Upwards Church

We’re wrapping up our series Explore God this Sunday.  One of the great questions of the series is, “Can I know God personally?”  I pray the following article from www.ExploreGod.com is helpful.

Is there a personal God whom people can know and experience? Some say yes. Learn more and decide for yourself.

Suppose you ask a friend for money—an amount to tide you over until you receive a promised paycheck. Your friend kindly obliges, and you both agree to terms. You have made what might be termed a personal loan.

What makes it personal? The loan exists between two persons: you and your friend. You know him, and he knows you. A relationship exists between the two of you. The loan provides context for some ongoing interaction between you.

In these ways, your arrangement can be called personal.

Now suppose you have a great respect for and knowledge of an historical figure—say, Martin Luther King, Jr. You’ve studied Dr. King’s writings, you’ve read books about him, and perhaps even spoken with persons who knew him. You can quote him and tell others about his life and work.

Is your relationship with Martin Luther King personal? Not quite. Why not?

You never interacted with Dr. King in the past, and it is impossible for you to do so now. Your connection with him would not be termed personal. Informed, yes. Inspirational, perhaps. But personal, no.

What Does “Personal” Mean?

Before we can wrestle with the question of whether or not God is personal, we must first understand the term itself.

We say something is personal when it involves relationship—particularly a binding, transactional, or socially acknowledged relationship. Furthermore, if something involves the actual presence of or interaction with another individual, then it is deemed personal. In this way, a personal relationship is not possible with an inanimate object, an intangible force, or an abstract idea.

For a thing to be personal, it must be particular and knowable. A teakettle is not personal; neither is a meteor shower nor “higher education.”

We may also describe something as personal if it involves our private life, our most intimate thoughts, or our emotions—something that touches us at a deep level. This definition is in play when we respond to a particularly probing question with the deflecting phrase, “That’s personal.”

The Christian Understanding of God

Of the many religions of the world, only three claim a singular, specific deity: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Each of these faiths believes that God is a being (not simply a force of nature) who can be known.

But of these religions, only Christianity proclaims a God who is relational within himself. Christians understand God as one God in three persons. The Trinity and the incarnation are exclusive to Christianity—and both are personal concepts, indeed.

The God Who Is Never Lonely

The triune God that Christians worship is three distinct persons in one being, revealed in history and in the pages of the Bible as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Because of this, God was, is, and will always be in relationship. He is never alone and never lonely. His loving overture to mankind is simply the outflowing of the love that already exists within himself, for himself!

The personal salvation that Christians experience “is reconciliation with God the Father, carried out through God the Son, in the power of God the Holy Spirit.”¹ God’s triune nature demonstrates the kind of personal relationship he longs to share with man.

The God Who Reaches Out

Christians worship a creator God who proactively enters into relationship with his created beings—a God who even refers to himself in the context of his human relationships: “I am the God of Abraham…the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” he says, identifying with the people to whom he made—and kept—great promises.²

Christians believe that God’s promises to his people demonstrate his desire for loving, personal relationships with them. He didn’t want simply to rule over them or micromanage their behavior.

He said over and over again that his desire was for them to be his people and for him to be their God.³ Such a God is “lovingly-loyal and loyally-loving to the works of His hands. He loves what He is committed to; He is committed to what He loves.”⁴

The God Who Became a Man

The crux of Christianity is this: the “good news” that God became a man to save men. Christians believe that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”⁵

What better way to relate to men than to become a man? According to the Christian belief, Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man. As a result, there is no human situation or emotion that God cannot fully understand or feel empathy toward. Jesus Christ makes God personal to man:

Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal described it this way:  “Not only do we not know God except through Jesus Christ, we do not even know ourselves except through Jesus Christ.”⁶

The God Who Pursues People

Through the ages, God’s loving overtures to mankind have compelled individual responses. Even self-professed atheists and skeptics have responded in faith to the God who lovingly pursues them.

Francis Collins, the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and current director of the National Institutes of Health, recalls his personal response to God more than thirty years ago, after reading C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity:

I struggled with that for many months, really resisting this decision, going forward, going backward. Finally, after about a year… on a beautiful afternoon hiking in the Cascade Mountains, where the remarkable beauty of the creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt “I cannot resist this another moment. This is something I have really longed for all my life without realizing it, and now I’ve got the chance to say yes.”

So I said yes. I was 27. I’ve never turned back. That was the most significant moment of my life.⁷

Personal Stories about a Personal God

Experiences like Francis Collins’s offer the strongest evidence of a personal God. Similar testimonies have come from millions of men and women over the past two thousand years who have experienced a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Those who share this experience testify that God is real and that knowing him is the adventure of a lifetime.

Ask someone who is a Christ follower  about how they came to know God. Then explore for yourself this God who knows you and wants to be known by you.

What do you think?

www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes

1. Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything(Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2010), 9.
2. The Holy Bible, New International Version ©2011, Exodus 3:6.
3. For examples, see The Holy Bible, Exodus 6:7; Leviticus 26:12; Jeremiah 7:23, 11:4, 30:22; Ezekiel 36:28.
4. David Naugle, “Developing a Biblical View of Life,” The Christian Worldview Journal, April 5, 2010.
5. The Holy Bible, John 1:14.
6. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Berwyn, PA: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910), #548, 177.
7. Francis Collins, “The Question of God: Other Voices,” PBS.org, accessed December 21, 2012.

By:  Leigh McLeroy

We’re continuing our new series Explore God!  Each campus will explore the topic, “Is Christianity Too Narrow?”   I hope you can join us!  Below is an article from www.ExploreGod.com to get us thinking on the topic.

Are all religions created equally? Can Jesus really be the only way to know God?

We all know the world is filled with a wide variety of religions. Though not all religions are the same, sometimes the similarities can be striking.

Most religions acknowledge a divine being or beings—for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call that entity God. Furthermore, people of all religious stripes tend to believe there is a barrier between God and humans.

This barrier has been identified as a variety of things—lack of belief, human finitude, a need for enlightenment, suffering, sin. But the commonality is that most religions claim that we can overcome this barrier in our search to know and experience God.

But is it possible that every religion represents a different way to the same God?

Atop the Mountain

Some picture it this way: God is at the top of a many-sided mountain. On one side is Islam. On another is Hinduism. Still another, the way of Christianity. Then Judaism, Confucianism, tribal religions . . . you get the picture. Each side presents an equally legitimate path to the same destination.

In contrast to this optimistic image, many Christians claim that the only true and valid way to God is through Jesus—a claim often considered intolerant and narrow-minded.

So which is it? Do all religions lead to the same place? Or is Jesus truly the only way to God?

Exclusive Claims about What’s at the Peak

Unfortunately, the God-at-the-top-of-the-mountain picture is not as simple as it sounds. For starters, many religions are exclusive in their definitions of who the God atop the mountain peak is.

Some forms of Buddhism and Confucianism do not conceive that a God exists at all. Hindus, on the other hand, believe in many diverse gods. Different still are Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who claim there is only one true God.

With such fundamental differences, not every religion can be right. Either God exists, or he does not. Either there are many gods, or there is just one. Only one of these viewpoints corresponds to reality; the answer cannot be “all of the above.”

In other words, a more accurate picture of religious perceptions of God would be a vast mountain range with countless different peaks.

Exclusive Claims about the Path

A second problem is that religions are also exclusive when it comes to how people make their way up the mountain to God. The journeys to the peak are as diverse as the peaks themselves.

Even if we limit ourselves to the three dominant monotheistic religions—Christianity,Judaism, and Islam—their pathways to God are conflicting.

For Muslims, knowing God must come through the prophet Muhammad and his sacred writings in the Qur’an. But Jews and Christians do not regard Muhammad as God’s spokesperson.

For observant Jews, knowing God comes through keeping his commandments in the Torah and identifying with his chosen people. But while Christians and Muslims respect the Jewish heritage of their faiths, they both believe that Judaism is incomplete. For them, the New Testament and Qur’an respectively teach a more complete way to God.

For Christians, knowing God comes through faith in Jesus as the Messiah and God’s son, and belief in his death and resurrection. But Jews reject the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah, and Muslims do not believe Jesus was the Son of God.¹

Add onto this the countless number of other religious ideas and the result is a confusing mess of largely incompatible claims and creeds.

Exclusive Claims about Hiking Practices

A third problem comes from each religion’s specific teachings about God’s will for our lives. Were we to enumerate all the practices and behaviors every religion both encourages and prohibits, we would find another lengthy list of irreconcilable elements.

Consider just one example: If there is a God at the top of the mountain, why would he forbid certain practices (like drinking alcohol or worshiping images) for some people but allow them among others?

The only way to make sense of these conflicting teachings is to conceive of God as inconsistent (at the very least), if not schizophrenic. Few would say this is a God worth seeking.

Exclusive Claims of the Guidebooks

Then there is the fact that most religions have their own particular—and often exclusive—religious texts. When it comes to Christianity, the biggest hindrances to a universalistic mind-set—the perspective that all religions lead to the same place—are the exclusive claims of the Bible.

The New Testament writers teach that humans are separated from God by their sinful nature. When Jesus died on the cross, he took on the sins of humanity through his sacrifice. He then offered the forgiveness of sins to all who trust in him.

The Bible also claims that Jesus rose from the dead, fully conquering sin and death for all who would follow him. The apostle Paul described it this way: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.”²

The implications of these New Testament claims are far-reaching: there is only one God; there is only one way to be restored to God; that way is through Jesus and his death for our sins; the way was made complete when Jesus rose from the grave.

If Jesus did not die for our sins and rise from the grave, then the Christian faith is a delusion. It may give people a purpose in life (albeit a misguided one), but it does not lead to God. But if the Bible is correct and the claims it makes are true, then all other religious paths to God lead away from the one true path.

To put it another way, if there are other paths to God, then Jesus’ life and death were unnecessary and his teaching about the need to believe in him was false.

Your Hike

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what you believe and whether or not you accept the Bible’s teaching. Perhaps you have good reasons for embracing another belief system and rejecting the Bible’s account about Jesus.

No matter what, to have confidence in our beliefs, they must be rational and coherent. And that begins by dispensing with the notion that exclusive religious claims simply offer different paths to the same God.

What do you think?

www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes

1. Though Muslims and Christians both believe many of the same things about Jesus, Muslims reject the divinity of Jesus. Muslims believe Jesus to have been merely a prophet, not the actual son of God. For more on this, see “Islamic Views of Other Faiths,” Religion Facts,http://www.religionfacts.com/islam/beliefs/other.htm.
2. The Holy Bible, New International Version © 2011, 1 Timothy 2:5-6a.

Written by Norton Herbst

We’re continuing our series Explore God!  Each campus will explore the topic, “Is the Bible Reliable?”   I hope you can join us!  Below is an article from www.ExploreGod.com to get us thinking on the topic.

What happened to give us the Bible we have today? What is its history?

Recent books, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, have proposed that those who believe the Bible are victims of an elaborate cover-up about its true creation and character.¹ Should anyone have confidence in the historical and ostensibly human process that culminated in this collection of books called the Bible?

The history of the formation of the best-selling book of all time is a fascinating story that covers not just centuries but millennia.

Who Wrote the Old Testament

The thirty-nine books of today’s Old Testament were composed over a period of about one thousand years by as many as forty different authors. Yet they tell one complete, unified story: the history of the Israelites, God’s chosen people.

Ancient writers did not share our modern preoccupation with detailed documentation. Yet the literary nature of these books demonstrates that they were composed by people with remarkable skills. In addition, the people, places, and periods they chronicle are often attested by other reliable ancient sources from history and archaeology.

Who Wrote the New Testament

Soon after the crucifixion and reported resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, around 60–90 CE, several written accounts of his life and ministry (some of which became known as the gospels) began to circulate. These were composed by some of his first followers.

But decades earlier, a Jewish scholar named Saul, who had persecuted Jesus’ followers, had come to believe that Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah (at this point Saul became known as Paul). From approximately 40 to 60 CE, he wrote many letters to early Christian churches in order to teach them, encourage them, and address specific problems they were facing. Several of these letters are included in the New Testament.²

The remaining New Testament books were written in the second half of the first century CE.³ Internal and extrabiblical evidence suggests they were written by Jesus’ disciples Peter and John and other well-known followers such as James and Jude.

Authorship and dating debates about New Testament books are ongoing. Yet the goal of each New Testament book remains to explain and hand down the teachings of Jesus and his first followers.

The Preservation of the Bible

Professor Bart D. Ehrman has said, “Even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words.”⁴ Many have claimed that centuries of translation and editing may have affected the content, leaving us with something that barely resembles the original writings. So how were the books of the Bible preserved? How could we possibly know what the original text said?

The books that comprise the Old Testament were carefully copied by hand over the centuries. There are some variations in the available manuscripts, but these involve mostly minor details.

Let’s take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. Written and copied during the second century BCE and discovered in 1947 CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls are invaluable witnesses to the manuscript history of the Old Testament. Specifically, let’s examine the two copies of the book of Isaiah that were included in the scrolls.

Each copy of Isaiah was almost one thousand years older than the previously known oldest copy. Amazingly—if not miraculously—the more modern text was 95 percent word-for-word identical to the copies included with the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the disparities introduced in that other 5 percent are spelling variations and obvious slips of the pen. When compared, these copies demonstrate the diligence of the scribes in preserving the wording of the Bible.

The hand-copying method was utilized in the preservation of the New Testament as well.⁵ Again, there are variations and seeming contradictions in some manuscripts, but there is substantial agreement in the essentials. New Testament Greek text scholar Bruce Metzger has concluded, “Even in incidental details one observes the faithfulness of scribes.”⁶

The Books of the Bible

But where did we even get the books of the Bible in the first place? Jews and early Christians believed these books to be the result of God guiding the human authors and editors. A fundamental difference between the Bible and the sacred literature of most other major religions is the claim that the Bible was a cooperative creation between God and multiple human authors.

However, it’s a fair question to ask how human councils in the early church could authoritatively decide which books belong in the Bible. The biblical canon is the recognized and official list of Scriptures believed to be the product of divine revelation.¹² A scholarly consensus is that the current twenty-seven books of the New Testament were already in use by the Christian Church as early as 150 CE.

While an official decision regarding the canon came later, the majority of churches operated with a relatively fixed canon from the second century CE onward.

The Translation of the Bible

Over the past two thousand years, translation into numerous languages around the world has characterized the Bible’s legacy. A Greek version of the Hebrew Bible was prepared in lengthy and uneven stages starting around 250 BCE. Originally created for Greek-speaking Jews living in Egypt, this Greek version, known as the Septuagint, became the “Scripture” used by the early Christians.⁷

As Christianity gained traction, the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—was translated into various other languages. The first English translation was created in the fourteenth century.

Though each version is created with much care, preparation, and research, no translation is able to retain perfectly the meaning of the original text. Christians are therefore encouraged to select a Bible with care. It is also recommended that Bible readers use more than one translation in their study in order to get a more rounded presentation of biblical interpretation.⁸

Relevance of the Bible’s History

The Bible’s content alone testifies to its character as a unique book, and its historical development supports this characterization. Of course, legitimate questions may indeed be raised about the nature of the Bible. Certain Bible passages continue to stump even the greatest scholars. And even for faithful Christians, it remains a mystery how God could speak his Word through fallible people.

However, the Bible’s own history and its enduring influence on the world compels us to take a closer look at its message. Its impact demands its content not be ignored.

What do you think?

www.RidgeFellowship.com

Footnotes

1. For further examples, see Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Bart D. Ehrman’s The Judas Gospel and Whose Word Is It? See also the works by Bart D. Ehrman cited below.

2. David B. Capes et al., Rediscovering Paul (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007).

3. Some scholars argue that a few of the New Testament books, like 2 Peter and 1 Timothy, were written in the early decades of the second century CE. See, for example, Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Others, however, disagree and date all New Testament books to the first century.

4. Bart D. Ehrman, Whose Word Is It? (London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 211.

5. With the invention of the printing press around 1450 CE, handwritten manuscripts eventually became obsolete.

6. Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 206.

7. The word “Scripture” is a direct reference to the Old Testament books. Christians believe that the biblical writings (both Old and New Testaments) were ultimately sourced in God’s work of revelation, although he used free human agents. Verses such as 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:21 suggest that the Bible was not “dictated” by God but that the authors were directed by his Spirit, writing from their own God-given personalities. While the biblical text is said to be “inspired,” this is never said of the authors.

8. See Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss, How to Choose a Translation for All It’s Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).

By:  Creig Marlowe, Ph.D.