Proof of The Existence of God - Short Version

Transcription

1 Proof of The Existence of God - Short Version One of the most commonly asked questions by both those who are seeking after God as well as those that deny His existence is: How can you prove there s a god? Well, that s certainly a reasonable question and one, by the way, that God anticipated would be asked even before He created the first man and woman. Because it was God s desire that every human being He created know Him personally, He built into every man and every woman an awareness that He exists. Listen to what God says to us through the prophet and king, Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT: 11 God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God s work from beginning to end. This verse simply tells us that we can never be completely satisfied with earthly pleasures and pursuits because God has created us in His image and planted an awareness of everlasting life within us. We therefore know in our hearts that there is something out there that we need to listen to, glorify, and worship. We also have the sense that if we don t do this, something bad may happen to us. In other words God has given us a spiritual thirst and that thirst can only be satisfied by the one true God. It s unlikely that you would ever find a person who would claim they don t have any kind of spiritual belief even if it s misdirected. Such people need to ask themselves this question: If I were God, would I trust all people to come to an understanding of me and my will for their lives based on their own reasoning? Considering that people have the tendency to create their god in their own image, my answer to that question would have to be a resounding, No! I ve no doubt that God wanted each and every person He created to know what is right and what is wrong, because their eternity would depend on their getting it right. And if God didn t tell them what was necessary in order to get to Heaven, how would they ever figure it out? So perhaps God decided that the right thing to do would be to write down everything He wanted them to know for their own good and hand it to them in a nicely bound instruction manual. He might even title the manual, the Bible, meaning book, as in a collection of sacred writings. 1 Now for those who think that all belief systems lead to the same God, I would have to ask you another question: Would God contradict Himself? Because that s what the many 1 Easton s Bible Dictionary Ron and Betty Teed 1

2 different religious systems of the world do. One religion says you please God in this way, and another says you please Him in yet another way, and a third yet another way, and so on and so on and so on. I will provide you with irrefutable evidence this morning of the existence of God, and that God is one God in three persons (the Trinity): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If a person is willing to open themselves up to the awe and wonder of the creator s handiwork in nature, God will reveal Himself to them. I would like you to take a few moments this morning to consider some of the miracles God surrounds you with everyday. To begin with consider your heart for instance, an organ that has been the subject of many a romantic movie and song. This incredibly fascinating muscle is only about the size of your fist. It begins to develop shortly after conception and begins beating regularly 5 weeks after fertilization; almost 8 months before we leave our mother s womb. It weighs less than half a pound and yet it pumps and circulates over 1800 gallons of blood through our bodies each day every day for an average of 76 years. That s approximately 4,200 hundred pumps per hour, 100,800 pumps per day, 36,792,000 pumps per year, and an average of 2,575,440,000 pumps during a lifetime. The heart generates enough pumping pressure in a 12 hour period to lift a load of 65 tons one inch off the ground. We also might want to consider another important life source for all of us, and that s the Sun. Without sunlight all life on earth would cease to exist. The Sun affects almost every essential function of our environment. The Sun provides our planet, Earth, with vast amounts of energy each day. The oceans and seas store this energy and help keep the temperature of the Earth at a level that allows a wide variety of life to exist. Plants use the Sun s energy to make food, and plants provide food for other organisms. All plant, animal, and human life depend on the Sun. The Sun s energy also creates wind in the Earth s atmosphere, wind that can be harnessed and used to produce power. You might be surprised to learn just what a miracle it is that the sun keeps burning consistently year after year. The sun burns up 4 million tons of matter each second, that s 8,000,000,000 (8 billion) pounds of matter per second. This means that in 1 year s time the sun burns up 252,288,000,000,000,000 (252 quadrillion, 288 trillion) pounds of matter. If you could convert the energy the sun gives off to horsepower, you would end up with 500 million billion horsepower. I sure can t figure out how the sun can keep burning like that and never vary at all in its surface temperature. The surface temperature of the sun remains fixed at 9,950 degrees Fahrenheit. And it s been burning that way ever since it was created. And one final mind-blowing statistic on the sun is that we could place 1 million planets the size of our earth inside it. God makes Himself known to everyone through these wonders of nature even if a person never picks up a Bible. Does that mean that everybody in the world has an opportunity to know God? It sure does! Somehow and in some way everyone knows there is a God. Now consider the planet that we live on, Earth. It weighs approximately 6 septillion 588 sextillion (6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000) tons, yet it never falls, even though it s suspended in empty space. It moves through that empty space in an orbit around the sun 2011 Ron and Betty Teed 2

3 that covers 580,000,000 miles at a speed of 1,000 miles per minute, which comes to 60,000 miles per hour. And it does this year after year with such precision that it completes its trip exactly at the same time to the second each year. In fact, time all around the world is gauged to the earth s movement around the sun. The earth is always running exactly on time, but occasionally the clocks need adjustment by a fraction of a second. Do you think it s possible that such perfection could have been accomplished by accident? Or if you accept the idea that there are any number of gods, which one of them do you think was responsible for accomplishing this feat? And why exactly do you think that? On what grounds of knowledge do you base your opinion? Do you base it on what you alone think? Or perhaps you base it on what some other human being thinks. If you do, you ll probably both find yourselves falling in a ditch. In Matthew 15:14, Jesus said: Ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch. Perhaps you ve been giving some thought recently to vacationing somewhere on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live. If you do you ll need a special space vehicle with the capability of traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, or to put it in terms we re more familiar with, 669 million),600,000 miles per hour. At that speed you d be able to travel around the world 7 times in 1 second. Before you leave you might want to say good-bye to everyone you know because you ll never see them again, that is in this life. For you see traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, it would take you 125,000 years to go from one end of our Milky Way Galaxy to the other. How do you think so vast a universe functions century after century with such precise order? Do you really think it just takes care of itself without a Master Creator sitting at the control panel? Have any of you ever wondered where the water comes from that provides us with rain? By a process known as the hydrological cycle of water, water is actually lifted out of the oceans, lakes, and rivers and carried skyward against the natural force of gravity, thousands of feet into the air where it is suspended and collected in clouds that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. I bet some of you thought clouds were just big puffs of colored air without any mass. Not so, and what keeps them up in the air without crashing to the ground is certainly beyond my capacity to understand. And did you know that the atoms that make up molecules consist of mostly empty space? The actual amount of solid material in an atom makes up just one-trillionth of its volume, which means that everything in our world that looks to be made of solid materials actually consists mainly of empty space, and that includes you and me. In fact if you were to take all the air out of a politician who was six feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, he/she would be reduced to the amount of space that is on the head of a pin. Now if you think that s remarkable, think about the fact that the matter on the head of the pin would still weigh 185 pounds. This further means that you could solve the problem of congestion in our major metropolitan areas because you could fit over 5,000,000 people in the space occupied by 1 cubic inch. In other words the entire population of Chicago and the surrounding 2011 Ron and Betty Teed 3

4 metropolitan area could be contained within an area no larger than a cup of coffee. But you d have trouble picking up that cup of coffee because it would weigh about a billion pounds. When someone tells me that creation just happened and then evolved, it simply doesn t make any sense. How could such an incredible, diverse, mathematically perfect universe just happen? It would be as unlikely as creating an automobile by placing some nuts and bolts and scrap metal in a pile and expecting the pile to develop into a fully functioning automobile. No matter how long you waited that pile would never become anything more than just a pile of junk parts with no function whatsoever. Can you imagine a couple of molecules sitting on a beach one day long ago and deciding that they would join their individual abilities together and evolve into, or become an eye, or a brain, or even a butterfly? Design, my friends, speaks of a designer. Over a period of approximately 1,500 years over which the Old Testament books were written, the prophets included a combined total of 109 prophecies, or predictions, about different aspects of the life of Jesus and where and when He would appear. These predictions were made anywhere from 400 to 1,500 years before Christ was born. EVERY ONE OF THESE PREDICTIONS CAME TRUE and we find verification of that in the New Testament. Do you know what the statistical probability is of 100% of these predictions coming true simply by chance? It is statically impossible for all 109 of 109 predictions to come true by chance because the statistical probability goes way off the chart. In fact the actual probability of these predictions all coming true by chance is 1 in the number 1 followed by 72 zeroes. All the world has been provided with proof of God s power over sin and death, and all the world has been offered the free gift of forgiveness and eternal life if they just would reach out and accept it. The only requirement for salvation and eternal life in Heaven is to believe that Jesus died to pay for your sins, Romans 10:9,10: 9 For 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. 10 For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved. We get a great picture of this in Revelation 3:20-21, where Jesus says: 20 Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If you hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends. 21 I will invite everyone who is victorious to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my Father on his throne Ron and Betty Teed 4

5 There is no other religion in the world today that can say its god rose from the dead. Only Jesus Christ was able to rise from the dead because He is the one and only Lord and Savior. The main figures of all other religions are still in their graves. So, what religion do you want to follow? One that raises people from the dead to eternal life or one that doesn t? In order to become a member of the kingdom of God, one must accept Jesus death on the cross as the only way they can be forgiven for their sins. If you haven t already opened that door and you hear Him knocking right now, don t delay, open it and invite Jesus in and He will grant you that special place one day in Heaven Ron and Betty Teed 5