Xty FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN'T CHRISTIANS J E WHITE Ch 3,4
3 JESUS 101
"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Jesus (Matt. 16:15)
He was born in a small, obscure village of somewhat questionable repute, the child of a peasant woman. He didn't go to high school or college. In fact, he never traveled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He never wrote a book. He never held public office. And he was only thirty-three years old when the tide of public opinion turned against him, prompting even his closest friends to abandon him. He was then turned over to his enemies and was nailed to a wooden cross between two criminals. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. After he died, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of an acquaintance.
Yet today, he is arguably the central figure of the entire human race. His life even marks our concept of time. We call this AD 2019, Latin for anno Domini, "the year of our Lord." Anything before that is referenced by BC, meaning, "before Christ." As Philip Yancey observed about the life of Jesus, "You can gauge the size of a ship that has passed out of sight by the huge wake it leaves behind."i No wonder that everyone, no matter where they are spiritually, is intrigued by Jesus and fascinated by his life and his teaching, message, and mission.
Historicity
Let's begin with the most obvious question to consider: Did Jesus even exist? Are we talking about someone who is real or is he a myth?2 Actually, this one is easy to
check off the list. No scholar, no matter where they stand on Christianity itself, denies that the man Jesus, the one the Bible talks about, existed in time and history. Jesus is one of the most documented figures in all of human history. You find him listed in the writings ofThallus, who was a first-century Greek writer; Pliny the Younger, a lawyer and author of ancient Rome; the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius; and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Of course, the most detailed record is found in the Bible, which gives not one, but four independent, eyewitness biographical accounts written by the men Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. More than a few historians have noted that his is the most documented life in all of ancient history.
So we know Jesus existed.
We also know a few other things for certain. We know that his teaching was of such a compelling nature that, to this day, it's part of our cultural ethos. Whether memorable lines such as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or timeless stories like the prodigal son (which you can read in the New Testament of the Bible in Luke 15:11-32), no one has been more spiritually or culturally influential. We also know that miracles were attributed to him. Whether you buy into the possibility of miracles or not, people who witnessed his life said he did them. We know that after a public ministry he was sentenced to death through a Jewish and then Roman legal process. We know that on the third day after his execution there was an empty tomb. A stone was rolled away and the body was gone. Even the Romans owned that. Now, they had their version of what happened, which we'll explore soon, but that the tomb was empty is without a doubt. And we know his followers went running around the landscape saying that Jesus had risen from the dead and that they had seen him, talked with him, and touched him. This
wasn't just one of the disciples making this claim, or even just a handful, but all of
them. There are even records of groups numbering in the hundreds who witnessed the resurrected Jesus at the same time. After that first Easter, the Jesus movement exploded. By AD 100, there were around 25,000 followers. By AD 310, there were 20,000,000. And today, there are billions and Christianity is the world's largest religious faith.
So who was he . . . really?
What Did Jesus Look Like?
think the face of Jesus looked like. [BBC Photo Library]
One of the things people seem to be the most curious about when it comes to Jesus is what he looked like. Is there a physical description of Jesus The answer is,
"Yes and no." First, the no. The Bible never says, "Jesus was white, 6'3", with blond hair and chiseled good looks." But here's the "yes" part. We do know that he wasn't white, 6'3, with blond hair and chiseled good looks. While there is not a single historical reference to the physical appearance of Jesus and nothing in the Bible that describes his looks, we do know that he was a Mediterranean Jew; therefore, his skin would have had the olive darkness to it that you find in that region to this day. This also means he didn't speak English. Not even King James English (sorry, he never uttered the words thee or thou). His native tongue was Aramaic. He would have been schooled as a boy in Hebrew and probably Greek, which was the common language of business and commerce, but when walking down the road with family, Aramaic was the language of choice. Being a Mediterranean Jew also means that he wasn't overly tall—probably well under six feet. And, according to the ancient prophecies surrounding the coming of the Messiah that Christians believe apply to Jesus, he wasn't physically impressive at all. In fact, the prophet Isaiah wrote in the Old Testament of the Bible that "he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isa. 53:2). So the idea that Jesus was "tall, dark, and handsome" is only accurate on the "dark" part.
Forensic scientists used cultural and archaeological data to create what they
Painting of Christ Pantocrator in the Church of the Pater Noster, Jerusalem
[Wi ki media Commons]
The earliest drawing ever made of him, at least the earliest that is still in existence, dates to the fifth century. The original hangs in one of the most ancient Christian structures on Earth, St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai desert of Egypt. It's called the Christ Pcintocrator, translated "Christ Almighty." It is the classic picture of Christ that dominated ancient Christianity and continues to be displayed in many churches to this day.
Enhanced photo of the face of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin [Wikimedia
Commons]
While the picture is ancient, we are far from certain Jesus looked like this. Forensic anthropologists have tried to re-create what Jesus might have actually looked like from common skeletal remains of that era and region. The image they came up with is not particularly flattering, but would fit the biblical prophecies as well as the distinguishing features of his actual ethnicity.3
But if you want to go all the way back, the earliest possible image we have (hotly debated in terms of authenticity) is the famed Shroud of Turin. It is thought to be the shroud the body of Jesus was wrapped in following his crucifixion, and that miraculously carries his image to this day.
In truth, we don't know what he looked like beyond being short, dark skinned,
and without any shot of being named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. What Was His Childhood Like?
A second set of questions many have about Jesus relate to his childhood: What was it like? What was he like as a child? What was life like for him growing up? There's not a lot of information to be found here. Most of the biographical material we have begins with his birth and then leapfrogs to his thirtieth year, when he began his public ministry. But there are some things that we do know that might be of interest.
First, it is helpful to be reminded of what the heart of the Christian faith maintains: Jesus is God himself in human form, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. One of the most amazing teachings in the Bible about God is the idea that God is triune. That his very nature is trinity. The Bible teaches the oneness of God—there are not many gods, but only One God. But then the Bible follows that up with another teaching: there are three persons who are each referred to as God—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Not
three gods, but three persons who are one God. So you find Jesus referring to God the Father, but then referring to himself as God as well. And he was God the Son. To be the "son" of someone in the way Jesus was referring to meant to be of the same order as that person, and to have the same qualities as that person. This is mind-boggling to think about on so many levels, but just consider it in terms of God really becoming human, starting off with becoming a baby. Philip Yancey writes that the God who could have roared, "who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged . . . as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, [and] who depended on a [poor]
teenage [mother] for shelter, food and love."-4
This means the childhood of Jesus was very much like any other child's. Max Lucado writes that once born, he had to have his diaper changed. When he hit puberty, he had pimples. He may have been tone-deaf. Perhaps a girl down the street had a crush on him. It could have been that his knees were bony, or that he had a cowlick in his hair that Mary, his mother, could never do anything with. He was completely divine, but he was also completely human. But that raises all kinds of questions, doesn't it? This child who was God in human form—what was that like? Lucado made a list of questions he'd like to ask Mary:
What was it like watching him pray?
Did you ever feel awkward teaching him how he created the world?
Did he ever come home with a black eye?
Did he do well in school?
Did he ever have to ask a question about Scripture?
Who was his best friend?
Did you ever think, That's God eating my soup?.
So what do we know about those early years in Jesus's life? Well, we know he was raised in poverty. We know this from a scene that took place on the fortieth day after his birth. His parents, Mary and Joseph, took him to Jerusalem to present him at the Temple. You see, in Jesus's day, following the birth of a son, a mother had to wait forty days before going to the Temple to offer a sacrifice for the purpose of her purification. The intent was to consecrate the baby to God. Back then, it was usually just the firstborn who was dedicated in this way, for it was the firstborn who had all the rights of inheritance. As part of the dedication, it was common for the parents to give a sacrifice or an offering. In the Bible we are told that Mary and Joseph chose to offer a pair of doves (or a pair of pigeons), which indicates they were poor. The best and most common sacrifice was a lamb, and the only reason to offer a substitute was if you didn't have the money for a lamb. This required securing special approval for a pair of doves or a pigeon to be accepted—a recognition that you were so poor you couldn't afford anything else. Mary and Joseph apparently did this, so we know they were poor.
The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple by Francesco Vittore Carpaccio at the
Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy [Wikimedia Commons]
Another significant fact we know about his childhood is that he was raised in the town of Nazareth. It was not a large place, just a little village. And not a very good one. Nazareth didn't carry a good reputation. If I told you I came from Bangladesh, Nigeria, or Syria, images of poverty, violence, or unrest would probably instantly come to mind. Nazareth had a bad social reputation, as well. The people were seen as backward, illiterate, and poor. Later, in the Bible's record of the life of Jesus, you read that when people heard him referred to as Jesus of Nazareth (that's how people were identified then—their first name and where they were from), they said, "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" (John 1:46). Even the name
Nazarene in that day was synonymous with someone who was despised. Let's just say he came from the wrong side of the tracks.
Another dynamic of Jesus's childhood that a lot of people either don't know or don't think about is how he was raised by a single-parent mother during his formative teenage years. He didn't have Joseph as his father for very long. One of the better-known details about Mary is that when she was betrothed to Joseph and received her angelic visit about giving birth to Jesus as a virgin, she was young. In that day, engagement usually took place immediately after entering puberty, so Mary would have just entered her teens—as in thirteen, fourteen, or, at the most, fifteen. But what isn't as well known is that while Mary was young, Joseph was old. So theirs was what is known as a May-December romance. And by our standards, very May and very December. He was probably in his thirties or forties and, as mentioned, she may have been as young as thirteen. But this would not have been
uncommon for that day.
Then, whether it was because of his age or illness or both, sometime after Jesus
turned twelve Joseph apparently died. The last record of Joseph is when Jesus was twelve, when he and Mary took Jesus to the Temple. The next scene from the life of Jesus, found in all four biographical accounts of his life in the Bible, is when he was thirty and began his public ministry. And in all four accounts, not a word is mentioned of Joseph. When Jesus returns home, when Jesus interacts with Mary—no Joseph. He is never present at any event in Jesus's adult life, even when the rest of Jesus's family is there. And on the cross, before his death, Jesus asks a man named John, who was also one of his closest friends and followers, to watch over Mary. This intimates that Jesus, as the eldest son, had carried that responsibility to that point and now was asking another family member (John may have been a cousin of Jesus) to watch over his mother. This tells us that Mary was a widow, and that sometime between the ages of twelve and thirty, probably in Jesus's teen years, Joseph had died. Regardless of exactly when he died, or what filled his life before this marriage, his death explains why Jesus didn't begin his public ministry until the age of thirty. He was providing for the family, carrying on as a carpenter as taught by his father. He assumed the role of caregiver until his brothers were able to assume primary care for their mother and the other siblings.
Did He Have Brothers and Sisters?
This brings us to another common question: Did Jesus have brothers and sisters? As you read just a moment ago, yes, he had brothers. Christians believe his brothers were half-brothers through Mary, since he was conceived of the Holy Spirit through a virginal conception, part of the miracle surrounding Christ as the God-Man. Probably the most famous of Jesus's siblings was James, who wrote the part of the New Testament of the Bible known as the book of James. James was a later son of Mary and Joseph, and head of the Jerusalem church. He was one of the
select individuals Jesus appeared to after his resurrection. He was called a "pillar" of the early church, meaning someone who was instrumental in building it, keeping it up, making it strong. Another famed follower of Jesus, a man by the name of Paul, was used by God to write much of the New Testament. On Paul's first visit to Jerusalem, he went immediately to see James, acknowledging the influential nature of his leadership in the early church. When the early church leader Peter was rescued from prison, Peter told his friends to be sure and tell James. Tradition has it that he was known as "old camel knees," because thick calluses built up on his knees from many years of determined prayer. Tradition also has it that he was martyred through a beheading around AD 62 under the great persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Nero.
When Did He Know He Was God?
So if Jesus was a normal child who was fully human but also fully God, when did he discover the God side of things? Was he born with some kind of weird maturity so that he knew it from day one? Did it come to him sometime during puberty? Did it happen when he was baptized by the man known as John the Baptist at age thirty, when he began his public ministry? When did Jesus know that he could walk on the water he had to take a bath in?
Nobody knows.
But we have a hint that he knew by the time of puberty, the time of his coming of age, which would have been around twelve. We know this because of the only scene recorded in the Bible about his adolescent years. It's worth reading:
Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. When Jesus
was twelve years old, they attended the festival as usual. After the celebration was
over, they started home to Nazareth, but Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents didn't miss him at first, because they assumed he was among the other travelers. But when he didn't show up that evening, they started looking for him among their relatives and friends.
When they couldn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem to search for him there. Three days later they finally discovered him in the Temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening to them and asking questions. All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
His parents didn't know what to think. "Son," his mother said to him, "why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere."
"But why did you need to search?" he asked. "Didn't you know that I must be in my Father's house?" But they didn't understand what he meant.
Then he returned to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. And his mother stored all these things in her heart.
Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people. (Luke 2:41-52 NLT)
At twelve, Jesus went to the Temple and stayed there day and night. He demonstrated a wisdom and intelligence, a spiritual maturity and insight that was unnatural. He was already amazing people at twelve. And though his parents were frantic, he knew they shouldn't have been. He knew they should have known where he would be—in his Father's house. And even that sentence is significant. The Jews of that day would never have simply said "my Father." That was too informal, too intimate. They would have said "our Father," or even more likely, "our Father in heaven." But not Jesus. Just "my Father." So it would seem that at this time, he knew who he was. It also appears that this knowledge was something he grew into, matured into, and gained an ever-increasing understanding of, as his physical, human life developed. Notice that last line again of the verses above, noting how Jesus matured, growing up in both wisdom and stature.
Was He Ever Married?
So when he grew up, was there a Mrs. Jesus? One of the most common myths surrounding the life of Jesus is that he got married and had children. That's not surprising since a bestselling novel in modern history, Dan Brown's The Do Vinci Code, made that idea its central premise.
At first glance, the plot wasn't anything that stood out above the normal mystery fare. The murder of a curator at the Louvre in Paris leads to a trail of clues found in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and to the discovery of a centuries-old secret society. But that's not what grabbed our collective cultural attention. Brown went on to write that the clues in Leonardo's work and the mission of the secret society revolved around the Holy Grail. This was not referring to the chalice Jesus used during the Last Supper. The novel suggested that the Holy Grail was instead a reference to the bloodline of Jesus. That a woman named Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and the mother of his child. And because she bore descendants, specifically a daughter named Sarah, she was, in fact, the Holy Grail. In the novel, Mary fled after the crucifixion with Sarah to the south of France, where they established the Merovingian line of European royalty. This became the basis for the secret society to preserve the bloodline and protect the secret until it was time to make it known to the world.
The problem with all of this is that Brown contended that he was basing his entire book on fact. So was he? Not according to every reputable scholar on the
planet. First, about Mary Magdalene. The Bible states that Mary was a devoted
follower of Christ, liberated from a serious illness of some kind that had plagued her life. She was present at his crucifixion and burial and was the first person Jesus appeared to following his resurrection. She was even charged to bring the news of his resurrection to his disciples, which she did. She was a remarkable woman, prominently featured in the New Testament of the Bible and honored throughout Christian history. But married to Jesus or a secret lover? There is absolutely no evidence that indicates Mary had a relationship with Jesus beyond being a devoted spiritual follower. Karen King, a history professor at Harvard University, while never claiming that Jesus was married put forward the possibility of evidence that, after the time of Jesus, people believed he might have been. She now admits there is no evidence for that.7
What Did Jesus Say about Himself?
This brings us to the most significant thing to know about Jesus, and it has to do with what Jesus said about himself. It was very direct:
The Jews [said to Jesus], "Aren't we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?"
"I am not possessed by a demon," said Jesus. .. . "Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death."
At this they exclaimed, "Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?"
Jesus replied,".. . Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad."
"You are not yet fifty years old," they said to him, "and you have seen Abraham!"
"Very truly I tell you," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" At this, they picked up stones to stone him. (John 8:48-49, 51-54, 56-59)
Who did Jesus say he was? He referred to himself here as "I am." Now that's either very bad grammar or he was trying to say something very significant. Let's explore the significance.
The background of "I am" is found in one of the most famous stories in the Bible, the story of Moses before the burning bush. The entire story of Moses is amazing, which is why almost every movie made on the Bible is either on Moses or Jesus. As a Hebrew baby, he was put in a small boat-like crib on the Nile to avoid being killed, rescued by the daughter of the pharaoh of Egypt, raised as a prince, sent into exile after killing a man who was assaulting a fellow Hebrew—and we haven't even come to the plagues, the parting of the sea, or the Ten Commandments. But back to "I am."
God himself was speaking to Moses, telling him to go to the highest authority and power in the land and demand that he release all of his Hebrew slaves. Moses understandably wanted to have a little credibility, so he asked God to give him his name—the very name of God—so that he could say to the people exactly who had
sent him. Here's the answer God gave to Moses: "God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say . . . : "I AM has sent me to you" (Exod. 3:14). That phrase—"l AM"—is considered the most holy word in existence because it is the very name of God. It was considered so holy that the Jews would not even write it completely, penning only the four consonants: "YHWH." Scholars used to think it was pronounced "Je-ho-vah." We now know that the closest we can make of the actual name in light of the missing vowels is that it was pronounced "Yah-weh."
God said my name is "Yahweh"—"l AM."
Now, return to what Jesus said when asked about his identity: "'Very truly I tell you,' Jesus answered, 'before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58). Jesus claimed the very name of God for himself. He said, "You want to know who I am? I'll tell you—I am God." And the people listening understood him completely. They picked up stones to stone him, because this was nothing less than blasphemy. Here a mere man was claiming to be God himself. But this "mere man" made that claim repeatedly throughout his life. Here's a taste from some of the biographical records:
I am the Son of God. (John 10:36 TLB)
I am the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6 GNT)
The high priest asked him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" "I am," said Jesus. (Mark 14:61-62)
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. (John 14:9)
So in Jesus, we have a person who walked the earth and claimed to be God. No other major religious figure has ever made that claim—not Buddha, not Mohammed, not Confucius. Only Jesus made the claim to be God in human form. So what do you do with that? As has often been observed, there are only four options.
First, you can conclude that Jesus was a stark raving lunatic. Maybe he did think he was God, but he was severely sick psychologically. The problem is that in most cases of severe psychological disorder, the background of the person makes it very clear they had a profile and history of mental illness. But nothing in the historical record of the life of Jesus exhibits a single sign of any of the classical manifestations of mental illness, such as the inability to relate to the real world, inadequacy in personal relationships, or deficiencies in verbal skills. In fact, psychiatrist J. T. Fisher concluded that if you were to survey all of the
psychological data that Jesus's life has to offer, and boil it down to one essential and perfect prescription for mental health, it would be the Sermon on the Mount—the most famous single message Jesus ever proclaimed.
A second choice is to say he was simply a liar. Jesus said he was God but obviously knew he wasn't. But this would be saying that the man whose teaching has set the standard for integrity and honesty throughout the civilized world was a habitual, premeditated, pathological liar. Even more important to remember is that Jesus was arrested, mocked, beaten, and tortured prior to his execution. Willingly. Jesus was offered a full pardon by the Roman governor, Pilate, if he would simply deny his claim to be God. If con man could stop a nail being driven into the flesh of his hand by telling the truth, you would think he would. People who are playing the system for personal gain tend to change their game when it stops paying off. They keep up the lie until the deception costs them more than what they gained through the deceit. But Jesus endured it all. He never denied his claim to be God, though given every chance.
A third option is to say that Jesus was just a good man, maybe even a prophet from God, but that's all. Not many people want to say that Jesus was a lunatic or a liar, but they don't want to say he was God in human flesh, either. So they land on him being simply a good man, a holy man—no more. But there's a problem with this option as well. Here's what C. S. Lewis wrote about this idea:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.9
Lewis is right. Here we have a man who walked the earth and claimed to be God in human form. You can say that Jesus was insane—that the man who has, in the minds of many, given the world its greatest picture of sanity was in fact a stark raving lunatic. You can say that Jesus was a liar—that the man whose teaching has set the standard for integrity and honesty in the civilized world was a habitual, premeditated, pathological deviant.
Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord, which is, of course, the last of our four options. What you can't say is that Jesus was just a good man, maybe even a prophet, but that's all. That is one option he didn't give.
Why Did He Pray to God If He Was God?
So if you're adding all this up, you may have a nagging question about Jesus's identity: Why did he pray to God if he was God? And make no mistake, he did. A lot. So who was he praying to? Remember our earlier conversation about the nature of God being triune? The Trinity means that God is community, the perfect relationship between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here's how Brent Curtis and John Eldredge describe it:
Think of your best moments of love or friendship or creative partnership, the best times with family or friends around the dinner table, your richest conversations, the acts of simple kindness that sometimes seem like the only things that make life worth living. Like the shimmer of sunlight on a lake, these are reflections of the love that flows among the Trinity. We long for intimacy because we are made in the image of perfect intimacy.1Q
Or as the thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart wrote,
"We were created out of the laughter of the Trinity." So that's why you have Jesus—God the Son—praying, talking, and communicating with God the Father.
So Why Did He Come?
So why did God come to Earth in the person of Jesus? Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes of the risk and complexity of this divine desire through the tale of king:
Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden. . . . Every statesman feared his wrath and dared not breathe a word of displeasure; every foreign state trembled before his power and dared not omit sending ambassadors with congratulations for the nuptials. . . . Then there awoke in the heart of the king an anxious thought. . . . Would she be happy in the life at his side? Would she be able to summon confidence enough never to remember... that he was a king and she had been a humble maiden? For if this memory were to waken in her soul, and like a favored lover sometimes steal her thoughts away from the king, luring her reflections into the seclusion of a silent grief. . . where would then be the glory of their love?.12.
The king wanted true love, but how could her love for him be true? He could bring her to the palace, covering her body with silk and jewels in an effort to coax affection by blinding her eyes.
But this would be a purchased heart.
He could come to her cottage, casting a pall of glory and power over its humble surroundings, driving her to her knees in awe and wonder.
But that would be an overpowered heart.
No, neither elevation of her nor himself could achieve the desired end. Only his own descent. Thus the king becomes a humble servant and seeks to win her heart, for only if it is so won has it been truly given at all.
God could have made us love him, but if he had, his relationship with us—and ours with him—would have been meaningless. As I've said before, God wants our relationship with him and with others to be real. So he came to us.
As Jesus.
The Great Test
But how can we know if this story is true? If I told you that I was God in human form, come to earth to show the way and call the world back to myself, you would have every right to say, "Prove it." People certainly said that to Jesus and, rumor has it, he did prove it through a stunning array of miracles. From walking on water to raising the dead, Jesus silenced more than his fair share of skeptics. But he raised the stakes even further. He laid out a very specific "proof" for his claims that he invited anyone and everyone to judge him by. Christians believe he passed that ultimate litmus test and the entire world is still talking about it. His big proof?
Coming back to life after death. He told people all along it was what he was going to do, and that it was going to be the definitive validation that he was who he said he was.
Let me give you a taste of his words:
One day some teachers of religious law and Pharisees came to Jesus and said, "Teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign to prove your authority."
But Jesus replied, '. . . The only sign I will give . . . is the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights." (Matt. 12:38-40 NLT)
Some Pharisees and Sadducees were on him again, pressing him to prove himself to them. He told them, "You have a saying that goes, 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.' You find it easy enough to forecast the weather—why can't you read the signs of the times? . . . The only sign you'll get is the Jonah sign." (Matt. 16:1-4 Message)
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, said to be the spot of the
empty tomb [Wikimedia Commons]
Taking the twelve disciples aside, Jesus said, "Listen, we're going up to Jerusalem, where all the predictions of the prophets concerning the Son of Man will come true. He will be handed over to the Romans, and he will be mocked, treated shamefully, and spit upon. They will flog him with a whip and kill him, but on the third day he will rise again." (Luke 18:31-33 NLT)
Over and over again, Jesus made it clear that the one sign you could test him by was whether he would come back from the dead on the third day after his death. And because of that, whether he succeeded means everything. Even the Bible says it's everything. One of the leaders of the early church, Paul, wrote:
If there's no resurrection for Christ, everything we've told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you've staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ—sheer fabrications, if there's no resurrection. . . . But the truth is that
Christ has been raised up. (1 Cor. 15:13-15, 20 Message)
But is it the truth? Did he rise from the dead? J. Warner Wallace is a decorated homicide investigator. After completing training through the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, Wallace joined the force in Torrance, working on the SWAT team on the gang detail and investigating robbery and homicide cases. Later, he became a founding member of the department's cold-case homicide unit assigned to crack murders nobody else had been able to solve. His natural street-honed skepticism served him well. He once said, "As a cop, if you believe everything people tell you,
then you'd never arrest anyone." So for him, facts need to be solid, witnesses have to be credible, evidence must be persuasive, corroboration is always crucial, and alibis have to be dismantled.
And he's good—very good—at what he does. Wallace has been awarded the Police and Fire Medal of Valor "Sustained Superiority" award and the CopsWest award for his ability to get to the truth and solve crimes. He's so good that he's been featured on Court TV, NBC's Dateline, and other news outlets when they need expertise on what it takes to arrest killers who thought they got away with murder.
Then he decided to take on the coldest case of his life. One that didn't go back a few years, or even decades, but one that went back two millennia.
He took on the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
He was an atheist, didn't believe a resurrection had occurred, and wanted to figure out what did happen since his wife had started to dabble a little bit in Christianity. He spent six months of painstaking analysis employing everything he had mastered as a detective: resisting the influence of dangerous presuppositions, emphasizing the importance of abductive reasoning, respecting the nature of circumstantial evidence and the role it plays and does not play, evaluating the reliability of witnesses, examining the choice and meaning of language through forensic statement analysis, determining what's important evidentially, recognizing the rarity of true conspiracies, establishing reliability by tracing the evidence, getting comfortable with conclusions and, finally, distinguishing between possible alternatives and reasonable alternatives. At the end of his investigation, this cold-case specialist reached his conclusions: Christianity is true beyond a reasonable doubt; the resurrection actually happened. Today, Detective J. Warner Wallace is a committed Christian.13
So what was it he found?
There are certain facts any investigation of this nature has in its possession to begin with. We know that Jesus existed. We know that after a public ministry he was sentenced to death through Roman crucifixion. We know that on the third day, there was an empty tomb—the stone was rolled away and the body was gone. We also know that on the third day after his crucifixion, his followers were quite bold in saying that he had risen from the dead and that they had, in fact, seen him. From that starting point, let's put our detective hats on and look at all of our options.
Did the Disciples Steal the Body?
The first option is that the disciples—or followers of Jesus—stole the body and then spread the idea that he rose from the dead. Jesus had said he would rise from the dead on the third day; so, on the third day, they stole the body so that it would look like it really happened. That way they wouldn't look stupid for following him. If it became known that Jesus was a fake—that he didn't rise from the dead like he said he would—they would be the laughingstock of the entire Middle East. So they
stole the body, hid it, and then said he rose from the dead. Assuming this option, there were never any post-resurrection appearances and no empty tomb. The body was probably devoured by dogs, following the fate of most crucified Roman criminals without the benefit of a burial cave.
This was actually the primary idea that the enemies of Jesus raised when news of the empty tomb first hit. After the first few tweets came out about Jesus rising from the dead, the news started to trend on Facebook, and the first Instagram of the empty tomb went viral, his enemies sent out a few social media messages of their own. Even the Bible takes note of this and records how the rumor got started. The biography written by Matthew in the New Testament says:
A few of [the guards] went into the city and told the high priests everything that had happened. They called a meeting of the religious leaders and came up with a plan: They took a large sum of money and gave it to the soldiers, bribing them to say, "His disciples came in the night and stole the body while we were sleeping." They assured them, "If the governor hears about your sleeping on duty, we will make sure you don't get blamed." The soldiers took the bribe and did as they were told. That story, cooked up in the Jewish High Council, is still going around. (Matt. 28:11-15 Message)
The problem that story ran into then is the same one it runs into now. The tomb was protected by a full guard of Roman soldiers. A Roman guard contained up to sixteen highly trained, heavily armed, professional fighting men. You couldn't have just snuck by them during the night, because that would have required all sixteen guards to be asleep at the same time, including the ones posted to keep watch at the time of the supposed abduction. The Roman penalty for sleeping on guard duty was execution. Staying awake on duty was one of the highest values the Roman army held. So this would call for the most sacred vow and highest value of the Roman military to be uniformly discarded. But, even more important, rolling away a two-ton stone makes noise. Lots of noise. The kind of noise that wakes up sleeping Roman guards. All sixteen of them.
That's not even the biggest reason why this would be hard to believe. Let's say they pulled it off Let's say they did sneak past the guards and somehow rolled the stone away without waking anyone, and then stole the body out from under the noses of the guards. A conspiracy theory of this nature must account for the fact that, according to all four independent biographical accounts recorded in the Bible, the first witnesses to the resurrection were women. This would never have been invented by even the least sophisticated conspirators who wanted to authenticate a failed religious leader, for Jewish courts did not even accept the testimony of female witnesses.
But there's something even more telling: How does this account for the amazing, overnight transformation of the disciples from a band of frightened, betrayal-oriented cowards into a group of radical revolutionaries who willingly risked their lives to spread the message of the risen Jesus? Would this have happened for what they knew to be a lie? Eleven of the twelve disciples who hypothetically stole the body died martyr deathsj. Meaning they willingly, purposefully died for their story. They laid down their lives claiming to be eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus. I say eleven of the twelve because of John. The Roman authorities tried to kill John but were unsuccessful, so he ended up being exiled to the island of Patrnos. Regardless, each of the disciples was faced with a decisive moment: deny what you say about Jesus and his resurrection and live, or cling to your pathetic story and die the cruelest, most painful and vicious death possible. Every single disciple faced this test of torture and martyrdom for the sake of the truth of the resurrection of Christ and themselves as personal eyewitnesses, but they stood their ground. And it cost them everything.
Tradition tells us that John's brother James was beheaded; Matthew was slain with a combination battle-axe and spear; Philip was whipped, thrown into prison, and then crucified; Simon the Zealot was crucified; Peter was crucified in Rome; James (son of Alphaeus) was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and then beaten to death with a fuller's club; Bartholomew was beaten and then crucified; Andrew was bound to a cross from where he preached to his persecutors until his death; Thomas was run through the body with a lance; Jude was shot with arrows and then crucified; and Matthias, who replaced Judas Iscariot (the disciple who betrayed Jesus), was stoned and then beheaded.15 Now think about that for a minute. People will die for what they believe to be true—what they think is true even though it may be false. We see that all the time. But people don't have a tendency to die for what they know is a lie. Yet each of these eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus went to their death saying: "Jesus has risen, and I saw him. Kill me if you must, but it happened." So did the disciples steal the body? The evidence makes that very hard to believe.
Did the Jewish or Roman Authorities Steal the Body?
A second option is to say that the Jewish or Roman authorities stole the body. The dilemma with this view is one that crime detectives ask all the time: What would the motive be? They were the ones who put guards at the tomb to make sure the body wasn't stolen. Their biggestfear was somebody stealing the body. That's public record, and even recorded in the Bible:
The high priests and Pharisees arranged a meeting with Pilate. They said, "Sir, we just remembered that that liar announced while he was still alive, 'After three days I will be raised.' We've got to get that tomb sealed until the third day. There's a good chance his disciples will come and steal the corpse and then go around saying, 'He's risen from the dead.' Then we'll be worse off than before, the final deceit surpassing the first."
Pilate told them, "You will have a guard. Go ahead and secure it the best you can." So they went out and secured the tomb, sealing the stone and posting guards." (Matt. 27:62-66 Message)
So do you see the motive problem? They understood Christianity to be an incredible threat against both Jewish authority and Roman rule. They had a vested interest in making sure people didn't believe that Jesus rose from the dead. The whole purpose of the crucifixion was to silence Jesus and demoralize his followers. The last thing they would do is steal the body to make it look like he rose from the dead, which would make him and the Christian movement more believable than ever. They wished they did have the body! They would have paraded it through the streets of Jerusalem, saying, "See, he was just a man. Here's his beat-up, crucified corpse." But they didn't. So did the Jewish or Roman authorities steal the body? That flies in the face of everything we know. This is also why nobody has ever seriously entertained the idea that the resurrection can be written off as some kind of mass hallucination due to people's grief or emotional stress, or that perhaps they mistook someone else (who was alive) for (the very dead) Jesus. Not only would a hallucination or mistaken sighting have to account for every single eyewitness account, but the simple production of a dead body by the Romans would have brought everyone back to reality.
The painting Christ Crucified by Diego Velazquez [Wikimedia Commons]
Did They Just Go to the Wrong Tomb?
A third option is that the disciples just went to the wrong tomb. This option doesn't attract much attention from people who look carefully at the evidence but needs to be raised in order to be thorough. The thinking is that the disciples were nervous, worried, and full of fear. It would have been relatively easy for them to have simply made a mistake by going to the wrong tomb, finding that tomb empty, and then assuming that Jesus was alive. The problem with this view is that all the Romans would have had to do was point out the right tomb where the guards were posted and the party would have ended. And you still have to deal with all the people who said they saw Jesus after his death—people who were more than willing to go on record, even under threat of death. Consider these words written by the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth. He noted that Jesus "appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living. . . . Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also" (i Cor. 15:5-8). In today's court system, all it takes is one or two eyewitnesses to begin to determine what happened at a particular point and place in time. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to Jesus being alive after his crucifixion. And again, all of the disciples said they saw him and were willing to die for it.
In fact, they did.
Did Jesus Really Die?
A fourth option is what has been called the "swoon theory." This was first
suggested back in the late 1700s, and then gained attention in the 196os through a book called The Passover Plot. This idea is a little different than the others; it says that Jesus never really died on the cross. He never resurrected, because he never died. This theory says that he was mistakenly reported to be dead when in reality, he just "swooned" or passed out on the cross from exhaustion, pain, and loss of blood. Or in the immortal words of Miracle Max from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, he was just "mostly dead." And, as we all know, mostly dead means slightly alive. And from that slightly alive state, after three days he got up, walked around, claimed he rose from the dead, and was received as resurrected.
Even the most die-hard skeptics don't raise this option very often. First, it makes Jesus out to be the most manipulative, false, lying, deceitful religious figure in all of human history. Not many people feel that way about Jesus. But the big argument against the swoon theory is physical—meaning, what he had to survive.
One of the first things he endured was a savage flogging from the Roman guards. He received thirty-nine lashes with a form of cat-o'-nine-tails, with weighted pellets of lead at the end of the whip and ends that were embedded with bone and metal to add weight—along with razor-sharp hooks. It was designed so that when it hit your back, it dug in. When it was pulled back, whatever flesh was on the hook was ripped out, literally tearing the body apart, often leaving the bones and intestines showing. He received thirty-nine of these lashes. Forty, by Roman law, was considered the death penalty.
Then, he was pierced in the head with multiple wooden stakes. You may have heard that Jesus had a "crown of thorns" placed on his head or have seen pictures of this (like the previous image). But what was used then were date palms, and the thorns were several inches in length. So it wasn't placed on his head as much as his head was impaled on it. It would be like having a series of three- or four-inch nails driven into your skull, causing massive facial distortion. It was beaten into his skull with the equivalent of a baseball bat to drive the wood as deep into his head as possible. Without a doubt, that alone could have killed anyone.
He then was made to drag his heavy wooden cross all the way up to a hill called Golgotha, which is where he was to be crucified, until he collapsed and could carry it no farther. That indicates that by this time he was already so physically decimated that he couldn't even walk. He then was nailed to the wooden arms of the cross with spikes that would have been driven into his wrists. Medieval art shows the holes in his palms, but when the Bible says the nails went through his hands, the word used for "hands" translates as anywhere from the wrist up. Based on corpses found who were crucified during that time period, the nail was typically driven through the wrist so as not to tear through the flesh of the hand with the weight of the body hanging on the cross. The goal was for the body to hang. Nails were also driven through the ankle, among the most sensitive nerves that could have been pierced. This is where we get our word excruciating: literally "from the cross," a pain that is so severe it can only come from crucifixion. After suffering all of that, Jesus then hung on the cross until he essentially suffocated to death. You had to push yourself up against the spike in your ankles to breathe. Eventually the body tires of this and the person chokes to death. And finally, Jesus was pierced in the side with a lance to ensure death, and subsequently pronounced dead by Roman experts.
"Swoon" theorists would have us believe this happened next: after Jesus was laid in a damp tomb in burial clothes and seventy-five pounds of burial spices, and endured three days without food, water, or medical attention of any kind, he popped up and said, "I feel better!" He rolled back a stone weighing thousands of pounds, then single-handedly, without any kind of weapon, overpowered a crack team of Rome's heavily armed, heavily armored, elite fighting troops. He then started walking around town, looking, physically, like pretty much nothing happened—just a few holes here and there but otherwise none the worse for wear. The resurrection is easier to believe than that.
But even more telling is that medical experts have pored over the biblical record of Jesus's death. There was even an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled, "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ." Among the article's points is that the Bible records, with great detail, that when the spear pierced Jesus's side, water and blood spilled out. Though the eyewitnesses who recorded that didn't know it at the time, we now know this was a medically significant detail. It was a sign that the spear pierced the pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds the heart, as well as the heart itself. It is a description of the postmortem separation of the blood into clot and serum, indicating that Jesus was truly dead.j
So Are You Saying He Rose from the Dead?
So let's add this up. If the disciples didn't steal the body, the Jewish and Roman authorities didn't steal the body, there wasn't any kind of mass hallucination, they didn't go to the wrong tomb, and Jesus didn't just pass out on the cross and start feeling better in a day or two . . . what option is left? Christians have concluded that he did what he said he was going to do. Why? Because he was who he said he was.
He rose from the dead.
Now, I know that you might be thinking: Time out! / don't care what the evidence points to. You're not going to back me into this corner through some kind of hypothetical detective analysis. Dead people don't rise!
And you're right. They don't. We know that now and they knew it then. But that's the point.
This is what startled N. T. Wright, who taught at both Cambridge and Oxford. In his massive, 800-plus-page academic work on the history surrounding the resurrection event of Jesus, he writes that no one would have ever thought up the resurrection, because nobody believed such a thing possible. Nowhere in paganism, nowhere in Judaism, nowhere in any worldview or philosophy did anybody ever conceive, posit, contemplate, or even suggest that such a thing could—or ever had—taken place. Wright's conclusion is that "the early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the 'meetings' or 'sightings' of the risen Jesus
in order to explain a faith they already had. They developed that faith."jj. And why did they develop it? Because of what they saw, because of what they experienced, because what they didn't think was going to happen—or could happen—did happen.
So What?
This isn't an intellectual game. Ifit happened, it validates Jesus and everything he taught. But there's more. If it happened to him, it also means it can happen to us.
To you. If true, two thousand years ago the power of God was reflected in a single life with such a clear demonstration of might and energy that all of human history was forever changed—culminating in raising that life, physically, from the dead. And through the resurrection of Jesus, God demonstrated his ultimate power, because there is no greater power on earth than power over death. Then the Bible says something equally radical: the very same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available for your life. Here are its words and the promise that goes with them: "[You need to] understand the incredible greatness of God's power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead"
(Eph. 1:19-2o NLT). The word for power used in that verse in the original Greek
language was the word dunamis, which is where we get our word dynamite. It's the same word used when referring to the power behind Jesus's miracles. And, as we just read, the power that raised him from the dead.
That's some power.
And the Bible says that power can be there for you. Think about that. That means the power that resurrected Jesus can resurrect your life too. Not just after you die a physical death, but here and now! God can take your life, and no matter where you are or where you've been, he can bring you to life from any place you feel lifeless. He can give you whatever new beginning you need. Here's how the Bible puts it: "And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives" (Rom. 6:4 NLT).
Beyond a new life, Christians believe that the resurrection of Jesus can give us the power we need to live the way God wants us to live. We live in a day of self-help websites and seminars, apps and tech toys. Such resources and experiences are good for telling us what we are supposed to do, but they can't give us the power to do it. The Bible promises an external power source, claiming that the power to change our life can come to us from God. We don't have it within us to live the way we want to live, much less the way we are supposed to live. But the Bible says that the very same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available for your life. You may not be ready to have it, or even believe it, but millions of Christians can testify to the fact that God's power has altered their lives. Marriages that seemed beyond hope have been restored. Long, habitual, destructive patterns of behavior have been broken. Finances have been straightened out, difficulties on the job have been overcome, and parenting challenges have been met. The resurrection of Jesus matters because it reveals to us that the power of God is there to change our life.
Even that's not the best of the "so what" when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus. In a letter to a group of Christians who had just chosen to put their trust in Jesus, the early Christian leader Paul reminded them of one more dynamic of the resurrection: "If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot. But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries" (i Cor. 15:19-20 Message).
The Bible says that if there was no resurrection, then there's no hope for life after death. And if that's true, then life has no purpose and no meaning. Soren Kierkegaard once compared such a view to a smooth, flat stone that is thrown over the surface of a pond. The stone dances and skims over the surface of the water until that moment comes when, like life without hope beyond death, it runs out of momentum and sinks into nothingness.18 In a similar vein, Samuel Beckett once put forth a play titled Breath. The curtain opens to a stage littered with nothing but garbage. A soundtrack begins, starting with a baby's first cry and ending with an old man's last, dying gasp. Then the curtain closes. Beckett's point is clear—life is absurd, man is meaningless, existence is pointless. But Christianity maintains that
the resurrection did happen, and the Bible says that "because Jesus was raised from the dead, we've been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven" (i Pet. 1:3 Message).
And that means hope. But that hope involves embracing a message—a message unlike any ever given.
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4 THE MESSAGE
Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
There was a British conference on comparative religions that brought together experts from all over the world to debate what was unique, if anything, about the Christian faith in relation to other religions. Was it the idea that a god became a man? No, other religions had variations on that one. Even the Greek myths were about gods appearing in human form. Was it heaven, life after death, or an eternal soul? Was it love for your neighbor, good works, care for the poor or homeless? Was it about sin or hell or judgment? The debate went on for some time, until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. (As we read earlier, Lewis journeyed from atheism to agnosticism and then eventually to Christianity and became one of the most famous of all Christian writers and thinkers from his positions at Oxford and Cambridge.) Lewis asked what the debate was about and found out that his colleagues were discussing what Christianity's unique contribution was among world religions.
"Oh, that's easy," he said. "It's grace."
And after they thought about it, they had to agree. The heart of the Christian message is the heart of the message Jesus brought to the world: grace, coupled with truth. We tend to get truth. But what is grace? We use the word in so many ways, seldom in the way Jesus used it. And the only way to understand his use of the word is to understand why we need this message so desperately. So let's get at the "why" before the "what." In other words, let's start with why grace is such a unique and needed message. To do that, you have to understand five background issues: the nature of God, the law of God, the human condition, the Old Testament sacrificial system, and then Jesus himself. If this sounds daunting or, even worse, dry, I promise I'll move fast. But trust me, each is important. Consider the five of them, together, Christian Theology 101.
First, the nature of God. What you need to understand about the nature of God is his holiness and his love. God is truly perfect and holy—sin is repulsive to him. He is allergic to it and cannot look upon it. His holiness demands either the removal or destruction of sin. But God is also love. Which means that much of the activity and any understanding of God lies at the crossroads of holiness and love. It's the creative tension of all that he is and does.
The second thing to understand is the law—God's spiritual and moral law. I
know, law is not a positive word for many of us. Think of it here not as an arbitrarily set policy but rather as a manifestation of what is right or wrong: God's standards and his dictates—the very expression of God's person and God's will.
The law is God and God is the law. It is his very nature and his character. As a result, it is God we either obey or disobey. When we obey it is an act of love, and when we disobey it is an attack on God's very nature. Cosmic treason. And the
penalty is serious—the most serious of all—which is why in the New Testament book of Romans, the Bible offers these words: "for the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). We are familiar with the reality of physical death, but the Bible also teaches the reality of spiritual death, which is separation from God. Sin causes spiritual death. It breaks the relationship. It destroys the intimacy that God
intended to take place between himself and his creation because at its heart, sin is rebellion against God and his character. So punishment or consequences are not simply a possibility, but an inevitability.
This brings us to the issue of the human condition—all of us are sinners. We all have this sin condition and we cannot save ourselves or lift ourselves out of our
sinfulness. The word sin is an archery term, and it literally means to "miss the mark." In archery, if you shoot an arrow toward a target and miss, it is called a sin. It doesn't matter whether it is by an inch or by a mile, it is still a sin. With that image in mind, take notice of how the Bible describes the human condition: "For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard" (Rom. 3:23 NLT). When it comes to living life the way God intended, all of us "miss the mark." Some of us do better than others, but no one hits the bull's-eye every time. And sin isn't just about a failure to be perfect. Sin is about willful choices and conscious decisions that we make to knowingly go against God's leadership. It is the choice we make with our very soul to go against the moral law and will of God. So whether it's murder or malice, lust or lying, stealing or slander, it's falling short. And we can't change that. We can't address this. We can't fix it. We are totally unable to rescue ourselves from our sinful condition. Salvation by works is impossible. There's nothing we can do to right ourselves before God.
The fourth background issue to understand is the Old Testament sacrificial system. In ancient times, God decreed that the payment for wrongdoing—for a sin—could be covered through the blood of an animal. Though our rebellion deserved death, God's love allowed for our sin to be addressed through the sacrifice of an animal. That seems strange to us, but it was very intentional by God. He wanted people to see the severity of their sin. He wanted people to see that paying for the sin that comes between them and him is messy, gruesome, and costly, because sin is messy and gruesome and costly. And that it really was a life-or-death issue, so the symbol was a real one. The sacrifice was a substitute for the sinner; it bore the sinner's guilt and is where we get our term scapegoat. I'm sure you've heard of making someone the scapegoat for something—blaming them or pinning something on them. The term comes from the Bible. There was an annual Day of Atonement when a priest made reparations for all the sins of the people. The scapegoat was the goat to which the sins of the Israelites were symbolically transferred on that Day of Atonement. For the sacrifice to be effective, there had to be some kind of connection, some point of commonality between the victim and the sinner for whom it was offered. People would lay their hands on the scapegoat, constituting a confession of guilt on the part of the sinner and a transfer of the guilt from the sinner to the victim.
God also said the animals sacrificed were to be without any kind of blemish or mark. The point was that sin (or imperfection) could only be addressed by perfection. Sin cannot reconcile sin. It can only be dealt with by God himself because the sin was against him and his law; therefore, only he can offer true forgiveness. The sacrificial system served as a sign of what God was going to do. It was offered to God, but it wasn't something that would finally and ultimately bridge the gap between us and God. Which is why throughout that time, the great prophets of God said that there would be One who would come—from God—who would take away the sins of the world once and for all. The one sacrifice for all time.
At a point and time in history that God chose for reasons known only to him, God did just that. He provided the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for the sins of all people throughout all of time and history.
And that brings us to Jesus.
Jesus was the fulfillment of the sacrificial system and, because of him, we can now be forgiven once and for all. The writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament likens Jesus to the high priest who went into the Temple on the Day of Atonement on behalf of the people to offer the sacrifice for their sins. Except that this time, instead of the blood of sheep or goats, Jesus offered his own blood. Or, as the man known as John the Baptist said upon seeing Jesus, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). This sacrifice is where we see God's holiness intersecting with God's love. This is where justice meets mercy. God cannot deal with sin except as his holiness allows it. If he did not punish it, or make adequate satisfaction for it, he would be forgiving it unjustly, which he cannot do. In other words, to simply forgive out of mercy or to redeem with a wave of the hand would cause him to cease to be God. His holiness demanded what sin demands—the just punishment, the death penalty.
So his love had him take our place.
This explains why Jesus, dying on the cross, cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). When you read that, it may sound as if he cried out to God the Father as if he had been abandoned. And to be sure, the word forsaken did literally mean "abandoned." Jesus was saying, "Why have you left me? Why have you turned away? Why have you left me alone here, now?" Interestingly, in one of the few times in all the Bible, it records him saying this in Aramaic, his boyhood tongue—the most personal, intimate language he could use with his Father. So what was going on? Nothing less than the most terrible moment on the cross of all, worse than anything he had gone through physically. He who knew no
sin became sin. Christians talk about Jesus dying for our sins. That he took our place. That he paid the price for our wrongdoing. What that means is the death of Jesus involved taking the sin of all of humanity upon himself. At the moment of his
death, Jesus carried the weight of the sins of the world—past, present, and future. Every rape, every murder, every lie, every betrayal, every adulterous relationship, every act of child abuse. When he died he carried the evil of terrorism and genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the brutality of ISIS. He shouldered the acts of Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. . . and me and you. In a single, blazing, soul-wrenching moment, the sins of the world were placed on him. And he carried their stain, their weight, their pain, their evil, their darkness.
He was the scapegoat.
As if there couldn't be anything worse, at that moment, for the first and only time in all of eternity, the Father had to turn away from him. The community of the Trinity was shattered, and the Son was utterly, terribly, alone as the embodiment of sin itself. It was in the midst of that separation from the Father, that tearing of the Trinity, that impenetrable darkness of sin, that he surrendered his life in sacrifice. So why did he say, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Was he really expressing hurt that God turned away?
No. He knew this moment would happen. Would it surprise you to find out that he was expressing love and loyalty, allegiance and trust? You see, what many don't know is that Jesus was quoting a verse from the Old Testament of the Bible—specifically, from the twenty-second chapter in the book of Psalms. It may have been that Jesus's intent was to quote all of it because as terrible as this moment was, it was clearly all a part of God's plan. But he physically couldn't complete the psalm—all he could get out was the first line. So what came next in the twenty-second Psalm? Why out of all of the Scriptures did Jesus quote this one on the cross? When you read Psalm 22 and think about who was saying it, in what condition and what situation, it is stunning:
Jesus was the fulfillment of the sacrificial system and, because of him, we can now be forgiven once and for all. The writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament likens Jesus to the high priest who went into the Temple on the Day of Atonement on behalf of the people to offer the sacrifice for their sins. Except that this time, instead of the blood of sheep or goats, Jesus offered his own blood. Or, as the man known as John the Baptist said upon seeing Jesus, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). This sacrifice is where we see God's holiness intersecting with God's love. This is where justice meets mercy. God cannot deal with sin except as his holiness allows it. If he did not punish it, or make adequate satisfaction for it, he would be forgiving it unjustly, which he cannot do. In other words, to simply forgive out of mercy or to redeem with a wave of the hand would cause him to cease to be God. His holiness demanded what sin demands—the just punishment, the death penalty.
So his love had him take our place.
This explains why Jesus, dying on the cross, cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). When you read that, it may sound as if he cried out to God the Father as if he had been abandoned. And to be sure, the word forsaken did literally mean "abandoned." Jesus was saying, "Why have you left me? Why have you turned away? Why have you left me alone here, now?" Interestingly, in one of the few times in all the Bible, it records him saying this in Aramaic, his boyhood tongue—the most personal, intimate language he could use with his Father. So what was going on? Nothing less than the most terrible moment on the cross of all, worse than anything he had gone through physically. He who knew no
sin became sin. Christians talk about Jesus dying for our sins. That he took our place. That he paid the price for our wrongdoing. What that means is the death of Jesus involved taking the sin of all of humanity upon himself. At the moment of his
death, Jesus carried the weight of the sins of the world—past, present, and future. Every rape, every murder, every lie, every betrayal, every adulterous relationship, every act of child abuse. When he died he carried the evil of terrorism and
genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the brutality of ISIS. He shouldered the acts of Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. . . and me and you. In a single, blazing, soul-wrenching moment, the sins of the world were placed on him. And he carried their stain, their weight, their pain, their evil, their darkness.
He was the scapegoat.
As if there couldn't be anything worse, at that moment, for the first and only time in all of eternity, the Father had to turn away from him. The community of the Trinity was shattered, and the Son was utterly, terribly, alone as the embodiment of sin itself. It was in the midst of that separation from the Father, that tearing of the Trinity, that impenetrable darkness of sin, that he surrendered his life in sacrifice. So why did he say, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Was he really expressing hurt that God turned away?
No. He knew this moment would happen. Would it surprise you to find out that he was expressing love and loyalty, allegiance and trust? You see, what many don't know is that Jesus was quoting a verse from the Old Testament of the Bible—specifically, from the twenty-second chapter in the book of Psalms. It may have been that Jesus's intent was to quote all of it because as terrible as this moment was, it was clearly all a part of God's plan. But he physically couldn't complete the psalm—all he could get out was the first line. So what came next in the twenty-second Psalm? Why out of all of the Scriptures did Jesus quote this one on the cross? When you read Psalm 22 and think about who was saying it, in what condition and what situation, it is stunning:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from. my cries of anguish?.
Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One.
But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults.
I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs surround me,
a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.
You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!
Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one.
All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.
Future generations will be told about the Lord.
They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it! (Ps. 22:1, 3, 6-7, 14-18, 22-24, 27, 30-31)
By the way, if you've ever wondered why Good Friday—the day commemorating the death of Jesus—is called "good," it is because of this moment on the cross. Sin is not good. Death is not good. But what he did for us in our sin, through his death, was good.
So this brings us to grace. The best and simplest definition of grace is that
which is freely given and totally undeserved. It's getting what you don't deserve and not getting what you do. Grace reaches out, in the midst of our sin, and offers forgiveness. Second chances. Yes, salvation. To have what Christ did on the cross applied to your life.
I will declare your name to my people; So What Is Grace?
in the assembly I will praise you.
Don't let this drift gently over your imagination. It is too pronounced, too substantive, for that. Let's say you're behind on your mortgage by three, maybe even four payments. You owe thousands and can't possibly make it up. The bank has started foreclosure proceedings and there's nothing you can do. Then, somebody with the power to forgive that debt—to step in and have the bank wipe it
clean—does so. You are ecstatic! You couldn't be more grateful. But why is that? It's because you knew the situation you were in. You knew what was going to happen. You knew you were going to lose your house.
Apart from grace, each of us is going to lose our life. We're going to face the full penalty for our sin. Our only hope is for a grace-filled, grace-giving God. I usually describe the situation to people this way, because when it was first described to me along these lines, it connected with me. Imagine you are brought to trial for vehicular homicide. You were driving on the road, exceeding the speed limit, and you hit a child on her way home from school. You are brought to trial, the evidence is presented, and from his bench the judge states, I find you guilty and sentence you to death." But then he does a strange thing. With compassion in his eyes, he gets up from behind his bench, takes off his robe, walks down to where you stand, embraces you, and says, "But I love you. The penalty must be carried out, for I am an honest and good judge, and what you did was wrong and it must be paid for. But I love you and do not want to see your life end this way. Justice must be carried out. So I will go in your place." And then he walks out of the courtroom and toward the electric chair.
That's what Jesus did for you. This is how it's talked about in the Bible:
We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death
while we were of no use whatever to him. (Rom. 5:7-8 Message)
So what does that grace look like? Feel like? Let's look at one of the more well-known stories surrounding the life of Jesus:
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" .
He straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." .
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time. . . until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus . . . asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"
"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:3-5, 7, 9-11)
That is a story of grace. It is first, though, a story of sin and corruption and decadence and judgment. And then it is a story of grace. So let's not miss the dark side, or we won't see how amazing grace really is. There was a lot of darkness. First, we have the sin of the people who brought this woman to Jesus. They didn't have to bring her to Jesus, heaping shame and ridicule on her in front of everyone. They didn't care anything about her. They didn't care if she was beaten or stoned, exposed or humiliated. She was nothing to them. They were cruel and unfeeling. They didn't even bother bringing the man she was caught with because they didn't really care about the act at all. They just wanted to trap Jesus. And here was the
trap: if Jesus said, "Yes, stone her," then he would have gotten in trouble with the Roman government in power at that time, because only they had the authority to exercise capital punishment. He would have also lost his reputation among the
people as being a "friend of sinners." But if Jesus said, "Don't stone her," then he would have been accused of being light on sin, compromising, and weak—someone who didn't really embrace Cod's law and holiness. They felt that
either way, they had him on this. The woman was just a pawn. So there was the conniving, heartless, manipulative sin of the people who brought her before Jesus.
Then there was the sin of the people who caught her in the act. The Bible is very clear that she was, indeed, caught in the act. That language is important because it was the basis by which they were making their legal claim. It meant they had the evidence needed to convict her. In that day, so that suspicious husbands couldn't accuse their wives without reason, the law required testimony from two witnesses who saw the couple together. And not just together; but lying together and clearly having sex. The two witnesses also had to see this at the same time and place. That's a high bar of evidence. So how could you reach that bar? Pretty much only one way: you had to set the couple up. The law also said that if you were to see someone about to sin in that way, it was your responsibility as a caring and compassionate person to say something to them to try to prevent it, which obviously didn't happen. So the witnesses and whoever else was involved in setting her up for the witnesses sinned.
Then you have the sin of the man who was having sex with her. If they were caught in the act, then he was obviously guilty too. But they let him go—he wasn't needed for the trap (but he certainly was part of the darkness).
Finally, we have the sin of the woman herself. And she did sin. Badly. Not just because she had sex with someone she shouldn't have, and was caught in the act, but since the penalty being asked for was stoning, that tells us she was probably engaged to be married and was having sex with someone who was not her fiancé. That was the specified penalty for an engaged person who was unfaithful to their fiancé. Unfaithful wives could also be sentenced to death, but the law did not specify how they should die. Here they say she had to be stoned, which tells us she was engaged and sleeping with someone who wasn't her fiancé. That's a nasty betrayal of trust and speaks volumes about not only her outer world, but her inner one as well.
So who deserved to be stoned? Who deserved to die? Who had engaged in heinous, premeditated, purposeful pursuit of sinful behavior before a holy Cod, holding him in contempt with their behavior?
All of them.
Just like all of us.
So what happened next? Jesus's words to those who brought the woman have become legendary, almost iconic: "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7). Given the darkness of every party involved, we know that no one could throw a stone, because no one was innocent. Then Jesus said that he would not condemn her either. Why?
Jesus didn't see a woman caught in adultery.
He didn't see her just through the lens of her sin.
He saw her through the eyes of grace.
Everyone but Jesus saw a woman caught in adultery. A moral failure. Someone deserving of condemnation and death. But through the extension of grace, Jesus saw a precious child of Cod. Someone who was a struggler in life and who had made many, many mistakes, just like everyone else. He also saw someone who could get past the struggles and grow toward the person Cod intended. Just like he
sees in me. . . and, if I can be so bold, just like he sees in you. God's grace is rooted in wild, radical love for us. A love so wild and radical it was sacrificial. Even unto death. Will Campbell, known for his disarmingly earthy approach to spirituality and life, was once asked a critical question: "In ten words or less, what's the Christian message? . . . Let me have it. Ten words." The answer became suddenly clear.
"We're all bastards but God loves us anyway."!
In his book The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning writes,
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and I get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an
incredible capacity for beer.2
That's me. Is it you? But here's where grace steps in. God knows who you are too. Manning continues:
If Jesus appeared at your dining room table tonight with knowledge of everything you are and are not, total comprehension of your life story and every skeleton hidden in your closet; if He laid out the real state of your present discipleship with the hidden agenda, the mixed motives, and the dark desires buried in your
psyche, you would feel His acceptance and forgiveness.,3
That isn't all there was to the story of the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus. And it's because grace isn't all there was to his message. It was a message with grace and truth. This was the defining mark of Jesus's message. As his biographer and (likely) cousin John wrote, Jesus came "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). So, after saying he would not condemn her he added these words: "Go now and leave your life of sin" (8:11). In essence: "Turn from the life that led you to this moment, because you are not innocent. Turn from it; see it for what it is. You have been rescued from the penalty of your sin; live like it. You're better than this."
To get the message of Jesus, to get grace right, you have to understand that it's not just about grace. It's about grace and truth. They are inextricably intertwined. Jesus accepted her as someone who mattered to him, but never did he affirm the life she had been living. Jesus didn't condemn her for what she did, but he didn't condone what she did either. Personal acceptance was never combined with lifestyle affirmation. Grace and truth went together. Which means Jesus comes to our defense when we're about to get stoned, but he's also the first one to tell us to stop sleeping around. Or stop anything else that is not God's plan for doing life optimally. As psychologist Henry Cloud has written, grace is accepting
relationship. Truth is what is real; it describes how things really are. Truth without
grace is just judgment. But grace without truth is just deception.-4. Grace is like a Band-Aid—it's meant to be applied to something. And ideally grace is applied to a desire for life change and from that, to sin. Almost every story Jesus told dripped with this one message: if you are far from God, you can come home. And when you do, you'll be met with grace and then challenged with the truth we all so desperately need.
There was a young girl who grew up on a cherry orchard just outside of Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, who were a bit old-fashioned, tended to overreact to her nose rings, music, and short skirts. They grounded her a few times, and then one night, when her father knocked on her door after an argument to try to reach out to her, she screamed out, "I hate you" Later that night, she ran away.
She headed for Detroit, a place she had been only once before on a bus trip with
her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Since the papers were filled with lurid details about the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she thought that would be the last place her parents would look for her.
On her second day in the city, she met a man who drove the biggest car she had ever seen. He offered her a ride, bought her lunch, and arranged for her to have a place to stay. He was just so nice. He even gave her some pills to make her feel better than she'd ever felt before. She thought that she had been right all along—her parents had been keeping her from all the fun and from the good life.
That good life went along for a month . . . two months . . . a year. The man with the big car taught her a few things that men like. And since she was underage, men paid a premium for her. Every now and then she thought about her parents back home, but their lives now seemed so boring and plain and old-fashioned that she could hardly believe she grew up there. She had a brief scare when she saw her picture on a billboard with the headline "Have you seen this child?" But now she had blonde hair and, with all the makeup and jewelry she wore, nobody would mistake her for a child.
After a year, the first signs of the illness began to appear. It amazed her how fast her boss turned mean. He told her that he couldn't risk having anyone around who was sick like that, and he threw her out on the street without a penny to her name.
She found that she was able to turn a couple of tricks a night, but they didn't pay much, and all the money went to support her drug habit. When winter came, she found herself sleeping on metal grates outside the large downtown department
stores. Sleeping is the wrong word, though. A teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Soon dark bands circled her eyes and her cough worsened.
One night, as she lay awake listening for footsteps that might harm her, everything about her life suddenly looked different. She felt, for the first time in a year, like the little girl that she was, lost in a cold and frightening city. She began to cry. Her pockets were empty and she was hungry. She needed a fix. She pulled her legs underneath her and shivered under the newspapers she'd piled on top of her coat trying to stay warm. Suddenly a memory came into her mind of May and springtime in her hometown, with a million cherry trees in bloom and her golden retriever chasing a tennis ball. And she said to herself, "Oh Cod, why did I leave?" And she started to cry again and knew that more than anything else in the world she wanted to go home. So she tried to call her parents.
Three straight calls, three straight connections to voicemail.
But on the third one, she finally left a message. "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, I get it. I guess I'll just stay on the bus."
It took about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and her home, and during that time all she could think about were the flaws in her plan. What if they were out of town and didn't get the message? What if they were home, but she didn't give them enough time to be at the bus station? What if they didn't even want her back?
Then she began to rehearse what she would say:
"Dad, I'm so sorry. I know I was wrong. It's not your fault—it's all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?" She said the words over and over, practicing.
When the bus finally rolled into the station, the driver said, "Traverse City, Michigan. Fifteen-minute stop." Fifteen minutes for her entire life to be decided. She checked herself in a compact mirror, smoothed her hair, licked the lipstick off her teeth. She looked at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wondered if her
parents would notice. If they were even there.
The Return of the Prodigal Son, painted by Rembrandt c. 1669 [Wikimedia
Commons]
She got off the bus and walked into the terminal, not knowing what to expect. But not one of a thousand scenes that entered her mind matched what she saw. Because there, within those concrete walls and plastic chairs in that bus terminal, stood a group of forty brothers and sisters, great-aunts and uncles and cousins, a grandmother and even a great-grandmother. They were all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal was a banner that read, "Welcome home!"
Then out of the crowd stepped her dad. Through tears, she started to say, "Dad, I'm sorry. I know. . ." And he stopped her. "Hush, child. We've got no time for
that. You'll be late for the party. A banquet's waiting for you at home.".5
That story is a retelling of a story Jesus told, a story often referred to as the story of the prodigal son. A story that, in one form or another, he told over and over again. A story of someone who turned away from God, found out that it wasn't the life they wanted, came back . . . and found out they could.
But Can There Really Be Just One Way?
You walk into a Starbucks, and you order a tall, half-caf soy latte at 120 degrees. Or a triple, venti, half-sweet, nonfat caramel macchiato. Or a grande, quad, nonfat, one-pump, no-whip mocha. Or if you're me, you just say, "Caffeine, please!" According to Starbucks' Global Chief Marketing Officer, there are now more than
8o,000 different ways you can order a Starbucks coffee.6 When John Naisbitt wrote his prescient book Megatrends back in the '8os, he said that one of the top ten trends of the modern world would be a shift from no choice to multiple
choices. And he was right. We've come to expect it. It's just the way things are.
But what about God? Can't grace and truth be found in other places? Isn't there more than just one way to come home? When it comes to an authoritative spiritual text, there's the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. When it comes to religious leaders, you can select from Krishna, Buddha, and Mohammed. When it comes to religious groups, you can link up with those in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Scientology. No wonder it's almost natural to believe that searching for God is like climbing a mountain. Since
everyone knows that there is not just one way to climb a mountain—mountains are way too big for that—there must be any number of paths that can be taken. We tend to look at all of the ideas about God throughout all the religions of the world as just different ways up the mountain. So where does that leave you? You're free to choose! Take your pick from among the countless philosophies and worldviews littering the cultural landscape. Why? Because all roads lead to God. All spiritual paths are equally legitimate. It doesn't really matter what you believe, much less who, what, or how you worship.
The only problem is that there's one faith that isn't playing well in this sandbox, and it happens to be the Christian faith. Jesus spoke directly to this idea and had some provocative words to say: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). In that statement, Jesus
makes it clear that there is a Father God and that there's only one way to that Father God—through him. And he was very careful with his language in that verse. Jesus
didn't say that he was a way, or a truth, but the way, the truth, and the life. And that no one no one—can enter into a full relationship with God apart from him. That was as politically incorrect then as it is now, but it has marked Christianity from its beginning. "It is by the name of Jesus Christ," the apostle and early Christian leader
Peter declared; "salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:10, 12 TN IV).
For a lot of people, that just makes them cringe. You may be among them. The idea that Christianity, and specifically Jesus, is the only way to God is so out of sync with the way we think. Beginning with its dismissal of other ways to God. That seems too. . . well . . . dismissive. Is Christianity saying that every other religion is just completely wrong? Actually, no. C. S. Lewis once wrote, "If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. . .. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, might contain at least some hint of the truth."7 Lewis goes on to suggest we think of it in terms of arithmetic. There is one and only one right answer to 2 + 2—and that's 4—but if you were to answer 6 it would be a lot closer than answering 37. While there is only one right answer, some answers are closer to being right than others.
A photo of Tian Tan Buddha, also known as "Big Buddha," on Lantau Island, Hong Kong [Wikimedia Commons]
That's not all. If all truth is God's truth, then it remains truth wherever we find it. So as a Christian, I can appreciate the truth in much of Buddhism's ideas, such as the first two of the Four Noble Truths that state there is a lot of suffering in the world (obviously), and that our desires are often at the root of that suffering. Buddhism also teaches many things that I can appreciate and affirm as clearly moral: you shouldn't engage in murder, you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't engage in immoral sexual behavior, and you shouldn't lie.
But just because there may be goodness and truth in other places doesn't mean
you have also found an equally legitimate way to God. In fact, the full teaching of that religion may involve a road that is heading in the totally opposite direction. Let's stick with the example of Buddhism. While there is some common ground between Buddhism and Christianity, there are also enormous tension points. The Dalai Lama himself has stated publicly that the central doctrines of Buddhism and Christianity are not compatible. He has been quite open with the fact that you cannot be a Buddhist Christian, or a Christian Buddhist. And he is right. Christianity believes in a personal God; Buddhism does not even believe in a Higher Being (Buddhism is, essentially, an atheistic religion). That is a divide that is simply insurmountable. That's not two different ways up the same mountain; those are different places on the map.
This is true when you compare Christianity to the other major world religions as well: Christians believe there's one God; Hindus believe there are millions. Christians embrace Jesus as God himself in human form; Muslims don't even rank Jesus at the top of the prophets, much less the Savior of the world. When you have divisions like this, you have only two options. You can either say that somebody is right in that particular area and everybody else is wrong, or you can say that everyone is wrong. What you can't say is that everyone is right—that it's all the same path, the same idea, the same God. That would be intellectually confused at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. And the areas of disagreement are not trivial in nature. They deal with the very existence of God and, if he does exist, how we enter into a relationship with this God (not to mention the identity of a person like Jesus).
Right about now you may be thinking, Okay, let me add this up. You're saying that there is Just one way to God and it's through Jesus. And while there may be some truth or good in other religions, that doesn't mean they are equally valid ways to God. So
are you saying that all non-Christian people just wind up in hell? That someone really good, really noble, like Gandhi, is in hell just because he wasn't a Christian?
Because if you are, you've lost me. I just can't believe that's right. Fair enough. But now let me see if I can add up what you're saying: all that should matter, in the end, is how good you are. Everyone should be banking on some kind of "goodness quotient." And since we define goodness in relation to other people, what you're saying is God should grade on a cosmic curve. And if God doesn't grade on a curve, you're not sure you can believe in that God.
Just for fun, let's remember what grading on a curve is about. It's when grading is relative. On any given assignment, your grade is based on the performance of the class as a whole. So if everybody does poorly but you make a 75 percent, and that 75 percent is the highest grade in the class, instead of a C suddenly you've got an A. Because on a curve, the highest grade, no matter how bad it is, is given the equivalent of a 100 percent—an A. Even though you made a 75 percent, because you did better than everybody else, you get an A. It gets better. Whatever the
average grade is becomes the average grade. So if the average is 40, instead of an F, that's a C.
We like getting graded on a curve. Particularly because we come out looking better, feeling better, and doing better than we deserve. So what might that look like if we were to apply that to spiritual things?
The 2 percent on either side is easy. On the Sinner side are the Hitlers, the bin Ladens, the rapists and pedophiles, telemarketers, and spam senders. We know
who's over there. On the Saint side is Mother Teresa or Gandhi. So those are your F and A grades. Now let's talk about the Ds. These are the people who are, at best,
Sketchy. They aren't the darkest of the dark, but they are far from Boy Scouts. These are people who lie, cheat, steal. So here we're talking car salesmen and members of Congress. Before you think that's a joke, according to a Gallup poll,
those really are the two least trusted professions in the United States.
Now for the 14 percent with the B grades. These are the people who are above average in their goodness. They set the day-in, day-out standard for most of us in terms of virtue or spiritual commitment. They are our role models and heroes.
They are our celebrities, our Stars. Medical missionaries, like those who risked their lives serving Ebola patients. Christian leaders like the late Billy Graham. Throw in a few pastors and social workers.
So where does that leave most people within the typical bell curve? Those in the
C-, C, and C+ range? Which, in our "grading on a curve" minds, means Safe? Not saints, but not sinners. Not a star, but not sketchy either. In other words, me and you. So we're okay. We're safe. Any other scale makes us nervous and insecure, so we reject it.
But what if that's not how God grades? What if the bell curve is all wrong and we're not graded on a curve at all? What if the whole thing doesn't even involve a letter grade? What if it is . . . pass/fail?
You're in or you're out. You're through or you're gone. You say, "Well, I don't know if I like that." Well, I don't imagine that any of us do. It's scary stuff to think about. But in full transparency, let me give you a headline: that's what the Bible teaches. The Bible only talks about pass/fail; it doesn't mention anything about a curve. And here's where it gets even worse: we aren't even graded based on a graduated scale at all, but on a person. And that person is God himself. In other words, everything on this pass/fail scale has to do with whether you are as good as God.
So what's going on? The truth is that none of us are okay—not even one. None of us are "good" enough to earn salvation. As Joseph de Maistre once observed, "I do not know what the heart of the rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an
honest man; it is horrible."9 No one is in less of a broken relationship with God, and in less need of the way to God, than anyone else. And that's the real issue: how to be made right with God. Every human being is in a broken relationship with God through the sin in their life. The only way to repair that relationship is to become reconciled with God himself. The God of the Bible has said that there is one and only one way for that to happen—one and only one way to have your sins against him forgiven. The way he provided, which is through what Jesus did on the cross. Jesus's death on the cross was the payment for our sins. The only payment that was ever made.
And that's what makes Jesus the only way.
Now, as I've already acknowledged, there are many visceral reactions against this idea, not the least of which has to do with sincerity. That it isn't what you believe that matters, but how you believe. Something deep inside of us knows, and I think correctly, that the nature of true spirituality is somehow connected with
authenticity. This is why people like Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela—both Christians—were so widely respected by Christians and non-Christians alike. But it is one thing to value sincerity and another to make sincerity the lone characteristic
of spiritual truth, much less spiritual standing. How you believe matters, but so does what you believe. If you say that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere, you miss a very important point. You can be sincerely wrong. I can sincerely believe that when I reach into my medicine cabinet at 3:oo am. with a headache that I am taking an aspirin, but if I am really taking cyanide my sincerity will not save me from the perils of the poison I've ingested into my system. If I put carbolic acid into my eyes instead of contact lens solution, no matter how sincerely I believe I've grabbed the right bottle, I will still do damage to my vision. During World War II, Adolf Hitler sincerely believed that the slaughter of six million Jews was justified, but he was sincerely wrong. Sincerity matters, but it cannot be a// that matters, because sincerity alone cannot alter physical, much less moral, reality. So it is not simply the sincerity of our faith that matters, but the object of our faith. Faith is very much like a rope—it matters what you tie it to.
Another visceral concern has to do with spiritual hubris, the idea that no religion should think it is better than another religion. Yes, you might believe you adhere to the truth, but that would be arrogant to assume, so the best thing to do is to function like an agnostic. And by all means, don't try to convince others of your convictions. But is it really arrogant to tell others about what you believe is true, or is it compassion?
Photo of Penn jillette at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas [Wikimedia Commons;
Photo Credit: David R. Tribble]
Penn Jillette is the "talkative" half of Penn and Teller, the Las Vegas comedy-illusion team. Penn has been an outspoken atheist. But Christians can learn a lot from a video blog he posted on his personal website that talks about a man who gave him a Bible:
At the end of the show as I've mentioned before, we go out and we talk to folks, you know, sign an occasional autograph and shake hands and so on. And there was one guy waiting over to the side in the, uh, what I call the "hover position" after it was all done.... He had been the guy who picks the joke during our psychic comedian section of the show. So he had the props from that in his hand because we give those away—the joke book, the envelope, and the paper, and stuff. .
And he walked over to me and he said, "I was here last night at the show, and I saw the show and I liked the show. . . ." He was very complimentary about my use of language and complimentary about honesty and stuff. He said nice stuff, no need to go into it, he said nice stuff.
And then he said, "I brought this for you," and he handed me a Gideon pocket edition. I thought it said from the New Testament but also, Psalms is from the New Testament, right? Little book.. . . And he said, "I wrote in the front of it and I wanted you to have this. I'm kind of proselytizing." And then he said, "I'm a businessman. I'm sane, I'm not crazy." And he looked me right in the eye and did all of this. And it was really wonderful.
I believe he knew that I was an atheist. But he was not defensive. And he looked me right in the eyes. And he was truly complimentary . . . it didn't seem like empty flattery. He was really kind and nice and sane and looked me in the eyes and talked to me and then gave me this Bible. And I've always said, you know, that I don't respect people who don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all.
If you believe that there's a heaven and hell and that people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that, well, it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward. . . . How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?
I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it, but that truck was bearing down on you, there's a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that. And I've always thought that and I've written about that and I've thought of it conceptually.
This guy was a really good guy. He was polite, and honest, and sane and he cared enough about me to proselytize and give me a Bible. Which had written in it a little note to me. . . just like, liked your show and so on. And then like five phone numbers for him and an email address if I wanted to get in touch. Now, I know there's no God. And one polite person living his life right doesn't change that. But I'll tell ya, he was a very, very, very good man. And that's real important. And with that kind of goodness it's okay to have that deep of a disagreement. I still think that religion does a lot of bad stuff But man, that was a good man who
gave me that book. That's all I wanted to say.jQ
That line rings so true: If I believe where you stand with Christ will determine your entire eternal trajectory, how much would I have to hate you to not make my convictions known? Ultimately, the question is whether we believe that truth even exists. Historically, the most common idea of truth is the correspondence between
our ideas or perceptions and reality.n That's why it's called the "correspondence theory of truth." If I make the statement, "It is raining," it is only true if I look
outside and find that it is raining. What is true is that which actually iS.12 The belief in more than one way to God is really a belief that truth does not exist or, even more to the point, that truth doesn't matter. But it does. Even a skeptic as noteworthy as Sigmund Freud maintained that if "it were really a matter of indifference what we believed, then we might just as well build our bridges of cardboard as of stone, or inject a tenth of a gramme of morphia into a patient instead of a hundredth, or take tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether."13
Let's get back to the Gandhi question. If Christianity is the only way, then does that mean that God is going to send everyone else to hell? Before we address that directly, in light of the "grading on a curve" dynamic, it's important to understand
that the Bible teaches that it isn't God's desire that anyone should experience hell as a punishment for their broken relationship with him, but that everyone would receive the gift of eternal life in heaven through Christ. But since God didn't make us mindless robots, we have a free choice to accept that gift or reject that gift, and there are consequences that come with our freedom to choose or else the choice would be meaningless. Ready for the big reveal? God doesn't send anyone to hell. We choose our own destination of our own free will. This is how the Bible puts it: "Whoever believes in him [Jesus] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed. . . . This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead" (John 3:18-19). And it's the same with the person who has chosen to embrace the Christian faith. The judgment of God will simply affirm the decision that has already been made. This is how Jesus phrased it: "Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24).
So when someone asks, "How can a loving God send someone to hell?" the answer often surprises: "He doesn't. We send ourselves." Think of it this way. Imagine you are out at sea and your boat begins to sink. You are clinging to a life raft in the middle of the ocean. A boat finds you and comes to you and offers to pull you to safety from your raft. You can either let yourself be saved or allow yourself to die. If you refuse their help, they aren't sending you to a death at sea.
You are sending yourself.
Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi, India, 1946 [Wikimedia Commons]
With that in mind, you might be wondering about those who have never heard about Jesus or who don't have the mental ability to understand. This is a heartbreaking question because you might have in mind infants or very young children who may have died before having any ability to know or to "hear" about Jesus, much less to respond. Or, perhaps, people with special needs or cognitive challenges that make truly understanding and embracing all of this nearly impossible. As tragic and heartbreaking as the question is, the answer is very simple: ultimately, this is answered in and through the very character of God. What I mean by that is either God is a good God, a just God, a fair God . . . or he's not. If he is, then he'll do the right thing by everyone, based on their ability to hear and understand and respond. So when someone asks if their baby who died is in heaven, I can say, "That is the one thing that you don't need to be worrying about in this moment. Your child is being cradled, right now, in the arms of God. Absolutely they are in heaven." Why can I say that?
Because we have a good God.
And what about those people in parts of the world who have never even heard about Jesus? Someone who was never told about Jesus? That's a little different. They are still held accountable based on the knowledge available to them through what can be seen through what has been made. Here's how it's talked about in the Bible:
But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.
Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles. (Rom. 1:18-23 NLT)
Each of us is held accountable by the raw wonder of creation all around us that is so intricate in its design that it begs for the notion of a Creator God. So how could this work positively in someone's life? Imagine in the darkest recesses of a rainforest, a man is walking along one day and comes upon a tree stump that has died and is rotting. He walks over to it and sees that it's filled with water. He gazes
at his reflection for a few moments and he thinks, You know. . . I didn't make me. And that totem carving we've been worshiping and praying to has never done anything
for me. It just seems to be nothing more than any other dead tree. And then he gazes at the sky and the stars and says, "Whoever you are, whatever you are, help! I want
to know. . . you."
Does God hear that prayer?
Of course.
As C. S. Lewis remarked, "We do know that no man can be saved except
through Christ; we do not know that only those who know him can be saved
through him."i 5 This does not mean that people will be saved by Christ through the channel of other religions, but simply that all persons will be judged fairly by
God on the basis of their knowledge of Christ and their ability to respond to that knowledge. So while Christians believe that choices have consequences, and hell is
real, no one has to go there. The way, the truth, and the life is available to us all.
===
5 THE BOOK
The problem of reading the Holy Book—if you have faith it is the Word of Cod—is the most difficult problem in the whole field of reading. . . . The Word of Cod is obviously the most difficult writing men can read; but it is also, if you believe it is the Word of Cod, the most important to read.
Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, 1972
Every year Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department of Boston University, gives his undergraduate students a fifteen-question quiz.
And every year they fail.
And it's all about the Bible.
Want to give it a try? I won't put you through the whole test—let's just dip in and out of a few of the questions to see if you know the answers. Here we go:
So how did you do? Let's find out.
1. Name the Four Gospels.
Answer: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
1. Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
Answer: Bethlehem
1. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho
road. What Bible story was he invoking?
Answer: The Good Samaritan
1. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old
Testament?
Answer: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy . What is the Golden Rule?
Answer: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (see Matt. 7:12).
6. "Cod helps those who help themselves." Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
1)
2.
3.
4.
5. 6. 7. 8. Name the Four Gospels.
Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the
Jericho road. What Bible story was he invoking?
What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old
Testament?
What is the Golden Rule?
"Cod helps those who help themselves." Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Cod." Does this
appear in the Bible?
Name the Ten Commandments.i Answer: No, this is not in the Bible. The words are Benjamin Franklin's.
7. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Cod." Does this
appear in the Bible?
Answer: Yes, in the Beatitudes of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3).
7. Name the Ten Commandments.
Answer: No other gods before me;
You shall not make yourself a graven image;
You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain; Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy; Honor your father and mother;
You shall not murder;
Hell exists because of our decisions and we send ourselves. The life and death of Jesus was about what God was willing to do to save people from the consequences of those decisions. But we have to take him up on the offer. If not, then yes, hell is inevitable. So is Gandhi in hell? The most direct answer is that Gandhi is where Gandhi chose to be. And that's how the final judgment will work. God will do the right and just thing by everyone. He will make the just judgment. Whatever the verdict is on anyone's life, it will be right and good. We will go where we decided, to the last dying breath of our life, to go. As C. S. Lewis once observed, we can bend a knee toward God in this life and say, "Thy will be done."
Or, at the end of our life, force God to say to us, "Thy will be done."i4
Now, some might push back and say, "But why is there even a hell? That doesn't sound like a loving God. Why would a loving God have something like hell in existence?"
I totally disagree.
The existence of heaven and hell shows that this is a moral universe, that God is a moral God, and that there is truth and justice and righteousness. Do you really want a spiritual universe, a moral order, without hell? Without punishment? Where Hitler and bin Laden are as rewarded as Mother Teresa? Do you want a cosmic order where pedophiles are praised and rapists are celebrated? Where nothing is seen as sin? A God that just kind of chuckles at it all in some kind of stupid senility? Is that what you think is good and right? I get that hell is disturbing to you. It should be disturbing to you. It's disturbing to me. Deeply disturbing. It should be a hard-edged truth. But it's a truth. A necessary truth. There wouldn't be a moral universe without it. Hell is a terrible, dreadful, horrific place, but its existence isn't what is evil. Its existence is what is moral.
===
5 THE BOOK
The problem of reading the Holy Book—if you have faith it is the Word of Cod—is the most difficult problem in the whole field of reading. . . . The Word of Cod is obviously the most difficult writing men can read; but it is also, if you believe it is the Word of Cod, the most important to read.
Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book, 1972
Every year Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department of Boston University, gives his undergraduate students a fifteen-question quiz.
And every year they fail.
And it's all about the Bible.
Want to give it a try? I won't put you through the whole test—let's just dip in and out of a few of the questions to see if you know the answers. Here we go:
1. Name the Four Gospels.
2. Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
3. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho road. What Bible story was he invoking?
4. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament?
5. What is the Golden Rule?
6. "Cod helps those who help themselves." Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
7. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Cod." Does this appear in the Bible?
8. Name the Ten Commandments.i So how did you do? Let's find out.
9. Name the Four Gospels.
Answer: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
1. Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
Answer: Bethlehem
1. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho
road. What Bible story was he invoking?
Answer: The Good Samaritan
1. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old
Testament?
Answer: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy . What is the Golden Rule?
Answer: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (see Matt. 7:12).
6. "Cod helps those who help themselves." Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
Answer: No, this is not in the Bible. The words are Benjamin Franklin's.
6. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Cod." Does this
appear in the Bible?
Answer: Yes, in the Beatitudes of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3).
6. Name the Ten Commandments.
Answer: No other gods before me;
You shall not make yourself a graven image;
You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain; Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy; Honor your father and mother;
You shall not murder;
You shall not commit adultery;
You shall not steal;
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor;
You shall not covet.
Now, why does he give that test every year? He says it's because everybody
should know the basics of the Bible. In fact, in a commentary for the Los Angeles Times titled "We Live in the Land of Biblical Idiots," Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and then became (in his own words) a "spiritually confused Christian," was one of those idiots! And knew he shouldn't be. So what should you know about the Bible?
Four things.
The Bible Is a Library
First, the Bible is a library. It isn't a single book; it is a collection of books. Sixty-six books, to be exact, written by more than forty authors and covering a period of around fifteen hundred years. Most of the books bear the name of their author and are straightforward. The book of Isaiah was the book written by Isaiah, the book of Daniel was the book written by Daniel. Sometimes, the books carry the name of the main event that the book talks about. For example, the book of Genesis is about the genesis—the creation, the beginning—of the world. The book of Exodus deals mostly with the great exodus, or departure, of the Jewish people from slavery under the leadership of Moses. Some of the books are actually letters and carry the name of the people they were sent to. So Philippians is the name of the book, or letter, sent to the people who lived in the city of Philippi. First and 2 Corinthians are the two letters sent to the people who lived in Corinth. First and 2 Timothy are two
letters a man named Paul sent to a man he was mentoring named Timothy. So the Bible is a library of books, reflecting different times in history, different authors, different settings, and different emphases.
The Bible Has Two Testaments
The second big headline is that this library of books falls into two parts, usually called "testaments"—the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is made up of thirty-nine of the sixty-six books, and the New Testament is made up of twenty-seven of the sixty-six books.
The word testament simply means "agreement" or "covenant." It refers to a pact, a treaty, an alliance, an agreement between two parties. And that tells you something about the content of the Bible. The Bible is a record of God's great covenants, his promises, with us in regard to our relationship with him. It's a record of God's dealings with us. The Old Testament is a record of God's agreements with people before the time of Jesus. The New Testament covers everything that happened when Jesus came and then what happened after his resurrection.
So if you want to know what divides the Old Testament from the New Testament, it's Jesus. Jesus is the One who separates the two sections of Scripture. Jesus's coming altered all of history, and all talk of sacred Scripture is about that which came before Christ and that which came after Christ. The Old Testament builds toward the New Testament; it looks forward to the New Testament. And then the New Testament fulfills the Old Testament and completes it; it's as if it writes the final chapters to the story, always looking back to the foreword.
If you like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you can think of the Old Testament as The Fellowship of the Ring followed by The Two Towers (the Old Testament takes two
films because it has the most books), and then the New Testament is like the final installment, The Return of the King.
If you don't like The Lord of the Rings, forget I said any of that. But like The Lord of the Rings, everything in the Bible is about the King. Only his name is Jesus, not Aragorn. The Old Testament looks forward to the coming of Jesus and the New Testament looks back on his coming. So while the Bible is sixty-six books, in two
parts, it's still one story. That's why it's called the Bible. The English word Bible comes from the name of the papyrus, or "byblos" reed, that was used for making scrolls and books. Because they were made from byblos reeds, books came to be known as bibles. But the writings of the Old Testament and the New Testament
were so sacred, so special, so revered, that they came to be known simply as the book, or the Bible.
The Bible Is Sacred
But why are these considered the sacred writings? Why these sixty-six books and not others? Why are these considered the Word of God? That's our third headline. Christians take the writings of the Bible as the Word of God for our lives for one reason: Jesus. Yes, the Old Testament was seen as sacred before Jesus—those books recorded God's dealings and God's prophets, who people saw and heard. And the same with the New Testament. But Jesus is the One who brings confirmation to both testaments. Here's why: if you believe Jesus was who he said he was—God himself in human form—then what he said is what matters more than anything. So if he said something was Scripture, or he set in motion the
writing of something to be Scripture, then it is Scripture. If he was who he said he was, then it's not about what books I think ought to be set apart as sacred or
inspired, or what books you think should make the cut, but what he said about it.
And the Bible we have is the one he set apart.
Let's unpack that a bit. First, we accept the Old Testament as Scripture because Jesus did. When Jesus made reference to the Scriptures, he was referring to the Old Testament we have today. When the New Testament records Jesus saying he believed in the Scriptures, that meant the Old Testament, because the New Testament had not been written yet. And here was his unqualified endorsement: "For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law [of Moses] until everything is accomplished" (Matt. 5:18). And then he also said, "[The] Scripture cannot be set aside" (John 10:35). In what may be one of the most intriguing statements he made in relation to the Old Testament, Jesus introduced a quote from the Old Testament by saying, "David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared . . ." (Mark 12:36) and then went on to quote what David said in the Old Testament book of Psalms. Clearly, to Jesus, the Old Testament was no ordinary collection of writings. He referred to the writers of the Old Testament as being inspired by the Holy Spirit, thus giving us the very Word of God.
When we come to the New Testament, again, we look to Jesus to give it authority. And he did. Much of the New Testament records what he said and taught. And if he was God in human form and said something, I would call that Scripture! But he also laid the foundation for the writings of the rest of the New Testament to be accepted as Scripture through the apostles. Jesus chose the word
apostle for a very small, very select group of his disciples in order to indicate their unique role. The word apostle means "those who have been sent," and the mission Jesus sent them on was that of preaching and teaching. The word is used only of the twelve originally chosen by Jesus and a handful of select others, most notably the apostle Paul. The apostles received a unique commission from Jesus himself,
never to be repeated, to assume a prophetic role and speak Cod's word to the people. Apostles were never self-appointed. The most literal translation of the Creek language has Jesus saying to Paul in the book of Acts, chapter 26, "I apostle you." Each was then given a historical experience of interaction with Jesus himself. They spent time with Jesus and were mentored by Jesus. This is why when a replacement was selected for Judas the principal requirement was that the person be someone who had been with Jesus throughout his ministry so they could be a true eyewitness and direct bearer of the teaching of Jesus. For Paul, the last apostle appointed, it was a post-resurrection interaction and appointment. Without this, he could not have been an apostle. These were the men who were to speak in Jesus's name and carry his word to others. They carried the very authority of Jesus himself as they taught. Jesus even said these words to them: "Anyone who welcomes you, welcomes me" (Matt. 10:40).
Each apostle was given a special inspiration for their teaching from Jesus himself through the Holy Spirit. While all Christians have the Holy Spirit operating within them from the moment of their decision to become a Christ follower, Jesus promised the apostles a special ministry of the Holy Spirit in regard to their teaching and writing. The Holy Spirit gave them a remembrance of the teaching of Jesus and inspired them to teach other truths from Cod as well. Jesus also said that they would be guided into all truth: "The Spirit shows what is true and will come and guide you into the full truth . . . by taking my message and telling it to you" (John 16:13-14 CEV).
This is why the teachings of the apostles were considered Scripture, and the mark of what would be included in the New Testament was simple: Was it written by, or based on, the teaching of Jesus or one of his apostles? This is why we read in the book of Acts, which records the history of the early church and the "acts" of the apostles, these words: "[the early church] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching" (Acts 2:42). Why? Because they knew exactly what Jesus had done—they saw and heard Jesus appoint them! They saw and heard Jesus teach on the kind of role the apostles were going to have. They knew that Peter and John, James and Paul were not, in this sense, ordinary men. The teaching of the apostles was the teaching of Christ. To receive them was to receive Christ; to reject them was to reject Christ.
So when it comes to the Bible, we didn't choose these books. It wasn't something a group of church leaders sat down one day and randomly picked. Jesus had already embraced and affirmed the Old Testament as the Word of Cod; the first four books of the New Testament capture his own life and teaching as Cod himself in human form come to earth; the rest of the New Testament was personally commissioned by Jesus, written by his chosen apostles through a special working of the Holy Spirit as they wrote. This is why, when the ancient church made the Old Testament official through the Council ofJamnia in AD 90 and the New Testament official in AD 397 through the Council of Carthage, it wasn't a selection process. It was simply a formal recognition of what had already been established.
For the Christian, that's our Bible. This is what Cod wanted us to know. Of course, you are welcome to reject Jesus and to reject the Bible. But what you can't do is accept Jesus and then reject the Bible, because he's the one who set it apart. It would be a little weird to say, "Jesus, I've come to you for my eternity, to save me from my sins. I'm banking all of eternity on you and I believe you are Cod himself in human form who came to earth. I believe that you did miracles and you died for my sins and rose from the dead. But this book of yours, I can't buy into it. I don't believe that you have the power to set aside a collection of writings for your
followers. So while I believe everything else, I think you're completely
untrustworthy when it comes to this."
No.
You're welcome to reject Jesus and reject the Bible. But what you can't do is accept Jesus and reject the Bible. He didn't give you that option. Jesus tells us it is Cod's revelation to us. The word revelation comes from the Latin word revelatio that means to "draw back the curtain." It was a theater term. Imagine a stage where a play is about to begin. You can't know the story until the curtain is pulled back, until it's revealed. That's the Bible God's revelation. It's Cod revealing himself and truth about himself that could not otherwise be known.
So, what about all of those "lost" books of the Bible you've heard about? No one denies the existence of other ancient writings within the first five centuries following the life of Jesus. No one denies that some of them contain things that go against the Gospels and their eyewitness accounts. No one denies that there are documents with names such as the "Gospel of Mary Magdalene," or the "Gospel of Thomas," or even the "Gospel of Judas Iscariot." That's not news. Not now, and not then.
But even then, they were uniformly understood to be forgeries, false in their information and most written two hundred to three hundred years after the time their alleged authors lived. And what they claimed went against everything the eyewitnesses of the early Christian movement knew to be true. For example, what is called the "Gospel of Mary" denies the resurrection, argues against a second coming of Christ, and rejects the suffering and death of Jesus as a path to eternal life. The manuscript even claims that Jesus said there is no such thing as sin. That's why this writing, and others like it, never took hold. Even the ones that appeared right after the life and death of Jesus. People at the time knew that they were diametrically opposed to what Jesus actually said and, since they were present when he said it, they were never taken seriously. It was clear that they were obvious attempts to undermine the integrity of the actual records of Jesus's life and teaching. The fact that such a document surfaces again in our day through archaeology does not mean we should give it any more credence than they gave it back then.
Let's say that I wrote a book about the 2018 Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. But, instead of writing that the Eagles beat the Patriots by the score of 41-33, which we know is what happened, let's imagine that I claim that my beloved Carolina Panthers stormed their way to the big game and beat the Eagles 34-3 the way I'm sure Cod originally intended. And let's say that in my book, I cite all kinds of made-up statistics and play-by-play analysis, and then self-publish it as an ebook on Amazon as an actual record of what took place. My goal? To change people's minds about who won because I am anti-PhilIy. Would anybody buy it, unless as a joke book for a Panthers fan? Would anybody actually believe it as historical record? Of course not. If intended to be a credible account of the 52nd Super Bowl, it would swiftly be denounced and become culturally irrelevant. Why? Because more than 100 million people watched the game. But let's say a printed copy of this book finds its way to a garbage dump and it gets buried, and three hundred years from now people find it. They look at it and they say, "Whoa, people back then did not believe the Eagles won! There's an alternate view. The Panthers might have won the 52nd Super Bowl. Look, it's right here! And it's three hundred years old! Why, it's as old as the official NFL records we have!" Yeah, but we also know that it's a three-hundred-year-old piece of... well, you know. And it was considered as much back then.
Carolina Panthers at Bank of America Stadium (Panthers' home stadium) in
Charlotte, NC [Wi ki media Commons]
This is why the early biographies on the life and teaching and ministry of Jesus, written by those who were eyewitnesses to his life and teaching, took hold. When the earliest accounts written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John came out, people were still around who had seen and heard Jesus. They knew whether what was said in the Gospels actually happened. And they weren't rejected. Instead, they ignited a movement that took over the entire known world. Why? People were around to say, "I know it seems unbelievable, but I was there. That's exactly what happened."
Another question people have is, "Why so many translations?" Actually, the answer to that one is easy. The Bible was basically written in two languages: Hebrew and Greek. The Old Testament was written in the language of its writers—Hebrew—and the New Testament was written in the most-used language of its day—Greek. That means all of our Bibles today are translations of those original languages. This is why scholars who do such translating study Hebrew and Greek. Translations are necessary for every ancient manuscript, whether it's the writings of Plato or the writings of Virgil. It's true for more recent writings that
weren't written in, say, English. If you read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in English, you're reading a translation from the original Russian. Whatever language it was originally written in—Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Russian, or German—if it wasn't originally written in English and you read it in English, it's a translation. So when people ask, "How can you believe the Bible with so many translations?," this is a misunderstanding of what a translation is, as all ancient manuscripts are translated.
But why are there so many different translations? Again, that's easy too. It's not because we don't know what the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts contain.
It's because language changes so much. Coy used to mean being happy; now it means having a same-sex orientation. Wicked used to be something bad; now it means something is good—as in saying something is "wicked good." Spam used to be canned meat. Or something like meat. Whatever it was/is, you ate it instead
of deleting it from your email inbox. Cool used to mean "cold," Coke was a drink not a drug, if someone was hot they were on fire, and your booty was your treasure. Not your. . . booty. Just think how our online world has changed what we mean by a troll,friend, stream, mention, or cloud. This is why dictionaries are always being updated. They have to be.
So when the Bible was translated in the 1600s, the Greek and Hebrew
manuscripts were translated into the language of that day. That meant that there were lots of thees and thous and heretofores and other words we don't use today, or that don't even make sense. That's why the King James Bible is called the King James Bible: the translation was commissioned by King James and employed what is commonly called "King James English." But there's nothing magical or holy about King James English and we don't talk in King James English today. This is why more modern translations from the original Hebrew and Creek manuscripts are continually being produced for ease of reading and understanding in light of the ever-evolving makeup of modern language.
The Bible Is Inspired
Which brings us to our fourth and final headline. For those of us who are Christians, this isn't a normal book. It's inspired by Cod and we shouldn't water that word down. Sometimes we use the word inspired to mean that something was wonderfully creative, such as a painting by Rembrandt, or music by Bach, or a play by Shakespeare. Sometimes we use the word to refer to something that we feel—how we find a beautiful sunset or a powerful speech inspiring. Inspiration, as it relates to the Bible, is much more profound. When the apostle Paul was describing it in his second letter to Timothy, he put it this way:
But you must remain faithful to the things you have been taught. You know they are true, for you know you can trust those who taught you. You have been taught the holy Scriptures from childhood, and they have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by Cod and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to
do what is right. Cod uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work. (2 Tim. 3:14-17 NLT)
The Creek word Paul used for inspired literally meant "Cod-breathed." That's the idea behind the inspiration of the Scriptures. Breathed out by Cod, exhaled by Cod, produced by Cod.
It's not a human book. It was written by humans, but as they were moved by Cod. It reflects their personality, vocabulary, and writing style, but the act of writing itself was stirred by Cod. More than three thousand times in the Bible we find the writers using some form of the expression "The Lord says." The prophet Jeremiah recorded Cod saying to him, "I [Cod] have put my words in your mouth" (Jer. 1:9). The idea of inspiration is that Cod used people to write the books of the Bible but was so involved in the process that they wrote exactly what he wanted. One of the clearest expressions of this idea was given by the apostle Peter: "Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet's own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from Cod" (2 Pet. 1:20-21 NLT).
About Interpretation
Now let's talk about how to interpret what you read. Because isn't that where it gets sticky? At least, that's what you hear, right? Every time somebody points out something the Bible says, somebody else will say, "Well, that's just your interpretation," as if when it comes to what the Bible says, there's nothing more than personal opinion. But is that true? Is interpreting the Bible just the reader's opinion, completely subjective, so that when it comes to the Bible, it's a free-for-all? You know. . . believe what you want, read it how you wish, because it
doesn't say anything definitive. I'm afraid that's a cultural myth. There's an actual field of study for interpretation called hermeneutics, defined as "the science of interpretation." And it is a science—a series of steps, practices, disciplines, and rules that apply to interpretation.
But make no mistake-99 percent of the Bible doesn't take any heavy lifting in regard to interpretation. Here's some quick reading. In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, it says, "Hear, 0 Israel: The LORD our Cod, the LORD is one" (Deut. 6:4). So is there one Cod or two? One! In the Old Testament book of Exodus, it says, "You shall not steal" (Exod. 20:15). Is it okay to steal or not? It's not! In the New Testament book of i Thessalonians, it says, "Jesus died and rose again" (1 Thess. 4:14). Did Jesus die and rise again or not? The Bible says that he did. So is the Bible obscure in meaning? No. So why do so many claim that the Bible is difficult to understand? For some, it's not in trying to grasp the most obvious reading, but in accepting the implications of that reading. It's interesting how when you don't like something you read, you can suddenly find yourself believing it's hard to understand.
Lee Strobel says to pretend that your daughter and her boyfriend are going out for a Coke on a school night. You say to her, "You must be home before ii:oo." Now suppose it gets to be 10:45 and the two of them are still having a great time. They don't want the evening to end, so suddenly they begin to have difficulty interpreting your instructions. They say: "What did he really mean when he said,
'You must be home before ii:oo'? Did he literally mean us or was he talking about you in a general sense, like people in general? Was he saying, in effect, 'As a general rule, people must be home before 11:00'? Or was he just making the observation that generally, people are in their homes before ii:oo? I mean, he wasn't very clear, was he?
"And what did he mean by, 'You must be home before ii:oo'? Would a loving father be so adamant and inflexible? He probably meant it as a suggestion. I know he loves me, so isn't it implicit that he wants me to have a good time? And if I am having fun, then he wouldn't want me to end the evening so soon.
"And what did he mean by, 'You must be home before ii:oo'? He didn't specify whose home. It could be anybody's home. Maybe he meant it figuratively. Remember the old saying 'Home is where the heart is'? My heart is right here, out having a Coke, so doesn't that mean I'm already home?
"And what did he really mean when he said, 'You must be home before ii:oo'? Did he mean that in an exact, literal sense? Besides, he never specified ii:oo p.m. or ii:oo a.m. And he wasn't really clear on whether he was talking about Central Standard Time or Eastern Standard Time. I mean, it's still only quarter to seven in Honolulu. And as a matter of fact, when you think about it, it's always before ii:oo. Whatever time it is, it's always before the next ii:oo. So with all of these ambiguities, we can't really be sure what he meant at all. If he can't make himself
more clear, we certainly can't be held responsible."
There's no doubt that some parts of the Bible are hard to understand. It reflects the places, histories, cultures, and languages of places long ago and far away. Sometimes it helps to have some background information on those issues to get the best sense of it, and there are some passages that people might disagree about. But on the essential teachings and issues, the Bible leaves little room for
confusion. As Mark Twain was known to have quipped, "It's not the parts of the
Bible I don't understand that disturb me, rather it's the parts of the Bible that I do understand that disturb me."
But while truth can be disturbing, it is always life changing. The Bible gives guidance for virtually every area of life—work, marriage, family, relationships,
finances, emotions, physical health—and millions, right now, today, are finding
that it is guidance that works. People who have studied the Bible and faithfully applied its wisdom to their life say that it has transformed their lives. They will tell you that it has saved their marriage, helped them straighten out their finances, repaired broken relationships, and revolutionized their attitude toward work. Most importantly, they will tell you that it has shown them how to be in an ever-deepening and vibrant relationship with the living God.
Okay, so much for what Christians say the Bible is; what you are probably ready to ask and explore is whether the Bible, as a writing, examined critically, is credible. It's a fair question.
The Bible's Textual Credibility
The Bible is an old book that has been copied thousands of times over a period of centuries. So is the text we have even reliable? Can we know what the authors of the Bible really wrote after all of this time? The integrity of any ancient writing is determined by the number of documented manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts we have to examine. For example, there are only nine or ten good
manuscripts of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars in existence, the oldest of which is a copy dating about nine hundred years after his time. Yet no historian that I am aware of has serious doubts about the reality of Caesar, or of the integrity of the text itself. There are also fewer than ten existing copies of the ancient manuscripts of Plato that are available to study and compare in order to determine the accuracy and quality of the transmission of his writings throughout the years. The oldest of these manuscripts is a copy dating aboutfourteen hundred years after it was originally written. Still, you do not have scholars discounting the historicity of the writings of Plato, or expressing concern that what we have of Plato's writings is
less than true to his original thoughts-3
A fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus containing the Greek version of Esther 1:16-17 [Wikimedia Commons]
When it comes to the Bible, there are more than five thousand handwritten manuscripts in the Greek language in support of the NewTestament alone that help us ensure the accuracy of its writings. Many of the earliest copies are separated from the originals not by fourteen hundred years, nor even nine hundred
years, but by only twenty-five to fifty years.-4 The Old Testament is equally rich, supported by such findings as the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, providing manuscripts a thousand years older than any previously known Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible and representing almost every book of the Old
Testament.5 Without a doubt, the Bible is the most documented ancient writing in all of history in terms of textual credibility.fl
The Bible's Historical Credibility
But simply because a text may be sound doesn't mean that what it records is
historically accurate. When the Bible says that something happened, did it really happen? The text may have been preserved with integrity, but that doesn't mean
that what it says is true. As a result, the historical credibility of the Bible demands investigation.
Interestingly, many of the writers of the Bible invite such examination by claiming to be eyewitnesses to what they wrote, or to have conducted such research themselves! For example, one of the four biographers of Jesus, a physician named Luke, writes the following at the start of his account:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you . . . so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4)
And the apostle John wrote this in one of his contributions to the New Testament:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim. (i John 1:1)
But merely claiming to convey factual historical truth as eyewitnesses has little to do with whether the actual writings are true. How has the Bible stood up under outside examination? Of particular interest to many is, understandably, archaeological evidence. Sir William Ramsay of Oxford University, regarded as one of the greatest archaeologists ever to have lived, concluded upon his own examination that the writers of the Bible are historians of the first rank who should be placed along with the very greatest of historians. So overwhelming was the support of the archaeological evidence that Ramsay eventually became a
Christian.7 Dr. W. F. Albright, late professor emeritus of Johns Hopkins
University, declared that there can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the
historicity of the Bible. Historian and archaeologist Joseph P. Free notes that recent discoveries have "produced material that confirm the Scriptures at point
after point."9.
For example, the book of Genesis makes mention of the infamous cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed for their utter abandonment to wickedness. No record of such places existed outside of the biblical record, leading many to question the Bible's historical credibility. Now, archaeologists have unearthed the place of pagan worship for the inhabitants of the two cities at Bab edh-Dhra, including evidence of sudden and unexplainable destruction in approximately 2,000 BC. The remains of the place were covered in layers of ash and sulfur, which, as the Bible records, is how the cities were destroyed when fire
was rained down on them in judgment.1Q Furthermore, scientists discovered that a "superheated blast from the skies"—possibly a meteor—decimated cities found
near the Dead Sea 3,700 years ago. Biblical analysts feel this clearly echoes the destruction of Sodom.ii
Even entire civilizations, such as the Hittites, were unknown outside of the Bible. Since a review of the known literature of the day revealed no mention of such people, the conclusion was that the Bible was simply in error. Then, the capital city of the Hittite empire was discovered, as well as forty other cities that made up the
empire.32 Another example is King David. He is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Bible yet, until recently, no record of such a person could be found outside of the Bible. This led some to put the biblical King David on the same footing as the mythical King Arthur. Then, in 1993 and 1994, at the northern Israelite site of Tel Dan, pieces of a three-thousand-year-old monumental basalt
stone were found that bore inscriptions about the "King of the House of David."-13 It was the first non-Biblical attestation of David's existence.
Sodom and Gomorrah ruins uncovered at Bab edh-Dhra [Wikimedia
Commons]
Even something as seemingly minor as a biblical mention of Jesus and his disciples being out on a boat on the Sea of Galilee has raised questions. No boats of that nature had ever been found, much less ones that would have carried Jesus and all twelve of his disciples, as the New Testament claims. Then, during a severe drought in the mid-1980s that brought the Sea of Galilee to unusually low levels, two brothers discovered the remains of a two-thousand-year-old boat buried in the mud along the shore. Dating to the very time of Christ, the boat could either be rowed or sailed and could hold up to fifteen men, perfectly matching the New
Testament descriptions.
King Josiah (see 2 Kings 23:11)—discovered among the ruins of a building destroyed by the Babylonians. Doron Spielman, vice president of the City of David Foundation, said of these findings: "The ongoing archeological excavations at the City of David continue to prove that ancient Jerusalem is no longer just a matter of faith, but also a matter of fact. It is truly fascinating to watch how archeologists have uncovered more than twelve layers of Jerusalem history in what used to be a
parking lot until just few years ago."34
The boat found in the Sea of Galilee dating back to the time of Christ [Wi ki media Commons]
There are so many more archaeological finds we could talk about. We've found the burial box of Calaphas—the high priest Jesus was brought to for his trial before his crucifixion. We've found inscriptions related to Pontius Pilate, the fifth
governor of Roman Judea, also a key player in the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Advanced photographic techniques also revealed an inscription on a seal ring stating "of Pilates" and would likely have been worn by someone who was able to act on Pilate's authority.s We've found inscription support for the Philistine empire, prominently featured in the Old Testament, giving support to the very
The stone found in Tel Dan bearing the description of the "King of the House of David" [Wikimedia CommonsL
Recently, in Jerusalem's "City of David" dig site, archaeologists unearthed a 2,600-year-old stone with the names of people found in the Bible—specifically Nathan-Melech, who is mentioned in the second book of Kings as an official to
names of the leaders and cities that the Bible records. Even the signature seal of
the prophet Isaiah has been discovered.i
But here's the real headline: not only have the Bible's claims been supported through archaeological research, there has never been an archaeological discovery that has ever refuted a single biblical claim. Renowned Jewish archaeological expert Dr. Nelson Glueck has observed, "It may be stated categorically that no
archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference."17 In fact, there have been so many archaeological discoveries that have supported the Bible that Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, then dean of the Greenleaf Law School, noted that if you were to apply the Federal Rules of Evidence to the Gospel records, "this rule
would establish competency in any court of law."
The signature seal of the prophet Isaiah found at the foot of the southern wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount [Biblical Archaeological Society/Eilat Mazar]
The Bible's Authoritative Credibility
Which leads to the question of the Bible's authoritative credibility as a spiritual text. Ultimately, the real question is whether this text is truly from God. We've already
explored how this rises and falls on where you stand with Jesus. But what if that's unsettled for you? Is there anything else to consider? One area that many have explored relates to prophecy. I know, the very idea of a "prophet" or "prophecy" seems planted in the realm of myth. But let's play it out. If the supposedly
"inspired" authors of the Bible foretold events with accuracy, and were never wrong in these prophecies, it would be convincing evidence of the Bible's authoritative
credibility. If such prophecies did not come true, or were (at best) average in their success rate, the Bible's position as an authoritative text would be dramatically weakened.
How does the Bible fare by such an examination? Let's just consider the prophecies surrounding the life and ministry of the Messiah, which Christians believe were made in relation to the coming of Jesus. In the Old Testament, almost eight hundred years prior to the birth of Jesus, there were prophecies about the place of the Messiah's birth, his ancestry, how he would be born, how he would be betrayed for a specific amount of money, how he would be put to death, how his bones would remain unbroken, and how the soldiers would cast lots for his clothing. Sound familiar? If you know anything about the life and death of Jesus,
they should, because every one of them took place in his /ft.g
Now, what would be the odds of each one of those prophecies being fulfilled in
minute detail, having come about—through chance—in the life and person of Jesus? This must be asked, because a questioning mind can simply say that the biblical prophecies in relation to the life of Jesus are just coincidence. Scientist and mathematician Dr. Peter Stoner, former chair of the department of mathematics
and astronomy at Pasadena City College and later chair of the department of science at Westmont College, worked on this with six hundred of his students.
Their goal was to calculate the odds for the detailed accuracy of just one biblical prophecy about the coming Messiah to have come true in the life of Jesus the way it did. Eventually they determined that the odds of such an event were 1-in-400 million. Stoner and his students then calculated what the odds would be to have
eight of the prophecies made about the Messiah be specifically fulfilled in Jesus by chance. The odds came out to be 1-in-1017. That's a figure with seventeen zeros behind it!
100,000,000,000,000,000
Stoner then went on to look at the odds of forty-eight prophecies about the Messiah being fulfilled, by chance, in the life and person of Jesus. His conclusion is that it would be i-in-10157 for all of them to have come true in the life of just one person in history.2o Yet this is precisely what happened. Not with merely forty-eight prophecies, but with up to 332 distinct Old Testament prophecies
concerning the Messiah that were fulfilled in the life of Jesus. For this to have happened by chance would be akin to a person randomly finding a predetermined atom among all the atoms in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the
size of our universe.22 For anyone who is trying to determine whether or not to give authoritative credibility to the Bible, the odds are overwhelming—based on
prophecy alone—that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. The Bible's Internal Credibility
So, the Bible stands up textually, it stands up historically in terms of outside evidence, but now let's consider another area: contradictions. Because isn't that
what you hear so many people say about the Bible? That it contradicts itself? Let's begin with what a contradiction is. In any introductory course on philosophy, you learn about the law of noncontradiction or logical fallacy. In essence, it means that A and non-A cannot both be true. That would be a contradiction. You can't say "It's raining" and "It's not raining" and have both be true. You can't say "It's hot" and "It's cold" and have both be true. That is the nature of a contradiction.
So a biblical contradiction would be like Mark's biography of Jesus in the Bible saying Jesus died on the cross, and then Luke's account saying Jesus didn't die or that he died falling off a donkey. But if you have Mark's biography record
something that Jesus said on the cross, and John's account includes something else Jesus said—or even leaves out some of what Mark recorded—that's not a contradiction. John's account does not contradict what Mark recorded—John just included another detail. Or, John didn't include a detail that Mark did.
So consider a common citation of a supposed contradiction in the Bible. In Mark's account of the death of Jesus, there is an emphasis on Jesus's agony. In Luke's account, there is a focus on Jesus's concern for His mother. But that's not a
contradiction. He could have been in agony and concerned for his mother! Here's another one to consider. In Matthew's account, we are told that Peter will deny Jesus before the cock crows, and in Mark's account we are told that Peter will deny Jesus before the cock crows twice. Again, that's not a contradiction. Peter would deny Jesus before the cock crowed, but Mark simply supplies an added detail—that the cock wouldn't just crow once, but twice. Not exactly a scandal. Which is why whenever someone tries to tell me that the Bible contradicts itself, I ask them, "Do
you know that to be true, or are you just buying into an urban legend?" Then I simply ask them to show me one.
But there is one "contradiction" that does seem robust, and it's the seeming
conflict between the Cod of the Old Testament and the Cod of the New Testament. The Old Testament is a record of Cod's covenants or agreements with people before the time of Christ. As time went on, the covenants gave more and more of Cod's plan, more and more of Cod's revelation, building toward the supreme revelation of Cod's plan, which the Old Testament said would be the coming of the Messiah—Cod himself—to save the world.
Which brings us to the New Testament.
The New Testament is the new agreement Cod made with men and women about how to be in a relationship with Cod after the coming of Christ. It didn't replace the old covenants—it fulfilled them. Cod's agreements with people and the nation of Israel in the Old Testament contained signs of what was to come, and these all found their fulfillment in the new covenants established through Jesus. All along, Cod's intention was to bring forth the Savior of the world in the person of Jesus. The very purpose of the old covenant, or what is often called the law, was to prepare the people for the coming, complete covenant that would arrive with the Messiah.
Once Jesus came and we received the New Testament, did that mean that we could just throw the Old Testament out? No. It still stands. But it needs to be read in light of its fulfillment in the New Testament. So does the law of the Old Testament apply to us at all today? Yes! The law provides us with a paradigm of timeless ethical, moral, and theological principles. But some laws no longer have validity because they have been completely fulfilled in Christ.
Take the famous "eye for an eye" idea. In the Old Testament, it says this:
The punishment must match the injury: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise. (Exod. 21:23-25 NLT)
But in the New Testament, Jesus said this:
You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. (Matt. 5:38-39 N LT)
So which is it? Is it an "eye for an eye" as it says in the Old Testament or "turn the other cheek" as Jesus said in the New Testament? The answer is simple: "Yes!" The "eye for an eye" passage in Exodus 21 was all about whether you could pursue private vendettas and retaliate when you had been wronged. And the answer was "no." That was for the judges to decide. Instead, they were to follow a principle based on "an eye for an eye," meaning compensation and restitution in direct proportion to the crime. They were to match the damages inflicted and no more. You were not to have blood feuds or private wars. So "an eye for an eye" was a literary device to give a formula for compensation. But then Jesus gave its fulfillment in the New Testament, essentially saying, "You have heard of 'eye for eye'—and that's good—but I tell you to go further! Don't retaliate at all! Don't harbor a spirit of resentment. If someone does you wrong, meet it by doing them something right!"
That kind of fulfillment ran throughout Jesus's teaching. Over and over the letter of the law was met with the greater, more challenging spirit of the law. Jesus would say, "You have heard you are not to commit adultery—but I tell you, don't lust in your heart!" "You've heard not to commit murder—I tell you, don't hate!" (see Jesus's Sermon on the Mount found in Matt. ). Jesus wanted to take the law and put it in people's hearts. So there's no contradiction—just bringing the law to its fullest expression and application.
The Bible and Science
Right about now, you might be thinking about things the Bible says that may not contradict itself, but that put it at odds against science. In other words, what do you do when science contradicts the Bible? For example, God creating the heavens and the earth in six days, making the universe less than ten thousand years old. We know that simply isn't true. So how is this reconciled? It's quite easy. The Bible doesn't teach that idea.
This is probably a good time to delve into the larger relationship between the Bible and science. The Bible does not pretend to position itself as a textbook on science. It doesn't even try to answer most of the questions that science is asking. This is extremely important to understand, because most of the supposed conflicts between science and the Bible come when people try to make the Bible speak outside of what it is intending to. Why? It's a Hebrew book.
There are three ways of looking at reality, at least in Western thinking. First, there is the Greek way, which is largely descriptive and explanatory. The Greek way of looking at the world has an emphasis on rationality. Aristotle, for example, felt that once you defined a thing, you had exhausted its essence. When you approach something with Greek questions, you tend to be searching for shape and
substance and definition. So one might approach water and ask, "What is water?" "What does it look like?" "What does it feel like?" Description. That's the Greek way.
Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 8:-10
[Wi ki media Commons]
A second way of looking at reality can be termed the Latin way, which is primarily concerned with method. Latin questions ask: "How does this work?" "How do we
do this?" "What are the steps involved?" Most of us tend to look at the world in Greek and Latin ways because we are the product of a Greek and Latin culture. So
it's natural for us to take our Greek and Latin questions to the Bible. The problem is that you can't always ask Greek or Latin questions of the Bible, because it's not a Greek or Latin book! It's Hebrew, which is an entirely different way of looking at reality. The Old Testament was written by Hebrews and in Hebrew. The New Testament may have been written in Greek, but it was with a Hebrew worldview. And the Hebrew way of looking at things was very different than the Greek or Latin
way.
The Hebrew mind was concerned with what a thing was for and did it work. Matters of use, utility, and value were paramount. This is why you can read all four biographies of the life and teaching of Jesus and never once find a physical description of Jesus. Four biographies, four different authors, yet he's never described physically in any of them. To the Hebrew mind, it simply wasn't important. It probably never entered their mind to describe him. Or consider when we read that an angel visited someone in the Bible, the question was never, "What did he look like?" That wasn't important to a Hebrew. Their question was always, "What does he want us to do?"23
Now we can return to the Bible and science. When you read the book of Genesis you find that it says two main things about creation: God did it, and it was good. That's it. Now, if you are inclined toward a Greek or Latin sensibility, you want to know how God did it. But Genesis doesn't tell us how God did it, only that he did it. Why? It's a Hebrew book. I know what you're feeling: "But I want Greek and Latin answers to my Greek and Latin questions!"
Get used to disappointment.
But some people don't want to get used to disappointment. So they force the Bible to be something it's not, and force it to answer things it doesn't. And that's what has created the conflict people think exists between science and the Bible. For example, people read Genesis through a Greek or Latin lens, reading that God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh day, and they interpret this to be a succession of twenty-four-hour solar days. From that, they use the histories and genealogies in the Bible and calculate that—according to what they've read—the age of Earth is less than ten thousand years old. Meaning, therefore, that all of the scientific evidence we looked at earlier of the Big Bang happening about 13.8 billion years ago and Earth being 4.5 billion years old is just wrong. That light we see coming from stars billions of light-years away, the geological stratigraphy we see in places like the Grand Canyon ranging from 200 million to 2 billion years ago, and the age of the fossils of dinosaurs has to be either ignored or dismissed by spending incredible amounts of energy on scientifically dubious theories that try to explain it all away in light of a young Earth.
Yes, there are some people who read the Bible and interact with science this way. Not many, but some. I can't speak for them. I can speak for the vast majority of Christians who say that in no way, shape, or form does reading the Bible make you
hold to that view.z4
The mention of seven days was just an ancient, poetic way of talking about the fact that God did it. People who try to make it a scientific statement about seven literal, twenty-four-hour days simply aren't reading the text carefully. You may say, "But aren't Christians supposed to take the Bible literally?" Absolutely, but in this
case, that's not taking it literally enough. To read the Bible literally means you read it the way it was intended to be read. Which means you take it the way it was written, in accordance with its genre, in light of its language and the time in which it was written. If you take Genesis 1 and 2 literally, as they were actually written, then you have to read them as poetic description because that's what they were. That was their genre. They weren't trying to be a scientific treatise. How could God have intended to inspire the writer to convey scientific precision about literal, twenty-four-hour solar days when, according to the text, the sun and the moon weren't even created until the fourth day! You couldn't have even had a twenty-four-hour solar day until the fourth day—because there was nothing in existence that was solar! I think God could have inspired the writer to be a little more careful on that one if he meant it to be a scientific statement.
The account also says that on the seventh day God rested. Since when does an omnipotent, omniscient Being need to take a day to rest That's not only bad science, it's bad theology. Clearly, this is poetic, figurative language. And if that's
not enough, the word used in the original Hebrew language for day is the word yorn that, while it can be defined as a twenty-four-hour solar day, can also mean a segment of time—weeks, a year, several years, an age, or even an era. We use the
word day in a similar way today, talking about our "grandfather's day" or about "days gone by." The use of the word day in Genesis could have stood for any period of time, even indefinite periods. It was a literary device, not a scientific declaration. The days in Genesis, if they carried any parallel to what happened scientifically, were indefinite periods of time allowing for everything from the dinosaurs to the Ice Age. The supposed tension between the Bible and science in regard to the age of Earth is really nonexistent. Nothing in the Bible would go to war against the universe being about 13.8 billion years old, and Earth about 4.5 billion years old, which are currently the best estimates of science.
Now you might be wondering about all the other stuff that seems to pit the Bible and science against each other, such as miracles. And it's true—the Bible is full of supernatural events, everything from the parting of oceans, to the feeding of thousands with a few loaves of bread and some fish; from the stopping of Earth's orbit, to the resurrection of the dead. Some would say, "Listen, you just can't have the disruption of the physical laws of the universe that way. Miracles are impossible." And they would be absolutely right. They are impossible. The Bible's record of miracles is guilty of flying in the face of what science would say can happen. But while a scientific dilemma, it is not a particularly large intellectual (much less spiritual) dilemma. Not if there is a God. If you admit to the possibility of a God, then miracles aren't an issue. Because a miracle, by its very definition, is the suspension of the physical laws of the universe. They are supernatural interventions that circumvent the natural laws. That's what makes them miraculous. MIT professor Ian Hutchinson, author of Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?, suggests that miracles should not be seen as God intervening in the natural order of things. Because the regular order of things that we explore through science is completely dependent on God's will, a miracle is "an extraordinary act of God" by which God "upholds a part of the universe in a manner different from the normal."as So if there is a God on the loose, miracles are no big deal. As journalist Rebecca McLaughlin put it: "To believe in the God of the Bible who created the universe and not to believe in miracles is rather obtuse. It would be like my daughters believing their dad could make bread from scratch (which he can) but
that he couldn't toast a Pop-Tart."26 Miracles just mean there is something and more specifically Someone bigger than science.
So that's a bit about the Bible. But as much as Christians might be called a "people of the book," Jesus did not come simply to cement a set of authoritative writings as religious canon. He came to fulfill God's redemptive plan, to establish
the new community—to write the final chapter on not simply another story, but the story.
And it is to that story we now turn.
Sheila Keane came to
Friends in 1982, 
Matt Lamont grew up in Perth (Wadjuk Noongar Country) and was
immersed in the bush of southwest Australia by his
plant ecologist father. He was also introduced to the practice of Christian
meditation at an early age by his mother. Matthew is an experienced social
worker, spiritual director and artist. He studied Christian Spirituality with
the Broken Bay Institute and has a long-standing interest in contemplative
practice and monastic traditions. Matthew moved with his wife Sophia (and now
three children) to Newcastle in 2003. He became a member of Friends in 2005 and
enjoys bushwalking, weight training and following the trials and tribulations
of the Fremantle Dockers. 
David Johnson is a
convinced Quaker of Conservative nature who is well versed in early Christian
and early Quaker writings, finding in both the contemplative spiritualities
that affirm the Inward Light within every one of us, and within the whole of
creation. David has led retreats widely in Australia and overseas. His
publications include: Peace is a Struggle (Backhouse Lecture 2005); A Quaker
Prayer Life (2013); and the Workings of the Spirit of God Within (2019). He
also has a short video on prayer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZxGL2GQgZ0 
