23 Feb The Biggest Problem Christianity Faces
Blog Series: Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life
We don’t want to lose sight of why we are going through this series, which will take months to complete.
First, to protect ourselves from rejecting Christianity.
Any number of mega-church pastors have defected from the faith in recent memory, and not too long ago, two high-profile Christian celebrities went online to tell their followers that they had rejected Christianity:
Joshua Harris, author of the mega-bestseller, “I Kissed Dating Good-bye.”
Marty Sampson, worship music writer, singer, member of Hillsong Church
Yet, listening to their reasons, it is my assessment that they did not reject the truth. They rejected their incomplete knowledge, understanding, or distortion of the truth.
The truth is a rock that will protect us us, a light that will guide us, and a liberator that will set us free if we know it, understand it, and abandon ourselves to it.
Second, to give ourselves a roadmap by which we can guide and accelerate our spiritual growth to become all we can become, in God’s eyes, before we die.
So here’s the outline of where we’re going. To be a strong and growing Christian we must:
- Abandon ourselves to an eternal perspective: We must view reality as God views it. Otherwise it will be like trying to play soccer while God is playing basketball. We simply won’t understand how life works and we will be continuously frustrated by God’s refusal to bless us as we think He should.
- Rise to our true spiritual nature: We must understand what happened when we became a Christian. We did not turn over a new leaf. God turned over a new life. We all act consistently with how we see ourselves, and when we understand our true spiritual nature, we are strengthened to live more consistently according to it.
- Become our own brain surgeon: Combining biblical truth with recent discoveries in neuroscience, we now understand how we can use our mind to change our brain, feeding ourselves truth until it changes us. We have the power to guide and accelerate our spiritual growth.
Each of these must be unpacked to understand it, so hang in there. But this is the overview of where we are going. I’ll repeat this from time to time, so we don’t lose sight of what we’re doing and where we’re going. Knowing these truths can change your life!
Having said that, we are now in the process of looking at “abandoning ourselves to an eternal perspective.”
To do so, we must believe the unbelievable. But, as we said two weeks ago, when looking at the fact that “God Cannot be Proved or Disproved” by science it is not really unbelievable. It just seems unbelievable to someone with a temporal perspective.
There are three “unbelievable” things we must believe:
- God exists, in spite of the lack of scientific proof.
- God is good, in spite of rampant evil in the world.
- God loves me, in spite of the fact that He does not make my life go better.
If we are not rock-solid on all three, life can overwhelm us and we can become in danger of rejecting the faith, as Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson did. Or, if we do not lose our faith, we can be stunted in our ability grow.
Then last week, we looked at the fact that, in spite of the lack of scientific proof, there is compelling evidence that God exists. This week we look at the fact that God is good in spite of the rampant evil in the world.
We must believe that God is good, in spite of rampant evil in the world.
If there is a silver bullet against God, it is the problem of pain, suffering and evil in the world.
It is, perhaps, the most serious problem of existence. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Perhaps more people have abandoned belief in God and/or Christianity because of the problem of pain, suffering and evil than for any other reason, and it is certainly the greatest test of the Christian faith.
In a recent interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo), the British comedian Stephen Fry delivered a vicious, scathing attack on the Judeo-Christian God when asked what he would say if it turned out, after he died, that God did, in fact, exist. He said he would want nothing to do with God. He called God, if He should happen to exist, a “maniac”, pointing to the large amount of unnecessary suffering in the world which He, by definition, created and allows.
He went on to make the case that the existence of suffering is an impossible problem for believers in a good God to solve. Even if they use wiggle room to argue that without some suffering there can be no charity; or that people who do wrong are punished, Christians cannot account for the suffering of innocent children and animals, or worse, devout believers.
What kind of God, he wondered, has created a world in which children die in floods, starve to death, perish in agony from TB and malaria? What kind of God allows people who worship and adore him to be murdered, raped, tortured and come to countless other hideous ends?
This does not preclude the existence of any God, of course. God might be, as Fry speculated, a maniac. He may be a vicious, sadistic God. Or, like the Greeks and Romans before us, he may be a pantheon of narcissistic Gods who have no interest in looking out for us.
But, he contended, a God who was benevolent and loving, as we are told the Christian God is, would never create the world we live in. Believing in him requires either shuttering yourself off from the carnage all around you; or crafting frankly ridiculous excuses (God works in mysterious ways).
And Frye is not alone in his assessment. Atheists commonly contend that a God who is benevolent and loving, as they are told the Christian God is, would never create the world we live in. Believing in Him requires either ignoring or excusing an ominous dark side.
People have been choking on the bone of rampant evil for thousands of years. In fact, there is a classic statement on the problem of evil: If God is all good and if God is all powerful, where does evil come from. Either, God must not be all good and He does not care that evil exists, or He must not be all powerful, and He can’t do anything about it.
On the face of it, that seems like a formidable conclusion to come to. But like many problems, there’s more to it than that. When we probe the depths of the other issues that must be considered we can fully embrace the fact that God is all good and all powerful and that pain and evil exist.
Next week we will look at the other issues that need to be considered in facing this this formidable challenge.
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Renew Your Mind, Transform Your Life”, introduced on January 5, 2021. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
In addition, I am creating a new online membership site, The Change Zone, that will provide information, strategies and resources to help motivated Christians renew their mind and transform their lives. If you would like to learn more about this and get updates to know when The Change Zone will be available, click here.
I look forward to going through this life-changing journey with you.
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