17 Oct 2022
(A)
The Christian is not afraid of facts, for he knows that all facts are God’s facts; he is also not afraid of thinking, for he knows that all truth is God’s truth. Faith cannot be endangered by right thinking and reasoning.
Of course, the Chrisian is not called to argue men into faith; rather, he is called to demonstrate the adequacy of the biblical faith. This he seeks to do for the glory of God and the gospel; the motive is certainly not intellectual self-justification.
In this light, there is a place for Apologetics: C.S. Lewis is one who excels in this area, for he himself struggled intensely before becoming a Christian and one major factor that helped him to become a believer is the reasoning and logic he concentrated upon to consider the validity of Christian faith. Consider the following he wrote:
“All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts – to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
As I ponder on what he wrote, I realise that it makes sense. When we present the gospel, it does not help by just presenting all the ‘comfort’ that believing the gospel would provide; we must not leave out the ‘dismay’ and the terrifying facts – about the Fall, and the sin of men, and the condemnation that would follow – we must present the whole truth and all the facts.
It is interesting also to note that the book of Ecclesiastes presents the terrifying facts of ‘all is meaningless and vain’ without God and without eternity – it is terribly frightening to realise that we are supposed to be here by chance and then we die – and there is no certainty what follows after, and whether there is any hope beyond this. This is compounded by observing all the injustice and dismay affecting so many here on earth and justice seems to be missing, and there is no assurance that there would be ultimate justice.
However, we know that there is ultimate comfort when the truth is revealed.
Consider what Lewis gleaned from thinking: He realised that if there is a God of absolute goodness, then this God cannot approve human greed and trickery and exploitation – this God would detest all behaviour that is not good. He then realised also that if there does exist this God of absolute goodness, He must detest most of what we do (for we are all wretched sinners) – ‘this is the terrible fix we are in’, Lewis concluded. He went on to reason that if the universre is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better the next day, and so our case is hopeless again.
God is our only comfort; He is also the supreme terror, the thing we must need and the thing we must want to hide from. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger.
Lewis’ thinking helped him to see the hopelessness of man after the fall – all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And when sinful man encounter absolute good God, He is the supreme terror and man must want to hide from Him. When sinful man meet holy and absolutely good God, he must die, for he cannot hide from absolute goodness and holiness. This would help us to know why Jesus Christ must come as a man to save humanity in Adam – there is no other way.
Here is illustrated why we need not be afraid of thinking and loving God with all our minds and seeking renewal of our minds in God.
(B)
We continue to consider the importance of loving God with all our minds. Perhaps the area that seems most puzzling and difficult to understand is the subject of the TRINITY – God is one and yet He is in three Persons. We know that there is a limit to human wisdom and the really wise human knows the limitation of this wisdom – it does not stretch beyond a certain boundary, given that we are the created, and God is the Creator, and we are certainly not God.
But loving God with all our minds does not preclude seeking to understand as best as we can, within the limitations of being finite beings. And particularly with regard to the subject of the ‘Trinity’, a better and clearer understanding would help in the richness of worshipping the Triune God and relating to Him with the object of giving Him all the glory.
When we consider “God is love’, this has no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons – love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.
Of course, what people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they actually mean ‘Love is God’. They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. This explains why those involved in premarital sex, homosexuality, promiscuity, adultery, and such, claim that their feelings of love for one another are legitimate and should be respected and even accepted as proper expressions of love.
This is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’. They believe that the living dynamic of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. In Christianity, God is not a static thing – not even a person – but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama – a harmonious wondrous interaction among the three Persons of the Godhead, bathed in eternal love and holiness.
We can think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like a light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father – what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it. Notice that all these pictures of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things instead of two Persons. We have to submit that the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it – surely God know how to describe Himself much better than than we know how to describe Him – hence we come to the realm of ‘mystery’ – not that we cannot understand what we are able to, but somethings are beyond our human understandings.
But the most important thing to know is that the relation between the Father and the Son is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son and the Son looks up to the Father. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God. The third Person is the Holy Spirit.
In the Christian life, you are not actually looking at the Spirit. He is always acting through you. If you think of the Father as something ‘out there’ in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as something inside you, or behind you.
The Father in heaven, the world’s maker and judge is the One who sent His Son to redeem us; He adopted us into His family; He loves us, watches over us, listens to us, cares for us and preserves us for the inheritance of glory.
The Son Jesus Christ, is now personally in heaven, nonetheless makes Himself present to us by the Spirit to stand by us, to love, lead, assure, quicken, uphold, and encourage us and to use us in His work as in weakness we trust Him.
The Holy Spirit indwells us to sustain in us a personal understanding of gospel truth; to maintain in consciousness our fellowship with the Father and the Son; to reshape us in ethical correspondence to Christ; to equip us with abilities for loving personal worship of God in praise and prayer and loving personal ministry to others; to make us realise our present moral weakness and inadequacy, and to long for the future life of bodily resurrection and renewal, the life of which the Spirit’s present ministry for us is the firstfruits and the initial instalment, guaranteeing the rest to come.
So do we see and appreciate the richness and depth of the understanding of the Trinity and our Triune God?
The three Persons of the Godhead are sufficient in their harmonious dynamic relation, bathed in holiness and eternal love – God does not need us; He does not need to create us – He does not need to save us – He could have left us in the state of sin and condemnation – but because God is love, He decides to love those who are unworthy and unlovable and to sacrifice in His love for humanity.
God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is love.