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"Reasons to Believe"
June 29, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower
Earlier in the service we showed our appreciation to our high school young people who returned from a mission trip, a work trip. I have a story to tell you about a time long ago when I was a Youth Director in a church and I took a group of junior highers away for an experience just like that. At the end of the experience, one of the eighth-grade girls--we'd been away together, had done good things, and now were returning--and one of the eighth-grade girls said to me, "Will, before this week I didn't believe. But now, well, now I do believe." I said, "That's wonderful! This is very, very good. I'm very pleased. But tell me, what is it that you believe?" And she kind of thinks and goes, "Well . . . I don't know."
Now, there would be two mistakes at a moment like that. One mistake would be to say, "Oh, my gosh! We got one saved!" You know--to treat the declaration ("Now I believe." "What do you believe?" "I don't know.")--to treat that as though she had completely arrived. That would be a mistake. But by the same token, it would be a mistake to sort of completely reject it, to treat it as though it was of no significance whatsoever. So I had a conversation with her as though this was a step in a series of steps that we wanted her to take. A very important step, but not necessarily a final step, or close to final step.
What that incident illustrates for me is the whole question of faith, on the one hand, and reasons to believe on the other. A number of years ago, Tammy Faye Bakker (who some of us remember) . . . and if you don't know who Tammy Faye Bakker is . . . never mind, because that's not important. But at one particular time she was quoted as saying, "Fantastic! Fantastic! Christianity is so fantastic I'd believe in Jesus even if it weren't true!"
And there again, that raises for us the truthfulness of the things that we believe in and the belief that trusts in the truthfulness of those things. So we've got "faith" and "reasons to believe." And I'm going to ask us to look together at "faith" and "reasons to believe" this morning. We're going to come at it looking at two different texts. The first text is in 1 Peter chapter 3. I'm going to ask us to understand how these two texts relate to each other. First Peter chapter 3, verse 15:
"Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands to know the hope that is in you." And in our New Revised translation they do a very good job of allowing the context of this verse to influence how they translated it, because this is in a "persecuted for your faith" context. If you look at the verses before and after, what you see is that the demand for an explanation for why you have the belief that you have is not just generally, but in a situation where Christians are being persecuted for their faith. Now, there are other translators who translate this much more simply, something like--the New Living Bible has something like:
That's much clearer, much plainer, but it doesn't do a very good job of capturing the adversarial context like this one does. But I think that whether we're being persecuted for our faith or not, I think either style of translating this verse lifts up something very, very important, and that is whether we're being persecuted for our faith or not, we ought to understand why we believe what we believe. We ought to be prepared to explain why we believe what we believe.
Now, let's take another verse and look at 1 Peter chapter 3:15 in sort of stereo with Ephesians chapter 2. Because in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8, we have this:
We're saved by grace. We're brought into a relationship with God by grace. We're not rationally persuaded. It's not because somebody had a good sales pitch. It's not because someone did a good job of market analysis and presented the gospel. No. We're saved by God's grace. It's a gift of God for anyone who believes in Jesus. The belief that we have is by grace. Now, because of that, we want to ask, "Then how would it be that there nevertheless ought to be this readiness to explain ourselves?" If I can't talk someone into believing in Jesus, if it's always going to be a matter of God's grace conferring salvation, then why don't I just sort of forget about having at the ready an explanation for why I believe?
Well, let's sort of break this apart and say, by way of explaining how it would be that those two things can be related together--that on the one hand we need to make a distinction between the "means" of faith and the "meaning" of faith. The "means" of faith may be different and narrower than the "meaning" of faith, by which I'm talking about the means, the way that we come to believe in God, which is by grace. That "means" of faith--it's an operation of the Holy Spirit in me--may be different than what that faith means once I have it: What it means to me, the meaning of it, what it involves, what is in view.
So let's look at the "means" of faith with respect to these 2 verses. On the first point, we have to say that you and I, the normal people that we were born--we were not born prepared to just sort of innocently and objectively consider the evidence for and against God in an even-handed kind of way. We were born rebels. We were born in enmity from God so that any evidence that just our natural selves first encountered, we would explain away--which is why we had to be saved by grace. I did and you did. My heart was not prepared to understand. My heart was not prepared to fairly evaluate the evidence that indicated that God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life. The Holy Spirit had to do a work in my heart and create--and I invite you to consider whether this was true for you, too--to create a readiness, to create an openness, where none existed before. That's why we have to say we were saved by grace.
We were saved by grace because we didn't start out neutral toward God. We started out in opposition to God. And everything that God could have sent our way, we would have misinterpreted except that God, by a miracle, gave me, gave you, gave everyone who ever comes to trust in Him, a receptive heart.
However, now that we're saved, we can see reasons why it would have been smarter for us to have believed in Jesus earlier, amen? Now that we're saved, it's easy to see the evidence. In 1 Peter we're told to be prepared to explain what that evidence is now that you're in a position to see it. Don't think that you're going to, by becoming a slicker and slicker salesperson for Jesus, don't think that you're going to talk a non-Christian into belief simply on the strength of your own slickness. But do be prepared to answer questions. Because though we're saved by grace, that grace can include what you say, what I say. And though God changed my heart and gave me a readiness, nevertheless, there were also individuals, there were people that I knew, that had influence on me. And that was all a part of the grace of God. It wasn't simply a miracle of God written in the sky, but it was a miracle of God that included the testimony of Christians that I knew before I was a believer. Do you understand?
Now, that all has to do with the "means" of faith. How do we come to faith? It's by grace--God using, as He wants to, the witness of the people around us or evidence of any other sort, in that process of winning our hearts toward Him. That's the means of faith, that's the way that we come to believe.
Now then, what do we believe? It's very important to say we believe something other than "God changes hearts." If God had wanted that to be the gospel in its entirety, He didn't need to send Jesus to die on the cross, did He? I mean, every page of the Bible could simply say, "God changes hearts," "God changes hearts." The meaning of faith is a heck of a lot bigger than the means by which we come to believe in it.
And the meaning of the faith is this: God created a real world and we can discern truths about life by investigating what this real world indicates. And God sent His Son Jesus Christ into this real world in a real way--in a way that would make a difference--so that we are now, 2,000 years later, still living off of the ripples created. The fact that you and I are here in worship this morning is yet a 2,000-year ripple effect of the fact that God came into the world in a real way, in a definite way, in the person of His Son Jesus Christ, who died a real death on a real cross. And so there ought to be--we shouldn't be surprised if there is--evidence all around us of the reality of the things that the Bible attests.
And so we consider things like: Recently it made headlines, and now it's making headlines again. Did you see (at either point) the news about the ossuary of James? James--which James are we talking about? Well, no, let's do "ossuary." What ossuary are we talking about? An ossuary is an ancient box for saving bones. I don't know how to say it any way other than, you know, something like an ancient kind of casket. That's what an ossuary is. James, the James in question, is reputedly James, the brother of Jesus, James, the author of the letter of James that we have in the New Testament. And this box was discovered, came to light, and there was printing on it saying, you know, "Here is the ossuary of James, brother of the Lord Jesus Christ" and it was taken as a huge archaeological confirmation of what the Bible says. Now that was six months ago.
And if you follow these things, what you saw is that in the news more recently (within the last few weeks) although archaeologists were saying, "Yes, this is legitimate, this is the real deal, this actually is a non-biblical confirmation, a very crucial piece of evidence, non-biblical confirmation for what the Bible teaches." Except that you wait six months and now a new team of archaeologists is saying, "No, it's not. It's a fake. It's a fraud. Though the box of bones . . ." Oh, I'm sorry. I should have told you there are no bones in the box any more. It's an empty box of bones. . . It's a bones-less box. The new finding is the box is legitimately ancient; the petroglyph, the carving in the stone, was recently-added.
You know, I'm not an expert in ancient writing and I assume few of us this morning have expertise in that particular area. So let me just tell you I was delighted and I was not surprised at the earlier point when this was being heralded as an important archaeological find, important evidence that the things that the Bible teaches are true. I was delighted, but I was not surprised.
Now, within the last few weeks when I heard that a new set of archaeologists are disputing it and are saying it's a fake, I was saddened, but I was also not surprised. Because we need to recognize that any and every bit of evidence outside of the Bible is always going to be heralded where faith is and rejected where faith is not. There is not ever going to be a neutral weighing of any of these things. You know: choose your bit of evidence.
A number of years ago people were talking a lot about the shroud of Turin, right? At one moment they were saying, "Oh, this is conclusively proven to be the burial shroud of Jesus." And then you wait a little while and they were saying, "This has been conclusively proven not to be the burial shroud of Jesus." We should probably, for our own faith's sake, decide "I'm not going to ride on the roller coaster of what the archaeologists happen to be saying at any particular point in time, because if I do, then at one point my faith is going to be up and at another point my faith is going to be cast down, because the archaeologists are never going to agree." If you want to talk about the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, the philosophers are never going to agree. And where there is faith, philosophers feel like our philosophical proofs for God hold water and are valid as philosophical proofs go. Where there is no faith, the claims are, "No, they do not. They don't prove anything."
Now, I said I was delighted. I said I was saddened. But in neither case was I surprised. That's because I know about myself. Before I came to Jesus, I was not fairly weighing the evidence. And as we look out in the world, we should not expect that there would ever be any kind of a find that will win universal support among the faithful and the anti-faithful. We should not hold our breath expecting that.
And as a matter of fact, it just occurs to me right now. Turn with me to the very end of the gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 28, verse 17. Now, this is a wonderful thing. We all know the story of doubting Thomas. Jesus appeared to the disciples, but Thomas was not there. Thomas came back (they had sent him out for burgers). He comes back, you know, he's got the Big Macs, and they all said, "We saw the Lord!" And he goes, "Oh, I doubt it."
That's why we call him "doubting Thomas." We always go, "Well, you know, if I had been there and if I had seen Jesus appearing after He had been crucified and resurrected, and now He's appearing--hey, boy, I'd believe!" Well. . . look at this: "When they saw Him, they worshipped Him, but some doubted." Let's look at verse 16: "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him--[this is a resurrection appearance of Jesus]--they worshipped him, but some doubted."
You know what? If Jesus appeared in our midst right now, we would worship Him and some of us would doubt. And I can't promise you that there would not be doubt in my heart. There is no proof sufficient to override all doubt where the heart is not willing to receive the evidence. So, I'm inviting us to pay attention to things like archaeological finds. Pay attention when someone makes a discovery and says, "This is a confirmation of Scripture." If you can follow the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, I commend them to you. Any of the ways that we can think of to help ourselves explain to an outsider the reason that we have for the faith that is in us, we ought to go ahead and do it. We ought to be prepared--and I think that it can be a faith-strengthening thing for us.
But let's just be forewarned that you're not going to be able to persuade someone to accept Jesus into their heart on the strength of simply what you have to say. If the Holy Spirit uses what you have to say to turn a heart toward God, that would be one thing. But let's not marshal our evidence as if we're going to persuade outsiders to want to become insiders simply because of the way that we talk because let's be honest about the church: The church sometimes, looking for evidence, looking for persuasive things outside of what Scripture presents, churches in the past have gotten really, really goofy.
I'm thinking right now, for instance, during the Middle Ages in particular, but among Roman Catholics in Europe even to this day. But in the Middle Ages the veneration of religious relics just went like crazy. People were looking for things outside of Scripture as aids to belief, so at the time when young Martin Luther arrived in Wittenberg (which is going to be, you know, the early 1500s), in Wittenberg they had on display a branch from the burning bush of Moses. I'm not kidding. They did. I don't know whether it was on fire or not . . . but they had it. In reliquaries (which were these special housings for the religious relics), and if you've been to Europe, you know all about this, they had enshrined a branch from the burning bush of Moses, they had some straw from the manger of Jesus, they. . .
Do I need to say? I don't think these things were legit! So that I'm not misunderstood, let me just say I don't really think it was a real branch from the burning bush of Moses. I don't think it was real straw from the manger.
They had on display--and I don't know how you display a drop of milk, but they had a drop of milk that they said was from Jesus' mother Mary. You know, in the Middle Ages, that was a lot better than the burning bush. And they had thorns from the crown of thorns of Jesus. The church at that time, and in some ways today, can go ga-ga trying to find things outside of the Bible itself to be aids to faith.
I want to say I believe that God has for us, sufficient for faith, right here [in the Bible] all of the evidence that we need. That "faith comes by hearing and hearing from the Word of God," that when the Word of God, the Bible, is preached, the Holy Spirit creates faith. And this is the evidence that we really, really need to trust in. And this is the evidence that we really need to allow our faith to be bolstered by. And if our faith is sufficiently rooted here [in Scripture], sufficiently grounded here, then I think that puts us in a position to be very pleased when a box of bones is discovered and not inordinately disappointed when suddenly the box of bones is now said not to be legit.
If our faith doesn't rest here [in the Bible], but rests there, then we're going to be on a roller coaster, because things are going to be accepted one year and then they're going to be rejected the next year. If our faith rests here [in Scripture], as the Holy Spirit ministers truths to our hearts, then we're not on a roller coaster.
Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we love you for being a wonderful God. Lord, we thank you for giving us sufficient reasons to believe in you, in your Word, when those truths are applied by your Holy Spirit. Lord, we ask that we would not seek other grounds for our faith beyond the ones that you provide. Lord, we ask that you would cause our faith to be built on the rock. And it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the worship service on June 29, 2003.] |
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