#YOLO

If you’ve been on facebook much or on Twitter at all this summer, you’ve probably become familiar with the #YOLO trend. YOLO stands for You Only Live Once, and it’s usually tacked onto the end of a statement about the poster doing something unusual, risky, or just plain silly.

While staying fun and casual, #YOLO is quite a metaphysical claim. Several worldviews have something to say about that.

#YOLOATSE: You Only Live Once And Then Stop Existing

If there is no God and no supernatural, humans are stuck in a world void of purpose and moral obligations. This gives us two options: either we’re basically animals subject to an impersonal universe and our own biology, or we’re capable of creating our own meaning, destiny, and identity.

The first option is naturalism. If it’s true, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” and we might as well find sensual pleasure in the material world before we plunge into oblivion. Our desires and choices come from our DNA and our environment; we don’t really have control over our lives.

The second option is secular existentialism. Existentialism means that you exist before you know who you are and what life is really all about. In SE, you have no inherent purpose or destiny, so you make them up. You authenticate your existence by acts of the will, choices that make you who you are. If there is no God, you take the place of God in your own life.

If SE is true, #YOLO is the perfect response. The more choices and experiences you create, the more meaningful your existence is.

#YOLOAOAO: You Only Live Over And Over And Over

Eastern religions hold to pantheism, a belief system in which reality is primarily spiritual and everything is part of a divine Universal. Hinduism and Buddhism teach that human souls are reborn many times into different bodies as they progress towards unification with the Universal. This way of thinking was resurrected (reincarnated?) in 19^th-century Romanticism and the recent New Age movement.

To become one with the Universal, which in modern versions often includes discovering that you are Divine yourself, pantheism encourages meditation, becoming more “in touch” with nature, treating animals and humans with kindness (Hinduism makes an exception for "untouchables", sadly), and various spiritual rituals.

#YOLOF: You Only Live Once—Forever

Theism teaches that human souls live on after death and are either rewarded or punished based on actions done in the body. The only way to avoid a sucky eternity is to find favor with God or the gods.

Notice that I’m not to Christianity just yet. Theism has been dominant for most of human history. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Norsemen tried to please their gods with sacrifice, displays of courage, and good works; Muslims try to keep the Five Pillars to please Allah; and Jews have tried to please God by keeping the Mosaic Law and traditional regulations and by celebrating holy days. Theists tend to take #YOLOF pretty seriously.

As Christians, we believe that we find favor with God by faith; believing God means taking on His righteousness. This is possible because God’s Son, Jesus, found favor with His Father while taking on a human nature. In Jesus’ substitutionary death, God attributed human sin to Jesus and attributed Jesus’ righteousness and favor to anyone who believes.

While faith determines where you spend eternity, God has commanded us to spread the good news and to do good works in the short mortal lives we have now. Believers will not face condemnation, but we will be judged nonetheless.

#YOLOF, but for now, #YOLO. Make it count! 

When Mountains Make a Splash: What is Faith? Pt. 4

[Continued from Part Three. Start the series with Part One.] 

H: Holds Great Power

While we’ve already seen that faith isn’t a magic formula, faith that is grounded in God’s character holds tremendous power. Jesus told many people He healed that their faith had healed them (Mark 5:34, for instance). He also said directly that faith was a catalyst for miracles:

“Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22-24) 

As cool as it sounds, this is really hard to do. Sure I think God can throw mountains into the sea, but if I saw it happen, I would be surprised and amazed. I might even have a hard time believing my eyes. Note too that this promise isn’t a blank check for those who ask for the wrong reasons. 

This opportunity also comes with a warning: with faith, all things are possible; without faith, God will limit His activity and we may miss out on some blessings. This happened during Jesus’ ministry when He travelled to His hometown. The Nazarenes still saw Jesus as just an ordinary person and didn’t think He could do much. Unfortunately for all but a few people, while He was there, He fulfilled their low expectations. 

Faith holds great power because God holds all power. Yet how easy it is to forget this! Think of the last time you shared prayer requests in a group. I’m guessing you heard of a few relatives in the hospital, some people in rough situations like breakups or unemployment, and maybe the infamous imagination-sparking “unspoken”. When you prayed, how confident was the group that the next time you met, those people would be healed and those situations miraculously resolved? I want to inspire you to talk to God to change lives, not to go through motions or prove to yourself that you care. And after you pray, take practical action (like we talked about in Pt. 3) and let God use you to answer your own request.

So, what is faith? We’ve seen that it’s a decision to believe truth about God, not an excuse for avoiding facts. We’ve also seen that faith is

Focused on God,

Always Reasonable,

Involves Action,

Takes Courage, and

Holds Great Power.

Believer, take confidence in the God who has the authority and power to do anything He wants. Be bold in asking and even expecting Him to use this power—He’s already promised it! And don’t be surprised when He moves mountains.  

Eighteen Inches: Pascal's Wager and the Goodness of God

Repentance and faith aren’t just an act of the intellect; they’re an act of the will. Someone may run out of intellectual arguments against Christianity yet refuse to accept the gospel. As one pastor said, if Christianity is in your head but not your heart, you’ll miss heaven by just eighteen inches! As an apologist, what do you do next?

One useful (and overlooked) art is dialogue. Asking key questions is just as crucial as crafting arguments. Gently ask your friend what keeps them from committing to belief in God. Simply blaming stubbornness or pride isn’t helpful; it’s redundant, since asserting that someone refuses to believe because they are acting stubborn is equivalent to saying that they refuse to believe because they refuse.

One excuse may be that sin is fun and giving up everything they enjoy to obey commands and do boring “church-y” work isn’t worth it. I’ll admit that I’ve seen Christians with this attitude, too.

Not only is it illogical, it reveals a distorted view of God. Its illogic is that those seeking happiness should care more about an eternal, infinite happiness or suffering than about the temporary. In 1660, Blaise Pascal wrote an argument now known as Pascal’s Wager:

“Let us then examine this point, and say, "God is, or He is not." … A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, section 1, paragraghs 233-241) 

In contrast, if you live like the God of the Bible does not exist, you may gain limited pleasure if He doesn't, but you may also suffer infinite pain in Hell if He does. Note that this only works for those who are already intellectually accepting of the gospel. Don't use it to be a super-villain to those who reject the possibility out of hand. 

The belief that earthly pleasure is a reason to reject the gospel also reveals a false view of God.  Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount that 

“[E]veryone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:8-11) 

God is a generous father, not a grumpy kill-joy looking to steal our fun. God help us to recognize that good pleasure is the kind that doesn’t lead to emptiness and self-destruction. Moreover, great pleasure is knowing God Himself. If that doesn’t seem exciting, you have no idea what you’re missing! 

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8) 

Big Beliefs Mean Bold Action: What Is Faith? Pt. 3

[Continued from Part 2]

I: Involves Action

In the last two articles in this series, we’ve established that faith isn't a feeling or a sense of optimism. The Bible clearly teaches justification by faith and not works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Still, we all know that ideas have consequences. Beliefs determine behavior. If you believe that you can please God with your own righteousness, you’ll try to get into heaven by doing good works. If you truly believe that Jesus is Lord, God’s promised Messiah raised from the dead, you will begin to act in accordance with His lordship over your life.

This principle is how Scripture can say both that “one is justified by faith apart from works” and that “faith apart from works is dead.” (Romans3:28, James 2:26) One version of the law of non-contradiction states that “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis mine) Since Paul and James are talking about different kinds of works, there is no contradiction.

The passage in James mentions Rahab, the prostitute who helped the Israelite spies when they came to Jericho. (Read the story in Joshua 2!) She told the men that the entire city had heard about the Lord’s miracles and was afraid. So why was she saved when the rest of the city was destroyed? Her actions proved that she believed that God would follow through with His promise to give the Israelites the land. Her faith was not an abstract fantasy; it involved taking bold action.

T: Takes Courage

Not only does faith require action; it sometimes requires bold, risky action. Hebrews 10 pits fear and faith as opposites: “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.” (Hebrews 10:39) 

The next chapter tells of saints who did outrageous and even impossible things through faith. For some, God came through with impossible miracles in their lifetime, such as Noah, Moses’ parents, and Rahab. Yet many of them, as both verses 13-6 and 35-40 point out, actually suffered for their courageous faith and weren’t rewarded—at least not yet.

It takes courage to give everything for an unseen future. Martyred missionary Jim Eliot is often quoted as saying, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” When God makes promises, He keeps them. God does reward those who seek Him, and He has prepared a much better city for us. Yet that doesn't exempt believers from suffering in the meantime.

So believer, don’t be afraid to take action based on God's truth and promises. Whether you see people raised from death or you face death yourself, know that you were created for an eternal country of glory, and keep “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

And the plot thickens... take a shortcut to the conclusion in Part Four!

A Leap into the Light: What is Faith, Pt. 2

[Continued from Part 1] 

Anything is possible if you believe it, even if it makes no sense! Right?

Wrong. That idea is repeated throughout our culture, but a biblical understanding of faith is different. There are several notable truths about faith, illustrated with an acronym FAITH:

F: Focused on God.

In the Bible, it isn’t enough to just believe in anything. Nor is it enough to “believe” in nothing in particular; “faith” without an object (or faith in faith itself) is just optimism, a useless fuzzy feeling. Effective faith is belief in truth about God: “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6, ESV) I notice that it’s easy to confuse believing that with just believing in. There is no believing in God without believing that—that He exists, a good place to start; that He is faithful; that His promises are true; and so on. Otherwise, you may have positive feelings about the idea of God, but you have no faith.

The simplest description of faith comes from God’s covenant with Abraham: “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6) Having faith meant taking God at His word. This is a good idea only if God is true to His word. Otherwise it would have been deception, not faith. The only reason Abraham’s faith was effective in justifying him was because God was able to justify him, not because Abraham “just believed” hard enough. Faith must have God as its object to be effective.

A: Always Reasonable.

God may call us to believe something hard to accept, but it will always be reasonable—in the sense that it fits with what we already know about Him. For instance, the virgin birth is a miracle that is humanly impossible, but considering that God made a whole man at creation, it was perfectly reasonable for Mary to believe that God could conceive within her the human body of her Lord. Faith is never a leap into the dark; how can that be when God is light? On the contrary, “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.” (Psalm 119:130) 

In one of the Old Testament’s greatest examples of faith, Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God, even though God had promised to make a nation of his descendants. When I've heard this story taught, the emphasis is usually on the unreasonableness of God’s initial command, and I admit that it would have been hard to obey. However, the Bible teaches that Abraham was logical to obey, in that “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead”. (Hebrews 11:19, NIV1984; emphasis mine) Abraham knew that God would keep His promise, and from the Genesis story, he seemed confident that both he and Isaac would come back alive. (Genesis 22:5) He acted based on what he knew about God, an act of both faith and reason.

My suspicion is that faith is so hard for us because we would rather figure life out on our own. It’s more comfortable (at first) to go with what we think makes sense. The idea of trusting God, Someone Whom we can’t figure out, is scary and means giving up control. Yet consider this: is it more reasonable to go through life making decisions based on our own limited understanding and limited experience, or to leave ourselves in the hands of the God Who knows everything, can do anything He wants to do, and passionately loves us?

So believer, don’t let this world redefine your confidence as an illogical fuzzy feeling. Focus on God and truth about Him, and believe in accordance with that truth. Know that the word of the Lord is true, and everything He does is worthy of your trust (See Psalms 33:4). 

What is faith? is continued in Part Three! 

Who Made God?

I admit, this question I received from a student in my 4^th grade Sunday School class made me smile. Still, it’s a fair question, if not entirely correct.

Atheists love to go after this. The idea of a supernatural being Who has always existed—isn’t that unscientific?

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote Five Ways that the existence of God can be demonstrated. The first three are cosmological (that is, having to do with the nature and origin of the universe), the fourth is more abstract, and the fifth is teleological (having to do with purpose). Read them for yourself! 

1. Motion. Aquinas argues that everything that is in motion needs to be moved by something else. His analogy of fire is a little confusing, but considering that Aquinas died over four centuries before Newton published his Laws of Motion (Principia, 1687), which state that an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force, this is actually pretty brilliant. This means that there must be a First Mover that needs nothing else to move it. This argument borrows heavily from Aristotle.

2. Causation. Next, he argues that everything has a cause, and nothing can cause itself. It doesn’t make sense to have a regressively infinite series of causes, because a series of causes must have a beginning. Therefore, there must be a First Efficient Cause, one which is uncaused. This Cause is God.

3. Contingency. Everything we see is contingent on something else for its existence. So why does something exist instead of nothing? If there used to be nothing, there would still be nothing—unless there is something in the universe that necessarily exists (that is, it is impossible for this thing or person to not exist). The being Who necessarily exists and on Whom everything else is contingent is God.

Taking these three arguments, it seems reasonable to believe that there is a supernatural being who is the First Mover, is the First Efficient Cause, and has always existed. What does atheism offer? Without God, matter and energy would have had to always exist or spontaneously to come uncaused into existence. Matter would have exploded, with nothing causing the explosion.  Plus, there is no explanation for why anything exists at all, because there should be nothing.

See? It’s really naturalism that’s unscientific in explaining the origin of the universe. The theory is implausible given the basics of physics. (Someone who says that the laws of science didn’t always apply has to take that assertion by faith.)

So, who made God? The answer is that nobody made God. He is, by definition, the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, and The One Who Necessarily Exists. And there’s nothing unscientific about that.

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36) 

Is Faith Opposed to Reason? What is Faith? Pt. 1

You’ve probably heard people refer to “blind faith”, a “leap in the dark”, “hoping against the odds,” or “believing against the evidence.” While it might be nice to romanticize the faith and pit it against factual, calculated reasoning, this idea of faith is inconsistent with scripture and doesn’t work in the real world.

If we accept the silly idea that faith is the opposite of reason, we’ve bought into our opponents’ lies. Modern atheist Richard Dawkins said in a 1994 lecture, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.” (You can read the entire lecture here.) 

But is faith really just an excuse for intellectual laziness?

Atheist Antony Flew debated theists R. M. Hare and Basil Mitchell on the question of the rationality of religious belief in 1948. Read it! He argued that theists make their propositions meaningless when they say things that have no possibility of contrary evidence. For instance, if a Christian receives an answer to prayer, he might see it as evidence for God, but if he does not, he explains it away by saying, “It just wasn’t God’s will.” This is illogical. Either religious claims are propositions for which the possibility of contrary evidence must exist, or they are meaningless clichés that have no truth value. He would agree with Dawkins that faith fails to take evidence into account.

Flew’s fellow Oxford professor R. M. Hare responded by pointing out that everyone has foundational assumptions that he or she holds to explain the world (he called these “bliks”). Bliks are not subject to evidence the way normal propositions are because they are not really explanations. While it is true that atheists take quite a bit by faith, this is an unsatisfying answer.

The second Oxford theist, Basil Mitchell, responded by saying that as long as we have sufficient evidence for something, it is reasonable to take the rest by faith. Although we can’t always know exactly how much evidence is enough, faith is reasonable as long as it takes the evidence into account. Mitchell’s view makes sense in light of scripture. 1 Corinthians 15 says,

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

In other words, the Bible says for itself that there is a situation under which Christianity is no longer reasonable: if Christ has not been raised from the dead. However, God has left us with overwhelming evidence for the truth of the resurrection, and from this fact we can infer the rest of Christianity. Therefore, no matter how much evil we see in the world, faith in Jesus is still the most reasonable path to take.

Hebrews 11 is all about faith. We see in verse one that “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” and in verse six that “without faith it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” The rest of the chapter makes it clear that the people listed here were not looking for a pie-in-the-sky easy life. They stuck to their convictions in the middle of extreme suffering because they took God at His word.

Summit Ministries notes in a 2010 article, “The Bible defines faith in a totally different way from the common understanding. Faith is not wishful thinking, blind hope, or surrender of reason. Biblical faith is a decision to believe something about God or Jesus based on evidence, the kind of evidence that would stand up in any court of law.” 

So believer, hold onto your faith. Weigh the evidence and see for yourself that Christianity is reasonable. And when you have made your choice, stand by your convictions no matter what. 

Want more on faith? Read Part Two!