Coffee and Philosophy Ministry


Topics and Discussion

How do we reconcile a God of love with a God who requires crucifixion of His son to reconcile us to Himself?
• Instead of just throwing Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, could not God have just destroyed Satan, thus solving the problem of sin and separation?
• Was God submitting to Satan by allowing the crucifixion to happen?
o Crucifixion is evil.
o Evil comes from Satan.
o God allowed the crucifixion when He could have just chosen to destroy Satan.
o So, did God submit to Satan’s will by allowing the crucifixion?
o Or was God strategic? He let Satan think he was winning because God allowed what he wanted, knowing all the time that the result was going to be exactly the opposite I am thinking of Brer Rabbit pleading not to be thrown in the briar patch, knowing that the briar patch was going to be to his advantage. • Suffering is not eternal- the crucifixion leads to resurrection and glory.
• For human beings, there is a limit on what we can do to “make up” for suffering we cause or tolerate. For God, He is easily able to eliminate suffering. For instance, if we do physical harm to someone that ends up putting them in a wheelchair permanently, we cannot ever make that person whole. God can and will make that person whole in His Kingdom. • Shedding blood was required for forgiveness of sin in the rules God devised from OT days. He would not be a God of justice if He did not follow the rules He created.
• Consider that God did not “sacrifice His Son,” but sacrificed Himself.
• The human parent/son relationship is analogous to the God the Father/God the Son relationship but is not exactly the same. These two persons of God do have a relational component, but they are also one in the same in a paradoxical kind of way.
• Part of the complexity of the Godhead is not only the three persons in one God, but the idea that Jesus was God and also human.

Were the Father and Jesus equal?
• Again, the paradox of the Trinity and the incarnation of Jesus apply to this dilemma.
• The fact that we believe in the Holy Trinity as one God (how can one person of an all-mighty God be more or less than another?) suggests that They are equal.
• There are sections of Scripture that suggest that God the Father is more powerful/more knowing/more dominant than Jesus (for instance, John and James mother asking for places of honor for her sons and Jesus said they weren’t His to give, no one knows the hour of the second coming-not even the son.)

Son of Man
• Jesus referred to Himself as Son of Man more frequently than any other title.
• Sceptics argue that calling himself Son of Man does not mean Jesus was God because “Son of Man” could be “son of Israel” or “son of God” the way we are all children of God.
• In Old Testament, Son of Man certain powers were imputed to the “Son of Man,” but not all the powers that Jesus displayed (forgiving sins, for instance.)
• Jesus fulfilled the OT Son of Man nature, but also a new, more elevated “Son of Man.”
• Jesus came to give us a focus, basis for some trust in God, but we can’t fully understand.

Evidence for the Bible
• The whole Bible, OT and NT, is about Jesus.
• There are 360 prophesies in the OT that Jesus fulfilled.
• The probability of any single person fulfilling so many prophesies coincidentally is almost zero.
• Some people say that these fulfilled “prophesies” were actually added after the fact to strengthen the case for Jesus as the Messiah.
• This may be an issue in some parts of OT, but Isaiah seems pretty well authenticated as an early foretelling of the kind of Messiah Jesus would be.
• Some differences in biblical understanding, especially in OT, might be explained because ancient Hebrew had no vowels.
• However, the Septuagint (the first known work translating a document from one language to another) Bible was a translation from ancient Hebrew to Greek. Greek did have vowels, so we have early testimony to which vowels were intended in the ancient Hebrew.
• One of the criteria for NT books to be in the canon was that they were “first generation” or “second generation”- in other words, written by apostle or a student of an apostle. That makes the canonical accounts reliably close in chronology to the original events.
• Didache- first catechism, written in phases; some phases written at same time as gospels.

Resurrection of Christ
• We think of the glorification of Jesus as being in the Resurrection, but we also acknowledge that the Crucifixion was glorification, also.
• The crucifixion looked like defeat and shame but was actually glorification and triumph because it was God’s foregone conclusion that the death would be a vehicle for everlasting life.
• People at the time of the crucifixion, based on their cultural understanding of the OT, had a hard time understanding a crucified Messiah. They expected a kingly warrior who would rule the world. They were expecting Jesus the Messiah in his first coming to be more like what we think of as Jesus the Messiah at the second coming.

Reconciliation of Evil and Conversion
• Can people we think of as evil (like Hitler or Stalin) go to Heaven if they profess Jesus 5 minutes before they die, despite an entire life of horrible behavior?
• Conversion may or may not be real (God knows what is truly in the person’s heart.)
• There was discussion of the concept of “worthiness” in the Scripture:
o No one is “worthy” of salvation; it is a free gift, not the just wages for our actions.
o There are Scriptures that talk about walking in a way that is worthy of the gift.
o The “worthy” in those quotes may mean, not that the recipient is worthy to receive grace but that the gift of grace itself is worthy or valuable. Another possibility: The word “worthy” has root in an Old Germanic word that has, as one of its meanings, “paid for.” We are “worthy” because we are “paid for” by Jesus’ sacrifice.
• How is it fair for people who never learn about God or Jesus to be condemned? Argument is that people all over, whether they have the right vocabulary or specific details about Jesus, can see the invisible attributes of God through His creation.
• Molinism is an answer to the tension between “free will” and “divine providence”- God doesn’t predestine us for certain outcomes, but He has foreknowledge of what choices we will make, and, therefore, what the outcomes will be.
• Molinism can reconcile the uncertainty about what happens to people who lived before Christ or have lived since Christ but never received the Word of God. God didn’t decide whether or not that person would come to Christ with or without evangelism, but He knows what the person would have decided if they did receive the Word.