I have been seeing a current of thought in religious and secular circles that only serves to accentuate the stark contrast between the 'Whole Counsel of God' in the New Testament finalized in the apostle Pauls words, that is not in the other religions or in evolutionary thinking.

Before I tell you what it is, I want to post some of the arguments I have heard from the other side that can be easily answered by the teachings of the Bible.

 

Some Liberal Arguments:

 

"10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.

9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.

 

4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the
exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."

http://www.vortexmind.net/index.php/2005-11-22-top-ten-signs-youre-a-fundamentalist-christian

 

"4 - People are giving thanks to WHO?

2 - Daycare centers are closed.

1 - Christmas celebrates a birth, not an abortion."

 

(Top Ten Reasons Liberals Hate the Holidays)

 

These statements and more will be dealt with in this message.

 

What common errors do these Liberal and Secular arguments promote?

It is the deindividuation of God and man.

 

" " (Deindividuation)

 

"The inconceivably complete identity of God is the paradigm of all personhood, at its very plurality is the foundation of all relatedness. Such is the 'image of God' in which we are made. In that light, the doctrine of the Trinity is not some facile mystification, but a straightforward statement of the multiple personhood of God ... If God is a Person, that ... translates into moral absolutes for us ... humanity's alienation from God has occurred at precisely that level of character and relationship. (1)"

 

(Dave Hunt, The Mysterious Trinity)

 

"Let Us Make Man in 'Our' image after 'Our' likeness." (Genesis 1:27)

 

"Before Abraham was, I Am." (John 8:58)

 

Only a Personal and Loving God can relate to his creatures, and humans that are in the image of God, have that personal quality as well, but that was marred because of the Fall.

 

No other religion or World View teaches this as emphatically Christianity does and most, not at all.

 

 

"But take Jesus Christ out of Christianity, and there would be nothing left. Biblical Christianity is not just a philosophy of life, nor an ethical standard, nor obedience to religious ritual. True Christianity is based on a vital, personal relationship with a Risen Founder who is our living Savior and Lord."

 

http://www.greatcom.org/resources/whoisjesusorig/lordliarlunatic.html

 

 

In Islam Allah, though this god's name means 'all compassionate' does not really love his creatures and the Muslim can never be sure of his salvation, unless he wages Jihad against the infidels.

 

" " ()

 

Every Cult/deviation or rejection of Christianity makes its followers eternally insecure, so that there is no surety of salvation from their god.

Only a constant insecurity and working ones way to a frightening God who is unpredictable.

 

This is a result of not understanding who God really is.

 

Their faith and life are only as good as the god they believe in.

The personal loving God, who from all eternity existed in three persons is the only being who can fulfill every need of loving and thinking human beings.

 

This personal and loving God desires fellowship with His creation. This can only happen if the personhood of God then man is a reality.

 

 

One can and should certainly see God as more than personal but not less than that.

 

Evolutionary Theory does not provide the rationale for a personal universe and the personal nature of man.

 

Evolutionary Theory must explain a design without a designer, living matter came from primordial and impersonal ooze and how the immaterial personal soul came into being through impersonal 'material' evolution.

The Genesis account doesn't say that we came only from dirt. That is only partly explains our physical nature.

 

Our immaterial nature (spirit and soul) came from the Triunity of God.

Evolutionary Theory if taken to its logical conclusion provides the most illogical and impersonal results because it is based on an impersonal and illogical starting point.

 

For if survival of the fittest is how we survive and evolve, then we are evolving into the most impersonal and unloving creatures who couldn't be trusted to be alone with Grandma.

 

Survival of the Fittest requires that we animals kill those unlike us and weed out all the weak ones (Abortion and Euthanasia), to ensure the development of our species.

 

Abortion and Euthanasia denies the personhood of the unborn and the elderly to justify their murders.

 

Some are already doing this.

 

If we can see the unborn, elderly or even our enemies as less than persons then we don't feel bad to do them harm.

 

We can do this by denying the obvious, being ignorant or exalting the preoccupation with our own selves.

 

If we are at least smart enough to admit that we have personalities/souls but are mere byproducts of the impersonal punyverse, then we must explain how an impersonal universe can produce personal beings that must practice impersonal and inhumane acts simply to survive in this evolutionary universe.

 

The Liberal uses 'evolutionary theory' to explain most everything.

You cannot watch a travel show, animal show, etc without hearing about how the earth is millions or billions of years old.

 

Most of these shows cannot even provide a shred of evidence for believing without question this old earth theory, which they base most of the rest of their logic on.

 

Even some believe that Aliens from outer space may just be advanced creatures that have had more time to evolve than us.

 

Would these aliens be friendly or be vicious creatures like the movie 'When Mars Attack'?

 

Well, if Evolutionary Theory is correct this is what Aliens would be like.

"Why should such 'highly evolved' beings act toward us mere 'worms' in any way other than in their own selfish interests? There is no evidence that evolution produces kindness, even in its highest forms, but exactly the opposite. A species doesn't survive long enough to reach godlike status by dealing fairly and compassionately with others. They would likely be even more self-serving that we are. They might keep some of us as pets or slaves, but their robots would be more efficient and cheaper to maintain, so most earthlings would be destroyed." (Occult Invasion, pg. 360, Hunt)

 

Some want to credit their punyverse with what the Personal Loving God has accomplished.

 

That would mean that there is no such thing as 'free will' because how could a mere process, produce beings that are more free and capable of noble acts than the universe that created them.

 

If one believes that the universe can actually produce loving and personal acts, the question would be how?

 

If their universe is not God, then how could it possess personal qualities?

 

"God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, "organised and minutely articulated." He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we posses. It would be safer to call His trans-corporeal, trans-personal." Miracles (New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 91."

 

You can even see a transition taking place in the Bible from Group Think to 'whosoever will' which appeals to individuals.

 

This of course was God's intention to go from an incomplete religion (Judaism), to a personal relationship of each individual to the Triunity of God.

 

Scripture goes from the 'Jew first' (Group Preference), to 'All' being offered the opportunity to commune with God.

 

Link: Group Think or Whosoever Will

 

At this page I demonstrate how the Bible goes from Group Think which contributes to deindividuation to the individual which promotes personhood and One Nation Under God, Individual.

 

"...A good many people nowadays say, "I believe in a God, but not in a personal God." They feel that the mysterious something which is behind all other things must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite agree. But the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other people, though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea is the only one on the market.

 

Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be "absorbed" into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves-in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.

I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully." (Mere Christianity, pgs. 160-165, C.S. Lewis)

 

Bj Maxwell

11/30/2006

Copyright ©

 

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"You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.

 

Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

 

Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.

 

You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn’t any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time—tonight, if you like.

...And that is how Theology started. People already knew about God in a vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet he was not the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they could not do before. And when they worked it all out they found they had arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal God.

 

This definition is not something we have made up; Theology is, in a sense, experimental knowledge. It is the simple religions that are the made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science "in a sense," I mean that it is like the other experimental sciences in some ways, but not in all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and find the rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them they cannot run away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot either help or hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take photos of wild animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks. The wild animals will not come to you: but they can run away from you. Unless you keep very quiet, they will. There is beginning to be a tiny little trace of initiative on their side.

 

Now a stage higher; suppose you want to get to know a human person. If he is determined not to let you, you will not get to know him. You have to win his confidence. In this case the initiative is equally divided—it takes two to make a friendship.

 

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.

 

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

 

God can show Himself as He really is only to real men, and that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one band, or organs in one body.

 

Consequently, the one really adequate instrument for learning about God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science—the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap—he may be cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still going on.

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about." (Mere Christianity, pgs. 160-165, C.S. Lewis)