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This doesn’t mean they didn’t trust the Holy Spirit to bring people to God. Rather they trusted the Holy Spirit to use their arguments and evidence to bring people to God.
If the gospel is to be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women today, then it’s vital that we as Christians try to shape American culture in such a way that Christian belief cannot be dismissed as mere superstition. This is where Christian apologetics comes in.
When you’re going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it.
You can’t force someone to accept the conclusion if he’s willing to pay the price of rejecting one of the premises.
Part of the challenge of getting American people to think about God is that they’ve become so used to God that they just take Him for granted. They never think to ask what the implications would be if God did not exist. As a result they think that God is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether God exists or not.
So before we share with people evidence for God’s existence, we may need to help them see why it matters in the first place.
The absurdity of life without God may not prove that God exists, but it does show that the question of God’s existence is the most important question a person can ask.
My claim is that if there is no God, then meaning, value, and purpose are ultimately human illusions. They’re just in our heads. If atheism is true, then life is really objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless, despite our subjective beliefs to the contrary.
If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.
For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong.
In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil.
The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.” But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear which way the evidence points. Today the proponent of the kalam cosmological argument stands comfortably within the scientific mainstream in holding that the universe began to exist.
If the universe will expand forever, then it will never actually arrive at equilibrium. Because the volume of space is constantly growing, the matter and energy always have more room to spread out. Nevertheless, as the universe expands, its available energy is used up and it becomes increasingly cold, dark, dilute, and dead. It will eventually become a thin gas of subatomic particles endlessly expanding in absolute darkness.
The Personal Creator of the Universe The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe. This cause must be itself uncaused because we’ve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and nonphysical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.
The kalam cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful Personal Creator of the universe.
Atheists will say that once all the purely natural properties are in place, then the moral properties necessarily come along with them.
I want to list, however, five reasons why I think this skeptical assumption is wrong.
local officials, Luke gets it right. According to Professor Sherwin-White, “The confirmation of historicity in Acts is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd.”[5]
Another story illustrating Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness is the story of Jesus’ answer to John the Baptist in prison (Matt. 11:2–6; Luke 7:19–23).
The criterion of embarrassment supports the historicity of this incident, since John the Baptist seems to be doubting Jesus. The phrase “the one who is to come” harks back to John’s prophecy of “the one who is coming after me,”
In mounting a colt and riding into Jerusalem, Jesus is deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Jesus is deliberately and provocatively claiming to be the promised king of Israel.
Virtually all critics acknowledge that during the following week Jesus did cause some sort of disruption in the Jerusalem temple, which resulted in a temporary halt to commercial activities there. The last sentence of Zechariah’s prophecy is “And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day” (Zech. 14:21). Jesus is deliberately fulfilling these prophecies, asserting His authority in the holiest precincts of Judaism.
At the trial Jesus is accused of claiming to do the same thing. His refusal to answer these charges provokes the high priest to demand, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61). This accusation shows that Jesus was on trial for His messianic claims.
But Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah could be represented to the Roman authorities as treasonous, so that they would execute Jesus. Independent sources testify that the plaque nailed to the cross over Jesus’ head recording the charge against Him read, “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26; John 19:19).
Now what does this parable tell us about Jesus’ self-understanding? It tells us that He thought of Himself as God’s only Son, distinct from all the prophets, God’s final messenger, and even the heir of Israel itself!
Jesus explicitly claims to be God’s Son in Matthew 11:27
Finally, another fascinating saying revealing Jesus’ sense of being God’s Son is His claim concerning the date of His return: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32). It seems highly unlikely that this saying could be the later product of Christian theology, because it ascribes ignorance to the Son. The criterion of embarrassment requires the authenticity of the reference to the Son’s ignorance. Just how embarrassing the saying was is evident in the fact that although Matthew reproduces it (Matt. 24:36), Luke omits
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It’s very likely that Jesus claimed to be the Son of Man. This was Jesus’ favorite self-description and is the title found most frequently in the gospels (over eighty times). Yet remarkably, this title is found only once outside the gospels in the rest of the New Testament (Acts 7:56). That shows that the designation of Jesus as “the Son of Man” was not a title that arose in later Christianity and was then written back into the traditions about Jesus. On the basis of the criteria of independent sources and of dissimilarity, we can say with confidence that Jesus called Himself “the Son of Man.”
For Jesus did not refer to Himself as “a son of man,” but as “the Son of Man.” Jesus’ use of the phrase with the definite article “the” is consistent throughout the gospels. By using the definite article, Jesus was directing attention to the divine-human figure prophesied in Daniel 7:13–14 (RSV). Daniel describes his vision in the following way:
Here in one fell swoop Jesus affirms that He is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the coming Son of Man. He compounds His crime by adding that He is to be seated at God’s right hand, a claim that is truly blasphemous in Jewish ears. The trial scene beautifully illustrates how in Jesus’ self-understanding all the diverse claims blend together, thereby taking on connotations that outstrip any single title taken out of context.
The saying is likely to be authentic, not only because it seems to envision an earthly kingdom that did not immediately materialize, but also because of the awkwardness of envisioning a throne for Judas Iscariot, who was known to have fallen away. Jesus’ calling twelve disciples is no accident: The number twelve corresponds to the twelve tribes of Israel.
A Jewish rabbi’s typical style of teaching was to quote extensively from other learned teachers, who provided the basis of authority for his own teaching. But Jesus did exactly the opposite.
“When Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt. 7:28–29 RSV).
Here Jesus explicitly quotes the teaching of the law (Deut. 24:1–4) and opposes to it, on the basis of His own authority, His teaching on the matter. In Mark’s gospel, He declares that Moses does not represent the perfect will of God on this matter and presumes to correct the law on His own authority as to what is really the will of God. But no human being, no prophet or teacher or charismatic, has that kind of authority.
His Use of “Truly, I Say to You” Second, Jesus’ use of the words “Truly, I say to you” expresses His authority. This expression is historically unique and is recognized on all hands to have been the way Jesus marked off His authoritative word on some subject. The Jewish writer Ahad Ha’am protests, “Israel cannot accept with religious enthusiasm, as the word of God, the utterances of a man who speaks in his own name—not ‘thus saith the Lord,’ but ‘I say unto you.’ This ‘I’ is in itself sufficient to drive Judaism away from the Gentiles forever.”[7]
First, it shows that Jesus claimed divine authority over the spiritual forces of evil. Second, it shows that Jesus believed that in Himself the kingdom of God had come. Jesus is saying, “My ability to rule the spiritual forces of darkness shows that in me the kingdom of God is already present among you.”
In parables like the prodigal son, the lost sheep, and so forth, Jesus describes persons who have wandered away from God and are lost in sin. In Jewish thought such a person was irretrievably lost and therefore given up as dead. But Jesus extended forgiveness to such persons and welcomed them back into the fold.
No mere prophet could presume to speak for God on this matter. Jesus “is consciously speaking as the voice of God on matters that belong only to God.”
Recall His reply to the disciples of John the Baptist, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (Matt. 11:4–5–6).
Moreover, Jesus’ miracles differed from those of Jewish holy men in that Jesus never prays for a miracle to be done.
Moreover, none of the other Jewish miracle-workers carried out a prophetic ministry, made messianic claims, or brought any new teaching in conjunction with their miracles.
“I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8–9).
For Jesus is saying that people’s salvation depends on their confession to Jesus Himself.
Resurrection In Jesus’ day it was clear what the various Greek, Aramaic, etc. words for resurrection did not mean. Resurrection did not mean life after death in some disembodied form, it did not mean the immortality of the soul in either torment or paradise, and it did not mean reincarnation. It meant the reversal of death, restoration to some kind of bodily immortality. Many pagans believed in disembodied life after death, but they considered resurrection impossible. Some (not all) Jews expected resurrection for the righteous at the end of days—but not for anybody before then. A resurrected
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The Fact of Jesus’ Empty Tomb Here I’ll summarize five lines of evidence supporting the fact that the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of His women followers on the Sunday after His crucifixion.
tomb. But that’s not all! Further independent testimony to Jesus’ burial by Joseph is also found in the sources behind Matthew and Luke and the Gospel of John. The differences between Mark’s account of the burial and those of Matthew and Luke suggest that they had sources other than Mark alone.
Straight to the Source The gospel writers used sources for the life of Jesus, as they themselves tell us. Much of New Testament studies is devoted to detecting those sources, for they will drive you back very close to the events themselves, thereby reducing the probability of legend or alteration. Mark, for example, was likely one of the sources used by Matthew and Luke. Mark evidently had a source for the passion story, since it stands out in his gospel as a connected narrative. Matthew and Luke also had other sources than Mark; some think they had a collection of Jesus’ sayings to which
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Mark’s Burial Account It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a
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The second line of evidence regarding the empty tomb is this: The discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb is independently reported in very early sources.
