Have People Made God Into a Wimp?

In the early part of the 1800s German university professors decided that the miracles credited to Jesus Christ in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were just too hard to swallow for people living in such a technologically advanced time in history. So, they conveniently erased all the supernatural acts of Jesus, leaving him to be just a misunderstood teacher.

Later in that same century Charles Darwin published his book “On the Origin of Species” in which he relieved God of his duties as Creator and Preserver of the universe.

A century passed along with two world wars which decimated the planet and in the 1960s Time magazine declared, with the encouragement of French philosophers, that God was dead.

In the early 1970s signers of the “Humanist Manifesto” boldly declared that humanity could not look to the Divine for help stating: “We are the masters of our destiny.”

God has taken a lot of hits over the last two hundred years. Surprisingly though, people haven’t given up on him completely. It may be the fear factor: Who do you turn to when no one can help except God? Or, it could be that people don’t know how to fill the vacuum if they take him out of their lives. So there still remains an overwhelming majority of people who believe God exists. The only problem is, they’ve reduced him to the category of a wimp.

Due to the influences of Darwin and the humanists, for most people, God is nothing more than a concept, or an impotent elderly gentleman wringing his hands over the sad state of affairs we human beings have gotten ourselves into. Oh, once in a while God does something impressive, but his involvement is rather erratic and inconclusive. The popular God of today is a token symbol of spirituality. The one who really holds the power is the individual human being.

This weekend at our services we’re going to look at a story of Jesus Christ’s life without the cynical glasses of the German university professors of the 1800s. In this story we don’t see a wimpy, misunderstood Jesus. No, we stand before a jaw droppingly awesome Jesus. A Jesus who speaks a word and a dead man comes back to life. Fairy tale? Hardly. The New Testament Gospels are historical documents with solid historical evidence to back up what they present. The only way to discredit the histories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is to take the attitude: “I don’t believe miracles can happen, therefore what is written about Jesus didn’t happen.” That kind of thinking though is not based on historical investigation, that’s based on the belief God doesn’t exist therefore miracles can’t happen.

The Jesus of history, the Jesus of the Bible not only has mind-blowing power, he is also totally committed to the human race. No, Jesus is no wimp. He is the awesome God – exactly the God we need.

Saturday night worship: 6:00 pm
Sunday morning worship: 10:00 am