The Seven Deadly Spins--Scientism

 “That’s just your opinion!” This phrase has become the rhetorical trump card in our society today. If someone makes a claim you don’t like, rather than go to all the trouble of proving that their claim is false, you can instead label their claim as an opinion and thereby escape from any pressure to believe it. After all, opinions really are just beliefs that flow out of personal perspective or preference. I’m not obligated to hold your opinions and you’re not obligated to hold mine. If someone claims to know something, however, that’s a different ballgame. Knowledge is based on facts that anyone can sort through for themselves, so if you can show me that the facts of a matter are such and such, then I can’t dismiss your claim as mere opinion. I either have to agree with your claim or show that you’ve misunderstood the facts (I can also withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to think it through, but I can’t reasonably say you’re wrong without showing why).

 Why do I mention all of this? To highlight that it makes a big difference where you draw the line between matters that can be known and matters that can only be opinion. In our society today, there’s a tendency to believe that the only matters that can be known are the matters studied by the physical sciences—geology, biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc. This mindset essentially argues that if you can’t weigh it, dissect it, dissolve it, etc., then you can’t really know anything about it—you can only form opinions about it. This view has been called “scientism” because it claims the realm of knowledge entirely for the physical sciences and relegates everything else to the realm of opinion.

 Notice how scientism relegates a huge swath of human experience and inquiry to being nothing more than opinion. Claims about history? They can only be opinions according to scientism (unless perhaps some detail of the claim can be weighed or measured). Thoughts about what is morally good for humans? Mere opinions. Religious or political views? Nothing more than personal preferences (again, unless some detail of them can be quantified in some way). Thus, scientism leaves us knowing—well, not much of anything about life in general.

 Why should we reject scientism? The first and best reason is that it is self-defeating; it doesn’t pass the very test that it offers for truth. Consider its core claim: only the physical sciences can give us knowledge. That very claim is not the product of any science; it is a philosophical claim. To put it another way, no one has ever dissected a frog and found that claim lying in the pan when he was done! No one has ever mixed solutions in a test tube only to have that claim come spilling out as the product of a chemical reaction. The claim cannot be proven true by science, yet science is the only proving ground allowed by scientism. Thus, the claim that only science can give us knowledge cannot possibly be true.

 A second reason is that it leaves us ignorant of vitally important aspects of life. Consider the nature of love. We all have a good idea of what it looks like to treat someone with love rather than hatred. In other words, we all know something of the essence of love. But if scientism is true, we couldn’t truly know anything about the essence of love since love is not a thing that can be weighed on a scale, examined under a microscope, etc. If the cost of embracing scientism is giving up our knowledge of love, then the price is far too steep to pay.

 The physical sciences have provided an incredible boon to our knowledge of the world in general. We enjoy benefits every day from discoveries that have been made in these fields. Yet to say that they and they alone can give us knowledge of the world is not an advancement—it is a regression, one that, if embraced, leaves us quite ignorant of the world, of ourselves, and of our Creator and Savior.

The Seven Deadly Spins--Skepticism about Morality

 It’s often said in our culture today, “You shouldn’t push your morality on others.” If this statement was simply used to argue that we should use persuasion rather than threats of force when we discuss morality, no one should object to that. But more often, there’s an unspoken claim that lies behind this statement; a claim that sounds something like this: “You shouldn’t push your morality on others—because what’s right and what’s wrong is just a matter of personal opinion.” Increasingly, our culture asserts that morality is a realm in which there are no objective standards that apply to everyone. We are told that each person must decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong and to tell another person that he’s done wrong would just be, well, wrong! It seems that the only sin in our society today is to tell another person that he’s sinned.

 It's not hard to see that this claim is self-contradictory. If you believe morality is relative to each person’s opinions and you say, “You shouldn’t push your morality on others,” you are really saying, “It’s wrong to tell someone else that he’s wrong!” Yet that’s exactly what you are doing by making this claim. Since this claim contradicts itself, it should be no surprise that we quickly abandon it when someone does us wrong. If you were (God forbid!) mugged in a parking lot somewhere, you wouldn’t think to yourself, “How unlucky that I ran into someone who has a different opinion about mugging!” No—you would think that this person has done wrong and that your assessment is not simply a personal opinion. You would think that this person had violated a true standard that applies to both of you and that he should have known about this standard and followed it. What’s more, you would be convinced that this man had done you wrong even if mugging was legal—so your conviction isn’t based on whatever the law happens to say but on something else, something more fundamental in reality than even the laws of a society.

 You would be right, of course, yet the idea that morality is relative still persists in our culture like a stubborn stain that won’t come out in the wash. On a spiritual level, it’s not hard to see why this persistence exists: we are sinners and we don’t want anyone telling us we’re wrong—not even God! On an intellectual level, I think there are two main reasons why moral relativism persists. First, we seem to assume that if there are objective standards for morality, then moral decisions ought to be easy. It might seem that our moral choices should be crystal clear if certain actions are always right and other actions are always wrong—yet our moral choices are not always easy to figure out, so we may question whether objective moral standards exist. But we need to understand that there’s a difference between recognizing moral standards and applying them. It’s one thing to acknowledge that the standard “do not murder” applies to all people at all times; it’s another thing to sort out whether a certain instance of killing is murder or if it is something else—like justifiable self-defense. But we must recognize that a difficulty in applying a standard doesn’t prove that the standard is non-existent.

 A second reason why moral relativism persists is the connection between morality and politics. Many moral issues have become hot-button political topics today. As free citizens of a republic, we correctly object to the idea that the government would have the power to tell us what is right and wrong. Yet it’s easy to take this line of thinking too far and say that if the government doesn’t have the power to tell me what is right and wrong, no one else should either—it should be entirely up to me. Here we must simply recognize the vast difference between human authority and divine authority. A human government cannot define what is right and wrong because it is also supposed to be subject to the true standards of right and wrong. But divine authority is different. God has the authority to tell us what is right and wrong because He is our Creator. He knows how and why He made us, so He can tell us what is good for human nature and what is evil for it, and He can declare what would move us toward our true purpose and what would move us away from it. This connection is why many people have seen the moral order to offer a powerful argument for God’s existence—for if objective moral standards exist for humans, God is the only one who could be their source. So ultimately, if you want to deny that objective moral standards exist, you must deny that God exists. I hope you’ll agree with me that that price is far too steep to pay.

The Seven Deadly Spins--Nominalism

Trying to understand our culture today is a lot like showing up late to a movie—important things happened before you arrived, but since you’re not aware of them, you’re struggling to understand what’s unfolding before you right now. So it is in our present time. Many people are looking at the ideas being embraced in our culture and are asking, “How can my neighbor (or friend or family member) believe THAT!?”

Spiritually, we know that the root of all problems and false ideas in our society is sin. The human race is in rebellion against God; we don’t want to accept things the way He created them. Sin is the problem causing trouble in all societies and yet, societies manifest this struggle with sin in different ways. Differences in the intellectual soil of societies produce different false ideas and thus different problems.

In my next few articles, I’d like to dig down into the intellectual soil of our society to uncover the factors producing false ideas around us today. I hope this project won’t seem out of place—my colleagues who also write in this column do a good job of taking us to the Scriptures, so I’m confident that contribution will continue. Perhaps my short project will simply provide some helpful context for understanding our society today and how to navigate through it in a faithfully Christian manner. I’m calling my little project “The Seven Deadly Spins” in order to refer to spins—or distortions—of what is true.

The idea I’ll mention today is called nominalism. It is the claim that an idea like “human nature” or “humanity” does not come into our minds from the world around us; rather, that idea is just a title or category that we assign to a group of similar but ultimately separate things. For example, when you go downtown to the café, you don’t shake hands with “human nature”—you shake hands with Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue. Yet from ancient times, philosophers argued that there was something real that connected Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue—something they all shared in common that we could call human nature. These philosophers argued further that this shared thing was not just an invention of our minds, it was something our minds discovered about the real world, and this shared thing was just as real as anything we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. Beginning in the Middle Ages however, it started to become more fashionable among philosophers to deny that something like “human nature” existed as anything more than just an idea that our minds created to categorize things around us.

That far-too-brief description is surely still a bit confusing to you, but the significance of nominalism is this—if an idea like human nature is just the product of human minds, then human minds control it. We would get to decide what the boundaries of human nature are and who fits inside those boundaries. Perhaps you can see where this could lead. Combined with another idea or two, nominalism becomes the root of racism—the claim that we can declare other people to be “sub-human” simply because of where we choose to draw the boundaries of humanity. In a similar way, nominalism becomes the root of denying personhood to a baby in the womb—because again, if nominalism is true, human minds become the arbiter of who does and who does not count as a person.

In contrast to nominalism, Christians ought to affirm that a thing like human nature is a real, true, objective feature of the universe. It’s not something we made up and thus it’s not something we control. My shared humanity with another person is a fact imposed upon both of us—I don’t get to decide if humanity applies to him any more than I get to decide if the laws of physics apply to him! And what could make reality be this way? Only our Creator God who conceived of humanity in His mind in the first place.

It's True--Jesus Rose from the Grave

 As you read this column today, we find ourselves in the middle of Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most of you reading this article have grown up in Christianity, so the claim that Jesus came back to life on the third day after he died is second-nature to you; it is old hat; it is so common that it has likely become mundane and ordinary—which is sad, ironic, and spiritually dangerous all at the same time.

 It is hard for us to understand that for many people in this world, the claim that Jesus rose from the grave is utterly ridiculous and silly. To them, the claim is as outrageous and unbelievable as a claim that Elvis Presley stepped out of a UFO in my backyard last night to give me a private concert—with Bigfoot on the bass guitar! To most of these people, the claim that Jesus was resurrected is simply a useful fiction rather than the truth. What’s the difference between a useful fiction and the truth? Consider Santa Claus—telling your children that Santa will reward them for being good might cause them to refrain from hitting their siblings once or twice a year. In that sense, the story could be useful, but of course, it’s not true—and when we all inevitably learn that it’s not true, the story ceases to have any motivating power in our lives.

 It is vital that we understand that our claim that Jesus rose from the grave is not simply a useful fiction. It is the truth, plain and simple. To say that Jesus rose from the grave is simply to state what actually happened one brisk Sunday morning in Jerusalem in the early 30s AD. Why should we think this is so? Because believing this claim is not only agreeable to faith in the God who created us and who spoke to us through the Bible—it is also agreeable to reason because it is the best explanation of the facts of the matter. Consider just four facts, facts that are affirmed by even the most vocal critics of Christianity:

 1. Jesus died by crucifixion at Jerusalem during the governorship of Pontius Pilate

2. Jesus’ disciples sincerely believed that Jesus came back to life and visited them

3. James, the biological half-brother of Jesus, suddenly converted to faith in Jesus after Jesus had died

4. Saul of Tarsus suddenly converted to faith in Jesus after Jesus had died

 What is the best explanation of just these four facts—the explanation that can account for all of them in the most convincing way? The most common explanation from critics has been that the disciples made up the whole story of the resurrection to gain a following for themselves—and perhaps fame and fortune with it. But this explanation struggles to explain why James converted to faith. Why would he have wanted to go along with such a scheme? Why would the disciples have invited him into their scheme and taken the risk that he would expose them? Furthermore, this explanation utterly fails in explaining why Saul of Tarsus was converted. He was doing quite well in his life as a Pharisee by persecuting Christians. Why would he have become one if the Christian faith was just a story made up by the disciples? He had nothing to gain by converting and everything to lose. Moreover, we must remember that the disciples all went to their graves proclaiming that the Resurrection was true—and nearly all of them were ushered to their graves by violent hands that made martyrs out of them. It’s outlandish to think that not one of them would have come clean about a hoax in the face of such a fate.

 Other explanations have been suggested which we cannot consider here for lack of space, but the most reasonable explanation is simply that Jesus died and then came back to life. It explains the facts of the matter perfectly. And when we remember that these facts came to be in a world created by the God who had already revealed himself through all of His dealings with the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament, it is no surprise at all that God raised Jesus from the dead. It is simply the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

A Review of "A Reasonable Response" by William Lane Craig

“A Reasonable Response” is a very intriguing, insightful, and instructional book on apologetics. Those who are already familiar with Dr. Craig’s work—and especially his website reasonablefaith.org—may have already encountered some of these topics and Dr. Craig’s responses to them, but this book is not meant to simply give you Dr. Craig’s answers to the questions presented—it is also designed to teach you how he answers questions, which is perhaps the most useful aspect of the book. In some of Dr. Craig’s responses, a highlighted box can be found that pulls back the curtain on Dr. Craig’s strategy for answering that particular question. That feature alone makes this a valuable book, even if one is already familiar with the answers that Dr. Craig offers.

The book is in a similar format to Lee Strobel’s “Case for…” series in that it is organized around specific questions and answers. The content of “Response” tends to be on a higher philosophical plane than the “Case for…” books, and thus it will likely appeal to a slightly different audience. Anyone who is brand new to the study of apologetics may find this book to be tough sledding in some places, particularly since the questioners may refer to arguments made by others without any further explanation of those arguments. Those who are more familiar with the subject, however, will find this book to be a very welcome and valuable addition to their library.

Though the subject matter is challenging, the book itself is very user-friendly. A long introductory section discusses such matters as the usefulness of questions in spiritual growth and practical matters regarding how to derive the most benefit from the book. Each major division in the book contains its own brief introduction that functions like an abstract in a scholarly paper—it allows you to get the gist of what you’re about to read before you read it.

The book covers a wide range of philosophical and theological topics, all of which Dr. Craig is well-equipped to address. But lest one think that the discussions are all theoretical with little practical application, the book also includes questions on such imminently practical concerns as protecting oneself from spiritual failure, facing rejection as a follower of Christ, preparing for marriage, and maintaining physical stamina (Dr. Craig writes from personal experience as one who suffers from a chronic disease which affects his muscles).  Those who are interested in questions about God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility will be particularly interested in the questions addressing Molinism and its concept of middle knowledge.

All in all, this book is a valuable resource for those who are actively engaged in Christian apologetics or those who are seeking philosophically rigorous answers to intellectual doubts about Christianity. Whether one agrees with Dr. Craig’s answers or not, he will leave an impression with you like that of C. S. Lewis—“he makes you sure, whatever you believe, that religion accepted or rejected means something extremely serious, demanding the entire energy of mind (Harper’s, quoted on the cover of “The Problem of Pain,” HarperCollins edition 2001.)

This book was provided by the publisher as a review copy.

Probable "Cause?" Why the Difference in Translations of Matthew 5:22? Part 2--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Last week, we began to discuss the history of how the Bible has come from the pens of the original authors down through the years to us today. We talked about the important doctrine called inerrancy, which is the belief that the original documents of Scripture contained no errors and no lies. Now, to our knowledge, the original pieces of paper on which the Bible was written no longer exist, because they’ve simply worn out over time. Don’t let that thought trouble you, however, because basically no pieces of paper from that long ago still exist—they’ve worn out and disintegrated.

            I’ll bet some of you have a book that was owned by your grandparents, and I’ll bet that book has at least started to wear out. Now consider this—your grandparents’ book has probably been in your house, which means its likely been out of direct sunlight that could have caused it to fade. Also, for several decades at least, its been in an air-conditioned room, which means it was in relatively low humidity. And yet, its still at least started to wear out. Well, now imagine pieces of paper from 2,000-4,000 years ago that didn’t have those advantages. As we would expect, they would just wear out.

            So, to the best of our knowledge, the original documents of Scripture no longer exist, but what we do possess are copies of the Bible—in fact, we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of copies of the Bible from over the centuries, some of which were written relatively soon after the original documents were written.

            Now as I also mentioned last week, those copies of the Bible don’t always agree about how a certain verse should be worded—which leaves us with questions like our question about Matthew 5:22 that led to this whole discussion. Today, we’re going to talk more about those differences. We’ll discover that those differences affect a relatively small number of verses and none of them undermine any central point of the Christian faith. In other words, we don’t find some copies that say, “Jesus rose from the dead” and other copies that say, “Ha ha—just kidding, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.” But there are differences that exist between these copies, and critics of Christianity love to point that out, but we’ll see today that we really have no reason to be concerned about the text of the Bible that we hold in our hands in our copies today.

            Our discussion today is going to focus on the copies of the New Testament. The Old Testament has its own history since it has been preserved by two religions—Judaism and Christianity. Also, critics of Christianity really don’t pick on the Old Testament that much. If you hear someone on The History Channel talking about errors in the copies of the Bible, they will almost certainly be talking about the New Testament, so that’s what we will focus on today.

            Let’s return now to the outline that I introduced last week. Point #1 was this—the original documents of Scripture were written without any errors. We’ll move now to…

2. As people began to copy the original documents, they sometimes made innocent mistakes or inserted words to help clarify a statement.

            What kind of mistakes are we talking about? Let’s discuss a few…

a. Mistakes in spelling

            In many cases, this was probably the result of a copyist confusing letters that look very similar. Think about how easy it would be in English to confuse two “v”’s that are side-by-side with a “w.”

b. Eyes jumping down the page of the original copy

            We commit that mistake ourselves at times, and it would have been easier for some copyists to make that mistake since the earliest copies of Scripture were written INALLCAPITALLETTERSWITH NOSPACESBETWEENTHEWORDS.

c. Confusing different letters or words that sound similar

            We know from historical records that people would sometimes read the text of Scripture and have several people copy it at once. That’s a little more efficient in a situation when everything has to be copied by hand, but that introduces the possibility of some other mistakes. Imagine if we were copying an English document that way and we came to the word “there” or the word “to.” Think about how often people misspell those words!

d. Faulty memory

            By this I mean a copyist forgetting something during the time it takes to look at the original copy and then write out what was on that page. This would seem to account for some of the differences in minor details that we see between some copies.

Now my outline also noted deliberate insertions that were sometime made in the text, so what kind of insertions are we talking about?

a. Changes in spelling and grammar

            Think about the way that English is spoken differently even within our own country. In some places, people say “pop,” but in other places they say “soda.” In some places, its fine to say “ain’t” even though English teachers don’t like it. Well, the same situation was true with the Greek in the New Testament, and in some copies we see copyists cleaning up spelling or grammar that apparently seemed wrong to them.

b. Changes to harmonize stories found in more than one book

            In the gospels in particular, we find stories that are recorded in more than one book, but frequently the authors emphasized and included different details. But sometimes, we find copyists who were apparently trying to make Luke and Matthew’s account of a story read exactly the same, so they added a detail from Matthew’s account into Luke’s account or vice versa.

c. The addition of words frequently found together

            The most common example of this kind of addition is with the words “Lord Jesus Christ.” You’re probably familiar with some verses that refer to the Son of God simply as Jesus or as Christ or as the Christ. Well, some copyists had a habit of writing out Lord Jesus Christ in all of those verses, even if their original copy didn’t necessarily have all of those words.

d. Changes made for doctrinal sensitivity

            We see a clear example of this in the birth narratives of Christ, where some copyists made slight changes to avoid calling Joseph the father of Jesus. Apparently, their concern was to remind us that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus and that Jesus, or course, was born of a virgin.

e. Addition of miscellaneous details

            This habit has produced some humorous results in various copies of Scripture. For example, in Revelation 4:8, when the living creatures in Heaven sing, “holy, holy, holy,” a few manuscripts have the creatures singing “holy” four times, six times, eight times, or all the way up to 13 times!

            The title of the Book of Revelation has also been expanded in some copies over time. The earliest copies simply call it “The Revelation of John.” Later, after John was declared a saint by the Catholic Church, some copyists changed it to “The Revelation of St. John. Eventually, there was one over-achieving copyist who called it “The Revelation of the all-glorious Evangelist, bosom friend of Jesus, beloved to Christ, John the theologian, son of Salome and Zebedee, but adopted son of Mary the Mother of God, and Son of Thunder!”

            Now, it is very important to realize that we don’t even find notable mistakes and insertions in very many verses of Scripture. Let me explain—in the Greek New Testament that has been compiled by comparing all of the ancient copies with each other, there are 138,020 words. In that whole document, there are only 10,000 places where notable differences exist between the ancient copies. That ratio equates to roughly 1% of the text. In other words, for 99% of the text of the New Testament, there are no notable differences between the ancient copies. That’s an incredible fact when you consider that we have over 5,000 ancient manuscripts of the Bible!

Even for that 1% of the text, point #3 of our outline is true…

3. By comparing the numerous ancient copies of Scripture that we possess, we can spot those mistakes and insertions and correct them.

            When there is a notable difference between the ancient copies of the New Testament, we are normally left with a situation like what I’ve portrayed in your bulletin handout for today. Normally, we will find many manuscripts that have exactly the same reading. Then, we will find some that have some of the various mistakes or insertions that we just discussed.

            Now notice one thing about my little illustration here—do you still get the same basic message from all of these statements? Of course you do! So for this very small percentage of the text where we find a notable difference between the copies, our doubt really isn’t about the message of the verse, just the exact, original wording of the verse. Also, its not that we’ve lost the original words of Scripture—one of the variations surely must capture the original wording, we’re just less than 100% sure about which variation that is.

            So remember, we’re only talking about 1% of the text—about 10,000 places. And in the vast majority of those places, we have a high degree of certainty about which of the variations captures the original wording. Evangelical scholar Norman Geisler concludes that there are only 40 places out of those 10,000 where we truly have significant doubt about which variation captures the original wording. We know one of them must, we’re just really not sure which one. And again, we’re only talking about 40 places out of the entire New Testament. As Dr. Geisler likes to say, we have 100% of the text, and we are sure about 99.5% of it.¹

So for that small number of places, point #4 of our outline is true…

4. In some verses, the exact wording of the original documents remains uncertain. This uncertainty is one factor that lies behind the differences we find between translations.

            These differences show up primarily between the King James and New King James Version on the one hand and new translations such as the English Standard Version on the other. When the King James Version was written in 1611, the translators obviously could only work with the Greek manuscripts that had been discovered at that time. In the 400 years since then, archaeologists have discovered many more manuscripts, and newer translations have been able to take those into account when they make decisions about that small number of places where we find significant differences.

            This is not to say that the King James and New King James Versions are poor translations—not at all! Remember, we’re talking about a very small number of places, and its possible in some of those places that the King James has it right and the newer translations have it wrong!

            So how should we sum up all of this information? First, we must acknowledge that there are differences between the ancient copies of the New Testament. That’s true, and we need to acknowledge that its true. We need to get out ahead of skeptics who only mention this tiny part of the whole picture. Some people have their faith shaken when they learn about these differences because they learn about them from a skeptic who only mentions part of the story. Worse yet, some people conclude that their church has been deliberately hiding this information from them. All of this confusion is totally unnecessary because Christians have nothing to hide about the Bible, especially after we hear the whole story.

            So yes, there are differences between the ancient copies of Scripture, but the vast majority of them are insignificant. They consist of spelling mistakes and other mistakes that are easily spotted and corrected when we compare the ancient copies with one another. And among the 40 or so places where we do have a fair degree of uncertainty about the wording of the original text, we know we possess the original wording in one of the copies, and none of those instances undermine a core doctrine of the Christian faith. We don’t find copies making different claims about the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, or salvation by grace through faith.

            Let me address one final question that arises from this whole discussion—why did God allow people to make mistakes as they copied the Bible? Why didn’t He just see to it that the copyists did their work perfectly? I think the answer is this—the fact that we do not find 100% uniformity between all the copies actually disproves a claim that many people have made about the Bible, namely, that there was a deliberate conspiracy in the past to change the teaching of the Bible. The fact that we find mistakes actually disproves that claim. Let me explain what I mean.

            Think about the difference between the produce that you grow in your garden and the produce that you see in the grocery store. When you harvest produce from your garden—say, tomatoes, for example—they don’t all look exactly the same, do they? They will be slightly different sizes and slightly different colors and some of them will have some flaws.

            But when you see tomatoes in the grocery store, what do you find? They all look exactly the same—they’re the same color, the same size, and the same shape. That uniformity tells us that there was a lot of human manipulation in the process of bringing those tomatoes to the grocery store. Someone threw out all the imperfect tomatoes and shipped out only the ones they wanted to have on display.

            Now, the fact that we don’t see complete uniformity in the copies of Scripture tells us that there has been no human manipulation over the copying process. If there was ever a conspiracy to change the message of Scripture, we would find uniformity in the copies because the conspirators would have destroyed all of the copies that they deemed imperfect. The history of the Bible as it stands shows us that there has never been centralized, human control over its copying and preservation.

            But consider this, even without that kind of centralized, human control over the copying process, we have received a Bible today that has no notable differences in over 99% of the text. I think we can conclude that God was overseeing the process, and He did so in a way that disproves the claims of those who want to attack the Bible.

            In the end, we can echo the words of the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 1:20—“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Indeed He has!

Notes

1. Norman Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, p. 160.

Probable "Cause?" Why the Difference in Translations of Matthew 5:22?--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Today, before we tackle the next section of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole, we’re going to take an in-depth look at a question that arises from Matthew 5:21-22. Please follow along with me as I read those verses [READ Matthew 5:21-22]. Now, I just read those verses from the English Standard Version of the Bible, a fairly new English translation that came out in 2001. If you were following along in the King James Version or the New King James Version, you might be scratching your head, because both of those translations say, “whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” Or, if you’re following along in the ESV or the NIV or the New American Standard, there may have been a little note in your Bible in the margin or at the bottom of the page that says something like, “some manuscripts insert without cause.”

            That is an interesting and important difference. Why do some translations read, “whoever is angry with his brother without cause” and other translations simply read, “whoever is angry with his brother?” That little difference has an impact on how we understand this passage, because one reading seems to allow for no exceptions whereas the other reading acknowledges that there could be situations in which anger is okay.

            So why do we find these differences between translations of the Bible? To answer that question, we need to talk about the history of how the Bible has come from the pens of Moses and Paul and others all the way down through the years to us in 2013. This discussion should boost your confidence in the Bible, especially in light of misinformation about this subject that is common in our world today.

            In our next two sermons, we’re going to work our way through the following outline, which will take us through the basics of the history of how the Bible came from God all the way down through the years to us:

1. The original documents of Scripture were written without any errors.

2. As people began to copy the original documents, they sometimes made innocent mistakes or inserted words to help clarify a statement.

3. By comparing the numerous ancient copies of Scripture that we possess, we can spot those mistakes and insertions and correct them.

4. In some verses, the exact wording of the original documents remains uncertain. This uncertainty is one factor that lies behind the differences we find between translations.

            I suspect that this information is very new for some of you, and for that reason, it could be easy for you to walk away from the next two sermons thinking, “Pastor Tim said there are errors in the Bible!” That is not at all what I’m saying, and its so important for you to realize that, that I’m going to spend the rest of our time today showing you that that’s not what I’m saying.

            We’re going to spend our time today looking at just the first point of the outline that I just gave you—the original documents of Scripture were written without any errors. In other words, the documents that were written by the hands of Moses and David and Peter and Paul and others contained nothing but the truth—no errors, no mistakes, no lies. The big, fancy term for this belief about the Bible is “inerrancy,” and I’m going to make a case for you this morning to show you why we have good reason to believe that the Bible tells us nothing but the truth.

So, we’re going to look at a few observations about the Bible and then draw the most reasonable conclusion from those observations.

1. The Bible is a communication from God given to us through men (2 Timothy 3:16)

            Its certainly true that human beings actually put pen to paper to write out the words of the Bible, but these men claimed that they were writing out a message from God, and we have good reasons to believe that claim. 2 Timothy 3:16 is a good place to find that claim. In the first phrase of that verse, Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” He is simply saying that God is the ultimate source of Scripture (which is just another term for the Bible).

            We have very good reasons to believe that claim—let me give you just one of them this morning. The Bible has shown the ability to accurately predict the specific actions of specific people hundreds of years before they happened. Now, we all know that humans don’t have that ability. We don’t always get it right when we predict how people are going to act next week, let alone hundreds of years down the road. But the Bible has shown that ability, which is a very good reason to conclude that God must have been the ultimate source of Scripture.

2. God directed those men as they wrote, and His direction extended to the tiniest details of their writings (Matthew 5:17-18)

            That last phrase is important, because if God’s guidance of those authors didn’t extend all the way down to the details, then we’re open to the possibility of human mistakes. But Jesus demonstrated an immense confidence in the tiniest details of Scripture, which tells us that God’s guidance must have extended down to the details.

            Consider a verse we read just last week—Matthew 5:18. In that verse, Jesus said, “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” We learned last week that the “iota” and the “dot” referred to the tiniest details of Scripture, and we can see what kind of confidence Jesus had in those details.

3. God knows all things; thus, He cannot make innocent mistakes in what He says.

            We’ve all had the experience of saying something that we thought was true, only to learn a little bit more and find out that we were wrong. I remember when I was in second or third grade and I was learning how to do division with remainders. You might remember that—you would figure out how many times a smaller number would go into a larger number, and anything left over was just called a remainder. Well, I had already seen some older kids doing math with decimal points, and I thought, “Ah! I see where we’re going here. I bet those decimal points are the same thing as a remainder.” Now, I wanted to show my teacher that I was way ahead of the game, so I did a whole assignment where I wrote out those remainders as decimal points instead of using that little “r” symbol. When I got that assignment back, my teacher had let me know with lots of red ink that a remainder is not the same thing as a decimal point.

            I had made a mistake because I thought something was true when in fact it was false. But think about this—since God knows all things, He’s not vulnerable to mistakes like that. He can’t be mistaken about something because He knows all things. So, when He says something, it must be free from any mistakes.

4. God cannot lie; thus, He cannot say something is true though He knows it to be false.

            Hebrews 6:18 makes this observation about God very clearly when it simply states, “…it is impossible for God to lie.” We can also approach this observation in a more philosophical way. Since God is the one who gave human beings our sense of morality, and since we understand intuitively that lying is wrong, then God must view lying as wrong, and thus He would not do it.

            Now think again about these observations: (1) The Bible is a communication from God given to us through men; (2) God directed those men as they wrote, all the way down to the tiniest details; (3) God knows all things, so He can’t be mistaken; and (4) God cannot lie. What we have to conclude about the Bible, then, is that it must be free from any errors or lies. In other words, everything in the Bible must be true.

            We can verify this conclusion by the fact that no one has ever proven a statement in the Bible to be wrong. Now this is the point, of course, when many people in our culture would throw up their hands and say, “Wait a minute! What about such and such a passage?” Certainly, people have suggested passages that they think are wrong, but no one has ever proven their case.

            Do keep one point in mind here—when we say that the Bible has no errors, we’re only talking about the original documents. People did commit errors as they copied those original documents, and that’s what we’ll talk about next week, but that’s not what we’re focusing on today—we’re focusing on those original documents. Particularly when someone makes a statement like, “the Bible has thousands of errors in it,” whether they realize it or not they’re referring to those copies of the Bible, not the original documents of Scripture.

            Let me give you a suggestion to keep in the back of your mind—the next time someone says to you, “the Bible has errors in it,” just ask them, “Are you thinking of any passage in particular?” The average Joe who says the Bible has errors in it is just repeating something he heard on The History Channel or on Facebook. He almost certainly hasn’t checked it out for himself, so just gently press him with that question, and don’t let him intimidate you with some statement like, “Everyone knows the Bible has errors in it!” Just keep bringing up that question—“are you thinking of any passage in particular?” If he does mention a particular passage, either help him understand that passage, or if you don’t understand it yourself, just say, “You know, that’s an interesting question about that passage. If you’re interested, I could do some homework on it and we could talk about it later.”

            Most of the time, however, that person will probably look like a deer in the headlights when you ask them if they’re thinking about any passage in particular. If they can’t name one, then you could say, “Why don’t you start reading through the Bible, and I’ll check in with you every so often, and if you find something you think is wrong, we can take a look at it together.” What a great opportunity if the person agrees to do that!

            Now, in the last hundred years or so, it has become sadly common for Christian people to modify the idea that the Bible has no errors or lies. We’ve been so intimated by ideas like the theory of evolution that some people have become willing to say, “Well, the Bible always gets it right when it talks about God and salvation, but it makes some errors when it talks about history or scientific stuff.”

            Sadly, quite a few denominations have been willing to make that compromise, but we run into a big problem when we take that step. There really is no way to separate what the Bible says about God and what it says about history (or “scientific stuff”) because the Bible is making claims about what God has done through history, as Lord of history. If the Bible states something about God by pointing to an event in history, but it turns out that that event never actually happened, then the statement about God just falls flat. We’re left with nothing more than fairy tales that have no basis in truth.

            The best example of this is the resurrection of Christ. I want to show you what Paul had to say about this matter in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 [READ 1 Cor. 15:12-19]. Notice that Paul did not say, “Well, if the resurrection didn’t actually happen, that’s no big deal because its still a good story about God that teaches us such and such.” No, he said that if the resurrection was not a real historical event, then he was telling lies about God and we’re all doomed! Those are the stakes, my friends—if the events recorded in the Bible did not actually take place, we’re not left with good, informative stories about God, we are left with lies about God.

            The importance of the doctrine of inerrancy was stated well by Augustine of Hippo, a bishop in northern Africa in the late 4^th and early 5^th centuries: “most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books. That is to say that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us and committed to writing put down in these books anything false. If you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement, there will not be left a single sentence of those books, which, if appearing to anyone difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away as a statement, in which intentionally, the author declared what was not true.”¹

            In other words, if you say that there is even one error in the Bible, you’ve declared open season on the whole thing. If there’s one error, why couldn’t there be two? And if two, then why not three, and so on? And when we run into a statement that is hard to believe or hard to live out, we can just write it off as an error and move on.

            Perhaps the real question that surrounds the issue of inerrancy is simply, “Who’s the boss?” Who’s the boss—me or the Bible? Do I stand as judge over the Bible, declaring where it is right and wrong, or does the Bible stand as judge over me, declaring where I am right and wrong? May we never establish ourselves as the judge over Scripture, but as this book can be shown to be a message from the true and living God, may we humble ourselves beneath it and declare that it tells us the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Notes:

1. As quoted in Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 91.

           

A New Confidence for a New Year

            As the father of a toddler, I’ve been hearing the song “Jesus Loves Me” quite a bit lately. In fact, Adrianna wants to hear that song at bedtime every night, so I hear it at least once a day! The first line of that song makes a very important claim, one that many people today would reject. That line says, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That may seem like just a simple children’s song, but its actually making an astounding claim—that we can know that a statement is true simply because the Bible says it is.

            That is a very significant claim, and its one that most people today would reject. In fact, many Christians are not willing to give whole-hearted approval to the claim that we can know that a statement is true simply because the Bible says it is. It is not popular in the culture at large to place that kind of confidence in the Bible; thus, it can be tempting for us to hesitate to place our full confidence in Scripture.

            So, should we be willing to say, “this I know, for the Bible tells me so?” Do we have good reasons to be so confident about what the Bible says? Today, I hope to convince you that the answer is “yes!” We’re going to look at a few of the most commonly asked questions about the Bible, and in my opinion we will find some very satisfying answers. These answers will take the form of an acronym that spells out the word MAPS, so that this little memory device will help you remember these answers whenever these questions might come up.

Let’s begin with a question that is common to virtually everyone who doubts the reliability of the Bible.

How do we know the Bible hasn’t been changed over the years?

            Virtually everyone who wants to challenge the reliability of the Bible will claim either that the Bible was deliberately changed at some point in the past or that it has simply picked up thousands of errors as it was copied over the years and thus can no longer be trusted. You will hear this claim from atheists on the one hand all the way to Mormons and Muslims on the other! So how do we know the Bible hasn’t been changed over the years? The answer is the word manuscripts. The “m” in that word gives us the first letter of our acronym.

            Manuscripts are the ancient, handwritten copies of the Bible that we have discovered through archaeology. These manuscripts are copies of the original writings that were meticulously copied and handed on from person to person and group to group. For the Old Testament, these manuscripts were copied by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes. These scholars took their work seriously—they knew how many letters were in each line, how many lines were to be on each page, and if they made a mistake they threw out the whole thing. Their work was so precise that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered around 1950, they confirmed that the Masoretes work was nearly flawless.

            In the case of the New Testament, archaeologists have uncovered literally thousands upon thousands of manuscripts—far more, in fact, than any other ancient work of literature. The New Testament, as you might know, was originally written in Greek, and if we consider only the Greek manuscripts that we have found, we have over 5,000 manuscripts to work with—which is about 8 times more than the number of manuscripts that have been found of any other ancient book (#2 on the list is the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer). Archaeologists have found some copies of the New Testament that date to within 35 years of when the Book of Revelation was written. If that sounds like a long time, its not! In this field of study, 35 years is like a couple of days.

            But, if we also count the manuscripts that we have found that were copied into other languages, like Latin, we have over 24,000 manuscripts to work with! Manuscripts of the Bible have been found all over the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, and when we compare them to each other, we find that the text of the Bible has always been consistent—there is no evidence at all of any sort of vast conspiracy to corrupt the Bible.

Now as far as the question of errors and mistakes in copying, it is true that these individual manuscripts have copying mistakes in them—a misspelled word here or there, or a word accidentally left out of a verse (you would make mistakes, too, if you were copying the entire New Testament by hand!). But, when we compare all of these manuscripts together, it is easy to spot these mistakes and ensure that they don’t creep in to our copies of the Bible today. The copy of the Bible that you hold in your hand is the result of painstaking work to compare all of the copies of Scripture we possess in order to root out the copying mistakes that were made. So you can confidently say that your Bible is not filled with mistakes and errors; instead, it contains precisely what the original authors of Scripture wrote with their own hands.

How do we know the events written about in the Bible actually happened?

            The answer to this question is the word “archaeology,” which gives us the letter “a” in our acronym. As archaeologists have done their work over the years, they have repeatedly found that the historical details recorded in the Bible are accurate and true. For example, archaeologists recently discovered coins from ancient Egypt that bore the name and image of the biblical character Joseph from the book of Genesis. One coin apparently also made reference to the dream that he interpreted for Pharaoh.

            We could mention thousands of other discoveries as well. Many cities and towns mentioned in the Bible have been found. Some of them are still being lived in, like Jerusalem, which still contains artifacts like the aqueduct built by King Hezekiah of the Old Testament or portions of the Temple in which Jesus walked and talked (perhaps you’ve heard of “The Wailing Wall”). All of these discoveries reveal that the people and places of the Bible were real people and real places.

            Let’s compare this for a moment to another religious book—the Book of Mormon. That book makes all kinds of claims about people who supposedly lived in North America many years ago and who became the ancestors of modern-day Native Americans. Archaeologists have never made a single discovery that backs up the story of the Book of Mormon. In fact, you won’t find maps in the back of the Book of Mormon like you do in the Bible because they can’t be produced! Mormons just have to guess about where those people supposedly lived because we haven’t found any proof that they actually existed.

            This observation raises serious doubts about everything that’s found in the Book of Mormon. If it can’t get the facts of history straight, why should we trust anything else it says? Perhaps you can see then how archaeology gives us confidence in the Bible. To paraphrase Jesus, since the Bible is accurate about earthly things that we can confirm through disciplines like archaeology, then we have good reason to trust it when it tells us about heavenly things—like the character of God and salvation.

How do we know that the Bible is more than just the writings of human beings?

            It is certainly true that the Bible didn’t just fall from the sky into our hands. The words of Scripture were actually written down on paper by human beings. But if that’s the case, then how can we claim that the Bible is anything more than just the opinions of human beings? Does it actually bear the mark of a divine origin?

            Yes it does, and we can see this in two ways, which will give us the last two letters of our acronym. The first mark of divine origin is predictive prophecy, which gives us the letter “p.”

            You might be familiar with the fact that the Bible has made certain predictions about future events, but what you may not realize is how specific some of these prophecies are. In general, the Bible’s prophecies are clear enough that their interpretation is obvious, and they could easily be proven wrong if they didn’t come true. Let me give you an example of what I mean—if I said, “We’re going to get an inch of snow tomorrow,” by the end of the day tomorrow it would be easy to prove whether or not my prediction had come true. But if I said, “A wintery sky will arise,” it would be more difficult to tell whether or not my prediction came true. What does a “wintery sky” even mean? Does it mean cold winds? Cold air temperatures? Also, it wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy to predict a wintery sky in December! Such a prediction wouldn’t show any special insight on my part.

            Most so-called “prophets” over the years have given only vague prophecies like my wintery sky prophecy. Nostradamus is a great example of such a prophet. Every so often, you’ll see a supermarket tabloid declaring that Nostradamus predicted some kind of world event, but when you read the so-called “prophecy,” its so vague that you could interpret it in a dozen ways.

            The prophecies of the Bible are very different. Many of them are very specific, and the fact of the matter is that they have come true. Some of the prophecies even give the specific names of kingdoms and people. [READ Daniel 8:20–22] [READ Isaiah 44:24–28]

            We can also look at the numerous prophecies that were fulfilled by the Lord Jesus. By some counts there were hundreds of prophecies that his life fulfilled, with such specific details as the name of his birthplace, the content of his personal character, and the treatment that he would receive in his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

            The fact that the Bible has accurately and specifically predicted future events before they took place is a powerful proof that it is supernatural in origin. It could not possibly be a merely human book because human beings do not have the ability to predict the future with such accuracy.

            The second mark of divine origin is statistics, which gives us the letter “s” in our acrostic. The unique circumstances behind the way that the Bible was written simply defy all odds. The probability that we would even have a book like the Bible is all but impossible. Consider this: The Bible was written over a period of more than 1500 years on 3 different continents by 40 different authors from at least 19 different walks of life, yet it contains one continuous storyline and no contradictions. Most of these authors did not know each other and they were not working in collaboration.

            It is not as though the authors of the Bible got together in Jerusalem one day and came up with a plan for their writing. They worked independently of each other, yet their writings show complete agreement with the writings of all of the other authors. If we didn’t have a book like the Bible, I doubt we would believe that such a book could even exist.

           I believe we can see that the Bible is worthy of our utmost confidence. From this information, I believe that we can be confident that when we build our lives upon the Bible, we are building on a solid foundation. We can truly stand tall and proud when we say, “this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”

He Arose?--Easter Sunday 2012

Last night, I had the most amazing experience I have ever had. I was getting ready for bed when I noticed a bright, greenish-colored light coming into my house from outside. When I went to the window, I saw a UFO in my backyard, hovering there like a giant metal Frisbee! It was about 15 feet off the ground, and after a few minutes, a staircase came down from the underbelly of the UFO, and a figure started to walk down to the ground. I looked closely, and soon I realized—it was Bigfoot! He was walking down right into my backyard! I hardly had time to think before I noticed another figure coming down the stairs. The second figure was somewhat smaller and more human, and then I saw him as clear as day—it was Elvis himself!

Now, some of you seem to be a little skeptical about my story of a UFO landing in my backyard, but I want you to realize what has just happened within the course of our church service. A few moments ago, we were singing about a dead man coming back to life, and no one seemed to think twice about it, but when I started talking about a UFO, you started laughing at me. Well, we don’t often realize this as Christians, but to many people in the world, the claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead is no different than the claim that Bigfoot and Elvis stepped out of a UFO in my backyard! Both of them sound ridiculous!

So let me ask you this—why do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead? 1 Peter 3:15 commands us to “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” So what reasons do we have to believe that Jesus rose from the dead?

Most people who deny the resurrection of Christ either claim that the disciples saw Jesus in a dream or a hallucination and came to believe that He was alive, or they claim that the disciples stole the body and made up the story of the resurrection. These two claims will serve as the backdrop of our discussion this morning, and as we look at the facts surrounding the burial place of Christ, we will see that the best explanation of the facts is that Jesus did in fact rise from the grave.

1. Jesus’ tomb was in a known location

If no one had known where Jesus was buried, then the disciples could have made up a story about a resurrection because no one could have checked it out; no one could have gone to the tomb to see if the body was still there. But since Jesus’ tomb was in a known location, once the disciples started talking about a resurrection, people could have easily gone to the tomb to check out their story. If the disciples had been just dreaming or hallucinating, then people could have seen that Jesus’ body was still in the grave, and the story would have immediately fallen apart.

The Gospels tell us that the disciples weren’t even involved in the burial of Jesus. According to the Gospels, Jesus was buried by two men who were members of the same Jewish council which had just condemned Jesus to death—a man named Joseph of Arimathea, who is called a respected member of the council, and a man named Nicodemus, whom Jesus called THE teacher of Israel in John 3. Please understand that this detail simply could not have been made up. If the disciples had made up these men for a fictional story, or if they had lied about real people, their lies would have easily been exposed. People could have simply talked to these men to find out if these details were true.

According to John 19, Jesus’ tomb was located in a garden in the same place that He was crucified, which we know was just on the outskirts of the city of Jerusalem. John 19:20 says that many of the Jewish people witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion because the place was “near the city.”

So the significance of these details is that the location of Jesus’ tomb was widely known. Thus, the events surrounding His resurrection did not happen in secret; they were played out in the public eye. So when the disciples began to publicly declare just a month and a half later that Jesus had risen from the grave, anyone who was curious could have checked out the tomb and spoken to those who were directly involved in His burial.

This brings us to the second fact that we must consider.

2. Jesus’ tomb was found to be empty by several of His female disciples

According to the Gospels, a handful of Jesus’ female disciples were the first to find that Jesus’ tomb was empty, and they then reported their discovery to the men whom we call the Apostles. How do we explain the fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty? Even the strongest critics of Christianity accept that Jesus’ tomb must have been empty, because otherwise the disciples’ claims could have never gotten off the ground. Christianity would have been dead on arrival if Jesus’ body was still in His tomb.

So how do we explain the fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty? All of the suspicion falls on the disciples, because no one else would have moved Jesus’ body. The Jewish leaders wouldn’t have done it, because that was precisely what they wanted to prevent! According to Matthew 27:62-66, they requested to have Roman soldiers stationed at the tomb so that the disciples could not steal the body and claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

So the Jewish leaders would not have moved the body, and the Roman authorities had no reason to do so. Grave robbers could not have gotten past the Roman soldiers without being discovered, so the real question is whether the disciples were somehow able to move the body.

Many skeptics of Christianity have claimed that Jesus’ tomb was empty because the disciples stole the body and then made up a story about the resurrection so that they could become the leaders of a new religion. Supposedly the disciples were after fame and possibly even fortune, and they thought that this was a way that they could get it. But this skeptical theory doesn’t hold water for numerous reasons.

If the disciples had made up their story:

1. They would not have begun to spread it in Jerusalem.

As I mentioned earlier, anyone in Jerusalem could have easily checked out the disciples’ story by visiting the tomb and talking to the people who were involved in the burial. If this was all a big hoax, it would have made much more sense for the disciples to travel to another part of Israel and spread their story there. News traveled slowly back then, so by the time anyone in a different city could have checked out the facts, the disciples could have had their new movement up and running. In their new location, they could have developed something like a cult following, and by the time anyone could have challenged them with the facts, it would have been too late to stop their movement from getting off the ground.

2. They would not have claimed that women were the first people to find the empty tomb.

In the culture of that time, the testimony of women was not considered to be reliable. Even the apostles did not believe the women who first told them about the empty tomb. Luke 24:11 says that when the women reported what they had seen, “[their] words seemed to [the apostles] an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” These women were personal friends of the apostles, yet they still did not believe them. That tells you what society thought about the testimony of women.

If the disciples had made up this whole story, you would think that they would have made it as strong and convincing as possible, which means that they wouldn’t have claimed that women were the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Why include a detail that so many men would have mocked? Likewise, they probably wouldn’t have stated their own unbelief. One would think that they would have made themselves out to be heroes, but the story recorded in the Gospels doesn’t make them look very heroic at all.

3. There is no good explanation for their dramatic change in attitude after Jesus’ crucifixion.

In the Gospels, we find the disciples in hiding after the crucifixion because they were afraid that the Jewish authorities might arrest them as well. But just a month and a half later, they stood up in front of a crowd of thousands in Jerusalem and proclaimed that Jesus rose from the dead. And when they were arrested not long after that, they listened to the threats of the Jewish leaders and said, “We have to obey God rather than you, so we’re going to keep preaching!” How did their attitudes change from cowardly to courageous? Are we really supposed to believe that their confidence came from a story that they made up themselves?

We should consider the conversion of Paul as well. Paul himself was one of the Jewish leaders, and he knew all about the disciples’ claims. He surely knew that the tomb was empty, but he must have thought that the whole thing was a hoax. He initially tried to stamp out Christianity by arresting Christians for blasphemy, but after the risen Lord appeared to him, he became a fearless preacher of the gospel.

Paul had much to lose from his conversion. He himself wrote in Galatians 1:14, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people.” Paul was destined for power and prestige among the Jews, but he gave it all up to be persecuted the same way that he was persecuting others.

The idea of a made-up story doesn’t square with the facts, especially when we consider that the disciples maintained their claims to the point of death.

4. There is no good reason to believe that the disciples would have died for what they knew was a lie.

Historians from centuries ago tell us that all of the apostles except one died as a martyr for their claims about Jesus and the resurrection—and even the one who wasn’t killed suffered terribly. According to tradition and historical documents, Peter, Andrew, Philip, Jude, and Simon the Zealot were crucified; James (son of Zebedee), Bartholomew, and Matthias were beheaded; Matthew was killed with an axe; Thomas was killed with a spear; James the Less was clubbed to death.

Now, history is filled with the stories of martyrs who have died for a thousand different causes, but the common denominator between them all is that they sincerely believed in the truthfulness of their cause. But some critics of the resurrection would ask us to believe that the apostles died for what they knew was a lie—one which they had fabricated themselves. This is simply an unreasonable conclusion. Are we to believe that ALL of the apostles maintained a lie as they saw their friends being martyred one by one; as they saw the entire Christian community suffering because of what they were proclaiming? That sounds like Elvis in a UFO to me!

When you think through the facts that we have surrounding the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the truly reasonable conclusion is that He has risen, just as He said He would! The real reason that some people do not want to believe that Jesus rose from the dead is that His resurrection proves that He is God, and as God, He is worthy of our worship and obedience. There is no lack of evidence, nor is there a lack of logic and reasoning behind this belief—there is simply a corruption of the will which compels all of us to resist the call to humble ourselves before God and embrace the Son whom He has sent into this world.

We cannot ignore the fact that Jesus rose from the grave. We cannot hide it behind a plate of ham and potato salad or a basket of colored eggs and then put it away until next year like all of our other decorations. We must decide whether we will accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior or whether we will ignore his rightful claim over our lives.

The Apostle Paul—who was also a martyr—stated that God in His grace has overlooked times of ignorance, “but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed: and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31).

One day, Jesus Christ will judge the world. Here is what he said himself in John 5—“[God] the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to [me], the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

God the Father has declared His acceptance of Jesus by raising Him from the dead—have you declared your acceptance of Him?