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The Bible: Can You Believe It?
The vast majority of people who disagree
with the Bible have never actually read it... including most professing
Christians! Why is that?
In short, because the vast majority of people could care less about
God or the Bible... including many people who call themselves Christians!
"Unbelievers"
- those who do not believe what the Bible actually says
about God, Jesus, Salvation etc. - have a multitude of reasons
to reject scripture:
- They don't "buy it"
- They don't "get it"
- They weren't raised in an religious home
- They were raised in a hyper-religious home
- They feel it's all made-up, it's fictional, unscientific, irrelevant,
boring, tedious, outdated and so on.
As unbelievers, these people are free to discount, discredit or
totally ignore the Bible if they desire.
But if you profess to be a "Christian", a "God-Worshipper",
a "Believer", a "Christ-Follower", then you
have a real problem on your hands when it comes to accepting the
Bible for what it says. In essence, you signed up for the class,
the Bible is the textbook, and like it or not, the final exam is
coming straight out of the book. You are responsible for ALL the
material... even the stuff that the professor/preacher did not go
over in the lecture/sermon! It's all or nothing, pass or fail. You
can't pick and choose which parts you like and which ones you want
to ignore. You either believe it all or you don't. Otherwise, you
get a skewed picture of who God really is and the "gospel"
that you create for yourself is no gospel at all.
While no book could possibly contain everything there is to know
about an infinite being like God Almighty, what He DID choose to
make known about Himself (at this point in time) He put in the pages
of the Bible. God guided the hands of over 40 different men, over
thousands of years, to say EXACTLY what He wanted to say about Himself.
Many teachings found in the Bible are hard. Some are hard
to understand - like the concept of the Trinity - while others are
hard to accept - like election and predestination. But just because
they are hard does not discount the absolute truth contained within
these teachings NOR does it relieve us as believers from our responsibility
to deal with them. A wise man once said "Whenever you and the
Bible disagree, one of you is wrong!" Sadly, many people would
rather ignore the scripture than to change their long-held erroneous
beliefs.
Sometimes the Bible is unpleasant. The characters in the
stories do some really awful things... and often these are supposedly
the "good guys". In the Old Testament, God seems very
angry and He is accused of doing some really hard core stuff to
people who don't go along with His plan - like the folks in Sodom
and Gomorrah. He seems very vain; always demanding that people worship
him and obey his every command... and there are PLENTY of commands.
His constant demands to be praised in the Psalms, prompted C.S.
Lewis to comment that God sounded a bit like "an old woman
craving compliments."
Sometimes the Bible makes us feel bad about ourselves. It
points out all the bad things we have done and the ways we have
fallen short of the extremely high expectations that God has set
for us. This does not sit too well with a society like ours that
worships at the altar of our own self-esteem. We want to feel good
about ourselves and to know how valuable we are to others. We demand
complete acceptance, regardless of how depraved our behavior may
be, and we accuse others of bigotry and hatred if they don't love
us unconditionally, just as we are. After all, we are only being
who God made us to be, right?!
Just who does God think He
is anyway?
One of the first places people run into problems with the Bible
is in its portrayal of God as an all-powerful being who is in control
of every aspect of the universe that He created. Many people fall
away at Genesis 1:1
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Not even 10 words into the book and already we have lost a huge
number of folks right there! You've heard all the arguments for
evolution, seen the pictures of monkeys turning into men, seen scientists
in lab coats firing electricity into test tubes creating life from
inorganic matter, seen photos of salamander and human embryos side-by-side
looking identical. To most people, evolution is virtually a fact!!
Irrefutable! "Why are we even calling it a theory anymore
when it has been proved so thoroughly?", one might ask.
No reasonable, rational, scientific-minded human in the 21st century
could even entertain the notion of an invisible being who existed
before time (and outside of time) speaking words and creating a
universe in only 6 days that we KNOW took millions of years to evolve.
It's ludicrous!!
And yet, there it is in the Bible. You either believe it or
you don't.
The God of the bible is a BIG God! He answers to no one. He creates
the world and the moon and the stars. He makes a man in His own
image out of the dirt for His own purposes. He breathes the breath
of life into the nostrils of the clay cadaver, and it lives. He
makes a complete woman out of the man's rib bone. He kicks both
of them out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying just one rule and
then curses the whole earth and everyone in it because of their
sin. He brings judgment and wrath on wicked people. He confuses
man's common language. He brings sickness, disease and earthquakes.
He wipes out individuals, armies, cities, and once He even destroyed
almost every living creature with a worldwide flood... except of
course for the 8 people and various animals He chose to put in a
big boat and kept safe until the waters receded. It all sounds TOTALLY
unbelievable, doesn't it?
And yet, there it is in the Bible. You either believe it or
you don't.
And then there is Jesus. The man who was born to a virgin girl
by the power of the Holy Spirit. He was the Son of God in flesh...
in fact He WAS God (but not God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit
even though He was one in nature with them). He was fully human
and fully God. He walked around healing people (although He didn't
heal ALL the people). He raised the dead (although he didn't raise
ALL the dead). He could turn water into wine and walk on the stormy
sea. He controlled the weather. He cured leprosy and freed demon
possessed individuals. He made blind eyes see, deaf ears hear, dumb
tongues talk and lame legs walk. He died on a cross at the hands
of the government and the religious leaders of His time and He was
buried in the ground for three days AND three nights (just like
when Jonah was in the belly of the great fish). After that, JESUS
GOT UP AGAIN, alive and well, in the same physical body that still
had the nail and spear marks from His crucifixion. He had the ability
to walk through walls and locked doors yet He could sit down and
eat a nice fish dinner. And if that isn't hard enough to swallow,
a month or so after His resurrection, while hanging out with His
followers, he just flew up into the clouds and promised to come
back again in the same manner! That was 2000 years ago and we are
still waiting.
WHO!?, I ask, could ever believe such an outrageous story as that??
And yet, there it is in the Bible. You either believe it ALL
or you don't.
Believe it ALL? You have got
to be kidding me!
No wonder people run from this book. No wonder people have sought
to ban it, burn it, destroy it, discredit it. It is impossible for
a well-educated adult human being to take the Bible seriously. After
all, dead people do not come back to life and fly into the sky.
Snakes don't talk. Bread doesn't fall to the ground. Rivers don't
part so people can walk across on dry land. This stuff just doesn't
happen. And since most of us have never witnessed these things,
how could we possibly be asked to believe it? Maybe if we
were ignorant, superstitious, third-world peasants we would buy
it. But who can believe ALL of this?
To make matters worse, according to the bible, God intends to judge
each man for the rotten stuff we have done in this life and the
ONLY chance we have to escape His judgment and wrath is our ABILITY
to believe this TOTALLY UNBELIEVABLE STUFF!! That sounds unfair,
doesn't it?
One of the most often quoted passages in the bible is John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only
Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal
life.
We like the part that says God loved the world SOOO much (even
though it actually means "God loved the world "so"...
or "thus"... or "in this way". It indicates
the manner in which He showed His love, not the measure, but I digress).
It goes on to say, "whoever believes in him shall not perish".
However the inverse is true as well: whoever does NOT believe,
WILL perish - even really "good" people who haven't sinned
all THAT much, who tried real hard to behave and to do good things
for other people and who even gave money to the church and to the
tsunami relief fund and to Jerry's Kids. Why will they perish? Because
of their unbelief. They may have piled up a mountain of good works,
but if they couldn't muster up the faith to buy into the tall tales
in the Bible, they are sunk!
So unbelievers will go to hell - not because of their evil deeds
but because of their unbelief. Everyone has done evil in
the eyes of the Lord but Jesus Christ on the cross paid for the
sins of believers - He did NOT pay for the sins of
unbelievers. Jesus came to give eternal life to believers
but not everyone believes in the Word of God.
Let's continue on to John 3:17 for a minute:
"For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn
the world, but to save the world through him."
Well, that's a little more comforting. Jesus came to SAVE people,
not to condemn them. That's nice! But if Jesus died for the sins
of the whole world then wouldn't the whole world be saved? Yet we
know there are a large number of people who will be condemned to
hell. If Jesus didn't condemn them, how do people still end up being
condemned? Hmmmm....
Look at John 3:18:
"Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever
does not believe stands condemned already
because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only
Son."
Uh-oh! Jesus doesn't have to condemn people because we are all
ALREADY condemned. It is our natural state. Remember the curse God
put on the world and everyone in it way back when He kicked Adam
and Eve out of the Garden? Apparently we are ALL condemned unless
we muster up the ability within ourselves to start believing this
Bible stuff.
But how do I do THAT? How
do I force myself to believe what I really don't believe?
Well, maybe we can lie to God and to ourselves and SAY we believe...
but not "reeeeally" believe. The bible says we have to
confess with our mouth that "Jesus Christ is Lord" (no
problem there, most people have a mouth and can say those words)
but then it continues by saying we also have to believe in our heart
that God raised Him from the dead (well now that's a problem). That
puts us right back where we started, unbelieving. Not to mention
the Bible also says "thou shalt not lie". So breaking
a commandment in order to trick God into saving you doesn't really
sound like a well-thought-out plan. God knows the heart of every
man and that it is "evil from childhood". If you don't
really believe, He knows.
Perhaps all you really need to do is say "I believe Jesus
existed" and that will be enough. Surely there is enough circumstantial
or archeological evidence around that you could convince yourself
of His actual presence in history. But yet, the Pharisees believed
Jesus existed. They saw him everyday and successfully plotted to
have Him crucified. Obviously the Pharisees would admit that Jesus
existed. Yet Jesus said to them, "You snakes! You brood of
vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?" Ouch,
not very seeker sensitive, Jesus! The Pharisees did not believe
the Word of God and He was standing right in front of them.
Unfortunately for the vast majority of people, God has set the
condition for eternal life to be an actual belief in your heart
that His Word, as revealed in the Bible, is the Truth. Above all,
you must believe that Jesus was God's Son, that He was crucified
to pay for the sins of those who believe and that He was raised
from the dead. He is alive today and He is returning to earth very
soon.
This is the Gospel that saves. You either believe it
or you don't.
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