About the App
1 Thessalonians 5:21 says “Test everything. Hold onto the good.” This entire app is loaded with archaeologists, historians, and great men of science that were skeptical of Jesus Christ and the gospels until they critiqued (investigated) them. Until a belief, thought process or philosophy is critiqued (challenged by adversity), you cannot know for sure if the belief you hold is true and real. If the hope that you have in your heart is not tried by fire” and has not “stood the test of the storm,” then you cannot rely on it when it seems like everything is going wrong in your life.
“I must always be prepared to give an answer and reason for the hope that I have in my heart” (1 Peter 3:15) …. If our hope is not founded in and proven by facts that stand the test of time, then our hope will fail.
As it is right now, 3 out of 4 of our young Christian kids are leaving the church by the age of 21. If this is not the most alarming statistic to every Christian man or woman on this planet, then I question their faith in the sacrifice of Jesus. Truth is, what we believe as Christians is so real and proven by science that the salvation of these 3 out of 4 children ought to mean more to us than our very own life!
“After more than two centuries of facing the heaviest scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has survived- and is all the more the better for the siege.” (Time magazine- December 1974)
The purpose of this app is so that kids can log on anywhere in the world and give an “honest answer and a reason” for their hope and faith in Christ Jesus when questioned by skeptics. A young Christian in Brazil or China, while riding on the back of a bus, is tormented, and ridiculed by questions from a skeptic. At the click of a finger, our young one will be able to give a solid scientifically backed and rationally reasonable answer for all that are present.
I love skeptics and so should you! Because, as a Christian, truth is on your side. A true skeptic is a genuine Christian in the making because an honest skeptic is going to follow the evidence where it leads.
Be aware, a cynic is at times someone who is throwing stones at you. And you could present all the irrefutable evidence in the world to a cynic, and they will continue to ridicule your faith. A cynic is merely a close-minded, evil hearted person who is blind to all reason.
In 1672, Filleau de la Chaise said, “If men know anything with assurance, it is the facts; and of everything that falls within their knowledge, there is nothing in which it would be more difficult to deceive and over which there would be less occasion for dispute. And thus, when one will have made them see that the Christian religion is inseparably attached to facts whose truth cannot sincerely be contested, they must submit to all that it teaches or else renounce sincerity and reason.
Christians do not get brownie points for not educating ourselves! We are commanded to “study to show ourselves a good workman” and to “love the Lord our God with all our heart, [mind], soul and strength” … The bible teaches us that every single Christian should be able to explain why he/she is a Christian. The reason is because of Jesus Christ; He is the reason for the hope that is within us. You can take the founder of any other religion, and historically he could have been replaced by anyone else and their message would survive, but you cannot take Christ out of Christianity. Jesus is the reason for the hope: his birth, his death on the cross and his resurrection.
On the cross we have the most amazing gift where God gives himself to us that we might have fellowship with Him. This is the reason why we have hope and it's not a question of a better philosophy somewhere. There is no other truth; Jesus Christ is the ultimate and absolute truth. This app is so you may always rest confidently assured that you have an answer for the faith you have in Him.
Why is there so much evil in the world if God is loving?
If God is good, and if God is all powerful, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? A young college student was in class and his professor started to speak against God: “If God is good, and God is all powerful, then why is there so much evil and suffering; why so many plagues and diseases causing so much pain and killing so many people all over the world? If God is truly good, he would intervene and put a stop to all this evil. So, in conclusion, there must not be a God- and if it so happens that there is a God, then God is evil.” All the other students nodded in agreement-all except one student. This student asked, “Professor, what is darkness?”
The professor looked confused. The student answered, “Darkness is the absence of light.” Then the same student asked, “What is cold? Cold is merely the absence of heat” … “Professor, evil is merely the absence of the love of God in someone’s heart.” That student was a young Albert Einstein.
Someone once said that it was not science that caused him to question God; it is the pathetic condition of the world, to which Dr. Ravi Zacharias asks, “What efforts have you personally put forth in an attempt to relieve the pathetic condition of the world?”
Many would point to God as an evil dictator, sitting back on His lawn chair while watching all of us suffer in agony, even letting out a little laugh or snicker every now and then at our plight… but the cross of Christ Jesus entirely destroys any inclination or insinuation that our Heavenly Father does not both see and share in our heartache! He is “longsuffering in love.” “We have a high priest in Jesus who has suffered and endured and who does empathize with our weaknesses, who has been tempted in every way we ever could” -Hebrews 4:15
The presence of evil in the world? What if it is because the Bible is in fact true?
Is God worthy of our love? Because of the immeasurable price he paid for us, surely, He loves us beyond human comprehension and desperately desires a relationship with us… but you cannot love without having the freedom to not love. No, forced love is rape. WE have been given “free will”; we have been given the freedom to choose the good and pure love of God, or evil. God could not, nor would He, create robots forced into subservient love. In giving men and women free will, God had to allow the possibility of us choosing evil.
Jean-Paul Sartre says, “The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically; the Lover will feel that both His Love and His Being are actually cheapened. If you make love an automatic reflex, then it is not love.”
Every single human ever born will get the chance to choose God’s good and pure, world-overcoming, awe-encompassing, addiction and depression-destroying love. Not everyone will; some will even rebel against it.
England’s celebrated biological atheist and Nobel prize laureate, Dr. Francis Crick, advocated compulsory death of all who reach the age of 80 as part of “a new ethical system based on modern science.”
David Berlinski, a secular Jew who received his PhD from Princeton University, says “What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe is that God was watching what they were doing.”
Where does evil actually come from? Certainly not from God who has convincingly proven himself to be absolute- and undeniably love. Atheism is a fundamental and philosophical foundation for racism. In fact, Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ refers to “evolutionarily superior and evolutionarily inferior races….” It was evolutionists who actually caged a young black man in a zoo in New York in the early 1900’s by the name of Ota Benga. Due to the outrage of Christians, the atheists released the young black man. He was so traumatized and emotionally devastated after being treated like an animal that he committed suicide. (see Creation in the 21st Century)
All thanks to evolution, Adolf Hitler was able to convince his people that a certain race of people was evolutionarily inferior. In the words of Sir Arthur Keith, a militant anti-Christian physical anthropologist, “The German Führer (Hitler), as I consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany to conform to the theory of evolution.”
It is estimated in the history of our planet that 9 million people have been murdered in the name of religion. Did you know that between 60-100 million people have been murdered in the name of atheism in only the last 100 years? (See Stalin’s Russia or Emperor Mao’s China).
Hitler said, “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systemic cultivation of human failure.”
At the end of World War 2, Atheists around the world were screaming “Auschwitz is proof that there is no God!” Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who wrote the book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning,’ and was, himself, in an Auschwitz concentration camp, responded in kind, “People did not disown and deny God in Auschwitz. If anything, they grew closer to Him! Praying all the more harder and grabbing onto Him all the more tighter. In fact, it was atheists and secular humanists who are the ones who planned and perpetrated Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.”
The cruelty of atheism is not hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The Communist Torturers often said, “There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. ‘We can do what we wish.’” I have heard one torturer even say, “I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.” He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners- according to Richard Wurmbrand who was tortured for his faith in communist prisons.
I believe in the sun even when it's not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when God is silent. -Inscription on the wall of a Jewish Hideout in Cologne, Germany: World War 2
If I did not believe in a moral lawgiver that I must one day answer to, then what is to stop me from lying, cheating, stealing and manipulating any situation just to get ahead in this life (if this life is all there is?). Even murder would be permissible if that is what floats your boat (remember Albert Einstein’s definition of evil?) The problem with not believing in God is not that you don’t believe in God, but that you are liable to believe anything. You could fall victim to the deceit of any lying, treacherous evil on this earth.
Notre Dame professor Alvin Plantinga teaches, “now God can create free creatures, but he can’t cause or determine them to only do what’s right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good… the free-will defense, however, shows that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus, it solves the main philosophical problem of evil.”
Did you know that 75-80% of charity in the world is done by Christians? When millions were dying in Europe during the Black Plague, you considered yourself lucky if you knew a Christian because they were the only people who would nurse someone with the plague. If there is no God, then why is there so much good in the world?
A man was visiting the barber and the subject went to God. The barber said, “I don’t believe in God. If there was a God, there would not be so much suffering and disease and poverty.” The man walked out of the barber shop, looked up and down the street and went back in and told the barber, “I don’t believe in barbers.” The barber was confused. The man said, “I looked around outside and all I saw was people with long-dirty-messed up hair. So I don’t believe in barbers.” “They must come to me.” (Matthew 11:28-31)
After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, a reporter asked Mother Teresa how she could spend the majority of her life in the slums of India with the sick and homeless to which she abruptly answered, “Because Jesus loves me!”
All signs point to the reason for all the pain and heartache and hatred and evil in this world being, “Because people don’t come to him.”
In closing, our God “gives us treasures in darkness” (Isaiah 45:2-3) and “He makes all things work together for good for those who love Him” (Romans 8:28). Did you know that the root-word for excruciating is “crucifixion”? What God allowed to happen at Calvary was the worst most horrifying thing ever! Yet it was only through this dark suffering of our King Jesus that the whole entire world could be saved- the most wonderful and glorious thing the world has ever known! So immeasurable is His love for you poured out on that cross that the Greeks had to create an entirely new word to describe it: “Agape.”
