Apologetic Class - Week 17

Notes
Transcript
 “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”
― Samuel Johnson
Revelation 21:5 ESV
5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
Question:
According to Christianity, what is the meaning of life?
The story of the Bible has been called the greatest story ever told, a great drama consisting of four acts: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
The book of Genesis says that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth:
and His creation was good, very good.
From the very first words in the book of Genesis,
humanity’s purpose is established by God.
And so because we were created for a reason,
this means our lives have purpose and meaning.
Pretty simple and straight forward, right?
The Bible tells us that God created humanity for the purpose of living in a perfect, loving community with Himself and others.
Unlike atheism, which believes that love is the product of blind physical forces and biochemical reactions of the brain,
and other religions that do not believe in a God of love,
Christianity believes that love lies at the very center of the universe, because “God is love.”
1 John 4:8 ESV
8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:16 ESV
16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
Question:
But how is that God can be a God of love?
After all, think about it.
Love requires other persons, and if God existed for all of eternity without other people, then how can He be a God of love?
The doctrine of the trinity tell us that God has forever existed in a trinity of three persons:
Father, Son, and Spirit.
And yes, while the idea of triune God is super confusing and mysterious to us,
without it,
God’s nature would be radically different.
Because He wouldn’t be a God of love.
He could still be a God of wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth,
but not love,
since love only exists between persons.
This means that if God is only one person,
then love didn’t exist until He created other beings,
which means that love is not an essential part of God’s nature.
Only if God is triune by nature can love be a part of His essence.
Question:
What is the difference between man-centered worship and God-centered worship?
When God created humanity,
He wasn’t creating us to fill a relational void,
but instead to take part in what C. S. Lewis called, “the dance of God.”
Lewis explained that the God of Christianity is “not a static thing―not even a person―but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”
Lewis believed that each part of the trinity circles around the other, just like in a dance.
The Father, Son, and Spirit love, adore, and glorify each other,
as they have centered their happiness on the happiness of one another.
This is the kind of loving relationship we were created to be a part of, the dance we were created for.
And it in this dance, that we find life’s meaning and joy!
Since people were created to have a relationship with God, there are at least three important truths that follow.
The first is that our value lies not in what we can do,
but in what we are.
And that’s an absolutely HUGE difference!
Unlike atheism, Christianity holds that humanity is made in the very image of God (the Imago Dei),
Philosopher J.L. Mackie showed how different these two views are when he argued that people aren’t valuable just for existing,
but for what they can do.
Mackie wrote:
“It would be more reasonable to think of the right or claim to life as growing gradually in strength, but as still being very slight immediately after conception.”
In other words, he believed that a person’s right to life depends on their abilities,
and that right starts off weak when they are first conceived, and grows as they grow.
Many today think the same way, defining human rights by things like intelligence, independence, or personal choice.
But if that’s true, then some people are more valuable than others based on what they can do.
But this idea is extremely dangerous as it has been used to justify things like abortion and euthanasia.
However, Christianity completely rejects this way of thinking.
It teaches that every person has value because they are made in God's image,
and that value never changes, no matter their abilities, age, or circumstances.
Which means that NO ONE OR THING can take away their value.
The second truth that comes from the creation account connects to the idea of gap filling,
which we talked about in the last chapter.
Since we were made to live in a perfect, loving relationship with God and others,
we have deep desires that can only be truly satisfied by living the way we were created to.
This is why trying to fill the God-shaped hole in our hearts with other things—like success, money, or entertainment—will never really work.
C. S. Lewis offered a significant insight into this problem when he wrote:
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
An important part of why we were created is to worship God.
and while most atheists find this idea offensive, they really shouldn’t.
Greg Epstein, like many atheists, finds this doctrine deeply repulsive.
Criticizing the Bible’s Ten Commandments, he writes:
“it simply makes no sense that the first words in this purportedly most important of all ethical statements, the one that people fight to have posted at courthouses and on public lawns, would not be about, well, peace or justice, or love, or compassion, or neighborliness, or anything like that. No, they are about “Worship Me. Properly. Or Else.”
Religious skeptics often argue that a God who demands worship must be egotistical and petty,
as if He has serious character flaws and isn’t a good person.
Question:
Are atheists right to say that God is prideful and self-absorbed by demanding we worship Him?
But this criticism might make sense if God were just one person,
but it doesn’t work if God is triune.
Why?
Because the God of the Bible already experiences perfect love, adoration, and praise within the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—
so He doesn’t need worship from us.
So why does God command us to worship Him?
There are two main reasons why worshiping God is the right thing to do.
First, if God is the greatest being that exists—or could ever exist—
then He is the ultimate standard of beauty and goodness.
Choosing not to worship Him isn’t just rebellion;
it’s actually irrational and twisted, like refusing to admire something truly wonderful.
Second, worshiping God is for our own good.
If we reject our place in the dance of creation,
we are left with an unquenchable emptiness—a void that nothing else can ever truly fill.
Bart Ehrman, an agnostic author who left Christianity after attending seminary,
explains how he sensed a void after dropping belief in God,
saying:
“I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it; I am fortunate beyond words. But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any plausible way of filling it.”
If you don’t live for God, you will live for something else, and that something else will never satisfy you.
Author H. P. Lovecraft recognized this when he wrote:
“Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else.”
Similarly, at a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005,
the American novelist David Foster Wallace gave an astonishing speech explaining how we all worship something:
He said:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough...
It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already . . . Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.”
Even though David Foster Wallace wasn’t religious, he still recognized that everyone worships something.
For as Augustine of Hippo famously prayed:
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”
The truth is, if we don’t worship and live for God, we will end up living for something else
—but nothing else will ever truly satisfy us.
Instead, it will “eat you alive.”
Sadly, Wallace understood this all too well. Just a few years later, he took his own life by suicide.
The third truth that comes from the creation account has to do with God’s laws.
Many people see them as oppressive restrictions,
but for Christians, they are actually the instructions for the dance with God
which is a dance that leads to flourishing, not enslavement.
Following this idea, Thomas Aquinas’s “natural law theory” teaches that God’s laws are the instructions for running the human machine.
Think of a barber’s scissors—they are made for cutting hair.
If you try to use them for something else, like cutting sheet metal,
they will get damaged and won’t be able to do what they were created to do.
In the same way, when people live outside of their created purpose and ignore God's design,
they don’t just hurt themselves—they hurt others too.
The Christian writer G.K. Chesterton explained that the right kind of limits don’t restrict us.
In fact, they actually set us free to be who we were meant to be.
He wrote:
“You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”
In the same way, God’s laws aren’t meant to hold us back,
they are meant to help us flourish.
They guide us to live out our created purpose,
which is the only way to find true meaning in life.
The reason life is so full of struggles and hardships is that we refuse to follow God’s design.
When we step out of rhythm with Him, we create chaos instead of harmony,
which results in us falling out of the dance of God.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is something deeply and terribly wrong with our world.
We live in a world of child sex trafficking, gang violence, continuous warfare, terrorism, racism, hatred, and random public shootings.
We cannot escape the unsettling suspicion that there is something fundamentally broken within us.
Yet still, many deny this brokenness,
instead believing that humanity is essentially good,
and that our environment is the cause of our problems.
We tell ourselves that if we only had better education, living conditions, and jobs,
then people would come to see that violence and oppression are inferior ways of living.
But the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge knew better,
which is why he said:
“The depravity of man (man being sinful) is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”
And yet, no matter how obvious this truth is,
we search endlessly for ways to explain it away, and convince ourselves that we are good,
even though the facts suggest otherwise!
The Times magazine once asked prominent authors to write a response to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?”
in which G. K. Chesterton responded:
 
Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton.
G. K. Chesterton understood that humanity’s core problem isn’t our environment, bad choices, lack of education, or anything external—
Our problem is sin, and it affects us all.
And if we’re honest,
deep down we all know something is wrong with us.
But what do we do?
We try to cover it up with things
—whether it’s a successful career, hobbies, money, sex, or drugs.
We convince ourselves that if we just had that one thing,
then our life would have meaning and we'd finally be happy.
But the truth is those things don’t truly satisfy us for long,
so we get stuck in an endless cycle of trying to prove ourselves again and again.
and so no matter what we do, we always end up empty, just short of finding contentment.
Question:
What are ways Christians try to gap-fill with things that aren’t God?
This is the biblical doctrine of sin.
It’s stepping out of the dance of God and trying to led our own dance on our own without Him.
But it never works.
The biblical idea of sin is deeply offensive to many people - especially to atheists.
It’s often seen as a burden that brings unnecessary guilt and anxiety.
Some believe that if we could just ditch the idea of sin,
then we could move on and enjoy life without worry.
Many atheists argue that the idea of sin came from a pre-scientific age when people believed in angry gods who needed to be appeased through worship and sacrifice.
But, the question is, does getting rid of the idea of sin really make us better off?
C. E. M. Joad, a socialist philosopher who was an atheist until World War II, didn’t think so.
He wrote:
“It was because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the Left were always being so disappointed; disappointed by the refusal of people to be reasonable... by the behavior of nations and politicians... above all, by the recurrent fact of war.”
After the Holocaust, British historian Lord David Cecil said:
“The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us... But barbarism is not behind us, it is [within] us.”
Lord David Cecil
The truth is,
we all contribute to the cumulative evil in our world by ourindividual selfish actions.
The Bible tells us the world is not made up of “good guys” and “bad guys,”
but as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:
“The line between good and evil passes not through [states, classes, nor between political parties] but right through every human heart.”
Even though we don’t want to admit it, we are the villain of the story.
and if the idea of sin and total depravity offend you,
I would suggest that this might be because you don’t understand them the way Christians do.
In the Bible,
sin isn’t just a list of the bad things that we do;
it is the distortion of good things into ultimate things in an attempt to give our lives meaning and satisfaction.
It’s saying to the Ruler of the Universe, “I know better, this is how I should live my life.”
Sin, then, is an attempt to create an all-new dance,
trying to get things and people to revolve around us.
But this never works…
The old famous Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was one of the most successful coaches in all of NFL history.
However, Landry realized that achievement and success couldn’t bring lasting happiness and fulfillment.
He explained:
Even after you’ve just won the Super Bowl—especially after you’ve just won the Super Bowl—there’s always next year. If [as the expression goes] ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing’, then ‘the only thing’ is nothing—emptiness, the nightmare of a life without ultimate meaning.
When we pursue good things and make them into ultimate things,
we corrupt ourselves and God’s creation.
As theologian Jonathan Edwards put it,
“God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper happiness; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.”
Jonathan Edwards
Make no mistake, there is such a thing as evil;
however, Lewis and Edwards help us see why sin is not just “doing bad things,”
but is putting good things in the place of God—“badness is only spoiled goodness.”
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