"...he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

    Well I'm back. It's been a while since I last made a post, and I apologize to anyone who reads this blog. I wish to continue on the subject of God's goodness because it is such a large and misunderstood subject. This  post will kind of jump around but it is connected!...loosely... I plan to make a couple of points. I plan to point that God is good, that we must trust in Him, and that our condition is ultimately one of choice.
     I remember reading C.S. Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe years ago, and there was a part when the four main characters; Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (all in age order), went to a mysterious world through a wardrobe, and found themselves in the country of Narnia. They had been mysteriously transported by Aslan, the Emperor's son, by magic to save the country of Narnia by defeating an evil witch that had cursed the land. She had declared herself the queen of Narnia, and ruled the country merciless. She and other Narnian's-she wasn't an actual Narnian- were aware of an ancient prophecy regarding two son's of Adam, and two daughters of Eve were to conquer the witch and were to rule Narnia afterwards having Peter as the high king.
     Before they were to defeat the self-declared queen they met Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, a lovely beaver couple that were supporters of Aslan- he was the true king of Narnia- and the Beaver's were telling the kids- they were still kids at the time-about Aslan the king, and that he was a lion. Lucy was uncomfortable with the idea of meeting Aslan because she learned about lion condition. She then tried to comfort herself by confirming that he wouldn't be frightful, and Mr. Beaver confirmed that she was wrong, she then asked if he was tamed, this also proved unfruitful, she finally asked if Aslan was at least safe-and I quote Mr. Beaver here because he said it eloquently-“Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” 
    And I present to you Aslan!  C.S. Lewis in his genius subtly presented Christ by using Aslan, and he beautifully presented Christ in that small section. To me this is possibly one of the most beautiful writings in literature outside of the Christian scriptures. 
   A few months earlier this year I had lost my Dad to cancer. This was one of the most confusing times of my life, everything I had known was in question. I thought I understood God's goodness-I already knew how to reason I realized long ago that God is good, and that we would not have any concept of goodness without God, but this was different. I still have problems coping with my dad's death, but I remember praying one morning, and I was hurting. I couldn't understand God's goodness and how it pertained to me. Who wants syllogisms, and deductive logic when one's heart is hurting? Then I remembered Mr. Beaver telling Lucy "Safe? Who said anything about safe? ' Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." And I immediately asked myself who said life wouldn't hurt? He's good. He's the King, I tell you. 
     I had to trust Christ the King because He is good. No matter if I hurt or not He is still good. St. Paul wrote this in his letter to the Roman church  "And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." 
    As humans we have difficulties separating what is good and evil. The writer of Hebrew's wrote "it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.", this can only be dreadful to those that rejected him, but is this not goodness? We must remember that God is immutably good.
   I remember discussing God's omnipresence- which is a fascinating subject! and it is one that i will enter in the future- that involves time, and eternity, and even a pen! I was almost labeled a heretic developing my idea...sigh...it was fun- and the person I was discussing with believed that God could not be omnipresent because he would have to also be in hell, but he forgot that God isn't confined to space. He also misunderstood the goodness of God, as believers we recognize that God is also just, which is also good. We forget at times that God's goodness isn't just grace, or redemption. It is also righteousness. It is difficult to accept that we must give ourselves to a completely good God, yet I would rather give myself to a just God, and die a thousand deaths because he is good. Yet we really want to reject that. 
    When man had fallen in the Garden he fell because he ate from the forbidden tree. Specifically the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is remarkable that they chose to eat from the tree, because they already knew goodness. God had declared that everything was good, and He Himself was ultimately good. Yet, man chose to also know evil. And now we are misdirected in our understanding of good and evil. We are still trying to trying to act as a god, trying to determine what is good and what is evil. If we know God than we will know goodness. 

Delay

I would like to apologize to anybody that reads this blog, and is waiting for my second part regarding my first post on a good God. I have been bogged down at school, and will not be able to write much until I organize my schedule, but I do have a thesis for my next post, and I should have it finished by next week-now that is subjunctive not indicative (thanks Dr. Hyatt)-so it is not for sure, but I will do my best. Please leave any questions or comments, and I will try my best to answer them. This is my approach to apologetic's so please bear with me because I am just a student. As Idan Rachiel says "Ya bless!"

A Good Cause

               In the last post I ended by saying that I will continue the discussion with human value, and I feel that I missed a few points. The last post is open to some attacks because I tried to fit too much in one post, and I left out some important questions. Thus I will present the questions, and I will answer them accordingly.

                My last post ultimately stated that if one is to deny the existence of God on the basis of an evil world one would also have to explain the concept of evil without an ultimate foundation of a moral standard. This cannot be if the world is pure material because we would only bound by physical laws and that would be the ultimate truth. If one does point to a moral standard then one must recognize it as the ultimate state of being, or better yet, an ultimate being. One simply cannot have good or evil without a point of reference towards an ultimate good.

                Now if I was given this argument to be true-which I believe it is-then one can easily look at the question of evil being even more perplexing because (as Descartes demonstrated) one cannot take out more from the effect than the cause gives…Huh?...This argument works both ways when demonstrating that there is a God, and when one tries to attack Him. By analogy-if there is no God, and we have evolved, we are purely objects made of material and nothing more; we cannot get a personality from a non-personal object. We would be only physical material because our cause is only material-one cannot take out more from the effect then cause. Thus personality must come from a personal cause. And I will admit that some atheist prove their point of an impersonal cause by their own personality, or the lack thereof. Like mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski said about Richard Dawkins “…he’s a bit of a reptile…”

                But! Where do we get evil from? Once again one cannot take out more from the effect than the cause. Therefore we can easily deduce that evil must come from God. We are given personality by God and an evil personality must come out of the cause. This can easily be explained by two examples from my  last post.

                The case we have before us is a case of “less is more”. We are not taking out more from the cause but we are just taking the cause out. We really are not taking out more from the cause, but we are just abandoning it; evil is not evil for its own cause, but it is evil for a good cause. In the last post I referred to Ted Bundy (the serial killer). He didn’t consider himself to be wrong, but he murdered for pleasure. He had a good cause, yet it was perverted. Pleasure has always been good, but we as humans have perverted it. From relationships to prosperity we have abused it. If pleasure is left out of its proper framework then it will become misdirected.  We left our cause, and have less of true goodness and moved away from it. We don’t have evil for its own cause, but a perverted goodness as a substitute.

                As in light, darkness is not a fulfillment of itself, but an absence of something else. When light enters a room it fills up the room, but when it is cut off darkness enters. This is because darkness is just an absence of light. Christ had once said that we being evil know how to give good gifts. As fallen humanity we still are aware of good things, but are haunted by the absence of God-which is true goodness. That is why every evil effect has a good, but perverted, cause. God is not evil; he doesn’t have that in him. We are evil because we don’t have Him in us. 

A Good Creator and an Evil Creation?

To begin I will admit that the title seems like an oxymoron. We can easily understand that someone can create something that goes wrong, but that is because we are imperfect. We understand that if God would have truly created us then we wouldn’t have gone wrong (and my have we gone wrong!) simply because God would be perfect, and he wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. This is reasonable, but it brings one big question to mind.

                The question is how did we know that there is something wrong? I mean how do we know that we as humans are imperfect? To me it is a fascinating question. Where did we get this concept of being imperfect? What or who is perfect? If something is deteriorating it is because it is leaving its good state-we have no point of reference on how we should be-at least to the atheist. We seem to base our state to something we should be, but the naturalist doesn’t believe in a God, and a perfect God at that. Yet! He realizes that there is something wrong with mankind. A friend of mine has a blog that asks the question “why?”, and I pose the same question to the atheist-why? How do we know what is a good state, if there is no good state? Could it be that we put ourselves against some kind of moral standard? I dare say not! We cannot, and will not do such a thing if there is no God! There must be no wrong.

 C.S. Lewis made the observation that people get upset at others who would try to trip them, but are unsuccessful, yet that same person wouldn’t be angry over someone that mistakenly tripped them, but they finished the job. It seems that everyone is aware of this standard to not hurt somebody purposely because it is just plain wrong, but we don’t give it a second thought. I have observed that this breaks the naturalist’s views on human value, but works accordingly with the Christian faith.

                The naturalist views everything as material. That is; nothing exists that is not physical. We as products of evolution are the same as our ancestors; apes, trees, bacteria, slime, etc.  And because we are just material we don’t really matter. I think Ted Bundy (serial killer) gives the perfect example of an evil person with the worldview of the naturalist.

                Ted Bundy had confessed to thirty murders, but never took responsibility for them. He said that  "It hurts you ... I guess I am in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt. There's just no reason for it." I find it chilling that a man that had destroyed other humans could not feel guilt or remorse because he has no reason for it. I remember hearing a quote from him, and he said to a victim that there is no difference to him between enjoying a piece of ham, and him enjoying torturing a victim. Why would this be wrong to the naturalist? If we are as Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking say that we are just “dancing to our DNA” then how can anyone truly hold him accountable. And don’t we believe in survival of the fittest? Obviously the attacked didn’t survive, and he moved up the food chain, but the idea of the food chain is just convention anyway because there is no absolute there is no standard.  This is exactly what is justifiable in a material world. This is exactly what would happen when one truly takes away God from this world, and most importantly his heart.

The very concept of good and evil cannot stand if there is no true good. This is true because if we are just products of primordial gunk then every moral dilemma is unimportant, because it goes by the standard of a moral law, and a moral law leads to a moral lawgiver. If anything bad happens it is not really bad. It’s only an event-it neither matters to; you, me, and the un-existent God. We as humans base the question of evil and God the same. We know that there is some kind of wrong, but we usually don’t think about where we got this concept from. I am amazed that the skeptic uses an evil world to debunk the existence of God, because he borrows the Judeo-Christian worldview to disprove God.  To the naturalist he should be fine as he is, because we would be imposing some kind of standard upon us highly evolved animals.

                We see that the human being has some kind of flaw-but why? If this world is evolving then this world cannot grade it according to anything else beside the past, but that was when we were lesser creatures. We see war, rape, murder, torture, pain, and death, and we are all haunted by these because it is thriving today, but we are evolving! This is a paradox. How can we say anything is wrong? If there is no true morality then there is no true wrong. You see when we compare any crooked line, even a slightly curved one; we know that it will be proven to be un-straight only by comparing it to a straight line. This also works with evil and good. There must be a good God, and he must be the standard by which we compare ourselves with, or else we are truly living according to an inexistent standard. How can we be put up against an inexistent wall? Yet we seem to uplift it to be our standard. If we truly reverence goodness as an ultimate state of being; wouldn’t goodness be God, or-I would dare say-wouldn’t God be true goodness?

Once Jesus was called “good master”, and he responded to that by saying “why do you call me good, no one is good but God.” –and to those that question Jesus’ divinity he never denied it- Isn’t this exactly our condition, and standard? We see that everyone has flaws, and Jesus calls us out. In that short phrase alone Jesus describes our human condition, “no one is good”, and he tells us how we know: God. Jesus had told us centuries ago that our evil is only evil in comparison to God. In that he had answered the skeptic on where we get this concept of good and evil. Only a good God could truly explain any evil if there is no good, then there is no evil.

                I had recently heard someone quote their brother in saying that evil is good because it shows how good Christians are, but I disagree. By analogy I will explain. Dr. Martin Luther King had once stated “darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that, and hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.” I feel the same about good and evil. Can one know light without knowing darkness? Isn’t darkness just an absence of light? Because light is not the absence of darkness, but the fulfillment of itself. Likewise the farther one is from light the more one is in darkness. If we as humans pull away from this standard of good (which is God) then we as humans cannot truly see, and that is why there is evil in this world. It is not because God doesn’t exist in our world, but because he doesn’t exist in our heart.

                Has anyone lived the standard of ultimate goodness? Or has someone been truly good? St. John recorded Jesus’ words when he said “ I am the light”, Jesus claimed to be goodness and in through Him he claimed that we can be pulled out of darkness. In the scriptures we find that Jesus was perfect. He was what man was meant to be. He is our standard by what we should go by. Because we are not good, and that we cannot be good by our own accord we must have our condition fixed, and Jesus claimed to be our answer. We are bound by our flaws, and Jesus said “the truth shall make you free.” He said he was the light, and he also claimed to be the truth. He is not only our “straight line”, but he is our line “straightener”!  I will end this post with that mainly because Starbucks is about to close, and if they weren't my chair is getting uncomfortable. I will continue this discussion with human value. 

On Pain and Suffering and a Good God

Where to begin? This is possibly one of the most difficult subjects to reason, but every world view must have an explanation on pain and suffering, and the Christian faith is no exception. I will most likely do a series on this subject, because questions regarding suffering are not really questions, one Christian philosopher wrote that evil is a mystery not a question, and a mystery requires an explanation not just an answer. The subject at hand is one that I had been perplexed with-naturally I believe-as a young believer, and human.
    I will sympathize a bit with the skeptic, and agree that pain, suffering, and evil are possibly the most justifiable reason to question a good God, but that alone cannot debunk God-it only leads to Him. Once again this is a complex subject, and it would require a complete page or more (most likely more) to give a coherent answer. Therefore this will not be the blog to do that, but I will present it in a few days since I am working out my ideas, and reading a little more.
    If an unbeliever is perplexed with the question "can a good God allow suffering?" or if the believer pushes off the question because of fear that he may stop believing-he should be worried that his belief might be in ignorance- they must sincerely consider the questions, and search because the repercussions are too important.  The Christian must remember the words of the ancient prophet Hosea "my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge."  the unbeliever should search for the truth to find the answers.-and to the unbeliever- Jesus said that he is the truth.
   In the series of discussions I will write about; the Christian defense of God and evil, a good God and a suffering creation, then I will finish off with my conclusion on Jesus as the answer. I look forward to grapple with my thoughts a bit more, and renew my faith in Christ. I pray that this will help the skeptic, and the struggling believer.
 

Welcome!!!

I would like to welcome everyone to my blog! I find it appropriate that the blog should start off with an introduction. This introduction will only be an introduction to the blog-though it is a blog it is not the b log itself, and only points to the beginning of the blog. I know one might say that an introduction is a beginning-and I would agree with them in a sense-but it is not the beginning because it only points to it. We find in the scriptures that the introduction to God’s self-revelation starts with “In the beginning God…” God is the beginning, and then everything followed. Even the introduction started years after the beginning! And likewise my blog will be fashioned as such.

                Now my blog is to fulfill the purpose of my academic ventilation. I wish to address both theological and philosophical thoughts. These thoughts are strictly my views and are not the views of my denomination or church fellowship-including my pastor.  I will clarify also that I can change my position on some views because I am still a student and I am not an expert, but I do hold on to the truths that are held in the scriptures-thus making my blog die the death of a thousand qualifications!

                Thinking back to the words of the French philosopher Rene Descartes “Cogito ergo sum” “I think therefore I am” I decided to start the blog. I find it astounding that such a brilliant philosopher would make a statement like that completely ignoring Aristotelian logic. One cannot deduce more than one is given-Descartes could only deduce that “I think therefore thinking exist.” Yet he could never separate his existence with his thoughts. I believe the wise king Solomon was accurate when he penned the words “as he thinketh in his heart so is he.”  Jesus’ trailblazer John the Baptist put it as “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

The purpose of my writing is to express my Christian faith. An old Indian proverb says that “whatever you are overflowing with will spill over when you are bumped.” And I wish to spill over my faith into the blogging world-which consistently bumps the world of faith. I want to express my thoughts because of what kings, philosophers, wild-men, pantheist, and God himself expressed; that man has thoughts and these thoughts are expressed out because it reflects his inner self. We our individuals, not just material as the secularist claim, what makes us different is what we embody our soul. CS Lewis said that “you do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” I wish to bear my soul because it expresses my life. As St. Paul wrote “for me to live is Christ”, and I want to give Christ to whoever will listen. As I had said earlier this is only an introduction my views are not new, or the truths that are expressed, but they are eternal. Jesus said that “the truth shall make you free”, he also said that He is the truth.

I pray that you enjoy my blog, and even though I hate criticism; I would appreciate it-it would allow me to review my ideas, and change them if I must. Enjoy!!!