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I have had many debates with atheists, agnostics, Christians, young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, theistic evolutionists, and everything in between. In all those debates I have found one very interesting common thread. Every one of these people who have rejected the Gospel, who have rejected the Biblical accounts, do so for one of two reasons: moral or emotional.

When I say “moral”, I am not saying an atheist cannot be moral. Some are moral. But in these cases, I find there is one particular thing that these people who reject God really want to keep a hold of and that something is rooted in sin. And in many cases, it is simply the desire to rule one’s own life and to not allow a deity to rule over them. That is simply known as pride, or the idolatry of “I”.

The other reason is for emotional reasons. Many times, someone who grew up in the church had someone in their life get serious hurt or died. A loved one is killed in a wreck or is diagnosed with a terminal disease. In some cases, the problems are other Christians. Someone in my family was a deacon and he walked away from the church and at least mostly he faith when he was told not to bring his junker car to church for the sake of the church’s image.

So when we deal with unbelievers, we have to remember that many of them carry baggage with them. And this is something a young college student encounters when he enters a philosophy class in the movie God’s Not Dead. His professor with a wounded past, has a personal agenda to destroy the faith of any Christian and to deny God’s existence. And when the student cannot follow through on the first assignment by writing “God is dead” on a paper and sign it, the student must defend himself, prove that God exists, in front of the class, or fail the class.

Walking into this movie, I had a few questions primarily about the script and would it be too obvious about what is going on or would it be obviously set up. But I was overall impressed with the movie. We look into the lives of several people. A Christian freshman who can’t ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit to make a stand for his faith. His girlfriend who he met at church and has their to-be upper-class lives planned out. A daughter of a traditional Muslim family but secretly is hiding her Christian faith. A businessman who is very successful and living the life of luxury. A blogger who wants to bash the beliefs of any public Christian figure, namely Duck Dynasty leader, Willie Robertson, and the Newsboys. A pastor hosting a missionary from Africa trying to take him on a vacation to Florida. All these lives interact with each other in some way and ultimately they all must come face to face with the question: “Is God real?”

The situation in the movie is not the stereotypical case in all college philosophy classes, but in reality the cases are just more subtle than the movie portrays. The movie was inspired by over a dozen legal cases in college universities across America where Christians or Christian organizations faced silencing or expulsion from the campus for whatever reason. The movie does not tell us the need to be ready to give an answer for what we believe. It shows us the need and it shows us one way we can do it. It is a great tool we can use to present the Gospel in an un-offensive setting of a movie theater. I strongly recommend watching this movie.