Scripture: Topics: Bible Questions with Mike
All right, here we are once again. I still got my new green shirt on, and we're here to answer your Bible questions. Jared is sitting behind the camera and he is going to read the question, which I've not seen yet, and we're going to try to give you an answer from the word of God.
“Are there any paradoxes in the Bible? If so, what kind of paradoxes?”
The Bible's full of paradoxes. I think the one that, when you ask it, the one that hit me right off is probably the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. I mean, that's the most classic installing in the Bible. That's in philosophy. It's in all religions. It's something that everyone's wrestled with. How can God be sovereign and man be free at the same time? And so the very nature of God is a paradox too, that God is infinite and finite at the same time. How can he be everywhere and be one place? And how can he come and go and how can he learn and know if he knows all things? And how can something occur that's new? Everything would be old.
It's very strange. You can stay up late at night wrestling with that. And I have, I've gone over those things in my mind since I was old enough to think, I guess. Most people do.
Is God one, or three?
The problem with our understanding, the complexity of these issues is our finiteness, and we make assumptions about the infinite based on the finite. For instance, God represents himself as three, and yet one. Genesis 1:26, let us create man in our image after our likeness. The Lord our God is one God. So is God an our, our likeness, our image, plural? In fact, the very word God, there's a got a plural ending in the Hebrew. So is God one or is he three?
He says there in the book of John 1:1, he says, “In the beginning was the word.” That's the word. “And the word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. By Him,” the word, “all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made.” So the Bible represents Jesus as with God and being God at the same time.
To illustrate another way, Jesus is with the Father, and yet he is the Father at the same time. In the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah, it's speaking of the coming of Jesus, it said in his name shall be called wonderful, counselor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father. So the Creator in Genesis chapter one is Jesus, and yet the Holy Spirit also is God. So I might illustrate it this way, although this is not accurate, it's the closest I can get to it. And so this is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The problem with my illustration is this is the Holy Spirit. This is the Holy Spirit. This is the Holy Spirit.
This is God, the Father, son, and Holy Spirit. And any place within my drawing is all three persons of the Godhead, and yet the three are one. Now, how can three be one? Mathematically it's impossible. In our finite thinking, it's impossible.
How can man have a free will?
How can I be free to make a choice and yet my choice is already known to God? The Bible clearly holds me responsible, all my choices and encourages me to choose wisely, and it warns me if I choose incorrectly.
Conclusion
So I am willing to accept the fact that I don't know much, and I live in a finite world with a finite mind, and I have a small percentage of knowledge of that which actually could be known in my finiteness, and a lot of what I know is messed up and confused, and so I end up having to do what I do when I wire a house, I get a book and I read the book. And I trust somebody that knows more about it than I do, and I put it all together, not knowing the theory, turn it on and it works. I say, boy, I must be smart. I got this thing fixed. I made it work. No, I just followed the book.
Here's my book. This is my book that tells me all about God and about these things. And so I believe what it says, and the beauty of it is that it's functional. It actually works in my life and the lives of other people to put us in contact with God and change our lives. And so when I can't resolve a paradox, I'm certainly not going to bail out of the ship of faith from what I don't know. I'm going to continue to ride the ship of faith based on what I do know and what God has revealed to us.
