Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

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Yancey’s Three Questions

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3 QuestionsI am not sure out of which Philip Yancey book I gleaned these. As I am reading, I sometimes make notes in Evernote on my phone or tablet to jog my memory for future use. I recorded the following questions listed in a such a note entitled “Yancey’s Three Questions.”

Here they are:

  1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
  2. Why is that something so beautiful and orderly?
  3. How ought we to conduct ourselves in such a world?

What I like about these three questions is that the answers get to the core of the answerer’s world view.

I cannot speak for everyone who has had a public education, but either I did not pay attention (not at all unlikely) or these questions were never raised or answered.

The evolutionary science that I was taught purported to explain how the world we see came to be, but does nothing to answer the question “why?” “It just is,” is not a satisfactory answer, no matter how many mathematical formulas are used to prove it.

Why do we have an innate sense of beauty and order? Why do we have an innate sense of right and wrong?

“Why?” is a much harder and a more important question.

Yet behind the three questions stands a person who claims to have the explanation and the answer to these questions.

Jesus claimed to predate Abraham (John 8:58), He claimed unity with a Creator God (John 10:30). He claimed to be the way to eternal life (John 14:6). He made some radical claims that bring cohesive answers to these questions. Jesus claimed to be the answer.

These questions are worth pondering. If you are open to it, please examine the claims of Jesus Christ in answer to these questions. You might find something of eternal value as a result.

 

A man convinced against his will . . .

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Saint Augustine“Always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 3:7, ESV)

One of the things that cannot be ignored when making a case for the truth of Christianity is the role of the will in recognizing the truth. I am reminded of the phrase that I learned a long time ago, “A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.”

In support of this idea, I ran across this passage from St. Augustine in The City of God:

For those who are either unable to understand our arguments, or are so hardened by the habit of contradiction, that though they understand they cannot yield to them, reply to us, and, as it is written, “speak hard things,” and are incorrigibly vain. Now, if we were to propose to confute their objections as often as they with brazen face chose to disregard our arguments, and as often as they could by any means contradict our statements, you see how endless, and fruitless, and painful a task we should be undertaking.

When we are dealing with people who have questions, we have to discern the motive behind the questions. Is the questioner merely using questions as a means of avoiding the truth?

Keep in mind that we all have blind spots. We all have parts of us that are resistant to the truth. We are all a work in progress. The Apostle Paul tells us that we are all in need of transformation as a result of having our minds renewed (Romans 12:2). We are all imperfect examples of living out the truth.

The point is that we cannot bring anyone along faster than they are willing to go. We may be able to argue them into a corner. But we have limited, if any, influence over the will of another. It is the will that

Patience and prayer are needed in dealing with those who have not yet come to believe in The Truth.

Barnhouse on the Love of God

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Barnhouse Romans CommentaryThe whole of the story of salvation would be nonsense were it not for the fact that the very nature of God is love. But we must not be confused into thinking that God is love apart from any other attribute. In fact, if you say that God is love without realizing that God is hate of sin, you have no gospel at all because you do not have God. The people who teach that God is love without teaching that God is also hate of sin, have, in reality, another god who is Satan with a mask on. You will never understand Satan if you do not realize that he loves to masquerade as God and that you will find him most often at church, in the pulpit, in the Bible class, preaching and praying, with a mask of a saccharine God in front of his grinning face.

Donald Grey Barnhouse – Commentary on Romans

John Lennox on Truth

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John Lennox on TruthMy mention of truth leads me to fear that some people of postmodernist persuasion may be tempted not to read any further, unless of course they are curious to read (and maybe even attempt to deconstruct) a text written by someone who actually believes in truth. For my part I confess to finding it curious that those who claim that there is no such thing as truth expect me to believe that what they are saying is true! Perhaps I misunderstand them, but they seem to exempt themselves from their general rubric that there is no such thing as truth when they are either speaking to me or writing their books. They turn out to believe in truth after all.

John Lennox in God’s Undertaker

 

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