I conclude my blog posts consisting of quotations from Ken Samples’ book with this one:

“The Christian truth claim is that creatures made in God’s image can only find genuine rest and peace for their souls through an intimate relationship with their Creator-Redeemer God.” This reality is made possible by the indwelling of the repentant human soul by the Holy Spirit sent as promised by Jesus Christ upon His resurrection. In our time we are blessed to hear God’s voice as well as to speak to Him by prayer. (John 10:27)

In my books I discuss the process of sanctification which in neurological terms involves synaptic plasticity. I am pleased to include in this post a paragraph from Samples’ book that speaks powerfully to sanctification:

“Redemption of humans comes through having faith (confident trust and reliance) in Jesus Christ’s perfect life, atoning death, and glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Upon regeneration (spiritual rebirth, John 3:3), the Holy Spirit implants a new, righteous nature in the justified-by-faith sinner (Romans 5:1). However, a person’s sin-affected nature remains even after conversion; that is why Christians still struggle significantly with sin (1 John 1:8-10). Conversion or initial salvation is the beginning, not the end, of a long, challenging, and dynamical process of transformation called sanctification (being set apart) and internally transformed to do God’s will.”

And it is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in repentant believers that provides counsel and help in this process by God’s grace.

“Jesus’ resurrection lies at the very center of the historic Christian faith. It stands both as the faith’s central doctrinal belief and the religion’s primary evidence in terms of truth claims. It is what makes Easter Sunday of critical significance for Christians. The resurrection is so important that, in 1 Corinthians 15:14-15a, Paul declares, ‘If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God.’” This is a key quote from Samples’ book.

And we are blessed in our time that as promised, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon his resurrection to indwell repentant believers to restore the intimate, personal, two-way communion always desired by God for mankind but lost at the Fall.

Samples continues: “First and foremost, the incarnation uniquely reveals God’s love and care for us by demonstrating his desire for a redemptive relationship with us. As both God and man, Jesus Christ can reconcile the two parties. As C. S. Lewis put it, ‘The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.’”

I am pleased to share a quote from Samples’ book that confirms the point I make in my books and blogs that our Creator God wants a personal, bidirectional relationship with His human creations. The indwelling Holy Spirit makes this possible.

“The God of the Bible is an infinite and eternal tripersonal Creator while humans are finite and temporal creatures. This Creator-creature distinction means humans can never fully comprehend or exhaustively understand God as God understands himself. Yet those profound limitations don’t mean that humans can’t apprehend God and genuinely know him and enjoy a personal relationship with him.”

Samples states that “John Lennox draws the logical conclusion that science’s dependence on and congruence with abstract mathematics is grounded in God: ‘One of the most powerful evidences, to my mind, that there is an eternal mind behind the universe is first of all, that we can do science, that we can do it in the language of mathematics, that we have language we can use. We can use abstract concepts that are not material to describe things that are physical. All of that points in one direction, and one direction only, and it’s this: In the beginning was the Word, not the particles.’”

Ken Samples addressed the problem of consciousness, noting that “scholars in fields concerned with consciousness must contend with the relationship between consciousness and the brain (known as the mind-body problem). While recognizing the profound complexity of the issue, naturalists have long proposed that it has a natural explanation. Secular neuroscientists believe physical events (brain) cause mental events (mind). According to this widely held view, consciousness is merely a byproduct of the brain (called epiphenomenalism). It is believed that the mind emerged as a caused property of the brain once the brain reached a certain level of evolutionary complexity.” Samples continues to cite comments by Thomas Nagel, philosopher of mind, who “concludes that Darwinian materialism has failed as a comprehensive scientific explanation for conscious reality. Nagel rejects both reductionist and emergent physical explanations for consciousness, stating that ‘consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.’” I conclude this post with Samples’ comments, “Christian theism and the existence of the biblical God provide a rational explanation for the presence of conscious beings in the universe. Christian philosopher Gregory Ganssle offers a succinct explanation: ‘If God exists, then the primary thing that exists is itself a conscious mind of unlimited power and intellect. This mind has its own first-person perspective, and it can think about things. The notion that such a mind, if it creates anything, would create other conscious minds that have their own first-person perspectives and can think about things is not a great mystery.’ . . . It is more reasonable to conclude that the human mind, personhood, reason, and self-awareness ultimately stem from a source (the mind of God) that possesses all these incredible qualities exponentially.”

I have just finished reading a book by my former colleague at Reasons To Believe (reasons.org), Ken Samples. It is entitled “Christianity Cross-Examined: Is It Rational, Relevant, and Good?” I will be posting selections from his book that relate to points I have made in my books and blogs.

On August 18th at 9 AM PDT I am scheduled to be interviewed by phone for a WebTalkRadio.net podcast, Books on Air. I will have the opportunity in a short edited time of about 15 minutes to direct the discussion to my two books and my website and blogs. I will let you know when and how to access the interview.

Consider that God created the waves that comprise our universe. God transcends His creation but can and does interact within it. To be sure God may have the means to commune with Man apart from all that is known about information transmission, but there is reason to accept the likelihood that He also uses the wave forms He created. Also, consider that the Holy Spirit indwells repentant mankind. As our own minds have the capacity to generate wave forms that pass through our neural networks, so also does the Mind of God via His indwelling Holy Spirit.