Pastors Who Don’t Believe

In my senior year in high school and first in college I believed. But I felt the need to examine and be sure of my faith. One thing that prompted that was wondering if all the talk of priests and preachers I heard was really so, and did they believe it to be so? Did they really believe what they were saying.
To my surprise I found that many did not. They did not believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he physically arose from the dead, that he ascended into heaven. I found many did not believe his miracles. Now, since the miracles of Christ were recorded as evidence that we might "believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (Jn. 20:31), I understood that those clergy men did not believe that Jesus was the foretold Messiah, or that he was in origin in a unique way, the actual Son of God.
My next thought was to wonder why they used such terms as resurrection, hope, redemption, and eternal life. Their explanation was that these were connotation words that people responded to and were thus useful in conveying a concept of the spiritual into life in this material universe. For a young un-jaded mind it was not difficult to conclude that they believed all these words really conveyed a lie, but that they could use that lie to their own ends. That is a harsh judgment they would not eagerly accept. Yet, to this day, I believe that is a correct assessment.
Here is why. If Jesus Christ is not the son of God as the scriptures claim in prophecy, fulfillment and specific declaration, then the scriptures are misleading and a lie themselves. And if that is so, try this question. What do you know for sure about God? Now, for all the assertions of people making judgments about God, saying, "Well I just don’t believe God would or would not do such and such." Oh, really? Upon what basis? We can’t just make it up about God. Anything we conclude about God on our own has no basis. As Dostoyevsky declared through one of The Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God, there is no right or wrong, any behavior is acceptable. Of course, there are those who believe exactly that today. And if that is so, and Jesus Christ is not the son of God, and the scriptures are not his word, we have absolutely no hope or assurance of anything beyond this life. And one day when earth either freezes in eternal uninhabitable ice, or is obliterated by fiery collision, what will existence and life have meant? Human life will be no more than a match struck in the darkness of eternity, and then extinguished forever. It meant and means nothing at all.
And clergymen and women who do not believe, cannot give us an ounce of hope. All they can give us are lying words. And the answer to the question, "What do we know about God," is a resounding nothing. Well, what do those clergypeople have to offer us? Nothing more than their ivory tower existence in their religious organizations and the opportunity for us to give them our money. That’s it. Nothing more.
On the other hand, assessing the prophecies of the scriptures, seeing them all come together centuries later in Jesus Christ, seeing his teaching and works, finding no reasonable explanation for the empty tomb from which his disciples declared he was raised and whereof they were witnesses, and concluding he is the Son of God, and that the scriptures are the word of God, we can hope, we can believe in redemption and eternal life. We can believe there is truth to live by. Thank God.
For more information or discussion, contact me: dalsmelser@aol.com
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