So, now we come right down to it. With the preponderance of evidence in favor of the Gospels, and with the undeniable fact that Jesus existed, we have to face the question that everyone who dealt with him in person had to face: “Who is this man?” (Mt. 8:27, Mk. 6:1-3, Lk. 7:49, Lk. 9:9, Jn. 4:28-29ff, etc.). Especially in light of his claims to be God incarnate—the Lord of Heaven and Earth—every person in all of time must answer the question for ourselves: “Who do I believe that Jesus is?”

Josh McDowell has spent his career writing evidences materials, and he’s been saying for fifty years that, “Jesus claimed to be God. He did not leave any other options. His claim to be God must be either true or false.” Others have insisted that it is foolish to say Jesus was just a great teacher nothing more. Because with the claims that he made about being God, Messiah, and master of other’s lives; he must have been either a blatant liar, a delusional lunatic, or truly the Lord of Creation.

If he was a liar, he was one of the most dastardly liars of all time, because he claimed that others could trust him with their eternal destiny while knowing that he could do nothing for them. Does that fit the Bible and all the evidence?

If he was a lunatic, then was paradoxically the most grounded, rational, and sane lunatic to ever exist. We would need some way to explain how his teachings can be so deep and so perfectly suited to reality if his mind was so broken that he would believe a delusion. Such a paradox is too great to even be considered plausible.

If he is the Lord—God come in the flesh—then he not only demands, but deserves the devotion of our hearts and souls. Obviously, this kind of belief may be long in coming for many people, but it is the only reasonable conclusion about him. And more than that, it’s the only option for a soul-saving conclusion. Peter said that he believed Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16:16). What do YOU believe about him?

- Dan Lankford

Let’s talk about the Gospels, those four wonderful books that we cherish so deeply. Without them, we’d know precious little about the life of Jesus. Without them, the foundation of the entire Christian system would crumble. In terms of the Christian faith, there have never been four books more valuable than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 

For that reason, it’s not surprising that those who oppose the faith vigorously challenge the validity of these four books. If they can manage to undermine the credibility of the Gospels, then they’ve won the war. Game. Set. Match. So, it’s important for us to think about why these Gospel are so worthy of our trust. For the next few weeks, we’ll dig into what makes the Gospels so reliable. That starts with a phrase you’ve heard before… 

Innocent until proven guilty. That’s the standard we use in a court of law, and it’s a reasonable and rational standard. If you are going to convict someone of a crime, then you should first be able to prove that they committed that crime, and, until you do, we must take them at their word when they profess their innocence. Innocent until proven guilty. It makes sense. 

Too often the Gospels don’t get the same treatment. Too often these historical documents which chronicle the life and teaching of a Man named Jesus of Nazareth are cast aside as unreliable, untrustworthy fairy tales before they are even examined. Too often the Bible writers are labelled as fraudsters spinning a lie, gullible simpletons falling for a trick, even pitiable souls suffering from a shared hallucination. These accusations are tossed around, repeated, believed, and accepted without a shred of evidence. Let that sink in… 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine some of the evidence that supports the reliability of the Gospels, but we should begin by appreciating that there simply is no basis for the charges brought against them. In criminal court, charges without evidence are thrown out before the trial begins, and that’s exactly what should happen in this case. Innocent until proven guilty. 

- Jonathan Banning

“The reason that no one should believe in miracles—especially the miracle of resurrection—is because it can’t be tested by the scientific method.”

The Scientific Method is the technical term for the type of empirical measurement and testing of certain behaviors based in the natural world. Its key to success is its dependence on repeatable scenarios—testing, observing, and documenting the behaviors of substances, animals, weather patterns, etc. in the natural world. And we would do well to be magnanimous: We owe much of the modern world’s convenience and safety to the scientific method and the findings that have been wrought through it. But its dependence upon repeatable scenarios is a double-edged sword: it leads to greater reliability but is also a limitation that we must acknowledge.

The trouble for Christian apologetics is not with the Method itself, but with those who see it as a universal template for determining all knowledge and reality. When we believe that “science” is what will make humanity whole and essentially *save* us, we have put far too much faith in it. This is the problem of those who make the claim from this article’s first sentence: It is that when we approach the Bible’s events, we are dealing with historical people (which, by definition, are not repeatable) and supernatural scenarios (which, by definition, cannot be measured empirically).

As a general rule, Christians would do well to temper our faith in “science,” so far as that is defined by a naturalistic worldview. It’s certainly not always a bad thing, but we must realize its limitations. Believers ought to read with a discerning eye when anything claims that “science” has discovered the key to something which the Method cannot sufficiently explain. For some examples, consider some magazine and online article headlines: “Science discovers why we’re unhappy,” or “Science discovers why some people are good parents and others aren’t,” or any such thing. Likewise, we ought to temper our faith in its promises for the future, especially when we are told that it will make humanity whole. For some examples, consider promises like these: “Someday, science will help us stop every disease and injury from happening,” or “With enough scientific advances, we’ll be able to stop all wars, because all the resource and commerce problems will be solved.” Only when Christ is fully accepted by faith in every believing heart can we expect to see the world saved in such ways. It won’t be “science” that saves us; it will be God, through his Son Jesus of Nazareth.

At the end of the day, our acceptance or rejection of the Bible’s history comes down to faith. Do we have faith in the Scientific Method to tell us all that is real in the world? Or do we have faith in the One who created the world which the Method can only measure? The Bible’s miracles, and especially the resurrection, must be accepted by faith (see Jn. 20:30-31’s emphasis on belief). But with the preponderance of other evidence for Christianity and the Bible, we have all the reasons necessary to put our faith in them.

- Dan Lankford, minister

All of Christianity’s most essential teachings center on the person of Jesus Christ. His divinity, incarnation, doctrine, life, death, and resurrection are The Gospel. But if you had to boil it down to the single most essential and distinctive belief among those, it would have to come down to his resurrection. C.S. Lewis observed from the book of Acts that for the apostles and early saints, “to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the resurrection.” It was that message, more than any other, that they proclaimed to a lost and dying world, and it turned the world upside-down.

Skeptics and opponents of the faith have long been aware of the importance of this doctrine too. Many have denied its existence, even in the face of compelling historical evidence. One notable, extreme example, a bishop in the Anglican church, is notorious for publicly disbelieving that Jesus rose. He has written somewhere, “That the apostles had a transformative experience of some kind is evident, but it had nothing to do with the resuscitation of Jesus’ body.” This is, of course, tantamount to denying the entire Christian faith, as Paul said: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Cr. 15:17)

And so the resurrection is the greatest among God’s many important miracles. And the evidence for it stacks up strong: there is a bank of prophecy behind it, a cadre of witnesses concurrent to it, a multitude of converts following it, and a host of martyrs clinging to it for eternal hope. Many people—on one occasion, more than 500 of them—saw him. Others touched him. Others watched him eat meals. The deniers never revealed his “stolen” body to disprove the resurrection story, and even the false testimony of its disappearance corroborates what really happened. The bottom line is this: It happened. He rose from the dead. And that matters.

It matters because the resurrection is the core belief by which we receive salvation from him. We are saved by grace through faith in who he really is: the crucified and resurrected Savior and Messiah. And even in the saving act of baptism, we are buried with him and raised with him to new spiritual life (Rm. 6:1-5). The resurrection is the place where the discipline of apologetics overlaps the most with the discipline of evangelism, because “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins… [and] we are of all people most to be pitied.”

- Dan Lankford, minister

In the past 10 days, I’ve been involved in or overhearing close friends in conversations on the following topics: Pride Month, atheism-vs-Christianity, modesty, depression, Christians and martial struggles, Catholicism-vs-Biblical Christianity, and the current state of the Israel-Hamas war. I know I’m stating the obvious here: any conversation on those subjects has the potential for argument, tension, and hurt feelings. They are all places where emotions run high and opinions grow strong.

The combination of all of those has reminded me of the importance of our words. When we speak as Christians, we are called to always speak graciously, with words “seasoned with salt,” so that we have the wisdom to answer each person appropriately in a given situation (Col. 4:6). We’re told that having the thoughtfulness to say the right thing at the right time is like giving the gift of fine jewelry (Prv. 25:11-12). We’re told that speaking the right word at the right time will bring us joy (Prv. 15:23), and that refraining from speaking when it’s right to do that will help us just as much (Prv. 21:23). In any and every situation, Christians are called to be thinking people, so that we will answer in a way that gives true benefit to everyone who hears it.

I’ve been encouraged by the Christians that I’ve heard in these conversations this week. I’ve heard believers speak their convictions, respect the convictions of others, admit mistakes they’ve made, and resolve conflict in healthy ways. I’ve heard them speak up for the truth to others who were holding to spiritual and religious errors. I’ve heard them have the humility to say, “This is what I think, but I could be wrong” when it came to some of the topics listed above. I’ve been encouraged by their examples to speak with wisdom all the time.

I hope and pray that I’ve handled the conversations where I was involved with the grace and wisdom that I should have. And I pray that for all of us—that our speech will always be the kind of gracious, wise, truthful words that Christ himself would speak.

- Dan Lankford, minister

The Bible is a collection of things that prophets and apostles wrote over the course of many centuries, all brought together to tell us the story and the system by which humans can come to God through his son, Jesus. It’s a unified work, sewn together with common themes, common purposes, and a common story from beginning to end. And as Christians, we believe that the words contained in it were given by the mind and the mouth God.

We believe that God “inspired” the Bible writers, not in the sense that he just planted a small thought and left it to their best judgment to flesh it out, but that he put his actual words into their minds to be spoken and/or written down for people everywhere. That’s a big claim. One that is hotly contested by many, but one for which there is plenty of evidence.

The first big batch of evidence for this kind inspiration comes from within the Biblical documents themselves. The writers repeatedly state their belief that they are declaring words from the mind of God. Keep in mind that these claims were made by different men from different times and places. They did not claim to have contributed a chapter or a section to the overall work that is the Bible; they just understood that God was speaking a message through them which was relevant to the situation and the people right then. Consider a few examples:

When the Ten Commandments were given, the account began this way: “And God spoke all these words…” (Ex. 20:1)

When the commands in Deuteronomy were being delineated, Moses urged the people to “keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you.” (Dt. 4:2)

When King David made his final speech, he opened by making the bold claim that “The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me; his word is on my tongue.” (2 Sm. 23:2)

The introduction to Jeremiah’s large work begins with how the author got the message which he wrote: he was one “to whom the word of the Lord came.” (Jr. 1:2)

The Bible’s writers often stated their conviction that these words had come from beyond themselves. These words came from God, and that is why they must be heeded and obeyed. We’ll talk more about this same thought in next Friday’s post.

- Dan Lankford, minister

For the past three months, we’ve explored various evidences that point toward God’s existence as Creator and point away from the prevailing explanations for existence touted by other worldviews. It’s our prayer that these have been encouraging to you and have more firmly established your faith in God. Now it’s time to pivot to another area of faith-building apologetics.

In the next three months’ posts, if the Lord wills, we’ll be talking about evidences in favor of the Bible: where it comes from, whether it’s still the same message the apostles and prophets spoke, and why it’s worth following with our whole lives.

We assume that most of our readers are already believers who are committing yourselves to following the Bible, and we hope that these articles will solidify that commitment in your heart.

We also pray that these thoughts will be read and considered by some who don’t know God and the transformative, saving power of his word. And we hope that these writings can bring hearts like those closer to knowing and enjoying the mercy of God too.
In either case, these articles stand as small testimonies to the power of a much greater writing: the spoken and recorded word of the Lord of Hosts.

“Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Ps. 119:104-105)

- Dan Lankford, minister

When archaeologists discover markings on walls, tablets, or papers at a dig, how do they determine if what they’ve found was put there by intelligent life or it’s just naturally occurring? How do they know whether what they’re seeing was carved or it’s just striations in a rock? The answers comes down to a combination of two fundamental criteria.

Repetition and complexity show intention. If a picture on a cave wall repeats the actual appearance of an animal or person, then we can tell it was done by an intelligent being. If symbols repeat often in a series of symbols, then we can tell that they’ve been put there deliberately. Additionally, a certain kind of complexity shows intelligence. Simple up-and-down, side-to-side repetition rock strata align with the natural process of gravity, but to find right angles and stacked stones at a dig site shows more complexity than natural processes achieve on their own. 

It's this combination that shows signs of intentionality. And in the natural world, one profound example of this combination points to God’s intentionality in creating it: DNA.

DNA is an incredibly complex code that provides the written language by which every living cell is designed, is built, and functions. It carries all the biological information needed by an organism—colors, shapes, sizes, and process instructions. It does this in a language that biologists are only recently decoding and finding to be remarkably clever. With a vocabulary of 20 amino acids, an unfathomable number of combinations are available, and they all communicate so much intricate design.

The DNA code’s patterns for all of life point backward to the Intelligence which wrote the code, just as the discovery of a written language in archaeology points back to its intelligent writers. It reminds us that all life bears the fingerprints of an intelligent Designer. The signature of design is present in the repeatable and variety-laden language of every cell of every living thing. When we look to the DNA code, we see yet another reason to say with the psalmist: “Your hands have made and fashioned me…” (Ps. 119:73)

- Dan Lankford

My youngest son is about 18 months old, which happens to be the perfect age to start donning those super-cool dinosaur t-shirts. I pulled one out of his dresser the other day when I was getting him dressed. Tan shirt, dinosaur green lettering, white T-Rex skeleton in the center – classic. Then I read the writing, “40 ft long… 7 tons… Could run 20 mph… 60 razor sharp teeth… Lived 65 million years ago.” Ah, there’s the evolutionary propaganda!

One of the most fundamental pieces of evolutionary theory is its immense timeframe. If all the complexity of life on Earth came from one common ancestor, then you need millions and billions of years for those changes to develop. With enough time, anything can happen, right? So, evolutionists claim that life has been billions of years in the making, but how could anyone know that? Prove that? 

How could anyone know that the T-Rex lived 65 million years ago?

Carbon dating is the answer we’re given. Carbon dating is key to the claim that the Earth is billions of years old, and it proves that the T-Rex on my son’s shirt is 65 million years old… or so we’re told. Unfortunately, we’ve not been given the whole truth about carbon dating. 

Did you know that carbon dating is totally ineffective once too much time has passed? Did you know that carbon dating has an expiration date after which it becomes completely unreliable? And did you know that its expiration date is about a few thousand years?

Consider what the renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins, had to say about the limitations of carbon dating, “It is useful for dating organic material on the archaeological/historical timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few thousands of years, but it is no good for the evolutionary timescale where we are dealing in millions of years.” 

Evolutionary theory requires an extraordinary chunk of time to back up its claims, but the dating method it uses to establish that time frame is more suspect than a gallon of milk that’s been sitting out on your counter since 2018. I’m not sure they could fit all those words on my son’s shirt, but it’s far more honest than declaring that T-Rex lived 65 million years ago.

- Jonathan Banning
 

Did you know that Darwin had reservations about his own theory of evolution? Did you know that there is one piece of data that gave him fits and cast doubt on everything he’d theorized? That piece of data is the fossil record. Last week, we discussed on Evolutionary Theory has a life problem, but it also has a fossil problem. Rather than offering support for Darwin’s theory, fossil evidence unravels everything.

Darwin’s theory proposes that all life evolved from a common ancestor: an alleged single-cell organism that crawled out of a primordial chemical soup. The theory goes on to claim that over the course of billions of years, all life forms gradually evolved from basic and simple to diverse and complex. If that were true, then we should see two things in the fossil record:

First, we should expect the fossil record to be arranged in a certain way. We should find only simple, basic creatures in the lowest layers of dirt, and we should find that the creatures become more diverse and complex as we go up. Second, we should also find millions of fossils of transitional life forms that demonstrate the gradual evolution from one type of creature to another. To offer an example, if we believe that fish eventually evolved into dogs, then we should be able to find many fossils that illustrate how the fish-to-dog transition took place.

Of course, that is not at all what we find in the earth.

The fossil record doesn’t show a gradual progression from simple life to complex life. Instead, there is an explosion of life—both simple and complex—that happens all at once. It’s even called the Cambrian Explosion. Neither does it show millions of transitional forms that catalog the gradual progression of evolution. Instead, we find that lifeforms have remained surprisingly static throughout the layers of sediment. To be fair, we do occasionally find that natural selection has led to some changes within species, but nothing that demonstrates the transition from one type of animal to another.

The fossil record looks nothing like Darwin and exactly like Genesis (Genesis 1:20-27).

- Jonathan Banning