The Uninvented Audio Book is Now Available!

The Uninvented Audio Book is Now Available!

Aug 4, 2023 | Uninvented

I’m not saying the learning curve in producing an audio book was like climbing Mount Everest, but by golly it sure seemed like it at times. It was often one step forward, five steps back, but persistence eventually paid off, and it will be a whole lot easier next time, God willing there is one. It is now available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes for your listening pleasure. My hope is that Uninvented will get more exposure to those who don’t have time to read and fit their “reading” in with audio books.

Uninvented Apologetics Canada Podcast Appearance

Uninvented Apologetics Canada Podcast Appearance

Jul 21, 2023 | Uninvented

I was recently on the Apologetics Podcast to discuss Uninvented, and it was a blast. Especially because the young man who interviewed me, Wes Huff, is getting his Ph.D. in some kind of biblical textual studies from the University of Toronto, so he’s a budding scholar. That someone like him appreciated the book was extremely gratifying. And he was enjoyable as a discussion partner about the book and the topic.

Apologetics Canada is the grandaddy of Canadian apologetics ministries, having been founded in 2010. Here’s a bit about them:

When Andy Steiger and his wife, Nancy, founded Apologetics Canada in 2010, they were motivated to stop the exodus of young people leaving the church. God however had much more in store. This generation of young people both Christians and non-Christians alike have questions and are seeking truth.  The challenge in Western culture is communicating the message of Jesus in a way that people can understand and appreciate. Sharing the gospel requires us all to understand and speak the language of culture and address the questions being asked with intellectual honesty, gentleness and respect. When we do this in the love and winsomeness of Christ Jesus, lives are impacted and culture is changed.

Uninvented: Daniel is Either All History or All Made Up Stories

Uninvented: Daniel is Either All History or All Made Up Stories

Jul 1, 2023 | Uninvented

One of the arguments I make in Uninvented is how for several hundred years biblical skeptics have assumed the Bible is primarily fiction, made up stuff, veritable make-believe. They never try to prove or even argue for it. In fact, the sense you get from skeptics even today is that not only is much of the Bible, especially the super-natural parts, make-believe, but that it would as easy to make up as modern fiction. Just as writers of fiction make up entire worlds and stories out of their heads, so the Bible would be just as easy to make up, a piece of cake. The ancient world of the Bible, to the skeptics, is no more real than the Middle Earth of Tolkien. Wrong! I call this question begging anti-supernatural bias, and it is so strong it blinds people to the narrative genius of Scripture, and how incredibly difficult it would have been to make up, specifically in light of the flow of redemptive history. I don’t focus on this theological perspective in the book, but that would be a great addition to this one (note to self!). Rarely, if ever, do critics connect the dots and how perfectly they fit into the entire theological picture of the Bible. The book of Daniel is a perfect example of a puzzle piece that fits into the whole picture with exquisite Scriptural beauty.

Filled with God working, doing, revealing, Daniel is super-natural from beginning to end. Which is of course why skeptics and critics deny it is historical in the least, but I would argue it is exactly the super-natural that gives the narrative verisimilitude, makes the stories read so real. If you don’t reject the “super” stuff even before you get to the text, if you aren’t completely programmed by secularism, you’ll know you’re reading history. Remember, fiction, including historical fiction, didn’t exist in the ancient world, not in any modern sense of the term. Skeptics will counter that ancient works about the stories of the gods and such are fiction, but when you read those, they don’t read like the Bible, and it’s not even close. The Bible claims to be history in the way modern people think of history, stuff that actually happened. Ancient myths only purport to include some history, like Homer’s Iliad about the Trojan war. Everyone believes there was a Trojan war, but nobody believes Homer intended to be writing eyewitness history like every biblical writer does.

A central theme of Daniel is a very simple one sinful human beings have a very hard time with: God is God and man is not. I know, shocking, but true. The entire tragic history of the world, all the sin, misery, suffering, and death comes from man the usurper thinking he belongs on the throne of reality rather than God its Creator. In Daniel we see God the sovereign ruler of all reality, in total control over nations and kings, over dreams and fire and lions, over past, present, and future. We have only two choices when we come to the text, either it’s all mere human invention, or it all actually happened. There is no in between.

When you study the history of biblical criticism that gave birth to something called liberal Christianity, an oxymoron, critics always try to have it both ways. Sure, they claim, some of what’s written in Daniel by whoever wrote it is historical, but some clearly is not. Who decides which is which? And why should I trust them? Good questions. The problem if it’s not all history, it’s all as good as lies. Liberals told us there are great moral lessons about courage and dedication and all that, but none of it really happened. Well then, who cares what it teaches. Lies claiming to be true just don’t do it for me. It’s either all, or nothing at all. Without the anti-supernatural bias, I’m going with all.

First a little context. Daniel was a teenager when he was taken to Babylon with the other Exiles of Judah in the late 500s BC. He along with some other young men were chosen to be educated and trained to become “wise men” of Babylon, but he and his friends never compromised their faith and devotion to Yahweh, and he was used mightily to get across God’s message to the rulers of Babylon, and then the Persian kings who later conquered Babylon. The first ruler is King Nebuchadnezzar, and Daniel comes to the rescue to reveal and interpret his dream (chapter 2), something only God himself could do. Nebuchadnezzar in modern terms is blown away, and appoints Daniel to a great position of power in the kingdom. After he says to Daniel:

Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery.

Daniel’s interpretation of the king’s dream points to a future time, the coming of Christ that will be the beginning of making the king’s declaration come true:

44 “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.

Jesus was crucified by one of those kingdoms, and a few hundred years later that kingdom was brought to an end by the Father’s kingdom come his will being done. Daniel points forward to Paul’s declaration that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” (I Cor. 15:25) His reign continues even at this very moment. Later Daniel himself has a dream (chapter 7) that expands on his vision of this everlasting kingdom referring to the “Ancient of Days,” and “one like a son of man,” Jesus’ favorite phrase for himself.  Of this son of man Daniel says:

 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

Over five hundred years later, Jesus declares after he is risen from the dead (Matt. 28) that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him, and Paul confirms (Eph. 1) that Jesus is seated at God’s “right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” in this present age. This is of course all consistent with the entire Scriptural message of God’s covenant promises from Genesis 3 on to save and redeem His people and the world. It’s almost as if there was one author of the whole thing!

This same message is communicated in two other utterly super-natural stories in Daniel, that God is the sovereign all-powerful ruler over not only all kingdoms of men, but over all of his created order, every nano particle of reality. Needless to say skeptics would mock the stories as make-believe. In the first (chapter 3) Daniel’s three friends refuse to worship a huge golden statue of the king and are thrown into a blazing furnace. Instead of being consumed, the king sees four men walking around in the fire, “the fourth looks like a son of the gods.” They come out unharmed and don’t even smell like fire. In the other story (chapter 6), Daniel refuses to worship a human king and is thrown into a lion’s den. He too is rescued and comes out unharmed “because he had trusted in his God.”

Let us too in our day in a hostile pagan culture be like Daniel and his friends were in his, and refuse to bow down to foreign gods because we know the Truth. The risen King Jesus rules, and we are his warriors of love as he extends his reign, advances his kingdom, and builds his church to return one day to consummate his ultimate victory over sin and death.

 

 

 

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Jun 3, 2023 | Uninvented

As I stated in my last post, in light of redemptive history, the theological argument for uninvented is powerful because of the coherence of the biblical message from Genesis to Revelation. In light of Jesus revealing to us it is all about him in Luke 24, we can see him everywhere. It is impossible apart from the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit for the writers to have had any idea of the ultimate meaning of their words, and thus to have made them up. And I don’t use the word impossible lightly. For much of my Christian life I thought, like most Christians, the Bible was most definitely not made up by the men who wrote it, but at some level thought it could have been. That’s what skeptics have been claiming for 300 years, and that message is everywhere in the suffocating secular cultural air we breathe. My deep dive back into apologetics in 2009 eventually leading to writing Uninvented has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt, in the vernacular, they just couldn’t make that stuff up!

Another example of this impossibility is from a passage in Ezekiel 21 that ingeniously ties back to a passage in Genesis 49, almost as if it was planned by a divine author! Maybe Ezekiel was so familiar with the book of Genesis that he decided to take the passage there and include the same idea in his writing, but that would make Ezekiel a liar. If you know anything about his very difficult life (being a prophet in Israel was a brutal job), you would know he consistently declares, “Thus saith the Lord,” as he does in this passage. We have a choice, as do all people who come to the text of Scripture, when we read of a prophet who claims the Lord told him to declare something. Either it happened, it is true, and the prophet was a faithful communicator of the Lord’s words, or he was a liar. The skeptic can’t say they had dreams or mystical visions, and so just thought the Lord was telling them these things when it was all in their head. That’s not an option over 400 years of the prophetic witness in Israel. Only what I call in the book, a question-begging anti-supernatural bias would prompt someone to think such a thing. If someone comes to the text without the hermeneutics of suspicion, the text reads real, as I also say in the book, with verisimilitude.

Now to the passage. Ezekiel has been speaking to the rulers and leaders of Israel:

25 You profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, 26 this is what the Lord God says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. 27 A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! The crown will not be restored until he to whom it rightfully belongs shall come; to him I will give it.

The obvious question is who is this one or will be this one to whom the crown of Israel, God’s people, rightfully belongs. We have to go back over a thousand years (God is never in a hurry, as I say ad nauseum) to find a clue from Genesis 49. The scene is after Jacob and his family has been saved from the famine in Egypt because of Joseph, and at the end of his life he is telling his sons what will happen to them “in the days to come” (v. 1). That phrase in Hebrew is literally “in the last days,” which if it sounds familiar it is because it is an eschatological Messianic reference as we read in Hebrews 1:2, “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.” This passage to Judah is about Jesus, the lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5):

8 “Judah, your brothers will praise you;
    your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
    your father’s sons will bow down to you.
9 You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
    you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
    like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
    nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
    and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
11 He will tether his donkey to a vine,
    his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
    his robes in the blood of grapes.

As we can see, this one will not only be ruler of Israel, God’s people, per Ezekiel, but also a ruler of the nations. This prophecy is what began the idea of a Messiah, simply an anointed one as were all kings and rulers in the history of Israel. From the time Jacob spoke these words to the time of Ezekiel’s similar words was approximately 1,400 years! That’s a theme with some staying power, and why it had such a hold on Jewish imagination at the time of Jesus. Not to mention why it would be very difficult, I believe impossible, to be a product of man, mere human fiction. 

Which raises the question of who this Messiah would be and what he would be like. While there were many differing ideas about it in the intertestamental period (Malachi to John the Baptist), most Jews agreed he would be a Davidic like king who would rule in Israel from Jerusalem and lead them in victory over their oppressors. Even Jesus’ disciples after he was raised from the dead and prior to his ascension (Acts 1), not understanding it all yet asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They like all Jews of the time missed the spiritual part of the equation, that the Messiah’s reign over the nations would be through the transformation of the hearts of his people. Which brings us to the eschatological and how we’re to understand Jacob’s prophecy that the Messiah’s rule would include the “obedience of the nations.”

In the Jewish conception of the first century, Messiah’s rule would be physical and temporal from Israel over the nations in this material world. Once the Messiah led them in military conquest over the Romans, everything would be like it was always supposed to be with the nation of Israel and their king ruling the earth. Unfortunately, they would miss the spiritual significance of the Isaiah 53 Messiah who would redeem his people from their sins. When Jesus rose from the dead, it didn’t take long for them to realize Jesus was in fact the fulfillment of Isaiah 53, as it is worked out in the rest of the New Testament. The question for Christians now would be looking back at these passages, what would the “obedience of the nations” look like going forward.” It’s not an easy question to answer, as we can see from the last two thousand years of Christian history.

Like most Christians, until last year and my conversion to post-millennialism, I saw the answer to that question as purely eschatological, meaning it was for the time after Jesus comes again in judgment and we experience the new heavens and earth of Revelation 21. My tendency was to over spiritualize such passages as if they had no relevance to life in this fallen material world. How could they! Look at how horrible things are. It will only, I thought, take a final, supernatural act of Almighty God in Christ to change things. Otherwise, we’re stuck with things getting worse and worse, or at best staying just the miserable way they are.

Now I am convinced Jacob’s “in the last days” prophecy about this ruler started when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven to reign “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1). These days started at Pentecost, as Peter says in Acts 2, that “in the last days” God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. We by the power of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s body in this fallen world get to be part of God advancing his kingdom and building his church in our day until “the obedience of the nations” is his!