God’s Counsel Stands

I am God, and there is none else; I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure (Isaiah 46:9-10).

Isaiah 48:5 KJV 1900

5 I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; Before it came to pass I shewed it thee: Lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, And my graven image, and my molten image, hath commanded them.

What does one say to a professed atheist when he demands “proof" that God exists? One could, of course, challenge him to prove that God doesn't exist, and to justify the preposterous scenario that the universe and even the human brain just happened by chance. The life and health of all creatures depends upon the fact that DNA molecules replicate exact duplicates of themselves. Only if the DNA, through chance foul-ups in its mechanism, failed to function properly could evolutionary changes occur.

That billions of intricately designed creatures,

each with its proper food,

and the delicately balanced ecological relationship between them—

to say nothing of the nervous system, eye, and human brain—result from a series of chance mistakes in the DNA is too preposterous for belief.

Yet those who reject God are left with no other alternative. The consequences of that theory, which is aggressively promoted by America’s public schools and media, are morally and spiritually destructive and logically fallacious.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind....

Lewis's simple logic destroys Darwinism.

If man is the chance product of impersonal evolutionary forces, then so are his thoughts—including the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, all of today's psychology, whether Christian or secular, rests upon Darwinism. Such was the basis of Freud's atheistic medical model which remains the key element in the attempt to establish a "science of human behavior."

As a result, man came to be viewed as a stimulus-response conglomeration of protein molecules driven by overpowering urges programmed into his unconscious by past traumas.

Sin, for which one is morally accountable to God, became a mental illness beyond one's control. No longer a moral problem for which one was personally responsible, wrong behavior could only be corrected by the newly-invented ritual of psycho-therapy. It was a new ball game with new rules and goals.

Even the Church went along with psychology. For evangelicals, the Bible, though still inerrant, was no longer sufficient.

Biblical answers to spiritual problems were now perceived as inadequate and were then supplemented and replaced by "scientific" diagnoses and cures unknown to prophets and apostles. The salvation of sinful souls through Christ alone somehow metamorphosed into the cure of sick minds through psychotherapy.

A "Scientific" Explanation?

Christ's mission took on new meaning. His coming to earth was seen as more akin to a heavenly psychiatrist's visit to help us feel good about ourselves than that of a holy God descending among sinners to judge sin and bring salvation. Paul warned that in the last days professing Christians would have "a form of godliness while denying the power thereof" (2 Timothy3:5).

Lip service is still given to the power of the Holy Spirit and the gospel, but as a practical matter, far more faith is placed in the ritualistic power of psychotherapy to change lives. "Getting in touch with one's feelings" and "understanding oneself" rendered obsolete Christ's supernatural solution to a problem of evil which began with Lucifer's rebellion.

By claiming to offer a "scientific explanation" for human behavior, psychology invaded the realm of soul, spirit, morals, and religion. It thus posed a greater challenge to belief in God and the gospel than had physics or chemistry, which proposed no explanation for the universe or man's existence. Many of this century's greatest scientists have issued grave warnings against trying to mix science and religion.

Einstein said, ...scientific theory has nothing to do with religion."

Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger added, "[Science] knows nothing of... good or bad, God and eternity."

Pretending to know what it couldn't, psychology offered a religious science of the mind and claimed to present new evidence for God's existence: the harmony of psychology and Scripture. The truth is that the two are irreconcilable.

Einstein, Schroedinger, and their colleagues were right:

Science has nothing to say about God or morals. It can no more prove that God does or doesn't exist than it can prove that one sunset is beautiful and another is not. Moreover, proofs are really beside the point. It is scientifically impossible to prove one’s existence—but who doubts it? Then why is proof of God's existence necessary? If God really is, He should be able to make Himself known. And if He can't do that, then whether He exists or not would be irrelevant to practical concerns.

Natural Inability to Know God

Of course, the problem may not be that God isn't making Himself known but that mankind fails to recognize Him when He does so. Even the natural world suggests such a probability.

Consider, for example, energy. It is invisible and intangible, though its effects can be seen and felt everywhere. And though those effects bombard us constantly, mankind was for thousands of years unaware of the existence of energy as we now understand it.

The invisible component out of which all things were made remained unrecognized, not because it didn't manifest its presence and power, but in spite of that fact. Its effects were commonly known, but no one could recognize the presence of energy behind the phenomena it produced and which so abundantly proved its existence. Even today, though we know much about it, no scientist knows what energy is, how it originated, or why it functions as it does. Nor do we know what gravity is, or space, or light or any other basic ingredient of the universe.

Could it not be the same way with God? If He created energy, would He not be even more elusive and incomprehensible than anything He made? To be the creator of all, God (by very definition) would have to be infinite and thus beyond human understanding. He would have to reveal Himself, or we could never know Him. Yet how could He make Himself known to finite beings? Our self-centered ignorance and blindness to truth posed a major difficulty.

How could God make Himself known in such a way that a finite man would be absolutely certain that God was revealing Himself? To ask such a question is not an attempt to avoid the issue. It raises a very practical problem which God, if He exists, would have to overcome and honest skeptics must acknowledge.

From the innermost depths of the atom (which we haven't yet been able to explore) to the furthermost reaches of the cosmos, the intricately organized universe God made adequately reveals His infinite intelligence and power.

It is something else, however, for God to manifest His love and will for mankind. To do so, He must make Himself known personally so that a finite man would realize beyond a shadow of doubt that the infinite God was revealing Himself. How could an infinite God unveil Himself personally to finite beings?

Suppose God thundered from the sky with an audible voice.

How would anyone know for certain that it was God who had spoken?

Suppose He made some great display of power. How would it be known that God had acted and that it was not some natural phenomenon? Suppose He made Himself visible in some earthly form?

If He came as a man, who would believe that He was God? Yet how could He reveal Himself to finite creatures unless He became one of them?

Suppose, instead, that God manifested Himself in some transcendent form. How could anyone know that it was God and not some highly evolved extraterrestrial visiting earth?

How, indeed! Miracles, no matter how spectacular, would not suffice, for skeptics could argue that highly advanced technology seems miraculous to those who don't know how it works.

And yet, if God really existed and was the creator of mankind, surely He would want to communicate not only His existence but His will to the creatures He had made and to whom He had given the capacity to know Him.

There Is Only One True God

Here we confront the many religions in the world. Each one claims to follow the revelations of the true god or gods—yet even in their basic concepts of deity, there are sharp contradictions. Obviously, contradictory views can't all be right. Hinduism, for example, embraces millions of gods and worships idols that supposedly represent them since everything is god. Islam, on the other hand, denounces idol worship and pantheism/polytheism and claims that its Allah is the only true God. Buddhism, in contrast, needs no god.

Allah was, in fact, the name of the chief god in the Kaabah, the pagan temple that Muhammad "purged" by destroying the more than 300 idols contained in it. Muhammad likely kept the name of this ancient pagan moon god and the crescent moon symbol because it would be easier to convert idolaters to his new religion if he could offer something with which they were familiar. Muslims see no contradiction in this strategy, nor even in keeping the chief object of worship in the ancient Kaabah, the black stone that Muslims kiss and revere today, even as idolaters did before Muhammad incorporated it into Islamic religious practice.

The God of the Bible states unequivocally: "Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no saviour" (Isaiah 43:10-11). He does not simply ignore the gods of other religions. He denounces them all, including Allah, as imposters who actually front for Satan or his demons. The great apostle Paul wrote,

"The things which the Gentiles (non-Jews] sacrifice [to their gods], they sacrifice to devils" (1 Corinthians 10:20

1 Corinthians 10:20 KJV 1900

20 But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.

Nor is such a denunciation narrow-minded or dogmatic. What could be more important than properly identifying the one true God, and what blasphemy could be worse than suggesting that God is something or someone who He is not?

Some well-meaning people, forgetting that the issue is truth and not wanting to cause offense, insist that the gods of all religions are simply different names for the same Being or Force. Such an idea, however, is like a man declaring that all women in the world, no matter what their names and individual identity, are one and the same person and that each of them is his wife. The particular woman to whom he is married would not accept that fraud, nor would the other women to whom he is not married allow him to treat them as though each were married to him.

Irreconcilable Differences

While there are some similarities, the distinctions between the gods of major world religions are far greater than those between individual men and women. The adherents of competing religions take very seriously the identifying attributes of their deities. Thus, it is not generosity but a cynical trivialization of what is vital and sacred to suggest that the gods of all religions are the same.

It is an affront to Muslims to insist that Allah is the equivalent of the many gods in Hinduism; or to tell a Christian that his God, who gave His Son to die for the sins of the world, is the same as Allah, of whom it is specifically stated that he has no son.

To say that all religions are the same denies the meaning of language and is an insult not only to the followers of these religions but to intelligence itself. The difference is particularly glaring when it comes to Christianity. It stands alone on one side of a theological chasm, with all other religions on the other side—a chasm that renders any ecumenical union impossible without destroying Christianity itself.

One cannot deny, for example,

the irreconcilable conflict between the belief that Christ died for our sins and rose again (which is the very heart of Christianity) and Islam's blasphemous claim that Christ did not die on the cross, much less for sin, but that someone else died in His place. To sweep such differences under an ecumenical rug (as Roman Catholicism, and specifically Vatican II, seeks to do) is not kindness but madness.

Nor is it possible to reconcile the claim of all non-Christian religions that sin is countered by good works with the Bible's oft-repeated declaration that only Christ, because He was sinless, could pay the penalty for sin, and that to do so He had to die in our place.

Of course Christ's claim, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father except by me" (John 14:6), is the strongest possible rejection of all other religions as Satanic counterfeits.

The very subject of the Second Coming of Christ, is a belief which is unique to Christianity and separates it from all of the world's religions by a chasm that cannot be bridged by any ecumenical sleight-of-hand.

Muhammad never promised to return, nor did Buddha, nor did the founder of any other of the world's religions. Only Christ dared to make this promise, and only He made it credible by leaving behind an empty tomb.

That undeniable fact is reason enough to take seriously His assertion that He would return to this earth in power and glory to execute judgment upon His enemies.

Prophecy, Evidence, and the Bible

The Bible, which provides the historical account of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, is unique for this and many other reasons. Even a superficial comparison with all other sacred writings becomes obvious:

The Hindu scriptures, for example, are obviously mythological. There is no historical evidence that the characters ever existed or that the fantastic tales refer to events that actually occurred. The same is true of much recorded in other religions’ scriptures.

Take, for example, the Book of Mormon. Not one pin or coin or the tiniest shred of evidence of any kind has ever been found to verify that the peoples, much less the events, to which the Book of Mormon refers were real. Not even a mountain or river or any piece of topography or geography described in the Book of Mormon has ever been located. And this even though the Mormon Church has zealously pursued an intensive search of North, Central, and South America in its attempt to find some evidence of the great nations which the Book of Mormon describes as having lived there.

In contrast, the world's museums contain vast evidence confirming the Bible’s historicity.

Yes, the skeptics have attacked the biblical record, but in every case, when the archaeological work has been done, the skeptics have been proved wrong and the Bible right.

As only one example, critics at one time denied that the Hittites mentioned in the Bible had ever lived, because no record of their existence had as yet been found. Today in Ankara, Turkey, an entire museum is devoted to the Hittites. Their relics are contained in museums around the world; and their history as we now know it agrees exactly with what the Bible has claimed for thousands of years.

In Israel's public schools, the children are taught the history of their people and land directly from the Old Testament.

Archaeologists in the Middle East use the Bible as a guide to finding ancient cities. the Bible’s historical, geographical, and scientific accuracy has been vindicated repeatedly, as have all other sacred writings.

The Bible was written by men who claim to have been inspired by God and recorded the message He wanted them to convey to mankind. So specific are the Bible writers that each claims to have written down, not a paraphrase or a vague recollection, but the very words of God verbatim. Those words speak with convicting power to the human conscience and bear their own testimony (Hebrews 4:12). The Bible claims that just as all men recognize the same moral standards because God has written His law in their hearts (Romans 2:14,15), so the gospel of Jesus Christ recorded in the Bible bears witness in every conscience (John 1:9; 2 Corinthians 4:2).

What About Objective Evidence?

The ardent skeptic, however, insists upon something more objective and convincing. The Bible declares that the universe all around us, so intricately organized and so subjected to precise and ingenious laws that it could not possibly have happened by chance, bears eloquent testimony to God's existence (Romans 1:19,20).

Unfortunately, modern man has been misled into believing that science has some explanation for the universe and human life, though this is not the case at all. Sir Arthur Eddington declared, "Ought [i.e., right and wrong] takes us outside chemistry and physics." Schroedinger reminds us: "Whence came I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question... for every one of us. Science has no answer to it."

The average person, however, has been led to believe that science does, in fact, have the answers but that they are too complex for ordinary people to understand. Thus they remain blind to the testimony of creation all around them. One of the beauties of the Bible is that it provides very simple evidence for God’s existence that anyone can easily and fully comprehend. It gives an equally simple and unequivocal way to identify which one of the sacred Scriptures claimed by the world's religions was inspired of God, and Who is the only Savior of the world. What is this simple yet profound evidence that the Bible offers? It is prophecy fulfilled, an irrefutable verification reserved to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures alone. No honest person can remain an unbeliever after even a brief study of prophecy, as we hope to demonstrate in the pages following.

As we have already noted, prophecy is the missing element In all other sacred scriptures of the world's religions. It is not to be found in the Koran, the Hindu Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Mormon, the sayings of Buddha, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, By contrast, prophecy comprises about 30 percent of the Bible.

The God of Prophecy

It is unsurprising that the God of the Bible identifies Himself as the One who accurately foretells the future and makes certain that it unfolds as He said it would. In fact, God points to prophecy as the irrefutable evidence of His existence and the authenticity of His Word. The verses at the beginning of this chapter offer an example. Yet the fact that God uses prophecy in this manner is scarcely recognized even by evangelicals.

Prophecy, of course, is the topic that we will pursue in the following pages. Our approach, however, will be different from what one usually encounters in books of this nature.

There are many individual prophecies in the Bible with which we will not concern ourselves because they lack universal interest and may be argued by skeptics. There are, however, two significant prophecy topics that must be studied if one is to have any understanding of the Bible.

They are: 1) Israel; and 2) the Messiah, who would come to Israel and, through her, to the world. These two major topics involve undeniable specific fulfillments of prophecy, and they hold the key to the timing of the Second Coming.

The Bible does not waste its time, as philosophers so foolishly have for centuries, in any attempt to provide some academic proof for the existence of God. The God to whom the Bible bears testimony can communicate with mankind and promises to reveal Himself to all who sincerely desire to know Him and earnestly seek Him.

"You will seek for me and find me, when you seek for me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:13) says the Old Testament.

The New Testament echoes the same promise:

"He [God] is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him" (Hebrews 11:6).

God balances subjective evidence with objective proof in communicating Himself and His will.

The Bible records God's provision of many tangible signs to those who wanted to know Him and His will. To "put out a fleece" is a common expression that is understood worldwide. It comes from Gideon's use of a sheep's fleece to be certain of God's will. Placing it on the ground overnight, he asked God for two signs: dew on the fleece and not on the ground one morning, then dew on the ground but not on the fleece the next (Judges 6:36-40). God honored his request because Gideon's heart was right and such evidence was necessary for the unusual task God called him.

That is not to say that God will honor every "fleece" that any person may lay before Him by whim or stubborn demand.

Those who neglect to study diligently and heed the Scriptures that God has provided and preserved through the centuries need not expect some new word of prophecy or some miraculous sign. Those who make such demands fall into the hands of Satan, who is only too glad to provide the "signs and wonders" that they seek and thereby lead them astray.

Israel: Irrefutable Proof

There is a sign that God has given to the entire world for all generations. That sign is the land and people of Israel. God speaks of "Israel my glory" (Isaiah 46:13) and refers to her as the one "in whom I will be glorified" (Isaiah 49:3). How would this glorification come about? It could only be by God's specific dealings with Israel before a watching world, after having prophesied precisely what would happen (2 Chronicles 7:20).

Referring to the rescue of Israel at Armageddon, the subject of many Old Testament prophecies, Ezekiel 38:23 declares:

"Thus will I [God] magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord."

The Bible declares that the prophecies concerning Israel supply irrefutable evidence for God's existence and that He has a purpose for mankind. History is not merely happenstance. It is going somewhere. There is a plan. Prophecy reveals that plan in advance. And at the heart of that plan biblical prophecy places Israel as God's great sign to the world.

The Messiah, the world’s Savior, was sent to Israel. As predicted by her own prophets, Israel rejected Him. How ironic that in rejecting Jesus, the Jews fulfilled prophecies that identified Him as the Messiah! If we are to understand anything of Christ's Second Coming, then we must gain some insight into Israel's key role as revealed by the Old Testament prophets and by Christ and His apostles.