Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Apr 20, 2023 | Culture

We recently visited relatives and spent some time with my wife’s mother and father who both live in elderly facilities, and also visited my mother who does as well. I don’t know how other people respond to being around a lot of older people, but it depresses me. Seeing people aging and their bodies having to endure the ravages of time is not something I can just blow off, like it has no implications for me and everyone around me. I know, they know, you know, we all know, they will be dead soon, but it’s not a pleasant topic to contemplate, so people, old and young alike ignore it. It’s even less acceptable to discuss openly, and if you do, people will think you morbid or negative.

For me, though, the topic is never far from my mind, and I have a story that is so indicative of that. When our granddaughter was about to be born (Jan. 22, 2022), I told my wife, “Just think, in 2100 she’ll be 78 years old!” And she replied, perfectly, “Can you just let her be born first!” It was hilarious. But as I told my daughter, who knows me very well, as soon as Eleanor was conceived, she was condemned to death. And given she isn’t shocked by my Woody Allen like obsession with death, she shook her head in lamentable agreement. But unlike the atheist Mr. Allen, for those of us who trust in the resurrection of Christ, death for isn’t the end, but only the end of the beginning of blissful life eternal with our Savior and all those who have preceded us in Christ. How do we know this? That’s a big question, but before I get to that, we need to establish that our mortality is something we need to think about all the time. I know, it’s a tough sell, but bear with me.

When I’m around much older people (I’m no spring chicken!), like in a retirement community, I don’t think about people much differently than if I’m in a restaurant in a chic part of Miami Beach, for example, where I’m surrounded by young, good looking “kids” in their 20s or 30s who are in great shape. It’s less depressing and easier to get sucked into the illusion that life isn’t a death sentence in such an environment, but it’s a lie, a bold-faced horrific lie that the devil uses to lead people to hell. I can hear Satan whisper in their ears, “Hey beautiful, hey, handsome, isn’t life great now? No need to worry about what happens after this life, get all you can, eat, drink, and be merry because, well, it’s fun!” I’m convinced most young people, I’d say prior to entering their 40s, are under the illusion that death happens to other people, not them. As Fraud argued, human beings cannot imagine their own deaths. It is, literally, inconceivable to us, unless that is, we are reminded of that fact, over and over and over again.

This widespread illusion in the modern world, or should I say delusion, is a “gift” of the secularism we’ve inherited since the seventeenth century Enlightenment. There have been many deleterious consequences of this movement in Western intellectual thought, but the most pernicious is related to epistemology, or how and what we can know. In our secular culture, thinking about or focusing on anything beyond this life is waste of time because, well, we really can’t know anything about it; we are bound, most people assume, to the physical world. This kind of thinking began to seep into the stream of Western thought with the work of Immanuel Kant (1774-1804). Simply put, Kant stipulated that there are two realms, one called the “noumenal realm,” and the other the “phenomenal realm.” The latter is material reality, the one we can know, while the former is the meta-physical realm (above, outside of the material), and beyond our ability to know. (Here is a great short video of R.C. Sproul describing how Kant paved the way for agnosticism, that we can’t really know, which is the faith choice of our age).

Given we are all drenched in a secularism that programs agnosticism into us from birth, most people figure why bother with that after life stuff; we can’t know it anyway, and it’s all guesses and “faith.” Which is why we need to remind ourselves, all the time, that death can find us at any moment. For example, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, what great shape we’re in, how perfect our bloodwork is, an airplane can fall on our house tomorrow, that’s it, we’re gone. Echoing Isaiah, the Apostle Paul says, “God gives all life and breath and everything else,” and he can take that breath anytime he pleases. So it’s best we approach life in humility and treat it as the precious gift it is, one for Christians that will continue forever, a life without pain, sorrow, sin, sadness or death. Yes, that is as inconceivable to us as our own deaths, but that is why faith (i.e., trust) is required, and there are an infinite number of reasons why this faith is justified.

In a recent post where I laid out some of the reasons that compel me to accept the trustworthiness of Christianity, I assert that “everyone lives by faith, which I define as  trust based on adequate evidence. I trust based on more than adequate evidence to me that Christianity is true.” The question is who and what will we trust. I trust the man who rose from the dead, who claimed he was “the resurrection and the life,” and that whoever believes in him will live even though he die, and whoever lives and believes in him “will never die.” Do you believe this? I do. And Isaiah 25 gives us a glimpse into what this promise will look like when it is fulfilled:

6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

This is a program even Woody Allen should sign up for: no more death.

 

Point of View Radio Interview

Point of View Radio Interview

Apr 17, 2023 | Uninvented

This was my first Uninvented radio interview, and it was a lot of fun. The poor interviewer, the host of the show, Kirby Anderson, butchered my name several times, but each time he said it after a break he got closer and closer, and the final time nailed it! It’s an occupational hazard having a name like D’Virgilio creates, and one I’ve enjoyed dealing with all my life. Like the Amazon review I just posted, having someone I don’t know rave about the book like Kirby does is thrilling, and humbling. I mean, I think it’s pretty good, but having that confirmed by others is a blessing of God. As the Holy Spirit says through King David, wealth and honor come from the Lord.

You can listen here, and I am on in the second hour that starts around minute 45, but there is a lot of good stuff prior to that.

My First Amazon 5-Star Book Review!

My First Amazon 5-Star Book Review!

Apr 15, 2023 | Uninvented

Not to mention it’s my first written review on Amazon. I had sent the reviewer my book some time ago because he does reviews, and like others I had approached, he agreed to have me send him a book, but made no promises. That was a while ago, and when he finally got to it, he really seemed to like it, as you can see. I was very pleasantly surprised and gratified that someone I don’t know assessed its value just on the merits as they saw it. And he sees a lot of merits!

I am looking for more reviews, and would love them to be 5 stars, but any reviews will do, in case you might be so inclined to help out a poor struggling author. Hopefully, as more new people read it, they will see fit to share their thoughts on the book with others on Amazon, and if you’ve already read it, sharing yours would be very much appreciated as well. Here it is.

Snyder’s Soapbox

This is a great tool for strengthening a believer’s faith in the trustworthiness of the Bible.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 15, 2023

 

As many of you know, I determine a book’s value in the individual’s home library primarily on a few factors. First of course, it must be doctrinally sound. Second, its message must be one that is valuable for rereading. Third, it must be an asset to lend out to others to read. I recently read a book titled, “Uninvented” by Mike D’Virgilio. I have several people send me titles they’d like reviewed, but most of them are self-published, poorly edited, and ill thought out. Their theology is usually a hot-soup-sandwich. I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It was none of those things. As a bonus, I can actually recommend it according to the criteria I previously discussed.

 

The book is an apologetic work in which D’Virgilio argues for the authority, and trustworthiness of the Bible as the actual word of God. He argues that its verisimilitude is potent evidence. Some might call that a circular argument, or an appeal to authority, but those arguments are null if the Bible is actually true. I’ve read other works with some of the same arguments for the trustworthiness of the Bible, but few with as many of them compiled together, and organized in such a way as to lend them to the work of strengthening the believer. If you are a Christian who has run into some arguments that have shaken your faith in the trustworthiness of God’s word, this book is for you. I highly recommend it. It is a brief work, but in its brevity lacks nothing significant for the intended work at hand.

Uninvented: What People Invent History Making Themselves Look Bad?

Uninvented: What People Invent History Making Themselves Look Bad?

Apr 12, 2023 | Uninvented

I was reminded last week of what a powerful Uninvented argument this is listening to a First Things podcast with Mark Bauerlein interviewing Dennis Prager on his book about Deuteronomy. Prager has written a series of books on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Prager says that no ancient people, or modern people for that matter, would consistently make themselves look so bad. Starting around minute 23, he says one reason he believes in the divinity of the Torah is that there is no holy text in the world as critical of its group as the Old Testament is of the Jews. Non-Jews come out looking at least as good as the Jews, and often better. If Jews wrote the text and not God, Prager argues, they would have never depicted themselves so negatively. I could not agree more!

In apologetics this is called the criterion of embarrassment, and it’s all over the Bible, not just the Pentateuch. And it is a compelling argument for the historicity of the text. The idea is if something is embarrassing for what you’re trying to prove, you don’t include that, let alone make it up. I’m no scholar of the ancient world, but from all my studies I’ve learned the Hebrew-Christian record we find in our Bibles is completely unique among all ancient literature for just the reason, among many others. Ancient writers made their people look good. And it isn’t just this contrast that lends credibility to the biblical record. Knowing human nature, who makes up stories for the specific purpose of making themselves and their people look bad? And in this case really, really bad. I would argue human beings do everything they can to make themselves look good! Especially ancient human beings.

One of the reasons Prager’s comments struck me with such force isn’t because it confirmed what I argued in Uninvented, but because I’m reading through Jeremiah. You might remember that Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet.” The website Got Questions describes him this way.

Jeremiah was chosen by God before birth to be a prophet to the nation of Judah (Jeremiah 1:4–50). He spoke the words of the Lord during the reigns of Kings Josiah (2 Chronicles 36:1), Jehoiakim (2 Chronicles 36:5), and Zedekiah (2 Kings 24:18–19). Jeremiah grieved over the wickedness of his people and the impending judgment the nation’s sins had provoked. Jeremiah’s warnings went mostly unheeded, and he responded to Judah’s rebellion with tears of mourning (Jeremiah 13:17). Jeremiah has been dubbed “the weeping prophet” because of the often gloomy nature of his message and the grief he expressed for his people.

Gloomy indeed. He also penned the book of Lamentations which fits with his prophetic calling.

Most lay Christians don’t know that because of biblical criticism there has been a veritable world war against the veracity of the Bible for almost 300 years, and that has put Christians on the defensive. Because of the uninvented argument, it doesn’t have to be that way—the burden of proof is not solely on Christians. Skeptics and critics not only believe the bible is made up, merely fiction to one degree or another, but that it would have been easy for ancient Jews to make it up. They could not be more wrong, and we must insist when they make that claim to back it up. They are rarely challenged in this way, and if they are, their only response is assertion, well, it just is. That is not good enough.

The criterion of embarrassment is a formidable argument that adds to the credibility of biblical stories, and why they are very likely uninvented. The examples are practically endless because God is in the habit of never making his people look good. It would be one thing if it was a character here or there, but it’s almost all of them. As you read your way through your Bibles keep this in mind. Those portrayed are terribly flawed humans, and the writers never see the need to paper over their very human flaws no matter where they fit in the history of redemption. I’ll randomly pull out some examples to get you started if you haven’t been reading your Bibles with this in mind.

It is interesting that God himself doesn’t seem to be embarrassed by the world he created perfect and good going to hell in a handbasket in three chapters! Then immediately in the next one we read the story of the cold-blooded murder of Able by his brother Cain. It doesn’t get any better from there, yet God never sees the need to apologize for the mess he supposedly made of the world. For skeptics, the “problem of evil,” is an obstacle to believing the biblical witness is true. None of the biblical writers seem to think so, not one. In fact, Moses writing about the time of Noah says, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.” He says of Noah, that he “was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” After Noah and his family were saved from the flood, Noah got drunk and something very bad happened, although we’re not told exactly what.

Then we get to Abraham and Sarah, and God accredits his faith, or trust, in Him as righteousness, then what do Abraham and Sarah do? They don’t trust God! Ishmael is the result, and all kinds of problems throughout history go back to that sin. Moses, the ultimate prophet, and leader of the Hebrews out of the bondage of slavery in Egypt, comes off like a coward. Then once he leads the people out of Egypt the ungrateful Hebrews almost immediately rebel and worship a golden calf! Because of his sin, Moses doesn’t even make it into the promised land. Who makes up such a story about the greatest hero of their faith? I would argue based on the criterion of embarrassment, nobody!

The Israelites now enter the Promised Land of Canaan, and the narrative doesn’t present as fiction either once they arrive. During this period of approximately 400 years the Israelites were ruled by judges. To say the book of Judges is not a flattering portrait of the people of Israel would be a significant understatement. The theme of the book is found in these passages reiterated several times: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes,” and “The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” What is the point of telling readers this? Am I to believe the skeptics who claim with certainty little or any of this is historical? Why record for all time your people are evil unless it was true, and that the history recorded in Judges had some larger purpose in redemptive history? The book ends with a story so shocking and horrific it’s hard to believe it’s in the Bible—an indication that the authors of the Old Testament wrote accurate chronicles of history.

When we get to the kings after David and Solomon, it’s almost all downhill from there. Eventually there’s a civil war, and Israel is split into two kingdoms, ten tribes to the north called Israel, and two tribes to the south, Judah. The prophets we read in our Old Testaments are during this period, and they did not have envious jobs. Nobody applied for that job, and the only plausible reason they spoke truth to power as they did was because in fact, the Lord commanded them to speak. It’s hard to imagine a people making up prophets who make their people look that bad. After the resurrection, we know why.

 

The Resurrection is the Only Explanation for Christianity

The Resurrection is the Only Explanation for Christianity

Apr 8, 2023 | Apologetics

This weekend we celebrate what we’ve come to call Easter, but what is in fact the celebration of the death and resurrection of the Savior of the world, who has been saving His people from their sin (Matt. 1:21) since he rose from the dead. When we come to that claim we have two options: either it is true, or it is not. If it is true, it is the most important historical fact in all of history, and we ought to treat it that way. If it is not, then it is completely irrelevant and should be ignored. It’s just fiction, something conjured up by mere human imagination, and in effect a lie. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to base my entire life on a lie. So I want to lay out here some brief arguments why I believe it is in fact true, and why you should too.

Something has to explain the rise of Christianity. Unserious people can blow it off as, whatever, but something that has transformed the world in the way it has needs to be explained. Tom Holland lays out the transformational influence of Christianity in his wonderful book, Dominion, as the only thing that can explain the modern world. However, Holland has not yet embraced Christianity as Truth, and therefore believes this transformational influence was the result of a lie. Of course he wouldn’t say that, I presume, and might wiggle out of his dilemma by saying, well, Jesus didn’t really, literally, physically come back to life after being brutally tortured to death on a Roman cross, but his followers maybe thought he did, they believed it, and that is what changed the world. That’s laughable and absurd, but many people still believe it.

1. Jews don’t make up the resurrection – First, Jews in the first century do not make up a resurrection in the middle of history. That was literally inconceivable to them, both theologically and eschatologically. There was only one general resurrection of the dead at the end of time when sin and death would be dealt with once for all (see Martha’s response to Jesus at Lazarus tomb in John 11). That one man in the middle of history would be resurrected from the dead, and sin and death go on as they always have was to them ridiculous. It would have made no sense. People do not make up what is inconceivable to them.

2. The fearless and bold proclomation of the resurrection – There is also the fact that the Apostles proclaimed Jesus’ physical, bodily resurrection from the beginning at the threat of their safety and lives, and argued for the truth of Christianity based on it. Here is Paul’s declaration of the historicity of the event in I Corinthians 15:

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Doesn’t much sound like a fairy tale to me, or just a “spiritual” experience. They ate with the risen Jesus and touched him. When Doubting Thomas finally encountered the risen Lord he declared, “My Lord and my God!

3. The Jewish religion transformed – An actual physical, bodily resurrection is the only thing that could have gotten first century Jews to alter their beliefs in such a fundamental fashion. Jews only believed in physical, bodily resurrections, not “spiritual ones.” Mere religious experiences don’t have the power to do what happened to those first Jewish followers of Jesus. The immediate, drastic changes in their religious convictions can only be explained by the resurrection, and Jesus proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

J.P. Moreland says anyone “who denies the resurrection owes us an explanation of this transformation which does justice to the historical facts.” Skeptics don’t like these historical facts because, well, resurrections can’t happen! Let’s confuse them with these facts they have no ability to explain apart from the supernatural. According to Moreland, the first Christians, strict Jews all, immediately gave up these Jewish convictions that defined everything about their religion:

  1. The sacrificial system.
  2. The importance of keeping the law.
  3. Keeping of the Sabbath.
  4. Non-Trinitarian theism.
  5. A human Messiah.

The skeptic says, “Yeah, so what. No big deal; happens every day of the week.” Well, if it does, I’m waiting for concrete evidence. Instead, we generally get anti-supernatural bias disguised as above-it-all, supposedly objective assertions with little basis in historical fact. As Moreland says in a bit of understatement, “The resurrection offers the only rational explanation.”

4. Altnernet explanations of the resurrection fail – Honest non-Christian scholars agree that some explanation is required to explain the explosive rise of Christianity. Almost all scholars and historians today believe the tomb was empty, but also agree an empty tomb is not enough to explain the explosive growth, and I would add, against all odds. They had everything against them, the entire Jewish establishment, the power of the Roman Empire, and initially very small numbers. What they did have, though, was the truth and the Holy Spirit. Those two things transform the world, lies do not.

The only options to an actual physical resurrection are a stolen body, or the swoon theory (he really didn’t die), or Jesus’ disciples thought they saw Jesus as mentioned above. These appearances of Jesus, while not real, had the effect as if they were real, and boom—Christianity exploded! German higher critics of the 19th century, and liberal Christians of the early 20th, were fond of arguing for this spiritual Jesus somehow appearing, and the disciples having what they called a “resurrection experience.” The historicity of the event was beside the point; and we all “know” people don’t come back from the dead, especially after the Romans got done with them. Jesus’ followers were so distraught, the argument goes, and so longing for the crucified Messiah to come back to them somehow, their minds conjured up a Jesus who came back from the dead. Then, because of this “spiritual” experience, they went throughout the Roman Empire proclaiming a resurrected Lord. The problem with this explanation however it was explained—by dreams, visions, or mass hallucinations—it all comes up against the same cold hard truth I mentioned above: For Jews, a resurrection of one man in the middle of history was inconceivable, as was a resurrection not bodily and physical.

As I argue in Uninvented, if someone comes to the text without a question-begging anti-supernatural bias, they will be able to see the verisimilitude in the resurrection account and all the events surrounding it. The gospels are all about Jesus’ death and resurrection because it is those events that happened in real space and time, in what we call history, and everything turns on whether they actually did or not happen. As I also argue in the book, the burden of proof is every bit on those who reject the resurrection and that it could have made up. My claim is that is not possible. Thus we declare this Easter Sunday the Year of our Lord 2023:

He is risen, He is risen indeed!