APOLOGETICS

The Question of Sin

The one thing a secular worldview can never provide is an answer to guilt and sin. Nor can it form the basis for reconciliation.

In fact, nothing apart from Judeo-Christian revelation can provide a basis for restoring a community that has been torn apart by sin — or offer hope of forgiveness and restoration to those who are burdened by sin. I have discovered while preaching in Hindu and Buddhist cultures that whenever I talk about forgiveness and a new life in Christ, eyes just bulge. This is something people haven't heard.

I remember in the Trevandrum prison in India, a thousand inmates looked up at me — outcasts, doomed to live with their sin for the rest of their lives, and then to have done to them in the next life what they did to someone in this life, which simply perpetuates evil. I told them they could be forgiven, that Christ died on the cross for their sins. The response was absolutely staggering.

I also remember the time I was in Japan, and met with a professor of comparative religion at the University of Yokohama. He was a Buddhist, of course, and had studied Born Again and used it as a textbook in his class on the Christian religion. He had asked to meet with me. We had a great conversation. I talked about forgiveness in the prisons and asked him how Buddhists could provide for forgiveness since there was no redemption, no Savior; no one had died for their sins. He said they had a new form of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism, where they can provide a level of forgiveness in the next life.

Buddhism, of course, is infinitely flexible; there is no one true God. There are simply stages of consciousness, and so to solve a dilemma — my question was how do you preach Buddhism in a prison — they simply invent a new sect or strain of belief to accommodate a particular need. It's almost amusing, but it also shows how bankrupt the system is.

Most secular thought today is parallel to Buddhism. It's really the same thing. We don't have a God in the secular world today, so we simply develop states of consciousness. We get in touch with our own feelings. We seek a higher state of consciousness or peace with nature.

How do you deal with the question of sin once you're aware of it? You can develop some better way to get in touch with your feelings and improve your self-esteem, but it won't solve the problem because the consequences of that guilt are there. You can't get rid of them. You can go to psychologists and they can try to help you get rid of the repressed memories and do all sorts of therapeutic gymnastics, but they can't get to the heart of the problem.

Only Christianity provides for that forgiveness and the subsequent healing that can take place in the individual's life and in the community. Kim Phuc, the little Vietnamese girl who became famous through a photograph showing her running naked after being burned by napalm, demonstrates this. If out of the horrors of war a young girl hideously burned can forgive those who dropped the bombs on her, then there is hope that the cycle of evil can be broken, guilt can be released, and people can be freed from bondage. This really is overcoming evil with good (Romans 12:21). There is no other way. Every secular system is doomed, as is Buddhism, as is Hinduism, as is Islam. It is only Jews and Christians who have a way out, and only the Christian has a way out by the grace of God.

This is an incredibly important and powerful apologetic.

Thank God for Peter Singer

I gave a lecture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary titled "Thank God for Peter Singer." The thesis is that when you want to make an apologetic argument, the best thing you can do is to force your adversaries to embrace the logical conclusion of their own ideas.

I mentioned a little story about my recent discussion with an agnostic, which illustrates my point. I forced this man to take his statement that all religions are alike, and reconcile it with the exclusive truth claims of Christianity. I said all religions can't be alike; they can't all lead to the same place because Christianity specifically denies that. So if all religions are equally true, then Christianity's truth nullifies the other religions.

I then got into a discussion of the law of noncontradiction, and drove him into a corner where he eventually had no choice but to say, "I have to admit that some things are extra natural." He wouldn't agree to supernatural, but he did have to conclude extra, at which point I said, "Precisely." He could not defend a naturalistic explanation for his own proposition.

That's the most effective apologetic there is.

The Question of God

I am two-thirds of the way through Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God, which contrasts the teachings of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. It is filled with wonderful apologetics.

For example, it's extremely useful to understand the role of the superego in terms of conscience in Freud's analysis. Freud has substituted the superego for God; if your conscience is being informed, it is being informed by the superego. Well, superego is just a made-up name. There's no more scientific validity to that than there is in saying God speaks to you.

Nicholi's comparison of Freud's view on natural law and C. S. Lewis's was also brilliantly done. Even though you're getting an objective presentation of both viewpoints, readers will come away with a realization that Lewis's position is vastly superior, because we know within ourselves what is right or wrong. Everybody does. So has the superego been taught, character passed on from our earthly father, father to son? If so, how did the first father come to know what is right and wrong? He didn't have any father to pass anything on to him.

Freud's arguments just blow away in the breeze as you read this book. It's absolutely brilliant.

The Question of God is Comparative Worldview 101, built around two great minds. Armand also weaves the gospel in, telling the story of Lewis's transformation, and points out that Freud actually admired religious people.

Armand finds inconsistencies in Freud's statements, though he doesn't say that. For instance, Freud talks about the importance of moral law as if there were a moral law.

This is apologetics in its most important form.

Idolatry Alongside

While Moses is up on the mountain for forty days talking to the Lord and receiving the Ten Commandments, the people below start grumbling. Gathering around Aaron, they said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us." And then, dismissively, they add, "As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him" (Exodus 32:1).

Notice how, in appealing to Aaron, the Israelites put down Moses as his competitor. In effect they say, "We don't know where this guy's gone. He's up mountain climbing, and we're trying to get on our way here and be delivered."

Aaron, in turn, told them to take off their gold earrings. He melted down the gold, 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' " (Exodus 32:4).

But note what it says in verse 5: "When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, 'Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.' "

Theologian Cornelius Plantinga says this is the classic example of "idolatry alongside."

We tend to think of idolatry as worshiping something other than God. But here we have a scene of two altars, one the golden calf, and the other the altar to God, side by side, and you could take your pick. But people wouldn't take their pick, of course; they worshiped both. It's sort of like hedging your bets, I suppose, or having your cake and eating it too. Because it means at one level you can worship God and at another level you can worship mammon.

And this is what all of us do.

Yes, we worship the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul — but not exclusively. We also worship a lot of other things in life, including our reputation, our money, our family, and our dreams for our kids. None of these things are bad in and of themselves. But the reality is that, taken too far, it's "idolatry alongside."

Luther also made this point. He argued that idolatry wasn't simply worshiping something other than God; it was worshiping something alongside God, and this is much more typical of the human condition.

Plantinga offers an interesting parallel. Idolatry and adultery go alongside each other in the Bible. Think about a middle-aged, married man who starts an affair with another woman. It isn't that he doesn't love the other woman: he does. It's that he tries to love both his wife and the other woman. This is a direct parallel with what people do with idolatry.

Of course, as the man discovers, you can't continue to love both unless you live a dual life, and after a while, that is completely destructive, as I've seen in the lives of so many people. So you ultimately have to make a choice: Which one do you love more?

The problem with adultery is that when you make the choice to commit it, you break your covenant with God in the first relationship; you have made the decision to worship something else. So there is a parallel between adultery and idolatry.

This is a very sobering, jolting understanding of idolatry. Throw into the mix here Calvin's belief that we are incorrigibly religious — that is, we are made in such a way that we cannot avoid worshiping something or someone. The reason we can't, I believe, is that we're made in the image of God. We know we have not created ourselves; therefore, there is a Creator, or some god, small "g" or big "g," that we are driven to worship. We can't be at peace until we do.

With adultery, people are forced to face the compartmentalization of their lives; they know they are living a lie.

But with "idolatry alongside," they're not. Many of us go blissfully through life, worshiping both God and something else — a basic flaw in Christian discipleship.

Getting back to Moses and Aaron, there's a humorous scene later in Exodus 32, when Moses comes down from the mountain and sees what the Israelites have been up to in his absence. He's furious! He smashes the tablets, burns the golden calf, and says to Aaron, "What did these people do to you that you led them into such great sin?" (Exodus 32:21).

Aaron's answer is absolutely classic. "Do not be angry, my Lord. ... You know how prone these people are to evil" (v. 22). (Notice how he shifts the blame onto the people.)

Then he repeats what the people said to him, and explains that he told them to take off their gold jewelry and throw it in the fire. He then says, "And out came this calf!" (v. 24), as if they had simply thrown the gold on the fire and presto! Out came a calf.

So here's Aaron, lying to Moses, who has just been with God.

The ancient Israelites — like us — were incorrigible. And of course, the Lord brought great judgment upon them for their idolatry.

The point is, we're going to worship something, so if we don't worship the one true God, we'll start worshiping nature, ourselves, money, or something else. But we will worship something.

Something to Cling To

During my devotions today I started trying to imagine God and found it impossible to do so. You can only think of Him as the all-powerful, omniscient Creator. But you can't imagine what He looks like.

God is outside of time and space. He is therefore beyond human comprehension. This is terribly scary when you think about it, because when we die we're going somewhere. Heaven is described to us figuratively in Scripture, but with our finite minds, we have no way of comprehending what it will be like, what we will be conscious of, what we'll remember from the past, or what we'll know. But we do know we'll be in a different dimension, which is a very awesome thought. It's a little bit like the film The Truman Show, where the character named Truman discovers he's been living on a stage all his life, and when he walks through a door in the sky, he's finally into reality.

For us, heavenly reality is going to be even more difficult to comprehend because it is very likely going to be totally unlike any human experience, so we'll have nothing to gauge it by. There is nothing, as we sit and contemplate now, that we can fix our minds upon.

We don't know (apart from Christ, of course) whether we'll be in a state of continual bliss or continuous pain. We don't know whether we'll be ascending into the clouds, with the glorious images that conjures up, or descending into the abyss. No amount of human reason can get us over this obstacle, this lack of comprehension.

So in one sense we're utterly helpless, alone in the cosmos with no idea of where we're going to land, what it will be like, what our experiences will be, or what God will be like. We can, as I believe, know intellectually that there is a God — that creation is inexplicable any other way. We can know God by experiencing Him in our lives, and we can sense and see His power (as we read in Romans 1 and 2), but we can't grasp it with our finite minds. This creates a terrible sense of alienation and frustration, particularly as you get older and realize that the day of judgment, when you leave this earth and your soul goes somewhere else, is humanly unfathomable.

So what can we cling to? The human Jesus.

I think this is one of the many reasons that God sent His only begotten Son to earth: So that we could have Someone who would lead us, who was going ahead of us to prepare the way. Someone we would know and be able to identify with in some ways. Someone who experienced what we have experienced and who has gone on before us.

So just when your spiritual life seems bleakest, when you're grasping, struggling, clawing for some understanding of God and what lies beyond in eternity, and you come to the point of utter frustration, picture Jesus — warm and friendly, cooking fish with His disciples by the lakeside, walking with them down the paths, and sitting around the table.

This is the context in which we think of Jesus. And we suddenly have something to cling to, which is a picture of what lies beyond. Without Christ, we would be like Charlie Chaplin, who, when he was told no life had been discovered in the universe, said, "I feel lonely."

The more intimate we are with Jesus, the more assured we are of what lies ahead. The closer I fellowship with Him, the stronger my assurance and comfort regarding the future. Without that relationship with Jesus, one would approach the end of one's life with enormous trepidation.

Following this realization, I had a long conversation with Bill Bright, who is dying and knows it. He has probably a matter of months to live, but is in the most joyous state he has ever been in. He told me that this year, since he learned he did not have long to live, has been the most productive one of his life. He has produced a series of books, won an award for one of them, and is presently working on many other books and pamphlets.

Bill told me excitedly about the book he has almost finished. It is on Jesus — his intimate, personal relationship with Jesus, and why it is so important to share Him with others. How Jesus has become so close to him in his last months on earth. Bill told me that, as he has approached death, he has felt a deepening appreciation of the person of Jesus. And he's had a deepening desire to share with others that intimate relationship with Christ.

The Christian life indeed starts with Jesus and ends with Him. He is the Alpha and Omega. Without Him, the physical Jesus, we would have nothing but the promises written in a book. We would be traveling into some distant place or state of being beyond human comprehension, and we would be traveling alone. Even if we believed God's promises fully as related in the Scriptures, it would still be bone-chilling. But we have the ultimate comfort of knowing that we'll be taken by the hand of the Jesus we know and can understand and experience.