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Lately, I've become concerned about our apologetics approach.
It seems more and more we're just becoming computers that end up shooting facts and refutations back and forth at each other.
I can mentally picture it as being at a Lasertag game and shooting a fact at my opponent hoping I'll make a hit.
Now
the problem isn't that the arguments are true. While I will grant there are numerous bad arguments for why we believe, there
are many good arguments as well. Like any apologist, I believe it's important to scrap the bad arguments and work towards
the better ones.
In order to establish the truth about what we beleive, we need first to establish the truth about
who we believe. However, I fear that often times when we defend the existence of God, it's almost as if we paint the picture
that God has nothing better to do than to exist. If all God's doing is existing, we might as well become deists.
I'd
say the same is true with the Trinity. I'm amazed in seeing JWs argue against the Trinity as they present us with the argument
to change our view as if that would have no ramifications on reality. It's comparable to switching a lightswitch on and off
as you go being a triune God to a unipersonal God. Frankly, if all the Trinity is doing is existing, why bother?
An
oft-forgotten attribute of God is his beauty. Psalm 27:4 talks about gazing on the beauty of the Lord. Psalm 90:17 has a prayer
that God's beauty will rest on us. The word is the same one used in Psatlm 27:4. While the word can have other meanings, beauty
is an acceptable translation.
Can the unbeliever explain this? If you are of an atheistic mindset, how can you explain
where beauty comes from? "Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder!" Go to a total eclipse and if you see someone who thinks
it's ugly, you'll think there's something wrong with them. Who will say a newborn baby being born is an ugly sight? What man
marries a woman without having some sort of attraction to her? Yes. Some forms of beauty might be subjectvie just like some
tastes might be subjective, but there's no doubt that there's something good there to be enjoyed.
If there is no creation,
then this is all the result of chance. If this is all the result of chance, then are we saying chaos produces beauty? If that's
the case, let's let the Adolf Hitlers of the world rise up and do as they please. Perchance in the total anarchy, we will
reach a beautiful Utopia.
The world simply has too much beauty to deny that there is a beautiful creator. The Genesis
account shows a world where light shows up in the beginning and then the sea and the land and the plants and the animals.
Just look around you. Even in your own room whereever you are, there is likely a multitude of colors. Why did God do that?
Could God not have made the world like an old black and white TV episode?
When I was growing up, the Super Nintendo
was coming out and I still remember an advertisement for the new graphics. The system would have 32,000 colors. Most of us
would be fortunate to name the simple 64 colors in a Crayola box of crayons. However, this system had 32,000, and there's
no doubt that God made many more colors.
Now if we return to the creation account though, we see that God makes man
and woman in his own image. Genesis 2 makes it clear that this was not at the same time, but that the two were made
at separate intervals. Man is made first and then, the last personal creation of God is the woman.
I have seen beautiful
sunsets. I have seen pictures of total eclipses surfing the net. I have seen works of fine art. I have seen animals that I
thought were amazingly lovely. However, if I was asked what is the most beautiful of all creation, I would, as a guy, say
that it's the human female.
In fact, the female might agree as well. C.S. Lewis said that "the beauty of the female
is the root of joy to the femaleas well as to the male....to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve,
and to both, it is in the lover that the beloved tastes of her own delightfulness." (Quoted from John Eldridge's Wild At Heart
p. 37)
As beautiful as she is though, we must remember that her creator is even more beautiful. The beauty of the female
is the pointer to the beauty of God. Imagine Adam waking up in the garden after being in the sleep and then there's a rustle
in the bushes. He looks up and two hands push them aside and out walks the naked Eve for Adam to gaze upon. I recall being
told once that when Adam said "This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was
taken out of man," that a Hebrew equivalent is "Va-Va-Va-Voom!"
No doubt, Adam immediately consumated a relationship
with Eve on the spot. This brings us to sexuality. How does the Arian explain it? The Trinity makes sense of sexuality. We
have a God who is relational in his inmost being. As hard as it may be for some to imagine, we have a God who is sexual in
his inmost being.
Some readers could be getting nervous at this point and wondering if I'm saying something dirty.
The only way to think that is to think that sex is something entirely physical. If sex is only physical though, then we might
as well sleep around with whoever we want. Again, the people like the JWs who deny the existence of the soul will have a problem
with this.
However, who is it that is making all the decisions? Do you walk because your body wants to walk or you
want to walk? Are you scrolling down to read this email with your mouse because you want to or your body wants to? There is
a you behind your body making the decisions. The matter that you are composed of is not capable of rationality.
Whether
you punch your neighbor in the face or reach out and shake his hand is not determined by the body but by you. However, your
body corresponds physically with what your soul is desiring. What is sexuality then? It's the male and female soul desiring
the closest possible relationship with each other, and the bodies are made by God to perfectly correspond to picture a relationship
of trust face-to-face, a kind of relationship that doesn't show up in homosexuality.
It also doesn't apply to promiscuity.
How can you have the ultimate trust in someone when you are not willing to commit to them? Sex outside of marriage is sex
without a covenant. Not being willing to enter a covenant shows a lack of trust in the other person. How can you give the
ultimate trust while not trusting? Only Christianity can explain this as each person of the Trinity relates to each other
in a relationship of deepest trust based on who the other persons are and not what they do. This is what it means to say that
God is sexual. Our masculinity and our femininity both come from the heart of God. It's not a matter of physical characteristics,
of which there are physical differences and I am thankful for them, but of relational characteristics.
Such beauty
has received neglect. How else do we explain how Jehovah's Witnesses have come up with the idea that the Trinity is some three-headed
monster? To be fair, that does go back to Thomas Jefferson, but JWs have no problem repeating such a claim today. If they
saw the beauty of the Trinity, would that happen today?
Thus, we need to not only show that God exists and that God
exists in Trinity, but that God is beautiful and that God is beautiful in Trinity. Perchance someone is wondering if that
means we should ever touch on sin in presenting the gospel. By all means! If God is beautiful, then whatever contradicts his
nature is ugly. By that, sin becomes the most ugly thing of all. In Final Fantasy X for instance, Sin is presented as a twisted
and mindless force that is bent on destroying whatever it can. It often takes the form of a hideous monster. It's clear there's
nothing appealing about Sin and is it any wonder that the goal is to destroy Sin? If we saw our sin as it really is today,
I have no doubt that the monster would be far more hideous. Would we be willing to pick up a sword to eliminate such ugliness?
Then why not do it in our own lives?
And this beauty can win arguments! In 1 Peter 3, Peter even tells the wives that
it is because of their beauty that they could influence their husbands. Beauty has power over people. If proof is needed,
go to any male and ask him if he's ever done anything, to be blunt, stupid, for a pretty lady. I can testify I've done some
amazing things just to impress the beauty or even get a glimpse of the beauty.
If that kind of beauty has such appeal,
then let us point to the greatest beauty of all. The new apologetic of beauty will present a God who is beautiful and desirable
above all. When such is seen, then we can use the more traditional arguments to show why we believe that God is the one that
is, if they're even needed at that point!
So today, I urge us all to live lives of beauty and point to the one that
is beautiful beyond all. If that beauty draws us, what's to keep it from drawing the unbeliever.
In Christ,
ApologiaNick
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