Delve Into Jesus Articles

Are Men and Women Equal in Christianity?

Rick Reed — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:27:50 -0800

The Bible teaches that men and women are equal in God’s sight. Both women and men were created in God’s image. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The New Testament affirms that men and women are equally heirs of the gift of life (1 Peter 3:7; Galatians 3:28).

Sadly, in our fallen world, women have often been dominated or demeaned by men. That’s why Jesus’ treatment of women surprised the men of His day. Instead of treating women as inferior, Jesus responded to them with compassion and respect. Jesus set an example for His church to follow. It’s not surprising that where Christianity has spread, the value of women has consistently been elevated.

While God created men and women to be equal, He did not design us to be identical. He made men and women to be complementary to one another (Genesis 2:18). Our worth is the same, but our work is somewhat different in the home and the church.

In our church, we follow the instructions given in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and appoint godly men to be pastors and elders. Women provide leadership in a wide range of teaching and caring ministries. We seek to be partners in serving Christ. Our desire is to see each man and women enter a personal relationship with God, through Jesus, and develop healthy, productive relationships with one another in the church.

Rick Reed is the senior pastor of the Metropolitan Bible Church in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Rick is a graduate of Biola University (B.A), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (DMin). This article appears in Rick's book "That's a Good Question". Used with permission of the author.

Faith in the Workplace

Rick Reed — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:36:55 -0800

Bringing faith into the workspace is good for business. According to research done by Merrill Oster, a former Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur Of The Year, executives who intentionally applied religious teachings at work scored higher on almost all leadership measurements. Leaders who took their faith to work also ranked higher in personal job satisfaction and net worth. Bringing faith to work pays off.

But just how should faith be brought into the workplace? Let me highlight three ways Christians are to take their faith to work.

First, Christians are to be industrious on the job. The Bible instructs Christians to work hard. “Whatever you do, work with all of your heart, as working for the Lord, not men” (Colossians 3:23).

Second, Christians are to have integrity as they work. Jesus wants His followers to be exemplary in their ethics (1 Peter 2:11-12).I know a Christian man who refused to lie for his boss. When his boss got irate, he said "Look, I won't lie for you, but I won't lie to you, either." His faith bolstered his honesty.

Finally, Christians are to be interested in others at work. Employees often carry heavy concerns with them when they show up at the office. At appropriate times--during a break over lunch--Christians can offer them the encouragement and hope that springs from their faith in Jesus.

Trying to keep faith out of the workplace is simply bad business. Companies and co-workers benefit when faith goes to work.

Are Angels Real?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:49:37 -0800

Angels are soaring in popularity these days. They get primetime airtime on TV. They're good as gold in jewellery stores. They're really in. But are they real?

The Bible's answer is that angels really do exist. Angels are mentioned in thirty-four of the Bible's sixty-six books. Jesus repeatedly referred to them. When it comes to angels, unseen doesn't mean unreal.

Though angels do exist, many of the popular notions about them are wishful thinking. Our culture sells us a Disney version of angels that portrays them as spiritual Tinkerbells. Angels are supposedly cute and cuddly, helpful but harmless.

This view of angels doesn't fly with the Bible. The Bible informs us that angels are powerful, spiritual beings. The people who encounter them are usually terrified or awestruck. The soldiers guarding Jesus' tomb collapsed in fear when an angel came down to announce that Jesus had risen (Matthew 28:4).

Do angels provide supernatural guidance and protection? The Bible does tell us of times when God dispatched angels to deliver a message or deliver someone in trouble. But we're never told to ask angels for direction or protection; we are to call on God for help. In fact, the Bible warns us that fallen angels, called demons, will seek to deceive and destroy us.

So, impressive as angels can be, they are not to occupy our attention or affection. We're not to worship them (Colossians 2:18-19). Rather, we are to join them in worshipping God and His Son, Jesus (Revelation 5:11-14).

Sex and Gore - Is the Bible Unsuitable for Kids?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:24:22 -0800

Keeping the Bible from children would be a childish mistake. It is true that when children read the Bible they will learn about our human failings, including the sins of immorality and violence.

However, unlike many books children read, the Bible does not sensationalize sexual sin or glamorize gore. Instead, a moral framework undergirds the discussion of human immorality and inhumanity. The Bible does not confuse kids with a worldview that blurs the distinction between right and wrong. In a day when many children are morally unfocused, the Bible can help bring clarity to their personal convictions.

But the Bible goes further than just helping children grow towards moral maturity; it also points them towards spiritual salvation. That's why the apostle Paul could remind his young apprentice Timothy to:

Continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 3:14-15).

Timothy's mother and grandmother taught him the Scriptures ''from infancy.'' As a child he learned the truth about salvation through faith in Jesus. I'm glad the Scriptures were not withheld from me as a child. And I can't imagine keeping God's book away from the children God loves so much. After all, it was Jesus who said, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3).

One is never too young to learn what the Bible says about having childlike faith in Christ.

Why Did God Create Satan?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:32:59 -0800

In J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord Of The Rings, the inhabitants of Middle Earth live under the shadow of the Dark Lord, Sauron. His lust for the Ring and its power brings suffering and death to many. While Tolkien's story of Middle Earth is fictional, it's not completely fanciful. There is a Dark Lord - Satan. His lust for power has caused great devastation and death on planet Earth.

The Bible tells us that Satan was not originally God's archenemy but one of God's archangels. Like the other angelic beings, he was created to worship and serve his i Creator. But being filled with pride, he rebelled against God (1 Timothy 3:6). Satan was created good, but he became evil.

If God made Satan to be good, why did He allow him to go bad? Perhaps for the same reason He lets humans go bad. God desires that His creatures respond to Him with a love that is free and not forced. Satan abused his freedom and become a slave of evil.

After allowing Satan to go bad, why does God allow him to go on? Why not stop his malicious and malignant actions? The Bible says God will do just that. Revelation 20:10 tells us that one day God will throw Satan into a lake of burning sulphur to be tormented day and night forever. Satan's time is limited, his doom is certain and his punishment will be eternal.

While Satan has become God's enemy, he has never been God's equal. For that reason, we need not live in fear of Satan's power. Instead, we should follow the admonition given in James 4:7-8: “'Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you.”

As we come near to God by trusting in His Son, Jesus, we can experience victory over God's archenemy.

Should Christians Support the Death Penalty?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:06:38 -0800

John Grisham's novel The Chamber captures the controversy that surrounds the death penalty. When a convicted killer, Sam Cayhall, is sentenced to the gas chamber, the community divides and debates the morality of putting him to death.

Christians approach this difficult issue with a conviction that God is ultimately the giver and taker of life. He controls the beginning and ending of each of our lives.

God has allowed humans to play a part in His creation of life through procreation. So does He also give us a role to play in the termination of life? Here's where evangelical Christians have some honest differences.

We all agree that God forbids murder. Individuals must not take vengeance by taking another life.

We also agree that God has commissioned governments with the responsibility of protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty. Romans 13:4 says a ruler is ''God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.''

Some evangelicals understand this verse to allow governments to execute justice even when it means executing convicted killers. They point out that ''bearing the sword'' seems to imply more than simply locking someone up for a long time. Others would contend that governments can punish wrongdoers without resorting to the death penalty.

Even though Christians come to different conclusions in the death penalty debate, we are united in proclaiming God's offer of eternal life to all who trust in Jesus for forgiveness. Even those on death row.

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:36:40 -0800

Halloween is a holiday that wears a mask. On one level, it's about children dressed as clowns or cowboys collecting enough candy to scare a dentist. But, behind Halloween's harmless disguise is a darker side.

Halloween is historically linked to fears about wandering spirits and evil omens. Over the years, the holiday has continued to be associated with witchcraft and the demonic.

Though some in North America dismiss the notion of demons, the Bible does not. It tells us of a spiritual realm that is unseen but not unreal. It warns to steer clear of the devil and his demonic cohorts since they are deceptive and destructive (2 Corinthians 11:14; John 8:44). Dressing up as a devil or a witch on Halloween only glamorizes or trivializes what the Bible calls demonic.

Christians don't have to be frightened on Halloween. While demonic beings are powerful, they have been defeated. When Jesus died on the cross, He not only provided forgiveness for all who believe but also disarmed demonic rowers. Colossians 2:15 proclaims that Jesus ''disarmed the powers and authorities...triumphing over them by the cross." Those who trust in Jesus can ''be strong in the Lord and in power of his might'' (Ephesians 6:10).

So how should Christians respond? Some will choose to sit out any celebration of Halloween. Others will find ways for their kids to enjoy candy and costumes without dabbling in the darkness. Increasingly, churches are offering fun-filled alternatives on Halloween night where kids can get treats without being tricked.

Is There Such a Thing as Ultimate Truth?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:07:54 -0800

The Christian faith affirms the existence of ultimate truth. By ultimate truth I'm referring to beliefs that accurately correspond to the nature of reality. Some things are absolutely true for all people in all places.

In our postmodern society, the notion of ultimate truth has fallen on hard times. Some have rejected absolute truth, opting for a subjective, relativistic world view. A friend once told me, ''You have your truth and I have mine." He was saying truth is subjectively, not objectively, determined.

The problem with relativism is that it is logically self-defeating. Take the assertion: ''Truth is relative." lf this statement is correct, then relativism has proven itself false. It's given us an ultimate truth. And that's the one thing it can't do!

But affirming the reality of ultimate truth still leaves us with another question: Can we ultimately know ultimate truth? We are all finite and flawed people. Can we ever hope to know absolute truth in an accurate way?

The Bible says God has made knowing ultimate truth possible. He has revealed truth to us in the Scriptures: "Your word is truth'' (John 17:17). He has also revealed truth in His Son, Jesus, who called Himself ''the truth'' (John 14:6). He promised those who held to His teaching, ''you will know the truth and the truth will set you free'' (John 8:32).

It's true that we only know ultimate truth ''in part'' (1 Corinthians 13:12). However, by knowing Jesus we can come to know it in a liberating and life-changing way.

Is Jesus the Only Way to God?

Rick Reed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:32:28 -0800

Jesus is respected and revered by people of various faiths around the world. Many would agree that He is a way to God for some people. But is Jesus the only way to God for all people? Those who are part of our church and denomination believe Jesus is the only way to God. We hold this understanding, knowing that such a view goes against the strong current of religious pluralism in Canada. We hold this view, though many of us have genuine respect for friends from other faiths and religious traditions.

Why do we hold to a view that some would see as intolerant or outdated? Only for one reason: Jesus Himself claimed to be the only way to God. In John 14:6 we read, ''Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'' The apostle Peter echoed this claim in Acts 4:12 ''salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.'' These statements lead us to believe that only through trusting in Jesus as Saviour can we come into a personal, saving relationship with God.

The belief that Jesus is the only way to God would be unbelievable if He hadn't done the impossible; His miracles and resurrection from the dead give credibility to His claim. As followers of Jesus, we seek to follow His example and show love and respect for all people. And as believers in Jesus, we also seek to believe His words - even His claim to be the only way to God.

Speaking your Audience's Language

Rusty Wright — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:55:57 -0800

When you seek to communicate the message of Jesus to those outside the faith, do you ever feel like you’re not getting through? There can be many reasons for this, including their own resistance, spiritual blindness, spiritual warfare, ego, personal pain, anger with God, disappointment with God or Christians, etc. But a major reason might be that you just aren’t speaking their language.

Different languages

People speak different verbal languages. They also speak different psychological, emotional and intellectual languages. Suppose I make this statement:

Yo tengo un millón de dólares en mi bolsa y voy a darlo a la primera persona que venga acá y me lo pida

.

Perhaps you know Spanish and understand this. Of course, many who don’t speak Spanish still understand the Spanish phrase un millón de dólares! As we say in English, “Money talks!” But if you did not understand my statement, you would not have realized that I was pretending to offer one million dollars to the first person to approach me and ask me for it. (And I was only pretending!) If you learned the translation late – and if I really had a million dollars to offer – you might feel cheated because I did not tell you of my offer in a language you could understand.

The gift

We are offering the people of our world a gift that is infinitely more valuable than a million dollars, the gift of peace with God and eternal life. But too often, we don’t speak their emotional and intellectual languages. I don’t know about you, but at the end of my life I don’t want to look back with regret on the people who didn’t appreciate Christ because I didn’t make the message clear. I want to speak their language so clearly that they see how attractive my Jesus is, so they run to him to receive him.

In communicating with non-believers, seek to avoid Christian jargon. Consider this example:

“The Bible says all you sinners need to repent and trust in the finished work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who, through his propitiatory sacrifice on Calvary's cross, made atonement for you so you could be justified, redeemed, sanctified and gloriously saved!”

That is all true, but will the unbeliever understand it? How about this instead?

“The biblical documents explain that humans have an emptiness, an inner void, a longing to love and be loved. Jesus of Nazareth said he came to fill that void, to offer hope and genuine purpose. He died a physical and spiritual death to pay the penalty we/humans owed for our/their flaws and imperfections. Then he returned to life to offer us/people the opportunity to plug into God both now and forever.

“If I had a traffic fine I could not pay, you could offer to pay it for me, as a gift to me. Just as I would need to accept your gift to pay my fine, so we/humans need to accept Jesus’ free gift of forgiveness to enjoy a friendship with him.”

Depending on the situation, you may wish to use either the more direct second-person or first person-plural (“you” or “we”) or the more indirect third-person plural (“humans”, “people”, “they”, etc.). You can make the Gospel very clear. Just use language that relates to your listeners and their situation.

Suggesting alternates

Consider a few additional suggestions for connecting with your audience.

Aim to contextualize your words and examples for your listeners or readers, and to paint memorable ‘word pictures’. Jesus took secular examples from the surrounding society and culture to fill out the content of abstract concepts. For instance, the Prodigal Son story illustrates repentance. The Lost Sheep story conveys God’s heart for someone whose life is a mess. Redemptive parallels from familiar stories that resonate with your audience can be vital. Popular culture is one very valuable source for such material.

For evangelism in a non-Western or non-Christian culture, careful use of language is equally important, because the words may carry entirely different connotations from those that Western Christians intend. Many non-Western societies are also shame cultures and view modes of behaviour in dramatically different ways than Westerners do.

Another audience that your “secular-friendly” language may help is those who are familiar – even over-familiar – with Christian terminology. Some may let Christian jargon simply wash over them without attaching much meaning to the words, having been somewhat immunized to their truth. For others, ‘Christianese’ may trigger memories of negative or hurtful past church experiences. In both cases, jargon-free language can add freshness and clarity that helps minimize these potential communication barriers.

Here are some suggestions for translating ‘Christianese’ into language that can better connect with the non-believers you seek to reach. No item in the table below is inviolate, but ask God to give you wisdom to apply these suggestions as appropriate for your situation. Trust Him to give you words and thoughts that will help people understand God’s truth. Remember, you are not seeking to compromise God’s message, but simply aiming to communicate it using language and concepts your audience can understand, relate to, and digest.

The Bible says:

- the biblical documents indicate ...
- a biblical perspective would be that ...
- a first-century follower of Jesus maintained that ...
- Jesus’ close friends claimed he taught that ...
- Paul, an early Christian, wrote in a letter to some friends ...
- one first-century witness to the events claimed ...
- an ancient Israeli king said ...
- an ancient Jewish wise man/sage once wrote ...
- etc.

Saved, salvation

- made safe (rescued) from separation from God

Hell, damnation

- separation from God forever
- a consequence of deciding to reject God – who loves you and wants to be your friend – is having to live apart from him for eternity. That would not be pleasant at all.

Sin(s)

- separation from God
- alienation from the Creator
- a condition of being unplugged from God
- human flaw(s)
- moral flaw(s)
- missing the mark of divine perfection
- Some psychologists would call this separation from God ‘alienation’. The biblical documents refer to it as ‘sin’.

Note: Using the word ‘sin’ is not always a turnoff, though increasingly in different cultures it can be variously misunderstood as only applying to certain limited behaviours (e.g., sexual, fraudulent, murderous, etc.). But introducing it with some phrasing like the above, and sprinkling such phrases throughout your discussion, can enhance a correct understanding of the concept. You’re not watering down or compromising truth. Rather, you’re seeking to communicate it in terms your audience can understand.

Sin nature, depravity

- fallen nature
- to use a philosophical term, humans are deeply fallen

Man is sinful

- humans are alienated from the God of the universe by their rebellion

Witness, evangelism

- communicating the basic message of Jesus

Pray/prayer

- talking with/communicating with God
- expressing your thoughts/views/heart to God

Gospel

- Jesus’ message of good news
- Jesus’ basic message
- Jesus’ perspective on/explanation of how humans can be plugged back in to God

Saving faith

- place trust in Jesus as the means of one’s forgiveness
- getting plugged into God

You need to receive Christ today

- a biblical perspective of how anyone becomes fulfilled and complete is that it involves developing a relationship with one’s creator.

Propitiation

- Jesus, through his sacrificial death on the cross, paid the penalty we owed for our rebellion/disobedience/alienation

God’s view is ... the biblical view is ...

- a biblical perspective would indicate ...

Make Jesus your Lord

- ask Jesus to become your best friend and give you the strength to follow his lead

Rusty Wright is an award-winning author, journalist, syndicated columnist and lecturer who has spoken on six continents and appeared on secular television programs in cities around the globe. His free outreach resources have been used in any of 14 languages by over 500 websites – Christian and secular – around the world. He trains Christian leaders, broadcasters, print-media and Internet professionals in effective communication with secular audiences and holds Bachelor of Science (psychology) and Master of Theology degrees from Duke and Oxford universities, respectively.

Jesus Didn't Stay Dead. Is That A Sacrifice?

Michael Lane — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:36:16 -0700

One of the most quoted verses of the Bible is John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I've been asked a few times how Jesus' death can be considered a sacrifice since a mere three days later, he was risen. The Son was not lost to the Father forever, so surely this is not like an earthly father giving up a child, knowing that they will never see them again in this life. If Jesus did not remain dead and they were reunited days later, what did God really sacrifice on the cross?

From the perspective of proving that He was the Son of God (and for the purposes of conquering/overcoming sin and death) it was important that Christ died and rose again. It is the greatest miracle the world has ever seen. There is enormous power and significance in the resurrection and without it, we would still all still be dead in sin.

However, from the perspective of God's sacrifice, I think death is less important than the suffering, humiliation and separation. A sacrifice need not be permanent. The terrible pain and suffering Jesus endured may have lasted only a few hours, but that does not take away any of it's significance or meaning.

The pain and suffering are self-explanatory, especially if you've seen Passion of the Christ. Jesus' death was not a quick or painless one by any means. It was horrific. Because He was fully human, Jesus had no supernatural protection from the pain. He endured it just as any man would have.

We need also consider the emotional torment Jesus endured. Jesus knew precisely what was about to happen, and the anticipation of that was so overwhelming that He remained awake all night, praying to the Father. It was agonizing for Jesus to contemplate what was about to happen. And, of course, the Father had to stand by and watch all this happen to His beloved son. This alone should be considered more than enough of a sacrifice that we should be in awe of what the Father and Son endured for us.

Next, consider that the Lord of the Universe, the one through whom the entire universe was created, was mocked, spit upon and beaten. Crucifixion was the worst kind of ignominious death, reserved for the lowest, most despicable criminals. That Jesus, the King of Kings would subject himself to that kind of humiliation (and the Father should see His son treated thus) should once again fill us with awe and gratitude.

But even these are not the most important parts of the sacrifice. Since before the beginning of time, the Father and Son had shared a perfect, intimate union. Then, with the weight of all of humanity's sin upon Him, Jesus became separated from the Father just as we were separated from God before we accepted Christ. We cannot possibly imagine what those moments of separation were like for Christ, being cut off from the greatest source of love in the universe. Nor can we imagine what it must have been like for the Father to leave Jesus alone on the cross. Jesus was so shocked and dismayed by the separation that he cried out, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" Yet, they both allowed this in order to save us from our sin, and they did so because they love us.

Jesus was a perfect man who knew no sin, yet he was tortured and humiliated. Then, as the weight of our sin was placed on His shoulders, He was separated from the Father and felt greater abandonment than we can imagine. He was in agony on the cross, terrified and alone, yet the Father desired so much to redeem us that he did nothing to help his perfect, beloved Son.

That was the real sacrifice.

Do Commandments On Tattoos and Hair Still Apply?

Michael Lane — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:12:10 -0700

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul provides some pretty specific instructions about hair length. Similarly, Leviticus 19:28 commands, "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD." Do these commands still apply today? Can someone worship Jesus just as well with long hair, earrings or tattoos?

It's important to begin by understanding the difference between a cultural custom and a law. Culture, customs and societies change, but God and His laws do not. However, that does not mean we can ignore ancient, biblical commandments simply because they apply to a culture which existed long ago and far away. Underneath every custom or culturally accepted practice which we are commanded to follow, there lies some unchanging truth or principle. Our challenge is to uncover that law or principle and apply it to a modern society. In the example of 1 Corinthians, maintaining hair short for men and long hair for women is a cultural custom, but there is nevertheless some deep truth of God's law which Paul is trying to express in this teaching. Whatever that truth is, we need to get to the bottom of it and ensure that we are faithfully following it.

In almost every case, when Paul or another apostle commands us to obey some cultural custom, the goal is to demonstrate to the world that we are children of God and to distance ourselves from the pagans. This was a very serious issue in the 1st century. Many new Christians had been gentiles or pagans and the early Church leaders wanted to ensure that they did not slip back into their old ways. It was also important that they did not have any kind of external appearance which made people think that they were still worshiping their old idols. This is the main reason for the decree that men should not have long hair, tattoos, or body piercings. These were things the pagans did, so any Christians who looked that way might cause others to be concerned.

That principle remains the same thousands of years later. Rightly or wrongly, people judge by appearances. As Christians, we need to avoid doing anything that would cause others to be uncomfortable with the way we look, or would cause them to fail to recognize us as followers of Christ. This is particularly true when we are witnessing to non-Christians.

A follower of Christ may deliver the Gospel very well with massive tattoos, long hair, and a nose ring. Unfortunately, with this appearance, some people may never be able to look past the image and focus on the message. They may assume that he could be a criminal or something worse, and this could be a serious obstacle in leading them to Jesus.

For this reason, we should avoid extremes. God commands us to look the part of His children, respect our bodies and understand that others will judge us by our appearance. We need to present an image which clearly sets us apart from the rest of the world.

The essence of the commandments given to us by Paul and Moses thousands of years ago still apply today even though the cultural specifics have changed. We must not give our fellow Christians a reason to think we have slipped into "pagan" ways. Likewise, we must not give unbelievers any reason to judge us and reject us before we have had a chance to present the Good News.

As with all things, we must approach this teaching with a healthy dose of common sense and Spirit-led guidance. If you have a tiny, inconspicuous tattoo or wear your hair a little longer or shorter than Paul commands, spend some contemplative time in prayer seeking what God would have you do about this issue, if anything. On the other hand, you absolutely must pause, pray and seriously seek to understand God's will before getting a new tattoo. You can be certain that if your appearance in any way presents an obstacle to someone knowing you are a Christian, or hinders you from leading them to Christ, then you have an obligation to make the right choice.

Why Are There Many Different Christian Churches?

Michael Lane — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:08:54 -0800

The complete answer is rather complex and deals with psychology and sociology more than anything else. However, at the heart of it lies two factors - that the Bible requires interpretation and that we are fallen creatures.

Let's start with the interpretation issue. I don't want to give the impression that this is a bad thing - it is how God has chosen to give us revelation - but there is no escaping the fact that we are far removed from the Bible's writing in terms of culture, language and time. Two intelligent, honest and sincere people can read certain passages and come up with two different, opposing interpretations. For this reason, there will always be people who disagree on how we should worship. Now, I'm talking about little things, not big things. No one could honestly and sincerely read the New Testament and believe that Jesus was not the Messiah, did not die for our sins, was not raised from the dead, etc. I do think someone could come away with different impressions about whether women should serve in the church, men should always have short hair or whether we must baptize babies. Again, these are small issues, not central to the core of Christian belief, but they do affect how we worship. All it takes is someone to strongly disagree with someone else about how to worship and they will eventually leave and start a new church with like-minded believers. If you examine the differences between all the protestant churches in North America, I think this is what you will find - differences in agreement on the less important doctrines in Scripture.

Sometimes, due to our fallen nature, church leaders become corrupt or lose touch with reality. (It is also certainly true that spiritual leaders are at greater risk for spiritual attacks). Whatever the reason, sometimes a church falls off the rails and the congregation must leave and start a new church. Some other members of the congregation may not see or acknowledge the problem and will stick around. The most extreme example of this would have to be the reformation, but this happens all the time on smaller scales.

All of this must grieve Christ to some extent. He called us to be His church, not his 1,356 different churches. But at the same time, we can look at the bright side. Sometimes churches differ in nothing more than the kind of music they play or how they dress in the service. This variety can allow people to find a home where they feel comfortable and welcome. If you want a very conservative church where they wear suits and play only hymns, you can find that. If you prefer to dress down and hear some contemporary music, that is also available to you.

My advice to anyone would be this: Discover your beliefs and your interpretation. Do this with much prayer and mediation, and ask the Lord to guide you. Be as honest and open minded as you can. Once you feel comfortable with what the Lord is asking you to know about Him and how He wants to be worshiped, find the church that is most closely aligned with what you believe.

The Moral Law

Michael Lane — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:37:28 -0800

There are many avenues to learning about God through nature. Scientists have been unlocking the mysteries of the universe for thousands of years, discovering the often beautiful and elegant ways in which God formed the world and its inhabitants. Francis Collins who headed the human genome project, called DNA, "the language of God" and remarked that after decades of study, we now understand the code which God used to create mankind. Recently, astronomers and cosmologists have discovered the incredible precision in the fine-tuning of the universe which permits life to exist.

Yet, perhaps one of the simplest and most often overlooked methods of learning about God rests within each one of us. There is something unique about our level of consciousness, self-awareness and ability to overrule our instincts. What do we learn when we look inside ourselves and reflect on the qualities which set us apart from animals?

We discover that there is something inside all of us which compels us to behave in a certain way. This compulsion is to do what society calls, "good". By nature, we desire to do decent, charitable acts and to avoid causing pain or suffering to anyone. We do not always comply with this desire, and when we fail to do so, we experience the odd sensation of guilt. Most commonly, people will call this a conscience, or we can call this desire, as C.S. Lewis did, the Moral Law.

We see dozens of examples of this moral law in effect every day. Accuse someone of doing something which is generally accepted as being "wrong" and the most common response you will get is either a denial or an excuse. The person will claim that you don't understand their extenuating circumstances, or that you've misunderstood what's really going on. They will defend to you how their actions do not constitute a "wrong."

But when confronted with an obvious wrongdoing, how often will someone reply, "What are you even talking about? Of course I did it and there's nothing wrong with it." It's extremely rare. Now, accuse someone of doing something very ordinary, such as eating lunch at noon, and that is exactly what they will say.

These everyday exchanges give us a glimpse of the moral law at work. Why does someone defend their actions in the first example but not the second? When you accuse your coworker of theft, why does she defend herself, but when you accuse another of eating lunch, he thinks you irrational. There must be some common standard of right and wrong about which we all, for the most part, agree. If this were not the case, no one would ever defend themselves. They would simply ask, "By what standard do you judge me?" Each time we defend ourselves we are acknowledging that indeed, there is a standard. It is God's moral law.

If you are now shaking you head and saying, "We defend ourselves because we will be punished if we do not" then you might be right. It's true that we sometimes break laws with which we do not agree and then defend ourselves rigorously simply to avoid the punishment. But then you are confronted with the issue of how our government came to have laws at all. How can it be that every country on earth has a law against murder? You may be one of the few who thinks that murder is acceptable and will defend yourself against the charge to avoid jail, but then you still have to explain why it is that almost everyone else on earth emphatically disagrees with you.

With few, if any, exceptions, this moral law is relatively constant from nation to nation across the span of human history. There have been variations in such things as sexual permissiveness or legality of incest from one culture to another, but there has never existed a culture where it was generally and widely acceptable to force a woman to have intercourse against her will. Forget all your social conditioning for a moment and ask yourself why this should be the case. It's difficult to come up with an explanation for why rape is wrong, except to simply say that it is. It's self-evident to everyone.

Yet, there are rapists and murderers in our midst. Does this sink the argument for the moral law? On the contrary. Some people have become extremely adept at ignoring the desire to do good and the guilt which comes as a consequence of our failure to do so, but it remains that there was first something there to suppress. No one is born numb to the moral law; they must be taught this behavior by a parent who is already numb to it, or else circumstances cause them to suppress it over time. It also occurs that some extremely rare people never have this desire to do good (or an aversion to causing harm). Our reaction to these people -- calling them psychopaths and locking them up -- reinforces the idea that this desire to do good is something real in the rest of us. We instinctively feel that it is proper that we should have a conscience and are repulsed by anyone who lacks one.

Now consider what happens when we obey they moral law. Most people will agree that doing good makes us feel good. Performing acts of kindness and charity rewards us with a deep and lasting sense of joy and peace. It's true that we can also find some happiness from breaking the moral law, such as if we were to embezzle money and spend it on a nice new car. Yet, beyond the initial guilt, most criminals find that their happiness is fleeting and hollow. When we pursue happiness through breaking the moral law, a constant level of happiness becomes elusive, as we have to sink further and further into depravity to maintain the same level of happiness. It's a downward spiral into misery.

We also find that this moral law defines all naturalistic explanations. It could only have derived by means of evolution if it served to further the species. Such a "naturalistic law" if it existed would place the highest value on preserving any healthy life which is capable of reproducing. Yet, we find the moral law sometimes compels us to place other values above life. For example, we will send our young men to fight a war and risk their lives for the principles of freedom and righteousness. Furthermore, a "natural" law as opposed to a "moral" law would place almost no value on lives which are unhealthy, cannot reproduce or cannot contribute to society. Such a law would not compel us to care for the elderly, sick or crippled, yet we find the moral law obliges us to do exactly that. A young woman will fight to the death to save her baby, yet her instincts if guided only by a consideration of the of survival of the species would prescribe that she save herself and then go on to have more children.

To further see just how different a "natural" law would be from our actual moral law, consider the example of a nation where the government puts to death all of the crippled, unintelligent or sterile people among them. Most of us would feel justified in waging a war to topple this heinous government; it is exactly what the moral law would compel us to do. Yet consider for a moment that what this government is doing is exactly what a "natural" law, - one arisen solely from evolutionary processes - would compel them to do. If this were all the moral law consisted of preserving the young and healthy among us - then we would be violating our own "natural" law by sending people to die at the hands of a government which was doing only what was natural. So, clearly, the moral law is something far more than an instinctive desire to preserve our species. It cannot have purely evolutionary roots, since preservation of the species is precisely what concerns evolution.

If you find this example far fetched, consider the historical example of World War II where something very much like this actually happened. Though their campaign of mass execution began with the Jews, the Nazis ultimately had their sights set on any man or woman who did not fit their genetic ideal. The Nazis wanted to bring about a race of supermen through a campaign of purging and purification.

In their defense at the Nurnberg trial following the war, the Nazis asked how another nation could presume to impose their morality on another sovereign nation. Where do we get the moral laws that transcend the society, they asked? They argued that no such transcendent law exists and accused the allies of imposing their morality arbitrarily simply because they were the victors in the war. The judges disagreed. There is, they contended, just such a moral law and the Nazis had violated it. For the most part, the rest of the world agreed as witnessed by the massive, worldwide opposition to the Nazi's atrocities.

So, if this moral law is something real, what can we learn from it? It provides extremely compelling evidence that we were created for a purpose and with an expectation of how we ought to behave. From this, we can deduce that our creator is "good" and is interested in also having us be "good". This is not the cold, indifferent God of the Deists; this is a God who is active and immanent in our lives, otherwise God would have no interest in our behavior. If our creator is so interested in our behavior, it strongly suggests He wishes to have a relationship with us.

We have thus arrived at a very basic definition God and we did so without consulting any ancient texts or examining any religious doctrine. We simply looked inside ourselves - at how we were made to behave - and there we found God.

Why Radical Muslims Hate You

Rusty Wright — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:09:22 -0800

Do you remember how you felt on September 11, 2001? You likely saw images of jets crashing into buildings, people jumping from skyscrapers, the towers collapsing. What feelings did you experience? Confusion? Anger? Depression? TV showed some Palestinians celebrating. One Hamas publication wrote, "Allah has answered our prayers."¹ In London, one Muslim group circulated stickers praising the "magnificent 19," the highjackers.²

Chances are, you are a target of this hatred. If you are a Westerner, an American, a non-Muslim, or a Muslim of a different stripe than they, then some radical Muslims hate you. Why? The answer is complex and involves history, culture, politics,religion, and psychology.

Of course, many -- some would say most -- Muslims are peace loving and deplore terrorism. Islam is quite diverse.³ Extremist Muslims do not represent all Muslims any more than white supremacists represent all Christians. Not all 'radical' Muslims are violent or hateful. But understanding extremist Muslim hatred is essential to interpreting our post-9/11 world. This article examines that hatred and offers a biblical response.

In his October 2001 video, Usama bin Ladin mentioned the 'humiliation and disgrace' tormenting Islam for 'more than eighty years.' Princeton Near Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis notes that the reference likely puzzled many Westerners. Many Muslims -- for whom Islamic history carries divine significance -- understood. Bin Ladin referred to the 1918 defeat of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire and to British and French partitioning of Ottoman territory. Secular Turks soon also abolished the caliphate,or succession of rulers of all Sunni Islam. Desecration of this symbol of Muslim unity has pained many Muslims ever since.⁴

For centuries, the Islamic world had displayed military, economic and scientific superiority. But European development eventually overtook Islam.⁵ Today, United States ties with Israel and involvement in Saudi Arabia have kindled ire.

Bin Ladin calls on Muslims to "obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions . . .to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military . . ."⁶ He and his sympathizers want to eliminate Western influence and restore their version of Islam to the world.⁷

Socio-cultural Roots of Hatred

History is behind some of the radical Muslim hatred of the West. But so are cultural differences. Would you believe that dancing in an American church helped fuel Muslim anger today?

In 1948, Sayyid Qutb visited the United States for Egypt's Ministry of Education. His stay left him shocked with what he perceived as moral degeneracy and sexual promiscuity.

He wrote that even American religion was tainted by materialism and consumerism. Churches marketed their services to the public like merchants and entertainers. Success, big numbers,'fun,' and having 'a good time' seemed crucial to American churches.⁸

He especially deplored clergy-sanctioned dances at church recreation halls. When the ministers lowered the lights, the dances became hot. Here is Qutb's 'PG' description: "The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone . . . the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust." He cited the famous Kinsey Reports as evidence of American sexual debauchery.⁹Qutb,who was dark skinned, also experienced racism in America.¹⁰

Back in Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brothers organization.¹¹ Imprisonment and torture made his writings more militant. Qutb became what Georgetown University religion and international affairs professor John Esposito calls 'the architect of radical Islam.'¹²

Some Muslim Brotherhood groups, offshoots, and alumni are mainstream and nonviolent. Others have a violent legacy. A militant offshoot,¹³ Islamic Jihad, assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Esposito notes that a radicalized former Muslim Brother, Abdullah Azzam, significantly influenced Usama bin Ladin.¹⁴ Former CIA Middle East case officer Robert Baer observes that a Kuwaiti Muslim Brother, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, became a bin Ladin terror chief.¹⁵

Secularization, consumerism, materialism, the status of women, sexual mores all concern radical Muslims.¹⁶ Bernard Lewis notes that Sayyid Qutb's denunciation of American moral flaws became incorporated into radical Islamic ideology. For instance, he says Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, in calling the U.S. the "Great Satan," was being consistent with the Koranic depiction of Satan not as an "imperialist" or "exploiter" but as a seducer, "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men."¹⁷

Historical, social and cultural factors have influenced radical Muslim hatred of the West. Consider now how global politics stirs the mix.

Political Roots of Hatred

Bernard Lewis -- who is not without his critics¹⁸ -- notes an essential difference between Christianity and Islam regarding government and religion. Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of the Christian faith, said, "Give to Caesar what belongs to him. But everything that belongs to God must be given to God."¹⁹ For much of history, this has been understood as recognizing the existence of two distinct authorities, one spiritual and the other political.²⁰

But much of Islam has known no such distinction. Muhammad was both a religious and political leader, the Prophet and the head of state. Under his successors, the caliphs, Islam grew into a huge empire and world religion. Islamic sharia, or Holy Law, deals with power, authority and political philosophy. Specific applications differ among Islamic nations. In an extreme example of this spiritual/political blend, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini once said, "Islam is politics or it is nothing."²¹

With this mindset, the Western world and the United States as superpower become to many Muslims the infidel invaders, imperialist bullies who desecrate Islamic states by force. European colonialism, Western imperialism and U. S. policies are frequent Muslim complaints. ²² Many Muslims deplore the U. S. invasion of Iraq. Of course, U. S. concessions to Israel often are seen as collaboration with an enemy of Islam.

One perceived offense to radical Islam that is sometimes overlooked by Westerners is Western complicity with corrupt rulers of Islamic states. These situations are complex. Oft-mentioned offenses include the 1982 government massacre at the Syrian city of Hama to put down a Muslim Brothers uprising. An estimated ten to twenty-five thousand died, attracting little Western attention. In 1992, with Western approval, the Algerian military cancelled democratic elections to prevent the Islamic Salvation Front from winning them and established a brutal regime.²³

Especially galling to radicals is Western complicity with rulers of Saudi Arabia -- Islam's Holy Land -- whom they see as warped by greed, graft and moral corruption. One Saudi diplomat noted after 9/11, "What shocks me most is why they hit America and not us."²⁴

But they did hit America, and radical views of politics played an important role.

Religious Roots of Hatred

Still other reasons some radical Muslims hate you involve religion. Wahhabism, a movement much in the news, was founded by an eighteenth century theologian, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Wahhab wanted to purify Islam and return it to its authentic ways. He condemned and burned books contradicting his views. Wahhab's followers became fiercely exclusive. Their principal focus was not outsiders but insiders, Muslims whom they felt had practiced a 'less-pure' form of Islam. They could be vicious, desecrating holy places and slaughtering Muslims who differed.²⁵

Wahhabism's ongoing Saudi links would propel it into international influence. When Saudi forces conquered Arabia in 1925, they controlled Islam's two most holy cities, Mecca and Medina. When Saudi Arabia became oil-rich, the stage was set. Wahhabism became the "official, state-enforced doctrine of one of the most influential governments in all Islam,"²⁶ which hosts annual pilgrimages to Mecca involving millions of Muslims from around the world. Saudi oil wealth funded Wahhabi propagation of their views at home and abroad.²⁷ Wahhabism affected both Usama bin Ladin and the Taliban.²⁸

Wahhabism's pervasive influence troubles Princeton's Lewis. Imagine, he says, that the Ku Klux Klan or a similar group took control of Texas and its oil and could widely propagate its version of "Christianity" through heavily endowed schools and colleges.²⁹ Georgetown's Esposito distinguishes puritanical, politically conservative Wahhabism from radical,militant Wahhabism.³⁰

Former CIA agent Robert Baer notes that Wahhabi soldiers fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, with U.S. support. There, Wahhabis linked with radical followers of Sayyid Qutb, an alliance Baer likens to 'mixing nitroglycerin in a blender.'³¹ A new, more militant strain of Wahhabism developed in addition to mainstream Wahabbism, with a new emphasis on taking the fight to outsiders: the infidels and the West.³²

After al-Qaeda attacked three housing complexes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May 2003, the Saudi government began to crack down on terrorists and violent rhetoric in the mosques. Initial results were mixed. U. S. Ambassador Robert Jordan reported, "We have noticed lately in influential mosques the imam has condemned terrorism and preached in favor of tolerance, then closed the sermon with 'O God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels and all who support them.' ''³³

Psychological Roots of Hatred

In addition to the foregoing, there are psychological factors at work in radical Muslim hatred. Lewis writes, "Almost the entire Muslim world is affected by poverty. . . "³⁴ Georgetown's John Esposito sees "weak economies, illiteracy, and high unemployment"³⁵ in many Muslim nations. Relative deprivation can be psychologically debilitating. If you are poor, some theories argue, and you see others more prosperous, you may feel inferior, trapped or depressed.

Reports from the United Nations and the World Bank note that Arab nations fall far behind the West in "job creation, education, technology, and productivity."³⁶ (There are, of course, exceptions.) When global media bring pictures of lavish Western life, frustration burns and some extremists lash out. One Egyptian playwright described these extremists as "pathologically jealous." He said, "They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers and all those who tower mightily."³⁷

Feelings of rejection play a part. Many Western societies have been slow to accept Muslims. The father of shoe bomber Richard Reid said of his son, "He was born here in Britain, like I was. It was distressing to be told things like 'Go home, nigger.'"³⁸

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman speaks of a "poverty of dignity" affecting even privileged Muslims. Belief in Islam's superiority contrasted with economic and military disparity in the context of a repressive regime can engender feelings of humiliation, prompting vengeance against the perceived cause.³⁹

What is an appropriate biblical response to radical Muslim hatred? A complete answer would take volumes. May I suggest four ideas?

First, love your enemies. Jesus of Nazareth taught, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.'⁴⁰ It is not emotionally easy for me to love Usama bin Ladin or to pray for him. I have to ask God for strength for that.

Second, support national defense. Paul, one of Jesus' early followers, wrote that governments are to 'bear the sword' to subjugate evil.⁴¹ The implications are complex and debatable, but the principle of defending against attack is biblical.

Third, if you are not a Muslim, learn about Islam.⁴² One writer remarked of some of Israeli King David's supporters that they "understood the times."⁴³ Paul sought to understand cultural and religious views of his day.⁴⁴

And fourth, befriend some Muslims, perhaps from your neighborhood or workplace. In humility, learn about their families, their hopes and dreams. If appropriate, discuss your respective faiths. You may be surprised at the similarities. And your kindness may generate warmth toward the spirit that drives your kind behavior and speech.⁴⁵

^{This article is adapted with permission from Rusty Wright, 'Why Radical Muslims Hate You,' The Plain Truth, September/October 2004, 6-9. Rusty Wright 2004.}

Rusty Wright is an award-winning author, journalist, and lecturer with Probe.org who has spoken on six continents. He holds Bachelor of Science (psychology) and Master of Theology degrees from Duke and Oxford universities, respectively.

Notes

1. Al-Riswala, issue of September 13, 2001; in Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 156-7.
2. Helen Gibson, 'Islam's Other Hot Spots: Britain: No Pause in the Recruiting,' TIME.com, posted September 7, 2003 at http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030915/wpakistan.html; from TIME magazine issue cover date September 15, 2003.
3. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii, xx, 225-226, 239.
4. Lewis 2003, op. cit., xv-xviii. Bin Laden is not alone in his concern. For example, the founding leader of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist militia in northern Iraq with suspected Al-Qaeda ties, sees his work as part of a lengthy Islamic struggle to restore the caliphate. See Neil MacFarquhar, 'Islamic Militants Said to Infiltrate Iraq to Battle the U.S. Occupiers,' New York Times (AOL edition), August 13, 2003.
5. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 6-7 ff., especially 18-63.
6. Lewis 2003, op. cit., xxvii.
7. Lewis 2002, op. cit., 164-5.
8. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 76-79.
9. Sayyid Qutb, Al-Islwam wa-mushkilwa;t al-hadwara (n.p., 1967), 80ff; in Lewis 2003, op. cit., 78-79.
10. John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 57.
11. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 79, 76.
12. Esposito 1999, op. cit. 135, and personal interview, November 19, 2003.
13. Esposito 1999, op. cit., 272, also calls it a 'splinter group.'
14. Esposito, personal interview, November 19, 2003; Esposito 2003, op. cit., 7, 19.
15. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003), 91-128, 195 ff.
16. See Lewis 2002, op. cit., 64-81 for historical perspective on socio-cultural differences between Islam and the West. See Esposito 1999, op. cit., for additional perspective that differs from Lewis' on certain key points. See Thomas A. Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2002/2003), 334, 357, ff., for a contemporary journalist's perspective.
17. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 81. The final quotation in the paragraph to which this note refers, 'the insidious tempter', is from Qur'an CXIV, 4, 5.
18. For example, Esposito 1999, op. cit., 219 ff.
19. Matthew 22:21 NLT.
20. Lewis 2002, op. cit., 97.
21. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 5-8; see also Lewis 2002 op. cit., 96-116, and Esposito 2003, op. cit., 67-68.
22. Esposito 1999, op. cit., 45-73, 222.
23. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 103-112.
24. Baer, op. cit., 166.
25. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 120-124 ff.
26. Ibid., 128.
27. Ibid., 123-128.
28. Esposito 2003, op. cit., 5, 7, 16, 48, 108-109.
29. Ibid., 129.
30. Esposito 2003, op. cit., 49, 111, 115.
31. Baer, op. cit., 89-90. Baer here refers to Wahhabis in Afghanistan mixing with Muslim Brothers. Esposito, personal interview, November 19, 2003, feels it is more precise to say that the Wahhabis there mixed with radical followers of Sayyid Qutb.
32. David Van Biema, 'Wahhabism: Toxic Faith?', TIME.com, posted September 7, 2003, at http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030915/wwahhabism.html; from TIME magazine issue cover date September 15, 2003.
33. Lisa Beyer with Scott MacLeod, 'Inside the Kingdom,' TIME.com, posted September 7, 2003, at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,483269,00.html; from TIME magazine issue cover date September 15, 2003.
34. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 113.
35. Esposito 1999, op. cit., 241.
36. Lewis 2003, op. cit., 114.
37. Friedman, op. cit., 216. Friedman takes the quote from an unidentified issue of TIME.
38. Ibid., 354-355. Friedman cites TIME of February 25, 2002.
39. Ibid., 242-243; 355 ff. The argument is not that all Muslims live in abject poverty. Many Muslim nations are oil-rich. But oil wealth does not always filter throughout society. Beyond finances, feelings of relative lack of power, influence and respect on the world stage contribute to the poverty of dignity, Friedman holds.
40. Matthew 5:44 NASB.
41. Romans 13:1-4 NASB.
42. For an example of a Christian reflecting on the essentials of Islam, see Rick Rood's, 'What is Islam?, and 'Probe Answers Our E-mail: Why Do You Lie about Islam?' http://www.probe.org/docs/e-islam.html.
43. 1 Chronicles 12:32 NASB.
44. Acts 17:16-34.
45. Colossians 4:5-6.

7 Questions Skeptics Ask

Rusty Wright — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:10:07 -0800

As the flight from Chicago to Dallas climbed in the sky, I became engrossed in conversation with the passenger to my left. "Aimee," a French businesswoman, asked me about my work. On learning I was a Christian communicator, she related that a professing Christian had signed a contract with her, attempted to lead her to Christ, then later deceitfully undercut her. "How could a Christian do such a thing?" she asked.

I told her that Christians weren't perfect, that some fail miserably, that many are honest and caring, but that it is Jesus we ultimately trust. Aimee asked question on question: "How can you believe the Bible?" "Why do Christians say there is only one way to God?" "How does one become a Christian?"

I tried to answer her concerns tactfully and explained the message of grace as clearly as I could. Stories I told of personal pain seemed to open her up to consider God's love for her. She did not come to Christ in that encounter, but she seemed to leave it with a new understanding.

Hurting people everywhere need God. Many are open to considering Him, but they often have questions they want answered before they are willing to accept Christ. As we answer them, seeking to blend grace with truth, an increasing number of skeptics may give an ear and become seekers or believers. That's what happened to me.

After trying as a teenager to live in a way that would be pleasing to people and to God, I was nearly expelled from high school for some problems I helped create. For some time after that, I put on hold any investigation into Christianity. In pain and anger I wondered, "Why would God allow this to happen to me after I had been trying my best to please Him?"

Later, students in the Campus Crusade for Christ group at Duke University my freshman year helped me see God's forgiveness as a free gift. They lovingly accepted me in spite of my sometimes-relentless questions.

After trusting Christ as Savior, I still had questions. Bob Prall, the local Campus Crusade director, took interest in me. At first his answers irritated me, but as I thought them through, they began to make sense. I followed him around campus for two years, watching him interact with non-Christians. Today, as I am privileged to encounter inquisitive people, much of my approach derives from my mentor.

"BUT WHAT ABOUT..."

How do you deal with questions and objections to faith that your friends may pose?

First, some guidelines. Pray for wisdom, for His love for inquirers (Rom. 9:1-3), and for your questioner's heart. If appropriate, briefly share the gospel first. The Holy Spirit may draw your friends to Christ. Don't push, though. It may be best to answer their questions first.

Some questions may be intellectual smokescreens. Once a Georgia Tech philosophy professor peppered me with questions, which I answered as best I could.

Then I asked him, "If I could answer all your questions to your satisfaction, would you put your life in Jesus' hands?" His reply: "Expletive no!"

I don't have complete answers to every concern you will encounter, but here are some short responses that might be useful.

1. Why is there evil and suffering?

Sigmund Freud called religion an illusion humans invent to satisfy their security needs. To him, a benevolent, all-powerful God seemed incongruent with natural disasters and human evil.

God, though sovereign, gave us freedom to follow Him or to disobey Him. This response does not answer all concerns (because He sometimes does intervene to thwart evil) but suggests that the problem of evil is not as great an intellectual obstacle to belief as some imagine.

Pain's emotional barrier to belief, however, remains formidable. Jesus understands suffering. He was scorned, beaten, and cruelly executed, carrying the guilt of our rebellion against God (Isa 53:10).

When I see God, items on my long list of questions for Him will include a painful and unwanted divorce, betrayal by trusted coworkers, and all sorts of disappointing human behavior and natural disasters. Yet in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection I have seen enough to trust Him when He says He "causes all things to work together for good to those who love God" (Rom. 8:28).

2. What about all the contradictions in the Bible?

Ask your questioner for specific examples. Often people have none, but rely on hearsay. If there is a specific example, consider these guidelines as you respond.

Omission does not necessarily create contradiction. Luke, for example, writes of two angels at Jesus' tomb after the Resurrection (Luke 24:1-9). Matthew mentions "an angel" (Luke 28:1-8). Is this a contradiction? If Matthew stated that only one angel was present, the accounts would be dissonant. As it stands, they can be harmonized.

Differing accounts aren't necessarily contradictory. Matthew and Luke, for example, differ in their accounts of Jesus' birth. Luke records Joseph and Mary starting in Nazareth, traveling to Bethlehem (Jesus' birthplace), and returning to Nazareth (Luke 1:26-2:40). Matthew starts with Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, relates the family's journey to Egypt to escape King Herod's rage, and recounts their travel to Nazareth after Herod's death (Matt. 1:18-2:23). The Gospels never claim to be exhaustive records. Biographers must be selective. The accounts seem complementary, not contradictory.

Space precludes more complex examples here. But time and again, supposed biblical problems fade in light of logic, history, and archeology. The Bible's track record under scrutiny argues for its trustworthiness.

3. What about those who never hear of Jesus?

God's perfect love and justice far exceed our own. Whatever He decides will be loving and fair. A friend once told me that many asking this question seek a personal loophole, a way so they won't need to believe in Christ. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity wrote, "If you are worried about the people outside of Christianity, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself." If Christianity is true, the most logical behavior for someone concerned about those without Christ's message would be to trust Christ and go tell them about Him.

4. How can Jesus be the only way to God?

When I was in high school, a recent alumnus visited, saying he had found Christ at Harvard. I respected his character and tact and listened intently. But I could not stomach Jesus' claim that "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me" (John 14:6).

Two years later, my spiritual and intellectual journey had changed my view. The logic that drew me (reluctantly) to his position involves three questions:

If God exists, could there be only one way to reach Him? To be open-minded, I had to admit this possibility.

Why consider Jesus as a candidate for that possible one way? He claimed it. His plan of rescuing humans ("by grace. . .through faith. . . not . . .works," Eph 2:8-9) was distinct from those requiring works, as many other religions do. These two kinds of systems were mutually exclusive. Both could be false or either could be true, but both could not be true.

Was Jesus' plan true? Historical evidence for His resurrection, fulfilled prophecy and deity, and for the reliability of the New Testament, convinced me I could trust His words.

5. Isn't Christianity just a psychological crutch?

Bob Prall has often said, "If Christianity is a psychological crutch, then Jesus Christ came because there was an epidemic of broken legs." Christianity claims to meet real human needs such as those for forgiveness, love, identity, and self-acceptance. We might describe Jesus not as a crutch but an iron lung, essential for life itself.

Christian faith and its benefits can be described in psychological terms, but that does not negate its validity. Evidence supports Christianity's truthfulness, so we would expect it to work in individual lives, as millions attest.

6. I could never take the blind leap of faith that believing in Christ requires.

We exercise faith every day. Few of us understand everything about electricity or aerodynamics, but we have evidence of their validity. Whenever we use electric lights or airplanes, we exercise faith -- not blind faith, but faith based on evidence. Christians act similarly. The evidence for Jesus is compelling, so one can trust Him on that basis.

7. It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere.

After discussing this, a respected psychologist told me, "I guess a person could be sincere in what he believed, but be sincerely wrong." In the 1960s, many women took the drug thalidomide sincerely believing it would ease their pregnancies -- never suspecting it could cause severe birth defects.

Ultimately, faith is only as valid as its object. Jesus demonstrated by His life, death, and resurrection that He is a worthy object for faith.

Your questioners may be turned off because many Christians haven't acted like Jesus. Maybe they're angry at God because of personal illness, a broken relationship, a loved one's death, or personal pain. Ask God for patience and love as you follow Peter's admonition: "But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15).

^{This article first appeared in the March/April 2002 issue of Moody Magazine. ©2002 Rusty Wright. Used by permission.}

There is So Much Brutality in the Old Testament!

Michael Lane — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:38:27 -0700

Christians, more than even non-Christians, tend to be appalled by the brutality of the Old Testament especially when they compare it to the New Testament. The contrast seems drastic; Jesus comes with a message of love, mercy and peace, while God in the Old Testament demands the complete destruction of his enemies, destroys entire cities and floods the earth, killing everything which is not safely on the ark. Is this even the same God?

This is not just a problem for modern Christians. Early Christians struggled with this as well, so much in fact that several early sects wanted to do away with the Old Testament completely.

The Old Testament is Jesus' Heritage

To begin, we have to acknowledge that we cannot accept Jesus and yet abandon the Old Testament, for Jesus himself revered and accepted the Old Testament. During His ministry, Jesus spoke candidly of Jonah (Matt 16:4), Noah (Luke 17:36), Abraham (John 8:56) and Moses (John 7:19) without any indication that the ancient books of the Bible were no longer applicable or in force, or that these ancient stories had no merit. Jesus said repeatedly that he came to fulfill, not to abolish the scriptures. (Matthew 5:17)

The Old Testament reveals the entirety of God's plan for redeeming his people, which came to fruition in Jesus. The Old Testament predicts and prophesies about him. It details his ancestry and His heritage, so we should not overlook how much we can learn about both the Father and Son from its riches.

Not a Fair Comparison

We need to resist the urge to compare the two testaments, for in several vital ways, they are substantially different. The Old Testament is a vast, sweeping epic spanning thousands of years and containing many central characters and events. It records the era when the Israelites were fighting the surrounding nations (and often themselves) to claim the promises of God. It was a brutal time, and the Old Testament faithfully reflects the conflict of those days.

In contrast, The New Testament is very different, spanning less than a hundred years and focusing almost exclusively on the life of Jesus Christ.

To make this comparison is to put a biography of Winston Churchill against a history of warfare in the first two millennium. The amount of violence and bloodshed in the two books would be very different!

The New Testament is not all Love and Mercy

While it is true that Jesus' central message is love, He never shied away from talking about justice or wrath. In Matthew 10:14-15, He says, "If any household or town refuses to welcome you or listen to your message, shake its dust from your feet as you leave. I tell you the truth, the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah will be better off than such a town on the judgment day."

Jesus understood very well that His message would not be universally accepted and that His Gospel would cause division, strife and bloodshed. In Matthew 10:34, Jesus tells us, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."

And, like the Father of the Old Testament, Jesus had extremely high standards for us to follow. Jesus never said, "try hard" or "do your best." He told us in Matthew 5:28, "But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Jesus' principles in some instances were even stricter than in the Old Testament, forbidding divorce where Moses had permitted it.

Jesus commanded us to cut off our hands and feet, or cut out our eye if they cause us to sin. (Matthew 18:7-8). He warned us not to cause children to lose faith, otherwise it would be better for us to be cast into the sea (Mark 9:42). On several occasions, Jesus called the Pharisees "vipers "and "blind guides" and warned them repeatedly that they were in danger of being cast into hell. (Matt 23:33)

Clearly, Jesus is no soft pushover who will look the other way when we sin. While we cannot overemphasize His message of love and mercy, clearly he was as His Father in the Old Testament, a God of justice and righteousness.

The Old Testament is Not all Death and Doom

We must not overlook all the examples of mercy which are abundant in the Old Testament, both on a personal level and for all of Israel itself.

On a personal level, the Old Testament contains wonderful, touching stories of God remaining faithful and caring for his people who remain faithful to him. We see great tenderness in the way God rescues Joseph, answers Abraham's prayer for a son and protects and cares for David, even despite his occasional indiscretions. God miraculously protects Daniel from the lions, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the fire.

On a national level, we can't ignore God's mercy in rescuing the Israelites from Egypt, or the fact that he did permit Noah to escape on the ark in order to preserve mankind.

God always gave cities and countries ample opportunity to repent before they were destroyed. We see from the example of Jonah in Nineveh that God is merciful and does not want to destroy them except as a last resort. When the people of Nineveh repented, God was glad and spared them, and would have done the same for any other people who would turn from their wickedness.

But what about all the killing?

No matter how we might rationalize, we still need to contend with and reconcile all the violence in the Old Testament. Most disturbing are the times when God Himself orders the annihilation of an entire race.

The clearest example of this occurs in 1 Samuel 15:2-3, "This is what the LORD Almighty says: Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.'"

To put this in perspective, we need to start by acknowledging that the Israelites had to be kept safe at all cost, for God knew that it would be through the line of David that Jesus would come to the earth. Jesus' resurrection is the greatest example of God's mercy, and so this act of mercy needed to be protected at all cost.

The Amalekites were far from innocent. They were attacking the Israelites constantly, often preying on children, the weak and the elderly.

Writes, Rabbi Aron Moss,

"The Amalekites took any opportunity to attack Jews for absolutely no reason. There was no land dispute or provocation that caused this hatred - it was an intrinsic pathological need to destroy God's people. Such hatred cannot be combated through diplomacy. There was no option to re-educate the Amalekites or review their school curricula. Their hatred was not taught - it was ingrained. As long as an Amalekite walked the earth, no Jew was safe. It was a clear case of kill or be killed."

What choice does God have in such a situation but to destroy them? None of us get pleasure in the idea of taking a life, but at the same time, given a scenario where an evil, violent man will stop at nothing to destroy your beloved children, who in their right mind would not want to see that man killed if there were no other options? This is the scenario which God faced. The Amalekites would not relent or repent, and so God acted to preserve his people. From the perspective of the Israelites, it was an act of mercy.

But Did God have to Annihilate Them?

I don't often get into examining the original Hebrew or Greek language used in the Bible, but we can learn something interesting from this example. The Hebrew word used in the original text of God's command to Saul is "herem." Most translations use some variation of the phrase "attack and totally destroy." This word in Hebrew has a deeper meaning than to simply destroy. One might also use the word "ban" or "exterminate" to describe something which cannot be allowed to continue to exist. "Herem" in this context refers to something which is so completely irredeemable that it is contaminated and must be utterly destroyed lest it further contaminate that which is good.

God understood that the Amalekites were like a cancer or a disease. They were so depraved and so vile that they had to be utterly destroyed. To spare them in any way would have the opposite effect, for they would rise up again as evil and degenerate as ever. Remember, God is protecting his people and wants no mistakes or chance of failure.

Life belongs to God

Finally, we must keep in mind that God is the one who ultimately decides who lives and dies, and that is true today as much as it was in ancient times. It is the result and curse of our sinful nature that we all must die, and the manner and time of our death are known to God alone. It may seem unfair for God to strike down an entire nation, but those are His choices alone to make. To argue that it's unfair for God to wipe out the Amalekites is simply to argue about timing, for they were all going to die by God's hand in time.

We are shocked at God's decree to Saul to exterminate the Amalekites because it is so explicit, yet God continues to take lives every day, sometimes one-by-one, or sometimes by the hundreds of thousands in the case of major natural disasters. You would be just as right to ask God why he destroys by Tsunami or earthquake, and many often do. In the end, we are all here for a short while and during that time, we must do the best we can to serve God and enter into a relationship with Him.

Is the Bible Infallible? Is it all Literal?

Michael Lane — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:53:49 -0700

Here is what we can say about the infallibility and literalness of the Bible: "The Bible is completely accurate where it intends to be and to the degree to which it intends to be."

Where the Bible intends to be Accurate, It Is.

Liberal scholars will say that the Bible is accurate and infallible where it discusses a matter of doctrinal importance. These would include the resurrection and Jesus' virgin birth, for example. Most liberal scholars would not say that infallibility extends to historical matters, which would suggest that the Bible could be wrong about who was ruling a territory at a given time, or dates when certain events occurred.

Conservative scholars would go further and say that infallibility extends to historical matters as well. Regardless of the the topic or subject, where the Bible expresses a fact which is intended to be accurate, that fact is accurate.

Doesn't the Bible Always Intend to Be Accurate?

No, not at all; it would be much less interesting if it did! Part of what makes literature so interesting and exciting are the various expressions the authors employ which tug at our emotions and our imagination. One could say, simply, "she was upset and cried," or one could say, "her tears fell like a torrent". No one expects that she literally was in danger of having her bed float away, but the implications are clear. This kind of expressive language gives us an emotional connection to the story. It gets our attention.

The Bible uses language like this. Have a look at Psalm 6:6, "I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears."

Jesus himself used many figures of speech. In Matthew 23:34 he tells the Pharisees, "You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."

How Do we know what's literal and what's a figure of speech?

It's very difficult! Two very sincere, honest and intelligent people can come up with two different answers depending on their background, their education or their assumptions about the Bible. People have been debating these issues for two thousand years, and there are some issues which will never be resolved.

There have always been fundamentalists who take every single passage in the Bible literally. I sympathize with their motives. If it's difficult to distinguish between what is supposed to be literal and what is not, then surely there is safety in going to the extreme, right? It's a noble thing to attempt, but it can't be done in reality. There is real danger that these fundamentalists end up misunderstanding the intent of the passage.

Let's look at Hebrews 4:12, for example, "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow;" Any attempt to take this literally will result in a misunderstanding of the meaning. There can be no way to ignore the figurative language and still understand the author's point. Thus, by trying to take the safe road, literalists may be doing themselves more harm than good.

Though it is difficult, we have to face up to the challenge and use our God-given mind to distinguish between literal and figurative passages.

With that in mind, there are several tools we can use to guide us.

1. The Genre of the Book. Books of poetry, such as Psalms and Song of Solomon will be much more likely to contain figures of speech or phrases which are not intended to be taken literally. On the other hand, almost everything in the Book of Acts should be taken literally because by his own admission, Luke has endeavored to create an accurate representation of what really happened.

2. Other passages on the same subject. Ask yourself, "If I take this literally, is it consistent with other passages I've read?" If you have read dozens of passages which explain the point clearly, and a single passage which seems at odds with all the others, perhaps that single passage is not intended to be taken literally.

3. Common sense. Hell is described as being full of darkness, yet eternally on fire. Wouldn't the flames provide some light? Clearly, the images of hell are intended to make the point that it is a terrible place, not to provide details of what it's actually like.

4. Look for the bigger picture. When Jesus tells us in Matthew, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away" should we take that literally? No, we need to get to the heart of what Jesus is saying, which is that we must not make excuses for our sin. Whatever causes us to sin, we must aggressively stop the pattern and break free of it.

What do you mean by, "..the degree to which it intends to be"?

It's not always appropriate to use scientifically accurate language on every occasion. We do this naturally all the time without thinking. When asked the time, we will respond "quarter to three" when it's really two forty three, or when asked how much money we have, we may answer "five bucks" when it's really five dollars and seventeen cents. No one is surprised by these inaccurate answers, and no one would accuse us of not telling the truth.

The level accuracy we expect depends on the context, and the Bible is no different. When the bible says that five-thousand people were present, it could have been as few as forty-five hundred or as many as five-thousand five hundred. We should not complain if the Bible rounds up or down, just as any author would do in the same context.

How Can Christians Say Other Religions Are Wrong?

Michael Lane — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:21:38 -0700

"So, I cast my lot with Him - not the one claimed wisdom, Confucius; or the one who claimed enlightenment, Buddha; or the one who claimed to be a prophet, Muhammad, but with the one who claimed to be God in the flesh. The one who declared, "Before Abraham was born, I Am" - and proved it" - Norman Geisler

What About All the Other Religions?

There certainly are a lot of other religions out there! In the early 20th century, we could have chosen from many ancient religions besides Christianity including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism. Today, if we include so-called new-age religions, it would be easy to come up with a long list of candidates. With so much choice available, why would anyone choose to follow Christ?

If you want religion to give you comfort, a sense of peace, or just to make you feel good about yourself, one is just as good as another. Christianity does all of this very well for those who practice it faithfully, but if you ask devout Jews, Muslims or Buddhists, they will tell you sincerely and convincingly that their faith provides them with just as much peace and comfort as Christianity affords. Some of the new-age religions will go even further, offering all the emotional comfort without the strict moral code.

The trouble is that its all very subjective. On what basis could you ever say that one religion is right and another is wrong when its the emotional and psychological benefits which are being measured? If that is what you're after, you would do well to try them all and find the one that is the best fit for you. No one could ever tell you their religion is the right one; they could simply tell you that theirs works for them. If it doesn't work for you, you can move onto the next one with ease.

This is how society has come to see religion in the last hundred years. It is now more about how it makes you feel than anything else. Sadly, many Christians have bought into this lie, so much so that when their non-Christian friends ask them why they go to church, they have nothing concrete or objective to offer except that it works for them. In the face of this, why would anyone who is spiritually hungry ever try Christianity? Its not the easiest or most approachable religion, and it often does less than other religions to promote and market itself (though many wonderful new churches and organizations are trying desperately to alter these perceptions).

If we want to say that Christianity is the right faith, there has to be some objective criteria which we can use to measure and compare all the different religions.

Every Religion Claims Some Truth

Every religion has some set of beliefs at its core which unites its followers. Jews, Muslims and Christians have much in common here, believing that the God who created the universe has revealed Himself and acted in history to teach his people how to worship Him and live together in harmony. Many believe in life after death or reincarnation. Some of the fringe religions may believe in aliens, UFOs or other such phenomenon.

Many of these claims are difficult to prove. We can be certain of little, especially when the events which form the foundation of the faith occurred thousands of years ago. Other claims, especially among the fringe religions, are actually constructed to be logically un-provable. The most common examples of this are the claims by religions leaders that they have received a vision or special revelation from God. How could such a claim ever be proven?

Christian apologist John Warwick Montgomery famously and facetiously gave the example of his cheese sandwich deity who lives at the edge of the universe. This deity would not interact with us in any way, and would always place himself ten miles beyond the reach of the most powerful telescope. As we develop more and more powerful telescopes, the cheese sandwich would move out another ten miles. How could you ever prove that he is really there? You can't, but neither can you prove that he does not exist.

Many religious claims are like this, which has led both modern science and the general public to throw up their hands are generalize that all religious claims are unscientific and un-testable. The late anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the realms of science (where truth claims are testable and verifiable) and religion (where they are not) which he called non-overlapping magesteria. Gould wrote,

the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap

Gould's view has become the prevalent opinion of the 21st century. Religious claims cant be proven; therefore one religion's claims are just as valid as any others. This is the attitude which ultimately gave rise to the idea that religions only value lies in what it makes you feel. After all, if they're all the same making claims that cannot be verified - why not make your choice on basis of their emotional and psychological benefits?

Christianity Is Different

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God." John 6:68-69

All of Christianity rests upon the person of Jesus Christ, and it is a testable, verifiable fact whether or not he actually lived. The most important reason to trust His teaching is that He rose from the dead, and once again, this is a testable, verifiable fact.

Christ's resurrection is not in the same category as a spiritual leader who claims to have a revelation from God. This leader's adherents must decide if they trust his claims and want to place their faith in him, however, they can never be completely certain, since he can offer no evidence. They must take him at his word. Conversely, the disciples of Christ watched Him die on the cross and then appear again before them days later. For those who were witnesses to the event, it required no faith or trust in Jesus to understand the facts which were plainly laid out before them.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an actual event in history and like other events from long ago, we can gather evidence, examine the facts and reach a conclusion. There may be some people who will find the evidence unpersuasive and will decide that Christ did not rise from the grave. However, the very notion that someone has examined the evidence and found it lacking demonstrates that the claim of Christs resurrection is, indeed, verifiable. Were it not, there would be no evidence to examine.

Christ's Resurrection Is Not Subjective

Once we begin talking about facts, evidence and conclusions, we've left the realm of subjectivity. If I say that Christ rose from the dead and you believe that he did not, then one of us is right and the other is wrong. It may be impossible for me to convince you of my position, however the fact remains that it is a completely objective matter. We cannot both be right.

If we expand this thought, then we can say that any religion which does not recognize Christ's resurrection is factually opposed to Christianity. Judaism and Islam do not, and therefore it is proper to say that on the issue of Christ's resurrection, either Christianity is correct or else they are correct. There is no way to say that all three are right, just as it is impossible for two people to arrive at different sums in arithmetic and both be right. It is not intolerant or ignorant to acknowledge that there can only be one correct answer.

Christ's Resurrection is Central to His Credibility

In John 14:6, Jesus proclaimed, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me." Now, this is not a provable fact in the same way that His resurrection is provable, but it is nevertheless either true or false. It cannot be true that Jesus is the only way while at the same time it is also true that other religions can also offer salvation. If salvation comes through Jesus then it is because He is the Son of God and it cannot come through any other means. If there are other ways to be saved, then Jesus is a liar and a fraud and He offers no salvation at all.

Each of us has to decide to trust or not trust Jesus on this issue. Why should we believe Jesus above any other religious figure? We can believe Him because He rose from the dead.

As we examined earlier, the resurrection is an event which we can examine and investigate, and about which we can conclude that it either did or did not happen. If it did, then Jesus gains an incredible amount of credibility and we should trust him when He tells us that He is the only way. Otherwise, He is a man of no importance and we can ignore him. Either way it is an objective issue, and those who follow Christ and those who do not simply cannot both be right. Jesus Christ is either the Son of God or He is not. If He is the Son of God, then Christianity is right and all the other faiths are wrong.

Christians do not say this to be intolerant or insensitive, but there is no way to find middle ground on this issue.

Rediscovering the Historical Jesus

Dr. William Lane Craig — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:49:34 -0700

Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate and continued to have followers after his death.¹

Still, if we want any details about Jesus's life and teachings, we must turn to the New Testament. Extra-biblical sources confirm what we read in the gospels, but they don't really tell us anything new. The question then must be: how historically reliable are the New Testament documents?

Burden of Proof

Here we confront the very crucial question of the burden of proof. Should we assume that the gospels are reliable unless they are proven to be unreliable? Or should we assume the gospels are unreliable unless they are proven to be reliable? Are they innocent until proven guilty or guilty until proven innocent? Sceptical scholars almost always assume that the gospels are guilty until proven innocent, that is, they assume that the gospels are unreliable unless and until they are proven to be correct concerning some particular fact. I'm not exaggerating here: this really is the procedure of sceptical critics.

But I want to list five reasons why I think we ought to assume that the gospels are reliable until proven wrong:

1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. The interval of time between the events themselves and recording of them in the gospels is too short to have allowed the memory of what had or had not actually happened to be erased.

2. The gospels are not analogous to folk tales or contemporary "urban legends." Tales like those of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill or contemporary urban legends like the "vanishing hitchhiker" rarely concern actual historical individuals and are thus not analogous to the gospel narratives.

3. The Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was highly developed and reliable. In an oral culture like that of first century Palestine the ability to memorize and retain large tracts of oral tradition was a highly prized and highly developed skill. From the earliest age children in the home, elementary school, and the synagogue were taught to memorize faithfully sacred tradition. The disciples would have exercised similar care with the teachings of Jesus.

4. There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles supervision. Since those who had seen and heard Jesus continued to live and the tradition about Jesus remained under the supervision of the apostles, these factors would act as a natural check on tendencies to elaborate the facts in a direction contrary to that preserved by those who had known Jesus.

5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability.

I don't have enough time to talk about all of these. So let me say something about the first and the last points.

1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. No modern scholar thinks of the gospels as bald-faced lies, the result of a massive conspiracy. The only place you find such conspiracy theories of history is in sensationalist, popular literature or former propaganda from behind the Iron Curtain. When you read the pages of the New Testament, theres no doubt that these people sincerely believed in the truth of what they proclaimed. Rather ever since the time of D. F. Strauss, sceptical scholars have explained away the gospels as legends. Like the child's game of telephone, as the stories about Jesus were passed on over the decades, they got muddled and exaggerated and mythologized until the original facts were all but lost. The Jewish peasant sage was transformed into the divine Son of God.

One of the major problems with the legend hypothesis, however, which is almost never addressed by sceptical critics, is that the time between Jesus's death and the writing of the gospels is just too short for this to happen. This point has been well-explained by A. N. Sherwin-White in his book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament.² Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is a professional historian of times prior to and contemporaneous with Jesus. According to Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman and Greek history are usually biased and removed one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence the course of Roman and Greek history. For example, the two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than 400 years after Alexanders death, and yet classical historians still consider them to be trustworthy. The fabulous legends about Alexander the Great did not develop until during the centuries after these two writers. According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be "unbelievable." More generations would be needed.

In fact, adding a time gap of two generations to Jesus's death lands you in the second century, just when the apocryphal gospels begin to appear. These do contain all sorts of fabulous stories about Jesus, trying to fill in the years between his boyhood and his starting his ministry, for example. These are the obvious legends sought by the critics, not the biblical gospels.

This point becomes even more devastating for skepticism when we recall that the gospels themselves use sources that go back even closer to the events of Jesuss life. For example, the story of Jesus's suffering and death, commonly called the Passion Story, was probably not originally written by Mark. Rather Mark used a source for this narrative. Since Mark is the earliest gospel, his source must be even earlier. In fact, Rudolf Pesch, a German expert on Mark, says the Passion source must go back to at least AD 37, just seven years after Jesus's death.³

Or again, Paul in his letters hands on information concerning Jesus about his teaching, his Last Supper, his betrayal, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection appearances. Paul's letters were written even before the gospels, and some of his information, for example, what he passes on in his first letter to the Corinthian church about the resurrection appearances, has been dated to within five years after Jesus's death. It just becomes irresponsible to speak of legends in such cases.

5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability. Again I only have time to look at one example: Luke. Luke was the author of a two-part work: the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. These are really one work and are separated in our Bibles only because the church grouped the gospels together in the New Testament. Luke is the gospel writer who writes most self-consciously as an historian. In the preface to this work he writes:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1:1-4)

This preface is written in classical Greek terminology such as was used by Greek historians; after this Luke switches to a more common Greek. But he has put his reader on alert that he can write, should he wish to, like the learned historian. He speaks of his lengthy investigation of the story hes about to tell and assures us that it is based on eyewitness information and is accordingly the truth.

Now who was this author we call Luke? He was clearly not an eyewitness to Jesus's life. But we discover an important fact about him from the book of Acts. Beginning in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, when Paul reaches Troas in modern-day Turkey, the author suddenly starts using the first-person plural: "we set sail from Troas to Samothrace," "we remained in Philippi some days," "as we were going to the place of prayer," etc. The most obvious explanation is that the author had joined Paul on his evangelistic tour of the Mediterranean cities. In chapter 21 he accompanies Paul back to Palestine and finally to Jerusalem. What this means is that the author of Luke-Acts was in fact in first hand contact with the eyewitnesses of Jesus's life and ministry in Jerusalem. Sceptical critics have done back-flips to try to avoid this conclusion. They say that the use of the first-person plural in Acts should not be taken literally; its just a literary device which is common in ancient sea voyage stories. Never mind that many of the passages in Acts are not about Paul's sea voyage, but take place on land! The more important point is that this theory, when you check it out, turns out to be sheer fantasy.⁴ There just was no literary device of sea voyages in the first person plural the whole thing has been shown to be a scholarly fiction! There is no avoiding the conclusion that Luke-Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul who had the opportunity to interview eyewitnesses to Jesuss life while in Jerusalem. Who were some of these eyewitnesses? Perhaps we can get some clue by subtracting from the Gospel of Luke everything found in the other gospels and seeing what is peculiar to Luke. What you discover is that many of Lukes peculiar narratives are connected to women who followed Jesus: people like Joanna and Susanna, and significantly, Mary, Jesus's mother.

Was the author reliable in getting the facts straight? The book of Acts enables us to answer that question decisively. The book of Acts overlaps significantly with secular history of the ancient world, and the historical accuracy of Acts is indisputable. This has recently been demonstrated anew by Colin Hemer, a classical scholar who turned to New Testament studies, in his book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. 5Hemer goes through the book of Acts with a fine-toothed comb, pulling out a wealth of historical knowledge, ranging from what would have been common knowledge down to details which only a local person would know. Again and again Lukes accuracy is demonstrated: from the sailings of the Alexandrian corn fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right. According to Professor Sherwin-White, "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd."⁶ The judgement of Sir William Ramsay, the world-famous archaeologist, still stands: "Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."⁷ Given Luke's care and demonstrated reliability as well as his contact with eyewitnesses within the first generation after the events, this author is trustworthy.

On the basis of the five reasons I listed, we are justified in accepting the historical reliability of what the gospels say about Jesus unless they are proven to be wrong. At the very least, we cannot assume they are wrong until proven right. The person who denies the gospels reliability must bear the burden of proof.

Specific Aspects of Jesus's Life

Now by the very nature of the case, it will be impossible to say a whole lot more beyond this to prove that certain stories in the gospels are historically true. How could you prove, for example, the story of Jesus's visiting Mary and Martha? You just have here a story told by a reliable author in a position to know and no reason to doubt the historicity of the story. Theres not much more to say.

Nevertheless, for many of the key events in the gospels, a great deal more can be said. What Id like to do now is take a few of the important aspects of Jesus in the gospels and say a word about their historical credibility.

1. Jesus's Radical Self-Concept as the Divine Son of God. Radical critics deny that the historical Jesus thought of himself as the divine Son of God. They say that after Jesus's death, the early church claimed that he had said these things, even though he hadn't.

The big problem with this hypothesis is that it is inexplicable how monotheistic Jews could have attributed divinity to a man they had known, if he never claimed any such things himself. Monotheism is the heart of the Jewish religion, and it would have been blasphemous to say that a human being was God. Yet this is precisely what the earliest Christians did proclaim and believe about Jesus. Such a claim must have been rooted in Jesuss own teaching.

And in fact, the majority of scholars do believe that among the historically authentic words of Jesus these are the words in the gospels which the Jesus Seminar would print in red among the historically authentic words of Jesus are claims that reveal his divine self-understanding. One could give a whole lecture on this point alone; but let me focus on Jesus's self-concept of being the unique, divine Son of God.

Jesus's radical self-understanding is revealed, for example, in his parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard. Even sceptical scholars admit the authenticity of this parable, since it is also found in the Gospel of Thomas, one of their favorite sources. In this parable, the owner of the vineyard sent servants to the tenants of the vineyard to collect its fruit. The vineyard symbolizes Israel, the owner is God, the tenants are the Jewish religious leaders, and the servants are prophets send by God. The tenants beat and reject the owners servants. Finally, the owner says, "I will send my only, beloved son. They will listen to my son." But instead, the tenants kill the son because he is the heir to the vineyard. Now what does this parable tell us about Jesus's self-understanding? He thought of himself as Gods special son, distinct from all the prophets, Gods final messenger, and even the heir to Israel. This is no mere Jewish peasant!

Jesus's self-concept as Gods son comes to explicit expression in Matthew 11:27: "All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him." Again there is good reason to regard this as an authentic saying of the historical Jesus. It is drawn from an old source which was shared by Matthew and Luke, which scholars call the Q document. Moreover, it is unlikely the Church invented this saying because it says that the Son is unknowable"no one knows the Son except the Father", but for the post-Easter church we can know the Son. So this saying is not the product of later Church theology. What does this saying tell us about Jesus's self-concept? He thought of himself as the exclusive and absolute Son of God and the only revelation of God to mankind! Make no mistake: if Jesus wasn't who he said he was, he was crazier than David Koresh and Jim Jones put together!

Finally, I want to consider one more saying: Jesus's saying on the date of his second coming in Mark 13:32: "But of that day or that hour no man knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." This is an authentic saying of the historical Jesus because the later Church, which regarded Jesus as divine, would never have invented a saying ascribing limited knowledge or ignorance to Jesus. But here Jesus says he doesn't know the time of his return. So what do we learn from this saying? It not only reveals Jesus's consciousness of being the one Son of God, but it presents us with an ascending scale from men to the angels to the Son to the Father, a scale on which Jesus transcends any human being or angelic being. This is really incredible stuff! Yet it is what the historical Jesus believed. And this is only one facet of Jesus's self-understanding. C. S. Lewis was right when he said,

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.⁸

2. Jesuss Miracles. Even the most sceptical critics cannot deny that the historical Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcism. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most sceptical scholars this century has seen, wrote back in 1926:

Most of the miracle stories contained in the gospels are legendary or at least are dressed up with legends. But there can be no doubt that Jesus did such deeds, which were, in his and his contemporaries understanding, miracles, that is, deeds that were the result of supernatural, divine causality. Doubtless he healed the sick and cast out demons.⁹

Back in Bultmanns day the miracle stories were thought to be influenced by stories of mythological heroes and, hence, at least in part legendary. But today it is recognized that the hypothesis of mythological influence was historically incorrect. Craig Evans, a well-known Jesus scholar, says that "the older notion" that the miracle stories were the product of mythological divine man ideas "has been largely abandoned."¹⁰ He says, "It is no longer seriously contested" "that miracles played a role in Jesus's ministry." The only reason left for denying that Jesus performed literal miracles is the presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, which is simply unjustified.

3. Jesuss Trial and Crucifixion. According to the gospels Jesus was condemned by the Jewish high court on the charge of blasphemy and then delivered to the Romans for execution for the treasonous act of setting himself up as King of the Jews. Not only are these facts confirmed by independent biblical sources like Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, but they are also confirmed by extra-biblical sources. From Josephus and Tacitus, we learn that Jesus was crucified by Roman authority under the sentence of Pontius Pilate. From Josephus and Mara bar Serapion we learn that the Jewish leaders made a formal accusation against Jesus and participated in events leading up to his crucifixion. And from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a, we learn that Jewish involvement in the trial was explained as a proper undertaking against a heretic. According to Johnson, "The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its coagents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned and executed by crucifixion."¹¹ The crucifixion of Jesus is recognized even by the Jesus Seminar as "one indisputable fact." ¹²

But that raises the very puzzling question: Why was Jesus crucified? As we have seen, the evidence indicates that his crucifixion was instigated by his blasphemous claims, which to the Romans would come across as treasonous. Thats why he was crucified, in the words of the plaque that was nailed to the cross above his head, as "The King of the Jews." But if Jesus was just a peasant, cynic philosopher, just a liberal social gadfly, as the Jesus Seminar claims, then his crucifixion becomes inexplicable. As Professor Leander Keck of Yale University has said, "The idea that this Jewish cynic (and his dozen hippies) with his demeanor and aphorisms was a serious threat to society sounds more like a conceit of alienated academics than sound historical judgement."¹³ New Testament scholar John Meier is equally direct. He says that a bland Jesus who just went about spinning out parables and telling people to look at the lilies of the field-- "such a Jesus," he says, "would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one."¹⁴ The Jesus Seminar has created Jesus who is incompatible with the one indisputable fact of his crucifixion.

4. The resurrection of Jesus. It seems to me that there are four established facts which constitute inductive evidence for the resurrection of Jesus:

Fact 1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus's tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike. In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the honorable burial of Jesus is one of "the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus."¹⁵

Fact 2: On the Sunday morning following the crucifixion, the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers. According to Jakob Kremer, an Austrian specialist on the resurrection, "By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb."¹⁶ As D. H. van Daalen points out, "It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions."¹⁷

Fact 3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is a fact that is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars today. Even Gert Lüdemann, perhaps the most prominent current critic of the resurrection, admits, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."¹⁸

Finally, fact 4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to. Despite having every predisposition to the contrary, it is an undeniable fact of history that the original disciples believed in, proclaimed, and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus's resurrection. C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University concludes that we have here a belief which nothing in terms of prior historical influences can account for apart from the resurrection itself.¹⁹

Any responsible historian, then, who seeks to give an account of the matter, must deal with these four independently established facts: the honorable burial of Jesus, the discovery of his empty tomb, his appearances alive after his death, and the very origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection and, hence, of Christianity itself. I want to emphasize that these four facts represent, not the conclusions of conservative scholars, nor have I quoted conservative scholars, but represent rather the majority view of New Testament scholarship today. The question is: how do you best explain these facts?

Now this puts the sceptical critic in a somewhat desperate situation. For example, some time ago I had a debate with a professor at the University of California, Irvine, on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the subject and was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus's honorable burial, his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection. Therefore, his only recourse was to come up with some alternative explanation of these facts. And so he argued that Jesus had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth, came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus's body out of the grave, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I wont go into how I went about refuting his theory, but I think that this theory is instructive because it shows to what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to deny the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the evidence is so powerful that one of todays leading Jewish theologians Pinchas Lapide has declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead!²⁰

Conclusion

In summary, the gospels are not only trustworthy documents in general, but as we look at some of the most important aspects of Jesus in the gospels, like his radical personal claims, his miracles, his trial and crucifixion, and his resurrection, their historical veracity shines through. God has acted in history, and we can know it.

Endnotes

¹ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 123.

² A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 188-91.

³ Rudolf Pesch, Das Markusevangelium, 2 vols., Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1976-77), 2: 519-20.

⁴ See discussion in Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), chap. 8.

⁵ Ibid., chaps. 4-5.

⁶ Sherwin-White, Roman Society, p. 189.

⁷ William M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), p. 222.

⁸ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 56.

⁹ Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1926), p. 159.

¹⁰ Craig Evans, "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology," Theological Studies 54 (1993): 18, 34.

¹¹ Johnson, Real Jesus, p. 125.

¹² Robert Funk, Jesus Seminar videotape.

¹³ Leander Keck, "The Second Coming of the Liberal Jesus?" Christian Century (August, 1994), p. 786.

¹⁴ John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 177.

¹⁵ John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), p. 131.

¹⁶ Jakob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. 49-50.

¹⁷ D. H. Van Daalen, The Real Resurrection (London: Collins, 1972), p. 41.

¹⁸ Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 80.

¹⁹ C. F. D. Moule and Don Cupitt, "The Resurrection: a Disagreement," Theology 75 (1972): 507-19.

²⁰ Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. Wilhelm C. Linss (London: SPCK, 1983).

Does God Exist?

Dr. William Lane Craig — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:20:13 -0700

Note from Delve Christian Ministries: This article was authored by Dr. William Lane Craig and is reproduced here with his permission. We are extremely grateful to Dr. Craig for allowing us to offer this article on Delve Into Jesus. For more information about Dr. Craig, please visit http://www.reasonablefaith.org

C. S. Lewis once remarked that God is not the sort of thing one can be moderately interested in. After all, if God does not exist, there's no reason to be interested in God at all. On the other hand, if God does exist, then this is of paramount interest, and our ultimate concern ought to be how to be properly related to this being upon whom we depend moment by moment for our very existence.

So people who shrug their shoulders and say, "What difference does it make if God exists?" merely show that they haven't yet thought very deeply about this problem. Even atheist philosophers like Sartre and Camus who have thought very seriously about this problem admit that the existence of God makes a tremendous difference for man. Let me mention just three reasons why it makes a big difference whether God exists.

1. If God does not exist, life is ultimately meaningless. If your life is doomed to end in death, then ultimately it does not matter how you live. In the end it makes no ultimate difference whether you existed or not. Sure, your life might have a relative significance in that you influenced others or affected the course of history. But ultimately mankind is doomed to perish in the heat death of the universe. Ultimately it makes no difference who you are or what you do. Your life is inconsequential.

Thus, the contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the research of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race ultimately all these come to nothing. Thus, if atheism is true, life is ultimately meaningless.

2. If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. If there is no God, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the shortcomings of our finite existence.

For example, there is no hope for deliverance from evil. Although many people ask how God could create a world involving so much evil, by far most of the suffering in the world is due to man's own inhumanity to man. The horror of two world wars during the last century effectively destroyed the 19^th century's naive optimism about human progress. If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for deliverance from evil.

Or again, if there is no God, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death. Although it may be hard for you as university students to contemplate, the sober fact is that unless you die young, someday youyou yourselfwill be an old man or an old woman, fighting a losing battle with aging, struggling against the inevitable advance of deterioration, disease, perhaps senility. And finally and inevitably you will die. There is no afterlife beyond the grave. Atheism is thus a philosophy without hope.

3. On the other hand, if God does exist, then not only is there meaning and hope, but there is also the possibility of coming to know God and His love personally. Think of it! That the infinite God should love you and want to be your personal friend! This would be the highest status a human being could enjoy! Clearly, if God exists, it makes not only a tremendous difference for mankind in general, but it could make a life-changing difference for you as well.

Now admittedly none of this shows that God exists. But does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. Therefore, even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do, I think, is to believe in Him. That is to say, it seems to me positively irrational when the evidence is equal to prefer death, futility, and despair over hope, meaningfulness and happiness.

But, in fact, I don't think the evidence is absolutely equal. I think there are good reasons to believe in God. And today I want to share briefly five of those reasons. Whole books have been written on each of these, so all I have time to do is to present a brief sketch of each argument and then during the discussion time we can go more deeply into any of them that you'd like to talk about.

As travelers along life's way, it's our goal to make sense of things, to try to understand the way the world is. The hypothesis that God exists makes sense out of a wide range of the facts of experience.

1. God makes sense of the origin of the universe.

Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal, and that's all.

But surely this is unreasonable. Just think about it a minute. If the universe never had a beginning, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, states,

The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.¹

But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can't go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In one of the most startling developments of modern science, we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about 13 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang. What makes the Big Bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from literally nothing. For all matter and energy, even physical space and time themselves, came into being at the Big Bang. As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains, "the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science . . . is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization . . . upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing."²

Of course, alternative theories have been crafted over the years to try to avoid this absolute beginning, but none of these theories has commended itself to the scientific community as more plausible than the Big Bang theory. In fact, in 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have an absolute beginning. Vilenkin pulls no punches:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.³

That problem was nicely captured by Anthony Kenny of Oxford University. He writes, "A proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing."⁴ But surely that doesn't make sense! Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

We can summarize our argument thus far as follows:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Given the truth of the two premises, the conclusion necessarily follows.

From the very nature of the case, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncaused because we've seen that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless at least without the universe because it created time. Because it also created space, it must transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical.

Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe? If the cause were a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. For example, the cause of water's freezing is the temperature's being below 0 Centigrade. If the temperature were below 0 from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. So if the cause is permanently present, then the effect should be permanently present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. For example, a man sitting from eternity could freely will to stand up. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator.

Isn't it incredible that the big bang theory thus confirms what the Christian theist has always believed: that in the beginning God created the universe? Now I put it to you: which makes more sense: that the Christian theist is right or that the universe popped into being uncaused out of nothing? I, at least, have no trouble assessing these alternatives!

2. God makes sense of the the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

During the last 40 years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve. But we now know that our existence is balanced on a knife's edge. The existence of intelligent life depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable.

This fine-tuning is of two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, like the gravitational constant. These constants are not determined by the laws of nature. The laws of nature are consistent with a wide range of values for these constants. Second, in addition to these constants there are certain arbitrary quantities which are just put in as initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate, for example, the amount of entropy or the balance between matter and anti-matter in the universe. Now all of these constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to be altered by a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed and life would not exist.

For example, the physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10¹⁰⁰ would have prevented a life-permitting universe. The cosmological constant which drives the inflation of the universe and is responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the universe's expansion is inexplicably fine-tuned to around one part in 10¹²⁰. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang's low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10^{10 (123)}. Penrose comments, "I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10^{10 (123)}."⁵ And it's not just each constant or quantity which must be exquisitely finely-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely-tuned. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

Now there are three possibilities for explaining the presence of this remarkable fine-tuning of the universe: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first alternative holds that there is some unknown Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) which would explain the way the universe is. It had to be that way, and there was really no chance or little chance of the universe's not being life-permitting. By contrast, the second alternative states that the fine-tuning is due entirely to chance. It's just an accident that the universe is life-permitting, and we're the lucky beneficiaries. The third alternative rejects both of these accounts in favor of an intelligent Mind behind the cosmos, who designed the universe to permit life. Which of these alternatives is the most plausible?

The first alternative seems extraordinarily implausible. There is just no physical reason why these constants and quantities should have the values they do. As P. C. W. Davies states

Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn't follow that the physical universe itself is unique. . . . the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions. . . . There is nothing in present ideas about 'laws of initial conditions' remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it. . . . it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise.⁶

For example, the most promising candidate for a T.O.E. to date, super-string theory or M-Theory, fails to predict uniquely our universe. In fact, string theory allows a "cosmic landscape" of around 10⁵⁰⁰ different universes governed by the present laws of nature, so that it does nothing to render the observed values of the constants and quantities physically necessary.

So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning of the universe is due to chance? The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe's being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. Even though there will be a huge number of life-permitting universes lying within the cosmic landscape, nevertheless the number of life-permitting worlds will be unfathomably tiny compared to the entire landscape, so that the existence of a life-permitting universe is fantastically improbable. Students or laymen who blithely assert, "It could have happened by chance!" simply have no conception of the fantastic precision of the fine-tuning requisite for life. They would never embrace such a hypothesis in any other area of their lives for example, in order to explain how there came to be overnight a car in one's driveway.

Some people have tried to escape this problem by claiming that we really shouldn't be surprised at the finely-tuned conditions of the universe, for if the universe were not fine-tuned, then we wouldn't be here to be surprised about it! Given that we are here, we should expect the universe to be fine-tuned. But such reasoning is logically fallacious. We can show this by means of a parallel illustration. Imagine you're traveling abroad and are arrested on trumped-up drug charges and dragged in front of a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all with rifles aimed at your heart, to be executed. You hear the command given: "Ready! Aim! Fire!" and you hear the deafening roar of the guns. And then you observe that you are still alive, that all of the 100 trained marksmen missed! Now what would you conclude? "Well, I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that they all missed. After all, if they hadn't all missed, then I wouldn't be here to be surprised about it! Given that I am here, I should expect them all to miss." Of course not! You would immediately suspect that they all missed on purpose, that the whole thing was a set-up, engineered for some reason by someone. While you wouldn't be surprised that you don't observe that you are dead, you'd be very surprised, indeed, that you do observe that you are alive. In the same way, given the incredible improbability of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, it is reasonable to conclude that this is not due to chance, but to design.

In order to rescue the alternative of chance, its proponents have therefore been forced to adopt the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of randomly ordered universes composing a sort of World Ensemble or multiverse of which our universe is but a part. Somewhere in this infinite World Ensemble finely-tuned universes will appear by chance alone, and we happen to be one such world.

There are, however, at least two major failings of the World Ensemble hypothesis: First, there's no evidence that such a World Ensemble exists. No one knows if there are other worlds. Moreover, recall that Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin proved that any universe in a state of continuous cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past. Their theorem applies to the multiverse, too. Therefore, since the past is finite, only a finite number of other worlds can have been generated by now, so that there's no guarantee that a finely-tuned world will have appeared in the ensemble.

Second, if our universe is just a random member of an infinite World Ensemble, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we should be observing a much different universe than what we in fact observe. Roger Penrose has calculated that it is inconceivably more probable that our solar system should suddenly form by the random collision of particles than that a finely-tuned universe should exist. (Penrose calls it "utter chicken feed" by comparison.⁷) So if our universe were just a random member of a World Ensemble, it is inconceivably more probable that we should be observing a universe no larger than our solar system. Or again, if our universe were just a random member of a World Ensemble, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses' popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since such things are vastly more probable than all of nature's constants and quantities' falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range. Observable universes like those are much more plenteous in the World Ensemble than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On atheism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no World Ensemble.

So once again, the view that Christian theists have always held, that there is an intelligent designer of the universe, seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe just happens to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life.

We can summarize this second argument as follows:

The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Therefore, it is due to design.

3. God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.

If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them. And the claim is that in the absence of God, moral values are not objective in this sense.

Many theists and atheists alike concur on this point. For example, the late J. L. Mackie of Oxford University, one of the most influential atheists of our time, admitted: "If . . . there are . . . objective values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus, we have a defensible argument from morality to the existence of a God." ⁸ But in order to avoid God's existence, Mackie therefore denied that objective moral values exist. He wrote, "It is easy to explain this moral sense as a natural product of biological and social evolution . . . ."⁹

Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science, agrees. He explains,

Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . And any deeper meaning is illusory.¹⁰

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great 19^th century atheist who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right.

But we must be very careful here. The question here is not: "must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?" I'm not claiming that we must. Nor is the question: "Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God?" I think that we can.

Rather the question is: "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?" Like Mackie and Ruse, I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, human morality is objective. After all, if there is no God, then what's so special about human beings? They're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of evolution has become taboo; but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, apart from the social consequences, there's nothing really wrong with your raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it. There's no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. The reasoning of Ruse at best proves only that our subjective perception of objective moral values has evolved. But if moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. Most of us think that we do apprehend objective values. As Ruse himself confesses, "The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2+2=5."¹¹

Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behaviorthey're moral abominations. Some things are really wrong. Similarly love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good. But if objective values cannot exist without God, and objective values do exist, then it follows logically and inescapably that God exists.

We can summarize this argument as follows:

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist.
Therefore, God exists.

4. God makes sense of the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place. That's why the Jewish leadership instigated his crucifixion for the charge of blasphemy. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and, thus, evidence for the existence of God.

Now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept on faith or not. But there are actually three established facts, recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today, which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus: His empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection. Let's look briefly at each one of these.

Fact 1: Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers on Sunday morning. According to Jacob Kremer, an Austrian scholar who has specialized in the study of the resurrection, "by far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb." ¹² According to D. H. Van Daalen, it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions.

Fact 2: On separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death. According to Gerd Lüdemann, a prominent German New Testament critic, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."¹³ These appearances were witnessed not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, skeptics, and even enemies.

Fact 3: The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus' crucifixion:

Their leader was dead, and Jewish Messianic expectations included no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel's enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.
Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, states, "Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was."¹⁴ N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, "That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him."¹⁵

Attempts to explain away these three great factslike the disciples stole the body or Jesus wasn't really deadhave been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. The simple fact is that there just is no plausible, naturalistic explanation of these facts. Therefore, it seems to me, the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists.

We can summarize this argument as follows:

There are three established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of his disciples' belief in his resurrection.
The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts.
The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" entails that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
Therefore, the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.

5. God can be immediately known and experienced.

This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him. This was the way people in the Bible knew God, as professor John Hick explains:

God was known to them as a dynamic will interacting with their own wills, a sheer given reality, as inescapably to be reckoned with as destructive storm and life-giving sunshine . . . They did not think of God as an inferred entity but as an experienced reality. To them God was not . . . an idea adopted by the mind, but an experiential reality which gave significance to their lives.¹⁶

Philosophers call beliefs like this "properly basic beliefs." They aren't based on some other beliefs; rather they are part of the foundation of a person's system of beliefs. Other properly basic beliefs would be the belief in the reality of the past, the existence of the external world, and the presence of other minds like your own. When you think about it, none of these beliefs can be proved. How could you prove that the world was not created five minutes ago with built-in appearances of age like food in our stomachs from the breakfasts we never really ate and memory traces in our brains of events we never really experienced? How could you prove that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated with electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are here listening to this lecture? How could you prove that other people are not really androids who exhibit all the external behavior of persons with minds, when in reality they are soulless, robot-like entities?

Although these sorts of beliefs are basic for us, that doesn't mean that they're arbitrary. Rather they are grounded in the sense that they're formed in the context of certain experiences. In the experiential context of seeing and feeling and hearing things, I naturally form the belief that there are certain physical objects which I am sensing. Thus, my basic beliefs are not arbitrary, but appropriately grounded in experience. There may be no way to prove such beliefs, and yet it is perfectly rational to hold them. You'd have to be crazy to think that the world was created five minutes ago or to believe that you are a brain in a vat! Such beliefs are thus not merely basic, but properly basic.

We can summarize this consideration as follows:

Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.

Now if this is right, then there's a danger that arguments for the existence of God could actually distract one's attention from God Himself. If you're sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident to you. The Bible says, "draw near to God and he will draw near to you" (James 4:8). We mustn't so concentrate on the proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our heart. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives.

In summary, we've seen five good reasons to think that God exists:

God makes sense of the origin of the universe.
God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.
God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.
God makes sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
God can be immediately known and experienced.

These are only a part of the evidence for God's existence. Alvin Plantinga, one of the world's leading philosophers, has laid out two dozen or so arguments for God's existence.¹⁷ Together these constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God.

Therefore, I think that Christian theism is a plausible worldview which commends itself to the thoughtful consideration of every rational human being.

End Notes

¹ David Hilbert, "On the Infinite," in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. with an Introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 139, 141.

² ABC Science Online, "The Big Questions: In the Beginning," Interview of Paul Davies by Philp Adams, http://aca.mq.edu.au/pdavies.html.

³ Alex Vilenkin, Many Words in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 176.

⁴ Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas' Proofs of God's Existence (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 66.

⁵ Roger Penrose, "Time-Asymmetry and Quantum Gravity," in Quantum Gravity 2, ed. C. J. Isham, R. Penrose, and D. W. Sciama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 249.

⁶ Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 169.

⁷ See Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 762-5.

⁸ J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),pp. 115-16.

⁹ Ibid., pp. 117-18.

¹⁰ Michael Ruse, "Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269.

¹¹ Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), p. 275.

¹² Jacob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. 49-50.

¹³ Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 8.

¹⁴ Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 136.

¹⁵ N. T. Wright, "The New Unimproved Jesus," Christianity Today (September 13, 1993), p. 26.

¹⁶ John Hick, "Introduction," in The Existence of God, ed. with an Introduction by John Hick, Problems of Philosophy Series (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 13-14.

¹⁷ Alvin Plantinga, "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments," Lecture presented at the 33rd Annual Philosophy Conference, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, October 23-25, 1986. Available online at http://philofreligion.homestead.com/files/Theisticarguments.html.

Faith

Michael Lane — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:59:59 -0700

"What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see. " Hebrews 11:1 (NLT)

Nothing is Certain

Without getting too philosophical, it's important to begin by pointing out that we cannot be certain about virtually anything we know. For one thing, all of our information comes to us through our senses and we can never been perfectly certain the information is reliable. We trust our senses because we have no choice, but if we're to be perfectly honest, there's always the possibility we've seen or heard things incorrectly.

A second reason that information can never be perfectly reliable is that most of what we know comes from second-hand knowledge. Everything I know about Venice, the moon or the history of Rome comes to me from others. I trust the information they provide, but once again, I must admit the possibility of error.

Finally, we must acknowledge that even the most basic, empirical knowledge we have can be overruled or superseded at any time by some new piece of information we could not have predicted. As certain as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow, there may be a comet poised to strike the earth tomorrow and throw it off course. As certain as I am of my own name, any number of facts from my past could come to light that alter even this basic fact.

Unless we know every fact, past present and future, everything we know is contingent and could be proven false. So why do we trust anything we know? Because we have to live; we have to do the best we can with the information we have. If we want to cross the street, we can watch the traffic all day but never reach total certainty that no cars are coming, however at some point we have to simply trust our senses and step into the street. Otherwise, we become paralyzed and can do nothing at all.

Faith Is: What Permits You to Jump From Evidence to Action

What is it which permits us to overcome our fear and step into the street? It's faith. Faith is what allows us to take imperfect evidence and act on it. It is the bridge that crosses the unknown and brings us to belief on the other side. It is trusting in the evidence we have, knowing that our gain if the evidence is right outweighs our loss if it is false.

Faith is: Trusting in What Has Proven To Be Reliable

Each and every time we make a decision, we are weighing the evidence, reaching the best conclusion we can and then acting on the faith of our conclusion. Usually, this process is completely subconscious and our mind does this in a fraction of a second without us even being aware. That is because our faith is accumulative. Once something has proven it self reliable time and time again, we require less and less faith to trust it.

Our senses are like this. For years, we have been able to trust the information we get from our eyes and our ears. When they tell us no cars are coming, we cross the road without a second thought. We have faith in our senses.

God is like this, too. Our faith in Him accumulates until we subconsciously, automatically trust Him in all things. Faith in God is not blind and not without reason. We trust in God because time and time again, He keeps His word and demonstrates that He has our best interest in mind in every situation. His love and mercy are so evident in all things that in times when we cannot specifically feel His presence, we have faith that He is still there.

Faith is: "Believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."

Philip Yancey wrote, "What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse?" It's a beautiful reminder that even though we sometimes have to make a decision before the pieces are yet in place, they often come together after the fact and validate our decision to have faith. I can't count the number of times I have heard Christian Missionaries say, "God wants me to go, and I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I'm packing my bags." And sure enough, God created a way and they're soon off to the mission field. For those who live by faith, it's common to hear, "Oh, I get it now!".

Faith is Not: Believing In Something Despite All Evidence to the Contrary

It is not faith when someone believes against all evidence to the contrary. That is foolishness, pride or both. When all the evidence points in one direction and we choose to go another way, it's time to re-evaluate.

People often accuse Christians of doing this - having blind faith with nothing to back it up. They may feel this way because they seek out only the contrary evidence, while Christians see the overwhelming positive case for Jesus. We must remember that someone can only base their decision on the information they have at hand. When people take the time to learn about Jesus, the evidence is extremely compelling.

How can we sure sure that we have not been foolish or naive? Be wary of anyone who discourages you from asking tough questions or seeking out more evidence. When our faith is well founded, it can only be strengthened by inquiry and investigation.

Origins of Life

marklang — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:41:34 -0700

When Darwin's Origin Of Species was published in 1859, it was expected to give naturalists a powerful weapon in their fight to show that life did not require a creator. However, in the nearly century and a half since that book was published, naturalists have yet to explain the origin of life itself. As chemistry and biology progressed and advances were made, the complexity of the cell and the nature of DNA suggest more strongly than ever that life could not have arisen spontaneously.

The naturalist's most powerful weapon, evolution, is of no value to them in this area, for evolution depends on cellular division and reproduction, which of course depends on cells and DNA. So, any attempt use evolution to explain the development of the cell or DNA presupposes the very things it is trying to prove. In other words, only life can evolve, but we are trying to explain life itself and so evolution can be of no help.

This was less of an issue in Darwin's day when DNA was unknown and the cell was not well understood and assumed to be fairly simple. It was not much a problem to imagine that cells just spontaneously developed from a swamp of chemicals. Today, we know how complex the cell really is and the issue of how it came into existence can no longer be ignored.

The Complexity of The Cell

One of the problems with evolution is that it can only take us back so far. It can explain changes that arise from mutations of cells, but it offers no insight into the origin or nature of cells themselves. In Darwin's time, cells were not understood to have the vast complexity that we are able to observe today. Even the simplest cell is incredibly complex - a tiny, delicate factory where many parts work together to accomplish the amazing tasks of growth and reproduction.

Michael Denton, an Australian microbiologist, explains: (quotes are taken from Denton's book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Great Britain, Burnett Books, 1985.)

Even the simplest cell, "contains thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world." (p. 250)

"To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers (twelve and a half miles) in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity (p.328). Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which -- a functional protein or gene -- is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?" (p. 342)

What about the Miller Experiment?

The Miller (or the Urey-Miller experiment) was an experiment conducted by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago in 1953 in which the two scientists attempted to simulate the atmosphere of the early earth in order to show that such an atmosphere was conducive to producing the building blocks of life. By exposing their hypothetical atmosphere to electrical current, Miller and Urey were able to produce some basic organic compounds and amino acids. Ever since, naturalists have been pointing to the Miller experiment as proof that life needs no creator and can arise spontaneously if the conditions are correct.

There are two serious problems with the Miler experiment. The first is that scientists no longer believe that the early earth's atmosphere was anything like what Miller and Urey envisioned. When the experiments are conducted in a mixture which is a more likely representation, no amino acids are produced. Instead, a combination of formaldehyde and cyanide result, both of which are averse to living cells. For this reason alone, Dr. Jonathan Wells has suggested that the Miller experiment should be relegated to nothing more than a footnote in modern biology text books.

The bigger problem is that even if Miller and Urey were correct that amino acids arise spontaneously, naturalists have greatly overstated how far this would take us in explaining the origin of the cell. The creation of amino acids is only the first step in a very complicated process. Cell creation requires the right kinds of acids in the right amount to link up and produce a protein molecule. Next, it requires hundreds of proteins in the right combination to create even the most basic living cell.

If we use the analogy of a computer as a living cell, what Miller and Urey asserted is that they proved silicon could arise spontaneously. Its absurd to leap from that to say that transistors or circuits could result spontaneously, let alone an entire computer. Yet, still to this day naturalists would say that once you've got the silicon, you've explained the computer. However, as Michael Denton described above, even the most powerful computer ever developed by man lacks the complexity of a single living cell.

Could it be random chance at work?

Thomas Huxley popularized the idea that almost anything is possible given enough time, and billions of years certainly seems like a long time. However, when we look at the numbers, the odds quickly fall away into the realm of impossibility. Huxley is reported to have said that six monkeys, typing away for millions of years, could reproduce all the works in the British Museum. Scientist Duane Gish put this idea to rest when he calculated that 6 billions planets, covered every square inch with monkeys, each typing 100 letters per second for 5 billions years could not be expected to reproduce even the first paragraph of a single volume in that museum. Yet, Huxley's exaggeration has captured the imagination of the public for over a hundred years.

Let's take a closer looks at the odds for proteins and amino acids. Even if we assume that the first living cell was crude and primitive, there is a certain level of complexity that is required in even the simplest building-block protein molecule. At least 75 amino acids are necessary, and given the number of ways in which they can combine, the odds of these amino acids coming together by chance is given as 10¹³⁰. Now, while the time between the creation of the earth and the emergence of life seems massive to us, the numbers don't stack up. Even a trillion years (which is several orders of magnitude more than the earth has actually existed), at 10¹², is a tiny number compared to the probability listed earlier of 10¹³⁰. To imagine just how big that number is, you could try a million combinations per second for a trillion years and still only be in the vicinity of 10³⁰. It's a staggering level of improbably, and time is simply not going to be able to overcome it. But remember, even if those amino acids did come together, all we would have is a single protein, not even a functioning cell!

Life is More than the Sum of it's Parts.

Last but not least, in the midst of all this talk about chance and odds, there remains a larger problem. If all the proteins necessary to create a cell come together in the right way and in the right proportions, it is not automatic that the cell will suddenly come to life. We can kill an organism, and within moments of its death, before the body has begun to decay, it has everything necessary for life, yet, it is no longer alive and there is nothing we can do to change that fact. We imagine stories like Frankenstein where we can "zap" the inanimate material and bring it to life, but it's never been done and never been seen. Clearly, there is something more to life than assembling the parts. Scientists cannot begin to understand the fundamental "essence" which makes something alive, let alone explain it's origins.

For this reason, scientists have by-and-large rejected the idea of life emerging by chance even though it is still a popular notion in the mainstream media. Though there is disagreement on it's nature, most scientists agree that some force or outside influence would be necessary to bring the chemicals together in the correct combinations.

Information and DNA

In the preceding section, we talked about how unlikely it would be that the elements - the ingredients - of a single protein molecule could ever come together by chance. It was clear from that discussion that something outside the system would be required to bring the necessary elements for life together in just the right way. That "something" is DNA, and it's origins are even more intriguing and mysterious than the origins of the cell.

Information

We know that every living being is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other elements, so in one sense, we can visualize how those elements might have combined to create life. Despite the odds and lack of evidence, naturalists have held onto the notion that "they just combined somehow." But how can we explain the emergence of something so intangible as information?

Information is the means of communication between a sender and a recipient. There must be an agreed upon set of rules for how communication will take place, known as grammar and syntax. It can be very simple, such as to nod when we mean yes and shake our heads when we mean no. It can be very complex, such as sign language, English or Russian. In every case, the sender and recipient of the information must conform to these rules, otherwise the communication is meaningless.

Without the intervention of a conscious, intelligent, living being, nature is capable of creating only two types of patterns - random and repetitive. Neither can convey information, for if I repeat the same word or sentence over and over, or if I call out random words, I cannot communicate my meaning to anyone. Only intelligence can create information; random or repetitive processes cannot.

What distinguishes information from any other type of pattern is that if the recipient and sender both agree on the grammar and syntax, then the information has the potential to be acted upon by the recipient. I can be asked to get milk from the store, or I ask my computer to get my stock quotes. However, if I hear random words or pound repeatedly on the same key on the keyboard, no meaningful result can occur.

In order for something to create a message which conforms to the rules of communication, it must be intelligent or have been programmed by some intelligence. Communication is impossible without a comprehension of the rules, and comprehension implies knowledge, understanding and sentience.

What does this have to do with the cell?

In the same way that computers operate in binary language or that we communicate using 26 unique letters in our alphabet, DNA has it's own language written in 4 letters - A,G,C and T. These letters combine to form instructions for creating every cell in our bodies. The long sequence of DNA has been compared to computer code, while others have likened it to a recipe. If amino acids are the ingredients, DNA contains the instructions for combining the ingredients into something meaningful.

Is DNA really information? If so, it has to pass three tests - it's not random, it's not repetitive and it can be acted upon by a recipient to produce a meaningful result. Science is in agreement that DNA is neither random nor repetitive, but who or what is the recipient? The recipient is the factory inside the cell that accepts the information inside DNA and uses that to determine how to make proteins. Like a tiny computer, the factory follows the program and manufactures each protein precisely according to the instructions it is given. This is information in every sense of the word, and the amount of information contained within each of our cells in staggering - equivalent to about 100 million printed pages.

Where Did the Information Come From?

We won't revisit the "chance" theory, for the odds that even the simplest DNA could have combined randomly in a meaningful way make the odds we looked at earlier seem like a safe bet. Instead, we'll look at another idea popularized by naturalists.

The idea is that the the chemicals have some natural affinity or self-ordering properties which make it inevitable that the "letters" of the DNA code would come together the way they do. It's true that in nature, many chemicals have affinities that cause them to combine into patterns. However, these patterns always fall into one of the two categories we looked at earlier - random or repeated - and neither random nor repeated sequences of letters in the DNA could ever produce a consequential results.

A further problem is that the letters in the DNA code do not demonstrate any particular affinity for one another, only for the backbone to which they are attached. Without any attraction to each other, there could never be any natural tendency to create even a repeated pattern, let alone a meaningful sequence.

Dr. Stephen Meyer likens this to the magnetic letters that some of us have on our fridge. The magnets are attracted only to the fridge while they lay flat against the metal, not to each other. They cannot "self-order" and have no tendency to form words when no one is looking. When you see a word spelled out on the fridge, it's a foregone conclusion that someone placed the letters in that pattern.

Is it not a forgone conclusion, then, that DNA, the "language of God" as it's been called, is similarly the result of intelligence?

Pascal's Wager

Michael Lane — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 11:24:14 -0700

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." -C.S Lewis

We each must choose what we are going to do about the idea of God. We may worship Him or mock Him, but we cannot do nothing, for doing nothing is in itself a choice not to worship Him. If we are going to place a bet, so to speak, what are we really wagering? What are the risks, and what can we gain?

Seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal examined the four possible choices and outcomes, and his summary has become known as "Pascal's Wager". Here are the four possibilities, as he saw it.

1) If God Does Not Exist and You Ignore Him, You Gain Nothing

If there is no life after death and this life is all we have, then nothing really matters anyway. We can say that it makes sense to have a good time while we're here, but soon we will not be around to remember it. All that exists after an experience has passed are the memories and the ways in which that experience changed us. If there is no more "us" and no more memories, then the experiences of our lives have no more relevance than if they never happened. For example, if you attended a party last night but can remember none of it, what difference does it really make if it was dull or really exciting? Once a moment passes, it's meaningless unless the person lives on, changed and affected by that moment and it's memories.

People talk about leaving behind a legacy and this brings some comfort, but what comfort can it offer when you don't exist to enjoy it? Furthermore, the people who are enjoying that legacy will soon not exist either. Whether we had a good life or a truly great life will mean nothing when we compare it against an infinity of nothingness which greets our death.

2) If God Does Not Exist and You Worship Him, You Lose Nothing

Some people object to this idea and point out that at least they will not have wasted time in church, abiding by strict moral codes and holding back on things they really wanted to do. In reality, there is reason to believe that Christians live happier, fuller lives and this would be true even if God did not exist. But that is not the point. Even if it were true that you would have been much happier had you not spent time worshiping a God which did not exist, it will still all mean nothing once you die. Again, the difference between your "boring" life and your "great" life will be insignificant against the vast contrast of infinite nothingness you've become after you die.

3) If God Exists and You Ignore Him, You Risk Going To Hell

This is what we could consider the worst possible outcome. It's not certain that ignoring God will result in this; it's what many major religions assert but that doesn't make it true. Even if God exists, you might go to heaven anyway, or hell might not be so bad.

However, the possibility remains, no matter how small, that failing to worship God results in an very unpleasant eternal afterlife. When eternity is at stake, the consequences are infinitely serious, no matter how unlikely.

4) If God Exists and You Worship Him, You Might Go To Heaven

This is what we could consider the best possible outcome. Again, it's not a given. You may worship God and not do it right or not do it well enough and go to hell anyway. Heaven may not exist, or may not be a great place. It's only one possibility that worshiping God will secure this outcome. But like the previous wager, the stakes are enormous. Your entire infinite afterlife hangs in the balance.

5) Therefore, The Only Reasonable Bet is to Worship Him.

If we are going to compare what can be gained during our short life on earth against what can be gained or lost in eternity, then we have to place our bet on whatever gives us the best odds in an afterlife.

John Bevere explains it this way: If I told you that what you do in the next minute might affect you for the next hundred years, you would endure anything in that minute to potentially secure your place in the next century. You simply would not risk it. Your life on earth compared with an eternity in heaven or hell raises the stakes to an unimaginable level.

Of course, reality is not a gamble and God is much more than a mathematical equation. If we only worship God because we want to avoid hell, won't He see through to our motives and send us to hell anyway?

Mercifully, that's not how God works, for He knows that we can only initially reach for him for selfish reasons. The first time any of us calls out for God, we do so not because we love Him, but because we are scared, lonely or want to be saved. But then, the Spirit takes over and changes our heart. If we will be obedient in prayer, reading the scriptures and living for Jesus, no matter what our original motives were, in time we will truly love God and worship Him with a right heart. Loving God selflessly is the result, not the prerequisite of obedience. If we could only come to God with unselfish motives, we would all be lost.

If Pascal's wager causes us to see God as a "safe bet" then we can begin investigating Him and learning about Him, and we can begin to worship for no other than than we are scared of hell. In time, it will grow into something real. Pascal's wager can't save anyone, but it can draw attention to the seriousness and importance of the issues and the choices, and start us down the right path where God will meet us.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 7

Steve Miller — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:45:10 -0700

Introduction

We're about to complete our series of articles on Mastering Your Circumstances, Before They Master You. We've said that there's a joy, a deep inner contentment, a peace that is possible for us to have, even when our world is caving in around us.

Some of you have already discovered that one student can be rich, beautiful, and talented, yet miserable. And a student sitting next to her, who seems to have little going for her, has an enjoyment for life that just won't quit. The difference comes from what's going on up here (point to your head), your perspective on life.

We said that a huge wave can be viewed from two perspectives. Do you remember what they are? (The sandcastle builder and the surfer.) The same wave, yet it causes the sandcastle builder to retreat the surfer to charge.

How many benefits can you come up with, either just brainstorming or remembering from the last article?

Let's ask God to help us internalize a few more points that can help us master our circumstances.

Eternal Payoffs

We talked about all the earthly payoffs that trials bring us. But for the Christian, the biggest payoffs will come when we hit heaven.

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." (2 Cor. 4:16-18; Mt. 6:19-20; Lk. 6:22-26; Col. 3:23-24; cr. Mt. 5:10-12; Rom. 8:17; 1 Cor. 2:9)

For the Christian, the big payoff for our difficulties here comes when we get to heaven, and lasts for eternity. We keep forgetting how short life is here, in comparison to eternity. When we see our eternal reward, all out of proportion to the relatively short duration of our trials here, we will realize that it was all worth it.

"But how will heaven be better for those who have suffered?" you might ask. A part of the reward could be in this: While all might experience the same blessings, those who lacked on earth may have a greater capacity to enjoy the blessings in heaven. So the person who experienced intense loneliness on earth will especially appreciate the intimate fellowship. The former pauper will exclaim: "I can't believe the size of my home, the comfort of this bed!" The formerly hungry: "Look at all this food!"

Knowing that my future reward outweighs my present pains keeps me from becoming absorbed with the "why" question.

To sum up this point an last week, when you look at all the good that will come out of your hard times, you ought to get a better perspective on the hard times you face.

But remember, don't think that for each trial you will be able to pinpoint a specific reason for God allowing it. The reason may be beyond your capacity to understand. There may be 112 reasons that you woke up this morning with a zit. But it's enough to know that so much good will come, that one day we'll consider the suffering well worth it. The more we keep our eyes on the results, the more we can view our trials, not as enemies out to destroy us, but friends who have come to make us better.

Lean On Someone Who Cares

Friends and family for emotional support
"Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their work:
If one falls down,
his friend can help him up.
But pity the man who falls
and has no one to help him up!
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. (Ecc. 4:9-12)

Some think, "Just me and God is enough." But often, God wants to meet your needs through other people.

Research from Stanford University found that cancer patients who attended a weekly support group lived an average of twice as long as nonattenders. (Fifty Essential Things To Do When The Doctor Says It's Cancer, by Greg Anderson, p. 82.)

Struggling with drug dependency or an alcoholic parent? Find some people you can confide in and lean on. We really need each other.
Wise counsel for difficult solutions
"let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance." (Prov. 1:5)
When Jan Dravecky struggled with depression, she began reading some Christian books on depression. A Christian acquaintance took the book and threw it on the ground, declaring, "All you need is the Word of God." But Jan knew that God's Word directs us to sometimes go to others, like our parents or other wise counselors. In the end, God used these books and wise counselors to pull Jan out of her depression.

Realize That Nothing Can Foul Up God's Plan For the Faithful Christian.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28; Romans 8:35-39; cr. Gen. 45:7-8)

We've mentioned Dave Dravecky several times, the fantastic pitcher with the San Francisco Giants, who lost his ability to pitch when surgery removed, not only a tumor, but half of the surrounding muscle from his pitching arm. But through his faith and iron will, he not only regained the use of his arm, but returned to the major leagues! But the victory was short lived. In his second game back, his bone broke in a pitch, causing excruciating pain to shoot through his arm.

Now tell me, what would go through your mind at this time? (Get some ideas.) Here's how Dave describes it: "As odd as it sounds, I wasn't discouraged as I lay there, because with the excruciating pain came a strange sense of exhilaration, a sense that God wasn't finished with the story He was trying to tell with my life. It was weird. There I was gritting my teeth, biting back, and I was thinking, Okay, God, what's the next chapter gonna be? Then suddenly I became overwhelmed at what God was doing with my life, and I realized what He was doing was much bigger than baseball." (Dravecky, p. 11)

Do you see how Dravecky's confidence in God's big plan helped him when most men would have folded? It wasn't that he was happy about leaving baseball behind. And he certainly wasn't looking forward to more doctor appointments and surgery. But he was assured that God had a bigger plan than baseball for his life.

Perhaps a romantic dream of yours has been recently crushed. If not, odds are it'll happen to you one day. And when it does, sure, you'll grieve. But I hope you can also lay back in your bed at night and say to your heavenly Father, "I can't wait to see the next chapter! Thanks, God, that it's bigger than that relationship."

Remember Those Who Have Suffered More Than You

"Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides evertything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches." (2 Cor. 11:23-28, Phil. 4:11; cr. 1 Pet. 5:9; Heb. 12:3-4)

I heard of a person who complained that he had no shoes, until he met a person with no feet.

Joni Eareckson grew up hiking, playing tennis, and thinking that handicaps happen to other people. But all that changed one hot July afternoon in 1967 when she dove off a raft that was anchored offshore in the Chesapeake Bay. Her head hit something hard, snapping it back and sending something like an electric shock through the back of her neck. At 17 years of age, she found herself a quadriplegic, unable to feel anything from her neck down. As the months dragged on, depression set in, and anger.

A therapist wanted her to learn how to write with a pencil clenched between her teeth. She stubbornly refused. But then something changed her. Joni says, "But that was before I met Tom, a young ventilator-dependent quadriplegic who was much more paralyzed than me. His attitude was buoyant and enthusiastic as he willingly permitted the therapist to put the pen in his mouth. I was ashamed of my grumbling and complaining." God used her friends' prayers and Tom's example to show her that good could come out of her situation. In fact, she eventually learned to draw so well that she now sells her artwork. But seeing someone worse than her was a turning point for her attitude. God later opened up many doors for her to speak and write about her story, challenging people to trust God with whatever trials they face. (Condensed from "Joni's Story," booket; A Step Further, Joni Eareckson and Steve Estes, Zondervan, 1978)

Understanding how most of the world lives can help us put some trials in perspective. For example, if you get down because your mother doesn't prepare decent family meals, remember that one out of four people in the world today live with stunted bodies or damaged brains because of malnutrition. Much of the world would love to have the meals you turn your nose up at.

To see yourself in relation to how most of the world lives, let's shrink the world down to a village of 100 people and keep all the present proportions the same. Here's how your neighbors would be living:

80 would live in substandard housing

70 couldn't read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

only one would have a college education

no one would have a computer

From this perspective, your bad grade in chemistry no longer looks like grounds for suicide. While some are facing agonizing trials like parents divorcing or the death of a friend, others of us whine about relatively trivial things and need to get get our eyes off of ourselves and become more concerned with the needs of others.

They say that misery loves company. If you're suffering, there's plenty of good company out there. And while you're considering, consider Jesus and all that He went through. It ought to cheer you that you are sharing in what He suffered while He was here. You have something in common with Jesus! (Heb. 12:2-3)

Get Your Eyes Off Of Yourself

(Phil. 1:12-25; cr. 1 Thes. 2:19-20; Acts 20:22-24; 1 Pet. 4:19)

Paul maintained his joy through incredible trials. What made this guy tick? Not his plans to visit "Six Flags Over The Roman Empire" or his hope of finding a good looking girl to date. Check out Col. 1:28-29 (cr. 1 Thes. 2:19-20; 2 Cor. 12:15)

"We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me."

Do you catch his heart? He wasn't here for himself. He was here for others, to fulfill his ministry.

Patti (not her real name) had been excitedly planning for the birth of her child for months. But tragedy struck when the child was born dead. To make matters worse, the doctor never allowed her to hold or even see the child. Later, she became bitter, not only at losing the child, but at being denied the gratification of her motherly instinct to hold the baby. But after a time, she heard of another mother who had lost a child. Patti's wise mother challenged her to look outside of herself and use her experience to go help this other grieving mother. Taking this advice began her own healing process.

Do you just turn inside and sulk when life throws you a curve? Try looking for others to help.

Realize Your Strategic Importance In God's Plan For The World.

"Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."(Mt. 28:18-20)

People can endure all kinds of suffering for a cause they believe in. Volunteer soldiers endure sleepless nights, minimal rations, physical exhaustion, and even torture for a cause they believe in the protection of their country. Do you have a cause worth suffering for? Corrie and Betsie ten Boom did. That's how they could fill their prison days with purpose, giving hope to fellow prisoners who dangled on the edge of eternity. That's how Dave Dravecky turned the loss of his arm and career into an opportunity to point others to Jesus as his source of strength.

Have you ever grasped how much your life counts, when placed in God's hands?

Endure Till the End

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing." (2 Tim. 4:7-8)

William Carey faced all kinds of trials as he left his beloved homeland and traveled to India to spread the gospel. His wife went insane and finally died. He took a second wife and she died. Three of his sons died. A flood destroyed the Indigo business that he used to support himself, and four of the seven missionaries who came to serve with him died. A fire destroyed his print shop, including some precious translations that were never replaced. Most people would have probably given up and lived the rest of their days in bitterness about the past. But not Carey. Rather than despair, he never quit, accomplishing incredible advances for God's kingdom. In his latter years someone described him as "cheerful, and happy as the day is long." And rather than retiring and returning to his homeland, he died in India at age 73, while reading the proofs of his recently completed final revision of the Bengali New Testament. Today he is hailed as the father of modern missions. My point? No matter how much crud the world threw at him, he never gave up.

Conclusion

We've covered a lot of ground over the past seven articles. We've confronted the big "Why?" questions that haunt people when tragedy strikes. We've peeked into the lives of people who faced life's deepest hurts but found a peace and even joy in the midst of them all. But it's one thing to hear the Word of God, and quite another to take it seriously and put it into your life. And for some of you, internalizing this series could make the difference between your future being a miserable existence, or an abundant life.

This world desperately needs more William Carey's, Dave and Jan Dravecky's, and Joni Earickson's. Men and women who refuse to get bitter, fold, or turn inward when life tumbles in. Men and women who trust their awesome Lord with the details and use their remaining strength to joyfully touch their world. Will you join their ranks?

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 6

Steve Miller — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:35:05 -0700

Introduction

Over the past five articles, we've been trying to learn to master our circumstances, before they master us. Last week we said that there are two ways to view a huge wave. Does anyone remember what the two ways were? The sandcastle builder sees it and panics, realizing that all his work could be washed away in a moment. But out in the water, a surfer paddles frantically toward the same wave, hoping to catch it for the ride of a lifetime. It's fascinating if you think about it. It's the same wave, but viewed with expectation by one and horror by the other.

In the last article, we looked at two steps to a new perspective. The first was to realize that no matter how bad things get, God has still have all that you need for your present happiness. The second step was to see your problems in relation to how many blessings you have. Now we come to number 3

3. Think of some good that will result.

(Jms 1:2-4, 2 Cor. 1:4; 2 Cor 4:17; Phil. 1:12.)

They say that the view of the dogs on a dog sled team is all the same, except for the leader. Think about it. I suggest that you occasionally glance around to get a better view. This is precisely why many people can't handle their hard times. All they can see is what lies immediately ahead, and it neither looks nor smells very good. I suggest that we occasionally peak around the pack to see the big picture of where we are going.

Imagine that two classes are dismissed to go get a shot in the school clinic. One class is told that the shot will inoculate them against a deadly plague that has taken many lives in your community. The other class is told, "recent studies have shown that this inoculation doesn't work, but we hate to cancel the plans and put a longer teaching load on the teachers, so we'll continue the shots, just as if they really help." With this preparation, which group will be able to take the shot with a better attitude? Why? (People will joyfully endure some pain, as long as they know that the payoff is worth the pain. The worst pains are the ones we can see no purpose for.)

You've mentioned some of these, but I want you to see them in in God's Word.

Temporal Payoffs.

When Corrie ten Boom, and her sister Betsie, were shown to their quarters in Ravensbruck, they found themselves crowded into a flea infested room with 700 other women. (It was built to accommodate only 200!) Corrie groaned at the thought of the unwelcome fleas. But Betsie said, "Praise the Lord." In time, God's purposes became clear. Betsie and Corrie started a Bible Study group, and were amazed that the guards never came in to interrupt or search the quarters. But one day Betsie discovered the reason. "The guards refuse to come in because of the fleas!" Betsie laughed. "Because of the fleas, we can share the gospel freely with our fellow prisoners." (Corrie ten Boom, by Kjersti Hoff Baez, pp. 174-180)

Do you see what happened? In the worst of circumstances (a flea-infested prison) Corrie found reason to rejoice when she saw some good that could come out of her trials.

And I think that when we look around the pack of sled dogs on the team in front of us get a better view, we too can rejoice in where we are heading. So, just what good can we know will come from our problems?
They Build Character
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." (Jms. 1:2-4; cr. 2 Thes. 1:4-5; Heb. 12:1-13; Rom. 5:3-5; Rom 8:16-18; 2 Pet. 2:19-25; Heb. 5:8.

Would you like to be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing? Then bring on the trials.

Steven Spielberg has been the most successful filmmaker for the last quarter of a century. Everyone is familiar with some of his blockbusters, including Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, and E.T. What you may not know is how some of his early heartaches taught him to make his audiences feel emotion. Once, when 24 year old Spielberg was directing a TV episode at Universal, the head of the camera department stopped an associate and said, "You've got to go down to the soundstage. It's something you'll never see again. Your friend Spielberg is directing." (He was directing an emotional scene where a character dies.) The associate responded, "I've seen people directing before." The camera man explained, "You've never seen a crew stand there and cry."

So how did he learn the empathy that can't be taught in film school? Spielberg says that as a young person experienced his grandmother's death with his family at her bedside. He felt anti-semitism through bullies in school, and learned what it's like to be an outcast from the rejection he experienced in school. He learned the anguish of divorce by seeing his parents go through it his senior year in high school. No one wants to experience these tragedies, but I doubt Spielberg could have learned to produce heart-felt films without them.

Says Spielberg, "E.T. was about the divorce of my parents, how I felt when my parents broke up. My wish list included having a friend who could be both the brother I never had and a father that I didn't feel I had anymore. And that's how E.T. was born." (Steven Spielberg, by Joseph McBride, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 72.)

So when I look around the pack to get a better view, I see my character developing as a result of my struggles. But there's more up ahead.
They Can Further The Gospel
"Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel." (Phil. 1:12)

Kimi Aukino was driving along a street in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, when he struck a drunken man who suddenly stepped in front of his car. The man died an hour later, and Kimi was thrown into cell 2 with 19 other prisoners. "Why would God allow this?" Kimi wondered. He felt confused and empty, like many of us would have felt. But the events of the next day answered Kimi's questions. Upon learning that Kimi was a missionary, one inmate suggested that he share something from God's word. The power of God filled the cell, as he began with John 3:16. Sixteen of the men responded to his invitation to repent! The next day he was allowed into cell 1, where all seven inmates prayed to receive Christ. In Cell 3, five out of six responded. Three days later, Kimi was released, leaving a church of 36 believers behind! When he returned to visit, he found that these convicts were meeting regularly for group devotions. ("SIM NOW" newsletter, Issue 79)

Remember, you might not see the impact you're response to trials is having on others. The poor skier in the poor conditions never knew that his response prompted Steve to consider the gospel. But trust God. He'll work.

So when I look around the pack, I see the gospel spreading because of my trials. But there's more ahead
They Bring Peace
"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." (Heb. 12:11)
They Can Help You Appreciate Life.

For children who are spoiled with sweet Colas and fruit juices, a simple glass of water offered at a meal is grounds for pitching a fit. But put that same child in the middle of a desert for a couple of days, and he'll treasure every drop of pure water.

Stephen Hawking, regarded by many as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein, used to do little work, drank too much and called life a "pointless existence." That was before he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, a degenerative muscle neuromuscular disorder that has left him unable to write, feed himself, comb his hair, or even speak. But his brilliant mind still memorizes "the long strings of equations that give life to his ideas." He communicates these ideas to the outside world via a computer that responds to the tiny movements of his fingertips.

But the affect of this disease on his attitude may surprise you. Hawking once said, "When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have." Small pleasures take on profound meaning, like a sunset or a child playing in a park. (Dobson, 145,146, drawing from Omni Magazine, Feb., 1979, p. 46)
They Can Get Your Attention

A high school senior named George decided to surf a tragedy instead of let it sink him. Throughout high school, he had coasted through school with his mind in neutral, with a D average to show for it. Instead, he lived for cars. He loved racing, and was pretty good at it, accumulating trophies by driving his little Fiat in nearby races. His dream? To drive a formula race car.

But his dreams all ended just a few days before his graduation. While driving home from the library in his Fiat, he prepared for a left turn by glancing in his rearview mirror. But as he started the turn, he heard an engine, a blowing horn, and the impact of a speeding Chevy Impala crunching into the driver side of his car. It should have killed him. The little Fiat turned 4 or 5 complete flips before it wrapped around a solid oak tree. The impact was so great that it actually moved the entire tree a couple of feet a couple of feet over, leaving a huge hole in its former position. But miraculously, George survived. Get this: During the Fiat's third flip, his regulation racing seat belt snapped, throwing him out of the open top and onto the ground. He was still close to death, but slowly recovered through two weeks in the hospital and months of physical therapy. His Fiat didn't survive, ending up in the junkyard.

After the accident, George was a changed person. He decided that there must be some reason he survived, and set his mind to get his act together and make something out of his life.

So he left his racing dreams behind and decided to go to college. There, he developed an interest in literature and writing. And instead of driving race cars, he began to film them. Today, I'm sure he's glad for the accident that changed his life. Without it, he might have never found his niche in the film industry, and no one would have ever seen Star Wars. That's right, George's last name is Lucas. I'm glad he let his tragedy count for something. (Facts from Skywalking: The Life And Times Of George Lucas, by Dale Pollock, 1983, pp. xiii-39)

My point? Like Lucas, whatever trials you are facing, learn from them and realize that good can come from them, no matter how horrible they seem right now.
They Can Help You Leave Your Mark
"who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God." (2 Cor. 1:4; Phil 1:12)

At a Christian youth camp, a speaker did strength feats to direct people to the gospel. The strength stuff was flashy and got kid's attention, but what really seemed to leave its mark was when he shared about his troubles growing up, including rejection and abuse by his own father. When he shared his struggles, and how God brought him through, people could relate, and he got through to their hearts. His strength got their attention, but his struggles penetrated their hearts.

Another speaker could make people laugh. But when he shared about the agonies of growing up obese and dyslexic, the audience agonized with him. They laughed at his humor, but related to his struggles. When he shared how Jesus had helped him through his agonies, many wanted such a Savior.

Those problems that seem so senseless to you now, could be the very things that God uses to spark a powerful ministry.
They Draw Us to God.
One of the worst things that could happen in life would be to breeze through with no trials, and thus see no need of God. Few things can shock us out of spiritual apathy like trials.
They Keep Our Eyes on Heaven.
"If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; ." (Phil. 1:22-23; cr. 2 Cor. 5:1-10)

Many people are so earthly minded that they're no heavenly good. And one day, all the things they lived for will perish, because they decided to live their life for themselves and their own pleasure. But some of us have to get knocked down on our backs before we can look up.

Conclusion

So are you seeing that without waves, a surfer could go nowhere? Are you seeing that it takes trials to get us where we need to go here on earth? With a new perspective, our biggest waves can become our greatest friends. Not that we don't cry at our losses or hurt with our physical pains. But when we see the good that can come out of our trials, we no longer have to despair.

Now, for the trials you are facing recovering from the betrayal of a friend, the rejection of someone you loved, a defeat in a sport that you have lived for. You're left with a choice. You can either despair, conclude that life's unfair and live the rest of it in bitterness. Or, you can choose to view your trials from that different perspective. Can you see that, like for Steven Spielberg or Corrie ten Boom, your problems might just be the waves that push you on to future victories?

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 5

Steve Miller — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:54:44 -0700

Introduction

We've been talking about mastering your circumstances, before they master you. We've said that most people live on an emotional roller coaster, where their peace, joy and contentment with life are dependent on whether their circumstances are at a high or a low. But there's a way off the emotional roller coaster. A way to have a joy that lasts through even the hardest times. A joy that will make your life contagious, so that others will want what you've got.

But to have this joy, you've got to respond, not naturally, but radically. Often, you have to do the very opposite of what feels right. Does anyone remember some of the steps we talked about last week? We talked about asking God for help, giving the load to Him, and fighting bitterness with forgiveness.

Let's pray that God will teach us more of the radical response that only He can give us toward life's trials.

A. Resist Envy

Turn to Psalm 73 where we find a guy with a problem the we all face at one time or another. He's trying to follow God and be a good boy, but when he looks around him, it seems like the wicked people are getting all the breaks and he's left with all the struggles. Ever feel like this? Well, after having his private envy party, he comes to his senses toward the end of his writing. See if you can figure out what pulled him out of his envy. He's talking to God.

"Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Those who are far from you will perish; You destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds." (Ps. 73:23-28)

George Mangakis, who was tortured as a political prisoner, found help in pitying his torturers instead of himself. "At this moment I am deprived of the joy of seeing children going to school or playing in the parks," wrote Mangakis, "Whereas they have to look their own children in the face." (George Mangakis, "Letter in a Bottle," Atlantic Monthly,October 1971, p. 253, cited by Yancey, Where is God).

B. Don't Trust Your Emotions

"Never will I leave you; Never will I forsake you." (Heb. 13:5)

Although God never leaves us, most Christians don't seem to live in a constant awareness of God's presence. Spurgeon is considered by many the greatest preacher who ever lived, but he often struggled with depression. He said that Luther's life might give a thousand instances of the same. C.S. Lewis, after His wife's death, said that when he prayed, it seemed like "A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." (A Grief Observed, p. 4) Lewis later found that God was there all the time. But our emotions, particularly during a crisis, can lead us astray. Don't trust them.

C. Get A Better Perspective

There are two ways to view a huge wave. The sand castle builder looks upon it with anguish, realizing that his beautiful creation may be destroyed in a brief moment. But a talented surfer frantically paddles toward that same wave, hoping to catch it for the ride of a lifetime. But it's exactly the same wave, viewed from two different perspectives.

How can we learn to surf life's trials, rather than merely endure them? We've got to learn to look at the waves through the eyes of a surfer. Here are some hints:

1. Realize you have all you need for your present happiness

"For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless." (Ps. 84:11; Phil. 4:11-13)

"for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances." (Phil. 4:11)

Have you ever noticed how some dogs can live in a spacious, fenced in yard, but spend all their time at the gate, longing to get out?

A Polish believer had been imprisoned several times for his faith. Once, when passing one of his former prisons, he was overcome with emotion. He ran and embraced the building, saying, "God, thanks for the wonderful times we had together here."

Just think. No stereo, dating privileges, allowance, or telephone. But he was content.

Here's an indicator to show if you lack contentment: how often do you say to others, or just to yourself, "If only"

If only I were better looking If only I were smarter If only I my parents would get their act together

"If only this" Then what? Do you think you'd be happy? If you're discontent, don't count on it, because your circumstances will never be perfect.

Instead, our goal is to be like Habakkuk, when he said,

"Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior." (Hab. 3:17-19)

But most of us don't seem to have the joy of the Polish believer or Habakkuk. We'd like to be able to find joy in the midst of our hard times, but practically speaking, how can we find such contentment?

2. See your problems in relation to your blessings.

"Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else. Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." (1 Thes. 5:15-18)

Some people are so negative that when they see a donut, all they notice is the hole.

Imagine that Kenny wakes up to a day that seems like a dream come true. He wakes to the smell of mom cooking his favorite breakfast. At school he realizes that he is about a week ahead in his homework. Incredibly, the lunch room serves a choice of steak or lobster. He gorge himself with his lobster, plus a friend's left-over lobster. School dismisses early and as he waits for the bus, a friend passes him a note. It reads, "I had a long talk with Leah (the most incredible girl in your school). She's madly in love with you." Getting on the bus, he steps on a fresh piece of gum. In the light of all that's gone on today, would it bother him?(No way!)

But let's imagine that day 2 is very different. Kenny sleeps through his alarm and his mom yells, "Grab a piece of cold bread on the way to school, you sluggard." In his first class his teacher reminds him of a long-term project that is due tomorrow. He had totally forgotten. As he walks into the lunch room, he sees a notice that reads, "Many students are suffering from food poisoning. But don't panic. This only concerns the few students who chose lobster at yesterday's lunch." His stomach begins to hurt. As he double over and makes his way to the clinic, his best friend comes up to him laughing. "By the way," he says, "you didn't believe my little joke about Leah liking you, did you?" Then, he steps on a fresh wad of chewing gum. Some of you, at this point,would throw your shoe down the hall and curse the day they were born. Why the different reaction from the chewing gum the day before? The incident was exactly the same. (Answer: the context in which it was seen.)

So our challenge is to become so aware of our blessings that our problems pale in comparison.

Now many of our blessings are temporal and changing. And since every good gift comes from above, we need to be thankful for them. If your family life is in shambles, you tend to forget that you may be reasonably healthy, be good at a certain subject at school, and have a friend.

We also have eternal and unchanging blessings (2 Cor. 4:18). I think that some Christians become so caught up in the wonder of these blessings that they are little affected by their situation here on earth. As the old hymn says,

"Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face And the things of earth will grow strangely dim In the light of His glory and grace."

So, the more you get enamoured with these incredible blessings that can never be taken away, your short-term problems won't seem as big. How do you become more aware of these blessings?

Regularly thank God for them.
Don't spend all your prayer time asking God for stuff. Next time, when you spend some time with Him in prayer, tell Him you're not there to ask for anything. You just want to thank Him for what He's already given you.
Spend time meditating on God's Word.
The world sets its eyes on the things that go wrong and complains. The mature Christian sets his eyes on the blessings that never change and gives thanks.

I'm convinced that the more we understand the eternal, unchanging blessings we have in Christ, the less we'll get rattled by the comparatively minor troubles we experience here.

Conclusion

Let's not wait to put into practice what we've been talking about. Brainstorm every blessing, some that change and some that never change, and thank God for them. You may have never before prayed out loud, but it's there's nothing to it. No special God language or way you have to hold your hands. Prayer is simply talking with God. And He can understand you the way you talk.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 4

Steve Miller — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:31:09 -0700

Introduction

We're in the middle of a series of articles which I call, "Mastering Your Circumstances Before They Master You." We've said that although most people live a roller-coaster existence, where when your girlfriend likes you, your parents do what you want, and your classes are easy, you experience the high part of the ride. But when your girlfriend dumps you, your teachers pile on the work, and your parents are on your case, your exuberance for life gets disappears as the coaster hits a low point. How can we get off the roller coaster and find a joy, peace and contentment that will last through the highs and the lows? That's what this series is all about.

So the first part of our series dealt with preparation for life's fires. Now we begin part two, where the heat is on and we've got to respond. Most people wilt when the heat is on. You know them. You see them every day at school. You can see it on their faces: bitter scowls that show their anger at God and the world. Others close themselves off to themselves and sulk. Still others sink into depression.

But occasionally you run across a person who's different. Like Ron, the person Steve met at the ski retreat, who seemed to somehow live above his circumstances. Someone who, sure, cries during grief and is not out of touch with his emotions, but somehow is not ruled by his emotions. Those who find the secret that Ron felt become contagious. People desperately want what they've got.

Let's ask God for help as we try to learn a radical response to life's fires.

II. Learn A Radical Response

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." (Jms. 1:2-4; cr. 1 Pet. 4:12-13)

If you caught what James was saying, you see how radical this response it. When hard times hit you in the face, James tell us, then "consider it pure joy." Wow! But how can we get from being whiners and complainers to being a rejoicers? Here's how

A. Ask God For Help

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."(Phil. 4:6-7)

Christian Psychologist James Dobson had a heart attack which left him alone in an eerie Cardiac Care Unit. At first, God gave him what he describes as "an inexplicable peace," but at a later time, anxiety took over. He prayed, "Lord, you know where I am right now. And you know that I am upset and very lonely. Would you send someone who can help me?" Soon, Dr. Jack Hayford, a pastor from the other side of Los Angeles, walked in. "Why did you come to see me today?" asked Dobson. "Because the Lord told me you were lonely," replied Hayford. (Dobson, pp., 130,131)

When I pray about troubles, He will either take them away, like the miraculous healings in the Bible, or give us the grace to handle it, like Paul with his thorn in the flesh. And remember, He works on His time frame, not ours.

Let's go ahead and put this into action. Think of the hard times that are trying to get you down. Now, let's bow our heads and silently ask God's help to deal with something that's too hard for us to handle on our own.

B. Take The Load Off

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you."(1 Pet. 5:7; 1 Peter 2:23; cr. Ps. 91:1-4; Ps 55:22; Ps 31:5; Lk. 23:46; 1 Pet. 4:19)

Sometimes you can pray about a problem, but still carry the burden around with you. God wants to carry our loads for us. But how do hand the load over?

Close your eyes. Now see yourself gathering up all your cares, the problems that are pressing the heaviest on you. Your problems at home. Your friendship troubles. Your bad health. Your overwhelming sense of loss. Now, place them in a sturdy box, tape it shut, then tie it up securely, like you're gonna mail it overseas. As you pick it up, you realize how incredibly heavy it is. But just now, Jesus appears in the room, walking toward you with His powerful arms stretched out toward the box. For a moment, you cling to the box, but as it gets heavier and heavier, you finally hand it to Him. He takes it away with ease. Now, do you feel as light as air as He takes the burden away with Him?

If your problems are more than you can handle, then you're in a great position to let go and let God take over. After all, without Him, we can do nothing (Jn. 15:5), but through Him we can do all things (Phil. 4:13).

We don't know whether God will take the trial away or give us the grace to handle it. But either way, we can have His peace. If you're facing the heat, you may find yourself daily taking back the burden, and reminding yourself to cast it back on Him.

C. Resist Bitterness

You can't be both bitter and happy. Bitterness can eat you alive.

1. Directed at God (Jn. 6:67-68)

When Jim Conway saw his daughter go through the amputation of her leg, he struggled with anger. But according to Conway, "Probably the most important thing I learned in this entire process is this: I became deeply aware that there were only two choices that I could make. One was to continue in my anger at God and follow the path of despair I was on. The other choice was to let God be God, and somehow say, 'I don't know how all this fits together. I don't understand the reasons for it. I'm not even going to ask for the explanation. I've chosen to accept the fact that You are God and I'm the servant, instead of the other way around.' And there I left it." (Dobson, p. 88)

You can't be a free agent here on earth. You must serve someone. If you turn on God, you serve the devil (2 Cor. 4:4) And though people sometimes question God's goodness because of certain things He allows, we dare not leave Him and side with the devil, whom we know to be a liar and murderer from the beginning. At some point we have to realize what the disciples realized when many were turning away from following Jesus. He asked, "You do not want to leave too, do you?" Peter responded, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." (Jn. 6:67-68)

Don't make a judgment till all the evidence is in. Remember, one day you'll be saying, "Of course."
2. Directed at People
"To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. 'He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.' When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly." (1 Pet. 2:21-23; cr. Rom. 12:19)

Corrie ten Boom miraculously survived Ravensbruck, one of Hitler's death camps. After the war, she started a home in Holland to help people recover from the trauma inflicted upon them by the Nazis. What she found was that those who were willing to forgive their tormentors could go on to rebuild their lives. But those who refused to forgive, hanging onto their bitterness, remained emotionally crippled.

But at a speaking engagement in Munich, Corrie was challenged to apply her own teaching on a new level. After the service, her blood ran cold as she recognized a man walking toward her. He was one of her former guards from Ravensbrook and not just any guard, but one of the cruelest guards. Suddenly, the horrid memories flooded her mind.

"You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk," he said, "I was a guard there." Corrie realized that he didn't remember her, only one of the thousands of prisoners. "But since that time I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear from your lips as well. Fraulein," and he put out his hand, "will you forgive me?"

Corrie just stood there, as she put it, with a "coldness clutching my heart." But she knew that forgiveness was an act of the will, not just of the heart. So she silently called out for Jesus' help, and prayed, "I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling."

"And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bring tears to my eyes.

"I forgive you, brother," I cried. "With all my heart."

"For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely, as I did then. But even so, I realized it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit as recorded in Romans 5:5, 'because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." (Corrie ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1976), pp. 53-55.

Odds are that some of you are bitter at someone, maybe a lot of people. You think Sherri ruined your life because she stole your boyfriend. But do you really think that God is pacing the golden streets of heaven, repeating, "Oh no, I can't believe that Sherri did that! Now how will I ever get that boyfriend back to the right partner?!" Don't you see? If that's the person for you, then nothing in heaven or earth will ultimately keep you apart. If that's not the person for you, then God's got something better for you. So don't sweat it. And ask God to help you drop the bitterness.

Listen, mere mortals can't frustrate God's plan for your life. Don't act like they have that power.

Conclusion

Do you struggle with Corrie's feelings, knowing you ought to forgive, but lacking the power and the feeling? Ask God for help. Ask Him to give you the want to. Just take the first step, and trust Him to take care of the rest.

In conclusion, I want to give you a moment to deal with God on this issue that Corrie did. Talk to him about those people you hate for what they've done to do. It may be a parent that deserted you or a friend that betrayed you. I know, I know that it hurts. And I know that they probably don't deserve your forgiveness. But if you don't deal with your bitterness, it will eat you alive.

First of all, if everything inside you is screaming at you to not forgive that person, ask God for the power to forgive. Admit to Him that you don't want to forgive. He knows what you feel, so you might as well talk to Him about it. Tell Him that you need His strength.

Second, just silently get the words out to Him. You may want to repeat silently after me, a phrase at a time. "God, I thank you that you forgave me when all I deserved was hell. Give me the strength to follow Your example. God, I forgive him or her. Amen."

Now you will probably find the bitterness creeping into your heart day after day. But when you feel it boiling up inside, whether it's at your locker at school or at the supper table, immediately ask God for strength, and silently repeat your attitude of forgiveness to Him. If you do, God can set you free.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 3

Steve Miller — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:03:22 -0700

Introduction

In the last article we began talking about some deep issues. And I don't apologize for forcing us to think. Because when you go through the fire in your life, you wake up to realize that some of life's questions are more important than "What should I wear to the prom?" or "What kind of wheels should I put on my 4x4?"

People's answers to the big questions of life either make or break them in the long run, and we can't afford to be air heads when the world is crying out for answers. Remember, in the greatest commandment, Jesus said that we're not only to love God with all of our hearts but also with all of our minds.

When I hear those jokes, I feel a little better about myself! At least I'm not that bad off! But as we will see, the difference between us and the airheads in these jokes is nothing near the difference between God's wisdom and our wisdom. When we understand this, it can help with some of our deepest questions.

Last week we discussed God's goodness in the light of the evil in His world. Today we want to take on a few other areas of His character that hard times sometimes make us question.

a. God is Smart...And We're Dumb In Comparison

"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (1 Cor. 13:12; Job 38:1-5; cr. 38:17,18; 40:1-5; 42:1-6)

God called Job a righteous man. So when tragedy struck (and it struck hard his livestock, servants and children were killed suddenly) it was not because of his sin. In fact, God never told Job why it all happened. In the end, God simply enlightened Job as to how far His intelligence and power outstripped Job's. The bottom line for Job from God? - "I'm smarter than you can imagine. Trust me. I know what I'm doing." And when Job personally saw God for who he was, he was satisfied. (See Job 38-42) As Job put it,

"My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you." (Job 42:5)

But all too often, we're like a meddlesome half wit in a master auto mechanic's shop, who keeps demanding that the mechanic explain his every move: "Why are you replacing that gasket? Now listen, you're going to remember where to put that part when it comes time to put it back together, aren't you?" No wonder they post a sign: "No customers beyond this point."

Apparently God has thought it best to post a similar sign just beyond some of our troubles that reads, "No questioners beyond this point. I know what I'm doing. Trust me."

But why would He keep a full understanding of the "why's" from us? There are several possibilities.

First, God highly values trust and faith
"We live by faith, not by sight."(2 Cor. 5:7; cr. Heb. 11:1).

If we could fully understand everything God allowed us to go through, then there would be no need for faith, would there? Only during the dark times can we learn to walk by faith, not by sight.
Second, certain knowledge might be too heavy for us.
"So when they met together, they asked him, 'Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?' He said to them: 'It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.'"(Acts 1:6-7; cr. Gen. 2:17; Gen 3:11).

We don't need to know some things. Remember, the world's first nudist colony had no shame. Adam and Eve walked around in paradise, with everything they needed. What ruined this original paradise? They disobeyed by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God knew that there were some things they were better off not understanding. Why can't we see that discovering other forbidden knowledge might wreak similar havoc in our lives?

As a child, Corrie ten Boom over heard a discussion about sexual immorality, while travelling with her father in Europe. Confused, she asked her father to explain what they were talking about. But her father realized that she was too young to understand. In Corrie's words, this is how he responded,

"To my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
"Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
"It's too heavy," I said.
"Yes," he said. "And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."
"And I was satisfied. More than satisfied wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions for now I was content to leave them in my father's keeping." (Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place, Fleming H. Revell Co., 1971, pp. 26,27.)
Think about it. If God were to explain why he allows certain things to happen, He might have to give you the big picture by laying out a series of events that will happen to you over the next fifty years. But although this might make you feel better about your present situation, if you knew all those future events, you might begin to worry constantly about preparing for them today.

So, sometimes God doesn't let us in on the answers because He wants us to learn to trust. Other times, the knowledge might be too much for us to bear. But here's another reason:
Third, Can We Fathom the Depths of God?
Since God is so much greater than us, wouldn't it be unreasonable to expect to understand all His ways?

Scientists often run into mysteries using the scientific method. For instance, some experiments show us that light is waves. But other experiments show us that light must be particles. It can't be both. And we can't fully explain it. But you don't see scientists giving up on the scientific method because of this apparent contradiction. They seem perfectly willing to accept some mystery in their field, especially in dealing with subatomic particles. So why should we expect to understand everything about the ways of an infinite God?

C.S. Lewis once said that he thought our first words, upon making it to heaven, would be "Of course." For then I will "know fully, even as I am fully known". (1 Cor. 13:12) We will look back and say, "Now it all makes since. I see exactly why God allowed me to grow up without a father, why so many people rejected me in high school, why I had such a hard time with Math. And if I hadn't had zits, I would have never met and married that fantastic Dermatologist! Thank you God that things were not different!"

It should be enough that He told us that He loves us and gave us an incredible demonstration of that love through His Son. I don't understand why He lets certain things happen to His children. But I can live with it until I see Him face to face in heaven. And when I see Him as He is, I doubt I'll need to ask Him for any explanations. For now, we need not expect clear answers to things we may not even be capable of understanding. For now, I can simply trust in one Who has proven Himself trustworthy.

b. God is just

"For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad." (2 Cor. 5:10; 1 Pet. 2:23; 1 Cor. 4:5; cr. Rom. 14:10-12)

Annie responds, "Okay, so I can trust in His wisdom, but I still can't see His justice. My mom served Christ and His church faithfully, then died of this horrible disease. And all this while some criminal is getting away with murder, and may live to a ripe old age. What gives?"

Does it strike you odd that the great devotional writer Oswald Chambers died at 43? Christian author Diedrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis at 39. David Brainard, famous missionary to the American Indians, died of TB at 29. Godly singer Keith Green died at age 33, while Mick Jagger (who's early songs included "Sympathy For The Devil,") continues to pack out audiences well into his 50's.

Check out Hebrews 11 and you'll find that the saints of Bible times often faced the same troubles. Righteous Stephen died young in the Bible, while wicked King Manassah was allowed to reign a full 55 years.

So how can we trust God's justice, when what we see of life seems so unfair?

Imagine that you are watching a trial in a court of law. After a couple of witnesses testify for the prosecution, the judge tires of the case and calls for a verdict from the jury. "That's unfair!" cries the attorney for the defense, "You haven't heard our witnesses! All the evidence is not in!" It's like the old hanging juries, that send cold shivers up our backs. But isn't that exactly what we do when we make a judgment on God's character before all the evidence is in?

So remember that the whole story hasn't been finished. Heaven and eternity will be the great levelers of fairness. So don't reach a verdict before the judgment (1 Thes. 1:5-10).

c. God is in control

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Rom. 8:28; Hab. 3:17-19; cr. Deut. 33:26-27; Phil 1:12-21; 1 Tim. 1:17)

Imagine that you are Joseph, sitting in an Egyptian prison, reflecting on your life. You were taken from your family and sold into slavery by your cruel brothers, falsely accused and jailed in foreign country, then having the guy who was supposed to plea for your release forget all about you. Your brothers are scoundrels, but they're home with dad. Mrs. Potifer is free to find a new boyfriend. And you're sitting in a jail cell for things you never did. If all this happened to you, would you have become bitter in that cell, concluding that God had abandoned you? But don't forget. The glorious end of Joseph's story comes later. Only in retrospect can we see God's hand in it all.

We've all seen paintings that were created to be viewed from a distance; not up close. It's amazing how I can observe one of these paintings up close all day and see what's apparently only random blotches of color. But when I step back, I see a beautiful landscape.

Here on earth we're too close to the picture to understand how all the colors fit together. It's enough for me to know that one day I'll step back and see the whole picture clearly (1 Cor 13:12).

Annie objects: "But if God's in control, then are we saying that God gave my mom cancer, and His hand is squeezing every suffering child? It seems so cruel."

If Annie views God as personally giving her mom cancer, you can see how this belief could have contributed to her bad feelings toward God. But the Bible doesn't blame everything that happens directly on God. Think with me here.

Not everything that happens reflects God's perfect will.
In Mt. 23:37, Jesus spoke of wanting to have a relationship with many 1st century Jews, but they wouldn't have it. So don't blame Jesus for these people's condition. God doesn't want anyone to turn from Him (2 Pet. 3:9), but many do. He doesn't want people to sin, but they do. So if a drunk driver runs over a dear friend, don't blame God for making that guy drunk. God aches with us over the results of sin in our world.

Annie: But why then is there any suffering at all? I mean, if He's all powerful and all wise, couldn't He have made a world that suffering would have never infested?
God must allow suffering for higher purposes.
I believe that God has a perfect will, in which everyone follows Him, loves their neighbor, and ends up in heaven (2 Pet. 3:9). But He's also got a permissive will, in which He allows all kinds of tragedy and suffering.

"So," Annie asks, "It helps to know that God might not have directly placed the cancer in my mom's body. But it still bothers me that God even allowed it. Why didn't he stop it, when He could have?"

Pain and suffering are only evil if they don't result in a higher good. So the only bad suffering is senseless suffering.

Often doctors must hurt us in order to help us. Small children wonder, "Mom, why are you allowing this man to stick me with a needle? It hurts!" And the child will never understand, until he is old enough to understand. Then it will all make sense. The hurt was worth all the benefits. Until he understands, he must trust that his parents have some good reason for the pain. Now the difference between the understanding of a child and that of an adult doesn't even compare to the difference between the understanding of God and that of an adult. Doesn't it seem reasonable that the answers lie somewhere in God's infinite understanding?

"But," Annie asks, "if God is all-powerful and all-wise, couldn't he figure out a way to bring about the same good end He is working toward without doing it through suffering?"

Apparently not. You see, there are things God cannot do. He can't make a rock that's too heavy for Him to lift, create a married bachelor, a round square, or a brilliant air head. They are logical absurdities. Neither can He lie (Heb. 6:18; cr. 2 Tim. 2:13, Jn. 15:19; Tit. 1:2). Not just won't. Can't. Apparently He can't act against His nature.

Could God have stopped Annie's mom from getting cancer? Undoubtedly. Could He have stopped her cancer without at the same time taking something away from either Annie's, or her mom's, or the creation's ultimate glorious end? Apparently not.

So if God is good, infinitely smart, and in control, we can rest in the fact that whatever He allows into our life is for our ultimate good. No matter how out of control things seem to us, He's in control. And one day, probably not now, we'll look back and see that it all makes sense.

Conclusion

Some of us here have been praying, staying up nights, and racking our brains to find the answer to all the "Why" questions. If God hasn't given you the answer, then maybe it's time to let go and leave it in God's hands. Like Corrie ten Boom with her father's heavy bag of watch parts, perhaps you need to realize that maybe the answers would be too heavy for you, and knowing the answers would make you miserable for the rest of your life. And like Corrie, maybe it would be good to just take those questions you've been asking, and finally relax to realize that it's enough to know that a loving heavenly Father sees the big picture that you can't see.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 2

Steve Miller — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:55:09 -0700

Introduction

In the last article, we saw that God is not an almighty party pooper in the sky who continually looks around for someone having a good time so that He can say, "Cut that out and get back to work." Its Jesus Himself who said, I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (Jn. 10:10) But for the deep thinkers among us, this presents a big problem. Some of you, when you are alone in your room late at night, think things like this:

If God loves me, then why does He let such awful things happen to me? Why did my parents divorce and my friend die? Why is my dating life nonexistent? Is God judging me for something I did wrong? And by the way, if Gods so big and powerful, then why would he allow all this misery in His world?

Now let me warn you: these are heavy questions. And for this article and the next, I'm challenging you to think. You see, some skeptics think that Christians have two brains: one is lost and the other is out looking for it. But God never asked us to hand in our brains when we come to Him. Because of the questions we're asking, some of your classmates either hate God or deny His existence. Over the next couple of articles, we're going to try to get some answers.

Some people don't like God because they see every trial as coming directly from His hand. Maybe their parents are strict, unloving parents who just punish all the time, and thats the way they see God. No wonder they dont like Him! So whatever you do,

B. Don't Misjudge the Source Of Your Troubles

1. By Always Blaming Yourself (Jn. 9:1-5)

When baseball pitcher Dave Dravecky came down with cancer, he received all kinds of advice from people, much of it contradicting each other. One person told him that he needed to repent of his sin. Another assured him he simply lacked faith.

Look at Jn. 9:1-5.

"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus.

Jesus' disciples viewed suffering much like Daves advisors. They saw a man born blind and assumed he was blind because of his own sins or his parent's sins. But Jesus said that in this case it was neither. It wasnt this guy's fault that he was born blind. And apparently, it wasnt his lack of faith that kept him from being healed sooner in life.

Often, when tragedies strike, people ask, "What did I do to deserve that?" We asked that question under "B", but often you may come up with a blank. You see, not all suffering comes because of personal sin. If it did, then tell me why so many godly people have suffered so intensely. (Think: Jesus 1 Peter 2:18-24, Paul 1 Cor. 4:7-13; 1 Cor 11:23-28, and so many Old Testament heroes Heb. 11)

If you are suffering, but you're a believer and God's not revealing any rebellion in your life as the cause, you're in good company! Don't punish yourself with the "What did I do to deserve this?" question any more.

2. By Always Blaming God (2 Pet. 3:9; cr. Mt. 23:37)

Some people turn from God when they can't reconcile His goodness with our suffering. "If God is so good," they ask, "then why does He make the innocent suffer?"

A good first step to answer this question is to change the "make" to "allow." You see, God doesnt present himself as the direct cause of all suffering. Give me some ideas. Who else can be responsible for suffering?

Sometimes Satan is responsible
"Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour." (1 Pet. 5:8, cr. Jn. 8:44, 2 Tim. 2:26, 1 Thes. 2:18)

According to the Bible, the world lies in the power of the evil one (1 Jn. 5:19). Satan is called the "god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4), so much of the mess we see around us reflects his character, not the character of the Creator.
Sometimes People are to blame
"When tempted, no one should say, 'God is tempting me.' For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed." (Jms. 1:13-14)

Temptation is a trial, but God is not the author of it. Where does this verse place the blame for temptation? (Our own evil desires)

God tells people to love their spouses and their children, indicating His perfect will, but they often rebel and do the opposite. So although some people try to thank God for every event that comes into their lives, it would seem inappropriate to thank God for the abuse of a wife by a drunken husband, when we know the drunkenness was not God's perfect will.

When the Bible says that every good and perfect gift comes from God (Jms 1:16-17), the implication is that not everything that comes our way is good and perfect. So dont be deceived into thinking that God sends everything that comes our way. But although the direct cause is often evil, we can thank God that He allowed it for some good reason.

"But thats just the problem!" some object. "Since God could have stopped the suffering, isnt He ultimately responsible?" To make this problem more personal, lets reflect on a skit.

Setting: Annie and Phil are hanging out after school, waiting for the bus.
Phil: Hey Annie, long time no see.
Annie: Yea, how have you been doing Phil?
Phil: Ok, but we sure miss you at youth group. Why haven't you been coming around lately?
Annie: I've made a lot of flimsy excuses to people, but we've always been pretty open with each other, right Phil?
Phil: Sure.
Annie: So heres the real problem. About a year ago my mom came home from a doctors appointment, and I could tell she was all torn up. For the first few weeks, she wouldn't level with me, but finally she told me that she had a terminal case of cancer. At first I totally lost it, but soon I turned to God. But no matter how much I prayed, the cancer kept winning the battle. As you know, she passed away three months ago. For a few weeks, I kept attending the youth group, but my heart just wasn't in it. I know it sounds awful, but every time we sang a praise song, I thought, "If God really loved me, then why would he take my mom?" Just think about it: Hugh Hefner publishes Playboy Magazine, makes millions, and lives rich and well into his 70's, continuing his promotion of sexual immorality. But my mom was a decent person who gave her life to God and her family. Why did He have to take her? I just cant believe that a God of love would give my mom cancer."

Here are four truths, which, if you can grasp them, will protect you from spiritually tubing out when tragedy strikes:

a. God is Good

Some of you think, "Yea, yea, I've heard it all my life. Jesus loves me, this I know." But if youve never thought deeply enough about this truth to securely anchor yourself, you just might end up drifting away like Annie. Here are some things that convince me God is good, even when my world is falling apart:

1) Look at Jesus' Life (Rom. 5:8; 1 Jn. 4:9).
We have plenty of evidence that says Jesus Christ was more than just a good man. He was God dressed in flesh. So if we want to know what God is like, we need to think about Jesus. And when we think about Jesus, what hits us in the face is His love. Think about it. As God, He could have really thrown his weight around on earth, slapping around the Pharisees, turning the officials who condemned Him into donkeys, and tossing around hulking Roman guards with His all-mighty pinky.

Instead, we find Him abandoning His glory in heaven to hold children, comfort the fearful, wash his disciples stinky feet, stand up for the truth, forgive His enemies, heal the sick, and side with the poor. And He offered people a path to heaven, a place free from the pain and misery of this earthly life. Then He proved for all time that He loved us by allowing Himself to be tortured to death on the cross, taking upon himself the punishment we deserved, so that we could live with Him forever in heaven. (1 Jn. 4:8-16)

Now listen carefully, the way we know that God is good is not by our circumstances here on earth. If that's the way we determine God's love, then the apostle Paul would have never believed that God loved him. He was beaten times without number, jailed, stoned, and ridiculed. But the same guy who experienced all these hard times wrote that "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom 5:8). He didn't look to his circumstances to find God's love. He looked to the cross. Because an evil God/man would have never written into his scheduler: "At 33 years old, have yourself crucified for the sake of all those undeserving people."

So whenever you're ever tempted to doubt God's love, take a closer look at Jesus.
2) Look at the lives He has changed
"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God."(1 Jn. 4:7-10).

Christians aren't perfect. But as people follow God, we see bad people turn good and good people get better. People like Mother Theresa attribute their selfless lifestyle, not to their own natural goodness, but to God's work in their lives. Again, this doesn't seem like the business an evil God would be up to.
3) Look at His commitment to truth
"I am the way and the truth and the life." (Jn. 14:6; cr. Jn. 1:14; John 19:37-38).

God claims to be just, loving, and worthy of our praise. If He is not, then He is a liar. But all I learn of God through Jesus tells me He is not a liar. He never flinched on the truth, and stood against public opinion, even when He knew it would cost Him his life. So if God says He is love, I have good reason to trust Him.

So God has given Annie and all of us a massive amount of evidence to show that He loves us. If Annie rejects God's love because of "the problem of suffering," she now has "the problem of good" to deal with: If God doesnt love me, then why did He send His Son to die for me?"

Conclusion

So what do you think? Is God for you, or against you? Is Jesus on the side of love, or simply a deceiver? These are probably the most important questions you could ever answer. I've given you a lot to think about in this article. And don't be surprised if it takes some days and weeks to think through what we're discussed in light of the troubles you face.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 1

Steve Miller — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:27:31 -0700

Note from Delve Christian Ministries: This series was authored by Steve Miller of Legacy Youth Ministry Resources, and was originally written as a lecture series for youth pastors. We are extremely grateful to Steve for allowing us to offer this series on Delve Into Jesus

Author's Note: I didn't write these articles from an ivory tower. I wrote them while caring for my dear 37-year-old wife as she fought cancer. We had been on the mission field for a year when doctors found the cancer, forcing us to return to the States and fight cancer for the next four years. At the time, our four boys were 9, 6, and 8-month-old twins. A few months after completing this series, the Lord took her home. In most situations like this, grieving hearts scream Why?! With such a need for missionaries, why would God call someone to drop everything and go, only to call him back after one year? And while many abusive parents live long, healthy lives, why would He take one who daily showered her children with love. So I know firsthand something about living with grief, sorrow, and unanswered questions. I also know firsthand about the very real comfort that Jesus can bring in the midst of it all. So, these messages were written from one suffering heart to other suffering hearts, letting you in on where I found the comfort and peace to carry on.

Introduction

Is your happiness totally ruled by your circumstances? You know, if your family is getting along, your friends all like you, and your grades are fantastic, you're on top of the world. But if the next day you wake up to the sound of your parents fighting, look in the mirror and find a huge pimple on the middle of your forehead, go to school and your friends all laugh and call you Cyclops, then your emotions go to the pits. Most live on this emotional roller coaster, unable to find joy or peace when circumstances turn sour.

But in a world where most students can't handle hard times, those who find joy even when things go wrong can't be ignored.

Steve, a tenth grader, went on a ski retreat, mainly because a girl he liked was going. It was a horrible day for skiing. The ski report called it a hard, granular surface, which meant that most of the snow had melted during the warm days, frozen back at night, leaving a slope of hard, lumpy ice. The horrible conditions, plus the fact that none of the people were experienced skiers, made for a terribly frustrating day. More skiers were on their rear ends than on their skis. But in the midst of the contorted bodies lying on the slope, Steve observed a fellow named Ron who seemed different. Although Ron, too, spent most of the day on his rear, he seemed to have a joy and peace that set him apart, as if his joy didn't come from his circumstances. That evening, Ron spoke about John 10:10, telling how Jesus came to give us an abundant life. Steve knew that Ron had something he was missing, and that night knelt by his bed and surrendered his life to Christ.

Would you like to have a life like Rons, that makes people wonder, "How does he do it?", when they see you handle adversity? Would you like to get off the emotional roller coaster and find a joy that will stick with you, even during your darkest days?

Through this series of articles, we will search God's word for answers to "How To Master Your Circumstances, Before They Master You". And we will illustrate God's answers with the lives of real people, including a professional athlete who lost his pitching arm to cancer, a brilliant astrophysicist who copes with a crippling disease, an active teenager who became a quadriplegic, and some who survived Hitler's concentration camps.

Before we start on our road to joy, let me clarify a couple of things. I'm not talking about:

Hiding your hurts behind a fake smile.
"I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart." (Rom 9:1,2; cr. 2 Cor. 6:10)

This was no wimp who wrote this. It was the apostle Paul, a spiritual James Bond who spoke the truth boldly, whether he risked beating, imprisonment or death. But when he thought of those of his race who rejected Christ, it tore him up emotionally. And he wasn't afraid to express it. It's healthy to grieve at times in our life. It's also healthy to tell loved ones what you are feeling. Those who bottle up their emotions sometimes regret it later.
Never feeling down.
"When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled." "Jesus wept." (John 11:33-35; cr. Luke. 19:41; Hebrews. 5:7)

Remember, if Jesus wept openly, then none of us should hesitate to express our sorrow, thinking it is unspiritual, unmanly, or uncool. But it's one thing to express emotions and quite another to be ruled by them.

So, when I talk about mastering our circumstances, I'm not talking about hiding your hurts or never feeling down. I am saying that, like the Apostle Paul, we can face persecution, physical pain, betrayal, and even undeserved imprisonment with a deep peace and joy that no one can take away.

How many of you would like that quality of life? Let's turn to God's Word.

Prepare Yourself For The Battle

A. Don't Get Caught Off Guard

"All this I have told you so that you will not go astray. They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God."(Jn. 16:1)

"In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." (2 Tim. 3:12, cr. Acts 14:22; 2 Cor. 6:4-8; 1 Pet. 2:20-21; 1 Peter 4:12-14; Jn. 15:19-21)

Dave Dravecky, formerly a major league pitcher with the San Francisco Giants, faced some intense challenges when doctors diagnosed cancer in his pitching arm. But he wasn't the only one who suffered during his surgeries and loss of an incredible career. His wife, Jan, struggled not only with Dave's crisis, but the recent death of both of her parents. It seemed that her life was tumbling in.

But what made matters even worse was that her understanding of the Christian life was falling apart. As she put it, "I was angry because I felt I had been lied to. The road to the abundant Christian life had been pictured to me as a scenic journey, something like a yellow brick road leading to a wonderful wizard who would grant all my wishes. But where had that road taken me? It wasnt the Emerald City." And for a moment, she thought about turning back to her old life, away from Christ. (Dave and Jan Dravecky, When You Cant Come Back, pp. 79,80, Zondervan, 1993)

But had Jesus really let her down? Did the Bible ever promise that life for Jesus followers would be all roses? No. It was those who painted a false picture of the Christian life, not Jesus, who let her down.

And Jan's not alone. Many of us became Christians because of some need in our life that God graciously met. Wasn't it exciting to get that guilt off our shoulders, find peace, or get some other need met?! But some Christians mistakenly took it that from then on God would just sort of bulldoze all difficulties from their path.

Do you ever ask questions like,

"If it really pays to serve Jesus, then why don't I have as many friends as the bad crowd?"
"If Christianity is true, then why did God let my parents go through that nasty divorce soon after I became a Christian?"
"If God is good, then why did my close friend have to die so young?"

If questions like this bother you, you may have an emerald city picture of the Christian life. And just like Jan, you're setting yourself up for a big shock.

To get a more balanced picture of the Christian life, look at what Peter wrote in 1 Pet. 4:12. He probably wrote this between 63 and 68 AD. In AD 64 Nero viciously persecuted the church. Rumor had it in the empire that Nero had ordered the fire that ravaged Rome. To dispel the rumor, Nero set up the Christians as the culprits. They were arrested, convicted, and killed in sadistic ways. Some were dressed in animal hides and torn to death by dogs. Others were crucified, still others set on fire to illumine Neros parties. ("The Neronian Persecution," 64, Tacitus, Annales, xv. 44) And Peter himself would soon die at the hand of Nero, crucified upside down in Rome. Thats why Peter warned these folks, "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you." So where do people get the idea that the Christian life in the 90s should be easy?

Make sure you hear me. Living for Jesus doesnt insulate you from hard times. Learn now what Jan Dravecky learned, and your faith won't fold when hard times hit.

Prevent Unecessary Troubles

"Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Gal. 6:7; 1 Tim. 6:6-11; cr. Prov. 13:15; Num. 14:26-35; Ps 89:30-34; Heb. 12:4-11)

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, 43 million US citizens (almost one in five) have an incurable sexually transmitted virus. Some will die of it, others will suffer with symptoms all their lives. (Dobson, When God Doesnt Make Sense.) A recent issue of Jane Magazine (not a Christian magazine) reported that girls who have sex with more than one partner have 500 times the chance of getting Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (March, 1999, p. 90, quoted from the book, About Sex). And once you get it, its no picnic. So, if you decide not to save sex for marriage, and one day find yourself face-to-face with a serious-looking doctor who breaks the news that you have a Sexually Transmitted Disease, don't start asking Why me, Lord? He warned you about that lifestyle over and over.

So if you're hanging with the wrong crowd, drinking the wrong drinks, holding unforgiveness in your heart, dating a loser, surfing web sites that you'd close in a split second if Jesus were to walk into the room, and rebelling against your parents, don't be whining "Why me Lord?" when life tumbles in. You see, God's been around a long time, and if he warns us against that lifestyle, its because he knows it's self-destructive. He wants you to avoid much of the heartache that others are bringing upon themselves.

And the good news is that no matter how far you've traveled down a self-destructive path, God still loves you and wants you back. Before the apostle Paul was a Christian, he dragged Christians off to jail and oversaw putting to death a godly saint named Stephen. But God still loved him, washed him clean, and gave him a fresh start. And He can do the same thing for you.

Conclusion

Some of you have bought the lie that God is an almighty party pooper in the sky, who constantly looks around for someone having a good time so that He can say "Now you stop that and get back to work." There is a force in the world that's out to destroy you, but its not God. As Jesus Christ Himself said,

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (Jn. 10:10)

Not a life without difficulties or even tragedy, but a life that can be lived to the full in the midst of it all. Do you want that kind of life? It starts with getting honest with God and telling Him that you've blown your life and desperately need His forgiveness and a new start.

Praying For Things I Want - What About God's Will?

Michael Lane — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:26:50 -0700

It's very easy for us to come up with reasons why we should not ask God for things in prayer. As Christians, we should seek the will of God in all things. Perhaps we should only pray for God's will and nothing else, for what if what we ask for is contrary to His will? If is is not God's will, we should not want it, for it cannot be good. In fact, what is the point in asking for anything? If He wants to give it to us, He will. We cannot change God's mind or affect His will in any way. Asking God to intervene in our lives does not seem to make sense.

Yet, if we probe even deeper, we may wonder why we should even pray to God that His will be done. It will be done no matter what we do, for God ensures that His promises are kept and His plans are fulfilled. We could not prevent or stop Him if we wanted to, nor does He need anything from us to assist Him in fulfilling his purposes.

So, after pondering all these issues, it would seem that we should not pray for anything, nor should we desire anything except to serve God. Whatever God wants to happen will happen anyway. It seems logical, I have met a few people who hold this belief, and I have read one book where this idea was the central theme, but it is not consistent with what the Bible has to say on the matter.

The Bible Tells Us That it is Right That We Should Ask God for What We Want and Need

Despite what might seem obvious from our own deductions, the Bible could not be more clear in stating that God does want us to ask for things. God delights in our asking and He delights in delivering good gifts to us. In Matthew 7:11, Jesus tells us, "If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!" In John 14:14, Jesus promises, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." Finally, the apostle Paul tells us in Philippians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God"

There can be no doubt that God wants and expects us to bring our requests to Him in prayer. Jesus was our example in this regard, for even though he knew what suffering lay ahead, He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that the Father would take it away if it were possible for Him to do so (Matthew 26:39). Jesus knew that this was not possible, so how can we explain this request? Why would Jesus ask this of the Father when He knew that it had to be done?

1) Having Strong Desires Permits Us to Have Meaningful Sacrifice.

In order to understand Jesus' prayer in the garden, we need to consider the alternative. Imagine that Jesus prayed to the Father, "So, tomorrow I am going to be crucified, that's fine whatever, thanks, and your will be done." There is something inherently wrong with that reaction. It demonstrates that Jesus doesn't particularly care and if that is so, can we rightly call his death a sacrifice? His act upon the cross will have lost some of it's meaning and power.

We have to understand that when Jesus cries out to the Father, His prayer is not about asking God to do something, it's about Jesus expressing anguish and seeking solace from the Father. Jesus is experiencing the most powerful human emotions imaginable and so He cries out to his trusted and loving confidant in Heaven. In this way, we understand that Jesus is extremely apprehensive about his death on the cross, but he will do it anyway. We must learn a valuable lesson from Jesus - there can be no sacrifice without passion.

Imagine someone saying, "Why should I pray for God to stop the slaughter in Rwanda? His will be done." No matter how much this person may intend to sound noble, the sentiment is cold and callous. We can never fully apprehend God's plan in it's entirety, so it is meaningless to desire God's will on that level. It's arrogant and it's an excuse for inaction. We can only do as God has commanded us to do and so we demonstrate our desire for God's will by doing specific acts of goodness and opposing specific acts of evil. We seek God's will, not indifferently by sitting back and saying, "His will be done", but by actively helping the poor, opposing violence and leading people to Christ. Our prayer for God to help in these areas is a reflection of those desires.

When we are confronted with real pain in our life, it does no good to shrug and say, "God's will be done." When presented with the reality that our child has cancer and is suffering tremendous pain, we must cry out, "Please Father, this is too much to bear! Please ease this suffering." But then, as Jesus did, we must conclude, "Yet not as I will, but as you will." In this way, we let God know that we are passionate about this terrible affliction and we desperately want it to stop, yet, if sacrifice is necessary and the suffering must be endured, we are prepare to offer it . This is true sacrifice, and it's not possible without also feeling the intense desire for it to stop. If we were indifferent, our sacrifice would be meaningless.

2) Asking For Things Demonstrates our Faith and Submission

Asking God for things we need is closely associated with humility. God wants us to accomplish great things for His glory and for the Kingdom. If we decide to do this on our own, we may very well do some good work, but it will be nothing compared to what we can accomplish if we permit God's Spirit to work through us. Pride is a problem for many of us and it gets in the way whenever we think, "I don't want help. I want to do this on my own." If this is our attitude, God obliges us and leaves us to our own destiny. However, if we can overcome our pride, submit to God and ask for His help, much greater things can be accomplished.

Final Note on Prayer

Though this article has focused on asking God for things we need, that is only a very small aspect of prayer. Let us not forget that prayer should be so much more. It should be a time of reflection, praise, worship, repentance, and thanksgiving. We should be wary of only praying whenever we need something. Our relationship with God is very much like a relationship with a friend or spouse. If the only time we talk to them is when we need something, it will be a very strained relationship!

Can We Pray For God to Punish or Harm Someone?

Michael Lane — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:52:22 -0700

This type of prayer has a special name - it's called imprecatory prayer. There are many examples of this in the Psalms, especially 58, 59 and 69. David writes in Psalm 69, "May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and their backs be bent forever. Pour out your wrath on them; let your fierce anger overtake them. May their place be deserted; let there be no one to dwell in their tents."

We need to be very careful with this type of prayer for it's a very fine line between appealing to God's perfect sense of justice and lashing out because our pride has been hurt.

Are we not to love our enemies? If we are going to pray for God to punish, curse or harm someone, we need to examine our motives. What are we hoping will be the result? If we want revenge because that person hurt us, then our motives are not honest. We should be asking God to help us to forgive that person, for the desire for revenge is not holy and it will end up causing our hearts to harden.

An important clue to watch for is that we are asking God to harm or punish someone in the same way they hurt us. This is an indication that we want revenge, not justice. If you've been hurt by a boyfriend who was unfaithful and you find yourself asking God to make his new girlfriend cheat on him so he knows how it feels, that's a pretty strong indicator that your motive is not pure. Forgiveness and healing should be your priorities.

On the other hand, if we are seeking for God to be glorified, then we may be right to ask for God's righteous punishment. In particular, when someone is doing something unholy such as worshiping the devil or persecuting Christians, then it is right that we should ask God to punish that person so He would be glorified. It might be right and even loving to ask God to harm the person in order to get their attention and stop what they're doing. We are not asking for our own gain, only that justice would be done and God would be rightly worshiped and obeyed.

Finally, we should remember that justice belongs to the Lord alone. When we pray for justice or punishment, we should be certain to make sure that we ask the Lord to deliver it in His way at His appropriate time. We should never seek for permission to deliver it ourselves unless we also happen to be part of God's appointed institutions, such as an officer of the law or a judge. It may be fine to ask God for justice, but we must be patient and allow God to work through the means that He has determined.

Pray to Whom? Father, Son or Holy Spirit?

Michael Lane — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:49:14 -0700

The Trinity is certainly a difficult concept for anyone to understand. It is a mystery how God can be one God in three persons, so the best we can do is accept what the Bible says about God's nature, even if we don't fully comprehend.

To which person of the Trinity should we pray? Certainly, there is no question that we can pray to God the Father. The Old and New Testaments are filled with examples of prayer to the Father, and Jesus Himself taught us to pray to the Father in Matthew 6:9-13.

There is also no question that we can pray to Jesus. As an example, in Acts 7:59, Stephen prays "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Jesus told us that we would be able to pray to Him after he had gone to the Father. He said, "...I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." (John 14:12-14)

The issue with the Holy Spirit is more complicated. There are no examples of anyone praying to the Holy Spirit in the scripture, nor is there any guidance that we should or should not do so. As a person of the Trinity and one who is fully God, there is no obvious reason why we should not pray to the Holy Spirit if we are led to do so. For me personally, I pray to the Holy Spirit whenever I feel stress or unease and I am seeking peace and comfort. I am not sure why I do this, but it seems appropriate.

Having said that, the Holy Spirit does play a special role in interceding for us when we are praying to the Father or to the Son. Many times in the New Testament we are told to pray "in the Spirit." In Ephesians 6:18, Paul tells us "...pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests", while Jude recommends, "...build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit." (Jude 1:20).

Paul gives us some clarification about the role of the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:26. Paul writes, "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."

So, although it is perfectly acceptable to pray to the Holy Spirit, scripture suggests that we pray "in the Spirit", which means we permit the Holy Spirt to guide our prayer and give us the right words to say.

There is no right or wrong. You may address your prayer to the Son, the Father or the Holy Spirit with confidence depending on how you feel led at that moment.

God's Response To Prayer Requests

Michael Lane — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:05:30 -0700

While it is certain that God hears each and every prayer request we make, His response can take many forms. Based on examples from the Bible and the personal experience of people I have known, here is a sampling of just some of the ways God responds to our prayers

A Sense of Peace: In my own experience, this is by far the most common response that God will provide, particularly when we have asked Him to help us with a difficult decision. Before prayer, we may have no idea how to proceed. After spending time in prayer, the right decision is accompanied by a sense of peace and "right"-ness. Often, that sense of peace comes from the guiding of the Holy Spirit, letting us know the right path to choose.

Signs: A few years ago, I had to make a difficult choice about meeting someone and I was not sure it was the right thing to do. I prayed for God to show me the answer. At virtually the same time, I got a call from the person I was supposed to meet offering me a chance to back out, while I also got an email from another person urging me not to go. The coincidence was too much to have not been from God. I canceled the meeting.

Miracles: Though this response from God is relatively rare, it does happen that God will respond in a supernatural and amazing way. I have seen this most recently in the miraculous recovery of a friend from a horrific accident. He was not expected to survive, and there can be little doubt that his recovery was a response to the constant and pleading prayer of his friends and family. We should not be shy about asking God for miracles if what we are seeking seems like it would be consistent with His will.

Delayed Response: Occasionally, God will answer our prayer long after we made the request. We see this in the book of Daniel, where the angel comes to Daniel's aide long after his prayer, explaining that he was delayed by a spiritual battle. The spiritual realm is complex and beyond our understanding, and we must be patient. Although He is all-powerful, sometimes God will put plans into motion that take time.

Encouragement from His Word: Whenever possible, we should conclude our prayer by spending some time reading the Bible. God will often to use the scriptures to lead us to an answer or to help us find a sense of peace about a problem.

Encouragement from a friend: Another way God commonly responds is to send someone across our path who can help, either by their actions or by providing advice or wisdom. You should never assume that if someone helps you with a problem that the true source of the help is not in fact from God.

Unexpected solution: Our understanding is limited and often we ask for solutions that are not ideal. God knows the best way to solve every problem, so we should not be surprised when God gives us something different and even better than we had hoped for. If money is tight, we may ask God to help us win some money, but He may help us get a promotion at work instead, for He knows that is a far better long-term solution.

Direct Answer: Though perhaps most rare of all, it does happen for a few people that in response to prayer, they hear God speak to them directly in order to provide the answer. This was more common in the Bible, but a few people I know have, on occasion, heard directly from God when they needed Him most.

No Response: Finally, there are times when it seems that God has not responded. It may be that God has responded in a way we cannot recognize, or it may be that what we have asked for is simply not in His will for us at this time. We can be certain that God loves us and wants the best for us, so if it seems that His answer is "no", there is a higher reason that we may not be able to appreciate today. In time it may become clear why God denied our request, or we may not know until we meet Him in heaven. Either way, we can be certain He has our best intentions in mind.

Final Note on Prayer

Why Is Jesus Called the 'Son of Man?'

Michael Lane — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:20:30 -0700

It is not common to hear Jesus referred to as the Son of Man in Christian churches today, however this usage in the Bible is frequent. In the New Testament, the phrase is used eighty-three times. Most often, it is used by Jesus to refer to Himself in the third person and seems to have been his favorite title for himself. Among the many examples are Mark 2:28 ("So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.") and John 12:23 ("The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.")

To understand why Jesus used this term and what it would have meant to the Jews of that time, we need to examine its usage in the Old Testament. The term is used sparingly in Numbers, Job, Isaiah and Psalms and is used to refer to someone who is mortal (i.e son of mankind and not a spiritual being). The term is used ninety-four times in Ezekiel and here too, the term is used to distinguish between the the human author and the divine being who is providing the revelation to him. None of these usages are particularly significant.

In the Book of Daniel, however, we find a very different usage in a passage where Daniel is describing a vision of the end times. Here, the term refers to the One who will come during the final days - the apocalyptic Messiah.

"In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." - Daniel 7:13-14

In several instances, Jesus uses similar language to Daniel and his use of this term is clearly meant to evoke the imagery in Daniel's apocalyptic vision. Jesus said, "At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory" (Luke 21:27) and "At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory." (Matthew 24:30)

This passage in Daniel and its meaning would have been very well known to the Jews of Jesus' day and it would have been clear to them what Jesus meant. By using this term, Jesus was making a statement that he was the Messiah. It was His use of this term among other things that the Pharisees would have found blasphemous and certainly contributed to his eventual arrest and crucifixion.

Why Is Jesus Called the 'Lamb Of God?'

Michael Lane — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:03:42 -0700

There are several passages in the Bible where Jesus is referred to as a lamb, or the lamb of God. Peter calls Jesus, "a lamb without blemish or defect" (1 Peter 1:19) and Paul calls Jesus the "Passover Lamb who has been sacrified" (1 Corinthians 5:7). When John the Baptist sees Jesus walking toward him for the first time, he exclaims, "Look, the Lamb of God!" (John 1:36). Throughout much of the book of Revelation, Jesus is referred to as a lamb. Angels proclaim, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" (Revelation 5:12)

According to the law of Moses, the Jewish people offered animal sacrifices to God to attone for their sins. This was a temporary solution for the problem of sin, and sacrifices needed to be offered periodically to keep Jews in a right standing before God. One of the animals commonly sacrificed was a lamb. When Jesus was killed on the cross, He became the final and ultimate atonement sacrifice. For those who place their faith in Christ, his sacrifice covers all their sin and no other sacrifice to God is necessary. In this way, Christ was the sacrificial "lamb" who laid down his life for us.

Christ's role as the lamb of God was predicted by the prophet Isaiah hundreds of years before He came to offer His life. In chapter 53 verses 6-7, Isaiah writes

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

Why is the Fish a Symbol of Christianity?

Michael Lane — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:51:13 -0700

When Jesus started his ministry, he began calling people to become His followers. The first two men Jesus called were Peter and Andrew. These two brothers were professional fisherman and were casting their nets into the Sea Of Galilee. Jesus called out to them and famously said, "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." (Matthew 4:19)

The disciples would not have likely understood what Jesus meant at that time, but soon it would become clear to them that they would leave their old careers behind them for good. After Jesus left them following his resurrection, Peter and Andrew along with the rest of the disciples would spend the rest of their lives preaching the good news about Jesus and bringing followers to Christ. This is what Jesus meant when he said they would be fishers of men.

The fish is still an apt symbol for Christians today because we have all been called to be fishers of men and to spread the good news about Jesus. In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus' final words to the disciples were, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." This command by Jesus has been called "The Great Commission" and it still holds for Christians today. Like Peter, Andrew and the rest of the disciples, Christians still have a responsibility to be fishers of men today. We are called to do what we can to spread the word about Jesus Christ. Not all of us can be missionaries, but we need to make sure we are financially and spiritually supporting those people who are doing this work on a daily basis. Christians need to make sure that their friends, family and co-workers know about Jesus and that they are welcome and invited to learn more about Him any time.

Christian Missionaries

Michael Lane — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 19:38:24 -0700

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus' final words to the disciples were, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."

This command by Jesus has been called "The Great Commission" and it still holds for Christians today. We are called to do what we can to spread the word about Jesus Christ. Missionaries are those Christians which have decided to make this mission their full-time job. These men and women travel to remote destinations where people have not heard the Gospel of Christ and bring them the Good News. They rely on the financial and administrative support of their home churches and other Christians who want to help make their work possible.

The goal of a missionary must never be to convert someone against their will, especially through force or coercion. God has made each of us with the ability to make our own choices, and so a true choice to follow Jesus Christ must be made freely and from the heart. A conversion to Christianity which is forced has no meaning and is not genuine. The goal of a missionary should be to ensure that everyone knows the good news of the Gospel and has an opportunity to make their choice from a place of knowledge and understanding. Compelling someone to make the right choice is the job of the Holy Spirit and no one should interfere. Helping them to understand the true nature and consequence of the choice is the only part missionaries can play.

There can be no doubting that Christians throughout history have been guilty of using force and coercion in an attempt to covert others to Christianity. Although they may have had honorable intentions, anyone who has done this has missed the point of Christianity and is guilty of a serious sin. The apostle Peter encourages us to be ready to explain our faith in Christ, but cautions that we must always do so "...with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15)

One of the ways that missionaries can demonstrate what Christianity is about is to provide an excellent example through their service, love and compassion. That is why when missionaries come to a new location, often their focus is on improving the quality of life. Christian missionaries aid communities in making improvements to food and water supplies, education and heath care. This compassionate work is done to demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ in a real and tangible way. This kind of loving service, when done with genuine care and concern, is the best endorsement of Christianity anyone can offer. People are naturally drawn to this kind of love and compassion and will want to know the reason for it.

The first Christian missionary, the apostle Paul explains in Acts 20:35, "In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"

This same principle is true for all Christians, even those who are not full time missionaries. In our work, our families and our communities, people will judge our conduct and that will become, for them, how they perceive Christianity in general. If we are kind, loving and compassionate, people will want to know more about Jesus. If we are sinful, greedy, judgmental and unkind, people will want nothing to do with him. This is what Peter meant when he wrote, "Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world" (2 Peter 2:12 - NLT)

What makes someone a missionary is that they have moved to a new area and have made service and evangelism the primary purpose of their life. However, all Christians are missionaries of Christ, even if the people they influence are only their family, co-workers and neighbors. Every Christian has been called to live a life in the example of Christ and tell people about the good news.

How To Pray

Michael Lane — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:46:34 -0700

Although prayer has many forms and many purposes, at it's most basic, it is simply a conversation between you and God. It can be formal or it can be casual. You can recite a prayer such as the Lord's Prayer or you can talk to God in a very free and natural way. You can pray alone or as a group. You can pray out loud, silently in your head, or even with paper and pen. You can pray by singing a worship song, or reading a Psalm. God will always hear you no matter what form your prayer takes.

Just as you may talk to your friends and family about a variety of topics, you can talk to God about anything. It's most common to praise God, ask for forgiveness, thank him, or ask for things that you need, but you can also tell God what you're feeling or just about anything else that's on your mind. For example, you can ask God to help you pass an exam, thank him for your friends, confess that you were insensitive to your wife or comment on how difficult your job is getting. Any topic that is important to you or important to God is appropriate.

Some people prefer to be formal and only pray when they are kneeling with their eyes closed. Others will pray in the shower, in the car or wherever they happen to be. There is no right or wrong way to pray so long as it's sincere. When you're praying, God deserves to have your complete attention, so if you need to find a quiet place in order to do that, then you should do so. On the other hand, if you can focus on God while sitting in the middle of a crowded cafeteria at lunch time, then that's perfectly acceptable too.

If you're ever in the position that you want to pray but don't know what to say, you can always recite the Lord's prayer found in Matthew 6:9-13. Another method is to find one of the Psalms which reflects what you're feeling or what you want to say to God. You can recite it our loud to the Lord, or read in quietly while contemplating God's presence.

What matters most is how often you pray. God wants to spend time with you! In order to have a close and intimate relationship with God, you will need to make prayer a priority rather than fitting it in whenever you have time.

When you begin to make prayer a priority, an interesting thing happens. You become filled with God's love and closeness and you will want to pray more and more. The more your pray, the more you will want to pray until eventually, you are spending time with God in everything that your do.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:17, Paul tells us to "Pray without ceasing." Paul does not mean that we should be on our knees in earnest prayer at every moment of our lives. Obviously, we need to work, to eat and to sleep. What Paul means is that we need to constantly have an awareness of God's presence and share with Him everything we do. For example, even when we are at work, we can be aware of God's presence, feel the peace and guiding of the Holy Spirit and consider how God wants us to respond to the world around us. Though we may not be engaged in conversation constantly, we can always feel God with us everywhere we go, just as we would a friend who is always beside us.

Do I Have to Go to Church to Be a Christian?

Michael Lane — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:45:26 -0700

Like so many other areas of Christianity, people often confuse the cause and effect. In an article about people who reject Christianity, we discussed how giving up a sinful life is the effect, not the cause, of being a believer in Christ. You do not become a Christian by changing your life, rather, you change your life once you become a Christian. You don't do it because you have to, you do it because you love Christ and want to live for Him.

The very same thing is true of attending Church. You can't become a Christian by going to church and it's not a prerequisite. There is no rule anywhere that says you have to go. However, once you give your life to Christ and become a Christian, you should very much want to go to Church.

Going to Church accomplishes many important things. First and foremost, it's a special opportunity to spend time with God in worship and praise, which is something that every believer should rejoice in doing. Second, it's a chance to learn more about God from the readings and the sermon. Finally, it's a time of fellowship with other believers, which permits us to all grow together as a community.

All of these are important, powerful reasons and every Christian should be excited about going to Church. If you're not excited or actually dread the thought of attending, then something is wrong. The problem might be with the church, or it might be with you.

An important part of the service is the music. If you prefer contemporary music and your church favors the hymns, you might have difficulty using that time to feel close to God. On the other hand, if you feel moved by the old hymns, you might really find the drums and electric guitar a distracting nuisance. Music is a personal choice, and it's important to find a church that shares your tastes otherwise it will be difficult to feel connected. God created all music and so long as it glorifies Him, He doesn't care if it's hymns or rock and roll, so long as it bring you closer to Him.

Another important part of the service is the sermon, and this can be a matter of personal preference as well. Some may prefer a pastor who is emotionally engaging, loud, passionate and challenging. Others may prefer a sermon that is more conservative and intellectually engaging.

Last but not least, you need to find a church community where you can feel welcome and loved. Nothing can replace the amazing feeling of walking through the door Sunday morning and being warmly greeted like family. That kind of relationship requires work and reciprocation. You need to get out there, meet people and open up your heart. Once you find that kind of Church family, you will never want to miss a Sunday.

If you've sampled a variety of musical styles, pastoral approaches and different communities and still feel like Sunday service is a drag, then something might be wrong in your relationship with Jesus. Spend some time with Jesus in prayer and reading His word. Ask Jesus to light the fire of passion in you and you will soon find that you can't wait to go to the church on Sunday morning.

Are Demons Real?

Michael Lane — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:41:00 -0700

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.” - C.S. Lewis, from the Screwtape Letters

Is there really such a thing as a demon?

Demons are fallen angels who have turned from God and no longer follow His will. They are absolutely real, as we can see from the New Testament. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus cures those who are possessed by demons and later, His apostles do the same. Matthew 8:28-32 recounts how Jesus cured two demon-possessed men in the region of Gadarenes and forced the evil spirits into a herd of pigs.

Today as in Jesus’ day, some illness and wickedness are caused by demons, though it would be a mistake to attribute all sin and disease to their work. Though Christians may be deceived, tormented and influenced by demons, it is not possible for a believer in Christ to be completely possessed or taken over by a demon.

The Christian Response to Demons

Following Christ’s example, our best defense against demonic activity is prayer. Sometimes demons can only be overcome by fasting and prayer together. (See Mark 9:29). It would be a mistake to ignore demonic activity, for sometimes those Christians with special discernment will identify the work of a demon and we need to come together in strong, fervent prayer. If we ignore the problem and pretend that demons are mere myth, we give them even more power.

We should be careful not to engage in any kind of activity with respect to demons other than rebuking them and praying for protection against their influence. We should refrain from slandering or insulting them. Jude verse 9 tells us, “But even the archangel Michael, when he has disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’ Yet these people speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals – these are the very things that destroy them.”

Most importantly of all, we should be wary of an unhealthy fascination with demons. We should not study them or otherwise demonstrate any interest in them at all, for it is a very fine line between being a student of the occult and falling prey to it. Be wary of giving demons a foothold. Best to rebuke them, pray for protection and then move on.

Evolution And Christianity

marklang — Mon, 14 May 2007 08:58:06 -0700

On the issue of evolution, what is commonly seen as a conflict between science and religion is really something deeper. Religion tells us what God has revealed about Himself through His own words and the words of His prophets. Science tells us what God has revealed about Himself through His creation. The conflict, then, is really between two different sources of revelation about God. For evangelical Christians who place their faith in the Bible, to question the information it contains is out of the question. At the same time, to question the honest and objective observations of the scientific community would be foolish. If science and religion both purport to tell us the truth about God, what can we do when they won't agree? The simple answer is that they must always agree when properly understood. Whenever a conflict arises, we can be sure that we've either misunderstood the Bible or that the scientists have failed to uncover the truth. In the case of evolution, both factors come into play.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that the first few chapters of Genesis were not written for scientists, they were written for a far simpler society thousands of years ago. The point of the story was to impress upon it's hearers and readers that the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac was the same God who created the heavens and the earth.

But here we are, thousands of years later, with a creation story that tells the earth was created in six days contrasted with stacks of irrefutable scientific proof that the earth is billions of years old. If we choose the six days, we are made to feel like a fool. If we choose the billions of years, we are made to feel like a heretic.

Literally or Figuratively?

To resolve this conflict, we have to keep in mind that while everything in the Bible is true, not everything in it is literal. In Psalm 6:6, David writes, " I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears." Did David really "flood" his bed with tears? Common sense tells us that David is employing poetic license to express how upset he was. It would be silly to accuse David of lying, nor would we ever take this literally. We expect modern poets to employ hyperbole, metaphor, personification and other figures of speech, and ancient writers did likewise.

We have to be very careful with this principle because it's a slippery slope. If we decide to accept the creation story as allegorical, then what's to stop us from dismissing Noah, Moses, Jonah or even Jesus as literary characters? We have to use common sense. First of all, Jesus confirmed the accounts of Moses' exodus, Jonah's time in the whale and Noah's flood. If you accept Jesus, you have to accept these men as well. On the other hand, we have to accept that there are some passages which are simply not meant to be taken literally, with poetry being the prime example.

Is the creation story poetry? There is reason to think that it is. Some of the sentence structure and vocabulary are unique to Hebrew poetry, and there is a difference in structure and style between the creation story and the rest of Genesis. If it is a poem, then its literary purpose is to explain God's plan of creation and His dominion over everything, just as the literary purpose of Psalm 6 is to express David's overwhelming grief.

How Long is a Day?

Even if the creation story is not poetry, it's still possible to take it literally and reconcile the account with the scientific evidence. It is quite legitimate to argue that the word "day" in the creation account does not strictly refer to a 24 hour period. The Hebrew word used is "Yom", familiar to us from "Yom Kippur", the Jewish Day of Atonement. Like our word "day", "yom" most commonly refers to a 24 hour period of time but occasionally, "yom" can be used to refer to any period of time. Though not as common in English, we still occasionally use "day" to mean "period of time" such as in the phrase "back in my day".

There are several examples of this usage in the Bible. As early as the book of Genesis 2:4, the word "yom" is used to refer to the entire 6 days of creation as a whole (the word "day" is not present in all English translations, but "yom" does appear in the original Hebrew).

Most biblical scholars, even conservative evangelical scholars will concede that either interpretation - creation in six days or creation over millions of years - is feasible. In Systematic Theology, well-known theologian Wayne Grudem concludes that it is is possible and acceptable today for a Christian to accept either viewpoint and either one represents a legitimate and valid interpretation of the text. As Christian apologist Dr. John Montgomery put it, he holds to an old-earth belief, but it would not surprise him one bit if when he died and went to heaven, God told Him that he really did make the world in six days.

What does it mean to "Create"?

This is an important first step, for if we hold onto the idea that creation took place in six literal days, then we absolutely cannot reconcile that with the fossil record and overwhelming geological evidence supporting a 4 billion year-old earth. However, one important conflict still remains. Genesis tells us that God created all the plants and animals as they were, yet scientists tell us that everything evolved from earlier, simpler species. How can we resolve this conflict?

There are two ways to approach this. If we want to be more liberal in our interpretation of the creation account, we can say that it is possible that evolution was the means by which God created all the species. In other words, God created life and imbued in it the power to evolve over millions of years into all the species which He intended. Depending on your faith in Darwin's theory, you can believe that God was active in the design of each successive new species which evolved, or you can believe that God simply started the process and then stood back and let evolution run it's course knowing that within millions of years, man would eventually come to be. This does not deny God's hand in creation, it simply posits that evolution was His tool.

Most conservative Christians (this author included) would find this explanation too liberal and at odds with the idea that God "created" man. Nevertheless, it's quite permissible to hold this view and still be a fulfulled and respectable Christian. It is not necessary to reject evolution in order to accept Christ's salvation and if someone cannot overcome the cultural bias in favor of evolution but still wants to be a Christian, it is completely satisfactory for them to do so.

Threshold Evolution

The second approach is to accept that evolution accounts for variation within a species, genus or class, but that the creation of each new major group of creatures, including man, was the direct and deliberate work of God. This theory is sometimes called "threshold evolution". The idea is that at various intervals which correspond to the "days" of the creation account, God introduces new lifeforms to the earth. Then, over the course of millions of years, there is evolution as tigers and lions evolve from a common ancestor, or new types of bird emerge. At the end of the process, God concludes by creating man distinctly and uniquely.

If a compromise between the evolution and creationism is desirable, then this position permits us to hold to the notion that God directly created man, but does not attempt to ignore the significant scientific evidence that some evolution happens. What remains in debate is whether evolution by natural selection can account for the emergence of all species from a common ancestor, or that man descended from primates. As we will now investigate, this premise is more open to debate than we have been led to believe.

Questioning Evolution - Do We Dare?

If evolution is presented in biology class as a "theory" anymore, it's done with a wink or a tongue-in-cheek, for we're told that no mainstream scientist retains any skepticism towards Darwin's theory. While this article will not attempt to refute all the evidence for evolution point-for-point, we will investigate some major areas where evolution is, if nothing else, misunderstood by the general public.

Origins of Life

Evolution and natural selection absolutely cannot explain how life began on earth. This is not a flaw in Darwinian theory, but it is outside the scope of what evolution attempts to explain. Natural selection depends on random mutations of cells, but if there is no cell, there can be no natural selection and therefore, there can be no evolution. The theory does not take effect until there are already cells available to divide and mutate, so it can do nothing to explain the emergence of cells from their constituent elements. In fact, no credible and widely-held scientific theory exists to explain how life began. Modern science simply does not know. You can read more about this subject in this article

Fossil Evidence?

In Darwin's day, it was known that the fossil record could not fully validate all of Darwin's claims, for no transitional species had ever been found. It was assumed that more of these fossils would be discovered in time and solidify the theory. The promising find of the Archeopteryx only two years later was hailed as an important find, one of many to come. Today, it is no longer certain that Archeopteryx was a transitional species and even if it was, it was the first and only of it's kind to be found. Despite nearly a century and a half of new fossil evidence, the small, gradual changes that Darwin predicts have remained elusive and nothing has been found to add any additional weight to his theory of a common ancestor for all living beings. Dr. Jonathan Wells, PhD in molecular biology from Berkley, calls the fossil record "discontinuous" and asserts that as far as the fossil record is concerned, evolution at the phylum level has be "dis-confirmed."

What has been found during the Cambrian explosion are examples of some insects, crabs and starfish appearing in the fossil record fully formed, ostensibly from nothing. Evolutionists maintain that since the theory of evolution is correct, the fossils will be found. But the fossils were supposed to be one of the primary pieces of evidence to support evolution. If there are no fossils, then where's the evidence?

Descent with Modification or Design?

Another commonly regarded proof of evolution is homology - the similarities that can be observed between species which are believed to share a common ancestor. An example might be the skeletal similarities between a human hand and a bat's wing. In a similar vein, it is commonly touted that since man and apes share ninety-eight percent of their DNA code, we must have evolved from apes. The problem with this argument is that it cuts both ways. One can point to the similarities and claim that when something works, you use it again and again. If eyes work well, or hearts work well, why wouldn't God reuse the same techniques where it made sense to do so? It's a no-win situation for creationists, for if every species were vastly different, the evolutionist would point to the extreme variations and exclaim, "look at how natural selection makes everything so different!"

We can see examples of this design principle in our daily life. Walk into any two homes anywhere in the country and there is a very good chance you will see the same construction techniques - a foundation of concrete or brick with drywall nailed or screwed to frames made out of pine two-by-fours. Why? Because it works! When you have an effective technique, you don't reinvent the wheel for each new home.

If we looked at the materials list for the two homes, how much would they have in common? Every home, regardless of the design, needs nails, wood, drywall, carpet and so forth. It is the same with man and apes. If our anatomy is so similar, why wouldn't we have such similar DNA? It takes virtually the same materials to make a simian heart as a human heart. To put this in perspective, we share ninety percent of our DNA with mice so clearly we should not overstate the importance of having similar structures or composition. It's an argument for design just as well as it's an argument for evolution.

Irreducible Complexity

The concept of irreducible complexity was first introduced by Dr. Michael Behe, a PhD in biochemistry. Using the example of a mousetrap, Behe explains that if we remove any of the necessary components such as the spring or base, we don't end up with a less effective mousetrap, we end up with one which does not work at all. Behe has identified many biological components which he believes are similarly irreducible. Since natural selection favors only those adaptations which are beneficial, and since these machines are completely ineffective until they are complete, it's difficult to see how natural selection could have preserved these mutations before the completed structure was in place. For example, if a species were to develop a spring, the unguided and random processes of natural selection could not have preserved the spring in anticipation of it's usefulness in the mouse trap because in the absence of a designer, the completed machine could not be foreseen. Most adaptations such as a spring, absent the rest of the necessary components would have offered no survival advantage and thus would not be preserved.

One of Behe's most persuasive examples in nature is that of the bacteria's flagellum, a whip-like protrusion from the cell which acts as a tiny outboard motor. In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize that this is a very complex design requiring between 30 and 35 unique proteins to work. It's inconceivable to Behe that this machine could have evolved randomly when the entire mechanism would provide no survival advantage until it was complete.

Evolutionists have derided Behe's work and it has not been accepted in the academic mainstream, however Behe continues to stand by his work and theories, adding his voice to the rising chorus of those who feel that evolutionary theory is in crisis.

What Does It Mean To Be 'Born Again'?

Michael Lane — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:54:32 -0700

The phrase has it's origin in a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus which was recorded at the beginning of chapter three of the Gospel of John:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. (John 3:1-8)

Being born again occurs at the moment when we recognize that we are a sinner and cannot save ourselves and so we ask Jesus to become our savior. At that moment, we are "born again" of the Spirit. We are forgiven for all the sins we have ever committed or will ever commit because of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. Peter also uses this phrase:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. (1 Peter 1:22-23)

God is not content for us remain as we were. At the moment we accept Jesus, the Holy Spirit begins to dwell within us to make us a new person. Notice that before he speaks of begin born again, Peter talks about obeying the truth and loving deeply from the heart. The Holy Spirit dwelling in us begins to help us make those changes in our lives. With His help, we are able to love others more deeply and obey God's commandments more consistently.

For some, this is an immediate change and their lives are completely transformed. I have seen people who were alcoholics or addicted to drugs immediately overcome those addictions through the power of the Spirit. For others, the process is slow and gradual. Eventually, we give up more and more of our old, sinful ways as the Spirit molds us into a new creation in the image of Christ.

Saying that someone is "born again" is simply another way of saying that they have accepted Jesus as their savior and as a result, they have been born again of the Spirit. Sometimes people refer to this as being "saved", or simply, "accepting Christ."

If you have not accepted Christ and been born again, we strongly encourage you to learn more about Jesus Christ and what he has done for you. Below this article, you will find some lines other articles which can help get you started. Please take a moment and discover these important truths about Jesus - it will be the most important thing you can ever do.

If God Exists, Why Doesn't He Just Reveal Himself?

Michael Lane — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:53:37 -0700

"In the past, he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony" Acts 14:16-17a

Nature and Creation

There are a number of different ways to reply to this question depending on what someone really means. The first is to simply say that God did reveal himself in the majesty and beauty of His creation. Paul writes in Romans 1:20, "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." This is perhaps our first and most important clue about God's existence. We were created and so there must be a creator. It's only natural as a child yearns to know it's father that we too should be curious about our Father in heaven.

The Bible

You may object that this is not what you had in mind. You may really be asking, "Why doesn't God talk to us and tell us about Himself?" Well, he did that. The Bible represents everything which God has revealed to man. Within the Bible, we can discover God's qualities, His nature and His plan for mankind. Everything we need to know for having a deep and meaningful relationship with God is contained within it's pages.

Jesus Christ

Others will object that the Bible is so impersonal. They may ask, "Why doesn't He just appear to us so we could see Him?" He did that too, in the form of Jesus Christ. Though Jesus was a man, He was also fully God and possessed all of the characteristics of God. When someone asks a Christian what God is like, we can point definitively to Christ and say, "There. That is what God is like."

How much Evidence?

Finally, you may object that Christ's appearance was so long ago and besides, you weren't there to see it. Why doesn't God appear to me, personally?

It's very tempting to say, "If I saw God personally, I would believe." In Jesus' day, there were many people who saw His miracles first hand but still did not follow Him. If Jesus appeared today and performed miracles, many would assume He was a skilled illusionist or a con-man operating a scam.

The point is simply that people will either believe or they will not. If someone is closed to the idea, no amount of evidence will ever convince them. There are many today who feel, as the late Scottish philosopher David Hume did, that miracles are simply impossible. Therefore, any time you see one, there must be some other natural explanation.

If Jesus Christ came and stood before you right now and performed a miracle, would you believe? Perhaps you would, or perhaps it would not take long before you started to think that it was dream, a hallucination, or that someone played a trick on you.

For some, it's very comforting to know that we have a loving Father in Heaven, so it's natural for us to reach out to Him. For others, it's frightening to admit that there is a God because that comes with an expectation of how He wants them to behave - and they don't want to change!

As long as people close their hearts and minds to the idea of God, nothing will ever convince them and no amount of evidence will ever suffice. For those who want to believe in God, there is more than enough evidence out there and they will find Him.

Are The Gospels We Have Close To the Originals?

Michael Lane — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:03:18 -0700

The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no-one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. - F.F. Bruce

The reliability of the Gospels is only as good as the copies which have survived. It does us no good to read John and Matthew's eyewitness accounts of Jesus if their work has been edited and corrupted in the two thousand years since they were written. Since we do not have an original copy of any of the New Testament books, how can we be certain we are reading anything close to what was originally written?

We have more ancient copies of the New Testament than any other book of it's time period. There are approximately 5,000 ancient Greek manuscripts, some as early as the second century. There exist complete copies of the four gospels and book of Acts from the 3rd century and portions of Paul's letters and the Gospel of John from the 2nd century, less than 100 years after they were written. One portion of John's Gospel was recently found in Egypt and is believed to have been copied between 100 and 150 A.D., no more than 50 years after it was written. There are over 24,000 ancient manuscripts in various languages.

For comparison purposes, the only ancient text with even close to this many manuscripts is Homer's Iliad, of which there are less than 650 copies, with the earliest being more than 1,000 years after it was written in about 800 B.C.

Though no two manuscripts are identical, the amount of consistency is remarkable. By combing through the earliest manuscripts and those which have the most in common, scholars are able to come extremely close to the original texts. Modern Biblical scholars estimate that the New Testament we have today is 99.5 percent identical to the original documents. Of the very small number of passages which are uncertain or in dispute, none contain any doctrine or teaching which would undermine the key Christian tenets of Christ's resurrection and divinity. All of the manuscripts, including the earliest known, affirm these core Christian beliefs.

With such a compelling number of ancient manuscripts providing an accurate reconstruction of the New Testament, we can know with great certainty what the New Testament authors wrote and we can be sure that their words have been persevered for us during these two thousand years.

Were the Gospel Accounts Just Myths or Fables?

Michael Lane — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:01:02 -0700

If we look at the author's own descriptions of their work, it is clear that they did not intend their readers to see the account as fictional. All four Gospels have a straight-forward, narrative style which contains none of the flourish and fanciful writing of myths from that era. Both John and Luke expressly state in their Gospels that they are writing accounts of actual events. Luke's Gospel begins,

Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.

Similarly, John concludes his Gospel by writing,

This disciple is the one who testifies to these events and has recorded them here. And we know that his account of these things is accurate

Finally, in describing the stories and testimony that they have been preaching through the land, Peter writes,

We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the powerful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We saw his majestic splendor with our own eyes. (2 Peter 1:16)

There are also important clues in the Gospels which suggest that these are not fables. To begin with, the Gospels are not very flattering of the disciples. There are several passages which portray the disciples as dimwitted (Matthew 16:23) or petty and selfish (Mark 9:34). Consistently, the Gospel highlights the disciples' lack of faith, such as when Jesus calms the storm or before he feeds the 5,000. Peter comes off particularly bad in the Gospel accounts for his betrayal of Jesus the night of his arrest. There would be no reason to add these accounts to a myth or fable, and no author would intentionally add anecdotes which make them look bad.

More convincing are the accounts which expose Jesus' limitations, such as his inability to perform miracles in his hometown or the fact that he does not know the hour of his return. Tales such as these which limit the power of the hero are very unlikely items to include in a myth.

If the stories were mythical, it seems unlikely they would have included such difficult teachings. Some of what Jesus taught is very strict and demanding. Jesus did not teach us to "try hard" or "do our best"; He taught us to be perfect. He taught us to love our enemies, to forgive all offenses and to follow him at all costs. A fictional tale about a fictional character would likely have included less demanding precepts.

We need to acknowledge that there is no evidence of anyone coming forward in the first century to dispute the claims of the apostles. There are accounts of Jesus in ancient Jewish and Roman texts, and while they claim that Jesus' power came from sorcery, these sources acknowledge His life, death and even the miracles He performed. If Jesus were a fictional character, these accounts would dispute the apostle's tale, or more likely, would not exist at all.

Finally and most importantly, we have to acknowledge that the apostles continued to preach the Gospel for the rest of their lives even though it meant torture, imprisonment and death. The idea that these accounts were fictional is totally inconsistent with the way the apostles were willing to sacrifice their lives. No one would be willing to die for a story they made up. We are left with the inescapable conclusion that theses stories were not intended to be fictional. We might conclude that the disciples were mistaken for one reason or another or we can conclude that Jesus lived and was resurrected just as they said, however the facts clearly point to four men who intended to tell the truth.

Did Jesus Christ Really Rise from the Dead?

Michael Lane — Mon, 07 May 2007 09:57:25 -0700

No other religion in history revolves around a single event the way Christianity revolves around the resurrection. It is a provable, testable event and is subject to all the power of archaeological, scientific and historical investigation. It either happened or it didn't.

In a previous article, we've established the authorship of the Gospels and shown that these men were first or second hand eyewitnesses to everything the accounts record. We've also established that the Gospels we have today have survived remarkably well so that we can be certain we know what was originally written. Finally, we established that the Gospels writers were not writing fiction, myth or legend. They intended their stories to be believed.

With all of the preliminaries out of the way, we can move onto the final piece of the puzzle. Were the Gospel writers telling the truth - did Jesus Christ rise from the dead? This is the key question in all of Christianity, for everything rests upon the fact of Christ's resurrection. If it happened, then all of Christianity is true and has profound meaning for all of us. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Christianity has no meaning at all.

Certainly, Jesus' disciples understood the importance of the resurrection. During the two days after Jesus' death, his disciples were distraught, disillusioned and ready to go their separate ways. They knew from ancient Jewish prophecy that the Messiah would not be taken by death, so Jesus' fate on the cross left them questioning everything they had previously believed. It was not until Jesus appeared to them in the flesh that the apostles got organized, motivated and began to preach the good news of the Gospel. They would all continue to do so until their deaths.

Jesus' Death On The Cross

The fact of Jesus' crucifixion is well recorded not only in the Bible but in ancient Jewish and Roman texts. It is not in doubt by virtually any modern scholar. But did He die? One explanation for the resurrection is that Jesus simply never died - that he survived the crucifixion and spent three days recovering in the tomb. There are several problems with this theory. First, we know that Jesus was flogged before he was crucified and we know from studying Roman history that this brutal process would have left Jesus extremely weakened and dehydrated. The amount of blood lost from this horrible torture would have caused Jesus to go into shock. Some people did not survive long after a flogging and it's possible that without intervention, Jesus would have died as a result of these wounds alone. Anyone who has seen the Passion of the Christ can understand how brutal this torture was. Then, if Jesus survived the crucifixion and faked His death on the cross, we know that a Roman soldier pierced his side with a spear before he was taken down. Then, without any medical intervention, he was placed inside a tomb where he fully recovered. The implausibility of this idea starts to become clear once we realize that during His many appearances, he walked with His disciples despite having had spikes driven through His feet days earlier. The final and most important reason we must reject this theory is that if Jesus did survive, He would have been weak, gaunt, bed-ridden and near-death. In this condition, Jesus could not have inspired his followers the way He did. Clearly from the accounts, we see that Jesus is alive, healthy, vibrant and active. Only in this condition could He have inspired his apostles to believe that he truly was the Son of God. If we are to believe all the historical account that Jesus was crucified, then we must accept that He was killed on the cross. Roman executioners performed thousands of crucifixions and were exceedingly good at their job, for they knew that a mistake could cost them their own lives. They would not have allowed someone to come down from the cross alive.

The Empty Tomb

With Jesus' death established, we turn to the empty tomb three days later. It is not in dispute that on the Sunday following His death, the tomb where He was laid was empty. Following the discovery of the empty tomb by Jesus' disciples, the Jewish leaders did not argue that the body was still there, rather, they accused His disciples of stealing the body. There were Roman soldiers guarding the tomb and the Jewish leaders accused the guards of falling asleep, permitting Jesus' followers to sneak off with the evidence. Never once is it recorded that anyone disputed the claim that the tomb was empty. Such a simple fact would have been easy to verify, yet all of the disagreement surrounds who took the body, not whether or not it remained in the tomb. Jesus Christ's body was nowhere to be found.

Did the Disciples Take the Body?

It was the consensus of the Jewish authorities at the time that the disciples took the body and non-Christians have been arguing this ever since. This theory becomes unsupportable once we look at evidence of the disciple's lives in the years following Jesus' death. Each and every one of them spent the rest of their lives preaching about Jesus amidst terrible persecution. Eventually, they were imprisoned, tortured and killed for their beliefs. How could it be that they would perpetrate a hoax and then face terrible persecution for their lie? The apostles had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling this lie. If we want to believe that the disciples took the body, we have to believe that they all were willing to die for something they knew to be false.

You can point to other religious people who are willing to die for their beliefs, but the comparison does not stand up. For most of us, we accept what we believe by faith. We cannot know the truth for certain, yet our faith sustains us, even to the point of dying for what we believe. Conversely, early Christians watched Jesus die and then saw him in the flesh three days later. They knew it was true; it was not a matter of faith. If you want to believe the apostles lied, then to make a true comparison, you would need to find someone who knows their religion is false but is willing to sacrifice their lives anyway. The idea makes no sense. You can expect someone to die for something they believe is true, but you can't expect them to die for something they know is false.

Were the Gospel writers telling the truth? It's clear that the early Christians knew for a fact whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. They saw Him with their own eyes and they touched with their hands. Unlike any other religious claim in history, there is nothing about their belief which involved faith at any level. From their perspective, it's either a fact or it's a lie.

Based on what they saw, each and every one of them dedicated their lives and were willing to die to get the word out. Like no other story in history, the Gospel writers demonstrated by their sacrifice that what they saw and what they wrote was so important that they were willing to give everything, including their lives, so that the story would still be told two thousand years later.

Could The Gospel Accounts be Accurate?

Michael Lane — Mon, 07 May 2007 09:47:20 -0700

In this article, we will look at the Gospel accounts from an objective viewpoint and consider them in the same way as we would consider any ancient texts from that era. We won't attempt to show that the author's were telling the truth; our interest will be in establishing whether or not they could have been telling the truth. The issue of whether or not they were actually telling the truth is something we cannot learn from studying the Bible in isolation. For that, we have to look to outside evidence and that is something we have done in the article, "Were the Gospel Writers Telling the Truth?" Let's now turn our attention to the authors themselves.

Could They Have Been Telling the Truth?

Our first priority in establishing the truth of the Gospel will be to examine whether or not the authors were in a position to have seen and heard the events which the Gospels contain. Were they eyewitnesses, or did they have access to eyewitness accounts? Both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Matthew were written by disciples of Jesus, so they would have been eyewitnesses to almost everything the Gospels contain. Mark was an associate of Peter's and based his account on Peter's testimony. Mark may also have been present at some key events in Jesus' life. Finally, Luke was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul and would have had access to the testimony of all of the first century disciples. As such, each of the authors would have had either first-hand or second-hand knowledge of all the events about which they wrote.

But how do we know these men were the authors?

There is external evidence to corroborate the authorship of the Gospels. Many of the early church fathers such as Irenaeus, Origen, Tertuillian and Eusebius, writing as early as the end of the 2nd century, confirm the authorship of these Gospels. Furthermore, the relative obscurity of these men, with the exception of John, suggests they are the real authors. It seems reasonable that if the authorship was in doubt, we would find more respectable names attached to the Gospels such as Peter or James. This is exactly we find in some of the later, extra-Biblical gospel which were written centuries after the events including the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Peter, neither of which were authored by the apostles. Claiming lesser names such as "Mark" and "Luke" as authors suggests they are legitimate.

Weren't the Gospels written half a century after the events?

One of the most common arguments against Christianity is that Jesus was just a man with some powerful ideas, but that He never claimed to be the Son of God. They claim that the elements of His resurrection and divinity grew out of legend in the many years that passed between His death and when the first accounts of His life were written. As we look at the time line, it will become clear that Jesus' followers believed He was the Son of God from the very beginning, for the written accounts of Jesus have their origins less than ten years after his death - far too short a time for legend to have eclipsed the facts.

It's not likely that more than 30 years went by before the 3 synoptic Gospels were completed. Our evidence here is the Book of Acts which Luke wrote after his Gospel. Most of the book of Acts is an account of Paul's travels, yet it ends abruptly before Paul's death sometime between A.D. 62 and 64. Surely an event of such importance would have been recorded in the Book of Acts, so it seems reasonable to conclude that Luke finished writing before Paul's death. We know that Acts was completed after his Gospel, and we know that Luke based some of his Gospel on Mark. Therefore, Mark could not have been completed any later than A.D. 62, but it was most likely already circulating long before then. That is less than 30 years after Jesus' death, which compared with other biographies of important historical people is an extremely small amount of time.

But that is just the Gospels. Most of Paul's letters were written before the Gospels and he quotes some ever earlier material. In 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, Paul quotes some of the very early Christian Creeds from which we can see that the idea of Jesus' resurrection was already firmly established. Given the early date of 1 Corinthians less than 20 years after Jesus' death, the creeds likely date no more than a decade or two after Jesus' death, far too short a time for myth and legend to have given rise. Clearly, the idea of Jesus having risen from the grave was not a later invention. This important concept was believed by Christians from the very beginning.

Is thirty years too long a time to remember everything Jesus did and said?

It may seem so, but there are a few things we need to keep in mind. The first century Middle-East was primarily an oral culture where little was written down. At that time, men, especially Jewish students, would have been expected to have excellent memory and recall. Next, remember that the Gospels record a very small portion of Jesus life. Most of the Gospels focus on the week leading up to Jesus death. This was an extremely emotional and important time for the disciples, and we know from our own experience that our memories can be very vivid from those times in our lives which had the most emotional impact. Jesus often spoke in parables and even when he did not, his words were often in a kind of rhythmic meter, making it easier to memorize. Finally, we must remember that Jesus spoke to hundreds of people, so there would have been many eyewitness accounts to draw from.

When we examine the evidence for the Gospel accounts, it seems completely plausible that the writers could have been telling the truth. Each of the writers had first or second hand accounts of the events, and the accounts were written soon enough after the events to still be considered accurate. But were the authors telling the truth? Could they have been mistaken? Lying? Hallucinating? Please continue on the the article "Were the Gospel Writers Telling the Truth?" to look at the evidence for the truth of the Gospel accounts.

Evidence for Jesus Outside the Bible

Michael Lane — Thu, 03 May 2007 10:28:46 -0700

Before we look at the evidence for Jesus outside of the Bible, it's important to pause for a moment and examine how the books of the New Testament were chosen to be included. For the most part, the books selected for inclusion into the Bible were those which were already widely circulated and widely respected. There was very little debate at that time about most of the books, and there was almost none about the Gospels. The four Gospels had already been in use for hundreds of years by Christians everywhere. The process of selecting the New Testament was much less about selecting which books to include, as it was about formally recognizing which books were already widely accepted.

There were many other accounts of Jesus life which were never seriously considered for inclusion, for by that time, it had already been recognized by most Christians everywhere that these books lacked the authority and divine inspiration of scripture.

Other Gospel Accounts

This is important to note, for it is very frequently asked by non-Christians how it could be that only four books were written about the life of such an important man. In fact, we know of dozens of other books which have survived, and it's very likely that thousands of books were written about Jesus in the first three centuries. The reason that almost everything we know comes from only four books attests to the fact that the early Christians felt that these four books alone contained the most vital information. All the other books did not survive simply because they were not as important. In a very real sense, it was an example of "survival of the fittest". Those books which had merit survived; those that did not were lost.

So, to begin, the first place we can look outside the Bible for corroborating evidence of Jesus' life is to these extra-biblical gospels. There are dozens of these, mostly written between the second and fourth century. Despite having titles such as "The Gospel of Thomas", "The Gospel Of Judas" and the "Gospel Of Phillip", these gospels were not written by any of Jesus' disciples, rather, they are told from the perspective of that disciple, or are told by a descendant of that disciple.

From an historical, objective point of view, these books suffer from the same problem as the Bible itself, which is whey were written by followers of Christ. What most people are looking for is something objective, written by someone who was not a follower of Christ. For that we, look to some early Jewish and Roman writings.

Josephus

Josephus was a 1st century Jewish historian born in AD 37 who wrote a comprehensive history of the Jewish people near the end of 1st century. In this book, he recounts the stoning of James, calling him "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ." This passage is considered by most historians and scholars to be authentic and is not generally in dispute. This an important piece of evidence which tells us that someone name Jesus actually lived in the first century and that some considered Him to be the Christ.

Josephus wrote another passage which is more controversial. He wrote:

About this time came Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is appropriate to call him a man. For he was a performer of paradoxical feats, a teacher of people who accept the unusual with pleasure, and he won over many of the Jews and also many Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon the accusation of the first men amongst us, condemned him to be crucified, those who had formerly loved him did not cease to follow him, for he appeared to them on the third day, living again, as the divine prophets foretold, along with a myriad of other marvellous things concerning him. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day

There is still much debate over the authenticity of this passage. The current consensus is that Josephus did write something about Jesus here, but that later edits were made by a follower of Christ. The parts in bold italics are those parts which are commonly believed to be later edits, for there is evidence that Josephus was not a follower of Christ and would not have characterized Him in this way. The description of Jesus as a "wise man" and and "teacher" are more consistent with Josephus' style and vocabulary found elsewhere in his work, and are probably the actual descriptions he used.

Tacitus

The Roman Historian Tacitus wrote of Jesus (whom he refers to as "Christus") and the spread of Christianity throughout Rome in his work Annals, approximately AD 116. He wrote:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired

There is a great deal of important information in this passage. First, it confirms the life and death of Jesus in Judea but even more importantly, confirms that his death was by crucifixion. According to Christian scholar Edwin Yamauchi, this is an important piece of evidence because death by crucifixion was the "most ignominious death" and reserved for the lowest and most worthless criminals. By Tacitus' own admission, people continued to followed Jesus despite his ignominious death and were prepared to follow him even to the penalty of their own death. This account of the faithfulness of early Christians by an unsympathetic witness is powerful testimony of the life of Jesus.

Pliny The Younger

We also get an account of the spread of Christianity from a Roman provincial governor named Pliny the Younger in A.D. 112. Though he does not speak of Jesus directly, he does recount that Christians in his province cause trouble because they worship Christ and not the Emperor.

They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food—but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations.

Talmud

Perhaps most controversial of all historical references is a possible reference to Jesus in the Jewish Talmud. The passage speaks of someone who was "hanged" because he "practiced sorcery" and "enticed Israel to apostacy". If this passage refers to Jesus, then it is an interesting piece of evidence because it confirm Jesus' influence and that Jesus did perform miracles and healing, though the Talmud attributes His power to sorcery rather than coming from God.

Delve Into Jesus Articles

Are Men and Women Equal in Christianity?

Faith in the Workplace

Are Angels Real?

Sex and Gore - Is the Bible Unsuitable for Kids?

Why Did God Create Satan?

Should Christians Support the Death Penalty?

Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?

Is There Such a Thing as Ultimate Truth?

Is Jesus the Only Way to God?

Speaking your Audience's Language

Jesus Didn't Stay Dead. Is That A Sacrifice?

Do Commandments On Tattoos and Hair Still Apply?

Why Are There Many Different Christian Churches?

The Moral Law

Why Radical Muslims Hate You

Socio-cultural Roots of Hatred

Political Roots of Hatred

Religious Roots of Hatred

Psychological Roots of Hatred

7 Questions Skeptics Ask

"BUT WHAT ABOUT..."

There is So Much Brutality in the Old Testament!

The Old Testament is Jesus' Heritage

Not a Fair Comparison

The New Testament is not all Love and Mercy

The Old Testament is Not all Death and Doom

But what about all the killing?

But Did God have to Annihilate Them?

Life belongs to God

Is the Bible Infallible? Is it all Literal?

Where the Bible intends to be Accurate, It Is.

Doesn't the Bible Always Intend to Be Accurate?

How Do we know what's literal and what's a figure of speech?

What do you mean by, "..the degree to which it intends to be"?

How Can Christians Say Other Religions Are Wrong?

What About All the Other Religions?

Every Religion Claims Some Truth

Christianity Is Different

Christ's Resurrection Is Not Subjective

Christ's Resurrection is Central to His Credibility

Rediscovering the Historical Jesus

Burden of Proof

Specific Aspects of Jesus's Life

Conclusion

Does God Exist?

1. God makes sense of the origin of the universe.

2. God makes sense of the the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

3. God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.

4. God makes sense of the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

5. God can be immediately known and experienced.

Faith

Nothing is Certain

Faith Is: What Permits You to Jump From Evidence to Action

Faith is: Trusting in What Has Proven To Be Reliable

Faith is: "Believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."

Faith is Not: Believing In Something Despite All Evidence to the Contrary

Origins of Life

The Complexity of The Cell

What about the Miller Experiment?

Could it be random chance at work?

Life is More than the Sum of it's Parts.

Information and DNA

Information

What does this have to do with the cell?

Where Did the Information Come From?

Pascal's Wager

1) If God Does Not Exist and You Ignore Him, You Gain Nothing

2) If God Does Not Exist and You Worship Him, You Lose Nothing

3) If God Exists and You Ignore Him, You Risk Going To Hell

4) If God Exists and You Worship Him, You Might Go To Heaven

5) Therefore, The Only Reasonable Bet is to Worship Him.

Dealing With Difficult Trials - Part 7

Introduction

Eternal Payoffs

Lean On Someone Who Cares

Friends and family for emotional support

Wise counsel for difficult solutions

Realize That Nothing Can Foul Up God's Plan For the Faithful Christian.

Remember Those Who Have Suffered More Than You