostles were given this ability to prove the validity of their message through such displays, but I have never seen anyone who had the Apostolic sign-gifts in our time. The healer may have plants in the audience which, “appear,” to be miraculously restored but the fact is that when the genuinely afflicted person is not cured, they end up being told that their faith was not strong enough to be healed. The weakness of the afflicted prevented the healing from being effective. Rubbish! When Christ healed, (or Peter, or Paul…), He sometimes healed to show what faith could do independently of the afflicted person’s faith.

There are many times where we read, “your faith has healed you,” or, “because of their great faith He was merciful,” but not always. In Luke 7:11-17 is the account of Jesus raising the dead son of a widow in the town of Nain. No one asked Jesus to do this, He took pity on the woman and gave her back her son, but it was not dependent on the faith of the dead man, nor that of his mother. This was a miracle which was performed to glorify Christ by the power to raise the dead before a gathering in a public place. Likewise, the man who was born blind and had his eyes opened did not know who it was that had opened his eyes. How could he have been receiving a reward for his faith when he had no clue what was happening to him or who was doing it?

The point is this, it is too easy for us to look to the claims of those who appear to be preaching the Word of God but allow us to be comfortable in our current situations. If you get to go to be with the Lord when you leave this life and have only to claim to be a Christian while living the same life you always have, who wouldn’t want to be a Christian? But that isn’t Christianity. Christianity demands that we change. Not to gain our salvation, there is nothing we can, “DO,” to earn that, but once we have given ourselves to Christ, His Holy Spirit begins to do supernatural things with us that will change who we are. If we didn’t begin to change than we would be violating Scripture because it clearly says, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son…” Romans 8:29. The book of James is all about the outpouring of good works that are a result of the change being made in us, not for salvation, but as a result.

Real faith, faith that serves God’s desires, is transforming. It changes us. We do not have the right, or the ability, to mash God into a mold that allows us to like who we are at present. We must learn who God is and then believe what He tells us and when that happens we will discover that we will most assuredly not like the people we are. But then the changes start to happen and we begin to be transformed toward the likeness of Christ and we can praise God for each step along the way, (even the painful ones). He is doing something for our good and it is a beautiful thing. The chicken came before the egg and God, the One true God is before our faith. When we keep this in the right order then, and only then, our transformation is a thing which is…


All for the Glory of Christ