“Adam and Eve are not real people!!”

Those words were scrawled in red ink across my Human Biology midterm, followed by an “F”.

I hadn’t even mentioned Adam and Eve. I hadn’t mentioned Jesus, the Holy Spirit, God the Father, Jonah, or Noah. The test question was phrased in such a way that the only correct answer was to say, in writing, that I believed the current theory of evolution.

But I didn’t! (And still don’t.) My answer began by saying “I do not accept evolution as it is currently proposed because…” and I went on to point out what I thought were glaring inconsistencies with my professor. (Biology and geology were my major and minor at Minnesota State University)

Why the reference to Adam and Eve? Why the “F”? Oh we had some history, this professor and I. My hand often shot up in the air to interrupt him whenever he said something that contradicted my faith. He knew who I was. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me.

Sitting down to watch Christopher Spencer’s movie God’s Not Dead (GND), I quickly found a kindred spirit in Josh Wheaton one of the film’s main characters. Josh is in his introductory level philosophy class and on the first day the professor tells the class that he does not want to waste precious time arguing about “God”. The teacher (well-played by Kevin Sorbo) asks all the students to sign a simple confession saying “God is dead.” Josh balks, his professor speaks to him condescendingly, and the film is now underway.

Most Christians will appreciate GND. It is a nice bit of writing, directing, filming and acting; cleverly introducing multiple storylines and characters which all intersect by the film’s conclusion.

Most Christians will identify with one of more of the characters: The one searching for good in an aged relative’s Alzheimer’s, the one with a life-threatening disease, the Christian who feels like a minority on campus (or at work).

Most Christians will enjoy seeing their side “win” for a change. Josh goes toe-to-toe with his professor, and although he does not “prove” God’s existence in his philosophy class, he does manage to dig deeper into his professor’s firmly held belief that God is dead.

Most Christians have been in shoes like Josh’s. While we are not to be “of the world”, still we are to be “in the world.” This is often a very hard place to be. Seeing Josh come away “victorious”, or at least not defeated, caused cheers in the theater I was in. Clearly Josh is not alone.

I especially found myself in Josh’s shoes when he countered his professor’s position, only to have his professor refer to things which a freshman like Josh knew nothing about. I’ve been in that seat with egg on my face, having blurted out what I thought was a witty little “zinger” to put my professor in his place only to be shown that he knew much more about my arguments to I knew about his.

Josh isn’t satisfied to say “because the Bible says so.” He realizes this carries no weight with someone who doesn’t believe the Bible to be authoritative. He undertakes to learn his professor’s material as best he can. This is a Biblical principle called “vocation”. Josh was a student, as such his vocation in philosophy class to learn what philosophy says and what value its discipline brings to the debate.

Again, GND follows a number of different storylines. I found the character Ayisha’s to be most compelling. In her we see Jesus’ words about being rejected by family on account of Him come true. I have never been in her shoes, am thankful for that, and am in awe of so many people around the world and throughout history who truly have been.

Another compelling storyline was that of the character Amy Ryan. (She is the reporter.) Most Christians have spoken with people like Amy. What challenging conversations these are! God grant us compassion and wisdom as He uses us to show them His Son.
This was revealed by the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, for every lowest price for viagra thousand men there were twenty-two suffering from erectile dysfunction in the year 1999. Prescription meds are sildenafil canada great for alleviating the pain, in addition to using manual adjustments to make sure the joints are moving and functioning properly. Using this medication can be dangerous, as these cialis on line drugs only suppress the symptoms and side effects but don’t cure the underlying reasons. As endothelial damage causes low nitric oxide, and the nitric oxide will help buy cipla viagra in blood vessel dilation.

Having given praise, here are some faults.

Josh goes to great lengths to try to prove the existence of God with logical debates but with a title like “God’s Not Dead” I wish he had spoken of Jesus’ resurrection. Saint Paul said to the Corinthians, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:17–19 ESV) Earlier Paul had told them, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”  (1 Corinthians 2:2 ESV)

As I said, I have literally been in Josh’s shoes. I have beat my head against that wall, going up against professors who were much smarter than I was (am). Saint Paul was no slouch though! He was an academic mind par excellence. Yet when he stood on Mars Hill, when he stood before governors and emperors, and when he wrote to the churches of Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, he simply told them of the resurrection.

In your desire to be right…don’t miss the resurrection

Matthew and Mark wrote about Jesus’ resurrection not ten years after the facts, Peter preached openly about it not two months after it happened. The people who could have easily disproved this were still alive and had a vested interest in doing just so, but they could not. The empty tomb was right there in town. They last had custody of His corpse, their answers for what happened didn’t even convince their own theologians. Contemporary Jewish theologians spoke of Jesus as being alive again. The Jewish historian Josephus writes of Jesus being alive after death, as does the Roman historian Publius Tacitus. Though all these writers attribute it to sorcery or magic, the fact that they record it corroborates the reports of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, James, and Jude.

Back then, claims about God not being dead, God being alive, couldn’t be disproved because the claims were true.

The absence of the resurrection in the film hints at a theological weakness: Faith does not come from cleverly devised arguments. Faith does not come from “one-upping” my professor, my neighbor, my classmate, or my co-worker.

Paul told the Romans: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17 ESV) When Peter gave his “great confession” about who Jesus was, Jesus said: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by My Father in Heaven.” (Matthew 16:17 ESV)

Instead of compromising the Word of God in order to redefine the Big Bang as just God saying “let there be light”, I wish that Josh had undertaken to show that God’s not dead by telling his class about Jesus who is not dead and what this means for them.

Perhaps I’m just looking for a way to do penance for the days when I was resolved to know and argue proofs of a global flood at the expense knowing “Christ and him crucified.”

GND speaks a lot about ”faith” and “having faith”. Don’t forget that faith is not in itself; in it’s own strength or in it’s own fortitude. Faith has an object; Jesus Christ who is the second person of the Trinity, born of the Virgin Mary, died and risen again. Faith is in HIM and in what HE did at Golgotha and on Easter.

We can’t always say why a child’s mother dies. We can’t always say why a hit-and-run driver escapes. We can’t always say why a young woman tests positive for cancer decades before the statistics say she should. These are hard questions for believers as well as for unbelievers. The answers aren’t found in logic, reason, or philosophy.

We can say with absolute certainty that God is not dead.

He was but he isn’t.

He is risen.

When on Easter evening he says, “Peace be with you,” he means it. Sorrow, hatred, sin, death, and even hell had given him their all. Yet there he was, alive. If alive then his promises are true: the one about being with us always, the one about a place for us in Heaven, and the one about coming back to bring us there.

GND is a good film. Had Josh’s class, or Amy, or Ayisha been told about the resurrection, it would have been much better.