POWERLINE #11 s: when the storms of life toss you around, what have you got to hold onto? d: grab onto the powerline. hi i'm dave clark s: and i'm shereen holier. during the next half hour, we've got some great music and talk on knowing and understanding God. d: plus, this week's problem letter. a listener wants help understanding how jesus could be God on earth. s: the powerline problem panel will have an answer. stay with us. d: a great song to start us out. "the evidence of God" by geoff moore. d: a great song to start us out. "the evidence of God" by geoff moore. s: and you're on the powerline with shereen and dave. marilyn is listed in the guiness book of records as having the highest iq in the world. her logic and reasoning skills are quite astonishing. recently someone asked marilyn what she thought the limits of human intelligence were. her reply is thought provoking. d: marilyn used a simple illustration to help us understand her answer. here goes: a flea is uable to fathom a fish. a fish is uable to fathom a dog. a dog can't understand mathmatics. humans are unable to fathom "who knows". to marilyn , the world's smartest person, the limits of human intelligence are unknown. but she is certain that they are fixed at some point. the reason is obvious. humans, like the flea, dog and fish, well we don't know what we don't know. s: nice that the world's smartest boffin will admit it. but even the average person can learn that truth by reading the bible. it tells us that man was created to take charge of the earth. though in power, a little lower than the angels. d: which means we will never understand in this life all the great mysteries of God, our Creator. s: except the most important things which He wants us to know. the group "Pray for Rain" has discovered some of them in their song "Do you wanna know love?" s: the show is Powerline and we're your hosts Shereen and Dave. time now to check the postbag and open up today's problem letter. d: it's one of the many addressed to the powerline's problem panel and if they can help you too, write us. whatever the problem or question especially if you feel you have no one else to turn to. listen for the address at the end of the show. s: now onto today's letter, it starts out: girl 1: i'm confused about God. I want to love the Lord and follow Him but it seems so hard to interpret what the Bible says about God. How could Jesus be God on earth? Who do i pray to? I try to accept things on faith but I have so many questions. Does this mean i'm not really saved? d: one thing to be sure of, God is not afraid of our questions. even though His ultimate desire is for us to follow Him and trust Him so that we may have eternal life, at the same time he leaves open many points for us to explore so that we learn to know him through our searching instead of someone elses' say so. s: but there are some points on which the bible is so clear that it cannot be mistaken. one of these is the divinity of Christ. throughout the new testament and the old testament we're told that God sent Jesus as the self expression of His own nature. God put on human clothes as it were, to show us himself in the flesh. His purpose was and is to restore our broken relationship with Him since the fall of Adam. d: the early church leaders debated the nature of Christ. They argued against people who said that Jesus was either human and merely had God-like qualities or those who said that He was totally divine and merely appeared human. The church counsel finally came to the point of affirming the truth that Jesus was Holy God and at the same time Holy Human. s: God did not create Jesus in the sense that he created the world and mankind. that would make Jesus just a creature alongside other creatures. and thus, he would not be capable of being our savior. the Bible says that Jesus is God's only begotten son which means Jesus is of the same nature as God. Jesus reveals God's desire and plan for everyone to be redeemed and reconciled to him. d: if we wanna know what God is like, we can look to Jesus. having the same nature, Jesus the Son and God the Father are one in the trinity. thus, whenever we pray to Jesus, we are praying to God and vice versa. it just depends on the aspect of God which is the focus of our thoughts at that point. so if you want to know more about this one to whom you are praying, read the Gospels beginning with John. s: learn about the kind of person Jesus was, and i think you'll find your faith in God growing just the same amount. d: and that's our panel's answer. drop us a line if they can help you too, on any subject. each letter gets a quick, confidential reply. s: have a pen or pencil handy, the adress will come at the end of the show. d: that's al denson and "nothing in all the world." d: alright, tell me about the importance of religion in your life. boy 1: With me, it's like I was raised in the church. On Sunday, it's like 'Church Time.' So I've sort of like grown up in that sense. It's not like I'm a 100% real faithful follower and such. At least I know my limits. boy 2: ...it was pretty much forced. Ok, when my grandfather was alive I was pretty much forced to go. When he died, now I don't...I try to get out of it and stuff. girl 1: religion has been a very big part of my life. it never used to but I went on a mission trip in december with a couple of friends from church and it really changed my life. and what i try to do everyday, everything that i do everyday, i do it for God. it's like all part of his big plan for me and everything. i gave up swearing and i'm trying to give up listening to pagan music but that's still something that's very big in my mind. alot of my friends changed. everything in my life just changed basically to what i thought was right. girl 2: like when you're small religion is forced onto you but when you're our age you can decide for yourself. and i had decided for myself and i do believe in Jesus and your life is better when you do make that the center of it because when you're focusing on yourself you don't really get anywhere. s: that's church of rythym, "take back the beat." d: and we're dave and shereen. "knowing God" is our topic today. s: and one of the most interesting questions people ask is about the problem of sin. If God loves us so much, why did he make man with the capacity to go against Him? d: C.S. Lewis, one of the most respected christian thinkers of this century, puts it this way: God created things which had free will. that means creatures that can go either wrong or right. some people think that they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possiblity of going wrong. but i cannot. if a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. and free will is what has made evil possible. s: so why did God give us free will? because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love, or goodness, or joy worth having. d: well the alternative is to have a world of robots mindlessly obedient to their creator. the height of God's creativity was to make us as unique persons, no two of us are alike. and He gave us the freedom to obey Him or reject Him. s: of course God knew what would happen if we used our freedom the wrong way. apparently he thought it worth the risk. d: perhaps some folk might feel inclined to disagree with Him. but there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God, he is the source from which all your reasoning power comes. you cannot be right and He wrong anymore than black can be the same as white. When you're argueing against him, you're argueing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all. s: it's like cutting off the branch you're sitting on. if God thinks the battle between good and evil is a price worth paying for free will then he might take it that it is worth paying. this way there's a chance that these creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen. d: instead of a toy world that only moves when he pulls the strings. s: we've shared with you today the thoughts of thinker C.S. Lewis as we consider the nature of God on Powerline. d: the next song in our lineup is a special one, performed by AVB, the Acapella Vocal Band. It's called Kyrie Eleison, which in the Greek means "God Go With US." Listen carefully to the sounds of this group. s: all of them were made with a human voice.