Barton Jahn's Blog - Posts Tagged "bible"
We Cannot Do It All
We cannot have everything we want, simply because as a practical matter we cannot do everything we want. Time and physical reality forces us to exclude and make choices.
We cannot both live in the county and in the city, travel the world and go to college, find time to read all of the books we want to read and lead an active social life, become expert in two or more sports, pursue a happy marriage, have children and a family life, serve on the local school board, volunteer for weekend charity social work, spend as much time with old friends as we used to before marriage and children, write books, and be active in social media, all at the same time.
Life is not only about what we do, but also about what we choose not to do. Some things have to be cut out.
It has been said that a sculptor creates a masterpiece in marble by the pieces that are chipped away. The finished marble statue is created by the material that has been removed from the rough-hewn block of stone marble. There is a final outcome envisioned within the artistic eye of the sculptor, but the actual carving process to reach the end-product involves the chipping away of the excess, waste material.
The cross of Christ element in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith is unique to all religions, philosophies, and worldviews.
As Abraham walks from the city of Haran towards Canaan, with each step he takes Abraham’s personal plans for worldly conventional normalcy are being replaced by the higher plans of God, beyond anything Abraham could imagine.
The fact that the Master Sculptor was chipping away the worldly normative life-plan of Abraham, the father of faith, over 5,000 years ago is massive evidence for the divine composition of this opening journey of faith narrative in the Bible.
You cannot be Abraham and be anything else at the same time. A focused life excludes other things.
No humanistic writer would ever invent the concept of chipping out the marble from the block of conventional worldly normalcy to replace it with a risky, God-led journey of faith containing the cross as its central theme.
Understanding the fact that a biblical-quality journey of faith excludes our own way is critical for today’s disciple of Jesus Christ.
We cannot both live in the county and in the city, travel the world and go to college, find time to read all of the books we want to read and lead an active social life, become expert in two or more sports, pursue a happy marriage, have children and a family life, serve on the local school board, volunteer for weekend charity social work, spend as much time with old friends as we used to before marriage and children, write books, and be active in social media, all at the same time.
Life is not only about what we do, but also about what we choose not to do. Some things have to be cut out.
It has been said that a sculptor creates a masterpiece in marble by the pieces that are chipped away. The finished marble statue is created by the material that has been removed from the rough-hewn block of stone marble. There is a final outcome envisioned within the artistic eye of the sculptor, but the actual carving process to reach the end-product involves the chipping away of the excess, waste material.
The cross of Christ element in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith is unique to all religions, philosophies, and worldviews.
As Abraham walks from the city of Haran towards Canaan, with each step he takes Abraham’s personal plans for worldly conventional normalcy are being replaced by the higher plans of God, beyond anything Abraham could imagine.
The fact that the Master Sculptor was chipping away the worldly normative life-plan of Abraham, the father of faith, over 5,000 years ago is massive evidence for the divine composition of this opening journey of faith narrative in the Bible.
You cannot be Abraham and be anything else at the same time. A focused life excludes other things.
No humanistic writer would ever invent the concept of chipping out the marble from the block of conventional worldly normalcy to replace it with a risky, God-led journey of faith containing the cross as its central theme.
Understanding the fact that a biblical-quality journey of faith excludes our own way is critical for today’s disciple of Jesus Christ.
God Didn't Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
Introduction
“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Heb. 11:6)
I once had a lively discussion with a borderline agnostic/atheist who said that he did not dismiss the idea that God existed…but that to believe and have faith he needed more objective, foolproof evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible and Christianity.
In pondering our talk afterwards, I thought of all of the evidences that are out there in the observable world…easily accessible through commonsense contemplation…that in the hands of a skilled litigator in a courtroom…for example…would not only convince most jurors of the existence of God…but also of the divine origin of the Bible and its message.
In better hands than mine (except when I have the anointing of the Holy Spirit…like Peter before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:8-12 or Philip in Acts 8:26-40…which can be experienced by all Spirit-born Christians for sharing our faith in Jesus Christ with boldness and conviction)…there are dozens of categories of very persuasive arguments for the existence of God…many of which contain the obvious “miracles” we experience and see all around us…that we accept as “normal” and take totally for granted.
A few of these obvious evidences might be the “miracle” of sexuality…or digestion…or our respiratory system…our constant heartbeat…or our balanced and symmetrical locomotion and motor skills…all of which shout-out for ingenious design rather than random chance assemblage.
Another obvious evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer God…easily accessible to ordinary, commonsense consideration…is the universal cuteness of any infant---a human toddler, a lion cub, a Labrador puppy, a baby elephant, young ducklings swimming after their mother in a pond…possessing the most sublimely complex and artistic information content…yet totally inexplicable and unnecessary under a Darwinian naturalistic framework…having no survival-of-the-fittest value whatsoever…but otherwise easily understood as a product of intentional, whimsical, premeditated design.
Certainly the mystery of human speech and the natural inclination of youngsters to acquire, understand, and accurately differentiate subtle concepts in language and communication…at a phenomenal rate of speed…is a reality far too complex and incredibly integrated to be lightly and uncritically accepted as the result of gradualistic, chance descent-with-modification…rather than conscious, deliberate design at a brilliantly creative, extremely advanced level.
In sports…our incredible facility to be able to play professional ice hockey in the NHL…to run back the opening kick-off 100 yards for a touchdown in college football…to hit a 95-mph fastball 400 feet over the left-field fence for a homerun in baseball…to play tennis, pin-pong, badminton, volleyball, run the 100-meter sprint in track & field, run a marathon, complete the Tour de France, surf the North Shore in Hawaii, and score a goal in World Cup soccer…these are physical acuities that are so advanced, so complex, so finely tuned, and so functionally integrated…that to ascribe their origin to gradualistic, random chance, trial-and-error processes as asserted in the theory of Darwinian evolution…when we see and observe nothing incrementally progressive and transitional in a major, creative sense anywhere in the natural world…currently or in the course of natural history…seems on its face to be nonsensical.
Certainly the existence of the moral framework that permeates all of the social interactions between people…which we take totally for granted… needs explanation…such things as romantic love, friendship, loyalty, bravery, humor, forgiveness, standing up for the right thing even when it costs us something, giving value to other people through respect…and the flip-side---lying, cheating, prejudice, selfishness, injustice, and evil…all of which in the hands of a skilled debater could be persuasively argued to be far beyond the creative naturalistic reach of material particles and energy…given that particles and energy demonstrate no capacity for creating complex and functionally integrated systems or concepts.
Add to this the mind-boggling Age of Information explosion of the last two or three decades…in which intelligence has been linked to the origin of information wherever we find complex and functionally integrated systems in human creations…in computer software codes, literary books of every genre, inventions of every type…which correspond to the information-rich systems we find in the natural world such as the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, the Cambrian Explosion, the DNA code, the laws of science, and the body-plan architectures and lifestyle habits of every living creature…to name only a few examples.
Curiously, in the area of the fine arts…we see the seemingly unavoidable necessity of the inclusion of the overcoming of evil…of the “good” cowboys wearing white hats rounding up the “bad” cowboys wearing black hats…fundamental as a satisfying through-line within the storyline fabric of movies, theater plays, and books…coming from a modern popular culture that otherwise outwardly claims to avoid the acknowledgment of the concept of biblical sin.
How can the existence and complexity of good and evil…sliced-and-diced in every which way in enumerable, fictional storyline settings and conditions…of unending fascination and interest to the human psyche…how can the plausible explanation for the existence of this complex reality be the sole product of material particles and energy…according to the philosophical worldview of naturalism?
The mere existence of the word forgiveness in our vocabulary and in our dictionary argues for a transcendent capacity for moral reasoning and intelligent judgment far above the rest of the natural living world.
The origin of the concept of falling short of some independent standard of behavior and thinking…requiring us to ask forgiveness from other people we have harmed or offended…in a materialistic Darwinian worldview has no survival-of-the-fittest value…and ascribes to the capacity of material particles and energy a broadly theoretical, God-like potential for creating premeditated end-points such as forgiveness…in the realm of moral reasoning.
A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one amongst tens of thousands of similar everyday commonsense examples that could be persuasive evidence argued in a court of law…in favor of the necessity of an intelligent designer God…is the existence of our navel…our “belly button”…the umbilical cord between mother and baby that is severed and tied at childbirth. Every human has one.
Is there a plausible series of sequential, progressive, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as a functional, intermediate bridge between the initial trial-and-error dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start…to a totally functional assemblage producing a viable fetus reaching the point in time of nine-month maturity and a healthy childbirth…whereupon the umbilical cord is cut-off from the placenta and tied into a knot?
Commonsense reasoning tells us that this one feature…amongst possibly millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features…of a functional umbilical cord with all of its complex processes…must be up and running at just the right time in the embryonic development process of the human fetus occurring within the mother…for successful human reproduction to occur.
The quality and the accuracy of the biological information codes and specifications…extrapolated out to every part of the human body to produce a functional living and reproducing organism…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.
The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced such a deep and detailed understanding of how things work…in our own bodies such as how we produce speech, how we hear, and how we see…extended out into all of the areas of scientific inquiry from the microscopic atomic level to the galactic scale of the astrophysics of our universe…that the information content is now so vast…that a previous naturalistic explanation for the folding of amino acids into proteins did not even exist 100 years ago at the start of the twentieth century…because this area of microbiological knowledge had not even been discovered yet.
The current discoveries in science…with the new awareness of their accompanying explosion of information content…in highly complex and coherent systems…undermines all theories based on the simplistic methodologies of random chance, trial-and-error search strategies.
What could pass as an “explanation”…as a placeholder for ignorance 50 or 100 years ago under the guise of naturalistic philosophy posing as science…is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and magnitude of complex and integrated systems of information that fall outside the chance probability of mathematics.
A naturalistic, Darwinian explanation for the complex phenomenon we now understand better in the living and non-living world…no longer “holds water” in this new Age of Information.
As a non-scholar layman in the areas of theology and biblical studies…along with millions of other common Christians around the world simply following Jesus within their journeys of faith…I sense that the centuries-old paradigm conflict between philosophical atheism and Christianity is at a balanced apex…at a tipping-point where the evidences for theism may now begin…if they have not already…to surpass the now archaic logic and arguments against supernaturalism and the miraculous in the Bible.
The Big Bang creation of the universe philosophically opened wide the door for intelligent agency…introducing in the first split-seconds of creation all of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics… along with time itself…and all of the material particles in the right quantities and proportions to produce the universe we now observe today…out of absolute nothing…sometime around 14 billion years ago.
If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…along with the accompanying physical laws out of nothing…then the philosophical objection by skeptics that God cannot introduce creative life and “miracles” into the natural world…a natural world incorrectly viewed by some as a “closed system” up until a few decades ago…is now debunked by the discoveries of modern science through the identification of massive amounts of complex and functionally integrated systems of information…everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world.
The concept of an independent agent…God…injecting vast amounts of complex information into our world utilizing creative foresight…such as the DNA code…the unimaginably brilliant folding of amino acids into proteins…and the body-plan architectural information stored somewhere in the embryonic developmental structure of the living cell that builds cells and tells them their unique function and location in the dividing and expanding embryo…is very similar to our own use of accumulated information and creative foresight in the planned and premeditated assembly of houses, automobiles, airplanes, laptop computers, and pharmaceutical medicines.
“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Heb. 11:6)
I once had a lively discussion with a borderline agnostic/atheist who said that he did not dismiss the idea that God existed…but that to believe and have faith he needed more objective, foolproof evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible and Christianity.
In pondering our talk afterwards, I thought of all of the evidences that are out there in the observable world…easily accessible through commonsense contemplation…that in the hands of a skilled litigator in a courtroom…for example…would not only convince most jurors of the existence of God…but also of the divine origin of the Bible and its message.
In better hands than mine (except when I have the anointing of the Holy Spirit…like Peter before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:8-12 or Philip in Acts 8:26-40…which can be experienced by all Spirit-born Christians for sharing our faith in Jesus Christ with boldness and conviction)…there are dozens of categories of very persuasive arguments for the existence of God…many of which contain the obvious “miracles” we experience and see all around us…that we accept as “normal” and take totally for granted.
A few of these obvious evidences might be the “miracle” of sexuality…or digestion…or our respiratory system…our constant heartbeat…or our balanced and symmetrical locomotion and motor skills…all of which shout-out for ingenious design rather than random chance assemblage.
Another obvious evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer God…easily accessible to ordinary, commonsense consideration…is the universal cuteness of any infant---a human toddler, a lion cub, a Labrador puppy, a baby elephant, young ducklings swimming after their mother in a pond…possessing the most sublimely complex and artistic information content…yet totally inexplicable and unnecessary under a Darwinian naturalistic framework…having no survival-of-the-fittest value whatsoever…but otherwise easily understood as a product of intentional, whimsical, premeditated design.
Certainly the mystery of human speech and the natural inclination of youngsters to acquire, understand, and accurately differentiate subtle concepts in language and communication…at a phenomenal rate of speed…is a reality far too complex and incredibly integrated to be lightly and uncritically accepted as the result of gradualistic, chance descent-with-modification…rather than conscious, deliberate design at a brilliantly creative, extremely advanced level.
In sports…our incredible facility to be able to play professional ice hockey in the NHL…to run back the opening kick-off 100 yards for a touchdown in college football…to hit a 95-mph fastball 400 feet over the left-field fence for a homerun in baseball…to play tennis, pin-pong, badminton, volleyball, run the 100-meter sprint in track & field, run a marathon, complete the Tour de France, surf the North Shore in Hawaii, and score a goal in World Cup soccer…these are physical acuities that are so advanced, so complex, so finely tuned, and so functionally integrated…that to ascribe their origin to gradualistic, random chance, trial-and-error processes as asserted in the theory of Darwinian evolution…when we see and observe nothing incrementally progressive and transitional in a major, creative sense anywhere in the natural world…currently or in the course of natural history…seems on its face to be nonsensical.
Certainly the existence of the moral framework that permeates all of the social interactions between people…which we take totally for granted… needs explanation…such things as romantic love, friendship, loyalty, bravery, humor, forgiveness, standing up for the right thing even when it costs us something, giving value to other people through respect…and the flip-side---lying, cheating, prejudice, selfishness, injustice, and evil…all of which in the hands of a skilled debater could be persuasively argued to be far beyond the creative naturalistic reach of material particles and energy…given that particles and energy demonstrate no capacity for creating complex and functionally integrated systems or concepts.
Add to this the mind-boggling Age of Information explosion of the last two or three decades…in which intelligence has been linked to the origin of information wherever we find complex and functionally integrated systems in human creations…in computer software codes, literary books of every genre, inventions of every type…which correspond to the information-rich systems we find in the natural world such as the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, the Cambrian Explosion, the DNA code, the laws of science, and the body-plan architectures and lifestyle habits of every living creature…to name only a few examples.
Curiously, in the area of the fine arts…we see the seemingly unavoidable necessity of the inclusion of the overcoming of evil…of the “good” cowboys wearing white hats rounding up the “bad” cowboys wearing black hats…fundamental as a satisfying through-line within the storyline fabric of movies, theater plays, and books…coming from a modern popular culture that otherwise outwardly claims to avoid the acknowledgment of the concept of biblical sin.
How can the existence and complexity of good and evil…sliced-and-diced in every which way in enumerable, fictional storyline settings and conditions…of unending fascination and interest to the human psyche…how can the plausible explanation for the existence of this complex reality be the sole product of material particles and energy…according to the philosophical worldview of naturalism?
The mere existence of the word forgiveness in our vocabulary and in our dictionary argues for a transcendent capacity for moral reasoning and intelligent judgment far above the rest of the natural living world.
The origin of the concept of falling short of some independent standard of behavior and thinking…requiring us to ask forgiveness from other people we have harmed or offended…in a materialistic Darwinian worldview has no survival-of-the-fittest value…and ascribes to the capacity of material particles and energy a broadly theoretical, God-like potential for creating premeditated end-points such as forgiveness…in the realm of moral reasoning.
A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one amongst tens of thousands of similar everyday commonsense examples that could be persuasive evidence argued in a court of law…in favor of the necessity of an intelligent designer God…is the existence of our navel…our “belly button”…the umbilical cord between mother and baby that is severed and tied at childbirth. Every human has one.
Is there a plausible series of sequential, progressive, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as a functional, intermediate bridge between the initial trial-and-error dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start…to a totally functional assemblage producing a viable fetus reaching the point in time of nine-month maturity and a healthy childbirth…whereupon the umbilical cord is cut-off from the placenta and tied into a knot?
Commonsense reasoning tells us that this one feature…amongst possibly millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features…of a functional umbilical cord with all of its complex processes…must be up and running at just the right time in the embryonic development process of the human fetus occurring within the mother…for successful human reproduction to occur.
The quality and the accuracy of the biological information codes and specifications…extrapolated out to every part of the human body to produce a functional living and reproducing organism…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.
The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced such a deep and detailed understanding of how things work…in our own bodies such as how we produce speech, how we hear, and how we see…extended out into all of the areas of scientific inquiry from the microscopic atomic level to the galactic scale of the astrophysics of our universe…that the information content is now so vast…that a previous naturalistic explanation for the folding of amino acids into proteins did not even exist 100 years ago at the start of the twentieth century…because this area of microbiological knowledge had not even been discovered yet.
The current discoveries in science…with the new awareness of their accompanying explosion of information content…in highly complex and coherent systems…undermines all theories based on the simplistic methodologies of random chance, trial-and-error search strategies.
What could pass as an “explanation”…as a placeholder for ignorance 50 or 100 years ago under the guise of naturalistic philosophy posing as science…is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and magnitude of complex and integrated systems of information that fall outside the chance probability of mathematics.
A naturalistic, Darwinian explanation for the complex phenomenon we now understand better in the living and non-living world…no longer “holds water” in this new Age of Information.
As a non-scholar layman in the areas of theology and biblical studies…along with millions of other common Christians around the world simply following Jesus within their journeys of faith…I sense that the centuries-old paradigm conflict between philosophical atheism and Christianity is at a balanced apex…at a tipping-point where the evidences for theism may now begin…if they have not already…to surpass the now archaic logic and arguments against supernaturalism and the miraculous in the Bible.
The Big Bang creation of the universe philosophically opened wide the door for intelligent agency…introducing in the first split-seconds of creation all of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics… along with time itself…and all of the material particles in the right quantities and proportions to produce the universe we now observe today…out of absolute nothing…sometime around 14 billion years ago.
If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…along with the accompanying physical laws out of nothing…then the philosophical objection by skeptics that God cannot introduce creative life and “miracles” into the natural world…a natural world incorrectly viewed by some as a “closed system” up until a few decades ago…is now debunked by the discoveries of modern science through the identification of massive amounts of complex and functionally integrated systems of information…everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world.
The concept of an independent agent…God…injecting vast amounts of complex information into our world utilizing creative foresight…such as the DNA code…the unimaginably brilliant folding of amino acids into proteins…and the body-plan architectural information stored somewhere in the embryonic developmental structure of the living cell that builds cells and tells them their unique function and location in the dividing and expanding embryo…is very similar to our own use of accumulated information and creative foresight in the planned and premeditated assembly of houses, automobiles, airplanes, laptop computers, and pharmaceutical medicines.
God does Things His Way for our Benefit...Part 1
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
If we are looking for convincing evidence to differentiate the biblical narrative stories of faith…from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to make the case that these biblical life-scripts could not be the product of human literary invention…another telling argument in this direction is the diametric opposites of our ways versus God’s ways as depicted in the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Anyone who follows the biblical God deep enough into their adventure of faith eventually runs experientially into the jarring realization, at some point in time, that we want to do things…even the big things like the fulfillment of the supernatural promises of God in our lives…our way.
This is one of the fundamental aspects of the Bible that creates a clearly delineated fork-in-the-road…a radical departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is an aspect in our Christian discipleship that takes us on a unique journey far from conventional thinking and norms.
Abraham naturally has his own ideas about how he will become the father of descendants as numerous as the stars in the night sky…and his ideas do not include waiting 25 years for the birth of Isaac…the son of promise.
This important piece of information God left out of the initial calling of Abraham…for the best and highest reason imaginable…to set up the unique context for biblical faith…to actualize.
According to contemporary Christian jargon…doing something our way outside of the council or participation of God…is popularly called an “Ishmael”…doomed to failure.
Abraham and Sarah trying to help-out God in fulfilling God’s plans and promise…by bringing Hagar into the picture and thus producing Ishmael…actually goes against-the-grain of the best and highest outcome in this Abraham storyline…in at least two ways.
First, the main goal…the outcome that the life-script of Abraham hones-in on…is not the start of a large family-life according to worldly expectations and aspirations…but rather for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…of biblical faith that by commonsense definition requires elements of patience, trust, and faith.
But faith and trust in who and in what? Not in himself…not in his plans…not in his ideas…not in self-realization and self-reliance. This is the dividing point…the departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…that is unique to the Bible.
Certainly the God-composed life-script for Abraham and Sarah could have had Sarah becoming pregnant soon after their arrival in Canaan…with several children following thereafter…producing a conventionally normal family life…in which it could be said of Abraham and Sarah: “and they lived happily forever after.”
But this is not the life-script for Abraham and Sarah. Normal marital relations are not working. The promised descendants…as numerous as the stars in the night sky…are nowhere in sight.
This is where the second main theme of the story comes into play. In a God-composed journey of faith life-script…God writes into the plotline of events and circumstances a dependence upon Himself…that has an outcome…a goal…that requires supernatural intervention…every time throughout the Bible.
This is the point where our ways and God’s ways divide. This is where self-sovereignty separates from God-sovereignty. This is where the biblical narrative stories of faith depart from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is one of the compelling reasons why the biblical narrative stories of faith could not possibly come from human literary invention.
Bluntly stated…we want the promises of God to be fulfilled in our lives…our way according to worldly conventionality…and they can’t be if they are to have any eternal value.
This rude and shocking reality is not only for our eternal benefit…but also for the benefit of others as God works out His plans through us to unselfishly minister to other people…as in the case of Abraham and Sarah…to produce physical and spiritual descendants…in fact as precisely promised by God…as numerous as the stars in the night sky.
Abraham and Sarah simply cannot produce Isaac…by themselves…according to conventional norms and thinking…on their own. This is by purposeful design. Like it or not, they need help from God.
A journey of faith composed by God will have this difficult and frustrating element…downright annoying at times according to our horizontally conventional thinking…of dependence upon God…involving some goal or outcome beyond our reach…usually beyond our initial imagination as we begin our faith journey…that requires God-sovereignty rather than self-sovereignty…to actualize and bring these outcomes into empirical reality.
If we are looking for convincing evidence to differentiate the biblical narrative stories of faith…from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to make the case that these biblical life-scripts could not be the product of human literary invention…another telling argument in this direction is the diametric opposites of our ways versus God’s ways as depicted in the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Anyone who follows the biblical God deep enough into their adventure of faith eventually runs experientially into the jarring realization, at some point in time, that we want to do things…even the big things like the fulfillment of the supernatural promises of God in our lives…our way.
This is one of the fundamental aspects of the Bible that creates a clearly delineated fork-in-the-road…a radical departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is an aspect in our Christian discipleship that takes us on a unique journey far from conventional thinking and norms.
Abraham naturally has his own ideas about how he will become the father of descendants as numerous as the stars in the night sky…and his ideas do not include waiting 25 years for the birth of Isaac…the son of promise.
This important piece of information God left out of the initial calling of Abraham…for the best and highest reason imaginable…to set up the unique context for biblical faith…to actualize.
According to contemporary Christian jargon…doing something our way outside of the council or participation of God…is popularly called an “Ishmael”…doomed to failure.
Abraham and Sarah trying to help-out God in fulfilling God’s plans and promise…by bringing Hagar into the picture and thus producing Ishmael…actually goes against-the-grain of the best and highest outcome in this Abraham storyline…in at least two ways.
First, the main goal…the outcome that the life-script of Abraham hones-in on…is not the start of a large family-life according to worldly expectations and aspirations…but rather for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…of biblical faith that by commonsense definition requires elements of patience, trust, and faith.
But faith and trust in who and in what? Not in himself…not in his plans…not in his ideas…not in self-realization and self-reliance. This is the dividing point…the departure…away from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…that is unique to the Bible.
Certainly the God-composed life-script for Abraham and Sarah could have had Sarah becoming pregnant soon after their arrival in Canaan…with several children following thereafter…producing a conventionally normal family life…in which it could be said of Abraham and Sarah: “and they lived happily forever after.”
But this is not the life-script for Abraham and Sarah. Normal marital relations are not working. The promised descendants…as numerous as the stars in the night sky…are nowhere in sight.
This is where the second main theme of the story comes into play. In a God-composed journey of faith life-script…God writes into the plotline of events and circumstances a dependence upon Himself…that has an outcome…a goal…that requires supernatural intervention…every time throughout the Bible.
This is the point where our ways and God’s ways divide. This is where self-sovereignty separates from God-sovereignty. This is where the biblical narrative stories of faith depart from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is one of the compelling reasons why the biblical narrative stories of faith could not possibly come from human literary invention.
Bluntly stated…we want the promises of God to be fulfilled in our lives…our way according to worldly conventionality…and they can’t be if they are to have any eternal value.
This rude and shocking reality is not only for our eternal benefit…but also for the benefit of others as God works out His plans through us to unselfishly minister to other people…as in the case of Abraham and Sarah…to produce physical and spiritual descendants…in fact as precisely promised by God…as numerous as the stars in the night sky.
Abraham and Sarah simply cannot produce Isaac…by themselves…according to conventional norms and thinking…on their own. This is by purposeful design. Like it or not, they need help from God.
A journey of faith composed by God will have this difficult and frustrating element…downright annoying at times according to our horizontally conventional thinking…of dependence upon God…involving some goal or outcome beyond our reach…usually beyond our initial imagination as we begin our faith journey…that requires God-sovereignty rather than self-sovereignty…to actualize and bring these outcomes into empirical reality.
The Benefit of the Doubt
From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics
As a near-to-last point in this opening introduction…if we have a conflict or an issue with some colleague at work…and we discuss this with a friend who thinks well of us…that friend will give us the supportive benefit of the doubt upon hearing the details.
But a person who is a friend, yet who may not think as highly of us, may automatically take the side of the other person in the dispute…upon hearing the details…and begin to question our handling of the situation…in a knee-jerk, critical fashion…not giving us the benefit of the doubt…thereby exposing their true lower opinion of us.
The biblical narrative stories of faith are filled with people giving God the benefit of the doubt in their adventures of faith.
Every positive person of faith in the Bible has a personal relationship with God that has the universal element of giving God the benefit of the doubt…even amidst difficult and challenging events, and the negatively trending direction of outward appearances.
Biblical characters that immediately come to mind in this regard are Abraham going to Canaan (Heb. 11:8), Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison desperately holding on to the promise of his two earlier dreams received years before in Canaan (Gen. 37:7, 9), and Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11, 4:20).
Jeremiah has a continual, ongoing dialogue with God about the stubborn unbelief of the Jerusalem leaders. Elijah complains bitterly to God about the overwhelming pushback and resistance he is encountering in his calling as a prophet in apostate Israel under the rule of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.
Other notable people who gave God the benefit of the doubt through difficult challenges are Joshua, Samuel, Job, Ruth, Hannah, Esther and Mordecai, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of the minor prophets…to name only a few in the Old Testament.
The Psalms in the Old Testament are filled with people having a personal relationship and dialogue with God…giving God the benefit of the doubt to come through for them in the middle of challenging difficulties.
David’s famous 23rd Psalm is all about giving God the benefit of the doubt.
People of faith in the New Testament actually spent face-time in person with Jesus the Son of God (Jn. 1:14)…and gave Him the benefit of the doubt amidst pushback and resistance to His message and ministry…pushback of deadly intensity (Jn. 11:8, 16).
This idea of the people of faith giving God the benefit of the doubt during the course of their journeys of faith…giving to God the value and worth that putting trust and faith in another person entails…has enormous commonsense, apologetic value as an argument for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible.
This has apologetic value by virtue of its existence as evidence of genuine relationships…very subtle yet solid evidence that holds water because the benefit of the doubt is there…integrally and inseparably embedded within the events and circumstances of the storyline scripts. This evidence would not exist at all in the storylines…if it was not in fact a true indication of the real connection of personal relationships between people and the living God.
This subtle element is baked into every biblical adventure of faith…and cannot be homogenized out without damaging the storylines.
This component of giving God the benefit of the doubt is a powerful clue that these relationships…these stories of faith…are real.
A moral concept as subtle yet as powerful as this could not be the product of collusion on the part of the 40 different authors spanning 1,500 years in the writing of the Bible…universally giving God the benefit of the doubt from Genesis through Revelation…from beginning to end…without the slightest hint of progressive evolution or creative development in the portrayal of biblical faith…as would be expected with a humanistic origin.
The life-stories of Abraham through Paul in the Bible…all depicting biblical faith having this common ingredient of giving God the benefit of the doubt…as religious fiction invented by human writers inspired out of the narrow realm of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking alone…as an explanation for their origin…is again nonsensical.
Like the massive infusion of creative information that entered into the natural world to form the complex living creatures during the Cambrian Explosion of 530 million years ago…inexplicable as a materialistic or naturalistic event…the correct answer to the question of the origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith is that they are a divine creation of God.
The complex and functionally coherent information that enters into the human experience…suddenly and instantly in the form of a God-composed adventure of faith…starting with Abraham…is the action of an independent agent God…providing commonsense apologetic evidence for both His existence…and for the truth of the Bible.
No one can write a fictional novel or short story without revealing something of themselves in the storyline.
In the biblical narrative stories of faith…God not only reveals His divine authorship through His supernatural participation in the storylines in a way that is outside of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…by introducing the way of the cross…but also exposes something of Himself in revealing His intention to introduce Himself to the people of faith in each biblical storyline…and in the process reveal something of Himself to us today…through the context of life-scripts designed to create the incredible opportunity to exercise the benefit of the doubt in the living God.
Mechanical robots cannot fathom the concept of respect. Neither can robots plumb the depths of giving someone the supportive benefit of the doubt of placing faith, trust, and dignity in another person…extending the gift of value, worth, and validation to that person.
Our non-robotic, analytical capacity for moral reasoning and free-will choice…wrapped within our physical living bodies having all of the marvelous abilities and talents we possess…may be the single-most, top-tier apologetic evidence for the existence of God…easily accessible to commonsense contemplation.
As a near-to-last point in this opening introduction…if we have a conflict or an issue with some colleague at work…and we discuss this with a friend who thinks well of us…that friend will give us the supportive benefit of the doubt upon hearing the details.
But a person who is a friend, yet who may not think as highly of us, may automatically take the side of the other person in the dispute…upon hearing the details…and begin to question our handling of the situation…in a knee-jerk, critical fashion…not giving us the benefit of the doubt…thereby exposing their true lower opinion of us.
The biblical narrative stories of faith are filled with people giving God the benefit of the doubt in their adventures of faith.
Every positive person of faith in the Bible has a personal relationship with God that has the universal element of giving God the benefit of the doubt…even amidst difficult and challenging events, and the negatively trending direction of outward appearances.
Biblical characters that immediately come to mind in this regard are Abraham going to Canaan (Heb. 11:8), Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison desperately holding on to the promise of his two earlier dreams received years before in Canaan (Gen. 37:7, 9), and Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11, 4:20).
Jeremiah has a continual, ongoing dialogue with God about the stubborn unbelief of the Jerusalem leaders. Elijah complains bitterly to God about the overwhelming pushback and resistance he is encountering in his calling as a prophet in apostate Israel under the rule of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.
Other notable people who gave God the benefit of the doubt through difficult challenges are Joshua, Samuel, Job, Ruth, Hannah, Esther and Mordecai, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of the minor prophets…to name only a few in the Old Testament.
The Psalms in the Old Testament are filled with people having a personal relationship and dialogue with God…giving God the benefit of the doubt to come through for them in the middle of challenging difficulties.
David’s famous 23rd Psalm is all about giving God the benefit of the doubt.
People of faith in the New Testament actually spent face-time in person with Jesus the Son of God (Jn. 1:14)…and gave Him the benefit of the doubt amidst pushback and resistance to His message and ministry…pushback of deadly intensity (Jn. 11:8, 16).
This idea of the people of faith giving God the benefit of the doubt during the course of their journeys of faith…giving to God the value and worth that putting trust and faith in another person entails…has enormous commonsense, apologetic value as an argument for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible.
This has apologetic value by virtue of its existence as evidence of genuine relationships…very subtle yet solid evidence that holds water because the benefit of the doubt is there…integrally and inseparably embedded within the events and circumstances of the storyline scripts. This evidence would not exist at all in the storylines…if it was not in fact a true indication of the real connection of personal relationships between people and the living God.
This subtle element is baked into every biblical adventure of faith…and cannot be homogenized out without damaging the storylines.
This component of giving God the benefit of the doubt is a powerful clue that these relationships…these stories of faith…are real.
A moral concept as subtle yet as powerful as this could not be the product of collusion on the part of the 40 different authors spanning 1,500 years in the writing of the Bible…universally giving God the benefit of the doubt from Genesis through Revelation…from beginning to end…without the slightest hint of progressive evolution or creative development in the portrayal of biblical faith…as would be expected with a humanistic origin.
The life-stories of Abraham through Paul in the Bible…all depicting biblical faith having this common ingredient of giving God the benefit of the doubt…as religious fiction invented by human writers inspired out of the narrow realm of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking alone…as an explanation for their origin…is again nonsensical.
Like the massive infusion of creative information that entered into the natural world to form the complex living creatures during the Cambrian Explosion of 530 million years ago…inexplicable as a materialistic or naturalistic event…the correct answer to the question of the origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith is that they are a divine creation of God.
The complex and functionally coherent information that enters into the human experience…suddenly and instantly in the form of a God-composed adventure of faith…starting with Abraham…is the action of an independent agent God…providing commonsense apologetic evidence for both His existence…and for the truth of the Bible.
No one can write a fictional novel or short story without revealing something of themselves in the storyline.
In the biblical narrative stories of faith…God not only reveals His divine authorship through His supernatural participation in the storylines in a way that is outside of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…by introducing the way of the cross…but also exposes something of Himself in revealing His intention to introduce Himself to the people of faith in each biblical storyline…and in the process reveal something of Himself to us today…through the context of life-scripts designed to create the incredible opportunity to exercise the benefit of the doubt in the living God.
Mechanical robots cannot fathom the concept of respect. Neither can robots plumb the depths of giving someone the supportive benefit of the doubt of placing faith, trust, and dignity in another person…extending the gift of value, worth, and validation to that person.
Our non-robotic, analytical capacity for moral reasoning and free-will choice…wrapped within our physical living bodies having all of the marvelous abilities and talents we possess…may be the single-most, top-tier apologetic evidence for the existence of God…easily accessible to commonsense contemplation.
As Big as Anything in History
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 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, missions, 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…contained 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 100 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.”
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 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, missions, 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…contained 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 100 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.”
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.
“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.
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 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
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.
“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
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 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
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.
“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.
