Barton Jahn's Blog, page 2

The Biblical Narrative Part 7 of 10

If modern science is now telling us that the complex systems of information…being highly specified and precisely coordinated…everywhere we look in the natural world…has their origin exclusively from an Intelligent Designer…who crafted the varied and imaginative lifestyle habits for lions, elephants, dolphins, and geese…then this generates the high confidence in the authority of this Intelligent Designer God to be able to craft value, worth, and purpose…in our unique and distinctive lives as well.

One of the key arguments of this book…and I think one of the great Christian takeaways from the advancements of modern science as they currently are unfolding today…is that merely proving the existence of God through the compelling evidence in the natural world…of design based on intelligence…only takes us half-way…only matters in the big picture if we can take the next step to directly relate this new discovery…to the logical extension of the displacement component integral within the biblical narrative stories of faith…of a life-script writer God much smarter than us…helping us to discover through the intelligently guided arrangement of the experience of empirical events and circumstances in the course of our journeys of faith…the real truth about the knowledge of good and evil.

Not everyone will become PhD scientists…able to navigate through the technical facts spanning several disciplines of research…supporting design in nature.

Winning a consensus favoring design in today’s scientific community…and rejecting materialism…is without question a monumental event in human history.

But the discovery by modern science of the inescapable presence of design in the natural world…and thus the existence of an intelligent designer God…expands a million-fold when filtered through the biblical narrative stories of faith…making a compelling argument that a faith-journey following the God of the Bible…is both credible and accessible…in our modern popular culture…as the one true worldview narrative…excluding all others (Mt. 7:13-14; Jn. 11:25, 14:6).

As a result of a journey of faith following God…Old Testament Jews of faith…and New Testament Christians in the early church…and today…are supposed to be able to look back after a moment of reflection about the course and direction of our lives…and say: “God knew what He was doing…in guiding and directing my life…better than I could possibly have known about or orchestrated on my own. He led me through a narrow path that was right and correct…in a way I could not have foreseen or anticipated ahead of time.”

This is different from human fiction-writing…as already noted above.

The suspense-filled story endings for Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, Tom Sawyer, Elizabeth Bennett, and even for Sidney Carton in Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities…are that they knew what they were doing…that they resolved their particular conflict through human ingenuity, persistence, and the application of their unique talents or their unique positions at the time.

The Bible is the only work of literature in all of history that has stories with endings that resolve with the realization that God knew…and knows…what He is doing.

This nail cannot be hit on the head by a hammer too many times.

Through the recent discovery in this new Age of Information…that the natural world is filled with complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…this now clearly exhibits the realization that the Intelligent Designer of the natural world…knew and knows what He is doing…in creating living organisms and non-living material things…far and away above anything that we can manufacture.

This now makes the leap from science to theology…that closes the gap between science and faith…a hypothetical gap that should never have been fabricated…because we now understand…in the natural world through science…and in the composition of the biblical narrative stories of faith…the modern fact-based evidence that God correctly knows what He is doing in everything….that God is a bridge that we can safely cross from the concrete material realities of the natural world…to the abstract thought of precisely how human beings created in the image of God…can best conduct our lives at the peak of intellectual and moral reasoning.

The connecting of the dots between the natural world…and the biblical narrative stories of faith…both equally display the brilliance of God.

This dovetails with the idea that after living a journey of faith within our God-composed life-script…after the pattern given in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that we can look back in hindsight and conclude that God knew what He was doing…knew what He was doing long before our own personal story endings bring to light the foresight of God…having set us early…and punctually on-time…upon a course that made our life-scripts beneficial to ourselves and to others…having well-defined purpose, meaning, dignity, and worth.

That God’s way and thoughts are higher than ours…now connects beautifully and seamlessly with the entirely secular field of science…which turns out after closer inspection…to not be secular and faith-free at all.

Modern science at this point in time now looks back through the discoveries of the last four or five decades…and sees the brilliance of design in the natural world…identifying the presence of intelligent design and an intelligent designer.

From this the ordinary man-on-the-street…can also now infer…after closer examination of the story endings in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that it was God who divinely and supernaturally resolved the particular problem or conflict…and not man operating on our own.

If we track the logic of this…it leads directly to the unique…and I would say revolutionary element in the Bible…that God displaces our ways with His higher and better ways…when we accept His invitation…place our faith and trust in Him…and enter in through the narrow gate (Mt. 7:13-14) of a journey of faith following His leading.

Starting way back in the Genesis 22:1-14 account of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah…God is saying: “Just trust me”…in the eventuality of the ram caught in the thicket of bushes nearby…sacrificed in place of Isaac…providing a priceless foreglimpse…for us…of what God would do two thousand years later on the cross at Calvary.

The God-composed journey of faith life-script for Abraham initiates a revolutionary new concept into the marketplace of ideas…the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways and thoughts…which does not exist anywhere in human literary fiction, non-fiction, ancient mythology, anthropology, philosophical worldviews, or religions…in the course of human history up to this present time…other than in the Bible.

God displacing our ways with His higher ways and thoughts through divinely composed life-scripts…that require the activation of faith and trust on our part…life-scripts communicated to us by listening in the Spirit to God speaking to us…in combination with our free-will choice to follow this enlistment into a risk-filled calling and mission-plan…is as contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking as is imaginable.

The concept of the living God actively participating in the definitive course and direction of our lives…either by an early recognition in childhood or adolescence of a special, innate, God-given talent we possess…or by a direct revelation of a specific calling and mission for our lives as adults that we could not anticipate ahead of time…this is on the opposite side of the spectrum from the competing worldview narrative of humanism…which says that we have the capacity within ourselves to operate as autonomous, independent agents determining the course of our lives on our own…going our own way apart from God…which is the dominant recurring worldview over the secular history of mankind.

The Biblical Narrative 6 of 10

Returning to the question of what light human literary fiction-writing might add to the identification of the right narrative worldview for our modern world…a murder mystery novel has a precise arrangement of letters and words that is different from a western, a romance, or a spy-thriller novel.

A murder mystery like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None…has a well-defined sequence of information specified to produce a singular function…and reveals the obvious presence of an intelligent designer…a human author.

A storyline that has God displacing our ways with His ways…is a singularly unique genre in the same way that a murder mystery novel is not a western or a romance or a spy-thriller book.

The main contention of this book…is that only God could and would create the narrative stories of faith…recorded in the letters and words in the languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic in the Bible…that arranges intelligently sequenced information in story-form to produce highly specified function and premeditated outcomes…similar to what we see in the DNA molecule.

The specified sequence of the letters A, G, C, and T that represent amino acids in the long-length DNA chain…are different for an elephant, lion, spider, rattlesnake, eagle, killer whale, and human…for examples.

Would human intelligent authors invent this concept of God displacing our ways…in the biblical narrative stories of faith?

The evidence from human literary history says no.

The creative brilliance of the information input into DNA to produce function…translates over into the imaginative origin of the biblical narrative stories of faith…if no secular human author has adopted this theme in their fiction and non-fiction stories.

The intelligent input of information into the life-script for Abraham…according to historical evidence…cannot be attributed to human invented fictional mythology…because this displacement element does not exist in literary history.

As the biblical narrative stories of faith fall within the past timing of human history…there are no discernable trial-tests…no trial-and-error, transitionally intermediate sampling of partially successful examples of a proto-Abraham, proto-Joseph, proto-Moses, or proto-David…to overcome the negative chance probability that the biblical narrative stories of faith would instantly “explode” onto the scene in their mature and fully developed state.

A classic quote by G. K. Chesterton fits here: that Christianity has not been “tried and found wanting” but “found difficult and never tried.”

The biblical narrative stories of faith are too complex…too difficult…and too unconventional…to simply fall into place through self-assembly…as a natural result of human invented fiction-writing…drawing from conventional experience.

The Biblical Narrative Part 5 of 10

What is it then about the biblical narrative stories of faith…that differentiates God-composed life-scripts…from the humanistic approach to human life that comes alternatively from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…in a head-to-head competition as two opposing and mutually exclusive narratives for our allegiance…as our foundational guide to life?

Modern literary fiction-writing gives us a strong and convincing clue.

Modern authors of secular fiction generate sustained interest throughout their storyline plots by keeping the book reader held in suspense until the final last pages…resolving the conflict…in a final ending that utilizes creative, literary writing talent and imagination…one example of intelligence at a high level of artistic invention.

We see the same equivalent, high-quality of imaginatively suspenseful story endings in the biblical narrative stories of faith…except for this one distinctive, added element…not found in secular stories…of God displacing our worldly conventional ways and thinking…with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9)…as the engine of momentum actualized consistently throughout all of the God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts in the Bible (Gen. 22:7-13, 45:4-5; Ex. 14:13; Dt. 34:4; Josh. 6:20; 1 Sam. 17:48-49; Acts 2:37-40, 9:1-5).

One might therefore reasonably conclude from the viewpoint of skepticism…that the biblical narrative stories of faith are merely the product of human literary invention…a religious variation on the same high level of creative, imaginative artistry alongside the best of modern writers of fiction…from Shakespeare to the great novelists of today.

But we might stop here and reasonably ask: what gives skepticism the automatic right to claim the high-ground hill to set-up their artillery cannons of criticism…to start-off the discussion by asserting at the outset that suspense-filled storyline endings in the biblical narrative stories of faith are a product of human literary fiction-writing…are the product of pure mythology having no special claim to being true…when in fact the opposite may be the case…that the origin of our mental capacity to write fictional stories containing suspense…comes instead from human authors being created in the image of God…having the thoughtful capacity for writing suspense-filled fiction novels…as a derivative of His literary imaginative genius?

Today’s skeptic incorrectly assumes the absolute, humanistic context of a godless materialism in evaluating the history of literature of any kind…and therefore by definition and necessity guarantees the categorization of the biblical narrative stories of faith as being human invented mythology…having no other option available within the philosophy of materialism.

But if the modern skepticism of humanism is banking its faith…yes, faith…in the philosophy of naturalistic materialism…that the material particles and fields of energy are all that we have to work with…to define reality…this investment of trust is now empirically standing on shaky ground.

The irony of the truth in the science-versus-the-Bible debate today…is that science itself has turned the corner in recognition of its own scientifically discovered, fact-based evidence for intelligence…as the only plausible explanation behind the existence of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that we now see in functional operation every place we look in the natural world…and now understand much better through the lens of this new Age of Information.

The recognition of the uniquely important role that information plays in the functionality of complex systems…now renders implausible the unguided and trial-and-error materialistic explanations of recent past decades for the phenomenon in the natural world…especially in the seemingly unsolvable origin-of-life paradox of how the first living organisms had to have… instantly up-and-running for survival and reproduction…a highly select assortment of coordinated parts that are information dependent.

These bundles of coordinated information…formed systems at the outset that are simply too complex to coalesce on their own…that are manifestly too complicated to blindly self-assemble into the minimum required number of components to produce function…and then somehow later over eons of time externally acquire or internally actualize from within…unimaginable quantities and qualities of dynamic new information to create the varied and distinct living organisms that radiated out to become the vast diversity of life we now observe on the earth.

The neutrally unbiased, evidentiary findings of modern science are pointing in the direction of telling us that the philosophical worldview of naturalistic materialism…has a defective conceptual framework that is now too narrowly limited, inadequate, and incapable of staying current with the expanding reality of these new facts “on the ground.”

If the human race in general…along with a sizable portion of the scientific community…as a collective group…concurs in recognizing and acknowledging the essential element of intelligence inseparable and integral within these complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information that now more correctly describe the living and non-living phenomenon in the natural world…this then logically and reasonably excludes the pure atheism of naturalistic materialism…as a viable philosophical worldview to inform the purpose…or more accurately the absence of purpose…for human life…the philosophy of naturalistic materialism which in our modern times now empirically turns out to be an unsupportable, false narrative.

This is a new realization…a modern resolution of an age-old question nearing a final conclusion…that many people will not like…because it strikes a fatal blow at the heart of humanism…the worldview philosophy of agnosticism and atheism…that says that we can and should be the sole guides of our own lives as self-reliant, autonomous individuals…going our own way apart from God…based upon the now unscientifically, empirically unsupportable viewpoint that the observed natural world…that we can see and touch materialistically…is all there is to reality.

The novel and unexpected new reality here…is that it is the philosophically neutral empiricism of the scientific method that is discovering, cataloging, and evaluating this vast quantity of intelligently coordinated systems of information…not theology…that is confirming from a totally secular direction this ever-expanding, new body of knowledge as genuine scientific fact-based evidence…that cannot be objectively interpreted as having any origin…other than through premeditated and knowledgeably informed intelligence…built-in, front-loaded, and in-place ahead-of-time through foresight…to produce positive outcomes of function in complex systems.

If it takes an intelligently designed sequence of carefully managed activities to brew a pot of coffee…to bake a cake…to design a specific model of laptop computer having select features and a price-tag aimed for a targeted segment of the buying public…and if it takes intelligence to collect, measure, and mix the exact chemicals to produce a scientifically designed simulation experiment of how the origin of life might have occurred 3.8 billion years ago on earth…does the similar presence of design that is immediately apparent everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world…present a new and timely opportunity to make the final leap across the gap from science to theology…to make the intellectual connection…at this pivotal moment in human history…to be able to craft a definitive statement about the meaning and purpose of human life…that the centuries old Scientific Revolution…in part hoped to discover?

Any thoughts?

The Biblical Narrative Part 4 of 10

In the Socrates in the City interview noted above…John Lennox makes another critical point by saying that information is not a physical entity. Information is correctly defined to be an abstract thing…that has a non-materialistic essence…quite apart from the material explanation of how ink bonds to paper.

This means that the complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information discovered in the natural world by scientific investigation…cannot be the product of naturalistic materialism…but instead come from an intelligent mind…because information correctly defined is not materialistic…but abstract.

The fundamental questions about human life: “How did I get here, Why am I here, and Where am I going?”…are in essence non- materialistic questions…and therefore require non-materialistic answers.

These questions cannot be answered through the mathematics, physics, and chemistry of science…because their defining character…like the abstract information in a newspaper headline or in a Chopin Etude…is not materialistically amenable to measurement, quantification, and testing in a laboratory.

The universal standard by which worldly conventional normalcy and thinking judges our worth, value, and dignity…measured by the acquisition and expansion of material wealth…is a false and misleading worldview narrative.

Living in a mansion in Beverly Hills or in a penthouse apartment in New York City…and driving a Rolls Royce or Bentley convertible automobile…is a false measure of our worth… because it defines human value and dignity through the materialistic standard of financial prosperity…a narrowly exclusive, universally unattainable, and inaccurate measure of the truly successful human life.

The best and most inspirational fourth-grade elementary school teacher in America will never have a salary large enough to generate great financial wealth.

Moderate financial wealth is simply a part of the otherwise commendable and satisfying reality of being a school teacher.

Jesus is recorded in Luke 12:15 as saying: “Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”

In my own walk of faith following Jesus Christ…and I would assume in the lives of many Christians around the globe…and what I see in the biblical narrative stories of faith…that is one of the lessons that identifies the true purpose of human life…is that God’s provision of needed resources, solutions to problems, and the deliverance from a crisis…often comes at the risk-filled end-point of time at the last minute…at the last hour…rather than at the more preferable safe and secure moment in time…at the beginning of the particular situation (Gen. 22:10-12; Ex. 14:21-22; Mt. 28:5-8).

If the purpose of human life is to “get ahead” through the acquiring of financial wealth, material things, fame, and power…this is definitely not the message put forward in the biblical narrative…first introduced into the marketplace of ideas…starting around 1,450 B.C.

So which of the two main competing narratives is the true narrative: the one from worldly conventional normalcy and thinking that says that we can operate successfully as autonomous individuals apart form God...or the biblical narrative that says that there is a God-composed journey of faith life-script written for every human being...but which contains a message that many people do not want to hear...that God is so smart He eill displace our ways with His higher ways and thoughts...if we will allow Him to?

What are your thoughts on this?

The Biblical Narrative Part 3 of 10

In the Socrates in the City interview “Has Science Buried God?”…conducted by the questioner Eric Metaxas …the scientist and author John Lennox makes the critical point that science has not buried faith…but that science can bury atheism.

Oxford professor of mathematics Dr. Lennox tells the story of some of his world-famous scientist friends and colleagues asking the question why he is not an atheist. His telling response is to ask them that if the computer they use in their scientific research was produced…was designed and manufactured through a mindless and unguided process…could they have confidence in the data the computer generated…and their answer every time is no.

If…according to materialism…the human mind/brain is likewise the product of a mindless and unguided naturalistic process…this undermines our sure confidence in the accuracy of human rational thought…that when extended-out to its end-point…dissolves rationality…even dissolves the philosophical thinking of atheism itself.

Atheism…thought all the way out to its logical end-point…dissolves the reliability and credibility of its own thought process…because the accuracy of a computer or a human brain that is the product of a mindless and unguided process…cannot be absolutely trusted.

Atheism based upon naturalistic materialism…when extended-out to its logical conclusion…destroys rationality because it sweeps away our reasonable confidence in the human mental capacity to take full advantage of the fundamental assumption underlying all scientific research…that the natural world is both orderly and intelligible…but most importantly and insightfully recognized…to be intelligible to human beings alone…amongst all other living organisms in the natural world…thus enabling scientific research in the first place.

One of the ingeniously insightful apologetic arguments in recent times for the existence of God…is the differentiation between matter and mind.

The classic case is made that the information conveyed in the daily headlines of the New York Times newspaper…is not explainable by means of the physics and chemistry of ink bonding to paper.

The information conveyed in the newspaper headlines is the product of the intelligent arrangement of the ink on paper…in the English language…that transcends above and is completely different from the mechanical explanation of how ink bonds to paper.

Physics and chemistry are incapable of arranging ink on paper to convey intelligible information. The arrangement of anything complex, specified, and coherently integrated…like the daily headline of the New York Times…requires a mind.

Saying that a creative mind is merely a brain of tissue-matter containing electrical circuitry…is similar to saying that the strings, felt hammers, soundboard, and keys of the concert grand piano are the origin of the artistic brilliance of Chopin’s Etude Opus 10 no. 3.

Fact-based evidence tells us this has to be true…because no other mind/brain in the history of music composition has produced piano pieces exactly like those of Chopin…or for that matter of Bach, or Beethoven, or Liszt, or Debussy, or Scott Joplin.

For some great discussions on science and Christianity...see Socrates in the City interviews of John Lennox and Stephen Meyer...among others...on YouTube.

The Biblical Narrative Part 2 of 10

Because darkness is the absence of light…looking back now in hindsight…the steady progress of the light of scientific investigation of the natural world was always going to lead to a massively important theological epiphany…a non-materialistic final conclusion.

Given the true complexity of the natural world…the naturalistic materialism of Darwinian macroevolution was never going to survive the transition from the modern Age of Science in past decades to the current Age of Information…because random-chance search strategies cannot…in theory or in practice…produce complex things such as long words having more than three letters, full sentences, paragraphs, entire books in English or any other language, and the exceedingly complex language-of-life DNA molecule in living organisms…consisting of a coordinated double-helix strand of 3.4 to 3.5 billion bits (letters) in the form of a four-letter alphabet…of connected yet distinct biochemical information…the longest single “word” in existence…intelligently arranged sequentially to produce function…like a book or computer software code.

Assembling a small, isolated island of coherently meaningful information through a mindless, unguided, trial-and-error process…one step at a time…also simultaneously creates the by-product of a massive surrounding ocean of nonsensical junk…of failed trials…of meaningless gibberish.

A sea of errors is not what we observe in the natural world. The surrounding ocean of nonsensical junk does not exist anywhere in the universe…not in DNA, not in the fine-tuning of the cosmos to support complex life such as ourselves, and not in the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits…of brilliantly varied instinct…in all living creatures.

This notion is summed-up in the popular phrase: “God makes no junk.”

The novelist Agatha Christie would use up all of the paper and ink on the planet…long before she could successfully compose one of her classic murder mysteries like And Then There Were None…daily sitting at her typewriter hour-after-hour hitting random keystrokes…with her eyes closed.

The end-point result…the best final resolution of human scientific investigation was always going to emphatically refute blind, unguided naturalistic materialism…because the natural world always contained vast amounts of information…intelligently organized and sequenced for functional utility…too complex for naturalistic explanations of origin…waiting eons of time for human beings to discover the true nature and extent of this information…through the advancement of modern scientific investigation…to our present time.

Can everyone see the displacement element in the biblical narrative stories of faith...connected to the brilliance of a Creator God...demonstrated through modern science...who would therefore be better at writing life-scripts than we are?

What are your thoughts?

The Biblical Narrative Part 1 of 10

The first fully detailed journey-of-faith life-script in the Bible begins with Abraham…who lived around 2,100 or 2,200 B.C.

The biblical storylines of Enoch (Gen. 5:21-24) and Noah (Gen. 6:8-9:29)…coming before Abraham…are short in length…and do not have the amount of detail to be able to analyze the element of faith being lived-out in their life-scripts.

The fully developed life-script for Abraham the “father of faith” inaugurates the biblical narrative stories of faith…his life-story recorded in writing beginning in Genesis 12:1…Genesis being the first “book” in the Bible…composed sometime around 1,450 B.C. according to the dating given by conservative scholarship.

The biblical narrative worldview of experiential faith…in God…actualized into a real human life…therefore enters very early into the social and cultural sea of multiple competing options for human life…coming into existence in writing around 1,450 B.C. at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible…the Christian Old Testament…and completed in the first-century around 62-64 A.D. in the New Testament book of Acts…closing-out the biblical narrative stories of faith…ending with the life-script of Paul making contact and speaking with the local Jews upon arriving in Rome…awaiting his upcoming trial before the emperor Nero.

To put this timing into context in terms of an early introduction of the biblical narrative into the ancient marketplace of ideas…the invention of writing itself only goes back to as recent a time as 3,200 B.C. in the wedge-shaped cuneiform lettering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the cuneiform alphabet in Syria around 2,000 B.C., and in the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet dated around 1,000 B.C. The Greeks adopt the Phoenician writing script around 800 B.C.

Very early therefore in recorded human history, a worldly unconventional concept was introduced into the marketplace of ideas…that was revolutionary then and is still revolutionary today…coming into existence abruptly out of nowhere…without transitionally incremental small steps of development leading-up beforehand…to the God of the Bible displacing our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9; 2 Tim. 1:9-10)…starting with the life-script of Abraham.

When Abraham receives his calling of God in the northern city of Haran…hearing God’s voice in the Spirit…and begins his journey south to Canaan the Land of Promise…with each step he takes…God is intentionally displacing…culturally and theologically…whatever “normal” life Abraham might otherwise have lived in Haran…as defined by ancient conventional thinking…instead bringing into existence the entirely new and innovative creation of a journey of faith following the leading of God…consisting of a new life-script that Abraham could not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination…Abraham or any other ancient person at that time and place.

This displacement element…of the God of the Bible actualizing His higher ways and thoughts into the life of a human being…starting in the detailed life-script for Abraham…has a direct correlation today to the modern scientific discovery of complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that unearths through science the brilliant competence of a designing Creator having a conceptually perfect mastery over all of the aspects of the natural world…which then logically also extends into the moral realm of giving this same creatively perfect, intelligent Being the benefit-of-the-doubt…to present an equally credible, authoritative definition of truth, right and wrong…of best practices in human life…introduced into the marketplace of ideas by way of the biblical narrative stories of faith.

If the recent recognition in the last four to five decades of complex systems of information identified solely through human scientific investigation…which leads to the inescapable conclusion of the existence of intelligence as the causal explanation for the phenomenon we study in the living and non-living natural world…thereby eliminating the mindless and undirected naturalistic processes of materialism as being incapable of producing these complex systems of information…this also surprisingly removes the route of self-autonomy as a rationally plausible worldview option for human life.

If the imaginative brilliance of the composition of the architectural body-plans and related lifestyle habits of the tens of millions of living species on earth…clearly points towards the incredibly high intelligence of a designing Creator…this then also elevates the qualifications and the resume of this same God to skillfully displace our ways with His higher ways…in the form of an alternative God-composed journey of faith life-script…recognizing the obvious fact that we cannot live two different lives at the same time…one life lived within ordinary conventionality…and the other life revealing right and wrong in human life at the pinnacle of purpose and destiny.

The theme of these 10 posts is that Christians today should no longer be suspicious of science.

What are your thoughts?

Visual Proof does not Naturally Translate into a Biblical-Quality Journey of Faith

“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” (1 Cor. 2:7)

If Jesus a few days after the resurrection walked down the middle of Main Street and right into the Temple in Jerusalem…then like doubting Thomas…all of the common people along with the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes could examine His wounds and observe His resurrected new body…and accept as proof that Jesus is the promised Messiah and the Son of God.

But accepting the visual evidence…producing absolute knowledge like two plus two equals four…or the existence of the noonday sun…in accepting the empirical evidence that Jesus is the divine Son of God…this proof is a type of passive acknowledgement that is not the same thing as active faith…that will produce a willingness to follow Him.

This is like people saying to the recognized king of the realm: “We know that you are the rightful king, but we will not follow you into battle against a formidable adversary…because we do not think you are a qualified military leader.”

The Pharisees and scribes would have looked at the resurrected Jesus…talked with Him…examined His healed wounds…and then said: “Great…good for you…nothing has changed in our minds as a result of this newest miracle of yours…we still choose not to follow you…we refuse to enter in at the ‘narrow gate’ (Mt. 7:13-14) you mentioned in your Sermon on the Mount…we will continue to do religion the way we have set it up…to mix old traditions with going our own way…to suit ourselves” (Isa. 53:6).

Absolute knowledge by visual, empirical observation does not address the basic problem…does not displace, remove, or shift the mindset of self-sovereignty…of autonomous individualism…over into the God-sovereignty category of a biblical-quality walk of faith.

Jesus walking into the Temple in Jerusalem after His resurrection…offering absolute proof of His divinity in physically rising from the dead…surprisingly does not change…by force of reason alone…the inner man…and does not equate to everyone freely choosing to make Him Lord and Master of our lives.

After the resurrection…revealing Himself to the Pharisees and scribes would not have produced biblical faith…defined as willingly allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways…as ancient in Jewish history as the calling of Abraham to leave Haran and to go…by faith…to Canaan (Heb. 11:8-10)…as basic to Judaism as it gets…and fundamental to the Christian concept of picking up our cross to follow Jesus.

Visual, empirical observation of the resurrected Jesus by the religious elites and the general populace in Jerusalem…a few days after Easter morning…does not translate into Hebrews 11:1 faith to surrender all…to abandon self-sovereignty…and to follow Jesus Christ into an adventure of faith through life…to match the examples of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Hannah, David, Elijah, Esther and Mordecai, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah…to name a few from the Hebrew Bible…the Christian Old Testament…which sets forth the examples of the lives of faith which should have been commonplace…should have been the norm for Jewish living at the time of the ministry of Jesus in first-century Israel.

Like our free-will choice to love someone…our choosing to follow God…by purposeful, intentional, divinely creative design…will always be a free-will, take-it-or-leave-it, open option of the heart and mind…in first-century Jerusalem, in the present-day, and for all eternity in heaven.

This is the remarkably sublime beauty of the free-will, free-thinking, moral reasoning, risky from God’s standpoint, non-robots that God created humans to be…operating with or without absolute, visual, empirically foolproof evidence of God’s existence (Jn. 20:29).

The spiritual mystery of self-autonomous rebellion…of pushing God aside and out of our lives…is therefore one of the key moral issues under examination in this life and this broken world.

A person does not have to be a scholar to see in the Bible and to experience first-hand…that God initially takes people having hidden potential…yet at the start of their calling are broken, lost, and aimless in life (Mt. 9:10-13)…and through the divinely supportive respect and acceptance over time of salvation, redemption, and the life-altering insertion of a God-composed adventure of faith…aided and energized by the Holy Spirit…turns them into something vastly better than they could have previously imagined.

This is one of the main themes of the Bible. Some people will accept God’s lead and follow Him into their destinies…others will push God away and follow their own course.

This in itself should be a telling argument against the random-chance naturalism of self-sovereign worldly conventional thinking…by virtue of the sheer inexplicability…of the origin of the concept of biblical faith…of God displacing our ways with His higher ways and thoughts…and its persistent longevity over thousands of years.

Naturalistic materialism…if true…should produce one homogeneous human mindset…either self-sovereignty or God-sovereignty…one lifestyle habit per creature type…like the rest of the natural living world.

This should tell us…that as human beings…we are different (Gen. 1:26-27).

The complexity of the information content, the innovative originality of the main concepts, and the utter crash and collision with worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…makes a compelling commonsense apologetic case for the divine origin of the journeys of faith recorded in the Bible…above, beyond, and outside of humanistic literary invention.

This is the easier half in answering the question of why Jesus did not walk down Main Street and into the Temple a few days after His resurrection…which would have changed the dynamics of a journey of faith following Jesus Christ…instead into the type of absolute, visual, foolproof evidence that atheists and skeptics demand…but which falls short as the means to establish a personal relationship.

The hard part in analyzing the wisdom behind the delicate balance between belief and unbelief in this current world environment…is as follows:

After Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead…John 11:45-48 reads:

45 Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him.

46 But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.

47 Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.

48 If we let him alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.

The religious elites in Jerusalem decided to continue worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…self-autonomous self-rulership…by sacrificing Jesus Christ…by removing Him out of the way.

This is expressed in John 11:49-50:

49 And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all.

50 Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

Caiaphas said this in order to perpetuate the status quo…to continue worldly conventional normalcy and thinking as it existed at that time and place…and not at all for the initiating or the maintaining of biblical-quality journeys of faith…which the early church would soon step into and demonstrate to the world shortly (Acts 8:4)…”turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6).

Killing Jesus through Roman crucifixion…falsely as a political and religious malefactor…simply foretells what would happen if this same attitude of self-sovereignty…at its worst extreme version of worldly self-interest as demonstrated that day at the cross on Calvary Hill…was imported into heaven for all eternity.

One reason why God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden was to prevent their access to the Tree of Life (Gen. 3:22-24).

An eternity of disruptive, self-centered rebellion in heaven…is and would be…unacceptable.

This brings us to one of the key questions regarding the real truth about God…of why it is faith…and not visual, empirical evidence…that is the driving force in Christian discipleship…why faith is the central element in the God-composed journey of faith life-scripts from Abraham in Genesis…all the way through the Bible to Paul in Acts.

Truth by definition is exclusive. Multiple competing “truths” cannot all be true at the same time.

In a sea of lies, deceptions, and cleverly disguised half-truths…the biblical narrative stories of faith inject a narrative of truth into the marketplace of secular worldviews…all of which tell people to go their own way as autonomous individuals…to sit atop the thrones of their lives as junior gods…to create their own definition and standards of purpose and meaning in their lives…to operate entirely independent of the input of the God of the Bible

When there are multiple competing narratives…which are difficult to parse and evaluate…then giving someone or some program the benefit-of-the-doubt…may be the only reliable way to differentiate truth from error…right from wrong.

Giving someone or some idea the benefit-of-the-doubt…comes into play as the only way to test whether a particular narrative is true or false...and if experientially proven over the course of time to be true…by the process of elimination this then excludes the other multiple competing narratives.

Thus the entrance into the human history of the marketplace of ideas…the uniquely innovative calling of Abraham into a God-composed journey of faith life-script…that displaces whatever normative life Abraham might have otherwise lived in the city of Haran…with an entirely new life-script that Abraham could not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination.

This new journey of faith…in the narrative storyline of Abraham…inaugurates the concept of listening in the Spirit to hear the voice of God…and then following the leading of God into life-scripts that produce positive results on a grand scale…unprecedented in all of human history.

The first introduction of a false competing narrative…is recorded in Genesis chapter three in the temptation of Adam and Eve…a competing narrative of such deep sophistication that it functionally continues down to this present day:

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4-5).

This is the fundamental, competing false narrative that says that human beings are capable of going our own way…apart from God.

Another competing false narrative prominent today is the alluring appeal of the coveting of materialistic possessions…found at the bottom half of the American Dream…that forms a false standard for measuring self-validation and self-worth…as determined through worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

Another competing false narrative prominent throughout our modern culture…is that Darwinian evolution explains the origin of life and the vast diversity we see in the natural living world.

The philosophical worldview of scientism is one of the most destructive false narratives in our modern cultural thinking…being the root of the relativism regarding truth that undermines the natural moral law which differentiates right from wrong.

We have four or five centuries of scientific investigation into the workings of the natural world “under our belt”…and we think we now have the world by the tail.

We have major civil engineering projects building dams across rivers, flood control plains, interstate highways, and massive international airports…giving us a false sense of power and control.

But we actually have little control over the planet we live on. Yellowstone National Park in the state of Wyoming could explode into a mega-eruption…creating an extinction level event any day…over the course of a few short, catastrophic hours.

We believe that we are free-thinking and exercise free-will…but we are influenced and controlled by mega-narratives without knowing it.

There is a historically pivotal narrative in first-century Jerusalem in the third year of the ministry of Jesus Christ…in which it appears that the competing narrative guiding the religious elites in Jerusalem…is stronger than the narrative of following Jesus Christ.

As discussed in an earlier essay…as Jesus is mocked and taunted by those standing around watching Him die on the cross…it would appear that the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes have won…and Jesus and His followers have lost.

But the true narrative unfolds three days later when Jesus is resurrected from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea…to fulfill His unique destiny to be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin…”slain from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8).

Jesus walking openly down Main Street and into the Temple merely creates a new competing narrative based upon an empirical observation of the risen Jesus as Messiah…but this would for many people do nothing to inaugurate the true God-initiated narrative of a God-composed journey of faith life-script in which our ways are displaced by God’s higher ways and thoughts…an imperative necessity in human lives for first-century Jews living in Jerusalem and for Gentiles at that time scattered throughout Asia Minor, and for people today…as previewed for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

For the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes in the Temple interrogating the risen Jesus a few days after the resurrection…the newly revealed, factual knowledge that Jesus is risen from the dead…would merely be in the minds of the people who are proud, arrogant, self-confident, and self-led…simply another tool in their tool-kit of self-righteous good works within the false narrative they prefer of self-in-control, self-sovereignty…in contrast to the correct narrative of a humble walk of faith following the leading of God for their lives (Mic. 6:8).

In the Sermon on the Mount…Jesus identifies the one true narrative for right living…that excludes all other competing narratives:

“Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because narrow is the gate, and hard is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (Mt. 7:13-14)

In Mark 8:34-37…Jesus clarifies further the one true narrative for right living…again which excludes all other competing narratives based upon worldly conventional normalcy and thinking:

“Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

The exclusivity of truth is uncompromisingly and unapologetically stated by Jesus Christ when He says in John 14:6…”I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Jesus says to Martha before He raises her brother Lazarus from a rock covered tomb after being dead four days: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosover liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (Jn. 11:25-26).

This is the epitome of a worldview narrative that excludes all other competing narratives.

G. K. Chesterton observed that Christianity has not been “tried and found wanting” but “found difficult and never tried.”

To actualize God’s true narrative into human life…requires a God-composed journey of faith life-script that displaces our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9)…requires repentance and a turning away from the narrative of going our own way (Isa. 53:5-6)…requires a reformation in our worldview narrative (Mt. 4:17)…that the visual proof of Jesus walking down Main Street and into the Temple after His resurrection…will not produce.

The Thief on the Cross

The story of the thief on the cross recorded in Luke 23:39-43 is the minimum baseline example given to us in the New Testament gospels…that defines faith plus our good-works for salvation…that will pass the test of fire (Jn. 6:28-29; 1 Cor. 3:13; 1 Pet. 1:7).

This baseline example is illustrated through an actual event in history…spread-out over the short interval of a few hours…rather than a doctrinal concept given to us in explanatory…expository words alone.

This baseline standard for measuring salvation is given to us by no less an authority than Jesus Christ Himself…the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin…at the precise moments of that sacrifice…and from the very instrument…the cross on Calvary Hill…that procured our salvation.

This condemned thief is not coming down off the cross to start a positive, God-composed journey of faith life-script for the remaining years of his life. His wrists and feet are immovably pinned by long metal spikes to the wooden cross-beams of Roman crucifixion. He will die there in a few more hours. There is no time left to do anything good or bad from that moment forward…in any major way.

The thief on the cross at that moment in time…has nothing by way of reformed, future good-works to offer to God on behalf of his salvation…to qualify himself before God. There is no second chance for him to come down off the cross with the promise to live a better life going forward.

Yet when Jesus says to the thief on the cross…crucified alongside Him and sharing His fate that eventful Friday in history: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise”…this thief can then confidently take this promise “to the bank.” He can “bet the farm on it”…in utter and complete assurance.

This is not just the word of a great prophet…declaring a future event. This promise comes from Jesus Christ the divine Son of God…the very Word of God in the flesh.

The thief on the cross can rest in the inner peace and assurance of eternal salvation for the remaining few hours he has on this earth…from the extremely privileged position of observing the exemplary character of Jesus Christ the Son of God in action…dying next to him as the Passover Lamb of God for the sins of the world.

I believe this real-life example…spelled-out for us through an action event recorded in the Bible…resolves the controversial theological issue of the eternal security of our salvation while we are still in this life and engaged in our journey of faith…by combining in this specific example both ends of a short time-interval defined as biblical faith in Hebrews 11:1…”the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”…in this salvation story of the last final hours of the thief on the cross.

A fundamental problem here with the general biblical interpretation…believed by some people today…that we can lose our salvation…is that Jesus at that moment in time…is telling the thief that later that same day he will be with Jesus in His kingdom.

Jesus…as the divine Son of God…either possesses Himself…or is perfectly exercising through God the Father…timeless foresight.

In my opinion…the part that confuses the issue of eternal security is the seemingly incoherent blend of a God who exists in a timeless environment…and human beings that live in the four dimensions of time and space.

These two things do not appear on the surface…at first glance…to easily mix. But both these realities…God’s timeless existence and our lives spread-out within the forward march of the God-created dimension of time…are absolutely essential for developing confidence in the wisdom and leadership of God…and our placing trust in a God-composed journey of faith for our lives…that have this Hebrews 11:1 risk-element of elongated and stretched-out time.

Our future actualized promise of salvation…the “evidence of things not seen” regarding eternal life…does not occur yet in this current lifetime. This culminating event occurs at our resurrection…at the last trumpet sound…at the great Judgment Day and our entrance into heaven.

This is what introduces an element of confusion…which in actuality is instead another strong apologetic evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible.

This interval of time…the gap in practical, lived experience between where we are now and where we need to get to…this unique feature of biblical faith as defined by Hebrews 11:1…is an inseparable part of the storyline of every positive person in their biblical-quality journey of faith life-scripts…whether we are Moses, David, or the thief on the cross.

Whether our destiny-of-faith moment in history spans years, months, or a few short hours on the cross alongside Jesus the Passover Lamb of God of Isaiah 53…like this thief…the surety of our salvation is not dependent upon any specific duration of time…or more importantly is not dependent upon our performance over that period of time…because with a timeless God having divine foreknowledge…there is no future earthly span of time that conditionally determines our salvation…years, months, or hours.

The simplistic yet powerful lesson of the thief on the cross…is that he cannot “mess-up” his salvation during his remaining few hours…this short interval of Hebrews 11:1 time remaining for him…the brief entirety of his faith-journey…on his cross of execution alongside Jesus…as the sky overhead darkens and the earth rumbles that Friday afternoon.

Why…because the promise of the assurance of eternal salvation…comes from the mouth of the divine Son of God…Jesus Christ of Nazareth…from the cross…in the very act of being the Passover sacrifice for sin. Jesus that moment on the cross…either has Himself or is exercising from God the Father…divine timeless foresight.

This pivotal moment in time and the dramatic circumstances of this historic event…could not be more definitive and decisive on the topic of eternal security.

That Jesus Christ our eternal Savior and King…and this remarkable human thief on the cross having no merit or achievements to argue on his behalf for salvation…should come together in this moment in history…is not an accident (Isa. 53:12).

The promise of entering shortly into paradise…coming from the timeless foresight of Jesus Christ the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the sins of the world…while He is suffering and dying on the cross…to the thief also suffering and dying alongside Him…is an iron-clad, irrevocable, unalterable event that cannot change within the span of a few short hours…for both Jesus and the thief on their respective crosses.

The word of God is sure…not only because it is based on the high-quality of His character…but also because it is timeless.

This is a product of the timeless nature of God (Isa. 46:9-10)…and the functional nature of the limitations of time and space that God created for us…so that we might experience and discover the knowledge of good and evil…not in split-second, instantaneous flashes of time…but spread-out over longer intervals of time…sometimes only hours as in the case of the thief on the cross…as expressed in Hebrews 11:1 and as so beautifully told in Luke 23:39-43.

The scriptural arguments…for and against eternal security…have already been written and fill entire books.

But for the purposes of this book…the biblical narrative stories of faith are the God-designed vehicles that actualize the context of events…wherein our souls are measured.”

This is an apologetic argument for the divine origin of the Bible.

The events and circumstances of the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible…unlike any other form or genre of human literature…measure our souls on the basis of our faith and relationship with God.

Our souls are not only measured by courage in battle, or the resilience to bounce back from numerous defeats to accomplish greatness, or by an epiphany that changes us from being a crass, self-centered person to becoming a loving person through character growth…the theme of countless books, plays, and movies.

The quality of life-script events that will measure our souls at the apex…at the zenith…of moral reasoning and decision-making regarding our relationship with God…can only originate from God.

The thief on the cross could never have orchestrated the cascade of events that placed him that fateful Friday on a cross of execution alongside Jesus Christ the Son of God…with the opportunity to go along with the crowd in verbally mocking Jesus (Lk. 23:35-39)…or amazingly for the first and only time in his life…to discover the power, conviction, courage, and liberated audacity to resist the peer pressure in the moment…and to instead proclaim publicly through the Holy Spirit a faith in the God/man Jesus crucified alongside him…to his fellow thief and to any and all others standing around the crosses and listening…that would pass the test of saving faith for time eternal (Lk. 23:43).

On that fateful day…and over a few short hours…the soul of the thief on the cross was measured…and found brilliantly passing the test for salvation…according to God’s terms and standards.

The point I want to make here is monumental in its importance.

We need God-composed journey of faith life-scripts to actualize for us a context of life-events wherein our souls are measured…precisely so that we can succeed on God’s terms and by His standards…and not through the futility of good-works and self-realization according to our ways (Isa. 55:8-9).

This is the record of the biblical narrative stories of faith…including this incredibly inspiring story of the thief on the cross.

Choosing amongst the smorgasbord buffet of the wants and aspirations of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…a great education, a good job, high salary, good marriage, a big house, luxury automobile, European vacation, a stock portfolio, good health, and sending our kids to Harvard or Oxford…will not measure our souls in the way that the life-scripts of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Peter, Paul, and the thief on the cross…were measured.

The thief on the cross could not have orchestrated the events that led to his salvation that day…any more than Abraham could have orchestrated his life-script of faith…any more than Paul could have orchestrated the events that led to him becoming the premier Christian evangelical missionary to the first-century Greco-Roman world.

The grand irony here…that is far beyond the contemplative imagination of human literary invention…is that the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes standing around and mocking Jesus on the cross…who attempted to self-craft “perfect lives” according to their way (Mt. 6:2, 5; 9:12-13; 10:33; 11:16-19; 15:7-9)…end up unknowingly killing Jesus their Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin (1 Cor. 2:8).

The grand irony is that the one person who obtained on that day on Calvary Hill the assurance of the eternal security of salvation…for the short but priceless few hours from sometime around mid-morning to when he died at dusk that late afternoon…was the thief on the cross alongside Jesus.

There are two massive takeaways from this dramatic scene taking place in Jerusalem in the first-century.

Imagine in our mind’s eye the religious elites standing around the three crosses…mocking Jesus…the Roman soldiers who carried out the execution nearby…the women disciples of Jesus including His mother at the base of His cross weeping over what has occurred…and the two thieves crucified on each side of Jesus.

The first massive takeaway from this scene is the huge gulf between the two opposing outcomes of going our own way in self-sovereignty…in contrast to God-sovereignty.

Jesus is the perfect, blemish-free Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin. To qualify to be the atonement for sin…Jesus must be perfect. A flawed sacrifice…in terms of moral performance in life…would be unacceptable. Wealth, popularity, and political influence are not qualifiers in this Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin.

The problem of human sin…is the precise target homed-in on by the blemish-free moral life of Jesus Christ…perfectly lived according to a life-script composed by God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit.

The perfect life and the perfect life-script of Jesus…lead to the cross on Calvary Hill.

But trying to be perfect…our way…as demonstrated by the religious elites mocking Jesus…leads to placing Jesus on the cross. These two outcomes could not be more diametrically opposite.

The second massive takeaway from this scene on Calvary Hill two thousand years ago…is that the thief on the cross…immovably stuck there and not going anywhere or able to do anything…secular or religious in the slightest way…surprisingly and unexpectedly experiences that fateful day in his life the “joy unspeakable and full of glory” assurance of the eternal security of salvation for the otherwise physically agonizing hours he spends being executed by Roman crucifixion…through the sure words of promise spoken to him by Jesus the Son of God being crucified alongside him.

If we incorrectly believe that we can lose our salvation…this opens the door ever so slightly for self-achieved good-works and self-realization to creep in as the sustaining justification for maintaining our salvation.

The story of the thief on the cross…composed and orchestrated by God Himself…totally outside the contemplative imagination of human literary invention…tells us our salvation…that is based upon faith in Jesus Christ…in this divinely illustrated case of the thief on the cross…is eternally secure.

A Journey-of-Faith is Beyond Human Origin

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20)

A God-composed journey of faith life-script…of God displacing our ways with His higher ways…has to be considered supernatural…non-natural…because the way of the cross lands so far outside of worldly conventional thinking.

The novel idea that we would see the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42; Mk. 8:34-35) internally positioned within every narrative story of faith in the Bible from Genesis through Acts…a way of the cross utterly in conflict with worldly conventional norms (1 Cor. 1:18, 23)…and that this unconventional concept would be the creative invention of human writers attempting to start a new “religion”…is unthinkable.

That the cross of Jesus Christ falls far outside of the acceptable norms of conventional worldly thinking is clearly and unmistakably evidenced by the execution of Jesus Christ by Roman crucifixion…as the epitome of adverse reception…of worldly rejection…in the most lethally emphatic and utterly final method of communicated rejection imaginable.

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ clearly expresses what the conventionally normative world thinks of the risk element of a God-composed journey of faith life-script (Jn. 11:47-48; Josh. 1:7)…a journey of faith demonstrated at the divine level of quality…acted-out to perfection through the life of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

This rejection component of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ clearly and emphatically validates…in a totally unexpected and incontrovertible way…the supernatural origin of the way of the cross we see in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

The way of the cross exposes the strength of the tight grip that our claim to autonomous self-rulership holds over the human race…otherwise the first-century challenge of the teachings of Jesus Christ would have been nothing more than a typically collegial, inoffensive exercise in intellectual debate rather than the deadly, worldview threatening conflict it became.

Here in the geopolitical and theological terrain of first-century Israel…the way of the cross in the narrative stories of faith in the Bible, and the actual cross situated on Calvary Hill…intersect into an overlapping picture of such ingenious composition as to be totally outside of human inventive imagination.

The concept of God displacing our ways with His higher ways (Isa. 53:6; Prov. 3:5-6)…in direct contradiction to the pride-driven, universal humanism of autonomous self-rulership…is seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of an adventure of faith…blending together the unlikely combination of God’s sovereignty and human free-will (Gal. 2:20; Phil. 2:12-13) that could not…nor ever would…conceivably be the product of human invention.

If the way of the cross is an inseparable through-line of the life-scripts of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Ruth, Hannah, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Jeremiah through Peter, Paul, James, Mary and Joseph, Barnabas, and Silas…inexplicable by humanistic origin as evidenced through its thorough and complete rejection at Calvary…then the anti-supernatural bias of philosophical naturalism is turned on its head.

If the way of the cross in the Bible cannot be explained by human composition…because it falls far outside of the creative contemplation of human nature…falls far outside the boundaries of any conceivable thinking motivated by the typical self-centeredness of worldly conventional norms…then the source of its origin must be supernatural.

Why is belief and faith so important?

When we exercise faith in someone else…a wife or husband, child, friend, or subordinate at work…and this brings out the best in them…inspires them to “rise to the occasion”…this is a commendable character trait in the person extending their faith…that resides at the top of the natural moral law (that C.S. Lewis wrote about).

So, in setting up faith-journeys as part of our relationship with God as we take up our cross to follow Jesus (wherever that leads in our individual lives and callings), God is allowing us to first exercise commendable faith directed towards Him…to put into practice this invaluable character trait…which cannot possibly actualize if our faith is solely pointed inward…in ourselves alone (Heb. 11:6).

This is one reason why every adventure of faith in the Bible and in the church age up until today is supernaturally composed.

We do not possess the capacity to imaginatively create an adventure of faith scenario that would involve ourselves as the main character, and then be able to integrate our life-script cohesively with millions upon millions of other complex life-scripts all leading toward a coherent overall plan of salvation.

Skeptics and critics of the Bible must be able to explain away the presence of the way of the cross integrally embedded in every biblical narrative story of faith from Abraham through Paul…all of which comes together into perfectly focused and coordinated alignment with the historical cross…planted firmly in a definite place and time on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem in the first-century.

This simply cannot be done using the narrow, short-sighted, time-limited lens of human creative invention…given the factor of the extremely negative reception of the way of the cross culminating in the actual cross of Calvary recorded in history…which essentially eliminates the possibility of human inspirational invention in the formulation of the biblical message.

If we are looking for a humanistic explanation for the origin of the Bible, the way of the cross removes that option.

The way of the cross in the Bible and the actual historical cross of Christ come together into a superimposed, clear overlapping focus…in a premeditated plan of salvation and true religious experience…soaring far above human literary invention.