This audio series offers insights on how to think about and respond to the twelve basic objections to the Christian worldview.
Kenneth Boa
Website: http://www.kenboa.org
Commentary: http://www.kenboa.org/blog
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This is part 17 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 19 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 5 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 6 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 13 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 14 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 10 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 1 in a 19-part study on Tough Issues.
We are looking at
the fourth question and it concerns the trustworthiness of the bible. The first question was the broadest most
general question that relates to the existence of God. Before that we looked at post modernism. We
live in a culture where unlike the pre modern world or the age of
enlightenment, rationalism, which lasted for a couple of hundred years, we’ve
moved into a stage called post modernism.
People have abandoned the project of some sort of absolute or any way in
which we can come up with coherent answers that are not imbedded in social
structures and context so that we have now the abandonment of a real grand
vision of the world.
The second message
looked at the three basic competing worldviews.
There is materialism or naturalism- a transcendental approach. There is the theistic vision. We looked into the question of the existence
of God followed by the question of why I believe in miracles- particularly
focusing on the resurrection. Then we
looked at Christianity and the question that it isn’t a psychological crutch
for emotionally weak people.
Tonight I’m going to begin what will take two sessions. I’m just skimming the surface, boiling it down to the distilled essence. Anyone of these questions, naturally, you could spend a good deal of more time on- particularly tonight’s question. This is a huge issue. This is a fundamental question because obviously everything else hangs on this issue. If the bible’s not trustworthy then Christianity does not stand on a worthy foundation. As far as I’m concerned there’s two pinnacles upon which things really rest- the resurrection and the reliability of Scripture. The resurrection and the reliability of Scripture are integrated as well. You don’t need to believe in the inspiration of the bible to have a plausible case for the resurrection. Merely, we need to see that the bible is really primarily historical documents. You don’t need to believe it is the word of God for that. However, if the resurrection did take place- that has incredible bearing then on the person and work of Jesus Christ. It specifically gives Him incredible authority. He becomes more than an ordinary, historical figure. In fact, His claims that the bible turns out to be inspired really have credibility because of His resurrection. You’re not going in a circle. I’m not saying you need the bible to prove the bible. I’m saying that if you look at the bible as simply being a reliable, credible, primary resource that leads to a pretty cogent case for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which in turn gives evidence for His deity. His claims to be authoritative which when He says, in the Old and New Testament, are in fact inspired by the living God, then it gives credibility to that. That’s the connection we’re going to be looking at.
We’ll be looking at a three-fold response to the question- is the bible trustworthy? There are a lot of variations of this question as you can imagine. One of these variations is, isn’t the bible filled with contradictions and errors? Doesn’t the bible perhaps teach things that are contrary to what science has definitely taught us? For example, doesn’t the bible teach us that the world is flat or that it’s the center of the universe? Didn’t the church teach that and wasn’t that based on the bible? There are all sorts of things like that that we come up with. How can you be confident the thing that you say is the bible is really an accurate representation of the original materials? Isn’t it just a translation of a translation? Remember that game you used to play, the telephone game, where one person would talk to another person and pass it on to another and so forth until at last the last person would say what the original message transmitted was and it came out a far cry from the original. Even if you tried your very best to make each generation accurate, one thing we know about information is that you never gain information in an information transfer. You always lose information. At the best, you maintain equilibrium but you never gain information. By the way, that has incredible bearing for genetics but that’s another story! The fact is that you lose information and therefore wouldn’t that be true of the bible? Isn’t our English bible after all a copy, a translation of a translation and so forth? How do we know that these people didn’t just make up this stuff?
Some say the bible is mythological. The position of the Jesus Seminar more or less takes this position. What you need to know is that here it is fringe scholarship. It’s really way over here and it would give us the impression that this is what credible, mainline New Testament scholars embrace. Actually it’s not the majority view by any means. The argument here would be that the gospels as we have them are merely legendary accounts. Some people become so skeptical that they say we’re not even sure if there really was a Jesus. I’ll be talking about these sorts of things and we’ll be looking at some evidences. I’m going to be offering a way by which we can compare biblical resources with any other ancient resource and see how they stack up. How does, for example, the New Testament stack up against say Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus and so forth? We generally do not have major general skepticism about let’s say Plato writing the Republic. Nobody really wonders whether those things in fact, Plato wrote. It’s an interesting thing to observe a double standard. One standard as it would apply to ancient literature but another when it applies to Scripture. I’m going to say that that’s an illegitimate double standard.
The first issue is that the Scripture is just not reliable. It is a flat, out-of-hand rejection saying the bible is just no good at all. It’s not reliable. How could anyone believe it? Some people will get more specific and bring up certain issues. I’ve listed six such problems that generally surface when people are informed enough to ask these questions about inspiration, interpretation, how it relates to science, ethical issues, problems of apparent errors that crept into the text and canonicity. (Canon refers to a rule or a standard) Canonicity relates to how do we know which books were really to be in the bible. Didn’t the church just kind of arbitrarily decide which books were to be in and which books weren’t to be in there? That’s an issue that surfaces. What I want to do first and foremost tonight is to focus instead not on these problems, that will be later, but to focus on the total rejection of the bible as being trustworthy material.
Some teaching that people have picked up along the way usually prompts this first option that the bible isn’t trustworthy. Whether in a university class or wherever there may have been some negative teaching about the bible but rarely have I discovered, although in some cases that can be, is it based upon first-hand exposure and a person’s own diligent study of Scripture. Normally it’s based upon second, third or fourth-hand information about the bible. One thing I always do with people when they say the bible is full of contradiction is to invite them to tell me about some of those contradictions. I don’t want to be adversarial here. They have a vague notion about what those might be. Now there are I know specific alleged contradictions that surface and people have pointed these things out but at the same time there are cogent and credible answers to these things. It’s not like somebody’s just come up with a new contradiction that nobody’s thought of in 2000 years. I can assure you there’s a wide literature, well-informed, cogent, responsible answers to any of these questions. While this is a very big question and no one can know all answers to all the issues, there are great resources one can go to and look up any particular concern one might have.
I’m just going to give you a broad-brush approach with this line of reasoning. What I often will do with people is tell them you owe it to yourself at least to have investigated the documents on a first-hand level before you say you will accept it or reject it. I merely appeal to intellectual credibility. That is to say integrity particularly because of the claims of Scripture. It’s not like another book. It has shaped Western civilization arguably more than any other book. It’s the sort of thing that really demands we make some informed (that’s the key word-informed) decision about this rather than an uninformed decision based on what other people have told us. The sorts of things that people sometimes think that the bible teaches. I grew up thinking this for example; God helps those who help themselves. I remember someone telling me that this was in the bible and I just figured it must say that. I later found out that it came from second opinions. The bible doesn’t say that God helps those who help themselves although many people probably think it does. Another saying is godliness is next to cleanliness. My dad used this one to get me to take bathes! He’d say the bible teaches it. I later found out I was being manipulated by second-hand information! It’s not in there! Many things that are in Poor Richard’s Almanac, people think that they’re in the bible. These are more aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin’s time. Some people think that the bible says the earth is flat or that it’s the center of the universe. Remember the Galilean controversy with the geocentric versus the heliocentric model where the sun and the planets all orbited around the earth? The church held that idea at the time because they felt like this is where the action is and everything ought to go around us. The bible never says that. That was a doctrine that some people in the church developed ascribing to the Scriptures what it never taught. It’s not an issue with the bible but had to do with the church’s misinterpretation of what Scripture taught.
Another common misconception is that the books of the New Testament were written centuries after the events described in them. It’s a very common notion. It turns out that’s just not the case. The earliest manuscript we have for example the gospel of John is dated within decades. The evidence we have is that the bulk of the New Testament documents were written between 45A.D. and 70A.D. The vast bulk was completed by 70A.D. We’re not dealing with something that was so far removed from the historical materials that myth could’ve developed. There were too many eyewitnesses who would’ve in fact objected to this. It is early material.
Another misconception is that the English bible is a translation of a translation of a translation and so forth. Actually the English bibles we possess are direct translations from the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. There are no intermediaries. The Douhay-Rheims version, which some Catholics use, was a translation from the Latin Vulgate. Almost all the translations we deal with these days are direct translations from the original languages. It’s important to see that we’re not looking at a lot of generations. We can go back to the texts themselves.
We have a number of arguments. For example, a lot of college courses will teach common sorts of things claiming that the Old Testament is a derivative of Babylonian and Syrian myths and law codes. Actually when you compare them you discover that while there can be similarities; there is no evidence that the Old Testament is lifted from those materials at all.
Indeed we can see as well, that people would say that the Old Testament is filled with the kind of contradictions that are usually taught when Genesis 1 and 2 are presented to be two separate creation accounts. How many of you have heard that idea? Turns out, I won’t go into detail, that’s not the case at all. The Genesis 1 account focuses on the broad-brush approach of the six days of creation whereas Genesis 2 focuses in on the sixth day and develops that as Semitic style commonly does. You go first of all into the broad picture and then it goes back and says now let me give you some more detail about this particular part. This is very common in Hebrew and Semitic style to do that.
I’m suggesting here that these sorts of arguments usually don’t hold much weight and again it’s good for a person first of all to first-hand read the material themselves. It’s rare for a person who has personally examined them to arrive at these things. There are some who have and I understand that. Generally when they do that, they do not expose themselves to the credible answers that are readily available. They say, see it’s contradictory and that’s that. They never consider the wealth of scholarship that cogently answers these things and have done so for hundreds of years. As a result I may have to straighten out some misimpressions that people have from this material and that’s where I mention again the false impressions people get.
Now I want to go into the documents- documentary evidence. There are three tests; the bibliographic test, the internal test and the external test.
For the bibliographic test I want to talk about three things; the quantity of manuscripts, the quality and the time span of those manuscripts. I have had people who will sometimes just say, I don’t believe the bible. Sometimes I might feel that the simplest question to ask them in response to that is, are you familiar with the message of the bible? Can you tell me what’s your understanding about the basic message of the bible? When they try to share that, rarely will that person have the clarity or understanding of the message. Again, I might say gently and not in a mocking way, you need to understand you treat people with grace and dignity because it’s a reasonable and fair objection. You never want to condescend or have a haughty attitude but you always want to treat each person with respect because frankly it’s good they’re asking these questions. These aren’t threats. These are opportunities for us to think through and reason it through together. There’s nothing wrong with that. I want to affirm a person and say it’s good that you’re asking this question. It’s better that you should ask this than ignore it. I’d much rather you think this through and we can think through it together. That’s the posture I take.
Furthermore, I want you to understand that when I’m sharing these things with people I never tell people that’s my agenda and I’m going to try to change your thinking. I want to expose not impose. There’s a big difference between exposing and imposing. I’ve had people terrified to meet with me because they think I’m going to come up with some big argument and try to change them. I’ve had situations where somebody, a third party, introduces us because they have some questions and they think I’m going to try to work them over. Immediately I say, relax; I don’t have any agenda to change your mind. I just want to help you think things through and that’s all I do. I can’t change anybody. I can’t even change myself. I just say let’s enjoy ourselves and let’s think it through together. People have the idea that there are two things you can’t talk about without arguing and they are politics and religion. I argue that you can talk about these things in a reasoned discourse without getting all emotional and wrapped up. That’s important to keep in mind, sort of ground rules and being open to that sort of a thing. I think open inquiry is healthy. I encourage a person to think through things. You owe it to yourself to at least be familiar with the basic message of the bible before you decide it’s wrong. If they’re specific about one of these issues, honest intellectual difficulties, then I need to give direct answers. That’s where we go here.
Let’s look first of all at the bibliographic test. The bibliographic test has to do with the manuscripts themselves. This is critical. We’ll be seeing the quantity, the quality and the time span of these manuscripts.
First of all in
looking at the biblical documents, how many do we have? The New Testament is
extraordinary. The quantity of the Old Testament is not as great and there are
reasons why but it’s compensated for by the quality. The reason why the
quantity isn’t as great as we might like is because the Jewish scribes would
ceremonially bury imperfect and worn manuscripts. They were real rigid about
the way they’d be transmitted. When it became a little bit harder to read (the
copies were meticulously done as we’ll see visa via the quality) they would
bury them. In addition
Also, there’s another factor that’s involved that’s intentional and that has to do with the text type. The Masoretic Jews who lived in the 6th century, about that period, standardized the text so the text we now have is called the Masoretic text. The Masoretes whole passion and livelihood and everything they did were focused around careful transmission of the text of the Old Testament. We have as a result of that standardization by the Jews of the 6th century this text. Those manuscripts that varied from this in any slight way would be eliminated eventually. However what compensates for the small number or really old manuscripts are such things as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were recently discovered and also the Septuagint. The Septuagint refers to “the seventy”. It goes back to a legend about there being 70 Jewish scholars who make this translation. We don’t know how many there really were. Around the time of the Alexandrian Library, about 259 B.C., they wanted to have a translation in the Greek language of the Hebrew bible so the Greeks themselves could be exposed to this. The Septuagint kind of became the common bible of the people. In Jesus’ day it would very commonly be the bible that would be used. For example, Paul often quotes from the Septuagint. Others who could not read Hebrew at least could be exposed to this. We have copies of that available. In addition other things are available such as the Samaritan Pentateuch.
By the way there are
still some Samaritans around (not many). What is amazing about these Samaritans
is that they still speak Aramaic. Who spoke Aramaic? Jesus did. Do you
understand that the language of Jesus has been preserved to the present day.
There are only about 500 people who speak it. There are people who have gone
and lived with the Samaritans and learned Aramaic. The language of Jesus has
been preserved. It’s a remarkable thing. It was the common language of the
people. Jesus also would’ve spoken Greek, Latin and Hebrew because He knew the
Hebrew language as Paul did. It was common in that period of time to know those
various languages. When Jesus says Abba, Father, it is an Aramaic word that
would be a term of endearment. Daddy would be the equivalent. Marana tha is an
Aramaic term for Oh, Lord come used in 1 Corinthians 16:22. Eli, Eli, lema
sabachthani? which means, “My God, My God why have you forsaken Me?” and is an
Aramaic expression. Talitha koum, which means child arise is Aramaic and so
forth. However, the gospels were originally written in Greek and there’s a
reason for that because that was the common language of that empire. Although
it was the
Other documents that we possess as well for example the Targums, which were ancient, praises of the Old Testament as well as the Talmud. There’s the Babylonian Talmud. There’s the Palestinian Talmud. The Talmud consists of the Mishna and the Gemara- the commentaries. What I am suggesting is that there is a lot of supplementary materials that add to the manuscript types.
We can see a number of copies and certainly there are old copies of the Old Testament but when we come to the New Testament, it’s really incredible. In fact it’s without parallel in the ancient world. There are over 5,000 manuscripts in the Greek language. There are another 8,000 manuscripts in Latin. There are another 1,000 in other languages like Coptic, Syriac and so forth. We have an extraordinary number of manuscripts, something on the order of 14,000 plus. In addition to this, there are tens of thousands of quotations of the New Testament by the Early Church Fathers. You could reconstruct the New Testament just by the first couple of centuries by the quotes of the Early Church Fathers. That deals with the quantity of Scripture.
Let’s deal with the
quality of manuscripts. In terms of quality nothing in ancient literature
compares to the Old Testament. It is unparalleled. There are reasons why this
is so. The reverential attitude of the Jewish scribes was phenomenal. The
caution was such that every detail in the scribal process was meticulously
done. They would look at the document and then write a word. They would not
trust their memory for any long phrases. They would use a certain position, a
certain pen, certain materials, the leather documents, and the scrolls that
they would create. They would actually try to minimize even the slightest
error. They would count all the letters and words and lines in the Hebrew after
doing the manuscript. They would also find the middle letter of the Pentateuch
and also the middle letter of the Old Testament and if they didn’t correspond
exactly, they’d pitch the whole manuscript. Would you like to spend 3 or 4
years of your life creating this thing just to discover that when another
scribe checks it out, it turns out that you made a blunder because of one or
two errors? You can see the kind of care it was done with faithfully and
meticulously so the quality of these manuscripts would hardly diminish. We have
a check here because our oldest copy of the Masoretic text dates from somewhere
around 895 A.D. That’s not so good but then we got the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was
interesting to do comparisons with the translations and they date back to about
200 B.C. to about 68 A.D. That’s when
they were finally buried. That brings us back 1000 years earlier. When these
were discovered in 1947 (this is a pretty recent discovery of ancient
manuscripts) immediately the question was, how do they compare? This pushes us
back 1000 years! It turns out the comparison is astounding. It affirms the
incredible reliability. You can compare an Isaiah scroll with the Masoretic
text and it’s just a few changes in spelling. The text itself has tremendous
integrity. It is an awesome thing to possess. You can go for example to the
Shrine of the Book in
Whereas with the New Testament, while the quality is good it’s not as great but still the quality is extraordinary compared to other materials that we possess. What I mean by the quality in the New Testament again is the number of variant readings. How does the text actually shape up? It turns out the New Testament quality is very good indeed. If you compare the materials it’s about 99.5% consistent. There’s about ½ of a percent where you have some variant readings. We have a science called textual criticism. It is a technique by which we compare text types. There are four basic text types that are used. They are the Western, Alexandrian, the Sysarian and I forget the other for the moment but you have these types that exist. You can compare this text type and see how they compare. You can see those variations, which best explain the others. That reading which best explains the other readings is the one to be preferred. There’s a whole technique by which we can do this and discover those things.
They used to have a scriptorium. That would be like me being up here and you’re the scribes and I would read the New Testament for example the letter of John and you would write. It was a way of making mass copies. They didn’t have printing presses so the most efficient thing they would have would be to have about 30 scribes- one reading and the others writing. You could imagine certain errors of the ear could pop up for example, in the Greek the difference between “your” and “our” is real, real similar- “humon” and” hemon”. If you’re not really catching on or it’s not pronounced as well, you could have variant readings as we do in fact have between “us” and “you”. For example in I John 1, we have, “we write these things so that your joy may be made complete.” The variation is, “we write these things so that our joy may be complete.” Not a big deal if you look at the text- its one letter. It’s an error of the ear. There are also errors of the eye- typography was a common thing. Have you ever done this where you’re writing a sentence and it has “the” and as you continue to write you repeat “the” on the next line? Your grammar checkers will immediately catch those deals. They didn’t have that in those days. Generally though, the manuscripts are very good indeed. In fact so good that you can pretty confidently with this trivial percentage, reconstruct with a high degree of confidence the text itself. These are called critical texts that evaluate those readings. Even in the worst case scenarios I want you to understand that the worse differences that we possess do not have any serious consequence. Furthermore, no variant readings are significant enough to call into question any doctrines of the New Testament. It’s important that you know that. The biggest variation I know of is the end of Mark’s gospel-verses 9-20- some have it and some don’t.
Time span is significant.
In the Old Testament we saw how the time span was compressed because of the
Dead Sea Scrolls. It pushed it back to 200 B.C. Also we have copies of the
Septuagint that did go farther back than the Masoretic text. In the New
Testament the time span is exceptional. There are manuscripts that were written
on papyrus. They didn’t have a codex- a codex is a book form. So we have a book
form in the idea of taking these leaves and binding them together. This was not
known in the ancient world. The idea here would then be that you’d write them
on papyrus and on both sides, to make it efficient. These would be used and
then recorded and kept so the ancient library of
The earliest
discoveries of the New Testament are these papyrus rolls. They were done in
columns. The earliest ones were unsealed manuscripts. They didn’t have word
breaks or punctuation which made it hard to read those things. There were no
verses either. That’s how it was done in those texts. We have some fragments of
John’s gospel, John Ryland’s
fragment, papyrus 52, dated between 117 A.D. and 138 A.D. John’s gospel was
written around 90 A.D. There’s nothing like it in the ancient world going back
that close to the original manuscript. The Brodmore papyri are dated from 175 A.D. to 225
A.D. The Chester Batey
papyri of these gospels go back to the year 250 A.D. These are in
What I find very helpful to do is compare it with a chart like this one. Homer is written somewhere around 850-750 B.C. The earliest copy- this isn’t a bad time span- is from around 400 B.C. Horiatis, Plato and so forth are more typical of the earliest medieval manuscripts around 900 A.D. and you’re dealing with about 1300 years after the originals. It’s common to find over 1000 years time span. I define time span as that number of years between the original document and our earliest known manuscript. When dealing with the New Testament, we’re dealing with less than 100 years. For the gospel of John, we’re dealing with just a few years. Homer is unusual because frankly, at the time almost everyone knew the Iliad and the Odyssey. These materials as you can see though have very, very long time spans and very few copies and many times the accuracy of these is not favorable-tremendous textual corruptions that have taken place in these materials.
What I’m suggesting here, the bottom line, is this, if we look at these tests here we see something unique to the New Testament that we do not find in other materials and yet a double standard is applied. The double standard is this- people will often throw out the New Testament but maintain these other materials. The reason for it is because of an anti-supernatural bias that’s often associated with this material.
The other two tests which relate to the bibliographic are the internal and the external tests.
The internal test has to do with the question- what did these documents claim for themselves? This might appear to be circular reasoning but really what we’re saying is this-we’re simply allowing these people to say-are they claiming to be second, third or fourth-hand or are they claiming to be primary accounts? This is not a trivial issue. People who were eyewitnesses of the events they recorded wrote the book of the bible. They claim this and they gave a lot of detail that can be checked out- names of cities, rivers, individual, dates and all kinds of things that can be compared with external evidence materials. The internal claim for example in John 19:35, “And the person who saw it has testified (and his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth), so that you also may believe.”- Referring to himself as the writer. John wrote this in his first epistle, I John 1:1-2, “This is what we proclaim to you, what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have touched (concerning the word of life- and the life was revealed, and we have seen and testify and announce to you the eternal life that was with the Father was revealed to us).” John’s referring to things we communicate to you. We can communicate that message to you. We cannot communicate what it was like to see Jesus and hold Him but we can communicate the living message to you. We’re not claiming to be secondary materials. We have a direct account. For example Luke in Acts all of a sudden shifts from “they” to “we” in Acts 6 and suddenly it becomes first-hand documentation because he was with Paul on many of his excursions and so forth. It’s primary material and Luke was a fine historian contrary to some 19th century speculations that have subsequently been refuted. Luke was an incredible accurate historian- more and more archeological and external evidences have supported this.
Peter himself said, “We have not followed cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We were eyewitnesses of this majesty.” These are the kinds of claims that are being made. These independent, eyewitness accounts in the New Testament about Christ’s life, death and resurrection. These were written by people who were intimately acquainted with Him and who traveled with Him. These were people as well and their epistles reveal integrity and complete commitment to the truth. Furthermore these are men who suffered persecution and martyrdom for the very things they wrote. This was not something trivial or secondary. They suffered for their faith.
The materials were written approximately in the years 47 A.D. to 70 A.D. There was not enough time for myths to develop. There is great stress as we said on accurate, historical details, which brings me to the external test.
Externally, the bible is verifiable, we say, because it’s locked into history. It’s space and time. It’s not long ago and far away but rather very specific and imbedded in history. We can see here that archeological evidence consistently affirms the reliability of both the Old and New Testament accounts. I do not claim that archeology proves the bible but I say that it provides corroborative support for the claims that are found in the accounts. We could spend a great deal of time discussing that but I want you to note a couple of things.
Turn to Jeremiah and you’ll see a couple of examples of chronological indications that we find scattered throughout Scripture that lock it into time and space. Jeremiah 1:1-3,
‘The following is a record of what Jeremiah son of Hilkiah
prophesied. He was one of the priests who lived at Anathoth in the territory of
the tribe of Benjamin. The LORD began to speak to him in the thirteenth year
that Josiah son of Amon ruled over
Another example from the New Testament is Luke 3:1-2, he gives the classical six fold reference (six references), “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the work of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” This is very specific material that we’re dealing with. We know about these people. We have ancient Documents that describe these individuals. I’m suggesting here that we have an extraordinary amount of reference from extra-biblical material.
People ask if Jesus was mentioned outside of the bible. The answer is yes. Josephus for example mentions a number of things that are related to the New Testament. Flavius and Josephus also made a number of specific references to John the Baptist, Jesus Christ and James in the antiquities of the Jews. Josephus gives background details about the Herods, about the Sadducees, about the Pharisees, the high priests like Annas and Caiaphas and the roman emperors that are mentioned in the gospels. We also have other secular references that mention Jesus. An early one that we have is a letter by an imprisoned Syrian named Amarabarrah Serapian, which is a letter to his son which compares the deaths of Socrates, Pythagarus and Christ. You have other writers like Sutonius, Cornelius Tasticus, Livy, Pliny and the Greek satirist, Lucien who have mentioned Jesus in all these sources. Another major source is the Talmud itself, which mentions Jesus. The fact is you have lots of external extra-biblical resources. There are whole books, which describe this in greater detail.
As for the Old and New Testaments, their details are open to archeological investigation. There are very many claims, which are mentioned that are verifiable. There was a particular explosion that took place around the turn of the century of archeological information. The interesting thing is the 19th century higher critical schools of thought came up with all these theories about the origin of Israel’s religion and about the documentary hypothesis and incredibly, although long refuted by archeological evidences is still finding their way into the seminaries. They’re still being taught. It’s astounding. It’s like the evolution of the horse. How many of you remember that as a kid? The Eohippus and the Mesohippus and so forth- a smaller one to a bigger one- it’s bunk. It’s been thrown out 80 or 90 years ago. It’s nonsense. It’s incredible the stuff that I recall learning that turned up to be all bunk! We were taught the moth turned darker as it evolved from a lighter one to a darker one. It turns out there was a lighter and darker one to begin with. It was not a matter of mutation. Sometimes they continue to teach this stuff!
The external confirmation in Scripture is remarkable. There are a lot of details given about rivers, mountains, cities, dates, kings, events, battles and so forth that can be checked out.
This is part 2 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 7 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 8 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 3 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa.
This issue about how can Christ be the only way to God is one of the toughest objections that will surface. It used to be the questions that concerned the issues of why do the innocent suffer. But now, I think, this question has become perhaps one of the largest obstacles. Why do you suppose that’s true? I think it’s a growth of pluralism and the issue of tolerance. We’ve discussed this in a number of cases but in our culture people have been educating us to suppose that tolerance is defined by agreeing with people or at least agreeing that their view may be just as legitimate as your view. That is to say egalitarianism when it comes to truth has become the kind of course of the time. In other words, we are egalitarian with regard to truth. It’s interesting that we are often still elitists when it comes to people but egalitarian when it comes to truth. As I see it, it should be just the other way around. We are to be elitists when it comes to truth and egalitarian when it comes to people. That is to say, treat people in such a way that tolerance would be defined as loving and caring for the person and agreeing sometimes to disagree but in understanding that when we disagree on a truth that does not mean I’m rejecting you as a person. Some how people have got the notion that to disagree with your thinking is to reject you as a person. I don’t know where that came from but that’s never really been the case at all. Such things would have eliminated the whole possibility of debate and dialogue in the past. Rather you have the idea that it is a good thing. Come now, let us reason together. (Isaiah 1:18) Let’s think things through and let’s have an opportunity to kind of evaluate options in the marketplace of ideas to see which ones hold and which ones do not. That is really all we are doing here.
My desire in our time together is simply to expose rather than to impose. There’s a huge difference between those two. I don’t feel as though I have to manipulate or control or wheedle to get you to accept my particular viewpoint. My intention is not so much to change your mind, as it is to expose you to some biblical perspectives. We may vary in where we are in our spiritual journeys but at least it’s a good thing for us to think these things through. Particularly when it comes to the person and work of Jesus Christ who, as I’ll be saying tonight, is arguably the most unique figure ever to walk on the human scene and we’ll make some comments about that.
But naturally, when we approach this question, the immediate objection surfaces that how can Christ be the only way to God is that means it’s too narrow. Some will say that since religion is all basically the same, some people feel that does it really matter which one you believe. In other words, aren’t all those religions pretty much variations on the same kinds of ideas? Isn’t it a matter of personal preference or upbringing or an estimated 75% of the world isn’t Christian, can they all be wrong? This sort of notion comes up. Jesus may be the only way for you but how does that make Him the only way for everybody?
You see, these are all really variations of the same objection. When this question surfaces then we need to consider that there are three basic options.
One could say that it’s not narrow and to revisit the whole issue and to say actually, as some have tried to do, that Christianity has been redefined in many circles as being so inclusive that it includes virtually anything. The question is whether that really is acceptable within the idea of mere Christianity or historic orthodox Christianity and whether that’s compatible or whether that’s coherent or not. The other option is if it’s narrow it must be wrong. The third option is narrowness doesn’t make it right or wrong. The question is whether it’s true or not. When C.S. Lewis came to faith in Christ, ultimately he communicated that it was not because he wanted to believe. In fact, it was very much against his predilection. His disposition was to go against that. In fact, he said, I was a very satisfied, smug atheist. Then all these friends, these people I ran into, kept on jostling me. An atheist, he says, can never be too careful these days! You might read something, you might run into something that might be factual and so it is. It was not really something he wanted but something that kind of embraced him. It was not unlike Paul’s experience. He was really fighting against this whole thing. It was when Christ laid His hand upon him- that became a decisive experience in his life. So Lewis came to the point where he says, you need to understand, it’s not because of any pragmatic value that Christianity may or may not have, it’s not because I feel good about it or that it is something I want to believe, I happen to be a Christian because I happen to believe it’s true. There is no other reason I believe but because I happen to think it’s true. I have been persuaded that there is a veridical case for Christianity among the worldview options. It’s such that it has the best evidential base of any of them.
Let’s take a look at the first option then that it is not narrow. My argument here is that such a view would conflict with the very exclusive claims of Christ. Now some people are clever and they try to redefine those claims or try to say that well, it looks like He said it but He really didn’t say it, the church put those words in His mouth. We’ve talked about that a little bit with this whole issue about Jesus being a myth or a legend when we talked earlier about the bible and it’s reliability. But the bottom line here is to say that there is no manuscript or historical or ancient traditions that would support such a view. In fact, it’s a view that’s rather recent that has been imposed upon the material to reconstruct or one might better say to deconstruct the text to fit modern parameters of a more pluralistic context. As we know, we live in a culture where truth is now presumably socially conditioned rather than something that’s objective. In a postmodern culture, which is actually ultra modern, basically the idea is that everything is up for grabs. What may be true for you may not be true for me. We’ll talk about that in a minute but let’s look at least at the texts themselves first of all.
Here’s what people often suppose. It might be that there is a mountain and as we go further and further up this mountain toward its pinnacle there are different ways up this mountain. Various people go up by different routes, some circuitous and others more directly but eventually they’re all going to converge at the top. The idea is that everybody at the top of the mountain will realize it was all the same quest after all. We’re all meeting at the top and whatever god, as you define who God would be, we’ll all say, oh, so all the religions really were all about the same god or about the same thing. It just looked different in our own culture. It’s often presented this way or else they use a wheel illustration. We look at this wheel and the various aspects and when we look at the hub, we see again that we’re all actually kind of heading toward the same hub, same center, whatever that might be and we may not know what it is. There are some accounts given that are of a pluralistic nature that say, nobody of course can know what kind of god this is. The very nature then of god is unknowable. Of course that’s a content statement that everyone has to ask, how do you know that He’s unknowable? Immediately you have to realize that they are importing backhanded some particular facts and making very specific claims that the various people who made claims to know about God were completely deluded.
In other words you cannot be totally neutral on this matter. I’m suggesting here that actually that kind of view does not take seriously into account the claims and credentials of Christ. Now in John 3:18, the statement made by Christ, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Often, Jesus will speak of Himself as the Son of Man or the Son of God. He has this very strong claim that He’s making. In John 8:24 He said, “Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” Again this is a very strong claim.
Many people say, well, Jesus never really spoke much about Himself but even if He wasn’t true or even if He didn’t live or even if He wasn’t raised from the dead, His teachings would still be true. This was what Gandhi actually held as his position. He said that I admire His teachings so much that even if there never was a historical Jesus, still they would be true for me. The problem is, Jesus’ teachings are always about Himself – unabashedly, constantly referring back to Him. He doesn’t talk just about general terms but He says, unless you believe that I AM, then you will die in your sins. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”
I take it as well, as I look at the various founders of world religions that there is a radical uniqueness of Christ in a number of ways in this regard. Some people promoted their teachings as the only way to God. But as I said earlier, Christ promoted Himself as that way rather than a set of teachings. Some would say that it is only through the teachings of various so-called prophets, and some said truth is spoken of in many ways but Jesus was very specific about this. He was specific not only about his exclusivity but also about His deity and His unique position. He boldly made this statement, (John 8:19b), “You know neither Me nor My Father; if you knew Me, you would know My Father also.” He who does not know Me does not know My Father. This is a very strong claim indeed and can be seen in another text in Matthew 11. This is just before the important text we’ve all heard, Matthew 11:28-30, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My Yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Jesus is inviting them not to come to hear His teachings but to come to Him and He will give you rest. Take My yoke- receive – He constantly talks about receiving Him. The verse just before this, Matthew 11:27 says, “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.” So you have this pretty strong kind of claim that has to at least be accounted for. In John 14:9, He said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”
This other phrase that we just alluded to, I AM, often in bold letters, is seen again and again throughout the Scriptures in the New Testament as being a claim that Jesus makes. The I AM claim that He is making is related to the claim given to Moses. The proposition was given to Moses at the burning bush and you recall when Moses said in Exodus 3, whom shall I say is sending me? Who, will I tell Pharaoh, is sending me? Who, will I tell Pharaoh, is giving me the authority for this message? What did that voice give Moses? What was that name that Moses heard? Exodus 3:14, “God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you.” That is the name then for the self-existent One. He exists in and of Himself. He looks to nothing else for His derivation. When Jesus said to the Jews, (John 8: 58), “Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM.” How do you suppose they reacted to such a phrase? By the way, He didn’t say, I happen to exist or I am He, He said I AM. Else where, when they came to seek Him and there was a cohort, some 600 of them armed, and they came at night, as you recall in the Garden of Gethsemane, to take Him away, they came armed with lanterns, spears, torches and so forth. John 18: 4b, “Whom do you seek?” John 18:5a, “They answered Him, “Jesus the Nazarene.” He said to them, “I AM.” (Note: now in your bibles it might say He in italics but this phrase was ego eime- I AM) John 18:6, “So when He said to them, “I AM He,” they drew back and fell to the ground.” Something happened that was pretty powerful. In another case (John 57-59), when Jesus said, before Abraham was born, I AM, the Jews objected and said, You’re not even 50 years old and are You saying that You preceded him. They took up stones and wanted to stone Him to death for blasphemy because they understood that such a claim would be to make yourself tantamount to being God.
He supported His case for deity in a number of ways besides His numerous I AM statements. He also claimed the attributes of God. For example, the attribute of eternality is something that He claimed in John 17:5, “ Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” He claims as well the attribute of omnipresence. You see this illustrated in several passages for example when Jesus says in Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.” Now you can see where there are lots of times when more than 2 or 3 groups of people as well will gather together and it would imply a clear statement of omnipresence. “And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20b) I am with you. I’m constantly present with you. I would also say another claim, His sinlessness, is also a divine attribute. He would say, which of you convicts Me, charges Me with any sin. That’s a pretty strong statement. Now I have run into one or two people, maybe two people, who claimed to be sinless. They’re pretty rare but every so often I’ll run into someone who claims to be absolutely perfect. It’s an astounding claim but it requires no self-consciousness whatsoever or the perfection of those 3 defense mechanisms of denial, rationalization and projection. The only way I can account for a person who thinks himself or herself sinless is of course to see what friends and perhaps a spouse would reply to that statement about them! This particular person had to hold that view because he held a particular theology where by if he sinned at all, he would lose his salvation. What I did was I pressed him a little bit with that particular theology and said, well, what kind of sin are we talking about? Is it something pretty big or something more modest because the question is, where is your cutoff? I pressed him with that. He hadn’t murdered anyone. Then the problem would be, what if you hate somebody in your heart? Do you recall when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said if you hate your brother you’ve committed murder in your heart? Then I pressed it farther and I got it down to where if he exceeded the speed limit, unbeknownst to him, by ½ mph, he would lose his salvation. Now at that point, frankly, he had committed the sin of pride in order to hold to such a stubborn position because he refused to acknowledge the incoherence of his position. The point is, if that’s your view then any sin will do it- thought, word or deed and it can be sins of omission as well. The sins of omission cut both ways as well. There are a lot of things I have done wrong by simply not doing them. Remember that idea- if you have a liturgical background part of the confession is that we have sinned in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and in what we have failed to do. That will nail you because there are all kinds of things that we should’ve done. We look back and say, I should’ve said a word of kindness to that person or I should’ve- you see where I’m going with that? Thought, word and deed will get you too. It’s not just your deeds but your thoughts and your words count too! We have a dilemma that we have to address. Scripture hits us front on with that.
There are a number of indirect claims that Jesus makes concerning His deity. There are a number of these but one of these is His ability to forgive sin. That is a pretty strong claim in Mark 2:5-11 and Luke 7:48-50 when Jesus says, I forgive them, and particularly when it was not a sin committed against Him. Try this at home- somebody complains to you about another person who had said something mean to your friend and your friend told you about this and whatever they did you say, that’s okay, I forgive them. Do you see the absurdity there? Wait a minute, what do you have to do with this, you weren’t involved? To make such a claim is to make the supposition that all sins are committed ultimately against Him. This would mean, of course, that He claimed to be God. In fact the Pharisees rightly said, who but God could forgive sins? They were right and again- they wanted to stone Him for these kinds of claims and these so-called blasphemies because they were right- if He wasn’t God these were indeed blasphemies.
Jesus’ acceptance of worship was pretty strong. Remember when, for example, Thomas sees Him and he says, my Lord and my God. (John 20:28) Peter worships Him in the boat and when Jesus says, all must honor the Son even as they have honored the Father. (John 5:23) The word that is used is the word for worship. These are very strong claims. That all people would face Him in judgment is not a modest claim either in John 5. Imagine me coming to say to you that by the way, when you die it’s going to be me that you give an account to- not anyone else- me. These are pretty strong claims if you would analyze the implications of that. Also, that judgment will be based upon what you did about Me is again, a very strong claim.
You can write Him off and say He’s crazy but one thing you can’t do is to say that He’s an ordinary, humble teacher from Galilee. There’s something more going on than that. That’s not an option but many people want to make it that. That He was a mysterious and magnetic Jew as many modern groups are trying to do that is to divest the New Testament of its contents by coming around that through various clever techniques that never really were supportable either textually, historically or by the Early Church Fathers who were in the position to know. Those are ingenious devices, like the Jesus Seminar, to try to avoid those claims, having a vote as to what He really said. It’s amazing, of course, how the vote always turns out to fit their preconceptions. Their theology is amazingly reflected by the votes. So what we have here is a vote indicating their viewpoint that Jesus didn’t do any miracles, He wasn’t God, and then we vote and find out that the texts that we arrive at are authentic, very few, are the ones where He didn’t do any miracles or claim to be God. It’s an amazing thing how this happens. I’m not saying these people are intentionally deceiving people. I think that they are wrong but I think that many of them are quite sincere in their views because of the particular views that they picked up in their own courses and seminaries and so forth. The radical implications of buying into these things are pretty strong. It doesn’t go against the current thrust of scholarship- parts of scholarship. Though I might say the Jesus Seminar is actually a fringe movement with New Testament scholarship.
There are also statements about Jesus made by others claiming His deity. His own followers made such statements as these, for example, in Acts 4:12, “And there is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven that is given among men where by we must be saved.” as Peter put it in his sermon. Or in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Or as Paul put it in Galatians 1:8, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” Paul addressed Jesus as our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. John, in his gospel, speaks bout His pre-incarnate state and that He is the living Word. Paul says that He spoke all things into being and in Him and through Him all things hold together. Now these are very strong claims and it’s not surprising the Jews often accused Him of blasphemy.
You couldn’t spend much time with Him and remain neutral. As a result of the encounter, you’d either move closer to Him or further away. But one thing you couldn’t do and that is just to be indifferent. That was never seemingly an option. Jesus made the claim that the only way for us to bridge the gap between God and ourselves is that we receive this free gift that He is offering to us and that good deeds that we have- systems of human effort and merit- will fall woefully short. Frankly, as Paul puts it, I have to agree, if there was any other way by which we could in fact obtain salvation other than the death of Christ- then Christ died needlessly. What He did on the cross would be a considerable waste because such a desperate means would have been an error. It would have been a tragic martyrdom. Do you see where I’m going with this? If I deal honestly and simply with the primary materials themselves, it forces me into a position where I have to acknowledge that there’s more to it than just the idea that He could’ve said anything you wanted Him to say. There’s a good deal more going on. Again we go back to the New Testament and the authority of that, as we looked at earlier in one of the sessions.
Some say that He staged it so that He could appear to be the Messiah. I see very little gain that He gets from that or what His disciples would gain from that. Remember the disciples themselves, we saw one of the cases for the resurrection, didn’t even think that He would or was going to rise from the dead even though He told them again and again. They refused to believe it and it was against their own preconceptions and furthermore, they were terrified about this whole matter. Suddenly, they became bold. If anyone was in the position to know if it was a fraud, these were the people who would’ve known. Again as we said before, no one willingly dies for something they know is a fraud. Now they may die willingly for something that’s fraudulent but they don’t know it is. But these were people who were in a position to know whether it was true or not.
You have a number of texts that are found in the synoptics that allude to His divinity. For example, all the texts I gave you that relate to His ability to forgive sins- who but God can forgive sins? The Jews themselves understood His claim to be divine. He claimed to be omnipresent- that was in Matthew- I am with you always until the end of the age and the other- wherever two or three are gathered in My name there I am with them. These are not the kinds of claims that are made just by an ordinary sage or someone like that. If you put the synoptic gospels together, you can derive a very strong case for His deity even from just those. The Jews understood His claims about the unique relationship He has with His Father and to them this would be blasphemy. John is more direct and explicit about it. It doesn’t mean he would depart from the basic teachings of the synoptics on these matters.
Let me move on to the next area. Suppose it is narrow so that makes it wrong. Here’s why there are three basic false assumptions that are made. One is that sincerity makes something true. The second is that belief makes something true. Last, is that exclusiveness makes something wrong. I’m suggesting here that those don’t really wash very well.
Let’s talk about sincerity. Remember Charlie Brown and how he said, how can we lose so many games when we’re so sincere? That is the idea. Can you give me a counter factual of some people that were sincere but sincerely wrong? How about David Koresh as an example? Perhaps on of the worst examples we could all think of is Jim Jones in Guyana with over 900 people drinking that poisoned Kool-Aid. Now these folks were pretty sincere when they did that. Nobody forced them against their will or twisted their arm but they were sincere and sincerely wrong. There are a number of cases where people can be sincerely wrong. There’s a case I read about where a nurse changed a patient’s oxygen tank and the next morning the patient was found dead. They later discovered that this oxygen tank was mislabeled at the warehouse and it was nitrogen. Now she was quite sincere about the matter but sincerely wrong. Many of you will know about Jim Marshal of the Minnesota Vikings and you recall that he picked up a fumble and threw off tacklers repeatedly until he crossed the goal line. Then he discovered that he went over the wrong goal line and scored for the wrong team. I want to tell you in that moment of glory- what he thought was glory- would in a moment later be horror. The realization of what have I done? I promise you he was sincere about what he was doing but he was going the wrong direction. Sincerity then has little to do as you can see with whether a thing is true or not.
The other claim that we can see is the second assumption that exclusiveness would make something wrong. Now there are a lot of people who raise this objection in this way. They think about neutral kinds of things; some people like oysters and some people don’t; some people like the Ivy League look and some people don’t- that sort of a notion. The idea here is that everybody needs to do his own thing. However, while that might be true about fashion and taste that may not apply to a lot of other areas of reality. I’m particular about things that have to do not so much with my belief or lack of belief but whether they are really true or false. For example, which side of the road are you going to drive your car on? We know that the earth is not flat. I think there is a Flat Earth Society that still exists and they say it’s all kind of hokum and malarkey and we are just being deceived into thinking it’s spherical. Most of us probably wouldn’t be candidates for joining the Flat Earth Society. I know of one person who says the trips to the moon were staged in a studio. You can make that kind of claim but there are a lot of counterfactuals that will go against such a claim. The fact is the earth is spherical- technically the earth is an obelisk spheroid though it’s pretty close to being a sphere. It’s not flat. My point here is that it’s not a question of opinion, it’s a question of good evidence. You could say I happen to believe in an octagonal planet myself. I happen to be from the planet Zendar. You might well claim to be from such a planet but you see where I’m going with that? There are some things that aren’t a question of just a matter of majority vote or popular opinion. I may believe as much as I want that such things are so but they may be completely wrong. It’s not a question of belief making a thing right or wrong.
Religions exclusiveness is a big issue in our culture. If a thing is exclusive it must, by its nature be wrong. But again when we press home and ask for some examples of this- we have to ask what do you mean by exclusiveness? Nature and everything we do in our culture is rather exclusive. I’m very particular about when I’m on an airplane and when they’re going to land that they know which runway and at what time they are going to land. They are very important factors to me and that they listen to the directives of the control towers. My car is mighty particular as well when it requires me to put unleaded fuel in. If I object and put diesel fuel in there, well I can do so, but the fact is I’ll suffer the consequences especially if I decide to get real cheap and put water in the thing! My point is the way things are is very, very specific. It’s not just a question of just saying that everything goes. As soon as you make a claim for something, you are by the very nature of that excluding the counterfactuals of that claim. I find it interesting where people, in the name of tolerance, are intolerant of people who don’t embrace their tolerance. It’s a self-defeating proposition. In fact, I just read a book by Thomas Odin called Requiem which should be read by every person in liberal seminaries. He teaches in such a seminary and says, I’ve got to come clean. Here’s what’s going on here. In the name of tolerance we’ve marginalized and also turned these people into like children, we’ve marginalized them and we have vilified them for their particular views, which don’t happen to correspond with our particular views of tolerance. It doesn’t fly. It doesn’t work. In other words, any position that you hold, by its very nature, will exclude its contraries.
We often hear that if you look at religions they all teach the same thing. All religions differ from one another and hold exclusive views about God, humanity and salvation. I’m either going to say one is right or the others are wrong or they’re all wrong but they cannot all be right. What we often hear is that if you look at all religions they teach the same thing. I’m going to suggest here that this is not the case. The three areas we can look at are their views of God, salvation and human destiny. In other words, who is God? What is the means of salvation? What is our destiny and what will our end look like? We will do a quick survey of five major religions; Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. We will see a number of different perspectives.
What are the options for God in Hinduism? One option is a view of God, particularly in the philosophical Hindu, as being monotheistic. Monism means all is one and all is God. There are variations of pantheism as well. There are different pantheistic viewpoints where we have a God who is eternal, impersonal and abstract without any knowable attributes whatsoever. The popular forms of Hinduism are polytheistic.
In Buddhism you have forms that are atheistic. Many forms of Buddhism, in particular philosophical forms, they have no God at all. There is not a doctrine and there is no God. Some forms, for example, myahanna, the wide path, can often be polytheistic or in some cases there’s the worship of Buddha. This was the last thing that he had in mind. You have various notions ranging from monism to pantheism to polytheism even to atheism.
What would God’s nature be? In Christianity, you have three persons but one God. In the Christian view God is three eternal and co-equal persons. In Islam and in Judaism you have one God and one person. Now these views then, it seems to me, can’t all be right in any meaningful way. If God is impersonal then He’s not personal and so forth.
We can go from there and look at salvation and see that there’s something similar that goes on here. As to salvation, we have the idea that some people will try to turn to God and lead a moral life so in many forms of Judaism you have the idea of good works and you have repentance, particularly on Yon Kippur. You have this idea of good works or deeds and repentance as being involved. Generally speaking we have variations of this in the various religious systems. In Islam there are the five pillars. In Buddhism you have to follow the four noble truths and the eight-fold path- right thinking, right consciousness, right behavior and all these things. In Hinduism there are forms of devotional service or works or various forms of meditation and so forth. But again we have in all these religions variation of works in one way or another. The idea is that if you work your way hard and long enough-in Eastern thought- what do you have? You have the law of karma, which is the law of cause and effect. This means that whatever you do in this life will produce good or bad karma. You will have kind of a net karma. I don’t know if the term is used this way but you have to net it out because doing some things would presumably bring some good but some things would offset that. Of course the question is what happens when your total karma is more negative than positive? I suppose there can be in fact a reincarnational regress. In fact, Eastern thought allows that. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to be progressing in reincarnation. Actually if you read Plato, you discover that he too had a doctrine of transmigration of souls. Achilles chose to go downward rather than upwards. You have here different views of human salvation. The problem with that is you have to have thousands if not millions of incarnations to eventually break off of the wheel of life, which brings us to human destiny.
By the way, in Christianity, faith alone is the vehicle of salvation- it is by grace through faith. It’s something that stands apart and is unique just as the idea of the Trinity is unique. The idea that God is a community of persons, three-in-one, is utterly unique to the biblical vision. By the way that idea of persons in relationship is what human life is pretty much about if you hadn’t noticed yet. We have an ultimate basis for such relationship that’s actually imbedded within the context of community of the Godhead. It also gives us an answer for the problem of the one and the many. If God is the ultimate iceberg or cosmic monad- how did anything come out? Why did He even make anything? Constantly the thought is that those things are illusion and evil because they are not really related to the all that is. Why did He bother doing that in the first place? Was there some kind of thing that made Him do something like that? To kind of spawn off these illusory worlds, people now for millions of lives have to kind of get back to godhead. Have you ever run into the Harakrishna people at the airport? They now wear wigs so they’re not as easy to see- they used to go bald-headed and they used to be pretty obvious-but they also discovered that they could do better is some places wearing wigs. They sell books and they have a magazine called back to the godhead. The idea is to do devotional or Bacta Yoga working our way back to godhead by devotion to the god Krishna through works and so forth. Human destiny is the idea of Nirvannah. Basically it means you break off this awful wheel of life, all these cycles, and to be absorbed into that which is. They have this phrase in Hinduism, Tak twam asee- thou are that. Once you come to realize that the individual self is the same as the ultimate universal self- you’ve got it. Right now your problem is just one of ignorance. You just didn’t know that you are god. So once you figure out that you really are god and you realize that all things are you and you are all things, you’re moving in the right direction. The idea of Sutori, also spoken of as Enlightenment, all have to do with the idea of breaking away from the boundaries and shackles of reason and entering into or being absorbed into the all that is. In many forms of Buddhism, annihilation, extinction, is the real meaning of this term. Extinction means the light is out and you are no longer in any form of any substantive existence. In the Christian version it is about relationship and persons in relation. In fact, you don’t really know yet what it’s really like to be in full and total relationship. We won’t know until we’re in the presence of the living community of Being- God Himself. Your best moments of relationship on earth are only hints of something God has in store.
Many times we hear that these other religions are more tolerant in view of our previous mountain and wheel illustration. I want to suggest that they’re more exclusive than you might suppose. I don’t know any Hindus that would allow for their kids to be raised in a Christian home. If they were born into one, the ultimate idea is that eventually they might have enough incarnations and be born into a Hindu home. The fact is that they are exclusive claims but I want to suggest they’re not going up the mountain this way, in fact, they’re not even on the same mountain. When we’re not even close to the same view of God- what makes you suppose we’re heading in the same direction on the same mountain? Do you see my thinking here? Let me give you an example of how this works when we talk about the law of non-contradiction. Suppose the statement A contradicts B. Now either A is true and B is false or B is true and A is false or they are both false but they cannot both be true. For example, if I say all dogs shed hair and then someone says poodles don’t shed hair they both can’t be right. They could both be wrong. All dogs shedding hair is incompatible with poodles not shedding hair. One could say, well, poodles aren’t dogs and we could go from there but that wouldn’t be a good way to go! One thing it can’t be is that the two statements are right nor does anyone think this way. They may claim that way but they can’t even in phrasing a sentence avoid the law of non-contradiction because in trying to make a claim that non-contradiction is not true is in fact to affirm the law of non-contradiction. You can’t speak in any meaningful way apart from that law. It’s not an Aristotelian logic being imposed here. It’s the way we are and the way we think.
Let me give you another example. We could say that Mohammed says that there’s another way to God besides Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ says, I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. (John 14:6) Now Christ could be right or Mohamed could be right but they can’t both be right. If there is one way and then Mohammed says that there is another way then they cannot both be correct.
I’m suggesting that the way we live and the way we are drives us to this position and that we have some very unique claims and very strong conclusions which can be derived from this claim which often brings us to the liar, lunatic or Lord dilemma. The idea that perhaps Jesus was lying about it and maybe He knew He was wrong but He just deceived His disciples to give them a false hope. Well, I suggest to you that it would’ve been a deliberate and conscious act of inviting these followers to put their hope in something that He knew was not true and that He was asking them to base their life deliberately on a lie. The evidence is weighted very strongly against Him being a person who would be a fabricator. He seems to be One who embraces truth. He seems to be One who pursues truth and virtue. Nothing that we know about Him would be compatible with the idea of Him deliberately deceiving people when He made these messages. Another option would be to say that He was nuts. He was a lunatic, which is what some people said. They said this man is demon possessed or that He is blaspheming and He’s getting His power from Satan so He might be demonic. (John 10) In other words, He might be totally deluded-maybe He has delusions of grandeur. Imagine you running into someone who makes those kinds of claims about themselves and stop to think about that! Those are mighty unusual claims. I’m suggesting here the evidence that we have for Him and everything we know about Him does not suggest any lunacy.
We read about His composure, His poise, His love, His grace, His peace and He’s never in a hurry. Do you notice that about Jesus? He’s never in a hurry. It’s an amazing thing isn’t it? He was constantly in demand by people for His time but He had an inner poise, a peace, a shalom, about Him that was contagious. People saw a quality about Him. That’s where He said I’m offering you My rest, My peace, My joy and My love. He was in fact the embodiment of other-centered love. He noticed the unnoticeable. He loved the unlovable. He was One who showed great care and effort and attention to people who would often be overlooked. He was One who gave Himself away for people.
The other option then would be that He is the Lord. If He were not a liar or a lunatic then He would be the Lord of all. We are about out of time but here are just a few quick words about the claims and credentials of Christ. It’s one thing to make claims and another to back them up with credentials. What are some of His claims? The I AM claims. He claims to be deity either directly or indirectly. How about the Old Testament Messianic prophesies? Again and again He said, in order that you might know, thus what the prophets said has been fulfilled. Luke 4:21, “And He began to say to them, ”Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke 24: 27, “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” He said this to the Jews as well. They said tell us plainly who You are. You claim to be the Messiah, the Christ, or are You not? He said, it is as you say. They tore their robes and so forth. The fact is He was making very strong claims and they picked it up. How about His resurrection? It’s one thing as some have said, the best way to start a religion would be to claim you’re going to rise from the dead and then do it. There was a cult in New York City a few years ago when someone made such a claim. There was a problem though when a horrible stench was detected coming out from underneath an apartment door. The corpse was rotting and yet his followers were convinced that he would rise from the dead. They had to fumigate the apartment and as you could imagine their faith diminished day by day as the body rotted. Maybe he’s not who he claimed to be after all. It’s one thing to make a claim and another thing to back it up. He claimed to be the exclusive way. I am the way of knowing the Father. He claimed that He would come again and be the judge of the world. He was also sinless. Now what kind of credentials did He have to back up these kinds of claims? Remember after He had said, I am the Bread of Life, He multiplied the loaves? It’s an interesting audio-visual illustration. He said, I am the manna who comes out of heaven (John 6) and then He feeds the multitudes and He connects the two. After awhile you begin to see that something is going on here- His fulfillment of these claims. In fact, He fulfilled 30 Old Testament prophecies on the day of His crucifixion down to the details; He would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, His garments would be divided, they would cast lots for His garments, they would pierce His hands and His feet, His side would be pierced as well but furthermore they would not break His bones and so on. The money that was used to betray Him would be used to buy the potter’s field. There are specific details being confirmed again and again in His life. There was the fulfillment of the prophecy in Micah 5:2 that He would be born in Bethlehem and on and on these details are fulfilled- from the tribe of Judah and so forth. How about His miracles? If you don’t believe Me on account of My words then believe on account of the works that I do- the works bear witness that I am the Son of God. My works themselves bear witness of who I claim to be. (John 11:37-38) We have the fulfillment of the prophecies, His miraculous life and His power. He had an awesome power to change lives. I submit to you for example the woman at the well as being a marvelous illustration of that very thing. Mary Magdalene is also another marvelous illustration of how this woman is transformed permanently and irrevocably. He had the power to change and transform lives. He still has that power today. His resurrection is also another divine substantiation of His deity. We spent a whole hour discussing the evidence for the historical resurrection from the dead. He also lived a sinless life. In fact His disciples who lived with Him, ate with Him, walked with Him, and for three and one half years saw everything He did and they could make the claims that in Him there was no sin. Jesus’ credentials were unparalleled. The reality of His authority over disease, demons, nature and death are well documented. The claims and credentials back each other up. They support one another. His words and His works are a seamless tunic. We’ll complete this discussion next time.
Let me tell you where we’ve been on this question about how Christ can be the only way to God. So far, we talked about how Christianity is either narrow or it’s not. If it’s not narrow the problem we have is that it would conflict with the clear, exclusive claims of Christ. I gave a number of those claims that He has made in the synoptic gospels and in the Gospel of John. We also saw that the unique claims were claims that referred to His direct claims and His indirect claims. Some direct claims He made were about things that He uniquely fulfilled such as being I AM, the God-Man. The indirect claims made- to be able to have the power to forgive sins- are an indirect claim to being God because only God can forgive the sins of other people that were not committed against ourselves. There are strong claims about His miraculous ministry that were authenticated by the various convincing proofs that He gave. The claims about the resurrection were also fulfilled. There were claims to be the embodiment of the historical Old Testament Messianic prophets and how those spoke about Him. All these texts from Genesis and all the way through the writings and the prophets, Jesus said, bear witness of Me. He said that His life was one that was marked by sinlessness- which of you convicts Me of any sin? He had authority that He claimed was given to Him uniquely by the Father and He said, to hear Me is to hear the Father. To see Me is to see the Father. To believe in Me is to believe in the Father. To deny or reject Me is to reject My Father. To honor Me is to honor My Father. He demanded the same kind of obedience and faith and they would honor the Son even as they honored the Father. Now that word honor is a word that has to do with reverence or worship. The implications are very astounding. When Thomas made the claim, My Lord and My God- if He was not and He accepted that worship it would’ve been blasphemous. The fact that He accepted worship and all these things, we saw, sets Him apart. We saw that He had convincing claims and credentials that backed up those claims.
We moved on to this other issue as well and we talked about the alternatives apart from Christ. We’re reduced to hopeless systems of human efforts. We’ll talk more about this in an upcoming session but can good works really get us into a right relationship with God? We’ll be talking about how the vision of Christianity is unique. It’s not so much a religion but a relationship with a Person. You do not merely believe in a set of principles but you’re putting your trust in a Person. That’s why intellectual assent is not enough. It must be a personal reception. How do you trust a person? You entrust yourself into their care and that has to do then with embracing Him as a person.
Now we said if Christianity is “narrow”, we looked at the assumptions that people make that would make that appear to be wrong. One of those false assumptions was that sincerity makes a thing true. That’s not the case as we have seen again and again. You can be sincere and sincerely wrong. We also saw the assumption that belief makes something true or false. It’s not a question of whether something is true or false by how much you believe in it. You can believe all sorts of things that aren’t true, as people have done throughout the centuries. It’s a question of is there any good reason to think it’s true or false? We also saw the false assumption that if it’s exclusive it must be wrong. This is an idea we’ve picked up and we’ve redefined the word tolerance, even the way we use it in colloquial language. Let’s say you went to a restaurant and you asked somebody if they liked their meal. The person says I tolerated it. You immediately see what the real meaning is. It doesn’t mean that they enjoyed it. It means that they put up with it. Tolerance in its traditional term meant to not necessarily agree with or affirm. In the case of relationships with people, we need to still care for them and love them even when you disagree. That disagreement doesn’t mean a rejection of the person. In our culture, we've redefined the word tolerance to mean that you are affirming it whole heartedly even if you disagree. I’m suggesting here that you can disagree with a person and still not reject them although our world is now telling us more and more that you can’t do that. I’m suggesting that’s not the case. You can agree to disagree but that doesn’t mean you’re rejecting the person. What we have is this mindset that all truth is really up for grabs.
There’s a new book out written by Paul Copan called True For You But Not For Me and it’s a fairly helpful overview of a lot of these tough questions that people ask. It’s a good supplement as well to my book, I’m Glad You Asked. It deals with some of the basic questions you’re going to hear more and more frequently- that’s true for you but not for me. In other words truth is up for grabs because so many people disagree that means relativism must be true. They’ll say, you’re just using western logic. Who are you to judge others? Christians are intolerant of other viewpoints. Paul goes on to say every view by its nature cannot tolerate the other views in the sense of saying that they’re all equally right. It’s not just Christianity that’s “exclusive” if the things disagree the law of non-contradiction is present. Remember the analogy we used last week? If one person says all dogs shed hair and someone else says poodles don’t shed hair, there’s only a couple of ways around that. You can say poodles aren’t dogs and then we can both agree. But if we say poodles are dogs then you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that’s true for you but not for me. It has nothing to do with you or me, it has to do with the thing and whether it’s true or not. That’s what I’m suggesting here. It’s not a question of an opinion. He talks about a number of areas and it’s well worth a look.
We’re suggesting
here as well that in looking at the various religions- Christianity, Judaism,
Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism- that they radically disagree on their view of
God. In fact, they disagree within themselves. The philosophical Hindus really
have a monistic or pantheistic view of God. There are practical Hindus, which
the vast majority of people in
At the end of the last session we looked at the unique claims of Christ and His unique credentials. These are numerous. We talked about how He claimed to have the power to forgive sins, to be sinless, to fulfill Old Testament prophecies, He would rise from the dead, He would come again and judge the world. That’s a pretty big claim. The judgment of all people would be based upon Him. The nature of this is always the same that they could all be wrong but they can’t all be right. One has to deal with these issues.
Let me read something from Renevare by Richard Foster. Some of you know him from the books he wrote called Celebration of Discipline, The Prayer- Finding the Hearts’ True Desire, and other books as well that are helpful. He makes a comment in this little perspective magazine, “The uniqueness of Christ, this exclusivity, which says that Jesus is the only way of salvation does not set well with modern sensibilities. People today wish every way to be valid, every belief to be true and every sincere person to be right.” But the fact is we live in an age, as he’s saying, where people believe there is no absolute truth and everything is up for grabs. “But the truth be told,” he says, “we’re not in the position to set the rules in these matters.” This is something you need to keep reminding yourself about. This isn’t something we’re making up. You have to decide whether the gospel accounts are right or wrong. But it’s not like we’re making the call and saying that this is the way it is. I’m just taking what Jesus says in those gospel narratives seriously and these are the implications of it. Foster goes on to say, “The law of non-contradiction, the reality that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time flies in our face every time we try to have things some way other than the way they are.” Take any example from your life that doesn’t have to do with God and religion and bring it down to an earthly plane. I used the example of dogs. One person can say A and one person can say B and they both can be wrong but they both can’t be right. For example, someone at your place of employment is accused of being an embezzler. They’ve been accused of embezzling $5000 from the company funds. The person says, I didn’t do it and another person says he did. Can they both be right? This isn’t complex stuff! What is painfully obvious to us on the earthly plain is somehow elevated to being some abstract mystery when it comes to the spiritual plane. Nobody lives that way in the course of a day. I’m suggesting here that we have two sets of rules. I don’t know where they came from but we somehow throw all logic to the winds when it comes to ultimate reality. We can’t be this way. Tomatoes are either a fruit or a vegetable. Peanuts are either nuts or legumes. You can’t have it both ways unless you want to redefine nuts to be anything you want them to be! We’re playing by two sets of rules. When one person says this and another person says that sometimes equivocation takes place and they are at loggerheads. The law of contradiction says that two things cannot be true at the same time and in the same sense.
Clearly there’s a lot of truth within other religions. You have to understand that sometimes people go too far and throw out the baby with the bath water. There are rich insights in other religions. In fact, they have pretty much the same moral codes. This should not be a surprise. It’s because of general revelation and according to Romans 1 and 2, you’d expect people to have a sense with their conscience about what’s right and wrong. There’s a generally agreed upon moral code. C.S. Lewis’ book, The Abolition of Man, talks about this in great detail. There he calls it the Tao. This Tao, as he uses the term to describe the fact that whether you’re looking at Islam, Confucianism, the Egyptian code laws, the Babylonian code or ancient Chinese codes, you find an incredible moral agreement across cultures and time. There’s a trans-temporal and trans-cultural basic agreement about what’s right and what’s wrong. They all agree that treachery, murder, kidnapping, betrayal and so forth are wrong. Lewis is basically saying that indicates something. We all know and have a sense about right and wrong. Frankly, we live this way. This is why anything you call blameworthy tells you that you’re really appealing to some standard and things you call praiseworthy are appealing to some standard. Everybody, I don’t care whether they’re an atheist or a theist; they have some things that are blameworthy and some things that are praiseworthy in their thinking. You don’t really run into people who basically say it’s a good thing I’m going to do my own thing; I really like injuring babies. We all know there’s something wrong with that. We realize then that if a person would make such an affirmation there’s a psychopath involved. We’re dealing with a person who is pathological in a sense that they do not have or share in the common understanding of what is right and wrong. We live this way in the practical level but when we project it with morality as well as truth on the large level we suddenly go off and become irrational again.
Foster goes on to say, “If Jesus is the way then those who are not in His way are not in the way. Jesus lived, died, rose from the dead and now extends to us, His disciples, the same life and power that He knew when He was among us in the flesh. That is His way. The disciple of Jesus actually has a transforming relationship with God, which those who are not His disciples simply do not have. This is the true exclusivity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The reality of people who have turned from darkness to light, turned from fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness and carousing. (That’s just a litany from Galatians 5.) They’ve turned instead to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control. It is an exclusivity of those who are truly living and walking in holiness and power of Jesus Christ. So when it comes down to it we’re claiming that this is the way by which the human life is transformed and there is no other way. There is no other power capable of taking people and changing them in that way. It’s not only that you have a belief system but also it’s Whom you believe in and what that produces in your very life.” Those are some of the issues.
I want to move into
a couple of second issues or implications. This one has to do with the Jew. The
reason I want to do that is because it’s a question that often surfaces in
connection with this issue. The problem facing believers at the very beginning
of the church was not how a Jew could become a Christian but how a Gentile
could become a Christian. In fact, when word got out that this Roman centurion,
Cornelius, came to faith in Jesus the Messiah, what did the Jewish believers
say? They said this can’t be. How can a Gentile become a Christian? Who wrote
the New Testament? Everybody except Luke was a Jew. Who was Jesus? He was a
Jewish rabbi. That’s why most representations of Jesus don’t really look like
what He would’ve looked like. He would like more like a Semite. He would have a
Semitic appearance. He wouldn’t look like someone from
So the question was,
what are you going to do with these Gentiles? Paul says in Philippians 3 how He
needed Jesus for salvation even though he was the epitome of a great Jew. He
talks about how he was a law keeper, a Pharisee of the Pharisees and he was
even so zealous he persecuted those crazy people who supposedly believed in a
false Messiah. He says I understood though that righteousness by keeping the
law wasn’t going to cut it but rather it had to be righteousness by trusting in
Jesus. That’s the only hope I have. Paul says in Romans 1:16, “For I am not
ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who
believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Galatians 3:28,”There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither
male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That’s a very powerful
and counter cultural vision. The things that divide us even today are overcome
in the gospel. He makes a broad road for all who would be willing to see Him.
He opens it up and takes all the barriers that we erect and removes them and
says, in Christ Jesus, you have a welcome to the Father’s family- all are
welcome- whosoever may come in. That’s an incredible concept in an exclusive
society. Ephesians 2 cites that He Himself is our peace who made both groups
into one, speaking of Jew and Gentile and broke down the barrier of the
dividing wall. In 1 Timothy 2:5, “For there is one God, and one mediator also
between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” So there are not a series of
mediators but there’s one Mediator.
That is a verse you ought to keep in your mind’s eye because Paul makes it clear here that there are not several mediators- there’s one. The reason for this, of course, is very clear. It is because it required the God-Man to be the Mediator. So that being the God-Man when He reaches down what He does is He takes on humanity and He takes humanity and raises humanity up into God. We don’t become gods but He raises Himself up and He Himself becomes the God-Man and in the God-Man we can now have a relationship with the Father. Before this, the Father was so transcendent, so holy and so awesome that we couldn’t even hope to reach Him. We see this again about how all human efforts and attempts to reach God fall far short. Look at this chart and see how high our human efforts will get us. Most of us would be little dots somewhere along the bottom of this chart. This dot may be just a little higher because according to human standards this might be the most righteous person that ever walked the earth. You see it’s relative though. So here’s a guy who says if God is fair, He’d better let me in! What is he comparing himself to? On this chart God would be a mile high up so now how is he doing? Our problem is that we compare ourselves with each other. The God-Man couldn’t of died if He wasn’t a man and if He wasn’t God, His death would’ve been merely an example or a martyrdom but it would not have been redemptive. He had to be fully God and fully Man and in being so the God-Man becomes the Mediator between the Father and us. He becomes the way to the Father. These are strong words that He’s made again and again.
Here’s another verse that you ought to keep in your mind and it’s in Matthew 11. The part I like the most is Matthew 11:28-30, “ Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” By the way it doesn’t say take the law upon you- take My yoke and learn. By the way, learn from Whom? Don’t learn from something else- learn from Me. He is saying true discipleship is the knowledge of Himself. Understand that in all the gospels, everything Jesus talks about is about Himself- very self- reverential here. He’s not saying learn this system, learn these teachings, do that or do the other. No, He says, come to Me. The way of life is Me. By the way, who of us in this room can say that we’re gentle and humble in heart without guffaws from other people? If you stop and think about it, it’s almost preposterous for one of us to say I’m gentle and humble in heart! We almost immediately say- there’s something wrong with that! Somehow, He can say it and get away with it yet He is the most powerful personality who ever lived. How can this be? Somehow you know that what He says is true and yet there’s also an awesome power under control. That’s what humility is- power under control. What we see here is that He is gentle and humble in heart and what does He offer? You shall find rest for your souls. That’s what you and I desperately need in this world of weariness, travail and pain. The world as it was not meant to be. You need rest for your souls- soul rest. You need, in a world of turmoil and outward confusion, an inner tranquility and peace. You need rest. He goes on to say, My yoke is easy and My burden is light- unlike that of the Pharisees. I want you to notice what He said in the verse just before those three verses. He has this strong word in Matthew 28: 27, “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.” I’d say that’s a very strong claim. I’ll leave you to think about the implications of that claim. They’re pretty awesome and powerful.
Let’s continue on.
I’m suggesting here then that the Jews, like anyone else, have to deal with the
problem of sin. The standard is set by God’s perfection and it’s found in
Isaiah 53, which talks about how we missed it. Isaiah 53:6, “All of us like
sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the LORD has
caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.” So there’s only two options in
the end in this world- either God’s way or your way. When Adam said not Your
will but mine be done, he turned the garden into a desert. Ultimately, he
turned this world, which was a paradise into a desert spiritually. When the
second Adam said, not My will but Thine be done, He turned that garden into the
place as the entry or gateway to heaven. He opened it up. I’m saying that the
second Adam has undone the work of the first Adam by saying, not My will but
Thine be done. Each of us has turned to his own way. There’s a stubbornness
about us is there not? Some of us are more stubborn than others but some of us
are better at covering up our stubbornness than others as well. But we’re all
pretty stubborn when it comes down to it. You see it in practical ways as well.
There are two people fighting for the same parking space. They get there at
about the same time and each one thinks they have an absolute right over that
spot! The other person deliberately, with forethought and malice, planned to
take that spot from you even though they knew very clearly that it was your
spot and not their own. Then you get this standoff where they’re both sitting
there in their pride and it’s a matter of who’s going to back down. This
happens in
Paul says in Romans 9-10, “What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, ‘There is none righteous, not even one.” There is the answer, all of us, Jew and Greek, Paul says, are under sin and therefore we all need the same solution. There’s none righteous, not even one. The solution is to receive this payment that He makes. Romans 3: 29-30, “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles, also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one.” Sometimes people put it this way, aren’t you nitpicking? After all Judaism worships the one true God of the Old Testament and Christianity proclaims Christ as the God of the Old Testament and the God of the Old Testament as one. Therefore, Judaism in reality believes in the same God. That’s one way of framing it. But let’s frame it differently. We could say it this way- Judaism rejects Christ as the Son of God. In Christianity, Christ is the Son of God and the only way to the Father. If that’s true, Judaism in reality has rejected the only way to the Father. You can’t have it both ways. The issue is what are you going to do with this Jesus? Now the thing I must stress when I share this message is that in all humility I’m not making this stuff up. I’m just the messenger and you need to understand that I didn’t make this up. I’m proclaiming the message of One who is utterly unique in the annuals of history and who had unique credentials to back up His claims.
We saw same of His credentials last week. There are numerous ones. His resurrection is not a bad one! He really did fulfill the Old Testament prophecies very literally, graphically and specifically as well. His miracles backed up His claims. John 10: 37-38, “If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father.” He was sinless. I would be real scared to make such a claim as that especially in front of people who know me real well especially my wife! These are strong kinds of claims and there are many others as well. He could break the power of disease, of death and of demons. He had authority even over nature. What man is this that even the wind and the wave obey Him? (Mark 4:41) You don’t see any other figure in human history that even comes close to this.
The question is also, first of all, what do I mean by God? A growing number of people will say He’s not a personal being at all but an impersonal force. This opinion has grown very rapidly in the last 20 years. Then secondly, how does one enter into a right relationship? If this God is personal, how is it done? To my mind, I only know of two options. One is by works and one is by faith in the One who has already done the work for us. I can’t think of a third option. I’m suggesting here that now the issue is not just a matter of trusting in Jesus Christ because that’s what we’re telling you to do but because that’s the only way that God has made available by which our sins can be forgiven. I can think of another way of dealing with the sin problem and the only other way I know is works. Now those works can be defined in a variety of ways. They can be prayers- you pray, you give, you do good works for people, you serve the poor, you give to organizations, you serve your community, your raise a good family, you go to church and/or you’re baptized. I’m suggesting that not one of those things in and of themselves cuts it with God because they were works. You were trying to do it in your power. Those things by themselves won’t do it. What I have to look at is what did He claim and what are the implications of those claims. Not all who name the name of Christ will enter into heaven. Matthew 7: 22-23, “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.” So there’s this issue that I have to deal with here that He Himself is making this claim that not all people who are religious know God.
Question: Inaudible
Answer: Yes. Basically orthodoxy would say it’s obedience to Torah and Mitzvah, these good works, and on the Day of Atonement, Yon Kipper, there’s the issue of contrition or penance. But basically the mindset is how do I get to know God? I have to do these things and if I do well enough, He’ll let me in or some variation of that. Usually it’s not analyzed like that- usually it’s the idea that I’m helping in my effort to achieve that. Now we’ll talk about good works in another session so I don’t want to get into that now, but I’m just suggesting it’s not up to me to call the rules. In other words, I don’t get to name the rules. If Jesus is the decisive revelation of the Father’s love and offer of a way of knowing Him then I have to take Him seriously. I can say He’s wrong but I cannot say that He’s right and then ignore Him. I can reject Him but I can’t ignore Him. I can accept Him and I can reject Him but to ignore His is to reject Him. People like to say I just don’t want to deal with that. Fine. You’ll deal with it one day if Jesus is who He claims to be and all will stand before Him then. So it’s a prudent idea now to deal with that. That’s why I say I try to help people make a carefully informed decision about Him.
Question: Are the Messianic Jews Christian?
Answer: I want to say that Messianic Jews are Christians and Gentiles can be Christians. In fact there are Hebrew Christians also. What I always tell Jewish people is you don’t give up your Jewishness by becoming a Christian any more than an Irishman gives up his Irishness by coming to faith in Jesus. You’re not giving up anything. In fact, you’re gaining something. What you’re doing is you’re finally finding the One about whom the Passover was about. It was about Him. You find that the feasts were about Him and you discover you’re a completed Jew as some use that phrase because all that the Torah, prophets and writings spoke of are fulfilled in this One Person. You now realize that what you’ve been looking for all along has already come. I always stress you don’t become a Gentile when you come to Christ. You’re either a Gentile or a Jew. Now you might be a Gentile Christian or you might be a Gentile non- Christian or you might be a Jewish believer. Paul is stressing this idea when he tells us that the same God and the same way are available for all.
Question: Romans 2:14
Answer: It talks
about the conscience there if they don’t have the law. Those who have the law-
they know the law- will be judged by it. Those who do not hear the law have a
law within them. I’m just saying the language itself is pretty strong stuff and
he says that to those who by perseverance and diligence and so forth who wish
to know God will come to know Him. How that happens is ultimately based on the
work of Jesus Christ, which brings us to another session, which is what about
those who never heard the gospel? The next obvious question is this, if He is
the way, the truth and the life, then what about people who have never heard of
Him? Furthermore, what happens to people who are never capable of making a
decision? They could be infants who die or let’s say people who never reach an
age of accountability intellectually and are mentally deficient. What about
people who lived before Jesus Christ? What about people in
On Sunday, someone asked me, why did God choose the Jews? My answer was that He didn’t choose the Jews but He chose a person, Abram. He made Abram (his name at that time and later he was called Abraham) a father of many. So He chose a person who then became a father of many and He gave him a covenant and said all the nations of the world will be blessed through you- the Gentiles as well as the Jews. Indeed that’s exactly what has happened. Salvation, which came through the Jews, is now available to all. Those who worship the Father must worship Him in two ways; in spirit and in truth. They go together. The Word of God and the Spirit of God go together- the power of God and the truth of God must go together and then true worship is there.
Some people say, isn’t it rather arrogant of you and unloving and harsh to say that Christ preached that kind of message? I suggest suppose you discovered a cure for cancer and felt like you shouldn’t share it because all these other people have been working so hard to find a cure and they’d be disturbed because it would show that their work was in fact invalid. Do you see the problem? If you have a cure you want to share it. It’s not a matter of arrogance, it’s a matter of saying I’ve found something that’s changed my life. He can change your life too. I’m not saying that I’m a better person than you. In fact, I realize now I’m a whole lot worse than I thought I was. When you come to Jesus two things happen. One thing is you realize that you’re a whole lot worse than you thought you were. The second thing is that you realize God’s a whole lot greater than you ever thought He was. That’s why you realize works aren’t going to cut it. You can’t bridge that gap. Frankly, it’s not a matter of arrogance, it’s a matter of a person saying, I’m the worse person in the sense that I know what I’m like inside. You know what you’re like inside and I take it by faith that maybe you have a problem too. The worse thing we can do is cover it up and suppose that all is well and we’re all just great folks. I’m suggesting that in our lives the cure is more radical than that and it’s called a heart transplant. You need a new nature.
Another text that’s
a great reference that I’d like you to know is in Mark 7. This had to do with
the laws of purification. By the way, more and more one of the things that has been
discovered in the last 30 years in the quest for the historical Jesus is a more
clear understanding of how consistent the gospels are with 1st
century Palestinian Judaism. It is really a kind of rediscovery of how Second
Temple Judaism fits so well in its context. One of the things that Jesus
challenged here was the law of purification in Mark 7. He talks about how these
people in verse 8 are more concerned about the traditions of men than the
commandments of God. He says that you do many things with your traditions and
you’re more concerned with them- the oral traditions had become like barnacles
that encrusted the truth and you couldn’t even see it anymore. Mark 7:14-15,
“After He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, ‘Listen to Me,
all of you, and understand; there is nothing outside the man which can defile
him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what
defile the man.” Mark 7:17-20, “When He had left the crowd and entered the
house, His disciples questioned Him about the parable. And He said to them,
‘Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever
goes into the man from outside cannot defile, because it does not go into his
heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?’(Thus He declared all foods
clean.) And He was saying, ‘That which proceeds out of the man, that is what
defiles the man.” He’s saying it’s not what you put in but what comes out of
your mouth- from within- that defiles. Now here’s the verse, Matthew 7:21-23,
“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts,
fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as
well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness, all these
evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” Jesus’ view of human
nature is a little different than human psychology.
I think He’s got us all. Do
you see the problem? His analysis of the human condition is that we have an
inside problem, not an outside one. If our problem were external then we could
clean up our act by doing certain things and every thing would be cool. He’s
saying you have so externalized the law; you’ve failed to see the inside.
That’s why the Sermon on the Mount says it’s not a question of just murdering your
brother; it’s a question of hating him. That’s like murder because it’s not
just what you’ve done but what you think and the attitude of your heart, which
means that it’s a lot worse than we thought. All of us violated the
commandments of God. Some of them are more obvious than others- I haven’t
murdered, I haven’t committed adultery but I’ll let you think that through in
your thought life. Of course the one that always gets you is coveting. If
someone says they’ve never coveted, there’s something wrong with their analysis
of themselves. They have a deficit understanding- let’s put it that way! We
will continue next week.
This is part 15 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 16 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 9 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 12 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 11 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.
This is part 18 in a 19-part audio series on tough issues done by Dr. Ken Boa. We will add a more detailed abstract for this audio when it is created.