In India with short interlude between teaching, I sat in briefly on a fellow faculty member’s lecture to vaguely aware pupils. Class offering was the deep subject of Christian Apologetics.
Sir Wijon, lecturing with palpable passion, made the following statement merely in passing. Like a gunshot on a sultry and still night, it caught my ear, “If God exists: He is identical to the God of the Bible.”
Let’s commence with a mutual starting point:
Assuming you agree that God exists,
Here are your options:
- The God of other religions:
- Islam: Unknowable, capricious, and arbitrary.
- Hinduism: Multiple gods, whimsical, often aloof.
- Animism: Myriad of fearful spirits, generally culturally determined.
- (Buddhism: technically philosophy, minus deity.)
- The God of your own Imaginations.
- Personal fancy. “The Man Upstairs”. Gray-bearded nice guy. Doddering Supervisor.
- New Age: “God is everything, …or anything I want him to be”
- A giant question mark.
- The God of the Bible.
- Possessing innate attributes of a Supreme Being:
- Self-Existent
- Omnipotent
- Omnipresent
- Omniscient
- Revealed Characteristics: (which have eternal ramifications):
- Holy
- Sovereign (therefore, exclusive)
- Entirely Just
- Perfectly Loving
“If God exists: He is identical to the God of the Bible.”
The God of the Bible has fully revealed Himself in Jesus Christ; thereby enabling us to personally know Him, to experience salvation, to have our character transformed into His image, and enlisting us to live for His service in the world.