Tag: God

The Life and Death Reality of the Gospel

From hatred to love, from death to life

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I murdered him for Allah but God raised him up to forgive me…. SHOCKING STORY OF REDEMPTION!! One for Israel: Israeli Arabs and Jews. United in the Gospel

The Gospel is a matter of life and death. The phrase seems cliché, even to a “religious” person. We believe it to be true, but the present reality of it may seem to be an abstraction. A non-religious person might understand the statement metaphorically and allegorically, but would subscribe little or no “weight” to it. Neither sense, however, captures the utter significance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it played out in the lives of people I want to introduce.

In the first story of a Muslim man who hated Christians and Jews, and in the second story of a Jewish woman who hated Muslims, the utter significance of the Gospel is brought home in a way that abstract ideas and allegorical concepts simply cannot accomplish. The Gospel is Living Water in a wasteland of hatred and death.

The first story of a Sudanese Muslim who hated everyone who was not Muslim will make your skin crawl as he describes a brutal, unprovoked attack by him and others against a Christian classmate that left the man broken, bleeding, and dying. He was unashamed and proud of what he had “done for Allah”.

An encounter with two Coptic Christians whose prayer healed his cousin as his cousin lay on his own deathbed opened his eyes to a new reality. When those Christians told him, “The real miracle is that God wants to change your heart,” the paradigms by which he had always viewed the world shifted forever.

The decision he made to embrace Yeshua cost him his family and life as he knew it. He became dead to them. They even performed a ceremonial funeral for him. The life that he formally knew was over, but the new Life he received was riches in comparison.

You will want to watch and listen to him tell his story in his own words, not just to describe this journey, but to listen to him tell the rest of the story about the man he left for dead. The power of the Gospel is so much more than a matter of mere metaphorical importance.

The second story comes from a Jewish woman who lived in a world in which Arabs “were the enemy”. She grew up in the midst of the complex political struggle in the Middle where all around her was war and death.

From her earliest memories, her world was unsafe. She was terrified of Arab people who lived in villages surrounding the settlement in which she grew up. The Arabic language was a reminder to her, when she heard it, of shooting, rocks flying and people dying. She learned to hate Arabs.

The Rabbis painted a picture of the God of the Bible as “a very cold and distant God, almost robot-like, a type of God that wouldn’t think twice before he would strike you down with a lightning bolt if you dared to tear a little piece of toilet paper on Saturday, which is forbidden in Judaism”. What she saw of God in the Bible, though, when she read it for herself, seemed different to her.

She grew up in a world of hatred and fear. When she was introduced to the God of love and hope, her world changed completely. She no longer hates or fears Arab people. She learned that the Lord of life is the God of Arabs and Jews alike.

These stories of people who grew up in environments that fostered hate against each others’ “tribes” show how the Gospel changes people so dramatically that those who once hated now love. Paul’s words are true of Jesus:

“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility….” (Eph. 2:13-14)

What Does it Mean that God Is a Person?

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An elementary truth claim of Christianity is that God is a “Person”. Not a thing. Not a principal of reason or intangible construct, and not a feeling.

But what does that mean?

We may smirk at the practice of people in the Bronze Age who constructed gods out of hand-made objects and worshiped them. This was the ubiquitous practice of the people in the Old Testament. We may (or may not) laugh at primitive people who worshiped the sun, moon,  mountains and trees.

We are not much different from them, really, when we approach God as if God is an intellectual construct or feeling that we can conceive or conjure up. We are walking in the footsteps of our primitive ancestors when we see God as something indistinct from the universe. Our concepts may be more sophisticated, but only in degree.

The same is true when we view God as an abstract idea. An abstract idea, or ideal, is still a thing. Not a thing made of human hands, but a thing constructed by human intellect.

When we construct a god, whether by our hands or in our minds, or conceive of God as indistinct from the universe, we are not perceiving God in the way He is revealed in the Bible. These are “idols” that are poor substitutes for the Person of God.

Continue reading “What Does it Mean that God Is a Person?” →

Of Dreams and What May Come

Imagine for a moment that you are dreaming.

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For some reason, dreams are a current theme in my life. I have never been one who remembers (most of) my dreams, so this theme comes a bit as a stranger to me. Not that what I write today has anything to do with a dream I have had.

This period of sheltering in place from the corona virus threat that has spanned virtually the entire world gives us time to pause and reflect, if we will use the time that way. I think that is a good use of this time, and I have been trying to spend more time, myself, reading, reflecting, praying, writing and re-calibrating. It seems from the increase in the number of people reading this blog that others are doing the same thing.

Today’s content comes not from me, but from a friend. Brian Asimor is a man of many talents. He is an artist who has spent his career doing art and illustrations, including technical patent drawings and portraits of people and animals. He is also a writer and thinker. I will let his writing speak for itself today:

Imagine for a moment that you are dreaming. Imagine in this dream you are witnessing a world like the one you know to be Earth. A planet that revolves around a star like our Sun. A planet populated with countless life forms from microscopic to the largest, vegetation, mammals, fowl and marine creatures.
Delve deeper in your imagination, into the very life experiences of each of these creatures as they interact with each other living out their lifespans and replicating their progeny to project and continue their purpose.
We as mankind see ourselves as the masters of our world. We see our advances in technology and science as amazing unto themselves. We credit ourselves with innovation and invention.
Imagine now as our dream flows on, we see God as a concept rather than the origin of all things. We see those who believe in God as ignorant and unsophisticated. We see trends as the cadence of the future. We see changing weather as our doing and think we can start or stop weather patterns by regulation of groups behavior.

We awaken to reality as we grasp our chest in pain and drop to our knees. This is no longer a dream. We find ourselves calling out to God to help us and save us from what is happening to our body. We are experiencing a heart attack and it is the one we feared all along. At that moment we realize that God is in charge and we are not. We are but one of God’s creatures that he loves and cares for. God has placed us here in this body, in this gender, in this bloodline, in this geographic locale at this moment of Earth time, all for a reason. That reason is to  exchange our talents and faculties with each other in harmony, pursuing wisdom, understanding and happiness as a family, the family of mankind!

Life is the highest school there is. It is a school of time, senses and experiences. It is the opportunity to advance our spirituality and shed the tethers of want. It is God’s Will for us! Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
In God I Trust we all will awaken to the importance we are to God and his plan. I pray you awaken this Saturday to Gods favor and blessing for you in your pursuits of the day.

Postscript:

I am reminder of CS Lewis who explored the idea in his book, The Great Divorce, that the lives we live in this world are dreamlike in quality compared to living with God in the life hereafter. In the book he portrays hell is an ethereal, ghostly world in which people are forever fading away from each other and reality. Heaven, by contrast, is so real that the grass doesn’t bend under the feet of the people emerging for the first time from the dreamlike world in which they lived. Heaven is more real then the people are as they emerge.

Reflections on Confidence in Faith and Atheism

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Lord Richard Harris, the once Bishop of Oxford, and author of Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith, participated in a podcast discussion with the former Catholic priest, now agnostic philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny and Justin Brierly, the host of the Unbelievable podcast. During the interview, he reflected:

“On [the] issue of transcendence…. there is something about the experience of beauty which is tantalizing. It … mysteriously pulls us into itself and beyond itself, but it is ultimately ungraspable.” Harris likened this “mysterious pull” to “an elusive call that haunts us” and which “has its fulfillment in God.”

Harris is quick to note that the tantalizing pull of beauty is not an argument for the existence of God, but it’s also not irrational. He says, “Once you come to believe [Christianity], everything falls into place. It coheres together. This experience of beauty makes sense, as the experience of morality makes sense.”

Of course, this observation is reminiscent of CS Lewis when he said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Sitting opposite of Harris, Sir Anthony disagreed, saying that he grew up in the church, but Christianity makes less sense to him today than it did when he was younger. As “proof” he commented on a couple of different aspects of theology (the idea of punishment for sin among them) that don’t make sense to him any more.

As I listened to him I thought, as I often do when I listen to atheists and decided agnostics, that Kenny puts a great deal of stock in what he, himself, thinks. Because it makes no sense to him, it makes no sense at all, which he asserts as a brute fact. In that sense, he elevates his own understanding into the place of an ultimate arbiter of truth.

Of course, what else are we to do?

That’s a fair question. We only have ourselves, ultimately, as tools for deciphering truth.  Continue reading “Reflections on Confidence in Faith and Atheism” →

Reflections on the Influence of Stephen Hawking

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Lets all go to Mars, sculpture by Stephen Hawking (Depositphotos Photography ID: 169212920 Copyright: irisphoto11 Editorial use only)

Stephen Hawking recently passed away after living a remarkably full life in spite of being stricken by Lou Gehrig’s Disease at an early age. He was one of the most influential people of his time, not because of his condition, but because of his mind. He was brilliant and pioneered new understandings of the universe through applied mathematics in the field of cosmology.

Hawking is a voice that people listened to, not only in science, but in the application of science to such things as philosophy and the origin of the universe. Hawking may have toyed once with the idea of God, but he became an atheist. He chose, as have many a modern scientist has chosen since the 19th century, to view the world without reference to God.

In this article, I explore some comments made by Hawking’s colleague, John Lennox, who begins a recent interview by extolling the brilliance of Stephen Hawking and his scientific achievements. The subject is the existence of God. I will also introduce two very young geniuses who have different takes on the subject of God at the end.

The subtext of the article is this: when Hawking went beyond the science that he knew so well, and entered into the arena of philosophy, he stumbled. Hawking, the great scientist and intellect, wasn’t a philosopher, though he sought to wield his influence in that area. We can, and should, remember Hawking as one of the greatest scientists of our time, but scientific acumen doesn’t necessarily extend to other areas of study, especially when he spent no significant time in them.

John Lennox quoting Martin Rees, a cosmologist, astrophysicist and 40-year colleague of Stephen Hawking, points out in the segment of an interview that follows that Hawking was not well read in the areas of philosophy and theology:

This unfamiliarity with sophisticated philosophy and theology led Hawking to make some very unsophisticated statements. For instance, his pronouncement that “philosophy is dead” is at best ironic. The statement, itself, is philosophical. If the statement is true, it undermines the very assertion being made.

However, since Hawking was a such a giant in his own scientific fields with which he was intimately familiar, we tend to let statements, like the one above, go by unchallenged. The danger in that is to allow some questionable philosophy into our view of the world. Without diminishing Stephen Hawkins’ contributions to science, we need to view his philosophical comments for what they are worth.

Continue reading “Reflections on the Influence of Stephen Hawking” →