Atheist Tuesday: God’s Gonna Get Ya (One way or another)

17 CommentsAtheist Tuesday

My habit most mornings is to crack open my Charles Spurgeon devotional called “Morning and Evening” (the updated version by Alistair Begg). Whenever there is a particular rumination that applies to atheists on their special day (Tuesday), I post it. So here you are, unbelieving friend:

“I have many people in this city.”—Acts 18:10.

HIS should be a great encouragement to try to do good, since God has among the vilest of the vile, the most reprobate, the most debauched and drunken, an elect people who must be saved. When you take the Word to them, you do so because God has ordained you to be the messenger of life to their souls, and they must receive it, for so the decree of predestination runs. They are as much redeemed by blood as the saints before the eternal throne. They are Christ’s property, and yet perhaps they are lovers of the ale-house, and haters of holiness; but if Jesus Christ purchased them He will have them. God is not unfaithful to forget the price which His Son has paid. He will not suffer His substitution to be in any case an ineffectual, dead thing. Tens of thousands of redeemed ones are not regenerated yet, but regenerated they must be; and this is our comfort when we go forth to them with the quickening Word of God.

Even more, these ungodly ones are prayed for by Christ before the throne. “Neither pray I for these alone,” saith the great Intercessor, “but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word.” Poor, ignorant souls, they know nothing about prayer for themselves, but Jesus prays for them. Their names are on His breastplate, and before long they must bow their stubborn knee, breathing the repentant sigh before the throne of grace. “The time of figs is not yet.” The predestined moment has not struck; but, when it comes, they shall obey, for God will have His own; they must, for the Spirit is not to be withstood when He comes forth with fullness of power—they must become the willing servants of the living God. “My people shall be willing in the day of my power.” “He shall justify many.” “He shall see of the travail of His soul.” “I will divide him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong.”

 

Comments (17)

  1. Nohm

    Reply

    Hi Steve,

    The two misspellings in your note leads to… uh… a different meaning.

    As for the post itself, I have two questions: is there any evidence to support this? If so, are you able to demonstrate this?

      • Nohm

        I have read the Bible slowly and thoughtfully; that’s how I became a non-believer in the first place.

        What is it about the Bible that is evidence of your claims? Is the Qur’an evidence for the claims of Muslims?

      • Nohm

        To clarify, claims (which is what the Bible contains) are not evidence; evidence is needed to support claims.

      • Mark Hunter

        Steve, I think you have confused the word “evidence” with the word “claim”. The bible isn’t evidence anymore than Harry Potter is evidence for wizards.

        In fact when you take some of the claims inside the bible (fish swallowing people for 3 days, flying chariots, burning bushes, etc) they would fit perfectly well in Harry Potter books, but not in a book that supposedly makes accurate claims about actual events of the past.

      • Mark Hunter

        That’s a big admission there Steve. I am sure it was not easy to say that.

  2. Dr Samuel Joseph Cheah

    Reply

    I fully agree with Steve. The Word of God is about life and issues pertaining to our survival, struggles and issues of life. The answers are all in there. Believers who don’t read the Bible is like going into an enemy territory unarmed and untrained.

  3. Schmader

    Reply

    “THIS should be a great encouragement to try to do good, since God has among the vilest of the vile, the most reprobate, the most debauched and drunken, an elect people who must be saved. ”

    What a great quote! It reminds me that we ought to pray for our atheist friends. There is one particular atheist that I want to pray for. He is apparently very sick, physically, emotionally and spiritually. He is undergoing dialysis. Christian friends let us remember this atheist in our prayers and pray that God would heal his sicknesses.

    To the atheist that is undergoing dialysis, please remember when you are getting your blood cleaned how Christ’s blood was shed for you and that blood can make you spiritually clean. Jesus can wipe away your sins and give you a new life.

    • vintango2k

      Reply

      Wouldn’t it be more just for God to just fix the sin problem for everyone, since he made man to sin and all =)

      • vintango2k

        I mean, to use a familiar analogy;

        If the building you see before you collapses, and in the investigation it is revealed that the builder or perhaps the architect used substandard materials that were going to fail given the location or environmental pressures, would you not blame the builder or the architect for such shoddy construction? What if the builder or architect knew the building would collapse because of the materials he chose to put in there? What if he said he designed it to fail? What then?

      • Laurie

        God did “fix the sin problem”. Jesus Christ did that. He died to pay the price that our sin deserved. Those who trust Christ are no longer separated from our Creator. (problem solved). However, there is still sin in the wolrd…for now… One day God will deal with sin once and for all time – when His timing is right. It is because of His mercy that He waits. For to deal with it means destruction.

        To blame the builder for a “faulty” building would make sense. However, God did not create a faulty anything. Man chose to disobey God and caused creation to crumble. If a building could choose to crumble, it would be ludicrous to blame the builder for that.

  4. vintango2k

    Reply

    As I’ve asked the believers to explain (when it comes to the salvation of the people that lived and died in the Americas for thousands of years after Jesus died) there’s usually a stunning non-answer following. The idea of Jesus fixing all the problems and then saying that belief in Christ alone is the only way to salvation… and then realizing that there were millions of people in the world who lived and died without even knowing who Jesus was for thousands of years, is a strike against our innate sense of fairness and justice. Were all these countless generations of people just coal to dump in the fires of hell because they were just not lucky enough to NOT be born in the Middle East around 100 AD?
    If you look at it in the grand scheme of things, God must have looked at the world, saw people were doing stuff it didn’t like and said, yeah a carpenter sacrificing himself in the middle east, that’ll fix it. To use the analogy again, its like the builder coming back to the faulty building and saying, “Yeah, put some support beams there to prop up that crumbling building that I built bad from the beginning, don’t blame me for that though.”
    The simple fact is, if you are an omnipresent, omnipotent being that knows the future, present and past and knows the full ramifications of everything it does, and you put in it desires that you do not like (sin), and an abhorrent punishment (hellfire and pain), then why go to the trouble in the first place? God, evidenced by the Bible, is no respecter of choice or free will (Hardening of Pharoh’s heart anyone?) , so why would it care to respect that sacred cow?
    And to use your analogy, “Why would a builder choose to build a building that had the DESIRE to crumble in the first place?”

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