Mere Christianity Bible Study - The Shocking Alternative

I.                    An evil power has made himself the Prince of this World.

A.    example – of mother to child clean up room – mother is in authority, but things go against her will – BUT it is her will which she has left the childten to be free to go untidy

B.     same concept in the universe – creatures can go wrong or right

C.    free will has made evil possible

D.    a world of automata (creatures that worked like machines) would be hardly worth creating

 

II.                 Difficulty in disagreeing with God

A.    ex – you could not be right and he wrong more than a stream can rise higher than its own source

B.     Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?

1.      We are not of rotten stuff – the goodness of His creation has allowed for the ecellence as we choose to go right, but this also leads to worseness if we go wrong

2.      Sky scraper example – the taller the more magnificent, the crash the deadly

 

III.               How did the Dark Power go wrong?

A.    The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first (wanting to be God)

B.     This was Satan’s sin, and this was the sin he taught the human race

C.    Satan taught Adam and Eve to “be like gods” by following what they felt

D.    From all these sins of self we have continues the tradition throughout history of trying to find something other God which will make us happy.

E.     There is no such thing as happiness and peace apart from God

 

IV.              God’s gifts to help us cope

A.    a conscience

B.     good dreams: stories of grace

C.    chose a people and hammered into their heads that there was only one Him and he cares about right conduct

D.    The real shock: a man/God who claimed to forgive ANY sins

1.      either this really is God or so preposterous as to be comical

2.      he acted as He was the one offended for sins ŕ if not God, “his words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history”

V.                 You cannot say “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his clain to be God.”

A.    A mere man would not say the things he said and still be a great moral teacher

B.     He would either be a lunatic or the Devil