Thoughts on Apologetics and Journeys of Faith 3

The question should be raised here…about the difficulty of anyone other than God inventing and composing a life-script that can get a perfect person to the cross on Calvary Hill in first-century Jerusalem.

How do you get a perfect person Jesus Christ all the way to the outward appearing, utter failure of the cross…traversing through the narrowest and tightest of circumstances…while turning this most catastrophic event into the most positive and productive salvation for mankind?

Everything in the life-script of Jesus Christ the Son of God…imagined and composed eons of time ago by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…is designed to get Jesus to the cross.

God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit have known from eternity past that the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross…has divine life.

The blood that Jesus Christ shed on the cross has power for redemptive salvation, spiritual re-birth, and moral transformation for believers, but also has thorough and complete justification that enables people of faith to enter into a dynamic journey of faith wherein they can personally know the living God of the Bible…because this justification comes to us signed and sealed through the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Here the biblical narrative stories of faith enter squarely into the apologetics debate.

God displacing our ways with His higher ways…His higher thoughts…whether this results in an entirely new, major calling in our lives…like Abraham or the apostle Paul…or staying exactly where we are but becoming changed people with new spiritual hearts and new attitudes for the better…is openly supernatural to the core…and is plainly there in clear print in the pages of the Bible.

            What is the explanation for how this entirely non-natural, non-materialistic concept came into existence within the human marketplace of ideas?

            How can the biblical narrative stories of faith…having the novel element of the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…arise out of the void of absolute nothing in previous recorded human history…in a similar manner to the Big Bang creation of the physical universe…out of nothing ex nihilo…in essence out of the creative imagination of God?

Is this pure, absolute truth…as defined by God…divinely initiated through life-scripts that contain scenarios having goals and outcomes outside of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…which require God’s participation within joint-ventures with the people of faith that lift them up into a higher context where discovering the character and person of God is possible?

If this is the definition of truth actualized within people’s lives…theistic and supernatural to the core…then this is the last thing Satan wants out in the open in public debate as a viable and rational alternative for the leading of our lives…God-sovereignty in place of self-sovereignty…because it has no explanation originating from the conventionality of worldly thinking.

The gradualistic incrementalism of Richard Dawkin’s Mount Improbable would never take mankind to the advanced end-point of biblical faith…where God displaces our ways with His higher ways within a God-composed journey of faith life-script…which at its core is completely contrary to the dreams, goals, and aspirations we see within the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

The idea that this concept of biblical faith…as deep and as sophisticated as any concept in existence…would originate as the product of material particles and energy according to the philosophical worldview of naturalism…is inconceivable…thus the question: “Where did it come from?”

I have the greatest admiration for the Christian apologists who debate world-renowned atheists in an open public forum.  I liken this to the steely courage and confidence needed by concert pianists or violinists performing concertos live on the stages of Carnegie Hall or the Hollywood Bowl…or to the confidence that major league baseball shortstops must have upon taking the field to start the game…knowing that the first pitch may be a groundball hit deep in the hole between third base and shortstop…necessitating getting to the ground ball…catching it…and then turning to throw a “bullet” across the infield diamond to get the speedy lead-off hitter out by a step.

The breadth of the preparation and the mastery of the subject matter are to be admired on both sides of the argument regarding the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible.

I can sit for hours in front of my computer screen watching on U-tube the discussions, lectures, and debates of my favorite apologists like Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, John C. Lennox, and others…brilliantly articulating with clarity and precision the Christian apologetic responses to some of the most difficult issues encountered in religion, philosophy, science, and practical living.

But I think one of the most important elements is still missing in the debate…an element accessible and discoverable on a popular level (Jn. 16:13; Jer. 31:34) by every Christian today who has picked up their cross and is following Jesus into their God-scripted destiny.

God displacing our ways with His higher ways…integral within every biblical narrative story of faith…in my opinion has not been fully recovered following the hugely positive breakthrough made during the Protestant Reformation…namely…that the common people should be able to directly read for themselves the Bible translated into their own language.

In my opinion, the Protestant Reformation does not deconstruct into the privatization of morality…in which each individual person determines what is right and wrong.

            God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…as illustrated in the biblical narrative stories of faith…place the authority to determine what is right and wrong…with God where it belongs

The outstanding novelty of the divine humility of Jesus that gets Him all the way to the cross…the humanistically unacceptable and offensive component of the gospel message that jettisons worldly conventional normalcy and thinking overboard…and the unthinkably un-worldly process of a biblical-quality journey of faith that introduces God-sovereignty into our lives through the cross of Jesus Christ…uniformly portrayed throughout the narrative stories of faith in the Bible…is in my view almost irrefutable evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible…because their origin cannot plausibly come from human literary invention.

Win the brilliant, ongoing Christian apologetics argument raging within scholarly academia and the popular culture…using evidences from the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…and Christians have thereby offered a compelling rebuttal to the objections originating from atheistic and skeptical unbelief…opening the way for people to work free from debilitating untruths…towards a personal relationship with God through belief in Jesus Christ as Savior.

But the biblical narrative stories of faith argue compellingly for a divine origin of the Bible itself…based upon the innovative originality of their storylines…taking the debate upward a level or two…above the standard evidences coming from within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…and thus outside of the reach of traditional, skeptical criticism.