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From Crusades to Car Bombs - Pick Your Poison!
You
are an intelligent, 21st Century person and you are fast becoming
irritated by all the religious commotion which is going on around you in the
world. You are indignant, not because you would rob someone of his religious
rights, but because you are irritated that intelligent, educated, 21st
Century individuals could still wallow in religious speculation at all.
Science was to have freed us from all this garbage a long time ago!
“Whatever makes these religious nuts think that they have some corner on the truth”? you ask. “And why or how does one person’s holy book stand out from the books of others?” In the end, they all argue that the good survive and the bad don’t. In the end, they all contradict themselves in one way or another, and commit one obscenity or another in the name of their gods. After all, haven’t the world’s three great religions all proven themselves unworthy in one way or another? It’s simply a matter of picking your poison!
It is, of course, your choice, to pick your poison. 
But
before you descend into total
agnosticism, existential depression, or good old fashioned suicide, we
invite you to consider one more alternative.
Most of what you we see and hear from the religious world is a giant smokescreen which obscures the facts from the careless observer. The answer is not in religion. The answer is intelligent and it is right under your nose. All we ask is that you extend us the courtesy of reading the next few paragraphs. They may just change the way you think – forever. In any case, they will help you pick your poison! We would like you to entertain a single question:
If there really is such a thing as a God…what would He really be like???
Come on, now, it won’t kill you to spend five minutes reading something about religion!
1. God is a unique God. When we say he is unique, we say He is not like anything. While we may know and understand Him intimately, He is ultimately beyond our comprehension.
All of the other gods which men worship are the product of the creation at some level. The Mormon creation model, for example, states that all of their gods are created, thus implying that matter is eternal. In short, all of the gods which men have invented are to greater and lesser extents, part of this creation, though they may exist in spirit form. The great Gnostic Pleroma provides us with a sophisticated effort to classify all men, angels, and spirits in a progression back toward full immersion into the Light. Common to all of the gods of men is the fact that order somehow derived out of chaos without intelligence, and voila!, there they were!
The God of the Bible alone one exists before the creation of all things and claims responsibility for it. He fills his creation, (the doctrine of omnipresence,) but He is separate from it. The gods of the nations begin with the Big Bang. God begins with Himself.
It is in the nature of man to reject or suppress this truth. Once we admit that there is an intelligent creator-God, we must concede that He has authority over us as our maker.
2. God He has no dependencies, no needs, and no compulsions. That is another way to say that He alone is sovereign. You are not sovereign. For example, you need air to breath. God needs nothing. While there are other “gods who are called Gods” each has a need of one kind or another. Hold on to this idea for a minute. We’ll come back to it.
3. God is a triunity. Don’t let the strangeness of this term put you off. We simply mean that God is one God who exists substantively in three inseparable Persons. These persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. No Christian fully understands this triunity, but all Christians freely admit that it forms the very basis of everything we believe. Of course, many more things could be said about this unique God who is both singular and plural. This triunity enjoys perfect love and fellowship in Himself.
Before you are tempted to announce how unreasonable this idea is, consider how important it is. If God exists in Himself as a single person (as is the case with Islam’s Allah) then he is not sovereign. He has needs. Who did Allah talk to before he created all things? He had nothing to talk to, nothing to admire, nothing to love. In fact, he was dependent upon His creation to express himself.
4. God is unchanging. Pagan gods are arbitrary and voluntaristic. They are subject to change according to their whims or wills. The God of the Bible is dynamic but He is unchanging. He as never changed in any way. This means that He is both consistent and predictable. For example, God is both a God of judgment (One who judges sin and its consequences) and a God of love. God cannot fudge on His judgment. He cannot favor His friends, for example, over His enemies. The good news for us is that God does not have to compromise. He has presented a way to judge sin and to spare the sinner at the same time, and do so without compromising His perfect character! The important point there is that unlike all other Gods, He is unchanging, and therefore predictable. He is not arbitrary.
5. God has revealed Himself to man in writing! Unlike any other god invented by men, the God of the Bible has chosen to communicate with us exhaustively. He has communicated His entire plan and program for mankind in the Bible. This expansive book (which does not contradict itself – as some like to say) comprises a unique and comprehensive world view from God’s perspective. It bothers some that God did not choose to dictate this book instead of giving it to us through His servants. What they do not understand is that this book is more than an encyclopedia about God and His ways, it is an actual working manual and a record of God and His dealings with men throughout history. Oh yes, and before you do that song and dance about how impossible it would be for God’s word to go through so many translations and still be accurate, give us an ear! We’ll prove to you why it was a perfect way to transmit His truth. But this is only the beginning.
6. God has also revealed Himself to us by actually becoming a man Himself! In the greatest story ever told, the Son of God became a man! He did not give up a bit of his “Godness” in order to do so; He simply took on our humanity as well. There are thousands and thousands of words in the Bible devoted answering the how, when, where, and why questions about this, and every word is worth reading. In a word, however, God became a man for you and for me.
One the one hand, Jesus Christ is the exact expression of all that God is and does. He is the one who actually created every living and non living thing. He is the one who holds the whole creation together and carries it forward. In fact, He is the one who controls all of the events of creation.
On the other hand, these facts are they would not be enough if our description of Christ stopped here. Here’s why: In an earlier paragraph we reminded you that God is consistent and unchanging. He cannot contradict Himself. We told you He is the just One who demands absolute justice, and He also loves absolutely. This places mankind on the horns of a terrible dilemma. As a perfect, Holy God, he must exact the penalty for our sin. That penalty is eternal separation from God and all that is good. The “wages” of our sin is death, the Bible says, and those wages apply to all men. God must judge sin.
In reality, God has already done that, in the most unique event which has ever occurred in the history of the world. In the person of Christ, God actually took our death upon Himself. Christ, in human flesh, died for every man. Just as our first father Adam, led us into sin and death, so in Christ we can be freed once again. Christ died for our sins. He offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins and the Father raised Him from the dead as proof that His payment was sufficient.
Now its time to pick your poison!
Poison
# 1. You may choose to walk blindly with the rest of the world down a
path toward ultimate destruction as you piece together some sort of morality
scheme and plunge blindly in the hope the good you do will somehow outweigh
the bad – in the unforeseen event that there really is a God who will make
you accountable.
That is one alternative.
Poison # 2. Go ahead, suppress the truth to the point where you deny your own inbred sense of purpose and destiny and actually embrace the insane idea that you and the whole creation with all of its intricacies are nothing more than the result of a primordial accident.
Poison #3. You may choose to believe that God does exist, that He is offended by your sinfulness and that as a sinful person you have no hope of ever saving yourself from the mess you are in. This poison, however has an antidote. That antidote is in the form of a Person who loved you and gave Himself for you, not merely to heal you from the consequence of your sins, but to give you a whole new life.
There is One who loves you. There is One who can save you from the bondage of whatever entangles you as you read this. There is one who can give you new life. You may have Him even as you read this. You may come to Christ and place your hope in Him.