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Questions about faith and faith claims are important. Whether the person asking the question is genuinely seeking an answer or attempting to pose a rhetorical “gotcha” question is not always clear. For example, GatoNegro777 posted a challenge to our webcast “No Quarter for False Teaching with Will Spencer,” on our Rumble channel. It was live-streamed to our YouTube and Rumble channels as well as several other destinations. From the comment, it is difficult to know if the commenter even watched the video or not:
What is wrong with looking for the truth by drinking from different fountains? Isn’t your faith Christian fundamentalism? Why are you right and the Jews, Buddhist, etc are wrong?
What if channeling, premonitions, demons, etc are only parts of the psyche we have not figured out yet?
How about things like psychological shadow, psychological compensation, projection, trauma, enlightenment – are they real and compatible with Christianity or other religion? Why can’t you look for God in the same way Descartes, Pascal, Einstein etc. did?1Comment is slightly edited for spelling and punctuation
Our initial response to the first question is simple. We speak against false representations of the Christian faith, as manufacturers put warning labels on dangerous products in the marketplace. We do not speak from any malice. We believe as Christians we have a God-given responsibility to ensure to our best ability that the spiritual “fountains” we see people sampling are not poisonous or could not cost them a price far too great to bear. Our job, as we see it, is to warn people who might be unaware of the dangers of false teaching. The worldviews in which these often-opposing beliefs reside can be objectively tested against God’s word to determine if they are spiritually safe, true, or have elements of truth and/or falsehood. They can also be tested against themselves to determine if they are consistent and coherent. Belief in a false worldview, no matter how popular, can result in damage to the unwary in this life and eternal separation from God. That separation brings with it eternal torment.
People are free to believe and disbelieve anything they choose. That’s a given. But the freedom to believe what they choose doesn’t mean the belief is true or valid.
GatoNegro777 is correct that we believe in the fundamental doctrines of the historic biblical faith:
– the nature of God,
– the nature of Man,
– the nature of Sin,
– the nature of the Resurrection,
– the nature of Salvation,
– the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture
These teachings are informed by the writings that make up the Old and New Testaments. All of the Old and nearly all of the New Testament were written by Jewish writers. That said, just because a number of Jewish people, as well as Buddists and so many others, reject the scripture’s teaching today doesn’t invalidate the biblical worldview, but merely demonstrates that often people believe partial truths or even false things for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, many Jews do fervently believe in the gospel and do not reject the God of the Bible, or His Son Jesus (Yeshua), the very God that we Gentiles now accept.
Most of GatoNegro777’s other questions are in line with a question posed to our article, “Paganicon 2025 – Re-enchantment and Neopaganism” by a commenter with the user name “Politics” who asked:
“I wonder if the author fully considers the complexity of human belief systems?”
We would suggest that “the complexity of human belief systems” is not as complex as one might imagine. Ultimately, there is what Dr. Peter Jones calls “Oneism” and “Twoism.” Our friend, Carl Teichrib, explains this in a one-minute video. In Oneism, everything is, as the designation indicates, One. In atheism, for example, everything is material, and there is nothing outside of the physical cosmos that interacts with the cosmos. As the late Carl Sagan put it, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” We are merely stardust. If this is true, then nothing humans have done or will do matters. Neither does it matter what one believes in the Oneism view. We will be born, live a few short, meaningless years, stop breathing, and simply cease to exist. The universe itself will either expand and die a heat death or retract and explode in a fiery inferno, and nothing that has been done by any human at any time in history will be left or will have mattered.
In Pantheism, everything is one, and indeed, in that view, everything is god. The rocks are god, the trees are god, humans are god, and what my cat leaves in the litter box is god. None of us is of any greater value than the lowest common denominator in the cosmos. We could go on with each of the Oneist worldviews, but they all suffer the same fate.
In Twoism, there is the creation and the creator. They are separate, and the creator interacts with creation. He (God) is uncaused and infinitely self-existent. The cosmos and all that is within it are caused by the uncaused creator. We are products of His creation and, as such, have a beginning. The Bible teaches that we will either live with Him eternally or reject Him to worship something else as our idol – perhaps ourselves, or money, power, or a physical idol – and be eternally separated from God. The Apostle Paul, who, as it happens, was Jewish and a believer, explained this in Romans 1:18-28. We either worship and serve God OR we worship and serve the creation. There is really no middle ground.
One of the questions posed by the user name “Politics” is:
“The assertion that everything is meaningless without God is a bold claim, but is it really that simple?”
This is not only an important question, but it is also an old question. It is a question King Solomon considered in his “biblical philosophical” book, Ecclesiastes. The entire theme of Ecclesiastes asks the question: Is there any meaning to life if God does not exist? He examined various aspects of life, including indulging in the pleasures that one may engage in, such as sex, building parks, large houses, owning slaves, amassing great wealth, and being entertained by singers. Near the end of chapter 2, he wrote:
What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23)
Solomon kept returning to the same conclusion about life “under the sun.” Life without God is pointless, and he called for the reader to look to God for all He gives (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8) for He is the One who gives meaning to life. This assertion by Solomon that all is meaningless (without God) is essentially Nihilism. “Politic” wondered:
What would you say to someone who finds meaning outside of a Christian framework?
The answer is that human beings can find a short-lived sense of happiness without belief in God, but to do so, we have to pretend life has meaning. But certainly, if we simply pretend life and existence have meaning, we would at some level know we are pretending.
As we get older, we think more about death and what it means to us personally. And if we have no assurance of a hereafter, what has our life really been about? No one alive can even truly imagine having no consciousness, no memories, no love, and no nothin’. No meaning whatsoever…
Except, of course, in a Christian worldview, there is no place of nothingness. People are either gathered with God and their loved ones that have gone before after they die, or sent to perdition by the God they rejected. For this reason, even many who do not ostensibly believe in God would far prefer to believe the unbelieving dead are merely disappearing into nothingness, no matter how unlikely that prospect seems in their own heart. There is something in each one of us that recognizes we ARE going to continue on after death, no matter our denials to ourselves or others. As Solomon points out in Ecclesiastes 3:11, God “has put eternity into man’s heart.”
But what of morals, ethics, etc? Fyodor Dostoevsky is credited with addressing that question by having his characters in Brothers Karamazov, say something along the lines of “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Without God (Twoism), there is no objective basis for morality, ethics, biblical justice, equality or the Woke mantras of Social Justice, equity, inclusion, or the significance of belief in a higher power of any sort. People not familiar with the Bible may have no knowledge of Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes and its very initially dark philosophical point of view. As Solomon, known for his great wisdom, philosophically reasoned in Ecclesiastes how being happy or unhappy, wise or unwise, smart or dumb as a dullard, is meaningless, if there is no God, no hereafter. Absolutely MEANINGLESS. IF there is no God, we live a few short meaningless years, Solomon reasons, then we die and cease to exist; that’s it. Nietzsche and Solomon asked the same questions. You’ll be happy to hear that Solomon recognized, however, that the overwhelming evidence rationally pointed to belief in God, not nihilism.
For those who reject the evidence that Jesus, a Jewish Rabbi of the first century, was and is God incarnate Who died for the sins of the world, raised Himself from the dead, and offers salvation for all who call on His name, they are taking a huge gamble on eternity. “GatoNegro777” suggested we ought “look for God in the same way” Pascal and others did. Many might be surprised by “Pascal’s Wager,” which we wrote about long ago in “You Bet Your Life.” Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century philosopher and Christian,2See What impact did Blaise Pascal have on the Christian faith? Pascal devoted a great deal of his time and energy after his conversion to Christianity by grace alone through faith alone, writing what he hoped would be a comprehensive apologetic in defense of the Christian faith. In that work, Pensées, he laid out his wager as a challenge to unbelievers. In it, he proposed:
“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
What he meant is that if you believe in God and a blessed afterlife, you lose NOTHING if you are wrong. Because, of course, YOU will no longer exist to be disappointed.
The evidence, though, in our minds, is that God exists. If we pick up again on Pascal’s Wager, the gamble is that if we do not believe and thereby reject God and the salvation He offers, and God in fact does not exist, we lose nothing, BUT if He does exist, we lose everything for all eternity. On the other hand, if we believe in God and accept the salvation He offers, and He exists, we gain eternal life with Him and everything that brings. Jesus made a similar challenge in the First Century:
I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins. (John 8:24)
You are gambling with your eternity. Pascal’s advice is sound:
Wager then, without hesitation, that He is.Ω
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“Creator/creature distinctions.”
(Letter to a friend.)
Having been created in the image of God is reflected in the fact that we have the ability to think rationally and logically (although many people appear not to do so), we have the capacity to love and be loved (although flawed and limited until we receive God’s unconditional love, and begin to understand that authentic love is both a choice and an action, and not a “feeling” — and is often in spite of our feelings.
From the moment we’re conceived, we are given an eternal nature (in the sense that we will all live forever; either rejoicing in the presence of God, or existing outside of the presence of God…for eternity).
Since “Light” is one of the attributes God uses to describe Himself, the opposite of light would be “darkness.”
(Ref. John 1:1-9; 3:19-21; 8:12;
1 Timothy 6:13-16, and 1st John 1:5-7.)
But when we bow our hearts and relinquish control of our lives to the Lord, we are given a new heart, and a new spirit; one that can now enjoy the fellowship God intended for us to enjoy as we “walk” in unity with Him.
In reference to your question, “Do I think God is part of us and we are part of God?” I can say without hesitation if that were even a remote possibility, the consequences would be catastrophic; and we’d all go down together in a sinking ship. The thought that God is like us is terrifying to me. Humans are incredibly sinful, selfish and destructive…and that includes the best of us.
There are many reasons why I say that, and I offer the following three points for your consideration.
1. God is neither fractured nor diminished by the sinful actions of His creatures.
2. Unlike us, nothing ever “occurs” to God after the fact.
(Like: Wow…I didn’t see THAT coming!) 😳
“Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways, and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and He will have compassion on them, and to our God, for He will freely pardon.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My word that goes out from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:6-11)
3. Although God has clearly expressed His heartache over the devastating consequences of human sinfulness — to the point of suffering in our place as the spotless Lamb who was “slain from the foundation of the world” (Isaiah chapter 53; Revelation 13:8), He doesn’t force us to change our behavior towards Himself and each other — and allows us the freedom to acknowledge our brokenness and humbly receive His forgiveness and restoration.
And though He desires that we choose “life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), and may grieve over the vast majority of His creatures who reject His gracious offer of salvation, I find it highly unlikely that God would agonize over the fact that His perfectly Holy and Righteous nature and character had to impose and enforce His predetermined plans and purposes.
As a father, my greatest desire is that my children will embrace Yeshua as their Messiah, Savior, and Lord of their lives, and I will do everything I can to point them to Him.
As a son, I presented and explained the Gospel to my earthly father for many years. Am I certain that my Dad is now rejoicing in Heaven? No.
If my children were to die today, would I be certain that they would be rejoicing in Heaven? No.
Have I always been faithful and consistent to reflect God’s Love, Mercy, Compassion, Kindness, Gentleness, Patience and Grace to my children and to my Dad?
Sadly… No.
But I am certain of one thing.
As long as we’re faithful to plant and water the seeds, God will be the One who causes the seeds to grow; to produce good fruit…and to continue the process. (1st Corinthians 3:5-10)
Baruch HaShem Yeshua! 👑