MrMister
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The following I am submitting so as others so inclined may have a few things made a bit clearer regarding Christianity and the associated views, truths, etc. It’s not done in an effort to shove this down anyone’s throat so to speak. For the following fact is scriptural in it’s basis, and that is we as Christians can only tell others about Jesus, the rest is up to God and the particular person we tell this to. My hope is to shed light on a few things that I personally struggled with, and my findings on such matters. I feel compelled to do this simply because of what so many here have indicated that they believe all this is an absolute falsehood, and I merely want to point out my personal experience regarding this matter. But just know that I am not person that is well grounded in theology; these are just my findings. And one other disclaimer here, I am not trying to infer that I am a perfect, shinning example of Christianity, or even close to it for that matter. So please don’t criticize me too hastily and/or condemn me for my views, as these things I am discussing apply to me as to what I personally have discovered.
To understand the reason why Christians worship Jesus, one must first come to terms with who exactly Jesus is and who He claimed Himself to be. But please forgive me if you feel this is a bunch of nonsense or whatever, but I sincerely believe this is something we all need to hear, for what's at stake here is more than whether or not you merely believe Christians through out the world are involved with a heresy, but what you feel to be true in regards to Jesus and the biblical doctrine concerning our personal salvation and where we will spend eternity. For to look at Pascal’s Wager once again, if anyone else (as an unbeliever) is right and I am wrong about Him, then in the end you will have nothing to gain and I (and all other Christians) really will have nothing to lose, but if You are wrong and I am right about Jesus and where we will spend eternity, well, you will unfortunately have everything to lose and I will stand to gain everything. This is the very thing that prompted me to begin a search for some answers, but to search with an open mind.
You see God does not want us to simply come to Him in a blind leap of faith as some folks claim. The fact is God created each and every one of us with a mind and we were created in His image. That image is not only represented within our spirit, but also represented within our body, within our thoughts, within our emotions within each and every one of us. And this image is to be used when seeking God. He wants us to check Him out and verify His truths. If this were not so He would not have told Moses at the burning bush various ways to prove to the Israelites that God did in fact send Moses to lead His people out from Egypt. God expected the Israelites to ask the intelligent question "How do we know that God sent you". Or in the book of Isaiah (40-48), God challenges the Israelites to examine every other God and then challenges these Gods to do what He does. And when Christ died, He stuck around for forty days in order to show Himself to others and prove to them what had taken place so as they would believe. God wants us to test and check out all the signs and all the evidence. Our Christian faith is faith that is real and is rational. And it is a faith that can be believed in, trusted in, and can be tested.
At this point I feel the need to make a case for the very existence of God. I suppose to start with, I should tell you my basis for all Scriptural truth is found in the Bible as well as many other resources available to all.
The simple fact is I once was agnostic and firmly believed that someone must prove to me God did in fact exist. I needed empirical, scientific proof of such, for all I considered His existence to be was merely nothing more than a fairy tale. My subsequent conclusion was that I must look further than my mere belief in science, and the information contained the Scriptures. So I began to explore with an open mind, I repeat, an open mind. Some of the things I soon discovered were that one could not “empirically” prove through scientific evidence that Abraham Lincoln was shoot and killed at Ford Theater. One must rely on historical evidence and upon doing so; based upon the overwhelming support, there is no disputing that this incidence with President Lincoln actually happened. Most certainly, it is the very same concerning a search for the truth about Jesus and the Holy Scriptures.
When one objectively looks at the overwhelming amount of evidence to support the authenticity of the Bible, an individual can only come to the conclusion that the Bible is from God and Him alone. And that evidence for me lies in the fact that the Bible is shown to be reliable in five major ways: (1) textural transmission (the accuracy of the copying process down through history), (2) the conformation of the Old and New Testament by hard evidence uncovered through archaeology, (3) documentary evidence also uncovered through archaeology, (4) the internal evidence test of the New Testament, and (5) the external evidence test of the New Testament. Here are some facts that cannot be disputed, and not merely in my humble opinion. There are a multitude of reliable sources of antiquity other than the Bible for information concerning Jesus, i.e., Josephus, Polycarp, Roman Government archives, archeological evidence and many others. All of which I would implore anyone so inclined to find these sources on your own behalf and not simply take my word for it.
Some of the more compelling evidence in the Scriptures themselves can be found by looking at the prophetic fulfillment of the future Messiah mentioned over 300 times in various verses throughout the Old Testament, which were written hundreds of years before Christ. Given the study of statistics involving the theory and laws of mathematical probability, the fulfillment of these prophecies by any one person is astronomical. The combined probability against just 17 of these predictions occurring is equal to: 1 chance in 480 billion x 1 billion x 1 trillion or, 1 chance in 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Some Bible critics have suggested that Jesus of Nazareth, as a rabbi, naturally knew about these predictions and simply arranged the events of His life to fulfill these specific prophecies. But how would you arrange to be born in Bethlehem? How would you manage to be born into the tribe of Judah? How would you make sure that the price of your betrayal would be precisely thirty pieces of silver? How would you arrange to be crucified with thieves? How would a crucified man arrange to have his enemies gamble for his garments? The truth is that, if you could arrange all these details, you would have to be the Son of God.
Yes, I know some people’s rebuttal would suggest that men have written the Scriptures to conform to whatever they believed in and thus are propagating a lie. Once again, I would implore you to look at the vast amounts of copies of the writings of Moses, King David, Solomon, Ezra, Samuel, etc, etc, etc, that were passed down from generation to generation through out Jewish culture. There are literally were thousands and thousands of these documents stored on whatever means were available such as papyrus. The fact is there are no books of antiquity that can be confirmed for their validity other that the Bible. The only other work remotely close would be that of Homer, and there aren't copies dating back far enough in time to substantiate whether or not it had been faithfully copied from original text. The Holy Scriptures are not so, check it out for yourself.
Second, look at First Corinthians 15. The thing to bear in mind is Paul didn’t initially write this as being Holy Scripture; it was a letter to the church at Corinth just about thirty years after Jesus’ death and ascension. And stated in it was that Jesus died and was buried then rose after three days then was seen by many. He included Peter and other disciples, 500 people and even some people in the crowd he was talking to knew of these things that took place. The fact is if anyone could attest to anything other than what Paul was saying, they would have certainly spoken up. There is no evidence of anyone ever doing so.
Furthermore, each and every one of the disciples of Jesus proclaimed through out the land what had happened and whom Jesus was, never once denying Him. All of this was after they had been emotionally crushed after Jesus was killed, After all how could the Messiah allow Himself to suffer a horrible death at the hands of men, yet they were rejuvenated after seeing Jesus risen from the grave. Had this been a lie these men would not have went to their deaths and not admitted it as such. The fact once again is that every one of these disciples, with the exception of the Apostle John, died horrible deaths and never once denied Jesus was who He said He was. These things are recorded in various Roman archives, and other historians of the time.
Speaking of historians, Luke, who wrote Luke and Acts, was a physician and a historian. If you read his work you will find many historical references, of which there is a tremendous amount of archeological evidence to support what he wrote. As a matter of fact, there is absolutely nothing that has ever been discovered that disproves anything written in the Bible. The simple truth is there are archeological support, prophetic support, and historical support for what is written in the bible. I don’t mean this a derogatory statement against all other religions, but the same cannot be said for any other religion, period. If there is other supporting archeological, or prophetic, or historical evidence for any other religion, would someone please be so kind and point me towards it.
Now back to what i previously mentioned regarding Lincoln and him being shot. Yes there is this obvious evidence existing concerning Lincoln (i.e., a body in the grave with a bullet hole in the skull, DNA evidence, as well as eyewitness accounts), and even given such strong evidence for the event, which is for me by far enough evidence to say without a shadow of a doubt that this event actually happened. But demonstrative scientific evidence cannot be offered to prove that Lincoln was shot. The problem we face is that demonstrative scientific evidence requires a hypothesis capable of being tested repeatedly in a laboratory by other scientists to verify the results. What I was trying to emphasize was, the very nature of historical events is that they cannot be repeated and, therefore, cannot be tested by scientific methods. The great error of skeptics is that they demand scientific proof about historical accounts about Jesus in the Gospels when such absolute proof about any historical event is impossible to obtain. However, the question about the historicity of the Gospels’ claims about Jesus is a question of fact and precisely the type of question that has been considered and judged by courts of justice every day for thousands of years.
Courts judge the truthfulness of witnesses and questions of fact according to a fundamental rule briefly summarized as such: In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true. Unfortunately, many arguments against the genuineness of the Gospel account are based on a cavalier approach that quickly rejects the historical record about Christ whenever the slightest doubt is raised by anyone about any detail in the Gospel account. Unwilling to acknowledge that the evangelists’ accounts are probably true, they contemptuously reject the Gospels’ statements because they believe that it is possible that they might be false. If this unreasonable basis for judging the truth were applied to the records of the event of the assassination of Lincoln, we would have to throw out as unreliable virtually all the statements of actual witnesses that allow us to understand what happened during that tragic event.
Now I could go on a bit more, but for the sake of not getting into a novel, I will conclude with this: I would like to point out that the claims of the Gospel are so momentous that it is vital that we as individuals examine the evidence to determine whether the Gospel record is true or not. Nothing less that our soul’s eternal destiny is at stake. Personally, with me previously being a hardcore agnostic, it was once presented to me by someone who loved the Lord Jesus, to at the very least, consider the evidence. And for many of us, myself included, this was the most difficult part of the whole process of accepting Christ and His message. For God makes it all too easy to have eternal salvation, as it's a gift freely given to all who genuinely seek.
< Message edited by MrMister -- 5/15/2006 8:47:54 AM >
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RE: End of Days. - 
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