Saturday, January 3, 2009

God Exists: A Biblical Truth

God exists. The atheist who denies this is foolish because he denies what is self-evident through the means of creation, and conscience, and ultimately through the Word of God and The Son of God, Jesus. Acts 17:22-32; Romans 1:18-32; Psalm 14:1
God exists ,therefore, nature, which has a beginning, was created by God’s Word, and is sustained by His sovereign power. God’s purposefulness and wisdom, eternal power and other attributes are clearly evident in the created order of the universe. Just as every building has a builder, therefore the building shows it’s designer’s planned detail, and it’s construction workers’ effort and work in all of it’s structure. It’s obvious that the building is not there by random, blind “chance,” and that the materials of it did not assemble themselves so intricately . Genesis 1:1-2:24

God causes the heavenly bodies to orbit along precise paths in space, to turn on their axes, and to be placed just precisely so that Earth experiences Sun and moon phases at precise times. His wisdom made mankind male and female and endowed us with superbly complex bodies that do wonderful things. Our genetic information is held in intricate chemical information systems called DNA. Our cells contain components that are literally engineered systems that work as biological machines with great precision and staggering complexity. Only God knows how to create this marvel of nature! His handiwork is displayed in the billions of stars that move in space, whose light our biological super-computer like eyes and brains detect from millions of light years away, and our God given tongues give praise to and awe in the Creator, who our inner soul just knows , made it all by his power, and for his Glory. God exists.

God’s law is evident to all people. God made mankind with the knowledge of right and wrong. Only God is perfect, and his nature is righteous and pure. He determines what is right, because He is righteous. We all have fallen short of the law of God. And because God is good, He will judge all people on day. Apart from God, there would be no moral law. While many people deny God, they do so by rejecting the plain truth that there is a God, and the conscience accuses them, which they suppress. Since the law of God has been broken by all, all are condemned by God, for how else can evil be judged, and eternal justice be meted out perfectly? Only the one, true Holy God and Judge of all can judge perfectly. So a changing of the heart is needed to see the God who judges all hearts as wicked.
Finally, but most importantly…God has spoken by specially chosen individuals called prophets, and apostles. These men were chosen to hear the Voice of the Creator, and to reveal His specific revelation of his Being, and His works. Their writings, which are God-breathed or inspired divinely, are in the Scriptures. These Scriptures promise salvation from sin and death, through the Mediatorship of God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the revealer of God. Jesus Himself revealed his heavenly Father, and spoke from His Father what the truth is. God sent His Son to be the Saviour of those who believe in God. Jesus fulfilled the prophetic words of the Scriptures in his birth, life, death for sins, and glorious resurrection. His rising up from the dead, in his tomb is greatest sign that He is the Son of God, and the true Lord who saves people from their sins, and from death,and the coming Judgment, and to be reconciled to the God who is. John 3:16-20;Hebrews 1:1-13

Amen

4 comments:

  1. How self evident are the Pauline epistles as Scripture? Not very! Paul accuses Peter of "Judaizing" in Galatians 2 when all Peter is really doing is following Paul's own teaching from Romans 14:15 and not eating non-kosher in front of the "weaker brethren" who came down from James so that he will not "destroy with [his] meat that one for whom Christ died." Yet Paul accuses him, to his face at Antioch and subsequently to the churches in Galatia (a whole REGION of churches far away and totally uninvolved in the incident) of being a hypocritical Judaizer! Does this self authentic Paul's epistles as Scripture? Far from it. It proves that Paul is a false apostle. There's no way of getting around the fact that Paul lies on Peter in Galatians 2 and also calls Peter, James, and John a bunch of nobodies who only "seemed to be something" (2:6) and "seemed to be pillars" (2:9) and he is quick to add that "whatever they were makes no difference to me" (2:6) and "these who seemed to be something added nothing to me." What is the point of all this apostle bashing? How can it be excused? I've tried before, as we all have, to excuse it, because we must, right? Well, if we are to accept Paul as an apostle "not of men nor by men but by Jesus Christ." But don't you see it is that erroneous claim that causes him to bash the REAL apostles? He establishes his own apostleship, not by any evidence that he is an apostles, since there is none, but by bashing the real apostles and "poisoning the well" against them with lies, labeling them as hypocrites and Judaizers. He can't bring forward any gospel that lists him among the apostles, as Tertullian points out, for his name is conspicuously absent from the "apostolic catalogue." Nor is his supposed vision altogether convincing, since it seems more likely that Jesus would (if he were to appoint a 13th apostle at all) appoint someone who actually met the requirements for apostleship, which Peter, who has the power of binding and loosing so that whatever he binds on earth is bound in heaven, prescribed in Acts 1:21-22 that an apostle must be one who walked with the 12 and Jesus from the baptism of John all the way to the Ascension of Christ! Surely then, Jesus would have (if he decided to appoint a 13th apostle) appointed Joseph called Barsabas who was surnamed Justus, who was chosen by Peter and the rest of the 11 as one of the two men that they would cast lots over to decide who would replace Judas as #12, but Matthias won that position. If a 13th were to be added, Justus would surely have taken that position, being qualified for it. But instead, here comes Paul, bashing Peter, James, and John, calling them Judaizers, writing to far off churches making public domestic disputes and accusing them of hypocrisy, claiming to have received a different gospel from them (Gal 1:6-9) and calling them accursed, claiming to have received his gospel by direct revelation (Gal 1:11-12). But it is obvious to anyone with half a brain even that Paul must have learned the gospel from the Christians he persecuted, either by interrogating them or by them following the example of the Lord's forgiveness and his command to bless those that curse us, and thus preaching the gospel to their rabid persecutor! Paul surely knew the gospel before he ever set foot on the road to Damascus, howbeit he did not beleive it. But now he writes to the Galatians saying he did not receive the gospel from men but by direct revelation? Give me a break. Nobody would believe such a ridiculous pack of lies....unless TRADITION forced it upon them. And the Protestant to this day hold Paul up as not only an apostle, but the greatest apostle, for no other reason than that TRADiTiTION, ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION, has told them to!

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  2. "God exists."

    Amen. But Paul is proven to not be his apostle.

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  3. "God made mankind with the knowledge of right and wrong."

    Or he made them without the knowledge of right and wrong, put a tree in front of them that could give them that knowledge, and told them not to eat its fruit. Then the devil tricked them into eating it and then they had the knowledge of right and wrong! And then come the Calvinists claiming that the fall took away the knowledge of right and wrong (i.e. their doctrine of total depravity) when in reality the fall brought us the knowledge of right and wrong (because the fall consisted of Adam and Eve eating the fruit that gave them the knowledge of good and evil).

    Two obvious questions, therefore:

    1. Why did God not want man to know good and evil while the devil wanted them to know it?

    2. Why do Calvinists reverse the story and make it as if the fall took away knowledge of good and evil rather than conferred it?

    I doubt you can answer the first, because I know I can't!

    I doubt you will answer the second, because the answer is that Calvinists twist Scripture and that's not politically correct to say.

    Nice thought provoking post!

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  4. Like the Judaizers of old, you are trying to discredit the divinely authenticated ministry of Paul.

    Even Peter equates Paul's writings as wisdom from God along with OTHER Scriptures, and all Scripture is God-breathed. So Paul's writings were received as sacred Scripture.

    The Judaizers are "false brethren", who covertly tried to undermine the Gospel of grace by requiring Mosaic circumcision for salvation.

    Peter was unfortunately caught up with their error, and Paul rightly rebuked him. It's not the first time Peter has needed correction either.

    Your conspiracy theory simply has no basis in the exegesis of the text of the Epistles.

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