My friend Andrew led a Bible study and I asked for his notes and he gave me permission to post here on Steemit...
In 1 Peter 3:15 we read:“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear; having a good conscience, that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.”
The word used for defense here is the Greek word “apologia” which means “a speech in defense, where we get the english word “apology”. So, to give a defence in favor of your position. Christian apologetics, then, is the science of giving a defense of the Christian faith. It doesn’t mean that we are apologizing for what we believe.
There are many skeptics who doubt the existence of God in general and/or attack belief in the God of the Bible specifically. There are many critics who attack the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. There are many false teachers who promote false doctrines and deny the key truths of the Christian faith. Especially today as Darwin’s theory of evolution has taken prominence in our educational systems, and scientific communities, and even in many churches, who’ve adopted ideas such as old earth creationism. So much so that many claim and teach evolution as fact rather than theory. The mission of Christian apologetics is to combat these movements and instead promote the Christian God and Christian truth... Otherwise known as Truth.
We as Christians should be able to defend our faith. We should be able to give a reasonable presentation of what we believe, and why we believe it. And this defense should absolutely be reasonable, because it is rational, logical, and factual. The faith component doesn’t take the place of these attributes of truth, but rather, faith accompanies them. In fact, faith is required by them. I’ll get to that here a little later on.
But many forget about the second half of this verse in 1 Peter. We’re not only to give a defense of what we believe, but we’re to give our defense with meekness and fear, having a good conscience. In other words, we’re to share the truth in love, being respectful. We don’t want to say something with hostility in our voice or our mannerisms. We don’t want what we say to cause someone to put their guard up. We shouldn’t be rude or angry in our presentation. We want to be gentle, kind, and patient, just as Christ was. If we win a debate but turn a person even further away from Christ by our attitude, then we have lost the true purpose of Christian apologetics. So, we’re to be loving, as Ed has just covered in the last two Sundays while we’ve been in 1 Cor. We are to present our defense with all the attributes of love.
Remember what those attributes are? 1 Cor. 13:3-8 “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”
And we’re to do all this, it says, with a good conscience. In other words, being right with God. Having been in a state of abiding in Christ, all “confessed up” on our list of sins, so that those that are hostile toward us won’t have a defence against us. Because there will be those that reject you, no matter how loving and gentle your presentation, no matter how logical and reasonable your defense. There are those whose hearts are hardened and willfully reject truth. And they will seek to destroy you, no matter how much sense your argument makes, because they’re not interested in your truth. But this shouldn’t stop you, nor dishearten you.
Luke 10:16 “He who hears you hears Me, he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me.”As Christians, we’ve been adopted as God’s children, and as such, we’re Christ’s representatives. So as we go about sharing the truth of God’s Word, we’re speaking for God, therefore anyone listening is hearing the Word of God. So, if they reject it, it’s not your word they’re rejecting.
And then of course John 15:18 “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. This is why Ed says all the time, you have to have thick skin, and a soft heart. When you’re confident in where you stand before God, you’re sensitive to the things of God, and you know that you’re not representing your own opinions. They’re His truth that’s been revealed to us. You’re the confident messenger. And many will not like the message. For truth is hate to those who hate the truth. And the Bible tells us that man in his unsaved state does in fact reject and hate the truth. But the Spirit can break through the hardest of hearts.
Therefore, we are also called by scripture to persuade people into the truth of the Gospel. And I view this as being an important aspect of apologetics presentations. We’re to appeal to them through the truth.2 Co 5:11 “Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences.”
Gal 1:10 “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.”
Acts chapter 26 we see Paul giving his appeal before King Agrippa, and King Agrippa, in verse 28, tell Paul that he almost succeeded in persuading him to become a Christian. Paul answered him saying: “I would to God that not only you, but also all who hear me today, might become both almost and altogether such as I am, except for these chains.”
In order to persuade someone, you do what? You take any opportunity you can to talk to them, seeking for the conversation to ultimately lead you to sharing the Gospel, in some manner. You could start by asking them questions to get a baseline of their belief structure and worldview. Once you get a baseline, you ask more specific questions until their belief structure reveals to you where they are. Your ultimate goal being to lead them to the truth of the Gospel and then persuade them to believe it.
Now, you can’t make them believe anything, but you can reason with them by appealing to logic. It’s God’s job to ultimately draw them in. We’re just the tools He uses to do it. As Children of God, we’re in a partnership with Him. We’re entrusted by Him with this message. We plant the seed, or we water the seed, but God provides the growth. I’m sure you’ve heard that. And planting or watering that seed may look different to different audiences, depending on what they need.
Now, Romans 1:18-21 gives us insight many we will be sharing with don’t know that we have. It reveals to us that the truth of God is clearly seen and has been revealed to them, but they reject it in ungodliness. So we won’t have to argue the existence of God with many of them, because they know there’s a God.
But there’s a growing number of people who’ve really bought into evolution, so in those cases, it is helpful to know the scientific arguments as well. God, after all, invented science. He’s the originator of all of our sciences. So you’re not going to run into anything truly scientific that points away from God, unless it’s faulty science, and Evolutionists love faulty science. They don’t use the key to understanding the map that is the Bible. They’re trying to navigate it blind, and coming to the wrong conclusions, therefore heading in the opposite direction of the treasure, which is Jesus.
But, because we know that science points to God, we also have to make sure that our arguments are 100% biblical. That means, no compromises, like old earth creationism, or multiple paths to heaven, or drugs are okay, or homosexuality is okay. We have to be 100% in line with God’s inerrant Word in order to be effective in our persuasions.
You see, compromise invalidates the message of the Bible. There are many Christians who believe in old earth creationism for example, because they’ve let the influence of the atheistic scientific community influence them toward evolutionary thought and feel that they somehow have to reconcile that with the Bible.
So, they compromise the clear verbiage of Genesis 1 with millions of years. Even though Genesis is clear that creation took place in 6 literal, 24 hour periods of sun up and sun down. Many Christians will say, well, that’s not a rib or a heart issue, so it really doesn’t matter. But they’re wrong. It does very much matter, because if Genesis 1 is flawed to that degree, then the whole book is compromised. If it took millions of years to create everything, then God is a poor communicator, and makes Him look incompetent.God said what he meant and meant what he said. We have to be in line with that.
So, they’re starting with science, and trying to use it to explain the Bible, but that’s the wrong way around. You don’t use the map to validate the key, you use the key to validate and interpret the map. Now, this is not to say that these Christians are not in fact born again Christians. The Bible is crystal clear, that salvation is based on belief in the finished work of Christ on our behalf. Acts 16:31 is one of my personal favorites. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” And Titus 3:5 accompanies this verse well with the addition of “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us”.
But people are different, and they need different kinds of proof, so you have to be prepared to give a defense in many different realms of thought. Some people will approach you from a strictly biblically moral argumentative standpoint, disagreeing perhaps on what the bible says about homosexuality. If God is love, then why can’t I love who I want? Revealing their very clear misunderstanding about what love is.
Other people want to try to break down what the bible says about things as compared to science as they understand it. For example, If God created the whole of existence in only 6 days, then how do you explain light years of start light that we witness in the heavens, or the apparent age of certain rocks in the rock layers and formations? Making it clear that they don’t understand the evidence that they see.
Or, there are many people of different denominations or separate religions who will question the concept of Grace and Mercy, and argue a works based legalistic approach to eternal security. Or question if God really is the God of the Bible, or some other text.
Still others will reject the concept of God completely in favor of “science by evolution”, by using Science to disprove the existence of God by crediting natural phenomenon to answer the question of everything. In those cases they are not likely to accept biblical answers.
So, before we get into any specifics like that, we first need to tackle truth.
How do we know what we believe is true?
I was challenged recently by two different conversations with two different atheists. They each wanted me to prove the existence of God without using the Bible, as they believe that any argument that ultimately goes back to the Bible is circular reasoning. Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy. The world’s favorite claim in logical fallacies is the Biblical truth claim. They say the Bible can’t be true because it internally claims to be the only source for truth. The Word of God is true because it claims to be true, so don’t doubt the Word of God.Well, they’ve got a good point. BUT, we know the Bible is true for many more reasons outside of it’s own internal truth claim. And we’ll get into that.
So, these guys claim is that the source of truth is Science. What they didn’t like, nor understand, is that my source of truth is also science, but that the Bible is the key to interpreting the science. You see, science is like a map. Ya’ll remember the Goonies? They found this old treasure map in the attic of one of the kid’s houses that sent them on this quest to find the treasure of local legend One Eyed Willie. But, there was a problem. They didn’t know what the symbols meant until they found that medallion. Remember the medallion? That little rock with the holes in it? They didn’t know how to interpret the map without the use of the medallion.They didn’t know where to start their journey. The medallion pointed them in the correct direction.
This is like any map. You don’t know how to interpret the map without the key. Well, the Bible is the key. The Bible helps us interpret what we see around us. It explains everything. The evolutionists are trying to read the map without the key. So their presupposition is that there is no God, therefore, they reject the key and they are therefore heading in the wrong direction, and are viewing the evidence incorrectly. They’re starting their journey to truth in the wrong spot.
I walked my atheist friends through a thought process that I wanted to share with you, to help illustrate the logical rational behind belief in God. The reason for this intellectual exercise is that they wanted extra biblical proof of the existence of God to avoid circular reasoning, they claimed.
Now you and I know that apart from the inerrant, infallible, perfect Word of God we cannot know truth. But you can speculate about it because Creation is the evidence that leads us to the Bible. We can read that in Romans 1.
So this is what I said:
All life has a beginning, and that life after it’s own kind. All the people, animals and plants after their own kinds. Life is not possible without previous life. We joke about what came first, the chicken or the egg. That’s an excellent question that the evolutionist can’t answer, because science doesn’t, and can’t explain this, but the Christian can, because we accept the key.
If they say the chicken evolved first, well, was it male or female? And then where did the counter sex come from, to be able to form and fertilize the egg for it to reproduce? If they say the egg, did it evolve fertilized? And then, you still have the sex issue.
If all life has a beginning, after it’s own kind, requiring two sexes to reproduce, then the scientific method leads us to the logical conclusion that everything has always had to come from it’s own kind. So how did it all start? Well, we also logically know that nothing comes from nothing. So it’s not possible for something to just pop into existence without manipulation from an outside force. Well, then, what was that outside force, and where did that come from? Nothing but a great, all powerful designer explains this. We call this designer God.
Now that we’ve make the logical decision that there must be a God for even one particle of matter to exist, much less the complexity of life itself, then we have to figure out who this God is.
So then, If God created us, then he created communication, because we’re communicative beings, so that must mean that He’s a communicative God. So logic follows that God would communicate to us.How would he do this? Perhaps he would speak in an audible voice. Or perhaps he would appear to us in some form. Perhaps he would come to us in a dream. Or maybe He would choose to write some things down in some kind of letter on stone, or a scroll, or a book even. Well, we know the Bible is that communication. So, why the Bible and not some other book?
Now let’s look at the Bible.
What is the Bible?
Where did we get it?
Can we trust it?
How do we know that it’s the communication of God?
One of the most famous professors of English literature of our generation was William Lyon Phelps, for forty years a teacher in Yale University. He probably gave more lectures outside of his classroom on the great themes of English literature than any other person of the twentieth century. In the Introduction to his book, Human Nature in the Bible, which he published when he was 57 years old, Phelps included a most remarkable paragraph on the necessity of knowing the Word of God. The man who wrote these words wrote them after he had been teaching for thirty years, and who lived the better part of every day among the greatest books of the world. This is what Phelps said about the Bible and the importance of knowing it:
”Everyone who has a thorough knowledge of the Bible may truly be called educated; and no other learning or culture, no matter how extensive or elegant, can, among Europeans and Americans, form a proper substitute. Western civilization is founded upon the Bible; our ideas, our wisdom, our philosophy, our literature, our art, our ideals, come more from the Bible than from all other books put together. It is a revelation of divinity and of humanity; it contains the loftiest religious aspiration along with a candid representation of all that is earthly, sensual and devilish. I thoroughly believe in a university education for both men and women; but I believe a knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible.”
That’s pretty powerful stuff.
See, The Bible is made up of 66 books. Written by over 40 different human authors from all walks of life, from fishermen, to doctors, spanning over 1500 years, and is absent of contradictions, which is a statistical impossibility.
The early Christians suffered great persecutions under the government of the Roman empire. The Apostles Paul and Peter and many other Christians were put to death under the cruel reign of emperor Nero. During the first 300 years of the church, persecution followed persecution, and many believers were killed.
In 303 A. D. the emperor Diocletian issued a royal decree or edict that every Bible should be destroyed. As a result many Bibles were burned and many Bible believers were put to death. This attack against the Bible did not last too long though, because the next emperor was Constantine who allowed freedom of religion and who even ordered copies of the Scriptures to be made.
In the centuries that followed, Satan used another method to get the Bible out of the hands of the common people. In some ways, this method was even more effective than burning Bibles. The Roman Catholic Church taught that the common man could not understand the Bible, and that the only ones who could understand and interpret the Bible were the priests, bishops and the Pope. To the average man, the Bible was a closed book and he had no access to it. As a result, most of the people were totally ignorant of what the Bible really taught. In 1229 A.D. the Church Council of Toulouse actually forbade the use of the Bible to laymen (the mass of common people; those who were not priests or bishops). Thus for centuries the Roman Catholic church did not want to put the Bible into the hands of the common people. Imagine that.
And then there’s the great French infidel Voltaire, one of the most fertile, talented, and influential writers of his time. He once boasted that in “20 years Christ will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took twelve apostles to rear.”Shortly after his death the very house in which he printed his foul literature became the depot of the Geneva Bible Society.
Voltaire was convinced that he could destroy Christianity and the Bible. He believed that people would become so enlightened that they would neither believe in God, the Bible or their need of salvation through Jesus Christ. Voltaire died in 1778. Since Voltaire's death millions upon millions of Bibles in numerous languages have flooded the world. Today most people in our country have a copy of the Bible, but few have the writings of Voltaire.Now I have another excerpt from another; writer by the name of Dr. Payson:
“For thousands of years this volume has withstood, not only the iron tooth of time, but all the physical and intellectual strength of man: pretended friends have endeavored to corrupt and betray it; kings and princes have perserveringly sought to banish it from the world; the civil and military power of the greatest nations of the world have been leagued for its destruction; the fires of persecution have been lighted to consume it and its friends together; and at many seasons death in its most horrid forms has been the almost certain consequence of affording it an asylum from the fury of its enemies. Though it has been ridiculed more bitterly, misrepresented more grossly, opposed more rancorously, and burnt more frequently, than any other book, and perhaps than all other books united, it is so far from sinking under the efforts of its enemies that the probability of its surviving until the final consummation of all things is now much greater than ever. The rain has descended, the floods have come, the storm has arisen, and beaten upon it; but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. Like the burning bush, it has been in the flames, yet it is still unconsumed; a sufficient proof were there no other, that He who spake from the bush is the Author of the Bible.”
And wouldn’t you know it, the Bible predicted this! 1 Peter 1:23 tells us that the Word of God lives and abides forever!
No book in history has ever been under such intense scrutiny. No regime has ever tried harder to destroy it, yet, it not only remains, but it’s the best selling book of all time.
"Century follows century--There it stands. Empires rise and fall and are forgotten--There it stands. Dynasty succeeds dynasty--There it stands. Kings are crowned and uncrowned--There it stands...It outlives, out lifts, outloves, outreaches, out ranks, outruns all other books. Trust it, love it, obey it, and Eternal Life is yours."-Dr. A.Z. Conrad
Okay, So what role does faith play in all of this? So, faith is the critical component to true knowledge.Hebrews 11:1 tells us “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And then in 11:6 we read “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”So faith itself is a gift from God, not something we can earn, or buy, or be given by someone. It’s given out only by God. And, it’s evidence for the proof of God. In other words, we can know that God is God because of the evidence of faith. Does that make sense?
So, everyone exercises faith in something. When we stand, we have faith that our legs will hold us up. When we sit down in a chair, we have faith that chair will hold our weight. When we take a breath, we have faith that just the right amount of oxygen, mixed with the right amount of everything else, will be present to sustain us. When we go to bed we have faith that the earth will continue its rotation so that morning will come once again. We have chosen to place our faith in these things because of their past reliability.
So when it comes to God and the Bible, the same principles apply. Faith in God means that we have chosen to trust that He exists based upon the evidence that we’ve seen, and that He is who the Bible says He is, and that our trust, or lack of it, will radically impact our lives and eternity. However, the alternative to faith is not “lack of faith.” To choose against faith in God also requires faith. We must trust that God does not exist, that He cannot be known by us, and that this choice has no impact on our lives and eternity. Denying God’s existence takes an even bigger leap of faith because the questions raised in the Bible still demand to be answered. Those who discount the Bible must supply answers themselves to countless questions with no ready answers, such as those dealing with the meaning of life and the complexity of design seen in the universe.
When choosing where to place our trust, we must consider the reliability of each option. The Bible makes some powerful claims about itself. Some people think they can pick and choose which parts of the Bible they consider true, but the Book itself never gives us that option. It states that it is the inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16), that it is true (Psalm 119:160; John 17:17), and that it is the guidebook for our lives (Psalm 119:105;Luke 4:4). To trust that this is not true means that everything else the Bible claims is suspect; therefore, claiming the promises while ignoring the commands is irrational.
To declare that the Bible is untrustworthy means we must find another reasonable explanation for its miraculous nature. For example, of the nearly 2,500 prophecies given in the Bible, hundreds or thousands of years beforehand, 2,000 of them have been fulfilled, with the remaining 500+ unfolding with time. The probability of all these prophecies being fulfilled without error is roughly one in 1020,000. So, to trust that the Bible is not a miraculous book is scientifically illogical and simply absurd.
So Is faith in God an irrational and blind faith that we exercise? Absolutely not! All evidence supports the Biblical claims. We have secular evidence for many of the people, places, and events that the Bible describes, and more pours in as time unfolds.
So yes, we can absolutely have logical, rational confidence that the Bible is indeed God’s communication to us. We know that it’s true because of the evidence we see around us. We can test its claims and verify its truth. It is the Key to the map. And the Treasure is Jesus’ finished work on the cross in payment for our sins.
So, what now? We dive into the Word of God. If the Bible really is the way the God of creation has chosen to communicate with us, then wouldn’t we want to know everything he has to say to us? We wouldn’t want to miss a single word of it! It’s the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. And as we know, it has the power to change our lives.
But, we have short memories. We tend to forget things. That’s why it’s important to stay in the Word, daily. It’s very important to have a running communication with God through his Word. It helps us abide in him, so that we’re able to give an account for the hope within us when we’re asked. When opportunities arise, we stand firm on the infallible Word of God. For He is our refuge and strength. I’m reminded of the Bereans in Acts 17:11. These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.
When we’re faced with difficult questions, we’re to be like the Bereans, and search through the scriptures for answers.
