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It is a pleasure to be with you here once more, and you have invited me to talk to the question, does it make sense nowadays to believe in the Bible? My frank answer to that will be, in short, yes, it makes superb sense nowadays still to believe in the Bible. I shall be answering the question, however, from my own personal particular point of view. So to those of you who are already Christians here, I may well give reasons, uh, somewhat different from what you would give if you were giving your personal reasons why you believe the Bible to be the word of God and to make superb sense.
To those of you who are not yet Christians, let me be honest with you and just sketch in my own personal experience. I was brought up by Christian parents, and I say that at once so that you can see where I am coming from, and you may well be inclined to think, well, of course, uh, he would hold a Christian view since he was brought up as a child in a Christian family. And then, of course, that, uh, argument is not very sound, is it? Because you could account for atheists by saying that many atheists were brought up in atheist families, and therefore that's why they believe atheism.
In the end, that argument is counterproductive. Yes, I was brought up as a, in a Christian family, but I have spent most of my adult life in academic circles, uh, teaching and studying the Greek classics and philosophers, and I still hold, I hold in fact more today than ever, that the Bible makes superb sense and is worthy of our belief. And tonight I want to put before you lessons and reasons that have impressed themselves on me during the years in academic circles and in practical living, why it is a superb sense to believe what the Bible says.
High among my, uh, reasons for believing that it makes sense to believe the Bible is the Old Testament, the Bible being in two parts, as you know, first the Old Testament and then the New. I believe it makes sense because of the high, immense significance that the Old Testament gives to mankind. According to the Old Testament, the c- man is the creature of our one true God, creator of the universe. Not only the creature of the creator, but according to the book of Genesis, man is made in God's image, says Genesis chapter one.
Made therefore able to have intelligent conversation with his maker. Made to act as God's viceroy over the rest of creation. And because man is made in the image of the Creator, man therefore is more important ultimately than any part or even the whole of the universe put together. Man is not simply a super duper computer. I am aware of the argument that rages ever more intensely in academic circles and technological, technological circles, that one day people will be able to produce a computer that in every respect parallels the human or perhaps exceeds him.
It is, of course, an argument that has powerful, uh, protagonists on both sides. I hold that man is not simply a super duper computer. That is, according to Bible, is not. For instance, if your computer doesn't please you, then you are free to kick it in the ribs as far as the Bible is concerned and destroy it. But if your next door neighbor doesn't suit you, you are not free, says the Bible, to kick him in the ribs and destroy him. Why shouldn't you destroy him? Because the Bible explains that man is made in the image of God, and to murder a human being is an insult to the Creator, of which man is a creature.
And that's a theme that we're never tired these days pointing out to the Russian intelligentsia. Man made in the image of God, does it make sense? Why, we gently say to them that if Stalin had believed it, Stalin would not have proceeded to eliminate sixty million people just for the sake of his political theories. It would have been a vastly more healthy place, would the CIA, if Stalin and some of his Confederates had actually believed what Old Testament maintains, that human life is sacred because man is made in the image of God.
Take any less of you you like, suppose that man is but a super duper computer, then why not, if it so pleases you, ultimately destroy him? He is but, in that sense, a machine that you made. Number one, therefore, uh, reason for my thinking that the Bible still today makes excellent and fundamental sense to human existence is this high significance it gives to human beings. I said a moment ago that, according to the Bible, man is made in the image of God, and therefore, because he's made in the image of his creator, he is more important than the material universe around him.
Actually, we all instinctively believe that, don't we? I suspect you all do. I certainly do. Take, for instance, the sun up in the sky. We are absolutely dependent on it for light and heat, without which human life is impossible. On the other hand, the sun is vast compared with my little brain. But I know in hes- hesitation in saying which is the more important, which is the more significant. For vast as is the sun, it is but a collection of gas. My brain is more than that, and so is yours.
I know the sun is there. Sun doesn't know I'm here. If it did, it would shine a bit more. You'll say, I actually know how the sun works, thanks to the scientists. I have every admiration for them. The sun doesn't know how I work. Size, ladies and gentlemen, in the universe is not of ultimate significance. A load of hay is very big compared with a baby's brain, but there's no doubt which is the more significant. It's not size that necessarily counts, it's complexity. And this vast universe, other than space and perhaps dark matter, is made up of billions and billions and billions of galaxies of billions of stars.
Yet every one of them we know is but a collocation of basic particles or collocation of gas. The whole vast universe is thus in one sense less significant than a baby's brain. We believe it, at least I believe it. It gives to humankind its her- its proper and elevated significance. Perhaps you'll say, but in arguing like that, start, you are guilty of wishful thinking.
You want it to be so. And surely that's what all men have always wanted, to think themselves important. And therefore it is no surprise that you should prefer that argument, but you're simply preferring it so doesn't make it so. Well, if it were wishful thinking, you would expect the majority of people that have ever lived to have believed it, yes? If it's natural, human, wishful thinking. The very opposite is true. If you go back to the time when the book of Genesis was written, then I suppose the nation of Israel were unique among the surrounding oriental nations in adhering to the view that there is one true Lord God Creator who made the heaven and earth, was independent and is independent of the creation.
He doesn't need the creation. The creation is not part of him. As the philosophers would say, his existence is not contingent. None made him. He is the self-existent. This is what the ancient nation of Israel stood for, and in standing for it in its day when Genesis was written, was quite unique. The rest of the nations around about, according to the Bible, had once known and believed that there was one supreme God creator. But for various reasons, the Bible explains, men had not liked to retain that knowledge in their heads.
And allow me an aside from my observation of the modern world, that o- that is, that statement is true of a good many people still. They prefer not to think of an almighty creator. They would prefer any other scientific explanation of the complexity of the universe rather than that. Professor Dawkins of Oxford, the ev- uh, evangelist for Darwinian evolution, has it in his book that the universe is a system that everywhere gives overwhelming appearance as if it had been designed, and then as, but it hasn't been.
I see. Yes. Says he, do know Darwinian theory, atheistic Darwinian theory, makes it possible for a man to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I wish I had the opportunity to ask Professor Dawkins why he wants to be an atheist to start with, let alone an intellectually fulfilled one. And as I shall argue presently, it is mighty difficult to be intellectually fulfilled if you dismiss the Creator from his creation. But to get back to this business of Israel being unique in her maintenance of this faith that there is one true Lord God Creator, uncreate himself, who made our universe and us within it.
The other nations, getting rid of that idea, letting it go rather, as the Bible would have it. Found what everybody finds. Get rid from your idea and your thinking of the creator. Get rid of the idea of God. Banish him to the dustbin. And now what? You will find that you can't just believe in nothing. You'll have to believe in something. You'll find by obvious, uh, uh, clear observation that you didn't make the universe.
You didn't make yourself. And therefore, you will have to decide what it was that made the universe, where it came from, what powers they are that made you in particular, and what powers will one day end our universe and all human life upon it. What powers are they? If you ask the ancients, the non-Israelites around Israel, what were the powers that made the universe and made them, they would have replied, well, the sun god and the moon god and the storm god and the god of fertility and such like things.
In other words, letting go the idea of the one true Lord God creator, they proceeded to deify the forces of nature. They saw they couldn't control these forces, so they adopted all sorts of antics to try and cajole them, but in the end found the inevitable consequence. They became slaves by their very superstition and their fear to the processes of the universe. The Old Testament bad meant not to be afraid of such things.
But, for instance, among the, uh, the, the, uh, less educated people, and they were the majority in those far off days, when the moon went into eclipse, the good ladies would come out with their bin lids and bang them hard together, you'll see, because they thought a demon had got hold of the moon. And if they banged their bin lids, this demon might be persuaded to let go, do you see? And, uh, then they began to afraid that these powers were going to destroy them. So presently they had to offer endless sacrifices, charms, magic, whatever they could. They were at the mercy of these great powers of nature.
Read the most exalted of the Babylonians, and they will tell you that man was made as a drudge and a slave to the gods. Well, if there's no God creator, then man is a slave to all these various forces in the universe. If you ask a modern atheist, what are the forces that control us, that produced our universe, that produced us? The curious thing is he will, he will reply exactly the same as the ancient pagan idolater.
Of course, he doesn't keep idols in his sitting room, nor burn incense to them. He, however, will say that the forces that made us and control us are the material forces of the universe. He's very sophisticated, of course. He doesn't say the sun god and the moon god. He will say that these forces are basic energy, whatever that is, and nobody knows. The weak atomic power, the strong atomic power, electromagnetism, gravity, anti-gravity, if there is such a thing, the laws of chemistry, physiology, biochemistry.
These, he will say, are the forces responsible for us and for, uh, our universe. Now, that is a very interesting answer. Because, as atheists will admit, these forces are mindless, impersonal. They do not work by plan, but by accident, by chance. So, according to the atheist, our intelligence and all the rest about us is brought about by mindless forces.
As one prominent, uh, evolutionist has it, we were brought into being by forces that did not have us in mind. How could they? They are mindless and mere material. The implications of this, of course, are horrendous. It means, if it were true, that there is no ultimate purpose behind human existence. No ultimate meaning. We do not move to some predetermined glorious goal. We were produced by mindless forces.
One day we shall be destroyed by those same mindless forces. And the irony is that when they've done it, they won't know they've done it. You'll see, I often say to my good atheist friends in Russia, one day, according to your theory, a little virus without tuppence hate me worth of sense in its head will enter your body. It will set about destroying you. You will have the intelligence to see what it's going to do. You will not have the power to stop it.
And you will be the spectator as that mindless power proceeds to rip your body to pieces, to invade your brain and your intelligence and make a nonsense of the whole thing. All your powers of planning, all your beautiful sense of aesthetics will be destroyed, mangled into pulp and juice. And when this virus has done it, it won't even know it's done it. Now, evolutionists, of course, constantly tell us, when they're being honest, that we might as well face the fact that is the fact of human life, that even our highest possession of intelligence, let alone our art, is but the mindless product of mindless forces, which mindless forces will one day destroy.
And then, so what? So nothing. It is a marvelous result, it seems to me, when man's highest intelligence comes to invent theories that make a mock of his intelligence. In medieval times, there was an exquisite torture. A prisoner would be put in a cell. At first, nothing would seem to change. Suddenly, he would get the impression that the cell was somehow smaller. He would take to measuring the distance between two of the walls.
After a day or two, he would find the walls were moving inwards, very slowly, but moving inwards they were. Measuring the rate at which they moved inwards, he was able to calculate that one day those walls would meet in the middle and he would be crushed lifeless. That was a hideous torture, wasn't it? But if there be no God, if we are the product of mindless forces, that is precisely the position we human beings are in. We are in a material prison house, the walls of which are coming in, not only for us as individuals, but for our world as a whole.
It is debatable, I suppose, whether our planet will be destroyed by a cold, or whether it will be s- destroyed when our sun explodes and becomes a, a, a, a red giant for a while. But people have the consensus that sure enough it will be destroyed. The Bible agrees, of course, it's been saying it for centuries. But then behind that destruction, the Bible adds, is a watchful creator that will use it for his own purposes. Meanwhile, there is a salvation for his creatures. That's another long story. I argue simply at this moment, that having read as far as I can on both sides of this fence, I believe it makes more sense to believe the Bible.
It is more honoring, more in line with intelligence, and to accept the other view that there is no God, that our intelligence itself is the product and ultimately the victim of non-intelligent forces. Then there is a second reason why I, uh, believe that the Bible makes sense, and believing it makes sense. And that is because the Bible's account of things makes sense of our inner feelings of right and wrong.
We all have them, of course, don't we? Even the little nipper on the nursery floor, he has a very highly developed sense of right and wrong, you'll see. If his brother steals his toy and there's an argument and mother comes in and clips his ear instead of his brother's who sold the toy, who stole the toy, infant says not fair, you'll see. We have it born with it, aren't we? That sense of right and wrong. What's its value? What authority has it? What is it? This sense of right and wrong.
Will you have it, for instance, I put it to you, will you have it that our sense of right and wrong is simply a matter of taste? You know, you like oranges, I like lemons. It's only a matter of taste. You like oranges? There's no sense my coming to you and saying, look here, that's nonsense. You oughtn't to like oranges. You ought to do like I do and like lemons. You will say, don't be stupid. When it comes to taste, there's no right and wrong about it. I have a right to my taste, and you have a right to your taste. I see. Is right and wrong simply a matter of taste? Suppose you met dear old Adolf Hitler and said, look here, Hitler, my boy, you oughtn't to be gassing six million Jews.
Come, come, come. You oughtn't to do that. And suppose Hitler replied, well, if you don't like gassing Jews, well, don't gas Jews. I like gassing Jews. It's just a matter of taste. Now, you won't have that, will you? Well, what is this sense of right and wrong then? We all use it, of course. Here's woman number one and woman number two in the supermarket, and they stop their purchases to have a little bringing up to date known under the name of the gossip column. And woman number one says to woman number two, have you heard that Mrs.
Brown has gone and left her husband and gone off with another man? No, says woman number two, I haven't heard that. She oughtn't to do that, did she now? Run off with another, another man? Oh, what do you mean she oughtn't to? Is this just your taste? Or are you appealing to some standard or other that you expect everybody to accept? Woman number two says, ah, she oughtn't to do it. And then woman number one says, yes, but you know, her husband was a evil, bad old thing he was. Oh, I see.
So the first woman was accusing Miss- Mrs. Brown for going off with another man. Now the second, the the first woman is now turned to excusing her. Why does she bother to excuse her? You see, if you like oranges and my friend says you oughtn't to like oranges, I don't excuse you for liking oranges, do I? Well, says the Bible, you'll see, you'll find people doing that, sometimes accusing other folks and sometimes excusing them. What shows what? That their conscience is appealing to some standard or other.
And they expect you to agree with them. But there is some standard of right and wrong. That is not just my private opinion or taste, or yours either. Well, what, what is the authority between, behind that right and wrong? Let's hear an atheist again. I had a colleague in my university, and a tremendous gentleman he was, I say that, this is not, uh, condescending or propaganda or anything. He was blinded as a commando in the last war, a brave and excellent and honorable gentleman.
But he was an atheist. And I remember his coming to lecture us, uh, in a particular, uh, forum that we organized, and the topic of his lecture was that you would have a morality, a system of morality, of right and wrong without God. His, uh, theory was a form of what is normally called the social contract, and he put it for us simple-minded people this way. Look, if you poke your finger in my eye, you will find that I shall poke my finger back in your eyes, you see. When you've done that once or twice and I have replied, you'll come to the sensible conclusion that it isn't a good idea, really, to go around poking your finger in people's eyes, you see.
You might get worse in return. So you will come to a contract with me that you won't poke your finger in my eye if I don't poke your finger in yours, you see. And thus we can order society, you see? We don't need God or some absolute law like that. As intelligent human beings, we can come to this idea ourselves, do you see? So he went on. It came to question time. So when I got a chance, I lifted my paw, uh, I asked permission to speak, and I said, uh, my name is Adolf Hitler, and I'm about to, um, gas six million Jews, you see.
Why shouldn't I? You will say to me, I shouldn't gas six million Jews if I were you, because if you do, we shall come back at you and destroy you. And I shall say, no, you won't. You, I happen to have the airplanes in the tanks at the moment. There's nothing really you can do for the next four years, so I shall proceed to gas six million Jews. I happen to like doing it. And when you begin to catch up with me, then I shall shoot my brains out, because there's no God, is there? And there's no final judgment. And I've had a jolly good time, and I've enjoyed myself.
You say, but that's not a very worthy way to live. Well, you keep your taste to yourself, I shall say. I've enjoyed it. And I've got away with six million murders. What will you say to me, I said to my good colleague, the lecturer. I remember his reply, for it was very short and to the point. I should say, go and get lost, he said. At that moment, I didn't quite, uh, perceive the philosophical, uh, urgency of his advice. The fact is, according to Bible, the authority and therefore the validity behind our moral sense is the authority of our Creator.
Therein is hope, because if our Creator is the author of our moral sense, then, as the Bible assures us, that one day there will be a final judgment when earth wrongs shall be put right. I am aware, of course, that to talk of final judgment, indeed, what the Bible will call in the end the lake of fire, that is eternal perdition, is nowadays an unpopular subject. But when one reads the Old Testament, you will find the assurance that one day there will be a judgment is a thing that gets people hoppingly excited and delighted.
Clap your hands, all you forests, shout for joy, you rivers and mountains, say the lyrics of the Psalms. Because the Lord cometh. He cometh to judge the world. He will judge the world in righteousness. And most Thursdays and some Fridays, perhaps most of us concur with that, don't we? Have you met anybody ever who would wish that Earth's evils and wrongs and injustices would go on forever? Prospect that the Bible holds out of a final judgment is glorious news.
And I say to some of my, I've said more than once to, to atheists in Russia as elsewhere, let's try our theory, shall we? Marx was all for fighting for the poor and seeing justice done to the workers. I honor his intent. Alas, Marxism was not scarcely ever published, uh, sorry, practiced. Published it was, but not practiced. True Marxism was never given a chance in the USSR. But that aside, I invite them, I say now, in thought now, let's come to Auschwitz, to the concentration camp.
We'll imagine we have permission to go and speak to the prisoners, and this is Saturday, and they're going to be gassed on Monday. And as we come to them in their weak voices, they cry out to us to help. What are you going to do about us, they say? We want justice. I shall have to be honest and say, I'm sorry, you're not going to get justice. On Monday you will be gassed. But there is a God who cares for justice. The Bible says that one day there will come a final judgment, when our wrongs shall be put right.
Now I say, you atheists come and talk to them, will you? They're saying to you, we want justice. What will you say? I'm sorry, you're not going to get justice. You're going to be gassed next Monday. What is more, there's no life to come, so there won't be a final judgment. You won't get justice then. Is that so, they reply. All these years we were brought up to believe that there is such a thing as justice, and you're telling us we have been duped. All hope for justice has been a rope of sand.
There never was any chance of our getting justice. And the atheist must say, yes, I'm afraid that's how it is. For multi-million, justice was a mockery. There never was any hope of their finding it. Does it make sense to believe the Bible nowadays? I hold it does. So then I hold it makes sense to believe Bible because of, um, its doctrine of creation and the position it gives to humankind.
Then the authority behind morality. Had I time, I would want to argue that it also has held out from the very earliest a hope for this world. Unlike some philosophies and religions that hold that matter is basically undesirable, and the best we can hope for is to be able to escape this material world and go off to be merged into the universe. The Bible holds that matter is very good. That God is not ashamed of having created matter.
And though we are a fallen race, Old Testament and the New hold out hope that creation herself shall not always be subjected to the vanity and frustration of corruption, while it shall be delivered from her bondage to corruption into the liberty of the glory of chil- of the children of God. That I must not stay to speak about now. That perhaps will come in tomorrow's talk. But I must come swiftly to the New Testament. I have given just two reasons. There are abundant more. While it makes why it makes sense for me to believe the Old Testament.
What about the New? What reasons have I for feeling it makes sense to believe in the New Testament? I begin with the central figure of the New Testament, which is Jesus Christ, whom Christians call our Lord. That he stands like a colossus over human history is an obvious fact, acknowledged by foe as well as friend. But what of this character of Jesus Christ? Was he real, historical? Or was he an invention, as many nowadays would hold, of the early Christian church, who began with a carpenter and after his death la- allowed their imagination to weave all kinds of religious fables and legends about him and gradually increase his stature in their eyes until they virtually turned him into a god.
Was he that? Or is his character solidly historical? Was he real? The idea that, uh, Jesus Christ's character, person were in- was in, uh, were invented, seems to me to be a very hard case to argue, much ve- much more difficult to believe in than to believe that he was an historical figure and was who he claimed to be. For instance, I begin by asking, if he was an invented character, who invented him?
We're not talking about a, a cartoon in the daily paper, after all, are we? We're not even talking about a character in a novel. Some novelists, very few, but some novelists haven't have contrived to invent characters that live in the imagination. Dickens's Scrooge, for instance. And yet, that's all they are, literary figures. So, Plato depicts in his works Socrates.
He too, for classicists, is an exceedingly vivid picture figure, yet he, of course, was a living actual figure. Plato may have polished his image a bit, but Plato tells us enough about the real Socrates for us to be able to distinguish fairly easy, easily between the real Socrates and later pseudo, uh, fables about him. But nobody would die for Socrates nowadays, would they? And anybody who talked about being in Socrates, you would think they were talking gobbledygook.
This Jesus Christ, they start with saying who invented him. He was, as was argued decades ago now, nobody's ideal. If he were not true, no Jew would have invented him. He claimed to be the Messiah, but as to their thinking, he was, could not possibly have been Messiah. They envisaged Messiah as a valiant politico-military leader, like the Maccabees, for instance, who would raise an army and lead the troops of Israel against the Roman imperialists and break their power.
When Jesus Christ didn't do that, not only the multitudes, and particularly his Galilean fellow citizens, but even his apostles deserted him. When at last, in Gethsemane, the squad came to arrest him, and Christ forbade his disciple Peter to use a sword, even in his defense, and let himself be arrested. At that point, says Matthew, the whole lot of us forsook him and fled. A Messiah that wouldn't defend himself and couldn't stop himself being arrested and crucified, what kind of a Messiah was he? I used to have a very respected senior Jewish gentleman friend in Belfast, and often we would have dinner together.
And eventually, when it came round to Jesus and so forth, he had the idea that we Christians were responsible for the Holocaust because we had taught Sunday school children that Ju- uh, that the wicked Jews crucified Jesus and had stirred up age-long antagonism and hatred in people's hearts against the Jews. So we had to try and explain that kind of thing. The shame of medieval Christendom has to be acknowledged and blazoned abroad. The Christians should have put Jews to the stake in Spain, in the auto-da-fé, or eliminated them in the gas chambers in Germany or in the pogroms in Russia or wherever, and done it in the name of the Christian church, was a horrible scandal that it is impossible to exaggerate.
But then I would point out that, of course, that all was quite contrary to the actual explicit teaching of Jesus that anybody could read on the page of the New Testament, to forbade the use of violence, either to protect him or to, to further his cause. And I would quote to my Jewish friend, uh, what the New Testament says about Christ, who when he was reviled, reviled not again, and when he suffered, he threatened not. And my friend's response? Pa. I wouldn't have an, a Messiah like him. He's a weakling. If anybody bit me on the nose, I would want to bit them back. No time for your Jesus. It wasn't the Jews' idea, was it?
The Romans? Well, Pilate thought him absolutely impractical when he stood before him and said, yes, in some sense I am a king, but for this reason I was born into this world that I might bear witness to the truth. Pilate shrugs his shoulders and says, goodness me, my dear man, what is truth? What has that got to do with politics or government? And you might well ask, mind you, in that context, what is truth? Herod and his soldiers found it all screamingly funny that Jesus should claim to be the Messiah, and they decked him out in royal robes and played the fool with him. And the Greeks? Well, read any school of philosophy you like among the Greeks.
Their idea went out at Calvary and cried, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Jesus Christ was nobody's ideal. Who would have invented him? If he weren't true. The early Christians wouldn't. The greatest evangelist, preacher of Christ throughout the European world in those early days was the Apostle Paul. And in his writings, he openly confesses that the message he preached, which was Christ crucified, as a solution to this world's problems, was to the Greeks utter folly and to the Jews a scandal.
Certainly Paul would never have invented the message on those terms if it were not true. The person of Jesus Christ to me stands out of the page of the New Testament as being actual, true, a hard fact as hard as the Rock of Gibraltar, a non-invented character. I hold him to be, of course, what he claimed to be, God incarnate. That brings me to my second point, which is already mentioned. The central point, according to Jesus Christ, of his, his visit here to our earth was not to preach morality, though he did preach morality.
Was not simply to do miracles, though he did miracles. Was not to feed the poor and hungry, though he did on times that. According to the new Testament, Jesus Christ's prime purpose for being born into this world was to die. His precursor and forerunner, who introduced him to the public, pointed to him and proclaimed him as the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. One of the main reasons I have for believing him to be true is precisely this.
You'll see, most religions, and we shall talk about that on our third, in our third lecture, but most religions are geared to tell you that you ought to be good. My problem is not that I don't know I ought to be good. I have a certain sympathy with the man who complained that he didn't see why he should pay a puff and a whole fat salary to tell him to be good. He knew before he started he ought to be good. My problem, like his, was that I hadn't been. I have broken and fallen below my own moral standards, let alone God's.
And the question arises, how, if at all, can we find forgiveness without lowering our own moral standards, let alone God's? How can I simply say, well, I did sin. I got drunk, maybe, and drove my car while I was drunk, and I knocked down your seventeen-year-old daughter and killed her stone dead. And, uh, well, it's happened. No good crying over spilt milk.
It's dead now, isn't she? Hm, sorry, but let's brush it under the carpet. How can I ever say my sin didn't matter? If my sin didn't matter, then your daughter didn't matter. And to say, well, it's years ago now, and time has changed, and memories have faded, is a poor let out that, isn't it? Is your daughter's value such an impermanent and temporary thing? The Bible says that God is not only creator, but God is love, and he loves your daughter.
If I injure your daughter, God will have it against me. And if I do not repent, God will have it against me, not only for this life, but for all eternity he'll have it against me. For God will never forgive. That is our problem and predicament. How do we find forgiveness without letting down our standards and saying sin doesn't matter? Unless you can solve that problem, you're not get very far with advising me to try and be good. Christ is the only one that ever came up with an answer that satisfied me, at least.
And he was God incarnate, come to deal with the problem of human guilt. He, the lawgiver, who prescribed the penalty of sin, himself in his mercy, coming to stand beside me and to bear the penalty of sin in my place. Paying the penalty that he might honor God's unchangeable law and make a heaven that's not built on saying sin doesn't matter, but to make a heaven that says that sin will forever be God's enemy number one, but that its guilt can be put away for us human beings who will repent and accept the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf.
I know myself of no other in the current world, let alone in the past, who's ever come into our world claiming that, yes, he had come to die for the sins of the world. No religious leader amongst all those that have led religion has claimed it. For, for a mere human to claim it would be a sign of insanity, wouldn't it? Christ claimed it. The question of whether Christ was insane is such an absurd question to ask that many people wouldn't bother to reply.
Christ has been the author of more peace and psychological health than anybody in the whole of human history. The man who said, come take my yoke and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. In the same breath as he says, the Father has given all things into the hands of the Son, and man is not insane. For this reason, I do ho- I hold that it makes sense to believe. One final question tonight, perhaps. Someone will say, but you have built your case on the Bible.
You've been guilty of circular reasoning. Someone will say, I don't believe the Bible, you see, so your arguments are no use. For me to accept your arguments, I should first have to believe the Bible. I don't believe the Bible. So indeed, it's not worth my while reading it. For me to read the Bible, says somebody, I should first have to believe it is inspired word of God, uh, for it to do me any good, and I don't believe that. So it's no use my even reading the Bible. I've had many tell me that. Yes, my arguments have been based on the Bible. You asked me to start with, does it make sense to believe the Bible?
Well, how should I not base the arguments on the Bible? But there's a deeper point. Christians are expected to believe the Bible, but if you are a non-Christian, God doesn't ask you to start by believing the Bible. That would be circular reasoning, wouldn't it? You're not a Christian and you don't believe the Bible, but yet do please, do pray for your own sake, have the sense to read it. At least to listen to what it says. You can then make up your mind whether you're going to believe it or not. Isn't that how you treat the daily newspaper? You don't start off when you open the paper in the morning saying, now I shall believe every word this paper says.
Do you? I think not. Perhaps you know Mr. Murdoch too well. Eh, but uh, you read it nonetheless and trust your moral sense to be able to distinguish, for the most part, what is true and what is not true and what's in the middle. And you will find, if you consent to read the Bible, Jesus Christ talking to you directly and appealing to you to use your moral judgment on his teaching. Be fair, he says. Judge fair, righteous judgment. Weigh up my teaching and my acts and come to your decision whether what I say is the word of God or not.
Use your moral judgment. Moreover, there is an a kind of an experiment that the New Testament holds out, and I commend it to you. The miracles of Christ were not only miracles, but simultaneously parables. When he fed the crowd, it was also a parable that men are hungry, and he can satisfy their spiritual hunger. So he found a blind man one day and gave him sight. The man had never seen, blind from birth.
Our Lord gave him sight. It becomes a parable. For there's more to this believing than just making up your mind, your moral judgment. That's a necessary first step. But the Bible declares that to see that Jesus is God's son will involve being given the spiritual sight to see it. At the same time, you don't have to sit there and do nothing. There's an experiment you can do with a man that was born physically blind. What our Lord did was to make mud and put it on his eyes and tell him to go wash in a pool in the city, and he would come seeing.
That put the man in a predicament, didn't it? He'd never seen, he had no concept of sight. I could have well imagined the man saying, well, now don't talk nonsense. I don't believe there is a sight, a thing called sight. You explain to me what sight is. And I can imagine a, a, a, a zealous apostle having a go. Have you ever tried to explain sight to a man that was born blind? Well, you say sight is sight is, well, sight is looking so you can see colors. They'll say, what is color? Oh, yes. Well. Well, you see, can you feel that? Yes. Well, now with sight you could see it. Well, what is seeing? And when the Bible says that Christ can give you eternal life.
Well, Christians, I, I confess I do, find it a little difficult to, to explain sometimes what eternal life is, do you see? Christians will tell you it's a very real thing, and Christians will say, once I was blind, but now I see. But what is sight? The man might have said, that's a whole lot of hokey pokey nonsense. Go and wash in a pool. No, of course not. If I first got to believe there is such a thing as sight, well then I, when I've washed, I shall imagine I've got it and self-delude myself. But the man was sensible. He said, well, I don't know what this sight is, but if it's real, I want it, of course. And these Christians say they have sight.
Ah. And this Jesus, is he a liar? Is he a mountebank? Is he a charlatan? Is he given to talking nonsense? What's his character like? Well, if he says there is such a thing as sight and he could give it to me, it'd be worth making the experiment. And off the old blind man toddled and found his way down to this pool, so the mirror, as the story goes, washed and came seeing. There is an experiment, nothing so dramatic, but we can make. Christ said, if any man is willing to do God's will when he knows it, he shall know of my teaching, whether it is of God or not.
There's the challenge. The fourth gospel in the New Testament is written so that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. You don't have to start by believing it. But if you will say, yes, if there is a God and Jesus is his son, and Jesus has authorized this gospel, all right, I will read it. And if God shows in me this light, this eternal life or whatever it is. If God shows me that Jesus Christ is his son, then I'm ready to do God's will when he shows it to me, whatever that is. The guarantee is that if we make the experiment, says Christ, God will give us that inward certainty, that illumination, we shall find the experiment.
My case for tonight is ended, and my chairman is going now to field your questions, and if need be, protect me from them. Ah. Well, I should want to s- to say things like I have said tonight, to try and show that he is relevant. Yes? He's relevant all the way down the line. He's relevant to our basic understanding of how we came to be. Your agnostic, he, he says that God isn't relevant, uh, you'll see, because he thinks that, uh, science has shown that the universe can come into existence without God and without a designer.
If he willing for the fray, I should argue to him, as I shall attempt to argue tomorrow, that, uh, such a view is scientifically untenable. And then I should raise the whole question of the purpose of life and life's values. Even an agnostic has got to quest- to face the question of where are values founded, you'll see. What are they based on? I shall want to know from him, okay, if God is not relevant to it, what are his values based on, you'll see, and such like things. Uh, the uh question of it not being relevant, I should say to my agnostic friend, is really perhaps he hasn't thought too much about it.
I can understand the agnostic that says that God may be there or he may not, but, uh, it is not possible to find out. No one can know about it. Most of my agnostic friends take that position. Some of them are hard agnostics. They say that God cannot be known. You cannot know about God. I say to those agnostics that they're claiming to know a colossal amount. Agnostic is the Greek for somebody who doesn't know. If an agnostic who says he doesn't know claims that you cannot know God, I'd ask him to prove it, for he is claiming an enormous amount when he says that nobody can know there is a God.
You see. Secondly, some agnostics are what I call weak agnostics. They say, well, some people could know God perhaps, but I personally don't know and can't know. And I would say, but, uh, then if you say that, my good friend, you are making Jesus Christ into a liar, actually, because he says you can know. And if you say that you know that Jesus Christ is false, my dear good man, you're knowing a lot. You shouldn't call yourself an agnostic, someone who doesn't know. If you know that Jesus Christ is telling untruths, you know a colossal amount. I should answer something like that.
