One of the chief complaints atheists have against Christianity is that your belief is subjective, irrational, unscientific. In particular, the idea of “faith” often comes in for attack. For example, in Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists, we read, “’Faith’ is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway” (p. 23). He defines faith as either “belief without evidence,” or “pretending to believe things you do not know.”

12. HASTENING THE SECOND COMING AND EMBRACING THE HARVEST PRINCIPLE

Heaven has put it in our power by consecrated, Christ-reflecting lives to hasten Jesus' return. God will wait for the maturing of Christian character in a significant number of people as the chief condition determining those events, such as the latter rain, loud cry, sealing, and Sunday law, which affect the time when probation for the world shall close, and thus the time of the Second Coming.

9. JESUS CURRENTLY MAKING FINAL ATONEMENT

Jesus' atonement was promised in Eden. With His incarnation and then death as our Substitute upon the cross, His atoning work was begun. He rose from the dead and went to heaven in A.D. 31 to represent us before the Father, who received His sacrifice for us. Through that sacrifice we can be right with God as soon as we accept His gift of forgiveness and heart cleansing. In A.D. 1844 He entered the second apartment of the heavenly sanctuary, commencing the closing phase of His atonement. Today, Jesus is making the final atonement.

5. Christ’s Character Reproduced in Us

Justification is God’s way of simultaneously counting men right and making them so. In declaring a man just, God writes no fiction. The disciple experiences the process of sanctification and the character of Christ is perfectly reproduced in us. Both justification and sanctification are the work of God and are necessary and causative for salvation.

The Last Generation: in recent years we are hearing many different things about the idea of the last generation. Some see the idea as simply describing God’s gospel purpose for end-time Christians. Others attack it as an unchristian heresy.

It is fascinating that something so fundamental, something that should be clear and obvious, so indisputably true or false, could come to be so much in dispute. Is it really that difficult to understand the Bible? Are the inspired writings God has given us so plastic and malleable that they can easily be misunderstood? If the core of the message and mission of God’s church is so disputable, how can we anticipate uniting together in a faithful work and seeing Jesus win the great controversy between good and evil?

The Declaration of Independence reads in part,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Imagine this scenario. Someone comes up to you on the street on a warm spring day a few months from now, and asks you, How do you know that Christianity is true? What would you say? What evidence would you refer to? And if this asking person rejects the “evidence” provided by you, in an apparently intelligent way, even logical way, would you be shaken? Would you walk away from the exchange with doubts maybe about the truth of Christianity?