Why the God of this Scripture?

In yesterday's post I briefly referenced a student's very good question which could be summed up thusly: how can anyone know if the God of the Bible is the real God?

There are literally thousands of different religions throughout history all over the globe. All of them claim to have inside knowledge about a deity (or deities) or insight into the truth about human existence and human flourishing. Why this Scripture over and above any other? Why the Christian "take" on God over any other of the buffet of options out there?

And why choose at all given that we might like a little bit of this and a little bit of that--and given that there are certainly things in Christianity that offend our modern (or post-modern) sensibilities?

I think, like most things in Christianity, the answer to this question lies in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus made some fairly audacious claims. Even if you were to quibble with some of the specifics of the reliability of the four accounts of Jesus' life, there's simply no doubt that he taught and did some extraordinary things.

Among the crazy things he taught in conjunction with what he did was at least some claim of representing God, acting on his behalf, and perhaps even identifying himself with God. The gospel writer John records him as saying, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father."

And there's little doubt that he was crucified by the Roman authorities under charges that were trumped up by the Jewish religious elite.

Three days later, everyone who knew him says that he was raised from the dead. And nearly all of them died nasty, brutish deaths rather than recant that claim. And from a small Jewish splinter group led by an uneducated fisherman has come 2,000 years of church history and the most sweeping, global faith tradition the world has ever known.

And one of the guys who met the resurrected Jesus used an interesting and important word in describing Jesus' resurrection: vindication (see 1 Timothy 3). God "vindicated" him by the Spirit--that is, through the resurrection of Jesus, God declared all that Jesus said not only about himself but also the God he claimed to bear witness to, was true.

God put his seal of approval, his stamp of endorsement on the person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus by raising him up from the dead. No other religion even claims this. Only Christianity claims that the dude who started this thing died once but isn't dead any more.

If God raised Jesus from the dead, then God has vindicated him once and for all as the true messenger sent from the true God and all of us must bow before him, his work, and his message about who God is. God himself has declared in this raising-up that this one named Jesus has represented him rightly.

If God hasn't raised Jesus from the dead, this whole thing is the largest and most colossal sham the world has ever known.

All the evidence actually points to the former. But I gladly confess to being extremely biased.

Big Universe and Random Chance

I got an e-mail several weeks back from a student who had engaged in a discussion with an atheist who argued for random chance. Here's a bit of her email about this conversation:

God didn't create us but just based on sheer numbers this sort of thing (Earth, humans) was bound to happen sooner or later. They supported this idea by asking me if God has anything to do with the rest of the universe. Though there may be life out there somewhere else (who knows) there certainly isn't any on the planets in our galaxy. So what does God do? Does He just take care of this Earth and us humans? Why didn't He create other people to occupy Himself with? The planets don't really need His control since they're just floating around out there. Why just us?

What about the rest of the universe? What's the point of it?

I thought that this was an interesting question, here was my feeble attempt at a response:

C.S. Lewis actually tackles this somewhere when he asks a question in response to the "huge universe" question. Would the atheist prefer a small universe where nothing else existed but our galaxy? Would that actually change anything about God, prove or disprove his existence, or help us to understand our purpose any better? In some ways I think that this helps to put the question in its proper place. There's no universe/created order that would definitely/definitively prove or dis-prove anything about God or his existence.

Given that there is a huge, created universe, I think that there's a couple responses:

1. Random change explaining all of this is still a long, long, long shot. That something like humanity was bound to happen somewhere eventually is just not mathematically sound reasoning. That's like saying if I leave my office a complete disaster that eventually it's bound to tidy itself up somehow if I just leave it alone long enough. Multiply my office by a couple billion, still not a good chance that any of those billion offices are going to organize themselves into something intelligible. There's no governing principle or energy or intelligence to organize my office apart from something entering into the raw material and helping to make it happen.

2. I think that Scripture talks about creation pointing to God's character again and again...and I think that this is at least in part why the cosmos is so big; why the details are so infinitely incredible. Go to your local swamp and take a small sample and it's teeming with life. Bust out a map of the universe and the stars and black holes and how big and massive all of it is--all of this is meant to scream out to us that God exists, that there's design here, that it's been done on purpose. God is infinite. It's like he's taken a cheese-slicer and run it across his character: we get something of the variety and diversity of his creative power, just a taste, but we don't get the infinite-ness of his depth--it decomposes, things die, it doesn't last forever. I would argue that the vastness of all of this and the fact that it all hangs together at all is proof in the opposite direction from your atheist friend: random-ness just can't possibly account for all of it.

3. God has clearly ordered some things so that they run to some extent on their own--he creates the laws of physics and gravity and such. But those things are held together in him. Colossians 1 talks about all things holding together/consisting in Jesus. I think of it like all the cosmos
being gathered up in a tennis ball and that ball fully submerged in an infinite bowl of water. If at any point that ball ceased to be under water, it would simply cease to exist. Every moment, every breath, all of it is being propped up by Jesus, the Living Word through whom all things were created and in whom all things hold together.

4. Who knows about life on other planets and whether or not they are fallen and whether or not God has acted in a similar way as he has here on earth? Perhaps one day we will meet more of God's creation and discover that they, too, have a story of redemption, of a God who comes to visit them and to make things right...and of course the atheists will find ways to explain
that away as well...