Josh McDowell's Blog, page 9

Listening for God to Speak

We can learn a lot about how God interacts with people by reading the Bible. Perhaps you’re familiar with the story of God calling out to a young Samuel in the middle of the night (1 Samuel 3:1-21), or how Jesus appeared to Paul in a blinding vision, as Paul was attempting to destroy the early Church (Acts 9:1-9). In both cases, God spoke audibly, His message direct and clear.

How many of us have prayed that God would likewise speak so clearly to us? That leads me to ask: Does God still speak to us in our modern world?

Yes, though perhaps not in the way that we typically define the word “speak.”Hearing God

Odds are, if God has a message for you, He won’t open the sky and beam Himself into your front yard. Or use a megaphone. Most of us can’t claim to have heard God speak to us in an audible voice — though some people do assert they have heard God say a word or phrase to them. It’s definitely possible, as the Bible proves. But God typically communicates to us today more subtly.

Have you ever been struck by the words of your pastor, or had a particular verse stand out to you as you read the Bible? That’s God speaking. Have you ever felt a persistent nudge to do something? That’s God speaking.

As we pay attention, we’ll find that God often uses His Word, as well as the words of others, to convict us of sin, give us answers, and guide us through tough situations. God also speaks to us through circumstance; the life issues personally affecting us.

Doubting God

If the Bible tells us that God regularly spoke to prophets and others, why doesn’t He talk to us so directly? Wouldn’t it make believing in Him and being a Christian so much easier?

Perhaps God wants us to get quiet, putting in real effort to hear Him. Perhaps He talked with the prophets directly because they spent so much time in prayer trying to discern His voice. Are you taking time to pray? Are you then patiently waiting for a response?

When I feel anxious or restless, I open my Bible app to find verses about trusting God. As I read the Scriptures, I feel God tell me not to worry; to simply trust His power and His goodness. I also hear God speak when He answers my prayers. In both cases, I am reminded that although I can’t see God, He is real and clearly at work in my life. My doubts diminish as my faith grows.

Trusting God

Perhaps God doesn’t speak to us audibly because He wants us to deepen our faith. In this era of science and technology, we’re told that it’s naive to believe in God because His existence hasn’t been proven by the scientific method.

Some argue that if God were real, He’d make it obvious not just by directly speaking to us, but by physically showing up. Then they’d believe He was real. God has already done so — in a big way. For three years, Jesus personally demonstrated God’s existence and supernatural power. Then He sacrificed Himself to prove God’s great love for us.

As much as we’d like to credit our human intelligence, we simply can’t comprehend God’s complex majesty. But through Jesus, we can know for sure that we haven’t been left here to muddle through life on our own.

God speaks to us all the time — because He longs to be in relationship with us. Are you making the time and space for Him to speak? Begin to do both, and you’ll discover how God, the Creator of the universe, chooses to speak to YOU.

NEXT STEPS

> Interested in knowing God personally? Get started with this really good info.
> Need prayer for more power in your faith? Contact us. We would love to pray for you!
> We invite you to read Josh’s book, More Than a Carpenter. This short apologetics classic examines the historical evidence of Jesus. He died. He rose. He lives. He is our hope and example!

GUEST BLOGGER CLAYTON THOMAS CARTER, A STUDENT IN PLANO, TEXAS, IS PASSIONATE ABOUT ENCOURAGING THE KNOWLEDGE OF A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW. HE ENJOYS PLAYING TRUMPET AND SERVING AT HIS CHURCH.

The post Listening for God to Speak appeared first on Josh.org.

Who Wrote Them? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 2

Hey, everyone! My name is Matthew. I’m a speaker and author with Josh McDowell Ministry. This is the second of a series on the historical reliability of the Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Last week we asked whether the original text of the Gospels is the same text we have today. This week we will start to examine if we can trust the text to be true. In this video, I’m asking: “Who wrote the Gospels?”

Are the Gospels Reliable? | Who Wrote the Gospels?

From a historical perspective, it doesn’t quite matter who wrote the Gospels. What matters is whether the Gospels are true. However, if we know the authors, when they lived, and how closely they associated with Jesus, we will be in a better position to determine whether their writings can be trusted.

The four Gospels are named after their traditional authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew was a tax collector and disciple of Jesus. Mark was an associate of Peter, a disciple of Jesus. Luke was a traveling companion with Paul, one of the first missionaries who claimed to have encountered Jesus. John was also a disciple of Jesus, and one of the closest to Him among the twelve. This puts all of these men in a good position to write about Jesus.

GOOD REASONS FOR AUTHORSHIP

You may have heard people say that the four Gospels are anonymous. This, I believe, is an oversimplification of the issue.

Our earliest copies of these manuscripts include descriptions at the start which say “The Gospel according to Matthew” or “Mark” or “Luke” or “John.” From a literary perspective, scholars consider this to be unusual, and so they suggest that these words were added when the gospels started to circulate together, maybe sooner. Whatever the case, we don’t need to have names explicitly written down. There are other reasons for believing the Gospels were written by these four men.

For instance, there is no competing tradition for the authors. The only exception I’m aware of would be a small group who denied the authorship of John near the end of the 2nd century, but that didn’t last. The ancient writer Irenaeus is one important author who gave us the authors of the four Gospels. He personally knew Polycarp, who knew John. This puts him in a great position to know who wrote the four gospels, especially John. They write about the authors as if there is no doubt, probably because there was no doubt. As far as we can tell, the whole Church knew the authorship of the Gospels. It appears these writings always had a name associated with them, even if the name wasn’t written down. In that sense, they weren’t anonymous.

SKEPTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST AUTHORSHIP

Some modern scholars have denied one or more of the authors, although it’s usually after ignoring the early Church writings or dismissing them quickly. For instance, some would say that Matthew is not the author of the first Gospel, because Matthew was an eye-witnesses disciple of Jesus and yet he appears to have drawn from Mark. So they ask: “Why would an eyewitness need to use a source?” Well, perhaps the Gospel of Mark had so much acceptance by the early Church that Matthew knew it would be good to use it in his material, and he didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Others point out that the first Gospel comes from a perspective that shows a deeper relationship with the Jews than one would expect to find in Matthew. But who’s to say Matthew didn’t know how to speak to his audience? It seems to me that the modern scholars who write against the traditional authors of the Gospels are speculating a lot. I think we would be justified to push against them because of the unanimous understanding from all the writers who lived within the first few hundred years of Jesus.

These early authors would have had many more resources than we have today. They would have had more connections with other people who knew about the Gospels. They would have been in a much better position to know who wrote the Gospels than those of us living nearly two thousand years later.

Another reason skeptics reject the traditional authors is that writings exist from early Christians who falsely attributed their writings to well-known people. For example, the Gospel of Peter was not written by Peter. And the Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas. The early church rejected the authorship of these books. We should trust that they had good reasons.

Some deny the traditional authorship of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they think the books were written after the supposed authors lived. This depends on how you date the Gospels. This will be the subject of our next video. I’ll see you then!

ENGAGE WITH MATTHEW

Josh McDowell Ministry:
Matthew’s Josh McDowell Ministry Speaker Page

Social Links:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram

Matthew is a Christian writer and speaker with a passion for the church to be united, strengthened, and unleashed to spread the good news of Jesus to every corner of the world. With a focus on apologetics and spiritual growth, Matthew offers a fresh voice. Matthew holds an M.Div from Talbot School of Theology.

The post Who Wrote Them? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 2 appeared first on Josh.org.

Freedom From Guilt: Confession and Repentance

Having racked up more than a million miles on three airlines, I have met a lot of people on planes. Every single time, our conversations came around to how they weren’t happy in their lives. As I shared that I grew up in a religious tradition that put a lot of focus on guilt, without fail each person leaned in to hear more.

It became clear to me that we all tend to hold onto guilt. And we so desperately want to be free of it. Read on to learn the two simple steps I shared with them for doing just that!Self-Imprisoned By Our Guilt

In my chats with my fellow travelers, I was amazed to hear that they, too, had been raised under the dark, stormy clouds of guilt. They would ask me the denomination I was raised in, but I kept it hidden, for one reason: I don’t think it’s fair to blame a denomination or specific church, when it’s individuals — myself included — who chose to sin.

Instead, I told them that what mattered is that I knew how they could get rid of their guilt. For good. Of course this piqued their interest, as they were suffering from not knowing how to resolve their guilt.

Some had tried self-medication with drugs, alcohol, work, or sex. Others had tried to find an emotional salve. But no matter what they tried, their results were temporary. Some told me they heard a nagging voice continually whisper that they’d done wrong. Others heard a shouting voice that got right in their face.

So how do we get rid of this condemnation? We turn to God. He did not create us to be weighed down by guilt. Which is why He has given us two simple steps to remove it: confession and repentance. Let’s look at what these words mean, and how our two actions differ.

HUMBLING CONFESSION

The first step is our confession that we have sinned. We have to name it, own it, and confess it.

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight (Psalm 51:3-4)

At its core, sin is our thoughts and actions that are against God. God is light, love, and purity. As God is holy, our sin revolts Him. Let me use the analogy of a dirty sock. Imagine a surgeon, all sanitized, gowned, gloved, and prepped for surgery, stooping to pick a dirty sock off the ground as he heads into the operating room. It would revolt us if the surgeon then approached the patient and began the surgery without again sanitizing his hands.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

Our confession shows God that we recognize the dirtiness of our sin, and that we’re ready to repent of it so that it doesn’t stand between us and Him. We need to remember that our sin hurts God, because He is holy and incapable of sin. We feel guilt because we intuitively know that we’ve wounded Him by our sin. But, amazingly, God never turns away from us! At any point, because of Jesus’ great sacrifice, we can confess and walk free of our guilt and shame. 

REDEEMING REPENTANCE

Our confession is our agreeing with God that we have sinned. Our repentance goes a step further: We turn from ourselves to respond to God. You and I can know that we have experienced repentance when we gain new understanding that leads to our living differently, on purpose, for Him.

Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. (Luke 3:8)

Our repentance is more than our saying we’re going to change. It’s our being intentional to actually change. Despite the pull of our sinful nature, we can commit to aligning our thoughts, words, and actions with God’s nature and His expressed will revealed in His Word. God knows this is hard for us, which is why He offers us continual grace. There are no loopholes. Jesus has provided our guarantee!

I can tell you that even when I’ve got confession and repentance down pat, I recognize there’s no guarantee that I won’t sin again. But there is great power and strength in seeing my sin in the light of the cross. This motivates me, more than anything else, to live my life in loving response to Him. Because I know how much He loves me — and how much I truly desire to please and honor Him — I stay willing to do the humbling work of confession and repentance. I encourage you to do the same!

Our ongoing process of sanctification is not enjoyable. But we can experience the JOY of being freed of our guilt as we take these two simple steps. Walk free of your guilt today!

NEXT STEPS

> Interested in knowing God personally? Get started with this really good info.
> Need prayer for more power in your faith? Contact us. We would love to pray for you!
> We invite you to read Josh’s book, More Than a Carpenter. This short apologetics classic examines the historical evidence of Jesus. He died. He rose. He lives. He is our hope and example!

Guest blogger Chet Gladkowski recently celebrated his 50th anniversary of teaching the Bible. He approaches the pain, issues, and heartache people face with the solution of a relationship with Jesus Christ.

The post Freedom From Guilt: Confession and Repentance appeared first on Josh.org.

Who Wrote The Gospels? | Gospels Reliable? Video 2

My name is Matthew. I’m a speaker and author with Josh McDowell Ministry. After you watch this video, feel free to leave a comment here or via my social channels, listed below. I’d love to hear from you and be a small part of your wrestling with these important questions about Jesus. I also invite you to subscribe to my channel! 

Are the Gospels Reliable? Who Wrote The Gospels?

From a historical perspective, it doesn’t quite matter who wrote the Gospels. What matters is whether the Gospels are true. However, if we know the authors, when they lived, and how closely they associated with Jesus, we will be in a better position to determine whether their writings can be trusted.

The four Gospels are named after their traditional authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Matthew was a tax collector and disciple of Jesus. Mark was an associate of Peter, a disciple of Jesus. Luke was a traveling companion with Paul, one of the first missionaries who claimed to have encountered Jesus. John was also a disciple of Jesus, and one of the closest to Him among the twelve. This puts all of these men in a good position to write about Jesus.

> GOOD REASONS FOR AUTHORSHIP

You may have heard people say that the four Gospels are anonymous. This, I believe, is an oversimplification of the issue.

Our earliest copies of these manuscripts include descriptions at the start which say “The Gospel according to Matthew” or “Mark” or “Luke” or “John.” From a literary perspective, scholars consider this to be unusual, and so they suggest that these words were added when the gospels started to circulate together, maybe sooner. Whatever the case, we don’t need to have names explicitly written down. There are other reasons for believing the Gospels were written by these four men.

For instance, there is no competing tradition for the authors. The only exception I’m aware of would be a small group who denied the authorship of John near the end of the 2nd century, but that didn’t last. The ancient writer Irenaeus is one important author who gave us the authors of the four Gospels. He personally knew Polycarp, who knew John. This puts him in a great position to know who wrote the four gospels, especially John. They write about the authors as if there is no doubt, probably because there was no doubt. As far as we can tell, the whole Church knew the authorship of the Gospels. It appears these writings always had a name associated with them, even if the name wasn’t written down. In that sense, they weren’t anonymous.

> SKEPTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST AUTHORSHIP

Some modern scholars have denied one or more of the authors, although it’s usually after ignoring the early Church writings or dismissing them quickly. For instance, some would say that Matthew is not the author of the first Gospel, because Matthew was an eye-witnesses disciple of Jesus and yet he appears to have drawn from Mark. So they ask: “Why would an eyewitness need to use a source?” Well, perhaps the Gospel of Mark had so much acceptance by the early Church that Matthew knew it would be good to use it in his material, and he didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Others point out that the first Gospel comes from a perspective that shows a deeper relationship with the Jews than one would expect to find in Matthew. But who’s to say Matthew didn’t know how to speak to his audience? It seems to me that the modern scholars who write against the traditional authors of the Gospels are speculating a lot. I think we would be justified to push against them because of the unanimous understanding from all the writers who lived within the first few hundred years of Jesus.

These early authors would have had many more resources than we have today. They would have had more connections with other people who knew about the Gospels. They would have been in a much better position to know who wrote the Gospels than those of us living nearly two thousand years later.

Another reason skeptics reject the traditional authors is that writings exist from early Christians who falsely attributed their writings to well-known people. For example, the Gospel of Peter was not written by Peter. And the Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas. The early church rejected the authorship of these books. We should trust that they had good reasons.

Some deny the traditional authorship of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they think the books were written after the supposed authors lived. This depends on how you date the Gospels. This will be the subject of our next video. I’ll see you then!

ENGAGE WITH MATTHEW

Josh McDowell Ministry:
Matthew’s Josh McDowell Ministry Speaker Page

Social Links:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram

Matthew is a Christian writer and speaker with a passion for the church to be united, strengthened, and unleashed to spread the good news of Jesus to every corner of the world. With a focus on apologetics and spiritual growth, Matthew offers a fresh voice. Matthew holds an M.Div from Talbot School of Theology.

The post Who Wrote The Gospels? | Gospels Reliable? Video 2 appeared first on Josh.org.

Who Wrote Them? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 2

After you watch this video, feel free to leaving a comment here or via my social channels, listed below. I’d love to hear from you and be a small part of your wrestling with these important questions about Jesus. I also invite you to subscribe to my channel! 

Are the Gospels Reliable? Who Wrote Them?

From a historical perspective, it doesn’t quite matter who wrote the Gospels. What matters is whether the Gospels are true. However, if we know the authors, when they lived, and how closely they associated with Jesus, we will be in a better position to determine whether their writings can be trusted.

The four Gospels are named after their traditional authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew was a tax collector and disciple of Jesus. Mark was an associate of Peter, a disciple of Jesus. Luke was a traveling companion with Paul, one of the first missionaries who claimed to have encountered Jesus. John was also a disciple of Jesus, and one of the closest to Him among the twelve. This puts all of these men in a good position to write about Jesus.

> GOOD REASONS FOR AUTHORSHIP

You may have heard people say that the four Gospels are anonymous. This, I believe, is an oversimplification of the issue.

Our earliest copies of these manuscripts include descriptions at the start which say “The Gospel according to Matthew” or “Mark” or “Luke” or “John.” From a literary perspective, scholars consider this to be unusual, and so they suggest that these words were added when the gospels started to circulate together, maybe sooner. Whatever the case, we don’t need to have names explicitly written down. There are other reasons for believing the Gospels were written by these four men.

For instance, there is no competing tradition for the authors. The only exception I’m aware of would be a small group who denied the authorship of John near the end of the 2nd century, but that didn’t last. The ancient writer Irenaeus is one important author who gave us the authors of the four Gospels. He personally knew Polycarp, who knew John. This puts him in a great position to know who wrote the four gospels, especially John. They write about the authors as if there is no doubt, probably because there was no doubt. As far as we can tell, the whole Church knew the authorship of the Gospels. It appears these writings always had a name associated with them, even if the name wasn’t written down. In that sense, they weren’t anonymous.

> SKEPTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST AUTHORSHIP

Some modern scholars have denied one or more of the authors, although it’s usually after ignoring the early Church writings or dismissing them quickly. For instance, some would say that Matthew is not the author of the first Gospel, because Matthew was an eye-witnesses disciple of Jesus and yet he appears to have drawn from Mark. So they ask: “Why would an eyewitness need to use a source?” Well, perhaps the Gospel of Mark had so much acceptance by the early Church that Matthew knew it would be good to use it in his material, and he didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Others point out that the first Gospel comes from a perspective that shows a deeper relationship with the Jews than one would expect to find in Matthew. But who’s to say Matthew didn’t know how to speak to his audience? It seems to me that the modern scholars who write against the traditional authors of the Gospels are speculating a lot. I think we would be justified to push against them because of the unanimous understanding from all the writers who lived within the first few hundred years of Jesus.

These early authors would have had many more resources than we have today. They would have had more connections with other people who knew about the Gospels. They would have been in a much better position to know who wrote the Gospels than those of us living nearly two thousand years later.

Another reason skeptics reject the traditional authors is that writings exist from early Christians who falsely attributed their writings to well-known people. For example, the Gospel of Peter was not written by Peter. And the Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas. The early church rejected the authorship of these books. We should trust that they had good reasons.

Some deny the traditional authorship of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they think the books were written after the supposed authors lived. This depends on how you date the Gospels. This will be the subject of our next video. I’ll see you then!

ENGAGE WITH MATTHEW

Josh McDowell Ministry:
Matthew’s Josh McDowell Ministry Speaker Page

Social Links:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram

Matthew is a Christian writer and speaker with a passion for the church to be united, strengthened, and unleashed to spread the good news of Jesus to every corner of the world. With a focus on apologetics and spiritual growth, Matthew offers a fresh voice. Matthew holds an M.Div from Talbot School of Theology.

The post Who Wrote Them? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 2 appeared first on Josh.org.

Really Listening for God to Speak

We can learn a lot about how God interacts with people by reading the Bible. Perhaps you’re familiar with the story of God calling out to young Samuel in the middle of the night (1 Samuel 3:1-21), or how Jesus appeared to Paul in a blinding vision, as Paul was attempting to destroy the early Church (Acts 9:1-9). In both cases, God spoke audibly, His message direct and clear.

How many of us have prayed that God would likewise speak so clearly to us? That leads me to ask: Does God still speak to us in our modern world?

Yes, though perhaps not in the way that we typically define the word “speak.”Hearing God

Odds are, if God has a message for you, He won’t open the sky and beam Himself into your front yard. Or use a megaphone. Most of us can’t claim to have heard God speak to us in an audible voice — though some people do assert they have heard God say a word or phrase to them. It’s definitely possible, as the Bible proves. But God typically communicates to us today more subtly.

Have you ever been struck by the words of your pastor, or had a particular verse stand out to you as you read the Bible? That’s God speaking. Have you ever felt a persistent nudge to do something? That’s God speaking.

As we pay attention, we’ll find that God often uses His Word, as well as the words of others, to convict us of sin, give us answers, and guide us through tough situations. God also speaks to us through circumstance; the life issues personally affecting us.

Doubting God

If the Bible tells us that God regularly spoke to prophets and others, why doesn’t He talk to us so directly? Wouldn’t it make believing in Him and being a Christian so much easier?

Perhaps God wants us to get quiet, putting in real effort to hear Him. Perhaps He talked with the prophets directly because they spent so much time in prayer trying to discern His voice. Are you taking time to pray? Are you then patiently waiting for a response?

When I feel anxious or restless, I open my Bible app to find verses about trusting God. As I read the Scriptures, I feel God tell me not to worry; to simply trust His power and His goodness. I also hear God speak when He answers my prayers. In both cases, I am reminded that although I can’t see God, He is real and clearly at work in my life. My doubts diminish as my faith grows.

Trusting God

Perhaps God doesn’t speak to us audibly because He wants us to deepen our faith. In this era of science and technology, we’re told that it’s naive to believe in God because His existence hasn’t been proven by the scientific method.

Some argue that if God were real, He’d make it obvious not just by directly speaking to us, but by physically showing up. Then they’d believe He was real. God has already done so — in a big way. For three years, Jesus personally demonstrated God’s existence and supernatural power. Then He sacrificed Himself to prove God’s great love for us.

As much as we’d like to credit our human intelligence, we simply can’t comprehend God’s complex majesty. But through Jesus, we can know for sure that we haven’t been left here to muddle through life on our own.

God speaks to us all the time — because He longs to be in relationship with us. Are you making the time and space for Him to speak? Begin to do both, and you’ll discover how God, the Creator of the universe, chooses to speak to YOU.

NEXT STEPS

> Interested in knowing God personally? Get started with this really good info.
> Need prayer for more power in your faith? Contact us. We would love to pray for you!
> We invite you to read Josh’s book, More Than a Carpenter. This short apologetics classic examines the historical evidence of Jesus. He died. He rose. He lives. He is our hope and example!

GUEST BLOGGER CLAYTON THOMAS CARTER, A STUDENT IN PLANO, TEXAS, IS PASSIONATE ABOUT ENCOURAGING THE KNOWLEDGE OF A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW. HE ENJOYS PLAYING TRUMPET AND SERVING AT HIS CHURCH.

The post Really Listening for God to Speak appeared first on Josh.org.

Is Atheism More Reasonable Than Christianity?

Welcome back to our series based on Josh McDowell’s apologetics book, More Than a Carpenter. Let’s continue discussing why atheists believe society is better chucking religion, particularly Christianity. Let’s start with this assertion: Atheism is more reasonable than Christianity. True?

More Than a Carpenter blog #whoisjesus

Is Atheism More Reasonable Than Christianity?

Atheists assert that atheism holds the rational higher ground. The late atheist Christopher Hitchens noted that religious belief requires faith, but atheism doesn’t, because it relies primarily on the empirical evidence of science. But didn’t Albert Einstein state that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is incomprehensible? Einstein understood a basic truth about science: that it relies on certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world — including the existence of a real external world that is orderly and knowable, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions.

This raises a thorny dilemma for atheists: If the human mind developed through the blind, material process of Darwinian evolution, is it trustworthy? Charles Darwin himself pondered this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Atheists place enormous trust in their personal powers of reason. Yet their worldview undermines the basis for such confidence. If Darwinian evolution is true, our cognitive faculties are the result of an unguided, irrational process, which should make us distrust them. “Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rational and logical at every level,” notes prize-winning physicist Paul Davies. “Atheists claim that the laws [of nature] exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this hard to accept. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.” Atheism undercuts any such rational ground, while theism does provide a foundation. We can expect a rational universe if God exists. In her article God Versus Science: Atheists Aren’t as Rational As You Might Think, Lois Lee notes, “The problem that any rational thinker needs to tackle is that the science increasingly shows that atheists are no more rational than theists. Indeed, atheists are just as susceptible as the next person to ‘group-think’ and other non-rational forms of cognition. For example, religious and nonreligious people alike can end up following charismatic individuals without questioning them.”

Is atheism more reasonable than Christianity? What might lead an atheist to change his or her mind? What are your thoughts? We’d love to hear them!

Next week we’ll look at another atheist assertion: Atheism is more scientific than Christianity. See you then!

Jesus: He’s More Than a Carpenter!

FREE download: Read the first chapter of Josh’s bestseller, More Than a Carpenter. You can buy the book here. Watch how More Than a Carpenter changed one reader’s life AND set off a chain reaction that introduced many others to Jesus. That’s how the truth of God’s love is shared: person to person! Want to learn more about starting YOUR personal relationship with Jesus? Click here.

The post Is Atheism More Reasonable Than Christianity? appeared first on Josh.org.

Is Life Better With Atheism?

Welcome back to our series based on Josh McDowell’s best-selling book, More Than a Carpenter, in which Josh shares the historical evidence for the divinity of Christ, and how Judeo-Christian standards have long benefitted the world.

Modern atheists, however, assert that religion is the bane of human existence … that science has disproved God … and that society will flourish when atheism is embraced. Really? Let’s discuss!

More Than a Carpenter blog #whoisjesus

Is Life Better With Atheism?

Atheism is not new. About 1,000 years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, King David described a person who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). There have always been people who deny the existence of God, but recent polls indicate that U.S. adults increasingly identify as atheist or agnostic. This is due, partly, to atheist influencers receiving a warm welcome in classrooms and the media. But it’s also due to Christians being less committed to actively living out their faith. 

Per a December 2021 article by Pew Research Center, the religiously unaffiliated population in the U.S. is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago. About three-in-ten U.S. adults are now religiously unaffiliated. As more U.S. youth are being raised by non-religious parents, they are easy marks for atheist claims.

“The latest cognitive research,” states University of Kent Research Fellow Lois Lee in her article Why Atheists Are Not as Rational As Some Like to Think, “shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. So if a parent says that they’re Christian, but they’ve fallen out of the habit of doing the things they say should matter – such as praying or going to church – their kids simply don’t buy the idea that religion makes sense.”

Another report states that about 40 percent of U.S. atheists are between the ages of 18 and 29, and 37 percent are between 30 and 49. Millennials and Gen Z are the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse generation to date.

The influence of modern atheist authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens has spread far beyond the publishing world. Their goal: eradicate any rational grounds for religious belief. In their view, Christianity poisons society. 

It’s not a stretch to say that contemporary atheists celebrate the death of God. They hold zero tolerance for religious faith. It must go. The sooner, the better. They assume, notes Professor John Haught of Georgetown University, that we “can just drop God like Santa Claus without having to witness the complete collapse of Western culture — including our sense of what is rational and moral.”

Many have bought into the argument that Christianity is a dangerous relic that needs to go. But if we do a side-by-side comparison of atheism and Christianity, will we find that banning God and Judeo-Christian standards from society is a good thing?

Is life better with atheism? Let’s discuss further in our next post when we look at the atheist claim that atheism is more reasonable than Christianity.

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The post Is Life Better With Atheism? appeared first on Josh.org.

Are the Gospels Reliable? Video 1

My name is Matthew. I’m a speaker and author with Josh McDowell Ministry. I look forward to our time together. Please feel free to ask questions along the way by leaving a comment here or on any of my social channels, which are listed below. I’d love to hear from you and be a small part of your own journey wrestling through these important questions about Jesus. Let’s get into it!

The books of the Bible were written thousands of years ago on material that typically only lasted for a couple of hundred years. So the original writings of the gospels are long gone. Instead, we have copies of copies of copies of the original writings. These copies are called manuscripts, and they are all different from each other in subtle ways because people make mistakes in the process of copying manuscripts.

In order to reconstruct what the original would have said, it helps to have as many copies as possible so that we can cross-check them with one another. We also look for the age of these manuscripts. Manuscripts that date closer to the time of the original writing have less time to become corrupted by mistakes or changes.

In both of these questions, the New Testament does far better than any other ancient document in history. If we take the New Testament, which is the writings about Jesus and content from his disciples, we have around five thousand eight hundred manuscripts in the original language, and almost 23-hundred of them include text of the Gospels.

To put this in perspective, most ancient historical writings of high regard have around a couple hundred manuscripts. Plato’s Tetralogies have about 237. The plays of Sophocles have about 226. The next runner-up after the New Testament is Homer’s Iliad, with around 1,900 manuscripts. Compared to the average ancient text, that’s incredible. But compared to the New Testament, it’s really small.

We also have a lot of manuscripts written very early after the original. According to New Testament scholar Dan Wallace, a manuscript specialist, “Today we have as many as 12 manuscripts from the second century, 64 from the third, and 48 from the fourth — a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament. Most of these are fragmentary, but the whole New Testament text is found in this collection multiple times.”

If a manuscript lasts an average of several hundred years, then the earliest manuscripts we have may well be only a small handful of generations removed from the original. If there were only a few generations of copies, we would expect the manuscripts to be pretty close. There would be some spelling differences, some words missing or copied twice by mistake. And for the most part, that’s all we get when comparing our earliest manuscripts. But that’s no reason to doubt our confidence in what the original would have said.

For the sake of example, let’s say I have four different manuscripts which read as follows:

Everyone left for home when the party died down.

Everyone left for home as the party died down.

Everyone left as the party died down.

Everyone left for home when the pary died down.

Even after all these differences, do you have a sense of what the original was trying to communicate? Certainly! When the party died down, people went home.

The exact wording is less clear. But the fourth manuscript has an obvious spelling mistake (“pary” instead of “party”). One of them doesn’t mention the people going home, but all the others do. It’s not clear whether people left “when” or “as” the party died down, but the meaning is essentially the same. With actual manuscripts we would have more to go by, like the dating. So let’s imagine that the earliest ones used the word “when,” making reading 1 most likely the closest to the original.

If we turned to the internal evidence for these manuscripts, looking at the larger context of the writing, looking at the typical styles and writing behaviors of the authors, we might be able to get even closer to an accurate and confident assessment of what the original text would have said.

When you work with manuscripts of the gospels and the Bible in general, the vast majority of your problems are not much different than this. There are some tricky spots, but there is no important doctrine or fundamental teaching of Christianity jeopardized by the differences in our manuscripts.

What if the Gospels were intentionally changed? Well, our early manuscripts come from different places around the middle-eastern world. It’s not like any person could travel the middle eastern world and change all of the manuscripts without the churches noticing. For this to work, they would have to access the text of the Gospels before it was copied and spread around the world. But how would they have known that the text was important enough to mess with until after it was already starting to spread? There’s just no good reason to suspect that we’ve lost the meaning of the original text, either by accident or by malicious intent.

Since we can be confident that the text we have today reflects the text that was written down, we are ready to ask if the text written down is true. I invite you to watch the rest of the videos. And please subscribe to my channel!

ENGAGE WITH MATTHEW

Josh McDowell Ministry:
Matthew’s Josh McDowell Ministry Speaker Page

Social Links:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram

Matthew is a Christian writer and speaker with a passion for the church to be united, strengthened, and unleashed to spread the good news of Jesus to every corner of the world. With a focus on apologetics and spiritual growth, Matthew offers a fresh voice. Matthew holds an M.Div from Talbot School of Theology.

The post Are the Gospels Reliable? Video 1 appeared first on Josh.org.

Do we have the original writings? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 1

My name is Matthew. I’m a speaker and author with Josh McDowell Ministry. I look forward to our time together. After you watch this video, please feel free to leaving a comment below or via my social channels, which are listed below. I’d love to hear from you and be a small part of your wrestling with these important questions about Jesus. 

Are the Gospels Reliable? | Testing the Manuscripts

The books of the Bible were written thousands of years ago on material that typically only lasted for a couple of hundred years. So the original writings of the Gospels are long gone. Instead, we have copies of copies of copies of the original writings. These copies are called manuscripts, and they are all different from each other in subtle ways because people make mistakes in the process of copying manuscripts.

In order to reconstruct what the original would have said, it helps to have as many copies as possible so that we can cross-check them with one another. We also look for the age of these manuscripts. Manuscripts that date closer to the time of the original writing have less time to become corrupted by mistakes or changes.

In both of these questions, the New Testament does far better than any other ancient document in history. If we take the New Testament, which is the writings about Jesus and content from his disciples, we have around 5,800 manuscripts in the original language, and almost 2,300 of them include text of the Gospels.

To put this in perspective, most ancient historical writings of high regard have around a couple hundred manuscripts. Plato’s Tetralogies have about 237. The plays of Sophocles have about 226. The next runner-up after the New Testament is Homer’s Iliad, with around 1,900 manuscripts. Compared to the average ancient text, that’s incredible. But compared to the New Testament, it’s really small.

We also have a lot of manuscripts written very early after the original. According to New Testament scholar Dan Wallace, a manuscript specialist, “Today we have as many as 12 manuscripts from the second century, 64 from the third, and 48 from the fourth — a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament. Most of these are fragmentary, but the whole New Testament text is found in this collection multiple times.”

If a manuscript lasts an average of several hundred years, then the earliest manuscripts we have may well be only a small handful of generations removed from the original. If there were only a few generations of copies, we would expect the manuscripts to be pretty close. There would be some spelling differences, some words missing or copied twice by mistake. And for the most part, that’s all we get when comparing our earliest manuscripts. But that’s no reason to doubt our confidence in what the original would have said.

For the sake of example, let’s say I have four different manuscripts which read as follows:

Everyone left for home when the party died down.

Everyone left for home as the party died down.

Everyone left as the party died down.

Everyone left for home when the pary died down.

Even after all these differences, do you have a sense of what the original was trying to communicate? Certainly! When the party died down, people went home.

The exact wording is less clear. But the fourth manuscript has an obvious spelling mistake (“pary” instead of “party”). One of them doesn’t mention the people going home, but all the others do. It’s not clear whether people left “when” or “as” the party died down, but the meaning is essentially the same. With actual manuscripts we would have more to go by, like the dating. So let’s imagine that the earliest ones used the word “when,” making reading 1 most likely the closest to the original.

If we turned to the internal evidence for these manuscripts, looking at the larger context of the writing, looking at the typical styles and writing behaviors of the authors, we might be able to get even closer to an accurate and confident assessment of what the original text would have said.

When you work with manuscripts of the Gospels and the Bible in general, the vast majority of your problems are not much different than this. There are some tricky spots, but there is no important doctrine or fundamental teaching of Christianity jeopardized by the differences in our manuscripts.

What if the Gospels were intentionally changed? Well, our early manuscripts come from different places around the Middle East. It’s not like any person could travel there and change all the manuscripts without the churches noticing. For that to work, the text would need to accessed before it was copied and spread around the world. But how would anyone have known that the text was important enough to mess with until after it was already starting to spread?

Are the Gospels reliable? Yes. There’s just no good reason to suspect that we’ve lost the meaning of the original text, either by accident or by malicious intent.

Since we can be confident that the text we have today reflects the original text, we are ready to ask if the text is true. I answer that in the next video. See you there. Please subscribe to my channel! Thanks!

ENGAGE WITH MATTHEW

Josh McDowell Ministry:
Matthew’s Josh McDowell Ministry Speaker Page

Social Links:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram

Matthew is a Christian writer and speaker with a passion for the church to be united, strengthened, and unleashed to spread the good news of Jesus to every corner of the world. With a focus on apologetics and spiritual growth, Matthew offers a fresh voice. Matthew holds an M.Div from Talbot School of Theology.

The post Do we have the original writings? Reliability of the Gospels | Video 1 appeared first on Josh.org.