WYC 2011: Alive Again!

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GYC West

Christian Apologetics

Andy Im

If God Is Good: Why Doesn’t He Seem Like It?

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity to delve into your word among other things.

And we also want to pray that you would bless this meeting, that you would speak through me and also speak to the hearts and minds of those who are listening and as well as to myself and also want to pray Lord for your guidance throughout the whole series of meetings at WYC in general, be with all the speakers and those who once again the audience.

We thank you Lord, we ask this in your name, Amen.

All right just really quickly as a show of hands where is everybody from?

So did you come all the way out here just for this?

Well, and I pray that the program's going well, you're enjoying it and growing spiritually.

Well, we're gonna look at, first and foremost, before we even delve into this question of refuting these claims by the atheists against the Old Testament God or their picture of the Old Testament God, first we're going to look at how our picture or knowledge of God is formulated in the first place.

And this is a vital and very important question, as Jesus himself said, eternal life, this is eternal life, John 17 3, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

So Jesus clearly places a connection between our knowledge of who God is and salvation.

And so it's very, very important, our understanding of God.

Review and Herald January 14, 1890, Ellen White says this, the whole, not just some or part, the whole, the entire spiritual life is molded by our conception of him.

And if we cherish erroneous views of his character, our souls, our souls will sustain injury.

That's a powerful, powerful statement by the pen of inspiration.

And if you go to society, if you go to modern mass media, you will find, according to Stephen Perthero, he's a scholar on religion, he states this, that Jesus means different things to different people in different times and places.

Shifting with the cultural, the political, the economic winds, images of Jesus are about as stable as the weather in Kansas's tornado alley.

How many of you experienced firsthand any of the tornadoes that just passed through?

I know 1 of my cousins experienced the horrifying events of that.

In the ancient world, he was the Messiah in Jerusalem, a truth teller in Athens, and an emperor in Rome.

In the United States, he has been black and white, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, a capitalist and a socialist, a pacifist and a warrior, an athlete and an atheist, a civil rights agitator and a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Muslims embrace him as a prophet, Hindus as an avatar, and Buddhists as a Bodhisattva.

So when Jesus asks, who do people say I am?

There is no easy answer, either in his lifetime or in ours.

Now having said that, I would hope that for you and I, we have a solid, grounded picture of who Jesus is.

And that our perceptions of Jesus are not formulated by what's going on out in the world, but from the sayeth the Lord.

But this is the confusion that we see in our world today.

Maybe the ideal, and this is Paul Copeland, as he's reflecting on our image of God, he has this insight.

He says, maybe the ideal God in the Westerners mind is just too nice.

How many of you have read something or a passage in the Old Testament before and you read it and you were just like what you did was you didn't you couldn't make sense of it it was just how could God do that all these pictures these thoughts are entering your mind how could God do this How could he just wipe out or command people to wipe out thousands of others?

And you think about this question, it hits you squarely in the face, but then you grab those thoughts and you stick it in a book, and shelve it, and now you have a whole library.

Not just a whole library, but yeah, just something that you've reserved to deal with later.

And these are the types of thoughts that often pop up when you're sleeping at night, right?

So maybe the ideal God in the Westerner's mind is just too nice.

So we throw those thoughts away and we just keep Matthew chapter 5 through 7, turn the other cheek, we like that.

The other ones can go to the Library of Congress, right?

And we keep the nice pictures of God in our home library.

We've ignored sternness and severity, latching on to our own ideals of comfort and convenience.

Humans regularly do make gods in their own images.

Meaning, we say God should be like this and so when the Bible may at times contradict our own representation of who and what God should be, when the Bible itself contradicts that, then we shelve it.

And so we've formulated this own in God in our own image and the reason why the atheists are making these claims is because they have this accusations that goes something like this, you Christians, you Christians are very good at sticking to the Matthew chapter 5 through 7 portions of scripture that paint a picture of God as loving, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile.

But when it comes to the challenging and difficult texts, you simply ignore them.

And I believe as a faithful Bible-believing Seventh-day Adventist, that we need to have clear and sound responses to these accusations because what they're saying is an accusation that God is unjust, unfair, and cruel.

So we need to begin to dig deep ourselves.

What they should do is not make a scramble in fear and head for the exit doors, but we need to start digging deeper into God's word.

Humans regularly do make gods in their image, yet the biblical God isn't the kind we make up.

He refuses to be manipulated by human schemes.

He makes us all, including his true devotees, uncomfortable, which in the end is what we truly need to overcome our self-centeredness.

Well, think about where most of us get our picture of God or formulate our conception of God.

1 of the places of course is in the home and more specifically from our parents.

You know you look at this picture here and obviously it's a picture that invites warmth.

And so this child, you could perceive, is getting a correct view of God because the family's spending time with this young child.

Another picture where you see a nice loving family.

And, but this is not necessarily the picture that everyone receives about God from their homes and families.

For example, there's a lot of pain, a lot of parents abuse their children.

There are a lot of, there's a lot of anguish.

And especially in a Christian seventh day Adventist home, if God is made out to be arbitrary and cruel and harsh, then your picture of God can be severely skewed.

Another place where we formulate our picture of God can be pop culture and of course these are this is not a correct place where you would seek to find a picture of God but it is a 1 of the places that you do find where people are learning about God.

For example, Madonna singing on a burning cross during 1 of her concerts.

You have Joan Osborn years ago singing a song about what if God was 1 of us.

Anne Rice, a popular writer about vampire novels, has turned Christian and is now writing about Christianity.

And she has a certain perspective about God and the church, etc.

You think of the passion of the Christ that made a sensation over the the media and the airwaves.

All these tend to formulate pictures of God that I would suggest are incorrect or invalid.

You think of Ned Flanders playing the Jesus freak, right?

And He certainly paints a picture of Christianity that is not positive, that is negative, that is shaping the hearts and minds of young people and old alike.

It's not just a show for young people, as you know.

I'm sure None of you have ever watched that show, right?

So anyway, so pop culture is another place.

We also formulate our picture and image of God from church and its members.

You think of a contemporary modern church and a message that is sent from a church like that.

On the other spectrum, the archaic, conservative, formalistic, maybe rigid church, on the other side of the spectrum.

You have church leaders who also paint a picture of who God is.

This is clearly sending a picture or a message of who God is.

Here in this picture, you see the words, God hates a fag enablers, or you're going to hell, or Pope in hell.

That certainly sends a picture or a message about who God is.

Then on the other side you have someone endorsing the fact that Christians welcome gays and holding their banner forward.

Then you also have conspiratorial Christians, right?

Or pacifist Christians holding up their banners.

Real Christians, real Christians don't choose war.

If God Is Good: Why Does He Seem So Mean? (Part 1)

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much once again for being with us.

We're also here because we want to make sense of the things that are written in the Old Testament of Scripture, of Holy Scripture.

We pray that you would guide us and give us your perspective, not ours, and lead us to truth, and we thank you, Lord, we ask this in your name, Amen.

Really, this portion of it is going to be a dialogue more than anything else.

I want to make it somewhat more conversational because this is something that I think all of us have thought about, or at the very least, have in the back of our minds what do we do with this Old Testament God that seemingly contradicts the New Testament Jesus and God of the New Testament.

And so this has been, this issue here in regards to the Old Testament, God has especially been a point of attack by the new atheists.

So not only are we attempting, or our attempt here will be not only to defend God, and that's 1 of the primary things we'll be doing, is defending God against these attacks, but also, and this is my hope, that some of the questions that we have in our own minds will also be resolved to an extent.

But, and having said that, we'll also discover that we don't have all the answers.

And as a matter of fact, the experts, Bible-believing experts, both Adventists and otherwise, conservative scholars also admit that we don't have all the answers.

But, having said that, we do have enough of a sufficient light upon which to base our faith.

I'm going to be reiterating some of those things.

And the other point I want to make is we don't want to go to either extreme.

And the first extreme being that we don't face up to the facts, we just run away from these things.

We shelve it, we lock the door, we put it behind another vaulted door and throw away the key.

We don't want to do that, because we want to come to some type of conclusion of who God is in the Old Testament.

At the same time, we don't want to go jump to the other extreme and say, well, what they're claiming is all true, and I'm just gonna jump on there, that bandwagon, because that's the popular thing to do.

So we don't wanna go to that extreme either.

So, having said that, let's go ahead and move forward.

If God is good, why does he seem so mean, especially in the Old Testament?

The new atheist, as Paul Copeland, he's 1 of the leading Bible-believing, he's not Adventist, but he is a Bible believing Christian who makes a strong biblical and historical attempt to defend God against these attacks.

And he says this, the new atheists are the new public, popular face of atheism.

Here you have a picture of Richard Dawkins.

And notice 1 of the things he says, "'Isn't it a remarkable coincidence "'almost everyone has the same religion as their parents.

And it always just happens to be the right religion.

If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece, we would all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo.

If we had been born Vikings, we would be worshiping Wotan and Thor.

Well through childhood indoctrination, he says.

And by the way, is there some truth to this statement?

And that's what makes their arguments compelling because Satan would never win, deceive anybody if there was some components or components of truth to it and so he is making sadly enough some truthful statements here and or assumptions.

And so we need to make sure that we are Seventh-day Adventist Bible-believing Christians, not because mom and dad are, but because we also have studied it out and we see that the God, that the religion or the Christian Seventh-day Adventist denomination that we're involved in is actually biblical.

Christopher Hitchens, how many of you have seen him before on television, the media, or anything like that?

He is suffering from cancer currently, but very, very vitriolic against Christians, and as a matter of fact he has stated that religion is evil, it's called massacres and it's just inherently innately evil and anti-intellectual.

He says this, let me just tell you something, quote, for hundreds and thousands of years, this kind of discussion, meaning this discussion of is Christianity true, I don't believe in Christianity, and the arguments against Christianity, even this kind of discussion, he says, would have been impossible to have.

And this is a true statement, by the way.

Or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives.

Religion now comes to us in this smiley face, ingratiating way, because it's had to give so much ground and because we know so much more, but you've no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong." he's referring to the Middle Ages and the middle, Christopher Hitchens.

And when it really did believe that it had God on its side.

And so what's happening is because in the name of Christianity, a plethora of atrocities have occurred.

The atheists are using this as ammunition to say Christianity, all it leads to is killing and murder and atrocities in the name of God.

And then you have Sam Harris, and we're not going to read that little portion there, but of course he again is 1 of the leading proponents, 1 of the 4 horsemen, if you will, that claims that being, if you are a Christian, that means you don't have a high view of using your, of your intellect, and you're not being honest, intellectually honest.

And then you have Daniel Dennett, who completes the 4 Horsemen, and he is a professor at Tufts and also very vocal in his anti-Christian stances.

So some of the claims of the of the new atheists and yeah, we'll read it here.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably, and by the way, this quote, you'll find it everywhere.

He's noted, he's been popularized because of this statement.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

Jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak.

A vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic ethnic cleanser, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, bully.

Now, you don't have to know the definitions of all those words to know to get a picture that he's not seeing God as someone who's good, right?

It doesn't take the brain of Einstein to figure that out, that he sees God as an evil being, at least what the God represented in the Old Testament.

Speaking of the Canaanites and the Old Testament, And by the way, that was, hold on 1 second.

Speaking of the Canaanites and the Old Testament, 1 of the horsemen says this, pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel.

Speaking of the Old Testament, It's a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride price, pricing or purchasing of brides, as seeing women as objects, another thing that they claim, and for indiscriminate massacre.

Now the previous slide was Christopher Hitchens.

Sam Harris says this, not only is the character, now we're getting, so he's talking about the character of God, who God is, is diabolical, devilish, in other words, in the Old Testament.

But there are explicit prescriptions for how to live that are not metaphors.

In other words, what he's saying is, the readings that you have in the Old Testament, what the Old Testament says, You Christians can't work any type of Judo around it.

It's just painting a picture of God who is vindictive and wrathful.

I don't care what you say, there's nothing you can do.

There's no theological judo that you can do to rectify that.

God just comes right out, He says, and says stone people for a list of offenses so preposterous and all encompassing that the killing never stops.

By the way, in our history, Christians have used and legitimized their atrocities using the Old Testament.

And then he says this, you have to kill people for working on the Sabbath.

So are they Are they raising some real issues here?

I mean, stuff that I don't think, and I don't believe we can just shelve.

We need to confront these, because it is being hurled at Christians, these types of attacks.

So charges against God, and it runs the whole gamut from inferiority of women, that the Old Testament endorses this, slavery, a God who is jealous and self-centered, The universality of the Mosaic laws and God being arbitrary to judge anybody for a set of laws that were confined to a specific people.

And so they, of course, sees that as injustice.

Ethnocentrism, Bride pricing, the binding of Isaac, right?

That's another attack, a child sacrifice, for example.

Favoring the ethnicity of Jews over anybody and everyone else.

How in the world do you stone someone for simply picking up sticks on the Sabbath?

And by the way, as I say those very words, I'm very sure that some of you are also thinking, yeah, how in the world do we deal with this?

I know I have had those thoughts, and those are honest reflections.

And by the way, what I did in this study as I was studying the Bible, as I was studying the Spirit of Prophecy, I also went forward, went over to see what other Bible-believing scholars are thinking and how they're responding because currently in Adventism, it's sad to say that we don't have a voice that is reaching the world at large And I believe that we need, if God has blessed you with intellect and a mind to go into and delve deeper into these things and study some of these things because it is certainly needed in today's day and age.

But Paul Copin, a non-Adventist scholar, he says this, he says some of us wince when we read Dawkins and other atheists, when we read their words, not just because we find them offensive, but because if we're honest, we sometimes find ourselves thinking the same thing when we read the Old Testament.

What are we to make of texts that speak of God meting out horrific punishments on whole families like Achan and Korah, or a God who smites a man dead for touching a sacred object, or for offering the wrong kind of sacrificial fire.

How are we to understand the language of God's anger, jealousy, or vengeance alongside what we have been taught about God's love, mercy and compassion.

It goes on to say Bible believers shouldn't shove them under their holy rugs.

Meaning these Old Testament ethical challenges.

As people of the book, Christians should honestly reflect on such matters.

Unfortunately, most pastors and Christian leaders are reluctant to tackle such subjects, and the results are fairly predictable.

And by the way, what we need to do is not just have some little text that we've memorized that superficially addresses these issues, we need to go beyond that because the arguments that are being hurled at Christians are much deeper and cannot be resolved from just 1 little proof text.

If God Is Good: Why Does He Seem So Mean? (Part 2)

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much once again for leading us and guiding us by appealing to our minds as well as our hearts.

And we just pray that even though we can't resolve all the questions that are in our minds today.

At the same time, that we will formulate sufficient evidence upon which to base our faith.

And we thank you so much for leading us far, continue to lead us throughout these meetings, we pray in your name, amen.

All right, so let's go ahead and continue on.

I'm just going to go ahead and finish off by reading this quote once again, and then moving forward just to frame the context once again.

We finished off with this quote by Christopher Wright in the context of the divorce controversy, how God accommodated and sometimes had to meet human sinners where they were at, not licensing sin, but understanding and accommodating their mindset, but of course with the grand purpose of taking them higher and bringing them forward.

And we see that in the New Testament when Jesus addresses that issue.

Christopher Wright in that context also makes some broad implications upon slavery and polygamy in that same context.

He says, It seems probable that if Jesus had been asked questions about slavery or about polygamy, he would have answered similarly.

From the beginning, these things were not in God's intention, but in a fallen world of hardened hearts, they might be accommodated with limiting and mitigating regulations and with a strongly subversive critique that would eventually lead to a clear recognition of their wrongness.

So in line with this, what is sometimes stated in certain portions of the Old Testament, especially the ceremonial laws.

We know that some of those were negated after the cross.

But what is stated in a certain portion of the Old Testament was not necessarily the ideal, but perhaps plan B, C, and D.

How many of you think in your own life that God is at plan X or plan Z.

Hopefully not plan Z, because then we have to broaden the alphabet, because with God, there is always opportunity.

With God, there is always the possibility of him doing the miraculous, even turning the stubborn heart from a life of sin to 1 of righteousness through his blood.

But what is stated, obviously, is not necessarily the first option in his plan, but God is great at meeting diversions in our lives.

The best illustration I can use is a GPS.

And if we have a little motel or hotel or something, we mark that in.

Let's just go get lost and look around and drive out in nature or go out over there.

And what's awesome about GPS, it doesn't matter where you're at.

But no matter where you're at, you just hit go home.

And doesn't matter how far you've strayed, it always leads you back to your destination.

And I'm talking about a reliable GPS that is working, of course.

And that just goes to show you that God is even beyond and much better than GPS.

Because no matter where you're at, He can get you home.

We need to see it in context and that's 1 of the points that I'm making here and and it's so important that we see scripture in context And remember we spoke a little bit about the kindling of the fires earlier.

The Sabbath application was contextual, according to Ellen White in Patriarchs and Prophets page 409.

Now, you and I, based on our assumptions of truth and how we read scripture, if we don't understand the correct hermeneutic or science of interpreting Scripture, we could just pull open the Old Testament, read Kindling of Fire, and believe that we can never pick up sticks on Sabbath, right?

And so, we need to be careful that we don't, that we use our minds and our brains to seek to understand scripture in its broader setting and also its specific setting as well.

Notice what Ellen White says about the kindling of fires.

She says, during the sojourn in the wilderness, the kindling of fires upon the seventh day had been strictly prohibited.

Series

Christian Apologetics

If God Is Good: Why Does He Seem So Mean? (Part 1)

Transcript

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