Now, That's a Good Question!

R. C. Sproul

• Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780842347112
• eBook ISBN: 9781414328096
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Now, That's a Good Question, R.C. Sproul answers more than 300 challenging questions about life and faith.

Addressing doctrinal points and contemporary issues such as euthanasia, evolution, and abortion, Sproul covers frequently asked questions in a personable, easy-to-read style that's perfect for the lay person. Combining wisdom, practicality, wit, and a serious approach to reformed theology, this book provides trusted answers if you've ever wondered:

• Does science disprove Christianity?
• Why are there so many interpretations of the Bible?
• Can I lose my salvation?
• Are there biblical grounds for divorce, and if so, what are they?
• Why in the Old Testament does God demand so much violence and war of the Jewish nation?

New believers as well as those mature in the faith will find this reference book a solid resource for those challenging questions of life and faith.

1

KNOWING GOD

“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, Let not the mighty man glory in his might, Nor let the rich man glory in his riches; But let him who glories glory in this, That he understands and knows Me, That I am the LORD, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these I delight,” says the LORD.

JEREMIAH 9:23-24

Questions in This Section:

• 
  Why does God love us so much?
• 
  What are the attributes of God?
• 
  What is the average Christian’s understanding of God?
• 
  Why does God remain invisible?
• 
  What is the “providence of God”?
• 
  What does it mean for us to call God our Father?
• 
  What are the characteristics of the Christian God that differentiate him from other gods?
• 
  Among the other world religions, are there any that share the Christian concept of the holiness of God?
• 
  Throughout the Bible we are told to fear God. What does that mean?
• 
  I’m told that the Bible says God makes himself known to all people through his created world. In what way could the average person see God and his attributes through nature?
• 
  Why did God need to send angels down to check out the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah? Wouldn’t he know these things already?
• 
  What is a miracle, and do you think God still performs them today?
• 
  Do you believe that God has audibly spoken to anyone since the apostolic age?
• 
  How would you define the sovereignty of God?
• 
  How do we reconcile the fact that God is sovereign with the fact that he has given us free will as persons?
• 
  In reference to John 6:44, does God compel people to come to him?
• 
  What is predestination?
• 
  Why does God allow random shootings, fatal accidents, and other horrible things to occur?
• 
  In the Old Testament, God brought judgment against Israel and other nations through catastrophic events. Does this still happen?

Why does God love us so much?

That’s one of the most difficult questions to answer if we think of it from God’s perspective.

Here we are, his creatures who have been made in his image with the responsibility of mirroring and reflecting his glory and his righteousness to the whole world. We have disobeyed him countless times in every place and in every way. In so doing we have misrepresented his character to the whole universe. The Bible tells us that nature itself groans in travail, waiting for the day of the redemption of mankind, because nature suffers under our unrighteousness (Rom. 8:22).

When we think of how disobedient and hostile we’ve been toward God, we wonder what it is that would provoke him to love us so much. In Romans 5:7, when Paul is astonished by the love of Christ that was manifested in his death, he says, “Scarcely for a righteous man will one lay down his life, but imagine one who is perfect laying down his life for those who are not perfect and praying for those who are in the very act of killing him.” That’s the kind of love that transcends anything we have been able to experience in this world. I guess the only thing I can conclude is that it is the nature of God to be loving. This is part of his internal and eternal character.

The New Testament says that God is love. That can be one of the most misunderstood verses in the Scripture. We remember a few years ago when it was fashionable to say that “happiness is a warm puppy.” We had these brief definitions of what happiness was, and the same thing was applied to love—“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” etc.—and we’re all very interested in what is involved in the whole act of loving.

But when the Bible says God is love, that statement is not what we would call an analytical statement whereby we can reverse the subject and predicate, and say that therefore love is God. That’s not what the Bible means. Rather, what the Jewish form of expression says here is that God is so loving and his love is so consistent, so profound, so deep, so transcendent, and such an integral part of his character that to express it in the maximum way possible, we say that he is love. That is simply saying that God is the ultimate standard of love.

What are the attributes of God?

When we talk about the attributes of God, we’re referring to those characteristics that describe God’s being. He is one. He is holy. He is omniscient. He’s omnipresent. He’s omnipotent.

Those are some of the different words that we use to describe the nature and character of God; these are characteristics we attribute to God’s being. When we describe someone’s attributes, we usually make a distinction between a person and his attributes. For instance, you may say your mother is patient, but you wouldn’t say that your mother is patience. And you would say that your mother is more than a mere list of traits. In the same way, God is not just a list of attributes. But God is different from your mother in that it was God’s being that defined attributes in the first place. By gaining a better understanding of God, we can learn more about what true kindness is, what truth, beauty, patience, strength are. In this sense, God is his attributes. It’s not that he’s a composite being—three pounds of omniscience and three pounds of omnipresence, and three pounds of self-existence, etc.—added together to give us a concept of God. Rather, God in his essence, in his very being, is holy, and that holiness is immutable. All of God is immutable and all of God is holy. These attributes cannot be heaped up like sand in a sandpile to give us a composite portrait of God.

By studying the individual attributes of God, however, we’re not dissecting God into composite parts. We’re simply focusing our attention for a moment on one dimension or one aspect of his being. This can be very helpful to our understanding of God because the only way we are able to know God is through his attributes. The more we understand them, the more we understand his being and his character, and the more we are motivated to worship and obey him.

For more information on God’s attributes, I’d like to suggest a book I’ve written on that very subject, The Character of God (Servant, 1995), in which I discuss the attributes of God for study by the layperson.

What is the average Christian’s understanding of God?

I don’t know what the majority view of God is in the Christian world. I can only guess from the small universe in which I live and the exposure that I have to various groups of people.

I certainly encounter a view of God that is widespread in the Christian community whereby God is somewhat reduced in scope from the biblical portrait that we have of him. He is seen as a sort of celestial grandfather who is benevolent in every respect and whose chief characteristic—and sometimes only attribute—is the attribute of love. We know that the Bible certainly puts an emphasis on the love of God and even goes so far as to say that God is love.

But I think we are in grave danger of stripping God of the fullness of his character as it is revealed in Scripture. This becomes a not-so-subtle form of idolatry. For example, if we obscure the holiness of God, or the sovereignty of God, or the wrath of God, or the justice of God, and sort of pick and choose those attributes of God that we like and then deny those that frighten us or make us uncomfortable, we’ve exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and we are worshiping a god who is in fact an idol. It may be a sophisticated idol—it’s not one made of wood or stone or brass—but, nevertheless, the concept of God we worship must be a concept that agrees with the God who is.

I’ve been on a crusade for years to focus attention on the doctrine of God—the character of God. Three of my books deal with the doctrine of God the Father: The Holiness of God, Chosen by God (which focuses on God’s sovereignty), and the latest one, The Character of God (which deals with the attributes of God). I wrote them intentionally as a trilogy to emphasize the character of God the Father because I think we are in grave danger of his being overlooked or distorted in the contemporary Christian world.

We have some idea of who Jesus is, and the charismatic renewal has brought much more attention to the Holy Spirit in recent years. But we almost systematically ignore God the Father. You also find that many Christians ignore the Old Testament. The whole history of the Old Testament is the revelation chiefly of God the Father. Everything we read of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit—so amplified in the New Testament—presupposes the knowledge of God the Father that is given to us in the Old Testament. I think it’s a priority for the Christian community to develop a higher understanding of the character of God.

Why does God remain invisible?

I don’t think there’s anything that makes living the Christian life more difficult than the fact that the Lord we serve is invisible to us. You know the expression in our culture “Out of sight, out of mind.” It’s very, very difficult to live your life dedicated to someone or something you cannot see. Often you hear people say that when they can see it, taste it, touch it, or smell it, they’ll believe and embrace it, but not before. This is one of the most difficult problems of the Christian life: God is rarely perceived through our physical senses.

On the other side of the coin, I would say that one of the greatest hopes set before the Christian church is the promise of what we call in theology the beatific vision, or the vision of God. We think of John’s letter in which he said, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). The Latin there means “as he is in himself.” That is to say, that which is totally concealed from our eyes right now, namely the very substance and essence of God, we will see in all of his glory and majesty and splendor in heaven.

I’ve often wondered about the text that says we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Does the Bible teach us that we will be totally cleansed from sin, totally glorified? Is this an experience that will eliminate sin from us altogether? Will it be because we catch a direct glimpse of the majesty of God? For example, if I see him—if he becomes visible to me—is that going to be the cleansing thing that rids all sin from my life; or is my seeing him going to be a result of his first cleansing me? I suspect it’s the latter.

Scriptures tell us uniformly that no person shall see God and live; this is because God is holy, and we are not (see Exod. 33:20 and 1 Tim. 6:15). Even Moses, as righteous as he was, pleaded with God on the mountain to let him have an unveiled look at God’s glory. God only allowed him to catch a refracted glimpse of God’s back parts, but he said to Moses, “My face shall not be seen.” Ever since Adam and Eve fell and were driven from the Garden, God has been invisible to human beings, but not because God is intrinsically incapable of being seen. The problem is not with our eyes but with our hearts. In the hymn “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” there is that wonderful phrase “All praise we would render: O help us to see / ’Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.”

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made the promise that someday a certain group of people would see God. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Those who hunger and thirst shall be filled. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. It’s because we’re not pure in heart that God remains invisible, and only when we’re purified will we see him.

What is the “providence of God”?

The word providence is a simple word made up of a prefix and a root. It means “to see beforehand.” We could dismiss the providence of God by saying that God sees everything that happens in this world before it happens; he is the great celestial observer of human history. But the doctrine of providence involves so much more than God as a divine onlooker.

There are basically only three ways in which we can look at the relationship between God and this world. There is the deistic view, in which God creates the world and winds it up like a watch with built-in secondary causes, and the world works like a machine. God steps out of the picture, simply observes everything that takes place in this world, and he never intervenes, never intrudes. Everything happens according to the built-in secondary causes in the universe. That view has certain advantages to it because then nobody can blame God for anything that goes wrong. We can say that we as creatures are bringing about all of the tragedies and catastrophes in this world and that God is absolved because his hands are tied.

Another viewpoint, which is an overreaction to de...

Table of contents

• Cover Image
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Knowing God
• Chapter 2: Who Is Jesus?
• Chapter 3: The Work of the Holy Spirit
• Chapter 4: The Book of Books
• Chapter 5: The Way of Salvation
• Chapter 6: Sin and the Sinner
• Chapter 7: Faith and Philosophy
• Chapter 8: The Power and Purpose of Prayer
• Chapter 9: The Growing Spiritual Life
• Chapter 10: Understanding Satan
• Chapter 11: Heaven and Hell
• Chapter 12: Sharing the Faith
• Chapter 13: Church Life
• Chapter 14: Marriage and Family
• Chapter 15: Career Issues
• Chapter 16: Money Matters
• Chapter 17: Life-and-Death Issues
• Chapter 18: Suffering
• Chapter 19: The End Times
• Chapter 20: Lifestyle Ethics
• Chapter 21: Christians and Government
• Chapter 22: Puzzling Passages
• Index
• About the Author