The history of this universe is explained in Genesis. Is it true? That is the crucial question. Listen to Jonathan Sarfati, author of The Genesis Account – A theological, historical, and scientific commentary on Genesis 1-11, do a great job of connecting the dots – history, cosmology, geology, Biblical exegesis. It will strengthen your faith and give you great ammunition to justify that faith. Download it from YouTube and share it.
This is the first in a nine episode series on the evidence for Christ. You will be blessed, your faith strengthened and your ability to spread the Good News empowered. These videos will be a great tool to share your faith even to atheists. They will shed light into a dark world. Make sure you share them with others.
“Why do the nations rage…? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His anointed, saying, ‘Let us tear off their bonds and cast away their ropes from us” (Psalm 2:1-3).
David describes a time when many rulers would see God’s Word in a negative light, as though it were bonds enslaving them and as cords binding them to His morality, godly ways and truth. They would see the demands of God’s Word as hindering “human potential” in sexual expression along with many other life choices.
This prophecy is being fulfilled now and it is time to speak up and to refuse to remain silent. In this hour, as the cultural wars intensify, the voice of aggressive secularists is getting much louder and bolder. At the same time, many in the church are retreating into fearful silence. To some, it seems as if the church will be overrun by the angry voices of the liberal left. However, I assure you that the Lord’s purposes will surely succeed. He is raising up those who will speak up with clarity and courage because of their fierce love for Jesus and the truth (John 14:21, 2 Thess. 2:10).
Where is all this going? Some ask if things will get better or worse. The truth is, both light and darkness will increase at the same time. Before Jesus returns, godliness and sin alike will reach their greatest heights in history:
“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For the darkness shall cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the Lord shall rise upon you, and His glory shall be seen upon you” (Isaiah 60:1-2).
The greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit in history is yet to come, in conjunction with a deluge of deep darkness assaulting the nations.
The Lord is raising up courageous messengers who will fearlessly proclaim Jesus as the only way of salvation, the authority of His Word and the supremacy of His glorious leadership.
Where do you stand? Where does your church stand? What is God calling you to do in this hour? It is time to make important decisions, to align yourselves with like minded brothers and sisters in Christ. The persecuted church invariably looks like the church described in the Book of Acts.
Compiled using article by Mike Bickle, The Lord is Raising Up Courageous Messengers in Charisma Magazine
According to Jesus, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18). When referring to the Old Testament, He would often assert, “It is written”, making clear that He considered Scripture to be the final authority in all matters of faith and life. Along with the Pharisees He regarded the Old Testament as truly God’s Word. When quoting Genesis 2:24, for example, He affirmed that it was God speaking (Matthew 19:4, 5) even though the passage itself does not specifically state this.6
In his second letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul wrote, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). Commenting on this verse, and the New Testament in general, Frederick C. Grant, Professor of Biblical Theology at Union Theological Seminary wrote, “Everywhere it is taken for granted that what is written in scripture is the work of divine inspiration, and therefore trustworthy, infallible, and inerrant.”7
From this it might be understood that Professor Grant held to a similarly high view of Scripture. Not at all! In fact, he believed much of the Bible to be based on myths. Despite this, and along with many other liberal theologians, he recognised the Apostles’ unswerving commitment to the Old Testament as the Word of God and as unquestionably trustworthy in everything it teaches.
It is not difficult to see why scholars understand this to be true.8,9 In the Apostle Paul’s thinking, the Jews had been “entrusted with the oracles [the very words] of God” (Romans 3:2). When referring to the Old Testament he had no hesitation in affirming, “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers …” (Acts 28:25). Similarly, when quoting from the Psalms, the Apostle Peter stated that, while the words came from the mouth of David, it was the Holy Spirit speaking (Acts 4:24, 25). Moreover, he affirmed that “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21).
Both Jesus and His Apostles undoubtedly regarded Genesis as history. Jesus, for example, affirmed the creation of Adam and Eve (Matthew 19:4), the murder of Abel (Luke 11:50, 51), the Noahic Flood (Matthew 24:37–39) and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15). Moreover, for Him, these were not simply interesting stories; rather they provided the basis for understanding important spiritual truths. Similarly, the Apostle Paul built his teaching on events recorded in the Old Testament, such as the doctrine of Original Sin (Romans 5) and the role of men and women in the church (1 Timothy 2:12–14). The writer to the Hebrews referred to the accounts of Abel, Enoch and Noah as real events that happened to real people (Hebrews 11). Significantly, this letter was written to encourage Christians who were facing serious persecution; but what use are mythical characters to those potentially facing death? The idea that anyone would think that such people might be helped by reminding them of stories suitable only for Sunday School children is absurd. The writers of the New Testament undoubtedly accepted the first book of the Bible as historical and Huxley was right: if Genesis is wrong, Christianity was built upon no more than “legendary quicksands”.
Where does your church, your denomination stand on the inerrancy of scripture? Ask your pastor to get one of the excellent PhD speakers from Creation Ministries to come speak at your church on the evidence for the Genesis account of Creation. His response may surprise you.
Pastor Andy Stanley has a church network of over 30,000 people in the Atlanta area, and his church was rated the fastest-growing in America in 2014 and 2015.
The Bible’s historical reliability is one of the most important considerations when it comes to whether people will accept the Bible’s claims about Jesus—and they’re right! If the Bible is demonstrably wrong regarding its history, it is not a reliable record, and the claims the Bible makes about Jesus are so extraordinary that it requires the Bible to be a supernatural, inspired, inerrant book. This is of course what it claims to be. Creation Ministries found it necessary to counter this serious challenge to the authority of God’s Word with this excellent article by Lita Cosner and Scott Gillis.
Pastor Andy Stanley says, “If the Bible is the foundation of our faith, it’s all or nothing. Christianity becomes a ‘fragile house of cards’ religion. Christianity becomes a fragile house of cards that comes tumbling down when we discover that perhaps the walls of Jericho didn’t.”2
Stanley’s message is clear as to the ‘unnecessary reason’ youth have left the faith:
So, if you stepped away from Christianity because of something in the Bible, if you stepped away from the Christian faith because of Old Testament miracles, if you stepped away from the Christian faith because you couldn’t reconcile 6,000 years with a 4.5 billion year old earth and something you learned in biology, I want to invite you to reconsider, because the issue has never been, ‘is the Bible true?’.2 (Emphasis added)
While he hopes to persuade people to come back to church, the route he took is actually more likely to deconstruct the faith of the young people he wants so much to keep in the church. In our experience (which to be honest, is much more wide than his own—speaking in over 1000 churches of varying denominations each year), people think the Bible’s historical reliability is one of the most important considerations when it comes to whether they will accept the Bible’s claims about Jesus—and they’re right!
What most people have commented on is the third part of his sermon series. Stanley begins that message by saying:
“In Sunday School we learned the song, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
He goes on to say,
“You grew up, but your faith didn’t grow up with you. You grew up, but you outgrew your faith. Your childhood god could not stand the rigors of adulthood, the questions of adulthood.”2
The reason he thinks this is a problem is:
“If the Bible is the foundation of our faith, it’s all or nothing. Christianity becomes a ‘fragile house of cards’ religion. Christianity becomes a fragile house of cards that comes tumbling down when we discover that perhaps the walls of Jericho didn’t.”2
To call Scripture a ‘house of cards’ (and elsewhere in the same sermon he calls it a ‘fragile thread’) reveals a troubling attitude for a pastor to have towards Scripture, which Jesus and the Apostles presented as the absolute foundation for our faith. After all, if he cannot be sure about Scripture, how can he be sure about the One that Scripture is ultimately all about, and moreover, the Bible’s history that necessitated Jesus becoming our Saviour.
One reason Stanley argues we need this change in perspective is that Scripture is too hard to defend:
“What your students have discovered, and if you read broadly you’ve discovered, it is next to impossible to defend the entire Bible. But if your Christianity hangs by the thread of proving that everything in the Bible is true, you may be able to hang onto it, but your kids and your grandkids and the next generation will not. Because this puts the Bible at the center of the debate. This puts the spotlight right on the Bible. Everything rises and falls on whether not part, but all the Bible is true. And that’s unfortunate, and as we’re going to discover today, it is absolutely unnecessary.”2
Among the things he specifically states are indefensible and not supported by evidence:
But as apologist James White pointed out in his rebuttal to Stanley, if the Bible is wrong, Christianity is untrue.4 Jesus’ own view was that the Scriptures could not be broken (John 10:35), and the New Testament authors referred to the Old Testament’s history as the foundation for New Testament theology. If the Bible is wrong about historical events, the basis for New Testament teaching vanishes. Worse still for Stanley, if Jesus is wrong about the very Scripture Stanley says is not defensible, then how can he still encourage faith in Jesus and His (historical) resurrection?
Stanley bases his argument that Christianity does not stand or fall with the Bible by his absurd claim that, for the first several hundred years of Christianity, they didn’t have the Bible: “For the first 300 years of the existence of Christianity, the debate centered on an event, not a book.” While they may not have had all the New Testament books bound together under one cover and called it ‘the Bible’, the entire Old Testament and many of the New Testament books functioned authoritatively from the beginning of the Church and were the central source of their theology, used to settle the doctrinal controversies of that time. In fact, there are over 100 references in the New Testament to the book of Genesis, let alone many other Old Testament events. So much of our Christian doctrine, and even Jesus’ own teaching, are centered on those biblical historical events.
Astonishingly, however, Stanley suggests that Peter might have responded to historical questions about the Old Testament as follows:
“Peter would have looked at you like, ‘I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, but I followed a man for three years who spoke like no other man spoke. He was arrested and crucified and we thought, Game over, because he said too much to be a good teacher, he claimed too much about himself to be a good teacher. Game over. We’re all in hiding; a bunch of women come babbling that “The tomb is empty, the tomb is empty”. I looked into an empty tomb, and do you know what I concluded? Somebody stole the body. And a few days later I had breakfast with my risen friend on the beach. So I’m not sure about 6,000-year-old earth, I’m not sure about archaeological evidence, I’m not sure about all that. The reason I’m following Jesus is because I saw him die, and I saw him alive, and I went into the streets of Jerusalem to say, God has done something among us.”2
But this does not match up with what Peter actually said in Acts 2 (by the way, it should be noted that Stanley purposely references no actual Scripture in his first several sermons). In Peter’s sermon as recorded by Luke, he included a lengthy quote from the prophet Joel and two Psalms, because he wasn’t arguing from his personal testimony and experience, but that the history they witnessed was a fulfillment of the Scriptures. And, even when he did appeal to his own eyewitness testimony, he tied this to a confirmation of the Scriptures (2 Peter 1:16–21)—the very Scriptures Stanley argues Christianity didn’t emphasize until 300 years later.
In Part 5 of the sermon series, Stanley dedicates an entire session to the reasons people leave the faith due to injustice in the world. Although Stanley does make some pertinent points, at no time does he state the foundational, historical event of Adam’s Fall as the cause of death and suffering in the world. In a self-labeled ‘footnote’, Pastor Stanley implies that a belief in evolution does not challenge the Gospel’s big picture when he states “Francis Collins actually embraces what we would consider macro-evolution and yet he is still a conservative Christian. If you didn’t think a person could believe in evolution and be an evangelical Christian, you should read this book. If science is the reason you have walked away from faith, I highly recommend his book, The Language of God [see our review].” Francis Collins would agree with Stanley when he stated in this sermon series, “And when religion and science conflict, at the end of the day if you are an honest person, science must win.” When people compromise on the historical account of creation they are unable to effectively explain the existence of death and suffering if God created a very good world. And Francis Collins along with his former organization BioLogos actually believes that Jesus could be wrong about His statements about biblical history and the historical Adam and Eve. See It’s not Christianity!.
It is interesting to note how Stanley defends the historical reliability of the New Testament and the historical trustworthiness and early composition of the New Testament documents. But as is shown by the list of Old Testament events that he claims are indefensible, he is all too ready to give up on the historical reliability of the Old Testament, which Jesus and the New Testament authors quoted constantly in all sorts of contexts, always taking it as completely authoritative and true.
We have pointed out that you can’t have a New Testament-only Christianity, because the Christians during the time of the New Testament used the Scriptures—the Old Testament.
The saddest thing about this attempt to justify Christianity apart from the Scriptures is that it won’t work. We’ve come into contact with many young people with questions, and most aren’t interested in a ‘squishy’ Christianity that takes all the ‘hard’ passages of the Bible metaphorically while only holding on to some sort of a belief in Jesus.
Andy Stanley is obviously passionate, and we would agree that a simple “the Bible tells me so” faith will likely not sustain people when they encounter objections to the faith. But the answer is not to so easily dismiss the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, but rather learn how the evidence supports the historical account of the Bible.
Many Sundays, after hearing a creation presentation, people will come up to one of our speakers and be so excited that they realize they can trust the entire Bible! By hearing that the Bible’s history is reliable, and that there are answers to all the objections that they’ve heard, believers are more confident to share their faith.
It takes effort, but it is not too hard to defend the entire Bible; we’ve been defending Scripture from the first verse for over 30 years. That is the key to keeping young people in the church. And the effort has eternal consequences. Given the wealth of scientific and archaeological support and information that is available today to support the Bible’s history, it is a shame that Stanley did not take the time to research it, before so readily abandoning the Bible as the inerrant source for the Christian faith.
The recently discovered ruins of a first century synagogue in Israel confirm historic accounts of Jesus’ life found in the New Testament.
Located near Mount Tabor in the Nahal Tavor Nature Reserve in the lower Galilee at a site called Tel Rechesh, the synagogue ruins date back to the time of the Second Temple period, which ended in AD 79 when the Romans attacked Jerusalem.
Motti Aviam, a senior researcher at the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archaeology at the Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, explained in a statement the significance of the Tel Rechesh excavation find.
“This is the first synagogue discovered in the rural part of the Galilee and it confirms historical information we have about the New Testament, which says that Jesus preached at synagogues in Galilean villages,” explained Aviam, as reported by JNS.
Haaretz noted that while there have been seven other synagogues from the Second Temple period discovered before, the one at Tel Rechesh is the first to be found in a rural instead of urban setting.
“Inscriptions and historical sources show that the synagogues of the period were used for meetings, Torah readings and study, rather than worship. They had neither Torah ark nor regular prayer services,” reported Haaretz.
“One source mentioning synagogues is the New Testament, which states that Jesus ‘went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues.'”
In an interview with YNet News, Aviam explained why the findings at the Tel Rechesh site “makes the place very important for Christians.”
“During the same period Jesus was still a Jew who observed Jewish rituals and requirements and like many rabbis, he delivered sermons in synagogues. Christianity which developed after his (sic) placed an emphasis on his sermons at synagogues in the Galilee.”
Aviam added that he hoped “that when the work is completed the place will constitute a tourist attraction for Jews and Christians alike.”
This is not the first major find in Israel this year connected to the times of Jesus. In March it was reported that several artefacts from the first century Near East were located in an orphanage in Jerusalem.
As Jesus Himself claimed the Bible is inerrant. It is God’s Word to us, it can be trusted from Genesis to Revelation.
The Bible accurately prophesied events which we see unfolding today as the nations turn away from Christian morality which came from the Bible. The rejection of the Bible’s authority and God as creator (evolution) means the Bible’s morality is being rejected as well. Morals are being redefined in ways that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. The Bible clearly calls homosexual behaviour an abomination. And just a generation or two ago most people would have agreed. The prophet Isaiah warned:
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight.” Isaiah 5:21
And the New Testament says:
“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. 2 Timothy 4:3-4
This booklet is both biblically and scientifically sound, it displays genuine compassion while at the same time not shirking from the truth; e.g. “because homosexuals can clearly love each other and since anything labelled ‘love’ is believed to be good, because their sin is then brought under the umbrella of ‘love’, then their sinful behaviour also becomes good. For Christians, we should steer clear of a ‘pro-marriage’ stance based upon mere tradition (often politically charged). We need to stand on the principles of scripture that define what God intends for marriage.
Christians who have an uncompromising stance on the Bible’s authority , which follows from a conviction that its big picture of history is true from the beginning, can be a powerful force, particularly if they can provide evidence to support the Bible’s history as real.
What is KEY is “What does the Bible say about marriage? What does the Bible say about homosexuality and other sexual sins?
“And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbour’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her…… You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. And you shall not lie with any animal…. it is perversion.” Leviticus 18:20-23
In the New Testament, Romans 1 argues that homosexual behaviour among both men and women is the result of suppressing the knowledge of God the Creator (the one who makes the rules for His creation).
“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passions for one another, men committing shameless acts with men receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” Romans 1:24-27
Jesus was crystal clear on the issue: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’.” Matthew 19:1-12 and Mark 10: 1-12
Nations have now embraced the homosexual lifestyle and gay marriage. It is now illegal in the USA for medical professionals or therapists to engage in reparative therapy that seeks to rehabilitate teen homosexuals back into a heterosexual lifestyle.
The White House was lit up in rainbow colours within hours of the Supreme Court declaring same sex marriage legal in all States. The rainbow is God’s covenant so what does this say about Obama?
The Bible shows God is sovereign and he has judged nations and its leaders down through history. He judged Sodom & Gomorrah and He will judge those nations that embrace this lifestyle. Look at what is unfolding in some of these nations – “Terrifying Bush fires prompt the evacuation of an entire Canadian City” News.com.au
Australians have an important decision before them at the coming election. Labour promises to bring in gay marriage and in fact, you cannot belong to the Labour Party after 2017 if you don’t support gay marriage. The Liberals pledge to hold a plebiscite on the issue as soon after the election as can be done.
There is now so much evidence which proves the Bible is trustworthy that Christians properly equipped can go on the offensive rather than go on the defensive as so many do when challenged as to the veracity of Scripture’s claims.
The many fulfilled Bible prophesies, such as Isaiah’s prophesy that a Persian king would arise with the name Cyrus – around 150 years before the event occurred. Three hundred prophesies in the Old Testament (OT) of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus that all occurred exactly as prophesied.
In the field of archaeology, the Bible has been confirmed accurate by numerous archaeological discoveries. The Hittites were presumed to be a mythical tribe because no physical evidence had been found. That was until a huge ‘City of the Hittites was uncovered. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls as late as 1947 with an almost complete copy of Isaiah in which there are so many of the prophesies of Jesus life, death by crucifixion and resurrection. As a result, the Bible is regarded as “the most accurate history book in the world”(The Archaeology of the New Testament by E.M.Blaiklock). Considering this fact alone, one can logically assume that its other historical claims in Genesis such as a real Adam and Eve and a global Flood are also true.
In the New Testament (NT), scholars used to be skeptical about John’s description of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, but archaeology showed that John’s description was accurate (which also proved that the gospel of John was authored by someone who had been in Jerusalem before the AD 70 destruction, which fits very well with the Apostle John being the author). John and all the NT authors – and even Jesus himself – believed and quoted from Genesis more than any other book in the Bible.
It is in the area of Genesis Creation where the rubber really hits the road, and where Creation Ministries has truly shone with evidence that recent discoveries particularly on DNA (Information Theory) and the function of cells have demonstrated the futility of evolution with its proposed mechanisms of natural selection and mutation. On their website http://www.creation.com there are almost 8,500 fully searchable articles you can access to equip you with answers to provide real seekers of the truth about God and Creation.
The Bible is trustworthy, including its claims about sin and salvation. Jesus is who he said He is. He is the way, the truth and the life. Jesus believed Genesis was true history then I suggest so should we.
JERUSALEM May 21st, 2015 — George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God Church (USA) and chairman of the World AG Fellowship, considered the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination with more than 67 million adherents, said Wednesday that young people are leaving traditional churches that have “abandoned a belief in the authority of Scripture.”
Responding to a question asking how the Empowered21 movement is doing among young people, considering reports that many are moving away from the church in general, Wood explained that it’s not the case for Empowered21.
“All I can do is tell you our statistics in the USA,” began Wood.
“We (AG USA) have 3.1 million young people in the USA and 34 percent of them are under the age of 25. … The young people that are moving away from traditional religious structures in the U.S. typically belong to churches which have abandoned a belief in the authority of Scripture and the uniqueness and centrality, and exclusiveness of Jesus Christ,” said Wood.
“They have no belief to hang on to since that has all been gutted by those who have chosen, under the guise of religion, to reject the very claims of the founder of the religion,” he said.
“This movement is very attractive to young people around the world because it believes we can experience God. We don’t just talk about Him, we don’t just think about Him, we actually can experience Him,” said William Wilson, co-chair of Empowered21.
“There is a whole generation of young men and women who are looking for purpose and really want their life to count and the radical message of Jesus Christ gives them that opportunity. In an expression, they can experience God in reality, so we’re seeing explosive growth in many parts of the movement among young people. It’s exciting,” said Wilson
Did gay deviant priests bring this debacle upon the Irish people?
“The once-dominant Catholic Church in Ireland is trying to come to terms with an overwhelming vote in favour of gay marriage … the faithful attended mass to hear their priests reflect on the new social landscape. ‘The Church has to find a new language which will be understood and heard by people,’ Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin told reporters after mass at the city’s St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral.
” ‘We have to see how is it that the Church’s teaching on marriage and family is not being received even within its own flock.’ ”
My wife exclaimed to me when she heard that Ireland had just voted to legalize gay marriage, “how could this happen in Catholic Ireland”?
The answer is both simple and profound. Ireland has lost so many tens of thousands of Catholic adherents for the same reason the Catholic Church the world over has lost so many — the scandal of gay deviant priests preying upon innocent children within the church has gotten so deep and so dreadful that families have been leaving in droves for years.
The pressure for Tony Abbott to legalize gay marriage is now increasing exponentially. After the Ireland announcement, listen to what the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who is in favour of marriage equality, said, “Mr Abbott now needs explain why the Government is unwilling to pursue the change. If the Irish people can vote in favour of marriage equality, the question has to be asked, what is Tony Abbott’s problem with it?” he said. “Most places in the world are dealing with marriage equality, why is Tony Abbott stopping Australia becoming a more modern nation?”
The world is quickly shedding God’s moral standards and sadly so much of the church no longer holds to God’s Word as TRUTH and it is infallible/inerrant. As a result, many church denominations have accepted gay marriage, gay priests along with other heresies.
Those nations, such as the U.S.A, that legalized abortion and have progressively taken God out its life, which now includes embracing gay marriage, are already under God’s judgment but don’t recognize it, and that judgment is set to escalate – see my posts on Jonathan Cahn, God’s prophet to America.
Prophesied last days events are unfolding rapidly, people who don’t know God and His Word will be shattered as it becomes obvious that governments are no longer in control and anarchy abounds.
I believe, it will be opportunity time for Christians as we understand what is happening. If we stay close to God, and allow the Holy Spirit to direct our activities, His church will bear much fruit in these last days.
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 