That’s the question, isn’t it. Nobody wants to live or believe a lie, yet most people refuse to consider the radically exclusive claims of Jesus Christ who claimed to be the way the truth and the life, and that nobody could come to the Father except through him. Then his followers continued to preach those exclusive claims. If they are true, then most people live or believe a lie. If he is the truth, then every other religious, or secular, claim that doesn’t include the truth is a lie.
Despite the exclusive nature of his claims, ironically, every religion wants a piece of Jesus, but only a piece. They reject the Jesus of the exclusive claims, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Having just a piece of Jesus never made sense to me. It’s a basic either/or proposition, and I knew that even as a teenager. Either Jesus is who he and his followers said he was, or it’s all a lie and I’ll throw the Bible in the trash, thank you very much. And if it’s all a lie, based on the claims it makes, it’s a horrible, terrible, nasty lie, and Jesus a devil. C.S. Lewis, as usual, said it best in Mere Christianity:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come away with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Yet the Bible’s critics for the last couple hundred years tell us what a great guy Jesus is. No, if it’s not true, he would be a monster
Even as an ignorant 18-year old I knew it was an either/or choice. I would only embrace Christianity for one reason: I believed it was true. If it wasn’t, I wanted nothing to do with it. As I was presented with the gospel and the claims of Christ, I contemplated whether to run away from God or fully embrace the Christian message. All during those months I had one thought always at the forefront of my mind. If this thing is real, if God actually exists, then he deserves my all. There are no halfway measures here. As I was reading my Bible, going to church, and listening to Christian radio, especially John MacArthur, I eventually came to the conclusion that it is real, the ultimate truth about reality, and I was all in. I didn’t have had any substantive apologetics reasons for believing this, I just did. That would come with my introduction to apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith, through Francis Schaeffer.
Sometime in my sophomore or junior year I happened upon his book, The God Who is There, and it was a revelation to me. He introduced me not only to a Christian worldview, how to view everything in life through Christian lenses, but to apologetics proper, and that there were substantive, logical, rational reasons to believe Christianity is true. The Christianity I was involved with then was a type of fundamentalism, and it wasn’t concerned with evidence for the veracity of Christianity. They believe it was true, but didn’t seem to see the need to prove it. I learned a lot about apologetics in the next several years and in seminary as well, but as life went on it wasn’t a focus, although I have always been of a mind to defend the faith. Then in 2009 I dove back in, and was amazed at the explosion of apologetics resources that had developed since the 80s. There are an incredible number of reasons for us to believe Christianity is true.
The Factual Foundation of Our Faith
I was reminded of all this as I was reading I John 1 recently, and why I so I appreciate the Bible and the Christian faith’s declaration that it is true. It is also the exact opposite of what the skeptic, the atheist, agnostic, and apathetic claim it is, made up stories of so much wishful thinking. On the contrary, it is historical, fact based, eye-witness, event oriented with an undeniable verisimilitude, accepting its veracity or not. Here’s how the Apostle John, one of the first three followers of Jesus, starts his first epistle:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. . . . 5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
We are immediately confronted with the either/or choice. John is declaring that they have seen, heard, even touched this man, Jesus the Jewish Messiah, God’s Son, which got him killed because the Jews rightly understood Jesus was making a claim to divinity. In their book that was blasphemy, but in reality it is the truth. John is either lying, or just making up that Jesus is “the Word of life.” Who makes such claims? There is no in between here; either it’s true or it’s not.
Another of the first followers of Jesus tells us the the same factual, historical nature of the claims (2 Peter 1):
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” 18 We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.
The Greek for stories is fables, myths, tales. Peter is referring to the transfiguration in the Synoptic gospels where Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on a mountain and he is transfigured before them. His glory as a divine being was revealed, and Moses and Elijah appeared talking with Jesus, representing the law and the prophets. Again, the choice. Either Peter is lying, or this really happened. He was willing to endure a terrible death at the hand of the Romans because it really did happened, and it was not made up. Nobody lies for what they know to be a lie.
Then all we need to do is read the gospels and we’ll see exactly what John and Peter are talking about; stories about real people in real life doing real things. Luke introducing his gospels confirms what Christianity is proclaiming:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
Without any anti-supernatural bias, the stories read real. I used the word verisimilitude above, something having the appearance of being real and true. The gospels have it in spades; they don’t read like myths or fairy tales, at all. C.S. Lewis was an academic steeped in medieval 1literature, and he had this to say about the gospels: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision‑literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this.” The Apostles were always concerned with asserting the factual nature of the message, that it was all the truth, and that we can rely on it, and trust in it.
Evidence and the Christian Faith: Consideration of the Alternative
There’s no space to get into the plethora of historical, archaeological, textual, philosophical, and other evidence; it’s massive and all easily available in books and online. For me, though, whenever I doubt whether this whole Christian thing can be true, I look outside. I see what we call nature, and thank God for his revelation in creation. Then I turn and look at my Bible, and thank God for his revelation in Scripture, which is even more amazing to me than in creation. And then finally thank him for what is therein revealed to us, his revelation in Christ. That is a revelatory trifecta making it impossible for me to believe it’s not true. The evidence for God’s existence in each is overwhelming and to me undeniable.
The way my mind grapples with this as I wrestle with doubts, and I’ll admit it’s not much of a contest, is what I’ve come to call the consideration of the alternative. If something isn’t true, some alternative must be, and from basic logic we know two contradictory things can’t be true at the same time in the same way. There is no true for you but not for me in the real world. Only one view of reality, one religion, one set of ultimate answers to the Big Questions is true—who are we, why are we here, what does it all mean, why is their suffering, evil, and death, and what is our destiny? If I’m going to believe in something, commit my life to something, it needs to give realistic, plausible answers to these questions that make sense of the reality I inhabit and experience every day. Here’s a brief look at the trifecta of revelation from my perspective.
First creation. In order for me to believe Christianity is not true, I would have to believe some alternative explanation for the material world is true. I would have to believe, be required to believe, the universe and everything in it is a cosmic accident, a product of chance, and everything came from nothing for no reason at all. That would be a blind leap of faith entirely too far. If it’s not all a product of chance, I am compelled to believe the God revealed to us in the Bible is what it says he is, the all-powerful, almighty Creator God who in the beginning made the heavens and the earth by the power of his word, “And God said let there be . . . . “ I look at the preposterous complexity, fine tuning, astonishing engineering, and breathtaking creativity of creation and I know God is, doubt vanquished.
Then looking at my Bible, to me it’s as amazing as creation, even if not as obvious at first blush. We’ve been told for over 300 years that the Bible is a product of human beings. People, not God, are the authors, and since we read of supernatural works of God in it, we are compelled to believe what is not verifiable straight forward history, is a product of human imagination, so much fiction. I don’t buy it. In my study of apologetics, I came across the idea that stories in the Bible could not have been made up, inventions of people. The more I read the Bible, the more I realized how true that is, and the result was my book, Uninvented: How the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It. Now I realize the burden of proof is on those to believe and insist that it is made up. As I write in the book and am convinced, that is impossible.
Because the Bible is God’s inspired verbal communication to his creatures, theologically we get the phrase, verbal plenary inspiration, or that every word is literally breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16). That means the Bible takes epistemic priority. The foundation for whatever we know or can know must first come from the Bible. There is knowledge to be had in God’s general revelation or creation (i.e., nature and other human beings), but we must submit that knowledge to what God has revealed in Scripture. In there we learn of the apex of his revelation, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only in him that all other revelation, and all of reality makes any sense. C.S. Lewis, as usual, said it best:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
In apologetics terms this is called explanatory power. No other view of reality can so compellingly explain all of reality. With this revelatory trifecta, it becomes literally impossible for me to not believe Christianity is The Truth.
Transformation as Christian Apologetic
What ties up all the evidence and revelation in a beautiful compelling big red bow is the personal and societal transformation always coming in the wake of the influence of Christianity. Where Jesus shows up, transformation takes place. This only happens if Christianity is The Truth. Mere psychology and ideas do not have this power to transform the crooked human heart in such a way as would make a butterfly jealous.
I started to develop this conviction a number of years ago when I started coming across Christians sharing their testimonies of personal transformation online. By this point I’ve listened to hundreds of them, and the verse that always comes to mind is Matthew 1:21 when Jesus is given his name by the angel to Joseph in a dream. He tells him, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, which means the Lord saves. His death on the cross, the payment for the guilt and penalty of our sins, accomplished our transformation before we were ever born! Jesus didn’t come to try to save us, but actually saved us. In Ezekiel the transformation is metaphorically compared to turning stone to flesh (Ez. 36)
26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
The contrast could not be any greater, dead, cold, inert stone, to an alive, beating, heart of flesh. This is confirmed in Jeremiah 31 when we’re told about the New Covenant when he will forgive our wickedness and remember our sins no more. He says in this process (v. 33):
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
I see this miracle of transformation in every story, each one as unique as their fingerprint. God is infinitely creative in how he saves his people from their sins. Again, to me this is impossible to explain away as mere ideas. Something real is happening, and it is the work of God in the souls of his people. This then explains the power of Christianity to shape civilizations as it has done in the last 2,000 years, turning the ancient pagan world into the modern world of innumerable blessing because of the gospel being embraced throughout the world.
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