OBAMA THE MESSIAH?

"Nobody really believes that Obama is the Messiah. It's only a talking point for Rush Limbaugh and his coolaid drinkers to whine about. I have great hope for him and our country. The odds are stacked against him."

This was a statement made in an email by a friend of mine that I have lot's of respect for. Naturally, he's of the opinion that no level headed Democrat would venture to make such a mistake as to think that the Messiah had arrived in the person of Obama. And I agree .... no level headed Democrat would. But my friend and myriads of others have failed to see that there are countless fringe Democrats who are obviously not level-headed who actually do believe that the Messiah has arrived! And though Democrats across the board are planning to use George Bush as their scape goat again (for the next 20 years one friend told me) for everything that Barack the Messiah will not be able to change, the fact of the matter is that thousands of dreamy-eyed Dems think that their god has arrived:: Let their words speak for themselves!

"Many even see in Obama a messiah-like figure, a great soul, and some affectionately call him Mahatma Obama." -- Dinesh Sharma [OK]

"We just like to say his name. We are considering taking it as a mantra." -- Chicago Sun Times [Probably don't want to read this newspaper anymore]

"A Lightworker -- An Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being" -- Mark Marford [Oh hey ...this isn't New Age mentality at all ... right. Looks like the dreamy-eyed Democratic fringe to me]

"What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history" -- Jesse Jackson, Jr. [Good grief, did you see Jackson's display on national television? Talk about loosing it ... and being out of touch with reality]

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
-- Barack Obama [Apparently Barack has even bought into his own rhetoric!]

"Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Obama on his journey, I mean, as he has said, the utter improbability of it all?" -- Daily Kos [I'm not feeling anything yet ....]

"He communicates God-like energy..." -- Steve Davis (Charleston, SC) [Oh please, somebody help this dude ...]

"I'll do whatever he says to do. I'll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear."
-- Halle Berry [Well Halle ...you just proved that your beauty just took a left turn into the twilite zone big time]

"A quantum leap in American consciousness" -- Deepak Chopra [Maybe un-consciousness]

He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians. . . . the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century." -- Gary Hart [No, this isn't a Messiah mentality. Nope.]

"Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings . . . He's our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence."
-- Eve Konstantine [Hold on, I'm expecting to lose my mind at any moment ...]

"This is bigger than Kennedy. . . . This is the New Testament." "I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often. No, seriously. It's a dramatic event." -- Chris Matthews [Chris Matthews should be removed from national television for his arrogance and stupidity. He is the prime example of biased news coverage]

"[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time." -- Toni Morrison [Deep Mesiah complex here]

"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves." -- Ezra Klein [New Age slop for sure....]


"Obama has the capacity to summon heroic forces from the spiritual depths of ordinary citizens and to unleash therefrom a symphonic chorus of unique creative acts whose common purpose is to tame the soul and alleviate the great challenges facing mankind." -- Gerald Campbell [Yep. The Democratic party has gone over the deep end ... all in response to the floundering Republican failures, no doubt]

"We're here to evolve to a higher plane . . . he is an evolved leader . . . [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth." -- Oprah Winfrey [One of the top five reasons to ignore anything and everything that spews from the mouth of the Guru-ess of Nirvana]

"I would characterize the Senate race as being a race where Obama was, let's say, blessed and highly favored. That's not routine. There's something else going on. I think that Obama, his election to the Senate, was divinely ordered. . . . I know that that was God's plan." -- Bill Rush [Ah, yes, that just might be. But what is God trying to show us by this revealation?]

Need more sources that Barack Obama is considered by Democrats to be the Messiah?
http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vb2JhbWFtZXNzaWFoLmJsb2dzcG90LmNvbS8=

Considering Death in the Abyss

THE DEATH CLOCK

Welcome to the Death Clock(TM), the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second. Like the hourglass of the Net, the Death Clock will remind you just how short life is. http://www.deathclock.com/

A THANATOPSIS ON HEBREWS 2:14-18

Keeping the Thought of Death Alive: The Most Essential of All Works

Why do so many ideologies throughout the world fail to ponder the significance of human death? Why are people so afraid to look closely at their own impending deaths before they arrive at its doorstep? Why do we plan to the minutest detail the small, miniscule moments of life, yet neglect to consider the eternity that awaits us at the door to our deaths? And this, In light of the fact that our deaths are for such a very long time!

Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, gave one of his slaves a strange standing order. Every morning this slave was to march into the king's chamber, and no matter what the king was doing, announce in a loud voice, "You must die!" I doubt if many of us would appreciate that kind of daily reminder of the inevitability of our own death, much less order it.

In truth, the person who has not confronted their looming death has not adequately prepared themselves to confront one of the greatest challenges that life presents: what are we to make of death? I am, by no means, suggesting that this confrontation is any easy task. It takes more than a fair amount of courage to engage one’s mind in a thanatopsis, a meditation upon the subject of death. Yet, like all disciplines, there is much to be gained by a deep reflection on this serious topic.

From the moment that Christ entered His last three years of ministry, the fact of His imminent personal death as the final culmination in His life of ministry and service was ever before Him. Ironically, the Apostle John declares that our eternal life is found in Christ’s death. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men (John 1:5).” “For the bread of God is He Who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (John 6:32).” “And I give them [My sheep] eternal life and they shall never perish .... (John 10:28).”

All that the Scriptures promise in Christ are true for us because of what took place at Christ’s death. All of the significance of His life and that which we believe to be true for us in eternity became a fact not only because of His perfect life, but through His atoning death. Christ’s death has a very practical theological side too it as well. Because of Christ’s death, the Scriptures say that we have forgiveness of sins. We are justified before a holy God. We have Christ’s righteousness added to our account, and therefore we now exist in a peaceful relationship with the Father.

The kind of life that is presented to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ is an eternal life. That eternal life exists, oddly enough, because of Christ’s sacrificial death. Without His death on our behalf there is no good news regarding either this life, or a life to come. It seems all the more wonderful and fitting then that Christ’s work regarding our salvation commenced in the moment of His death. As Christians we of all persons have the greatest reason to be hopeful in the face of death, because God himself has shown us that, though so much about the subject is shrouded in mystery, it is, in the final analysis, a most blessed hope.

George Kennan became the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952. As a thoughtful and devout Christian man, he was one day greatly moved and impressed by the dreariness of a Soviet Marxist funeral. It was there that he was first awakened to the very real Marxist misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of life. Oddly, for Kennan, this meaninglessness of life was captured and expounded in Marxist idealogy, when he witnessed their failure to attach any significance to the meaning and purpose of death.

Kennan’s disdain for the doctrine of Marxism stemmed from a careful look at how shallow its doctrinal probe reached for satisfactory answers to the questions raised by the phenomenon of death. More than any other reason, Marxism, (as with any religious ideology that proposes to influence the lives of human beings), must be abandoned because it fails to recognize that the total individual human condition must also embrace elements of tragedy. He wrote:

“As an adequate and enduring personal philosophy Marxism has many deficiencies; but the greatest of them is that it has, in contrast to Christianity, no answer to the phenomenon of death. This is why there is nothing more pathetic than a Marxist funeral; for to the Marxist this formality celebrates nothing more than an inexplicable, unpreventable, and profoundly discouraging event in the human experience. Unable to give meaning to death, Marxism is unable to give meaning to life. This helplessness is the guarantee of its impermanence and ultimate failure as a personal and political ideology.”

As Vice President, George Bush represented the United States at the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by something that Brezhnev’s widow did at the funeral.
She had been standing motionless next to her dead husband’s coffin during the entire ceremony. Seconds before the coffin was to be closed in finality by the Russian soldiers, Brezhnev’s wife committed an act not only of great faith and courage, but at the same time, an act of profound ideological and civil disobedience. In those final seconds before her husband’s memory was sealed shut by the coffin lid, she quickly reached down and made the sign of a cross on her dead husband’s chest.

There, in that singular simple fleeting movement, she had expressed the hope that Breshniv and the atheistic philosophy he had for so long paraded before the entire world, had, in the final analysis, been an empty inevitable tragedy in itself, that offered no answers to the questions men had concerning death.

The entire world was left to wonder in that fleeting gesture, had she not hoped there was indeed something more than an inexplicable emptiness at the end of the road of life? Wasn’t Breshniv’s wife suggesting by the sign of a cross, that Jesus Christ, so vehemently denied in that atheistic culture, might be the truth that her husband’s philosophy had for so long rejected?

John Climicas, a seventh-century ascetic, wrote: “You cannot pass a day devoutly, unless you think of it as your last.” He called the very thought of death the “most essential of all works”, and a gift from God. “The man who lives daily with the thought of death is to be admired, and the man who gives himself to it by the hour is surely a saint.”

The Context of the Stunning Truth About Death in Hebrews 2:14-18

Hebrews 2:14 begins by teaching that

“Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. 16 For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham.
17 Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18 For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted” (NKJ).

Hebrews 2:14-15 are perhaps two of the most astounding verses in all of Scripture. They are rife with the larger focus and depth of purpose of Christ’s life. These verses, which we will examine more closely, are located within the larger context of the author of Hebrew’s explanation of the purpose and function of Christ’s humanity.

It seems that the recipients of this letter had been wrestling with two theological issues, which the author of the epistle is clarifying. The first issue that apparently troubled their theology was that they could not understand how the human being Jesus Christ could have been a more accurate revelation of the character of God than the Angel of the Lord had been in the Old Testament. Repeated references to the Angel of the Lord appearing to men when God desired to communicate to the Hebrews had probably made them wonder why that accepted means of revelation had now been set aside for an apparently more superior revelation in the person of Christ.

Secondly, they were obviously struggling with the implications of Christ’s suffering in death. If Christ was indeed the Incarnate One, how could He die? And what was the value of Him suffering in death the way that He did? How could His death on a cross be anything more than dreadful? How does Christ’s foreordained suffering in death demonstrate any kind of goodness of God the Father toward humanity?

The author states that God found it “fitting” that Christ would be made perfect in suffering (2:10). He affirms that Christ’s suffering death does indeed serve men, the seed of Abraham, by redeeming them (2:16). He concludes chapter two by saying that Christ’s suffering propitiated sin and enabled Him to aid those who suffer.

The author of Hebrews seems to make an astounding connection here in verse 14 that we must not miss. He began by telling the reader in the opening verses of the Epistle, that God, who had once spoken through the Angel of the Lord, now speaks to us “in” His Son Jesus. He was the One through Whom the worlds have been made. Indeed, Christ is the “brightness of God’s glory” and represents the very character of God Himself (1:3). Chapter two verse one begins by reasoning that because these things are true about Christ, we must pay heed to that truth about Christ’s superiority, and not drift away from Him doctrinally, substituting some inferior understanding about Him for the truth.

The author explains further that all things have been “put under Him”, even the things that we cannot now see that are being put under Christ’s authority, namely, death itself (2:9). Man, in spite of all his many supposed triumphs in life, is ultimately defeated in death because in death we face judgment for sin. But the full magnitude of God’s graciousness to us is seen when we comprehend that His eternal Son is the only human, who unlike us, conquers death. Where there is only ever defeat in our own deaths, there is great glory in Christ’s death. Because of the suffering of Christ’s death as a man, we see Jesus already crowned “with glory and honor” in his defeat of the enemy that had defeated us all, death.

Christ’s death is said here to be, in some sense, on behalf of everyone (2:9)! Not in an “atoning” or “substitutionary” sense of dying “for them”, but in the sense that Christ’s death was a statement of all of humanities inability to overcome and destroy the cause of death, sin.
Death had been the enemy and foe of every man. Death was a foe which ultimately brought every human being defeat, and yet, had at last, been defeated by a man! The grace and glory of God are abundantly expressed in the fact that the motive for Christ’s incarnation was to defeat death at the cross. He was indeed “born to die.”

In Christ’s defeat of death, He experienced the death that had bitterly defeated all men, only to finally triumph over it in grace and power. In that defeat, Christ defeated that which had subjected all men to the fear of death.

And so the author of Hebrews suggests that rather than looking at Christ’s humanness as being a cause for theological concern as to the validity of God’s true revelation, Christ’s humanity should rather be seen as a remarkable evidence of God’s divine goodness towards us.

In an almost stunning view into the seriousness and true meaning behind the significance of human death, the author reveals, without any apparent compulsion to clarify for the reader the bare bones theology of death, that there are three purposes to Christ’s death.

III. Three of God’s Purposes in Christ’s Death

a) Christ destroyed him who had the power of death (2:14)

We must ask two questions of the text here. “In what way is the Devil understood to be destroyed” in this text? And, “in what way does the author of Hebrews mean that the Devil had the power of death?” The Devil still exists, tempting and enslaving men to sin. It is in this ability to tempt and enslave to sin that the Devil is said to have “the power of death.” In no way then can we say that in Christ’s coming “to destroy him who had the power of death” are we freed from anything more than the Devil’s ultimate power which prevailed against us in death. Christ’s death has served to deliver us from the tyranny of the devil’s reign over both our lives and our death. In Christ, we are rendered safe from the bondage of sin to which the Devil introduced us, and Christ has so redeemed us from the death due to sinners, that death is no longer to be dreaded.

Surely, the words of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God must have been written after reflecting on this very passage!

“...For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great; and armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal.

“And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can
endure, for lo! his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him.”

When the writer of Hebrews speaks of the Devil’s “power of death” he refers to the Fall of man in Genesis 3:15, where Satan’s temptation in the garden of Eden introduced death by enticing Adam and Eve to transgress the will and commandment of God which had promised death for disobedience (Genesis 2:17). The Lord refers to the devil’s introduction of sin in John 8:44, where He calls “the devil a murderer from the beginning.” It was there, in the beginning, at the garden, that the devil became the author of sin, and then perhaps immediately, the author of death also (death having been introduced because sin had been introduced) -- and it was there that the Devil figuratively is assumed to have gained the power of death over us.

Wonderfully, it was in the death of our Lord that God did also destroy the cause of death, sin. One commentator said, “by bringing life and immortality to light, Christ delivered those whose continual fear of death placed them as it were in a state of slavery to a relentless tyrant.”

b) Christ released those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (2:15)

What an amazing statement this is. It asserts that there is a fear of death that holds men to bondage for a lifetime, from which Christ releases us. I don’t think that the author of Hebrews is saying that Christ released us from the fear of the way that we might die. He is concerned with our fear of death at a much deeper level. It is not simply the ceasing to be that men fear in their conscience. It is not simply “the shuffling off of the outer covering” that alarms men.
Dr. Bernard Seltzer, an outstanding surgeon, wrote a book entitled, "Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery." In it he suggests that as a culture, Amebicans have failed to learn to contemplate death. Our more natural reaction is to try to disguise death by acting as if is of no concern to us. He says, "He who shrinks from this contemplation is like an Elizabethan 'dandy' who breathes through a handkerchief that has been soaked in vinegar in order to avoid the rank whiff of the poor." It is a striking illustration of our utter neglect as a society to contemplate death. It may be safe to say that we are the most death-denying culture in all of human history. Yet, ironically, the fear of death is the most prevalent among those who avoid its contemplation.

This fear of death is as Shakespeare said, “.... the dread of something after death.” Lord Bacon remarked that “Conscience does indeed make cowards of us all. Men fear death as children fear the dark.” All children fear the dark. But it is not that children fear for what is there necessarily, but for what they imagine to be there, for what their conscience suggests may be lurking.

G. K. Chesterton, the British author and theologian wrote:
“The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it— because it is a fact.”

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard understood the fear of death. He saw the fear of death as an anxiety which pursued men their whole lives, from the time of their birth till the day that they died. This fear is based upon a conscious fear for unforgiven sin which is brought into effect by the work of the law which is written in men’s hearts (Rom. 2:15). This fear is represented in Adam’s fearful response when he first sinned (Gen. 3:10); in Felix’s response to Paul’s preaching (Acts 24:25); and here in the book of Hebrews by men who reject the preaching of the gospel of salvation (Hebrews 10:27-31).

The great sting of death that Paul referred to in 1 Corinthians 15:56 is sin. “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

It is to the ensuing results of sins, i.e., death, that men have been bound all their lives. And the only deliverance from that bondage to sin is genuine faith in the finished work of Christ, a faith the Paul tells us can “liberate” us from that fear.

How strange it seems that we no longer express the urgency of possessing the kind of faith that frees men from the fear of the horrible bondage of death, as was once owned by the Puritans. Matthew Poole, the great Puritan divine, wrote

“The fear of death is a painful and wasting horror, working the saddest apprehensions and tumultuous workings of the soul, from its apprehended danger of death spiritual, temporal, and eternal, when the wrath of God does not only dissolve the natural frame, but makes an everlasting separation from Himself, shutting them up with the worst company, in the worst place and state that is possible for the human mind to imagine, and that forever.”

This verse expresses in a striking manner how miserable the bondage of those who fear death. And they live in that dread because they look at death apart from the grace of Christ, for then, nothing but a curse appears in it.

The question that Scripture implores each one of it’s readers to consider is worthy indeed: “Why do we die except for God’s wrath against sin?”

Death here does not only mean the departure of the soul from the body, but also the punishment which is inflicted on us by an angry God. Death here includes the idea so prevalent in Scripture of eternal ruin. As one Puritan commentator said, “Where there is guilt before God, there immediately hell shows itself.” How many of us have never read John 3:36? “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”

Calvin said that “through a consciousness of sin the judgment of God is ever presented to the view. From this fear Christ has delivered us, who by undergoing our curse has taken away what is dreadful in death.” It is a Christian duty to live in light of the fact that Christ has empowered us to be free from the fear of eternal ruin that comes with sin. “If any one cannot pacify his mind by disregarding death, let him know that he has made as yet but very little proficiency in the faith of Christ; for as extreme fear is owing to ignorance as to the grace of Christ, so it is a certain evidence of unbelief.”

From the following statement by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart it would appear that it is our duty to become intimately acquainted with our death. Mozart wrote

“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that [meditating upon my] death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.”

Charles Spurgeon suggested that we become so familiar with death that we die, in a sense, every day! He wrote that

“No man would find it difficult to die that died every day. He would have practiced it so often, that he would only have to die but once more; like the singer who has been through his rehearsals, and is perfect in his part, and has but to pour forth the notes once for all, and have done.”

c) The turning away of the wrath of God

Hebrews 2: 17 says, “Wherefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”

The sentence He had to be made like His brethren is an imperfect active indicative verb. It means that in time past, it was always true that God had intended that Christ was under obligation and bound by necessity, to become like one of us. And herein is the motive or purpose of His being made like one of us, “To make propitiation for the sins of the people.” The verb to make propitiation is an aorist infinitive. It implies motive or purpose. If we were to take a photograph of what God was purposing to do in Christ’s death, it could be summarized in the statement “God, in offering Christ as a sacrifice, was intending to make propitiation for sins.” That was His purpose in the Incarnation of Christ. That was His intended result. Christ’s work is to bring God and sinner together in reconciliation, to make the One propitious and gracious to the other by sacrifice.

This propitious work of Christ’s includes the idea of turning away God’s wrath toward sin by an offering. “Propitiation” appears four times in the New Testament: Heb. 2:17; Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2, 4:10. Note the difference between expiation and propitiation. The intent here in the passage in Hebrews is not simply to describe some blanket expiation, or cancellation of sin for all people. God did not simply cancel all sin and it’s penalties once and for all in Christ’s sacrifice. If that were the case, then no one would ever need to have any fear of death at all, because the guilt and punishment associated with sin and death would be non-existent!

Rather, Christ, by the sacrifice of Himself, satisfied God’s justice by placating God’s wrath toward all those who have genuine faith in Christ, and procured their pardon for each and every sin of omission and commission they had accrued in their entire lifetime.

The wonderful truth found in Christ’s suffering and death is that the cross is God’s ordained means of removing the condemnation toward sin which His justice required. Death entered the world because of sin. And because of sin, men have all their lives been bound to the penalty of sin, death. And in death, men rightly find fear and judgment from a holy and righteous Judge.

This is the true testimony of God’s love toward sinners. The love of God which is poured out towards us in the merciful offering of Christ for sin cannot be known and apprehended apart from the fact that Christ’s death averted the wrath of God due us by our sin.

The death of the soul is very different. It is the judgment of God, the weight of which the wretched soul cannot bear without being wholly confounded, crushed, and desperate, as both the Scriptures teach us, and experience has taught those whom God has once smitten with his terrors. To begin with Adam, who first received the fatal wages, what do we think his feelings must have been when he heard the dreadful question, “Adam, where art thou?” It is easier to imagine than to express it, though imagination must fall far short of the reality. As the sublime majesty of God cannot be expressed in words, so neither can his dreadful anger on those on whom he inflicts it be expressed. They see the power of the Almighty actually present: to escape it, they would plunge themselves into a thousand abysses; but escape they cannot. Who does not confess that this is very death? (John Calvin, Vol. 3, Selected Works, 416).

May God be praised for His wonderful work in Christ!

What If It Were True That God Is Very Good?

“. . . . Indeed, it would seem very strange that Christianity should have come into the world merely to receive an explanation; as if it had been somewhat bewildered about itself, and hence entered the world to consult that wise man, the speculative philosopher, who can come to its assistance by furnishing the explanation.” -- Sören Kierkegaard

If God is so good, why does it look like he isn’t? It seems that nothing stirs the passions of the atheist more than the fact that Christianity asks the world to believe the impossible about God. Christians might have been able to get away with simply believing that somewhere out there in the abyss of infinity there is some vague disinterested and impotent something that some people have decided to call God. The atheist could have remained dispassionate if only that something would have remained unfamiliar, inexplicable and abstract enough so as not to interfere with the world’s perceptions.

But enough is enough, it seems; Christianity hasn’t simply asked us to believe that this God merely exists. It has asked us to believe that he’s knowable without empirical evidence. If that isn’t enough, it has asked us to believe that he’s more powerful than anything we can imagine; that he can do anything at all! More importantly it has asked us to believe that he has the best interests of this world in mind all the time. And finally, it has asked us to believe that he even cares about people and what happens to them in spite of his repeated failure to utilize his supposed attributes on their behalf.

And now that the world has clearly failed to see the enormity of this Christian proposition, and the travesty of irrationality that has been perpetrated against it by this belief, the atheist has been forced to come to the world’s intellectual rescue. Their antidote for this travesty that has been perpetrated against the world is a rational and logical explanation that can lead to only one conclusion: If there is any kind of God that exists, it certainly cannot be the God of Christianity. Christians have taken their faith too lightly, too illogically, too childishly it seems, and now the speculative philosopher must come to its rescue and furnish it with the only reasonable explanation for this outrageous claim: no such thing exists!

B.C. Johnson, for instance, in The Atheist Debater’s Handbook begins a chapter entitled God and the Problem of Evil with this illustration:

Here is a common situation: a house catches on fire and a six-month-old baby is painfully burned to death. Could we possibly describe as “good” any person who had the power to save this child and yet refused to do so? God undoubtedly has this power and yet in many cases of this sort he has refused to help. Can we call God “good”? Are there adequate excuses for this behavior? ....Certainly not. If we would not consider a mortal human being good under these circumstances, what grounds could we possibly have for continuing to assert the goodness of an all powerful God?[1]

There are two major concerns that will be addressed in this chapter: What constitutes a reasonable proof that God exists? And, if there is any such proof, is it reasonable to assume that the God of Christianity can be that God? If we are assured that there is no empirical proof for the existence of a God, why does the Christian continue to believe in one? Even more astoundingly, assuming there is a reasonable way to hold to a belief in a God without empirical evidence, how can Christians hold to the notion of his goodness in light of the evil he supposedly allows if he does exist?

Interestingly, in order for this debate to take place, both the atheist and the Christian must assume that God does exist, and that He is some kind of real being in the universe who acts deliberately and with power in the world. Both sides must acknowledge that God’s character, which is the basis for the motivation of his actions, can be scrutinized, criticized or defended in human terms. Without both sides making these assumptions first, there would be no on-going debate on the subject of God’s existence or his goodness.

The atheist desires to show that his viewpoint on the existence of a God without empirical evidence is valid.[2] The atheist perceives the world in terms of ‘physical’ reality alone, and then wonders how some other reality that the Christian perceives God to exist in might better account for God’s goodness. “Provided that you can demonstrate that it is reasonable to assume that your God exists, how can you possibly suggest that your God is good when all around us we experience and bear testimony to such horrific atrocities? Doesn’t the existence of these atrocities at least challenge the Christian concept of God’s ‘goodness’ and ‘righteousness’”?
At the outset, the atheist sets the parameters for understanding God by limiting his view of reality to a mere scientific, rational, materialistic physical world which can only be understood through empirical (i.e., physically tangible) means. After all, to him, that is the only real world! [3] The atheist believes that the Christian God can only be understood apart from the concept of faith. He will never be able to come to terms with the existence of the God of the Bible the way that the Christian does, because of his view of reality. In the end, it is perhaps not so much that the atheist doubts the goodness of God in this debate, though he undoubtedly does do that. That is secondary. All of the atheist’s doubts about God arise from his fundamental understanding of reality as “anti-spiritual.” It is this limiting view of ‘reality’ that forces the atheist to deny God’s very existence, and consequently, his supposed goodness.

But the Christian also struggles at a very foundational level in this debate. If he concludes that God is indeed real in an entirely ‘other’ sense than the mere physical reality that the atheist perceives, he must then believe in a God who is not only capable of preventing pain and suffering, but also is one who picks and chooses what He does or doesn’t do about it. While the Christian believes in the literal spiritual reality of the eternal, omnipotent God of the Bible, he is often incapable of debating effectively whether God remains ‘good’ within the perspective of this spiritual reality.

The Christian must understand, ultimately, that his belief in the goodness of God comes from his reliance on the fact that Scripture alone establishes his perception of God’s existence and goodness, and not his experience. Scripture is replete with examples of the apparent thriving of the wicked in their wickedness. “For I was envious of the boastful, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no pangs in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, nor are they plagued like other men” (Psalm 73:3-5). “Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11). The prophet Habakkuk wrote of his confusion about the thriving of the wicked while the righteous God-fearer suffers: “You [God] are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness. Why do You look on those who deal treacherously, and hold your tongue when the wicked devours?” (1:13). In Judges 6:13, Gideon complains with wonder that “...if the Lord is with us, why then has all this [hardship] befallen us?”

Furthermore, what serves as fuel for the atheist’s argument is the Christian conviction that even the very faith we rely on to believe in the God of the Bible is from God Himself.[4] Karl Barth wrote in On Christian Faith, that

Faith is a freedom; a permission. It is permitted to be, so -- that the believer in God’s Word may hold on to this Word in everything, in spite of all that contradicts it [in reality]. It is so: we never believe ‘on account of,’ never ‘because of’; we awaken to faith in spite of everything… when we believe, we believe in spite of God’s hiddenness. The hiddenness of God necessarily reminds us of our human limitation. We do not believe out of our personal reason and power.

Christians do not believe that God is good based upon an empirical proof that God necessarily demonstrates on a physical basis. We awaken to faith in spite of everything. We understand that whether or not God is good is not based upon the limited reality of our human comprehension of our particular experiences. Faith does not allow us to determine what ‘the goodness of God’ should look like. It allows us to believe His revelation about His intrinsic goodness in spite of what our experience shows it does look like. Our faith in God and in his goodness cannot be scientifically tested within the bounds of this physical reality because God exists outside of it. It cannot be validated scientifically or empirically, and so, while to the atheist, it is mere nonsense to attempt to answer the questions regarding the existence or the goodness of God through some means other than empiricism, the Christian cannot look to empiricism as establishing its proof.

Yet both the atheist and the Christian attempt to explain the same set of facts. Both can see that there are discrepancies in our experiences that make it difficult to account for God’s goodness, which is why, from the atheist’s perspective it is

…incumbent upon the theist to provide enough reason for his belief that God is the true explanation of the universe and morality. The atheist, for his part, does not necessarily offer an explanation; he simply does not accept the theist’s explanation. Therefore, the atheist need only demonstrate that the theist has failed to justify his position.[5]

The atheist does not offer a solution because he has none except his experience and human judgment. In the end, it is the atheist’s own materialistic view of the world that has made it impossible for him to believe in a God, let alone one that is good. And we are not blaming the atheist for making that assumption; he has no other alternative! The Christian insists that this physical reality alone cannot account for our understanding of the goodness of God.

Our desire to solve the problem of the goodness of God, therefore, is at a standstill unless we ask an entirely different question than “How does our perception of reality demonstrate that God is ultimately good?” Perhaps it might be better to arrive at some tenable solutions if we ask, “Are you so entirely dedicated to your materialistic view of reality that you will not allow for any other view of reality in considering the question of God’s existence and goodness?”

How Does Christianity Account for God’s Goodness?

Thomas Warren has written that “it is likely the case that no charge has been made with a greater frequency or with more telling force against the theism of Judeo-Christian (biblical) tradition than the complication of the existence of evil.”[6] Historically, Christian theologians have insisted that God has permitted evil in order to bring about “a greater good” than would have existed had evil not been present in the world. Thomas Aquinas argued on a broad scale that “the permitting of evil tends to the good of the universe.”[7]

The Christian theologian relies on the truthfulness of the Biblical account to inform him of God’s goodness and the existence of evil. The Biblical account suggests that a good God allowed evil and sin in the world in order to bring about an immense advantage to men, in that, God, through the incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ, atoned for sin. This atonement for human sin is ultimately an expression of a better “good” than the “goodness” of a world that might have been without the presence of sin because the atonement for human sin is the ultimate expression of His goodness toward mankind. Philosophers have suggested that God gave “to the universe something nobler than anything that ever would have been among creatures except for this sinfulness,”[8] when He allowed sin to come into existence. Therefore, in light of this Biblical theological argument we cannot

…doubt that God does well even in the permission of what is evil, for He permits it only in the justice of His judgment. And surely all that is just is good. Although, therefore, evil, in so far as it is evil, is not a good [in and of itself]; yet the fact that evil as well as good exists, [on the whole] is a good. For if it were not a good that evil should exist, its existence would not be permitted by the omnipotent God, who without doubt can as easily refuse to permit what He does not wish, as bring about what He does wish. And if we do not believe this, the very first sentence of our creed is endangered, wherein we profess to believe in God the Father Almighty. For He is not truly called Almighty if He cannot do whatever He pleases, or if the power of His Almighty will is hindered by the will of any creature whatsoever.[9]

It is the Biblical revelation of the person of God and the existence of evil that informs us of God’s goodness in light of that evil, and not merely our human perception of what God’s goodness should look like in the world. Faith is an absolutely necessary requirement to understanding how God can be good in this world; it is not an alternative to answering the difficult question of His goodness, it is the solution to answering the question. Often in speaking with people about the choices God made about the kind of world he supposedly created, they will inevitably ask “Couldn’t God have made a better choice by creating a hedonistic paradise that is free from pain and suffering? Isn’t a world free from pain and suffering better than this world? Because God did not create such a hedonistic paradise, is He not therefore lacking in the qualities of love, goodness and power?”

The remainder of this essay will attempt to address these questions. We recognize that the Christian theistic conception of God not only grants that there is evil in the world which God created, it believes that God has ordained its existence (using this word ordained in the normal dictionary usage of “commanded, ordered, established, or intended”) to demonstrate how good he is. Scripture teaches that not only has God created the whole earth and all that dwells within it, but that He remains good in spite of the choices He made to create it as He did, and to govern it as He does.

B. C. Johnson has written of this formidable and difficult problem, that “throughout history God has allowed numerous atrocities to occur. No one can have justifiable faith in the goodness of such a God.”[10] Yet there are literally millions of people who do have justifiable faith in the goodness of the God of Scripture Who has not only allowed evil atrocities to exist, but has in His sovereignty, decreed that they be so, without impacting their view of God’s goodness.

According to Biblical theology, an infinitely good God demonstrated His goodness in spite of His allowing evil to exist. Romans 8:28 says “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose...” Note, however, that this verse does not teach that all events in life are ‘good’ from the human perspective in spite of the fact that some of them may actually be evil! Nor does this verse teach that the good and evil events alike work together within God’s providence for the benefit of both the Christian and atheist. This verse however, does teach that as Christians, we know that God’s ordaining of all events, regardless of how they appear in this physical reality, work together for an ultimate good to those who love God. Christians must keep in mind this ultimate end in their understanding of God’s goodness. There appears to be nothing in Scripture to indicate that all things also work together for good to those who hate, or deny the existence of God.

Which Kinds of Choices Demonstrate Goodness?

Now, if we suppose for a moment that Scripture is true in terms of its declaration that God remains infinitely good while permitting the existence of evil, and apparently failing to remedy each instance of it from a human perspective, then does the existence of evil in the world demonstrate God’s goodness, or negate it? In other words, if God is truly good, would He allow evil to exist because He is good, or would He destroy evil because He is good? Furthermore, would there even be an atheist in existence to question the goodness of God, if God were intent upon eliminating every evil?[11] This of course only requires two things. First, the atheist must necessarily admit to the possibility of possessing a single evil thought in his mind for at least one second during his lifetime. We ask that if the atheist would acknowledge the possibility that for one second during his lifetime he has had a thought that was evil, or merely not good, is the fact that God allows him to exist, in spite of his evil thought, a demonstration of God’s goodness? Or would the fact that he did not destroy the atheist the second he had an evil thought demonstrate that God is evil?[12]

The question remains, which action on God’s part demonstrates His goodness? Is God good because He allows evil to exist? Or can His “goodness” only be demonstrated by His elimination of evil as the atheist suggests? Who determines the degree of evil that must be present before God eliminates it? This issue is especially difficult for the atheist. B.C. Johnson states that

A very large disaster could have been avoided simply by producing in Hitler a miraculous heart attack -- and no one would have known it was a miracle ... No one is requesting that God interfere all of the time. He should, however, intervene to prevent especially horrible disasters. Of course, the question arises: where does one draw the line? Well, certainly the line should be drawn somewhere this side of infants burning to death. To argue that we do not know where the line should be drawn is no excuse for failing to interfere in those instances that would be called clear cases of evil.[13]

The atheist must obviously perceive that premeditated murder is a relative ‘goodness,’ which leads to several serious problems. For instance, how does murdering Hitler demonstrate God’s goodness? Furthermore, how do we know that God didn’t interfere in Hitler’s actions, for example, by preventing every Jew from being exterminated? Which is the greater good, allowing only some Jews to live, or murdering Hitler?

Furthermore, how would anyone prove that it was God who gave Hitler a heart attack, were he to have died from one, rather than that his heart naturally stopped beating apart from any intervention by God?[14] Who decides what is ultimately “good”? Should it be the atheist? If so, on what grounds will he suggest that he knows best what is good or not good in every circumstance? He cannot claim eternal omniscience. Perhaps he would claim this knowledge on the grounds of his own goodness? Furthermore, it is intriguing that the atheist is not requesting that God interfere all the time, but just when the atheist says so. Perhaps the atheist imagines that the Christian God should be available to intervene at every beckoning and call that the atheist determines He should?

The atheist apparently knows as well that a line should be drawn in some cases that require the knowledge of “goodness”. Apparently unbeknownst to God, it is before the death of innocent children. But we wonder, if all children are innocent in the atheist’s perspective, wasn’t Hitler once an innocent child as well? How is it that the atheist can label as good the murdering of ‘innocent’ children if they turn out to be like Hitler, and still use God’s failure to rescue innocent children from burning as a demonstration that God is not good? Who knows whether or not one of those children that God allows to burn in a fire will not grow up to be the next Hitler?

Furthermore, on what basis does the atheist determine the ‘innocence’ of children? Certainly not on his understanding of what they will do thirty or forty years after their birth! For even the atheist would have to agree that though Hitler may have been innocent as a child, that innocence certainly left prior to his choosing to murder several million Jews! And if we compare the supposed ‘innocence’ of children to a perfectly holy and just God, what more can we say then of their innocence, than that it is only a relative one? Won’t the atheist agree that even humans allow for degrees of evil when they make “good” choices? Does not a general in the army prefer a slight wound accompanied by great victory, to no wound at all and no victory?

Certainly goodness is relative even in the light of evil choices. Winston Churchill allowed the Nazi bombing of the city of Coventry, England, during World War II, even though he knew ahead of time that the Nazis were preparing to do so and could have prevented the deaths of ‘innocent’ people. Through various spy networks and the obtaining of a Nazi book of codes, Churchill had learned of the Nazi plan to destroy the non-military site of Coventry. Yet he reasoned that if he were to evacuate all of the citizens from Coventry prior to the bombing, (thereby sparing the loss of innocent life), the Nazis would have known the British had broken their secret codes, thereby endangering the future good that would come from being able to determine the war plans of the Nazis more thoroughly, and gain the ultimate victory in the war. The difficult choice was to allow some innocent people to die at Coventry for the greater good of eventually defeating the Nazis once and for all. Did Churchill make a “good” choice? Or would it have been better to save Coventry, yet be defeated by the Nazis in World War II? Perhaps that is a something only God can determine.

The Problem of the Value of Pleasure and Pain


The atheist often supposes that if God is ultimately ‘good’, then He could have demonstrated that goodness more effectively through the creation of a hedonistic-like paradise where only pleasure or pleasant consequences exist. The question of whether human beings[15] might always be capable of only choosing the good in a paradise of pleasure is virtually incapable of being determined in light of our current perspectives of reality. The Christian Biblical perspective is that a perfectly good God allows evil to exist while He Himself remains good. Christians admit that evil is endemic to the world and to those of us who live here because of the presence of sin. The atheist’s argument that all that God needed to do to have made a better choice when He created was to change the environment to one that is hedonistic, is essentially flawed if it does not take into consideration how our present world is affected by sin. For we see that even in our world that now exists, pleasure does not always lead to good. In fact the physical pleasures that we now experience can just as easily lead human beings to jealously, envy, addiction and hatred as they can lead to good, (assuming of course that the atheist would agree that these previous things are not good). I believe it can be demonstrated that injecting heroin into one’s veins, for example, is one of the most pleasurable sensations that humans can experience in the flesh. Yet there are limits to the goodness of these pleasurable sensations. For a little too much heroin can lead to death. And unless the atheist is willing to agree that death is a possible ‘good’ that results from living in a hedonistic paradise of pleasure, we cannot say that the presence of that pleasurable environment alone guarantees ‘good’ results, if human beings, as they now are, were to live there.

Furthermore, we could even question whether we could experience more pleasure in a ‘hedonistic’ world than we are capable of experiencing in the world in which we now live. More importantly, has anyone experienced not only every possible pleasure to its fullest extent in this world, but every possible extent and avenue of every pleasure, in the human body we have in this world that contains evil? It is utter speculation on the part of the atheist to assume that we could experience more pleasure than we are currently able to experience, and then, without negative (evil) consequences, while remaining the human beings that we now are.[16] We grant the atheist his case that he is not necessarily arguing for a world where no pain exists, but perhaps only for a world where less of it exists. B.C. Johnson, for example, does not necessarily require a completely hedonistic world where no suffering of any kind at all might exist, as the only possible alternative to this one. “[The atheist] need only claim that there is suffering which is in excess of that needed for the production of various virtues (which virtues, according to the theist, produce courage, sympathy, etc).”[17] It is interesting isn’t it, that the atheist suggests that suffering might bring virtue to humanity? One would gather by his arguments that suffering would not be considered a relative good, but rather something that God in his goodness would necessarily remedy if indeed he were good. Huston Smith has written that Hinduism, for example, accepts the existence of pain in reality “when it has a purpose, as a person welcomes the return of life and feeling, even painful feeling, to a frozen arm.”[18] Yet, is it not with difficulty that anyone accepts the notion of “purposeless pain”? What function would useless pain have in the physical world? Apparently even the atheist doubts the possibility of the existence of purposeless pain when he suggests that some suffering might be necessary to produce virtue.

Now, we need not look far to see that at least certain kinds of pain do serve a good purpose in this world. Scientists have explained that lepers experience the mangling and deterioration of their flesh because they are no longer able to sense pain in the extremities of their bodies. Because they cannot feel the pain which would normally caution them to be attentive to their own actions, lepers cannot determine whether or not they are incurring any detriment to their flesh. Pain in ones extremities protects the person from incurring more damage to them.

Even the atheist can easily see that pain in the world in which we now exist, is necessary, and that it actually serves a ‘good’ purpose in our world. And even though we agree with the atheist that pain in certain excesses is most often considered to be evil and appears to be of no use to us in this world, God had a purpose and use for it in the world which He created. Does our world not function better in some degrees because of the existence of pain in it?

Though it remains difficult to assimilate the excesses of pain and evil which appear in this world, the Bible teaches further that God uses physical pain and suffering to chastise His own “for their own good,” (rather than plant them into an imaginary world of hedonism and pleasure which is free from pain). King David wrote, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.... I know, oh Lord, that your laws are righteous, and in faithfulness you have afflicted me (Psalm 119:71, 75, emphasis added). Charles Haddon Spurgeon, London’s greatest preacher, was afflicted with gout for most of his adult life. His response to that affliction demonstrates a Christian conviction that in spite of pain and suffering, God uses it toward our ultimate good.

The result of [being in the melting pot of pain] is that we arrive at a true valuation of things [and] we are poured out into a new and better fashion. And, oh, we may almost wish for the melting-pot if we may but get rid of the dross, if we may be but pure, if we may but be fashioned more completely like our Lord.[19]

The response of the greatest apostle in the New Testament to God’s goodness and the struggle he had as God formed him towards the pattern of Christ through pain and suffering, is clearly laid out for us in 2 Corinthians 12:9b, 10. “Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Does God Demonstrate the Greatest Good by Allowing the Greatest Evil?


Is it possible that in our desire to answer these difficult questions regarding the place of good and evil in this world that we have failed to ask the most important question of all: Could God have demonstrated the greatest good by allowing the greatest evil? Our tendency to question whether God should have made a world other than He did is worth serious reconsideration. After all, though it is fun to speculate, this is the world we live in.[20] We all experience both good and evil here, some of us to a greater or lesser degree than others. Yet if God did not create this world with the intention of it being a hedonistic paradise, but rather created it to be, as one man suggests, a “scene of history in which human personality may be formed toward the pattern of Christ,” how shall we go about reaching that end while we live in a world that is evil?

First, the Christian theist must acknowledge his own responsibility for his own evil, and cannot fault the world’s Creator for it because he believes that Scripture is true when it says that God is perfect. The Westminster Confession of Faith has stated the Biblical truth that “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.....” (WCF 3:1). But what Christians often fail to understand is that in His perfection there exists a mysterious element that defies human comprehension. God being perfect does not mean that his choices are perfectly understandable. From our finite perceptions of reality, we humans are too willing to challenge the concept of whether God is entirely good. We critique His wondrous ways, faulting Him for what appears to us to be haphazard carelessness in His creation, without any trepidation. We so arrogantly dispute His power and ability by suggesting that He could have done it better ....“If only”. We see murder, rape, greed, and death all around us, and do not hesitate to shake our fists in the air and say, “Why have You allowed this!” Why do we remain so thoroughly blind to the extent of His goodness in light of our own evil? Would any of us be alive for a second longer if God were to eliminate all evil because of His goodness?

This issue is at the heart of the mystery of the Gospel: This God Who is good, who created human beings with a huge propensity toward evil, chose the greatest good for them, by experiencing the greatest evil for them. This God, in demonstrating His goodness, by His grace alone, saves believing men from their evil rather than destroying them for it. In doing this, God demonstrated for those who believe, that though they are worthy of nothing more than to pay for their own wickedness with their own lives, He paid the price for their evil for them with the life of His only begotten perfect Son.

Perhaps rather than challenging God’s goodness, we might become inclined to see how it can be, that Scripture explains to us that while God is free from any evil in and of Himself, and would remain holy and just even if He held us accountable for each of our sins, He has chosen rather to demonstrate His goodness toward mankind in that “…God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them…” (2 Corinthians 5:19). He chose the greater good of allowing the world to become what it is, so that we could experience the greatest demonstration of His goodness toward us who are evil. And that greatest good was to reconcile wicked sinners to Himself, not at the cost of our lives, but at the cost of Christ’s life.

This mystery is the gospel that defies human comprehension. The mystery lies in the fact that God’s goodness is demonstrated to us through the explanation in Scripture that instead of a perfectly holy God obliterating humanity because of its sin, God did the most inhumanly incomprehensible thing to remedy that situation. This remedy is a mystery precisely because His solution is, at the same time, a horrible demonstration of the extent our own evil and an incomprehensible demonstration of His goodness toward us. Even the goodness of God’s solution for our wickedness is incomprehensible in that God poured out His wrath against evil upon His own Son, Who was the only Person to have ever existed who was free from any evil whatsoever, so that he wouldn’t pour it out on us!

I urge the reader to consider 1 Corinthians 1:18-31. The gospel message of God pouring out His wrath upon His own Son is a message that is absolutely foolish to those who are perishing in their unbelief! (1 Corinthians 1:18). Yet that very same message has the power to save those who believe it. God, in His mysterious wisdom, has made what the world believes to be true about ‘goodness’ foolish. The gospel is foolish because the world can never understand God’s goodness unless it understands God through faith and the wisdom of the cross of Christ. In fact, not only can the world not know God through its own kind of wisdom, it was pleasing to God to save those who believe the very same message that the rest of the world rejects as foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:21).

Scripture records that, “it pleased the LORD to bruise Him [Christ]; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. He shall see the travail of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities (Isaiah 53:10-11)”. That message of forgiveness of sin by the pouring out of God’s holy wrath against His perfect sinless Son is a message that cannot be understood apart from faith.

The very idea of God putting His own sinless Son on a cross to pay the penalty of sin for every person who would ever believe that message is impossible for the human mind to accept as logical or rational. The unbelieving world asks, “How can that message demonstrate God’s goodness, when, for all intents and purposes, that message describes one of the most horrific absurdities capable of being conceived?” And even to begin to grasp that message in faith, requires of the believer that he acknowledge that the greatest good could only come about through what appears to us to be nothing short of an atrocity. God’s gracious forgiveness speaks volumes not only of our inability to save ourselves, but begs the question: “What if God demonstrated the supremacy of his goodness by allowing the greatest evil to occur?”


[i] B.C. Johnson, The Atheist Debater’s Handbook, (Amherst: New York), 1983, 99-100.
[ii] On what basis does the atheist come to the conclusion that there is no spiritual reality? On what basis does he come to the conclusion that empiricism is the only valid source for determining all that is real?
[iii] One cannot prove what does not exist through any means, empirical (see, hear, touch, taste, smell) or otherwise. Using empirical means as a scientific proof can only prove what does exist. If atheism is certain that God does not exist, there would be no empirical proofs available to prove it. So why make any effort to do the impossible?
[iv] This short paper cannot consider all of the implications about faith. We are only considering here that it does not arise within ourselves.
[v] The Atheist Debater’s Handbook, 12.
[vi] Thomas B. Warren, Have Atheists Proved There Is No God? (Nashville: Gospel Advocate Co., 1972), vii; quoted in The Blue Banner, vol. 8, Issue 11-12, First Presbyterian Church Rowlett, Dallas, Texas, 1999, 7.
[vii] John A. Mourant, Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, sv. “The Best of all Possible Worlds,” Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954), 384.
[viii] Leibniz, Readings, 384
[ix] St. Augustine, Readings, s.v. “Evil as Privation of the Good”, 391. The reference is to the Apostle’s Creed, which begins with the words, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth....”
[x] Handbook, 106.
[xi] A friend of mine made a good point here. We are not suggesting that questioning God’s goodness is an evil in and of itself. Nor are we suggesting that having a single evil thought makes the whole person evil. What we are suggesting however, is that all humans have at times thoughts that are essentially evil, and we are assuming that evil thoughts arise from an innate evilness. That God does not destroy us for this innate evil is a good thing.
[xii] Perhaps at this juncture, the atheist might consider it a ‘good’ compromise if God were to only erase the evil thought that came to the mind of the atheist the second that he had it, rather than eliminate the atheist altogether.
[xiii] Handbook, 104.
[xiv] It is curious that the atheist suddenly and conveniently argues for a God produced miracle in his belief system. We wonder if a miracle certainly would be the atheist’s contention were he to discover that had God actually produced a heart attack in Hitler.
[xv] By this we mean human beings as they now are. Neither the Christian nor the atheist can speak reasonably or explain what might be involved in speaking of some other kind of human being that exists in a different kind of world. In this imaginary utopia of pleasure, where the divinity apparently demonstrates His love and goodness by providing nothing but pleasure to human beings, yet no evil consequences to any of those pleasures whatsoever, do humans have the same bodies they have now? Are they still sinful? Would all other things in the world be equal? How would they need to be different to live in that world and experience more pleasure?
[xvi] It might be reasonable to ask here whether or not the evil consequences can be deemed good in that they might restrain the participant from a complete abandonment to utter hedonism to the neglect of other necessary considerations in life.
[xvii] Handbook, 102-103.
[xviii] Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 22.
[xix] Hank Hanegraaff, Christianity in Crisis (Eugene, OR.: Harvest House, 1993), 266.
[xx] On what basis does the atheist make the assumption that a ‘safe and peaceful world’ is a better world than this one? Certainly it is not on the basis of his omniscience. On what basis does the atheist make the assumption that he knows what would make this world a better world? If this is the only world he has experienced, how could he know?

The Philosophical Life of a Gutter Sparrow

What does a sparrow know about philosophy? The answer to that question depends on how sparrows formulate their world view: Upon what basis do they interpret reality? What is real to them, and what is not real? How do they put their thoughts regarding reality in logical order, to establish a reasonable argument for why they think the way that they do?

Near the end of his second missionary journey the Apostle Paul makes what appears to be a random unplanned stop in Athens. The text says that as he waited in Athens for Silas and Timothy to meet him, he realized the tremendous depth to which the Athenians were engulfed in idolatry. His spirit was provoked within him to reach these people with the truth, and he daily reasoned with them in the synagogues and in the marketplaces (17:17). It was there that he encountered two groups of people, the Stoics and the Epicureans. Only by understanding the world view of these two philosophic groups, and comprehending how they reason, do we begin to sense the genius in Paul's apologetic. The basis for Paul's appeal to the truth of the gospel is based upon his knowledge of what these men believe! When he understands how they think about their world, and the people in it, and their perception of its reality, it is those particular misunderstandings that he addresses with the truth of the gospel.

The Stoics

The Stoics were materialists, pantheists and empiricists. Anything that you could see, touch, taste, smell or hear (empiricism) was real. But only material things were real. There was no room for any sort of 'unseen spiritual' reality. They therefore necessarily discounted reality of spirit, angels, or a God Who is a living Spirit. After all, there was no empirical material proof for such things in their reality. Pantheism means literally that 'God is everything, and everything is God.' There was this mental 'Reason' that filled the whole universe, which was the ‘soul of the universe.’ But because all reality to them could only be realized in terms of materialism and empiricism, God, for the Stoics, was a vague, unidentifiable mentality within the universe.

For them, God could not be distinguished from the world, nor could their view of God allow them to differentiate any of his works from anything in the world. The thought of God creating and directing the flow of the unfolding events in time was a laugh to the Stoics. The ability to distinguish between the virtuous works of God and the sin of men hence became equally impossible. For the Stoics, there was this sense of sheer fatalism and apathy towards all circumstances that came to pass in life. There was nothing to be done about one's circumstances except learn to grin and bear it, and be unemotional in response to it. A "stoic" look today is considered to be one that shows no emotion in spite in the face of trials and difficulties. There was no sense of God being sovereign over circumstances and trials in life. Since God was essentially unidentifiable, and only some vague esoteric aspect of the world, He could not be someone who would intervene into the events of the world.

This apathy manifested itself most in how men related to each other. There was no sense of brotherhood, or unity among men. This of course led to a deep confusion as to the purpose of the lives of men in the world, and there were no efforts toward peace or compassion, other than on an intellectual level.Interestingly, Stoicism is the seed bed for many false religions in the world today. In its philosophy of life and its world view, we find the earliest forms of Humanism, Evolution, situational ethics, Fatalism, New Age, Islamism and others.

The Epicureans

The Epicureans were 'garden philosophers.' They meditated on nature, and tried to see how nature and morality interrelated. They believed that the universe was eternal and infinite, though not created by God. It came about by accident really, because there were billions of little 'atoms' that had specific gravity and structure randomly colliding together which happened to make all that existed. Naturally, there was no plan or design behind the universe. It was, after all, an accident that anything was 'here.' They believed in ‘gods’, but they were separate from humanity and less than remotely concerned about men. These gods were engrossed in their own cosmic concerns that didn't concern humans. In the Epicurean mind the greatest evil was fear, particularly fear of the unknown, such as death and what the gods might do. The greatest possible achievement for men was to become completely free from any belief in the gods, because the gods only brought fear into life. Once men were free from the evil associated with the fear brought about by the gods, they could eat, drink, and be merry. That was the real purpose to living: “Exist in the now, that's all there is.” Any kind of judgment in the after-life could not be taken seriously, since all that there is, is 'now.'

There are multitudes of philosophical, theological and doctrinal differences between Christianity and the philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism. But reading Acts 17:24-31 reveals that the Apostle Paul didn't try to wrestle with every detail about the differences between these two philosophies and the many doctrines of Christianity. He focused on three essential doctrines that differentiated Stoicism and Epicureanism from the doctrines of Christianity (17:19). These three major differences were in how God, man and sin were viewed.

Foremost in our thoughts about sharing the gospel ought to be these three standard truths about Christianity: it is the one true religion that reveals the one true God and the truth about Him; it alone has the proper perspective about the nature, origin, and condition of men; and it reveals the truth about the future reality of judgment. These three errors in their thinking were so foundational to their misunderstanding about all of life that Paul probably felt that by helping to get a clearer understanding of these doctrinal differences would help them to see the truth of Christianity more clearly, and their own errors as well.

These Athenian philosophers were Gentiles. Paul does not use Old Testament prophesy or Scripture with Gentiles, only with Jews. Why? Because Jews already know who the One true God is. After all, that is foundational to their heritage. They already believe, at least for the most part, the God of the Bible. What they needed to learn is that Jesus of Nazareth is the One Who fulfills Old Testament prophesy about the Messiah. It is the Gentiles who need to hear about the One true God, and His relationship to men and what differentiated men from God. Paul never uses the Bible per se (the Old Testament Scriptures) to explain to Gentiles about this God either. Why should he? They don't understand that the only source of truth can be found in the true, inspired, inerrant Word of God like the Jews do. Certainly, all that Paul explains to Gentiles is couched in the truth of the Old Testament, but he does not hold up the Old Testament as being the source of that truth, because the Bible is just another book to them. You won't find Paul saying anything like "The Bible says," or "the Scriptures teach" when he is speaking to Gentiles in the book of Acts. In fact, even in the passage we are looking at, He reminds them of the writings of the Greek secular poets to suggest that what he is telling them is believable, not because it is in the Old Testament, but because it is common knowledge (17:28) even in their own culture.

God, Man and Judgment

Paul begins his conversation with these Gentiles by saying that the true God whom the Stoics and Epicureans did not know personally, "made the world and everything in it, since He is the Lord of heaven and earth (17:24)." But Paul doesn’t inform them of this only to give them correct information. He tells them this so they can distinguish the errors in their own thinking process. If this God made the world and everything in it, He cannot therefore logically be a part of the world, as pantheism suggests, since anything that anyone makes or creates, must be less than, and apart from, the One who makes it. Furthermore, the fact that He made it suggests purpose, intent, design and reason. It does not suggest randomness, senselessness and fatalism as the philosophers believed.

Two of the foundational truths of the Christian doctrine of God are that He transcends the universe that He created, and that He is at the same time immanent with it. The God Paul is instructing them about is too big to be only 'here', but too personal and caring to be only 'out there.' Since He is so much greater than we can conceive Him to be, and He is Spirit, it is ludicrous to think that He lives in these little idols they think represent Him that men make with their hands."Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath and all things (17:25)." In this statement Paul affirms that God is entirely self-sufficient. There is nothing He needs from anything to help Him exist. He is not dependent upon anything we might have or could give to Him so that He might continue living, unlike men. We are, on the contrary, utterly dependent upon Him for our life and even the breath within us, which He gives to everyone in His mercy, and takes away when He sees fit. He is the Creator and Sustainer of life! We are daily in need of His mercy and forgiveness, and His strength and love. There is a natural vacuum within us that longs for Him, yet we cannot identify it until He reveals to us that it is Him that we need.

Paul found it necessary to explain that there is no reason to be apathetic towards our fellow men because we are all from one flesh. We have the same ancestors, and we are all in the same predicament here regarding our existence. God made the earth for our dwelling place, and has in His sovereignty determined where we dwell: for the express reason of seeking Him and finding Him (17:27). He is not so unidentifiable that He cannot be readily seen and grasped by the human mind and spirit, at least in His creation. He is not just an indistinguishable force in the universe named 'Reason.' He reveals Himself through the works of His creation and His immanent relationship to each person who lives.It is "in Him that we live, and move, and have our being (17:28)." He sustains our lives in His mercy. We are daily swimming in His grace, providence, mercy, power and love. We were made in the image of God. It is our responsibility to honor Him with our worship and our understanding of His person, not with little molded images that cannot begin to represent Him as He exists in His true majesty.

Finally, this God Who made everything is the Judge of everything. He cannot be unjust, or too harsh, or uncaring, like men are. There will come a day when He will righteously judge the world by the standard of perfection established in the life of Jesus Christ. This we can be assured of because Christ was raised from the dead (17:31).

Paul’s Grace and Humility

Athens appeared to have all the potential for a successful evangelical crusade. These were the most intelligent, reason-possessed philosophers of that day. If anyone was capable of coming to terms with the ‘logic’ of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and rationalizing its timeless truths, it was the men of Athens. There are two characteristics that Paul demonstrates toward the philosophers of Athens after they reject the gospel message at Athens: Grace and humility.

Note first of all Paul's grace to these men as he responds to their rejection of him. Acts 17:18 says that when these philosophers encountered him they called him a "spermalogos." They were literally calling him a ‘gutter sparrow’, or a seed picker. They were in effect saying, "Paul, your message is unreasonable! You really haven't thought this thing through very well. All you have are little pieces of different philosophies that don't fit together. You're like these little gutter sparrows all around us who flit over to those crumbs and gobble them up, and then flit over to that table to gobble up some other crumbs. Your theology is a hodgepodge of nonsense. Our logic will not allow us to see life through the eyes of a gutter sparrow."

But note the total grace that flows from the lips of Paul when he finally has their undivided attention. He can be totally gracious because he knows that the result of evangelism is out of his hands entirely. He bears no bitterness toward them in their rejection of the gospel. He desires no vindication. A cursory reading of the Bible explains that it is God's work to bring men to the truth. Paul sees the Athenians as lost, spiritually dead men responding the only way they know how! He doesn't panic at their rejection of the truth. He doesn't show them his Apostle's badge and say "What's this 'gutter-sparrow' stuff? Open your eyes guys! Idolatry is sin, and you guys are floundering in it. The real God hates sin, and according to the Hebrew Scriptures you guys are going to fry in hell....love God."

There isn't any hint that somehow they can snap out of it if the gospel message gets laid out for them really nicely either. People don’t repent because of what you say or the way you say it. They repent because God grants to them eyes with which to see the truth. If you are opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, you are not in the truth, and it is God alone who will grant you repentance (Romans 2:4). Note also the humility that he brings with the gospel. In Acts 20:18-19, as he gets ready for one last time to speak with the elders from Ephesus, he says, "You know, from the first day that I came to Asia, in what manner I always lived among you, serving the Lord with all humility...." Do you know why Paul can present the gospel with total humility? I think there are three reasons.

First, because he never lost focus from the very beginning that he was called as a servant. There was never a question in his mind that he was doing God's work for God. He wasn't taking any credit. He never said, "I led those people to the Lord through my skills of persuasion." He never lost focus from the beginning that he was an 'under-rower.' How do I know he never lost focus on it?The book of Acts closes with the Apostle Paul in a Roman prison in A.D. 63. His last epistle is Second Timothy written about A. D. 67, shortly before his death. In 2 Timothy 2:24-26, he writes to Timothy "And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him (the devil) to do his (God's) will."

What a magnificent commentary on the grace of God in evangelism! The Greek word for 'opposition', antidiatithimi, is in the middle voice. Paul reminds Timothy that the heretics he was speaking about literally "place themselves in opposition." They are wholly accountable for their opposition because they put themselves there due to their lost and sinful condition. Yet we can be humble because God grants repentance. Lost sinners don't sort of pupate out of their sin on their own power. Paul affirms that they are not even in their right senses! If they were, don't you suppose they might have a clue they were in the snare of the devil? And then Paul makes an absolutely astounding statement! Lost sinners not only place themselves in opposition to the gospel, but then he adds that they have also been taken captive by the prince of darkness to do God's will!

Secondly, Paul can be absolutely humble in the presentation of the gospel because he never lost focus that God is absolutely sovereign in salvation. No one fails to become a Christian because you didn't present the arguments correctly and they found the weak link in your thought process. The reason people don't become Christians is because they love darkness rather than light (John 3:19), and in their natural state the unbeliever is not only threatened by the gospel message, but he wants nothing to do with God. He willingly ignores and rejects the truth about himself and God until God enables him to understand the gospel that is being presented.

Thirdly, Paul learns humility because of the lack of response to the gospel in Athens. After departing from Athens, Paul arrived in Corinth. Corinth was the same kind of city; it had the same blossoming intellectuals, all convinced of the same types of philosophy. Paul must have been thinking of Dionysius, and Damaris, and the few others that came to Christ when he preached in Athens, as he strolled into Corinth. But I don't think he was wondering why it was a pitifully small number that came to Christ from the intellectual philosophers in Athens! No. Paul had two overwhelming thoughts on his mind as he came to Corinth as the Lord's servant: Power and Christ's crucifixion.

In today's huge arenas where alter calls go out to thousands upon thousands in the audience, and possibly millions more who have watched by television, we have a distorted concept of "the power of the gospel." Paul wasn't thinking in terms of thousands of people coming to Christ when he wracked his brain about the power of the gospel to save a few stragglers in Athens. But you'd almost expect him to, wouldn't you, if he were going to talk about that much power! Instead he was thinking about the few in Athens that the Lord had enabled to come! What a demonstration of power that was! Because he knew that whenever anyone comes to Christ it is for no other reason than the power of the gospel.

"And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Corinthians 2:4)." Paul came to the Corinthians in weakness, fear and in much trembling because the truth was that there was power in the message that Christ had died for sinners. All he desired to know was Christ and Him crucified. He had just witnessed how much intellectual garbage had been stuffed into the cerebrums of those Athenians, and how none of it could ever bring them one inch closer to coming to Christ, and all he wanted to know was Christ and His crucifixion! Everything else in evangelism is excess baggage. He trembled in weakness not so much because he knew the message of Christ was full of power, but because there wasn't any power at all, except God's power, exhibited through the truth of the gospel and Christ's crucifixion, that brought sinners to salvation.

copyright: Rick Brownell

WHY SOME THINGS REALLY DO MATTER IN THEOLOGY

Being a theologian requires that you become dissatisfied with your present level of understanding. You must desire to deepen your comprehension of the Christian faith and be committed to growing toward mature thinking about God, yourself, and the world. This dissatisfaction includes a healthy discontent with folk theology—the all-too common patchwork of unexamined cliches, slogans, stories, and half-baked notions about God that forms the thinking of many Christians today. And you must find unsatisfying the possibility of remaining at the level of accepting by sheer blind faith whatever you have been taught by your own Christian subculture. You must have such a strong desire to grow in a deepened faith that you are willing to question widely propagated yet questionable ideas and beliefs in the light of the Gospel.

—Stanley Grenz and Roger Olsen

About five years after I graduated from a Dispensational Seminary (Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland) with a Master’s degree in Exegetical Theology, I started to have some serious doubts about certain teachings that I had had drilled into my brain at seminary.  I mean I really struggled!  It was the kind of struggle where you can’t sleep at night because most of your waking thoughts are consuming you even at night in your sleep! For a time I was so distracted that I felt I couldn’t concentrate on anything except trying to figure out what was eating at me about my lack of understanding of the Gospel.  To be honest, I knew I had some serious flaws in my thinking about the Gospel, but didn’t exactly know then what they were, or how to articulate them, or worse, how to fix them.  I do believe this was the Lord causing me great discomfort and desiring that I think through these issues for myself.

Just prior to this discomfort, I had finished reading a book by John Gerstner entitled Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth: ‘A Critique of Dispensationalism.’ This one book set me on a journey that completely changed how I think about the Gospel.  (Oddly enough, several of the books that were quoted in the footnotes in the first publication of Wrongly Dividing were books that I had in my personal library, and when I went to check the references of several of the quoted passages in Wrongly Dividing, several of the quotes were noted as being on the wrong pages.  These not-so-slight errors led to the book eventually being rewritten and published by another company after it sold out.  In the newest publication the errors have been fixed).

That being true, the body of the work in that book did exactly what the author intended it to do: make the reader consider the inferences and consequences that go along with owning your theological beliefs.  For anyone who thinks that this kind of articulation doesn’t really matter in theology, all I can say is … maybe you should keep reading.

Let me illustrate with an example:  How can it be, that such well known para-church organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ (along with many other Dispensational groups), justify continuing the present day orthodox Christian practices of Communion and Baptism within the church, when both were instituted prior to the day of Pentecost; and yet adamantly defend the notion that not one single Old Testament believer was ever indwelt by the Holy Spirit when they believed the promises of God, nor will those Old Testament believers ever be a part of the Church in eternity, because the Church and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit happened after Pentecost? 

But there is more to the problem than simply speaking about what the indwelling of the Spirit is, and when it took place.  Equally troubling is the Dispensational teaching that the Sermon on the Mount is utterly non-Christian in its entire content, and therefore irrelevant for Christians because the Church was instituted after the Sermon was given.  At the very least this is a blow to the continuity of Scripture and what God intended to do since the Fall of man.  At most, it is a blatant rejection of the Gospel.

The Problem of the Sermon on the Mount

In chapter eleven of Dispensationalism Today, Charles Ryrie, a well-known prolific writer from a Dispensational point of view, wrote that D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a British author of great esteem and respect, had inappropri­ately commented that

“… [Dispensational] teaching says, in effect, that the Sermon on the Mount has nothing to do with us … it is the law … of the kingdom of heaven, and has nothing whatsoever to do with Christians in the meantime.”

Ryrie writes, "this simply is not true … To represent [Dispensationalists] as so saying does not evince integrity."  Yet countless Dispensational writers have written that Dispensationalism does teach that the Sermon on the Mount (and all its content in the New Testament) has no reference to the Church age.  This is clearly depicted by another Dispensational writer who shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that what Lloyd Jones wrote was true.

Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, writes “it could not be that Christ was addressing the Christian Church in the Sermon on the Mount because the Church, as we know it, did not come into existence until Pentecost, and great Church truths are not here presented.  There is nothing about the Holy Spirit, our position in Christ, [or] redemption through the blood of Christ in this sermon ... As a way of salvation it is useless.... It is legal, not gracious in character, and is full of judgments and threats (Matthew 5:22-29).  It offers no salvation to any man.  The non-Christian world, which so admires this sermon, is condemned to hell by it.  As a way of sanctification it is useless.... the motive is fear, not love.... The way of grace is not here.”   

In a word, Dispensationalism teaches that what Christ articulated in the Sermon on the Mount is to be rejected and ignored by the Christian Church today.  

Dispensationalists believe that when the Sermon on the Mount references the word ‘kingdom,’ it means a literal Messianic, Jewish kingdom yet to be on earth; a kingdom that does not now exist, but that will one day exist in the distant, unknown future, where its King, Christ Jesus, will rule with a rod of iron.  Not surprisingly, even John MacArthur takes the Dispensational view that the kingdom consistently referred to in the Gospel of Matthew (‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done’) refers only to that Millennial Kingdom in the distant future. 

MacArthur suggests (MacArthur New Testament Commentary on Matthew 1-7, 380-381) that "... we are praying for God's rule through Christ's enthronement to come, His glorious reign on earth to begin... It is the coming millennial kingdom (Revelation 20:4) of which the Lord is speaking ... the most obvious fact of life is that God is not now ruling on earth as He rules in heaven (Matt. 6:10c) -- and it is the divine earthly kingdom we are to pray will come... for Christ to return and to establish His earthly kingdom, to put down sin and enforce obedience to God's will."  The Lord will then "rule them with a rod of iron." 

Ryrie says of this kingdom that "some will accept Christ as their Savior, and others will not, though all, whether regenerated or not, will have to give outward allegiance to the authority of the King … all will apparently be obliged to give outward allegiance to Christ, but, as in every age, God will not compel them to receive the Savior" (Bible Doctrine, 176-178, italics mine).

This kingdom that Dispensationalists mistakenly equate with the Millennial kingdom of God will be filled with unregenerate, unsaved people.  There is unanimous agreement about this among them.  For example, Ryrie writes, "The end of the millennium will see the last and final revolt of man and Satan against God and all of His rule… many born during the millennium will choose not to receive the saving grace of the King (Bible Doctrine, 178)." All this of course takes place in the Millennial Kingdom "in which our Lord will reign the earth in righteousness … this is the secret peace on earth -- a Ruler who can enforce peace righteously… and the world shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord."  Pentecost writes in Things To Come, 551, quoting Louis Sperry Chafer, "it may be inquired why, with Him upon the throne of the universe, He ever permitted the evil which He hates … there is no understanding how a multitude, "the number of whom is as the sand of the sea (Rev. 20:8) could revolt against His beneficence all their lives."

It sounds to me like the Millennial kingdom is anything but perfect and peaceful as the Dispensationalist dreams, which just throws more baggage into that whole system of thought.

     

So think this through with me: here is Christ, someday in the distant future, ruling with a rod of iron in supposedly perfect righteousness and peace during the Millennium which He is calling us to pray for in the Disciple's prayer; He is demanding outward allegiance from people whose hearts are unregenerate, who in truth hate being obedient and long for the day they can rebel against Christ's Messianic rule with Satan himself at the end of the peaceful and perfect thousand year reign of Jesus the King.  And that teaching, no less, is after the Sermon on the Mount where Christ tells us that those who are blessed are the spiritually bankrupt, who recognize their complete lack of righteousness and who mourn over their sin, and hunger and thirst after the true biblical revelation of  righteousness which comes by faith alone in Christ alone; something which the New and Old Testament alike repeatedly affirms can only happen to those who are regenerated by the Holy Spirit!

Supposedly then, what God really does want after all, is for the unregenerate to bow down to Jesus for a thousand years, knowing full well that they can't and won't be willing do so because they are dead in sin.  And all the while it's an utterly forced and phony obedience, not from the heart; these unregenerate people that fill this literal kingdom do it only so they won't get beaten with the rod of iron.  And to top it off, the Lord and God are supposedly satisfied with this worship ... and for a thousand years ... after which there is complete rebellion among all the unregenerate as they finally join Satan to demonstrate their complete dissatisfaction with Christ's perfect, peaceful rule! 

Frankly, I don't get how someone can think this theological position doesn’t really matter.

 

Again, one must wonder why Christ would even choose to bother to teach anything from the Sermon to the Jews of His day, without mentioning that its reality was thousands of years off, if indeed He knew what He was teaching them was to be implemented, or had value, more than two thousand years into the future!  Yet that Christ was proclaiming a kingdom that was to be literal and political in nature only in the distant future is evidenced prolifically by Dispensational authors.      

The Dispensational Concept of the Nature of the Kingdom

Still more troubling is the way that Dispensationalists comprehend the nature of the kingdom that was offered to the Jews by God at Christ’s first advent.  Is it to be understood as a spiritual kingdom, or was the kingdom that Christ offered a literal,  political millennial kingdom?  How does our conception of the kingdom that God offered Israel at His first advent influence our interpretation of the book of Revelation and Christ's supposed future thousand-year reign on earth with Israel?

If indeed that was Christ's intention, (to set up a political millennial kingdom at His first advent), then what are we to make of the notion that Christ was apparently not able to accomplish what He actually intended to come here to do?   

“The Lord was not asserting that His kingdom was to be a spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men.  Such is contrary to the entire tenor of the Word of God" (Things To Come, Dwight Pentecost, 452).

          "It was the Davidic kingdom which Jesus offered and not the general rule of God over the earth or His spiritual reign in individual lives.... The kingdom the Lord preached was something different from either the general rule of God in His overall sovereignty or the rule of God in the individual heart" (Dispensationalism Today, Ryrie, 173).

           

I do not believe that Christ is telling us in the Disciple's Prayer in Matthew 6 to be praying for the "millennial kingdom."  MacArthur says that "it will not be a kingdom of this world -- that is, the present world system," referring to John 18:36.  [Thayer's Greek Lexicon says that the use of kingdom there in John 18:36 refers to a kingdom that is not of "earthly origin and nature" (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, 357).  I take Christ's remark to mean that this kingdom is not like a kingdom that originates here; it is not material in nature, not of a physical nature as one could only get on the earth, but rather a kingdom with a purely spiritual nature.  Obviously it is not "of this present world system" as MacArthur claims!  I believe that the kingdom Christ is referring to exists in the world right now, but its nature or moving force originates in the world of the Spirit.   

In John 18 it is very clear that Christ says that if His kingdom were of this world, He would have people fighting over it right now, so valiantly that He would not have been delivered to the Jews (John 18:36).  The fact that Jesus was handed over to the Jews proves that His kingdom is not from here and is of a spiritual nature.  His deliverance to the Jews, and the fact that no one was fighting for His earthly kingdom then proves that His kingdom is not a material one of this world! 

Furthermore, would He not have reigned in His physical, Messianic, political kingdom had God sovereignly ordained it?  There is absolutely no way that an exegete can honestly say that Christ is telling the disciples to pray for a "millennial" kingdom. 

The Significance of Keeping Israel and the Church Eternally Distinct in Dispensational Theology

Dispensationalists teach that Israel and the church are to remain eternally distinct.  The importance of understanding this teaching has many implications and ramifications.  Charles Ryrie has clearly spoken for Dispensational teaching about this subject in a clear and undeniable way.  In Dispensationalism Today, he writes "A Dispensationalist keeps Israel and the Church distinct" (44).  He quotes Fuller as writing that 'the basic premise of Dispensationalism is two purposes of God expressed in the formation of two peoples who maintain their distinction throughout eternity' (44-45)." 

Quoting Louis Sperry Chafer he adds:

“The Dispensationalist believes that throughout the ages God is pursuing two distinct purposes: one related to the earth with earthly people and earthly objectives involved which is Judaism: while the other is related to heaven with heavenly people and heavenly objectives involved, which is Christianity.”  

Again in Dispensationalism Today (173), Ryrie writes "The church is kept distinct as another purpose of God in addition to His kingdom purposes."  His summary of the chapter entitled 'What Is A Dispensationalist' in the same book concludes, "the essence of Dispensationalism, then, is the distinction between Israel and the Church." 

Elsewhere Charles Ryrie adds to the confusion about the kingdom by writing "But though redeemed and assured of heaven, [these redeemed Israelites] will apparently not be a part of the body of Christ, which will be distinct from other redeemed people.... The point is, however, that there are distinct groups of believers in heaven. Distinction is maintained even though destiny is the same."

John Gerstner writes in his critique of Dispensational theology that "Consistent with their view of the Abrahamic covenant as an eternal pact pertaining only to ethnic Jews, Dispensationalists view Israel and the church as having distinct eternal destinies.  Israel is an earthly people with an earthly promise and an earthly destiny eternally.  As we saw, Israel is an eternal nation, heir to an eternal land, with an eternal kingdom, on which David rules from an eternal throne.  There will be an endless succession of human generations upon the earth but never the twain, Israel and the church shall meet.  And as John Nelson Darby [the founder of the Plymouth Brethren and perhaps the first to make these doctrinal distinctions about Dispensationalism -- RB] wrote, "The Jewish nation is never to enter the Church."


Actually, Covenant Theology does not ignore national Israel per se, they just put them in their rightful place among all sinners of the world, seeing them as part and parcel of the entire plan of God from the beginning and as no different from anyone else who denies Christ.  In opposition to the Dispensational view, the Amillennial/Covenant view sees the church and believing Israel, not as two separate peoples with distinct destinies (Israel a national, material eternity on earth and the Church a heavenly spiritual eternity in heaven), but as one people of God. This is consistent theology. 

And I agree with most of George Ladd's views about the kingdom (laid out clearly in his A Theology of the New Testament). For Ladd, spiritual/remnant/believing Israel (who must become part of the Church if we want our theology to be consistent) has taken the place of literal/national/material/unbelieving Israel, who will be treated in eternity like every other unbeliever -- having the wrath of God poured out on them.

Some of the promises made to literal/material/physical Israel are fulfilled in the church (see Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 1043). Both Ladd and Erickson believe (true)/believing/remnant Israel, will be saved by entering the church, just as do the believing Gentiles. If I'm not mistaken, this is exactly the excellent point Paul makes in Ephesians 2:14-15. There is no statement anywhere in the N.T. that there is any other basis for salvation than Jesus Christ. The Reformed view is that the Church is the new Israel in this: they have had the barrier of enmity removed.

New Testament and Old Testament believers all make up the Church, and are people of the spiritual kingdom of God. If there is a special future for national Israel, as the Dispensationalists claim, it is through large-scale conversion and entrance into the Church as it is with all believers (1043).  They become united in Christ through faith like everyone else.  Erickson adds (of Ladd) that “those who were part of (believing) Israel prior to Pentecost have been incorporated into the church .... If the O.T. believers, those who made up true Israel, were saved like us, upon the basis of Christ's redemptive life and death, then they ... have been swept into the same body as N.T. believers. Israel was not, then, simply succeeded by the Church; rather, (spiritual/believing/remnant Israel) was included within the church. The people of God are truly one people; the body of Christ is truly one body (1048-49).”  No one has a biblical basis for suggesting that the nation of Israel is ignored except for the distortions of Dispensational theology.

Just so you get the idea of how rampant this view is among Dispensational teaching, elsewhere, W. J. Grier, a non-Dispensational theologian, wrote that

“A leading pre-millenarian, L. S. Chafer (founder and president of of Dallas Theological Seminary [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Sperry_Chafer]), says that after this gospel age there will be 'the re-gathering of Israel and the restoration of Judaism', and that there is 'an earthly people who go on as such into eternity, and a heavenly people who also abide in their heavenly calling for ever'; that is, God will have two distinct peoples, one on the earth and the other in heaven, for ever and ever.  This may be consistent literalism, but surely it is a veritable delirium of folly.”

Robert L. Saucy, professor at Talbot Theological Seminary has written, "This en-grafting [of the church into the great promises of blessing] is not to replace Israel or to fulfill her specifically national prophesies ... Rather, both Israel and the church share in their distinctive phases in God's program as the people of God through whom He will be glorified."  (The Church in God's Program, 82).

Dwight Pentecost, in Things To Come, 572, writes "Since [saved Gentiles] are said to inherit life [when they inherit a kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world, (Matthew 25:46)], it must be eternal life.  This would indicate that individuals will be saved and have eternal life and yet will be distinct from Israel."

Elsewhere, in the same book, page 529, Pentecost affirms the Dispensational belief in two separate programs for the Church and Israel when he writes that "Scripture is unintelligible until one can distinguish clearly between God's program for His earthly people Israel and that for the church."

The troubling aspect of the propensity of Dispensationalism to maintain this distinction between Israel and the Church is that Dispensationalism maintains the distinction as an eternal one.  This of course suggests that into eternity, God will be relating to Israel and all believing Israelites of the Old Testament (in an entirely different way than He will relate to all the rest of the people in the world, and all New testament believers).   

The common New Testament distinctions that Christ made regarding the eternal results of belief and unbelief, and between the eternal fate of believers and unbelievers, is totally obscured in this Dispensational teaching.  Where Christ teaches that New Testament believers are saved and with Christ, and non-believers who refuse Christ are eternally separated from Him are the only two prerequisites for entering into an eternal relationship with the Father, Dispensationalism blurs this teaching by making God maintain an eternal relationship with Israel that is neither based on their faith nor their unbelief, but rather on their national heritage. 

The Offer of the Kingdom

There is so much that hinges on this concept of the "offer" of the kingdom, that it is crucial to grasp the significance of this idea. Clearly, Dispensationalism teaches that Jesus Christ's purpose was to come to earth to set up an earthly kingdom.  He came to fulfill and set up the political, Messianic promises God had made to Israel, where Christ would have ruled literally from the throne of David.

All Dispensationalists that I have read are in agreement that the "gospel" then, was a happy accident.  What else could it be other than an accident, once one begins to understand how this point of view sees Divine sovereignty?  Of course, they would never describe it that way, yet that is undeniably what it is.  Dispensationalism insists that Christ came for the purpose of setting up a literal earthly kingdom.  Christ's death on the cross came about because He was unable to fulfill His real purposes here on earth.  In dispensational teaching, Jesus Christ was a failure in His first Advent on earth.  He was unable to accomplish the real purpose God had for Him.  But worse than saying He was a failure, is coming to grips with the reason why He ultimately failed.  He failed because the whole plan of God, according to Dispensationalism, was capable from the start, of being thwarted by the wills of apostate Jews!  Christ's death on the cross was entirely dependent upon the faithlessness of the Jews, even though according to Dispensationalism, we are assured that God intended the Jews to make Christ their Messianic king in His first advent.  Had they responded as they were supposed to have responded, there never would have been a "gospel"!  Had they accepted this supposed offer of a kingdom, Christ would never have gone to the cross.  But because the Jews didn't accept God's supposed offer, it made it necessary for God to accomplish a greater purpose, Plan B, namely the salvation of souls.  

The idea that there would never have been a cross had the Jews responded as God had supposedly wanted them to according to Dispensational theology is not only totally appalling, but is a blatant rejection of the gospel!  This issue forces one to question everything in Dispensationalism!  You might want to ask yourself a question in the process, and perhaps you will be better able to grasp what I went through with this whole issue when I began to think through the consequences to holding to this view.

If you were to discover that what you had thought about God’s intention in all of Scripture all along was entirely wrong, no matter how ingrained its "rightness" was in your thinking, and that it had some fatal flaws in its grasp of theology, the gospel, and the Bible, would you bail it entirely?  Or would you sort of avoid certain issues that were questionable theologically?  (For instance: how on earth could a Dispensationalist say that God made a "bona fide" offer of a literal kingdom to the Jews, knowing full well that He could never sincerely offer it and at the same time, anticipate Israel's acceptance of it, and have Christ die on the cross to pay for the sins of the world?)  Would you remain a staunch supporter of it regardless of its inability to answer some serious theological problems?  One of the most difficult things to do is to stand up and categorically reject Dispensationalism as a whole, especially when you have graduated from a Dispensational seminary like I did, until one asks oneself, "what exactly would I be giving up if I bailed Dispensationalism entirely?"  And the answer is "surprisingly little", yet Dispensationalists make it seem as though one would be giving up the only truth ever founded on Biblical grounds someone gave up Dispensationalism as a theological position. 

           

What if the Jews had accepted Jesus' offer to establish an earthly Davidic kingdom at His first Advent?  Then there would have been no salvation via the cross. God was making Israel a very wicked offer that He never could have kept if indeed He offered them a legal earthly kingdom.  Had the Jews accepted His offer of a kingdom, this would have destroyed the only way of man's salvation, and would have made the cross an impossible option.  I take it that you believe that God cannot lie, and that He is truthful and honest!  Yet, if God did offer a kingdom to the Jews that He neither intended to allow nor wanted them to accept, then it could not have been a bona fide offer in the first place, as every Dispensationalist wants to somehow believe, and God is therefore neither honest nor sincere.  The reality of the problem is that had the Jews accepted this supposed "bona fide" offer, God could not have possibly redeemed His promise He made to Abraham, thus making Himself a liar, if indeed the offer was "bona fide."

Furthermore, if Christ never intended to set up an earthly reign at His first Advent, and if indeed His coming was to establish a spiritual reign in the hearts of the elect and die on a cross for the redemption of their souls for eternity, then there will never be, nor was there ever a need for, a literal millennium at the end time where Jesus Christ reigns on earth on the throne of King David over the Jews!  Dispensational theology needs a literal millennium because Jesus has more work to do with Israel.  That is why Amillennarians insist that there is no need to fulfill a literal thousand-year period where Christ rules on the throne of David on earth, because that was never what He intended to do at His first Advent!  The Gospel teaches that Christ finished His work!  He absolutely fulfilled all that the Father ever had for Him to do here on earth with perfect obedience and timeliness.  Therefore, there must be some other interpretation of the word "millennium" in Revelation other than a literal time period where Jesus sits on a throne and has some kind of rekindled sacrificial relationship with Israel.

As I have attempted to grasp the differences here between Dispensationalism and Covenant thinking, I believe the problem hinges on a Dispensational misunderstanding of what it means to be in union with Christ.  Let me share some more with you about that.   
We have seen that Dispensation­alism sees the Church (which supposedly did not begin until the Day of Pentecost) and Israel as two different people of God for all eternity.  Dispensationalism teaches that Old Testament saints are not in union with Christ, or placed into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit, even though they are true believers, have genuine faith in the promised work of God to send the Messiah through the seed of Abraham, and are redeemed according to Dispensationalists, they are never part of the Church. 

In Genesis 15, Abraham believed by faith the Word of God about the promise of the Messiah who was to come through his lineage, and God accounted it to him for righteousness.  This is exactly the same thing that happens to believers in the New Testament who are placed in union with Christ as the New Testament affirms.

The question then is: is that distinction that Dispensationalism makes about the nature of the kingdom one that is superficially applied or imposed by Dispensationalists because of their strict interpretation and understanding about what took place at Pentecost? 

What is the basis for the salvation of sinners?  It has always been and will always be the shed blood of Christ.  His salvation is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  He is the only Savior in all dispensations. The cross of Christ is the only way of justification for everyone from Adam to the last elect saint, isn't that correct?  (This is critical, as you will see).  The blood of Christ is the only ground of salvation for all sinners in God’s plan.  There is redemption through no other means. 

Dispensation­alists teach that O. T. saints are not the heirs of the Holy Spirit and are not regenerated and grafted by the Holy Spirit into Christ in the same way that N.T. saints are.  The extent to which this concept is prolific in Dispensationalism is clear.

“...union with Christ does not happen until we receive Him as Savior and we consequently are at that moment baptized into His body by the Holy Spirit.  In other words, the historical actions of Christ's death and resurrection become part of our personal history when we believe (Ryrie, Bible Doctrine, 124).”

Elsewhere he writes “...what is it Spirit baptism does? … it places the believer in the body of Christ.  Since this is the only way to enter the body (i.e., by the baptizing work of the Spirit), and since this work of the Spirit first occurred on the day of Pentecost, then the conclusion seems obvious that the church, the body of Christ, began on the day of Pentecost (Bible Doctrine, 158).”

Yet he follows on the same page with this comment: “Just as there were redeemed Israelites before the day of Pentecost … and though redeemed and assured of heaven, they will apparently not be a part of the body of Christ, which will be distinct from other redeemed people.” 

How can those who are redeemed in the same way, by the same Savior, through the same redemption (shed blood), throughout all time, be a different people?  If you say, "They can’t be", then welcome to the discussion of the problem.  But in saying and believing that, you must also bail all other notions that repudiate that statement that they are a different people, unless it is your desire to be utterly inconsistent in your theology, which apparently does not bother most Dispensationalists one bit!! 

Let's run through the typical Dispensational understanding of what happens theologically when we become New Testament believers.

1) When we receive Christ as Savior, we are placed into union with Christ.

2) When we have received Him as Savior and are in union with Him, the Holy Spirit then baptizes the believer into His body.

3) When we believe, the things Christ accomplished on the cross are applied to us (which I take to mean justification, propitiation, salvation, etc).

4) There is no other way to enter the body of Christ.

5) But Spirit baptism never happened before the day of Pentecost.

6) Because Spirit baptism never happened before the day of Pentecost, no O. T. believer can be in the church. 

Where is there any Scriptural evidence that it did not happen in the O.T. saint the way Ryrie says it only happens in the N.T. saint? 

7) The church was not in existence before the day of Pentecost.

8)  However, there were redeemed Jews before the day of Pentecost.

9) They were also assured of heaven but for eternity, these redeemed Israelites, will not be a part of the body of Christ.  They will remain eternally distinct from the redeemed body of believers, the Church, even though everything about their salvation is identical.

This of course affects how we perceive the kingdom, Christ's mission on earth, the millennium, and all of our theological understanding regarding the salvation process.

Therefore, the gist of this problem is that Jews, who are apparently redeemed and assured of heaven, are not saved, according to Ryrie and others, or are saved via some other means than the N. T. clearly maintains.  Yet, the N.T. teaches that redemption is coupled with justification and propitiation (Rom. 3:24; 1 Cor. 1:30).  On what basis does someone agree that those who are redeemed, justified and sanctified, are not saved like those are who came after the Day of Pentecost?  Doesn't redemption include forgiveness of sins (Eph. 1:7; Col.1: 14)? Can a redeemed person, whose sins are forgiven, not be in the Church?  The only other place I can find in the Bible for people who are not in the church (for eternity) is hell! 

Again, Pentecost writes, "There is a distinction between the true church and true or spiritual Israel.  Prior to Pentecost, there were saved individuals [he's obviously caught in the same warp as Ryrie], but there was no church, and they were a part of spiritual Israel, not the Church." (Things To Come, 199) …"these contrasts  which show the distinction between Israel and the Church, make it impossible to identify the two in one program" (202). 

Feel free to comment about this.  It is my hope that it will cause you to reflect on what you believe.  Blessings. 
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A helpful (albeit pro-Dispensational article): 25 Stupid Reasons for Dissing Dispensationalism

http://bibchr.blogspot.com/2006/11/twenty-five-stupid-reasons-for-dissing.html