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Does God Exists? Series
Contributed by Stephen Sheane on Oct 12, 2011 (message contributor)
Summary: This message offers evidence for the existence of God through the arguments of Movement, Minute Design, Morality, Miracles and My Life.
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DOES GOD EXIST?
Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano. To them in their piano-world came the music of the instrument, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone out there who was making music for them. Someone who was invisible and yet at the same time close to them. They loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see. Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths that trembled and vibrated. They must revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player. Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Hammers were now the secret, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. In time the Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth. But the pianist continued to play.
Today we are starting a series on Tough Questions and the first question that I would like to address this morning is the most basic. It is a question that I hear all the time and that many people in the world are asking. It is the question “How do you know that God exist. How can you PROVE to me that He is real.”
The simple answer to this question is that we know that God exists because he has revealed himself to us through General Revelation to all people.
Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. 3 There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
Rom 1:19-20 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
For those demanding PROOF I cannot PROVE anything to you this morning. In a court of law you seek to prove your case through reason and witnesses. It is impossible to PROVE something absolutely, you can simply offer the available evidence and then let the facts speak for themselves. Let me offer some evidence to you this morning as to why I believe that God exists:
1. The Argument of MOVEMENT –
Natures shows us that nothing moves unless it is moved by something else. All movement requires energy to be present. So where did the energy for all movement come from?
Suppose that you were walking down the beach one day an suddenly you were hit in the back of the head by a rock. You turn around and there is a boy standing there. You ask him if he hit you with the rock but he explains “No, the rock just jumped up off the beach and hit you”. Would you believe him? You probably would not believe him because an object at rest will stay at rest until some form of energy acts upon it to move it. In other words, the rock did not just jump up off the ground. It must have been thrown or dropped from somewhere.
The universe is in motion. It contains an incredible amount of energy. So the basic question I have to ask is this; where did all that energy come from? If everything in the universe is moving then who first moved it?
2. The Argument of MINUTE DESIGN –
Nature shows us that the world and our bodies are incredibly complex. There is design to it. If something has design then there must have been a designer.
When I was in Winnipeg a few weeks ago I went out for lunch. I bought a sandwich and walked along the nature path close to Morrow Gospel Church. I sat down on a bench to eat. There, next to the bench I was sitting on, was an old tree stump that someone had carved an old man’s face onto. It was clearly not just something caused by nature. The chisel marks were clear. It was obviously created.
In university I took a degree in biological science and all I heard in my first year was evolution and it made sense to me. The further I went in school the less evolution made sense to me because the more I came to understand how incredibly complex the world around us really is.