Why I Believe in God - Grant S. Sisson, MSCP, CI
A little old lady was amazed at how nice the young man was next door. Everyday he would help her gather things from her car or help her in her yard. One day the old lady finally asked the young man, "Son, how did you become such a fine young man?" The young man replied, "Well, when I was a boy, I had a drug problem". The old lady was shocked, "I can¡¦t believe that". The young man replied, "Its true, my parents drug me to church on Sunday morning, drug me to church on Sunday night and drug me to church on Wednesday night"
There comes a point in everyone’s life where we have to take what we’ve been taught and make it our own. Its one thing to be drug to church as a kid, but quite something else to say when one is grown up, "I am a Christian."
A fellow named Danny Ferguson wrote something entitled, "Why Do You Believe in God?" He suggested that there are three basic extra-Biblical arguments, cosmological, teleological, and moral, that argue for the existence of God. I think those arguments to be valid, and I will touch on them a little as we go along. But as of this morning, I wanted to respond to the question, "Why Do You Believe in God?" with a direct response. This morning I’ll speak on "Why I believe in God."
The creation itself
The specific revelation of God to mankind also speaks of a different kind of revelation, what some call general revelation. The Bible is specifically God’s revelation to mankind, but there are other ways that God reveals Himself to us. Listen to Rom 1:18-20 "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." So the creation itself glorifies its Creator; creation demands a Creator. But...
All world views begin with a premise. Either there is a supreme being/creator, or nature itself is god, or there is no God. If there is no God, then all bets are off. This is the moral argument of Mr. Ferguson. Our world instantly devolves into survival of the fittest. Nothing has been created, it all came into existence by itself (which is a self-referential paradox, thus cannot be.) No behavior that we can think of is of any purpose except for the individual to survive and reproduce. Any behavior that suits me, that I choose to use for my own survival, is OK, in fact, there is no such thing as OK or not OK. Any value system that you choose is yours. In the end, only might makes right, because there is no one to say otherwise, and the powerful will use that power in whatever way they want to. Relationships, including marriage, are irrelevant, except if and when we want. If and when we decide we no longer want to, then we leave; there is nothing to say that we should not. There are no shoulds or should nots. This is moral relativism - atheism. Think of the end results of a world based upon this premise.
If we look at the argument that nature is itself God, we immediately see that there is an irresolvable paradox involved here. How can something which does not exist cause itself to come into being? Further, if nature is God, then we are what our basic instincts tell us we are. We do whatever we desire to at the time, because "its natural." We worship the environment, which becomes more important to us than humanity. This is how it can make sense to simultaneously defend abortion and then go to ungodly lengths to save the baby whales. This is why it is more important to keep the oil companies out of our oil fields to protect wildlife than to provide for human need for energy. (BTW, this is not an either/or problem. We can provide our energy needs while at the same time protecting nature.)
But if there IS a God in heaven, things are totally different. There is order to human life by design. We are born into families; it takes a man and a woman to have children, and to care for those children for the twenty years it takes us to grow into adulthood. There are certain ways of living, beliefs that guide our lives into wholeness, peace and contentedness, that lead us into harmony with ourselves, each other and our God.
God has made things to exist in such a way as to provide for our peace and comfort. When Adam and Eve were in the Garden before the Fall, everything was perfect in this way by God’s intentional design. We may create disorder by violating the design; this is what the Bible calls "sin." It is why Jesus came to earth and died for us. God loves us and has provided for the chaos introduced into our world by sin. This God that loved us so much as to provide Paradise for us has tried every way since we turned our backs on Him to communicate with us; to have a relationship of love and friendship. He has left a written transcript of His attempts to love us (the Bible.) It is this very love letter written to us by God Himself that is used by the enemies of the Cross to try to discredit our faith. They know that if they can discredit the Bible that they have cut the very heart out of Christianity. And they are right, so they will stop at nothing to prove the Bible wrong at whatever point possible. This is nothing new. But sometimes we play into their hands.
In Galileo’s time, it was thought due to a misunderstanding of scripture that the Bible taught that the earth was the physical center of the universe, and that the sun went around the earth, as it appears to from the perspective of a man standing on the surface of the planet. But Galileo came along and with the newly invented telescope showed that it made more sense to conceive of the motion of the planets as we know it to be today, that the earth moves around the sun, not vice-versa. The church of his day, believing that since the Bible teaches that man is God’s supreme creation placed in what was intended to be paradise, therefore the earth is the center of the physical universe, ex-communicated him as a heretic. This event was used by the secularists of his day in attempts to discredit Christianity.
So what? Well, today the biggest inroads into discrediting the Bible come from attacks on the creation account. The atheistic world says that since the world is many billions of years old, not a mere six thousand or so as a literal interpretation of scripture would have it to be, that the Bible is false. (I find it funny that this argument is used to weasel out of the moral ideas of the Bible; many of those who make this case continue to argue for causes such as abortion and gay marriage. It seems a pretty far stretch from "Was the Earth REALLY created by a Supreme Being?" to abortion. The only connection is that there is a specific attack upon Bible principles, through the anti-creation argument, used to justify and rationalize immoral behavior.)
So let’s look at the creation. Gen 1:1 "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." It is not necessary by the language used here to insist upon a twenty-four hour interval for "day" because it was the fourth day of creation before the lights were created to govern days and nights; the Biblical expression is, "to mark seasons and days and years." This is how we play into our adversary’s hands; by insisting upon something that while traditionally the way we have understood things is not necessarily the only acceptable reading of scripture, like the church of Galileo’s day insisting that scripture says that the sun goes around the earth. The Hebrew word for "day" ("yome") could mean from one sunset to the next, or the same word sometimes means "a space of time defined by an associated term" ("Day of Creation.") Since there was no sunrise/sunset before the fourth "day," a distinction is made between a 24 hour "day" and a "day" of creation when the Holy Spirit said that God made the world capable of governing "days" on the fourth "day" of creation. In my thinking I find it helpful to remember that the Bible does not tell us how God did it in every detail, only that God did it, and provides the teaching necessary to make it’s point. You will find it true that just as Jesus said, not one jot nor tittle of God’s Word will fail, still we must remember how important it is to "rightly divide the Word of Truth." It might be well to remember that one of the days of creation was referred to as a "day of rest," (in the Creation account using the same word for "day" and in the same context) and yet scripture says that this particular day has lasted thousands of years. The Hebrew people who refused to enter the Promised Land in Moses’ time were not allowed to enter into God’s seventh day of rest because of their unbelief, and the writer of the Book of Hebrews says that that seventh day of rest (the Seventh Day of Creation) is still available to the faithful(1). I introduce this thought to you to encourage you to study the topic further; our world has made havoc of the tenets of Christianity using this and similar scientific arguments, making Christianity out to be an ancient and irrelevant religion full of myths, distortions and falsehoods, and we must know the truth in order to defend it! We certainly don’t want to play into the enemy’s hand due to our own imperfect understanding of Scripture. Clearly, more study is warranted by us all.
OK, to continue on "Why I Believe in God"...
The Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible - reveal how God dealt with man in the very earliest stages of our existence. The most relevant story here, other than Creation itself, is the story of the fall. In that story, we read how God’s intent for us has always been good; He has always loved us. He was always looking for our best interests; the only time He viewed His creation and said, "it is not good" was when man was alone. So He created another for us to know as friend, as helper, as lover, to fill the void He Himself created. He placed us in a perfect place, where all of our needs were always met unconditionally. And the primary need that He met was for relationship. The two primary relationships that existed in Paradise were God/man and husband/wife. Not only were our physical and emotional needs provided for, but our spiritual need to be with God. He always took the time to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden.
One of the most important things He has communicated to us is how we are created; what our function in life is; how He has designed us to be. It is this design that brings order into life, or by its violation, brings chaos. We can "walk with God" as Adam and Eve did in the very beginning as they existed as they were created to be "in the image of God" and experience joy and peace, or we can violate our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual functions and bring on chaos and death in the world. The very fact that there is this kind of order to our lives, that when this order is violated we become spiritually/emotionally unstable ("sick") proves to me that there is a Creator Who designed us on purpose and with a purpose.
It really struck me hard when I learned that the human body has functions built into it that are simply not useful in any sense except in context of interaction with other people. From the structure in our brain that’s only function is facial recognition, to our emotional systems that tune in to each other (ever had someone walk into the room and you think, "Man, I’m glad they’re here"? That’s your limbic system, which controls your emotional functions, tuning in to the presence of that other person. We do it all the time. It is such a natural part of us that we don’t realize that we're even doing it.) From our physical make up, to our need for peer groups (relationship with other people) to our spiritual make up (relationship with God,) we are created by God to be connected to others. And the primary connection is to God. If we have violated our relationship with Him, we find that our lives are not full of joy and peace. We find that our lives are chaotic and unstructured. As a counselor I have seen chaos is a person’s life corrected by application of these ideas many times, and this again is evidence of the existence of a Creator.
Conclusion
So then, why do I believe in God? I have discussed the argument from creation itself, and touched on the Biblical arguments in our world today. I believe that we can say that it makes more sense to believe in God because:
The idea that there is no God leaves us to believe that the universe simply sprang forth out of nothing. How can nothing, that is, absolute oblivion, the absence of anything, even space, bring something into existence? There is no power to "bring forth" in the absence of something.
The belief that nature is god cannot be, because it leaves us in a similar paradox, that is, how can nothing create something? This paradox is a little more specific; it is saying that the earth and the universe created itself, which would be the beginning point if nature is God. Again, how can something come forth out of nothing and create itself? Something cannot spontaneously spring forth out of nothing, and no physical object can bring itself into being.
And so that leaves us with the Supreme Designer and Creator of all, the One Who spoke the worlds into existence. The One Who is eternal, the Alpha and the Omega, with no beginning and no end. He is the One Who created us in His Own image, with the need for relationship and love built into the very fiber of even our physical bodies, as well as our spiritual being.
Why do you believe in God? Is it because your parents drug you to church? If so, you are fortunate indeed to have parents that cared that much for you; but now, it has got to come from your own heart.
(1) For further study:
Heb 3:7 - 4:11:
"7Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
’Today, if you will hear His voice,
8 Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
In the day of trial in the wilderness,
9 Where your fathers tested Me, tried Me,
And saw My works forty years.
10 Therefore I was angry with that generation,
And said, ’They always go astray in their heart,
And they have not known My ways.
11 So I swore in My wrath,
’They shall not enter My rest.’
12Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; 13but exhort one another daily, while it is called ’Today,’ lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. 14For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, 15while it is said:
’Today, if you will hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’
16For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? 17Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? 18And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? 19So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.
Chap 4
1Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. 2For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. 3For we who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said:
’So I swore in My wrath,
They shall not enter My rest,’
although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. 4For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way: ’And God rested on the seventh day from all His works’ 5and again in this place: ’They shall not enter My rest.’
6Since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience, 7again He designates a certain day, saying in David, ’Today’ after such a long time, as it has been said:
’Today, if you will hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts.’
8For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day. 9There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. 10For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.
11Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience."
The writer quotes Ps 95 in Heb 3:7b-11:
"Today, if you will hear His voice:
8 Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion,
As in the day of trial in the wilderness,
9 When your fathers tested Me;
They tried Me, though they saw My work.
10 For forty years I was grieved with that generation,
And said, ’It is a people who go astray in their hearts,
And they do not know My ways.
11 So I swore in My wrath,
’They shall not enter My rest.’"
Note that Heb 4:3 and 4:7 establish the context of the seventh day of creation.
Grant S. Sisson, MSCP, CI
Countryside Christian Church
Shreveport, LA
srminister@netscape.com
