Facing the Issues

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary, a theologian, and a prolific writer. He wrote the following in his devotional book Victorious Living about how our "intellectual" objections are just a smoke-screen for our moral objections to God, Who is our righteousness. We need to remember this when we are dealing with souls:

"The barriers to finding God are not on God's side, but on ours. Since God is seeking us, then the problem is not of our finding God, but of letting Him find us. We must put ourselves in the way of being found by God. Some of us are not there. There are definite barriers on our side.

"Some of them are intellectual. People do have honest doubts, and I have spent many years in meeting those doubts, perhaps too many years, for I now see that the problem is usually deeper. Not always, but usually. For instance, a young man came puzzled about the Trinity. I replied that the emphasis in Christianity was not upon the Trinity but upon the incarnation, that the doctrine of the Trinity was rather overheard than heard in the New Testament, but still I could see reasons why the Trinity is reasonable.

"The lowest life is the simplest life: the amoeba is a single cell, but as we come up the scale of existence we find complexity emerging, so that when we come to man we find a very highly complex being made up of body, mind, and spirit--man is a trinity.

"The movement of life, then, seems to be from the simple to the complex. When we get to the highest of life of all, God, we should expect, not simplicity, but complexity--the Trinity is thus the natural culmination. But the movement of life upward is toward unity amid that complexity.

"Man is a trinity but he is also a unity. So in God there is a richer unity in the richer Trinity. I waited to see if my answer had any effect. It had none. By a swift insight I saw the young man's problem was not intellectual, but moral. I put my hand on his, and quietly asked if he was pure? His eyes dropped. He was not. His trouble was not honest doubt, but dishonest sin."