Category: Theology: Thinking Deeply About God and His Relation to the World

Who is God? What is He like? What has He done?

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Will God Forgive Me?

A young man came into my office after our worship service one Sunday morning. He was clearly distraught. As he told me of the wrong things he had done and the guilt he had experienced, tears came to his eyes.

What message did I have for him?

The most basic message of Christianity: no matter what we have done, where we have been, or how much we have sinned, God freely offers to us a restored relationship with Him and the healing and forgiveness that go with it.

Guilt is a universal phenomenon. It is based on the fact that we have not done what we should have done and and not become what we should have become. It is a basic reality of human existence (this side of Adam’s fall).

What are we to do with the guilt we feel? The message of evangelical Christianity is to come, come back to God, come home, and receive forgiveness and new life.

I love the way Isaiah describes this. He compares a life of a restored relationship with God to eating at a banquet table. He says: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost” (Is. 55:1).

This is a message not only for unbelievers. It is a message for believers. As Christians, we have not made our Christian life what it should have been. But: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

I have encountered so many people who have felt that they were worthless because they had failed. They failed God. They failed other people. They failed themselves.

The good news: God still wants to use you. He wants to restore you. He wants you to come home. He values you even others don’t, even when you don’t value yourself.

It’s crucial to see that though this forgiveness is free for us, it cost God something very weighty: His own Son. Isaiah 55 comes on the heels of Isaiah 53: “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (5–6).

He pays. We get life for free.

That is an astonishing and joyful message. It is a message for the weary soul burdened with guilt and for those searching for meaning. It’s the joy of this message that led people like Billy Graham to preach to millions. He wanted to let people know that the way to God was wide open because of Jesus.

In Isaiah 55, there are several pictures of what happens when people receive this offer.

One of these pictures of new life in God is this: “instead of briers the myrtle will grow” (v. 12). Since I’ve been in the South, I’ve grown to love the myrtle trees. I finally got tired of the ugly trees on the side of my driveway and replaced them with two myrtle trees this winter. I have great hope that these will beautify my landscape and symbolize the beauty of God’s forgiveness.

Isaiah also says that these things are “for an everlasting sign, that will endure forever.” I recently hiked the Chickamauga National Military Park. There are monuments everywhere: to man’s sacrifice and to his strength in the face of battle.

When people accept God’s forgiveness, they become monuments, too. Not to man’s strength and sacrifice, but to God’s sacrifice and grace.

And we can be sure that God’s Word will produce such monuments wherever we announce God’s free grace. “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (10–11).

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Power on the Way: Thoughts on the Holy Spirit

Who is the Holy Spirit?

When people hear the word “Holy Spirit” today, it may seem strange and mysterious. This is especially true when we use the old English term, “Holy Ghost.”

As mysterious as the word may sound, it’s really no more mysterious than God Himself is. There is mystery, but the Holy Spirit is the presence of God with us for comfort, encouragement, guidance, and power.

Christians believe that God is one, but we also believe that God has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (read more about this here).

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have existed forever. You can find references to the Son (as The Angel of the Lord among other references) and the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. However, the Son is uniquely revealed when He comes in human form and reveals Himself as Jesus, the Son of God. The Holy Spirit comes into the world after Jesus’ resurrection as the unique revealer of Jesus to the world (see John 14:15–18 and Acts 2).

The Holy Spirit is the one who makes Jesus real, known, and believed in by human hearts. People from all over the world with different languages, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and educational levels have embraced the crucified Jesus as “the unique Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). How can this be? The answer is: the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not merely the one who reveals Jesus, He continues to apply Jesus’ love and care to Jesus’ followers throughout their lives. He is the one who brings His followers love, joy, and peace. These are all “fruits” of the Spirit in their lives (see Gal. 5:22–23).

However, the Holy Spirit is there not merely to give us personal peace. He wants to use us to spread the love of God and bring restoration and redemption to a world in need of hope. He invites us to be a part of a larger project. Continue reading “Power on the Way: Thoughts on the Holy Spirit”

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Is Jesus God?

This question must seem very strange to modern ears. Sorta like asking, is George Washington God, or is Abraham Lincoln God?

For modern people, the question may seem absurd, but for those who first heard it, it was blasphemy.

When Jesus said to the people of his day, “I and the Father are one,” here was their response: they picked up stones to stone him. Here’s what they said: “We are not stoning you for any good work . . . but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

To the Jews, the first article of their faith was that God is one. If Jesus claimed to be God, then he was, in their mind, attacking this fundamental article.

On the other side, when Jesus’ followers went out into the Roman world and claimed divine status for Jesus, this would have seemed neither strange nor improbable to Roman ears. The Romans believed in many gods, and the distinction between gods and humans was not that great. So, what would be the big deal with adding one more god to the pantheon?

The trouble for the followers of Jesus in the Roman world was that they claimed that there was only one God and that Jesus was that God. “He is the true God and eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:20) and “the Word was God. . . . Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:2–3). Paul wrote: “we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ . . .” (Tit. 2:13).

The early Christians believed, prayed to, and trusted in Jesus as the one true God.

So, how to explain that Jesus is God and the Father is God? The church had to struggle long to think through this relationship and express it clearly.

One possibility is that the Father and the Son are just different manifestations of the one true God in a similar way to the fact that I am a father, son, friend, and husband. I’m the same person, but I play different roles.

This just did not do justice to the New Testament revelation. For example, Jesus said, “In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is true. I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me” (John 8:17–18). No, the Father was one person and Jesus another, yet there was not two gods but one God.

From this, it’s not a far jump to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. We believe that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is hard to understand, but should it really surprise us that there would be something about God that is way above our understanding of God? It would almost be surprising if this wasn’t the case.

But the key question is, is it true? Is Jesus really God?

Let me suggest three things to consider.

First, everyone believes that Jesus is a great teacher. Even non-Christians throughout history have looked at him as a great moral teacher. Yet he claimed to be God and the Lord of all. Could a good teacher make such a claim? If I said that what my word that you are reading on this blog are the words of me, the one true God, would you continue to read my blog? No, you would think I was crazy or a charlatan. But Jesus is not the sort of person you can write of as a crazy person or charlatan. He is one of the greatest people who ever lived. So, how can you put those things together?

C.S. Lewis, the atheist turned Christian apologist, put it this way: it is a trilemma. He is either a liar, lunatic, or lord. You can’t say he’s just a good teacher because Jesus has shut that door. Those are really the only options. Which one makes the most sense?

Second, He rose from the dead. He said he was God, and he proved it by rising from the dead. I believe that this is not only a belief, it is historical fact. You can read the evidence for this claim here and here, but I’ll just say this. All of his followers believed he rose from the dead, and they staked their lives on it. They gained very little in this life for this belief, and most of them paid for believing this truth with their lives. If they made it up, would all of them have gone to terrible deaths for its truth? To me, that does not seem at all plausible. So, the only conclusion I can come to is that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Third, all over the world, people from diverse cultures, regions, socioeconomic backgrounds, intellectual levels, and so on have come to Jesus. They have done this without any apparent gain in this world. They have done it often in the face of the greatest persecution. In China, as one example, all of the missionaries were expelled when the communists took over, decades later, Christianity was exploding all over China in the face of often terrible persecution. How did this happen? In my mind, it is only the power of the resurrected Christ that provides an adequate explanation.

Whether you find this convincing or not, I hope that you will consider this crucial question that Jesus asked his own followers while he was on earth: who do you say that I am?

If you are convinced that Jesus is God, let me ask you to consider the significance of this truth.

First, God wants to connect with us. If He became a human, He is not some distant, far off being. He is one who comes, very close. He wants to connect with us and have a relationship with us.

Second, he is accessible. How do you relate to an infinite being? Hard to conceive. But what if He comes down to our level to relate to us? If you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father. You know God.

Third, he can sympathize with us. It would seem that God is remote from us and immune to all our problems. But if He became a human, then He has experienced all of our struggles and is able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. He suffered. He died. He experienced rejection. He can sympathize with us.

He has come close to us and invites us to come close to Him. That is the implication of the glorious truth that Jesus is God.

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God . . . the Father

God. He’s so far above and beyond us.

When I think of God, I think about how He is bigger than the universe with its billions of stars in millions of different galaxies. The universe is so immense, I wonder if God created it to give us a visual picture of what infinity is like.

At the same time, He designed the smallest units of life. He wrote the code that organizes biological organisms and causes them to operate. The level of complexity on even the “simplest” cell is staggering.

He is greater than the universe yet intimately involved in the smallest details of life.

Of course, I am not the first to stand in awe of our Creator. Our tools have enabled us to see things on a larger and smaller scale than our ancestors, but they too stood in awe at the Creator.

In some ways, they might have seen Him better because they were in more direct, regular contact with what He had created in an agrarian and pre-industrial society.

One of the songs of David, the shepherd turned king, went like this: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3–4). I’m sure he sang that many times as he went to sleep outside under the moon and stars.

In light of all this, it would be easy to think of God as distant, as One who had no interest in humans at all.

But that’s where Jesus comes in. How does He speak of God? As Father.

Jesus taught us to think of the infinite, almighty, all-wise Creator in intensely personal terms: the Father.

He did more, though, than just teach us to call God “Father.” He taught us what this means. That’s good because we all bring different things to the table when it comes to the word “father” or “dad.”

Here’s what He taught us to think about our heavenly Father.

1. The Father will take care of us: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Mt. 6:26).

2. The Father wants to give us good things: “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Mt. 7:11).

3. The Father wants us to imitate Him: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Mt. 5:44–45).

4. The Father gives us guidance: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Mt. 16:17).

5. The Father wants us to believe in His unique Son: “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”

These are just some of the ways Jesus taught us to think about our Father in heaven. You can read what else Jesus said about it here.

I think the reason that Jesus put such a strong emphasis on God as Father is because He knew that He was the unique Son of the Father. Jesus is a Son of the Father in a way that no one else is.

He said, “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

However, Jesus said that we also should think of God as our Father. When He saw Mary after His resurrection, He said, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). In other words, Jesus wants us to think of our relationship with God in the same intimate way in which He thought of it.

The God who made the universe is our Father. That’s worth thinking about . . . every day.

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Where We All Agree

Sometimes doctrine seems to divide.

However, when you read the various statements of faith of the variety of Protestant denominations, you will find that there is remarkable unity on the key points of doctrine.

You will find that this list includes the most important doctrines of the Christian faith. I believe that these teachings are the ones that should be most central to the life of every church, whatever their other differences may be.

I have listed here eight points of doctrine on which we all agree. Under each point, I have provided citations from a variety of statements of faith that illustrate the particular point.

Here are the areas where all evangelical, Protestant Christians agree.

1. The Bible is the infallible, inerrant Word of God and is the supreme judge of all controversies and opinions.

Westminster Confession of Faith: The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God. . . . . The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

Methodist Articles: The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

Wesleyan Articles: We believe that the books of the Old and New Testaments constitute the Holy Scriptures. They are the inspired and infallibly written Word of God, fully inerrant in their original manuscripts and superior to all human authority, and have been transmitted to the present without corruption of any essential doctrine. We believe that they contain all things necessary to salvation; so that whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man or woman that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. Continue reading “Where We All Agree”

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