Religion keeps people from God?

By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean

Religion is this… people prepare a table with their offerings to the gods.

But a relationship with God is this: God prepares the table for us.

 

 

I Don’t Believe in Atheists

By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean

A long time friend of mine was a self-professed atheist for all of his adult life. He went through chemotherapy, and while enjoying a few beers, killed his liver, and was given only a few weeks to live. He had for many years mocked believers. A friend of mine said to me that it was terrible that Roger was dying, and especially so because he was an atheist. How terrible– how meaningless for someone who has no hope for their eternal future! He was waiting to die. (Like some of us?). Roger had a good attitude about it, he was friendly and jovial with those of us who came to visit him.

It was then that the Holy Spirit spoke to me, and I suddenly knew that Roger was not an atheist. With no explanation, I suddenly knew that Roger did very much believe in God and that he was absolutely terrified to peer over the precipice into a fate of eternal separation from God. He knew what that meant. I told my friend this, and said, “lets go talk with Roger about this, he is ready to accept Christ right now.” So we went in, and I said, “Roger, Ken and I want to pray with you. May we pray with you?” I will never forget the look that came over his face as he said nodded yes. He could no longer speak… but his yes was emphatic, thankful, fearful, and very intense.

“Father, thank you for Roger as our friend. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for wanting to be with us like a mother hen longs to be with her chicks. Thank you that we don’t have to be good enough to earn our way into heaven. When you were dying on the cross, you had become a man to die in our place, and the thief on the cross next to you said, “please remember me when you get to your kingdom,” you told him that today he would be with you in paradise. That thief had done nothing to deserve an eternity in heaven, he waited to the very last minute and all he did was believe, and you accepted him lovingly. Thank you God that you love Roger and Ken and me the same way. So God, we admit that we are rotten, and that we have done all kinds of bad things. We reject all that now, and we commit the rest of our lives to you– to live for you. Wash away our filth with your blood which was poured out for us, from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our toes. Make us new! Breathe your Holy Spirit into us, and fill us with your presence, from this day forward. Give Roger a peace that surpasses all logic, in Jesus’ name!” Even though he could not speak, he squeezed our hands as we prayed, and the earnestness showed on his face. He had been transformed, made new, and made whole. The God-shaped void in his life had suddenly in an instant been filled.

2013 was a tough year for me, but looking back, I am glad to have been in Iowa available to talk with my atheist friend. Just remember, if you are going through tough times, ask God to make it worthwhile and use you for His purposes!

A scientifically accurate account of the formation of the universe and the earth

By Taylor Moffitt of Halydean

Of all the world religions, and their sacred books, all of these books but one are mystical and full of inconsistencies.

If a book was produced by humans, it will contain errors and vague explanations of things, like a fortune teller. If a book is from God, it will be distinct. Only one book gives a concise scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. The Bible is simple, direct, and specific. It is full of historical and scientific references, and with detail. Instead of another bizarre creation myth, or an idea that the universe had always existed, the Bible is journal-like as a record of the earth’s initial conditions– correctly described from the standpoint of astrophysics and geophysics– followed by a summary of the sequence of changes where Earth came to be inhabited by life and ultimately by humans. The account is simple, elegant, and scientifically accurate. From the stated viewpoint of an observer on the Earth, both the order and the description of creation events perfectly match the established record of nature. It is amazing.

Does science support creationism?

 

By T. M. Halydean

We see God in the universe not because of things we do not yet understand, but rather the things which we now understand. Science shows that the universe had a moment of creation and it was ordered with laws of science. The precarious and fragile balance of all life on Earth, and all order in the cosmos, is held together by this order.

Less than 50 years ago, the overwhelming opinion of the scientific community was that the universe was eternal, and never had a beginning. Today, we know that the universe had a beginning, as was originally stated in the very first sentence of the Bible. Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson won a joint Nobel prize because they found the “echo” of the moment of creation when the universe exploded into being, and since that moment, the scientific community has had to come along to admitting that the universe had a beginning.

 

Figure 1. The timeline of the universe

 

If you search on Google for “WMAP” you can see a chart of all known scientific knowledge of the timeline of the universe, condensed into one image (see figure 1, or see NASA’s version at https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/060915/index.html). It starts with a burst of energy, and an arrow pointing to it which says, “Quantum fluctuations.” That idea was first proposed in the journal Nature almost 40 years ago.  This allows the creation of something from nothing as long as you have the laws of nature– these are called quantum fluctuations. Time started to exist only after the universe did, and there were quantum fluctuations (laws of quantum physics and laws of relativity) which existed prior to the universe, and prior to time. The universe can be created from absolute nothing, but only with the laws of nature, or quantum fluctuations, existing ahead of time. They create the universe, therefore they predate the universe, and therefore they predate our understanding of time.

These quantum fluctuations, or set of forces, are not physical. They act on the physical world. They created the physical world from absolute nothing. They predate the universe. This is the biblical definition of God– who first identifies himself as the Creator. He pre-dates time, is outside of time, is not physical, is a force, and creates the universe. Dr. Schroder, a former physics professor at MIT, had this to comment regarding the quantum fluctuations responsible for causing the universe: “Science has indeed discovered the Biblical God.”