Purposeful Theology

Many times we have an incorrect view of God. We either have too low a view of God so that he is just our buddy that we can pray to once in a while, or we think that God wants nothing to do with us or is constantly frowning down waiting for us to screw up. The reality is, he both wants to have a relationship with us through his Son Jesus but also is our creator and is majestic and holy. He even has many attributes as God that have nothing to do with us as humans. 

Isaiah 55.8-9 states, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Below are a few attributes of God that are immutable, or characteristics that God does not share with us. 

Eternality of God 

This attribute is that God had no beginning and has no end, he has simply just existed. Even thinking about that blows my mind, but the Bible paints a picture of a God who is completely outside of time and can see the end from the beginning, yet chooses to act in time. 

Aceity of God

This attribute has to do with the independence of God. He does not need creation or humans for that matter to exist. When God created us he wasn’t bored and needed something to do, but rather created us so that we could have a relationship with him and were created in his image to show forth some of his excellence. 

Immutability of God

The immutability of God is simply that God does not change. He is the same yesterday, as he will be today, as he will be in 10,000 years. This is in contrast to us who are fickle nearly every day and change our minds constantly. Thank goodness that he does not change his mind about things. Could you imagine if one day God just decided to be evil and scratch all the promises he has made to be good and loving to his people? This is in contradiction to something called Process Theology, or that since things here on earth are in constant change God must be changing as well. This would go against the very character of God’s existence. 

I know for me I wouldn’t even want to follow a God who is just like us so that we could just study enough about him to figure out exactly what he’s about. Christians worship a God who is the sustainer of the universe yet is intricately involved in our day to day lives. How does that make you feel?

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When someone walks up to you and asks to prove that God exists what do you say? Many people devote their whole lives trying to prove or disprove the existence of God.  But as we will see, believing that there is a God does not mean taking an ignorant leap of faith, but looking around at our surroundings and seeing all the amazing things that God has made that point to him existing. The honest truth is that there is no way to completely prove through a scientific method the existence of God, but even though you have not physically seen something does not necessarily mean it does not exist. The two biggest things that point to the existence of God are our inner sense of a creator as well as the proof through nature. 

Inner Sense

In a recent study more than 90% of those living in the United States say that they believe there is a God. The most influential book in history, the Bible, just assumes this to be the case from the very fist sentence. Romans 1.19-20 states that all people know instinctively that there is a God and that we are without excuse by claiming that there wasn’t enough evidence around us to support this claim. The Bible also acknowledges that there are atheists in the world, but also paints such a clear picture that God exists that it calls such people fools. Christians also know within them that a God exists because of their changed life from before they were saved by Jesus what their lives look like today.

Proof Through Nature

Romans 1 also states that when you look around at the beauty of creation you are able to know that there is a God. Psalm 19.1 states, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Just looking around at a sunset or the intricacies of what must take place for life to continue to exist and it is an amazing witness to the existence of God. As humans, we are also created in the image of God and our bodies themselves give evidence that there is a God. Dr. Wayne Grudem has said that in the space of a single ink dot, there are 10,000 separate living cells. Each cell is like a miniature city and each one contains our our unique DNA. If a person had to create such a thing as an iPhone or a macbook, our complex bodies must have been created by God. 

Throughout the ages there have also been several individuals who have come up with proofs that they say explain the existence of God. These proofs are summarized below:

Cosmological Argument or the Intelligent Design Theory – Everything in the universe has a cause or initiator, and that cause of the universe must be God.

Teleological Argument – Since the universe was created with a purpose, there must be a God to give the universe that purpose. 

Ontological Argument – If you cannot prove that there is a being more powerful than God, he must therefor exist.

Moral Argument – We have an innate sense of good and evil and that of right and wrong. There must be a God who ultimately decides what constitutes such things. 

This week take some time to look around your city or maybe even drive to the ocean or a lake to see the amazing things that God has made that give evidence to his existence. 

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What exactly am I on this earth for? What truly is the meaning to life? Have you ever stopped to think about this? Is it just a mere accident that we are even here and like David Benatar you would say it is “Better never to have been?” Joseph Cambell has said that, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asked the question when you are the answer.” Is our short life really about us or can it be about something greater?

There came a point in my life where I needed to come to my senses and realize what exactly I was really living for. Was it just to keep partying at my frat house and live for the moment? I mean YOLO right? Or I thought maybe it was to gain as much knowledge as I could and use it to help as many people along the way as possible. Not a bad idea. But after trying both, I realized that those endeavors really didn’t satisfy what I was looking for in life. I would argue that the meaning of life really isn’t much about us but about the one who created us and that we find our greatest fulfillment when we are most satisfied in that Creator. 

As a pastor-in-training I have seen both in my own life and in the lives of many others just how empty it is to seek after other things. I mean, maybe what you value the most is wealth and that is what you live for. But what will happen if the market crashes and you lose everything, or if the economy goes into hyper inflation down the road and the money you stored away isn’t worth really anything? Or what if all that you lived for was your kids or your spouse and one day you unexpectedly lost them or they just got up and left? Or what if all that you ever wanted was to land your dream career. Most will tell you that even when they attain the job they worked for their whole life they still felt like something was still missing. 

The only thing, or person for that matter, who can truly fulfill that void you feel each day is a relationship with the one who will never change nor leave unexpectedly in the night. Billions of people worship him as Jesus Christ. He is God’s very own Son who lived a perfect life and dealt with the same things that we deal with today. He was executed for claiming that he was God or the Messiah that everyone was looking for and publicly and historically rose from death three days later. He is the only man who claimed not to show you the way to God, but that he was God himself, and then went to prove it by rising from death. 

No historian on this earth will tell you that Jesus Christ is not the most important figure to ever live in history, so there does come a point where you have to do something with those facts. Either he was God himself, or he was a lunatic that deserved to be killed. As C.S. Lewis says in his book Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

So this week, take some time to really study and think about what you believe is the purpose of being here. If your not a Christian, maybe just pray and ask that God would show you that he’s real in your life. What do you have to lose?

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After hitting a home run or scoring a touchdown have you ever seen an athlete point to the sky? Or maybe you’ve seen a grammy award winner give thanks to God and those who helped her along the way. Whether they really realized it or not, all these people are in effect saying that the ability that they have comes from above.

The fifth and final solas is Soli Deo Gloria, or “Glory to God Alone.” This recognizes that the whole of salvation, or being in a right relationship with God, is from Him alone and completely apart from our works. All glory is due to God. The Westminister Shorter Catechism says: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

When this slogan was used during the reformation, and even today, the Roman Catholic church saw life as divided into the sacred and the secular. They saw the work that the pope and the priests did throughout the week as spiritual and to be praised, but the rest of our menial work was not really glorifying or pleasing to God.

But in actuality, the Bible says something completely different about our lives. According to 1 Corinthians 10.31 all that we do in our work or our day to day lives can be done for the glory of God. Whether it is shining shoes, bar tending, teaching a class or running a Fortune 500 company, all of our life can be pleasing to God if you believing in him as your Savior.

In his book, Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper says, “Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this? Don’t coast through life without passion.” According to Christianity, the greatest thing to live for and be passionate about is the man who split time in two, Jesus Christ. If you say that you are a Christian, how do you glorify God in your life?

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How many ways are there to get to God anyways? I mean, I can drive a bunch of different ways to get to work in the morning, how many roads did God make to get to heaven so that anyone who wanted to get there was able to? The answer given in the Bible is that there is in fact only one way: salvation is through Jesus Christ and that he is the only one who can forgive sins.

Whoa. Now your probably thinking Christianity is just for narrow-minded, stubborn conservatives  who think they have it all together, but you also have to think of the other side. Yes, salvation does only come through Jesus, but according to John 6.37 all who believe in Jesus and say sorry for the wrongs or sins they have done are accepted into the faith; and isn’t dependent on what your past or present looks like nor what you do in the future.

The next sola is Solus Christus, or “Through Christ Alone.” If you were to read through the Bible it would be remarkably clear that Jesus is the only way to God and thus we have no need to confess our sins to a priest for forgiveness.

There is salvation by no other means

This is one of the most controversial doctrines in the Bible for many people. To really understand it we have to go back and look at exactly why we are separated from God in the first place. The reason why there is so much evil and pain in the world is because of our sin. In the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis it shows a perfect world free of death and pain. God had perfect fellowship and relationship with his people. But given the opportunity, mankind rebelled against God and chose to bring sin into the world.

The only one who could save us had to be sinless in everything that he did. This man was God’s own Son, Jesus Christ, who 2,000 yeah ago lived a perfect life on our behalf, died a death that we deserved and publicly and historically rose from death three days later. 2 Corinthians 5.21 is probably the most succinct verse that describes this. It states, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus not only died to take away our sin, but when he was executed gave us his very own righteousness and took our sin upon himself.

Because this man was both sinless and God Himself  there is no other possible way to get to God. Acts 4.12 and John 14.6 make this abundantly clear. And as seen in Sola Fide and Sola Gratia we could never do enough good things to earn it. Salvation simply comes by grace, through faith in Jesus.

Jesus is the only one who can forgive sins

Based on this truth, we have no need for a priest to mediate and confess our sins to on our behalf since there is only one person who can mediate between God and us. 1 Timothy 2.5 says,  “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Now don’t get me wrong, we absolutely have need of pastors or priests for spiritual leadership and guidance, but you can simply confess your sins while praying to Jesus and don’t need to drive down the street to sit in a confessional to have your sins absolved.

So take some time this week, and if your a Christian thank God that he even provided a way to be in a right relationship with him. And if your a skeptic, maybe pray for the first time in your life that God would show himself to be real in your life.

Have you ever been up in the mountains or on the beach and just stopped to take a look around and realized just how many good things there are in the world? Of course life is full of sorrow and painful seasons, but we also have so much goodness around us that we don’t even notice. Maybe its not the easiest to spot all the time in places like Las Vegas, where I’m grew up in desert land, but where I live now close to Lake Tahoe it happens all the time.

The next sola that we are looking at is Sola Gratia, or “By Grace Alone.” Grace can be defined as God’s one way love for us, or the unmerited, unearned and undeserved favor that we have because of God. An analogy is like this: Let’s say that I’m driving down the street going twice the speed limit and get pulled over. The just thing that would happen is that the cop would give me a ticket for speeding. Now if he decided to let me off the hook he would be having mercy on me. But an even crazier thing is if the police officer decided to let me go, but before he walked back to his squad car he gave me a hundred bucks and told me to have a nice day. This would be grace. Grace is so over the top that it almost seems ridiculous. The Bible teaches two different sides of the doctrine of God’s grace: his common grace and his special grace.

Common Grace

Going back to the opening paragraph, it amazes me when I look around at my daily life and see all the great things that we have, simply by God’s grace. My mind didn’t even think this way until I was talking with my friend Pastor Alex Early and was reminded of this simple truth: Self-sufficiency is only an allusion. He was quoting Gene Edward Veith Jr. in his book God at Work. Every good thing that we have is dependent on other people and is all a grace given to us from God. Even something like going to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread is a huge evidence of the common grace in our lives. There were multiple people involved, all the way from harvesting the grain to packaging the product to the truckers that made the delivery to the store. And this is just one simple thing that we need on a day to day basis. The Bible in James 1.17 says that every good thing that we have comes from God and this includes his providence of everyday items that you don’t really think about.

Special Grace

The other side of grace that people typically think of more often is God’s special grace in our lives. This is when God decides out of his own kindness and love to save individual people that were destined for hell and separation from him. This closely ties in with the last blog, Sola Fide, in that we are save by God’s grace alone, by faith alone. The Bible says that left to ourselves, and because of our sin, we were basically on the bottom of the ocean and dead with no way to save ourselves. God decided in his grace to come down and rescue us in the form of Jesus Christ on a cross. He had no obligation to do this but decided to anyways. This gives us great assurance in life because it was God who did absolutely everything in our salvation, thus we could never do a single thing to lose that gift. It is all because of his grace.

So take some time today to look around and see all the great things we have in this life, and if you believe in God, just say thanks. If not, tell someone you run into what a beautiful world we’re all a part of or how they have impacted you for the better.

So when I die God is just going to weigh the good things in my life against the bad things and if I did more good than bad then I’m in right? That statement actually couldn’t be further from the truth. The second sola is Sola Fide, or literally “By Faith Alone”. This doctrine simply says that we are saved or made right with God through Jesus and apart from anything (bad or good) that we have or ever will do. This was the central issue for Martin Luther and many other reformers, and also the main doctrine that separates Protestant churches from Catholicism. Luther said that this was the doctrine “by which the church stands or falls.”

The Gospel found in the Bible is that we all have done wrong things or sinned in our lifetime, and because of that are at enmity with God. But God loved us so much that he sent his very own Son to die on the cross. This was Jesus, who was born a baby, who grew up, lived a perfect, sinless life, and was crucified and humiliated on a cross. Three days later he rose from death and is now ruling and reigning as King. He did all of this for a theological term called justification or the doctrine of Sola Fide.

Justification is just a fancy term for our legal standing before God. It is as if God looks down on us as if we had never sinned. A common analogy goes like this: Lets say a teenager is standing before a judge in the courtroom and is guilty of stealing a car. The judge happens to be the boys very own father but he knows that to be fair he must enact a punishment equal to the crime. As hard as it is the judge declares that his very own son is guilty of the crime and will have to pay. But he does something that you wouldn’t expect. When the gavel is about to drop and the sentence announced, the judge stands up, gets down from his chair, crosses the bar and says that the boy is free to go and that the judge himself will take the punishment for the crime in his place.

This is exactly what Sola Fide or justification is. Jesus came down to earth and was condemned in our place for our sins. And he does not save us for the good things that we do, but simply by us placing our Faith in Him and saying sorry for our sins. The Bible in Ephesians 2.8 says “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Many of us spend countless hours planning a vacation or what we will do for a career but we won’t take an hour to spend some time researching and to think about what will happen when we die one day. If you have never done so already, spend some time today and really think about and weigh out exactly what you believe.

What exactly are the Five Solas of Christianity? These five latin phrases are really just the rally cries of the reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther in the 16th century. They are known by many as the theological pillars of the reformation and began when the reformers saw the corruption throughout the Roman Catholic church. All Five Solas are in response to five doctrines that they believed were the core essentials of Christianity and were being wrongly taught by the church. This movement eventually transformed Christendom and led to the emergence of the churches that you see in your city.

The real question is why should you even pick up a book that is thousands of years old and has things in there that seem absolutely crazy? The first of the Five Solas is Sola Scripture or literally “By Scripture Alone.” This slogan is the doctrine that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and living a Christian life. Now you might rightly say “what about all the truth in this world like engendering and science?” Great question. The Bible does not write off other scholastic writings nor is it a math or science text book. It is there to show us how we might know God and have a relationship with him.

In other words, the Bible is the only final authority in matters of faith and and how that faith applies to our daily lives. There are also many characteristics of the Bible that attribute to this doctrine. The majority of these descriptions are taken from my favorite living theologian and previous professor of mine, Wayne Grudem.

Inspiration

This point is re-iterated hundreds of times within Scripture. It is that the Bible is the very Word of God. If God were to speak, (and he did) it would look exactly like what we have in our hands. Even though the Bible was written by human authors, those human authors were inspired by God himself as they penned what we have today.

Authority

In short, the Bible has the full authority of God. All the words of Scripture are God’s words and to disobey any part of his Word would be to disobey God. The Bible does not contain all knowledge, but it does contain everything that is necessary for salvation.

Clarity 

The Bible is also written in such a way that it is able to be understood by ordinary Christians who seek to understand and know more about it. You don’t need a priest or pastor to interpret the Bible, you can go and simply read it yourself. This is in contradiction to Apostolic Authority in the Catholic Church that would see leadership, such as the pope, as a source of authority along with scripture.

Necessity 

The Bible is necessary for knowing what the Gospel is and living a spiritual life, but not necessary for knowing that there is a God. The Bible teaches in the book of Romans that every person on this earth knows that there is a God instinctively. It is evident when you look at such things as creation, but a woman or man do not instinctively know how to be at peace with that God without the Bible.

Sufficiency

The Bible contains all the words of God that he intended us to have and also contains everything God needs to tell us to obtain salvation.

Inerrancy 

The written words of Scripture, in the original manuscripts, is true in all that it says. As afore stated, the Bible is not a science text book, but everything it says about any topic within it, is true.

All of these characteristics culminate into the Bible that we have today and thus we can trust what it says. So take some time to dust off that old book on the shelf and give it a read, you’ll be surprised at what you see!