To begin our study in Bible doctrine we should begin with God. After all, that’s where the Book begins. The problem for the Bible believer is solved with the very first verse in the Bible which says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1, the beginning verse, assumes the existence of God. The Lord Jesus Christ never questioned the existence of God; He referred to God in a matter of fact way. To tell the truth, there is not one writer in the Bible who wastes time trying to prove the existence of God. The term God alone occurs in the Bible more than five hundred times; the Bible takes the existence of God for granted. But in this lesson we’re going to talk about the Teleological argument for the existence of God, the Cosmological argument, the Anthropological argument, and the argument from Congruity. These are theological subjects, but let us notice that the Bible takes the existence of God for granted. It is never brought up as a question.
Christians are constantly challenged by atheists, skeptics, agnostics, and hecklers to prove that there is a God. Fortunately, we don’t have to prove it. The Bible says in Psalm 14:1, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Any man may argue about the existence of God with his head, but the trouble is with the heart.
It is very difficult for the natural man to believe in something that he cannot see, touch, or feel; so in I Corinthians 2:14 we are told, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” However, anyone with any intelligence can acknowledge the evident fact that a supreme intelligence is manifest throughout the operations of nature, history, and the universe.
Christ says in John 7:17, “If any man will do his will [God’s will], he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” That is, a skeptic’s trouble is heart trouble. It has to do with a bad life and an immoral attitude. Now, it is true that you have moral atheists and moral skeptics and moral sinners— men who do good because they have found that it pays to do good. Or, they might do good because they cannot do evil and get away with it. Or, they might do good to soothe their conscience. Or, they do good so that they can brag about their selfrighteousness before their fellowman. We have always had moral sinners, moral atheists and moral skeptics, but the only real difference between them and the immoral sinners is the difference between brand new garbage cans and old ones.
Being an atheist takes a great deal of faith. As a matter of fact, it takes a great deal more faith to be an atheist than to be a Deist or a Theist—a believer in God. To be an atheist, a person has to deny a first cause. And in order to deny this, he has to deny his rational powers. Anybody who knows about the laws of thermodynamics (and in particular, the second law, the law of entropy) knows that if the universe had been here more than ninety billion years it would have run down; by now it would be wasted out and burned out. How much more if it had been here “forever” without a first cause? If the universe had been here for more than, say, a hundred billion years, it would have burned out at least fifty billion years ago—by the law of breakdown. For example, the magnetic field around the earth is decreasing at such a rate that it could not have been here for more than ten thousand years at a maximum.
There are other proofs which we shall also discuss: the proof of nature, the proof of conscience, the argument from cause, the argument from design, and the moral argument; but the first main proof is from God’s word, “Thy word is truth.” David said in Psalm 119:160, “Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.” David said, “Thy word is true from the beginning,” and the beginning takes God for granted—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” So the Bible begins with God and takes His existence as being a fact.
“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” He didn’t say that in his head. Any man with any sense, a man who is half intelligent or half rational, can see immediately that there is a God. The man that says there is no God simply says that down in his heart because of a bad life. Now, it’s true he may have cleaned up temporarily, but he may have plans for later, or he may be trying to cover up a skeleton in the closet from thirty years back. There’s more that meets the eye than just a college education, science, religion, and all that foolishness. All right, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Anyone with any intelligence would acknowledge the evident fact of a living God.
The greatest proof, apart from Scripture, of the existence of God is the daily fellowship that a born-again person can have with God in prayer. Those of us who know God can sing, “And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own, and the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known.” We know there is a God because we talk to Him daily. He hears our prayers and answers the prayers of our heart. The Bible says that we are to commit everything to Him in prayer. Why would anyone be dumb enough to tell you, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you,” when there is nobody there to answer, nobody there to give, and nobody to open the door. Rather stupid, don’t you think?
The Bible takes the existence of God for granted. The first proof is Scriptural. The Bible speaks of “God” over five hundred times using the name of God, and it uses the word “Lord” over three hundred times.
Proof From Nature
The next proof we have for the existence of God is from nature. We find this great passage in Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” No man could gaze at the universe and think that it came together accidentally unless he had set himself up as his own god and looked at everything relatively, like Einstein did, or unless he had set up his own moral standards in order to avoid the moral standards of God. “The heavens declare the glory of God.”
Romans 1:20 goes even further and says, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” The man who will accept Scripture will readily acknowledge the existence of God. He will have proof for the existence of God, and there will not be any doubt about it. The invisible things are clearly seen. When Christ wanted to tell man what hell was like, he pointed to a city dump—Gehenna. When he wanted to show people what heaven was like, he pointed to a sinless, clean city with a park in it. When the Lord Jesus Christ wanted to picture Himself, He pictured Himself in the Bible as the SUN, which moves east to west, as history moves east to west, as revivals move east to west, as the Holy Ghost moves east to west, against the rotation of the world. “The invisible things...are clearly seen.”
A perfect picture of the Godhead and the Trinity, for example, is found in the sun, which contains alpha, beta, and gamma rays. The sun has light rays that you can see and cannot feel, a picture of God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ; rays that you can feel but cannot see, a picture of God the Spirit, the Holy Ghost; and rays which you can neither see nor feel, actinic rays which picture the soul of God, God the Father. The sun, then, visibly seen, is a representation of things not seen. So the things that are not seen are eternal, but they are clearly seen, “being understood by the things that are made,” Romans 1:20.
Proof From The Conscience
All right, the next proof for God comes from conscience. Man is born with a universal belief in a Supreme Being. No tribe has yet been discovered which lacks this. They know that some Being creates and controls life. The only kind of people who doubt belief in a Supreme Being are people who have been educated out of it and have been taught relative matters so they can live like the devil and justify themselves. There is not one tribe (isolated or unisolated) on the face of this earth that does not believe in a Supreme Being. If a man was raised on an island with the animals, he would grow up worshipping a Supreme Being. You have to be educated out of such a belief. There is no such thing as an uneducated, natural atheist. Romans 2:15 says about the heathen people, “Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.”
The existence of God is written in the human conscience. Whether the man has a Bible or not, or the law or not, his conscience bears witness to the Ten Commandments. People say, “What about those who don’t know and haven’t heard?” They knows a great deal more about God than the professors at the University of Oregon or the University of California or the Universities of Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, or New York. You say, “Where do they get that from?” From having common sense. Where would you get it otherwise? Out there in the jungle, the heathen cut off a man’s hand when he steals the first time, his other hand when he steals the second time, and his head the third time. Why? Because they know the commandment that says, “Thou shalt not steal,” even if they do not have a Bible.
There is not any tribe on the face of this earth where adultery is not recognized as a crime, except in the college circles and high school circles of America. They talk about “adult consent” and “premarital sex.” You are not born with a disbelief in morals and the existence of God. You’re born with the revelation of God in your conscience which you have to drown out. The Bible says about these educated Americans in I Timothy 4:2 that they have “their conscience seared with a hot iron.”
In Acts 17:23, Paul says, “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.” That was in the city of Athens which contained the most educated, cultured people of their day; the people who wrote the grammar textbooks for the correcting of the King James text by the modern Christian schools. They were agnostic, but conscience told them that there was a God though they did not know him personally. They were agnostic. (That’s what the word “unknown” is. Gnosis with the alpha before it. Agnostic. Agnostic. An “unknower” or, as they say in Latin, an “ignoramus.”)
So the heathen know about God. He is revealed in nature, and He is revealed in conscience even to those who have no Scriptures. Some atheists may claim that their conscience does not tell them about God. That’s because they burn their consciences out.
Some men are so blind that they may deny the existence of a sun in the sky, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the sun exists, and that it rises and sets each day. None are so blind as people who refuse to see, and the honest man knows that the inner, still, small voice says that God exists and is alive. Men deny the existence of God, not because they cannot find Him, but because they are afraid to face the responsibility of being accountable to Him after death. There is not an atheist in the world who did not run to atheism in order to get out of his personal accountability to God. And that is why when Paul preached to the most educated, cultured people of his day, the Athenian Greek scholars and the Athenian Greek philosophers (Acts 17), they mocked when they heard about the resurrection of the dead. No atheist could stand to have his life brought out in the open, and that is why men are atheists. That’s why “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”—not in his head.
Atheism is one of the devil’s tools to put man to sleep without accepting salvation. If there is no God, then I am not responsible to anyone. I can live and die as I please. And if you don’t accept the true God, you can get yourself another one. Which really means, when a man says he is an atheist, he is really just a liar. What he means is that he does not want the God of the Bible.
Cosmological Argument
All right, another argument for the existence of God is what we call the argument from cause—Cosmological. That is, the world is here. The first cosmological argument for God is that the world must have come from somewhere. Somebody or something must have caused it to come into being at one time or another. For example, here is a book. Well, somebody must have written it. No printing press can, of itself, print a book, be it ever so modern a press with the latest gadgets. Somebody created the trees. Somebody operates the universe. If all the pieces of a watch were placed in a can and the can was shaken gently for 150 billion years, the watch would not accidentally get together and start running. The only sensible answer, to a man who is intellectually honest, to the problem of the existence of the world, is the existence of an intelligent being behind the order, the “cosmos.”
The chances that man could come into being by Darwin’s theory (or by any modern evolutionist’s theory) are the chances you would take if a print factory blew up in the air and came down in the form of a dictionary. We say this with charity toward all evolutionists, who are entitled to believe what they want to believe. Freedom of speech, son. Help yourself. But don’t expect an intelligent man to buy it. I mean, after all, education is not brains. An education is not intellectual honesty.
Moral Argument
We read in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And again, in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him;” that is, He patterned man after God. God says in Psalm 94:9, “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see?” God has given to man ears, eyes, knowledge, intelligence, and will power, for these are the things that He Himself, God, possesses. Man, who was once in the image of God in righteousness and holiness, is a miniature, fallen counterpart of God; man fell, but he still retains in his fallen state the vestigial remnant of the Godhead. Man was made in God’s image, not the image of an orangutan or a possum or anybody else in Darwin’s family tree that swung by the tail. (We’ll talk about this more when we get into our lessons on Anthropology, one of the branches of theology which deals with the creation of man.)
Conscience teaches man right and wrong, good and bad, for his Creator is a moral being who is holy and loves righteousness but abhors evil. That is why the God of truth, the God of creation, the God of this universe, has been “run off the boards” by modern man. Modern man does not abhor evil and does not love righteousness. “Modern man,” per se—especially the educated, religious, scientific type of man—is a man who believes that righteousness and evil are relative terms which you can switch back and forth. As a matter of fact, they are often switched back and forth in matters like those discussed by men like Hugh Hefner in Playboy, Esquire, Genesis, Playgirl, and the rest of the girlie magazines—what they are doing is calling evil “good” and calling good “evil.” To such a race of degenerates, the God of the Bible can hardly be accepted, or even retain His respectable position. After all, when a man hates righteousness and loves sin, he cannot have any fellowship with the God of truth and righteousness.
The Moral argument is simple. Anthropology and the study of ethnology shows that throughout the races, in any type of ethnic culture, there are standards of right and wrong, and though varying slightly from culture to culture, there is not any culture on the face of this earth that does not consider murder a breach of moral standards. “Thou shalt not kill.” “Thou shalt not kill,” not applying to national defense or personal defense, but to malicious intent and assault and battery with intent to kill an individual. The Bible doesn’t make any mistakes. You may. Your education may have taught you and helped you to nurture a bad disposition, a dishonest intellect, and a rotten attitude toward the truth; but that is your problem, not ours and not the Lord’s. We have the Moral argument.
Life From Life Argument
Then, we have the Life argument. That is, life comes from life, except if you are an evolutionist. If you are an evolutionist, life must come from death. Do you realize that right now man is desperately searching Venus, Jupiter, and every place he can find, to try to prove that Darwin was right? Our government has spent over fifty billion dollars to try to overthrow Genesis 1. Isn’t that something? Our government has spent over fifty billion dollars to try to find life on some other planet to prove that life is not unique to this planet. Life comes from life, and the original life must have come from a being possessing eternal life. That is, there had to be some life existing before physical life was created; if you are a straight thinker!
Now, where can such life be found? It can only be found in God who possesses eternal life. Psalm 36:9 says, “For with thee is the fountain of life.” The apple tree, for example, gets its life from the parent tree; the lamb gets life from the mother sheep. From where here did they get their life? You have to go back to the original creation. This answers the problem of what came first, the chicken or the egg; the answer is obvious. The chicken. Life can only come from life. Jesus said in John 11:25. “I am the resurrection, and the life.” In John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” John 10:28, “And I give unto them eternal life.” In John 5:40, He said to the educated people of His day, “And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.” The Bible says in I John 5:12, “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” All life proceeds from God.
The theory of spontaneous generation has been proved to be false and completely unacceptable to authoritative science. There is not a really educated man (although he may wave some degree in your face) anywhere in the world anymore who believes in spontaneous generation (although you may find a few college teachers who do). Life must have a beginning. The only logical answer, if you’re logical at all, is that the beginning of life was with God. This is what we call the Life argument.
Conclusion
So what may we conclude in our first study? In our first study on the existence of God we may conclude that atheism is only a giant doubt. Its unbelief can only lead to darkness and despair and disaster for the one accepting it. It can only lead to anarchy, paganism, or international socialism with the torture and imprisonment of millions of people who do not knuckle down to a state as god. Therefore, if there is any God up there at all (and of course, we say that with no doubt in our own mind), theologically, it is impossible to believe that He would not reveal Himself to His creation by words. This is so fundamental and foundational in theological truth that when Jesus Christ shows up in John 1, we read. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John says in I John 1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.”
Source: Theological Studies Vol I - Existence of GOD by Dr. Peter S. Ruckman
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