Month: January 2010

Keep praying


Keep praying always, and don’t give up. That’s the key to success, and the topic of today’s message at the church from Luke 18. You can hear the recording, in English and Romanian, here.

See the Lord


Tonight’s home fellowship study was of Isaiah 6, and Isaiah’s encounter with God that changed everything, and how it will also change everything for us if we see Him as He is. You can hear the message here.

Theistic Atheism

The letters continue to pour in, more than ever before in my eight years of blogging, in response to this week’s not-so-soft criticism of atheists and their faith. It appears that they aren’t all that used to being openly criticized, because they come unraveled so much more quickly than the adherents of any other religious system that has ever disagreed with my admittedly narrow theological beliefs. Their anger, profanity, threats, and foot-stomping demands that I “shut up,” “stay in church,” publish their responses RIGHT NOW, or go burn in a place I thought they didn’t believe existed, makes me feel like I’ve challenged a bunch of pouty teenagers to a debate.

But there’s another category of professing atheist, different from these ones that are devoted to their faith in godlessness to the point of being incapable of reason. This different kind of atheist actually believes deep down that God is there, but claims to believe He isn’t, because he or she is angry at God. These ones make comments about how if there were a God, then there wouldn’t be any of what they ironically call “acts of God,” like hurricanes, earthquakes, and all sources of suffering. These ones protest, rather confidently, that if God were real, they would have seen Him, and He would have come to them and been forced to answer to them for all of the things they perceive He is doing wrong in the world. Since He has never shown up to apologize for the fact that their mother died, or their friend got cancer, or whatever other horror they’ve endured, they decided in their hearts that the best revenge against Him for what they perceive as His indifference to their suffering, is to look Him in the eye and say, “You aren’t there. You don’t exist.” They know, deep down, He is there; but they’re mad at Him.
If they were right in their perceptions about His indifference, or about His injustice, then they would indeed have reason to be angry at Him. But He isn’t really the reason they have suffered. He is actually the One who can heal their pain and restore to them everything that has been lost, stolen, broken, or murdered in their hearts. Like Job in his moments of weakness, after he lost his 10 children, his property, and his health, they demand an audience with God so that they can state their case, plead their innocence, and have God apologize for failing to bless and protect them as much as they feel they deserved.
It’s an amazing thing that God did show up when Job summoned Him to a meeting. But what He said when He got there wasn’t anything like Job expected from the encounter.
If you’re one of those who is absolutely ticked off at God because of what you’ve been through, let me advise you not to deny Him. You don’t gain anything by that. It won’t make you happy or bring you peace and healing. Let me advise that instead you come to Him and seek His help and healing. He loves you, He can help you, and His answers to your problems, fears, and hurts will be more than satisfactory if you show the wisdom to take Him at His word, instead of just believing the falsehoods your heart has told you about Him. He saw your tears. And He wants to help you. He will, if you will let Him.

The Irrational Atheist


Here is another nice book about how silly the atheists’ views are in an age when people think they should just be polite and pretend atheism is an intellectually tenable position just to get along.
But when Richard Dawkins is held up as “logical” when he repeatedly claims that the mountains of evidence of our lives’ being created by design means that some other alien planet’s people made us after they evolved out of nothing, it is time for us Christians to be at least as honest as we are polite. It is simply not speaking the truth to describe atheism as anything but utter foolishness. It is not my goal to hurt the feelings of the atheists who are writing me one hysterical letter after another about my posts here yesterday, nor to annoy them by my “censorship” in not publishing their comments on my blog; but if they are hurt by the truth, and by the shaking of their faith with logic, that is ultimately better than just being silent and letting them continue to plug their ears to reality and assure themselves that “day is night and night is day, up is down and down is up, and God isn’t real and won’t judge me because I’m a big boy now and deserve to do what I want without having to fear any consequences, so those people who warn me about God and eternity should just leave me alone!”

The Atheist’s Lie

Pretty often, including one instance today, when atheists write me in response to things I’ve written or said on this blog or elsewhere, and when they are forced to admit that disproving God’s existence would be a lost cause for them, they resort to telling me that they just can’t believe in God because of “the lack of evidence” that He is there. Now, they aren’t just ignoring the obvious fact that the evidence of the reality of God is both infinite and omnipresent. They are also asking me to believe that they are people who intellectually demand evidence of something before they will believe in it. That, though, is simply a lie. They are lying to themselves, and to me, when they tell me they want evidence of something before they will believe it. Because, to a fault, they all believe in things like: 1) The Big Bang Theory; 2) The evolution of species; 3) Humanity descending from ancestors in the animal kingdom; 4) The earth’s presence for billions of years prior to lifeforms being on it; 5) the continents of the earth having separated from what was originally one land mass; 6) the moon having originally been a piece of the earth that spun off from it millions of years ago, and other such things. And there is not now, nor has there ever been, any evidence at all that any of those things are true. They have accepted all of those beliefs on faith alone. They want me to believe that they don’t believe in God because they “can’t” instead of just that they “won’t.” But I don’t believe them. Because there is also no evidence of their skepticism. They gullibly believe any ideas their atheist forerunners invented to explain the origins of the universe and of life, regardless of how unfounded those beliefs are.

The Atheist’s Delusion

Here’s a brief excerpt of James Spiegel’s new book The Making of an Atheist. (I haven’t read the book, but intend to–just found this in an introduction that you can read online here.)

“The truth is that atheism is profoundly false. It is a misconstrual of reality at the most basic level. So it is no surprise that atheism has given rise to such harmful ideologies as Marxism and nihilism. But perhaps most tragic of all is how deeply irrational atheism is— a form of irrationality that itself almost defies comprehension. The reality of God is manifest all around us, from the unimaginable vastness of our universe, with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, to the breathtakingly complex micro-universe of individual cells to the elaborate machinations in animal and plant physiologies and the diverse ecosystems they comprise. To this list we could also add the phenomena of human consciousness, moral truths, the existence of beauty, mystical religious encounters, miraculous occurrences, and fulfilled biblical prophecies.
To miss the divine import of any one of these aspects of God’s creation is to flout reason itself. Yet this is precisely what atheists do, and it points to the fact that other factors give rise to the denial of God. Atheism
is not the result of objective assessment of evidence, but of stubborn disobedience; it does not arise from the careful application of reason but from willful rebellion. Atheism is the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality. In short, it is sin that is the mother of unbelief.”

Come and worship

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to Him with songs of praise! For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

In His hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.
Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, “When your fathers put Me to the test and put Me to the proof, though they had seen My work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known My ways.’ Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
–Psalm 95

Kingdom Coming – Like Lightning


Today’s message from the church was on Jesus’ words on end-times prophecy in Luke 17. You can hear the message, in English and Romanian, here.

Salt & Light?


When Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the world,” to whom was He talking, and what was He talking about? That’s the passage we studied at the home fellowship in Cluj tonight. You can hear the recording of the study, in English and Romanian, by clicking the link here.