Who created God?

The first cause argument goes like this...the fact there is something rather than nothing points to a first cause, and that first cause must be a purposeful being existing outside of time and space (i.e. God) Critics of this argument state if there must be a first cause for everything then you must answer who created the creator. Bertrand Russell, the famed atheist, made this criticism popular. 

This criticism, however, deserves to be criticized. Let's try applying it to something else. Suppose I was an archeologist, and during one of my digs in Michigan I found some very ancient tools, predating Native Americans as we know them. It would be a very significant find. I would immediately know that there were people here who made these tools. I would not need to know how they came to ancient Michigan to know that they were here. However, if I were to apply Bertrand Russell's criticism to the first cause argument to this situation, I would need to know the first cause of the ancient civilization, and the first cause of that first cause, and the first cause of that first cause etc. before I could conclude that there were people there at all. It is entirely illogical, and if you applied this to science or history we would never know anything about anything.

I would say then that when one concludes from evidence that physical reality must have been created by a personal and intentional creator that this does not put a burden of proof on them to explain the origins of the Creator. It is not a logical criticism. 

God's sense of humor

A number of years ago I underwent the darkest days of my life emotionally. I wanted to hear from God. I needed to know that He had not forsaken me, and unfortunatly I was so emotionally driven that I was not trusting Him at His word on the matter, even though I had wanted to. God tried to reach me a number of ways. It seemed like every time I would turn a Christian channel on or open a book, it was like I was hearing exactly what I needed to hear.

In fact I even had a number of people of God tell me that God had shown me what I was going through, even though I told absolutely nobody. There was no way they could have known the details had it not been revealed to them. I am somewhat of a private person for an extrovert. If I begin exposing my weaknesses and feelings to someone it tends to mean I have really gotten close. The rest of the world gets my ideas, my beleifs, my interests and my jokes  (well most get my jokes but anyways... )

Speaking of humor, that is what this is leading to... God's sense of humor. God most certainly has one. He would have to since we are created in His likeness and image. A good healthy sense of humor is actually an admirable thing and it is one of the finest most unique gifts of being human.

At any rate, with all the ways God used to reach me, none of them seemed to be enough. I was in a very poor emotional state. Then one night I became really desperate! I remembered that Jesus said if we ask anything in His name and do not doubt we will have exactly what we pray for. So I opened my Bible to Mark eleven and I read it. I remembered that Kenneth Hagin Sr. had said that he was healed off of that verse because of his faith. So I became bold, not so much in my spirit but in my emotions. I told Jesus that I wanted Him to let me see Him that very night and I told Him He had to do because I was going to beleive and not doubt. I fell asleep with that mindset.

Then just before I woke up I had a night vision. There are some distinctions between a night vision and a dream, but to explain those is not really the purpose of my note tonight. In this night vision I simply saw a bible before me and I opened it to the book of Acts where I was reading Peter's words at the gathering of the day of Pentecost. I litterally saw every word and was reading my bible just like I would had I been awake.

When I got to the part where it said "this is that spoken by the prophet Joel" something strange began to happen. Peter's words began turning read as I would read them. As I kept reading, more and more words were turning red. I started franticly flipping pages to other books and every scripture was not only precisely where they would be as if I was awake and holding a bible, but each word was fastly turning red until I flipped over to the book of Revelation and even it was red. Then I arose from the vision and sat up in bed startled.

I knew I had just heard from God in a marvelous way, but I was somewhat perplexed about the vision. Then it hit me what I had prayed for. I wanted to see Jesus and I had really beleived it would happen, but I got stuck with this perplexing vision. It did not seem fair. Then I heard the voice of Jesus by His Spirit speak to my human spirit. He said (paraphrased), "You wanted to see me and I honored your request. I am the Word made flesh and when you study the written word you are seeing me."

I knew then what He was saying to me. In order to get out of my pit of despair I would need to do so by seeing Him through the lens of His word. Of course we know true faith comes by hearing the Word of God! I immediatly burst out laughing! It was almost like God had played a joke on me. He knew exactly what I had asked Him for but still He chose to give me the answer in a humorous way. I can't even begin to tell you how healthy that laughter was for me. It had been months since I had really experienced the joy of laughter, one of God's greatest gifts!

The Most High

Have you ever wanted something really badly, and then you get it and it is exactly what you want. It is everything you dreamed it could be, but then after a certain point it just was not really all that exciting. Now don't get me wrong. There may have not been a let down, but still it seemed something about it was just not as great and magical as you thought it would be.

There are a few places in this world that I really want to visit: Tokyo, Rome, Cairo, Jerusalem, Athens etc... but based on what I have experienced before when I finally get the things I want, I doubt they will be quite as exciting as the anticipation. It seems to me that this is a part of human nature. That shiny new gadget just becomes another accessory eventually.

Its funny how many times I have "fallen in love" and said to myself "she's perfect," only to eventually realize I really should have gotten to know this and that about her before putting my heart on the line.

I am told that even when I meet "the one" for me there will be this magical chemical phase of falling in love, but this will only last anywhere from 6 months to a few years, and then it will take true compatibility to sustain us.

When I look at Hollywood and the music industry its not difficult to see why so many stars blaze hot at first, and then burn out through controversy, divorce, substance abuse and often an early death. There is a certain high that comes with the feeling of anticipation, and these wealthy celebrities get all the highs. They get to have anything they want... money, homes, affluence, influence, fame, the most attractive and sought after lovers in the world etc... Then eventually these things either wear off and they look to move on to another high, which accounts for the many divorces we see in Hollywood. If you are seeking just a high out of a relationship, if all you are looking for is the thrill of the chase, there is no man and no woman who will satisfy your craving. Many celebrities I believe turn to drugs and alcohol as a sort of high when their careers no longer or never did satisfy them.

There is another sort of anticipatory high that we first experience as small children. It's a magical world of imagination we have where anything is possible. We don't really have reasons to doubt there might be great magic in the world. We tend to carry that with us for awhile. However, as we grow older it changes. Unless our spirits have been broken when we become teenagers and young adults, we dream of great careers, of fairytale romances and changing the world. Then for many people, reality hits, age settles in upon them, and they see a part of their life as being an unfulfilled accomplishment, and they come to the conclusion that life is not as magical as they once believed. They stop chasing dreams.

I think the problem with humanity is a lack of realization that there is nothing on Earth, no matter how great that will fulfill us. Likewise, there is no natural estate that is so terrible that we should give up on life. Life is worth living because there is more to life than life in the biological sense. There is a place of wonder that we are longing for because that place is home.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33 that we are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness. He makes a promise to us that in doing so, we will get the other things we want.

However, God should be our greatest desire. An encounter with Him should be our greatest anticipation. There are no letdowns when we seek the Kingdom ahead of our materialism, intellectualism and other desires. There is no high like the Most High!

C.S. Lewis on what a Christian society would look like

SOCIAL MORALITY
(by Clives Staple Lewis)

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr Johnson said, 'People need to be reminded more often than they need to he instructed.' The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political program for applying 'Do as you would be done by' to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

People say, 'The Church ought to give us a lead.' That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practising Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians--those who happen to have the right talents--should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting 'Do as you would be done by' into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists -not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no 'swank' or 'side,' no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would he what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies'.

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, 'advanced,' but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned--perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity.

Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest--what we call investment--is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or 'usury' as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.

One more point and I am done. In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason 'in order that he may have something to give to those in need'. Charity--giving to the poor--is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words,' if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of 'charities' in the common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbours or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear--fear of insecurity. This must often be recognised as a temptation. Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help.

And now, before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this section has affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are some Leftist people among them who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us right up against the real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching. the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a Master or--a Judge. I am just the same. There are bits in this section that I wanted to leave out. And that is why nothing whatever is going to come of such talks unless we go a much longer way round. A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat 'Do as you would he done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And. so, as I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward--driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home.