Ask Pastor Mike Live

Speaker 1

Does God exist? Well, how do you know? It's a question loaded with serious repercussions depending on your answer. That's why we're setting aside the next half hour to sift through the evidence right here on Focal Point.

Well, we're glad to have you with us today on this paradigm-shifting Focal Point. I'm your host, Dave Drouy.

Today, Pastor Mike Febares addresses a question that's gonna perk the ears of Christians and non-Christians alike. Every culture has developed some belief system about the existence or non-existence of God. Is it just a matter of blind faith or positive thinking? Or is there an objective way to prove that he exists?

On this edition of Ask Pastor Mike, we're catching up with executive director Jay Worton from inside the Pastor Study.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Dave. Pastor Mike, we have more of an apologetic question. The listener asks, how can we know there is a God? Yeah, that is a fundamental question for us as Christians. We need to be assured that there is a God. And of course, I've taught on that. I think we're going to hear a little bit from a sermon here in a second about that. But the idea of God's existence is a conclusion we reach based on all the available evidence. If you look at it that way, we say, okay, it fits the evidence that there is a God. Everything from even you could use anthropological reasons that, you know, the intuitive nature of human beings, you know, believing in God. You could look at evidence in terms of, you know, the cause and effect and design and all those things.

And of course, the world's rushing to try and find answers for those that will give us a natural explanation versus a, you know, a divine explanation. But when it comes down to it, it just seems that the frame matches the picture. The picture of God is matched by the evidence that we see and certainly is the foundation of a Christian worldview that says, hey, this is the fundamental approach to looking at the world that seems to make the most sense. And guys that have lectured in apologetics have often said, you got to be careful how you choose those presuppositions. Because that basic fundamental belief that you have, the starting point, whether you believe there is a God, there isn't a God, there's a purpose for life, there's no purpose for life, God has spoken in the Bible, God is not knowable and hasn't spoken.

I mean, those fundamental choices regarding presuppositions are moral choices. And you are going to be judged, as others have rightly said, by the moral choices you make in choosing presuppositions. And so my presupposition is, you know, to put it in the framework of how Francis Schaeffer used to say it, that there is a God and he has spoken. There's a God, and he's revealed himself, and he's revealed himself more specifically in the pages of the Bible. And because of that, I reason as a Christian, everything else makes sense from that point.

And, you know, everybody likes to say, well, I don't like presuppositions. Look at all the evidence objectively. But everything we do right has to have a set of presupposed foundational beliefs. I used an illustration recently about waking up on September 11, hearing the news talk about how many years it had been, 13 years since September 11th. And even just the way they said it, I thought to my. I kind of giggled. I thought if someone came from another planet, right, and didn't have the presupposed knowledge of the terrible events in New York City 13 years ago, and they said, well, it's been 13 years since September 11th, they would come to completely different conclusions.

I mean, time has stopped. You know, we outlawed the month of September. I don't know. They would come to some different. Other than, oh, we know what you mean when you say 9, 11, September 11th. You mean that specific one back in 2001. So it's as simple as looking, walking on the beach with your kid, seeing some interesting scrawling on the ground. You've watched birds make that in the past, and you know that as a parent, they don't know that. Their assumption is the shells did that little design on the ground. You know, it's the birds that did it. You're coming at the same evidence with two different sets of assumptions about how things work.

I mean, the basic presuppositions we bring are going to determine how we reason through the evidence. But you have to make those presuppositions based on the evidence as a whole. You have to stand back and say, does this make the best sense? And so the classic discussions, like with Thomas Aquinas many years ago, to look at all the things that would lead us to believe that the evidence that we see matches our assumption. The biblical presuppositions of a God revealing himself, that, you know, I'm persuaded by that. In other words, if I were to go to bed tonight and say, I want different presuppositions, I want to believe there is no God and he hasn't spoken, I would have a hard time trying to convince myself of that based on the evidence.

Could I see the world that way? It would be really tough. But if I did, then I'd see what kind of person I would be. I'd use the same intellect, the same logic to work through to a whole different set of assertions about reality. But to me, I'm thinking I would be ignoring so much of what I think convinces me to believe there is a God and he has revealed, taking leaps that you wouldn't necessarily want to take because it didn't fit the evidence. Right. I'd have too many leaps to take in my thinking and I would say, no, it makes best sense.

Now, there's things about being a theist I don't like. Right. And I'm speaking out of the flesh here. As Paul would say, I'm speaking as a fool right now. But I don't like the fact that there's a greater being than me. I don't like the fact that someone's going to judge me. I don't like the fact that there's going to be someone I'm accountable to. I don't like the fact that I'm not the master of my own fate, captain of my own destiny. I'd prefer in my hubris as a human being to retain those things and see, being a theist, I have to give those things up.

You know, I understand why we want to downplay the Bible, even if we do believe in a God. And that's a little bit of what we hear in people saying, I want to be spiritual but not religious. Right, you've heard that phrase. I mean, what we're saying in that is, you know, I don't mind believing in a God as long as I can shape him to be who I want. But your religion, that comes from your Bible, I don't want any of that because that's too stifling for my freedoms and my, you know, personal autonomy.

So anyway, I'm just saying, yeah, is there a God? I believe there is. I believe the overall evidence is convincing. And I believe once you assume that presupposition that there is a God and he has revealed himself, then I think there's nowhere to go but to biblical. I mean, be more specific. Evangelical Protestant Christianity. I think you're stuck there. You talk about people wanting to be spiritual but not religious. You talk about people wanting to find a God out there. In fact, polls will reveal that most people, over 90% will believe that there is a God, if not the God of the Bible. What does that tell us about ourselves innately, that we know that there is something greater out there than ourselves?

Right. Well, what the Bible says and what the Holy Spirit has led the Apostle Paul to write in Romans chapter two is that God has written his law on our hearts. And to quote chapter one, I probably should have started there, that there's enough about our constitutional makeup, looking out at the world that God teaches to us that there is this power, this being, this designer, this personal being who is the Creator. His immutable, unchanging attributes are known through what we see. They're intuitively known in our conscience. Even the rules and regulations to some extent are impressed upon our ethics and our conscience. And so that's why people believe there is a God according to the Bible, which I think is right, because there is a God and he has spoken.

And in that book that he spoke in, I think there is the answer. We're still going to struggle with adopting His Word because the more we read it, there's more that we don't like. I wrote an article just recently about that, you know, that we, even as evangelical Christians, there are parts of the Bible we go, oh, I wish that weren't there. You know, can't I just fit in with the world? And I was writing this morning on Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and I think here's guys that would have liked to bent the rules and just fit in a little bit, but it would have been better for them in Babylon just to bend the rules, you know, but instead, they knew who they were serving. They knew the King of Kings, right of the Old Testament, Yahweh, the God of Gods.

And they knew that they had to adhere to his rules even if it cost them. You know, they weren't going to bow to the cultural dictates. They weren't going to compromise. And it cost them in terms of being detained, arrested, thrown into the fiery furnace. And of course, in that miraculous event, God delivered them. But that is the reality for us. Are we willing to let God speak and speak clearly? And when he does speak, he speaks to the fact that we all know there's a God. We should all just stop fighting that. And when we do deny it, we're fighting the truth, as he puts it in Romans. When we're suppressing the truth of that inherent knowledge, we're suppressing it in our quest and our desire to live unrighteously.

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. We're going to listen in on a message that you gave on this issue. It's called worldviews and the existence of God. Life's fundamental questions. We all, as sentient beings who can self-reflect and interpret things around us, have to have a grid by which to interpret those things. And we have to understand that a belief, an assumption embracing of the truth of God changes everything about that. Everyone's got to at some point ask the question, why are we here? Where do we come from? We have the ability, unlike rocks and trees, to think about ourselves. And we've got to be able to have some answer to that because that will determine so much about everything in the world and how we interpret it.

We call it a worldview now, a biblical worldview. But if you were going to start at the basics of what we come to the world with as biblical thinking, people look at the world through the grid of biblical truth. What are my basic suppositions about life? Well, my basic belief and understanding, if I'm a biblical thinker, is there is a God. And secondly, we believe that God has spoken. He has revealed himself, that we're not left without a witness as to who God is. But a Christian worldview begins at least with those two basics.

So I want to be able to look through the lens of biblical theism and I want to look at the world and I want to say, okay, here's an observation. I can make the whole observation of cause and effect cosmological just for the sake of completeness. Cosmos. Cosmos is the Greek word for world, universe, created things and what we have to deal with. And the problem that we have is that we're in desperate need of a cause. We've got to somehow define the cause. And everyone's got this issue.

Now let me just go back. If you examine the concept of cause and effect 75 years ago and you want to talk about cause and effect, the options were that God caused the universe, or you had the world's view without God. And that view was what we call uniformitarianism. And that is the world has always been here. And therefore your choice was between an eternal God or eternal matter. The rules have changed on a popular level now we don't claim in uniformitarianism anymore. We have a new view of reality that the world had a beginning, right? Pick up your kids' textbooks. The world had a start and so now we're stuck with a world through understanding entropy, through catastrophism, through looking at the realities of what we're dealing with as an effect.

We say, well, it had a cause. And it's not infinite, it's finite. And it had a beginning and it had a start. Dawkins when pressed and any good atheist, any philosopher is still going to have to say, well, I know there was a beginning, but the cause is mysterious and unknown. Ask any honest philosopher, ask any honest person who doesn't believe in God. They still believe in a temporal universe and some beginning. But we can't really discuss that because we it's too mysterious. So we're still lacking this. Either we have as now we're back to the Middle Ages as Thomas Aquinas taught an unmoved mover or we have mover question mark and the biblical worldview hasn't changed.

If we stick with the biblical worldview, we'll watch the changing, shifting views of the world and eventually at least it's moving in that direction. Now we're getting to a place where we recognize, wow, you know, the biblical worldview answers a lot of questions we don't have answers for. Matter of fact, there are more questions today about the naturalistic worldview than ever before. Cosmological observations is that we as Christians look at the effect of the universe and say we understand the biblical worldview is that it has a cause. And the cause is by definition the self-existing, eternal sovereign tri-unity that we know of in scripture as Yahweh.

The Bible demonstrates this by the way, consistently with 86 examples of divine cause and effect. Something out of nothing. If you study the Bible, do the count. I've done it myself. Go start at the beginning, go all the way to the end and just count God's creative miraculous work. There are 86 examples of God creating something out of nothing. And these are pictures pointing to the creator. Jesus tried to prove his position as the means, an agency of creation by continuing to create things out of nothing. So this isn't just oh yeah, the Bible claims a unique event. It claims that that supernatural event was affirmed when God needed to put his imprimatur on his teaching or his work or his redemption by doing it again in some form, either through the prophets, through Moses in Egypt or through the apostles in Christ in the New Testament.

There are 86 biblical examples of God engaging in supernatural creative acts, biblical theism and perceived reality. I can see then and observe a designer that now starts to explain the design. Design and designer. This is what the whole ID intelligent design movement is all about. That information doesn't derive from chaos. That organized useful information comes from creator. We call this teleological observations teleios. I talk a lot about teleos in my preaching because it's an interesting word. I know. It's translated sometimes perfect, right? Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Well, we don't sometimes understand that because teleos. I prefer the translation just right, which no one's ever going to use.

But the concept is when you look at the world, whether you're a microbiologist or whatever you might be, and you observe things in the creative order that are just right, you go, oh, that's just right. Even in cosmology, we need a moon that does exactly what the moon does. And just to have that, it's just right. And I quote this all the time, but the sun is 600 times further than the moon, and the moon is also 600 times smaller than the sun. Therefore they appear just the same size. Greater light, lesser light. They're just right. That's teleos. Things that are just right. Teleos. They speak to something that is not chaotic, haphazard or random.

And that's the point of the teleological argument, or in my case, the teleological observations. I expect through a lens of a worldview, a biblical, theistic worldview, to look at the world and find things that are just right. Because there is a God who has intelligently designed this world, because that's what the Bible teaches. Not accidental, not haphazard, not random, not chaotic. Which, by the way, is all you're left with as an atheist or a naturalist. But a biblical worldview says, no, there's a God that creates things the way that he does. That are teleos. They're just right. They're perfectly designed.

Which, by the way, let's turn to this passage, Psalm 19, verse 1. The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. That's the teleological argument or observation right there. They display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Every people group gets to hear this. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens, he's pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion. Pavilion. Like a champion, rejoicing to run its course. It rises to one end of the heavens, makes its circuit to the other. Nothing is hidden from its heat. If it were any further away, we'd freeze. Any closer, we'd fry. It's teleos, by the way.

If you're into the whole ID movement, the whole intelligent design thing, please beware of this. Now, good ID guys, though I don't agree with a lot of what they teach. They're not going to fall to this. But pop readers of it will. They start to paint the picture of the God of the gaps, which means that God is the God of the stuff that we can't explain. That's not what any good ID guy is teaching, and that's certainly not what I'm saying in the teleological observations. Now, I know it sounds that way because we're saying, well, Denton and guys like that are out there writing about the fact that, hey, chaos to information doesn't happen. We can't explain that it's God.

That's not how really the argument works because that would relegate God to the gaps. And that's not at all what the Bible teaches. What needs an explanation is not the gaps. What needs an explanation is the whole kit and caboodle, the whole kitten, the whole thing. See that? There is beauty, order, intelligence, design in the universe. That's the point. I don't believe that God is the God of the gaps. God is the God of the whole thing. What necessitates explanation is the whole thing. And the whole thing, I think from the biblical worldview, a designer who explains the design certainly makes biblical sense.

Keep your finger here because I'm going to come back to Psalm 19 and I would like you to turn, if you would, to Isaiah 44:6. This is what Yahweh says, Isaiah 44:6, Israel's king and redeemer, Yahweh Almighty, which is literally the Yahweh of hosts, of the armies of heaven. I am the first and the last. Apart from me, there is no God. Who then is like me? Which, by the way, is the Hebrew word. Mikael, Michael. I like that name. Let him proclaim it. God says. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people. And you're saying, well, we can do that. We'll try. People write history, you know, oh, wait a minute, this is harder. And what is yet to come. Yes. God says, that's it. You guys can't do that, can you? Let him foretell what is to come.

God calls things with specificity before they ever happen, long before they ever happen, sometimes a generation before they happen, sometimes in the case of the Messiah, four or five, 600 years before they happen

Speaker 1

You're listening to Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez in a message titled "Worldviews and the Existence of God." Hear the complete unedited version when you go to focalpointradio.org or look for today's Ask Pastor Mike episode titled "Does God Exist?"

You know it's hard to come up with a way to talk about God without a cohesive worldview. That's why Focal Point is here each day with relevant and accurate Bible teaching. With hard-hitting messages like this one, we're stretching our listeners to become stronger and bolder in talking about their walk. But it's only possible because committed folks like you are stepping up to help cover the cost of programming. Through your generosity, we're reaching people all across the country on over 800 radio stations, and we don't intend to stop. Keep the fire going and send in a generous gift to stoke the flames of Focal Point for another year. Call 888-320-5885 or go online to focalpointradio.org.

To thank you, we're offering a book that today's leading apologists are clamoring over: "The Apologetics of a Caring Approach to Dealing with Doubters." If you've got someone in your life who's asking the tough questions, this book is for you. Christian talk show host John Ankerberg says it highlights powerful examples of the way Jesus answered skeptics himself. It's thoroughly biblical, extremely practical, and perfect for anyone who desires to share how to talk about questions of faith in everyday life. Plus, it's packed with thought-provoking points to help you make your case succinctly and effectively.

Ask for "The Apologetics of Jesus" when you give by calling 888-320-5885 or go online to focalpointradio.org. I'm Dave Drouy, wishing you a restful weekend ahead. Here, Pastor Mike Fabarez returns after the weekend with more from his series, "Your Role in the Harvest." Come back Monday for Focal Point. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.

Speaker 2

Sam.