One of the challenges that college students face in America today is the fact that many of their professors try to force their own personal opinions on them. We have reported on examples of college mind control in previous postings such as HERE, HERE, and HERE.
The Week magazine for August 28, 2020, (page 8) reported on a case at Iowa State University. Professor Chloe Clark announced she would eject any student who engaged in saying anything negative about “Black Lives Matter, gay marriage or legal abortion.” Say goodbye to academic freedom for students being able to express their own opinions.
A free and open discussion leads to understanding and learning. There is no way to advance those things when professors attempt to force their young disciples into college mind control. To make matters worse, they are doing it while being supported by public tax dollars and high-priced tuition paid by the parents.
Second Timothy 3:16-17 says that all Scripture is inspired by God, and God uses it to prepare and equip His people to do every good work. One of the major evidences that the Bible is not a human creation is the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled. The correlation between the prophecies of the ancient books and the historical documentation of Jesus fulfilling those prophecies is fantastic.
Atheists and biblical minimalists have tried to use all kinds of explanations to deny the proof from prophecies. We have a list of 44 prophecies that were fulfilled by Christ. Many of these prophecies were beyond the ability of any human to fulfill. You have a hard time saying that Jesus made special arrangements to fulfill them all. Here are 20 examples:
*Christ would be born in Bethlehem Ephrathah. Micah 5:2 (There were two Bethlehems.) -Fulfilled in Matthew 2:1 and Luke 2:4-6
*Christ would be a descendant of Jacob and Isaac. Numbers 24:17, Genesis 17:19 and 21:12 -Fulfilled in Matthew 1:2 and Luke 3:34
*Christ would spend time in Egypt. Hosea 11:1 -Fulfilled in Matthew 2:14-15
*A massacre of children would happen at Christ’s birthplace. Jeremiah 31:15 -Fulfilled in Matthew 2:16-18
*A messenger would prepare the way for Christ. Isaiah 40:3-5 -Fulfilled in Luke 3:3-6
*Christ would be preceded by “Elijah.” Malachi 4:5-6 -Fulfilled in Matthew 11:13-14
*Christ would be rejected by his own people. Psalms 69:8 and Isaiah 53:3 -Fulfilled in John 1:11 and 7:5.
*Christ would be declared the Son of God. Psalms 2:7 -Fulfilled in Matthew 3:16-17
*Christ would speak in parables. Psalm 78:2-4. Isaiah 6:9-10 -Fulfilled in Mathew 13:10-15, 34-35.
*Christ would be a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Psalms 110:4 -Fulfilled in Hebrews 5:5-6.
*Christ would be praised by little children. Psalms 8:2 -Fulfilled in Matthew 21:16
*Christ would be sold for 30 pieces of silver. Zechariah 11:12 -Fulfilled in Matthew 26:14-16.
*Christ’s price money would be used to buy a potter’s field. Zechariah 11:13 -Fulfilled in Matthew 27:9-10
*Christ would be spat on and struck. Isaiah 50:6 -Fulfilled in Matthew 26:67
*Christ would be crucified with criminals. Isaiah 53:12 -Fulfilled in Matthew 27:38
*Christ would be given vinegar to drink. Psalms 69:21 -Fulfilled in Matthew 27:34
*Christ’s hands and feet would be pierced. Psalms 22:16. Zechariah. 12:10 -Fulfilled in John 20:25-27
*Soldiers would gamble for Christ’s garments. Psalms 22:18 -Fulfilled in Matthew 27:35-36 and Luke 23:34.
*Christ’s bones would not be broken. Exodus 12:46, Psalms 34:20 -Fulfilled in John 19:33-36
*Soldiers would pierce Christ’s side. Zechariah 12:10 -Fulfilled in John 19:34
When you consider the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled, realize that they were written many hundreds of years before the New Testament historical events. To see our previous posts on Old Testament prophecies of Christ click HERE and HERE.
Researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education report that teaching human evolution in public schools has doubled since 2007. The study shows that the percentage of public school science teachers who teach evolution as established science has grown from 51% in 2007 to 67% in 2019. Simultaneously, the percentage of science teachers who discuss intelligent design has dropped from 23% to 14%.
The problem with data like this is that terminology is not defined. There is a difference between teaching human evolution according to neo-Darwinian theory and teaching the fact that living things can change. Nobody denies that new breeds of dogs, roses, corn, cattle, and fish have come into existence within recorded human history. There is also no doubt that racial variations of humans are happening as we watch. The Bible even describes evolutionary change as we read about what Jacob did with Laban’s flocks in Genesis 30:31-43. It is difficult to imagine a competent biology teacher not explaining how these changes come about, and how we can use them to solve the problems of hunger and disease today.
It is also easy to see how a teacher can destroy children’s faith by teaching that chance physical changes determine everything about humans. Teaching human evolution from primates makes humans no different from any other form of life on Earth. Children do not need to be taught that survival of the fittest governs every part of all life. There is a close correlation between the teaching of human evolution, playground bullying, and the historical justification of slavery. They all center around the survival of the fittest.
This ministry is based on the belief that science and faith in God are symbiotic. They support each other. It is bad science to teach theory as fact. It is also wrong to be selective in what valid data we use to make decisions about what we teach children. As a science teacher in public schools for 41 years, I know the pressure that teachers face. But avoiding bad science and bad theology is the answer to the evolution/creation controversy. The current pandemic may offer parents and teachers a unique opportunity to improve the education of our students and reduce the tension between science and faith in America today.
Churches are seeing an exodus of young people. One reason is that many do not provide relevant teaching for building faith in God and the Bible. I recently received an announcement by a well-known preacher that he was beginning a series of lessons on reasons to believe in Jesus. I’m sure that the lessons will be outstanding, but will they address the things that are keeping young adults away from the Church?
The listing of evidences in the announcement included the empty tomb, the stone taken away, the grave clothes lying there, the eyewitness testimony, the faith of the apostles, and the conversion of James and Paul. Those are all evidences based on the Bible. Those of us with a long history of hearing sermons and being in Bible classes are familiar with the biblical teachings and believe them to be true. We still need to have our faith strengthened, so we are not denigrating this kind of teaching. But building faith in God and the Bible requires more than quoting the Bible. Where is the Church failing the unchurched, and, in many cases, failing the children of church members?
In recent postings, we have dealt with the popular teachings of Bart Ehrman, who devotes many of his books and articles to attacking the biblical account. We receive many letters from skeptics and atheists attacking the biblical account based on Ehrman’s material. Magazines like the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine are full of attacks on the Christ and the Bible. The leader of many attacks in these atheist publications is Michael Shermer, a former preacher, and graduate of Pepperdine University. The Freedom From Religion organization joins the attacks with advertisements in Scientific American and other popular scientific journals.
It is essential for church leaders to understand that young adults receive a heavy dose of attacks on the Bible. Quoting the Bible as proof of something only works for people who believe the Bible is 100% true. Most of our preacher training schools have a single course on apologetics. They pay very little attention to archeological evidence, historical support, and scientific answers to the skeptic attacks. Building faith in God and the Bible requires more than quoting the Bible.
Bible classes for young people must include evidence that does not depend on scripture alone.This ministry provides resources to do that, and we often review books that give this kind of support. We are in the process of completing a video series by John Cooper on archaeological support for the Bible. We have a museum in York, Nebraska, designed to show through artifacts the credibility of the Biblical account. Before we quote scripture to prove anything, we need to be sure that the person we are dealing with believes the Bible is from God. God has given us the tools to do that, and we must use them.
There are billions of stars in the galaxy, so there must be billions of planets in the galaxy. For many years people have speculated that there must be intelligent life out there and even civilizations that have developed space travel. In a casual conversation among scientists in 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “If these civilizations do exist, where is everybody?” That question came to be known as the Fermi Paradox, and it led to the picture, which we will explain.
The Fermi Paradox points out the lack of any evidence for what many see as a high probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. Since no space aliens have landed on Earth and announced their arrival, some scientists decided to search for them by electromagnetic radiation. In 1960 astronomer Frank Drake began a coordinated project which became known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Ever since then, millions (or billions) of dollars and millions of hours have been spent listening for any transmission of any intelligent beings on other planets. The results have been zero. Where is everybody?
In 1995 the SETI Institute established Project Phoenix, which concentrated only on the 800 closest stars and their planets. Working from 1995 until 2004, the project concluded that there is no species as technologically advanced as humans in the universe within 200 light-years of Earth.
Because of the laws of physics and the dangers of space, any space traveler would be limited to no more than one percent of the speed of light. (Exceeding, or even approaching the speed of light is only possible in the movies.) So traveling at maximum speed from the nearest possible location, a space alien would need 20,000 years to reach the Earth. You could add to that another 5,000 years to dodge space objects (including stars, planets, and asteroids) on the trip. So for a space alien to reach Earth would take at least 25,000 years, and probably much longer.
So what is the picture? It’s a digital representation of what is called the Arecibo message. In 1974, scientists sent out a radio message from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. They aimed it a star cluster called M13, which is 25,000 light-years away. If there is any intelligent life there able to receive and decode it, the message tells about planet Earth and humanity. (You can find the “decode” HERE.) Of course, if there are any intelligent beings in M13 wondering “where is everybody,” they should receive the message in 25,000 years.
The Fermi Paradox is still unsolved. As the leader of Project Phoenix, Peter Backus, said, “We live in a quiet neighborhood.” God, on the other hand, being unlimited by time and space (remember that He created time/space and matter/energy) is always near and ready to hear our prayers unless we are unwilling to acknowledge His existence.
One of the objections that we hear most often is, “God cannot exist because a good God would not allow evil and suffering in the world.” The argument is that if God is good and all-powerful, He would not allow evil, pain, and suffering. Either God is not good, or He is not powerful, or, most likely, there is no God.
Those who advance this objection are saying that their knowledge of all things proves that they know what God should do. God could not possibly have a good reason for allowing things to run their course based on circumstances and the actions of people. God should intervene to stop people from doing anything that would cause harmful consequences for themselves or others. God should cancel the natural laws at times to prevent accidents and disasters. People who make these arguments are claiming to be smarter than God.
But what if God is smarter than we are? What if God knows more than we know? Suppose that God knows the future because He is not limited by our time dimension. Is it possible that God has a reason for allowing bad things to happen that we, in our limited knowledge, cannot understand? Just because we can’t see a reason for God not to intervene, does that mean God could not have a purpose?
It’s a mistake for anyone to assume that a God beyond our limitations of knowledge and understanding could not exist. A god with our limited knowledge would not be God. George Burns played the role of “god” in the 1977 movie Oh, God! When the character played by John Denver asked him what was going to happen, Burns replied, “How should I know?” When asked for clarification, his response was, “I only know what is. Also, I’m very big on what was. Now, what isn’t yet? I haven’t got a clue.” That describes the limitation of humans—not God.
The Bible tells us that God is not only good (“God is love”) and omnipotent (all-powerful), He is also omniscient (all-knowing). It’s a mistake to say, “God cannot exist because a good God would not allow evil.” The only way you could know that God has no reason to allow evil and suffering in this world is for your knowledge and understanding to be greater than God’s. To believe that is indeed the height of arrogance.
Perhaps the theologian most often quoted by atheists today is Bart Ehrman. Ehrman graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary is a “Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and has written many books harshly criticizing the Bible. Perhaps his most cited book is Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Atheists reference Ehrman using his credentials and position to declare his credibility. We suggest that Bart Ehrman’s bias relates to his motivation to sell books, not an open-minded search for truth. Here is one example:
“There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament…We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them…in thousands of ways” (pages 10-11). So what are the facts? If one manuscript says “Christ Jesus” and another says “Jesus Christ,” is that an error? Of the 400,000 errors that skeptics claim, most are differences in spelling or the order of words. Scholars studying manuscripts report a 99% agreement between all known manuscripts. None of the existing variations change any crucial element of the Christian faith.
Scholars have over 5700 manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament available to them. Those manuscripts are not from one recent time. Some are from very early, and others are 200 or 300 years later. When you compare the earlier manuscripts with the more recent ones, you don’t find significant changes. This is true even though they are not in the same language. There are more than two million pages of text and yet no significant variations.
Bart Ehrman’s bias is explained in a book by Timothy Paul Jones. The book is Misquoting Truth published by Intervarsity Press.
As we have pointed out before, the followers of Christ spoke Aramaic rather than Greek. The reason for this is that Aramaic was the language of the common people, and Christ dealt with the common people. The better-educated intellectuals of that day spoke Greek. Why then are the New Testament manuscripts written in Greek? Atheists have maintained that the Bible’s human authors were people other than the apostles and eyewitnesses, and they wrote the manuscripts at a later time.
Atheist scholar Bart Ehrman wrote, “It seems unlikely that the uneducated, lower-class, illiterate disciples of Jesus played the decisive role in the literary compositions that have come down through history under their names.” (From Ehrman’s book The followers of Jesus in history and Legend, page 45.)
Jesus and the Church of the first century indeed reached out to the common people. Christianity was not and is not a faith just for intellectuals. Paul certainly handled the academics, as demonstrated in Acts 17, when he carried on the debate with the Epicureans and Stoics in Athens. However, the claim that intellectuals wrote the scriptures later because the early Christians were too ignorant is an uninformed position.
Matthew the tax collector wrote the book of Mathew (Mathew 10:3). Tax collectors were not uneducated people, and the masses did not like them. The Romans required tax collectors to be fluent in several languages. They used a wax-covered wooden tablet called a pinax to record notes, which were then transcribed to papyrus. Luke was a physician, according to Colossians 4:14, and physicians were trained to pull eyewitness accounts into a coherent report as Luke did. (See Luke 1:1-4.) Paul certainly was capable of writing in Greek. Galatians 6:11 and Philemon 1:19-21 indicates Paul could do his own writing, but scribes sometimes wrote for individuals. Paul mentions that in Romans 16:22 and Peter in 1 Peter 5:12.
It is strange that atheists would attempt to denigrate the apostles’ intelligence and writing capacity when people living at that time did not choose to do so. The complaint about the Bible’s human authors was about their message of love and forgiveness free of greed and control. That problem still exists today. We can know the Bible is the word of God and came from God due to its message, not because of the academic pedigree of its human authors.
Atheists are desperate to attack the reliability of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman wrote that the biblical stories about Jesus “were changed with what would strike us today as reckless abandon. They were modified, amplified, and embellished, And sometimes they were made up” (Bart Ehrman in his book The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, page 269.)
Atheist scholars like Ehrman assume that the average person is too ignorant to understand why such a statement isn’t true. They assume that most people won’t take the time to find the answer to a challenge like this one. Thankfully some Christian scholars have responded. Dr. Timothy Paul Jones explains why Ehrman’s statement is false.
The accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching emerged among eyewitnesses shortly after the events occurred. Can we trust the New Testament accounts to be true? How about the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. Paul summarizes the story of Christ’s resurrection with two Greek words – paradidomi and paralambano. When these two words were used together, ancient Greek readers understood that the writer was citing oral history. Paul wrote in Greek, but in that passage, he called the apostle Peter by his Aramaic name “Cephas.” Paul also used a Greek word to describe an Aramaic method for joining clauses. What that means is that the oral history was originally in Aramaic. People in Galilee and Judea spoke Aramaic, and Paul must have received this oral history in Aramaic.
What that tells us is, Paul heard the story of Jesus from eyewitnesses (Galatians 1:18) who conveyed it to him in Aramaic. In 1 Corinthians 15:1, Paul reminds the Corinthians of what he had told them three years earlier. Paul carried this message everywhere he went, meaning that it was unchanged as it spread across the Roman empire. Clearly, the story of Jesus’ resurrection was not made up long after He died. The account was not “changed with reckless abandon”.
We can trust the reliability of the New Testament. The average person may not have the knowledge to see the fallacies in every atheist statement, but there are scholars who can. This information came from Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus by Timothy Paul Jones, published by Intervarsity Press.
Jesus told Pilate that everyone who follows the way of truth listens to His voice. Pilate replied, “What is truth?” That was a rhetorical question. He said it because he didn’t think there was such a thing as ultimate truth, and his worldview was like that of many moderns. What is truth today? “Truth is what you make it.” “Your truth is not my truth.” “I don’t believe anyone has ultimate truth.”
In today’s world, people are confused by many contradictory “truths” presented by politicians, religious leaders, and social media. It is amazing how two people can look at the same fact and reach opposite conclusions. After Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb, He told His disciples that He would soon be crucified. Jesus said, “Now my soul is troubled. What should I say—Father, save me from this hour? But that is why I came to this hour. Father, glorify our name.” Then a voice came from heaven, saying, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (See John 12:27-29.) The crowd of people who heard it reached different conclusions. Some said it was thunder, and some said it was the voice of an angel. When Peter and the apostles spoke to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, some said they were drunk while others repented of the grave injustice they had done to Jesus. (See Acts 2:5-13, 38-41.)
It has always been possible for people to reach completely different conclusions while looking at the same evidence. In our posts and publications, we often show design in living things, on planet Earth, and in the universe. We see that design as evidence of a Designer. Others see it as a pattern of accidental coincidence created by random chance. Paul said we can know there is a God by the things He has made. (See Romans 1:20.) He explained the inability of many to see that truth by saying, “In their case, the god of this age [Satan] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers…” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
What is truth today, and why is it often difficult to tell from lies? Experience has shown that when a lie is told repeatedly and often, people will eventually believe it. In our post-modern age, we have social media spreading lies. We also have “fact checkers” who have their own agendas and biases, which slant the way they look at “What is truth?” It can be hard to know whom to believe.
The term “fake news” has entered our vocabulary in a big way. We have seen news reports of “peaceful protests” while behind the reporter, fires are burning. In cases like that, we can see that the facts don’t fit the description. However, modern technology has created ways to fool our senses. We have posted examples of various kinds of fakery HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.
The fakery is only getting worse to the point where we can’t always believe our eyes and ears. Artificial intelligence has made it possible to create very convincing fake videos. You won’t believe your eyes if you watch THIS FAKE VIDEO of president Richard Nixon eulogizing the Apollo astronauts who died on the Moon. Of course, we remember that it did not happen, but the video can almost bring tears to your eyes. The creators of this fantastic fake video were not trying to fool us but to show us how dangerous video fakery has become.
So what is truth today? Jesus is truth. The Bible is truth. The point we are making is that we must be skeptical when it comes to history or politics, or religion. Make sure your sources for faith topics are reliable and test them against God’s word. Fake news can be dangerous, but false religious teaching is the most dangerous of all.
