QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Last Sunday I had our congregation submit questions that they wanted answered. Here are my written responses.

How can God allow a good young person to die?

A lot of people have a problem with the idea of suffering. There are some that say if God is all good and God is all powerful, why would He allow evil and suffering into the world? They go on to conclude that either God is not all good, or He is not all powerful, or there is no God at all.

I would like to assure that we have a God that is all good and all powerful. Why He allows suffering in the world I addressed to some degree in our sermon series What Happens when you Die? If you missed it or want to look at it again they should be on the website or you can go to my Blog. The address is in the bulletin.

However, this is a bit of a tangent … let’s look at the question “Why does God allow good young people to die?”  I don’t know why good decent people have to suffer. I don’t know why infants have to die when they have parents and grandparents who love them so. I don’t know why there is cancer. I don’t why there has to be ALS or any other illness. There are some things that we will never know this side of eternity. What I do know is that everything in this universe has a beginning and that everything in this universe has an end. Our sun will eventually burn out. Our mountains will eventually erode to the sea, and every one of us will die. None of us will escape this fact.

I have done a lot of funerals and in every one of them there was sadness and grief. When I do a funeral for an elderly person I see children crying because Nannie and Papa are gone. When I do a funeral for a middle aged person I see the tears of their husband or wife and their children. When I do a funeral for a child I see the devastation in their mom’s eyes, their dad’s eyes, and their grandparent’s eyes.

So what kind of God would allow us to go through the pains and agony of death? The kind of God who went through it Himself. Christianity is the only religion that teaches that us that God left where He was and became uniquely and fully human. Jesus Christ came and knew what it was like to be poor, what it was like to be hungry, what it was like to be lied about, what it was like to be abandoned by His friends, what it was like to be tortured, and Jesus Christ knew what it was like to die.

What kind of God would allow a good young person to die? The kind of God who experienced it Himself. God the Father got to see His innocent Son lied about, beaten, and tortured. God the Father got to see His Son, who had so much to offer this world, die upon a cross while passers-by humiliated Him and mocked Him.

How can we say that we have a God that is all good and all-powerful? We can say that because He saw what we were going through, came and experienced it first hand, and then raised Him from the dead. Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God^[a]; believe also in me. ² My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. ⁴ You know the way to the place where I am going.” Yes we may die, but He offers us, comfort, hope, strength and salvation.

If you don’t believe in God do you go to Hell?

 

The short and harsh answer is yes. John 3:16 plainly tells us that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have ever lasting life.”

When I talk to people about Hell quite often they believe that God works like this: God gives us time, but if we haven’t made the right choices by the end of our lives, He casts our souls into hell for all eternity. As the poor soul falls through space they cry out for mercy, but God says “Too late! You’ve had your chance! Now you will suffer!!”

This is a very simplistic and erroneous caricature of what happens.

In this world, even the most ardent of atheists enjoy the presence and the gifts of God. Even the most ardent atheist can enjoy a sunset, birds singing, sailing on the ocean, walks in the park, their dogs or cats, music, snow, they can enjoy the company of Christian friends, they can enjoy the rights and protections the Christian value system has helped create.

Now ask yourself a question: “What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity?”  

If hell is the absence of God, then our atheist friend will exist in a situation where they exist without God’s presence or God’s gifts to interfere with them or influence them. There will be nothing there to give us hope. There will be nothing there to check our self-centeredness. There will be nothing there to stem our pride. There will be nothing there to check our arrogance or self pity. In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into eternity.

Without the presence or the gifts of God such things like pride, self-pity, arrogance, the uncertainty that everyone else is wrong goes unchecked. They are locked in a prison of their own self-centredness, and their pride expands like a mushroom cloud as they continue to blame everyone but themselves. No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham. That is why the picture of God casting people into hell and them crying “Let me out!” is so wrong.

In the end, all God does is give people what they want most, including freedom from Himself. As C.S. Lewsi wrote … There are only 2 kinds of people, the ones who say to God “Thy will be done.” And those to whom God in the end says “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose to be there.

 

How did we all come about?

If you read the first couple of chapters of Genesis you see that God created the Universe out of nothing. This is called creatio ex nihilo. Many atheists will say “Hey look!!” this is completely at odds with what science teaches us (however, isn’t the Big Bang creation out of nothing? Hold that thought) However, that is not true. Some Christians believe that Genesis 1 should be taken literally and that God created everything in a period of 6 days. This is what those who espouse Christian Science come from. On the other end of the spectrum, some Christians believe that God was the primary cause of the beginning of the universe, but then natural process kicked in. A more central approach has some Christians believing that God created the universe and then guided evolution to create complex life forms out of simpler ones. Other believe that there are gaps int eh fossil records and claim species seem to appear rather than develop from simpler forms and believe that God performed large scale creative acts at different points in history to bring us to where we are today.

I believe in the authority of the Bible and the inerrency of the Bible. However when you read the Bible your primary goal has to be is discover what the author was trying to tell his audience. That means you have to be very aware of the literary genre of the book and passage that you are reading. For example, when we are reading the Psalms we understand that this is poetry and we read it like poetry. We really don’t think that Mount Hermon is literally skipping like a wild young bull. Also, Luke claims to be an eyewitness account so we read it like history. In Genesis, especially the first couple of chapters it is not that easy to tell. However, what I would submit to you is that there are really 2 different Creation Stories. One describes a historical event and the other is a song or a poem about the theological meaning or event. When I read Genesis 1 and 2 I think Genesis is a poem or a song about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account of how it actually happened. Unlike Genesis 1 where we have everything marked down into days, Genensis 2 simply tells us that God created the heavens and the earth … no timeline is established.

What science tells us is that the universe came into being through an action called the Big Bang (According to Steven Hawking this is the accepted theory). What science also tells us is that this universe was designed for the propagation of organic like. This is called the fine tuning effect. There are 15 constants of nature that make life in the universe possible. Things like  the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the ratio or protons to electrons and gravity. If any of these forces were difference by even a millionth part of a million then this universe wouldn’t exist.

Consider also the strength of gravity. When the Big Bang occurred billions of years ago, the matter in the universe was randomly distributed. There were no stars, planets or galaxies—just atoms floating about in the dark void of space. As the universe expanded outwards from the Big Bang, gravity pulled ever so gently on the atoms, gathering them into clumps that eventually became stars and galaxies. But gravity had to have just the right force—if it was a bit stronger, it would have pulled all the atoms together into one big ball. The Big Bang—and our prospects—would have ended quickly in a Big Crunch. And if gravity was a bit weaker, the expanding universe would have distributed the atoms so widely that they would never have been gathered into stars and galaxies. The strength of gravity has to be exactly for stars to form. But what do we mean by “exactly”? Well, it turns out that if we change gravity by even a tiny fraction of a percent—enough so that you would be, say, one billionth of a gram heavier or lighter—the universe becomes so different that there are no stars, galaxies, or planets. And without planets, there would be no life. The other constants of nature possess this same feature. Change any of them, and the universe, like Robert Frost’s traveler, moves along a very different path. And remarkably, every one of these different paths leads to a universe without life in it. Our universe is friendly to life, but only because the past fifteen billion years have unfolded in a particular way that led to a habitable planet with liquid water and rich chemistry.

Both the Big Bang Theory and the Fine Tuning of the Universe point to a divine creator. The Big Bang states that in the beginning matter was all together and then there was a big bang that blew all the matter everywhere. However, in order for there to be a big bang there had to be a cause for the big bang. What do we know about that Creator of the Big Bang. The Creator existed separate and apart from the ball of matter. The Creator is powerful (otherwise it couldn’t have caused the Big Bang) The Creator had the intention to create the Big Bang (otherwise it wouldn’t have happened). The Fine Tuning of the universe tells us that the Creator created the universe with the intention to support life. Therefore science and logic tells us that we have a Creator who is separate and apart from this universe, who is all powerful, and created the universe for life. Is this any different than different than what the Bible Tells us.

The question also asks about the beginning of God. What I will tell you is that God has no beginning, that God is eternal. Steven Hawking tells us that time began when the universe started. God existed outside the ball of matter. God existed before there universe existed. Therefore God existed before time existed. That is what we mean when we say that God is eternal. He exists outside of time.