Welcome to the World of Christianity (by Harry McCall)
As a Christian, you are now following THE supreme God who created the universe. The main facts you need to know are these:
Your God is omnipotent (Having unlimited power and authority).
Your God is omnipresent (He is present everywhere).
Your God is omniscient (Having total knowledge).
Your God commands billions of angels of which just one could destroy the world.
As a Christian, you are part of a large and diverse group totaling over 2.1 billion members that has a worldwide budget that totals approximately one half of a trillion dollars.
Satan (a fallen angel) is your main and only adversary who leads a small rag-tag army (1/3 the size of God's) of fallen angels (demons).
Satan has limited power (Only what little control God gives him).
Satan has no earthly members (Just a few "Dabblers").
Satan has no budget.
AND YET...
According to God's own word, the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation), God, with all the above supreme attributes, is losing a battle He created and even sacrificed His only begotten son to win.
For instance, most of humanity will one day stand before your God at the Great White Throne of Judgment to "give an account" of why they as mortal sinful creatures with limited understandings, screwed up, and then they will be cast into a Lake of Fire (whose smoke rises forever), i.e., blamed for their loss of innocence and (and/or their great great great ancestor's loss of innocence) for all eternity.
HOW ARE WE TO MAKE SENSE OF ALL OF THE ABOVE?
It is a divine Mystery. (A theological term employed by the Catholic Church to depict the lack of understanding we mere mortals have of God's ways.)
Harry McCall (former ministerial student, whose testimony appears in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists)
It's amazing how many unbiblical assumptions these apostates are able to cram into the Biblical narrative:
1. The Bible teaches that God is losing the battle? Really? I wonder where that's found. It's amazing that the book of Revelation is cited because the central theme of Revelation is the victory of the Lamb!
2. A Righteous God accomplishing justice by condemning all sinners would have been a win. In fact, with God it's pretty much always going to be a win-win, considering that he is self-sufficient and has no need for his creation. The cross, rather, wasn't some last resort of a losing god trying to stay on top. Rather, from eternity past, it was the Trinity's intention to accomplish fellowship with God's own people through the cross.
3. Notice how this author assumes an unbiblical posture towards sin. Sinners are just people with limited knowledge who "screwed up." Yes, forget everything the Bible says about sin's hostility towards a holy God. Forget what the Bible teaches about radical depravity. Forget about the federal headship of Adam in the fall of man. Forget all that, but let's still attempt to critique the Bible on its own merit.
You see, these apostates love to fluctuate in and out of internal critiques. They'll do a post like this one where they appear to be taking Biblical data into account (consider the "statistics" that were cited), but then they'll push aside everything the Bible says about the subject only to insert their own atheistic presuppositions. But of course the Bible disagrees with atheistic assumptions!
Evan May.
'God is losing.' Is he? Just over one hundred years ago, no-one would have made that statement.
ReplyDeleteGreen Man,
ReplyDeleteAssertion or fact? If fact can you point me to the accredited source.
I don't follow his argumentation. What do material resources have to do with a spiritual battle? Why would having more knowledge matter, would he change his mind?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous:
ReplyDeleteExactly. I was going to comment on it, but decided to qualify myself and not do so. There is no direct parrallel between resources and converts. Obviously, salvation is God's doing, not man's.
But it is true that financial resource can contribute to the church's fulfilling of the great commission in a practical sense (i.e, finance allows them to reach out to the world).
But, in any case, you are correct that his reasoning is flawed, and certainly his ultimate conclusions are flawed.
Thomas Rees, Brecon Memorial College, 1900:
ReplyDelete‘No children of any century will be prouder of their flag nor louder in their praise to Him who ordains their times and seasons than those of the nineteenth century […] but the twentieth century will be yet more privileged.’
Quoted in: R. Tudur Jones: Faith and the Crisis of a Nation: Wales 1890-1914 (Cardiff, 2004) pp.2.
The Green Man has a point. The problem of the late nineteenth century was one of over-confidence, not pessimism. Most people identified themselves as Christians. The question for many was not how to convert the world, but what to do with the converts. The 1904-5 Welsh Revival added to that confidence, even though its fruits did not last.
ReplyDeleteSome disquiet might have been voiced as to the direction Christianity was headed in, but the mood of late Victorian and Edwardian Christianity was one of confidence. Read the hymns written in that period if you don't believe me.
Obviously 'no-one' is rhetorical exaggeration, the followers of J. N. Darby, for instance, with their ideas of 'the ruin of the Church' would have given the impression they believed God was losing. But they were an extreme minority. Most Christians, Liberal and Evangelical, were confident.
Of course, most were equally not premillenialist. I wonder if Premillenialism is one reason why some people seem to think that the Bible says God is losing?