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The Bible Breakdown
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The Bible Breakdown
BBXtra: Chapter 8 of 12 Points that Prove Christianity is True
Can you truly defend your faith using reason and evidence? This month on Bible Breakdown Extra, we unravel the powerful field of apologetics with Dr. Norman Geisler's "12 Points That Show Christianity Is True." We start with the compelling assertion that truth about reality is knowable and journey through critical concepts like the existence of a theistic God and the possibility of miracles. By adopting a systematic approach, we aim to equip you with the tools to engage in meaningful conversations about faith, from skeptic dialogues to discussions with those who believe all spiritual paths lead to God.
This episode isn't just about reading scripture; it's about transforming your spiritual practice into a lasting legacy of faith. Using an insightful analogy of building a church, we invite you to see your spiritual journey from a new perspective. Are you merely stacking bricks, or are you constructing a sanctuary for generations to worship in? Learn how different perspectives can reshape your understanding and connection with God, and discover the profound impact of knowing and articulating your faith convincingly. Join us as we explore these deep and enriching themes on Bible Breakdown Extra.
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The More You Dig. The More You Find.
Welcome back to a Bible Breakdown Extra. And if you are not currently doing this with us, what we do is we take one day out of a month and we kind of work on it instead of in it, and what I mean by that is is the rest of the month. We're reading God's word every day and we're digging in. The more we dig, the more we find, and the goal of the Bible Breakdown Podcast is really building something one day after another.
Speaker 1:I heard someone one time tell this illustration, and they were saying that they went up to three different men who were working on building a building and they were actually building a church. And they went to the first man and they said what are you doing? What's your job here? And the guy said oh, I'm just here to get a paycheck. Just here to get a paycheck, just no big deal. Okay, second guy, what are you doing? Well, I'm just stacking bricks. I'm stacking bricks, that's what I'm doing. Went to the third guy what are you doing? I am building a church where people are going to worship God for generations.
Speaker 1:Whoa, so three different ways of looking at this, right, and that's one way that you can look at God's work. You can look at just reading the Bible every day. You can look at it as acquiring knowledge about God, or you are creating a legacy of God's faithfulness in your life and you're getting to know God a little bit more every single day. And that's what we think the Bible breakdown is is. It's a journey in getting to know God. It's not just about reading the Bible and consuming the content. It's about getting to know the God of the Bible and the idea is that God has given us his word because he wants us to know him and we know him by the word that he's revealed. And as we go through life, we're building on that. But then we want to take one day out of a month and just dig a little bit deeper, and especially when it comes to the idea of apologetics. Now, if you're just now joining us on this, apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means in defense, and it's in defense of the gospel, being able to prove, being able to prove to yourself and to others and discuss what the Bible is, where it's from and all of that. And we're going through a book right now. It's taking us all year to do it and we're on chapter seven this time around or, excuse me, chapter eight, rather, this time around, and it is on 12 points that prove or show Christianity is true.
Speaker 1:12 points that show Christianity is true, and I love this. Whenever I'm talking to someone who doesn't know Jesus, I love thinking from. Whenever I'm talking to someone who doesn't know Jesus, I love thinking from this point of view, because I don't know where they are in their walk with God. You can talk to some people and they don't believe in God at all. Well, that helps you know where to get started.
Speaker 1:Some people say well, I believe that there's a God, but there's many roads to God. This would be someone like an Oprah Winfrey. She thinks that there's one God but a thousand different ways to get there. So Islam, buddhism, confucianism, all the other things, all of it's the same thing. That's her belief. She's dead wrong. That's all her. You know, whatever. And so then you have all these other things. You have Mormons, jehovah's Witness, all this stuff, and that's where, like, how do you find a way to prove Christianity to all of these different things?
Speaker 1:Well, I've never found anything better than one of my mentors, dr Norman Geisler, who says 12 points that show Christianity is true. And so what he does is he makes it so that you can start literally from the beginning and go all the way through, and so I want to read these to you, as we do every month, and then we're going to take just a moment to focus on number eight. This time around, he says this the first point is truth about reality is knowable Once you get to that one. Number two the opposites cannot both be true. Number three it is true that a theistic God exists. Number four miracles are possible and these are building on top of each other.
Speaker 1:Number five miracles performed in connection with a truth claim confirms the truth of God through a messenger of God. And from there, number six the New Testament documents are reliable. Number seven as witnessed in the New Testament, jesus claimed to be God. Number eight, that's today, jesus claimed to be God was proven by the unique convergence of miracles. And then what we're going to cover over the next few months. Number nine therefore, jesus was God in human flesh. Number 10, whatever Jesus, who is God, affirmed as true must be true. Number 11, jesus affirmed that the Bible is the word of God. Therefore, number 12, it is true that the Bible is the word of God and whatever is opposed to any biblical truth is false, all right.
Speaker 1:So that's where you can go from someone who just doesn't even believe in truth. Go, okay, well, let's talk about truth, let's talk about the three laws of logic first principles and go through that aspect with it. And then, once you've done that, then you start building from there. Is there a God? Okay, well, if there is a God, well, is it a theistic God? You just kind of go through that and if you want to, you can go back and listen.
Speaker 1:And the way I'm looking at this is I'm not teaching these to you verbatim I'd love for you to go get the book 12 Points that Show Christianity is True. But also you can go on YouTube and if you type in this title and then Dr Norman Geisler, you spell his last name G-E-I-S-L-E-R. He actually does some lectures on each one of these and does a fantastic job. But the way I look at it is us kind of having a discussion about how we can use this to talk to other people about the gospel, because if you can get these in your head, you don't have to have them completely memorized, but if you can get them in your head, you can figure out where you can talk about the conversation, because a lot of times in my life before I really started to study this kind of stuff, if you didn't already believe in God, I had no idea where to start with. But if you did believe in God but you didn't believe in the Christian God, well that was also hard.
Speaker 1:So we kind of go from there and what we've been building on is that if there is a God that he should be able to do a miracle and a miracle is where he interrupts the normal natural law he's created to do something supernatural for a specific purpose. Well, if that's true, then the New Testament is important. And then we proved how the New Testament is reliable. And then that's important because the New Testament is where we learn that Jesus claimed to be God. Well, a lot of people claim to be God. Did he prove it? Well, he proved it because what we have today is Jesus claimed to be God and it was proven by a unique convergence of miracles.
Speaker 1:And what I love about what Dr Geisler does is number one. He talks about why these different miracles happened. And what we see is in the book of John that was what God was very, very interested in covering is he would constantly say that Jesus would do this miracle, and this particular miracle was a sign to the people. One of the things we have to really realize is that the different miracles that Jesus did wasn't to wow the audience. If I can go so far as to say this, when you look at the Bible, the number one reason why Jesus did these miracles wasn't simply because he wanted everyone to be healed. Now, he did want everyone to be healed, don't get me wrong on that. But the miracles is what validated the message, because, if you think about it, there are people all over the place who claim to be God. I mean, there's people in our world right now who say they are God.
Speaker 1:The whole nation of Islam started because Muhammad claimed he knew who God was, and they started, of course, also by the sword, killing a whole bunch of people. You can really set up a religion when you kill people if they don't believe it. But a lot of that was because he claimed he had found the real God, and even Jim Jones at one point. He started off as a Christian. Eventually, he started saying that he was God. So all that's fine, but what? Not? Fine, but all that is yes, they say that, but can you prove it? And that's why Jesus did miracles, because here's the honest reality Jesus didn't heal everybody. He healed a lot of people. He didn't heal everybody. He would heal people in order to prove the message, because Jesus also knows that in this life there are certain things, but the ultimate healing is salvation. And so when you look at through the book of John and I want to encourage you next time you go read the gospel of John notice how, every time he would do a major miracle, they would say this was a sign and it was pointing to who Jesus was.
Speaker 1:And that's why I believe in the New Testament documents. The New Testament is so very important because the New Testament points to Jesus as the Messiah and because he did these miracles. As a matter of fact, you look at even his critics. The Bible says that his critics got mad at him because he healed on the Sabbath day. So even his critics couldn't deny what he was doing was miraculous healings, doing amazing miracles, but they didn't like what he was doing was miraculous healings, doing amazing miracles, but they didn't like when he was doing those miracles. And so the New Testament documents prove that Jesus was a miracle worker and those miracles that were not even disputed by his enemies is one way we're able to look and say, is one way we're able to look and say okay then. Therefore, if Jesus claimed to be God and then he validated it by miracles, then he must be who he says he was.
Speaker 1:And the greatest miracle, of course, was the resurrection. Did you know we have more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than almost any other event in ancient antiquity, not just the four gospels, but there's so many things. I would encourage you go look up a guy's name by Gary Habermas, dr Gary Habermas. He is an amazing teacher. He actually teaches at Liberty University. He's a teacher. I think he's also a scholar in residence. He's written these huge books on the resurrection and he can prove by so much data, so much scholarly data, that the resurrection is a historical event. Anybody who rises from the dead, they get to be God. Because I don't know anybody, you don't know anybody who has risen themselves from the dead. And when Jesus did that greatest miracle, then he's God.
Speaker 1:And we know that because we've been able to prove that the New Testament documents are reliable. And because of that, we know that because of the miracles and we know that because miracles are done by a theistic God. A theistic God is because it's true and we go all the way back. So one more time let me read these and then I want to read to you the chapter summary, and we'll be done, for today we believe that Christianity is true because number one truth about reality is knowable. Opposites cannot be true. It is true that a theistic God exists. Miracles are possible, miracles performed in the connection with a truth claim. To confirm that truth claim about God through a messenger of God is important. The New Testament documents are reliable. As witnessed in the New Testament, jesus claimed to be God. Jesus claimed to be God was proven by a unique convergence of miracles and because of that we can believe that Jesus is God. Now, that doesn't end it, because after that then it's okay. Well then, what did he teach? So we're going to get there later, but let me finish this one and then let me finish this, this chapter summary, and then we'll be done for today.
Speaker 1:It says of all the world's great religion, christianity alone meets the criteria necessary to establish miraculous confirmation of its truth claims. First of all, christ is the only great world religious leader to whom we have reliable contemporary documents of his life and teaching. Second, he is the only one of them who claimed to be God. Third, then, christ alone met all the criteria for using a miracle to confirm his truth claims. These criteria include that the events be truly supernatural, multiple, predictive and connected with a truth claim Other than Old Testament Judaism, which pointed forward to Christ. Only Christ's miracles meets all the criteria and only Christ claimed to be more than a prophet. So only Christ of all the great world religion leaders, claimed to be God and we can see that in chapter 7, and only he proved to be God by a convergence of three sets of supernatural events to confirm his claims. Thus, contrary to Hume and to the skeptics, there is no real equivalence to any competing truth claim to that of Christ. Hence, christ and Christ alone was confirmed to be God Almighty in human flesh. In short, the central claim of Christianity is true and opposing claims are false.
Speaker 1:Can I tell you, when I was growing up in church, I was told all the time and it was never meant to be bad, it just was what it was. I was told all the time. You just have to have faith, can I tell you? It is very important that we have faith, but it is also okay to want evidence. It's okay. I told someone one time because they thought they could only get like 10% evidence and had to have 90% faith. See, that's awesome, some people, that's what they can do. Can I tell you, growing up I needed a lot of evidence and then I could have faith. You're always going to have faith, but I think you can have 90% evidence and 10% faith. But if you're willing to do the work, there's a lot of evidence out there that Christ really is who he says he is. And if he is who he says he is, then we need to follow him in everything he says for us to do. All right, okay, I love you. I'll see you tomorrow. We'll get back to our regular Bible breakdown.
