The Only True God (2 Chronicles 20:5-12; Exodus 33:14-20; Psalm 139:1-17)
Billy Milton - September 5, 2004
This morning we begin a new series entitled, ‘The Character of God.’ Over the next few months we will be looking at a variety of subjects such as – God is Wise; The Grace of God; The Majesty of God; God Rules, Okay! – just to mention a few. All of the titles are on the notice board at the back. I’m very conscious that I’m making 2 big assumptions here. The 1st is that God exists and the 2nd is that we can know him. In order to set the scene for the rest of the series, let me spend a few minutes addressing each of those assumptions this morning.
One of the biggest ever blows to Christianity was the worldwide acceptance of the Theory of Evolution as first popularised by Charles Darwin. As this became generally accepted in our schools and universities so whole generations became, in reality, practicing atheists. After all, who needs a creator when the scientists can explain quite satisfactorily how life began and how we came to be where we are as a species today? And so God as Christians knew him was sidelined. It was okay to have a belief in him as a helpful concept but not as someone who had intervened in the life of our planet in any way.
With the rise in popularity of the Theory of Evolution came a corresponding fall in the credence of the Bible and it’s teaching, especially on such a subject as the origin of mankind. What I’m trying to say is that for the vast majority of our population today – God is a complete irrelevance. Time magazine put it this way, “Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did!”
However, over the past 25 years or so, a bit of a revolution has started to take place. Scientist after scientist is beginning to stand up and say that they are not convinced that Evolution explains the origin of our species. In fact, in an amazing turn around, many of the most prominent scientists today are now confessing that much of what they study in the fields of physics, mathematics, cosmology, astronomy, bio-chemistry and so on is leading them to the inescapable conclusion that an intelligent designer is responsible for our universe and how it functions today.
Let me give you some examples from this book I’m reading at the moment which you might find disturbing. The book is called, ‘The Case for a Creator’ by Lee Strobel who is a journalist and a former Pastor at Willow Creek Church in Chicago. In it he interviews some of the most pre-eminent scientists of our age and discovers from them why their particular field of expertise leads them to believe in an Intelligent Designer rather than a random evolutionary progression.
On page 65 he is interviewing a scientist called Jonathan Wells who has a double PHD and is one of the world’s foremost experts in Darwinism. Listen to what he has to say:- READ QUOTE FROM BOOK “….in 20 to 30 years from now – people will look in amazement and say, ‘How could anyone have believed this?’ Darwinism is merely materialistic philosophy masquerading as science, and people are recognising it for what it is.” And then he goes on to say, “When you analyze all of the most current affirmative evidence from cosmology, physics, astronomy, biology and so forth – well, I think you’ll discover that the positive case for an intelligent designer becomes absolutely compelling.” Another scientist called Patrick Glynn, a former convinced atheist said this:- READ QUOTE ON p 126
Let me give you a couple of the examples of an intelligent designer that Lee Strobels uncovers as he interviews these scientists in their different fields of expertise. All of them are compelling but I’ll just pick a couple that appealed to me especially. A physicist called Robin Collins said this:- READ QUOTE ON p 130 When Strobel asked him to give an example of the ‘fine tuning’ of the universe as he called it, Collins gave the following example p131 – gravity is the weakest of all the force strengths in nature and the strongest is the force that binds protons and neutrons together which is a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. Picture this as a ruler the size of the universe. (USE STRING TO ILLUSTRATE) If you moved gravity one inch along that ruler that small adjustment would increase gravity by a billion-fold! The effect on earth would be to crush out all life.
Now here is the truly amazing thing. There are over 30 such razor edge physical or cosmological parameters that require equally such precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe. The chances of that happening by pure randomness, such as the evolutionists propose, is about the same as the chances of you being able to throw a dart at the earth from away out in space and that dart scoring a bull’s eye on a target less than the size of one solitary atom! In summary, the evidence from all those different fields is coming to the inescapable conclusion that God exists. I can talk about this a lot longer with you privately over coffee at the end but it seems that the men in the white coats are beginning to once again agree with the men in the black robes and dog-collars.
Now to our second question. Its all very well proving beyond reasonable doubt that God exists but I suppose the more important question that I want to pose this morning is… can we know him?
In John 14:8 Philip said to Jesus, “Show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” and I suppose that men and women right down through the ages have unconsciously echoed that request of Philip’s - “Show us God”. Every era and every culture have exhibited a curiosity as to what God is like. That’s why so many religions have built their own gods out of wood and stone - at least then you can see what your god is like. You can take your god with you, put it in a box and carry it, point to it and tell your friends, “That’s my god.” But attempting to capture the image of God in wood or stone or on a painting can only achieve one thing - it reduces him to our level, which is at best a distorted picture of what he is really like.
We are told in Exodus 33 that no one can “see God” and live. And yet God is the central theme of Scriptures and, whatever else is going on in the various books and chapters of the Bible, we can be confident of one thing - the aim of each and every writer was to reveal more of God to us - to help us see him with our minds and hearts. So can we know God?
In 2 Chronicles 20:6 Jehoshophat’s prayer begins with a question,
“O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven?” What a way to open any prayer, “Are you not…?” How was he going to continue? I dare say that if we asked 100 people at random to finish that sentence, we’d get a hundred different answers, simply because God is something different to each one of us. For example, I feel pretty confident that most people in Berkhamsted would admit to some belief in God but, the problem is, when we begin to narrow the definition of who God is, as per the Bible, so belief in God drops off.
This point was clearly illustrated for me in a David Frost show. He was interviewing Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who is an outspoken atheist from America. After some heated discussion, Sir David, himself the son of a Methodist minister, asked the audience how many of them believed in God and the number who raised their hands was overwhelming. He then turned to O’Hair and suggested that she was clearly against the mainstream of society’s views on this issue and had quite clearly lost the debate. Later, however, a theologian who had been watching the show approached Frost and informed him that his question to the audience could just as easily have backfired if O’Hare had only taken his question a bit further and asked them, “How many of you believe that God exists…and that his son Jesus was born of a virgin, that he died on a cross, rose from the dead, and is the only way to God?”
A staggering number would have dropped their hands at this proposition. As keen as the audience were to affirm a belief in God it’s quite clear that there would have been many and varied views of who or what God is, or looks like. To many, God is whatever you want him to be…but sadly for us the Bible doesn’t give us that option. God does not change to suit our views of him or he would not be God.
The question, “What is God like?” guarantees contradictory answers when left at the mercy of individual whim. And everyone cannot be correct. For instance, if I were to hold up this pen and ask you what is this thing I am holding up, I could get a variety of answers varying in their correctness. Its a pen, its a straw, its a weapon, its a pointer - yes to varying degrees it is all of those things but if someone told me that it was a postage stamp, I’d have to say that they were wrong, no matter how convinced they were of their correctness. Sincerely believing something does not make it true. If we are going to know what God is like we need a concrete frame of reference outside of ourselves. That’s why we are going to be looking at the various aspects of God’s character over the next few months.
But something quite startling surfaces when faced with these aspects of his character. We become confused. Why should that be? Well, quite simply because we don’t understand them. Few, if any, of us have the mental capacity to understand intellectually who God is and when we rely on our own experience of who God is, it can result in lopsided ideas. So did God just have the Bible written so that we could marvel at the great doctrinal truths concerning himself, or is there more? Well thankfully God didn’t stop at merely causing the Biblical writers to write great truths about him…he went further. He became a man in the person of Jesus so that we could see exactly what he was like in ways that we might begin to understand. The only way for us to get to know God is to get to know Jesus.
Do you remember the words of Psalm 139? Yes God might be the intelligent designer behind the creation of the universe and of each of us; and he may well be the sovereign sustainer of life on our planet; and he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. But he is not aloof and disinterested in us. Any God who took such infinite care in the forming of the vastness of our universe must surely love us soo much to make us the pinnacle of his creation. surely?
That love was seen in the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth when God in an amazing way revealed who he was to us - The One True God whose feet got dirty in Galilee. And over the next few months we will be getting to know him better as we study his character. If this is your first time in KRC I invite you to come back each week to discover more of God and his purposes for your life. Amen.