March 29, 2020 - The Journey: Trusting God, Trusting Each Other

Video of this message can be viewed at the following link - 

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Jim Carey starred in the movie Bruce Almighty.  In the movie, Carey plays the character of Bruce Nolan, a TV reporter whose life is unraveling, and in the midst of his trials he complains to God.  Bruce complains that God is not doing a very good job, and even claims he could do better at managing matters than God.  So God appears to Bruce – in the guise of Morgan Freeman – and gives Bruce his powers for a week, with two exceptions:  he cannot tell anyone he has those power and he cannot violate anyone’s free will.  Bruce thinks this is a good deal and sets about working to run the world in the way that he sees fit.  He is soon overwhelmed, however, with all the prayers that are sent his way, so he answers every one of the prayers with a yes.  This does not improve matters, as he assumed it would.  In fact, Bruce quickly finds that he is making matters much worse.  As Bruce struggles with how to make things right in the world, he begins to understand that having God’s powers was not going to make things as easy as he had assumed.  He finds it especially difficult when he loses his girlfriend. Because Bruce cannot violate free will, he finds that all his powers are of no help when it comes to winning back his girlfriend.  At one point in the film, Bruce has another conversation with God, and he asks this question – how do you make so many people love you without affecting free ill? To which God responds, welcome to my world, son.  I love that scene, and I love the premise of the film.  Perhaps all of us have wondered what we could do if we had God’s powers.  How might we run the world?  Could we solve the problems of the world?

      

This morning, I am speaking about trust.  Trust is very difficult, especially now, in the days in which we are living.  In a moment, we will turn to one of the stories of the Hebrew people, as they wandered through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  They struggled with trusting God, and they struggled with trusting Moses.  In fact, the people struggled so much with their trust that they attempted to do what Bruce did in the movie Bruce Almighty– they attempted to wrestle divine powers from God and take those powers into their own hands, in the form of a golden calf.

      

As you will remember, I changed the theme of my messages from apologetics to The Journey.  In this series, The Journey, we are using passages from the journey of the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt to the Promised Land.  We are in the midst of our own journey now, and there are a lot of parallels to the journey of the Hebrew people through the wilderness.

      

This morning’s Scripture text again comes from the book of Exodus, where we will spend most, or maybe all of our time, in this series.  From Exodus 32:1-2, 4, 7, 11, 19-24, here is the text – 

¹ When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

² Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 

⁴ He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

⁷ Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. 

¹¹ But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

¹⁹ When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.

²⁰ And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

²¹ He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”

²² “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil.

²³ They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 

²⁴ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

      Let’s talk about trust, because trust is one of the great elements of this part of the journey, both for the Hebrews and for us. Let’s talk specifically about the lack of trust on the part of Aaron and the lack of trust on the part of the people.

Aaron’s Lack of Trust.

Aaron is often overlooked in this story. Aaron, if you do not know, was the brother of Moses.  Unlike Moses, Aaron did not grow up in the house of Pharaoh; Aaron and his sister Miriam grew up in Goshen.  When God called Moses to lead the people out of Egypt, Moses made some excuses, trying to get out of that calling.  One of his excuses was that his inability to speak well (¹⁰ Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”

¹¹ The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? 

¹² Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”

¹³ But Moses said, “Pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else.”

¹⁴ Then the Lord’s anger burned against Moses and he said, “What about your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He is already on his way to meet you, and he will be glad to see you. 

¹⁵ You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth; I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to do. 

¹⁶ He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if you were God to him.

(Exodus 4:10-16).

To overcome that excuse, God sent Aaron along with Moses to be his spokesman when they approached Pharaoh.

      

When we come to this morning’s text, Moses is on the mountain, where God gives him the law and the Ten Commandments.  While Moses is on the mountain, the people get very impatient, wondering if Moses will return, so they come to Aaron – who has been elevated to the position of leadership during the absence of Moses – and pressure him to fashion them a god who will go before them in their journey.  Aaron gives in to their request, instructing the people to bring their gold to him, and from that gold he fashions a golden calf.

     

On the mountain, God informs Moses of what has taken place, telling him to go down from the mountain to his people, who have rebelled.  There is an interesting back and forth that then takes place between God and Moses.  God tells Moses to go down, because your people, whom you brought out of Egypt, have become corrupt(verse 7).  When Moses responds to God, he asks, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand(verse 11)? I find this to be a fascinating back and forth, as neither God nor Moses seem to be willing to accept responsibility for the people.  Both God and Moses refer to the people as belonging to the other.  God refers to them as Moses’ people and Moses, in turn, refers to them as God’s people.  At this point in the journey, both God and Moses seem to be so frustrated with the people that neither wants to claim them!

      

Now, verse 24 is also fascinating, and I find it so because on more than one occasion, when I was younger, I gave some really lame excuses to cover my shortcomings and failures.  Here is what happened – Aaron asks the people to bring their gold to him. He takes that gold, smelts it down, and fashions it into an idol in the shape of a golden calf.  Verse 4 is very specific in saying that Aaron fashioned the goldwith a tool, which means that Aaron took some time in making this idol. When Moses confronts him about what he has done, here is what Aaron said – They gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”  Wow!  What a miracle!  I’ll be honest and say that I have come up with some really lame excuses in my day, but this is the all-time classic of lame excuses.  This exceeds the dog ate my homework by at least 1,000 times; maybe 10,000 times.  

      

Aaron lied to Moses about what had taken place. Aaron’s lie was not simply because he wanted to hide the truth from Moses; Aaron lied because he did not trust Moses.  Aaron did not trust Moses because he did not trust how Moses might react.  Would Moses reject his own brother?  Would he harshly judge him?  Would he banish him?  We too are often afraid that if we are honest with others, they will reject us, turn away from us, or judge us.  Now, I’m not going to say that being honest is easy and will not result in some measure of hurt.  Sometimes, when we are honest, we have to speak of things that are hard to say and hard to hear.  When Aaron failed to be honest, he demonstrated his lack of trust in Moses.  If we want to demonstrate trust in one another, we too must be honest with one another.  Doing so, obviously is not easy, but it is necessary.  

      

When I read this passage, I cannot help but feel some measure of sympathy for Aaron.  It is not easy to be in a position of leadership, especially in times of difficulty, and Aaron was placed in a position of leadership at a time of profound difficulty.  Moses was on the mountain, receiving the law and the Ten Commandments from God, and Aaron was left with a large group of anxious, stressed, and restless people.  The people were wondering what had happened to Moses and were beginning to wonder if he would return.  Perhaps he had abandoned him, they feared.  It was in their fear and anxiety that they came to Aaron.  In that moment what the people needed from Aaron was a word of comfort and assurance, but he failed to provide it.  In moments of difficulty, people need to be reassured by their leaders.  Those leaders need to be honest and acknowledge the difficulty, but they also must offer a word of hope and call for the people to be at their best.  This was a time when Aaron needed to offer the people a focused, strong, and hopeful response.  Sadly, he did not.  Instead, Aaron buckled under the pressure of the people to give in to their fears.  Instead of saying they would continue to trust God, Aaron gave in to their demand to create their own god.  The people, in their fear, did not trust God.  They wanted to take control and determine their direction and destiny.  They wanted to make the choices about their journey, their path, and their destination, and trusting in God would not allow them to do so.  Forsaking trust, then, Aaron gave into the fears of the people and fashioned them a golden calf.

The People’s Lack of Trust.

So here is the question we generally have about creating a god – why would the people want to worship an idol of their own making?  Doesn’t it seem silly to create something with your own hands and then worship the object you have created?  How could anyone believe there could be divine power in something you create with your own hands?  Well, let’s try and get into their heads for a moment and understand their thinking.

      

The people wanted Aaron to fashion them a god for a very simple reason – they wanted a god they could control and a god to whom they could dictate how that god should operate.  By following a god of their own design and their own making, the people could make any decision they desired and then credit that decision to the leadership of their god.  It makes things much easier to have a god whose decisions and will just happen to match your own decisions and will.

      

It is also important that we acknowledge this desire is one that remains alive and well today.  We might not have golden calves to worship, but we have our own, modern expressions of that desire, one of which is this – God, wave your hand and end all the suffering.  Wave your hand and end this virus.  And to some extent, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  I mean, if you can do that, why would you not?  If you could end the suffering and the difficulties of anyone, wouldn’t you do it?

      

That’s the way the people were thinking in the wilderness.  They were thinking, there’s got to be an easier way than what we are doing. We’re waiting around on this Moses guy, who is up on that mountain, at least as far as we know.  Maybe he has abandoned us.  He keeps telling us to trust God, but it seems time to take matters into our own hands, so let’s make our own god, which will be a god that will do what we want and make the decisions we want.

      

After the baptism of Jesus, he went into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted.  Three times Satan tempted him, as Matthew’s gospel tell us – ¹ Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ² After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. ³ The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” ⁴ Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”  ⁵ Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ⁶ “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”  ⁷ Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”  ⁸ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ⁹ “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” ¹⁰ Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”  ¹¹ Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him (Matthew 4:1-11).

      

What is so alluring about those temptations is how much sense, at least on the surface, they seem to make.  If you’re hungry, why wouldn’t you turn a stone into bread, if you could?  If you knew God would send angels to bear you up after jumping off the pinnacle of the Temple, why not?  Or, to make that comparable to our current situation, if you knew God would protect you from getting the virus, why not gather in a group of people?  And if you were given authority over all the kingdoms of the world, why not?  I mean, wouldn’t it be a good opportunity to fix some things, if you had all that power? After all, don’t we all, deep down, believe that if we were given the chance, we would be able to fix things?  If you could capture all that power and could do what you want to fix the world, wouldn’t you do it?  Imagine, you could have prevented the savings and loan disaster of the 80s, 9/11, the 2008-2009 crash, the coronavirus pandemic and so much more.  You could just snap your fingers and fix it all.

      

That’s why the people wanted Aaron to fashion them a god out of their gold.  Maybe then they would have a god who would do their bidding and run the world the way they believed it ought to be run.  Well, considering what we do with the very limited powers and abilities we have, I think it’s safe to say that it’s a really good thing God doesn’t hand over his powers to us to try and fix everything.

      

In the gospels, we read of how people often clamored for Jesus to perform a miracle (such as in Mark 8:11-13).  In doing so, they wanted to determine how God should act, but in reality, they were demonstrating a lack of trust in God.  Jesus certainly performed miracles, but not on demand.  Jesus determined when, how, and why he would perform miracles.  To give in to the demands of the people for a miracle would have turned that miracle into nothing more than a magic show, and Jesus didn’t do magic, he didn’t put on shows, and he didn’t perform on command.

      

Trusting God is never easy, even in good circumstances. When circumstances deteriorate and become difficult, as we are now experiencing, trust becomes increasingly difficult. Trust becomes difficult because we cannot see the larger picture of God’s work, and the ways in which God works and how he interacts with humanity, especially in difficult times.  We must resist the temptation – the temptation to take divine matters into our own hands – and in so doing attempt to take away God’s control. 

      

There is another element in this story that I want to mention as I begin to close, and it is something that Moses says to God.  Moses is, obviously, very angry at the failure of Aaron and the people.  When he comes down from the mountain, and sees the people dancing around the golden calf, Moses throws down the Ten Commandments, smashing the tablets.  He then takes the golden calf and burns it in the fire.  Taking takes the powdered remains of the golden calf from the fire, he sprinkles them on the water, and has the people drink the water.  

      

But then Moses does something really interesting, and really touching.  Moses said to the people, you have committed a great sin.  But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.  Moses approached God and said, oh, what a great sin these people have committed!  They have made themselves gods of gold.  But now, please forgive them their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.  I find the words of Moses in verse 32 to be amazing – if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.  Moses, as frustrated and angry as he was with the people, not only begged God for their forgiveness, he even told God that if they were not forgiven, he would prefer to have his name taken out of the book God has written.  Talk about a commitment to his people!  Moses preferred to have himself written out of the story of God rather than his people left unforgiven.  Even in the Scriptures, where we see so many strong bonds between people, seldom do we see such a powerful and beautiful bond between people.

     

God, in his ever-present grace, of course, forgave the people.  Grace is the golden thread that runs throughout the Scriptures, offered by God at all times.  In times of difficulty, grace is needed more than ever.  We are not always at our best when we are in the midst of difficulty. Yes, difficulties can bring out the best in us, but can also put us at our less than best.  Grace, then, ought to come from us and be offered to one another, just as it comes from God.  

      

In times of stress and difficulty we will find ourselves faced with the decision of who we will be.  Will we be the person who holds to their values or gives in to what is expedient to the moment?  Will we remain calm in the face of panic or be that person at the grocery store who says forget everyone else!  I’m going to get mine and everyone else is on their own, and if you get in my way, I just might knock you down!

      

Aaron and the people, in their moment, were not at their best.  They failed to trust and that failure caused them to succumb to one of the lowest moments of their journey through the wilderness.  Moses, however, trusted God, and in spite of all that happened, he trusted the people, and he bound himself to them.  Isn’t that beautiful?

      

We will get through this.  I will not say it will be easy and I will not say that it will be without pain.  I wish it weren’t necessary to say that, but that’s simply being honest.  While the circumstances in which we find ourselves are beyond our control, how we respond to those circumstances is not.  Let us, then, with the power and grace of God upon us, trust one another and trust God.

March 22, 2020 - The Journey: Preparing for the Journey

What a strange few weeks it has been.  

     

I have been praying for you, and your families, throughout this time, and you can be assured that I will continue to do so.  If there is something specific about which you would like me to pray, please let me know.

     

Last week’s message, obviously, deviated from the series I had planned for Lent. I was only one message into that series when the coronavirus crisis took full hold of our country.  It was clear to me, in writing the message for last Sunday, that the very abrupt change in circumstances required a different message than what I had originally planned.  As we continue to move through these challenging days, it has become clear also that it is time for me to completely change the message series, and so I will do that this week, and for the coming weeks.

     

As we are now journeying through uncharted territory, the idea came to me for a series of messages called The Journey.  I will take the messages from the wandering of God’s people through the wilderness, after leaving bondage in Egypt.  After being liberated from bondage, Moses led the people through the wilderness and to the edge of the Promised Land (Moses did not lead them into the Promised Land. That responsibility fell to Joshua). 

      

This morning’s Scripture text comes from the book of Exodus, which is where most of the texts in this series will come from.  Many of the stories are lengthy, so I will only be able to hit some of the highlights each week.  I will also condense the passages I use as my texts, as I am doing this morning. Follow along with me as I read from Exodus 12:40, 13:17-18, 14:10-12, 21-22

⁴⁰ Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years.

¹⁷ When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” 

¹⁸ So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt ready for battle.

¹⁰ As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. 

¹¹ They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 

¹² Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”

²¹ Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, 

²² and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

When I was preparing to leave for college, in August of 1975, it occurred to me that I might need to increase my wardrobe a bit.  I didn’t have much money to spare, but I went to the Fort Steuben Mall in Steubenville, Ohio to look for some clothes.  When I counted the amount of money I had in my wallet, it quickly became clear that I only had enough to buy a couple of T-shirts.  The mall had a T-shirt shop that you found in most malls in those days.  On the wall were rows of iron-on designs.  You chose the design you wanted, picked out a T-shirt, and the store would iron it on the shirt for you.  Some of you probably remember those T-shirt shops.  They were high fashion in those days!  The first design I chose was a beach scene, with a few palm trees, and the moon shining on the water.  The second design was a large ship on the ocean, also with the moon shining.  I have no idea why I picked two designs with the moon, but hey, it was the 70s so what can I say?  I guess I could have picked out one with the band Kiss, but I already had one of those.  I took my two new T-shirts home with me and added them to my other belongings that were packed and ready to be loaded into the car.  Looking at the small pile, it didn’t amount to very much.  

      

My older brother was beginning his junior year at the same school, so we planned to travel together.  As I loaded the car the night before we left,Idid take note of the difference between my leaving and when my brother left for the first time, two years before. When my brother left for his first semester at school, being the first of the five siblings to leave home, the entire family – all seven of us – loaded into the car for the almost 450-mile trip to campus.  Things were much different when it was my turn to leave.  No one seemed to notice that I was leaving home.  In fact, as we loaded the car the night before our trip, I think my parents might have asked, are you going somewhere?  In spite of the fact that my family seemed to have forgotten that I was leaving home, I was very excited about my journey. I had made several visits to the campus and for many months I looked forward to arriving on campus as a student.

      

This is the truth about most journeys – we look forward to them.  We anticipate them.  We get excited about them.  Whether it’s a trip to the beach, a dream vacation, a new opportunity in life – whatever the destination – it is a journey we choose, a journey we plan, and a journey we look forward to taking. 

      

But that is not the case for all journeys.  Some journeys are not planned.  Some journeys are not anticipated.  Some journeys are not exciting.  Some journeys are not our choice.  Such is the reality of the journey we now find ourselves taking.  

      

The title of this morning’s message is Preparing for the Journey.  Here is the difficulty in this journey – how do we prepare for a journey that we did not choose, that we did not want to participate in, that we do not know where it is leading, when it will be over, or what life will look like when the journey is completed?

      

I’m not sure how well I can answer any of those questions, but I do know this about the journey we are now on – 

1.  Journeys always have an element of uncertainty.  

      

I.  Do.  Not.  Like.  Uncertainty.  I do not. If you do, there is something seriously wrong with you, in my opinion.  There are always unknowns with any journey, such as the weather, unexpected expenses, and other matters that come about despite our best made plans.  

      

This journey, through the wilderness, was filled with uncertainty.  When Moses led the people out of Egypt, there was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm.  Think about it – 430 years of captivity!  And now they were free!  That’s the really great news!  But there was also some not so great news – they were setting off into the wilderness, without enough provisions, without adequate shelter, with a lot of people to move through that wilderness, and their former captors coming after them because they changed their minds about letting them go.  The journey suddenly shifted from excitement to anxiety, anxiety that came about because of the multitude of uncertainties that were ahead for the people.

     

Though the people had actually longed for freedom, they did not realize the challenges that would be inherent in their journey to that freedom.  Exodus tells us, in 12:40, that the Hebrews were in Egypt for a total of 430 years, and most of those years were spent in bondage.  It seems to me that more than four centuries of bondage would be more than enough time to prepare for a journey to freedom and a new land.  One of the difficulties, however, is that their future was an unknown commodity, full of twists and turns they could neither foresee nor anticipate, so how could they prepare for the unknown?  Simply put, they could not.  This is why the Hebrew people struggled so greatly at times, as there were challenges that came to them without warning and there were challenges that they had never before experienced.  It is no different for us today, thousands of years later.  We do not know how long our present crisis will last.  Will it be two weeks, two months, or more?  No one knows, but we will complete this journey, and will do so with faith, hope, and love. 

      

The uncertainty that was before the Hebrew people caused them to do exactly what we see many people doing in this time – succumbing to panic.

      

Do not panic.  Let me say that again.  Do not panic.

      

Throughout their generation of wandering, Moses spent a lot of time giving pep talks to the people.  He did so because the people were prone to panic, and why wouldn’t they be?  They were wandering through a tough, difficult wilderness.  Moses did not gloss over the difficulty of the circumstances in which the people found themselves.  They were making their way in the midst of a lot of uncertainty, and though they had faith, sometimes that faith faltered, especially when they looked around and wondered where their next meal would come from.  God would provide them with food, although the people continued to have a hard time keeping their faith, in spite of God’s faithfulness to them.

      

It is not wrong to acknowledge the difficult circumstances in which we now find ourselves.  It’s okay to say to one another, I’m having a tough time dealing with this.  I’m worried.  I’m anxious.  My goodness, who wouldn’t be worried and anxious?  To express those concerns is not to demonstrate a lack of faith, however; it’s simply being honest.  Honesty is good.  But you know what is not good?  Panic. Panic happens when there is so much uncertainty that the uncertainty overwhelms what can be seen about the future.  As Moses and the people traveled through the wilderness it was a constant effort on the part of Moses to convince the people not to panic, and he was not always successful at doing so.

Panic never helps any situation.  Never. So let’s hold to faith, knowing that God is with us, and will continue to be with us, no matter what might come our way.

2.  Journeys require a lot of faith.

      

I’m not sure I can think of any journey in which I have participated in life that did not require a lot of faith.  Every journey requires some measure of faith.  Accepting a new job.  Getting married.  Having children.  Moving to a new city.  

      

It is not possible to sit down and chart out every journey on a piece of paper or on some kind of a bar graph in order to weigh the pluses and minuses before taking a step of faith.  At some point, you just have to say, I’m going to take a step of faith.  And then another step.  And another step.  And another. And before you know it, you are well into your journey.

      

The disciples certainly needed a lot of faith to follow Jesus.  I often refer to Jesus’ call to Peter, Andrew, James, and John (Matthew 4:18-22).  Peter and Andrew were on the Sea of Galilee, casting their fishing net.  James and John were in their boat, with their father, preparing their nets.  Jesus stepped into their lives and simply said, come, follow me (4:19).  And, amazingly, they did.  They walked away from their boats, their nets, and in the case of James and John, their father.  

      

I’m not sure if the Hebrew people knew just how much faith it would take to follow Moses through the wilderness.  Actually, I know they didn’t, because their faith so often faltered.  There will always be those moments when faith falters, which is why God doesn’t call us to walk alone.  Individual faith – solitary faith – is never a good idea because of the simple fact that we were created to be in relationship with one another.  In these days, when we are so disconnected from one another, we understand this in a very dramatic way.  It is hard to be disconnected from friends and family and our church family. We are, however, learning to connect in other ways.  I hope you are not growing tired of me cluttering your inboxes with updates or your social media feeds with information, but I am trying to keep us connected. Let us remember as well that there are people who are less connected electronically.  Not everyone is on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram.  Not everyone has email.  Not everyone is watching or reading our latest posts, because they do not have access to them.  Let us, then, make an effort to keep in touch with those who are in special need of being connected.

3.  Journeys teach us lessons.

      

When I moved to Louisville in August of 1981, to attend seminary, my two roommates and I took a drive around the area soon after our arrival on campus.  One of the places we visited on that drive was Shelbyville, although I don’t remember much about our visit here.  Most of the day, actually, we were hopelessly lost, and one of my roommates – who was our driver for the day – finally said, well, we’ve had an adventure.  I asked him why something as discouraging as a day spent mostly lost would be considered an adventure, and his reply was an adventure is something you do that you eventually regret doing.  That’s when you know it’s been an adventure.  But you always learn something from it.  I’ve always liked that definition.  At least the part about learning something from our experience.  We are certainly in the midst of an adventure, aren’t we?  It is an adventure that requires a good deal of hope and a good deal of faith, but let us remember that there is much that we can learn as well.  The lessons might not be immediately apparent, but there are lessons we will learn, and I hope they are lessons we do not soon forget.

      

For the Hebrew people, the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land was one that took a generation and was replete with challenges, difficulties, threats, and discouragements.  To paraphrase my friend’s description, it was one really big adventure.  The difficulties of that journey brought the people, on more than one occasion, to Moses to complain.  And they could, at times, really complain.  One of the refrains Moses grew accustomed to hearing was how they would have been better off if they had remained in Egypt.  In 14:10-12, for instance, we read as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them.  They were terrified and cried out to the Lord.  They said to Moses, “was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?  What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?  Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians?’  It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” When people prefer bondage to freedom, that is a sign that those people have faced great difficulties and challenges in their journey!

      

Moses and the people did not take the straight route on their journey through the wilderness.  It does not take a generation to travel the distance that the people traveled through the wilderness. From Egypt to the Promised Land was a distance of about 380 miles, as the crow flies.  I’m not going to say it was a walk in the park, but neither was it a forty-year walk. Here is one reason why it took so long – there were some lessons for the people to learn.  One of the lessons they learned was how to truly become a people. There is something about shared suffering that really bonds people together, and it certainly did for the people as they wandered through the wilderness.  

      

Now, I want to be careful to point out that I am not saying that this time of difficulty has come upon us because of lessons that we need to learn.  I will say, however, that there are lessons to learn from this time.  As a nation, we have taken much for granted.  As a nation, we have failed to understand the depths of suffering of many millions of people in our world.  As a nation, we have been too quick to believe we were insulated from such tragedy and difficulty.

      

Just as the Hebrew people learned important lessons from their journey, so will we. What will be the lessons we learn? Will we take those lessons to heart? Will we keep those lessons in mind? 

4.  What are the essentials we need?

      

When we distill life down to the absolute essentials, what are they?  Faith, family, love, food, shelter – and toilet paper. Am I right?  Judging by the empty store shelves, maybe toilet paper is the greatest essential!

      

My parents both grew up in humble circumstances.  Neither grew up in a family that had much money.  My mom, when she was still an infant, was adopted by her aunt.  Her aunt was a widow who was already raising eight children on her own, surviving on the meager pension she received from her late husband.  My mom used to tell my siblings and I about the hardships her family confronted, and as we listened to some of the stories, we thought she was just making up some of them. One story I remember is that they couldn’t afford much milk, so the oldest sibling would eat their cereal at breakfast and pass the bowl on to the next to use what milk was left, and on and on, until it reached my mom, who was the youngest.  By the time it reached my mom there was nothing left, so she put coffee or water on her cereal (personally, I like my Captain Crunch plain, right out of the box, but to each their own).  My siblings and I would chuckle and roll our eyes in disbelief, but as I look back on some of the stories, I’m not sure many of them actually were fiction.  I can’t speak for my siblings, but I know this – looking back, I now realize that at that time, I could neither see nor understand how blessed I was.  All I saw, much of the time, was what I didn’t have, and I never lacked for anything I needed. From my perspective today, I have great regret for my insular and clueless attitude.

      

As we adapt to our current situation, we are learning to define what is essential and what is not.  As we continue in this situation, we will refine even further what we see as essential. Already, we are finding ourselves gravitating closer to the essentials of life – our faith, our family, our friends, our homes, and the blessing of having food to eat.  I’m not saying we failed to understand these as essential.  I am, however, saying that we had, perhaps, allowed other matters of life to come between us and life’s essentials.

      

For the Hebrew people, a 40-year journey through the wilderness brought the definition of an essential very clearly to them.  When things are taken away in life, we very quickly find out what we really don’t need, and we also learn what we do need.  There are some things now missing in my life that I have discovered are not very important in the larger scheme of things.  There are others that I miss very much, and I have realized how essential they are to my life.  And so as we continue on this journey, let us hold to what matters in life, to what is essential, and learn to let the rest go.

March 1, 2020 - The Existence of God: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

As I have mentioned over the course of the past several weeks, this morning I begin a sermon series on apologetics.  While considering a series of messages for Lent, several people asked me if I would speak on the topic of apologetics at some point this year, so I thought it would be a good topic for Lent.  Apologetics is the spiritual discipline of explaining belief. While it can be a defense of belief, if one is given a challenge to defend their faith, apologetics is more than just a defense of belief.  Apologetics is more of a systematic theology, that is, it is an organized – or systematic – explanation of what we believe as well as why we believe.  

      

The age of apologetics began many centuries ago, I would say, with the early church father St. Augustine.  St. Augustine is one of the greatest theologians in church history, and whether or not you are familiar with him, his influence extends to our present day and has greatly affected the way in which we think about God and faith.  Augustine wrote the City of God, a monumental work that was, among other things, a huge tome of apologetics.  Augustine wrote the City of God in response to charges leveled against the early church. In the year 410, the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, which was one of the greatest jolts to ever hit the mighty Roman Empire.  When a traumatic event takes place, people often search for a scapegoat, and many in Rome found their scapegoat in the early church.  Many Romans took the view that the sacking of Rome was punishment meted out to Rome because they had forsaken their traditional gods for Christianity.  In response to this charge, Augustine wrote the City of God.  Augustine’s work became not only a great work of apologetics – arguably the greatest work of apologetics ever – but also a great work of theology.  What the City of God helped to do was to provide a language for apologetics and, further, to organize beliefs and theology in a systematic manner.

      

In I Peter 3:15 we find a verse that encourages us to always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.  If someone asked you, why do you believe in God, how would you answer?  It doesn’t have to be a challenge to your faith; it might simply be someone asking about your personal journey of faith, and an interest in your personal beliefs.  Each person should, I strongly believe, be prepared to answer such questions, and I hope this series will help you in formulating your answer.

      

As an introduction to this morning’s topic, I have a riddle for you – a poor man has it, a rich man needs it, and if you eat it for a long time, it’ll kill you.  What is it?  Nothing.  (Why Does the World Exist:  An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt, p 42).  This morning we are talking about nothing, or more specifically, The Existence of God:  Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?  For millennia, humans have gazed into the heavens and wondered about our origin.  How did we get herehas been asked by countless people over the course of the ages. On a deeper level, we then ask not only how we got here, but why is there something rather than nothing?  Why does anything exist at all?  Well, for one reason, as soon as we contemplate nothingness, it is no longer nothing but, rather, something. 

      

Our Scripture text comes from the first chapter of Genesis.  Follow along with me as I read from Genesis 1:1-14, 18-21, 23-27, 31 – 

¹In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 

² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 

⁴ God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 

⁵ God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 

⁷ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 

⁸ God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

⁹ And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 

¹⁰ God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

As I worked on this message, I quickly realized the sheer size of the topic, which could easily become its own series. Trimming this message to a manageable size was a challenging task, so I hope I don’t treat it with such a shallow overview that it loses much of its impact. (The printed version of this message contains much more information than what I presented in our Sunday morning worship. Looking back, I feel as though I should have divided this message into two parts, as there was so much information I sought to cover.  After the services, I felt as though I dumped a truckload of information on the congregation.) 

      

What I will do with this topic is break it down into two segments, the first being what I will call the dismantling of the straw man arguments.  Are you familiar with straw man arguments?  A straw man argument is when someone appears to refute the argument of another person but what they are actually doing is refuting an argument that was not presented.  In the case of discussions about God’s existence, a straw man argument will appear to refute the idea of God’s existence, but in reality, the straw man argument has nothing to do with the question of God’s existence.  When discussing whether or not God exists, that is the primary and only question.  What often happens is that the discussion veers off into other topics, none of which apply to the primary question of God’s existence.  Most every objection or argument against God’s existence, I have found, is really about something other than the larger question of God’s existence. To illustrate my point, let’s look at some examples of straw man arguments.

1. Belief in God is declining.

      

Let’s talk about the facts – religious belief as a percentage of the world’s population is growing, while that of non-belief is declining as a percentage of world population.  While there is no doubt that the role of institutional religion – and the number of people who believe in God – has changed in our country, for instance – it is important to note that this is a dynamic almost exclusively associated with Western Europe and North America.  Around the world, religion and belief in God continues to grow, and in many parts of the world, particularly Asia and Africa, Christianity is growing at a rapid rate.  Even in parts of the world where religious belief has historically been low or in parts of the world that have been officially atheist – such as China – religion, and Christianity in particular – has been growing at a rapid pace.  It has been estimated, for instance, that in coming years China will have more Christians than any other nation on earth.  In spite of very strong persecution in recent years – and attempts by the Chinese government to influence the church to be more supportive of the government – Christianity is growing very rapidly in that country (https://www.ft.com/content/a6d2a690-6545-11e4-91b1-00144feabdc).
      

While religion and belief in God is growing worldwide, the percentage of atheists – related to world population – is declining.  This may come as a surprise to some people, as a result of the narrative – a false narrative – that religion and belief in God is declining. Another interesting truth is that atheists, as a group, have the lowest rate of retention when compared to religious groups.  For those who have been raised in an atheistic home, only 30% remain atheists into adulthood. This is a rather astounding statistic. No religious group comes close to having such a low retention rate, and many of those who do leave a religious group do not actually leave religion or belief in God, but instead change from one religious group to another.  Catholics, for instance, have a retention rate of 68%, but this does not mean 32% of people who are raised Catholic will abandon faith.  Many, if not most, of that 32% will become Protestant or align with another faith group.

      

The reality, however, is this – whatever the reality of the growth or decline of religion and belief in God, it has nothing to do with whether or not God exists.  God either exists or does not, and the truth of God’s existence has nothing whatsoever to do with what people believe, which means the question of religion’s growth or decline is a straw man argument.

2.  Science has proven that God does not exist.

      

For most of human history, people have believed we exist because of divine action. God created the universe and that was the answer, pure and simple.  As we entered into the modern scientific age, however, that began to change somewhat, especially in Western Europe, and to a somewhat lesser extent, North America.  The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on science and reason, began to call into question long held assumptions about the origins of creation. When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, things shifted more dramatically, as the schism between faith and science that began in the Enlightenment deepened, making them, in the minds of many, diametrically opposed to one another.

     

I believe there is no inherent divide between faith and science, and those that do hold to such a belief perpetuate the idea of an insurmountable divide because of bad theology, faulty thinking, or to further a particular agenda.  There are those on the side of unbelief, for instance, who claim faith and science are at odds because science is based in facts, evidence, logic, and reason, while faith is opposed to all of these. Faith, in fact, is not at all opposed to any of these.  While it is true that faith does not depend upon proofs and evidence, it is certainly not opposed to them.  There are those on the side of faith who, like their unbelieving counterparts, believe that faith is incompatible with science because they reject the findings of science as being incompatible with their interpretation of faith or because they fear the findings of science, as those findings contradict their views of faith and their interpretation of Scripture.

      

I am not a scientist, obviously.  I passed biology my first semester in college by a single point.  But that’s okay.  I do not believe one has to be a scientist to speak to the relationship of faith and science. As a theologian, I feel not only comfortable, but compelled, to speak to this issue.  

      

I believe there is an important point to make about faith and science and it is this – science is really about process, that is, the explaining of the way the universe and other physical and biological processes operate.  Science tells us about gravity, the speed of light, atoms, neutrons, protons, and all the processes by which the universe functions. This provide us with the answers to what I would call the “small w” why questions.  These are questions such as why do planets hold to their orbits, how is the universe expanding, etc.  Faith, on the other hand, provides us with the answers to the “big W” Why questions. These are questions related to the why of existence and what purpose there is to our existence.  Science can provide the mechanics and processes of how things have developed and how we got to where we are at this point in history, but not why we are here.  Science provides us with important insights into processes, while faith provides important insights into the meaning and the why of existence and creation.  

      

And, contrary to what some might know or admit, a good many of the world’s greatest scientists are doing much in the area of bridging faith and science.  Francis Collins, for instance, who wrote the book The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, serves as the director of the National Institutes of Health.  He previously led the National Human Genome Research Institute, guiding the work that sequenced the human genome.  Collins’ work led to the identifying of the genes that cause cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and other diseases.  Collins, early in his medical and scientific career, was an atheist. He began to investigate faith after one of his patients asked him a question that intrigued him to the point that he began to investigate faith, and ultimately led to his religious conversion. Collins is also one of the founders of the BioLogos Foundation (https://biologos.org), an organization that promotes greater understanding between faith and science.  Collins is so highly regarded that the late Christopher Hitchens, who was one of the world’s most well-known atheists, once referred to him one of the greatest living Americans.  I believe that the work Collins does as a scientist, and as a person of faith, is quite extraordinary.  Collins reminds us that when it comes to faith and science, there are three options – 1. Abandon our faith in order to accept the results of science.  2.  Deny the scientific evidence to maintain our interpretations of Scripture.  3. Reconsider our interpretations of Scripture in light of the evidence from God’s creation (from the biologos.org web site).  Collins reminds us that the third option is where we should come down, in terms of our belief, as it has helped us to correct faulty theology, such as the belief that the earth was the center of the universe.  Collins uses the example of Galileo’s and Copernicus’s discoveries, which caused a great deal of consternation and resistance from the Church, as they were hesitant and fearful about letting go of their incorrect beliefs. The Church did, however, eventually acknowledge that the discoveries of both Galileo and Copernicus were, in fact, true.  Today, the Catholic Church supports the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose aim is to promote the progress of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences and the study of related epistemological problems.  It was also, most people probably do not know, a Catholic priest – Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître – who first proposed what has become known as the big bangas an explanation for the process of how the universe came into being.

3. The reality of suffering, the Inquisition, the support for slavery, televangelists and their private jets and mansions, etc. prove that God doesn’t exist.

      

If there is a quintessential straw man argument, this is it, because none of these have anything whatsoever to do with the existence of God.  The reality of suffering, for instance, tells us something about the manner in which God works, but not whether or not God exists.  As to the others I have listed above, they are reflective of and do have something to say about some of God’s followers, but they are subordinate to the ultimate question of God’s existence.

      

In regard to matters such as the Inquisition and the excesses of some televangelists, I would remind us that economists sometimes say of the stock market that the market is not the economy and the economy is not the market.  Just as I am not a scientist, I am also not an economist, but I understand their distinction.  The stock market is not always indicative of the larger economy and the two often act in ways that are independent of one another.  The stock market might do well while the overall economy struggles, so the two do not automatically go together.  I like to borrow the phrase about the stock market and economy and paraphrase it into theological language, saying that God is not the church and the church is not God.  What I mean by that is, the church is not always representative of God or of God’s will. This is certainly true when it comes to the darker elements of church history.  While the Inquisition was implemented and carried out by the Church, such terrible behaviors and abuses are reflective of the Church, but not God. The Church is to blame for the Inquisition, not God.  I say this not to mitigate the responsibility and the error of the Church in any way, but to point out the truth that the Church – and religious people – have acted at times in ways that are not at all reflective of the nature or will of God and those actions cannot be laid at the feet of God in terms of responsibility. The same is true of other dark and tragic episodes in the life of the Church, or of churches, such as slavery.  Yes, it is true that slavery is mentioned in the Bible – and not always condemned – but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of God’s existence.  Slavery, I would be quick to say, is always wrong and is an abhorrent practice, but its presence – both in the Bible and the history of the church – is a reflection of the nature of humanity rather than God.  Churches, and those who claim to follow God, have often acted not only independent from God’s will but in opposition to it.  This is a sad reality that remains with us, by the way.  When churches tell women they are not equal or that they cannot be ordained, they are working in opposition to God’s will, not in accordance with it.   

      

Lastly, I would also ask a question – when one blames God for anything, such as suffering, is that blame a tacit acknowledgement of God’s existence?  After all, can blame be assigned to anything – or anyone – that does not exist?

4.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  

      

This is one of my personal favorites, because it is so obviously flawed.  Victor Stenger wrote a book titled God: The Failed Hypothesis, in which he raised this argument.  My reply to Stenger would be to ask several questions.  For one, who determines what is extraordinary? Why is it extraordinary to claim that God exists?  The idea that God does not exist would actually be the extraordinary claim, in my opinion, as most people throughout history – as well as today – have believed and continue to believe in the existence of God.  Furthermore, to claim that the universe and everything it encompasses is the result of totally random processes; well, that seems quite extraordinary to me.  I would also ask, what constitutes evidence, and who gets to decide what is evidence?  Is evidence only what can be measured in a lab?  Can we, for instance, put a Monet painting, or a Beethoven sonata, under a microscope to search for evidence of what makes them such great works of beauty?  I don’t think so.  When I look around at creation, the handiwork of God in the creation seems like very strong evidence to me.  The problem with demanding evidence is this – first, no one can agree on what constitutes evidence and, second, when evidence is produced, it does not guarantee belief. Jesus performed many miracles, but those miracles did not convince everyone.  Stenger also wrote in his book, in several places, that absence of evidence means evidence of absence.  I imagine that Stenger was very proud of that statement, butif God’s hand were to write across the sky, I exist, there would be no shortage of people who would still not believe.  There is nothing God can do that would provide to some people the absolute proof they need of his existence.  When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead – arguably his greatest miracle – not everyone was convinced.  In fact, it was in response to that miracle that Caiaphas spoke of what the other opponents of Jesus had come to realize – that they must kill him.  John 11:50 records Caiaphas as saying you do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.  

      

Arguments for God’s existence.

      

I need to preface this section of my message with the statement that there is no ironclad proof of God’s existence upon which everyone can agree, obviously.  One person’s evidence may be another person’s wishful thinking.  Not even the miracles of Jesus, as I have already mentioned, convinced every person of the truth of who he was.  And not every argument is as effective as it might seem.  C. S. Lewis, for instance, famously said there are only three ways to view Jesus – he was a liar, a lunatic, or exactly who he said he was.  If Jesus was not the Son of God, then he was a liar, and someone who is not truthful in what they say is worthy neither of worship nor adoration. In the same way, if Jesus was not the Son of God, he was a lunatic.  What do we think, after all, of people who make such claims of divinity?  We think they are crazy.  That leaves, then, the third option, that Jesus was exactly who he claimed to be.  This argument, as proposed by Lewis, has been viewed for years as one of the great arguments in apologetics.  Personally, I do not find it to be an effective or compelling argument when talking to skeptics.  It’s not that I don’t agree with Lewis’ conclusion; I just don’t think it is very compelling to a lot of skeptics, and here’s why – they can simply say well, your evidence all comes from the Bible, and I simply do not accept the Bible.  Well, there goes the argument, in terms of its effectiveness.  And I suppose we can say that all the other arguments I will present have their own unique shortcomings, but I believe there are some that are very effective and have, over time, proven their effectiveness. 

      

I would also add that it is important to be familiar with the various arguments for God’s existence because an argument that simply says because God created itis not going to work for many people.  God gives us logic and reason, so we should use them.  Engaging the modern, scientific mind requires a greater answer than God did it.  It’s fine to make a saying such as God said it, I believe itas your personal faith statement, but if you want to present something to a skeptic that will engage their mind or that they will take seriously, a more effective and compelling argument should be presented.  And, finally, I will add that because of time constraints, these are very, very cursory overviews of each argument.

      

Here are, in my opinion, some effective arguments – 

1.  Life has a built-in purpose and meaning.

      

It is hard to escape the sense of purpose inherent in life, and even many skeptics use language that reveals the difficulty of accepting there is not some built-in purpose and meaning to life.  If, however, God does not exist, the best we can say is that life is bleak, purposeless, and without meaning.  Those who deny the existence of God often must be hard pressed to admit this reality.  Speaking once with a skeptic, I pressed them to admit that, without God’s existence, there is no possibility of meaning and purpose.  After some discussion and prodding, the person finally did admit that the best they could do would be to invent their own sense of meaning and purpose. That is a valid effort, I agreed, but it was also not what we were speaking about.  Of course it is true, I said, that every person can manufacture their own sense of meaning and purpose, but that is quite different from the question of an inherent sense of meaning and purpose that is built into the universe. Without God, what do we have?  We would not, certainly, have an inherent meaning or purpose, and there is no debating that issue.  One can come up with their own sense of purpose, but without God there is no inherent purpose, meaning, morality or anything else.  There is only what we see.  And personally, I find that to be very bleak and depressing.

      

I suppose that one could make the case for something akin to biological determinism, if there is no God.  One could, possibly, say that our genetic code, defined and refined by the process of both biological and sociological evolution, has programmed into us a sense of meaning and purpose.  Of that idea, however, I am a great skeptic. Biological – or even sociological – determinism is absolutely not the same concept as a meaning and purpose that is not only part of creation, but infuses all of creation because of God.  

     

Sigmund Freud believed that humanity invented God, and did so out of the terror of the meaningless of life and inevitability of death that came without God.  I disagree with Freud, obviously, on the question of God’s existence, but I think he is right about the terror related to the meaning of life – or absence of meaning – that comes with no God.  Jeremiah 29:11, a famous and beloved verse, tells us for I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  People love that verse because it speaks to the meaning and purpose God provides in life.  Where would we be without that hope?  Without that future?  Life would indeed be bleak.

  

2.  The Anthropic Principle, or fine-tuning argument.  

      

One of the most powerful arguments, I believe, for the existence of God is what is called the anthropic principle, or more commonly, the fine-tuning argument.

      

The fine-tuning argument states that the laws of nature seem to have been crafted so as to move the universe toward the emergence and sustenance of life.  If the value of even one of the fundamental constants – the speed of light or the mass of an electron, for instance – had been to the slightest degree different, then human life could neither have formed or be able to continue once formed.  For those in the field of science, this is a particularly persuasive argument.  

      

Explaining this far better than I could, I will offer a quote from Francis Collins, who quotes from Stephen Hawking – The way in which the universe expanded after the Big Bang depended critically on how much total mass and energy the universe had, and also on the strength of the gravitational constant.  The incredible degree of fine-tuning of these physical constants has been a subject of wonder for many experts.  Hawking writes:  “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate?  If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part of 100 thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”

      

On the other hand, if the rate of expansion had been greater by even one part in a million, stars and planets could not have been able to form.  Recent theories involving an incredibly rapid expansion (inflation) of the universe at very early times appear to offer a partial explanation for why the present expansion is so close to the critical value. However, many cosmologists would say that this simply pushes the question back to why the universe had just the right properties to undergo such an inflationary expansion.  The existence of a universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability (A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief:  The Language of God, Francis S. Collins, pp. 72-73).

      

After a somewhat lengthy, and technical discussion, Collins concludes with this statement – …no scientific observation can reach the level of absolute proof of the existence of God.  But for those willing to consider a theistic perspective, the Anthropic Principle certainly provides an interesting argument in favor of a Creator (page 78).

3.  Morality.

      

We will talk more about morality in a few weeks, but let me say one or two things today about this point.  Just as there is a sense of meaning and purpose built into creation, so there is a sense of morality that is inherent as well.  In fact, that sense of morality is a very powerful force in humanity.  From a young age we have the inherent sense that we ought to be kind to one another and that we ought to treat people with fairness and dignity.  

      

In Romans 1:20 Paul speaks to the idea that morality is built into who we are.  He writes that since the beginning of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. When Paul talks about the qualities of God, such as his divine nature, as clearly seen, he is referring to the idea that a basic, universally understood sense of morality is built into all people.  That being said, I would add that we must also remember that there is no universally agreed upon sense of morality.  While most everyone would agree that we ought to treat one another with decency and fairness, what constitutes decency and fairness will find many different definitions. This is why, I believe, the process of comparing one another – I’m just as good as anyone else – is misplaced, as to compare our goodness to anyone else’s means we must first agree upon a standard for goodness by which we can compare ourselves, and this is not at all likely to happen.

      

A basic sense of morality is, I believe, inherent in every person.  To be more specific about morality, however, means that we must define further what morality specifically means, and we will do this when we arrive at the message on morality, or, more specifically, Christian morality.

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the final three that I will now present are the most convincing for me.

4.  Near-death experiences.

      

My first exposure to the idea of near-death experiences came when I was in high school.  I don’t remember which happen first, but two events stand out in my memory from that time in my life.  I remember there being a copy of the book Life After Life, by Dr. Raymond Moody (published in 1975.  Dr. Moody began his research in 1968 and says of his experience in conducting research on near-death experiences that when he began he was a skeptic and an atheist. Now he is neither.)  I picked up the book and was fascinated by what I read. The other event was when my grandfather had a very serious heart attack.  To my remembrance, he was not a religious man – at least not expressing it in any way that I ever noticed – but while he was in the hospital recovering from his heart attack he asked my older brother to baptize him as soon as he was able to get to the church.  Whatever he experienced (and I am not aware that he ever shared his experience with anyone), it obviously brought about a major change in him.

      

I have spent many years visiting in hospitals, nursing homes, and places where death takes place.  I have also visited with many people in their homes, in their final days.  I have witnessed many inexplicable and unexplainable occurrences.  I understand that some people will say that when death seems to have taken place the brain is still able to process information and that it has an awareness of its surroundings for some time before it fully shuts down.  This, some would say, explains how people are aware of what happens around them as they experience what we would call clinical death (clinical death being a state of death from which one can be resuscitated).  Fair enough. I am willing to concede some validity to that point.  However, I have witnessed the kinds of experiences for which there is no explanation, the most convincing of which is when someone is resuscitated and returns with knowledge they did not have, and could not have known.  An example of this would be when someone comes back to life with a message for a friend, an acquaintance, or a loved one, and their message contains detailed information they were never given, and could never have had, except for their experience of near death.

      

I could relate many such experiences, but for the sake of time I will simply say that I have encountered many people over the course of my ministry who have had near-death experiences.  It is powerful to hear their stories, and I believe those people have been given a glimpse of what is to come.

5.  Human consciousness.

      

Skeptics will say that, given enough time, very complex life forms can evolve from very simple organisms.  I accept that premise, with one very significant difference:  I believe God used the process of evolution in creation, but it was a process that was not an end in and of itself.  While God used, I believe, the process of evolution, it was a process directed by God and instituted by God.  To say that complex life forms – most especially, human life – could evolve from a series of random processes is leap of faith that I simply cannot make.  That such a variety and complexity of life could arise from random processes seems, to me, to have about the same likelihood as putting 100 or 1,000 chimpanzees in a room with laptops and one of them eventually types out something like War and Peace.  That one of those chimpanzees would produce such a literary masterpiece, to me, seems to be a more likely prospect than complex life arising from complete randomness.

      

Human consciousness, for me, is really a key element in belief that God created all things.  To believe that human consciousness can arise from simple, inert matter, from some random chemical bonding, is a stretch to far for me.

6.  Love.

      

Lastly, I would say that if life is nothing more than the result of random processes it is not possible to build an argument that love truly exists.  If there is nothing but the material – those things that we can see, touch, and measure in a quantitative manner – then we could also say there is nothing that approximates the spiritual.  The best we could say, I believe, is that chemical processes in the brain produce pleasurable feelings that provide us with the illusion – but not the reality – of love.  

      

The brain, obviously, controls the functions of our body through biological processes.  Even the most vociferous skeptic, however, would most likely say that the brain also processes experiences that can be explained only by what we would label as spiritual – the experience of standing on a beach and watching a beautiful sunset, the overwhelming sense of gratitude at the birth of a child, being moved by a powerful piece of music, and other such moments.  But are such experiences truly spiritual, or merely the triggering of chemicals in the brain that cause us to believe something special is taking place? Obviously, I believe something special and something greater is at work, but I also believe that without the existence of God – which means that we are ultimately only the culmination of random physical and biological processes – we cannot make a cogent case that any kinds of spiritual experiences truly exist.  And love – being the ultimate in spiritual experiences – is, ultimately, little more than the sensation caused by those processes.  I understand that many skeptics would greatly disagree with me on this point, but I stand firmly by it, and would challenge them to convince me of how love could truly be more than simply a chemical process, if God does not exist.

      

Well, I have given you a lot of information this morning, with more yet to come.  I hope you have found this information to be helpful, and that I did not overwhelm you with the sheer volume of it.