What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

Mar 24, 2023 | Culture

There has been a lot of news recently about a revival at Asbury University, a Methodist school in Kentucky. In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher asks, “An extraordinary movement of the Holy Spirit at a Kentucky college chapel — is it for real?” By real he means “visceral experiences of the presence of God,” and he thinks as many do that this is a movement of the Holy Spirit and is real. I would tend to agree because I don’t feel qualified to determine whether what someone says is God moving in their being is real or not. But that is not my question here. I’m more interested in what revival accomplishes in the place in which it happens. I guess the question really is, is revival merely a personal religious experience, or does it have cultural implications. The answer should be obvious, but for many Christians it probably isn’t.

If we go back to the first great revival in history, and I’m not talking about the first Great Awakening in America in the 18th century, there were societal transforming implications. I’m speaking about the revival that started at Pentecost when God poured out his Holy Spirit because Jesus had accomplished redemption for his people and ascended to the right hand of God, according to the Apostle Paul, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” He also said Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” That means in this life, in this fallen world among fallen people in societies filled with such people.

If we go back to that first great revival we see the beginning of the transformation of Western civilization from fully pagan to Christian in seed form. We might even say mustard seed form. It took almost 300 years until the conversion of Constantine the Great for paganism to begin its slow demise as the dominant worldview in the West. By any measure, a modern person would have to agree the world produced by Christianity is far superior to the ancient pagan world.  Historian Tom Holland, not a Christian, wrote a book about this called Dominion. The subtitle makes the point: How the Christian revolution remade the world. That is what a revival does, it remakes the world. What does that look like? Read Holland’s book and you’ll find out. The spiritual war against paganism goes back to Yahweh calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and the Lord making a holy people for himself in Israel. God’s promises to Abraham would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ 2000 years later, and now His holy people is us!

When “the last days” came upon us with Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension, the war against paganism broke out of a small geographical area in the Roman Empire to encompass the entire earth. When that phrase “last days” is used, most Christians go right to Paul in I Timothy 1:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

Then they look at our culture and conclude this must be the last days Paul was referring to, and it is! But these indications of the last days have been with us in all recorded history. Have people gotten any better or worse in the last several thousand years? Obviously sinful human beings are every bit as sinful today as they’ve always been. But “last days” from a redemptive-historical perspective is the advance of God’s kingdom and the building of Christ’s church by the power of the Holy Spirit. We find prophetic descriptions of that throughout the Old Testament, but we find it defined in two important passages in the New. One is in the first Christian sermon given by Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2:

16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

17 “‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
18 Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.

The other is the first few verses of Hebrews:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

And Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 what Jesus is now doing at God’s right hand, ruling

far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

These are the last days we inhabit. And Paul points out that the purpose of Christ’s rule is the Father placing all things under his feet appointing him to be head over everything for the church. As I often say, God is moving in a mighty way to advance his kingdom and build his church. These are two different things working in symbiosis for the good of God’s people and His glory. So real revival apart from the personal salvation and experience of individuals is going to change the culture in which it happens. Not immediately, but in due course. In addition to the mustard seed metaphor I linked to above, Jesus also used the metaphor of levin in a very large batch of dough. The influence and manifestation of both grow slowly but inevitably.

That inevitable growth is what we as God’s people are part of, and the result of true revival. When God gave man, male and female, and the first Adam, the dominion mandate, they failed. Whereas the last Adam most certainly did not. Christ is now taking dominion of His world through His body, which is in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit (Zech. 4:6). That means our Christianity influences everything we do, literally every single thing. From how we make a living, to how we raise a family, to how we do art, music, politics, business, law, science, health and medicine, entertainment, architecture, education, farming, gardening, everything. And there is no culture war that is not spiritual war. Our pastor once said those focused on the culture war are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He isn’t alone in such sentiment, and he could not have been more wrong.

Christ came to save not just individuals so they could go to heaven, but the world itself, and people in it for a very specific reason. I’ll leave you with the Apostle John in Revelation 5:9-10 who tells us what that is:

9 And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
10 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”

 

Take 3 on My Encounter with The Rationalist: Why I Believe the Evidence

Take 3 on My Encounter with The Rationalist: Why I Believe the Evidence

Mar 21, 2023 | Apologetics

In my previous post on my encounter with The Rationalist, I explained the nature of evidence and how it is used in a court of law as “proof” for conclusions to either convict a defendant or not. Everyone uses evidence in life in all kinds of ways that acts for them as “proof” for what they do or don’t do, believe or don’t believe. What evidence that leads to “proof” can never yield is absolute certainty, as I also discussed. I put the word proof in quotation marks because in a very real way proof is in the eyes of the beholder, and everyone at some point needs to trust the evidence and only then does it become proof for them. This fact of human existence is why I always insist on pointing out 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.

As I said, whenever I mentioned a bit of evidence to The Rationalist, he rejected it as evidence. He would basically say, That’s not evidence! Says you, Mr. Materialist Atheist. He has what afflicts all such people: epistemological blindness. According to them, there is only one way to know and it’s their way or the highway. No thanks. So by what evidence do I embrace Christianity?

Before I get to that it’s important to preface it with knowing the importance of “the consideration of the alternative.” I talk about this in writing and conversation often, and it is something The Rationalist rejected because it didn’t serve his purpose. It states, if one thing isn’t true about something, another thing must be. This basic fact of reality cannot be escaped, so keep that in mind any time you consider pretty much anything, regarding Christianity or not. There is no neutrality in reality, only being in between decisions about what we choose to believe, or not. Not choosing is of course a choice.

In no particular order:

  • When I look outside every morning, I thank God for his revelation in creation. It takes entirely too much faith to believe everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Literally every nook and cranny of reality shouts of being the result of an infinite omniscient omnipresent Almighty Creator God!
  • Next, I thank God for his revelation in Scripture, and that also takes entirely too much faith to believe it is made up, mere human invention. In fact, I wrote an entire book about it! Every morning when I the Bible, I marvel that it even exists. I am continually amazed at how it shows evidence of a plan only a divine author could orchestrate. Even though written over 1500(!) years by 40 or so different authors in primarily two languages, it has a tight, coherent, and relentless theme from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 22:21 we call redemptive history. I see in it everywhere theological genius only a divine author could conceive.
  • Lastly, I thank God for his revelation in Christ, the most astounding revelation of all because it, He, makes sense of everything else in all of creation, all of Scripture, and in all of our experience living life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. I agree with ex-atheist C.S. Lewis who of course said it best: I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun rises, not because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

To get logical, these are deductive considerations, by which I mean I embrace the major premise, God exists. The minor premise is revelation is possible. Therefore, I am completely blown away! Some might see this as a presuppositional approach in that I assume something, God, and everything follows and makes sense because of that. There are also more inductive ways that I find extremely persuasive, meaning I find data and that leads me to a certain conclusion. There is mass quantities of such evidence. I am not sure where deduction and induction part ways, and have concluded they can’t be parted, as much as The Rationalist insists they must be. A list of such evidences would be very long indeed, so here is a small taste off the top of my head.

  • At the top of the list would have to be the resurrection. I do not believe the resurrection happened because the Bible says so, I believe it because the evidence is overwhelming, compelling, and solid. Most persuasive to me is the argument I make in Uninvented, that first century Jews would never, ever, in a million years make up a story of a Messiah being crucified, hung on a cross under God’s curse, buried, and rising from the dead. There is also an abundance of scholarly work on the historicity of the resurrection. One good example is a scholarly work by Mike Licona called, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. He has almost 60 pages of references in his bibliography, so there is no shortage of scholarly work on the topic.
  • I can also trust the Bible is historically reliable on several grounds. As someone has said, archaeology is the Bible’s best friend because the more that is discovered, the more it is confirmed as history. There are also secular external sources that corroborate much of the history we find in our New Testament, including Jewish historian Josephus, and Roman historian Tacitus. In addition, despite what the critics say, it is not written like myth or fairy tells, but like eyewitness testimony, and thus history. Lastly, I believe we can trust the textual transmission of the Bible gives us pretty much what was written in its pages, and there is also an abundance of scholarly work on this topic.
  • I also find philosophical arguments persuasive. Among these are Thomas’s Five Ways, or five arguments that prove God’s existence, among them what are known as the cosmological and teleological arguments. The moral argument is another especially powerful argument because morality, the human sense that right and wrong exist, and that injustice is wrong, can only be explained if an objective standard exists. We only know a line is crooked because we have a straight line to compare it to. Human consciousness is also something philosophers find impossible to explain from a purely material perspective. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel, though, can’t bring himself to reject his atheism, so he’s kind of stuck and the book reflects that.
  • We can extend the philosophical arguments to goodness, beauty, and truth, the classical virtues that the ancient Greeks share with Christianity. The question is not whether these things exist, but why, and whether The Rationalist has any ground to justify their existence based on his materialist worldview. What better explains their existence, matter, since that’s all the materialist has, or the God who created this world with features that go beyond matter? All the explanatory power goes to Christianity, every single bit. It is also a far more plausible explanation.

There is much more, and the resources on any one of these are endless. When I dove back into apologetics in 2009 I was amazed at the explosion of resources available since I’d last engaged in this theological discipline in the ‘80s. There really is no excuse for Christians today to know not only what they believe, but also why they believe it.

 

Chapter 9: Jesus’ Teaching

Mar 21, 2023 | Uninvented

  • It’s All or Nothing at All: The Problem with Partial Jesus
  • The Forgiveness of Sin
  • The Hard Sayings of Jesus
  • Eat My Flesh and Drink My Blood
  • The Way, the Truth, and the Life
  • The First Will Be Last, And the Last Will be First