If God exists then He must be the greatest of all beings. Indeed, God must be infinitely great. If God was not the greatest then He would not be God. He would be a mere mortal. Now, there can only be one such being because if there were another then there would be something equal to God. And if there were something equal to God then God would no longer be the greatest and if God was no longer the greatest then God would no longer be God. For God to be God He must surpass all others. And to surpass all others He must be the supreme. There can only be one ultimate supreme because if there were two then the other would no longer be supreme. He would no longer surpass all others and if He did not surpass all others He would no longer be God.

So, if there is a God there can only be one.

Proverbs 8:13

  The fear of the Lord is the hatred of evil

The fear of the Lord isn’t terrifying for those who believe in Him. I see it as a reverent awe and worshipful response of faith to God. It’s our response to a loving Father not a tyrannical ruler. It is remembering what God hates (sin) and choosing to hate those things too. God doesn’t delight in evil (drunkeness etc.).

  I finally reached a point in my life where I hated getting drunk. I think that is one of the things we must do to get rid of our drunkeness. Hate it. I guess I would call that a holy hatred. A good “dislike”. I hate that “stuff”. I love God more.

Scientists search for causes. They search for an explanation in terms of an efficient cause.
Causality or causation denotes the relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the consequence (result) of the first. A cause is something that brings about an effect. An effect, by definition, is something that has been caused by something else. A cause cannot be a cause unless it produces an effect. Thus, “All causes have effects and all effects have causes.” If something can be shown to be an effect, then the necessity of a cause has been established. The very denial of causality implies a necessary causal connection in the thought process. Without assuming a necessary basis (cause), the denial is meaningless. Indeed, to deny the principle of causality is to deny rationality. We put together thoughts (the causes) that result in conclusions (the effects). So if anyone says they don’t believe in the principle of causality simply ask that person “What CAUSED you to come to that conclusion?” Some have said that quantum mechanics has invalidated the principle of causality. But if quantum mechanics invalidates the principle of causality it is also self defeating. Quantum mechanics (the cause) has invalidated the principle of causality (the effect). So, it’s impossible to have an uncaused effect, because an effect, by definition is something that has a cause. To say there is an uncaused effect is to make a nonsense statement.

The Bible clearly teaches that we are born with a sinful nature. This doesn’t mean that babies commit actual sins when they are born or that they go to hell when they die. I believe that all children and babies go to heaven when they die. It’s like a poisonous rattlesnake. When they are little they are harmless but when they grow up you see their nature develope. We are not born in an innocent state.

The Bible teaches us that because Adam sinned we are all born with a sinful nature. In other words Adam was our representative in the Garden. That sounds unfair because we didn’t choose our representative. Rather he was chosen for us. Usually the assumption that is hidden behind this is that we would have done different had we been there. But clearly this can’t be true. After all God is infallible and knows everything while we are fallible and don’t know everything. If I was to choose my own representative I would do so fallibly. When God chooses my representative He does so infallibly because He is infallible. So, I can never say that I was poorly represented in the garden. To do so just shows how much of a fallen son of Adam I really am. In fact the scriptures teach us that we are born with a sinful nature.

Psalm 51:5 Behold I was broght forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Psalm 58:3 The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies.

Genesis 8:21 The intent of a man’s heart is evil from His youth.

Proverbs 22:15 Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.

Moreover, physical death and spiritual death is the result of sin. Since infants die then they cannot be born in an innocent state. Therefore, God does nothing wrong by allowing them to die.

Some will say that Christ was sinless and He died. Yes, but our sins were imputed to Christ. He willingly took our sins upon Him. So God did nothing wrong in allowing Him to die either.

2 Corinthians 5:21
We implore you on behalf of Christ be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin,So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Galatians 3:13
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.”

1 Peter 2:21-25
He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart…..therefore you shall serve your enemies. (Deut. 28:47-48)

Serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2)

Delight yourself in the Lord (Psalm 37:4)

Christ endured the cross for the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12:2)

The Apostle Paul was sorrowful yet always rejoicing (2 Cor. 6:10)

Rejoice in the Lord always (Phil. 4:4)

To the degree that you share in the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing (1 Peter 4:14)

 We implore you on behalf of Christ be reconciled to God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin,So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Gal. 3:13
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.”

1 Peter 2:21-25
He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

Human beings are made in the image of God. Because of sin that image has been tarnished. Jesus Christ the second Adam fulfilled the Law that bound us and at the cross our sins were imputed to Him and punished in Him and His righteousness is imputed to us. Believers have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of it’s creator (Col. 3:10).

 I am a corrupted image of God but in Christ I am restored to the original goodness that characterized Adam and Eve in the garden. I am now acceptable to God. I have been clothed in the robes of righteousness. By faith God transfers the righteousness of Christ over to me. Justification means that I am not only forgiven but I now have the righteousness of Christ. Because of justification, I bear Christ’s righteousness, and I am fully pleasing to the Father. (Rom. 5:1). I’m not perfect but I am fully accepted and fully forgiven. I am justified by faith because of my union with Christ whose righteousness is counted as mine. I have died with Christ; therefore I should consider myself dead to sin. I should start to become what I am in Him and because of Him.

I’ve been sober now for 3 years from drugs and alcohol. Some people think you need A.A. and rehab. I guess some do because of the D.T.’s that some have when they are coming down off of alcohol. The last rehab I went to was a christian rehab. When I got out I went into an intensive study of John Piper and I’ve been sober ever since. This is the longest I’ve been sober and clean in ten years.

People want to put down theology and say it doesn’t matter or that it doesn’t work. Well I’m living proof that it does. It has so far anyway.

Today when I get the urge (which is very seldom) I try to bring to mind a couple of verses in the Bible that helps me. The primary foundation for resisting the temptation for me is trusting in the Bible. Trusting in God’s promises. Trusting in God. God promises us:

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you. (James 4:7-8)

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can handle. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so you can stand up under it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

See Also:

Edward Welch
Addictions: A Banquet In The Grave

John Piper
Desiring God
The Pleasures Of God
Future Grace
When I Don’t Desire God: How To Fight For Joy
God Is The Gospel

Wayne Grudem
Systematic Theology

For the addict dope is God. It is the Supreme Being in the junkies life. He is subjugated to it’s will. He follows it’s commandments. The drug is the definition of happiness, and gives the meaning of love. Each shot of junk in his veins is a shot of Divine love, and it makes the addict feel resplendent with the grace of God.

B. Meehan, Beyond the Yellow Brick Road (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1984), 175

Words that I can See 

Words are so beautiful but mean nothing to me

Just the sprinkles of love is all I want to see

For the flower has bloomed and is alive again

It’s spreading it’s beauty and showing it within

Brightened is the rainbow that circles you around

Brightened are the colors that shine upon the ground

But words cannot explain the love that I can see

Words are so beautiful but nothing do they mean

These words are words I see not the words I hear

For the words that I can see are sweetness to my ear

Liking what I see I lift my heart to you

May you shine your rainbow bright and may your love be true

Words that say I love you may not be true to me

Only the love you show only the words I see

Through millions of years of death and decay God provided the human race with natural resources such as gas, coal, oil, topsoil, etc. So, even before man arrived we see God’s grace towards man through His wrath. After all nobody deserves to be created. Also, even before Adam and Eve sinned they lived on God’s grace in the garden. Adam and Eve didn’t deserve grace but it was not yet accompanied by misery. Since sin always brings misery, and misery is always accompanied by sinners then all of God’s acts of mercy are also acts of grace. Every act of grace shown to a person because he is a sinner is also an act of mercy because his sin brings misery. And every act of mercy shown to a person because of his miserable plight is also an act of grace because he doesn’t deserve it. God doesn’t sometimes show mercy and sometimes grace. Rather, He shows them both. That is, whenever He is showing one of them to His fallen creatures He is showing both.Nobody deserves God’s grace whether we are talking about common grace or saving grace.

The very meaning of grace is something we don’t deserve. What we deserve is God’s eternal justice.Eternal death, which is eternal seperation from God.Because we have spurned the infinite worth of God’s glory the consequences are infinite. Whenever we talk about something that is deserved we talk about God’s justice. God is never obligated to show His grace. In order for grace to be grace it must be freely given. Because God doesn’t owe it to us. The fact that I am alive today is an act of God’s mercy. God owes me nothing and I owe Him everything. If He alows me to get run over by a bus He does nothing wrong. And if I die from it I go to be with Him.

If someone commits an injustice against me then they do something wrong but God does nothing wrong in allowing it to happen. On the human level I am a victim of injustice and have the right to cry out to God. God is angry with those who wrong to me and promises to vindicate me some day. The wrongs I suffer are of a horizonal sort. My relationship with Him is vertical and I never suffer injustice in terms of my vertical relationship with Him. God would be perfectly just to allow me to be thrown into prison for a crime I didn’t commit. I may be innocent before other people but I’m guilty before God. Whatever evil God allows to come to me He intends for good. God causes all things to work together for good for those that love Him. Even if I don’t know at the time why He would allow it.

This argument is taken from Ronald Nash’s book Faith & Reason with my own additions. Now keep in mind we are talking about a specific kind of truth.

Truth Exists. This can be shown by reminding us that it is self-defeating to deny the existence of truth. If you say there is no truth you are saying it’s true that there is no truth. If you say it’s possible that there is no truth then you are saying it’s true that it’s possible that there is no truth.Since skepticism is false then there must exist knowledge; and if there is knowledge then there must exist the object of knowledge namely truth.

Truth Is Eternal. If the world will never cease to exist, it is true that the world will never cease to exist. If the world will one day perish then it is true that the world will one day perish. But truth will abide even if the created world will cease to exists. If truth were to perish then it would be true that truth has perished. So, truth cannot perish it’s eternal.

Truth Is Mental. The existence of truth presupposes minds. Without a mind truth could not exist. The object of knowledge is a proposition, a meaning a significance; it is a thought. There is a mental nature to truth. If you were to fly to mars and see this true statement you would assume that there was intelligence on the planet. This statement contains words and meaning. It contains information about a man named George Bush. And information pressuposes intelligence:

George Walker Bush was elected president in the Uninted States of America and re-elected as president in the year 2004. All triangles have three sides. Knowledge presupposes minds.
Truth is superior to the human mind. Unchanging truth cannot be subjective or individualistic. Some truths are not only necessary but universal.  They are true in all  places whether or not we are aware of it. Therefore truth must transcend human reason because the human mind is finite and mutable and subject to error.Since truth is unchanging, eternal, and mental then truth must exist in an eternal mind. There must exist a Supreme Reason. A personal living God.

George Walker Bush was elected president of the United States in the year 2000.This was true yesterday and the day before that and it will be true tomorrow, the next day, the next day. It’s unchanging it stays the same. It’s always true. (eternaly true)

It’s true that if God didn’t exist then it would be true God doesn’t exist. God knows that if God didn’t exist then it would be true God doesn’t exist.

2+2=4. God knows 2+2=4

If God is all powerful then God knows that God is all powerful.

If God is omnipotent then God knows that God is omnipotent.

It’s true that something cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same sense. God knows that something cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same sense.

There must exist an eternal personal God. And since that is true it’s always true. It will always be true. Eternaly true. Always. Forever.

The Bible clearly teaches that God reveals Himself through creation. For His invisible attributes have been clearly perceived since the beginnig of creation. Before Adam and Eve sinned they lived in a protective state inside the Garden of Eden which was located eastward in the promised land. The destructive forces outside the promised land were God’s judgements held in readiness. If we would not have sinned we would been able to have witnessed all this in the promised land. But because we sinned God cursed the ground in the promised land and Adam and Eve were cast from the Garden of Eden and banished from the tree of life. These forces are good in one sense because the animals, stars, and such do not sin. They work in a harmonious balance with one another. Even if Adam and Eve had not sinned they would have given glory to God because in destroying each other they demonstrate His mighty power and His wrath.
The Bible is quite clear that God is not ashamed of of Hs judgements including Hell but is glorified by them. The Bible tells us that they are good. While hell is a horrible reality on this side of the grave I think when we are in heaven it will be erased from the mind and we will see things from God’s perspective.

Also, in dealing with carnivorous activity we see that it increases the quality of life for the herbivors as a whole. Without carnivorous activity disease would spread and there would be starvation and genetic decline. Without predators we have to thin out the herbivore population to keep it healthy and alive. Moreover, the carnivores go after the weakest, and the sickest and therefore protect the herbivore species.

As psalm 104 states (the creation Psalm) carnivorous activity is good and not evil.

THE LIONS ROAR FOR THEIR PREY AND SEEK THEIR FOOD FROM GOD……

How many are your works, O Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number-
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there,

These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
When you open your hand they are satisfied with GOOD THINGS

When you hide your face they are terrified;
When you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in all His works-
He who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.

Praise the Lord.

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

In dealing with the problem of evil we have to admit that we simply don’t know all the reasons why God allows evil to take place in every circumstance. To know that we would have to be God. And as I have said before I’m not God. God does however reveal to us in the Bible one reason why He allows evil in the world.

Romans 9
What if God, desiring to show His wrath and make known His power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand for glory.

As Piper has pointed out in quoting Johnathan Edwards:

You see, God doesn’t delight in evil for the sake of evil. Evil comes to pass that good may come of it. What good? And how does the existence of evil serve this good end?

Jonathan Edwards:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, all the parts of His glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all…Thus it is necessary, that God’s aweful majesty, His authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of His goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should< permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in His providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever He bestowed, His goodness would not be so much prized and admired….So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which He made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of His love. And if the knowledge of Him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.

Is God less glorious because He allowed that evil be? The answer is no. God is more glorious.

In 1970 Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose published the first of the space-time theorems.
What it says is this. If the universe contains mass and general relativity is accurate then space and time must have a beginning along with matter and energy. Also, there must exist a cause that brings the universe into existence outside of physical time and space. I would say that the First Cause exists in metaphysical time or eternity. But that is for another time.

The Singularity of the space-time theorem is outside the universe. It’s transcendent. The Singularity of the space-time theorem is a causal singularity.

Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London series A, 314 (1970): 529-548. States:

We are now in a position to state the corollary to our theorem.

COROLLARY. A space-time M cannot satisfy causal geodesic completeness if, together with Einsteins equations, the following four conditions hold:

(3.20) M contains no closed timelike curves
(3.21) the energy condition (3.6) is satisfied at every point,
(3.22) the generality condition
(3.10) is satisfied for every causal geodesic,
(3.23) M contains either
(i) a trapped surface,

(ii) a point p for which the convergence of all the nullgeodesics through p
changes sign somewhere to the past of p,

(iii) a compact spacelike hypersurface
We may interpret failure of the geodesic completeness condition in our corollary as virtually a statement that any space-time satisfying (3.20)-(3.23) ‘possesses a singularity’…..The implication is virtually, that a space-time satisfying (3.20-3.23) must contain a causal geodesic which possesses no pair of conjugate points….Instead, we see that our theorem implies that some causal geodesic ‘enters a singularity’ (i.e. is compelled to be geodesically incomplete) before any repeated focusing has time to take place.

Gravitational Singularity-Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia states:

More generally, a spacetime is considered singular, if it is geodesically incomplete……The simplest Big Bang cosmological model contains a causal singularity at (t=0), where all timelike geodesics have no extensions into the past. Extrapolating bakwards to 0 results in a universe of size 0 in all spacial dimensions…So, at the singularity 0 (the lack of space, time, matter, and energy) there’s a CAUSE. This places the CAUSE outside our universe. So, the corollary of the space-time theorem is that if general relativity accurately describes the dynamics of the universe then there is not only a beginning to space, time, matter, and energy but there must also be a transcendent non-physical CAUSAL AGENT that brings the universe into existence. Since General Relativity has been established beyond reasonable doubt the space-time theorem can be trusted.