What would Jesus say to Bill Maher?

• Raised in New Jersey to a Catholic father and Jewish mother
• Left religion at 13 when his father rejected the positions of the Catholic Church
• Attended Cornell University graduating with a BA in English
• Became a stand-up comedian and appeared on TV and in smaller acting roles
• Landed comedy show, “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher” from 1993-2002
• Though the show received numerous awards, it was finally cancelled for Maher’s controversial and offensive remarks after 9/11 which caused the sponsors to withdraw their sponsorship
• Maher went to cable TV with his sarcastic and attack brand of humor by launching the hit show “Real Time with Bill Maher”
• Maher is a frequent commentator on various cable news networks, namely CNN, MSNBC, and HLN. Maher has regularly appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and has also been a frequent guest on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Rachel Maddow Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Maher has also appeared as a guest on HLN’s The Joy Behar Show
• He describes himself as a progressive and espouses decidedly liberal political views
• On the board of PETA and Advisory Board for Project Reason, an atheist- oriented think tank dedicated to spreading the message of secularism
• He is a caustic and comedic critic of conservative politics, family values and all religious viewpoints
• His movie, “Religulous” was an in your face sarcastic critique of religion, seeking to portray religious people as mindless buffoons
• Bill Maher is a skeptic, atheist, “apathest”, who describes himself as having no belief in or interest in God and a disregard for all religion
Does the Bible address people who espouse atheism and willfully reject God?
Romans 1:18-25
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
1. You reject the truth because you are suppressing the truth
• No one is born an atheist
• There are intellectual atheists, moral atheists and emotionally-hurt atheists
• Because of God’s revelation in creation, atheists are without excuse
• Most people who claim to be atheists use this as an excuse to avoid seriously thinking through the gospel
• The real issue is that people suppress the truth that they are rejection
2. The knowledge of God is accessible to you if you would seek it
• God has revealed Himself to every person
• Romans 1-2, Psalm 19; God reveals Himself in creation and in human conscience
• Bill Maher’s form of atheism is to reject, attack and not even engage in the dialogue
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
3. Your mind and your heart are dark because you have rejected God and have chosen to worship idols
• There are spiritual, intellectual and moral consequences for rejecting God
• When a person morally and or intellectually reasons God out of his life, what is left is a dark vacuum of moral relativism and intellectual inconsistencies
• Some form of idolatry is always the result, we were made to worship the one true God and we always substitute something else when we reject Him
• Bill Maher’s angry sarcasm is merely a defense for the fact that he has no moral compass and worships self rather than Jesus Christ
• Those who intellectualize their rejection of God are just worshipping a different idol; the idol of their sophisticated, self-centered humanist philosophy
Mark 12:18-27
18 Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21 The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22 In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23 At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
24 Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25 When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26 Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”
4. You don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God• Jesus responds to secular anti-supernaturalists
• They try to trap him with a hypothetical scenario
• Bill Maher seeks to mock religion, God and evangelicals by creating straw-men that he attacks without ever having to honestly debate someone armed with the truth
• I think Jesus would say “You don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God”
• People distort the Bible for their own defense by misquoting and taking truth out of context or mocking miracles
5. You can know the living God by believing in and surrendering to Me
• Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15)
• Jesus reveals God to us (John 1:1-18)
• Jesus is the only way to the Father (John 14;6)
• Jesus died as a substitute for our sin and rose from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
• We must confess our independence and rejection as sin
• We must repent of our idolatry of worshipping ourselves rather than God
• We must surrender to Christ and believe in Him as our only Savior
• When we believe in Christ and are saved by His grace alone, the light is turned on and we see clearly; we are like the one’s in Plato’s cave that just see shadows and then we are freed and see what is real only in Jesus Christ
• I think Jesus would say to Bill Maher that he needs to repent of his sin and believe in Jesus Christ as His only Savior and Lord