Is God our Enemy?

In view of  suffering, one “Christian” blogger charged:

• The great judgment of Matthew 25 should apply to God too.  I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat.  I was trying to take a flight and you didn’t stop a missile from hitting my plane.  I was trying to solve the HIV/AIDS crisis and you let a missile obliterated my body.  I was on death row and you let them kill me.  I was simply playing soccer with my cousins and you let the bomb kill all of us.  I was cooking for my family and you let tanks into my neighborhood.  I was going for a hike and you let me be kidnapped and tortured to death.  I was walking down the street and you let people burn me alive.  I was raped at my school and you did nothing to hold back my attackers.  I shot myself and you didn’t come to help me.  I died of cancer and you didn’t bring me a cure.  I starved to death and you gave me nothing to eat.  The tragedies that have taken place today are too numerous to list.  What you have done to the least of these you have done to all of us.  What do you have to say for your self?  Silence…just like always. In the absence of any defense, my judgment today is that God is our passive enemy.

Admittedly, we have all felt like this. However, this charge not only reflects a failure to understand God but also a failure to understand ourselves. What is it that we fail to see about ourselves? That as certain plants require frost, we too require suffering in order to bear spiritual fruit. We have a mistaken conception of what should constitute the ideal life – a relatively pain-free life of only the simplest, doer struggles – and when our lives fail to conform to our ideal and expectations, we indict God.

Frankly, I still require regular doses of suffering. Without them, I tend to grow proud and arrogant, and when I do, my God has a way of growing smaller. The Apostle Paul detailed his painful, teachable moment this way:

• We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters,[a] about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.  Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. (2 Cor. 1:8-9)

If trusting in God is of such surpassing worth, then anything – self-trust – that interferes with this needs to be counteracted. And this is not a truth limited to the Christian revelation. Instead, we find that, in the absence of suffering, we become self-satisfied, self-righteous, and self—sufficient. We then tend to think more of ourselves than we ought and less of others. We relegate them to a position beneath us and deem them unworthy of our compassion.

Also, without suffering and loss, we become ungrateful and take for granted our lives and relationships. We all have seen the joy when a loved one is rediscovered after an earthquake. Perhaps then, we need such tragedies.

Without suffering, we do not grow. One study revealed that those who reported that they were most satisfied with their lives grew the least. This truth is also reflected in biblical revelation:

1. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,[a] whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4)

2. We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3-4)

We fail to understand the need for suffering. One bystander saw a butterfly struggling mightily to emerge from its cocoon, helped it free itself from its cocoon, but the butterfly died as a result. He didn’t understand that the struggle to free itself from the cocoon was a struggle necessary for its development. We too fail to see the necessity for struggling and pain and therefore rush to condemn God.

Is God our enemy, as the blogger claims? Perhaps, instead, we think more of our myopic indictments than we ought. In contrast, those who regard Him as a friend, experience Him as a friend, and benefit from this friendship. Consequently, we experience increasingly better mental and physical health, as the surveys reveal. The benefits even extend to our most intimate relationships, as former atheist, Patrick Glynn, reports:

• A 1978 study found that church attendance predicted marital satisfaction better than any other single variable. Couples in long-lasting marriages who were surveyed in another study listed religion as one of the most important “prescriptions” of a happy marriage. (God: The Evidence, 64)

Perhaps then God does have His reasons for allowing suffering, and those who are willing to listen to them benefit as a result.

Anti-Semitism in the Spirit of Hitler

I’m not quick to call anyone anti-Semitic. In fact, I can’t remember ever having applied this terminology directly to anyone. Instead, I am more inclined to laugh at anti-Semitic jokes. However, anti-Semitism – the kind that calls for the death of the Jews, the kind that has been past-ripe in Muslim lands - has resurrected the long-dormant cries for the “death to the Jews” and “Hitler didn’t go far enough” in Western Europe.

This is troubling. As our heart gives birth to our words, our words also bear violence – a truth that has been demonstrated repeatedly in our history.

This kind of thinking is even leaking over into the church, of course, without the calls for death. Recently, I re-posted an article on the persecution of Christians in Islamic lands. One Christian responded back about the death of Christians in Gaza in the wake of the Israeli invasion, as if the incidental death of Christians in Gaza is equivalent to the purposeful death of Christians elsewhere. Is this an anti-Semitic response? How can we know what is in a person’s heart!

Another Christian just blogged that the Jews are not chosen of God:

• As for Jews being God’s chosen people: This is a matter of biblical and/or theological understanding. I consider being chosen (in this context) to mean elected unto salvation; and I believe salvation is to be found only in Christ. God’s people are saved (in both Testaments) by grace through faith. Biology saves no one and never did. That is to say, no one has ever been or ever will be saved simply because he or she is Jewish.

Although I agree that salvation is matter of believing in Messiah Jesus and that “biology saves no one,” this Christian is certainly taking an extreme and unbiblical position by denying that Israel is chosen. I cannot fathom what motivates this blogger, and I will not try. However, such a message of Israel’s supposed non-chosenness will inevitably serve to undermine support for Israel among those who take the Bible seriously.

Instead, Scripture uniformly attests that God chose the Jewish people as His own special possession:

• For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7:6)

• For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 14:2)

As His chosen, God also made many indelible promises to Israel:

• “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, you descendants of Abraham my friend, I took you from the ends of the earth, from its farthest corners I called you. I said, ‘You are my servant’; I have chosen you and have not rejected you. So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. All who rage against you will surely be ashamed and disgraced; those who oppose you will be as nothing and perish. Though you search for your enemies, you will not find them. Those who wage war against you will be as nothing at all.” (Isa 41:8-12)

Has God utterly washed His hands of Israel, as many falsely allege?

• For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. The Lord will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—a wife who married young, only to be rejected,” says your God. “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,” says the Lord your Redeemer. (Isaiah 54:5-8)

Nor does the NT revoke these truths. Paul affirmed that Israel, as God’s chosen but errant people, still has a place within God’s plans:

• For if their rejection brought reconciliation to the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches. (Romans 11:15-16)

Clearly, in God’s mind, Israel remains special and holy. Also, His promises remain in effect, despite Israel’s rebellion:

• I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written: “The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. (Romans 11:25-29)

What should our response be to all of this? The Gospel:

• For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. (Romans 1:16-17)

However, there is also a place for seeking justice and speaking truth. Everyone has a right to protect themselves, their families and their communities. However, this is a right that is now being denied to Israel. Why? According to author and commentator Charles Krauthammer:

• “When it comes to Europe, I think the overwhelming factor is raw native deep-seated anti-Semitism,” he told Fox News on Tuesday. For a long time, the anti-Semites of Europe discovered that by using the “veneer of anti-Zionism,” they could get away with it, he said.

• “Now, the veneer and cover are gone,” Krauthammer said. Signs used by European protests saying “Hitler was right” and chants about gassing Jews makes anti-Israel protests into “raw anti-Semitism finding a semi-respectable outlet,” he said.

Enough said!

What Muslims Want

We wonder weather the majority of  Muslims will ever adopt Western ways. Well, they haven't and there are good reasons for this. For one thing, they want to restore the Caliphate:

• Polling data released (April 24, 2007) in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview surveyof 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007—1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians—reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed-almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”-desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict application of Sharia law in every Islamic country.”

This "strict application of Sharia law" is utterly incompatible with Western liberties and protections. Sharia subjugates everyone else, regardless of religion to Islamic law. Forget about equality or freedom of religion!







And how about the Muslims the USA had liberated from Sadam Hussein and the Taliban? Would they also seek to subjugate their liberators?

•  The Pew Research Forum report, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” released April 30, 2013, confirms the broad appeal of the totalitarian Sharia, across Islamdom. Specifically, 91% of Iraqi Muslims and 99% of Afghan Muslims supported making Sharia the official state law of their respective societies, after both nations were liberated at the expense of much priceless U.S. blood, and great U.S. treasure.

 These findings suggest that we haven't done our homework - that we have failed to understand Islam.

Evolution and the Scientific Consensus

Is there really a scientific consensus in favor of macro-evolution? According to Casey Luskin, research coordinator for the Discovery Institute, such a consensus, if it still exists, is quickly coming apart:

• In 2007, Harvard chemist George Whitesides admitted he has “no idea” how “life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth.” More recently, a paper in Complexity acknowledged, “Many different ideas are competing and none is available to provide a sufficiently plausible root to the first living organisms.” (CRJ, Vol 37/#03, 37)

This issue of “consensus” is not a minor one. Evolutionists continually appeal to this alleged consensus to argue that they represent science, while IDers and creationists do not. Therefore, in order to be in step with science, schools must use the textbooks that advance evolution. It also means that there should be no place for ID or even any criticism of evolution in the classroom.

However, this “consensus” is becoming increasingly elusive, even on Darwin’s home-turf:

• In 2008, sixteen leading biologists convened in Altenberg, Austria, to discuss problems with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. When covering this conference, Nature quoted leading scientists saying things like, “evolutionary theory has told us little about” important events like “the origin of wings and the invasion of the land.” That same year, Cornell evolutionary biologist William Provine explained that “every assertion of the “evolutionary synthesis below is false,” including: “natural selection was the primary mechanism at every level of the evolutionary process,” “macroevolution was a simple extension of microevolution,” and “evolution produces a tree of life.” (38)

The “tree-of-life” is a concept inseparable from Darwinism. If higher life-forms had evolved from lower ones, we should expect the fossil record to bear witness to this fact. We should therefore be able to observe how one form gradually morphs into another, creating a virtual tree-of-life, connecting the dots. However, such a tree has eluded its proponents:

• The following year, leading biologist Eugene Koonin wrote that breakdowns in core neo-Darwinian tenets such as the “traditional concept of the tree of life” or that “natural selection is the main driving force of evolution” indicate “the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair.” (38)

• Koonin mentioned growing skepticism over the “tree of life,” and the technical literature contains numerous examples of conflicting evolutionary trees, challenging universal common ancestry. An article in Nature reported that “disparities between molecular and morphological trees” lead to “evolution wars” because “evolutionary trees constructed by studying biological molecules often don’t resemble those drawn up from morphology.” Another Nature paper reported that newly discovered genes “are tearing apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree,” since they “give a totally different tree from what everyone else wants.” A 2009 article in New Scientist observes that “many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded.” (38)

It is noteworthy that the tree should be “discarded” rather than revised. This is because many have despaired of finding a tree – a biological/morphological roadmap - to demonstrate how one species evolved into another. However, it would seem that to despair that such a tree exists is also to despair of neo-Darwinism. The tree is as indispensible to neo-Darwinism as a blueprint is to an engineer.

Consistent with the idea of unguided natural selection, evolutionists had predicted that they would find leftover, now useless, genes leftover from our evolutionary ancestors. They called these genes “junk DNA.” Francis Collins had even claimed that “45 percent of the human genome” consists of “genetic flotsam and jetsam” – leftover junk! The presence of such an extensive collection of junk, would, of course, rule in favor of evolution. However, more recently, the findings have ruled against evolution:

• A major 2012 Nature paper by the ENCORE consortium reported “biochemical functions for 80% of the genome.” Lead ENCORE scientists predicted that with further research, “80 percent will go to 100” since “almost every nucleotide is associated with a function.” (39)

This prediction does not accord with the messiness of evolution and its leftover loose ends that evolutionists would expect to find, but rather with the design of Intelligence!

Is there a consensus regarding evolution among the scientific community? Hardly! Nevertheless, the vast majority still expect to find a natural explanation for the origins of life and speciation. However, in light of the above, such an expectation is the product of faith and not science. Interestingly, it is this faith that now predominates throughout our scientific institutions.

Bible “Contradictions” and Confidence in the Face of them

The most potent way to attack Christianity is to attack its foundation – the Bible. As a result, it is easy to find lists of alleged Bible contradictions on line, which draw its detractors like honey draws bears. There is even an atheist bible listing an assortment of contradictions with predictable scorn.

When I debated Rabbi Yossi Mizrachi in 2007 – you can find this debate on UTube – he zeroed in on the question of contradictions, claiming that if he could find just one contradiction, this would prove that the New Testament could not possibly be the Word of God.

I accepted his challenge because, in theory, I agreed. I even agreed that there were many seeming contradictions. However, if the NT is God’s actual words, we should expect no less. If, instead, we could easily get our mind around Scripture so that it all made perfect sense, we would have every reason to suppose that this book was actually the word of man and not of God.

Admittedly, Scripture contains many perplexing passages, some of which yield way to understanding under closer scrutiny, and others remain resistant to our attempts to harmonize them. This shouldn’t surprise us. Even the Apostle Peter acknowledged that much of what Paul had written was difficult to understand (2 Peter 3:16). Nevertheless, this fact never caused him to be skeptical about Paul’s writings. After all, the miraculous workings of the Spirit had clearly validated Paul and the other Apostles (Heb. 2:3-4).

Therefore, we shouldn’t be overly troubled by the fact that we too are perplexed by some passages of Scripture. After all, scientists are perplexed by their “contradictory” scientific findings. Should this be a reason to jettison the entire scientific enterprise? Of course, not! Instead, these perplexing findings rightly serve as goads to provoke further research to understand our world.

Consequently, I regard these Bible “contradictions” as mysteries to be solved (or marveled at) rather than as indictments. Of course, the atheist will say:

•  Well, science has provided us with great and tangible benefits. It has proved itself, while Scripture has merely misled.

I think that we can make a similar claim about Scripture. Here is a brief list of proofs, each containing storehouses of evidence:

1.     Transformed Lives and Cultures

2.     Personal Authenticating Experiences

3.     The Non-Human Nature of the Scriptures

4.     Internal Consistency

5.     External Verification

6.     Wisdom for Life of the Word

7.     Validating Miracles

8.     Fulfilled Prophecy

However, I must warn you – even if you become skilled in the use of these various proofs, it doesn’t mean that you will pave inroads into the hearts of others. These hearts are already committed to their own carefully chosen paradigms and find the Christian revelation highly offensive.

However, I hope that these thoughts might make you more confident that you are on the right road and have a light to shine upon this resistant world.