From my book God Didn't Create Robots---Commonsense Christian Apologetics

God takes us down a deserted road we would never travel by our own choice. No person purposely chooses the path leading to a broken heart…even if this is the best possible thing that could happen to us and for the benefit of others in our Christian ministry.

If we were fortunate enough to be grounded in orthodox biblical teaching as young Christians about the cross…and have realistic expectations about the costs of true discipleship…we still really do not…cannot…understand exactly how the life-long transition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty will break our self-centered will-and-way…and eventually break our hearts…for our eternal benefit.

We typically discover this final capstone development so deep into our adventure of faith storyline that when our last remaining trace of self-centeredness…even commendable self-centeredness when wrapped around the fulfillment of a positive future promise of God…when placed on our own cross alongside the cross of Jesus…we are so committed at that point in our faith-journey that we can do no other…than to go forward.

This I think is a part of what the prophet is saying in Jeremiah 20:7-9 and 20:14-18.

This I think is what Jesus the Son of God is crying out from the cross when He says as recorded in Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Jesus the divine Son of God…who has for all eternity been perfect goodness and pure brilliant light…experiences for the first and only time the taking upon Himself of the huge mass of human sin…past, present, and future…as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…the rebellious rejection that is a part of the sin directed against Himself as the king and ruler of heaven and earth…but also this temporary separation between Himself and His Father caused by this massive infusion of mankind’s self-centeredness (Isa. 53:6)…a dual cause of separation which on the cross breaks His heart (Jn. 19:34-35).

It is not the self-centeredness of Jesus that is put to death on the cross…it is our self-centeredness applied to and absorbed by Him. The life-script and the character of Jesus Christ the Son of God have no self-centeredness. The God-composed life-script for Jesus was conceived and actualized entirely for our benefit.

One of the most insightful verses in all of scripture reads: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk, 22:42).

Here God amazingly shows us that He can write a life-script for the second Person of the Trinity…the divine Son of God Jesus…that actually challenges Himself in the precise area where we need the most help…the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty.

But equally important, this Luke 22:42 verse tells us that Jesus had an alternate preference for exploring the possibility of another, different approach to accomplish the salvation of mankind…different from the upcoming ordeal of the cross the next day…a personal preference that nonetheless the Son of God perfectly and instantly subordinated to the will of the Father…in essence surrendering and relinquishing any alternate options or changes to the ancient plan of salvation…co-written by Jesus Himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit eons of time in the past…established before the foundation of the world.

This incredible interaction between Jesus the Son…and God the Father…tells us that in order to qualify Himself as the sole competent leader of our expeditions of faith into the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil…that Jesus not only understands the subtleties of our difficult transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…but that He also intimately understands the heart-breaking process of the death of our self-centeredness…having absorbed our self-centeredness in mass on the cross…a self-centeredness that was and is completely foreign to a perfect God.

The concept that God could experience sin and a broken heart by absorbing ours as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin…that He could manufacture for Himself an unimaginable Passover scenario whereby He could grasp the difficult rejection of self-centeredness in-the-moment on the cross from billions of human beings (my speculative musing)…self-centeredness that universally plagues the fallen state of humanity…by ingeniously crafting the series of events that would test this very thing (Lk. 22:42) in His own life in a human body through Jesus Christ the Son of God…is remarkable.

That God could pre-qualify Himself to be our Guide and Leader of the expedition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty…a route God never personally traversed prior to the incarnation of Jesus Christ…is a concept…an idea…that exists in the reality of our contemplation…and that by its very existence leaves the philosophy of naturalism miles behind.

The complexity of the information content in the life-script of Jesus Christ…and the novelty of its creative originality (Jn. 21:25)…makes a compelling case for its divine composition.

Pre-programmed robots could never have the capacity to make free-will choices and autonomous decisions. An inanimate rock boulder on a steep hillside does not choose to break-free and fall.

We choose to build a suspension bridge across a deep ravine. At the Saturday family picnic at the park…we choose to put mustard, or catsup, or pickle relish on our hot dog…or all of the above or none of the above.

We possess the incredible capacity for qualitative, discriminating, evaluative decisions and choices in an enumerable quantity of varied life situations.

But we do not voluntarily choose to have a broken heart by way of the cross.

This is another compelling commonsense argument for the divine origin of the Bible…and the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith.

There is zero motivation for any human writer to imaginatively invent this element of a broken heart inherent within a journey of faith…coming from the frame of reference of the contrary worldview of conventional normalcy and thinking that is based upon the pride of the appearance of outward success, self-adulation, and self-assurance…traversing in the opposite direction from brokenness.

As Abraham travels with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah…to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering…the heart of Abraham is broken.

But this deep into his faith-journey following God…Abraham cannot turn back. Abraham has already seen first-hand the truthfulness of God’s word and the faithfulness of His promises…and in this final test of faith regarding Isaac his beloved son…Abraham was ”Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. 11:19).

Does God allow Abraham to follow through and to kill his son Isaac as an offering for sin? The answer is no. That was never God’s intention.

Instead, God gives to mankind a prophetic foreglimpse of what He will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill as His own Son Jesus dies on the cross as a righteous payment-in-full for the offenses of our sins.

Through the faith freely chosen and actualized by Abraham…he suffers a broken heart…in unknowing unselfishness at the time…for our benefit…in choosing to believe in and trust God…contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

This God-composed life-script for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…contained a broken heart at the precise point where self-sovereign self-rulership meets up with divine unselfishness…brilliantly scripted for the benefit of others and for Abraham…above anything Abraham could have imagined at the time.

This curiously unconventional theme of a broken heart is ingeniously repeated in some variation or another in every positive story of faith throughout the Bible…for Joseph prior to Pharaoh’s dream, for Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11), for David at Ziklag, for Ruth after her husband’s death in Moab, for Esther and Mordecai (Est. 4:16), for Daniel in the lion’s den, for Peter at the night trial of Jesus, and for Paul after his tumultuous rejection in Jerusalem and before the Sanhedrin council…to name only a few biblical examples among many.

A broken heart…as a non-automated, non-robot…placed somewhere along the path after entering in at the narrow gate of Matthew 7:13-14…not only differentiates the biblical adventure of faith from all other religions, philosophies, and worldviews…but also validates the divine origin of God-composed adventures of faith as recorded in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Nothing and no one other than God our Father could or would take us to the place of heart-brokenness where an advanced, beneficially usable knowledge of good and evil can be found…a place He Himself has painfully been in the heart-breaking and uniquely unprecedented experience of taking upon Himself the sins of mankind through Jesus Christ the Son of God…on the cross at Calvary.

But why the universal need for a broken heart along the way of our journeys of faith?

I think that as we…over time and experience…mature into seasoned Christians…like the exterior conflict of the cross of Christ set on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem two thousand years ago…when the self-centeredness of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking crashes up against the unselfishness of God-sovereignty…the result is a broken heart.

The thing that raises this discussion above any possible human creative invention…is that in a God-composed adventure of faith life-script containing the main ingredient of God-sovereignty…people of faith do not give up their self-autonomy. In a blender-mix that only God could create…the contrary ingredients of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty come together into a divine mixture in which neither is violated.

God created human beings in His image with the invaluable capacity of free-will. The very last thing God wants to do in our personal relationship with Him is to remove the very free-will component of our individuality and autonomy that differentiates us from an automated robot.

Only God can blend together the two disparate parts of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty into a functionally coherent, biblical-quality adventure of faith storyline that eventually produces brokenness…a broken heart.

The part of this discussion that begins to approximate the brilliance of the complexity and functional coherence we find in the structure of DNA…is the point in time along an adventure of faith when the mature Christian realizes that the costs of unselfish service in our called-out ministry equals or may even appear to exceed the perceived benefits in-the-moment (Lk. 22:42)…causing us to evaluate and question the value of going forward.

This is the point in time in Christian discipleship and service when we finally give up on any further self-efforts or self-contrivance…and surrender our own will-and-way to the higher ways of God…bringing the two together into a single joint-venture of mutually shared purpose and direction (Psalm 23).

When God takes us to the place where self-centered self-sovereignty and divinely unselfish God-sovereignty collide…our hearts break…but in actuality God is giving us something better…a piece of His divine character.

When God displaces the normative life Abraham would have lived in the city of Haran…with a higher life-script that Abraham would not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination…God is giving us something immeasurably and incalculably better…the necessary character trait of selflessness…to thereby be able to successfully navigate through a knowledge of good and evil…for all eternity.

This is why our heart breaks…because the rebellion component of going our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) is dying on our cross so that our way can become one with God the Father’s way (Jn. 12:24-25).

Jesus confronted and overcame this very thing with perfectly executed faith in the Garden of Gethsemane…even though this may be one of the most difficult things God has or ever will do…and cost Jesus a broken heart on the cross as He absorbed within Himself this huge mass of sinful actions…along with the hundreds of millions of broken hearts like my own as people not only repent of their sins…but also make the perilous transition from self-centered, self-sovereign rebellion to God-sovereignty along the course of their journey of faith…all procured completely and perfectly through the textbook definition of unconventionality as demonstrated through the cross of Jesus Christ (Mt. 21:44).

This cannot possibly be the product of human creative invention. It is too sudden…too complex…and too functionally integrated within an entire coherent worldview of biblical quality faith…that is violently antithetical and repugnant to the contrasting, competing worldview that has us sitting atop the thrones of our lives…apart from God as independent agents…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Like the question posited in chapter one about how difficult it is to get a perfect Person Jesus Christ to the cross…a similar question arises here as to how difficult it would be to break the heart of God? This again is not as easy as it sounds.

Only if God has to go before us through the earthly life of Jesus Christ the Son of God…incarnate in a human body…to fully experience out ahead of us everything that will challenge us in redemptive salvation and a transforming journey of faith…to honorably and commendably dispel the notion of being a distant, armchair, uninvolved God…can God help us to master the lesson-plan of relying upon God-sovereignty in our pursuit of an understanding of the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13) while at the same time maintaining our God-created and God-given capacity for free-will moral reasoning.

The only thing that could break the heart of a perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful God…is to lovingly and unselfishly…according to the highest precepts of righteous judgment… to take upon Himself the penalty for the imperfect sins of mankind…and in the process experience momentarily the separation between Son and Father…that Jesus expresses from the cross…”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34)…and then to say minutes or hours later: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”…”and having said thus, he gave up the spirit” (Lk. 23:46) in perfectly executed faith and trust.

Brokenness is certainly not a new concept to Christianity. Many books, commentaries, sermons, and great Christian hymns have brilliantly covered this subject. A recent example in church history is John Bunyan the author of the classic book A Pilgrim’s Progress…its huge worldwide impact in part the product of the high cost of a broken heart…being written from a jail cell…separated from his loving family.

But I wonder how many people have written about the apologetic value of brokenness…of the complexity of its information content…of the originality of its relationship to God-sovereignty as a universal component in biblical faith, and the sheer fantasy of this being a humanistic literary invention given its utter contrast with the pride of the worldly conventional thinking of placing “me, myself, and I” first in everything?

When skeptics assert that the biblical narrative stories of faith are fictional nonsense…what they themselves are saying is itself nonsensical.

These biblical stories are too far advanced…have progressed too far along…are too complex and functionally integrated to be fiction.

Skepticism that classifies the biblical stories as mere fiction display a shallowness and shortsightedness of analytical thinking that disqualifies their claims…that reveals a scholarship that not only does not dig deep enough…but does not even scratch below the surface.

The interaction between people of faith and a God who crafts life-scripts of events and circumstances having the pinpoint accuracy to procure broken-heartedness as a beneficial by-product of the move from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…has taken us so far beyond human literary invention as to render the proclamations of atheists and skeptics about the origin of the life-stories of the biblical characters…to be nonsensical.