Scripture Psalm 42:2-3
As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My being thirsts for God, the living God.
When can I go and see the face of God?
Comment
Looking at Ourselves
Things in the world are not the way that they aught to be.
That is a way of saying that we human beings live on two levels –
Ø we live on the level of the way things are and
Ø a second level where we can envision/imagine/work towards a perfect way of life – perfect justice, perfect beauty, perfect truth, perfect harmony and so on.
So here we have a chasm between the way things are and the way things aught to be.
This is verifiable by looking within us. We don’t need theories or science.
We can just look within ourselves and we see we operate on these two levels.
Lets just call the first level the way things are – the human level
And lets call the way things aught to be – the divine level.
I want to suggest that in all the religions of the world that to go from the human level to the divine level you have got to build a ladder and make a supreme effort through codes, commandments, laws, dietary regulations –these may differ but the idea is the same. You climb up this ladder and as human beings we move rung by rung to the divine level.
What is unique about the Christian answer is that Christianity steps back and looks at this process and says this is a very impressive attempt but it is not going to work.
Why?
Because the chasm is between the way things are and the way things aught to be is too big.
If this gap is going to be closed, it has to be closed from the other side.
In other words, God has to descend or condescend to the human level and that is the only way to bridge this chasm.
This is the role of Christ helping to bridge this huge chasm between the way things are and the way things aught to be.
Source: D’Souza vs Loftus Debate - Does The Christian God Exist.mp3
MORE INFORMATION
First, there is the question of whether something exists or not. A thing can exist whether we know it or not.
Our argument first derives a major premise from the real world of nature: that nature makes no desire in vain.
Then it discovers something real in human nature—namely, human desire for something more than nature—which nature cannot explain, because nature cannot satisfy it.
Thus, the argument is based on observed facts in nature, both outer and inner.
The atheist Jean-Paul Sartre admitted that "there comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, 'Is that all there is?'"
Source: Peter Kreeft
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these 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.
Source: C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity, Bk. III, chap. 10, "Hope"
QUOTE:
Celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking knows more about the universe than almost any other person ever to walk the planet, but some answers still escape even him.
In June 2010, when asked by ABC (USA) News' Diane Sawyer about the biggest mystery he'd like solved, he said,
"I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing."
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Did you hear the one about the atheist who goes out fishing with his believer friend?
The atheist pulls up his net and finds a rock inscribed with the words: “I do not exist. Signed: God.”
The atheist turns to his friend: “What’d I tell you!”
One wants to be sympathetic to such a sincere cry of the heart. But one can’t help wondering: Is this all there is to life—pursuing a liberal social agenda while eating, drinking, and making merry?
What happens when we suffer, when people do us wrong, when we face persecution or attack for what we believe in, or for no reason at all?
What happens when we age and realize that this is all we’ve done with our lives?
The problem of the new atheism is the problem of the old atheism.
It amounts to the demand that God stand trial, that he justify his ways and means before a jury of his creatures.
It’s the protest of reason against the uncertainties and injustices of existence.
Reason tells us that God could have made the world differently—without giving us the possibility to do all the bad things we do to each other, without the possibility of all those things insurance companies used to call “acts of God.”
Reason causes us to wonder why God made us with free will, knowing what we would do with it. Why couldn’t his purposes be served by creating us with a little less freedom, or none at all?
And if it’s true that we’re made for heaven, why didn’t God put us there in the first place and let us skip this brief life of testing, pain, and heartache?
These are reasonable questions for which reason alone can give no answers.
What the new atheists forget is that a world without God is not a world without evil or innocent suffering.
It’s simply a world in which we face sufferings without hope, without any possibility of justice—in this life or in the next.
Atheists demands of the Bible things the Bible was never meant to provide—certitude, black and white answers, the absolutes of reason.
The Bible wasn’t meant to tell us why people starve in sub-Saharan Africa any more than it was meant to tell us about evolution or the “big bang.”
The Bible is written as the apostle John wrote—that we might believe in Christ and that by believing we might have life eternal.
It’s a book not only of reason, but of faith.
Faith helps us to see beyond this veil of tears, this gloomy Golgotha of pain and death.
It lets us see what angels longed to see, what the human eye has not seen and cannot see—that the suffering of this present time can’t be compared to the glory that will be revealed.
God’s love is stronger than evil, suffering, and death.
That’s the Bible’s true answer to our ultimate question.
Source: David Scott
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