From God Didn’t Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics

The hard truth I have discovered…along with tens or hundreds of millions of people experiencing biblical faith over the past centuries going back to Abraham…is that in the fulfillment of God’s promises to me in my own journey of faith…a part of me does not want God to do things His way within the elevated zone of the supernatural…I want things to progress more conventionally according to Bart’s way.

The cross of Jesus Christ applied to my life inserts a supernatural participation into the course of my life that brings with it goals and promises of God that are beyond my reach to self-fulfill…requiring all of the improvements of character…patience, trust, faith, surrender, flexibility, and giving God the benefit of the doubt (Heb. 11:1)…that in the process requires part of my way to die…to move aside…to make way for God’s higher ways.

But if we look hard enough…in these biblical stories of faith…God has a long-range plan that is above and outside of horizontally conventional thinking…above the aspirations and expectations…what we think we are entitled to…in terms of worldly conventional normalcy.

Yet the sacrifices made in every biblical narrative story of faith…the departures from normal aspirations and expectations…from Abraham onward…produces good for a large number of other people.

Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac his beloved son on Mount Moriah…stopped just in time by God with a shout out of heaven at the last moment…gives mankind a priceless and confirming foreglimpse of what God will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill…God indeed providing a very special Lamb…His own Son…as a sacrifice for sin.

God’s higher ways for the life-script of Joseph…to prepare him to become governor of Egypt during the great famine…basically displaced 13 years of “normal” life according to horizontally conventional thinking…that Joseph might otherwise think he was entitled to.

Yet this divine insertion of God’s ways…removing altogether whatever alternative “normal” life Joseph might otherwise have lived…was and is a huge benefit to mankind in demonstrating not only the reality of the existence of God…but also the incredible ingenuity that accrues within a God-scripted adventure of faith when we choose God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty.

If we take this same model and apply it to every positive person of faith recorded in the Bible…we find the same overlay of the cross of Christ…God displacing our ways with His ways…for the benefit of ourselves and for a large number of other people.

This is the difficult part about true biblical faith…it involves the participation of the living God who wants to do things His way…for our benefit.

This may be the primary, fundamental explanation underlying the existence of our universe and our world.

If God can come through for me…and for you…in a clearly supernatural way involving fulfilled promises outside of our control…this confirms not only God’s existence beyond a shadow of a doubt…but also His competence in human life script-writing to match the brilliant design we see in the natural world all around us. This priceless discovery then becomes a reality that belongs to me…and to you…for all eternity.

This reality can only occur within the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…inaccessible except through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and King (Mt. 4:17; Lk. 13:1-5; Jn. 8:24).

It does not exist anywhere else outside of the Bible.

This idea of God doing things His way in our lives…for our benefit…above and beyond our understanding at the time (Heb. 11:1)…according to a God-composed life-script individually crafted for us…is so far outside the bounds of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…so offensive and off-putting to the norms of sitting atop the thrones of our lives as autonomous, junior-gods “calling the shots”…that to ascribe this aspect of the biblical narrative stories of faith to be the product of human literary invention…is nonsensical.