Doubt Busters

When a policeman arrests a person for murder, a judge condemns him to death, and a special group straps him to a death chair and kills him, none of them are saying, “Do as I do.” None of them are saying, “As I do to him, do to me.” The reason is that criminals deserve the sentence they get. The law enforcement personnel are carrying out their orders to uphold law and order.

God is the ultimate law enforcement officer. He is officer, judge, jury and executioner all rolled up into one. He is better than all these men because He has perfect knowledge of every circumstance and the hearts of men.

Murder is what persons does to others when they have no authority to take life. Law enforcement officers, CIA, FBI, SWAT, the military, guards, certain spies, etc., fall under a different heading of people who are authorized to use force to kill when necessary. It is not murder in those instances, and it isn’t murder when God carries out the death penalty.

Let’s look further into the instance of the Flood deaths, shall we?
1. According to Genesis 6:5-8, God did not kill nice people like your next-door neighbors. He killed people who were so sinful that a man boasted to his wives that he killed a man for hurting him (Genesis 4:23b).
2. The passage also says that God was not vengeful or angry, but sorrowful for what He had to do.
3. God did not wipe out everyone at the first murder, of Cain and Abel. He patiently waited for men to change their ways, but they got worse and worse until there was only one righteous man left: Noah. I’d say that God patiently gave man every chance He could. He saved the last righteous man standing! God did not kill Noah, did He?
4. God did not sit idly by while the world went down the toilet. He sent prophet after prophet to warn men of coming judgment, but none listened except Noah (2 Peter 2:5, Jude 14-15a).
People are upset over the Flood deaths, but few know the circumstances. I hope the above helps you to see the story in a new light. God is still warning of coming judgment. I hope you will join Noah and stand for God, rather than join those who reject His salvation.

What Do You Think?

a. Our nation’s laws forbid murder, yet the armed forces are allowed to kill in certain circumstances. Is that a contradiction? What keeps it from being hypocrisy?

b. God is in the place of authority, having the decision of life and death. Would his “do as I do” apply to normal citizens, or to other people who have authority to use deadly force?

c. If I use the weed-trimmer in the back yard, then tell my five-year-old boy not to touch it, am I being hypocritical? If a police officer kills in the line of duty, but tells his children not to kill anyone, is the officer being hypocritical? Why or why not?

Here is the verse: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). The word evil in this passage has been mistranslated in the King James Version of the Bible. As it is with our English sentences, we must derive the meaning from the context.

The writer adopted a form unique to poetic Hebrew literature which incorporates parallelism and word contrast. For instance, light and darkness are opposites. But what about peace and evil? Evil is not the opposite of peace. For the passage to be a successful parallelism, evil should be replaced by a word representing lack of peace. Newer translations of the Bible have corrected this verse. Instead of peace and evil, The New King James Version says, “peace and calamity.” The New International Version says, “prosperity and disaster.”

But what is the passage really saying? The chapter containing this verse is fascinating. In the first eight verses of the chapter, and the last portion of the previous chapter, God tells us that he will use Cyrus, king of Persia, as his tool to free the Israelites from captivity far from their land and rebuild Jerusalem and the temple: “Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd, and he shall perform all My pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem, ‘You shall be built,’ and to the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid'” (Isaiah 44:28).

What’s amazing about this passage is that Cyrus will not exist for another 140 years! Here is an example of prophecy where God names a person before he existed and tells him what he’ll do. Indeed, through Cyrus, God delivered the Jews from their Babylonian captivity. This passage tells us that God brought the Jews into darkness and calamity through their captivity, and God will again bring them light and peace when Cyrus releases them.

What Do You Think?

a. Have you ever had someone take your words out of context, forcing you, or someone who knew you, into explaining what you meant? What does it mean to take something out of context?

b. When you read a story, do you read only a small portion of the page in order to make sense of it? Or do you read the entire story from the beginning to understand the flow of the story?

c. Do you believe the Bible could be better understood if one read it from the beginning?

If the Christian God does not exist after all …

Then how did the prophets plainly foretell of Jesus’ coming, complete with the exact name of his birthplace, how he would die, even to pre-quote the words people will say around his crucifixion hundreds of years before they happened? Through approximately one hundred prophecies, the Bible carefully identifies the Son of God with specific details so we would recognize him when he came.

How did the Bible accurately foretell the time Jesus will appear on earth, even naming a historically verifiable character (Cyrus) who was not yet born? No modern fortune-teller, psychic, or other holy book has the prophecy fulfillment track record of the Bible.

Why didn’t the first century Jews who were against the Christians deny Christ’s miracles? They accused him of being in league with the Devil rather than deny that he healed the blind and raised people from the dead. Why did they have to make up a story about a stolen resurrected body? Jesus said he would rise from the dead and ascend into heaven. The Jews circulated the report that his body was stolen from the tomb because they had to acknowledge that it was indeed missing. The disciples of Jesus were persecuted to death for supposedly robbing the body. If they had hidden the body as the Jews claimed, then they could have produced the body and escaped death.

Why does the fossil record show only a handful of disputable transitional samples linking fish to amphibian or any other species? Archaeologists have unearthed millions of fossils—more than enough to find a single undisputable example of evolution.

How did the male and female sexual organs, perfectly suitable for the other, appear in nearly every specie of animal and insect? It is ludicrous to accept the idea that male and female sexual organs evolved in lockstep over many millions of years across virtually every kind of beast.

These questions are easily answered by the existence of a Creator who wants to make himself known to us. Through the prophecies, he wrote the Bible in a way that showed himself as the author. Through creation he shows us several of his attributes, such as order and law.

What Do You Think?

a. If the Christian God did not exist, would you be relieved? Why or why not?

b. Was your answer to the above question based on what you know about God through personal reading of the Bible, or through other people?

It’s only natural to be curious about how people invent things. When we admire the intricacies of a created object, such as the iTouch or the Sistine Chapel paintings, we naturally are curious about the creator. When people find out that I write, they ask me where I get my ideas from. We enjoy reading biographies of famous people. We’re fascinated by the way the parents and other people shaped their lives.

We see the world with its strange creatures and fantastic formations and wonder about the one who created all things. Then we naturally wonder where God came from.

We ask, “If all things have a creator, then who created God?” Actually, only created things have a creator, so it’s improper to lump God with his creation. God has revealed himself to us in the Bible as having always existed. The Bible says of the Creator of all things: “From everlasting to everlasting, You are God” (Psalm 90:2). In other words, with God alone there was no beginning and no ending. Even Jesus, who was born of Mary in Bethlehem, existed in spirit form before he came in the flesh as a baby in the manger.

What Do You Think?

a. Is there any conceivable way a human being can create something out of nothing? Why or why not?

b. Is a being’s ability to create matter from nothing a sufficient indication of God-like status? Why or why not?

Love and judgment are two different things, not opposites, so they can exist together. A federal judge can sentence lawbreakers to prison and still go home and love his kids. Love and hate can also exist together. When we love something, we sometimes hate its opposite. I like it when things are neat and organized, such as an orderly home. By implication, I hate disorderliness. I love it when people treat me well; I hate it when they’re rude.

God loves good; this means he hates evil. God loves us; he is also loves justice. Like any good judge, he will note the evil that men do. The day is coming when God will judge everyone and give us what we deserve. But he will also forgive the wrongs when we turn to him in repentance. One verse that combines his love and justice is Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” This is like a federal judge offering up his son to take the place of the man he has condemned to death: Justice with compassion. God must judge sin, but in love, God chose to punish his son in our place so he could pardon us of all our sins.

We need to be careful not to over-simplify God and make him into a two-dimensional cardboard character. We make this mistake when we overemphasize a general observation (such as his love) and forget he has other traits. That’s like insisting that we compose a painting using only one color. God is love, but that is only one of his attributes. When you paint him with all the colors in the Bible, you’ll end up with a picture of surpassing beauty and majesty!

What Do You Think?

a. Have you ever demonstrated love to one person and still justified passing judgment on another person?

b. If you answered yes to the above question, does this show a defect in your character, or an innate ability to see that different people and situations demand personalized approaches?

Since the Scriptures say that God exists from eternity past to eternity future with no beginning or end, it would be disconcerting to think of God as possessing any kind of nationality – he was present before any nation existed on earth!

It’s a different story with Jesus. When the Son of God became flesh, born of a virgin, he took on the ethnicity of his mother. Jesus could not be born just anywhere. God wanted to make sure we could identify his son when he came, so through prophecy he gave us particular features to look for.

One of the identifying features of Jesus Christ was his birthplace. Remember when the wise men followed the star and came to Herod asking where the King of the Jews would be born? Herod consulted with the scribes, who found the verse in the Bible that indicated that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem: “But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you shall come a Ruler who will shepherd My people Israel” (Matthew 2:6, quoting Micah 5:2, which was written hundreds of years earlier). Through fulfilled prophecy we know Jesus is God’s Messiah, whom God sent to save us from our sins. If Jesus was born in any other city, then he would not fulfill the prophecy and would be a false prophet.

Why can’t Jesus have been an African born in Bethlehem? God had proclaimed in advance that the Savior of the World would come through King David. The two genealogies in Matthew and Luke trace Mary and Joseph’s lineage to King David, a Jew.

So it’s very important that we see the Messiah as Middle Eastern, because God said that’s how we could identify him. This means that we need look for no other Savior, for he has already come! Through him God will deliver us from sin and bring us into a relationship with himself.

What Do You Think?

a. If you are a non-Jewish believer, would you feel closer to Jesus if he were your own nationality? Why or why not?

b. Are you reluctant to accept Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity? If so, can you trace that hesitancy to its roots?