Objections to Christianity

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.

�But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, here on a Tuesday, or playing on a Tuesday, with Pastor Steve Cooley. You know, Steve Cooley�s middle name is similar to Sinclair Ferguson�s Steve Buchanan Cooley.

So that�s nice. Actually, the B stands for Big Brother.

What are we going to do when we can�t play no-co on the airwaves anymore and they take us off of WGBN or something?

We�re going to go out onto a boat in the ocean, recorded there, you know, just beyond.

The national border. What�s the big Chicago radio station, WBG? WBN? Yeah, it was World�s Greatest Network or something. Oh, so WGN. Yeah, yeah. That�s interesting. Are we on WGN? No, but I think James McDonald used to be.

Did you listen to that Mancow interview with Julie Royce about James McDonald?

No, I just, you know, I know what he was allegedly trying to do. And I say allegedly because I don�t want to be sued by James McDonald. Or killed. Yeah, well, yeah. Metaphorically speaking. Allegedly hiring an assassin to take care of somebody.

Objection: The Existence of God and Romans 1

Well, that�s a good way to start the show today on No Compromise Radio. Steve�s going to be put in the hot seat. This doesn�t happen very often, but my chair�s slinking down and you�re rising up. And so I found an article on crosswalk .com.

I wonder what the Klieg lights were for. You�re going to put me in the hot spot, okay.

I�m trying to think of something funny, but my son Luke would know about Klieg lights and all that. Yeah. Yeah. We have lights now out in the parking lot. So in case you ever lose your contact lens at three in the morning, it�s bright as can be.

Instant daylight. Whitney Hopler is a contributing writer for crosswalk .com. By the way, if you go to crosswalk, there�s quite a few good Bible tools, I think. Okay. What would you do, dear listener, if the internet shut down, you could no longer get any Bible tools?

I wonder if you have any Bible tools at home. Ten most common objections to Christianity. So I�m going to ask, give Steve an objection to Christianity, and then we�re going to see how he would answer.

Uh-oh. The presh. I�m feeling the presh. I don�t believe that God exists. How could anybody be sure?

That�s the question. There�s an objection. I don�t know. I need surety. You need surety. Well, I don�t know what to say. I mean, there are several ways to go at this. There�s the philosophical kind of arguments.

I can argue from the greater to the lesser, and the lesser to the greater, and all those kind of things. Or I could just say, you look around the world, I just go to Romans 1 basically and summarize it in my own words.

You look around the world, you see a world of order, not a world of chaos. You know, if there was no God, we would presume that there would be chaos, because that�s what is the basis of, say, evolution and that kind of thing is.

You know, out of chaos there comes order, which is pretty far-fetched. What Romans 1 says is you look around the world and you see order, you see the power of God, you see it on display, and yet you suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

It�s no wonder that you don�t believe or you�re not sure that there�s a God, because you�re kind of hoping that there isn�t. But the truth is, there is a God, and there�s a God that you will meet one day and you will be held accountable for your sins.

I like the answer, straight to the point. I don�t prefer the philosophical things, because I don�t think that really gets us anywhere, but when you were talking about Romans 1, I went there. It says, �For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

And what they don�t realize is they�re blaming God for a lack of revelation sufficient to make them say there�s a God, when in fact that is the case. And why do they do what they do? I mean, that�s not part of the show today, but we�ll throw this in for free.

Steve�s right. From Huxley to Nietzsche, they�re saying, �You know what? We do these things, that is, suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because we have a lifestyle we�d like to live. Who wants to fornicate or commit adultery or something like that, thinking, �If I breathe my last, the second, I�m dust.

I�m going straight to hell. I don�t want to think about that. Right. But Steve, here�s what you didn�t do. So, I�m going to give you an A on Romans 1, because God has clearly shown His power and His divine nature by what He�s made so that people are without excuse.

But you failed in your approach, because here, this article, it says, �Get to know why people are asking the questions in the first place. Find out what issues are stirring their souls and motivating them to seek answers.

So, you didn�t do that.

You just went straight to the answer. Well, it�s because all that stirs my soul is Jesus.

Well, there�s victory in Jesus, my Savior forever. You know what? When I sing that song, I remember my mother. She had chemotherapy, was dying of lung cancer, non-smoking lung cancer, was bald because of the chemo.

She had some kind of scarf on. And I was visiting her in Omaha, and we were at Omaha Bible Church, and we were singing Victory in Jesus. And I never really liked that song for some reason. I don�t know.

Maybe the tune, Oompa Band or something. I don�t know. But that�s always been one of my favorite songs now because I remember that. Here she is. She�s going to die, and she�s singing Victory in Jesus, my Savior forever, who sought me, great lyric, and bought me, great, with his redeeming blood or his redeeming love.

I know. I know. Steve�s singing right now. So, I give you an A on content and a C on trying to understand the philosophical underpinnings of a person who needs their heart stirred and their souls motivated.

Hmm.

Yeah. I needed to figure out their heart because their heart isn�t deceitful or wicked.

The futility of their mind, right? How do I know the Bible is really true? That�s the next question here on No Compromise Radio.

Here, I�ll make it easy because it says it�s true.

Oh, Steve, it�s circular reasoning. How can you say it�s self-authenticating? Because it says it�s self-authenticating. So, years ago, I preached a sermon at some apologetics conference, and I just entitled it Stop Defending the Bible.

And so, I was just trying to figure out ways to encourage people to preach the gospel and not be on their heels. Well, I�ve been so in pain with this neck thing, and I�ve done�I mean, it�s just constant in one place to the next to the next.

I thought, well, I�m just trying to get Nahum ready, but Nahum�s harder to preach than one might think. And if you�ve never preached it before�so, I pulled up an old sermon that I�ve never preached here and began to preach it last Sunday, what I didn�t get to but I will get to this coming Sunday.

Think about this. We, Steve, didn�t even prove the Bible to be true to ourselves. How could we prove it to be true to others?

I mean, I just remember reading it, and I never questioned whether it was true or not. Honestly.

Don�t you think that�s the work of the Holy Spirit? Even if you weren�t saved then, you were getting drawn into these truth�these statements about God and His truth?

Yeah. But, I mean, now that you say that, it�s just funny, because I remember reading it, and I never thought to myself, hmm, I wonder if I can trust the Bible. That just never occurred to me. I mean, I had lots of thoughts about the Book of Mormon, right?

But that was because not only had I been a Mormon for a long time, I almost said a Book of Mormon for a long time, not only had I been a Mormon for a long time, but I had a lot of questions about the author because I never believed, you know, was inspired.

So, you know, but I never had any difficulty at all, and obviously I have less difficulty with the Bible now. Well, I mean, the whole idea, can I trust the Bible? We�re talking about 40-some-odd authors, you know, over what, a couple thousand years, and the idea that somehow a coherent book, and it is coherent, a coherent book could be written by these men in the ancient world without some kind of massive conspiracy or whatever, which is why some people posit a massive conspiracy, it�s just bizarre.

It's wacky. It's so, it's nuts. So, why do I believe the Bible? Because the Bible says I should believe it, and because the Holy Spirit gives you assurance that it is God's Word.

What might you add, Steve, when it comes to the view of the Bible that the Lord Jesus had? Is that a good approach?

Well, yeah. I mean, Jesus never said, He did say, you know, you've heard it said, but I say to you, but He was correcting teaching. What He never did was correct the Bible. He always affirmed the Old Testament.

He talked about, you know, these things speak of me, and He was talking about, you know, Moses and the prophets, you know, basically summarizing all of the Old Testament spoke of Him. He never corrected a single word.

Isn't it interesting, Steve, that Jesus, He is inaugurated into public ministry at age 30, and probably what He should have done. If there was a bunch of errors in the Old Testament, He probably should have corrected them to start.

By the way, God sent me here. I'm the prophet, ultimate prophet, and these things about Jonah and the whale, fish, you know, all that will correct it all.

And by the way, in Isaiah 47, you ought to put a little asterisk in your Bible, right?

I know. But He, instead of defending the Bible, He regularly said, even think to Satan three times, it is written. And I love it. I think it's a perfect tense in Greek, and it basically means it is written and it stands written and forever it will be written.

God's not going to edit Himself or change or subtract or, you know, society's evolving so we need a new word or something like that. And what I love, Steve, about the Lord Jesus, He went, I don't know how, it helps me with my apologetic methodology, but He didn't go to an obscure verse.

Noah, right? Worldwide flood, affirmed. Lot, Sodom, Gomorrah, affirmed it. Adam and Eve affirmed it. You know, all the things that were like, wow, could that really happen? And Jesus then affirms those things.

The Bible’s Reliability and Jesus’ View of Scripture

Okay. So, we're talking to Steve Cooley today, and I've got a little article about common objections to Christianity, and Steve needs to answer those. What about, somewhat related, we can do this faster.

What about all the errors in the Bible? So someone says to you, the Bible's, you know, got a lot of things in there that, you know, maybe shouldn't be, and Council of Nicaea and 327 and all these other things.

What about that? It was actually 325. I know. I know it here.

It says 327. Errors in the Bible. Well, you know, it's interesting because I used to do things like in the zeal of my youth, somebody would post a huge list of, you know, alleged contradictions in the Bible.

And I would start going through them one by one. And I remember somebody posted like a list, I don't know, it was like 20 or something like that. And I started going through and I was like, on the second one, I think I'd written like 10 pages already.

And then I thought to myself, you know, they didn't write these on their own. They cut and pasted these from somewhere. So, I Googled it. And sure enough, there was the list. And then I go, hmm, well, if they can do that, I can too.

And so, I found somebody who refuted the entire list and cut and pasted that. And you know what they actually did? They actually wrote back and go, you cut and pasted that. You know, and my attitude was, hey, it takes one to know one, bro.

See? Projection.

Okay. Good. How about this? How about, aren't there many roads to heaven? Don't all paths ultimately lead to the same place?

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. That's John 14, 6. No one comes to the Father but by me. You know, if there were many paths, Jesus being not only God, not only man, you know, truly God and truly man, but someone who never sinned, who never lied, could not possibly have said that.

Right? He would have said, you know what? Relax, bro. There are many paths to God. Don't worry about it. And if you're a Buddhist, if you're, you know, he would have said, it's all chill.

Well, I have two comments. Comment one, in one sense, all paths lead to the same place and they lead to God and he will either judge you or he will see you in Christ. And so you will be in the presence of God one way or the other.

Right? Revelation 14, hell is not, well, God is absent, but hell is a place where God is there with all the fullness of his fury.

Right? It's without a mediator. But I think when, you know, and clearly you're saying this too, when Jesus said that, you know, I am the way, he meant, he didn't mean the only way to be, to judgment. He meant the only, you know, the only protection, the only ark, as it were, God's wrath is like the rain and your only ark, your only protection is Jesus Christ.

Absolutely. And I also think about it from this perspective, Steve, God expects worship, right? We're to love him. The number one commandment, greatest commandment with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

If there were many ways, then I think we would have a division of our worship because let's just say there's two ways. It's Jesus and Confucius. Well, who gets more worship? I mean, you've got to split them somehow, but God demands that we worship him and he will not share his glory or give his glory to another.

The whole idea that there can be, you know, multiple truths out there, that's, it's, it's so irrational and unbiblical and absolutely crazy because, you know, like what you're just saying, we wouldn't have a Trinity then we'd have what?

We'd have a pantheon of gods, right? We'd be back to polytheism in a heartbeat.

What's that old, who used to say when, when people were discussing, well, you know, to me and my truth and in my mind, and they would say, well, you know what, what would this text mean if you were dead?

In other words, it doesn't matter what you think it just is, right? If we didn't live, the text would still be the same because Jesus still said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life.

I think that sort of gets to authorial intent, doesn't it? It's not, I mean, if, if the correct hermeneutic was reader intent, you know, now we've got something entirely different.

Hell, Divine Justice, and the Cross

Good. No compromise radio today. We're asking Pastor Steve some of these questions that we regularly hear. How about this one? Is hell for real? If so, how can a loving God send people there? How would you answer that?

How does a loving God send people to hell? Is hell for real?

Well, absolutely. I mean, this is often said, but it's true. Jesus spoke a lot more about hell than he did about heaven. Why? Because he didn't want people to go there, right? And I mean, he, he proclaimed the horrors of hell because he did not want his people to be, or the people who were listening to be unaware.

He wanted them to understand the stakes. Now, how could a loving God send anyone there? Well, the problem is, is our thoughts, as Luther said to Erasmus, of God are too human. We think of God and his love like we think of our own love.

You know, we love our children. Therefore, we think, oh, I can never want my child to suffer. And we think of God in that way. Well, we failed to think of God as holy, as just, as someone who hates sin, which it says he does.

And the psalmist writes in Psalm 5, Psalm 7, that he hates sinners. In other words, those whose lives are marked by a pattern of sin. So he's not just loving. He also must be just, and in order to be just, he has to punish sin, violations of his law and thought and deed and intent.

It would be pretty rough for him to do that, and it would be impossible for him to do it because otherwise he'd have done it some other way without hell, without a place where people would suffer torment forever for violating his statutes.

Good answer from Pastor Steve when you were talking about Jesus teaching on the doctrine of hell. I think it was Ed Donnelly or someone like that who said Jesus was the theologian of hell because he talked about it so much.

The best part about this, I think, when they asked the question, how can a loving God send people there? Now, in one sense, I appreciate that because, for instance, Tim Keller would have a C .S. Lewis approach, and it would be hell, you know, you get what you want kind of thing.

You don't want God, so you go there yourself. I think C .S. Lewis said, you know, hell's doors are locked from the inside.

They don't want God. So it's kind of like God says, well, if you want to, you can go to your room.

Yeah. And we want to stay in our room, so we don't want to go out there. When they hear, use the word send, and of course, Jesus in Mark chapter nine, it says, and if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off.

It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell.

So I appreciate at least they say that. But your answer stands the test of truth because Jesus, the Father, the Holy Spirit, the triune God, God is more than loving. He's just and holy. And what would happen if we took away hell?

And then we would have what occurred at the cross, right? I think Pink is right when he talks about it's like the horrors of hell, the eternal hell condensed and thrown on Jesus as he's the sin bearer for those three dark hours.

Yeah, we, his excruciating pain, his suffering is what pays the price for our sin so that we are declared righteous. We stand righteous before Holy God, not because of our own efforts, but because we are in fact, wrapped in the robes of Christ's righteousness.

We need that righteousness. So that's how we, Christians, believers, do not go to hell.

Human Sinfulness and the Need for Perfect Obedience

Related to the last objection, I don't think I'm a sinner. I'm not so bad. It's not really a question, but we're supposed to respond to that. That's some kind of objection. I'm not really a bad person.

I'm pretty good.

What do you say to that? I think there are several ways to go around that. I mean, one is, you know, do you keep the 10 commandments? You can go to, you know, you ever look at a woman with lust in your heart, Jesus said that that is, you know, adultery.

Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself?

That's good, the positive side, because lots of times we think, well, I didn't commit adultery. Right.

And I mean, the problem with, you know, I'm not so bad, listen, for a long time, I convinced myself of that, right? I thought, well, I'm not really bad. I'm not like, I mean, I wind up like the Pharisee that where Jesus is talking about the public and the Pharisee, and I wind up like the Pharisee, God, I thank you that I'm not like other people.

And I was like that. I thought, I thank you that I'm not like that child molester, like that murderer, like that, like that, like that. And, you know, therefore, in my mind, those people deserve hell.

I believe in God because there has to be some sort of judgment for those really bad people.

Well, with your background in law enforcement, I'm sure you saw a lot of bad people and compared to them. I was pretty good. You were pretty good. You were on the right side of the law. What happens is when people think, well, I'm pretty good, I'm not so bad, really, at the end of the day, they, like with the hell issue, they forget about the holiness of God and that we're creatures and he's a creator and they don't understand the scriptures and everything's relative to them.

It reminds me of Jesus as he verbally slapped the Sadducees who are arguing about resurrection because they denied it. And Jesus answered them, you are wrong because you neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.

That was an ancient survey says, would you love it? You are wrong. Wrong.

That would be incorrect. Well, once we begin to read the Bible and then we realize, wait a second, God really is that holy and he wants perfect obedience, right? To use the language of some of the confessions, perfect obedience.

Are you still good? Entire obedience, right? Perpetual obedience, exact obedience, from the heart obedience.

I'm not as good as I was a couple of minutes ago.

I've had people come to my house for Bible studies before, one in North Hollywood and one here in Lancaster, and both have said to me the same thing. I'm not a sinner. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.

Blessed art thou among men. Which leads me into just a diversion here for a second. We've had 40 years of self-esteem jammed down our throat. You've got to have a good view of yourself. Self-esteem taught everywhere.

Well, now there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, so it can't be with us, therefore it has to be the system. So it's a systemic issue. It's not people because people are good, so it's built in the system.

How's that for a thought? It is a thought. I know. All right. Well, we have only one more to go, and this is like a speed round for Pastor Steve. What makes Jesus so different from other great men of history?

I mean, just because he's a great leader, there's lots of great leaders. That's pretty easy. What makes him different?

Why Jesus Is Unlike Any Other Great Man

Well... Have you ever heard of Easter? He's God, right? He's the creator. He's the sustainer. I mean, you learn these things as you read the Bible. He's the sustainer of all life. He's the creator. He was in the beginning.

He entered being fully God, the second person of the Trinity. He entered into the world, into his creation. Took on a body of flesh, became truly man while remaining truly God. Lived a perfect life, which no one else ever did or ever will or ever could live.

Was unjustly sent to the cross. Died a sacrificial death voluntarily, right? Again, something nobody else could ever do. And then rose on the third day. Again, something no one else could ever do. No one else has been raised from the dead in the sense of resurrection.

Lazarus was raised forth from the dead. And then what happened to him? But Jesus is alive, ruling, and reigning in heaven. I like it.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.