Giving Answers (1 Peter 3:15)

There are many great articles highlighting the dangers of "deconstruction".  Some of the best recent posts can be found here , here and here .  Trinidad and I even did a livestream discussing the matter here a few months back.  All of these are great resources. One of the things that I believe is overlooked in the debate over deconstruction is the proper understanding of feelings from a biblical worldview.  Those who are trying to throw people into doubt and confusion are honing in specifically on feelings.  Their often pithy posts are made specifically to evoke an emotional reaction for the purpose of confusion, not clarity.  They do so because personal feelings under either the progressive Christian viewpoint or the current secular humanist viewpoint is their equivalent to absolute truth, having rejected absolute Truth that comes from God's Word and the person of Jesus Christ.  It fits well with the deconstructionists view that "questions are more ...

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net As we expose our children to God, the Bible and its teachings questions are bound to arise.  These questions usually start at the age of 3 or 4 but will accompany your child throughout their walk with Christ.  Many of their earliest questions will either be on the silly or profound side.  The silly ones we can handle pretty well.  However, it is interesting that many of the first questions your child will have about God and faith will be the ones that will need to be revisited over and over again as they grow.  Let's take the question posed for today:  Who created God?  (Or who's God's daddy?) This question was asked to me yesterday by a curious Kindergartener in our Day Care.  It is important to answer the question at the level of understanding, and this is why we will have to revisit this question over and over again as our children grow into tweens and teens and finally adults....

One of the biggest complaints that I receive about belief in God is the problem of evil.  As a pastor, I receive this complaint in two different ways.  The first way is from atheists who look at all the evil in the world and posit:  If God were all powerful, why is there evil in the world?  Why couldn't God just prevent the evil from happening in the first place? There are two major of fallacies within the context of this line of questioning.  First, an atheist has no framework for evaluating good and evil and must therefore borrow that understanding from somewhere outside his/her worldview.  This is the easiest to see and there are scores of resources referencing this by both theists and atheists.  (I personally recommend Frank Turek's book "Stealing from God".)  Second, the atheist makes a category mistake in confusing the nature of a human being with free will with that of a toaster oven.  If we look at a d...

I find it ironic that some of the biggest online arguments with atheists I've been a part of revolve around morality.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, the atheist worldview doesn't ultimately allow for good and evil.  As such, their claim that God is evil (or unjust) falls flat. Yet, in many of these conversations that I have had, atheists tell me that you don't need God to be a good person.  Often, right after those statements, they will point to themselves as an example of this being true.  They just happen to be led by science and logic.  That doesn't make them a bad person, but it does give them freedom from what they claim is the false god in the sky. Then they will go on and use examples from the Bible or the actions from those who claim Christ as examples of why religion is evil, unjust or immoral.  They will bring up slavery in the Old Testament as an unjust treatment of people or the Israelites slaughter of the Canaanite peoples in the...

Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net One of the biggest arguments against the existence of God is the problem of evil (or pain and suffering).  It has been stated many ways usually trying to show how either God, if He exists, is powerless to prevent evil (as in the cases of people harming one another) or is ultimately the cause for such evil (such as natural disasters).  The premise behind such arguments is to diminish the God whom a believer is defending in such a way that no vestige of that God exists any longer and the only logical options are either atheism or skepticism. What often isn't questioned are the assumptions behind such scenarios posed to the believer.  If these were focused on a little more, I believe, that many of the arguments against theism would crumble against the weight of the very questions asked. Consider the worldview of the atheist or extreme skeptic that comes down on the side that God doesn't or probably...