Tackling the Toughies: Christian Issues We Ponder and Puzzle

By Dale "Bud" Brauer

As Christians, we are often presented with questions that the Bible doesn't give clear-cut answers to, but with a little searching and a little thinking outside the box, we can postulate fairly accurate answers. This book is a collection of subjects that often frustrate or confuse Christians, with thoughts and insights into what the Bible says about them.

If you've ever had questions about heaven or hell, about marriage or divorce, about sin and its origin, or why we suffer, you may find answers here.

What happened to Cain after leaving Adam and Eve? How do we reconcile dinosaurs and the creation account? Is there life beyond our planet? Whether it is an issue of a personal nature or a larger extrapersonal issue, we have gathered insights into one book for your convenience.

Each issue in this book could be a book in itself, and many books have been written on some of these subjects, but our aim is to give you one source with insights and a biblical basis for these issues. The above issues, and more, can be found inside for your reading pleasure and edification!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781644168813

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Tackling the Toughies

Christian Issues We Ponder and Puzzle

Dale Bud Brauer

Copyright © 2018 by Dale Bud Brauer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Foreword

I’d like to say, in deciding to write this book, I realize that many of these topics can and have had entire books dedicated to each of them. My purpose is to offer biblical and sometimes personal insight into these issues, perhaps to give an insight into an issue that has not before been considered. Some topics are more serious and more personal than others; some are included to stretch our imaginations and get us thinking outside our mental box. Perhaps in the future I’ll tackle individual topics on a deeper basis, but for now, this purpose is to offer insight on a myriad of topics in a condensed format of a single book. I hope this book will help Christians expand their ability to think beyond their comfort zone and to provide sound biblical basis for those issues that can be so difficult in our personal lives.

—Bud Brauer, 2018

Part 1

Thinking Outside the Box

Chapter 1

Does Extraterrestrial Life Exist?

Aliens … UFOs … science … Christianity … There were two camps of influence when I was growing up: those who believed in science and those who believed in the Bible. Now both camps made compelling arguments concerning controversial issues, and as a young Christian, I felt the pressure of school and of the church forcing me to choose a side. Being raised in a strong Christian home, I felt that I had to believe in the Bible, but there were questions science raised to which I had no answers. In my sophomore year of high school, for example, I once got kicked out of my biology class. My teacher was teaching evolution, and I believed the biblical account of creation, and when I asked, Why don’t we see apes evolving today? it flustered her. When I said her ancestors might have swung from trees but mine didn’t, I was gone, but I think that was when I really began questioning if science and the Bible were really at odds, or did they perhaps actually support each other?

Questions are always good; don’t ever hesitate to ask questions if your spirit is troubled by the status quo. Questions stimulate thought, thoughts lead to insights, insights are the beginning of ideas, and ideas spark questions. The saying Ignorance is bliss is true, for the guy who doesn’t have a clue just chugs merrily along his way oblivious to the depth of his surroundings. However, the inquisitive spirit, the student of learning, finds more and more layers of knowledge the deeper he digs. The more he learns, the more aware of his real ignorance he becomes. The more I learn, the dumber I realize I am.

This leads me to my first revelation I had some years ago. I was teaching a senior high Sunday school group, and the question was posed to me, questioning whether I believed there was other intelligent life out in the universe. I answered, yes, I believed there could be, and the debate began. You see, there were still those two camps that our kids were forced to choose from. I let the debate go on for a bit. Then I called up one of the group leaders, who was championing the side of No, there isn’t. I handed him a dry erase marker. He looked puzzled; so I walked to the four-foot-by-eight-foot whiteboard on the wall and told him this board represents all the knowledge in the universe—known and unknown from corner to corner. Now how much knowledge did he think mankind had learned throughout our total history? Draw a circle on the board. He thought for a few moments, then drew a small dot near one corner. Now, I asked him, how much of that knowledge do you have? Well, he looked at me for a moment and replied, Not even a speck on the dot. So I asked, With all that knowledge out there that we don’t know, that mankind throughout history hasn’t touched, how can we say with any certainty that no other life exists? I had some very sober high school students that morning.

We feel that we are alone in the universe for one reason only; we are arrogant in our fallen state. Satan convinced Adam and Eve to sin by playing on their vanity—telling them they could be like God, though there was never any hope of that; for the created can never equal the Uncreated, a lesson that Satan, through his own vanity, had already learned. God is beyond the scope of creation, unbound by time or boundaries outside of all the parameters that define us. We are so far removed from God that there isn’t an adequate example to illustrate that gulf between the created and Uncreated. But our vanity, our arrogance, has been plaguing us ever since Satan suggested we could bridge that gulf on our own, there in the garden. You see, after his attempt to be like God sadly and dramatically failed and resulted in his ejection from heaven, his mission became to take down as many with him as he could, for misery loves company.

Not only is our vanity, our arrogance, the reason we poo-poo the idea of other life in our universe, also causes many to doubt the existence of God. We want to be the Supreme Being in our universe, but we fall far short. If anyone can ponder the intricacies of nature and not admit to a divine Creator, then the reality is they are not digging very deep, or they are fooling themselves. Nature screams out the existence of God in all its intricacies. But in our sinful state, we choose to ignore the evidence of a creator and seek to explain creation through our own knowledge, our science.

Science has determined that our universe is governed by natural laws, but they are too precise to be happenstance. Even these laws disprove the idea of evolution, of a creation that just happened. Just to name one example: the second law of thermodynamics states—and I’ll put it in layman’s terms—that any environment, when left to its own random mutation, goes from a state of order to a state of disorder. In other words, we should be de-evolving into apes, not the other way around, if we believe in science and evolution. If science is wrong and evolution is right, then we should see buildings growing randomly out of the prairie, not old buildings decaying and falling apart.

So what does the Bible say about the potential for other life? I was in a Bible study once and had a man tell me that if there were other life in the universe, the Bible would indicate it. I told him it did, to which he responded that he’d been through Bible College and read the Bible from cover to cover, and he could say definitively that the Bible doesn’t. I told him I was sorry he missed it, then shared my thoughts on where it indicated the possibility.

Let’s examine the creation story in Genesis, the first chapter.

(1) In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (2) The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (3) Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light. (4) And God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. (5) God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.

(6) Then God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. (7) Thus God made a firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. (8) And God called the firmament heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.

(9) Then God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place, and let dry land appear; and it was so. (10) And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good. (11) Then God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seeds, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth; and it was so. (12) And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields the seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (13) So the evening and the morning were the third day (NIV).

So there is the record for the first three days of creation. The chapter continues of course, through the rest of the creation process, but for the purposes of our discussion here, this is enough. Did you catch the reference to potential life somewhere else? I’m not arrogant enough to believe I have the answers, and with a whole universe of untapped knowledge to prove me wrong, I could never say other intelligent life doesn’t exist, but I also know that God wouldn’t leave something so blatantly evident right in front of us if He didn’t want us to at least consider the possibility. Did you figure it out yet? The question we must ask after examining this passage is, What happened to the water above the firmament?

God gave us an imagination for a reason (some of us have a far more developed one than others!), so I ask you to use it here. We see that God just created the earth and all that is in it. Yet being God, who is all knowing, all powerful, and ever present, He has another body of watery substance of the same composition as the earth on the other side of the heavens. Now this doesn’t require imagination. This is fact, and if you believe that the Bible is the Word of God, then this is an undisputable fact. But here’s where we can let our imaginations run …

Just as God created earth, and life, and animals, and mankind here, imagine if he did the very same thing on the other side of the heavens. God, being who He is, could have created a thousand or ten thousand different earths across the breadth of our universe. We can’t know that, but we do know the potential for one is there. And if we allow our imaginations some room to run, let’s consider the potential possibilities.

Just as our creation was perfect in its conception, let’s imagine our mirror earth is too. But instead of being tempted and falling for Satan’s guile, this other world’s Adam and Eve resist, and they remain blameless in the sight of God. Satan, being a created being, may not even have access to this world! They are allowed to eat of the fruit from the tree of life, and they know no death. Their offspring likewise live untold ages, and instead of wars and fighting and killing, they live in peace and harmony.

Because they have lived so long, and because their world knows no disease or sickness, they naturally prosper at a far faster pace than we could imagine. Because they live so long, they are able to acquire vast amounts of knowledge, both individually and collectively, and don’t have the issue of having to relearn it each generation. While we are able, after some five thousand years, to put a man on the moon, our counterparts are involved in interplanetary exploration, and perhaps even interstellar space travel! They are exploring far beyond the bounds of our capabilities, and even our imaginations! Imagine, if you will, that one day they actually venture to our solar system, way out on the fringe of the Milky Way, a tiny planet in a miniscule galaxy on the edge of the heavens. They find our planet and discover our civilization, in all its broken glory. Can you imagine their reaction?

Here is a perfect race, vastly knowledgeable and ancient, viewing our civilization from afar. They see the scars on our earth from mining, fighting, and natural disasters. They see the pollution filling our atmosphere, destroying our air, slowly choking the very life blood of man away. They see the peoples of our world fighting each other—from nations down to gangs, to individuals. They see the crimes committed—burglaries, robberies, assaults, abuses, even murder—and struggle to comprehend such actions and such mental exercises as lying and deceit. All of these things are foreign and repugnant and reprehensible to a race that knows no wrong. They are confounded how their perfect Creator could allow such a malady to exist in His perfect world.

Imagine further that they delve into our past, and they find out that to save us from our sin, Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and we crucified Him. We whipped Him, spat upon Him, mocked Him, and brutalized Him to the human breaking point; and then we nailed Him to a tree as a public display of shame and defeat. Can you imagine the potential reaction of a people who live in perfect community with God learning that we killed their God in such a brutal and degrading manner? My imagination thinks they would be extremely hostile toward us.

The fact that they live in perfect community with God would be our saving grace, however, for despite our actions, God still loves us and does protect us. Despite the righteous indignation they would feel toward our world, they would not act against us if it defied God’s will. I can’t imagine there would be any great interaction between our world and theirs, especially after the discovery of the sin that permeates our world; for we would be like the plague to a perfect race, and they would seek to stay inoculated against our diseased state. I would imagine we would be nothing more than a brief interruption for them in their travels. After all, why would a diseased, polluted planet hold interest when the entire universe of perfect creation is waiting to be explored? Yet a visit from them would be eye-opening to us, for we would have a firsthand look at the what might have been had Adam and Eve made different choices.

Our reaction to such a visit would also be interesting. Assuming contact is made, are we accepting of an ancient and seemingly benevolent race, or have we preprogramed our response by ingesting too much fiction from movies