Apologetics31

This page is for those who would like to think about how the revelation of God came to us. We need to approach this slowly and systematically if it is to be satisfying and producing answers that ‘fit'.

Please do take the time to read it all through. On this page we put aside the question approach, for this subject really flows on chronologically and is best read as a complete piece.

1. How this Subject Arises

Criticisms

In the writings of modern crusading atheists, there often appears strong criticism of Biblical things far back in history. There is often a derisory note about a God who would make an imperfect world, and how primitive man was unlikely to have been part of God's plan, and as for dinosaur's?????

Questions

It is only as we start thinking about these issues that we start thinking about

• why God made the world in the way He did, and

• why He revealed Himself in the way He did.

Archaeology

When it comes to looking to archaeology for answers, we find we are limited. In his book, Is Religion Dangerous?, professor Keith Ward, who knows about these things, declares, “The truth is that we know virtually nothing about the first origins of religious belief. ” He continues, “From a purely scientific point of view, all we have to go on are grave-goods and archaeological remains.”

Old Testament

If we hope to look at masses of ancient parchments of the Old Testament of the Bible to help us, we again find ourselves disappointed. The reason for this was that the Jews destroyed every old, damaged document once they had fastidiously copied it. Yes, there were lots of copies, but they don't go back three thousand years plus.

When we study the nature of how the Old Testament documents came about and how they were passed on (see elsewhere on this site), we can see that we can trust what we have in what we call the Old Testament. Our work then becomes to understand what is written and ponder how it ‘fits' what else we know about the rest of the world.

2. Options for God's Design

Biblical Limitations

The Bible is blatant is ascribing to God the role of Creator. It doesn't tell us how He created the world and in fact we are given only broad brush stroke descriptions.

The Debates that Rage

This means we end up with debates about

- whether the world was brought about by pure-chance evolution (which excludes God, and leaves us with a meaningless and purposeless existence),

- whether God brought it about by directed evolution (i.e. the chances weren't chances but God's way of moving from simple cell to complex organisms etc.,)

- or some other alternative.

Some believers even desperately put forward the idea that God made everything about five thousand years ago, complete with fossils etc. to give an appearance of great age. Well of course such a thing is possible but somewhat unlikely (wait to you get to heaven for the definitive answer!).

Those are the usual lines of debate which we aren't going to follow here. We have a much more specific goal in mind. When our atheist friends deride God making a ‘primitive' world which, they say, is much more likely to have come about naturally, they are in fact, without realising it deriding the almost only logical option if God made the world. Let's explain.

The Two Options

In this line of thinking, there are really only two likely possibilities:

Option 1:

God makes man as fully developed in thinking as modern man is, so that he didn't have to learn, and he didn't have to gradually develop. Please see this; this is the only possible alternative to what happened if God made the world.

The main difficulty about this option, would have been how much knowledge to implant in us. The other difficulty would have been how to create the structure of civilisation already developed (we take for granted that one invention follows another.)

Option 2:

God created primitive man and allowed and encouraged man to gradually develop in all the ways archaeology suggests. Now we do need to note something quite specific here.

Evolutionists suggest (and they may or may not be right) that mankind developed from apes. The only thing about this is that at some point there had to be a cut-off point where mankind suddenly developed and the apes didn't.

The differences between apes and mankind are staggering. Think of all the things that we do – communicate with words, think, plan, reason, formulate, investigate, research, invent, create, write, produce music, paint, sculpt and so on – and worship.

Humans are Different

Something, somewhere, somehow, did something that triggered the changes that make us so different from the animals. If you ever saw the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey , you may remember the apes come across the monolith that is used to suggest ‘something other', and from that point they are changed.

The Biblical description is that at some point God made the first two beings, male and female, as human beings with all the capabilities we now have.

Now very little is said about them so we don't know if they were ‘primitive' men, or what, but the suggestion is there, because in following chapters men do develop and become those who raise livestock, produce music and invent tools from bronze and iron (a suggestion of the period that they lived in.)

Ongoing Development

Thus from the outset there is the concept of development, development that is slow and gradual – because learning is always that, invention is always that.

Remember the only alternative is to have mankind dropped onto this planet as fully developed and my atheistic friends would object to that, so let's think about this one, the gradual development scenario.

3. God doesn't develop but....

God doesn't develop

This needs to be said from the outset. Unlike man, God didn't develop. He always was as He is and always will be. It defies our imagination and understanding but that's what the Bible says, and it makes sense for an ‘Ultimate Being'.

Our Understanding does

Now God may not develop but our understanding of Him does and that's what we see in the Bible. I'm not very bothered whether or not you accept the story of Adam and Eve, but it does explain a lot of things and makes a lot of sense.

The Start of the Story

Genesis 2 & 3 show us these first two truly-human beings relating to God. Now we don't know how this happened but all we know is there was this communication interaction which occurred daily. When they rejected that, this daily communication was broken.

In the chapters that follow, in succeeding generations that could have been spread over a very long period, there is sporadic contact. It is not until we come to Abram in chapter 12 of Genesis that we see God taking the initiative to establish a long-term relationship with this particular man.

4. Why Abram?

Answer:

Serious thinkers might ponder this question. Why Abram? Why this childless nomad? The answer, we suggest, is that God saw in him a man through whom He could reveal things about Himself.

The first thing I want to suggest, is that:

1. God sees and knows and understands everything there is to know about us .

God sees this man who has gone along with his father on a trek from Ur to Canaan but has settled in Haran . He sees he is childless and sees that this is something through which He can reveal something of Himself. (The unfolding story indicates all this is true).

The second thing God shows is that:

2. He has a purpose for the earth which stretches far into the future.

He communicates with Abram and tells him that He has a land for him to settle in and He will make him great and He will give him many descendents. For a childless nomad, this quite an amazing promise. God is going to take him and use him to bless many people in the centuries to come.

The third thing that comes through about God is that:

3. He persists with our slowness to understand .

Remember Abram is the first man that God is going to reveal Himself through. This is a very embryonic relationship. Abram has nothing to go on beyond what he senses he is hearing. Difficult! Yet God understands us and understands Abram and knows how difficult it is, so we find Him speaking again and again to Abram, reiterating His original first promises, that the land of Canaan will be his, and he will have many descendents.

Now after many years pass, Abram's wife Sarai suggests that perhaps Abram has misheard (I'm assuming) and in all those previous promises there was no mention of her, so why not take her maid and have the first of the children through her (culturally a common thing to do). So this is what happens and Ishmael is born.

But God doesn't give up. Some twelve years later He speaks to Abram again and tells him that a coming son is in fact to be born to Sarai. Now the only trouble about this is that Sarai is also very old and well past the menopause and well beyond child-bearing capabilities. By now, Abram has learnt that he can trust what he is hearing from God, so this lovely old couple try for a baby, and miracle of miracles, she conceives and Isaac is born.

So fourthly, through this incredible event, God reveals that He is :

4. A God who can intervene in His world and bring miraculous changes

i.e. the things He can do, can go completely against what we call the course of nature, the way that God originally designed things to be.

5. Why Isaac and Jacob and....?

Answer:

So as the book rolls on, we see Isaac growing up, getting a wife and eventually having twin boys, Esau and Jacob. Isaac doesn't come over very well in some of this, but one thing that does become clear through him is that he has learnt that:

5. God knows the future and acts into it.

We then watch Jacob growing up, and he's a real little twister. He's an opportunist who gets his older brother to sell him his birthright (culturally the older son became the leader and took over management of the farm) and later cons his father into promising him the goodness of taking the role of the older son with all that went with it. We watch him working his way through life as a schemer, working for his own selfish good.

Now here's the tricky part: God has chosen him, even though he's the younger son, to become the leader and also to become a major figure in history.

6. God knows what He can do with individuals .

Thus Jacob encounters God, submits to Him and we gradually see some remarkable changes taking place, until eventually in old age (renamed as Israel ), he is a wise old man, patriarch of a family of twelve sons and one daughter, with a great understanding of God.

Following Jacob, we said, are twelve sons, but one of them, Joseph, is picked out by God. He is given pictures of the future by God but then apparently everything goes wrong, except the end result of it all is that he ends up as Prime Minister of Egypt, one of the most powerful men in the world. It is in this position that, with the wisdom God gives him, he acts as saviour of that whole part of the world, by making provision for seven years before a further seven year period of famine strikes.

We see behind Joseph, all the way through his tumultuous circumstances, the invisible hand of God at work, being there for him. In this we come to realise that:

7. That God works in and through and around us as He works for His end goal for the good of mankind.

He is the God of destiny. He doesn't make us do things, but uses what we do for His long-term goals.

In other words, God who is Almighty, works for the good of mankind and uses those He sees will be open to Him, as He sees the future and knows what He wants to achieve in it. He doesn't force them but calls them – despite their initial apparent negative, self-centred and godless attitudes. Part of the process of revealing Himself, involves drawing out the best out of men and women who will be open to Him. With Jacob and Joseph in particular it is the picture of a God of grace and mercy who tolerates their self-centredness because He knows their potential – the ability to develop into men of faith and goodness.

6. What about Moses & the Exodus?

Answer:

Remember this is all about God gradually revealing Himself to mankind. At the end of Genesis we are left with Joseph and the rest of this family settled in Egypt . In the book of Exodus, about four hundred years pass and with the passing of time two things have happened.

First, this family, now named Israel, has multiplied and multiplied and may well have been in excess of a million people. Each son has essentially become a separate ‘tribe'. The second thing is that their numbers have become a threat to the Egyptians, who have now made them slaves.

In the early chapters of Exodus we find a miraculous encounter of Moses with God (not visible, but a voice from a burning bush). In the discussion that ensues, God instructs Moses to go to the Pharaoh or king and demand the release of the Israelites. This Moses does but Pharaoh refuses.

Through a series of ten ‘plagues' of increasing severity we learn some more things about God. Because He is Creator:

8. He is all powerful and can act into His world and change it with what we call acts of nature .

Next,

9. Where He does bring pressure to bear on individuals or a nation , He always gives a warning and options first .

But more than that, when He does bring such pressure to bear it is always with:

10. The Intention of bringing such people through to a place of agreeing with Him , for their good and the good of His people.

Stubbornness and total refusal to respond means the death will ensue, i.e.

11. When all else fails, God will sometimes take that person or people off the planet ,

yet it becomes very clear in Scripture that,

12. God does not delight in death but wants people to repent and live .

This part of Scripture reveals the shear folly of proud men who think they can outthink God, but it is also a chance to realise, as some modern counsellors have concluded, that ‘love must be tough' and it is not loving to let tyrants carry on beating up on people. Why, we may ask, doesn't He do it with all tyrants, and the answer from this part of the Bible is that he only does it when He is able to speak into the lives of such tyrants and give them the option to repent.

For anyone carefully reading and thinking about the ‘plagues' that came upon Egypt, it becomes obvious that God could have wiped out the entire nation instantly from the beginning, yet the process that follows through chapters 4 to 12, amazingly gives ordinary individuals in Egypt, as well as the ruling class, the opportunity to come in line with God's wishes for all people, and to avoid the plagues. Moreover observing the plagues shows that they gradually increased in intensity so that the message could gradually sink into to these obtuse people. It was left to the prophet Ezekiel, many years later, to declare the truth from God which was obvious in this situation: “ Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” (Ezek 18:23) and “ I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!” (Ezek 18:32).

As became obvious many years later with Israel before the Exile, God warned again and again and again before He acted. Some of us today might become exasperated with a father who kept on warning his wayward child and did nothing but warn, yet that is what we find again and again in the Old Testament. Those who speak about God as a capricious, hasty or angry God simply reveal they have never read the Old Testament!

7. What about the Law of Moses?

Answer:

Moses, at God's instigation, leads his people out of Egypt , and across the desert to Mount Sinai where they have a longer encounter, as a people, with God. God conveys to Moses the Ten Commandments and then a number of other laws which might be divided into national, social, or ceremonial laws.

The national ones applied to them as a nation, the social ones were about relationships, and the ceremonial were all about how they, as individuals or as a people, should deal with their sins. Within these we see two more important things about God.

The first one, which should not surprise us if we accept that He is the Creator of the world, is that:

13. God knows best how we ‘work'

and therefore

14. Any laws He gave Israel could perhaps be seen as His ‘design rules' for living'

The second one is that,

15. God knows we are weak and will fail ,

and so

16. He provides for a way for our guilt to be taken.

That comes out clearly in the provision of the ceremonial or sacrificial law. This is all about how to deal with personal or corporate guilt. God knows what many counsellors state today, that one of man's biggest problems is that of guilt. So how did God deal with it? He gave them a procedure whereby they would present an animal that would die in their place, and in presenting it they would become aware of the seriousness of their wrongs and seeing the animal die in their place, determine not to repeat that wrong. Also, having gone through the procedure instituted by God, they knew that they had dealt with it according to His requirements, and therefore they also knew that they would not have an ongoing issue with God. It was sorted!

So many religions (or people) today try to appease God for their guilty consciences by their own striving to do good things to make up, but the trouble is you never know if you have done enough. When God lays down a simple and specific procedure to deal with your guilt, when you have done it, you know it is dealt with and you can walk away from it without fear and carry on with your life. Are we advocating we all follow the sacrificial law of Moses? No, the teaching of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ came as our sacrifice and all we have to do is believe that. When we do and approach God on that basis, the New testament says, we ARE forgiven.

In the midst of these laws comes the clear and stated revelation that,

17. He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin . (Ex 34:6,7)

Can we see that everything God does here is show us how we can live in peace and harmony with ourselves, with others and with Him. The Law didn't only provide a ‘blueprint' for living for Israel , it also made provision for when they failed. This is a picture of God who seeks to work for our ‘success' in life!

This is a far cry from the callous, capricious, angry God that others try to make Him out to be. We thus see that this God is more concerned to bring people into a place of peace and harmony than He is to tell off, chide or punish.

8. And so on through the whole Old Testament

Unity in the Old Testament

Those who struggle with the idea that God inspired people to write all these different books of the Old Testament also struggle to see (often because they won't read it) the incredible unity that there is throughout it.

These seventeen points that we have picked up purely from the first two books of the Bible, are seen again and again throughout the Old Testament. There is no contradiction of these points throughout all those books.

9. The Revelation so far

Recap:

Let's pick out those points again that have come as gradual revelation, and put them all together:

1. God sees and knows and understands everything.

2. He has a purpose for the earth.

3. He persists with our slowness.

4. He can intervene in His world and bring changes.

5. God knows the future and acts into it.

6. God knows what He can do with us.

7. God works in and through and around us as He works for His end goal.

8. He is all powerful and can act into His world and change it in what we call

acts of nature.

9. Where He brings pressure to bear on individuals, He always gives a warning

and options first.

10. The intention is of bringing such people through to a place of agreeing

with Him.

11. When all else fails, God will take that person or people off the planet.

12. God does not delight in death but wants people to repent and live.

13. God knows best how we ‘work'.

14. Any laws He gave Israel could perhaps be seen as His ‘design rules.

15. God knows we are weak and will fail.

16. He provides for a way for our guilt to be taken.

17. He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and

faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness,

rebellion and sin.

10. The Coming of Jesus

The Passing of Time

Now, at the end of the Old Testament, we have a nation, Israel , who have a history of revealing God. By the beginning of the New Testament, history has moved on some four hundred years and they are now under the rule of Rome . It is into this environment that Jesus Christ comes. Although he is born as a little baby, his arrival is surrounded by supernatural events.

Jesus' Ministry

At the age of about thirty Jesus starts preaching, teaching, healing people and performing miracles. He clearly has a power beyond anything known to mankind. He reveals himself as the Son of God who has come from heaven.

After three years he is arrested, falsely tried and put to death by crucifixion. It was clear that he knew this was going to happen. More than this he had predicted that he would come back from the dead after three days. This happened, and in such manner he convinced his followers that he was who he said he was.

Jesus' Transformation

To all who believed in him he gave life transforming power and in the Acts of the Apostles, following the four Gospels, we see the power of God flowing through these followers of Jesus, who has now returned to heaven.

It is so staggering that it would be almost impossible to believe if the same life transforming process is not observed in every new follower of Jesus down to the present day.

Jesus reveals God

The New Testament teaches us that Jesus came to more fully reveal God, his Father. Thus when we look at the life and character of Jesus we see this same love that the Old Testament spoke about, a love which accepts us exactly as we are, and yet which loves us so much that wants to help us change so that we can more fully enjoy being who God has designed us to be.

The work of Jesus on the Cross, for that was what it was, a purposeful ‘work of God', was to deal with our guilt in the same way that the sacrificial system in the Old Testament had helped the people of Israel . That Old Testament sacrificial system, the New Testament teaches, was simply a picture of what the Son of God would come and do.

The end product is a people who can call themselves ‘children of God' who are not ‘religious' but who have been made whole or complete and able to live at peace and harmony with God. There is nothing servile about this in the same way that a poor child adopted into a rich family does not have to be servile, only to enter into the fullness of a child of that family.

11. The Struggle of the Years of Church History

Persecution & Heresy

As we are still very much aware today, the ongoing history of the Church is an ongoing battle. Those who do not want to submit to a sovereign God speak out and do all in their power to destroy Christianity. In the early centuries of the life of the Church there was tremendous persecution that went on against the Church, which went on for the first three hundred years of its life. In some measure or other that persecution has carried on throughout the whole period of Church History and in some parts of the world is just as terrible as ever. The sceptic would do well to consider why such a pointless religion (as they see it) should evoke such terrible violence and horror against it.

There was also a battle against heresies throughout those early centuries, those teachings that sought to distort the historical truths of Christianity. In the beginning of the 21 st century we see a resurgence of many of those heresies. What those who refuse to study these things fail to see, is that the traditional Christian beliefs are clear cut and free from the ‘weird and wonderful'. The New Testament accounts and teaching is free from mystical or weird teaching. It is very simple and straight forward and can be understood by anyone coming to God through Jesus Christ. There is no ‘special' or ‘mystical' knowledge required as the variety of heresies have demanded. The testimony of John in his letter that we have above, is that this was all about the eternal Son of God who had come, and who they had seen, heard and touched. This was as down to earth as is possible to get!

Internal Struggles

Possibly the biggest struggle that the church has had is within itself, with what the Bible calls ‘ sin ', that tendency to self-centredness and godlessness. So the further history moved on from the life of Jesus and the early apostles, the greater the distortions and variations and mishandling by men involved in leadership in the Church.

Thus we had one part of the Church growing up with a central focus at Rome while the eastern part grew under the focus at Constantinople . Eventually came what was referred to as the Great Schism where the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church split apart to go their separate ways.

Reformation & Revivals

Through the Dark Ages, abuses eventually so upset Martin Luther that we had the Protestant Reformation, the start of a return, away from tradition and abuses, back to Biblical Christianity. At various times in Church History in various places around the world, different areas experienced ‘revival' where the sovereign working of God brought many people to know Him, often accompanied by signs and wonders.

Renewal and Restoration

At the beginning of the twentieth century, while much of the Church was suffering the ravages of liberal theologians, God came by His Spirit in California with the start of the Pentecostal wing of the church, emphasising the use of the gifts of the Spirit (see 1 Cor 12), now a strong worldwide movement.

In the latter part of the twentieth century came a fresh emphasis on the teaching that the Church is the body of Christ. With this came charismatic renewal and the so-called restoration movement. In each of these movements can be seen, by those with eyes to see, the ongoing revelation of God to and through His church, confirming and affirming all that is found in the New Testament.

The history of the Church has included:

a) a struggle to arrive at the truth of what happened two thousand years ago

• in and through the life of Jesus Christ,

• and its effects for us as human beings, by the early Church,

b) a diluting of that truth by the formation of human institutions and ideas of men, over the centuries,

c) a recovering of the biblical truths through the protestant reformation,

d) a recovering of the biblical life of the Spirit, by a variety of moves of God over the past hundred years.

In these notes we observed the gradual revelation of God through the first two books of the Bible which is echoed throughout the Old Testament. We briefly considered the greater revelation of God through His Son, Jesus Christ, and the effects of that on mankind. The ongoing battle is to hold onto the truth of the revelation of God through the Bible, and to counter the many distortions that we, the sinful human race, seem to manage to come up with about God, that are contrary to the Biblical revelation.

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