Evidence for God in the Bible Archives

November 12, 2022November 8, 2022

Unconditional Love – Agapao

Biblical Greek had five different words for love, each of which refers to something God created. For example, God wants us to have friends, and the Greek word for friendship is phileo. Peter’s exchange with Jesus in John 21:15-17 does not indicate that phileo was wrong, but Jesus was calling Peter to a different kind of love, agapao (unconditional love). Philadelphia (brotherly love) in Greek calls us to care about others as in Hebrews 13:1. The Greek word thelo (to want something physical) is not negative, but the condemnation in Mark 12:38 was about priorities. Finally, Eros (sexual love) is not used in the New Testament but refers to a beautiful creation of God, used to cement marriage.

What Jesus wants from Peter and us in John 21 and throughout the New Testament is agapao. The Greek dictionary defines it as “seeing something infinitely precious in its object.” People quote John 3:16 carelessly without understanding the depth of the kind of love that God has for us. Read 1 John 2 – 4, especially chapter 4:7-11. The word used throughout 1 John is agapao.

We need to be reminded that God doesn’t create any junk. Every human has a spiritual makeup that makes them “infinitely precious.” When you reject that concept, human life becomes cheap–worth no more than a cockroach.

Where would we be today if all world leaders saw human life as “infinitely precious?” Without that concept, you can’t make sense of the Sermon on The Mount and the admonitions of Jesus to love your enemy and do good even to those who abuse you. Racism and sexism exist because we refuse to have unconditional love for those who are different from us.

Peter learned to have agapao. It was a rough journey for Peter, and it isn’t always easy for us, but we need to preach it and do our best to live it. We can grow in unconditional love (agapao) with the help of God’s Spirit.

November 10, 2022November 8, 2022

The Concept of Infinity and God

When you read the biblical description of God, you find that it involves qualities that atheists reject. An omnipresent, omnipotent, and eternal God are biblical descriptions that skeptics refuse to accept as possible. The foundation of the atheist worldview rejects an infinite eternity in heaven. Likewise, mathematicians rejected the concept of infinity for many years until the end of the nineteenth century. However, infinity exists, and mathematics doesn’t make sense without it.

Euclid’s geometry deliberately excluded the idea of anything infinitely small or infinitely large. The Greeks believed they could describe the entire universe with positive rational numbers. However, there are cases where a calculation cannot be made with a whole number or one having non-repeating decimal places. For example, the value of pi requires an irrational number with infinite decimal representation. A circle with a radius of one turns out to be 22/7, which is 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 if carried out to 100 places. The value of pi is called an irrational number because even at 100 places, it does not end. The digits after the decimal point are infinite.

Legend says that Hippasus, the first to prove that irrational numbers exist, was executed when his proof was published. The scholarly group known as the Pythagorean brotherhood was vocal about naturalism which had to deny the existence of the infinite. Eventually, it became evident that their view of the cosmos was impossible. And yet here in the twenty-first century, we find that denial of the concept of infinity is still the thinking of those who reject the biblical concept of God.

You can’t understand your life as having an infinite purpose if you reject the concept of infinity. The concept of the infinite is contained in the statement of Jesus in Matthew 20:16, “So the last will be first, and the first last,” and Matthew 16:25, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has set eternity in the hearts of humanity. On a fundamental level, that biblical concept of reality makes sense, and the history of mathematics is a strong support for the credibility of the biblical concept of eternity.

Reference: “Mathematical Theology” by Doug Phillippy in the Fall 2022 issue of God and Nature

November 5, 2022November 1, 2022

The Gifts God Offers for Free

We live in an age of skepticism about religion in general and specifically about the “church.” There are many churches in America, and their messages frequently contradict one another. At the same time, we are inundated with vast numbers of messages about attractive alternatives to the Church. The word “church” is “ekklesia” in the original language, and it means “the called out.” It does not refer to any denomination or human-made religious body. It refers to individuals who reject the alternatives the world has to offer. The biblical teachings about the “called out” cannot be improved upon, and neither can the gifts God offers to us. Here are some that specifically deal with finding the best life possible.

The word of God cannot be improved. The Bible has been tested over the centuries, primarily by people who were trying to prove it wrong. Having been one of those people, I can testify to the futility of that attempt. As 2 Peter 1: 16-21 tells us, the Bible is not a bunch of fables. It contains prophecies that can be confirmed. The Bible includes just enough history to verify its integrity and just enough science to show it is beyond human knowledge for its day. The philosophy of the biblical narrative has proven to lead to a high quality of life, mentally and spiritually. The problems come with what Peter calls “private interpretations” and when humans try to find a way to make money with it instead of just letting it guide their lives.

God’s instructions on how to live cannot be improved. Take the teachings of Christ in Matthew 5:21 through chapter 6 and think about what kind of world it would be if everyone lived by those teachings. As you read those verses, you will see that this wisdom contradicts what you hear from politicians and secularists. Next, read Galatians 5:19-23 and think about what has caused the misery we see in the world around us. The gifts God offers are free, and all alternatives to God’s instructions fail.

God’s instructions for salvation make sense. Being lost means a relationship has been severed–be it a marriage, a business, or a life. All the pop psychology in the world won’t repair relationships because it has no power. God created us pure, but the world corrupts us, rupturing our relationship with Him. Repairing that relationship is beyond all human efforts. God knows how to restore us (2 Peter 2:9), and Romans 6 tells us how to become a new person with God’s Spirit living in us. This is the ultimate gift of God because it is eternal. Go to a quiet place and allow yourself to think about the gifts God offers. Accepting God’s gifts and living life God’s way works, and it’s the ultimate solution to the human dilemma.

October 29, 2022October 26, 2022

End-of-Year Holidays

One interesting part of this ministry is the wide assortment of emails and postal letters we receive. We average about 1000 per week, which come from every corner of the globe and express every viewpoint you can imagine. So, for example, we get many letters complaining about the end-of-year holidays and the decadent origin of many of them.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s are the major end-of-year holidays, and someone will find things to dislike about their origins or practices. Halloween leads all the others with people citing complaints about everything from destructive spirits to human sacrifice. So, should we avoid trick or treat, carving faces on pumpkins, costumes, orange and black decorations, telling ghost stories, or games like Dungeons and Dragons?

The origin of Halloween goes back to ancient days in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales when the people celebrated the end of harvest. They had feasts, games, bobbing for apples, and thanking God for a successful harvest. The Roman Catholic Church added a time of remembering those who had died with special memorials for past family members. This was a positive thing that brought people together.

Years later, the Catholic Church tradition added the doctrine of purgatory. In many European countries, people held graveside services to atone for sins that family members committed before they died. This included leaving food, articles of clothing, or things that were special to the deceased by the graves. When some of these items disappeared, people assumed that somehow the dead had found a way to enjoy them. This led to fantastic stories about meeting these characters at night. Human imagination ran wild, and skeptics made fun of this practice and invented ways to profit from the stories created by people’s imaginations.

People today still invent wild stories, and the entertainment industry has taken advantage of that in films, plays, TV shows, and books. What began as a celebration of God’s blessings evolved into a memorial for those who had died and then became a tool for those who would exploit the uneducated for economic gain.

Taking advantage of people through trickery is nothing new. We read in the Bible about a man named Simon who used magic as a tool to exploit people ( Acts 8:9-11). In 1 Samuel 28:8–25, we find the story of Saul and the “Witch of Endor” seeking to bring up the spirit of Samuel. God commanded His people to avoid witchcraft of any kind. A miracle of God allows Samuel to actually show up, and the witch screams in terror, realizing that God has acted because she knows her scam is worthless. Bringing people back from the dead in today’s world is also a scam.

We have chosen just one of the end-of-year holidays as an example. Is carving a pumpkin or putting up Halloween decorations endorsing something evil? Of course not! Does evil exist? It absolutely does, but God is in control, and for Christians, evil cannot overtake us if we resist it. The Bible tells us to resist Satan, and he will flee from us (James 4:7). Halloween is a great time to learn and help dispel the claims of charlatans and con artists as they strive to fleece the ignorant and uneducated. So enjoy the end-of-year holidays and use them to teach others about what really matters in life–following the teachings of Christ as our guide to successful living.

October 27, 2022October 26, 2022

Little Aborted Souls in Heaven

An article by S.M. Hutchens in Touchstone magazine raised the question of what the Redeemer will do with “those little aborted souls … in heaven.” A skeptic recently suggested to me, “If we believe the Bible, Christians should support abortion because those aborted babies automatically go to heaven.” Both of these views miss the point. There will be no such thing as “little aborted souls” in heaven.

When we die, we leave all of our physical existence behind. At the end of time, the physical world will be dissolved and turned back into the form from which it came. (See 2 Peter 3:10-18.) Einstein’s famous equation e = mc² tells us that mass and energy are really the same thing, and quantum mechanics continues to support that concept. In 1 John 1:5 we read, “God is light.” Light is energy, and the idea is that God took some of His own nature and turned it into matter. That was the start of the creation process.

Revelation 21 tells us that in heaven, we will be free of every negative thing that afflicted us here on Earth. There will be no death, pain, or suffering. As verse 5 says, all things will be made new. Christ will bring all of us who are His into this new existence, including those babies who were killed before they could draw a breath.

The skeptic then says that we should rejoice that these “little aborted souls” are now with God and will never have to experience the trauma of life. That might sound like a reasonable argument, except for something that atheists can never deal with. It is the question of purpose. What is our purpose—why are we here? There is a joke about the skeptic who says to God at the judgment, “Why didn’t you put a stop to COVID?” God responds by saying, “I did, and you aborted it.” That really is more than a joke. It raises a key point in this discussion.

The Bible makes it clear that God had and continues to have a purpose in the creation and a purpose for each of us. We are not just accidents. Ephesians 6:12 and 3:10, as well as the Book of Job, show us that there is a war between good and evil, and we are on the battlefield. Atheists may try to deny this by saying evil doesn’t exist, but that is an irrational view.

Everyone was created with talents and abilities to do something in the battle with the spiritual forces described in Ephesians. Unfortunately, many refuse to participate and end up with lives full of frustration and no direction. Aborted babies never have a chance to do what God created them to do. Those of us who find our niche realize that God put us here for a reason. In that, we find contentment and value in life as we fulfill the purpose for which we were created.

Reference: “L’Chaim!” in the column “Mortal Remains” by S.M. Hutchens in the November/December 2022 issue of Touchstone magazine

October 22, 2022October 18, 2022

A Negative Attitude Toward Christianity

“Religion” is a bad word in the world today. Many religions are violent, abusive, dishonest, and the source of war, waste, and murder. When I gave my lectures on science and faith in England, Ireland, and Scotland, I found that people were very interested in what I was presenting, but if I used the words “church” or “religion,” they were repulsed. In many countries today, telling someone you are a Christian invites a very negative response. Why do people have a negative attitude toward Christianity, and what can we do about it?

People have seen destructive actions by people who claim to be Christians. If you take a history course, you will learn about the Crusades, religious wars, slavery, racial hatred, and racial abuse, from the Tulsa tragedy to lynchings in the south. In modern times, we have seen people robbed of their money, their property, and their virginity by people who claimed to be Christians. There is no defense for that behavior. It is wrong and flies in the face of what Jesus Christ taught and lived. Furthermore, those actions create a negative attitude toward Christianity.

Surveys in the last ten years have shown that more and more people are rejecting “religion.” Religion is usually defined as human attempts to reach God. According to recent surveys, when asked if they believe the Bible is God’s Word, 20% of Americans say “no.” A substantial percentage of Americans cannot tell you anything about the Bible except what they have heard critics say. They also admit that they doubt God’s existence and reject the Bible’s moral teachings. The answer to this situation is education about Christ and His teachings.

If we are to change the trend away from God and the negative attitude toward Christianity, we must start at the very bottom. We must assume the world around us knows nothing about God, Christ, or the Bible. Unfortunately, that is the situation for many people today, and starting with the basics is necessary. Here are some basic places to begin:

1) How do we know there is a God? What is the evidence?
2) What is God, and how do we know that the spiritual world exists? Naturalism teaches that the material world is all there is.
3) What are the properties of God, and how are they relevant to humans?
4) What is a human, and why are humans special? What uniquely sets us apart?
5) Why do the teachings of Christ make sense, where do we find them, and are they reliable?

We address all of those questions on our websites and in our free materials. However, as long as preachers and religious leaders spend their time, money, and energy attacking each other and promoting emotionalism and entertainment, a negative attitude toward Christianity will continue. We must share our faith in love.

October 20, 2022October 20, 2022

Learn from the Past or Repeat the Cycle

How much of the Old Testament do you know and understand? If you are like me, you know some of the stories of biblical heroes and heroines. In the New Testament, Hebrews 11 discusses many of those individuals – Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Rahab. Chapter 12 begins by referring to them as” a great cloud of witnesses” and an inspiration to run “the race that is set before us.” The historical record of God and His relationship to His people is a “schoolmaster” so that we can learn from the past and not make the same mistakes.

Someone said that the value of knowing history is to avoid repeating it, and humans have been slow learners. One lesson from Old Testament history that needs our attention is the on-and-off cycle of the human relationship with God that can only be broken by the message of Christ.

That cycle begins with Adam and Eve and is repeated over and over up to the present time. God creates, and His creation is perfect. Humans receive the blessings of God’s creation, and for a time, all is well. But, when humans become too comfortable with God’s simple covenant, they turn away from Him.

That began the cycle. Deuteronomy 28:1-14 predicts that it will be repeated. First, God told Israel, “All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God.” God then lists all the good things Israel will receive if they follow His commands and take advantage of His promises. Then in the following 54 verses, God tells Israel what will happen if they do not obey God’s provisions expressed in His covenant. The next chapter of Deuteronomy begins with, “These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites ….”

As we follow the history of Israel from the golden calf to corrupt king after corrupt king, we see them turning away from God to embrace sinful and destructive practices, worshiping pagan gods, and even going so far as to sacrifice their children to those gods. Over and over, God responds by removing His protection and allowing foreign nations to overtake and destroy them. Then, finally, they repent and return to God, but they fail to learn from the past and repeat the cycle.

The whole message of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles tells the story of this destructive cycle. Jeremiah and Hosea devoted their lives and message to warning Israel of the dangers of their actions. When Israel returns to God, He restores the covenant until they forsake Him again. Finally, Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, and still, they repeat the cycle.

But then, a new creation begins. Christ comes on the scene to restore the human relationship with God and establish His Church. Humans can now become new (Romans 6). Jesus shed His blood to make us one body free of all division and human fallacies. As in the past, God promises blessings when we obey His commands. (See John 14:15-17.) But here we are in America today, failing to learn from the past as we repeat the cycle.

We have seen the blessings of God as America has prospered. But humans are rebelling against God and His covenant by embracing destructive practices. How long will God tolerate our nation’s immorality as we restrict worship of God and endorse the killing of babies and the destruction of marriage? The Church is all that stands against the complete rejection of God’s commands and His covenant. We can break the cycle of history by relying on God’s word and following His instructions individually and as a nation. Will we learn from the past or repeat the cycle by following the path of nations that rose and fell in the past?

October 18, 2022October 17, 2022

Surge of Sexually Transmitted Diseases

The rejection of God and refusal to follow the Bible as a guide for moral decisions is having an enormous effect on the surge of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that syphilis cases rose by 26% in 2021. In addition, the number of congenital syphilis cases, in which the disease passes to the baby in the womb, rose from 300 in 2011 to 2700 in 2021. HIV cases increased by 16% in 2021, while gonorrhea and chlamydia also rose. This continues a trend of recent years.

People don’t seem to understand that these diseases cause a great deal of collateral damage. Syphilis causes brain damage, and babies are especially vulnerable. Statistics strongly support the relationship between cancer and chlamydia. Suggesting that modern antibiotics can treat these diseases does not address the side effects. It also assumes that people who engage in dangerous sexual practices get medical treatment.

One evidence of the Bible’s inspiration as the Word of God is that its teachings provide the best sex while avoiding the diseases that promiscuity causes. Unfortunately, as the number of people engaging in sexual practices outside of marriage and with multiple partners increases, we can expect STDs to reach epidemic proportions, causing increased damage.

Following God’s instructions for responsible living can solve the surge of sexually transmitted diseases. However, that can only happen if people learn the risks involved in aberrant sexual practices and discover the joy they can have in a committed relationship with someone who shares their commitment.

Reference: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

October 15, 2022October 12, 2022

Significant Decline in Christianity

The Pew Research Center has released data on studies of the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians or having no religious affiliation from 1990 to 2020. The data shows a significant decline in Christianity.

The number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians dropped from 90% in 1990 to 64% in 2020. At the same time, the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation rose from 16% in 2007 to 20% in 2020. More recent data has shown these numbers to be conservative. Atheist and skeptic numbers put those claiming to be Christians at well under 50% and those claiming no religion at over 40%.

There is an adage that says, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” Of course, we can argue about these numbers, and the sampling techniques need to be defined. However, the fact is that there is a significant decline in Christianity as the number of Americans who claim to be Christians is rapidly shrinking, while those who claim no religion is growing.

The message to those involved in Christian preaching and teaching should be clear. We need to provide church members, visitors, and others with evidence for faith in God and the validity of the Bible. Ignoring skeptics’ claims and not answering the questions of seekers and church members is a destructive practice.

This ministry has been dealing with the challenges to belief since 1968. Our materials are free and available for all ages. We welcome questions sent to jncdge@aol.com or our mailing address at 1555 Echo Valley Drive, Niles, MI 49120. In addition to this website, doesgodexist.org has information, links, and a catalog of materials. You can also find our daily postings on Facebook.

We can know why we believe what we believe. We must take the instructions of 1 Peter 3:15 seriously, “Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and respect.”

Reference: Pew Research HERE and HERE

October 13, 2022October 12, 2022

Infectious Diseases Can Spread from Animals to Humans

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that three-quarters of “new or emerging infectious diseases” in humans originated in animals. Medical scientists call them zoonotic infections. Furthermore, six of every ten known infectious diseases can spread from animals to humans. Diseases that originated in animals include SARS, Zika, Ebola, West Nile, HIV, COVID, and Monkeypox. Some diseases, such as HIV, have jumped to humans because of sexual relationships between humans and animals.

As the human population grows, people have more contact with animals and use more animals for food. In addition, the pet trade has seen a massive increase, with a wider variety of animals being confined to homes and sharing everything from beds to meals with their human owners.

Those who blame God for the diseases that are such a serious problem should understand that God never intended for animals to replace humans as family members. A virus that may be of no consequence or even helpful to an animal can cause severe problems for humans. The Old Testament contains strict hygienic rules designed to minimize disease transmission when raising and using animals for food. The rules also forbid using blood as food and any sexual relationship with animals. (See Leviticus 17:12 and Deuteronomy 27:21.).

We may think the biblical instructions for using and managing animals were just for religious purposes. However, it is evident that God knew infectious diseases can spread from animals to humans, and He wanted to protect His people. This is one more example of the consequences of rejecting the Bible as a source of information on how we should live and what our priorities should be.

Reference: United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention