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Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

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How many persons are in the one God?

Posted on October 27, 2016 Written by Mark McIntyre Leave a Comment

Question 6Question 6 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “How many persons are in the one God?”

The answer given is, “Three persons are in the one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three are one God, the same in substance and equal in power and glory.”

Let me start by admitting that one God in three persons is one of the more difficult things to begin to understand. J. I. Packer says this:

“The historic formulation of the Trinity (derived from the Latin word trinitas, meaning ‘threeness’) seeks to circumscribe and safeguard this mystery (not explain it; that is beyond us), and it confronts us with perhaps the most difficult thought that the human mind has ever been asked to handle. It is not easy, but it is true.”

We see a trinitarian formula in the Great Commission as given by Jesus in Matthew 28:19-20;

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (NASB)

As Packer said above, “it is not easy, but it is true.”

The importance of a proper understanding of the trinity is highlighted when we think of love as a characteristic of God. Love implies an other to love. God did not create humanity because without us, he would not have been able to demonstrate love. Love existed from eternity between the persons of the Godhead. In other words, God is not dependent upon us as his only object of love. We are not necessary for God to love.

Somehow, I find some measure of peace in this understanding. There is comfort in knowing that perfect love is found in God. I feel better knowing that my failures do not diminish God’s love.

Also, as Jesus prayed in John 17, the love and unity which is experienced among the members of the trinity can be experienced by us in some measure. Jesus prayed,

“Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.” (John 17:11b, NASB)

Filed Under: Discipleship Tagged With: God, persons, three, trinity

Herod vs. God

Posted on October 8, 2015 Written by Mark McIntyre Leave a Comment

Boxing GlovesFor those of us raised in democratic countries, it is difficult to image life under a despot like Herod. When the despot is upset, the people will feel his wrath. This is why, in Matthew 2,  it says that Herod “was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matthew 2:3)

Yet, behind and above the throne of Herod stands one who is greater. Herod sought to eliminate a threat to his power, but that threat represented God’s plan for the salvation of humanity, a plan that God would not allow to fail. God protected Joseph, Mary and Jesus by revealing Herod’s plan to them in a dream.

Kings and governments have power, but it is limited and that power cannot overrule God’s plan for bringing us into relationship with himself.

In the United States, we are heading into a presidential election year. Starting soon, we will be bombarded by ads in print, television and radio letting us know that if we do not vote for a particular candidate, life as we know it will end. From my vantage point, it seems that each of the political parties is more interested in increasing its power than they are in solving the problems that are staring them in the face. They give the politicians far too much credit in their ability to fix or break the government. But I digress.

The point of this is that no matter how corrupt or despotic the government may be, God remains in control and will work things out according to his plan in his timing.

Jesus made that clear during his interview with Pilate when Jesus said to Pilate,

“You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”” (John 19:11, ESV)

Paul tells us that governments have been given authority by God to keep order in the world. But even when this authority is abused, God’s will cannot be thwarted.

Because we are limited to a particular place at a particular time, it sometimes appears that evil will triumph. The lesson we can learn from Matthew 2 is that when Herod fights against God, God  wins.

I am reminded of some lines from This Present Crisis by James Russell Lowell:

Scaffold

Filed Under: Bible Reflection Tagged With: fight, God, Herod

Barnhouse on the Love of God

Posted on July 27, 2015 Written by Mark McIntyre 1 Comment

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

Filed Under: Quotation Tagged With: Barnhouse, God, Love, Satan

Roy Abraham Varghese on the “New Atheism”

Posted on September 13, 2014 Written by Mark McIntyre 1 Comment

There is a GodAt the foundation of the “new atheism” is the belief that there is no God, no eternal and infinite Source of all that exists. This is the key belief that needs to be established in order for most of the other arguments to work. Int is my contention here that the “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, not only fail to make a case for this belief, but ignore the very phenomena that are particularly relevant to the question of whether God exists.

As I see it, five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God. These are, first, the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world; second, life, the capacity to act autonomously; third, consciousness, the ability to be aware; fourth, conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols such as are embedded in lanuage; and fifth, the human self, the “center” of consciousness, thought, and action.

Three things should be said about these phenomena and their application to the existence of God. First, we are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence. In my view, such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as “proofs” whose formal validity determines whether there is a God. Rather, each of the five phenomena adduced here, int heir own way, presuppose the existence of an infinite, eternal Mind. God is the condition that underlies all that is self-evident in our experience. Second, as should be ovbious from the previous point, we are not talking about probabilities and hypotheses, but about encounters with fundamental realities that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, we don’t apply probability theorems to certain sets of data, but consider the far more basic question of how it is possible to evaluate data at all. Equally, it is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by all phenomena. Third, atheists, new and old, have coplained that there is no evidence for God’s existence, and some theists have responded that our free will can be preserved only if suce evidence is non-coercive. The approach taken here is that we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Roy Abraham Varghese in There is a God – How the world’s most notorius atheist changed his mind.

I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 1:18 where he informs us that the problem of those who don’t believe is not a lack of evidence, but the suppression of it.

Filed Under: Quotation Tagged With: atheism, atheist, Flew, God

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