By John A. Huffman, Jr
Others who raise these questions to me come from completely non-religious backgrounds. They know nothing about the faith. A few have never been to church before. They tell me that the first time they came they didn't know when to sit and when to stand, and the language was foreign. It was all new. They were raising questions they had never raised before.
This morning, I would like to talk with you honestly about some of these basic questions that frequently get tossed my way. I could make a life work out of trying to answer each one of these. These are big questions, not easily resolved. But, sooner or later, you have to make a decision whether or not to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Let me, at least, identify and make some brief comments on several of these questions I have singled out as most frequently asked.
Question 1: Is there really a God?
That's the starting point, isn't it? If there is no God, the jig is up. I am a fool to waste my time doing what I am doing. If it's all an accident anyway, I may just as well eat, drink and be merry, pleasing the immediate, feel-good sensations I can get out of life. After all, tomorrow, or maybe even before tomorrow, I am going to die.
Now, to be honest with you, not too many of my questioners sustain this one very long. The reality is that every culture has some sense of the divine. Atheism has a tough time prevailing. The dialectical materialism of Marxist thought, which was so prevalent in my youthful years and so threatened to take over the entire world, is now bankrupt. Religion has survived.
Written into the very nature of who we are as human beings is a sense of the divine. There is a power or force beyond us. One bows before some pagan idol or stands in awe before the Creator-Sustainer God of the Bible who came in human form as a Redeemer in the person of Jesus Christ and is present in the lives of all who follow Him in the person of the Holy Spirit. There is at the heart of every human being a God-sized vacuum, filled only by One distinct from us who has power over us.
In my moments of doubt, when I am inclined to question my own personal experience with God, I still have to confront the intellectual conviction that all that is couldn't have happened by chance. The cosmos, the universe, the earth, nature, the complexity of the human body, all this couldn't have happened by chance. The continuance of it without our planet being either fried by heat from the sun, or frozen into oblivion by the lack of the sun's warming rays, convinces us of an intelligent Designer, doesn't it? I see a watch laying on a counter, intricate in design. I may never meet the watchmaker, but I've got to believe there is one.
The chances of anything as complex as the human body happening by evolutionary chance without a Creator-Designer is much less than, as one observer stated, a tornado hitting a print shop and throwing all the type up in the air and bringing it down in a fashion that goes through the presses and comes out with a fully bound edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
