Sep 8, 2019 | Gratitude
You’ll be happy to know that for most of the characters in the Bible, life was as much a conundrum for them as it is for you and me. This is one of the reasons I don’t believe the Bible is just myths and fairy tales as many critics contend. Rather, it reads like real people encountering real things, much of which they don’t understand. If it was all made up I don’t think we’d see so many confused people in it’s pages. It would read much more like, well, myths and fairy tales!
(more…)
Sep 2, 2019 | Apologetics
I wrote recently about a documentary of Korn guitarist Brian Welch’s conversion to Christianity. He had a serious issue with drug addiction, even after his conversion, and some people are accusing him of replacing his addiction to drugs with an addiction to religion. Here is part of his response to these critics he recorded in a Youtube video:
“There’s a supernatural way that you can feel that euphoria and that high and that pleasure, and that comes from the Spirit,” Welch continued. “There’s a scripture in the Bible that says, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived the wonderful things that God has prepared for us,’ or prepared for humans.
“Now, people would say, ‘Why do you believe the Bible? Why do you believe that? Why would you believe some words by men two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years ago?’ It’s because of the next verse, and the next verse says, ‘But God has revealed it and unveiled it to us by his spirit.’”
Those are very good questions that any honest person should ask. Welch gets the answer exactly right, and any good Calvinist, like me, would completely agree. The only reason people believe on and trust in the Lord Jesus is because God has revealed it to them, and enabled them to believe it. He turns the heart of stone to flesh, brings the dead sinful heart to spiritual life. But that’s not all that could, and should be said.
(more…)
Aug 30, 2019 | Truth
I recently wrote about a wonderfully nostalgic (for me) documentary about John Lennon and the making of his album Imagine. For some reason ever since, I haven’t been able to get out of my mind his somewhat quirky song, “Gimmie Some Truth.” It’s typical hard-edged Lennon speaking “truth to power,” or something like that. It’s almost quaint looking back at it from our 21st century “post-truth” age. That term is politically loaded, so not as helpful as understanding the philosophical assumptions of postmodernism that got us here. In case you’re not familiar with it, the term came from a response to modernism, an Enlightenment concept that objective truth exists, and is accessible to reason. On the surface that doesn’t seem particularly controversial, but reason ended up becoming rationalism, the idea that reason was the only way to know truth. Every other means of knowing was discounted as invalid. But paraphrasing Jesus, man shall not live on reason alone.
(more…)
Aug 24, 2019 | Apologetics
I can’t tell you how many moronic, absolutist, immature, know-it-all atheists I’ve come across in online comments sections who declare with absolute certitude that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, full of metaphorical unicorns and other such unbelievable nonsense. These people, and I’m sure mostly young males, have never bothered to actually read the Bible, only other skeptics like them who haven’t read it either. The problem for such dolts is that the Bible doesn’t read anything like myths and fairy tales, not in the least. In fact it reads like straight ahead history that takes place in real time, in real places, with real people, and real events. History outside of the Bible confirms this again and again. We can take comfort, and have confidence, that our faith is rooted in history, not human wishful thinking and fiction (which didn’t exist in the ancient world).
(more…)
Aug 21, 2019 | Apologetics
Not many Christians are familiar with first century Jewish historian Josephus, which is unfortunate. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (the latter rejected purely out of anti-supernatural bias) are the most well-attested facts in all of ancient history. But skeptics insist that because the writers of the Bible, and specifically the gospels, had a religious ax to grind, it cannot be trusted as objectively historical. I’m not sure there is such a thing, but if it can be established that the basic outline of Jesus’ life and death, and the Jewish, Greco-Roman world he inhabited, all existed, then the biblical record becomes incredibly compelling.
(more…)
Recent Comments