Dealing with Doubts - Why I Believe in the God of the Bible, Part 1

You know, something we hear all the time is that Christianity is so narrow-minded. I mean, how can you say that there's only one God?

I mean, as long as a person is sincere in their belief, does it really matter? Well, today I want to tell you it really does, and I'll tell you why. Stay with me. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Our mission is to inspire Christians to be genuine followers of Jesus and to empower them to be active disciple-makers in our world. Today we're continuing our series Dealing with Doubts, Reaffirming Your Personal Faith. Over the next two programs, Chip will challenge us to think about God in a different way that will cause us to worship Him more intentionally and remind us why we can trust His promises. But before he dives in, let me encourage you to use Chip's message notes while you listen. They include his brief outline and all the supporting scripture he references. To download these message notes, go to the Broadcasts tab at livingontheedge.org.

App listeners tap Fill In Notes. Well, if you're ready, here's Chip with his talk, Why I Believe in the God of the Bible. I was recently walking through the hallways of our church in between services, and I mean, it was chaotic. You know, one service was coming in, another was leaving, and people had their kids, and the place was super crowded, and I was walking.

I saw an Asian couple that were just kind of standing there, and I couldn't tell whether they were lost or needed help with their child. We're a multicultural church, so lots of people from all kind of backgrounds, and so I just was prompted. I said, Excuse me. Can I help you all?

Everything okay? And they said, Yeah, actually, you can. And then it went from not their child being in a class to, he said, You know, my wife and I have been coming for several months, and we're exploring Christianity, and the place has been very warm here. Our children, the impact on our kids is really good, and my wife actually, after the first few months, she put her faith in Christ, and we were just sitting here talking because we're on our way back to Asia, and we're going to visit our families, and we come from a multi, multi generation of Buddhist, and we want to thank you.

We feel like the teaching has been clear. We feel like it's been intellectually grounded that, you know, we had no idea about the history of Christianity and the reasons to believe, and I'm on the verge of making that commitment. But he said, The price will be very, very high, because when we tell our relatives that we are trusting in Christ, we're telling them that they are wrong, and past generations are wrong.

And I don't know about you, but there's probably not anything more unpopular, but more important than asking and answering the question, Is it intellectually feasible that there is only one true God, and that God is the God of the Bible? You know, we've talked about a lot of reasons why I believe, and we've talked about thinking through faith issues, but this is at the core, and this is our final time together. So I want you to really lean back and more than just take in information, ask yourself, Do I really believe? And I want you to know that I always know there's a, you know, mixed group of people, and whether it's small groups or big groups, you know, I want to give you a chance before we end our time, that if you have never placed your faith in Christ, you'll have that opportunity. But I want you to know why I believe. There's 320 million gods in the world today.

There's 22 major religions, each with a half million followers or more. So the question you got to ask is, Why do you think the God of the Bible is the one true God? Now, just so we are unequivocal, God makes no bones about this. He writes through the prophet Isaiah, This is what the Lord says, Israel's king and redeemer, the Lord Almighty.

I am the first and I am the last. Apart from me, there is no God, who then is like me, let him proclaim it, let him declare and lay it out before me. God is very, very clear with Israel.

And as we'll learn, Jesus is very, very clear that there is a narrow road, and that he is the way, he is the truth, he is the life, and no one comes to the Father except by him. Now before we jump into this, there's a couple big word presuppositions that I need to talk to you about. Presupposition is an unconscious set of thoughts or values that are so part of the culture and so a part of your life that you don't even know you believe them, but you just believe them.

But like the foundation of the house that's underground, everything is upon it. So we have presuppositions, especially about religious things and in our culture today. And I think there's two presuppositions I want to talk about, get really clear on, and then I will walk through very systematically the reasons why I personally believe that the God of the Bible, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the one true God. Presupposition number one is that aren't all religions essentially the same? The answer is no. Now if you kind of listen to pop psychology or I was recently on a plane with a fellow from another country and he lives in the Bay Area and we got into discussion about religion and relationship with God and he basically said, well you know I know all religions are basically the same, you know like there's God is on the top of the mountain and there's many paths and people go up different paths and they give him many names.

And so this is very very common, very very common. What I can tell you since I studied this, if I got a Buddhist, a Taoist, a Mormon, someone from Islam, someone from Judaism, believe me if I got the top seven or eight religions and got these guys in a room and say okay now, line out what you actually believe, do they conflict at all? Well the Eastern religions are all impersonal, God's not even a person. Specific other religions are dramatic, they would start arguing.

What I can tell you is you can choose to believe what you want to believe but one of the options is not. All religions are basically the same, possibly with the exception of Baha'i. Baha'i is a sort of interesting religion. I remember sitting actually next to a lady who was Baha'i and I asked her what she believed and she said everything.

Well that conversation went in amazing ways. But here's what I want you to know, it's very clear that there's distinctions between religions in terms of who God is, what it means to have a relationship with Him, what it requires to have a relationship with Him and what each of the different religions teach. The second presupposition is does it really matter what a person believes as long as he or she is sincere and practices those beliefs?

These are so common. The fellow that I was talking to on the plane, our discussion first was well they're basically the same and then he said oh you're probably right, you know Buddhists are really different than this and that group is really different but he said you know as long as they're sincere, I mean this isn't in the water system, this is what people unconsciously believe and what I want to tell you is that the answer is no. You can be very, very sincere but you can be very sincerely wrong. In fact think about this, imagine if you will your child is very sick and you go to the doctor and he writes a prescription and it's a little bit hard to read and the pharmacist sincerely fills it out and he sincerely believes this is the prescription and gives your child something different and your child dies. Being sincere isn't good enough or in our relationships no one buys that.

Imagine your mate falls in love with someone else and says I'm very sincere, I used to love you, now I love them, is that okay? Or current example, I will guarantee those in ISIS are absolutely sincere. They actually believe in their Quran in the radical version that you are an enemy and you're an infidel and they are sincerely killing people thinking they're doing it for God. But think of this, even in all the world religions, you know who one of the great heroes is? It's Jesus.

They don't believe he's the son of God but Jesus, he's the ideal man, he's the most loving, he cares for the poor, the marginalized, we all want to be like Jesus. Would you like to hear what the most loving person who's ever walked the earth says? This is the loving Jesus, enter through the narrow gate for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction and many enter through it but small is the gate and narrow that leads to life and only a few find it. Jesus is, not was, is the most loving person in the world and what he says is it's not about sincerity, it's about accuracy.

Now we need to be sincere in our love for Christ. Now here's what I want to do and some of this will be review but I want to pretty quickly go through these are the reasons why I'm not throwing my brain in the trash but that I absolutely believe the God of the Bible is the one true God. Reason number one, the historical evidence. Christianity is subject to objective verification. It happened in a crucial place, crucial time, real people, real events in space time history. I can verify that. We've already talked about the actual historical events from archaeology, the trustworthiness of the manuscripts of the Bible, the evidence from extra biblical sources so it's not just what the Bible says about Jesus, it's what even historians have said and then the eyewitness accounts.

I mean in any court of law, I've been on a number of juries, I don't know how that works but I end up on juries and I mean when you have two or three eyewitnesses, it's a slam dunk. There's 500 eyewitnesses and it didn't happen out there somewhere, it happened where it could be verified right in Jerusalem. The second reason that I believe God of the Bible is the one true God is the prophetic evidence.

Predictions of specific future events with 100% accuracy confirm the authenticity. I call it the Isaiah principle. Follow along as I read this passage from Isaiah chapter 44 verses 24 to 28. This is what the Lord says, your redeemer who formed you in the womb. I am the Lord, the maker of all things, who stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself, who foils the signs of false prophets and makes fools of diviners, who overthrows the learning of the wise and turns it into nonsense, who carries out the words of his servants and fulfills the predictions of his messengers, who says of Jerusalem it shall be inhabited of the towns of Judah that they shall be rebuilt and all of their ruins, I will restore them, who says to the watery deep be dry and I will dry up your streams, who says to Cyrus, he is my shepherd and I will accomplish all that I please, he will say of Jerusalem let it be rebuilt and of the temple let its foundations be laid.

God is authoritatively saying I am the Lord God Almighty and he makes prophecies that are very, very specific that are undeniable and that aren't vague. You're listening to Living on the Edge. We'll get you back to our series dealing with doubts in just a minute. But first, if this teaching has ministered to you, consider becoming a monthly partner. Your regular financial support goes a long way to help us encourage pastors, create resources, and share Jesus with today's youth. Visit livingontheedge.org today to learn how to support us. Well, with that, here again is Chip.

Now this is one that I wanted you to get. I spend a lot of time in one of the other messages talking about prophecy and the fulfillment of all the prophecies of Jesus. But this is 150 years before Cyrus was born. And Isaiah is getting a clear prophecy from God telling what's going to happen.

150 years, Cyrus the Great is born. And if you go into this passage very specifically, all the specific things that God says this person will do is accomplished. And he names them by name. And in Jewish prophetic literature, it's quite different than today. Often people make lots of predictions, you know, like some are right, some are wrong. Here's the way it worked with God. A real prophet is right 100% of the time or he's not one of God's prophet.

And if you claim to be and you're wrong, it's the capital offense. So what I want you to know is that my faith is in a God who's sovereign, who knows the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. The third reason I believe in the God of the Bible is what I just call the philosophical evidence. The triune nature of God and the testimony of Scripture best answers life's most timeless and difficult questions. Now we could spend years on this one and this is an area that was really a part of my coming to know Christ and really believing what's true.

It's a bit on the metaphysical and the philosophical side. But let me just highlight three things that the God of the Bible answers that other religions don't. Number one, the problem of unity and diversity. If you look at Egyptian gods, if you look at Hindu gods, if you look at the Western gods of the Greeks and the Romans, they solve the problem of individual gods, diversity. If you look at the Eastern gods of Buddhism or reincarnation, what you find is the Easterns, they solve unity.

We're all one, one drop going back into the ocean. The challenge is the individual gods competed with one another. The gods of unity are impersonal and only the triunity of the one God, three persons and one essence, really answers the question of how can there be both unity and diversity in the world. Second is the problem of evil and justice.

Every religion has this problem. How do you account for the evil and the suffering and the injustice in the world? Many religions have a God that has a good side and a bad side or there's two gods or the force, right? The dark side of the force.

It's interesting. Biblical Christianity answers this, I think, in the most compelling way. God is a good God who is perfect, who's made a perfect world. He gives humankind, mankind freedom and the world that we live in is not the world that he desired.

It is our sin that separates and brings what was called the fall. And now we have a good God who is sovereign, who gave us freedom to accept or reject him and that the evil in the world is a temporary evil that he will actually come and die in our place to pay for our sin and then make all things right. So evil and suffering has a very clear source and beginning and there is a good God who gives us the freedom but in essence is willing to love us so much to solve that very problem.

I think the third philosophical issue is I would just call it the enigma of man. I mean think about this, mankind is noble, creative. I mean our technology, we put a man on the moon, we have a cell phone for everybody in the world, medicine, heart transplants, heart lung transplants, mankind is brilliant, amazing, creative, art, music and yet on the other side the enigma is cruelty, hate, jealousy, prejudice, Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust. I mean it's hard to imagine how the human species could be so beautiful, so wonderful, so noble, so made in the image of God and yet so cruel. The history of mankind is war after war after war after war. Unmentionable cruelty and pain and the marginalizing of people that look different or a different color, hatred and starvation.

How can that happen? The Bible would say man is made in the image of God and so he's noble but he's a fallen sinful creature and he needs to be redeemed. The fourth reason that I believe in the God of the Bible is I'll just call it the evidence of impact. You know every religion has impact. You can go to different countries and you can know sort of what their religion has been and you can kind of look around and say wow this is what is produced after hundreds of years. I've spent some time in India, a lot of time in China, time in the Middle East. I don't know anyone that travels in India for business that it's heartbreaking. I mean so much of India despite the technology and the growth in some areas is the same that has been. You see there's a caste system formal or informal and people are getting what they deserve so I shouldn't help that person because you know that's karma.

They're just getting what they deserve and there is poverty everywhere. They're fearful of their ancestors. Limited education except for missionaries came and began to do the teaching and create the hospitals that were Christians. See the impact of Christianity when you begin to study what happened as a result of the teaching of Jesus and actually the laws of the Old Testament, the nation of Israel from one nomad, I mean Abraham.

You know he's running around on a camel somewhere and God chooses him and from that he develops this nation Abraham and then Moses, the laws of Israel. I mean we don't think about all those ceremonial laws. Guess what? They didn't know about germs, the circumcision on the eighth day.

They didn't know that's when the blood clots. I mean you think of the laws of hygiene. You think of the economic laws. Here is a religion that says this is what we're gonna do for the poor. Every seven years we're gonna reset the dial.

Every 50 years economically we're gonna reduce things back to the way it was so you don't have this super rich and everyone else is poor. I mean what the Bible has done and what God has done, the mustard seed conspiracy, this tiny little group of people following Jesus that gets birthed that changes the world, the liberation of women, the liberation of slaves, the basis of our jurisprudence, economic impact, the care for the poor, Wilberforce. You know he stood on scripture in England and stopped.

It took decades and stopped the horrendous slavery that was happening. When you find and do research you find that Christians have been in key areas that have changed the course of history. This is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and you've been listening to part one of Chip's message, Why I Believe in the God of the Bible from our series Dealing with Doubts.

Chip will be back shortly to share some helpful application for us to think about. Did you know there's a lot of solid verifiable evidence that supports the truth of scripture and the existence of Jesus? The real challenge lies in communicating that proof and the hope of the gospel to those sincerely seeking answers. So how do we do that? Well, in this series, Chip and guest teacher John Dickerson share ways to effectively and winsomely address honest questions about our faith that will attract people to the Bible, not repel them from it.

Also, we want you to have all the necessary tools for those conversations. So whenever you hear a book, podcast, or article mentioned in this series, visit LivingOnTheEdge.org and check out our resources page. We want to point you to relevant, biblically-grounded experts who will equip you to engage with the doubters and skeptics in your life. Find that resources page at LivingOnTheEdge.org or through the Chip Ingram app.

And before we move on, here's Chip. I want to pause just for a minute, and if you're a financial partner with Living on the Edge, I just want you to hear a message that we've received from a lady named Kelly who listens every single day. She said, Thanks so much for your ministry and daily podcast.

I listen every day. I'm a recovering addict of many things. I grew up in a Christian family and was saved at the age of 17.

Shortly after that, because of peer pressure in school, started doing drugs. I now have a few years of sobriety, and God saved my life, and He has totally removed the physical urge to use drugs and alcohol and cigarettes. I've now joined an awesome church that has small groups, and Christ has blessed me in recovery meetings. Anyway, thanks so much for sharing your life with others. You've made a positive difference in my life. You know, Kelly is one of hundreds, actually thousands of emails that we get at Living on the Edge. I just call them life change.

Spirit of God took the Word of God, and it might have been on a podcast, could have been on the radio, could have been in a small group, could have even been a CD or a book. But God intervenes with their life, and something happens that changes the course of their life. And I just want to pause and thank you. You know, some of you write a check every month. Some of you have it taken out of your account every month. Some of you, like once a quarter, twice a year, you give to Living on the Edge.

I want to remind you what it actually does. It's not about giving money. It's about extending ministry and changing lives. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. And if by chance you're listening and you're thinking, you know, I've never given to Living on the Edge, but I'd like to get in on that, we'll give you a very simple way of how you can join the team and really make a difference.

Thanks, Chip. Well, if you were inspired by this story, pray about becoming a financial partner with Living on the Edge. Your support helps us reach more people with sound Bible teaching as we encourage Christians everywhere to live like Christians. To give a gift, go to livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003 or go to livingontheedge.org.

Have listeners tap donate. Well, here again is Chip to share a few final words for us to think about. As we close today's program, I went through what I'd call four reasons that I have personally come to of why I believe in the God of the Bible, the historical, the prophetic, the philosophical, and then the impact. And I really want to encourage you as we think through this together and as we learn how to articulate this to people in our culture that somehow think that if you disagree with them that you're narrow or bigoted, the fact of the matter is that there are some really sound reasons that are verifiable about why we believe in the God of the Bible.

But here's the thing for today. In reality, every religion or truth claim thinks their way is the only way. The real issue is what is really true. And so let me just ask you in light of your study or lack of it of other religions or Christianity in general or even your family of origin and where you come from, what choices have you made and what do you believe honestly about the God of the Bible?

Here's what I can tell you and why this series is so important. It is going to be more and more challenging and the cost of being a follower of Jesus is getting higher and higher. And so as a follower of Jesus, it's going to be important for you to know what you believe and why and then be able to articulate that in a kind and winsome way. And I want to speak to some of you that you might even call yourself a skeptic and the farthest thing from a follower of Christ.

But as I was speaking, you said to yourself, almost reluctantly, I should check this out. I want you to know there is a God who loves you and who's for you and wants to reveal Himself to you. And can I encourage you to give us a call or email us and the book Why I Believe. It's my personal journey.

I've done the research and I would love to share that with you. Thanks, Chip. During this series, we've bundled Chip's Why I Believe book together with John's book Jesus Skeptic.

We hope that through these resources, you'll encounter Jesus, the God-man, and understand why we can fully trust and follow the teachings of the Bible. For complete details about this two-book bundle, call 888-333-6003 or go to LivingOnTheEdge.org. Chip listeners, tap Special Offers. Well, be sure to join us next time as Chip continues our series, Dealing with Doubts. Until then, I'm Dave Drouy saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.