Confused About God?

 

Nothing should be clearer to mankind than the existence of God. Yet there are different answers to questions like “Is there a God?” and “Who is God?” If God exists, then why are there different interpretations of the world He created?

There is confusion over these questions. But that doesn’t mean there should be. Just because there are different opinions does not mean a person is unable to know which answer is right.

This episode of Finding Truth in the Confusion shows that the reason for misunderstandings about God—skepticism, atheism, deism, polytheism and other false philosophies—is not a lack of evidence. It is a failure of the heart.

The passages of Scripture in this episode give clarity and comfort to Christians in a world of doubt and unbelief.

Read about this subject

• Scriptures: Acts 14:11-16; Acts 17:16-34; Romans 1:18-32
• God at a Distance

Listen to more on this subject

• Bible Doctrine, “Is There a God?”

 

Transcript

Kerry Duke: Hi, I’m Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you’ve learned with others.

People are confused about God these days. Is there a God? And if so, which God is true? Should we say God with a lowercase g or God with an uppercase G? And who is God? How do we define God? What is he like? What are his characteristics? What is his nature?

Some people are skeptics about these questions. They’re agnostics. They say, “Nobody knows.” They tell us that there’s not enough evidence one way or the other. They won’t say that there is a God, but they can’t say that there is not a God and be consistent. Although if you listen to them carefully, you’ll find that most of the time skeptics lean more to atheism than they do to theism.

But there are serious problems. There are logical challenges to this kind of thinking. One of the questions that we always need to ask these people is: How do you know that nobody knows? That is just logically contradictory. Given this reasoning, could we ever be sure about anything? Could a skeptic ever know anything?

Could he ever know that he exists? Could he ever know that he’s alive? The truth is, being a skeptic is the easy way out. It’s actually the coward’s excuse for not believing in God. And it’s a funny thing that skeptics can be so bold and confident. They talk like they are sure of themselves, but in the end, they must say, if they’re consistent, “I don’t know.” Then why do they talk so much, we would ask. Why are they so opinionated? Skeptics are a walking and talking contradiction. The Bible way is simple and clear. John eight, verse thirty-two is where Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Now, estimates as to how many people in America are skeptics vary. Some surveys would say that five to six percent of the population are skeptics. Others would say it’s closer to maybe thirty percent who say, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t care.” But ironically, these people often think they’re more intelligent than everybody else. In fact, many professors in universities are skeptics.

They are agnostics. And even worse, they seem to make it their mission to convince young people that nobody can be sure of anything, and yet at the same time, they act like they’re very sure of themselves. How do people live thinking like this? Now, they may say it’s exciting, that they love having everything so open that they can just explore and use their imagination.

But what kind of life is that? They don’t even know why they’re here or where they’re going. They’re not sure what’s good or bad. They’re not sure whether there’s a God or the devil. They’re not sure whether there’s a heaven or a hell. These people remind me of some verses in the Bible. One of them is Acts 17:21. The Bible is describing the mindset of people who came to Athens. Athens was the intellectual center of the day. This is where people came to philosophize. And that verse says that the people who were there or who came there to visit were there for nothing else but either to tell or hear some new thing.

Now, that’s not a verse about gossip That is not a verse about the latest news. That verse describes the mindset of these people. They wanted to hear some new philosophy. They wanted to teach some new idea. And so they could never agree on which one was right. They were just constantly comparing and then evolving with their ideas.

That’s why there was so much confusion in the city of Athens. That’s why they could never reach a point of agreement. They could never say that anything was definite. And that’s also, by the way, the reason that the city was full of idols. I’ll get back to that in a few minutes.

But another passage that all this skepticism reminds me of is Second Timothy three, verse seven, where the Bible describes some like this, “They are always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Have you met someone like that? Do you know people like that? They read this, they listen to that, and they always have some kind of idea or theory that they want to tell you about. “I read this the other day,” or, “I saw this, and it’s very, very interesting.” But they can never settle on anything. They know some about a lot of things, but they know very little of the truth.

So skepticism or agnosticism has added to the confusion that we find about God in our society and throughout the world.

Here’s another reason. There are others who are atheists. Now, an atheist is different from a skeptic or an agnostic because an agnostic says, “I can’t say for sure, and nobody knows for sure whether God exists.”

An atheist, on the other hand, says, “I know that God does not exist.” He’s bold about it. Now, the Bible doesn’t say much about atheism. In Psalm fourteen, verse one, and Psalm fifty-three, verse one, you have the famous statement which says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” That’s about the only direct statement that you will find from the mouth of an atheist in the Bible.

And the Scripture says that that man is a fool. He may be highly educated. He may be brilliant as far as earthly standards are concerned. He may be famous, but God’s view of that man is that he is a fool. Now, if you listen to these people long enough, you’ll find that they usually say why they don’t believe in God.

They’ll give you their so-called reasons or arguments against God. First of all, they will tell you they don’t believe in God because of all the evil and suffering in the world. So it’s the classic problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, he’d put a stop to all this. And if God is all-loving, he would surely want to end all this suffering and evil in the world.

So if we have evil and suffering in the world, there cannot be a God. Well, the whole problem with that is very simple. If there’s no God, then there is no real evil How could you say that something is evil, and I mean objectively, really, absolutely evil, if you don’t have a divine standard? If you don’t have a standard that rises above man, then it’s simply man’s opinion that that is evil.

So if there’s no God, there’s no way to say that this is evil or that this is good. So the whole idea that they’re promoting that God cannot exist because of evil in the world contradicts itself. Another reason atheists give for not believing in God is because they attack the Bible. They say it has contradictions and all kinds of problems.

One of the responses that Christian people need to get used to making is this. When someone says the Bible contradicts itself, Christians need to say, as a habit and as a rule, “Where? Give me an example.” It’s one thing to throw out a general accusation against the Bible and say that the Bible contradicts itself. It’s quite another thing to show where the Bible contradicts itself, because that way a Christian can analyze that so-called contradiction and give the atheist an answer. And if he doesn’t have an answer, then he can study it and resolve the passages in question.

Another reason atheists give for not believing in God is that religion is all about control, that it’s done immeasurable harm to mankind because it enslaves people, and it’s abused by governments and all kinds of evil people. Well, when atheists say that religion is all about control, I would ask this question: What about atheism? What about atheists? You talk about trying to control people. Look at how atheists have tried to gain control of America in the past one hundred years, trying to forbid prayer in school, hoping to be able to get the Bible out of school permanently, forbidding the Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools.

You talk about control. That, my friends, is control. They’re guilty of the very thing that they’ve accused us of. Then there are atheists that oftentimes say that there’s no scientific evidence for God. Well, if you’re talking about quote scientific evidence, then you’re talking about physical proof or physical evidence.

But you don’t have to see or touch something to know it’s true. You see, God is spirit. We admit that God is not a physical being. So the idea of touching him or hearing him or seeing him and so forth is out of the question, and that’s why some atheists say, “That’s the reason we’re atheists. There is absolutely no proof of God.”

But physical proof is not the only proof. Tangible and what many people would call empirical evidence is not the only kind of evidence. For instance, an atheist has to use his mind. Now, he cannot verify that he has a mind with a microscope, with an X-ray, or anything else. I’m not talking about his brain.

I’m talking about his soul as we understand it in Christianity, his spirit. He has a will. He has a mind that he reasons with. That’s something that he cannot verify with physical observation. So he believes that he has a mind, and he speaks his mind. He wants you to believe him, and yet he says that there’s no evidence for God. Well, by the same reasoning, there’s no evidence that he has a mind.

Then there are atheists that say that they don’t believe in God similarly because of the theory of evolution, because they say that the theory of evolution explains everything, and we don’t need the idea of God. Really? Evolution explains everything? What about our existence? Evolution doesn’t explain where all this comes from. What about morality? Evolution surely cannot give us a basis for saying that one thing is right and one thing is wrong, and that is always the Achilles’ heel of the atheistic movement. They can never answer the question about right and wrong.

Some atheists are so angry and full of hate that they say that all of religion is evil. As a matter of fact, Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism and communism, said that religion is like opium. In other words, it’s like a drug. It’s like people that are high on something. It blinds them, and it clouds their thinking, and that’s why he wanted to get rid of religion in society.

But Psalm fourteen, verse one says that an atheist is a fool, and fools say foolish things. One infidel was Bertrand Russell. He was a brilliant mathematician. He denied the existence of God. Somebody asked him once, “If you die and find out that you’re wrong—If when you die, you discover that there really is a God, what are you going to say to him at the judgment?”

And Bertrand Russell smugly replied that he would say to God, “Sir, why didn’t you give me more evidence?” That’s foolish. That is blasphemy. The truth is that man is dead and he’s already been saying something like this, “Lord, have mercy upon me.” Another man, Antony Flew, was an atheist who was world-renowned for all his debates and all his writings. He was asked in a public debate once about a mechanical hand and a natural human hand. So a chart was put up on a screen. On one hand, you had an artificial hand that was man-made, a prosthetic. On the other side of the chart, you had a human hand, a natural human hand. And so the question was asked to Mr.    Flew, “Was the artificial hand made? Was it engineered and designed by somebody?” And he said, “Of course, yes.” And then the same question was asked about the human hand. “Did somebody design this? Was this created?” And he said, foolishly of course, “No.” He said, “Nobody designed it. Nobody created the human hand,” which is thousands of times more complex.

He said it just grew. Now, the interesting thing about that is that when he was in his early eighties, he changed his mind and said that this world and all that’s in it was created and designed by God. Now, when we look at this movement called atheism, there are not that many atheists today or in the past.

There are more skeptics and agnostics than there are atheists. Still, one of the reasons why people sometimes think that there are more atheists than there really are is because they are so bold. They are loud enough to be heard, especially in universities. Now, this can be intimidating to young people as well as confusing to young people.

It can give an excuse to some young people who are looking for a reason to rebel. These people, I’m talking about atheists, especially in universities, can muddy the waters and confuse people in general. They can discourage people, and they can cloud their minds.

Now, of course, there are some who live like there’s no God. They are practical atheists. But I’m talking mostly about people who are genuine atheists.

Then there are others that say that God exists, but he doesn’t involve himself in the affairs of the world. He doesn’t intervene. He doesn’t do anything in the world. He has never spoken in any way, in spoken form, that is oral form or written form in the past.

So they point to different religions that claim to have a revelation from God. They say the Jews have their Old Testament and the Christians have their New Testament. Then they say the Muslims have the Quran. Then they say the Mormons have the Book of Mormon. And then they observe that all these contradict each other.

All claim to be a final revelation from God. And so these people say all of those claims to a divine revelation are false. Now, people who believe this are called deists. They believe in God, but not the Bible. They believe that God created the world, but they believe that God has not done anything in it since that time, and they emphasize the fact that they don’t believe that God ever has spoken directly to mankind.

Now, Thomas Jefferson believed this. He believed this very strongly. And some surveys today in our time indicate that deism may be on the rise. People believe in God, but they don’t want to be tied down by the Bible. So it makes sense that a lot of people would want this kind of religion. It’s just what people are looking for—a little religion, but not too much.

Then there’s another view that adds to this confusion about God and religion. There are hundreds of millions of people who believe in many gods. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and tribal religions in various countries of the world teach that there are all kinds of deities. Now, why is this kind of belief so widespread? Well, in the first place, it is very old. It is thousands of years old, and it is passed down from generation to generation. So the parents received it from their parents, and on and on you go back in the past, and they’re handing it down to their children, who teach their children, and so forth.

Another reason why the belief in many gods rather than one God is so popular is because in this kind of view, which is oftentimes called polytheism, nothing is absolute. There is no one supreme God. There is no definite will of God that you can follow or even learn. There is no absolute teaching or no set of rules. There is no definite way to worship and no definite way to live your life. Also, given this way of thinking, there is no clear concept of what God with a big G or god with a little g even means.

You just use your imagination. You create your own deity and worship it or not worship it and follow whatever you want. That way, these people can blame bad luck and wrong behavior, their wrong behavior, on gods and demons. And in that way, they can salve their conscience.

Also, these religions tend to unify the culture where they’re found. They’re part of their heritage, their families, their schools, their customs, their government, their laws, their neighborhoods. And often because this kind of religion is so integral to their culture, they’re quite proud of those kinds of beliefs.

Then there are others, as a matter of fact, about two billion people, who say there is one God, but he’s not the God of the Bible. I’m talking about the Islamic teaching that Allah is the true God. Allah supposedly is the supreme all-knowing deity. Allah is not the God of the Bible. He is not the God of Christianity because the Islamic religion denies the Trinity. The Bible talks about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit being one in Matthew 28:18 through 20.

We find the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all mentioned in Matthew chapter three, verses 13 through 17. The Bible does talk about the eternal spirit in Hebrews chapter nine, verse 14. The Bible specifically says that Jesus, the Word, was God in John chapter one, verse one. And so all three are specifically referred to as having the nature of God in the New Testament.

Islam denies the concept of the Trinity. Islam denies the deity of Christ, which is affirmed in those same passages. Islam says that the Quran is the true word of God. This movement has caused tremendous trouble all over the world, and it causes confusion for people who are trying to understand all these questions about religion.

First of all, Islam confuses the minds of hundreds of millions of children who are taught this every day. Second, this religion confuses people who don’t know anything about God or the Bible. It leads them down the wrong path. So these are just some of the views today about God and religion that cause a lot of confusion.

These are just some of the conflicting answers you’ll get if you ask about God. But what we’re seeing in this series is this. This is not new. There were conflicting views of God in Bible times, and we can learn and be encouraged if we study these stories in our Bibles. With that in mind, let’s turn to the Bible to see what it says about this.

You might think that most people agreed on who God is, but that wasn’t the case. Early on in Scripture, we see people that had the wrong view of God. Let’s go back to the time of Abraham. You read about his life in the book of Genesis, but there’s not much said about the religion of Abraham’s parents and grandparents in Genesis. There is something Joshua said much later. In Joshua chapter 24, verse 2 The Bible says, “And Joshua said to all the people, ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: Your fathers, including Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, dwelt on the other side of the river in old times, and they served other gods.'”

Abraham’s father worshiped other gods. Now, you might think that’s just not fair. How could those people have known any better? But we’ll see in a few minutes that they could have. They chose to be idolaters, and the very fact that Abraham decided to serve the true God shows that a person can do right regardless of how he’s raised.

Abraham chose to believe the true way, and his father worshiped a different way. Now, I don’t know if Abraham’s father ever came out of idolatry. The Bible doesn’t say. What we do know is that every person chooses what he believes about God. So belief in other gods was already in place by the time you read about Abraham in the Book of Genesis.

Exactly when people began to serve other gods, the Bible doesn’t specifically say. The first time you read specifically about idols in the book of Genesis is in the story of Jacob and Rachel. When Jacob and Rachel decided to gather up their things and take their family and leave, the Bible says Rachel stole her father’s images, the King James says, in Genesis thirty-one, verse nineteen.

The New King James says that she stole her father’s household idols. These were small statues or ornaments that they kept in their houses. She stole them, and she hid them, and she didn’t even tell Jacob about it. When her father caught up with them, he was very upset that they were missing, and he said that somebody in Jacob and Rachel’s family had stolen them.

Now, why was he so attached to these sculptures? Was it because they were worth a lot of money? Well, some were made of silver or gold or expensive jewels, and that’s why the people in Ephesus in Acts chapter nineteen were so upset at Paul’s preaching. Some of them made a lot of money selling silver shrines that honored the goddess Diana.

So that could have been why Rachel’s father, Laban, was so upset. But what about Rachel? Did she want them because they were worth a lot? Did she just like the artwork that went into them and think that they were beautiful? The Bible doesn’t give us the details, but there’s one thing we do know. People back then prayed to these gods and believed that they would have good luck, maybe even good fortune in their life.

They believed, like millions today still believe, that if they worshiped a certain god, that he would bless them with a good crop, with plenty of rain and prosperity and so forth. They thought these idols were like good luck charms that would keep bad things from happening to them. They didn’t pray to these gods because they loved them and respected them.

They worshiped these idols because of what they thought the idols could give them. Their motivation was selfish. That’s just one of the many reasons why idolatry is so reprehensible in the sight of God.

By the time you get to Moses in the book of Exodus, idolatry is everywhere. It’s all over the map, literally. The chosen nation of God, the descendants of Abraham, are in Egypt, and Egypt is full of idols. So when Moses led these Hebrews out of bondage, God sent great signs and wonders. He brought plagues on the Egyptians. Now, those plagues were not sent just to punish the Egyptians. God didn’t send those plagues just to show King Pharaoh that he, that is God, was in charge and not Pharaoh.

He sent plagues to show that he was the true God and that all the gods of the Egyptians were false. Numbers 33 verse four says that the Lord executed judgment upon the gods of Egypt. So these Israelites had seen idols all their life. When God brought them out of Egypt by the hand of Moses, they saw His power.

They confessed Him as the true God. When they reached Mount Sinai, God came down upon the mountain in thick smoke, dark clouds, and lightning. The earth shook, and their hearts trembled. That’s what we read in the book of Exodus chapter 19. In Exodus chapter 20, we read the law that God gave to this chosen nation of people, and the first thing that God said, the first rule that He gave, was not to worship any other god but Him.

Exodus chapter 20 verse one says, “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20 verses one through five).

From that point in the law, God warned specifically about following other gods. He gave the death penalty for it in Deuteronomy chapter 13. But time and time again, the Jews did it anyway. This went on, off and on, for hundreds of years. In fact, for almost 1,000 years. Eventually, the Jews got so involved in worshiping idols that they sacrificed their own children to pagan gods.

That’s how deep they were into false religion. And they had the Old Testament books that were written. They had the prophets that warned them, but they didn’t listen. Finally, after the Jews spent 70 years in Babylon as punishment, they stopped worshiping idols. Finally, they learned their lesson. But the Gentiles kept worshiping idols.

By the time we get to the New Testament, we see idolatry as a common practice in pagan cultures. The Jews had gotten burned with it. That’s why you don’t see it in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But when the gospel goes out into Gentile places in the book of Acts, you see a different picture There had been all kinds of gods in the Old Testament—Baal, the worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and whatever their imagination desired. But when you come to the New Testament, you see a different version of gods.

You read about Greek gods. The Greeks believed in different gods. These gods were almost half men and half deity. They fought and argued with each other. One was over one part of the universe and another was over a different part. And there was a hierarchy of gods. Zeus was at the top. He was the highest and the greatest deity, even though he had limitations. We look back and say all that was foolishness, and it was. But we have to remember that this was the culture in the Roman world.

This was the culture in New Testament times in the Gentile-speaking world. The Roman government even honored these gods with special celebrations. That’s the world in which Paul preached the one true God and His Son, Jesus Christ. Here are some examples. In Acts Chapter 14, Paul and Silas healed a man who was born crippled. Here’s what the superstitious people in the city said about that. In Acts Chapter 14, beginning in verse 11, the Bible says, “Now when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, ‘The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.’ And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.”

So these people were very superstitious. They believed in these false gods or these false deities. Now, how did Paul deal with this? The Bible tells us in verse 15 that he came out among these people and said, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them.”

In verse 17, he said, “Nevertheless, He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” So Paul pointed them to the creation because the creation shows the Creator. And the interesting thing is that these people already had the creation, but they misinterpreted that evidence intentionally.

In Acts Chapter 17, Paul went to Athens, the home of Greek philosophy for 500 years. And what did Paul find? In verse 16, the Bible says that the city was full of idols. How did he deal with this confusion? He pointed them to the creation again, which shows the Creator, verses 24 through 31. This is what we read in other verses of Scripture throughout the Bible.

In Psalm 19 verse 1, the Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” Psalm 19, verses 1 through 3. In the New Testament, in Romans Chapter 1 verse 20, Paul said, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” Men are without excuse when they serve idols. Men are without excuse when they say, “Well, I don’t know whether there’s a God or not. There’s not enough proof. There’s not enough evidence.” Men are without excuse when they deny the true God. Men are without excuse when they have all kinds of ideas about different kinds of gods.

So there was a lot of confusion about God in New Testament times. But people that were honest admitted that their ideas about God were a lie, and many of those people were converted.

In First Thessalonians chapter one verses nine and ten, Paul said that those Thessalonian Christians had turned to God from idols to serve the true and the living God. In First Corinthians chapter six verses nine through eleven, Paul said that some of the Corinthian Christians had been idolaters, but they were converted. That happened in Acts chapter eighteen verse eight when Paul preached the gospel, and many of the Corinthians hearing believed and were baptized. And people today may say they don’t know whether there’s a God or not. They don’t know which God to believe in. If they are honest, they can find the true and living God, and they can become Christians just like these people in New Testament times did.

Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs. Study at your level. Aim higher and get in touch with us today.