I cannot force you to Believe God

There is no way that I can force anyone to believe God or to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.

Sad to say, over the history of the Christian Church many have tried to force conversion of unbelievers. This is not Biblical and has opened the Christian Church up to shame and ridicule. God wants you to believe, but you must come to Him willingly.

No, I cannot force you to believe God, but I can give you some information that I hope will make you think.

Someone commented on one of my posts that “we know the New Testament was written 300 years after it supposed to have happened.” This unbeliever went on and on about other things, but his basic statement on when the New Testament was written formed the basis of his argument.

Sorry to tell this person and anyone else who holds to this lie, that all of the New Testament had to have been written before 70 A.D. Between 30 and 35 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

How can I say that, you might ask?

The answer is simple. We know that the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in that year. In the Gospels Jesus predicted that the Temple would be destroyed. If that had happened after the New Testament was written, the writers would have used it as proof that what Jesus predicted had come true.

Because there is NO mention of the Temple being destroyed in any of the New Testament books, we must accept that the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing when those books and letters were written and distributed.

My unbelieving friend must have confused the writing of the New Testament with the beginning of the assembling of it in the form we now have. The sorting out as to which books or letters were to be included in the New Testament started as early as 170 with the Muratorian Canon followed by the Council of Laodicea in 363.

But all of the New Testament, including the Gospels, Acts, and the epistles were written and being read in the churches of the time, throughout the late 1^st century.

The truth of the New Testament’s early writing means that those who wrote it were alive at the time Jesus walked the earth and taught, and were witnesses of His life, death and resurrection. Also many of those who read or heard the New Testament read in the small churches of the time were also witnesses of the life of Jesus.

Simply put, if the New Testament was full of lies and distortions, it would never have survived.

No one who does any research at all can deny that Jesus was a REAL person and that the New Testament books were written very early in the history of the Church.

But I still cannot force you to believe God.

But I will give you some more things to think about.

Many unbelievers point to the theory of evolution as proof there is no god and that we can explain how we got here naturally with no help from above.

It all started with the “Big Bang” they say.

Did you know that when that theory first came out, many unbelievers spoke loudly against it? Why? Because it postulated that something came from nothing; that everything we know just happened in less than the blink of an eye. That is exactly the way the Bible talks about the creation in the book of Genesis, God spoke and things were created.

Something out of nothing, the evolutionists still can’t explain how that happened.

Think about how complicated this world is and how many plants and animals interact and depend on each other. That could not have come about by accident. That doesn’t even take into account the many complicated parts of the human body that would have had to “evolve” at the same time in order to be of any use what so ever. For example, why would we need an optic nerve if we didn’t have an eye yet? How could any parts of the human eye become part of the body when there was no use for them until all the rest of the parts of the eye were in place? Did they just sit there waiting for the next mutation to come along and then the next and the next and so one? I don’t think so.

Think about this, all we have is the fossil record which is nothing much more than the bones of long dead animals. We cannot see the soft tissue and can only guess at what these animals looked like, not to mention how they acted. The so called proof of evolution is that we have similar bones from similar types of animals, so we guess that one evolved into another. A case can easily be made for a Creator who used a similar design to create His creatures.

I still cannot force you to believe God.

But I can give you more to think about.

We know that Jesus, called the Christ, lived and we know that His life and teachings, His miracles, death and resurrection were written about and taught all through the Mediterranean region within a few years of His death.

We know that His followers were persecuted and put to death for their belief in a risen Lord and that belief changed the world.

We also know that belief in Jesus Christ has, throughout the centuries, changed many lives and given much that is good to this world. Hospitals, orphanages, schools, colleges and great universities were all started by believers in the life, death and resurrection of a carpenter from a small village at the far western end of the Mediterranean Sea. Someone who was never the leader of even a small country and someone who never traveled more than a hundred miles or so from where He was born, yet that someone changed the world.

No I cannot force you to believe God.

I can ask you think about all the prophecies in the Old Testament that speak of Jesus, written many hundreds if not thousands of years before He was born, which He fulfilled to the letter. Do a google search on the prophecies of the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus and you will see what I’m talking about, but I can’t force you to believe God.

As a Christian friend of mine is fond of saying, “You either believe or you don’t.”

That’s all there is to it, you either Believe God or you don’t, I cannot force you.

All I can hope for is that if you are one of those who don’t believe God, that what I have written here will at least give you something to think about.

And if you are a believer, then my hope is that what I write here will cause you to come closer to God and His Son Jesus.