IS THERE A GOD ben
7 WONDERS OF THE WORLD: Is There a God?
Acts 17:24-28
Let me tell you my presuppositions. I believe that there is a God and that we can have a personal relationship with Him through Jesus Christ, who is revealed to us in the New Testament. If you're an atheist or an agnostic, you may see that as a disadvantage in helping you realize or recognize that there is a God. But let's just put all of our biases aside for a moment and try to answer this question together, "Is there a God?" I think it's the most significant question that's ever penetrated the human mind. According to the Bible if there wasn't a God, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Actually the whole Bible is about man's rebellion against God and God's grace and compassion, trying to pursue him and draw man back into a relationship--trying to reconnect. I hope you know as well that the Bible also has a presupposition that there is a God. Genesis 1:1, at the very beginning of the Bible, assumes that there is a God. It says, "In the beginning, God" and that's where I'm going to start from today.
In the beginning, there's a God. He doesn't need us to exist and He's also self-revealing. He reveals Himself to us. He's done that through His Word and through a number of ways that we'll talk about today, but let's try our best to answer the question, "Is there a God?"
On the left-hand side there's atheism. Atheism says there is no God. Atheism is absolutely opposed to God. In the middle, there is agnosticism that says maybe there is a God, but we certainly can't know for sure. Then on the right side, you could say theism, but I particularly want to point to Christian theism that says, yes, there is a God--there is only one true God. Where you fall today is probably in one of those three categories. Some of you may actually fall into the category of being a polytheist. You believe that there's many gods, that's there not just one true God. Or perhaps you're a deist and you believe that there is a God. He created the world, but once He created the world, He split. He's an impersonal God. Thomas Jefferson was a deist. Some of our founding fathers of this nation were deists. They believed that there was a God, but that He had no connection with His creation.
There is only one true God, and I believe that He's personal and that He's connected to His creation in very real and relevant ways, particularly to human beings. He's created a way for us to be connected to Him. Atheism and agnosticism are fundamentally flawed. For one thing, they're too simple. If you're just going to say there is no God, your reasoning is actually what's called a “universal negative.” It's logically indefensible to say there is no God. If you were an atheist and you're sitting here today, you would have to be omniscient and omnipresent. You would have to know everything that there is to know in the universe, and you have to be everywhere there is to be in the universe to say that there is no God. The last time I checked, the only person that came close to being omnipresent and omniscient was my mother when I was like eight years old! So an atheist has a logically indefensible argument because it's based on the universal negative. No atheist knows everything and is capable of being everywhere in the universe all at once. In fact, for an atheist to say there is no God, he would, in fact, have to be God in order to say there is no God, so that's a logically indefensible argument.
Agnosticism--we can't know for sure. That also is very simple. That's just a very simple way out. We can know for sure. In fact, I think it is built into us to know for sure. I think we know that there is something greater than us. Even the Greek philosopher Plato knew that there was a first cause, that there was something that put this world into motion. While he may not have recognized that as God revealed in the Old and New Testament, he did know and understand intuitively that there was a God, and yet he couldn't explain it. When Plato realized that there was a God or a great cause behind this universe, Jesus Christ had not been revealed in the flesh, so I think he was at a disadvantage. We are not at that same disadvantage.
Look at the proofs in your handout. Scripture is a convincing proof that there is a God. I already gave you Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God." Scripture presupposes the self-existence of God, that God existed before Scripture was even penned, before the world even began. He is the only self-existent one in the universe. Most people would argue that you cannot go to Scripture as a convincing proof because Scripture is biased towards God because it's God revelation of Himself, right? Well, if I was going to try to find out if Plato or Socrates, or whoever else, was an authentic person in history, where do I have to go? I have to go to his writings and discover who he is. I have to go to something that he's written or something that's been written about him to authenticate his existence. All Scripture is the authentication of the existence of God. So we go there because we believe that Scripture reveals to us something about the nature and character and existence of God.
The 2nd proof comes from creation. Psalm 19:1: "The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they [being the heavens and the skies] pour forth speech. Night after night, they display knowledge." Knowledge about what? Knowledge about God. There is no speech and there is no language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth; their words to the ends of the world. What is it that they're saying? They are saying there is a God.
But let's go to the New Testament and confirm it again—let's see what the apostle Paul has to say about it. Remember the apostle Paul grew up as a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, a persecutor of the church. He hated and despised Christians, but he had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ on the way to go take out some Christians. In a moment, he was converted and he was given the gift of faith and he was saved. All of a sudden, he now believed that there was a God and he could have a personal relationship with Him apart from the Law. Romans 1:20, "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen. Since the creation of the world, God has been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."
Now, let's go back to a person who suffered a great deal during his lifetime and actually had everything restored to him. Job 5:9-10: "God performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted. [some of them in verse 10] He bestows rain on the earth, He sends water upon the countryside." How does rain work? Does anyone really know how rain works? It is a mystery in some ways, but I am going to try to unpack it for you just a little bit. Picture yourself as a farmer from the Near East, and you are far from any lake or stream. A few wells on your ground keep the family and animals supplied with water, but if the crops are to grow and the family is to be fed from month to month, water has to come from another source on the fields. But where does it come from? Water will come out of the clear blue sky. Water will have to be carried in the sky from the Mediterranean Sea over 700 miles, and then be poured out on the fields from the sky. How much does water weigh? Well, if one inch of rain falls on one square mile of farmland during the night, that would be 27,878,400 cubic feet of water, which is 206,300,160 gallons, which is 1,650,501,280 pounds of water--if just one inch drops overnight on that farmer's field. That's heavy. So how does it get up to the sky and stay up there if it's so heavy? We know the process as evaporation, and that's a nice word, but what does it mean? It means that the water stops being water for awhile so it can go up and not down. Then how does it get down? Well, condensation happens. And what's that? That's the water starting to become water again by gathering around little dust particles between one 10,000th and one 1,000th centimeters wide. I know what you're thinking--that's small. Yeah, that's small. Well, what about the salt, because there's salt in the Mediterranean Sea, right? That'd kill the crops if it rained salt on the crops. So what about the salt? Well, the salt has to be taken out. So, the sky picks up a billion pounds of water from the sea, takes out the salt, carries the water, or whatever it is when it's not water, for 300 miles and then dumps it, now turned into water again on the farm. It doesn't just dump it exactly because if it dumped a billion pounds of water on the farm, the wheat would be crushed. So the sky dribbles the billion pounds of water down in little drops. They have to be big enough to fall for one mile or so without evaporating and then they have to be small enough to keep from crushing the wheat stocks. Are you guys following this? This is just rain, just rain, just like what we're seeing outside. How do all these microscopic specks of water that weigh a billion pounds get heavy enough to fall if that's the way to even ask the question. Well, it's called coalescence, c-o-a-l-e-s-c-e-n-c-e. What's coalescence? It means the specks of water start bumping into each other. They join up and they start getting bigger. When they're big enough, they fall to the earth just like that. Not exactly just like that because they would just bounce off each other instead of joining up, but there is no electric field present between the water molecules. You have to take my word for it, this is how it happens. I think instead that I'll just take Job's word for it. I still don't see why drops of water ever get to the ground because if they start falling as soon as they are heavier than air, they would be too small not to evaporate on the mile-long trip down to the earth. But if they wait to come down, what holds them up until they are big enough not to evaporate? I'm sure there's a name for that too. Perhaps His name is God. How does water get from the Mediterranean Sea to a farmer's land in the Near East? Maybe it's just God. Creation shows us the existence of God in just something as simple as rain.
Another proof is moral conscience. You say what is that? You remember September 11, 2001? How did you feel that day when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and they crashed the plane in a field in Pennsylvania? You felt like they should be punished, brought to justice, that something should be made right because so many people were done wrong that day. From where does that sense of rightness and wrongness of justice come? The Bible says that you were made in the image of God, so when you respond to acts of terrorism and feel strongly that whoever is involved should be brought to justice, that is something that you are wired with, a gift from God, moral conscience.
I think thoroughly convinced atheists are actually a very convincing proof that there is a God. If I simply believed that there were no ghosts I would not have to develop very, very intense arguments in order to tell you that. I would just tell you there wasn't, and yet an atheist who was thoroughly convinced that there is no God will never, ever let it die. I would just tell you, yeah, I know Casper exists on cartoons and things like that in the movies, but I just don't believe in ghosts. But if you get into a conversation with an atheist who is thoroughly convinced that there is no God, their insistence that there is no God can only lead you to believe that if they feel that strongly and that passionately that God does not exist somewhere in the universe, He must because of their emotion that goes into it.
Folks deny His existence because they can't stand the feeling of unbelief. When we lose our belief system, the infrastructure of our lives, we have to fill that void with something else. So we fill it with unbelief, which is denying the existence of God. We fill that unbelief, that void, that emptiness, with the belief system that seems legitimate to us and may even seem attractive, even seem reasonable. Yet it's really, really not because it's built on a logically indefensible argument, a universal negative [there is no atheist that's omnipresent or omniscient]. If we're going to talk strictly out of intelligence and reason, I think it's reasonable to believe that there is a God, but I think it's even more reasonable to believe that there is only one true God and that you and I can have a personal relationship with Him through His son called Jesus Christ.
I think the church is a convincing proof. Talk to church people about their story, and see how deeply and profoundly their lives have been transformed! That's evidence that there is a God, for someone to be transformed to the degree that some of you have been.
Finally we've got to contend with Jesus Christ. Is there any more authoritative source on the existence of God than Jesus Christ? John 14:9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Later he goes into a discourse about the fact that He and the Father are one. They're one being. God is the one true God, but He eternally exists in three distinct people--God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. C.S. Lewis was an Oxford professor, a Cambridge professor of medieval literature and a very wise man. He actually hung out in a pub with J. R. R. Tolkien, the guy who wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here is what C.S. Lewis said, "I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus. They say I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That's one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice about Jesus. Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon, which is what they did, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He's not left that open to us and he didn't intend to. Jesus Christ intended to create in us a stumbling block and the only thing [as we'll talk about in just a moment] that transcends that stumbling block of Jesus Christ, in Him being the only way to God is a little word called faith.”
If you disagree with the idea that Jesus is God and you do not like that as one of the proofs for His existence, then consider what Lewis said, “There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He's the source from which all your reasoning power comes. You could not be right and God wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you're arguing against God, you're arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all. It is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.” I believe that He is proof that there is a God because only a person like Jesus could do the things He did. He forgave people's sins. I mean, you and I can forgive someone for stepping on our toes, right? We can say I forgive you. We can forgive someone for offending us. Jesus would forgive people for no reason. He would just say I forgive you of your sins. No person has that authority unless He is divine, unless He is God.
I want to show you the chasm of uncertainty in getting from no to yes. All of these things come into play when you're trying to get from one side of this chasm to the other, but still there's a great degree of uncertainty in scientific evidence. It's not foolproof and it's not really the way in which you come to faith in Jesus Christ. What it does is simply bolster my confidence that God does exist and that faith in Jesus Christ is a legitimate expression for a human being and it is the way that I'm united with the Father.
The next one is human reasoning or philosophy. Philosophers have spent a great number of years trying to prove the existence of God, but these are not always legitimate ways. In fact, the first two, scientific evidence and human reasoning, have moved many people from yes to no, because people come up with very convincing arguments, not all of which are reasonable, not all of which are logically defensible, but people do have some convincing arguments. For instance, in 1859 when Darwin unleashed his theory of evolution through the book, Origin of the Species, does anyone know why Darwin did this? Because he knew something about God for he lived in Victorian England. Back then, theology taught you, God is great, let us thank him for this food, amen. They understood God as great and righteous and wise, all knowing, all powerful, but they dismissed the attributes of God that were negative--his wrath, his justice, his sternness. All of these things about God that we described as negative attributes, Charles Darwin did not grow up. When Darwin pursued his passion of biology and understanding the natural order of things, the world around him, he began to see that the world was chaotic at times and confusing and that there would be parasites that would live in the bodies of caterpillars that would eat them from the inside out. He didn't know why a good God, who he came to know and understand as a child, would ever create a world in which evil and suffering existed and he could not reconcile this. So evolution, my friends, is simply an anti-theology. It's not a scientific method as much as it is a philosophy and a theology of God.
If you read the story of Charles Darwin, you find he could not reconcile suffering with the God that he knew, so he came up with something called natural selection. He felt like that thoroughly explained how a good God could be distant from His creation. There was already a movement under way in England to buy into that, which Darwin clarified and articulated in the book. Not only was God distanced from us because of our sin, which is what the Bible clearly teaches, but now God was distanced from us in regards to creation. He was no longer a personal God that created everything. Theologians and professors and philosophers do not have to make excuses for God. We do not have to create elaborate systems to explain God away--why there is to be evil and suffering in this world. Sometimes we just don't know, do not understand. The Bible says his ways aren't our ways, His thoughts just simply are not our thoughts. So if we go back to scientific evidence and particularly the theory of evolution, we can see that Darwin's understanding of evolution was nothing like it is now. It has been developed into a full-blown science, and yet it is called in textbooks the Theory of Evolution and it's a theory of how the world came into being.
My contention is that the world came into being by the Word of God. God created the world out of nothing, just His spoken Word, just the thought in His head. He said let the world come into being, let there be light, let there be people, let there be land and animals. In Darwin's theory, this all came about through natural selection. It just kind of happened, just randomly, just came into existence. I want you to understand that Darwin's scientific theory, what's now known as a scientific theory, is really much more than that. It's really a way of life. It's really a theology that distances God from His creation. When you create those kinds of gaps, now you've got another barrier to overcome before you come to faith. Now you have to say, well I just don't understand this whole world. We have sin, and then we have unbelief in the middle, and Darwin's Theory of Evolution creates huge gaps for people who want to believe that there is a God and that you can come into a personal relationship with Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Religious experiences can't get you from no to yes and over the chasm of uncertainty. It might get you further along. You can have a religious experience and you can be truly inspired and encouraged by that experience, but that is not what gets you to saying, yes, there is only one true God.
Some of you grew up in “inherited belief systems” [Christian home] so it comes as no surprise that you would believe that there is a God. Your parents brought you up that way. But even raising you in the “fear of the Lord”--that there is a God and He created everything—you still had to come to face with whether you believed it. Inherited belief systems can help you across the chasm, but it cannot get you all the way across.
Theology is simply the study of God. You spend your lifetime studying God, and still there is no guarantee that you will ever be able to cross the chasm of uncertainty--get yourself from no to yes. I remember visiting with a young man who was a seminary dropout. He was studying for ministry, studying to preach, studying to be a theologian and he drops out. He says he has no idea whether God exists or not. And if he or she or it does exist, he would never be able to communicate how or why. He said he wouldn't even want to. He said his faith was completely stripped away from him at seminary. A lot of times when you start studying theology, you have so many questions that go unanswered that you begin to doubt. The only thing that can help you and guide you through that process of having unanswered questions is faith.
Sometimes cultural bias can point us towards the fact that there is one true God, but it can't point us all the way there. In the 1940s-50s, most of us grew up with people around us who, Christian or not, believed that there was a God. There was a cultural bias towards the existence of God. Then as prayer was taken out of the public schools and these types of things happen, God was moved further and further out of the picture. Now the cultural bias swings the other way completely. Now, people assume right from the beginning that there is no God, and that you need to prove to me that He exists.
But all of these seven things that I have listed will not get you across the chasm of uncertainty and get you from believing that, no, there is no God to, yes, there is only one true God. There is only one thing, and I've given it away already, that gets you across the chasm, provides one way across, and that is faith. Scientific evidence, human reasoning, religious experience, inherited belief systems, Scripture, theology and cultural bias are not sufficient to get us across this chasm. Faith is the only thing that finally and completely gets you across the chasm of uncertainty.
At Borders Books, there was a female and a male cashier who were in their 20s. I went in there and said, “Do you have any books on the existence of God for dummies?” They said, “No, that's funny you ask, because we have books on philosophy for dummies and religion for dummies and all these other things, but nothing on the existence of God for dummies.” They said, “Why do you need a book like that?” I said, “Well, actually this weekend I have to do a presentation on the topic or the question ‘Is there a God?’” And they are like, “Oh, wow, are you going to do that presentation locally because we would like to hear that?” But after I looked through the religion section, I walked up to the register with a couple of books, and I said, “So, how would you start a presentation or a lecture or talk on ‘Is there a God?’” The girl says to me, with just a straight face, she says, “I would start with another question. I'd ask, ‘Does it matter that there is a God?’” And I was like, okay. That's a good question. Does it matter that there's a God? I didn't respond to her very well. Does it matter? I wanted to say, yes, but I didn't have time to unpack this entire presentation there at Borders. But immediately my response was, wow, people are walking around not only with the idea that there is no God, but, if there is, it doesn't really matter.
The only way that it's going to matter is if you have faith because there is nothing else that's going to push you across this chasm in such a significant way that it transforms your life. Faith is the one thing that makes all these other things significant. In fact, many times your faith is what makes these things confirming, and actually affirmative, and you feel as though your faith has been strengthened when you read something like what rain does. You realize that there's got to be an intelligent designer behind this entire world that we live in and when you read theology, again you are just encouraged and strengthened.
But does it matter? Does it matter if I believe that there is a God? Here's what Blaise Pascal said in his book, Pensees: “It's the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is--God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.” I think that the answer to "Is there a God?" is an answer that stands above human reasoning, that stands beyond scientific evidence, that stands over, and perhaps, even past theology, pointing us to the existence of God. But these things are not discerned or determined by our minds. They are discerned and determined by our hearts and that's where faith comes into play. Jeremiah 29:13: "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." Hebrews 11:6: "And without faith it's impossible to please God because anyone who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." C.S. Lewis said, "God made us. He invented us as a man invents machines. Now God designed a human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the [fuel] our spirits were designed to burn on or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from himself because it is not there. There is no such thing. That is the key to history.”
When I was walking out of Borders, the female cashier encouraged me. She said, “I guess you can't start with ‘it doesn't matter’ because that would be kind of a cynical, sarcastic way to start.” She said, “So, I'd start by talking about the myth of God that exists in almost every major world religion.” She said every religion, almost, has a legend about God. And the Christian religion does have a legend, the story about God. It tells us what God's been up to since the creation of the world. That story is about Him pursuing us, creating ways in which we can reconnect with Him. That happens through faith, but I want to show you very specifically what God is up to by reading Acts 17.
Again, we go to Paul who reasoning with some very wise philosophers in Athens, Greece, on a place called Mars Hill. They actually invited Paul to come and reason with them about these ideas that Paul had that there is a God and that you can unite with Him freely and voluntarily by faith in Jesus Christ. He was talking to them about this in Acts 17:24: “The God who made the world & everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth. [this is what God's up to!] [God] determined the times set for these men and women and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him though he's not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’”
We exist in this time and in this place to seek God, to reach out for Him, and find Him. And the way that you find God, is through the person of Jesus Christ. We believe, as Christian theists, yes, there is only one true God. No, God's not a myth, not a legend like He is in other religions. We don't believe that there's many gods. We don't even believe that there's many ways to God. We believe in one on-ramp to God and that is the person of Jesus Christ. You either believe that Jesus was God or He was a madman or a lunatic, no better than a poached egg. The decision is completely left up to you and the only way that you cross of chasm of uncertainty is by faith in this person of Jesus Christ. [One small task—to do this week.]