Full-Proof Ministries

Archive for the ‘Apologetics’ Category

This is a question you might get asked by a skeptic. It came up in a debate that the Tuesday night students and I were watching (as this implies . . . I teach a Tuesday night Bible study at my house for teenagers). A couple things come to my mind:

1) Jesus did appear to unbelievers. Do you remember when the apostles first told Thomas what had happened? He was hardly believing.

^24Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. ^25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

The Holy Bible : Today’s New International Version. 2005 (Jn 20:24-25). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

The response to this is usually that Thomas was one of his immediate/intimate followers. I don’t buy that as an excuse for the fact that Thomas was pretty adamant against the claim of the other ten remaining apostles. But even if we grant that, we have Jesus’ brother James and the Pharisee Saul who came to be known as Paul. So there are three unbelievers that Jesus appeared to.

What I find interesting is how many Bible commentators and scholars who I respect miss this point and state that Jesus never appeared to any unbelievers, but only to those who believed. They haven’t thought this through.

2) Think about what this request is really asking for. What the skeptic is asking for is for an unbeliever who saw Jesus but didn’t convert. There is no such person. Can you imagine it? “Yep, I saw the resurrected Jesus and I don’t believe him.” It really isn’t a reasonable request.

Popular is the notion today that faith is little more than blind allegiance to something that cannot be proven.  More lately, it appears to be the popular definition that faith actually defies what can be proven. The faith we exercise in our daily lives might very well reflect the first definition.  After all, I don’t often examine a chair for structural integrity before I sit down on it.  I’ve never pulled my gas tank off to verify the reading I was getting on the fuel gauge inside the car.  I’ve never witnessed the germicidal effect of a squirt of germ-x in my hand under microscope to verify that indeed 99.99% of the germs present were truly eradicated.  Such is the pattern for the faith I exercise in most of my daily activities – it truly is a blind faith.  But do these examples adequately represent the type of faith the Bible speaks of?

I’m going to piggy-back here on the article Joe wrote just the other day on How to Read Hebrews 11.  The reason?  Well, besides the fact that I’m not terribly creative, Hebrews 11 gives us the Biblical definition of faith.  We read the definition in the very first verse of that chapter – Hebrews 11:1.  (You can just run your mouse over the reference and a bubble will appear with the actual cited verse, but you’ve probably figured that out on your own already!)  This verse tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.  Of course there is an element of the unknown and unprovable in our definition here, but it defies completely the definition(s) provided at the outset of this article.  My faith in the accuracy of my fuel reading is without substance because I’m not even sure how it works.  It is completely without evidence, because, as mentioned earlier, I’ve never seen the gas it claims to contain.

Contrary to a blind faith in a fuel reading, my faith in God, my faith in the Bible, and my faith in Jesus Christ are not without substance or evidence!  The Bible’s trustworthiness is evidenced in fulfilled prophecy.  God’s credibility is established in His promise to invade humanity in the person of Jesus Christ – God incarnate (John 1:1-14) and His making good on that very promise.  Jesus’ credibility is established upon His promise to leave an empty tomb as a constant reminder to all of posterity that He was who He said He was and He did what He said He would do.  Far from being blind, our Christian faith is well founded on historical evidence that he who wishes to deny it is going to have to dance around or deal with.  But this elephant in the room hasn’t left much room for dancing.

So what’s the deal with people asking others to choose a side – Religion or Science? I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and am officially fed up with people pretending that to side with science is to side with the “known.”

Science is supposedly a self-correcting apparatus, right? Hasn’t anyone ever wondered how much is left to be corrected? After all, we only know what was wrong when we find out what is right – and then we only “know” that we were wrong before, but still aren’t completely positive that we’re “right” now – maybe just closer to it. Is it really that “intellectual” to pursue a scientific path at the cost of knowing you only believe something until some lab coat tells you to think differently.

I’m all for science…really. I have benefited from the technological advances, medical discoveries and electronic innovation as much as the next guy, and I’m glad for it. I’m just not ready to “thrown in” with a system that admits it’s faulty from the get-go, but is unsure just how faulty and for just how long. It is especially difficult for me to embrace a movement that asks me to place my faith and trust in the knowledge of man over and against the knowledge God has relayed to us through His Word. One system changes almost daily…the other system is still using the same textbook, with no revisions pending. Like I said, I like science and have reaped its many benefits, but let’s get real.

Let’s review some of the things we KNOW:

1. Milk does a body good…until we find out all the potentially terrible things it can do to the adult body.

2. The earth is hundreds of thousands of years old…actually its several million years old…okay, this just in, it’s 4.5 Billion years old…this time we’re SURE, trust us!

3. The planet is slowly, but surely cooling. Though the measurement seems small in our lifetime, it will have a catastrophic impact on future generations. Whoops…it must be opposite day – we meant to say that the planet is heating up at such an alarming rate…

You get my point. There are some helpful elements of science and we can all appreciate most of them. Just don’t go abandoning your faith because someone in a lab coat demands more answers from the faithful laymen than he or his buddies can answer in their own fields of expertise. When you’re tired of changing your mind (or having it changed) every few years, find a Bible and get a hold of some unchanging truths. God will be waiting for you when you make the move.

Many today who casually call themselves “Christian” fail to see the very existence of Christianity today for the miracle it is. Today, one third of the world’s population wear the label. So where do I get off calling Christianity an unlikely story?

Well, to start, the story of Christianity begins obviously enough with the birth of its namesake, Jesus Christ. This birth fulfilled a prophecy written by Micah 700 years before it took place! (Micah 5:2) In fact, Micah even prophesied where the birth would take place – Bethlehem. This was certainly not the only Messianic prophecy that Jesus fulfilled. In all, some 300 prophecies were fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ! One prominent mathematician calculated that the odds of one person fulfilling just 8 of these prophecies was so unlikely as to be statistically impossible.

While the odds were bad enough that one person could fulfill the prophecies necessary to identify them as the promised Messiah of the Old Testament, the religious culture into which Christianity was born was totally opposed to the idea! The Jews were expecting a Messiah, sure enough, but not in the fashion that Christ was delivered to them. They thought it utterly disgraceful to think of the Messiah being born of a human mother. No man could be God, and surely God would never become a man. The very idea to them was no less than blasphemous.

Despite their ideological bent against Jesus being the true Messiah, there was a period of time when a large portion of the Jewish community accepted Him as such. This of course found its peak on Palm Sunday, but was short lived as they would be shouting “Crucify Him” just a few days later. You see, the Jews were not anticipating the Spiritual Savior they ought to have been, but were looking for a Kingly, political figure to reinstate them as a nation.

In addition to Jesus, there were a host of others Messianic claimants ranging from late first century B.C. all the way in to the second century A.D. We read of just a few of them in the book of Acts, chapter five as the High Priest, Gamaliel tells us that the claimants he were familiar with had died and their followers were scattered as a consequence. Nothing became of their following. He postulated that if Jesus were of the same ilk, the same consequence would befall He and His followers. But, he continued, if this Jesus were the real deal, he wanted no part of standing in the way.

Despite all the odds being stacked against the fledgling faith system, not only did it survive, but thrived. In the first few centuries of the church, we read of heavy persecution against Christians by the Roman government – all to no avail. In fact, Tertullian made the claim in the 3rd century that the blood of the Christian martyr was the seed of the church. Persecution had the exact opposite of the intended effect.

It should be mentioned at this point that the reason Christianity was able to survive – especially in the early years – was that it demonstrated itself to be authentic, to be the truth. Christ and His apostles were not the only ones claiming miracles for Jesus. His enemies – the very religious group that crucified Him – never denied that He did the miracles that were attributed to Him. They simply ascribed the power by which he accomplished them to Satan. It is difficult, however, to argue for an evil cause when the effect manifests no such evil. You would think that if Jesus Christ had an evil ulterior motive in working His many miracles, it would not be to appropriate a system steeped in good will toward the fellow man and love of your neighbors. That is hardly a likely product of deceitful scheming.

For all intents and purposes, Christianity was a belief system that should not have survived the first century. Jesus’ very name should be one that was forgotten in ancient History with the likes of Theudas and Judas of Galilee. The problem for the unbeliever is that His name wasn’t forgotten. In fact, the most ardent atheist today acknowledges the birth of Christ each and every time they employ our dating system. Like it or not, Christianity was meant to stick around and today, some 2 billion of its adherents bear heavy testimony that it has no plans of going away any time soon.