The Good News for Christians with Doubts
I was once asked what advice I would give my 20-year-old self. As a teenager I was an agnostic. I had been taught about God and knew the Bible stories, but I had never heard the good news of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile I went to public schools and was authoritatively taught that evolution was a proven fact. As a result, I had doubts about the existence of a Creator God and did not know what to believe, so I was an agnostic. The most important guidance I would give a young agnostic would be to demonstrate that evolution is false and the Bible true, and to explain the good news of the gospel. You can have a relationship with your Creator by trusting Jesus as your Savior. This post is the Bible guidance I would give a teenager raised in a Christian home who has doubts about Christianity.
As a 20-year-old, I was smart and knew a lot. But like most teenagers, I was foolish. I did not know as much as I thought I did and much of what I thought I knew was wrong. I knew Bible “stories,” but not Jesus Christ. I had been fully indoctrinated into the world view of evolution, but had never been taught the scientific evidence that refutes evolution and supports the Bible. And I had never heard the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ. I needed Biblical guidance about why I should believe in God and trust Jesus as my Savior. This is the spiritual advice I would give my young agnostic self.
My Most Important Spiritual Advice
At the age of 20, I was an agnostic. I had been raised going to liberal protestant churches, so I was familiar with the Bible, its teachings, and the life of Jesus Christ. But I had never heard the gospel. I did not understand why God would become a man or what the life and death of Jesus did for us. The liberal churches taught me that if I did more good than bad, I would be OK. I was not convicted of my sin nor understood my need for a Savior.
Meanwhile, I was indoctrinated into the evolutionary world view my whole life through. The public school system, TV, magazines, and other media all taught me that we evolved from lower primates through time and chance, struggle and death. The earth and universe were presented as billions of years old. And it was all taught as proven fact. “Everyone” believed it, so what was I to think?
The only purpose evolution can offer for life is to survive, reproduce, then die to make way for the next generation.
Bill Ogden
I did not know God yet and didn’t understand His Word. I was not ready to reject God, but I didn’t know enough to contradict evolution. So, I went along with the evolutionary flow. I did not take God’s name in vain though because I knew the 3rd commandment told us not to. If God was real, taking His name in vain was asking for trouble. If God were not real, then taking His name in vain would be meaningless. I just was not sure what to believe. I had been brainwashed into believing in evolution but had not rejected the possibility that the Bible was true, and that God was real.
True meaning in life comes from having a close personal relationship with your Creator (i.e.: God)
Bill Ogden
The most important thing I would tell my 20-year-old self (or any other agnostic) is that the Bible is true, God is real, and evolution is a lie. The only purpose evolution can offer for life is to survive, reproduce, then die to make way for the next generation. This depressing philosophy helps no one. True meaning in life comes form having a close personal relationship with your Creator (i.e.: God), and the way to do that is by trusting Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as your Savior.
Evolution is a Lie
Evolution is presented in public schools, “scientific” literature, and the media as “proven fact.” We are taught that evolution is science and Biblical creation is religion. But evolution does not meet the definition of science because it does not follow the scientific method. Real science is based on observations in the present, creating theories based on those observations, doing experiments to test those theories, publishing the results, and other people repeating the experiments and reproducing the results.
Evolution is a theory about how the universe and life came to be in the distant past. We can make theories about how that happened, but we cannot observe what happened. We can observe stars and galaxies in space, we can observe fossils and rock layers on earth, and we can make guesses about what happened, but we cannot know because no one was there to observe them. And we certainly cannot repeat the origin of the universe and life to test our theories. Believing evolution is no more scientific than believing in Biblical creation. Both beliefs are outside the realm of observational science. Therefore, the theory of evolution is just as religious as faith in the God of the Bible creating everything in 6-days.
The explosion of the universe out of nothing in a “big bang” violates the first law of Thermodynamics (the conservation of mass and energy). The “big bang” and evolution also violate the 2nd law of Thermodynamics (the entropy / disorder of the universe is always increasing). This law indicates that the most ordered state of the universe would have to have been at the beginning, but explosions do not create order.
The evolutionary story is presented as scientific fact, but it is just science fiction. Much of what is taught is based on ignorance and assumptions rather than evidence. The more we do real science and learn how DNA works, the more amazing and complex life becomes. What was once thought to be “junk DNA” is now known to perform important regulatory functions. Radiometric dating is based on multiple unprovable assumptions. The evidence for the earth being young (e.g.: the concentration of minerals in the ocean, the exponential decay of earth’s magnetic field, the movement of the moon away from the earth, Carbon-14 in diamonds and dinosaur fossils, soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, the “missing links” are still missing, etc.) are just ignored. True science welcomes scientific debate, but evidence supporting creation is strictly censored from “scientific” publications and forbidden in classrooms.
This just scratches the surface. Please research the topic at these Creation ministry websites:
- The Institution for Creation Research (ICR.org)
- Answers in Genesis (AnswersinGenesis.org)
- Creation Ministries International (Creation.com)
- Bible Science Institute (BiblicalScienceInstitute.com)
God is Real
We live in a universe which operates by cause and effect. Time, life, and the material universe are enormous effects that must have an even bigger cause. Time, chance, and the evolutionary fairytale cannot explain how the world we know came to be or how we can “know” anything.
I know you have asked, “If God created the world, where did God come from?” You have used that question as an excuse to accept evolution, but that is an illegitimate question. Even if I could explain where God came from, then you would just want to know where that cause came from. Then the next cause, at infinitum. God’s pre-existence must be accepted by faith based on the testimony of the Bible (the Word of God) and the fact that we are here as an a-priory fundamental truth.
The Bible is the revelation of God about Himself and His creation to mankind. The very first thing God reveals in His Word is, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Genesis 1 does not tell us where God came from but reveals the origin of everything else. At the first moment of creation, the pre-existing, all-powerful God created space, time and the earth. The 1st chapter of Genesis goes on to explain the order of creation of the atmosphere; dry land and plants; the sun, moon and stars; water and flying creatures; and land animals and people.
God created people in His image so we could have a personal relationship with Him. He gave the first man and woman (Adam and Eve) just one rule to test their love for Him. All they had to do was not eat the fruit from one tree, but they failed the test. They sinned by eating the forbidden fruit. As a result, they died spiritually and their relationship with their creator was severed. They became sinners and passed their sin nature on to all their descendants (including us).
Their disobedience brought sin and death into what had been a perfectly good world. Their sin also brought a curse on the earth. Evil and violence increased to the point that God judged the earth with a global flood in the days of Noah. This global catastrophe explains the fossils and the sedimentary rocks layers that cover the earth far better than the evolutionary story.
God has revealed Himself through the Bible (the written Word of God); through Jesus Christ (the Word made flesh who dwelt among us (John 1:1-3, 14)); and by His creation (Romans 1:19-20). God’s Word, the Bible, is the only source of absolute truth (John 17:17). Anything that disagrees with the Bible (e.g.: evolution) must be rejected as false.
How to Have a Relationship with Your Creator
Ever since Adam fell, people have been born spiritually dead. We are sinners by nature. You don’t have to teach children to be selfish, disobey, lie, or fight. That all comes naturally to them. Instead, we must teach children right and wrong / good and evil, and train them to do what is good and right.
I know you have heard the scale theory, which says that if our good outweighs our bad then the scale will tilt in our favor and God will accept us. This idea is the basis of most religions, which teach that we must do good works to earn heaven. But that is not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible says God is perfectly pure, holy, and just, but we are cut off spiritually from God and begin sinning from birth. Justice demands payment for crimes, so God must punish sin and will not fellowship with sinners. Doing more good than bad cannot save us from our sin because God’s standard is perfection, complete holiness, untainted by any sin. We do not deserve to go to heaven and cannot do enough good to earn our way there. And the penalty for sinning against God is death (Romans 6:23a).
The Bible says:
- “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” (Ecclesiastes 7:20 / ESV).
- “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:” “. . . there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Romans 3:10, 12b / KJV).
- “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
- “We are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Isaiah 64:6 / NKJV).
- And “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a).
The bad news is that we are all sinners by nature, spiritually separated from God from birth. The penalty we earn by sinning is death, not only physical death, but eternal separation from God, and everything good He has created, in a place called “Hell.” And there is no amount of good you can do to pay for your sin.
While God hates sin, and His holiness and justice demand the penalty of death as punishment for sin, the good news is that God loves us. God doesn’t want to punish us, so God devised a plan by which He can remain holy and just without having to punish people He loves.
- “The Lord is . . . not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9 / KJV).
- “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16 / KJV).
- God “desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4 / ESV).
- “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23 / KJV).
- For God “made Him who had no sin (i.e.: Jesus) to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21 / NIV).
The eternal Word of God, “the 2nd person of the Trinity,” was born into the world through a miraculous virgin birth as the sinless Son of God. Jesus was spiritually alive and filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus had no human father, so He did not inherit our sin nature, but He did have a human mother, so He was genuinely human. Having God as His father, Jesus was not merely a man, He was also God embodied in human flesh. Jesus was fully human and fully God.
God became a man, conceived by the Holy Spirit, without a human father, born with the sinless image of Adam before his fall. Because Jesus was God, did not inherit a sin nature, and was filled with the Holy Spirit, He was able to live a perfect life without sin. Jesus was sinless and did not deserve to die. Because Jesus had no sin of His own, He was able to be our substitute and pay the penalty for our sins by dying on the cross.
Just as our sin nature and death was passed on to all people through the disobedience of one man (Adam), the payment for sin and spiritual life has been made available to all through the death of the sinless Son of God (1 Corinthians 5:22). Christ’s substitutionary atonement (paying our sin penalty as our substitute) was the reason God became a man.
Yes, Jesus was a good man and revealed God’s truth and will to the world, but that is not why He came. The eternal Word of God became the human Son of God to pay for our sins, so we could receive forgiveness of sins, receive eternal spiritual life through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and have fellowship restored with our Creator.
God has paid for our sins Himself. All we need to do is accept His free gift of salvation through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. Now you know the way. All you must do is confess your sin, believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and trust in His death on the cross as payment for your sin. I encourage you to call upon the name of the Lord to wash your sins away. You don’t know what the future holds, so trust Jesus today, while you may.
- “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31 / KJV).
- “Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9 / ESV).
- “He says: ‘In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in the day of salvation have I helped you.’ Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2 / NKJV)
Summary
Just as children are taught to believe in Santa Claus, the world has been brainwashing you to believe in evolution as “proven fact.” But evolution is a lie. The theory of evolution contradicts many proven fundamental laws of the physical universe. There is no proof that evolution occurred or that it could occur. The idea that the irreducible complexity of a living, reproducing cell could spontaneously arise by chance from a puddle of chemicals is absurd. Evolution is nonsense, not science.
The Bible is the living Word of God, through which God has revealed Himself and His creation to mankind. The Bible is not a science book, but when it talks about scientific things it is accurate. The Bible accounts of creation and the global flood explain what we see in life, space, and billions of fossils buried in sedimentary rock layers all over the earth far better than evolution and uniformitarianism. The evidence for Biblical creation is so obvious that those who deny it are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20). The Bible says that those who deny the truth of God have become fools (Romans 1:22).
The Bible is absolute truth. You can trust what it says. Anything that disagrees with the Word of God is wrong. Believe in your Creator. Believe God’s Word. And trust Jesus as your Savior from sin.
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