The Battle For Belief

First epistle of Paul to the church at Corinth in chapter 1. We commence reading at verse 17. The Apostle is here setting down what he reckons to be the nature and the objectives of his ministry. 1 Corinthians 1 17.

For Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but to unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ, Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty and base things of the world and things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not to bring to naught things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence, that of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, that according as it is written, he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

Amen. Well, we come to our second study under the general heading of the doctrine of God and this evening I want to speak to you about what I have called the battle for belief, the battle for belief. Last Thursday evening, you may recall, I made a plea, a plea that I reckon is a biblical one, that Christians should be more informed about the Word of God, more able to give an answer for the hope that was within them, that is within them.

The other day, Tuesday evening, I was able to listen into part of the radio broadcast on the discussion on immortality. I didn't hear it all on the Tuesday evening, but by means of tape recording, heard it all later on. And what impressed me about the Reverend John Stott's contribution was his amazing ability to quote scripture just at the right time.

Now, I appreciate that one, I haven't got his brain, and two, there are many of us here who perhaps are not quite as able as Mr. Stott is intellectually, but nonetheless, there is a great need for us to be more informed about the Word of God and to be able in a reasonable fashion to explain what we believe to others who make inquiry. And that's the reason, the fundamental reason why I feel it laid upon my heart to bring to you this course of studies on the doctrine of God, a very difficult subject indeed, but one that is fundamental, obviously, to our faith. And last week, you remember for our launching pad, so to speak, we took the question that Zophar put to Job when he said, can man by searching find out God? And we gave what really was a cautious yes to that answer.

As far as the Bible's terminology is concerned, it is possible provided you approach the subject of God as the Bible does. You remember it's what the prophecy of Jeremiah where the Lord says, if ye seek me, ye shall find me. If ye search for me, with all your heart.

Well, that was the question that we sought to answer in part last week, and I hope that more and more of an answer will be supplied as our series continues. We discovered, you remember, how God disclosed himself, has disclosed himself to the world through the realm of nature, through the world that he has created. He's left his imprint upon it.

But then, in a special fashion, in a particular fashion, he has disclosed himself first of all to the Jewish people in the days of the Old Testament, and finally through Jesus Christ. God is known by the Savior. But I want to move on to the question, can we prove God? Here we are as Christian people saying that we have discovered something about God.

We have answered in the affirmative to Zophar's question. We have found out something about God. Oh yes, we've admitted that it's God who gave us the initiative, God who has disclosed himself to us.

But what about the question, can you prove it? Can you prove that God exists? Now many times as a schoolteacher I was asked to do just that by my lads, whether they were sixth formers or first years, 18 year olds or 11 year olds. Sir, can you prove it? And that's the question that we've got to look at, at least to some degree, this evening. The question is the same sort of inquiry that Thomas was putting up to the disciples, you remember, when they had seen the resurrected Lord, but Thomas was absent.

And doubting, Thomas said, unless I can see him, unless I can place my finger in the print of the nails, unless I can thrust my fist into the wound in his side, I won't believe. In other words, he wanted something that he could see, something that he could feel, something that he could touch. And many people there are today who are in the same position as Thomas, and they come along and they say, can you prove that God exists? And by proof they have the thought in mind of the scientist who does an experiment in his laboratory.

He verifies empirically, which means to say he tests beyond any dispute certain things, for example, let me give you a simple case. A scientist could demonstrate that water is composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. And sometimes when folks come along and naively ask the question, can you prove God exists, they approach it in the same sort of line as a scientist might prove that water is composed of those two constituents.

Well, can you prove God? Can you prove God in that way? There's been a cleavage of opinion in the so-called church down the centuries in the answer that's being given to that question. You get a man like Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the main contributors to Roman Catholic theology, a man who lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and he said, yes, yes, you can prove God. And he wrote I don't know how many books to do just that, to prove that God exists.

Then when you turn over to the days of the Reformation, John Calvin comes along and he supplies what is in effect a more biblical answer. He says, no, no, you cannot prove, not empirically, not in a scientific fashion, that God exists. But you see, knowledge is not only, or does not only, come to us along the realm of science.

We can discover things that we believe in, that we know to be true, that the scientist could never discover or test or analyze in his laboratory. Now, I'm not just saying that. I'm quoting, for example, Professor Boyd, who is a professor in one of the chairs of science at the University of London, has written a little booklet entitled The Three Ways of Knowledge, or something to that effect.

And beyond scientific knowledge, there is what we could call religious knowledge. Knowledge that the scientist cannot test, but is nonetheless valid. Now, let's go back to the question, can God be proved? The Bible tells us that he who would know God must move down the avenue marked faith.

And as he moves down that road, then he will have an encounter with God. That's a paraphrase of a verse in Hebrews, let him that cometh unto God first of all believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. And the Old Testament is very blunt when it speaks about men who say they don't believe in God.

The Old Testament characteristically says, the fool hath said in his heart there is no God. And when the Bible is talking about our knowledge of God, our knowledge of the existence of God, it is not speaking in a scientific sense. It is speaking in a religious sense.

And God can be known, says the Bible, through faith. He that cometh unto me must believe that I am, and that I am a rewarder of those that diligently seek me. That's a text I quoted earlier, only I've put it into the first person.

It's very interesting when you think through the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, and particularly look at his ministry from the point of view of, does he try to prove God? When he's engaged in conversation, does he debate the existence of God? And again, the answer is no. In fact, as the thoughts go through my mind at the moment, the only point that I can think of when the Lord Jesus Christ actually speaks about the doctrine of God was when he was engaged in conversation with the lady you remember by Sykes as well. And the Lord there doesn't debate the idea of God.

He dogmatizes, he says, God is a spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Jesus Christ took for granted the idea of God. Of course he did, because he knew that God existed.

And by implication in his teaching, he was asserting that he was a revelation, is the revelation of God to this world. Now bearing that in mind, let's also move on to the thought that there have been people, I've quoted one, Thomas Aquinas, who have claimed that God can be proved. And if you were to look at any book on systematic theology, you would find sooner or later a chapter or a section given over to proofs for the existence of God.

And before I go on to enlarge upon the biblical approach to the doctrine of God's existence, it's necessary for us at least to have a cursory glance, to have a brief glance at the so-called proofs for the existence of God that are offered by some people. And here the theologians and the philosophers have a field day, because they tend to coin words that are as long, as long as can possibly be. Some people think that I use now and again a long word.

If that's so, it's just a scar that I carry with me from my days at college. But the philosophers and the theologians, when they're talking about proofs for the existence of God, well they really have a field day in bringing out their words. And some of the arguments that they offer, they call the ontological argument, the teleological argument, the cosmological argument, the anthropological argument, and so on and so forth.

But we're not concerned merely just to follow their theories. But I want this evening, because we need to be informed, just to take three of the arguments that are sometimes put forward for the existence of God, to indicate the existence of God outside anything that is found in the Bible. And let me simplify the way that the theologians and philosophers would talk.

Some would quote to us what is known as the causal argument. And from the argument of cause, they would conclude that God exists. What do they mean by this? Well, I'm not very good at recognizing wood, but let's just say for, for my sake of my illustration, that the pew you're sitting on is made of oak.

Now, what caused that pew to be there? Well, let's put aside human factors like the lumberjack who chopped down the tree, and the carpenter who fashioned the seat. Let's think in terms of what this wood depended on. Well, a tree, didn't it? Obviously, all every piece of wood comes from a tree.

What does a tree depend upon? Well, the seed that eventually grew into the tree. So the oak depends upon the acorn. And so you can go backwards through time, thinking through all the acorns that were necessary for the various oak trees to come along and to grow up.

Now, you can think that through on any particular line of illustration that you want. Everything in life is dependent upon something else. It was caused by something else.

The acorn or the oak tree was caused by the acorn. And so you go back and back and back, and you try and find what was the first cause. And certain people will say, well, the first cause was God, the Christian God, the God of the Bible.

Their argument for God's existence rests on the argument from cause. And then you get other folks, and they say, well, another argument to supplement this, to underline this, is what we'll call the argument from design. Now, sometimes I used to use this with my lads at school.

I would say to them, now, let's imagine you've been at play, you've had your break, and you've come back into the classroom. I'm not here in the classroom to greet you, but as you sit down by your desks, and you look at the blackboard, you see a picture. Now, what's your immediate reaction? You never saw anyone draw the picture, but you know full well that chalk doesn't have the ability to fly out from my box and to sketch a picture of its own initiative.

So from the fact that the picture exists, you deduce there was, there I call myself, an artist. At least someone drew whatever was on the board. Now, the idea is basic, that idea is basic to the design argument for the existence of God.

Let's put it in another form. Somebody suggested walking along the beach one day and coming across a watch, and when you saw the watch, although we suppose you'd never seen another watch before, you knew by looking at the watch and having looked inside the watch that there was a designer, a watchmaker, a great mind that had constructed this particular watch. Well, the world has been designed.

There is intricacy, there is delicacy, there is beauty in the world. So from seeing the world itself, folks have deduced the idea that God exists, the Christian God. And then another line of argument that's sometimes put across is what is known as the moral argument.

In certain given circumstances, providing that we're reasonably intelligent people, that we're not sick mentally, we know the difference between right and wrong. Whether you live in Arabia or Africa or in Europe, you know that it's wrong to hit somebody on the head and to rob them. We have an in-built idea of morality, right and wrong.

The argument's sometimes been expressed in terms of the categorical imperative, that means I know what I ought to do in certain situations. There's a fascinating picture that I keep in my mind, I may have used this before, I forget, of Khrushchev. You remember Nikita Khrushchev, that leader of the Soviet Union at one time until he fell from grace? He was at the United Nations headquarters and he disagreed fundamentally with the way the argument was going.

And he took off his shoe and in Khrushchev's style, he bashed the desk with his shoe and he said, it ought not to be, it ought not to be. And you know, although he probably wouldn't have admitted it, though some folks said he did later on in life, he was really saying that there was a moral law, something that Nikita Khrushchev objected to. It ought not to be.

Why ought it not to be, Nikita? Oh well, you see, because I've got an idea of right and wrong. Where did you get that idea from? And from that argument, which I put to you in the form of a political illustration, so you see how some folks would defend the idea of the existence of God. And there are many other arguments that are, at least several other arguments that are thrown in to underline this idea that God exists.

Well, what are we to say about these arguments? Do we as evangelicals subscribe to them? Do we use them? Well, I think on your notes, I quote to you the reference or the conclusion that Lewis Burkoff, a great theologian, made when he was evaluating these arguments. He calls them just testimonial, ideas towards, evidences towards the existence of God, but not conclusive in any fashion. Why not conclusive? Well, you see, when you've argued along this line, when you've exhausted all the various points in debate that you possibly can, what are you left with? This great first cause who never was caused himself, who always existed.

Who is he? What's he like? Does he love me? Can he enter into a relationship with me? You see, our ideas of God are so vague if we just follow these particular arguments for his existence. I quote for you the little incident of Robinson Crusoe. You remember how Crusoe thought that he was all alone on his island, and then one day, if your knowledge of the book is good, you'll recall it, he came across a footprint, and he had evidence that someone else was there on the island besides him.

But who was it? Was it a he? Was it a she? Was it blight? Was he or she white? What were like? You see, he couldn't deduce much from a footprint, could he? Now, this is what I'm saying about these arguments. There's not a great deal you can deduce from them. Just the idea of a cause, something that's impersonal, that has existed always, and is responsible for bringing the world into being.

That's about as far as you can go. But before, again, directing your attention to the biblical approach to the doctrine of the existence of God, having dealt with those folks who try to prove God's existence without reference to the Bible itself, let's talk for a while about those folks who say that they can disprove God's existence. Now, the word to describe someone who makes that sort of assertion is an atheist, and atheists have been with us for a long time.

The psalmist, I think it's in Psalm 10, refers to those whose evil thoughts continually say there is no God. And there are certain groupings that you could fit these people in who claim that God does not exist. The first grouping is the general heading that I've just given you, the word atheist.

What does it mean? Well, theos is the Greek word that means God, and a, in Greek, is a negative. So, an atheist is a not-Godder, someone who doesn't believe that God exists, and indeed goes so far as to say they can demonstrate that God does not exist. Now, there are quite a number of people who make such a claim in Western civilization, and as you know, particularly in the communist world.

And in this country, there are a very virile, a very active group of people who have bound themselves together in an organization called the National Secular Society, and as that title indicates, they want to see the dawning of a godless society in England. That doesn't mean to say they want to see the dawning of a permissive and immoral society. I think that this will be a byproduct if they ever got their wish.

But nonetheless, they want to have the idea of God erased, erased from the United Kingdom. And a man like David Tribe is the General Secretary of the National Secular Society, and you'll often find him writing to the Times and the Telegraph and contributing articles in influential magazines, endeavouring to enhance the position of the Secular Society. Atheists, who claim to be able to prove that God does not exist.

Then you've got another category of unbelievers. They're not exactly atheists, but really it adds up to the same. They are folks who call themselves agnostics.

And agnostic is a word that comes from another Greek term, gnosis, which means knowledge. And the word was coined by a man called Huxley, who said that really the evidence was inconclusive. He couldn't really say whether God existed or God did not exist.

So they sit on the fence. They haven't made up their mind, but they do reject the Christian position about God and about his revelation through the Lord Jesus Christ. And then you've got the humanists.

Now the humanists could slot into either of the other categories. They could be atheists, they could be agnostics. But the thing about the humanists is this.

They stress the idea of man's responsibility to his fellow, that the spirit of humanity, the brotherhood of man. They tend to be a very left-wing organization, but nonetheless they believe that a man should treat his fellow in an honorable fashion. And they've banded themselves together in what is known as the British Humanist Association here in this country.

And you'll find them in the Vanguard for Reform, particularly in connection with the movement to legalize abortion and to legalize homosexuality. These are folks whose views are promoted by the British Humanist Association humanists. And then you've got, in the last category I've given to you, Marxists.

And Marxists are, as you probably are aware, atheists. But the category is a special one, deservedly so, because atheism is pivotal to the position of Marx and to the position of Marxists. They don't believe in God.

Karl Marx, who was half German and half Jew, came to a position of atheism when he was a university student at Berlin. He was influenced by certain liberal scholars in the university, and he rejected any idea of the existence of God. And yet you will discover that Marxism, which in turn has created communism, is in effect a religion without God.

They don't believe in God, and yet they are religious, inasmuch as they have a way of life. They have an objective that they're trying to strive for. And if you were to analyze the teachings of Karl Marx, you would see that he really believes in predestination.

In fact, someone has said that there's some common denominator between Karl Marx and John Calvin on this line, because John Calvin believed in the predetermined will of God, and Karl Marx believed that by the clashing together of economic and materialistic forces, eventually the communist society would dawn in this world. The kingdom of man would come, and utopia would be with us. So you get these categories of people who object fundamentally to the idea of God, with the humanist straddling the fence, not being able to make, or rather the agnostic straddling the fence, not being able to make up his mind.

Now, having said this, what is the Christian to say? What's the Christian approach? First of all, to the proofs for the existence of God, and what's the Christian approach to people who are allegedly atheists? Well, as far as the proofs of the existence of God is concerned, the evangelical doesn't need them. He doesn't need his five proofs or his seven proofs. He's got his Bible.

He has been brought to an understanding of God, not through having proved him in a laboratory experiment. That is impossible. That would make man greater than God.

He has had a knowledge of God through faith, and faith is a legitimate way to accrue, to gain knowledge. He has come to a realization of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. And as the Christian moves out into the world, what he is to do is to take the Bible and to bring men and women into a position where they can hear, they can listen to the Word of God.

He talks about the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the most amazing thing about the Bible and the message of the gospel is that it authenticates itself. It has a ring of truth about it. This is precisely Paul's argument when he's writing to the Corinthians in the first chapter.

He talks about the foolishness of the gospel as certain people estimate it. But the Apostle Paul goes on to say that the preaching of the cross, though to them that perish is foolishness, is unto us which are saved the power of God, and Jesus Christ, the Savior, the Savior of the Christian gospel, is none other than the wisdom of God. So the Bible has an uncanny fashion.

In an uncanny fashion, a miraculous fashion, has the ability to convince men and women of the existence of God and to convict them of the need for salvation. You remember it is the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews who talks about the Word of God being sharper than any two-edged sword. And he goes on to use language which is perhaps a little difficult to understand in the authorized versions translation, but it means this, that the Word of God can reach into the very heart of a man and convince him of the existence of the Lord and convict him that he needs to have his sins forgiven.

What does a Christian do? Come along with a few arguments and talk about the first cause and the great designer behind the world? No, the Christian comes along and he talks about Jesus Christ. This is what we preach, says Paul, the Lord Jesus Christ, Christ crucified. This is the basis of our gospel proclamation.

And as far as atheists are concerned, we are not to apologize for our belief in the gospel, and we are to recognize that by the power of God even atheists can be convicted of the existence of God and convicted of the need to receive God's forgiveness because of the sins that they have committed. You see, the Bible tells me this, that man is born in the image of God. Every man, every woman, when you analyze him or her psychologically, has a religious need.

I don't believe really that there are such people as atheists. That's not to say that I impugn the integrity, I question the integrity of atheists. What I would say is that I feel they are deluded.

They delude themselves into believing that there is no God, but the Bible says man was born in the image of God. What does the gospel do? Well, the gospel, when it's proclaimed, it revives man's desire for God. It activates his desire.

Here an atheist comes into a building, shall we say, such as this, and it has happened. He sits down and he's scornful. He mocks at the evangelical ranter as he comes along and proclaims from the Bible what he believes to be the gospel.

And yet there have been many occasions in history when such a man has come into the sound of the gospel, and the Word of God has activated a desire for God in his own heart and life, and that man has become soundly saved. I could give you examples from my own experience of that happening. Oh my friend, the battle for belief is indeed a very, very serious battle.

It is one that's raging all the time, but as far as Christian people are concerned, we have in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ the very weapons that we are to use against atheism. So let us recognize that God indeed does exist. He has disclosed himself to the world through Jesus Christ.

You can't take this and analyze it scientifically in a laboratory, but there is a knowledge that is valid, that is not scientific. It is the knowledge of religion, the knowledge of faith, and that knowledge is the way, or that is the way rather, through which God reveals himself to men and women even today. Now next week we shall go on from this particular study, from the battle of beliefs, and we shall talk about the nature of the God in whom we believe.