God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (24 page)

As one experiences grace in his own life, he extends grace to others. Through the inward transformation of the individual, there is a corresponding outward transformation of society. This is what I call the “grace effect.” Simply defined, it is an observable phenomenon—
that life is demonstrably better where authentic Christianity flourishes.
¹⁰

C
RITICS OF
R
ELIGION
H
AVE A
P
OINT

Make no mistake, regardless of the vast number of people claiming a belief in God and the enormous variety of religious expressions, the skeptics’ aim is at the Christian faith. It’s common to hear things like, “All Christians are hypocrites,” to which I respond, “How many of these hypocrites do you personally know?” When they stop and count, they often realize they are taking the sins of a few people and marginalizing close to two billion others on the planet who would say they are believers in Jesus Christ.

The English reformer William Wilberforce, whose twenty-year campaign against slavery resulted in its abolition, wrote a book that shook his country in 1797. Its title was unusually long:
A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity
. It was later shortened to
Real Christianity
. He showed how the essence of Christianity had been replaced with mere
moralism
and religious obligation. This is exactly what Christ encountered during His earthly ministry. The prevailing religion had missed the point of the mercy and motive of God’s laws. Jesus came to set the record straight by demonstrating the power of mercy and truth in action.

Therefore, the critics of religion are not always wrong in pointing out failures and deficiencies in Christianity. It is simply not the whole story. Just believing in God and knowing good and evil won’t make you choose good over evil. That
knowledge
simply means you have no excuse. The Bible warns that even the demons believe in God and tremble (James 2:19).

But grace is the result of God’s Spirit acting on the human
heart and empowering us to overcome evil. There are millions of real believers who are serving God faithfully as well as serving their fellow men through acts of kindness, integrity, and service. Through their lives, God has poured out His grace like a pipeline of fresh water into the desert. Because of this grace, life can arise from death.

A
MAZING
G
RACE

One of the most well-known songs on the planet is “Amazing Grace,” written by former slave trader John Newton and published in 1779:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

The reference to Newton being a “wretch” demonstrated the fact that he had seen how horrible his actions were in the light
of God
’s grace and truth. You see, many accuse the God of the Bible of being hard or merciless. They point out acts of judgment, such as the flood of Noah, the ordering of the Hebrew armies to destroy the Canaanites when entering the promised land, or harsh penalties, such as stoning, for breaking God’s law.

The accusation is that God couldn’t be loving if He carried out such acts of judgment. First, God is a God of judgment as well as love. The two traits are not mutually exclusive. If God
did not judge evil, then He wouldn’t be truly loving. That is why the Bible says that “righteousness and mercy are the foundation of Your throne” (Psalm 89:14). Our hearts cry out for justice today. Think of TV shows such as
The People’s Court
and
Divorce Court
where we witness the constant cry of men and women for someone to set the record straight and give them justice. When a crime of any kind is committed, we long for justice. The only Being in the universe who is wise enough to judge rightly and truly and knows the whole story is God. When we read of God acting in judgment toward a person, city, or nation, many fail to recognize the seriousness of the evil that was committed and the number of opportunities the wrongdoers had to change their ways before judgment came. God’s mercy is more abundant than His judgments.

History records how debauched and depraved were the nations He ordered destroyed. The murder and disregard for human life through their detestable practices was only a part of how perverse they had become. When God acted in judgment, He was like a surgeon amputating a cancerous limb to save the entire body. These nations needed to be stopped as the
Nazis
of World War II did.

Even in the law
of God
where there were harsh punishments for evil, there were sacrifices that could be made to avoid the punishments. As always there was more mercy than judgment. Remember the story of Jonah? Most critics focus on whether he could have been swallowed by a whale and survived. Yet the real miracle was the grace God extended to a wicked city. God told Jonah to tell the city of Nineveh that they would be destroyed. Jonah ran away from this call, and that is how he found himself in the belly of that whale. When he finally obeyed and delivered
the message from God to the people of Nineveh, they repented, and God spared them. Jonah was upset and said, “That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2
NIV
). In most cases severe warnings from God to mankind are balanced by the offer of grace. Amazing grace was demonstrated in the
Old Testament
as well as the New. That is why every year during Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the book of Jonah is read in synagogues around the world.

You see, if you don’t know how serious the consequences for your actions should be, you’ll never really understand how amazing the grace is that God extends to you. That’s why people today tend to minimize the sacrifice of Christ on the cross for our sins to pay for our salvation. They have never realized the eternal separation from God that we deserve for our sins and assume the reward of
heaven
is certainly theirs.

Take for example the belief in heaven or the afterlife. A majority of people will say they believe there is a place called heaven that exists beyond this physical life. They will also admit when you ask them that there are some who will probably not be in heaven because of their crimes here on earth. But who decides that? And furthermore, what is the criterion for getting into heaven? Being good? But how good is good enough?

No one
deserves
heaven. Our sins of pride, selfishness, lust, and rebellion have resulted in a separation between God and us. Only when we realize the punishment we deserve will we comprehend the magnitude of God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Grace is God’s unmerited favor toward us that He gave us through Christ’s death and resurrection.

T
HE
I
MPACT OF
G
RACE

The grace we have been talking about is the grace that is available to us as individuals. There is another type of grace called
common
grace
. This describes the blessings that a culture receives because of God’s blessing on an individual. It is why God causes the “sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45
NIV
). Many of the good things we take for granted are the result of God’s grace that has mightily influenced the world we live in. Let’s take a closer look at the Grace Effect upon our society.

1. D
IGNITY OF
L
IFE

The ancient world’s devaluation of life logically follows from any worldview that rejects the true God as the
author of life
and reduces it to merely a natural explanation. Because God designed and created humanity, there is significance to our existence. We are more than chemicals and chance.

Can you place a real price on one human life? Remember the Chilean miners who were trapped twenty-three hundred feet below the earth for sixty-eight days? The world watched in amazement as the extensive efforts to rescue them paid off, as each one was extracted from a living nightmare and brought safely to the surface of the earth. Did anyone talk about how much those efforts cost or the man-hours spent to coordinate such an effort? There is no price too high when it comes to saving a human life. Where faith in God is present, so is this premium on human life. In the ancient world as today,
abortion
and infanticide were results of a materialistic view of life.

The impact of the grace that comes through the gospel is
clearly illustrated in the history of the Fiji Islands. There is no better before-and-after picture than this one.

In 1844, H. L. Hastings visited the Fiji Islands. He found there that life was very cheap and that it was held in low esteem. You could buy a human being for $7.00 or one musket. That was cheaper than a cow. After having bought him you could work him, whip him, starve him, or eat him, according to your preference—and many did the latter. [Hastings] returned a number of years later and found that the value of human life had risen tremendously. One could not buy a human being for $7.00 to beat or eat. In fact, you could not buy one for seven million dollars. Why? Because across the Fiji Islands there were 1,200 Christian chapels where the gospel of Christ had been proclaimed, and people had been taught that we are not our own; that we have been purchased with a price, not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
¹¹

2. P
ROTECTION OF
C
HILDREN

It is difficult to imagine the world that a child faced two thousand years ago. “Roman girls married young, very often before puberty.”
¹²
The most vulnerable had the fewest rights and least protection from the brutal world they entered. That vulnerability was exploited without backlash until Christ and His followers demonstrated the value of each child. Jesus warned of the harshest of judgments against those who would harm a child. “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his
neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones” (Luke 17:2).

Think about our world five hundred or even one hundred fifty years ago. Children worked in dangerous mines or in forced labor. Even today the sex-trafficking industry exploits millions of innocent children. Christ brought value to children by giving them honor and dignity and commanding that they be protected by the strong and not harmed.

A dismal fate awaited the youngsters of ancient
Rome
,
Greece
, India, and
China
. Herod slaughtered the innocents, but the advent of Christ was the triumph of the innocents. Jesus gathered the little children unto Himself, saying, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them” (Matt. 19:14a). His words gave a new importance to children, an importance that bestowed dignified treatment upon them.
¹³

Abortion
was normal two thousand years ago. The practices of the Greco-Roman world made killing the unborn or discarding newborns as common as discarding a bruised melon at the market. The grace of God released through the influence of His people on the culture made an enormous impact in that area. Both infanticide and abortion ended in the early church, which eventually led to its dramatic reduction in the entire Roman Empire.
¹⁴
The US Supreme Court justice who wrote the opinion on the landmark
Roe v. Wade
in 1973 that legalized abortion saw the connection between the value of human life and religious ideas: “If I were to appeal to religion, I would appeal to the religions of Rome and Greece.”
¹⁵
Therefore, as a culture embraces
the
knowledge
of the one true God, the respect for human life and the unborn rises. As that knowledge recedes, so does the attitude toward the protection of human life.

3. E
LEVATION OF
W
OMEN

Jesus Christ was the unquestioned champion of women’s rights and their value as joint-heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7). He ministered to women and lifted them up from subservience and gave them the dignity, value, and protection they deserved. This was certainly the opposite of how the ancient world saw them: “In ancient cultures, the wife was the property of her husband. . . .
Plato
taught that if a man lived a cowardly life, he would be reincarnated as a woman . . .
Aristotle
said that a woman was somewhere between a free man and a slave.”
¹⁶

The source of the change in this mind-set was the force of the Christian community and their view of women. “Although some classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any ‘foreign superstition,’ most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”
¹⁷

In nations where the gospel has not taken root, this low view of women is what you’ll find. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, confirmed this in his book
The Wealth of Nations
: “In all great towns [of China] several [babies] are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.”
¹⁸
This was just two hundred years ago, and it was before any influence of Jesus Christ was to begin to penetrate China.
¹⁹
In the twenty-first century, where the
communist ideology
still is embraced, the disregard for women is rampant in China. Its one-child policy places a premium on men as opposed to women. Young girls are many times unwanted, discarded, or turned over for adoption.