Clear answers ready for these questions will help to arm you for the fight.
1. If there is a God, and if He is good, why is there pain and suffering in the world? Why did God create the devil? Why does He allow evil to continue?
Cliffe Knechtle explains: “Don’t make the mistake of using moral indignation as an argument against God’s existence. For if there is no God, there is no authority to define what is absolutely right and what is absolutely wrong.” Of course if one rejects God because there is suffering in the world, it leaves you with nothing but despair.
The Bible tells us that God not only created the world perfect, but included in it creatures who could choose to love and know Him in a personal way. That meant, of course, that they could choose not to love Him, in fact to rebel against Him. And that, says the Bible, is just what happened. All the grief you see in the world is a result of a civil war in the universe.
But that is not all the Bible says about evil and suffering. It also explains that although God is not responsible for the evil, He has found a way to use it for good if we co-operate with Him.
First, He uses it to get our attention. C. S. Lewis writes: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Second, pain is God’s means of bringing things into focus. A phone call from the hospital about a loved one reminds us about what is really important in life.
Third, suffering—like a trip to the dentist or to the surgeon—can hurt us in order to heal us. Some of the things in life that we thought were assets turn out to be liabilities, like too much freedom or too much money. Other things we first thought were bad turn to our good. Many people thank God they got cancer, or ended up in jail, because that is what they needed in order to meet Him.
Some people think God should get rid of all evil as soon as possible. But then that would mean getting rid of every sinner, too. God says He is going to rid the world of evil and suffering, but Jesus has set about to rescue as many as possible first, to invite them to switch sides, to lay down their arms of rebellion, repent, and believe the gospel.
2. How can I take Christianity seriously with so many hypocrites in the church? And why are there so many denominations? Anyway, isn’t Christianity just a crutch for weak people?
Jesus reserved His most scathing remarks for the sin of hypocrisy. Why? Because as long as I pretend to be what I am not, I will never become what God designed me to be.
Of course prejudging all Christians as hypocrites is like saying all apples are rotten because I’ve seen a few rotten ones in my time. True, Christianity sets high standards for its followers, and there is no place for a Christian excusing his sin. But assessing Christianity by the performance of some Christians is to miss the main point.
Christians are often assumed to be claiming perfection because most religions teach that only a perfect person could be sure of heaven. But when a Christian claims such assurance, he is basing it on his trust in the perfection of Christ and His work, not on his own condition!
So the real question is: “What do you think of Christ?” He is the Saviour, and no moral imperfection can be found in Him. Yet His followers should seek to show His grace, love and holiness in our lives that others “may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”
The variety of denominations—barring false cults that purposely twist Scripture—should not be an insurmountable problem to a true seeker. While some things need to be interpreted in the Bible, the essential message—believed by every true Christian—needs no interpretation. It needs only to be believed. The four elements in the message: i) all have sinned; ii) the soul that sins dies; iii) Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; iv) believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.
Christianity a crutch? Hardly! What good is a crutch to a dead man? What everyone needs is new life, and that is what the Christian gospel offers.
3. Don’t all religions lead ultimately to God? Are you saying that all other religions are wrong? Does it matter what you believe as long as you are sincere?
A student described his belief as a mountain which everyone was climbing, all on different paths yet all leading to the same summit. This has one fatal flaw. It only works if you can prove that humanity is going uphill! Not easy to believe of the generation that has seen two World Wars, the collapse of the family and common decency, and lives with the constant reminders of incessant bloodshed around the world. The Bible says man is getting worse.
The shocking fact is this: with all the religions in the world, there are many ways. So says Isaiah 53: Everyone has turned to his own way. But there is only one Saviour! No other religion even offers one; they say that a person must accomplish their salvation by their own works.
The politically correct way to look at things in the West these days is to assume that all beliefs are equally valid. This moral relativism is shown for what it is in the following paragraph by Hadley Arkes: “In one society, a widow is burned on the funeral pyre of her husband; in another, she is burned on the beach in Miami. In one society, people complain to the chef about the roast beef; in another, they send back the roast beef and eat the chef.” Any difference?
We all know from experience that sincerity is not enough to guarantee arrival at one’s destination. One must also take the right road. On this Jesus was perfectly clear: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the Father, except by Me” (John 14:6).
4. What about the people who have never heard of Jesus? Will they all go to hell? How can a loving God send anyone to hell? And is it fair to be punished for ever, no matter how much you sinned during 70 or 80 years?
Certain things we know for sure. God never gives us information just to tickle our fancy. If we are not to be the judge in this matter, God feels no obligation to tell us how this judgment will be decided. Yet we know “the Judge of all the earth” will do right. And that Judge is no one other than Jesus Himself. What does He say in John 3? “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). So the light has come, yet men refuse to respond.
We know as well that all those saved are saved through Christ and His finished work. There is no other saviour.
And there is a real place called hell. It was not made for humanity; it was made for the devil and his angels. But if certain people decide to remain with the devil in his rebellion, they are welcome to share his fate. After all, doesn’t hell show that God takes human decisions seriously? He doesn’t drag people kicking and screaming to heaven. If they don’t want His Son, they certainly don’t want heaven since heaven will be filled with His glory. Imagine being with millions of psalm-singing Christians and never able to get out! It is an unbeliever’s nightmare of astronomical proportions. Hence Jesus’ comment to the highly respectable Nicodemus, “Men love darkness rather than light.” Nicodemus needed to be born from above if he ever hoped to see the kingdom of God.
But back to the question of who can be saved. We know that many have been saved who never heard of Jesus, in Old Testament times. It was not only people like Abraham, who “rejoiced” to see Christ’s day, but those like Rahab and the men of Nineveh—who clearly were saved since they will be used as witnesses for the prosecution at the Last Trial (Mt. 12:41). What did they know of Jesus?
David Gooding states: “When Romans 2 says that God’s goodness to people was meant to lead them to repentance, was that goodness extended to Jews only or also to Gentiles? I would have thought that God, being no respecter of persons, was good to Gentiles as well. Paul says it to the people of Lystra, Acts 14. God didn’t leave Himself without witness; He was good to them.
“Now Romans 2 says that this goodness of God was meant to lead people to repentance. Did God hope that they would repent? Unless He was insincere, of course He did. What really happened when they did repent? Did God, by His silence, indicate, ‘You’ve repented, but that isn’t enough, of course. I haven’t revealed to you the means of salvation and I am not intending to. Therefore, you repented but there is no salvation for you’?
“Another indication in the OT of God’s attitude to the Gentiles is the famous one, ‘Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else” (Isa. 45:22). That seems to suggest that God was interested in saving Gentiles and He bases that invitation on the fact, if one looks at the context, that He is the Creator. There is no other God, and in God alone is there salvation. Thus the Gentiles were urged to look to God and be saved. Unless God is saying things that are ultimately meaningless and tantalizingly insincere, He must have meant it seriously, inviting Gentiles to look to Him and be saved.”
As to suffering punishment forever, three factors must be considered: i) do they want out of their place of torment if the only alternative is living in Christ’s glory? ii) will they stop sinning—and therefore stop running up their debt—when they die? iii) what is suitable punishment for being guilty of the death of the Son of God and never repenting for it? We must beware when we think that we are more merciful that God After all, His Word itself declares that there is no other escape if men “neglect so great salvation.”
5. Doesn’t evolution disprove the necessity of God? Can’t science explain everything we need to know?
John Lennox states: “For many centuries theism was the dominant view, that God is the Creator and Upholder of the universe. It was the view of many leading figures in the scientific revolution. It…comes as an astonishing surprise to many…intellectuals that many of the figures that they revere in science as being responsible for the great upsurge of science in the 16th, 17th & 18th centuries were not only theists, but Christian theists. In fact, 90% of the founding members of the Royal Society of Great Britain were believers. Sir Alfred North Whitehead, one of the leading historians of science of all time said this, ‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a Lawgiver.’ We owe a great deal of modern science to people who were motivated by their belief that behind the universe there was a Creator God, so that science and Christianity were certainly not incompatible in their minds.”
As far as the question of evolution—meaning that all we see in the universe can be explained by impersonal force randomly acting on mindless matter—is concerned, it is far from being proven. Michael Behe, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, argues that “the most convincing evidence for design is not to be found in the stars or the fossils, but in biochemical systems. Behe uses examples such as vision, blood-clotting, and cellular transport to demonstrate that life comprises an astonishing array of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts that defy current naturalistic explanations. Behe surveys professional science literature and shows that it is completely silent on the subject, stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life.”
Behe writes: “It is important to realize that we are not inferring design from what we do not know, but from what we do know…. A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.
“It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead…”
It is unwise to think of God as “a God of the gaps.” John Lennox explains: “As science advanced, God appeared to be squeezed into the gaps in scientific knowledge and, of course, He got tinier and tinier…The notion that God is simply a God of the gaps is a very dangerous notion. It ended up in deism—that God, if He existed at all, started the whole thing off and then He simply lets it run. You can see that it wouldn’t be very long down that road before you would end up with God losing His existence altogether. As science pushed the frontiers further and further back, God would become less and less necessary. So we get to naturalism, a situation where God has lost His existence; only the universe exists as a closed system of cause and effect….
“There are certain logical problems within naturalism that are worth pointing out. Because we believe in God as a God of rationality, we are guided by Scripture to the conclusion that when intellectuals give up on God, Romans tells us that they become darkened in their understanding.
“Professor J.B.S. Haldane was an atheist and yet, he could see that the extreme form of reductionism that reduced everything simply to physics and chemistry and mathematics had a logical flaw at its heart. He put it this way, ‘If my mental processes are determined solely by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. In particular, I have no reason to believe that my brain is even composed of atoms.’
“Here you have a very curious situation. If we are simply to be reduced, as George Gaylord Simpson says, to being the product of a natural process which didn’t have us in mind, then, in the end, it’s true that the thoughts in our minds are simply the results of motions of atoms in our brain. Then why on earth should we believe them? There’s a logical absurdity at its heart.”
Lennox continues: “Let me tell you a story. In Siberia I gave a lecture some years ago, chaired by the Communist Party, on ‘The Search for Meaning and Values at the End of the Twentieth Century.’ One man, a senior politician, was very angry. He went up and drew a lightning flash on the blackboard and said, ‘People used to believe that that was caused by God and now we know how lightning works.’
“I looked straight at this politician, and said, ‘I am amazed how much we agree. The God you don’t believe in I don’t believe in either. A God who disappeared when you discovered how lightning worked wouldn’t be worth believing in anyway, would He?’ Then I looked at the audience and I said, ‘Our friend here, I suspect on the basis of his logic, when he discovered how the main spring of a watch worked, he ceased believing in a watchmaker.’
“So many people feel that once you have discovered a mechanism, you’ve wiped out the notion of a designer. So in science, the only place you’re going to find God is in the places we don’t understand anything. That is nonsensical. It is actually the other way around. The more intricate you discover the mechanisms to be, the more it ought to increase your wondering at the sheer brilliance of the Mind that invented them.”
6. If Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures, why didn’t most of the Jews—especially the religious leaders—recognize Him?
When the leaders in Jerusalem cried, “Not Jesus but Barabbas” they made it clear why they rejected Him. Barabbas was a freedom fighter against the Romans, and the rulers of the Jews wanted a Messiah who would deliver them from their earthly enemies. Thus Jesus’ words to Pilate, “If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (Jn. 18:36). Nor did the Jews like Jesus absolute claim over their life because of His insistence that He was indeed God manifest in flesh. They objected to Him being “Lord of the Sabbath,” forgiving sins against God, and telling them that He would yet be seen by them in His kingdom glory (causing the same irritation as Joseph telling his brothers about their bowing to him).
But the Jewish leaders’ rejection of Jesus’ claims does not weaken the Bible’s argument; it strengthens it. After all, many OT prophets warned that Messiah would be “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not” (Isa. 53:3). David warned of the “The stone which the builders refused” (Ps. 118:22). Paul, quoting Isaiah, quoting God, asked, “Who has believed our report?” Of course, as Paul points out, there were many Jews (including himself) who did believe and responded with John, “It is the Lord!”
7. How can someone know for sure? Many Christians say that it is presumptuous to say you know until the final judgment. After all, Jesus said that some who will stand outside knocking who thought they should be inside. Couldn’t you be one of those people?
If we are to know for sure, certain factors are required. First, it would have to rest on a finished work with no possibility of failure. That Jesus did at Calvary. The logic is inescapable. He was verifiably perfect, five trials by His enemies overwhelmingly proving the point. If perfect, He did not die for His own sins. He states that it was our sins for which He died. Therefore, since “the wages of sin is death,” one sin left unpaid-for would keep Him in the grave. The resurrection of Christ is our receipt of a payment for sin fully satisfying God.
But we would also need to have God’s word on it. And we do. He says: “Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more” (Heb. 10:17). And Jesus declares, “I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand” (Jn. 10:28). “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.” (1 Jn. 5:13).
As far as the people standing outside (who thought they should be in), what are they saying? We trusted in Christ’s finished work? No! We did miracles in your name. They were claiming that, on the basis of their performance that they deserved a place in heaven.
Notice Christ’s response. He does not say, I knew you once, but I no longer do. Instead, He sadly declares: “I never knew you.” Anyone who comes to God must be honest about their sin; anything else is an alias. Because only your sins rightly introduce you to God—like this: “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Lk. 18:13).