The God Effect – Chapter 13: Escape from Darkness

A good part of the last chapter was fairly grim, but it ended with a much-needed note of hope.  The relationship between mankind to God was ruined a so long ago but the situation is not a dead end.  If God is all that we have found Him to be, He is not one to leave us stuck in the darkness that was caused by our first parents (Adam and Eve).  So, this chapter is not only going to wade into the darkness and everything it infects and ruins (what the Bible calls “sin”) but will also pull everything that we have talked about over the last 12 chapters together so that anyone who decides to follow through will know the path to the end of the tunnel, the God-given way into life in the light.

Anemic Answers, Disappointing Results

I am sure that there are all kinds of ways to explain the miseries and malfunctions that all of us live with from the first day we are born.  A lot of them sound pretty good.  What’s not attractive about the claim that loving yourself will radiate love to others?  Or does it not sound logical that the weaknesses and disfunctions in us can be solved if we can map out the offences against us by parents, stepparents, foster parents, or guardians?  Maybe it is just a matter of finding your true self.

Now, even if, for the moment, we go with one of these explanations, there are still huge stubborn problems.  How did my supposed self-love get messed up?  If others in my life ruined mine, how did they get in such bad shape themselves?  If you believe that you don’t know who you are inside, how did you get so disconnected?  The truth of the matter is that anything the world offers as an explanation never really gets to the root of the sicknesses and evil. 

The Depth of the Darkness

So how bad is it?  It is bad.  The corruption of our bodies is probably the thing that feels the harshest to us personally and death is the worst part of that.  It is a strange situation.  Death is a normal part of life, but we never get used to the pain of it. 

According to the book of Genesis, we were actually originally created to live forever physically.   It makes perfect sense.  If the Creator of life is Himself eternal, why would He not make our bodies fit for eternity in a material paradise?  Clearly something went wrong and that is where sin comes in.  It was at that point of the rebellion against the holy and eternal God, because of the break from Him, the creator of life, that the power of physical eternal life in us was broken.

The results didn’t end there.  From the day we are born, we begin a journey toward death and along the way it is spiked with sickness, injuries, and deterioration.  Before Adam and Eve’s fall, there was not even the possibility of such things.    Behavior and relationships didn’t escape either.  With the alienation from God, all of the problems that “The Most Basic Problem” section talked about in chapter 12 became the stuff of everyday existence on Earth.  The first murder happened between two brothers not long after our first parents were evicted from paradise. 

But there is something else we live with that is a little less obvious.  The death that we inherited included the spiritual part of us – our souls.  If the Bible is to be believed as we talked about before, it means that that brokenness includes our spiritual side.  The great spiritual relationship our first parents began with was lost when they rebelled, sinned against God, and we all inherit the same condition.  To put it bluntly, the spiritual relationship we could have had with God became dead.  Yes, everyone still has their spiritual part which gives life to the body, but having a soul does not bridge the divide of spiritual death between man and God. 

Rescue – If You Want It

Let’s get personal now. It is a heavy weight and an impossible-looking situation to think that God is out there, watching and waiting for us to figure out how to deal with our hidden struggles and corrupt heart, not to mention our outward failures and offenses.  The good news is that there is a rescue, if anyone wants it.  It centers on Jesus Christ.  Because, according to the Bible, He was both God and man sent by the Father, He has to be the way.  For now, I am going to deal with the absolutely critical results of that.  A later chapter will get more in depth about Jesus Himself.

This is where, once again, God’s character (chapter 5) and His reaching out to us (chapter 8) comes into play.  He works it all together (chapter 6).  Because He loves perfectly, is perfectly righteous and just, and the only one with the power (chapter 4) to step in, He made the first move.  Since the case has been made that the Bible is God’s communication (chapters 8 & 9), let’s use it (chapter 10).

The Bible says that there is only one mediator between us and God, Jesus Christ and that God’s love caused Him to send Jesus to pay for the sin of mankind in general and for our individual sin in particular.  The shocking thing is that even Satan knows all this.  There is certainly a big difference between him and us! 

The difference is submission and allegiance.  In other words, it is one thing to know that Jesus is the way, that His sacrifice is the payment, and that He was resurrected to finish the process (even Satan knows those facts and hates them), it is quite another thing to personally accept what He did and ask Him to take over our life.  

God only asks a few things of us so that the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our offenses (sins) can give us peace with Him and an actual living relationship with Him. The crazy thing is, all anyone has to do is ask.  Prayer, just talking to God, is the way to ask.  The Bible says that we need to tell Jesus that we understand and accept what He did for us.  We also need to ask Him for His forgiveness for our sin.  Finally, we need to tell Him that we want Him to take over our life.  It sounds so simple, but for a lot of people it can be hard to do if they really mean it.

Now, anyone can say words and pray, but it is important to understand that, as the Bible also says, it is only the prayer of a sincere heart that God will answer.  We know that we can’t play games with God.  He knows the hearts of men and, as the Bible says, judges their intentions.

Life On the Other End

There is beautiful fruit from sincerely praying to Jesus the way we have just talked about.  At the moment of that prayer, there is, in our souls, what Jesus called being born again and what the book of First Corinthians says is the making of a whole new inner person, a “new creation”.  Also, the book of Romans says that at the same time as that, the judgement of God over us that would have condemned us is paid for forever.  Then, as new “creatures”, the Holy Spirit starts helping with the power to fight and win over sin.

But the blessings are not done.  The promise of God through Scripture is a life after our physical death that will last for all eternity.  Our Heavenly home will be in the very presence of God with no more “tears, death, crying, or pain!

The God Effect: Chapter 12 – The Most Basic Problem

It’s great to realize that I and everyone around me actually has the purposely created “image of God” built into us.  But is that how everyone behaves, always making the right decisions or acting with totally pure motives?  Does anyone we know always act as if they did everything in line with God’s character?  We all know that people are not perfect and in a lot of cases are just plain corrupted.

If chapter 11 is true, there has to be an explanation for the world we actually live in.  That’s what this chapter is about – figuring out what the problem is, what it looks like in real life, and how it started in the first place.  I am predicting that a lot of what we talk about will not go over very well.  But if it turns out that it fits reality, it should actually be a big help in understanding life.

I suppose that there must be hundreds of ways out there to try and explain the problem of evil in the world or how every single person on Earth has ended up with less than perfect records of clear thinking, pure motives, and stellar behavior.  One way to go is to leave God out of the picture.  That way of explaining wickedness is what modern psychology is based on.  It really boils down to believing that the dark side of humanity comes out of things like a messed up society, traumatic experiences, or bad genetics.  I will admit that all those things can help explain how we behave at times, but none of them explain the problem of evil. 

It should be pretty obvious at this point that we can’t leave God out of this.  We know too much about Him and  too much about how He made us.  To cut Him out at this point would make no sense.  What makes a lot more sense is to use everything we have learned, including the character of the Bible, to look at the problem of evil from God’s perspective.

The Beginning

God has a lot to say about how the world got into the sorry shape it’s in.  If we take the Bible at its word, the problems started in paradise!  According to the historical record, and I know of no reason not to believe it is recorded history, it began with our first parents, Adam and Eve.  We could get into a lot of discussion about Adam and Eve themselves, but for now let’s take the first book of the Bible at its word and see if in the end, it makes sense.

According to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve gave in to Satan’s lies and temptations.  He claimed to give  them the chance to take over for themselves “the knowledge of good and evil” so that they could operate morally without God.  Satan’s deception was crafty.  He didn’t tell them to outright disobey God but instead offered them all the attractions of the world and put doubt in their minds about God’s integrity and His motives for the rules for living in Eden (paradise).  But probably the biggest part of the whole temptation was Satan’s claim that if they took him up on his claim, they would “be like God” Himself.  There could not have been a more horrific challenge to God’s holiness, and they fell for it.  At that point, that act of rebellion, was the first of what the Bible calls sin.

The result of what they did was catastrophic, not only for them and everyone that would come after them, but also for the rest of creation.  God had trusted them to take care of everything and they blew it and defied Him in the process. 

The Fallout

The world we live in now, and all the weaknesses, ailments, and struggles we have to live with came out of that whole mess of sin.  The effect of that “fall” hit every part the special ways that God made us (chapter 11).  It is not hard to see it every day, if not in every hour of every day. 

The best way to think about it is by looking at the results as being torn apart from God and everything He made us to be.  For example, when we die, it is really a separation of our souls, the spiritual part of us, from our bodies, the one leaving the other.  We are also obviously separated from God too.  After we die, that separation is carried on into eternity with no way to reconnect again unless He steps in.  After all, if we are unholy, why does it make any sense to think that death would just automatically fix the problem between Him and us?  How would that even work?   Finally, we are now forced to deal with living in the physical world with all of the good and bad that goes along with it.  In a real way, even creation is spoiled and separated from how it was meant to be.

The fallout from all this gets personal too.  The stresses and conflicts from unholy people trying to live with other unholy people create all kinds of problems.  Even in the best families, spouses irritate each other, and siblings argue, sometimes, sadly, to the point of being alienated from each other.  At work, conflicts and challenges show up everywhere, from the lowest people on the totem pole to the highest.

The bottom line is that the damage from the first rebellion infected everything and everyone from then on.

The Most Basic Problem

When evil invaded the universe through the actions of our first parents, the worst damage was to mankind’s conscience, his ability to make correct decisions between right and wrong.  We lost the ability to be pure and that means that our minds and even our souls are spoiled.  This is the most basic problem between us and God, between us and other people, and is one of the hardest things to accept.  No one, including myself, likes to think that we are not mostly good, or are at least able to always think clearly and live righteously.  But that’s just not real life and, if we are honest with ourselves, there is just no way we are that holy.  The evil in the rest of the world proves the point even more.

It is easy to call out the sins of the rest of the world with its violence, perversions, injustices, and abuses.  But what about things closer to home?  What about the things we have personally seen or been a part of ourselves?  As it turns out, the Bible has some pretty good lists – “strife, jealousy, angry tempers, selfishness, slander, gossip, arrogance, immorality, indecent behavior, rebelliousness, envy, drunkenness, carousing, blasphemies, and evil thoughts”.  Jesus said that the most dangerous ones are hidden in our hearts and that no one else can see them but God.  By the way, that includes anything that violates our own consciences.  When we look at this list, it is much too easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have  never been part of any of it or, for some of us, that we are still there.

The Cost

So, is there a cost from all those imperfections and, as the Bible calls them, sins?  Here is another hard thing to understand; there has to be!  Think back about God’s character again.  Everything we know about Him leaves us with no choice.  God’s faithfulness to His holiness, righteousness, truth, and goodness demand that the things on the “sins list” and more, must be reacted to.  Remember, right now we are not talking about vague “out there somewhere” kinds of stuff, but about things in us that are offensive to God Himself and a lot of times to other people.  We are talking about real people, including ourselves, that carry those darknesses and therefore have to face the alienation they cause, both between us and God.  This is not just a matter of keeping or breaking rules, it is about being offensive to God because of who He is.

There are only two ways for God to deal with these assaults on His character and on His moral standards that are a part of His character.  Both of them come out of His holiness; the need to have righteousness and do justice.  God cannot just wait for us to show up after we die and say, “Oh well, I’ll just call Myself loving and ignore all the crimes against me”.  That’s not how justice and righteousness work.  Instead, in a legal kind of way, He has to judge us in some way or another.  There simply has to be payment in order to set things right.

The two choices are pretty obvious.  Either He has to condemn the offender forever since the offences are forever against an eternal God or the second way, He could pay an eternal payment Himself to cover the sin.  It sounds unimaginable, but that means God Himself would have to be the payment!  We will talk about this later on, but that is exactly why it is so important to understand who Jesus Christ is how He was that payment.

Justification and Healing

After all of this, a very bright future is possible, but it hinges on owning up to the sin we carry and willingly accepting God’s plan and payment so that things can be made right.  The results of the fall of our first parents are devastating in the here and now and into eternity.  How can it be anything else?  Everything is based on accepting eternal principles from an eternal God.  It makes perfect sense that God would, for the sake of righteousness, use judgement and justice against the sin and at the same time exercise His mercy, grace, and love to offer the payment, forgiveness, and new life to those of us who act on it.   

The God Effect: Chapter 11 – Man, Who Are You?

The world is full of ideas about what makes a human being.  By that I mean things like what makes people different from animals.  The answer would have to take into account things like language, having a conscience, and being able to have logical thinking.  The problem of good and evil comes to mind also.  But what is behind all of that?  In the end, even understanding the claims of Christianity involves understanding who human beings are.

How It Starts Matters

If there is one thing I learned about God, it is that He does not mess around when He does something. 

Being God means that when He acts and uses His power, He goes all in.  He is never surprised and does not wait to let circumstances dictate His next move or how He has to reach His goals.  The same thing is true when it comes to how human beings were made in the beginning. 

I think of it this way: If mankind just came to be out of chance, it would mean that God didn’t notice what was going on until after it started.  That hardly fits a God who knows everything all the time.  If evolution was the way it happened, God would have taken something second hand, an animal (apes), either because He didn’t want to mess around with starting from scratch, maybe out of laziness or incompetence, or because he didn’t have the power to do it differently.  None of this fits the God we have come to know about.

 Maybe I’m being picky, but the way mankind started in the beginning makes a difference. Knowing the beginning is the only way to truly understand who we are and how the world has come to be in the condition it is in.  For one thing, being created gives value to a person far more than being an improved model of an animal.  What can be more valuable than being specially made?  It also gives life a purpose.  There is simply no comparison between being made for a reason and from a plan rather than exploding into existence out of dumb luck.  The believability and truthfulness of the Bible comes into play also.  As far as a plain reading of Scripture is concerned (remember the golden rule for reading it), there is no question about what it claims.

The Beginning

The testimony of the Bible is that God personally and directly made man and woman literally from the ground up, Adam from the dirt of the earth and Eve from the flesh of Adam.  To modern ears that sounds like fantasy, if not just crazy.  So, I’m going to take a step or two back and remember what God is like. 

God is eternal, without beginning or end, unlike humans who had to have a beginning and have a physical death.  Because He is eternal, God has always had the power of life, even when there was not life around Him.  He is all-powerful and therefore is the only one who can make life.  The bottom line is that humans are radically different from animals and our fantastic uniqueness in all of creation should be expected to automatically reflect our Maker.

We Are a Reflection

Here is what I think is an important question to think about, not just for the sake of knowing where we have come from, but also for the sake of understanding how mankind is so unique compared to any other creations on this earth.

The very first statement in the record of God’s creation of mankind, in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, is “Let us make man in our image, according to Our likeness.”  God does not make that statement about any other creature.  It is declaration of the “image of God” in all people.  That means that among every other created thing in the universe, humans carry in them traits that reflect the One they came from.  This is massively important for getting a handle on how people are engineered – how they act toward others, how their moral “compass” works, whether or not they have souls, and how they think.  That is why in this first part of this section, I’m going to talk about at least four traits that make every one of us what some people have called the “crown of creation”.

We Have Souls

It is obvious that for humans to be different from other living things, there has to be more to us than just our flesh and bones.  For most people, it is the most natural thing in the world to assume that they have a spiritual part to themselves.  It is a built-in way of thinking, so much so that those who deny that part of us are very much in a small minority.

There is a reason for that.  Having a non-physical part, a soul, a spiritual part, was designed in us from God who is Himself Spirit.  Mankind being spiritual comes with some important results.  For one thing, it means that we are all made with the ability to know and experience God on a personal level.  That’s why the Bible is clear that in order to do that, we all have to have a spiritual side to begin with.

In the here and now, that is a great blessing.  It means that there is a possibility for anyone to worship God in a real way.  Also, there is a special bond between those of us who share those times of fellowship and worship because there is a common inner life going on.  There is also a less obvious benefit.  Think of it, since our bodies and souls are so tightly intertwined, a healthy soul will empower a healthy mental life.

Because we get our “spiritness” from God and He is eternal, people will never stop being alive; our soul/spirit is also eternal.  We have been created for eternity. Because our body and soul are “woven” together and because they are God’s handywork, He holds all people accountable for how they live in this life.  We will eventually face our holy creator.

We Are Intellectuals

There are probably not too many people who ever think about thinking.  But thinking for ourselves, being able to have understanding, be creative, have imagination, and be able to communicate with others is exactly what we should expect if we are creatures made by God. 

This part of the image of God in man is obvious.  Everyday life simply cannot be lived without being able to think and have feelings in a way that no animal can ever come close to.  Not only that, but God’s communication with us through the Bible depends on our being able to understand and follow through with whatever He has given us.  That is why He makes such a big deal of training our minds to think clearly on right things. 

We Know Good and Evil

One of the most important things that came out of understanding God’s character was that He is holy, righteous, good, and just.  The other side of the coin is that He knows about evil and is repulsed by it.  Now imagine God passing on the need to know right from wrong.  Imagine being able to follow through and live in line with His character.

That is what God passed on when He created us to be reflections of His moral personality.  He gave us the power to make our own decisions about good and evil and the freedom to follow through on either one for ourselves.  That is a lot of responsibility.  But it is on our shoulders because we have the built-in ability to control our inner life that no one else sees except God.  We also have the job of acting for the right or for the wrong in every other part of life.  In the end, whatever comes out of how we use our freedom of choice is on us and no one else.

We Need Fellowship

People need people.  People also need special people.  Even when relationships are hard, there is still something built into us that makes us need to be part of other people’s lives and for other people to be a part of ours.  It is all automatic from the most public to the most private relationships.

The design in us for relationships is also a reflection of God, of His character and how He feels about His own relationships with mankind.  It shows up right away in the record of the creation of Adam and Eve.  Adam is said to need a tailormade companion and immediately after God brings the two of them together, their “flesh of my flesh” bond is announced, and they are told to start a family.  Their devotion to each other became a reflection of God’s devotion to them as their maker and father. 

So, why is the social part of us so important?  The Bible lets us know that there are a couple of important things about our social reflection of God.  First, His purpose for us is for us to act toward other people, no matter who they are, so that His image gets lived-out toward them because they also have His image.  Second, this goes for this life and for life after death.  Our ability to have communion with others is the same thing that gives us the way to have fellowship with God through Jesus.  If we did not bear His image, did not have a need to be around other people or know what deep relationships are, spending forever with God or without Him, depending on our choice, would have no meaning.

The God Effect: Chapter 10 – Using the Bible

The last three chapters were all about deciding whether or not the Bible can be trusted.  We looked at how God communicated through the Bible but then moved through all the ways to decide if it is true or not. At this point there is just a couple of more things to work on.  One is the question of how the books inside the Bible were chosen and the other is how to go about reading and using them.

Getting What We Have

If you think about how old some of the books of the Bible are – some going back to 1500 B.C. while other “newer” ones being written in the 100’s A.D., the logical question is:  “How did they all end up being put together?”  That is a fair question. 

First a reminder.  We know now that God does not make mistakes and never does anything without making sure it is done perfectly; that is just who He is.  That goes for His giving us written communication too.  That’s why in Old Testament times, anyone who claimed to speak for God falsely could be killed.  That’s why in the Apostle Paul’s letter to a group of churches in the territory of Galatia, he bluntly said that if anyone tried to preach anything different than what the apostles preached, that person was worthy of judgement from God. 

In the end, we have to change our thinking a little.  We have to understand that God, because He knows all things and is the one in control, was the one who decided how the Bible would be put together and what would be in it.  No human being ever had the right to tell God what was worthy or not worthy.  That means, and this is really important, that man’s job was to figure out how to recognize what was already from God in the first place.  So, with that kind of seriousness, how could anyone dare to put a bunch of books together and claim they were from God?  As it turns out, it was not a simple thing.

Here is how it worked

For the Old Testament, over time, four basic rules were figured out.  First, the author of the book had to be recognized as having been God’s appointed minister.  They had to have been bona-fide prophets.  People who had spoken under God’s direct authority.  Second, their authority from God had to be proven through demonstrations of power such as miraculous signs and 100% fulfillment of their prophecies.  Third, what they wrote had to always go along with God’s character as well as the messages and truths that other proven prophets had revealed.  Fourth, the author’s writings had to have a long history of being accepted by everyone as the real deal.  No pop-up surprises.  Those books had to be valued as Scripture over a long period of time.

For the New Testament, the rules were almost the same as for the Old Testament but with some added expectations.  First, under rule one, the writer had to have been either an apostle, someone who had been personally taught by Jesus Christ Himself, or had personally witnessed the ministry of Jesus.  When it came to rule three, not only did the book have to be in harmony with other apostles, but it could never contradict anything in the entire Old Testament either, which makes sense.  If God spoke perfectly in the Old Testament, there is no way that He would allow someone in the New Testament to contradict Him!  Rule four, acceptance, now meant that the book not only had to be completely accepted by Christians everywhere, but also had to prove itself by being used by great church leaders and thinkers over several hundred years. Finally, a new exception: The book had to have changed peoples’ lives. In short, it had to make a difference.

J. I. Packer  summed up the who situation this way:  “The church no more gave us the New Testament than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.  God gave us gravity by the work of His creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament by inspiring the individual books that make it up.”

Reading the Bible

Just like any other document, it can be easy sometimes for it to be misunderstood.  Have you ever tried to read a legal document?  For that reason, it is important to look at the best way to read and understand what is in the Bible.  This is not a matter of anything mysterious or special.  It is actually the opposite.  God did not give us the Bible to hide meanings or confuse us or make us solve word puzzles.  He gave it to us to be read by everyday people, not just experts or the person with the best education. 

The best way to read is to just do it naturally and the same goes for the Bible. Always read it just as you would any other book, just like normal language always works.  By the way, that also includes reading special kinds of writing as it should be like poetry (e.g. the book of Psalms) as poetry that God uses to teach.  The next thing is to read it remembering that it was written to real people at a real time in history with a message to them first.  Read it as if you were there but also as it is personal for you also.  A third thing to do is to read verses as part of the whole book.  When something is unclear, always go to other verses that talk about the same thing. It is no different than trying to understand one sentence or paragraph out of a good story without knowing what had happened before.

There is a really helpful saying that sums all this up nicely called the golden rule of interpretation:  “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense.  Take every word at its ordinary meaning unless the facts in the rest of the book or other Bible truths make it different.”

Useful Advice

What kind of advice is there for actually doing the reading?  First, just read it!  It doesn’t matter were in the Bible a person starts except that, for someone who is new to it, it works better to start in the New Testament, maybe in the book of Luke.  It is also a good idea for new readers to avoid using the old King James version of the Bible  – a lot of the vocabulary is from centuries ago and can be hard to understand.  There are several ways to make things a little more interesting as well.  For example, a lot of times a Bible writer might keep using the same words over and over to send a signal that they are extra important to pay attention to.  At other times he might purposely compare two opposite ideas to make a strong point that might not be appreciated as it should be.  The Bible even uses exaggeration and gives personality to things in nature just to make a point.

In the end, the Bible is not some stale, boring, hard to read book.  It is not mysterious or something that was left for just preachers or professors.  It is for anyone who honestly wants to learn about and understand God.

If everything we have talked about is true, from the beginning of this book until now, the Bible is God-given and is a spiritual work.  For the truly serious person, it will come down to the Bible’s most important message of all – that of knowing God.  The truth of the matter is that the Bible is a spiritual book and the only way to really connect with it more deeply is by personally knowing God through Christ.  The huge promise of the Bible is that it will be opened up in a special way to anyone who has that personal relationship with Christ. 

The God Effect: Chapter 9 – Inside the Bible

It has been fashionable over the years and in some circles to look at the Bible as if it were just good for stirring up religious feelings and giving comfort to people in hard times.   Some people will accept the idea that the Bible is a spiritual book that has valuable life lessons in it, that it could maybe even have spiritual power to help find God and connect with Him in their own way.  That all sounds good, but none of it is the whole story.                                    

It is one thing for the Bible to be religious, it is quite another thing to claim that it is that plus the written historical record of God’s personal, sometimes miraculous, actions in this world.  If we think about it, one way to see if the Bible’s supernatural history is true is to also find out if the other facts of history in it are correct.  After all, if it doesn’t fit into real world history, how could it claim to add the miraculous things on top of it?  This chapter is about whether or not both the spiritual and the earthly writing inside it fit together.

Prophecy

Prophecy is a big deal.  If God knows everything, is infinite and eternal, has endless power and runs everything, it stands to reason that, He would have chosen people as His mouthpieces at certain times to reveal important things He planned to do latter.  They would have been people of great faith and the best representatives for Him to their own people.  They would have been, in a word, prophets.

Now remember, when God speaks, He speaks from being perfect, purely truthful, and never makes mistakes.  That means that even when He chose to speak through prophets, what they had to say for Him would also have to be 100% accurate.  As a matter of fact, under Old Testament law, if someone claimed to be a prophet of God but was found to be false, they could be sentenced to death. 

The Bible is full of prophesies that have been fulfilled.  In 740 B.C., the Jewish prophet Isaiah warned ten of the twelve tribes of Israel who held land to the north, that God had given him a warning for them.  If they did not get rid of their idols and immoralities, judgement would bring them to destruction.  Eighteen years later, in 722 B.C. the Assyrians invaded, destroyed the capitol city and carried away all but a minority of the population; men, women, and children.   In 605 B.C., the prophet Jeremiah was given much the same message of judgement  to the last two tribes who had the southern territories and for almost identical reasons.  In that case it took 19 years (586 B.C.) before the Babylonians invaded and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple.  Another prophet, Ezekiel, predicted the destruction of the city of Tyre over 250 years before hand.

Incredibly, the most important predictions were about Jesus.  His birth and crucifixion were both prophesied by Isaiah over 700 years earlier and His being raised from the dead was described by Israel’s King David in the 1,040 year-old Psalm 16.

Character

There is an old saying that “character matters”.  Believe it or not, the same thing should hold true for any writing that claims to be telling the truth.  For the Bible, character is massively important.  It was written in three languages by over 40 men from all kinds of backgrounds over a span of 1,500 years who lived on three different continents (Asia, Africa, Europe). Yet its most important teachings never changed over all those centuries.  No matter what the details of each situation were, everything centered on one thing: God saving mankind and creation from the lostness and destruction caused by sin.

Over all that time, as the message became more and more focused, the Bible also stayed true to real life.  Among all other “religious” books, it is the only one that honestly records the good and the bad and the ugliness of human lives.   It never shies away from the same controversial issues that our nation is struggling with now, but always with an eye to God’s mercy, justice, love, and saving grace in action. 

It is no small thing that Jesus Himself validated the Bible’s history, teaching and authority and called it Scripture.  The apostle Matthew recorded that Jesus said the Old Testament from beginning to end had authority from God and would never go away.  In other places in Matthew, Jesus treated people like Adam and Eve as real and events like Noah and the flood, Jonah and the whale, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as actual history.  He even used the account of Jonah as a lesson about His coming resurrection from the dead.

How Did God Do It?

So, if the Bible is so different and claims such big things, how did God get it finished and what were all those writers like?  Those questions really get down to the heart of things.  The answers can tell us if we need to take all of this seriously or if the Bible needs to be put on the shelf as just another religious book like many others.

Remember that in chapter seven I mentioned the ideas of inspiration and special revelation.  Special revelation  is God showing Himself through certain events at certain times in certain places, communicating to certain people.  Inspiration was God giving His truth to different people in writing – in some way giving them certain things to say or write down for the sake of future generations.  But how did it happen? 

There was a lot more to inspiration than we might expect.  The Bible gives some important information about how God used a combination of different tools to get His message out depending on which person He was using and what the situation was each time.  Remember, God is all-knowing which means that He knew every one of the Bible writers intimately.  We also know from chapter six that He works everything together as He sees fit.   The writers would have been specially chosen by God for the part they played.  That means that He set them apart and that they could not have been just random individuals that somehow found a way to be self-inspired.  These great people would have known God, understood exactly what they were a part of, and been sure of what God was giving them to share. 

As an example:  the Apostle Paul made it clear how God’s communicating process worked.  In one place, in a letter to a church, he wrote that God’s Holy Spirit was actually teaching him and other apostles directly.  In another letter, this time to fellow minister, Timothy, he reminded Timothy that everything in the Bible was, as he put it, “breathed out” by God.

 God also used the New Testament writer Luke.  When Luke opened his letter to a man named Theophilus, he let him know that everything he was recording came from eye witness testimonies.  On top of that, he told Theophilus that he had also personally investigated everything.  So, that part of inspiration used actual witnesses and good old investigation.

Another New Testament writer, John, was very close to Jesus during His ministry and ended up writing two of the historical books of the Bible (John and Acts) and three letters to the church (1st, 2nd, & 3rd John).  His testimony is very personal.  His claim  in his first letter was pretty dramatic:  He was sharing what he had heard with his own ears, seen with his own eyes, and actually touched with his hands!  In his case, just like the other writers in the Bible, God’s method of inspiration came through real men and their personal experiences.

But probably the most important testimony came from Jesus Himself.  He is recorded many times challenging people in His teaching by using Old Testament  sections as authorities from God.  One time, by using a story, He put it very bluntly.  He said that the writings of Moses and the prophets were so important that if anyone did not believe those scriptures, that they would not believe even if someone rose up from the dead! 

After all is said and done, the most important thing to remember is that, after getting to know more about what God is like and what He cares about, He is the only one who is qualified to open Himself up to us.  To do that, He had to be the motivator behind the things the Bible writers shared.  It also means that, because of God’s perfections, what He gave them to communicate had to have been exactly right.  That is why the Bible is the physical centerpiece of Christianity and why it is essential for knowing Him and for having a real relationship with Him.  Scripture is not the product of human ingenuity, or of Divine manipulation.  God used a perfect balance of the Divine and the human in order to achieve exactly what He wanted to achieve—His exact written Word.

Because it comes from God, it tells us things that no one could possibly know otherwise and it’s all there for our benefit and for us to use in real life.  Because God is perfect and holy (chapter five), what He has given has to be 100% reliable without mistakes or contradictions because, if all the clues fit together, it has come out of His perfect personality. 

The Bible’s basic message is always the same:  Man is corrupted, God has always offered to save him, and the coming Savior would be the answer.  If all this is true, that makes the Bible the standard of authority for all of life.  It puts all of us in the position of having to make the choice to respond or ignore it with consequences to follow.

The God Effect: Chapter 8 – Evidence Outside of the Bible

The question of whether or not the Bible is God’s communication to mankind is not just a matter of one group’s opinion over another group.  That sounds pretty bold, but as I hinted at earlier, the Bible itself doesn’t leave us much choice.  If  it read like other religious books or its authors didn’t make the fantastic claims they do, there would be no problem.  Everyone could just choose their favorite one and go on with their religious life.

But what do you do with a Bible that claims to record miracle after miracle or is the only book to teach that the only way to have the answers to life and death or to ever know God is through only one person in all of history: Jesus Christ who claimed to be God Himself?  In the end, if the Bible cannot be trusted or the Spirit of God is not allowed to use it, Christianity kind of becomes pointless.

For that reason, this chapter and the next one are going to check out how reliable the Bible is.   After all, if it is not reliable, it is not telling the truth and truth is the one thing that God will not compromise.  In all of this, it will be worth remembering that if the Bible is a spiritual work, even with all the evidence to come, only God can make it “come alive” for each person.

Archaeology

The Bible is a history book as much as it is a book of teachings and commands.  As a matter of fact, all of its teachings come out of the situations that were happening at the times they were written.  It stands to reason, then, that solid evidence has to be found for any mention of places, people, or events.  That’s where archaeology comes in.

The Old Testament, the first big section of the Bible, was a popular place for many years for sceptics to reject some of the most well-known people and events.  Things have changed.  Thanks to the discovery of some scrolls hidden in caves, we now have copies of the Old Testament that go back to 125 BC.  Not only that, but the accuracy compared to modern Bibles is amazing.  For example, the book of Isaiah has 266 words in it.  Those old manuscripts have only 3 letters that are different from the Isaiah we have now.  It used to be said that people that lived at the time of Moses were too primitive to have writing (1400BC) – until written laws from an older king were found from almost 1800BC. 

The New Testament history is just as good.  The Bible’s record of the political situation at the time of Jesus’ birth, such as the massive migration of the Jews back to their ancestral homes that included Joseph and Mary,  was attacked as having mistakes in it that proved it to be fiction.  Newly discovered finds have now proven that mentions of kings, governors, events, and lost sites in Jerusalem are exactly right.  The history in the book of Acts is so reliable that it is hardly questioned at all and even used for reference by scholars.

Preservation

The way the Bible has been preserved over thousands of years is a spectacular witness to just how deeply treasured it has always been.  It is a demonstration of the belief that God had spoken in it and that it had to be preserved at all costs.  The Bible itself claims that it (“The Word”) will never be lost, even, as Jesus said, down to the smallest letters.

From the earliest days of the church and going on into present day dictatorships, different times of persecution have included efforts to stamp out the contents of the Bible.  At times rulers, sometimes including corrupt church leadership, have used raw power and law against it.  Some of the early Roman Emperors were ruthless, but even during the late 1400’s through the 1600’s suppression and persecution rose because of a movement to  let the common person have the Bible in their own language and in their own hands. 

Yet the Bible stands and is now the most published book of all time because it has been faithfully transmitted through the ages.  The practices used to carry the Bible through 20 centuries is amazing especially when we realize that before the invention of the printing press, every single manuscript of the Bible had to be copied by hand.  The rules for the Jewish copiers of the Old Testament were strict.  Every page in the copy had to have exactly the same number of columns with no less than 48 lines and no more than 60 lines per page. No word or letter could be written from memory and every letter had to have exactly the same space between them.  They even counted the number of letters!

The New Testament was different because the copyists were from different places and backgrounds.  Their mission was to spread the word to Christians all over the known world.  But in spite of the lack of formal rules, the record is amazing.  As of 2019, we have about 5,856 complete and partial copies with the earliest partial one being from only 30 years after the last apostle John died.  Also, there are so many quotes of Bible passages from early church leaders, about 36,000, that even if we had no copies, we could recompose the whole Bible.  Men who have spent their lives tracing these things say that the copies we now have are anywhere from 99.75% to 99.9% accurate with almost all the differences coming from things like misspelled or missing words.

Influence

There is one other thing worth mentioning – the humanly unexplainable influence of the Bible.  There are about 100 million Bibles printed each year and it is estimated that there are about 6 billion Bibles currently in print.  Those include translations into a total of over 3,600 languages of either the whole Bible or parts of it.  Even the most skeptical historian has to admit that our entire western civilization developed on a Judeo-Christian foundation.

This is only one part of whether or not the Bible is reliable enough to read and accept as communication from God.  But it is an important part.  It points to the idea that God’s love, power, wisdom, goodness, and graciousness would not be hidden or neglected in some little-known set of writings.  He would not behave in any way in which the whole world would  not be able to read His message of wanting to save people from the evils around or even in them. 

The God Effect – Chapter 7:  The Basics (rev.)

Everything that we have figured out so far about what it takes for God to Be God – including His greatness, personality, and works – points straight to the realization that He naturally reaches out, not only to make Himself known to us, the crown of His creation, but also to be personally involved in His world.  That reaching out could take a lot of forms, but the most long-lasting one would have to be a way to commit everything to writing for the sake of preserving it for a long, long time.

Of all the religious writings in the world that claim to be from God, the most unique one is the Bible. The purpose of this section is to look at that uniqueness and then figure out what it has to do with how God reveals Himself to us.  As we will see, in the practice of knowing God, the Bible is central.  But the honest question has to be: how do we know that the Bible is what it claims to be?  To find some of the answers, we need to take a look at the human side of what that looks like. 

The next several chapters will look at how the Bible fits in with how God communicates.  They will also look at whether is reliable or not.   But first we need this chapter to explain some basic labels.  Labels are important because they kind of package ideas together so that when we are in a discussion or just trying to communicate with someone else, there is no need to re-say everything over and over again.  So, here is information about some labels:

Revelation:  This word is used to describe all of the ways that God shows Himself to the world and sometimes in special ways.

Special Revelation: This is God showing Himself through certain events at certain times in certain places communicating to certain people – in some way giving them certain things to say or write down for the sake of future generations. 

Inspiration: God giving His truth in words to specific people for them to be written down.

Illumination: God enabling humans to understand Scripture.

There are a few important things to remember about all this. For one thing, there are differences in the way we use the word “revelation”.  In everyday conversation it means that someone realized something they weren’t aware of before or that they were given new information.  But when the word is used about what God does, it describes what happens when He communicates truth on His own to mankind.  This is that “special revelation” above.  Just remember, truth is rare but opinions and experiences that claim to be truth are everywhere. 

Using the word inspiration works out the same way.  It mostly means that we were really moved by something – “That was so inspiring”.  Sometimes  we talk about great human insights or achievements as being inspired.  With God, His work of inspiration is much greater.  For Him, the act of inspiration is the tool for carrying out His special revelation.  That means that His inspiration is, like Himself; always true, without mistakes, and never changes.

So, what is the bottom line?  When God does revelation and inspiration, He has purpose and design in them.  He does not, because of who He is, run around putting out unexpected fires or waiting to see what humans will do next.  For Him revelation is holy work because He is holy; whether He does it generally through what He has made or specially through inspiration.  If all this is correct and the Bible claims to be that source, it has to be verified.  That is what the next chapters are all about.

Always remember that God is perfect and does everything perfectly.  That means that if He speaks, either to anyone personally like a prophet or gives someone something to write, whatever the circumstances may be, the end result cannot have any mistakes – and that goes for every single word that is written when He gives it the first time.

The God Effect – Chapter 6:  God Is A Worker

God is a worker.  As the first five chapters have pointed out, He is not “the man upstairs”.  He is not faraway but is forever everywhere.  His personality is the perfect combination of everything that makes Him completely and totally involved in everything. His love, righteousness, and justice look for ways to be used toward us.

Knowing what we do about who God is and what He is like, it makes sense to follow with how all those perfections come together when He is involved with us and all of creation. Imagine Him doing everything with perfect reasons for perfect results. That is what we talk about when we look at God’s works. And, just like His personality and greatnesses, everything about understanding what He does builds on everything that has been shown before it.

Sovereignty

One of the hardest things to grasp and accept about how God works is the idea that if all of His perfections actually are 100% true, then He has to be 100% in charge. Just think for a moment how, for example, perfect love has to work with perfect knowledge to make sure perfect justice gets done. There is no way that could happen unless God owns everything and completely holds the reins.  He has total authority and is always the one in control of what He decides to do.  On the other hand, this is not about being string puppets being manipulated down to every step we take or decision we make.

Think of sovereignty as the governmental part of God’s interactions with everything. It is His right and ability to take the management side, a mystery we cannot totally understand.  It is the “macro”, not the “micro”. In a real sense, it is a position of kingship – which of course can be hard for westerners to live with.  But that is how, as we saw above, things have to work.  But remember, kings don’t tell you which car to buy or what coat to put on in foul weather. All of us operate under a government in our own way.

God’s sovereignty is not pointless or meaningless though. In it, God always works to showcase His holiness and glory for the benefit of everything and everyone under Him. For humans, the main benefit He wants for us is to bring us to Himself; to lure us out of the bad and take us into the person and ministry of Christ.

Providence

The action side of God’s government is what we call providence. It is what happens when He works His governmental authority. It is one thing to have the right or power to have authority, it is quite another thing to follow through with it.  That follow-through is God bringing together the events around us of every kind so that He can accomplish what He has in mind. The Bible talks about how He orchestrates things in nature and even toward governments!  Most important of all, God’s providence is intimately involved in peoples’ lives.

There are some very logical and necessary limits to how He does this work.  Because of His character He sets boundaries.  For instance, people have the free choice to do evil (sin) from the “small” stuff to the horrendous stuff.  God allows that freedom.  But, because of His holiness, love, justice, etc., He does not allow evil to get to the point that it could destroy goodness.  Even though humans are capable of unimaginable depravity, they are never allowed to be totally evil.  At the same time, because of His grace and mercy He allows prayer, accepts it, and honors it so that we always have a way to reach out to Him even in the worst of circumstances.

Creation

Everything around us, the whole universe, “speaks” to us of a beginning. At the same time, the physical sciences tell us that there is nothing physical that is or ever was eternal. Atheist intellectuals have tied themselves in knots since the dawn of modern science to find a way to prove otherwise and have failed.  The problem is that when a person ignores or rejects what is logical about God and all the things that we have looked at so far, there is no room for serious thinking about beginnings.  There are just roadblocks, no matter how sophisticated an atheist sounds. 

The key to creation starts with knowing how God acts.  Everything we know so far leaves no choice but to understand that He is always doing things non-stop.  His personality is all about action and creativeness and His power is endless.

All of this leads to one thing: Everything that exists had to have a start and that beginning had to come out of absolutely nothing, zero, before it all came to exist.  The conclusion is obvious – God had to have made everything out of His own power and will, instantly. There is no serious reason to think that He would lollygag around or use time and resources needlessly. Not only that, because of understanding Him to be “one-in-three” (remember Chapter Three), all of God had to have been involved in that unimaginable beginning.

It is worth admitting that there is an amount of faith involved here – but the same is just as true for any other less logical explanation of the beginning, like any idea that leaves God out of the picture or tries to downplay His work.  After all, no one was there at the beginning, there is no way to test creation or redo it. The same holds true for “a big bang” or anything else. In the end, it’s a matter of which faith we choose – design and purpose by a Creator or everything starting  from nothing by happenstance.

Most people don’t think about it, but what we believe about creation shapes a lot of how we view other parts of life.  Without God in the picture, men and women end up having no special place or value in the world compared to any other living thing and no hope for a future after death.  Everything from marriage to having the created ability to know the difference between truth and error depends on our special design. 

Preservation

Here is a question: While God goes about working His sovereignty and providence, who is left to keep creation running and held together?  There is only one logical answer, the one who made it all come into existence in the first place. If everything so far is true and makes sense that only God has the power, will, and ability to preserve it and us.

The God Effect – Chapter 5: A Perfect Personality

The personality of a person can make or break a relationship. I am sure that everyone can remember times when just trying to get along with another person seemed like too much work or sometimes, with some people, even painful. Those kinds of relationships are unavoidable in this life. The trick is finding people that you can be close to without all the drama!

Personality is, if you think about it, a complicated thing. There is so much that makes up the mix; morals, emotions, ways of thinking, how someone acts, and so much more. Now try to image how even more deeply complicated God’s personality has to be? If God lives, as we have seen so far, without limits of knowledge or location or power, would it not also make sense that His character and personality would have to be perfect because He uses all of those things to interact with His creation, including mankind?

The answer should be pretty obvious. But the question is, what would His personality and character be? Here is a look at some of the most important things to know about how God’s personality works.

The Most Popular Traits

Holiness

Everyone expects God to be perfectly pure. How could it be any other way? No one in their right mind would be ok with an all-powerful but shady God. That was the problem in the ancient world and in some religions even today. One Bible passage describes what happened when mankind with “darkened imaginations”, decided to worship creatures rather than the Creator with images of “corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures”.  Most of those gods, being the products of human imaginations, were really just frightfully powerful human-acting animals or glorified superheroes. They could be vengeful, intolerant, and act in the same evil ways as men and women on Earth.

But that is really not being genuinely divine. For God to be truly God, He must be totally different from and above anything or anyone common. It means that there can be no shadow of moral weakness or pollution from evil. He cannot be temped to do evil or cause evil Himself. In other words, wickedness cannot have any part in His thinking or anything He does. Plainly then, evil in any form cannot be in His presence, no matter how insignificant or horrendous.

The impact of God’s holiness on any kind of relationship with Him is huge. To put it bluntly, how many absolutely pure people do you know? I am thinking, none. Yet, in order to have any kind of interaction with God, somehow, we have to be acceptable to Him. Not only that, if we are able to establish a relationship with such holiness, we would have to live it out in such a way that it could not be hidden.

There has to be a solution to this situation, but I see no other way around it other than something designed by God Himself. I truly believe He has done that. But for now, let’s look at more of Him.

Love

Here is something to think about: Because God is holy, He is loving. That might sound like a weird connection, but it really isn’t. Look at it this way: True love, any kind of love, is never only a frame of mind but is always a matter of action. Without someone or something to receive love, it really has no meaning or importance. As a matter of fact, the purest form of love is also sacrificial. (Even if a person only values themselves, their love, however deformed, still has someone to receive it!)

God is no different. We know from the last chapter that God is not just “out there somewhere” but is also present and involved with His creation, to the point, as we will deal with later, of true sacrifice. That involvement means He cares. That is love in action; His holiness reaching out and treasuring not just His creation in general, but mankind in a special way.

The great news is that divine love shares in all the other qualities of God’s character. It has all His other “greatnesses”.  It is eternal and infinite, without weakness or corruption. It is completely different from and beyond any earthly kinds of love. At the same time because, as the Apostle Paul has been quoted as saying in chapter 4 (“In Him [God] we live and move and have our existence”), it is always possible for anyone to reach out to Him. As we will come to later, there is naturally a special place in God’s heart toward those who treasure His holy (sacrificial) love, just as there would be in our hearts for someone who loved us in the same way.

Truthfulness

If there is one thing that holiness and love requires, it is truthfulness. The problem nowadays is that it is fashionable to believe that everyone has the right to have their own version of “truth” as they see it. But while that kind of thinking may feel good, it really just doesn’t make much sense. Somewhere out there, there has to be a way to find a match between what someone claims or thinks or feels and what is actually real, in the physical world and in the spiritual world.

This is where understanding God and His character is so important. Holiness means purity and purity just cannot tolerate falsehood. Does that not make perfect, pun intended, sense? Would any of us ever say that another person had a pure character if we knew that they had a problem with lying?  Because we now know that God is holy and is the only possible one who determines what the truth is from of His own perfect thoughts, decisions, and actions; who else could do better?

God’s truthfulness means then, that He can never lie, or deceive, or even “fudge” the truth. When He interacts with anyone, He always does so with absolute, unchallengeable truth. His motives and purposes have to be totally “on the up and up”, no matter what. It also means that anyone who claims to care about God or value His part in their lives, always has an absolutely rock hard, reliable place to go for true truth. The only thing that remains is to find out where God has given out that truth. In Jesus’ ministry, he said that he was that place – something to think about!

Faithfulness

Truthfulness leads right into the next part of God’s character, faithfulness. Think of it this way, the one of the biggest ways for God to show truthfulness is to practice what He preaches.  It means that He totally dependably keeps His promises – in short, being faithful is really just putting truth into practice. Just like everything else in Himself, any commitments He makes are going to be permanent and pure. If He would ever be able to act in another way, He would have to turn His back on Himself! There can be no one else in the entire universe who can claim to be perfectly reliable.

This is, to say the least, a big deal for us humans who have to live in a very troubling world. Witnesses in secular history and the historical records of the Bible have testified to what it was like for them when God was faithful to their faithfulness. Once again, if it is true that God loves His creation and all of us in it and that people can and have reached out to and lived under that love, then the normal thing to expect is that when God promises to rescue those folks and give their lives meaning, He is self-obligated to make it happen. Such surety is a source of great strength.

Righteousness

Righteousness just naturally follows truth and faithfulness, doesn’t it. It flows out of God’s character in the same way that truth does – determined by God because of all the other perfect things about Him. Righteousness then, is what happens when God perfectly puts into action toward someone else all the character traits of holiness, purity, truth, and faithfulness.

In a lot of ways, the idea of righteousness can be warped in the same way that truth can. Without a way to understand what it means and without a final authority to give it direction, each person can decide to act out in any way they choose and feel perfectly fine with the results, no matter how others may suffer. On the other hand, with a person’s recognition of God’s righteousness, an anchor is created by which to live.

By the way, one of the big claims by Jesus was that He actually came to reveal what God’s righteousness looks like and to totally live it out so as to demonstrate that kind of life in the real world. It is one of the main reasons that the religious authorities of His day were so angered by Him – He claimed to actually be on the same level of righteousness as God and to be there to give people the anchor they needed.

Goodness

Have you ever thought about what it means to be good? I believe that goodness is a way to demonstrate what is right. In other words, no one can claim to be good if they don’t live righteously. I don’t know of anyone whose life I’m familiar with, whom I would consider a good person, that also isn’t well known for a devotion to trying to do the right thing as much as they can.

It can’t be any different with God. Everything we know about Him continues to flow into the new things that we talk about. Goodness is no different. If God is purely righteous, holy, loving, and faithful: He is good. Like all the other traits, God’s goodness is endless, unchangeable, and cannot be polluted or defeated. Not only that, but it also means that everything He does toward us or thinks about us, radiates from His goodness.

In a world that sometimes seems to thrive on inflicting disappointment and pain, understanding that God is not only present but is also immeasurably good, means that hope is alive and well. A relationship with Him is a relationship with the fountain of goodness. As a matter of fact, since He is the Creator, all the goodness we experience has its beginning from Him.

God is Just

After everything covered so far, there is one glaring personality trait of God that has to be one of the most misrepresented or misunderstood traits by huge numbers of people – that is the issue of God’s absolute need to be a just God, even while being loving and good at the same time. The question is; if God is so deeply loving and good, how can He possible justify punishment or discipling of wrongdoing? Would not love and goodness require forgiveness of bad actions?

I purposely saved justice (later grace and mercy) for close to the end of this chapter. The only way to understand how justice must work is to be able to see it in its place alongside the other characteristics of God’s personality. Too often, we tend to latch on to, shall we say, the warmer more pleasant-feeling things like love and in our minds make them the “be all” of God. The truth is it just can’t be that way.

What does it mean for anyone to do justice, but especially for God?  The first thing to remember is that if evil did not exist, there would be no need for justice.  Justice is really just using goodness or rightness to correct evil or unrighteousness.  Justice can only be true if it works from a position of purity. 

At this point, we understand that God is holy, good, and righteous.  It has to follow then, that when He is confronted with unholiness, evil, or unrighteousness, He must address the situation or be impure Himself.  The stakes couldn’t be higher. God’s judgements are nothing more than Him applying His holiness, goodness, and righteousness to evil.  In that sense, judgement is simply the natural consequence of God’s character.  By that standard, it is always impartial – no matter what. 

God’s justice is a kind of self-declaration of two things; the natural need for evil to be judged and equally that His judgements and punishments show Him advocating for victims with love, compassion, patience, and blessing.  All of this is why, in the Bible, God calls on all people to live justly themselves as a reflection of His standards.  He makes it clear that no one can borrow or steal real justice from Him.  He can’t be bribed or coerced into ignoring injustice.

God is Merciful:                   

But what does God do with those of us who know we can’t live up to being 100% pure all the time?  Or, for example, what about folks who struggle with, shall we say, “the dark side” of life?  Is there anything in God that moves Him to help the helpless or reach out to the lost, sometimes in spite of themselves?

So, how does mercy have to operate?  Probably the most glaring thing is that, like love, mercy has to have someone who needs it from someone who is willing to give it!  With mercy there is always a giver and a receiver who is in distress or has acted badly enough toward the giver that they can’t fix it by themselves.  That is when mercy kicks in.

The compassionate side of God is His mercy. It is something within Him that wants to find a way to be lovingly kind, even when a person’s circumstances make it seem impossible.  We are talking about the consequences of not living up to the holiness and love of God.  It is God reaching out to the ones of us who do wrong or feel alienated or, to use an old term, feel downtrodden.  This kind of situation is a big enough deal that there is no way to rack up enough “brownie points” or good works to get out of it. 

God’s mercy causes Him to see our pain or worst behavior and exercise His love toward us in spite of it.  Someone has said that, when a person is offensive to God, His mercy is the act of not giving that person what they deserve, judgement.  Mercy always makes the first move toward someone, sometimes even when that person is more of an enemy than a friend or when they feel like they don’t’ need mercy at all.  This is true compassion from God Almighty, not just religion.

God is Gracious

Why in the world would a holy, loving, good, and just God be merciful to people who are unholy, unloving, morally corrupt, and unjust.  One word really says it all: grace. Grace is a lot like mercy because both of them come out of God’s goodness and love. The simplest way to compare the two is to understand that grace is giving us what we don’t deserve, mercy!  Grace deals with us based on what we need, not on whether or not we are deserving or worthy of it.  It is a free choice by God and is given without the need to be good first.

The most important part of grace is what it does.  Grace is the open door for anyone who wants to experience God and all the great things about His personality that we have looked at so far.

But God does more than share His personality.  Grace is what brought Jesus to live on Earth to finish a mission which made it possible to connect God to us. He has made grace real.  We will deal with that much more later, but for now there are some things that might show the value of God’s grace.

Because God is everything we now know about, none of us can ever just walk into Heaven, so to speak, carrying all our baggage of unholiness.  All any of us have to do to know what I’m talking about is to honestly look into our own past lives to recognize our moral failures and offenses toward others, if not toward God Himself.  What grace offers is the chance to be rescued from all of that.  It gives us all a chance to be blameless before God and live out the rest of our lives under His care and acceptance.  This is the most important need out of all the others that there is.

God is Persistent

When I talk about God being persistent, I mean that He never gives up on us. He is always constantly working to fulfill the promises toward mankind.  He never stops working out what He has made up His mind to do through perfect truth, goodness, righteousness, and justice.  He is perfectly faithful to those who have chosen to love Him. The bottom line is that He cannot and will not ever fail.

There is a danger here that understanding this will lend itself to a kind of lackadaisical attitude toward God.  If there is any understanding now of who God really is, to put it in strong terms, it is a dangerous game to play when we are tempted to blow off His tolerance.  By the same token, if anyone is “with Him”, they can face discouragements and live life without being derailed along the way.

God is Incomprehensible:    

One final thought.  It is, as they say, “a fool’s errand” to think that anyone, no matter how smart they are or what titles are by their name, can understand absolutely everything about an infinite and eternal God.  There will always be mysteries about His unimaginable knowledge, presence, and power.  There is no way to search out the whys and wherefores of some of the things He does.

Our minds can only handle so much, our moral flaws short-circuit us, and we know only what He has given us to know.  But that’s ok.  The gifts of knowledge about Himself that He has given us should cause us to be grateful and hopefully generate reverence for Him.

The God Effect – Chapter 4: The Greatness of God

It is fairly easy to think of God as being spiritual. He is, after all, not able to be seen as a physical person. We talked about that and went a little deeper with the “three-in-one”(Trinity). But there are so many more things that are important to understand.

How big is God and how long has He been around? Does He move around to hear or see different events or places? By the way, just how much does He know about our private lives or, for that matter, the lives of our enemies? These kinds of questions have to do with figuring out how  long God lives, where He lives, and how much power He has. This can be challenging stuff if we are willing to dig deeper than the surface. There are certain things from chapter three that should make sense but need to be looked at anyway.

Foreverness Without Borders

 In the world we live in, every living thing has a beginning and an end, a birth, and a death. The only exception to that rule is mankind – if he is indeed the handiwork of a living God who has the power and desire to not only create the soul, but to somehow also be in a relationship with it. If death is to be a different kind of experience for us, God also has to have some more important qualities than simply spirituality and “three-in-oneness”.

For one thing, God has to always live, to be eternal and immortal, without a beginning or an end, which means that time does not apply to Him. This is how an uncreated spiritual God exits. For we humans, it is massively important for the kind of “looking forward”, getting beyond death, which is the goal of the vast majority of people that have ever lived.

This built-in expectation is recorded in everything from cave walls to graveyard tombstones. These kinds of hopes only make sense if God has always been, and always will be, present at the moment of death. Because He always lives, He will always be Master over everything and everyone. And because He is, as we will see later, also eternally pure and holy and expects those qualities in His presence, at the moment of our death we have to be either endlessly with Him in perfect life separated from all evil or be forever separated from Him living endlessly saturated in evil.

God also has to be limitless, infinite in every conceivable way, as long as it doesn’t run against anything that makes Him perfect. That includes contradicting things like being in control of everything or having perfect love. Sometimes it is tempting to ask questions like, “Can God make a boulder so big He can’t move it”? But questions like that make no sense with God because it pits His perfect power against his perfect creativeness. For anyone who understands how perfect God is, those kinds of challenges simply have no meaning. It would be like asking if a man could make a car so perfect it couldn’t be driven.

The wonderful thing about God’s infinity is that that makes Him Master and Creator of  endless possibilities for our lives on this earth and going on into eternity. Living in this world does not need to be a dead end proposition. It means God has endless resources for remaking the dreadful things of life out of its ashes. The old can quite literally become new.

Another couple of things to cover before the next section. First, God’s character and abilities never change. He is complete, with no need for any more maturing. He is permanently who He is. He is, for example, always wise and always keeps His promises. That means anything He says about Himself and His relationship with those who embrace His program, is totally and completely dependable without failure. This world and the people in it are notorious for unpredictability and constant change, sometimes even turning on their own. But God is the one Being in the universe that will never be a part of those kinds of corruptions.

Finally, how much power would it take to manage everything we have covered so far? Think about the power needed to live forever or be without limits or exist above and beyond the universe! It is pretty obvious that that power would have to be total, what theologians call omnipotence. But God’s absolute power means more than being able to make stars or create life. It means, there is no weakness in Him. He cannot be tempted to do evil and cannot be defeated by anything or anyone in existence. His purity cannot be weakened, nor can His righteous character or the depth of His love.

Where is God?

There is, of course, much more. There has probably never been a time in history when people have not looked for, I mean, literally, looked for, God. At times they have looked for Him in all kinds of things like animals, the weather, trees, and even the sun, moon, and stars.

One time when the Apostle Paul in the Bible was talking with some Greek philosophers, he couldn’t help but notice that all over the city of Athens they had statues erected for every type of human-looking “god” they could think of and even had one installed that was named “To the Unknown god”! It was like they were trying to look everywhere while at the same time trying to cover all their bases.

As it turns out, the Greeks, like so many others in history, were operating by a deformity of what is real. They had figured out that God was “out there” (what theologians call being “transcendent”) but they imagined Him to be similar to men and women. I am saying that it was a deformity because for God to be who He is, He has to be radically different from anything in the physical world or the universe. For example, He is not the same as nature nor part of nature but is beyond and infinitely greater than nature – can even be called Master of it. He has to be above and beyond it all as the Creator because, in the end, He is the only one who can manage and hold it all together!

But that is only half of it. What mankind has always missed until the rise of Judaism and Christianity, is that God is, and must be, incredibly involved in everything down to the smallest detail (what theologians call  being “immanent”). If you really think about it, everything that exists survives and thrives in very tightknit relationships and in incredible harmony. That is the amazing nearness and personal involvement of God in His creation. That same activity of God follows through to mankind as well.  Remember the Apostle Paul and his conversations with the Greeks? He put it best as he was finishing the conversation by saying “In Him (God) we live and move and have our existence.”

Another way to talk about God’s nearness is to say that He is everywhere at the same time. That is to say, that “farness” and “nearness” has no meaning in God. To be and do everything He is and does, requires He be everywhere.

The impact on everyone is vital to understand. God does not have blind spots. We can’t outrun Him, and we can’t hide from Him. That means that even the mind and the soul are open to His observation without limit. The good news is that just as He sees someone trying to avoid Him, so He sees the person who runs to Him.

Which brings us to one final greatness of God. Being more than and above creation, while at the same time being intimately involved, means knowing everything. Look at it this way: Our brains get crammed with useless facts all the time. Either we can’t use them, or they don’t affect us. For God, that has to be impossible. He makes no mistakes and never gets surprised because He is everywhere, managing everything.

All this means is that He knows every person completely, the whole person inside and out, from the moment of conception to the moment of death and beyond. He knows the history of our lives in the smallest detail. It is that depth of knowledge which He uses for both guiding and disciplining.

God’s positions of being outside of and beyond us (and everything else) while at the same time being intimately involved, gives us stability and security in the big picture. His power means that there is nothing in this world that is beyond His ability and authority to deal with. He has the capability and the desire to be a rock of strength and security. On the other hand, because God knows the hairs on each of our heads, He can be very personal. In other words, He has the authority, power, and personal investment to judge us or to rescue and remake our lives or the lives of anyone else who is willing.

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