Apologetics

Proving Jesus by Doing

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'Sermon on the Mount' by Henrik OlrikSo Jesus answered them, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.”
—John 7:16-17 ESV

The above passage has been stirring in me all weekend. It bothers me. A lot.

Jesus had a validity issue. When He tried to teach in the temple, the learned questioned how He knew what He knew. Jesus sought to tell them, but they weren’t responsive.

We live in an age that has made the mind the arbiter of all truth. We are rabid rationalists. Even when someone tries to stick a label of “emotional” on us, it peels off soon enough.

For many people, Christianity is all in their head or it is nowhere at all.

Clever arguments, a Ph.D. in biblical hermeneutics, and an iPod filled with Ravi Zacharias podcasts are the base material needed for being an apologist for Jesus today. The person who cannot tie together every last passage is seen as not qualified to talk Bible with anyone. An inability to look at Paul’s Letter to Philemon in light of the Hebrew captivity in Egypt or to spout every last occurrence of the concept of a hardened heart or to detail the finer points of New Testament infralapsarianism proves a person is not up to the task of living as a Christian and certainly cannot be trusted to be an evangelist or teacher.

But what does Jesus say will prove His words true in a person’s life?

Doing them. Not thinking. Doing.

Perhaps the reason we live in such a godless age is not because people don’t know the words of God but because so few do them. Jesus said that if people do the things God wills through His word, the validity will be self-evident.

Imagine if our evangelism of the lost and teaching to the found consisted more of telling people, “Here are the words of Jesus. Do them and you will know Him.” Imagine if our measure of the maturity of the believer was not how many Bible passages he or she had memorized but how many he or she actually practiced in real life.

We think we must construct systems of biblical logic to make a cage that cannot be escaped, a sort of ultra-secure fortress of rationalistic thought. But Jesus said that our proof is in doing what He says. That’s how the words are justified, because they are life and truth when lived.

All this teaching yet the proof is in the doing.

What if our Sunday Schools were more about doing the words of God? Would our understanding and retention of truth improve? Jesus says it will. Do we trust Him in this?

I don’t know when the Faith migrated from all parts of the whole person to reside solely in the head, with a trickle down into the heart when we’re really “feeling it.” But Jesus Himself says that’s not the way we should be. Instead, truth is in the living out of what He says.

That’s a paradigm shift of the highest order. I hope to see more of it in my lifetime.

The Lie Remains the Same

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Due to an overwhelming number of tasks on the old to-do list at year’s end, I called a halt to interacting on Facebook, that great time suck. I said goodbye to birthday congrats for people I hadn’t seen in 30 years, bid adieu to keeping up with other people’s holiday plans, and articulated a hearty aloha to commenting on someone’s else post that got my goat. And there were plenty of goat-getting updates to note.

Too many.

Now returned from exile, it seems to me that Facebook is awash with the kind of commentary guaranteed not only to get one’s goat, but raise hackles, rub the wrong way, get dander up,  make to see red, and stand hair on end. Everyone seems angry on the Internet, especially on Facebook.

But it’s the way people respond to the things that make them angry that should alarm a thinking person. Everyone and his brother must add their two cents, and it might as well be counterfeit coinage.

In nearly every conversation regarding culture, societal shifts, current events, politics, or religion, you see the following:

Does the Bible really say…?

People should be free to do what they want, so….

Over and over and over. And in almost every case, those two are used to justify something antithetical to orthodox Christian theology or to godly, righteous living.

I wonder if the people who resort to using that question and that statement recognize their source:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
—Genesis 3:1-5 ESV

That supposedly clever line of reasoning some guy used to justify his immorality or someone else’s is old, old stuff. Back to the beginning kinds of justification and argument—just with contemporary wording to fit the spirit of the age.

Did God actually say…? Well, yes, He actually did. And your argument that He meant it in some other way that no one in 2000 years of Christian history has ever proffered as true should tell you something about the wrongness of your interpretation.

But then…

…And you will be like God…. You will be self-determining. You will be free to decide what is right and wrong. You will do whatever the heck you want to do, and no one will tell you otherwise because you told God to take a hike and enthroned yourself on His plush chair. You.

Red-eyed snakeEngaging the conversation in 2014 means a near-constant return to the Garden. Any time some postmodern Socrates chips away at traditional morality or invokes an alternate interpretation of truth, you can hear hissing between the words.

The part that no one who resorts to the old lies ever thinks through is this:

You will not surely die.

Actually, you will. And you’ll start that dying long before you get to the genuine finale. And then you’ll get a nasty, nasty surprise.

At least it will be a surprise to you. To some who weren’t spouting lies, it’s no surprise at all. They know that people who argue Satan’s way get to meet the originator in person.

Meanwhile, people who know better than to quote evil keep seeing the same old lies everywhere they turn.

If it weren’t so sad, it would be boring.

Equipping the Saints: The Synergy of Spirit & Word

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It wasn’t the best of mornings when you get down to it.

My wife had an appointment scheduled that put her on edge because it had the potential to determine the course of the rest of her life. Jangly nerves and a tremor in her voice all said, “I really need you to pay attention to me right now.”

My son, watching his summer vacation slipping away, fell into that desperate state of attempting to pack as much living into five days as was humanly possible. Flubber had nothing on the kid. He was bouncing around the house begging for things to do, his sole mission to get me to pay attention to him right now.

Meanwhile, I’d awakened to a malfunctioning Internet connection and a deadline to meet. As the materials had to be emailed, that posed a bit of a dilemma. With my IT background, I normally don’t blanch when tech things go awry. But after some computer finagling, I came to the terrible realization that it was nothing on my end that I could correct; my ISP was down, no matter what the blinking lights on the modem said. It was the kind of situation I needed to deal with right now if I was to make my deadline.

And right at that moment of stark tech realization, kid yelling, wife anxious, the doorbell rang.

“Dad, there’s two people standing at the door,” my son added to his tirade.

I knew in that second exactly who it was.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses.

While that’s enough to start some people hyperventilating, I greatly enjoy talking to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I know their theology very well, know what verses to share with them out of their own (flawed) New World Translation bible, and generally throw a box full of monkey wrenches into the cogs of their apologetics. In short, I know exactly what to say to them. And I do it in a very neighborly and loving way.

Most times, that is.

Normally, I would invite them in, but the hyperactive son and the anxious wife who had to leave for her appointment in a few minutes did not make for the best environment. So I offered to have them sit down on our front porch in our three porch chairs—except two of the three chairs seemed to have gone missing.

So we stood around. Ugh.

I then began to commit a series of errors. Instead of steering the conversation toward the divinity of Jesus (as the JWs believe Jesus is a created being, the archangel Michael), I let myself get dragged to the end of that discussion prematurely, as we somehow jumped right to the Trinity, which requires nearly a full overview of Scripture to present accurately (as the JWs do well at dismantling piecemeal Scriptures on the Trinity, especially when presented standing around on someone’s front porch). When I attempted to go back to the issue of Jesus’ divinity, I asked for the junior JW’s New World Translation and immediately realized I couldn’t read it; the words were too small. This meant going to find either of the two pair of reading glasses I now own—of course, both eluded me. Then, I got the “brilliant” idea while looking for my glasses to pull out my Aland Greek New Testament in case we stumbled into differences between the NWT and the genuine text. Five minutes later, I think, I got back outside, hoping to talk more about the tirpartite nature of man and how it reflects the Trinitarian nature of God, but somehow I spent most of that time thumbing my way through my Greek NT and not enough concentrating on the tripartite explanation. Meanwhile, the truth of Jesus’ divinity was receding into the murky past of the conversation. At this point, my wife informed us that she must leave and the JWs’ car was blocking our driveway. Seeing this as the perfect out, the senior JW said it was obvious they and I were at completely different places and were never going to come to any agreement on anything, so so long, buh-bye.

And with that, there was no joy in Mudville; mighty Casey had struck out.

The postmortem of this moment doesn’t need the team from CSI to enunciate what went wrong. Anyone want to venture the answer?

It wasn’t that I was stressed by the events of the morning.

It wasn’t the time crunch or the blocked driveway.

It wasn’t an inadequate knowledge of the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

And it wasn’t an inadequate knowledge of Christian doctrine.

What made the morning less than stellar was that I left the Holy Spirit out of that golden opportunity.

We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about what it’s going to take to get the American Church educated in the deep truths of the Faith, but what I want to add right now is that all the Bible-learnin’ in the world is pointless without the Holy Spirit to pull it all together and make it scintillate in our spirits.

I know plenty of Christians who can handle the Bible well. I know plenty of Christians who claim to know the voice of the Holy Spirit. But the kind of Christian I rarely meet is the one who puts both together.

Word of God speak by Your Holy SpiritYou have on one side the intellectuals with their systematic theologies who could mount an apologetic that rolls like thunder but are tone deaf when it comes to listening to instructions from the Holy Spirit. On the other side are the charismatics who are always talking about the revelation they’re receiving by the Holy Spirit but who will search for hours if you ask them to locate the Book of Hezekiah in their Bibles.

My problem that August morning was that I didn’t ask the Holy Spirit to take charge of the time and guide me His way. I barged ahead like one of those deaf intellectuals, smug in my learnin’.

If we’re to make a difference in the education of Christians in America, we have got to start bridging the gap between the word of God and the Spirit of God. Because in truth, the only gap that exists in that gapless relationship occurs because of you and me. We’re the problem. The Spirit and the Scriptures are perfect.

And so I ask, what churches out there are teaching people how to listen to the Holy Spirit when it comes to correctly handling the Scriptures?

Because it doesn’t work if we know the Bible but can’t hear the voice of the Spirit tell us how to understand and use it. And it doesn’t work if charismatics go on and on about their spiritual gifts but then don’t give the Spirit of God the fodder of His learned word to work from.

If you are in a church that does a great job teaching the Bible but not listening to the Spirit, then you may be getting only part of the story. And chances are, your use of the Bible in those cases when you really need it are going to fall under the label of “the flesh,” and your effectiveness will be diminished. Likewise, if you are in a charismatic church that teaches how to hear the Holy Spirit, yet the average person can’t string together five verses to show why Jesus is God, then you are not putting it all together, either.

If we are to be effective ministers of the Gospel, we have to rely on the voice of the Spirit to lead us in all situations, especially in how to correctly handle the Bible. And we have got to ensure we know the Bible if we are to give the Holy Spirit living in us the free access to the discipline of our study.

Jesus didn’t drop Biblical knowledge into the heads of the disciples at Pentecost. He made what was already there more clear and more transformational. The Spirit brought to mind the time those men had shared with Jesus and amplified the Savior’s teachings. The Spirit made use of what had already been implanted.

And so it must be with us. It’s not enough to know the Bible or say we have the Spirit living in us. Unless we learn the synergy of the Spirit and the word (and—unlike me—ALWAYS rely on it), we’re going to whiff again and again.