The problem with the God question

I Tim 4: 1–5

Rev Peter R Green, Sunday morning 3 February 2008

IN AUSTRALIA today, a large and vocal minority fears and hates any talk of God. Every day it seem there are anti-Christianity rants in the internet blogs. What has gone wrong?

Some of us remember back to the Billy Graham crusades in the 1950s and 1960s. There was great excitement. Even people like John Laws spoke positively about his efforts. It was a time when even small churches packed, extra seats down the aisles, to accommodate crowds coming to hear the gospel. Sunday nights people packed the footpath outside the Fairfield Salvation Army hall, trying to get in.

Have things improved for the churches since those days? Of course, we haven’t stood still. Many positive things have been achieved since tnen. But where do people crowd in to churches today? What changed?

Many people do seem afraid of talk about God. To be effective in reaching to our generation, we must be understand what might have led to their fear, anger and rejection of the gospel, and think about our responses.

Here are some of the things I had to overcome when I was young.

There were the angry, threatening nuns in the school next door to my grandparents’ place.

Sexual abuse scandals have rocked the Catholic Church, but it happens everywhere. A Baptist,woman in Sydney was recently found guilty of sexually abusing a girl she taught at school and led in a Youth Group.

And think about the arguments going on between the Creation Science people and scientists. Science does not disprove God: it is not really about religious questions.

And religion can’t fully answer scientific questions, either. Both have their own place.

But aggressive Christians in this area just make Christians seem stupid. We have to know what we are talking about when we get involved in issues, or we will not get a hearing for the things we do understand.

Watch out, that we don’t drive wedges into our society and stop people from hearing each other!

Things are harder now, too. It is never easy for anyone to change their mind about God and Christ, but there have been eras when certain factors have made it a little easier.

The Anglican minister in the village where my great grandfather, Sam Taylor, was born was cruel and arrogant. People didn’t like him. If you got in his way, he would strike you with his riding crop. Sam Taylor reached Australia wanting nothing to do with the church.

But he knew the Bible, because people did in those times.

He was in his room in a hotel on the goldfields, and the Methodists came and preached on the hotel verandah. Sam Taylor was listening in his room, and he was immediately converted. He didn’t like the church, but he heard, and he recognised the truth about Jesus, and he surrendered to him right there.

Who understands in our day? Who has been taught? A generation has learned that all religions are the same, and you can mash together everything you hear about God from every different religion.

It just leads to confusion.

Paul says,

Unless the trumpet gives a clear sound, who will prepare for battle?

Is God the God of love that Christians proclaim, or the God of vengeance that we sometimes see in the Old Testament, or the aloof and distant Allah of the suicide bombers?

Think of how confusion impacts on people’s views of God! Is it any wonder that they dismiss the whole affair, that they accuse religion of causing confusion and wars?

Historically, religion is not the cause of most wars. They are mostly political and economic.

Think of the major wars since 1800. There were about 14 wars, from the Napoleonic Wars to the current mess in the Sudan. Nine were strictly political and economic, two were mainly political and economic, but had some religious aspects, and the other three could be described as religious wars. That’s not exactly religion as the main cause of war!

But start a lie, and if people want to believe that lie, it spreads freely. As Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, said, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

So our own experiences reveal many of the roots of today’s rebellion against religion of all kinds. Have you been hurt? Did you doubt that God truly cared? Were you scarred by religious people and wondered if there can be any truth in an idea represented by such people? Have you heard confusing messages and wondered if anyone could sort truth from error?

And how far do those incidents still influence you today?

The fact is that the Bible warns us to expect troubles, the kinds of things which will put many off the gospel of Christ.

In I Timothy 4: 1 – 5, we read,

^4:1 The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. ² Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. ³ They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. ⁴ For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, ⁵ because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

Paul clearly expects Timothy to be in a battle — not in a human war, but in a struggle to win hearts and minds and to overcome the oozing wound which will afflict both our society and the church as an institution within our society.

You can see what kinds of problem Paul expected to show up in the final days of this age.

There are essentially three key aspects to this time of trouble. There is rejection of truth, there is radical self–interest, and there is pursuit of falsehood.

The Bible tells us that these things are evidence of the growing influence of “bad religion”.

People will not put up with sound doctrine. Paul is not talking about sincere questioning here. He doesn’t set the church up as a harsh inquisitor, weeding out false teachings, demanding adherence to a standard. He looks at the heart. People reject sound doctrine when it challenges them and demands a change in attitudes and behaviour.

I once worked with a two chaps who were living with their girlfriends. When we were all discussing life over coffee, the topic of living together outside marriage came up.

My friend, Laurie, knew that I thought it would have been wise if he had waited, but he knew that I was not condemning him.

One day the other chap joined the conversation, and someone asked me what I thought. I didn’t even manage to answer. This other fellow angrily flew into me. He didn’t want to hear what I had to say, not at all!

Laurie turned to him.

“I know that Peter does not agree with the fact that Jill and I are living together, but he has never judged me for it, and I know he thinks the way he does because he wants the best for Jill and me. You don't want to hear, because you just exploit girls. You use them, make promises to them, and then you cast them off! You will end your life bitter and unhappy, and you would do well to listen to what Peter has to say!”

You can see in that other fellow exactly what Paul means. People hate good teachings, because they do not want to have to act on them.

And that is what radical self–interest is about. Each one looks after himself.

Laurie told me a story about hell. He said, “In hell, there is a big pot of delicious stew cooking, and everyone there has a long spoon to get out as much as they want. But they can’t bend their elbows, so they can’t get the spoon to their mouths. The result is that they stand around the pot and starve. If they would serve each other, they would all have plenty.”

I think he was onto a truth there.

People do look for theories of behaviour which do not challenge their lifestyle choices. In fact, we all do to an extent, and we all need constantly to review our ideas and attitudes.

People look for some theory, some teaching, which says, “When most people do what you are doing, it is wrong, but you are a special case.”

And so it goes on. No one wants to look really thoughtless and self–centred. But the more lee–way, the happier we all are. Paul knew that. And he warned about it.

And these are not just trends in our world. What happens out there eventually sneaks in here as well. Let’s be alert to trends in our world so that can’t creep in among us.

One outcome of the current trend is the negative ways in which religious people are portrayed. We have fiction like the current film, The Golden Compass, where the villains are a parody of the worst features of organised religion gone bad. But even in ordinary dramas, ministers and other identifiably religious figures are either weak and incompetent or thin, angry, driven people with no compassion.

Even in real life, you get the news item with a sound grab from some Bishop who might have said, “This is a difficult question, and we have to consider the genuine needs and hopes of the people involved, but you can’t just rush in and do this kind of thing when the Bible says...” and he quotes whatever the Bible says. But the sound grab only has him saying, “You can’t just rush in and do this kind of thing when the Bible says...” The genuine compassion is left right out of the picture.

You can hardly call it fair.

However, religion can truly be a very negative thing. Many people react against all faith because of the false religion they have seen. I was pushing it a bit to talk about the three “Rs” of religion, but, in many cases, religion can be described as rules–bound, ritualistic and ruminative.

Religion is the beliefs and behaviour systems of people who do not have a central place for Jesus. So, in verses 1 - 8 again, we see the things people substitute for a real relationship with God.

Bad religion is built on rules, like forbidding marriage, or specifying whom you can and can’t marry, or like what you can and can’t eat. Cults built around such things are very common.

Many of these same matters are tied into rituals. Marriage, of course, involves a lot of ritual. Damaged religion nearly always binds strong rules to detailed rituals, because rituals reinforce the desired behaviour.

However, there is also often a rumination aspect, where people “chew over” certain thoughts or feelings, looking for God inside themselves. And that is where these false teachings come from. As Paul says,

...in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.

We must discourage dead–end efforts to find God!

If the common methods people use to find God won’t work, what other options are there?

The Evangelical answer is that we must have a revelation of God.

However, the three major world religions with their own book — Buddhism, Islam and Christianity — each have very different ideas of revelation.

Buddhism is actually agnostic about whether there is a God or not, which leaves us with the answers of Islam or Christianity. Islam refers back to The Qur’an, written around 650 – 700AD, and Christianity refers back to the Bible, written between several centuries before Christ to around 100 AD.

The Muslims claim that their book is the only trustworthy word from God for today, and they argue that it is more recent than the Bible, so it has to be the final word from God.

On the other hand, it tells versions of stories also found in the Bible, but certainly quite different from what the Bible says, and its view of God is substantially different from the way God is revealed in the Bible. One has to be wrong.

We Christians also claim that our book is the only trustworthy word from God for today. We can point to a continuity between the Old and the New Testaments, and talk about fulfilled prophesies. We can say that our book is much closer to the events it records, and, in some cases, has clear historical backing.

But, of course, we don’t have historical or archaeological back up for quite a lot, and all we can do with much of what we believe is to take it on faith. We argue that, if parts of it are found to be reliable, it is probably true of the parts we can’t verify.

The Qu’ran appeals to its own authority. It says, “You must believe me because I am what you must believe.”

The Bible says, “Look at the evidence and make up your mind.”

Both books claim an historical basis. Either one is right and one wrong, or both are wrong.

Everyone must make up his or her mind.

The Bible calls on its readers to consider the evidence and make up their minds.

Come now, let us reason together...

says God.

 Paul writes,

If Christ is not risen, your faith is empty and you are still in your sins.

We need to think over the evidence. Don’t leave our brains outside the church!

In I Timothy 4: 9, 10, we read, 

⁹ This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance ¹⁰ (and for this we labour and strive), that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, and especially of those who believe.

Isn’t it simple? The God we proclaim as Christians is the living God, known most fully through Jesus our Lord.

The message is so simple: this same God may be the judge, may be the Lord of Armies, may be the supreme Creator, but, above all, he is the one who, through Christ, saves people of all kinds and conditions.

And the way he does this is so straightforward: it is by faith: by believing enough to act in obedience.

So when Paul encourages Timothy live as an example to others, it is not so that he will earn his salvation, but it is so that others will be led in right paths and be saved.

To sum up, we do live in a world where there is a lot of negativity about God, the Bible and Christian belief. But there are reasons, and we can live and act in ways that minimise the negativity, and encourage people through our example to know the living God and be saved. Let’s aim to do so!  AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)