Xty FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN'T CHRISTIANS J E WHITE Ch 1, 2 God

 CHRISTIANITY FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN'T CHRISTIANS

UNCOMMON ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS

JAMES EMERY WHITE

Contents

Cover

Endorsement 2

Half Title Page 3

Title Page 5

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction ii

i. The Cod Who Is There. . . or Not 19.

2. But What Kind of God? 43

3. Jesus 101 67

4. The Message 103

5. The Book 133

6. The Church 167.

7. UnChristians 189

8. Next Steps 209 

Notes 221

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Baker team for their support of this project, our seventh together, and specifically Bob Hosack, who connected with the idea and vision of this book almost immediately.

Alli Main is one of the great gifts to my life and earns my deepest gratitude for her assistance with all of my writing. Whether through research or editing, feedback or ideas, constructive criticism or encouragement, she is nothing less than a godsend.

And as always, my wife, Susan, continues to make every page possible. After thirty-five years of marriage, I think it's safe to say she is still the love of my life.

Finally, to Mecklenburg Community Church, an amazing community of people who continue to die to themselves daily in countless ways in order to reach out to their friends and family, neighbors and coworkers, and share the message of the Christian faith like gossip over the backyard fence. It's an honor to be your pastor.

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Introduction

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us .....ike an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true.

Pascal, Pensées

I hope you begin this book with a healthy amount of doubt. It's the best way to explore anything. When you believe something to be true, you are "in one mind" about accepting it; when you do not believe something to be true, you are "in one mind" about rejecting it. "To doubt," Os Guinness writes, "is to waver between the two, to believe and disbelieve at once and to be 'in two minds."i

I'm so glad someone gave me that permission. When I was around nine, it dawned on me that the reason I considered myself a Christian was because my parents were Christians. Like a thunderbolt from the blue it hit me: That's why! believe all of this-1 have been raised to believe it all! Which, of course, did not make it true. My preadolescent brain quickly surmised that if I had been born in India, I would have been raised a Hindu. It would have been Hinduism I believed and accepted. If I had been born in Iran, my parents would have raised me to accept the Muslim faith. Ill had been raised in Pittsburgh, my parents would have raised me to accept the cult known as "Steeler Nation" and I would be waving yellow towels in worship.

I remember panicking—what if I wasn't born in the right place? My entire eternity suddenly seemed to rest on whether my family of origin was geographically correct.

I went to my mother, innocently working in the kitchen and unaware of my spiritual crisis, and asked, "Mom, why are we Christians? You did . . . like

check it out first, didn't you? How do you know we're believing the right thing?" I then shared my geographical concerns. She did not dismiss me or give me a quick "Don't worry" kind of reply that would have trivialized my question. She knew me well enough to know that I was serious about the question.

So she did something that was very unusual for a parent to do for their nine-year-old son. She said, "Jim, your father and I have looked at all of the faiths of the world and have determined that Christianity is true. It's not just about where we live—Christians are all over the world and, in fact, it's the world's largest faith. You'll find Christians in India, in Iran, and other places as well, so it's not just about geography. But you have to come to that in your own mind. So you are welcome to look into all of the world's religions and come to your own conclusions. And if, at the end, you want to go to a different church, or believe something else, or believe in nothing at all, that is your choice."

When she said that to me, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Not just because they had apparently done their homework, but also because I was allowed to pursue my questions without fear of retribution. Without insecurity. There was something comforting—even reassuring—about such freedom. I learned that questions, by themselves, were not wrong. Neither was good, solid, healthy doubt, which can be the fuel that energizes any faith when seeking understanding.

It was many years before I settled the matter for my own life, so I know what it's like to approach the Christian faith (or any faith, for that matter) with a healthy dose of skepticism, curiosity, willful disobedience, and, for my part, ignorance. Which is why this is a book about the Christian faith for people who may not be Christians, written by someone who understands not being one. 

As such, I will try to accomplish two things: first, to explain the Christian faith in a way that doesn't assume you have a foundational knowledge or understanding of it. I'm not going to assume you were raised in a church or that you've had much exposure to the Christian faith. 

Second, I'd like to try to answer some of the more common questions people standing outside of the Christian faith are quite reasonable to ask based on what they do know or understand about it. And I think you'll find these answers are uncommon—meaning they may not be the answers you'd expect based on caricatures or ideas you've already formed about Christians. If you consider yourself a Christian, I've got a feeling you'll enjoy this conversation, too, as there may be many aspects of the Christian faith you've never fully understood or questions that have remained unanswered. You can have doubts even as you believe.

It won't just be you and me on this journey. You will find that I have invited a partner to join me. His name is C. S. Lewis. He died on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley, so he's not exactly a contemporary. I mention him because you will find that as we walk through the Christian faith, I bring him up from time to time. One reason is that his writing and thinking were very helpful to me when I first explored the Christian faith. The second reason is that he also understands what it's like to be an atheist well into his adult life.

If you're not familiar with Lewis, you may be familiar with some of his friends,  particularly J. R. R. Tolkien of The Lord of the Rings fame. They spent many, many hours together at their favorite Oxford pub, The Eagle and Child (affectionately known by locals as "The Bird and the Baby"). As a plaque on the wall reads:

C. S. Lewis, his brother, W. H. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and other friends met every Tuesday morning, between the years 1939-1962 in the back room of this their favorite pub. These men, popularly known as the "Inklings," met here to drink beer and to discuss, among other things, the books they were writing.

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England [Wikimedia Commons] In the morning. I've spent time at Oxford pursuing various post-doctoral studies. Over many years, in my many hours at The Eagle and Child pub, I've had conversations with people who knew Lewis. I have heard tales of how he would often come to class with alcohol on his breath—sometimes with what we might call a bit of a "buzz." No, not drunk, but without a doubt having clearly imbibed. I was told that he had holes in his coat pockets from putting away his pipe and the ashes burning through. He was also widely known to be loud and somewhat earthy in his stories-4

I think we would have liked him.

Addison's Walk

There is a path on the grounds of Magdalen College where Lewis taught, just a short ways from Merton College where Tolkien resided, called Addison's Walk. The path runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell. On Saturday, September 19, 1931, Lewis invited two friends to dine with him in his rooms at Magdalen. One was a man by the name of Hugo Dyson, a lecturer in English Literature at Reading University. The other was Tolkien.

On that fall evening, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds, ending with a stroll down Addison's Walk. It was there they began to discuss the idea of metaphor and myth. Lewis had long appreciated myth. As a boy, he loved the great Norse stories of the dying god Balder; and as a man, he grew to love and appreciate the power of myth throughout the history of language and literature. But he didn't believe in them. Beautiful and moving though they might be, they were, he concluded, ultimately untrue. As he expressed to Tolkien, myths are "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

If you are familiar with Lewis, it is probably as a result of the movie of his life titled Shadowlands, his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia (also made into movies), and such works as The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity.

Lewis went to University College, Oxford, where he achieved a rare double first in Classics, an additional first in English, and the Chancellor's Prize for academics. He was shortly offered a teaching position at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a fellow and tutor from 1925-54, and then later at the University of Cambridge as professor of Medieval and Renaissance English from 1954-63.2 In 1931, Lewis came out of atheism into the Christian faith, aided significantly through his friendship with Tolkien. As he journeyed away from his rejection of any type of God, he flirted with several alternate worldviews before Christianity—most seriously Hinduism—but ended with Jesus. But this journey was not without resistance. On the particular day in the Trinity Term of 1929 when he "gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed," he confessed he did so as "the most reluctant convert in all of England.".3

The intellectual questions that plagued him during his spiritual journey—why God allows pain and suffering, how Christianity can be the one and only way to Cod, the place of miracles—became the very questions he later navigated with such skill. They were my questions too.

I'm also drawn to Lewis because—while thoroughly converted—he didn't act the way some would say Christians are "supposed to" act. It has been suggested that he could not even be hired by the evangelical college that now stewards his personal letters due to his pipe-smoking, ale-drinking, free-speaking ways. Do you remember what the plaque at The Eagle and Child said they would do when they  met at the pub? Drink beer. And do you remember what time it said they often met?

"No," said Tolkien. "They are not lies."

Later, Lewis recalled that at the moment Tolkien uttered those words, "a rush of wind . . . came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath."

Tolkien's point was that the great myths might just reflect a splintered fragment of the true light. Within the myth, there was something of eternal truth. They talked on, and Lewis became convinced by the force of Tolkien's argument. They returned to Lewis's rooms on Staircase Ill of New Building. Once there, they turned their conversation to Christianity. In the case of Christianity, Tolkien argued, the poet who invented the story was none other than Cod himself, and the images he used were real men and women and actual history.

 

Addison's Walk at Magdalen College, Oxford, England [Wikimedia Commons] 

Lewis was floored.

"Do you mean," he asked, "that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old 'dying Cod' story all over again"

Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real "dying" Cod, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth has become fact. Such joining of faith and intellect had never occurred to Lewis.

The time approached 3:oo a.m. and Tolkien had to go home. Lewis and Dyson escorted him down the stairs. They crossed the quadrangle and let him out by the little postern gate on Magdalen Bridge. Lewis remembered that "Dyson and I found more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4."

Twelve days later, Lewis wrote to his close boyhood friend Arthur Creeves: "I have just passed on from believing in Cod to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.".5

So let's go on a long walk together. You may not land where Lewis did, but hopefully the journey itself will prove enlightening.

1 THE GOD WHO IS THERE... OR NOT

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

Voltaire, Epitre a l'Auteru du Livre des Trois Imposteurs

If you don't care about the interplay between science and matters of faith, or if you already believe in God, feel free to skip this chapter. If the interplay between science and faith is important to you, and you're not at all sure whether you believe in God, then let's begin.

On August 7, 1961, a twenty-six-year-old Russian cosmonaut became the second Soviet to fire off into space, orbit the earth, and return safely. When he returned, he let it be known that while in space, he looked around for this God people talked about and couldn't see him.

While some do see things that way, there aren't too many card-carrying atheists in the world. Recent polls show that 8o percent of all Americans believe in the existence of God. If you throw in those who may shy away from the word "God," but who would say they believe in a "higher power," the percentage increases to nearly 90 percent. But when it comes to the God of the Bible, the percentages drop dramatically.j. Let's just say that there are an understandably healthy number of agnostics out there, and you might put yourself among them. An agnostic doesn't

necessarily reject God himself as much as the possibility of knowing whether God exists. Rather than say, "I don't know if there is a God," they say, "I cannot know if there is a God." Or, even beyond that, which God.

So let's start with whether a God even exists. The Christian faith very much believes in a God who is there and—as the famed Christian thinker Francis

Schaeffer added—has not been silent. But why would a thinking person believe such a thing? Can the existence of God be proven? Obviously, you cannot put God into a test tube for examination. You cannot prove that God exists, at least by normal scientific methods, because the scientific method depends upon repetition. There are certain things that cannot be contained or repeated in order to be scientifically proven. If something cannot be examined beyond our five senses, then you cannot use science to either prove or disprove it. However, just because you can't repeat something doesn't mean it isn't real. No one has ever seen love, but we all know it is real. No one has ever smelled freedom, but it exists. And, of course, God—by almost any definition—would be very hard to examine by human measures. So instead of a chemical reaction in a test tube that would somehow reveal God's existence, those who are wanting Christians to explain their belief should instead look for evidence that would support whether it is reasonable to believe in the existence of God: signs, if you will, of his existence. Christians believe that such evidence exists in abundance, beginning with something as simple as cause and effect.

Cause and Effect

Most of us have ventured out on a clear night to look up and stare at the stars. During moments like those, it is natural to reflect not only on the vastness of the universe, but to wonder how it came into being.

Only recently has the idea that the world was created by a personal God been dismissed by some as intellectually absurd. The late-coming idea is that there was no creative event at all. The late astronomer Carl Sagan opened up his bestselling book Cosmos by saying, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."2 But the most recent findings of science are turning us back to—if not a God—the reality of a creation event. For example, the second law of thermodynamics states that the universe is running out of usable energy. And if it is running out of energy, then it cannot be eternal and must have at one time been given an initial "start" of energy. Something does not wind down unless it has been wound up.

Picture of the mountains and stars at Fiordland National Park, New Zealand

[Unsplash]

These ideas related to the second law of thermodynamics have been supported through the leading hypothesis for the beginning of the universe, which is the Big Bang theory. The idea of the Big Bang was first put forward by Dr. Edwin Hubble, the man we named the Hubble Space Telescope after. His theory was that at one time all matter was packed into a dense mass at temperatures of many trillions of degrees. Then around 13.8 billion years ago, there was a huge explosion. From that explosion, all of the matter that today forms our planets and stars was born and the universe as we know it was created.

Hubble's idea was confirmed through what has been called the discovery of the past century. On April 24, 1992, the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, better known as COBE, gave stunning confirmation of the hot Big Bang creation event after investigating the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe. In many ways, it really was the birth of modern cosmology. And, for many people, the birth of a belief in Cod.

It is known that something cannot come from nothing. We also know that the universe isn't eternal. Yet, according to the Big Bang theory, something did come from nothing. The problem is that you can't just say everything began with the Big Bang and act as if somehow you've explained the origins of the universe, because that still doesn't explain where the matter that exploded came from. In lay terms, where did the stuff that got banged come from and who banged it? Something (or Someone), somehow, brought that first matter miraculously into existence in such a way that it exploded into the universe. This "something" had to exist outside of space and time, because space and time didn't exist before the Big Bang. Anyone in the scientific community would agree that this could not have happened according to the current laws of physics. Which means we're talking about something outside of the laws of physics. Something outside of all natural phenomena.

There's a category for this. If something is outside of natural phenomena, it's called supernatural, and that puts us in God territory. This really is worth wrestling with. If the universe could not have come into being by itself from nothing (because it is a scientific impossibility that absolute nothingness could produce anything), and if the universe isn't eternal and there really was a creation event

through the Big Bang, the questions I raised earlier still remain: Where did the matter that exploded come from and who caused the explosion?

George Smoot, head of the COBE satellite team, who, along with John Mather, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for their work on the project, noted that when the COBE satellite measured the ripples in the microwave background radiation that gave confirmation of the Big Bang theory it was "like looking at God."3 Dr. Robert Jastrow, professor of astronomy at both Columbia University and Dartmouth College, director of the Mount Wilson Institute and manager of the Mount Wilson Observatory, and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for twenty years, made the following comment in regard to the COBE findings: "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world."-4, jastrow went further, saying, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."5

I know, if you've tracked with me so far, this now begs the question, "Who, then, made God?" We ask this because we live in space and time, and nothing in our understanding of space and time can exist independent of some type of beginning. So if God began our universe, who "began" God? The Christian response is to challenge the presupposition of the question—namely, that God is confined to our understandings of space and time. The Bible points to God as the Creator of space and time, independent of their constraints. God is eternal, without beginning or end, and he is not limited to our understandings of beginning or ending.

Now, some may say, "Well, physics just hasn't found the answer to the idea of 'something from nothing' yet. You can't just jump to God." Perhaps. . . but as

Alan Guth, one of the leading physicists of our day at MIT, has written, even if you could come up with a theory that would account for the creation of something from nothing through the laws of physics, you'd still have to account for the origin of the laws of physics.

But that's not all there is to think about when it comes to the origins of the universe. Astrophysicists will tell you that what should have happened with the Big Bang was the creation of equal parts matter and antimatter. But that isn't what happened. Particles of matter barely outnumbered particles of antimatter by a rate of about a billion-and-one to a billion. Without that billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else. No planets. No stars. Nothing. Which again is what should have happened. Equal parts of matter and antimatter should have been created during the formation of the universe. The universe as we know it should not have come out of the Big Bang. But it did. Something, somehow, stepped in to counter all we know about science and created an imbalance in favor of matter. And no one knows how or why. It was as if there was . . . an intervention. 

Design and Order

When it comes to the existence of God, there is more than cause and effect to consider. There are also the issues surrounding design and order. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible and contains most of the "origins material." In Genesis we read that at the end of whatever creative process God used to create the universe—and, specifically, our world and all living things within it—there was a single declaration: "It was very good." Meaning, it was good because it was good for the crown of creation: human life. What we're learning from science is how deep and wide that "good" goes, given that everything about the universe, the Milky Way, our solar system, and our planet, are perfect for the existence of human life. In other words, what came out of the Big Bang was not chaos, but life-giving,

life-sustaining order. So much order that it appears to be intricately designed.

 

A picture of Earth from NASA [Wikimedia Commons]

How is this accounted for? This is such an obvious question that it has been

with us from the most ancient of days, first raised by the Greek philosopher Plato.7 Here's the thinking: All designs imply a designer. If you find a watch, you understandably assume there is a watchmaker; if you see a building you assume an architect designed it; if you view a painting, you know there was a painter. The greater the complexity of the design and order of something, the more a designer begs to be considered. I once heard it put this way: It's one thing to see a logjam and wonder if there was a beaver behind it; it's another to see Hoover Dam and question whether there was intentionality and purpose behind its creation.

At the time I'm writing this, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is arguably the top fighter jet in the world.8 It is super stealthy and virtually invisible to radar. It's an extremely advanced twin-engine aircraft with amazing maneuverability. It can even do something almost unthinkable—a vertical takeoff. Now, imagine you came upon an F-22 in the middle of the desert. You could reason that it came together by chance; that the metal was flung together by way of a chaotic sandstorm; that the instruments and panels and wings and advanced technology were all brought together by a freak accident of nature. But it is highly unlikely that this would be yourfirst thought. If you came upon an F-22 in the desert, your initial thought would likely be that someone made it and landed it there.

There is staggering design and order to the universe. So much design and order that it seems too much for mere chance. So staggering that it compels many people to consider a "Great Designer" of the universe.

But it goes deeper than that. The anthropic principle, from the Greek word ant hropos that means "man" or "human," is the idea that our world is uniquely suited to human beings and carbon-based life, the only form of life known to science. But that's putting it mildly. It's freakishly suited for human life. There are so many dynamics that if changed only slightly, would make it impossible for us to exist. You can't help but marvel how all of them came together in one planet, in one solar system, in one galaxy, in one universe.

For example, Earth is in what is called a "Goldilocks Zone" around the sun. Remember the Goldilocks story? A little girl, lost in the woods, finds a house where three bears live. She tries some porridge they had left out. One bowl is too hot, one is too cold, but one is just right. That's why scientists call where we live the Goldilocks Zone—the only part of the solar system that's just right for human life. It's not too far and not too close to the home star in order to sustain life. If we were any closer to the sun, all of the oceans would have evaporated. If we were any farther away, they would have frozen.

Then there's the speed of our planet. Our speed enables us to maintain a stable orbit around the sun while never getting too close or too far away. The precision to maintain the right distance at all times while in orbit calls for a very specific speed. So much so that if you were to increase Earth's orbital speed by no more than the square root of two—just 1.4 times its current speed—we would achieve escape velocity. We would fly right out of the solar system if we moved just 1.4 times faster.g.

And consider how the planet Jupiter, with its mighty gravitational field, redirects the vast majority of comets that would wreak havoc on the inner solar system and, specifically, on Earth. It's as though a mighty shield has been strategically positioned in just the right place to protect our planet..1Q There's also Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere that not only allows life, but the existence of ozone in the upper atmosphere serving as a shield to protect Earth's surface from most of the sun's molecule-hostile ultraviolet photons.jj These are just samples of all that has come together on Earth to make life possible.

Even when scientists discover other Earth-like planets, it only adds to the wonder of Earth. "Earth-like" means a planet may have two or three of the twenty-plus elements needed to mimic what we find on Earth. And every Earth-like planet we find falls dramatically short of everything that came together on the planet Earth. For example, when scientists discovered Kepler-22b, just 600 light-years away, it was in the Goldilocks Zone of its solar system. Like Earth, it circled a star similar to the sun at approximately the same distance away from the sun and with a year of 290 days. Yet, it was 2.4 times wider than Earth and covered with water, making it more like the planet Neptune. Size and soil are just two of the twenty-plus elements needed to be like Earth in terms of being suitable for life. Kepler-22b, like every other Earth-like planet we've found, is far from being Earth. Our galaxy contains more than a hundred billion stars. The known universe harbors some hundred billion galaxies. The latest, best estimates suggest there may be as many as 40 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. Yet still, in all that vastness, among all those planets, only one can sustain life. And the odds of finding another one are so remote it staggers the imagination, because the odds of everything coming together the way it did on Earth are considered virtually impossible.

But one planet—supernaturally--did come together.

In a National Public Radio interview, Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and the history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, noted that "there are so many wonderful details which, if they were changed only slightly, would make it impossible for us to be here, that one just has to feel, somehow, that there is a design in the universe and, therefore, a designer to have worked it out so magnificently."12 As theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Cambridge has observed, "We are meant to be here."13 This is such a compelling reality that it causes even the most ardent of atheists to pause. Physicist Stephen Hawking once told a reporter that "the odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous....I think clearly there are religious implications."j.. Going even further, Hawking conceded,

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.15

About God and Evolution

It was the summer 011925. The place was the small mountain town of Dayton, Tennessee. The issue at hand was a legal confrontation that made headlines around the world. On one side was William Jennings Bryan and on the other was Clarence Darrow. Their confrontation was not over a crime or misdemeanor; it was not over a legal suit involving a will or a trust. It didn't even involve special prosecutors or a grand jury. In fact, the courts had never encountered a case quite like this one.

The subject was the very origin of human life.

It is known in history books as the "Scopes Trial." A young biology teacher by the name of John T. Scopes was charged with violating a law on the Tennessee books stating you could not teach evolution. As a result, the trial posed defenders of evolutionary theory against those who wanted public schools to teach what was considered to be a biblical view of the origin of the world's inhabitants. William Jennings Bryan represented the state and, by default, those who believed in the biblical view of the creation of human beings. Clarence Darrow represented those who embraced the evolutionary theory.

It really was the clash of two worlds. Bryan was the good-old-boy religious Southerner. Darrow, in favor of evolution, was the outspoken religious agnostic from the North, polished and intellectual, supplied to defend Scopes by the ACLU. Many people do not know that the result of the trial found the teacher guilty, but not before Darrow (the evolutionist) had made a fool of Bryan (the creationist). Bryan allowed himself to be cross-examined by Darrow, arguably the greatest trial lawyer of his day, on the precise accuracy of the Bible. In the course of that examination, Darrow forced Bryan to admit that he couldn't answer even the most basic questions about what the Bible puts forward as truth. Not because there weren't answers, but because Bryan wasn't the sharpest biblical scholar around. So the verdict as it stands in history is intriguing: Bryan won the battle, but he lost the war. While he technically won the case, the conflict stamped the entire debate with an unmistakable image. Evolution vs. creationism came to be seen as the city vs. the country; places like New York and Chicago vs. backwoods Dayton, Tennessee; science vs. ignorance; the modern world of the twentieth century vs. the American religious fundamentalism of the nineteenth century. That image has remained firmly in place for nearly a century and so have the lines of debate. Evolution has become the accepted scientific theory of how human beings and all of life developed and came into being. Whether through evolution or not, the biblical idea of a God creating is seen as a view that is antiscientific and out of touch with the real world.16

The three main parties of the Scopes Trial—William Jennings Bryan (left),

John T. Scopes (center), Clarence Darrow (right) [Wikimedia Commons] 

But is that the caricature we should have in mind? A divide between smart and dumb, sophisticated and backward, science and the Bible. . . or even between evolution and creationism? Or is there something more to be considered? Namely,

that the real divide is between a naturalistic view of the universe (seeing nature as all that there is) and a theistic view of the universe (remaining very much open to the existence and activity of God). In other words, a view of the world that sees nothing but the temporal, the material, the natural, over and against a view that is open-minded toward the eternal, the spiritual, yes, even the supernatural. To be sure, those who are Christians believe that God created human beings. If you are a Christian, you are, by necessity, a creationist. You believe that we were wonderfully and carefully designed, and that the entire creative process was miraculously and supernaturally generated and guided by God. So do we now have an insurmountable impasse?

I'm reminded of the joke about a little boy who goes to his dad and asks, "Dad, where did human beings come from?" His father says, "Well, we descended from apes." The little boy then goes to his mother and asks, "Mom, where did human beings come from?" She says, "We were created by God in God's image." The boy says, "But Dad said we descended from apes." "Well," she answers, "I was talking

about my side of the family."jj.

But back to the impasse. First, the Bible doesn't say how God created, only that he created. And it talks about the creation of human beings in a very literary, poetic way using phrases like "from the dust of the earth" and receiving "the breath of life." That doesn't exactly sound like it is trying to be a biology text, does it? Evolution is one of the leading theories in science for the "how" we were created. You may be surprised to hear me say I think this is fine for those who are open to God. You may also be surprised to learn that according to a new study released in February 2019 by the Pew Research Center, this is where most Christians land. The majority of Christians today (as in 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 66 percent of black Protestants) "agree that human evolution is real—and that God had a hand in it." Pew acknowledged that perhaps in the past they had been asking the question regarding evolution wrong, meaning not phrasing it in a way to allow both the embrace of evolution along with a role for God.18 If God used evolution as part of his creative process, so be it. That doesn't mean there wasn't an original Adam and Eve who God breathed an actual soul into at the end of the process to mark the beginning of the human race as we know it, much less a God guiding the entire process. But does the theory of evolution itself point toward a God or away from one?

Let's begin by thinking about the timeline. While the age of the universe is around 13.8 billion years, the age of Earth is about 4.5 billion years. But life didn't exist 4.5 billion years ago. It couldn't. That was a geologically violent time; there was constant bombardment from meteorites. Earth itself had to cool and its

surface solidify to a crust. Life on Earth, the latest thinking goes, began about 3.8 billion years ago, in the form of single-celled prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria. Multicellular life didn't come into play until more than a billion years later. It's only in the last 570 million years that the kind of life forms we are familiar with even began to evolve, starting with arthropods, followed by fish 530 million years ago, then land plants 470 million years ago, and then forests 385 million years ago. Mammals didn't evolve until just 200 million years ago, and our own species, Homo sapiens, only 200,000 years ago (according to theorists). So humans have

been around for a mere 0.004 percent of the earth's history.19 That's the evolutionary time frame, but also the evolutionary problem.

 

Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine

Chapel, 1512 [Wikimedia Commons]

The whole idea behind naturalistic evolution is that it's a product of time plus chance. But there just hasn't been enough time for Earth to cool and life to be produced naturalistically by chance. Sir Fred Hoyle, former Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, determined that if you computed the time required to get all 200,000 amino acids for one human cell to come together by chance, it would be about 293.5 times the estimated age of

Earth.2o Even further, Hoyle, along with his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, calculated the odds for all of the functional proteins necessary for a one-cell animal to form in one place by random events. They came up with a figure of one chance in 10 to the 40,00oth power—that's the number 1 with 40,000 zeros after it. Since there are only about 10 to the 8oth power atoms in the entire universe, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe concluded that this was "an outrageously small probability that

could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."j For the current proposed evolutionary timeline to work, it would be like having the working dynamics of the latest iPhone along with the entire corporate campus of Apple that produced it to be instantly created—by chance—through a single explosion in a computer geek's garage. If you are going to embrace the theory of evolution, you also need to (seemingly) embrace some kind of outside guiding, enhancing force that sped it along and directed it strategically in the time frame of the age of Earth.

Now, even if you assume there was enough time, or perhaps you want to buy into the theory that mutations and evolutionary leaps can fill all of the time-gaps, you still have the problem of the initial complexity of life. (I hope this isn't all too much science. But for some of you, it is precisely science that matters, so on we go.) Darwin himself noted, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive,

slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."22

Biochemist Michael Behe speaks of Darwin's self-challenge in terms of a mousetrap. The common mousetrap includes a platform, hammer, catch, spring, and holding bar. Each component is required for the mousetrap to function as a mousetrap. You cannot start with a wooden base and catch a few mice, add a bar and catch a few more, and functionally evolve—step by Darwinian step—into the most effective mousetrap, one that has a base, hammer, spring, catch, and holding bar. There must be a minimum number of interacting parts that are assembled to allow the catching of mice before the trap can begin developing into more

advanced levels of mice-catching. This is what it means to be irreducibly complex: to be a system that consists of several interacting parts that must be in place in order to function as that system. Darwinian evolution depends upon there being a minimal function in place from which the more advanced functions could evolve.

But as an irreducibly complex system, our mousetrap could not have been produced by continuously improving an initial function of mouse-trapping by slight, successive modifications of the mouse-trapping process. Take away any of

the five parts, and no mice would be caught!23 The conclusion is that the mousetrap was somehow made as an intact system. It could not have just evolved into that system. It had to have been designed as a system for that purpose.

Yet this is the relatively new and astonishing conclusion of molecular biology: the basic forms of life are not simple, but irreducibly complex molecular machines that cannot be explained by natural selection working on variation. Think about something like the human eye. According to evolutionary theory, it would have started with a simple, light-sensitive spot, and then evolved to what we see with today. The problem is that when science finally got to the point where we were able to study life at the molecular level, we found it wasn't simple. We found it was irreducibly complex. Which means something, or Someone, had to create those first complex systems from which all of life evolved. Something, or Someone, had to create that first light-sensitive spot. It couldn't have come into existence by itself. You might be able to start simple and get to complex—which is what

evolutionary theory maintains—but you can't start complex.14. Behe, a biochemist, concludes that the result of recent research into life at the molecular level is a loud,

piercing cry of intelligent design.25 There is simply no other explanation for the incredible complexity of the world.

The problem goes deeper than having to explain the complexity that existed at the beginning of the evolutionary process. You also have to consider how the evolutionary process created ever-increasing diversity—in other words, the idea of macroevolution, which is one species evolving into a totally different species. This is very different than microevolution, which is just changes or adaptations within a species. Microevolution is like a dog breeder breeding a dog that sheds less hair. It's still a dog. They can't breed a dog that flies. But that's what naturalistic evolutionary theory—meaning evolution without outside intervention—maintains happened. That microevolution somehow led to macroevolution. That single-cell bacteria led to multicell bacteria, and multicell bacteria led to spiders, and spiders somehow led to fish, and fish somehow led to plants, and plants led to mammals, and it all eventually led to us. How one species creates a completely different species is, at best, vague.

Beyond the lack of time for evolution to have done its work without outside help, beyond tracing the origin of life back to its roots and finding its starting point was so complex that it couldn't have evolved naturally (step by Darwinian step) to get there, there's the beginning of life itself Just like you can't say, "In the beginning, the Big Bang created the heavens and the earth" and consider the questions surrounding the actual origin of the universe solved, you can't say, "Life exists

because 3.8 billion years ago it began evolving from single-celled prokaryotic cells." Just like Big Bang theorists have to wrestle with where the stuff that got banged came from and who made it bang, evolutionary theorists have to ask how those first bacteria came to life. It's a profound question: How did life come from non-life? You can say that within chemically rich liquid oceans organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life, but that's like saying your SUV can become Optimus Prime after it goes through a car wash. It doesn't just happen. Gerd Muller, a highly regarded Austrian evolutionary theorist, gave one of the most honest presentations on this I've heard. As far as I know, he's not a theist much less a Christian. He doesn't argue for God's hand behind the origin of life. But in a lecture as an evolutionary theorist, he confessed that not only does Darwin's theory fail to explain how life originated or explain how complexity developed, it hardly even asks the questionS.26 Yet those are the questions.

So what is the leading theory of how this is all solved outside of a God working in and through the process of evolution? This might surprise you, but one of the

leading ideas is called panspermia—the idea that the first life, along with the beginning complexity, was seeded here from another planet, such as Mars. But that doesn't solve anything. If all the scientific challenges surrounding life beginning on its own on Earth can be solved by saying life began somewhere else and got here on the back of a meteorite, well then how did that life start there? So the real decision is not between creationism and evolution, but between theism and naturalism. You can be a theistic evolutionist or a naturalistic evolutionist. It seems to me that the evidence causes being a naturalistic evolutionist the greater leap of faith.

The Humanness of Humans

The last thing I'll put forward that Christians have considered on their way to belief in the existence of God is the "humanness" of humans. Where does human personality come from? It's difficult for many to believe that the human personality—the soul, if you will—evolved naturalistically out of a pool of primordial slime. Legs and arms and lungs, maybe—but what is inside of us? That

which makes you, you? Consciousness itself? When the philosopher Rend Descartes attempted to boil down his one and only true starting point for reflection, he came up with his famed phrase Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am.

But where does that "thinking" come from? How are we able to think, reflect, feel, and reason? There is a voice inside of my head, a personality, a living spirit that I know exists and that is tangible and real when I think to myself. What is that, and where did it come from?

Humans really are different from every other living creature. People who say there's really not much difference between human beings and chimps, because humans are just slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes sharing about 99.4 percent of their DNA, lose me. As John Ortberg once noted, "If you really believe that yourself, or if you wonder if that's really true, just ask yourself if you would have a chimpanzee babysit one of your children. Would you date one? Would you

hold one morally accountable for its behavior?"22

The nature of human identity is not about DNA. There's something else going on, and that includes our spirituality. We are, all of us, deeply spiritual beings regardless of our individual beliefs. One of the most interesting manifestations throughout all civilizations is the deep spiritual hunger of men and women. Anthropologists have discovered that human beings are incurably spiritual and conscious of the idea of God. This was described by Blaise Pascal, the great

 

seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician, as the "God-shaped hole" in every human being. If there isn't a God, and we evolved naturalistically, that would not make sense.

In reflecting on this, C. S. Lewis noted that drives supposedly come about due to the realities of our world. For example, we have an appetite for food, and there is food to satisfy that need. We have this drive to know God, an authentic spiritual hunger, but there is no God? That doesn't make sense. If it were true, we shouldn't have the drive. Why would creatures who evolved by chance as a result of naturalistic causes alone desire and hunger after a Creator God? Some have suggested that the answer to this is not God at all, but a so-called "God gene" that has been hard-wired into our genetic constitutions. But why would a gene like that have ever evolved? Some take another tack and say the reason we're so spiritually hungry is simply our desire, our hope for a God. This was the belief of Sigmund

Freud, the father of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. 28 The dilemma is that it doesn't explain the universal desire for God throughout time and across civilization. At some point, particularly in our modern context, you would think that the wish, desire, or need for God would simply end. Yet it only grows, which makes no evolutionary sense if there is no God.    The Thinker by Rodin, located at the Musée Rodin in Paris [WikimediaCommons] "Hey, that's my seat! I was there first!" When we do that, we are appealing to some behavioral standard that the other person is supposed to know and accept. And there is a surprising consensus from civilization to civilization, culture to culture, as to what is right and what is wrong. When you take the time to study the moral teaching of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, it is amazing how similar they are to each other morally. For example, selfishness is never admired and loyalty is always praised. Men may have differed as to whether you should have one wife or fourteen, but they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you like-3o As C. S. Lewis once observed: "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and

unjust. But how had I got this idea ofjust and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight Iine."31 Somehow it seems we have an innate sense of right and wrong. Or, as Darwin once replied when asked whether man was in any way unique from other life forms, "Man is the only animal

that blushes."32 Where does this come from independent of an outside source? National Public Radio did a story on the most challenging questions facing

science based on an article in The Guardian, one of the biggest news publications in the UK-33 And what were those questions plaguing scientific minds? The very ones we've detailed in this chapter. For example, "How did life come about?"

Translation: "How did life come from non-life? How did something dead become alive? If everything was once dead, how did life appear?"

There are no scientific answers.

Another question: "What makes us human?" From the NPR story: "We have three times more neurons than a gorilla, but our DNAs are almost identical. Many animals have a rudimentary language, can use tools and recognize themselves in mirrors. So, what is it that differentiates us from them?"

Coupled with this is our inner sense of morality. According to a major study by Oxford University, everyone everywhere shares seven universal moral rules. In fact, all societies are held together by these seven rules. The huge study of sixty different cultures around the world found that all communities operate under these seven basic moral codes. "It was the largest and most comprehensive and widespread survey of morals ever conducted, and aimed to find out whether different societies had different versions of morality."

The study found they did not. Here is what we all share in common—across continents, religions, and politics—and value as important:

1) Help your family.

2) Help your group.

3) Return favors.

4) Be brave.

5) Defer to superiors.

6) Divide resources fairly.

7) Respect the property of others.

The study also found that inherent within this code was caring for frail relatives, passing on property to offspring, going to war if needed to protect the group, and

respecting elders.g.

Intuitively, each of us appeals to some sense of right and wrong in our dealings with ourselves, with others, and with the world. If we have to get up from our seat for a moment in a crowded venue and someone sits in our place, we naturally say,

Then the question, "What is consciousness?" Meaning: "How is it that the brain generates the self of self, the unique experience that we have of being. . . unique? Can the brain be reverse-engineered to be modeled by machines? Or is this a losing proposition? And why is there a consciousness at all?"

Again, no scientific answers.

But there are theological ones. In the beginning, there was a God who created and, through that creation, sent out a compelling message about his existence: that he does, indeed, exist.

Such considerations are turning more than Christian heads, as was the case for atheist Antony Flew shortly before his death. Flew was the famed Oxford philosophy professor who wrote the quintessential articles in favor of atheism for college philosophy textbooks the world over. But before his death, he renounced his atheism. Why? Cause and effect, design and order, the challenges to a purely naturalistic view of evolution, and the humanness of humans. He's not alone. Some of the greatest names in science will tell you that they have not only become believers in God but card-carrying Christians. Not despite science, but because of it. People like Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project that produced the first reference sequence of the human DNA instruction book, and who became the director of the National Institutes of Health. He looked at everything science has discovered about the beginnings of the universe and the beginnings of life, and determined it was "God's elegant plan for creating humankind," all complementary

to his faith in Christ.34 The "Hiddenness" of God

Of course, after such a lengthy conversation about things that point to God it would be reasonable to ask why God isn't more direct with his existence. The short

answer is because whatever relationship he may have with you, he wants it to be real—not forced or coerced. Imagine God making himself known to you in the most unmistakable of ways (and, to be sure, he could). Would your belief in him be anything other than something imposed upon you? C. S. Lewis weighed in on this in an even more telling manner:

God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. . . . For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we

really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not.35

And the longer answer to those who ask, "Why doesn't God make himself known? Why doesn't he reveal himself more clearly?" is that Christians believe he has.

But we'll get to Jesus in a bit.

It's Your Choice

In the 180s, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed "God is dead." During the 196os, someone took Nietzsche's famous slogan and wrote it in spray paint on a billboard near Union Seminary in New York: "God is dead—Nietzsche." Then someone else, undoubtedly a seminary student, took a can of spray paint and wrote: "Nietzsche is dead—God." The debate is hardly

academic. More consequence for thought and action flow from the question "Does God exist?" than almost any other question you can raise. The only question that can match its significance is built on it: "If God exists, what is he like?"

The Christian answer might surprise you. 

=====

2  BUT WHAT KIND OF GOD?

"What is . . . God?"

I asked the earth and it answered: "I am not He";

and all things that are in the earth made the same confession.

Augustine, Confessions, Book X

I once heard of a little girl who was drawing a picture at school. Her teacher came over and asked her what she was drawing.

"I'm drawing a picture of God."

Her teacher said, "Honey, you know, nobody really knows what God looks like." And the little girl said, "Well, they will when I get through!"

Whether you accept or reject the existence of God, most of us have a picture of that God that we have drawn in our minds, usually based on a series of ideas, feelings, and past experiences from our life. Christianity presents a picture of God that is both unique and compelling, but it may be a picture that is very different from the one you've drawn, even if you think you've been drawing the Christian one. George Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard, recalled how students would come into his office and say, "I don't believe in God." Buttrick would then reply, "Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don't believe in. I probably don't

believe in that God either."

Now, there's a lot the Christian faith holds about the Person of God: God is Spirit, not flesh and blood; God is personal, not an impersonal energy force; God

is living, not a dead totem; God is infinite in terms of space, time, knowledge, and power; God is constant, not in a state of flux. For many people, the real question is not about the Person of God, but his nature. Is this God moral? Does he have integrity? Is he loving? Many aren't so sure. In fact, most people who reject the idea of God don't reject the possibility of his existence—they reject what they think they know about him. Particularly, what they think they know about him from the Bible. The reason for this is simple. Sometimes it can seem like the God of the Bible acts in ways we would never dream of acting ourselves. This makes it hard to believe that God—or what we think we know about that God—is right. Many people feel the God of the Bible is angry, mean, capricious, and a bit too quick to send people to hell. They don't even like the idea of a God who would create a hell, much less send people there. And if he's supposed to be so good and loving, then why is there so much suffering in the world and why has it gone on for so long? Why doesn't God step in and stop it? To a lot of people, it seems like we need a better God than the one that we have—or at least a better God than the God of the Bible. I've heard people say in one way or another, "When I look at the world and how it's being run, how it's playing out . . . if I was God, I could do better." As an atheist blogger once put it (in a post that has since been taken down), "If I was God, the following words and phrases would not exist

Famine Accident Death

Jealousy Weapon Anger

Slavery Atrocity Apology

Homeless Bomb Old

Conflict Abortion Need

Hate Molestation Evil

Natural Disaster Dictator Sick

Greed Steal Cancer

Crime Mental Illness Hell"2

On Evil and Suffering

One of the most chilling places I have ever visited is the Dachau Concentration Camp just outside of Munich, Germany. It opened on March 22, 1933. It was the first of the German concentration camps, and the only one kept open throughout the Nazi era. It became a model for every other concentration camp—camps with names such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbruck. Dachau did not close until liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945, so it had a twelve-year nightmarish run. By the end of its operation, more than 200,000 human beings from across Europe were robbed of their freedom, tortured, exploited, and—for tens of thousands—eventually killed on its grounds.

I recall finding myself in a part of the camp that was somewhat off the beaten path. I wandered over to a ditch and there was a placard hidden among the weeds that said the man-made ditch served as a stream to carry away the blood from all the people who were shot in the head. It is hard to even explain the emotion of seeing that and reading that sign unless you were standing there.

War Drugs Disease

Hunger Murder Poverty

Rape Oppression Sorrow

Poor Victim Kill

Fight Gun Sadness

Genocide Third World Loneliness

 

The gate at the entrance of the Dachau Concentration Camp with the phrase

Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work will set you free") [Wikimedia Commons]

The most spiritually persistent question people ask—across every world religion, every philosophy, every worldview—is, "Why is there evil and suffering in the world?" It's the question that lingers and never goes away, and it's the most troubling question for people spiritually, crying out to be answered. People cannot seem to wrap their heads around why evil and suffering exist in the world, and when this question is not answered it can become a huge stumbling block. This is not a question that the Christian faith alone must answer. If you reject Christianity because of the existence of suffering in the world, then you need to reject every philosophy, every worldview, every ideology, every religion. Because the reality of suffering is not just unique for Christianity to explain. I don't care if you're

Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon, Scientologist, Hindu, or nothing at all—everyone must answer the question about why this is such a screwed-up world. Even

atheists. It's actually one of the biggest arguments against atheism. Atheists may not believe in God, but they believe in the inherent goodness of human beings and the inevitable upward progression of naturalistic evolution. Which means that human beings should be becoming increasingly good and noble, peaceful and humane, through the advances of education, politics, and technology. So in theory it should be a better world every day.

It's not.

But there is a reason this question about evil and suffering is often laid solely at the feet of Christians. The Bible teaches that God is all-powerful, able to do anything he wants. Further, the Bible teaches that God is thoroughly good—not mean, capricious, or vindictive. Yet bad things happen. There is suffering in the world. And for many, many people, those dynamics just don't mix. If God is good

and all-powerful, he shouldn't allow bad things to happen. Since they do happen, people then decide either God isn't good or he isn't all-powerful. Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, embraced the idea that God cares but is powerless to do anything about it. Elie Wiesel, who suffered through the Holocaust, said of the God described by Kushner, "If that's who God

is, why doesn't He resign and let someone more competent take his place?".3 This was the sentiment of C. S. Lewis who, after his wife died from cancer, wrote: "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive

yourself no longer."'-4

So let me try to give the answer the Christian faith gives to the question of

suffering. You can compare it to any other answer you want. And it's really more of a story than some sterile, textbook answer. A deeply relational story. But before I tell it, let me state the obvious: there is no answer that can be given that will satisfy

the emotional pain of suffering. In the movie Shadow!avids, Anthony Hopkins portrays C. S. Lewis, whose wife died soon after their marriage. In the movie, a minister tries to give Lewis a "God knows best" pat answer, causing Lewis to explode: "No! This is a mess. That's all anyone can say—it's just a mess!" For most of us, though, the search is not for an answer that will alleviate the pain as much as a reason for why the pain was ever allowed. So let me see if I can tell you that story.

In the Beginning

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. Even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator's love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well

spurn his love. But this is the only way to have the relationship be a relationship.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he had to take the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: "If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve....

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15).

The first instance of this freedom to choose love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were given one and only one instruction: "Don't eat from this one tree." The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real. Then they chose to eat the fruit from that tree. They made the conscious, purposeful decision to go against the love, against the relationship. The Lover was spurned.

suffering. You can compare it to any other answer you want. And it's really more of a story than some sterile, textbook answer. A deeply relational story. But before I tell it, let me state the obvious: there is no answer that can be given that will satisfy

the emotional pain of suffering. In the movie Shadowlarids, Anthony Hopkins portrays C. S. Lewis, whose wife died soon after their marriage. In the movie, a minister tries to give Lewis a "God knows best" pat answer, causing Lewis to explode: "No! This is a mess. That's all anyone can say—it's just a mess!" For most of us, though, the search is not for an answer that will alleviate the pain as

much as a reason for why the pain was ever allowed. So let me see if I can tell you that story.

In the Beginning

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. Even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator's love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well

spurn his love. But this is the only way to have the relationship be a relationship.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he had to take the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: "If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve....

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15).

The first instance of this freedom to choose love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were given one and only one instruction: "Don't eat from this one tree." The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real. Then they chose to eat the fruit from that tree. They made the conscious, purposeful decision to go against the love, against the relationship. The Lover was spurned.

suffering. You can compare it to any other answer you want. And it's really more of a story than some sterile, textbook answer. A deeply relational story. But before I tell it, let me state the obvious: there is no answer that can be given that will satisfy

the emotional pain of suffering. In the movie Shadow!avids, Anthony Hopkins portrays C. S. Lewis, whose wife died soon after their marriage. In the movie, a minister tries to give Lewis a "God knows best" pat answer, causing Lewis to explode: "No! This is a mess. That's all anyone can say—it's just a mess!" For most of us, though, the search is not for an answer that will alleviate the pain as much as a reason for why the pain was ever allowed. So let me see if I can tell you that story.

In the Beginning

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. Even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator's love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well

spurn his love. But this is the only way to have the relationship be a relationship.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he had to take the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: "If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve....

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15).

The first instance of this freedom to choose love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were given one and only one instruction: "Don't eat from this one tree." The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real. Then they chose to eat the fruit from that tree. They made the conscious, purposeful decision to go against the love, against the relationship. The Lover was spurned.

suffering. You can compare it to any other answer you want. And it's really more of a story than some sterile, textbook answer. A deeply relational story. But before I tell it, let me state the obvious: there is no answer that can be given that will satisfy

the emotional pain of suffering. In the movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins portrays C. S. Lewis, whose wife died soon after their marriage. In the movie, a minister tries to give Lewis a "God knows best" pat answer, causing Lewis to explode: "No! This is a mess. That's all anyone can say—it's just a mess!" For most of us, though, the search is not for an answer that will alleviate the pain as

much as a reason for why the pain was ever allowed. So let me see if I can tell you that story.

In the Beginning

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. Even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator's love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well spurn his love. But this is the only way to have the relationship be a relationship.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he had to take the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking

of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: "If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve....

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15).

The first instance of this freedom to choose love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were given one and only one instruction: "Don't eat from this one tree." The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real. Then they chose to eat the fruit from that tree. They made the conscious, purposeful decision to go against the love, against the relationship. The Lover was spurned.

suffering. You can compare it to any other answer you want. And it's really more of a story than some sterile, textbook answer. A deeply relational story. But before I tell it, let me state the obvious: there is no answer that can be given that will satisfy

the emotional pain of suffering. In the movie Shadowlavids, Anthony Hopkins portrays C. S. Lewis, whose wife died soon after their marriage. In the movie, a minister tries to give Lewis a "God knows best" pat answer, causing Lewis to explode: "No! This is a mess. That's all anyone can say—it's just a mess!" For most of us, though, the search is not for an answer that will alleviate the pain as

much as a reason for why the pain was ever allowed. So let me see if I can tell you that story.

In the Beginning

God made us in order to love us. We are tenderly crafted and designed, each as an individual, for the purpose of being related to, known, and deeply cherished. Yet this means we are also given the freedom to make choices with our life, to live as fully conscious, self-determining beings. Even to the point of whether we choose to respond to the Creator's love. God did not choose to seduce us against our will. Instead, he determined to woo us, knowing that in so doing, we might very well

spurn his love. But this is the only way to have the relationship be a relationship.

This is the dynamic at the heart of human existence. God could have made me love him, but if he had, his relationship with me—and mine with him—would be meaningless. God wants my relationship with him and with others to be real. So when he created me, he had to take the risk of setting me free. The great leader of Israel, Joshua, voiced some of the most famous words in Scripture when speaking

of this amazing liberty in relation to his own life: "If serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve....

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15).

The first instance of this freedom to choose love was, as you might expect, made by the first humans, Adam and Eve. They were given one and only one instruction: "Don't eat from this one tree." The tree in the middle of the garden stood as the great authenticator that the love between the first humans and God was real. Then they chose to eat the fruit from that tree. They made the conscious, purposeful decision to go against the love, against the relationship. The Lover was spurned.

Native American Flute Music, 1, X @ Christianity for People Who Are X

 

Photo of Adam and Eve by Raphael (1509-11), ceiling panel at the Apostolic

Palace [Wikimedia Commons]

And then all hell broke loose.

The decision the first humans made to reject God's leadership and ongoing intimacy within a relationship with him radically altered God's original design for how the world would operate and how life would be lived. Theologians have

termed this the fall, and talk about how we now live in a fallen world. We live in a world that is not the way God intended it to be. When Satan told Eve that if she ate the fruit from the tree God had forbidden them to eat from that she would not die, he lied. That became the day death and dying were born into the human race. Their choice forever stained the relationship of loving intimacy that had been intended for eternity within the Lover's heart.

Langdon Gilkey observes that few of us find it easy to believe that one act of disobedience brought about a fall for the whole human race that is now continued in us by inheritance. Yet reflecting on his experience in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, where prisoners representing a cross-section of humanity were forced to participate in a living laboratory of community, Gilkey noted that the theological idea of a pervasive warping of our wills is the most accurate description of the reality of life. "What the doctrine of sin has said about

man's present state," Gilkey concluded, "seemed to fit the facts as I found them.".5 As it does for most.

In a scene from the movie Grand Canyon, an attorney tries to get around a traffic jam, but he gets lost in a series of back streets that take him farther and farther into parts of the town that are anything but the tony suburbs of his world. His expensive car stalls, and he uses his cell phone to call for a tow truck. While he waits, five young street toughs come up and circle his car and begin to threaten him. The tow truck arrives, and the driver begins to hook up the car, ignoring the

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Photo of Adam and Eve by Raphael (1509-11), ceiling panel at the Apostolic

Palace [Wikirnedia Commons]

And then all hell broke loose.

The decision the first humans made to reject God's leadership and ongoing intimacy within a relationship with him radically altered God's original design for how the world would operate and how life would be lived. Theologians have termed this the fall, and talk about how we now live in a fallen world. We live in a world that is not the way God intended it to be. When Satan told Eve that if she ate the fruit from the tree God had forbidden them to eat from that she would not die, he lied. That became the day death and dying were born into the human race. Their choice forever stained the relationship of loving intimacy that had been intended for eternity within the Lover's heart.

Langdon Gilkey observes that few of us find it easy to believe that one act of disobedience brought about a fall for the whole human race that is now continued in us by inheritance. Yet reflecting on his experience in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, where prisoners representing a cross-section of humanity were forced to participate in a living laboratory of community, Gilkey noted that the theological idea of a pervasive warping of our wills is the most accurate description of the reality of life. "What the doctrine of sin has said about

man's present state," Gilkey concluded, "seemed to fit the facts as I found them."5 As it does for most.

In a scene from the movie Grand Canyon, an attorney tries to get around a traffic jam, but he gets lost in a series of back streets that take him farther and farther into parts of the town that are anything but the tony suburbs of his world. His

expensive car stalls, and he uses his cell phone to call for a tow truck. While he waits, five young street toughs come up and circle his car and begin to threaten him. The tow truck arrives, and the driver begins to hook up the car, ignoring the

 

five young men trying to steal it. They, in turn, threaten him. He then takes the leader aside and says, "Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without askin' you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's supposed to be different

than what it is here."

He is right.

And the results of our collective choice to turn away from God run so deep that it isn't just moral sin and evil that we face, but natural evil as well. The whole world is sick. In the Bible, we're told that "the whole creation has been groaning" (Rom. 8:22). This is why we have earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanoes and mudslides, wildfires and birth defects, famine and AIDS. Our world is "The Groaning Planet," writes Philip Yancey, an author who has invested much of his life in exploring issues like these. The pain and suffering and heartache is a huge cosmic "scream

that something is wrong. . . that the entire human condition is out of

whack."7 These are far from original insights, much less contemporary ones. The medieval Christian philosopher Boethius aptly noted that "evil is not so much an

infliction as a deep set infection."a This raises a provocative point: God is not behind what is tragic with this world, much less responsible for it—people are. Or, as C. K. Chesterton once wrote to the editor in response to a request by the London Times for an essay on the topic, "What's Wrong with the World,"

Dear Sir:

In response to your article, "What's wrong with the world"—I am.

Yours truly,

G. K. Chestertong

Yancey, whom I mentioned earlier, was contacted by a television producer after the death of Princess Diana and asked to appear on a show to explain how God could have possibly allowed such a tragic accident. "Could it have had something to do with a drunk driver going 90 miles per hour in a narrow tunnel?" he asked the producer. "How, exactly, was God involved?" From this, Yancey reflected on

the pervasive nature of the mindset that our actions are actually an indictment of Cod. For example, when boxer Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini killed a Korean boxer in a match, the athlete said in a press conference, "Sometimes I wonder why God does the things He does." Or when, in a letter to a Christian family therapist, a young woman wrote how she became pregnant while dating a man and wanted to know why God allowed that to happen to her. Or when South Carolina mother Susan Smith gave her official confession to pushing her two sons into a lake to drown, she said that as she released the car she then went running after it as it sped down the ramp, screaming: "Oh God! Oh God, no! . . . Why did you let this happen!"

Yancey raises the decisive question by asking, "Exactly what role did God play in a boxer pummeling his opponent, a teenage couple losing control in a backseat, or a mother drowning her children?"lo God let us choose; we did, and our choices have brought continual pain and heartache and destruction. Our self-destructive bent seems to know no bounds. As historian Will Durant once wryly observed, "In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war."i I On a more personal level, here's how one psychologist described it: "We drink too much, or gamble compulsively, or allow pornography to control our minds. We drive too fast and work like there's no tomorrow. We challenge the boss disrespectfully and then blow up when he strikes back. We spend money we don't have and can't possibly repay. We fuss and fight at home and create misery. . . . We toy with the

dragon of infidelity. . . . Then when the 'wages' of those sins and foolishness come due, we turn our shocked faces up to heaven and cry, 'Why me, Lord?' In truth, we are suffering the natural consequences of dangerous behavior that is

guaranteed to produce pain."ia

Returning to the Dachau story: when my wife and I went to visit, we took a taxi from our hotel in Munich. We told our German driver where we wanted to go. He didn't say anything for a long time; he just drove. Then, out of the blue, he said in his thick German accent, "Where you go, it is a very painful place." Then he paused again and said, "When I was ten or eleven years old, my teacher took us here. She said, 'We were responsible for two world wars—now we are responsible for freedom." Then he paused again and said, "Those were the right words to say, I think."

And I think so too.

A Father's Love

After reading all of that you may be tempted to say, "Well, if he knew how it was going to turn out, he should have never created us!" because everything from cancer to concentration camps doesn't seem worth it. Yet when we blithely say such things, we betray how little we know of true love. Yes, God took a risk. Yes, the choice he gave each of us has resulted in pain and heartache and even tragedy. Yes, it would be tempting to say that it would have been easier on

everyone including God—never to have endured it. But that's not the way love—real love, at least—works. To remember this, I need only reflect on one of the most defining realities of my life—my own role as a father. I have four children, all of whom are now grown with children of their own. I remember the season of parenting when I had to let go of each one. Seeing them get married, move to other

cities, start their own lives and families. Each became free in ways they had never been free before to leave, to make choices on their own, and even to turn away from us if they so wished.

It wasn't easy. Rebecca, my oldest, was obviously the first child I had to go through this with. I thought it was hard when she went off to her first birthday party and the birthday girl suddenly announced at the start of a game, "Everyone can play but Rebecca," sending her home in tears.

I thought taking her to first grade, walking her to her desk, and then turning to leave her for an entire day for the first time—and then hearing how another child had purposefully tripped her on the playground—was hard.

I thought pulling out splinters or holding her through the night when she had a fever was hard.

I thought watching her experience the onset of puberty and the painful awkwardness and insecurity of becoming a teenager was hard.

I thought it was hard to send her off to college, where she could go her own way like never before, make her own decisions, choose her own paths and, in the process, wound and be wounded in ways that were unthinkable when I first held her in my arms.

But walking her down an aisle and putting her hand—the hand I had always held from the day she was born—into the hands of someone else. .

Now that was hard.

Each stage involved granting love-filled freedom. But now our relationship is just that—a relationship, like never before. Without guarantees, without ties, without obligations. It can be scary. She calls, or she doesn't. She texts, or she doesn't. She visits, or she doesn't. It's a relationship. But as her father, as the one who loves her more than anyone, who would lay down his life for her instantly, let me tell you

what has never entered my mind.

Never having her.

Never bringing her into the world.

Never going through life with her.

Even though she can reject me, hurt me, turn from me, and tear out my heart by hurting herself as well as others. If someone were to say, 'Why did you ever bother?" my only reply would be, "You have obviously never been a father." And as one who has stood by the side of countless other fathers who have endured far more pain and anguish than I have—suffering through prodigal years, chronic illnesses, and even death—I can attest to the solidarity that is held toward the sentiment. No matter the wound, no matter the cost, the worth and value of bringing our children into the world goes without question.

Cod's desire to be in a relationship with us is why suffering cannot be reduced to mere injustice, much less punishment. As a Time magazine reporter attempting to understand Christianity's unique perspective rightly noted, "It is a harrowing invitation to a higher dialogue."13 That higher dialogue is love. When one loves, there is risk—risk of suffering, risk of loss, risk of rejection. But without this willingness to be wounded on the deepest of levels, there cannot exist authentic relationship on the deepest of levels. Cod's great longing is to commune with us

for eternity. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, "Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills

involves, and you will find that you have excluded life itself "L4 Cod has refused to let the perils of authentic love prevent him from loving. As Lewis writes in The Four Loves,

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you

must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can

be perfectly safe from all the dangers ... of love is Hell.

Hopefully now you can imagine why Cod chose to risk creating us out of a Father's love for us, but what would our choice have been? Apart from rare and tragic cases of suicide, where emotional and psychological trauma drive a person to self-destruction, few truly wish for their lives to end. Glib statements such as "I wish I had never been born" are seldom meant. Even among the most wretched of conditions, we intuitively understand the priceless nature of life itself, clinging to it tenaciously and thanking Cod for every next breath. Which is why it's equally glib to say, "Why doesn't Cod just end it all now?" If Cod wiped out all evil, all wrongdoing, every person who committed harm against another, tonight, how

many of us would live to see the dawn? I know Iwouldn't. You see, Cod could wipe out all evil, all suffering, this very night. But he doesn't, and the reason he doesn't is because of his love for people like you and me. Because if at midnight tonight Cod decreed that all evil would be stamped out in the universe, not one of us would be here at 12:0.

So Where Is God?

So where is Cod when it comes to the potential pain in my daughter's life—the pain that might come her way and the pain that might flow back to me—because I

chose to have her? The same place Cod is when it comes to all of the pain in this

world: right by our side, caring for us, weeping with us, and longing to hold us in his arms.

Philip Yancey once wrote about a pastor friend of his who was in conflict with his fifteen-year-old daughter. He knew she was using birth control, and several nights she had not bothered to come home at all. As parents, he and his wife had tried various forms of punishment, but nothing seemed to make much of a difference. Their daughter lied to them, deceived them, and always found a way to turn the tables on them, blaming her behavior on them for being so strict. Yancey's friend said that he remembered standing in front of the window in his living room one night, staring out into the darkness and waiting for his daughter to come home. He said he felt such rage. He was so angry with his daughter for the way she manipulated him and his wife and constantly tried to find ways to hurt them. He was also upset because he knew she was hurting herself more than anyone. In that moment he understood more than ever before the passages in the Bible where God expressed frustration—passages talking about how the people knew how to wound God and how God would cry out in pain.

"And yet I must tell you," he said, "when my daughter came home that night (or rather the next morning), I wanted nothing in the world so much as to take her in my arms, to love her, to tell her I wanted the best for her. I was a helpless, lovesick father." Yancey writes that now, when he reflects on God, he holds up that image of the lovesick father. Because it really is the most biblical image you can have —a God who is standing in front of the window, gazing achingly into the darkness,

waiting for his child to come home.j

Countless numbers of people who have opened up their heart to God's presence and comfort in the midst of their pain have found this to be true. After being a prisoner in Ravensbruck, one of the infamous concentration camps of Nazi

Germany, Corrie ten Boom traveled throughout the world, telling her story of suffering in the context of a faith in God. For thirty-three years following her time in Ravensbruck, she never had a permanent home. When she was eighty-five years old, some friends provided her with a lovely home in California. It was a luxury she never dreamed she would have. One day, as a friend was leaving her home after a visit, he said, "Corrie, hasn't God been good to give you this beautiful place?" She

replied firmly, "God was good when I was in Ravensbruck, too."jj

One of the most difficult tasks I was ever called upon to perform was as a pastor of a church outside of Louisville, Kentucky, during my seminary years. A friend and member of the church called and told me that his next-door neighbor had just committed suicide. She was the mother of five girls, and her youngest daughter had found her. They had no church, no pastor. He asked them if it would be all right if he called someone from his church to come. They said yes, so he called me. When I arrived, I saw huddled in a corner of the house the five daughters with

their father. I thought: What am I doing here? What could I possibly say, what could! ever do, that would help at this moment? I went over to the family, introduced myself, and said the only words I could think of: "I just want you to know that I'm sorry. I'm so very, very sorry."

The girl who had found her mother looked up at me and said, "Would you pray for us?" So I prayed. I don't remember a single word of that prayer. But when I finished, that little girl looked up at me and simply said, "God's here, isn't he?"

And I said, "Yes, he is."

She said, "I thought so. I could feel him hugging me when you prayed. It's going to be all right, isn't it?"

And I said, "Yes, honey, it's going to be hard, but it's going to be all right." But being with us is not all that God has done.

He's invested himself in the process of healing the wounds that come from our

choices by entering into the suffering process with us in order to lift us out of it. The heart of the Christian faith is that God himself in human form came to earth in

the person of Jesus and suffered. He knows about pain. He knows about rejection. He knows about hunger, injustice, and cruelty because he has experienced suffering. An ancient graffito found at the museum on the Palatine Hill in Rome, Italy, shows a crucified figure with a donkey's head, bearing the inscription "Alexamenos worships his god." While meant to disparage and even mock, the image rings true.

We worship, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann observed, the crucified God. Jesus on the cross was God entering into the reality of human suffering, experiencing it just like we do, in order to demonstrate that even when we used our free will to reject him, his love never ended. This was not suffering for its own sake, but suffering so that we might use our free will to choose again—this time, making the right choice. Frederick Buechner put it this way: "Like a father saying about his sick child, 'I'd do anything to make you well,' God finally calls his own bluff and does it."18 The ultimate deliverance, the most significant healing, the most strategic rescue, has come. Our greatest and most terrible affliction has been addressed. God has given us the greatest answer to our questions. He has given us himself.

And he is going to keep giving himself to any and all who will turn to him until the end of time. And time will come to an end. A missionary was once asked what Jesus will say when he returns to the earth, because Jesus himself said he would return at the end of all things. He thought it was an odd question, but then he remembered a verse in the Bible about Jesus's return from the first letter that the apostle Paul wrote to the people of the church in Thessolonica. It says, "For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout" (i Thess. 4:16 NLT, emphasis added). The person wanted to know what Jesus will shout. The missionary thought a moment, and then it came to him. He said, "Enough." Jesus will shout, "Enough!" Enough suffering, enough starvation, enough terror. Enough death, enough indignity, enough lives trapped in hopelessness. Enough sickness

and disease. At the end, when he returns, "Christ will shout, 'Enough!"g.

 

"Alexamenos worships his god" is a second-century pagan graffito depicting a

crucified figure with a donkey's head. [Wikimedia Commons]

That is the story you need to know.

This raises the real question when it comes to our broken world: Will pain and

suffering drive you away from God, or will it drive you to God? The whole reason it is being allowed and that "Enough!" has not been shouted yet is because God is

hoping for people like you to turn to him. You may say, "You mean God endures all that for. . . me?" Yes. Do you want to know the reason?

He's your Father. The God of the Bible

The questions about why the world is such a sin-stained, screwed-up place are not the end of the matter, are they? While every faith, every philosophy, every worldview must speak to the reason for the existence of a very broken world, the Christian faith has another set of questions waiting in the wings. These questions have to deal with the fact that when people go to the Bible to learn more about God, they find out that it's God who seems to be behind a lot of the pain and suffering—even the one causing it! It's the God of the Bible doling out capital punishment for seemingly minor infractions; the one who is asking for blood sacrifices; the one who is calling for the slaughter of entire people groups. The late Christopher Hitchens wrote a book on this titled God is Not Great. Fellow sympathizer Richard Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a "moral monster." It doesn't take familiarity with the names and places to feel the force of Dawkins's ruthless examination of, particularly, the Old Testament text of the Bible. For example, Dawkins calls God's commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to be "disgraceful" and tantamount to "child abuse and bullying." He calls the killing of the Canaanites by the Israelites, as a dictate from God, an "ethnic cleansing" in which "bloodthirsty massacres" were carried out with "xenophobic relish." He says that the Israelite leader Joshua's destruction of Jericho is "morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds." Conclusion? "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,

capriciously malevolent bully."

So is the God of the Bible a moral monster?

When you read the Bible and find instances of seemingly harsh punishment, the call for sacrifices and even the mass slaughter of entire nations—which, I might add, you do find—do we still have a good and loving God on our hands? Or do we have a terribly evil Being to be rejected, and certainly not to be believed in?

There's no doubt you can paint a picture of the God of the Bible any way you want if you are selective in what you focus on and take the Scripture out of its original context and meaning. I once saw a YouTube video titled "Scary Mary." It

was a collection of scenes from Disney's classic family film Mary Poppins. The mashup took what looked like "scary" scenes from the movie out of context, changed the background music, and produced a trailer as though it was a horror film. The mashup obviously did not reveal the true character of Mary Poppins. It was creative but misleading, showing Mary Poppins as evil. Could we be doing this with our image of the God of the Bible?

Slaughters

Let's look at just one of the concerns about the God of the Bible, arguably the one most discussed—the slaughter of the Canaanites. It is what some have called the most difficult and bloody part of the Bible, and the one that on the surface is the most ethically troubling. It's found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. The context is critical. God led the people of Israel out of slavery and out of Egypt. He was not only forming them into a new people, a new nation, but taking them to a new land that would become known as the Promised Land. But it wasn't just given to them. They had to take it, possess it, and, at times, conquer it. And that's what brings us to one of the bloodiest scenes in the Bible: the slaughter of the

Canaanites by the Israelites on the directive of God himself. There are several places where this is referenced in the Bible. Here's an overview description:

As you approach a town to attack it, you must first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare

to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands the town over to you, use your swords to kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy

the plunder from your enemies that the LORD your God has given you. (Deut. 20:10-14 NLT)

(Before you read on, let me just add that this was not a license to rape and pillage. It was later detailed that if an Israelite took one of these women, it meant that they were going to have to take them as their wife and treat them with all the respect and decorum that came with that marriage. Now let's continue reading.)

But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of the

nations in the land you will enter. In those towns that the LORD your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing. You must completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and

Jebusites, just as the LORD your God has commanded you. This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the

worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the LORD your God. (Deut. 20:15-18 NLT)

So was that an indiscriminate massacre, an ethnic cleansing along the lines of Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust, or Saddam Hussein's slaughter of the Kurds?

Something that deserves not only universal condemnation, but a complete rejection of the God of the Bible? Or is there something more here?

First, this was more than just an invasion or conquest. This was God's planned punishment of the people of Canaan for their ways, long in the making and in the coming. Yes, God was displacing them from the land to give it to the people of Israel. But that displacement came because of their ferocious, habitual,

unrepentant wickedness. And I do mean wicked. The Canaanites were marked by the worst possible aspects of slavery, religious prostitution, and sexual cults. (Not that there's anything good about slavery, but think taking slavery to the darkest place that you can possibly take it.) Scholars have called the Canaanite cult religion the most sexually depraved of any in the ancient world.21. They had given themselves over to every kind of sexual depravity, including incest and even bestiality. At their worst, their orgiastic worship of idols even included human sacrifice—both of children and adults. There's imagery of their cult sexual practice of bathing themselves in blood.

The Bible says that God had been tolerating this for more than four hundred years. Their wickedness kept increasing and increasing and God kept enduring it. Four hundred years of restraint and patience. Why? Because no matter what you've heard, judgment is always his last resort. But the wickedness reached a point where Scripture talks about how God couldn't stomach it anymore and he vomited them out of his mouth (see Gen. 1:16 and Lev. 18:24-30). So what stands out in the Bible is not God's acts of justice, but how much he is marked by mercy. By restraint. But this was a time when God determined that there was no other recourse but divine judgment.

A second point to remember is that this was a divine, God-ordained action. In other words, it was God's call to make. Not just the punishment, but the

possession of the land—who he was going to give that land to. Israel didn't have an inherent right to the land. Neither did the Canaanites. But God did. He could give it to whomever he wanted. So if someone says, "I can't believe God kicked the Canaanites out and gave away their land," an appropriate response is, "What do you mean by 'their land'?" This was God's land. He made it. He could do with it whatever he wanted to do. Israel would never have been justified in doing this had God not ordered it. But God did. So don't think about this as a simple invasion of one nation into another. Or a strong army beating a weaker army, as if strength or desire gives anyone the right to be aggressive. You'll never find that in the Bible. This was God saying, "I'm telling you, this land is now yours. It is not theirs."

But there's a third observation to make here, and it's about the command to "destroy every living thing" in the cities. When you read something like that it sounds over the top and unnecessary even for divine judgment. But the command was for the cities, not the outlying areas. This is a critical point. In the culture of the ancient Near East, most people lived in outlying areas, not the cities. The cities

were military fortifications for soldiers and military officers. It's not where the

women and children, farmers and laborers lived. So in terms of warfare, this was not about targeting civilians. Also, in the ancient language of the day, even the phrase about destroying everyone in the city was common hyperbole. It wasn't about literally taking every life, but ensuring that the war was won, the enemy defeated, the task accomplished. Think how in our day we talk about a sports team that blew their opponent away, or slaughtered them, or annihilated them. It's a form of rhetoric. When you study the language of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, this was very common. They would talk about how they destroyed every man, and then later talk about what they were going to do with the survivors. In other words, destroying everything meant winning decisively, not literally

destroying everything. This was more about purifying than purging.

Which brings up the final point to remember in all this, one that is unavoidable: it's the idea of God's wrath. And that may be what bothers us the most. That God is a God who is angry with evil, at war with evil, livid with evil. It is as if we have determined God has no right to any emotion but love. And, if he does express anger, we have a bad or immoral God on our hands. But why does an angry God bother us so much? I once read some penetrating words on this from Yale theologian Miroslav Voif. He was born in Croatia and lived through the nightmare years of ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia—atime that included the destruction of churches, the raping of women, and the murdering of innocents. He once thought that wrath and anger were beneath God, but he said he came to realize that his view of God had been too low:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates,

200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where Soo,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God

 

who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.3

Yes.

When it comes to God, the fire that warms can be the fire that burns. I'm not sure any other kind of God would even matter.

What does it mean to be poor in spirit? (Matthew 5:3)

What does it mean to be poor in spirit? (Matthew 5:3):


20 examples of what it means to be poor in spirit

Jesus began the well-known Sermon on the Mount with “Blessed are the poor in spirit …” Here is an insight into what that means.

3 min · ActiveChristianityAksel Smith

1. “And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’” Matthew 5:1-3.
2. 
   
3. Being poor in spirit must be very important and valuable, if it means taking possession of the kingdom of heaven itself!
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5. How can we know if we are poor in spirit? Here are some characteristics of someone who is poor in spirit:
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8. Always lowly in his own eyes. He does not exalt himself; he is not proud. Even though he may be considered insignificant by others, he sees it all as God’s will and rejoices that he is allowed to share in the sufferings of Christ. It becomes natural for him to go the way of the Lamb; humiliation becomes his nourishment, exaltation his reward. (1 Peter 5:5; 1 Peter 4:13; 1 Peter 5:6)
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11. Loves to do all his work in the hidden and does not receive honor from men. (Matthew 6:1-4)
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14. Loves to occupy the lowest place, not because he desires to be more esteemed, but because he thinks that this is precisely the place that it is suitable for him. (Luke 14:7-11; Philippians 2:3)
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17. Reserved in his conduct – neither aggressive nor demanding.
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20. Loves to give up his advantages for the benefit of others. (Philippians 2:4)
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23. Does not seek to be anything great, whether it is on an earthly or a spiritual level; his only desire is to do God’s will from moment to moment.
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26. Does not seek to gain influence with people, yet his entire longing is that people might come under the influence of God. (1 Corinthians 2:1-5; 1 Corinthians 9:19-23)
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29. Time is precious to him – he has none to waste; yet he is calm and is never led to do anything in haste. (Ephesians 5:16-17)
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32. Sanctifies himself so that others, by his example, can sanctify themselves in truth. (John 17:19; 1 Timothy 4:16)
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35. Denies himself so that his life may not be an offense to others in any way. (Matthew 16:24)
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38. Satisfied with the cross God gives him to bear, and he does not complain when others bother him.
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41. Does not draw back in the sufferings of Christ, so that after he himself has been tested, he can be of help to others. (Romans 8:18; 2 Corinthians 1:3-5)
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44. Just as happy wherever God puts him – whether it is among the teeming masses or in a solitary place – because he meets God in each place by doing His will.
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47. Places great value on the fact that wherever he is or has been, others should find only the truth, be it in spiritual or in earthly things.
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50. His love compels him to contribute to the others’ good; he feels that he is indebted to everyone. His life evolves as the life of a servant, and he is more than willing to bear the others’ burdens.
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53. Never dreams about great things, but rather takes heed to the small things. No work is insignificant, and no one is too small to be served.
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56. He does not discriminate and is a servant to all. Therefore, he goes just as willingly to where sorrow prevails as to where joy is overflowing. (Mark 9:35; 1 Corinthians 9:19-23; Romans 12:15-16)
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59. Lives his life for the purpose of laying it down as a sacrifice. (Mark 10:45; John 15:12-13)
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62. Willingly steps on thorns if only he can refresh the others in their sufferings by doing so. (2 Corinthians 1:3-6; Colossians 1:24)
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65. His ear is open to God’s voice, not just to enjoy it in self-satisfaction, but in order to do what he has heard. (James 1:22)
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67. Poverty in spirit is really something to strive after – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!”

Blessed are the poor in spirit, Matthew 5:3 - Wikipedia

Matthew 5:3 - Wikipedia:

Matthew 5:3

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Matthew 5:3
← 5:2 5:4 →
Matthew 5:3 depicted in the window of a Trittenheim church
Book	Gospel of Matthew
Christian Bible part	New Testament

Matthew 5:3 is the third verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. It is the opening verse of the Sermon on the Mount, and the section of the sermon known as the Beatitudes.

Contents

• 1Content
• 2Interpretation
• 3See also
• 4References

Content[edit]

Text of Matthew 5:3 in the Beatitudes at Our Lady of Peace Shrine, along I-80 in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming (2016).

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. (KJV)^[1]

Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι, ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν

beati pauperes spiritu quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum (Vulgate)

For a collection of other versions see BibleHub Matthew 5:3.

Interpretation[edit]

This verse opens the first of nine statements of who is blessed. Each, except for the last, follows the same pattern of naming a group of people and the reward they will receive.

Hans Dieter Betz notes that in Jesus' time blessed was a common way of describing someone who is wealthy. In his discussion of Croesus in Herodotus, for instance, the link between being blessed and being wealthy is assumed^[vague] .^[2] Similarly, Albright and Mann prefer the word "fortunate" to "blessed" for makarios. They argue that the term has none of the religious implications that the word blessed today has in the English language.^[3] Kodjak believes that this opening of the sermon was meant to shock the audience, it was a deliberate inversion of standard values. Today the text is so common that its shock value has been lost.^[4] While not a mainstream view, Betz feels this Beatitude has important pre-Christian precedents. He traces it back to Socrates' notion of enkrateia, which explained that the philosopher was one who had no interest in wealth. This idea was adopted by the Cynics, who rejected wealth and saw poverty as the only route to freedom. This group, while small, had a wide influence and some of their ideas were embraced by some Jewish communities at the time of Christ.^[5]

Luke 6:20 simply has "blessed are the poor"; that Matthew adds "in spirit" is seen to be of great consequence. The phrase does not appear in the Old Testament, but Psalm 34:18 comes close.^[6] The phrase "poor in spirit" occurs in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and seems to have been an important notion to the Qumran community. Scholars agree that "poor in spirit" does not mean lacking in spirit, be it courage, the Holy Spirit, or religious awareness. Rather it is that poverty is not only a physical condition, but also a spiritual one. In fact, the more self aware a person is of his or her spiritual poverty caused by the innate human condition of the sinful nature, the more one is humbly aware that they are "poor in spirit" left to his or her own ways without Jesus Christ as Savior. Without Jesus the Christ alive and active in one's soul, it remains in a completely impoverished spiritual state; once a person declares Jesus as Lord and Savior of his or her life, Jesus sustains them through a daily renewing of their poor spirit: "Then Jesus declared, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.'" (John 6:35).

The important phrase Kingdom of Heaven is generally understood as referring to the Messianic age after the Second Coming. For a full discussion of Matthew's use of this phrase see Matthew 3:2.

See also[edit]

• Related Bible parts: Psalm 34, Matthew 11, Luke 6

References[edit]

1. ^ The World English Bible has the same, literal, translation as KJV. For a collection of other versions, see BibleGateway Matthew 5:3 (click on the arrow next to "American Standard Version").
2. ^ Betz, Hans Dieter. Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. translations by Laurence Welborn. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.^{[page needed]}
3. ^ Albright, W.F. and C.S. Mann. "Matthew." The Anchor Bible Series. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971.
4. ^ Kodjak, Andrej (1986). A Structural Analysis of the Sermon on the Mount. New York: de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3110108330.
5. ^ Betz, Hans Dieter. Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. translations by Raphael Clemente. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.^{[page needed]}
6. ^ Nolland, John. The Gospel of Matthew: a commentary on the Greek text. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005 pg. 199