The Prophecy of Isaiah - Lesson 2: Structure and Themes

The Prophecy of Isaiah
Lesson 2: The Book’s Structure and Main Themes
Structure of the Book of Isaiah
Importance of chapters 36-39Form a historical interlude between chapters 1-35 and 40-66.
Chs. 36-37: the defeat of Assyria, which is a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies in chs. 1-35.
Chs. 38-39 predict the Babylonian captivity, which is the dominant theme of chs. 40-66.
Chapters 1-35Chs. 1-6: Opening Messages and the Call of Isaiah
Chs. 7-12: The Rule of Assyria and the Messiah
Chs. 13-23: Oracles against the Nations
Chs. 24-27: The Apocalypse
Chs. 28-35: Book of Woes and Restoration
Chapters 36-39: Historical InterludeChs. 36-37: The Fall of Assyria
Chs. 38-39: The Rise of Babylon and Prediction of the Babylonian Captivity
Chapters 40-66Chs. 40-48: Deliverance from Babylon
Chs. 49-57: The Ministry of the Servant of the Lord
Chs. 58-66: Ultimate Blessing for God’s People
Isaiah’s Main Themes
Standard pre-exilic message:You’ve broken the covenant (through idolatry, social injustice, religious ritualism) so repent!
No repentance? Then judgment! Judgment will also come for the nations.
Yet there is hope beyond the judgment for a glorious future restoration both for Judah/Israel and the nations.
Remnant
Recurring theme word (šeʾār, šeʾērît)
“Remainder,” “rest,” or “residue.”
Theologically it refers to the faithful remainder of people that God has chosen, people who are looking to God to work his will in and through them.
They return to the Lord and experience the fullness of salvation when others don’t.
The Sovereignty of God
God is the sovereign Lord of the universe, and as Sovereign, he is actively at work in the world, guiding all history in accordance with his grand purpose.
“The Lord has spoken” – when the ruler speaks, the matter is settled.
God’s sovereignty does not end at the borders of Israel or Judah. He is the Lord of all nations, whether they know him or not.
Even though Isaiah ministered primarily to Judah, he understood the universal sovereignty of God.
Many people from many nations will recognize God’s sovereignty one day, while others never will, but God nonetheless remains sovereign (10:5–7; 37:24–26).
The Servant
“Servant” (ʿebed) occurs 39 times in Isaiah.
Servants are slaves to their master. Their duty consists totally of doing their master’s will.
In Isaiah, the term “servant” occasionally describes God’s people as a group (41:8; 54:17) but usually denotes individuals who fully follow God’s will and serve his people faithfully (22:20; 42:1; 52:13).
Serving their master faithfully fulfills God’s will for their lives.
The NT makes much use of this “servant” concept, using the Greek equivalent (doulos) 122 times.
The OT “servant of the Lord” becomes “servant of Christ” in the NT.
Paul argued that slavery to God brought people true freedom—freedom to become all God has created them to be.
The Holy One of Israel
“Holy One of Israel” occurs 31 times in the OT, and 25 of those are in Isaiah.
The words of the seraphim, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty . . .” (Is 6:3), profoundly affected Isaiah’s thinking and theology.
God stood utterly apart from his creation, including his people.
His holy nature clashed with his people’s sin. Yet he loved them, desired fellowship with them, and called to them through the law of Moses, as well as through Isaiah and other prophets.
The expression “Holy One of Israel” occurs in both judgmental and redemptive contexts.
The Holy One of Israel has experienced rejection from his people, who have resisted his sovereign purposes (Is 1:4; 5:19, 24).
He also will judge nations who oppose him (37:23).
But the Holy One of Israel also stands as Israel’s Savior (43:3) and Redeemer (43:14), who delivers them from exile and establishes his kingdom.
The Messiah
The word “Messiah” comes from the Hebrew māšîaḥ, which means “anointed one.”
Kings, priests, and prophets all experienced God’s anointing, which symbolized God setting them apart for special service. 
The term māšîaḥ and the corresponding verbal form māšaḥ occur only twice in Isaiah (45:1; 61:1 respectively).
One of the most interesting usages appears in 45:1, where Cyrus, king of Persia, is so designated. 
We do not know to what extent Cyrus understood his mandate from the Lord (Ezr 1:1), but the Bible is clear that God set him apart for a special work: to bring his people back to their land. 
The Messiah is God’s chosen instrument to bring about his kingdom.
Even though the word does not occur regularly in Isaiah, the concept of messiah lies beneath the surface of many prophetic utterances (9:6–7; 11:1–10; 32:1–4; 42:1–4; 52:13–53:12).
God’s chosen instrument works faithfully to bring about God’s earthly and heavenly kingdoms. 
Though many prophets, priests, and kings carried the title māšîaḥ in Old Testament times, the New Testament points to Jesus, God’s Son, as the ultimate Messiah (Gk. Christos).
As we will see, many of Isaiah’s prophetic utterances point to this Jesus.
Resources used for this lesson:
Bryan E. Beyer, Encountering the Book of Isaiah
J. Daniel Hays, The Message of the Prophets
Herbert M. Wolf, Interpreting Isaiah
 

The Prophecy of Isaiah - Lesson 1: Introduction

Isaiah: Lesson 1
Introduction to Isaiah*
Isaiah the Man
Isaiah’s Times
Authorship and Date of the Book
Date of Isaiah’s Ministry
Isaiah’s Message
Isaiah the Man
His Name“Yahweh Saves”
His FamilySon of Amoz
Royal lineage
His DeathMartyr’s death
Isaiah’s Times
1The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. (Isaiah 1:1)
Uzziah2 Kings 15:1-7; 2 Chronicles 26:1-23
792-740 B.C.
Also known as Azariah
Characterized as a good king
King at age 16 and reigned 52 yrs.
Pride – died a leper
Jotham2 Kings 15:32–38; 2 Chron. 27:1–9
750–732 B.C.
Good king
Co-reigned with father for 11 yrs.
Pressure from Israel/Syria alliance
Ahaz2 Kings 16:1–20; 2 Chron. 28:1–27
732–715 B.C.
Evil and idolatrous king
Forced to choose between Israel/Syria and trusting God.
He chose to ally with Assyria and faced the consequences.
Hezekiah2 Kings 18:1–20:21; 2 Chron. 29:1–32:33
729–686 B.C.
Good king; cleansed the temple
N. Kingdom fell to Assyria in 722
Lord delivered him from his foolish choice to rebel against Assyria.
Manasseh2 Kings 21:1–18; 2 Chron. 33:1–20
696–642 B.C.
Evil and idolatrous
Tradition has him putting the prophet Isaiah to death.
Spiritual damage was irreversible after Manasseh’s reign.
Author and Date
Traditional ViewIsaiah – one author
8th century B.C.
Critical ViewMultiple authors
Others finished the book after Isaiah died.
Dates of Isaiah’s Ministry
Most scholars believe Isaiah 6:1-8 describes his divine call to become a prophet of God.
Isaiah 6:1–8 (NIV)
6 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Began ministry around 740 B.C., the year of King Uzziah’s death.
Possibly put to death during early part of Manasseh’s reign.
Possible dates of 740-690 B.C. for Isaiah’s ministry.
Isaiah’s Message
Forthtelling
Foretelling
Focus on Judah
Global in Scope
 
*Two primary sources were used for this lesson: Bryan E. Beyer, Encountering the Book of Isaiah, and Richard J. Schultz, “How Many Isaiahs Were There and What Does It Matter?”

Introduction to Isaiah

Introduction to Isaiah
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
 
“The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” (Isaiah 1:1, NIV)
 
 
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1, NIV)
 
 
2 Chronicles 26:1–23 (NIV)
26 Then all the people of Judah took Uzziah, who was sixteen years old, and made him king in place of his father Amaziah. 2 He was the one who rebuilt Elath and restored it to Judah after Amaziah rested with his ancestors.
3 Uzziah was sixteen years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-two years. His mother’s name was Jekoliah; she was from Jerusalem. 4 He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father Amaziah had done. 5 He sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God. As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success.
6 He went to war against the Philistines and broke down the walls of Gath, Jabneh and Ashdod. He then rebuilt towns near Ashdod and elsewhere among the Philistines. 7 God helped him against the Philistines and against the Arabs who lived in Gur Baal and against the Meunites. 8 The Ammonites brought tribute to Uzziah, and his fame spread as far as the border of Egypt, because he had become very powerful.
9 Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the Corner Gate, at the Valley Gate and at the angle of the wall, and he fortified them. 10 He also built towers in the wilderness and dug many cisterns, because he had much livestock in the foothills and in the plain. He had people working his fields and vineyards in the hills and in the fertile lands, for he loved the soil.
11 Uzziah had a well-trained army, ready to go out by divisions according to their numbers as mustered by Jeiel the secretary and Maaseiah the officer under the direction of Hananiah, one of the royal officials. 12 The total number of family leaders over the fighting men was 2,600. 13 Under their command was an army of 307,500 men trained for war, a powerful force to support the king against his enemies. 14 Uzziah provided shields, spears, helmets, coats of armor, bows and slingstones for the entire army. 15 In Jerusalem he made devices invented for use on the towers and on the corner defenses so that soldiers could shoot arrows and hurl large stones from the walls. His fame spread far and wide, for he was greatly helped until he became powerful.
16 But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the Lord his God, and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. 17 Azariah the priest with eighty other courageous priests of the Lord followed him in. 18 They confronted King Uzziah and said, “It is not right for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord. That is for the priests, the descendants of Aaron, who have been consecrated to burn incense. Leave the sanctuary, for you have been unfaithful; and you will not be honored by the Lord God.”
19 Uzziah, who had a censer in his hand ready to burn incense, became angry. While he was raging at the priests in their presence before the incense altar in the Lord’s temple, leprosy  broke out on his forehead. 20 When Azariah the chief priest and all the other priests looked at him, they saw that he had leprosy on his forehead, so they hurried him out. Indeed, he himself was eager to leave, because the Lord had afflicted him.
21 King Uzziah had leprosy until the day he died. He lived in a separate house —leprous, and banned from the temple of the Lord. Jotham his son had charge of the palace and governed the people of the land.
22 The other events of Uzziah’s reign, from beginning to end, are recorded by the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz. 23 Uzziah rested with his ancestors and was buried near them in a cemetery that belonged to the kings, for people said, “He had leprosy.” And Jotham his son succeeded him as king.
 

"Why Believe in Christianity Alone?" - Chapter 10 of "Know Why You Believe"

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in Christianity Alone?” – Chapter 10
Introduction
Christianity is not simply one more religion. It has implications that apply to all of life and the entire world.
One of the most offensive teachings of Christianity is that belief and eternal life.
“The Universality of Relativism”
Relativism and Postmodernism
Relativism and Religious Pluralism
Relativism and Tolerance
Reasons
How should Christians assess these three siblings?
Do Christians consider themselves a part of this family of siblings?
Do we see Christianity as true only because we believe it?
Do we think that Christianity “sees” a limited part of the same elephant that Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and others “see”?
Is tolerance a proper Christian attitude toward other “truths” and other religions?
Relativism & Christianity
“Is Christianity true for me, or is it true whether or not I believe it?”
The truth of Christianity is not dependent on whether or not I believe it. Christianity is true whether it is believed or not believed.
Subjective vs. Objective Truth
The Inescapability of Objective Truth
The “Unlivable” Nature of Relativism.
What is the best way to understand the world?Naturalism?Naturalism cannot escape complete relativity.
In full relativism, no idea can be intrinsically better than other ideas.
Hitler’s fascism and anti-Semitism, Stalin’s communism and barbarism, and the West’s freedom and democracy are all relative.
Christian Theism?Christian Theism recognizes that truth does not come from within us; it comes from outside of us.
All truth originates with God.
As creatures of God who are meant to reflect God, who is himself the truth, human beings are supposed to recognize and affirm the truth of who we are (God’s image) and of what the world is (created and sustained by God).
Truth cannot be relative. There is no way to account for it if it is.
The only way to account for truth is to see it as something that is both beyond us (because it is in God himself) and is given to us (in God’s revelation).
That way, we can affirm objective truth and, at the same time, recognize that the truth that we have is, in the first place, not ours, but God’s.
Religious Pluralism & Christianity
Relativism is the “big brother” of its smaller, more religious sibling, religious pluralism.
It reasons that we ought to affirm that all religions are at least partly correct because we can only “see,” or “sense,” in a limited way. Religious pluralism recognizes the finitude of human existence.
Religious pluralism rightly recognizes our limitations in “seeing,” but it does not account for gracious divine revelation.
Christianity gives a transcendent reason to recognize the world as created, and human beings as specially endowed with God’s image at creation.
It is a transcendent reason because, as Scripture begins, we recognize that before all things began, God was.
God, who transcends creation, creates all other things.
Christ as the only way to God is the story of the whole Bible. It actually begins in the Garden, immediately after the entrance of sin in the world (Genesis 3:15).
The rest of the Old Testament testifies to this one exclusive Redeemer who will come to solve the problem that people produce and propagate (Luke 24:24-27).
Christ has been the only way to God since sin entered the world.
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
No clearer statement of the exclusiveness of Christianity could be given, and it comes in the context of all of Scripture.
What separates us from God is not that we don’t perform the proper religious functions, or that we don’t live good enough lives.
What separates us from God is our sin.
And the only way that our sin can be overcome is if someone takes on the penalty of our sin, including death, and conquers it.
Only Christ can do that. No one else can.
“Jesus is…the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:11-12)
Tolerance & Christianity
The central question with tolerance is why someone would extol its virtues.
It is very often thought that the reason we are to be tolerant is because truth is relative. No one religion, or position, is able to describe anything exhaustively.
We should be tolerant of anyone else’s view because it’s just another version of truth.
But tolerance doesn’t have to be linked to relativism and religious pluralism.
Instead, tolerance can be what it is in the context of the exclusive claims of Christianity.
Christ said that he was the only way to the Father, but he lived a life that was marked by love and compassion, even to his enemies.
The way of Christianity is a way of tolerance.
But that tolerance has its roots in the God who made and controls all that is.
It is a tolerance that has its foundation in God’s comprehensive control of all things, including the fact that his gospel is a gospel that alone brings and produces peace, not war.
Christianity can hold to the exclusive truth of the gospel while demonstrating love to others.
Responses
Probably the most prominent response to Christian exclusiveness is some kind of inclusiveness.
To be so exclusive, some will think, is to exclude so many others and all other religions.
However, many other religions are equally as exclusive as Christianity (ex. Islam).
Why can Christianity not just include everyone, in whatever way, who is trying to follow a path?
Complete inclusivity ultimately leads to complete relativism – no truth is better than any other truth.
For someone to be truly “inclusive” means that even those who believe that Christianity is exclusive have to be “included” in the universal religion.
But that is not what those who want to be inclusive believe.
Those who think that everyone should be included also think that everyone should think that everyone should be included!
When that is not true, then it turns out that the inclusive person is just as exclusive as the exclusive person.
In the end, the inclusive person is just as exclusive as the ones they seek to oppose.
Conclusion
It is important to know—from a Christian perspective eternally important—what, or in whom, we believe.
The fact that our belief is exclusive is no argument against it. It shows it to be in some ways like beliefs that all people hold.
The important and central question is not what do I believe and who does it include. The central question is, Is my belief true?
Christianity says it is true only when it has its focus in Jesus—the One who himself is the Truth.
Questions
Can you think of a religion or person whose beliefs truly include all people? Why or why not?
If all people are exclusive in their beliefs, why is Christianity’s exclusiveness so offensive to many people?
Aside from those given in the book, can you name other examples of God’s tolerance toward those who are his enemies?

"Why Believe in God Despite the Evil in the World?" - Chapter 9 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in God Despite the Evil in the World?” – Chapter 9
Introduction
The Pervasiveness of Evil
The Root of Evil
The Problem of Evil for the Christian FaithIs there a God?
Is He good?
Is He powerful?
Then, why is there evil and suffering?
The Problem
Christians should be “ready to give an answer” regarding the problem of evil, because it directly relates to our belief in God and to the character of our God.
Secularists also have a “problem of evil.” They have no way of explaining what evil is.If everything is chance, then shouldn’t we expect “accidents” and “tragedy”?
If everything is chance, then how can there be moral categories of good and evil?
The character of our God and the presence of evil.God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good.
There is a vast amount of evil in the world.
How do we reconcile these truths?
The problem of evil is not only philosophical; it is also personal.
What are the solutions to the philosophical and personal dilemma of the presence of evil in the world?
Potential solutions cannot create bigger problems.We can’t deny one of God’s attributes.
Atheists suggest we give up our belief in God because they attempt to show the direct conflict between our belief in God and the presence of evil in the world.
But, is there another way? Is there a way to maintain faith in the God of Scripture while holding to a compelling explanation for the presence of evil in the world?
Reasons
We can’t deny the existence of God or one of his core attributes; so, the challenge is put to Christians to come up with a “God-justifying” reason for evil.Theodicy – what reasons or justification God could have in creating a world that contains so much evil.“Greater Good Defense”
The “non-existence” of evil – Augustine
The “Free Will” Defense
Biblical Reasons
The ultimate explanation for why evil is in the world must come from Scripture.
Three central teachings of Scripture that provide clarity on this issue:GodThe Creator and Sustainer of Creation
God’s Eternal Decree – Evil was not a “surprise” to God. It was all a part of his all-inclusive, eternal, sovereign decree.
Image of GodHuman beings are created in the image of God with dignity and dominion.
Humanity had a responsible relationship to God, with responsibility that included dominion over what God had made.
Their dominion was not exhaustive; there were limitations. God is still sovereign.
Adam and Eve sought to extend their dominion beyond God’s boundaries.
These actions had consequences for humanity and all of creation.
God and Image of GodEverything that happens in the world was initiated by God in eternity past.
Even the remedy for the problem was guaranteed before creation ever was.
It was planned by God that those made in his image would be responsible agents in God’s world.
When Adam and Eve sinned, God judged them for their disobedience.
Their sin brought real consequences, both to themselves and to all creation.
God with UsGod himself sees the incompatibility of his character and evil as a serious problem.
God determined to deal with it in a way that deeply involves him.
God is not “outside” the problem of evil.
God involves himself in dealing with the problem of evil in the Garden in Gen. 3.
“Theodicy” is solved by “Theophany.”
God comes down to his creation to solve the problem of evil.
The ultimate and permanent “theophany” of God is Jesus Christ, who is God with us.
Jesus Christ, as fully God and fully man as one person, came into this world to set right what we ruined.
The cost that Christ paid to deal with our problem of sin was high – it involved death and taking on himself the wrath of God against evil.
The problem of evil could be conquered only if the penalty we should pay was paid by him, the innocent one.
God, in the person of his Son, comes to us to solve the horrendous problem that we started and that only he could finish.
No greater concern for the “problem of evil” could God show than the sending of his only Son to be forsaken by him and to die.
The problem of evil, which is our fault, finds its solution only when God solves it.
Responses
Why did God create then, knowing that sin and evil would follow?We don’t have all the answers; we can’t see all things as God sees them. We must not “condemn God in order to justify ourselves.” (Job 40:8)
God didn’t provide answers to Job, but he did remind him of his character.
But that still doesn’t answer the question! Why would God plan this kind of a world?This is the wrong focus.
A better question would be: “Why would God, from eternity past, plan and create a world where he himself, in the person of his Son, would come and suffer and die, being forsaken by his Father on the cross, to bring rebellious human creatures to himself?”
His plan, from all eternity, included suffering in it—the suffering and death of his Son.
And this is where the Bible requires that we stop asking the question.God has given us all we need to know about the solution to the problem of evil.
We stop asking because of the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. He is God and we are not.
God has solved the problem of evil. The solution is working itself out in history until the most obvious indication of the problem—death itself—will finally be destroyed.
In the meantime, the proper response to the problem of evil is to trust him.
Since God is God, we can place ourselves in the hands of the one who knows the end from the beginning, who through Christ has provided our deliverance from evil for eternity.
Questions
Why is God’s solution to the problem of evil not satisfactory for some people?
What do you know of how other religions deal with the problem of evil?
Why do you think Paul calls death the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26)?

"Why Believe in God in the Face of Modern Science?" - Chapter 8 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in God in the Face of Modern Science?” – Chapter 8
Introduction
ShortsightednessWhen we consider our present circumstances, we lack a historical horizon to give us perspective.
The comforts and conveniences that we use every day are relatively new in the history of the world.
This historical shortsightedness is detrimental:Whenever we ignore anything beyond our own circumstances, we tend to think that what is “now” is normal. We lose a critical perspective.
We lose context.
When we lose historical perspective, we tend to think that what is new is always better.Technology makes some things better but some things worse.
Now is not always normal. Newer is not always better.
Reasons
The purpose of this lesson is to provide a historical perspective on the relationship between science and Christianity.
Modern science began in the nineteenth century when science was defined and carried out in a radically different way than before.
The word “scientist” was not even coined until the nineteenth century.
There are two reasons for believing in Christianity in the face of modern science: Historical
Foundational
Historical Reasons
In its historical context, the relationship of science and Christian belief has been mostly harmonious, not hostile.
Natural Philosophy or Natural Theology
Natural philosophy concerned itself with the workings of nature. It sought to discover and utilize the forces and laws of nature in order: To better understand how the world works
To improve the quality of life for people
The goal of natural philosophy (or theology) was to connect the workings of the world with the “One” thing or being that could explain and justify those workings.
Natural philosophy intuitively recognized that there had to be something that provided for the harmonious display of nature, something that connected all the different parts.
From a Christian perspective “natural theology” understood that “nature” was a “book” written by the one God and that it could only be properly understood through God’s written book, the Bible.Francis Bacon (1561-1626)“Scientific Method”
Offered a genuinely Christian approach to nature. Bacon tried to eliminate pagan roots of natural philosophy and see its task in light of Christianity.
Robert Boyle (1627-1691)One of the founders of modern chemistry
Believed that science could make no progress if viewed through atheistic assumptions.
It was God’s providence that provided for the constancy and regular and rapid motions of celestial bodies.
This consistency had to be there in order to pursue science.
Isaac Newton (1642-1726)One of the most influential thinkers in Western civilization.
Recognized that his task was dependent on the character and activity of God.God, Providence, and therefore theology was central to any proper understanding of science and nature.
The modern antipathy between science and Christianity is not normal in history.
Science and Christianity are fully compatible and meant to work together.
The divide between science and Christianity began to form during the Enlightenment.All external authorities began to be challenged.
The problem with challenging all authority is that the one challenging becomes the ultimate authority.
The Age of Reason sought to ground all truth in individual thinking. Truth could not come from religion or a creed. The search for “real truth” needed to throw off the shackles of religion.
We have all now been “breathing the air” of the Enlightenment for 300 years.
Its influence is profound, deep, and nearly universal.
The “battle” between science and Christianity began in earnest in America in the mid-19th century.John William Draper – “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science”
Andrew Dickson White – “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom”
Charles Darwin – “The Origin of the Species”Probably the greatest influence on the divide between science and Christianity in the last 150+ years.
In the history of science, Darwin’s view is new, but it is not, from the historical perspective, normal.
The norm in the history of science was to see nature as understandable only within the context of nature’s God.
Darwin’s view didn’t need God.
Foundational Reasons
New is not necessarily normal, and new is not always better.
Darwin’s views are not better because they are new.
The modern assumption of the separate and hostile spheres of religion and science is virtually universal.
The concept of an unguided process of species development and change is nearly universal in the realm of science today.
Richard Dawkins – “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
To hold a Christian worldview and not believe in evolution is to invite the hatred (or pity) of much of today’s society.
How could someone not believe in evolution in the 21st century?Initial thoughts:The theory of evolution has gone through numerous changes and mutations since its ascendancy in the last hundred years. There are really numerous theories of evolution (not just one).
The main reason Darwin’s theory caught on and developed is not because it was a completely new and previously never conceived theory. Ideas like Darwin’s can be traced back to ancient Greece.
Darwin’s theories caught on and spread like wild fire because they were planted in the soil of the of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was intent on abolishing all external authority and finding answers by human reason alone.
Evolution and Enlightenment goals were mutually affirming and acted like gasoline being poured on a small flame.
With an evolutionary explanation for all things, the Enlightenment could now get rid of God once and for all.
Evolution suffers from a major flaw: it is intellectually incoherent (despite its near universal acceptance).Evolution believes the universe is random and chance-produced and only natural (no supernatural allowed) and only made up of matter (nothing immaterial or spiritual).
Everything we believe about this view is produced somehow by the material that makes up a human being. All of our beliefs are a product of the matter that composes our bodies.
If all of this is true, how can we have any guarantee that our beliefs our true?These beliefs might help us adapt to our environment.
But whether our beliefs are true or not cannot be determined simply through the material workings of our brains and bodies.
Belief in evolution is nothing more than a random collection of chemical reactions or bodily materials. It is no more special or unique than carbonated bubbles.
Evolution in reality has no foundation. It is a theory that cannot make sense of itself.
A lack of foundation is not just an academic or philosophical problem; it goes to the heart of what is true and why it is true.
An atheistic physicist has no way to affirm or argue why the laws of physics are the way they are. He can only teach the laws. He has no way to guarantee that the laws are actually laws and that they will be there tomorrow and continue to run in a predictable pattern.
In order to approach the world in any kind of predictable and stable way, we must assume some organizing principle or being that makes it predictable and stable.
Any theory that is based only on the natural and the material will never be able to make sense of the world.
In the history of science, the recognition of a unifying principle of nature found its true home in Christianity. It gives us a true starting point for a proper understanding of human life and all of nature.
Given the relative novelty of modern science it would be more appropriate to ask how could someone believe in modern science in the face of Christianity?
The Enlightenment was not an argument that human beings were self-sufficient; it was a declaration that they wanted to be.
Modern science has done nothing to discredit the truths of Christianity; it has simply dismissed them.
The rejection of Christianity is more about self-autonomy than it is about “science.”
Unlike unguided evolution, belief in Christianity has a foundation. That foundation is in what God has said in his Word and his world.
Science can flourish with a solid foundation in God’s revelation.
Without this foundation the scientist has no place to stand. He is unable to produce the coherence needed for science to thrive.
Responses
What about the fossil record that show evolutionary changes in species?Darwin himself recognized that the fossil record was actually an evidential argument against evolution.
If evolution were true, then we should have an abundance of fossils of intermediate species not just changes within species.
Some scientists responded with “punctuated equilibrium” – quick evolutionary changes that didn’t have time to leave a fossil record of intermediate species.This is only a red herring solely designed because of the lack of fossil evidence of intermediate species, not because there is actually any evidence of rapid evolutionary change.
The evolutionary view of the fossil record assumes a principle of uniformity, that things have progressed at relatively stable rates throughout time. But there is really no scientific evidence of this kind of uniformity; it is simply assumed.
Scripture provides one explanation for the fossil record: the cataclysmic universal flood. Given the flood we simply cannot assume a principle of uniformity in the formation of fossils and other evidence.
Don’t Christians just assume their position, while evolution is based on scientific evidence?Lewis: “I believe Christianity as I believe the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
We believe Christianity because we see it. We see it in God’s world. We see it in Scripture. We see it in the church. We see it in our friends and ourselves. It is our life.
Through Christianity we see everything else and make sense of God’s world.
Christianity is a full worldview that can carry the weight of all of life’s most important questions.
Evolution is not a comprehensive worldview; it cannot answer many of life’s questions. It doesn’t provide a full view of the world. It can’t even sufficiently account for its own theory.
Evolution is random, unguided, and without moral or ethical content.Christianity provides the only sure foundation for scientific inquiry.
Questions
Why is it important for most who believe in evolution that it be unguided?
How should Christians respond to the Enlightenment view of human reason?
In what ways does the abundance of design in the universe refute typical views of evolution?
Is it possible to believe what the Bible says and to believe in evolution?

"Why Believe in Life after Death?" - Chapter 7 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in Life after Death?” – Chapter 7
Chapter Overview
Introduction
ReasonsProblems with Persons
Problems with Proofs
Christianity and Life
Responses
Questions
Introduction
An overwhelming majority of people believe in an afterlife.75% believed in life after death.
82% believed they would go to heaven.
But why? Why do most people believe in life after death?
Many believe in an afterlife but without sufficient reasons for doing so.
“Heavenly Tourism” books are popular because people are looking for evidence.
Reasons
A minority (avowed atheists) will prefer to argue that death is the end of everything.
The majority who believe in the afterlife never sufficiently ask the “why” question.
Some have tried to scientifically prove the existence of the afterlife, but these generally come from “near-death” experiences.
But “nearly dead” is not the same thing as “dead.” So, these are not sufficient proof.
There are two dominant traditions that explain the prevalence of belief in an afterlife in Western culture:Christianity and its remnant ideas
Greek philosophy (Plato)The dominant tradition in Greek philosophy believed in the immortality of the soul.
Greek philosophy popularized the concept of a “soul.”
Problems with Persons
Greek philosophy took for granted that there was some kind of “animating” or life-giving aspect to human beings.Plato thought this “soul” was immortal.
Souls preexisted their bodies and existed after they died.
This idea of an immortal soul that continues after we die is still the majority opinion in Western culture.
Most of us recognize that there is more to us and our existence than just our physical bodies and our physical appearance.
Because of Greek influence, most philosophers throughout time have believed in a duality of body and soul.
The problem is that this concept is virtually impossible to prove philosophically or scientifically.Philosophy can’t account for “consciousness.”
What makes us the same person even while our physical bodies grow and change, sometimes drastically?Most of our bodily cells completely replace themselves every 7-10 years.
Do our memories make us a person?What happens if we lose our memories?
How many retained memories constitute a “person”?
Does “continuity of consciousness” make us a person?What about sleep and those in a coma?
Even though we don’t have conclusive answers to these questions, we assume that we are the same persons that we were decades ago. We have not become different persons over time.
We seem to inherently believe in the idea of “personhood” or “consciousness” that is separate from mere biology.
What is significant is that there is a wildly popular belief in the reality of life after death without adequate or successful reason for that belief.
Problems with Proofs
Some Christians have attempted philosophical or scientific proofs, but without much success.
Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) attempted to refute deists by affirming belief in the supernatural and life beyond death.
Butler argued that we all use reason and perception, even over various changes in time, even if we don’t know where they come from or how they are put into practice by us.
In other words, since we use our reason and our senses even though we have no idea of their source, can’t we also recognize that there is a high probability that they will continue after our physical existence ceases?
Problems with this type of “proof”:Butler never really advanced much beyond the typical philosophical argument for the reality of life after death. Like philosophy, there were things he couldn’t sufficiently account for.
The foundation of his argument was in what we do not know and then moves to some kind of probability.
These “proofs” still only leave us with “probability.” This is not sufficient warrant to believe in life after death.
How can it be “probable” that our consciousness and our ability to reason and perceive will continue after death if we don’t even know for sure where they come from or how they function in this life?
We need more solid reasons for believing in the afterlife than philosophy can give us.
The Christian faith and the biblical story provide a coherent explanation for “personhood” as well as the reality of life after death.
Christianity and Life
Only the Christian position is able to give a full account of what it means to be a person and of what life as a person means.
Humanism (and pure naturalistic atheism) is incapable of providing meaning and dignity to human personhood.For the naturalist, the human body is just a collection of physical materials that will one day decompose and be no different than a trash heap.
And yet the “Humanist Manifesto II” declares: “The preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value.”
But how is our life precious if it is just a collection of cells and physical materials that arrived completely by accident?
The humanistic position on human personhood is inherently contradictory.
“Preciousness” and “dignity” are terms that point beyond the material and the accidental.
There is only one way to ascribe dignity to human persons: They have to be more than their simple physical existence.
The Christian message provides a more coherent framework for understanding personhood.
Human beings were made from the dust of the ground as were the animals, but then a significant difference took place:God breathed the breath of life into mankind and the human being became a living person or living soul (Gen. 2:7).
God made human beings in his image and likeness.Dignity of BeingSelf-consciousness
Reason
Language and Communication
Morality – sense of right and wrong
An immortal “breath of life”
Dignity of FunctionDominion over creation
Responsibility to care for creation
Special relationship with God
The original command of God to Adam and Eve points in the direction of permanent life:If they had never disobeyed, they would have lived forever.
There would be no life “after death,” because there would be no death.
Adam’s disobedience brought death, which was “unnatural.” It was part of the curse.
Death is not the end of the story.
God provides a way for fellowship with him to continue.Promise of a “seed” to come.
Clothed with animal skins from sacrifice.
We see pointers throughout the Bible of life beyond death:Enoch “walked with God” and “was not” for “God took him.” (Gen. 5:24)
God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – not the God of the dead but the living.
Jesus speaks of a divide separating those who die in Christ and those who do not.The rich man and Lazarus
They both continued to exist in consciousness after death, but with two radically different destinies.
For those who die in Christ, existence continues in him and with God.
For those who die in their sins, existence continues, but it consists of nothing but eternal torment (Luke 13:28-30).
The “image of God” in Scripture includes an inbreathed life, an inbreathed character, that is distinct from everything else in creation.It implies a relationship with God for eternity that ends either in eternal fellowship with him or in eternal torment under his wrath.
In either case, human beings continue to exist beyond death.
The troubling thing about the poll of people who believed in the afterlife is that 82% of them believed they were going to heaven.This demonstrates a great lack of understanding about salvation.
On what basis do they believe that they will go to heaven?Probably on the same unsure foundation as their belief in the afterlife in general.
They are holding on to some basic remnants of Christianity without the true biblical substance.
Some clarifications:When we die, it is not just a “soul” (a thing) that goes to heaven (Greek philosophy).
The Bible speaks of “us” personally going to be with the Lord.
Our separation from our bodies when we die is an abnormal separation.For the Christian, to be “with Christ” after death is to be absent from the body.
But there will be a time, at the end of time, when we will receive resurrected bodies.
The time between our death and the end of time is commonly called the “intermediate state.”This means that even though we live “with Christ” after we die, we have not yet become what we will be for eternity.
In Scripture, our final destination is not heaven.
The place where Christians will reside for eternity is called “a new heaven and a new earth.” It will be a real physical place, and we will have real bodies (imperishable).
While Christians live eternally in a new heaven and new earth, those who die in rebellion against God will experience eternal death. It is called the “second death.”
The second death is not an end, but an eternal existence. It is the final and eternal punishment for sin.
Existence after death is a fact of life. A majority of people believe it. The only real reason to believe it, however, is given to us in the Christian faith.
Responses
The primary objection to the idea of life after death is that there is no real evidence for it. Neither philosophy nor science can provide an adequate explanation or proof.
There is, however, evidence for life after death.The Bible records real historical events.
Biblical events did not take place in a hidden corner.
The Bible records numerous facts about life after death, including testimonies from some who actually saw those alive who had previously died (Mark 9:2-8).
It is our status as “image of God” that alone can support our belief that there is more to us than our physical bodies, and that we, as persons, will exist for eternity.But because the “image of God” is defaced by the effects of sin, our existence can be restored to true life again only if we are, by faith, in Christ.
Questions
What evidence is there that people are more than simply material bodies?
Why is it important for us to receive new spiritual bodies in the end?
Why do most people believe that they will spend life after death in heaven?

"Why Believe in Salvation?" - Chapter 6 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in Salvation?” – Chapter 6
Chapter Overview
ReasonsThe God Who Saves
The “People” Problem
The Divine Design
Divine Determination
Response
Conclusion
Questions
Reasons
The God Who Saves
Who is the God who saves?Triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit
No salvation without the harmonious but distinct operations of the triune God.The Father sends the Son.
The Son comes as a man to suffer, die, rise, and ascend.
The Spirit glorifies the Son and applies the redemption accomplished by the Son.
The “People” Problem
The Human ConditionMust be understood through the lens of God and his Word.
Made by God in his image.Given responsibility over creation.
Given moral commands to be obeyed.
Original human parents rebelled.
Adam, our representative, plunged all of humanity into the universal condition of sin.
All of humanity is now in this fallen sinful condition and liable to the judgment of God.
Death is the penalty for sin against God.
Now, “There is no one righteous; there is no one who seeks God; there is no one who does good.”
All of humanity is guilty of sin and condemned to death and all of creation suffers under the weight of the curse.
We cannot measure up to God’s standard.
The Need for DeliveranceIt is essential to understand that sin and death is the universal condition of humanity in order to understand salvation.
“Salvation” means there must be deliverance from something.
Divine salvation is deliverance from sin and its consequences.
We All Need SalvationComparing ourselves with others doesn’t work, because the standard is God.
Salvation is not just for the “really wicked,” because we are all wicked.
We are all rebels against God, and we all need to be saved.
The Divine Design
The One OffendedGod is holy and righteous.
Sin is an offence against God’s holy and righteous character.
God’s holiness and righteousness demand that he judge sin.
God cannot simply overlook our rebellion.
We are condemned sinners; we cannot remedy our standing before God.
The One Offended Removes the OffenceOur sinful and rebellious condition is not the end of the story.
God has determined to rescue and forgive sinners.
Salvation is God’s design.There is no possibility of self-atonement.
Salvation involves atonement for sin by means of sacrificial death.
The death that sin brings can be covered only by the death that bloodshed requires.
The only sacrifice that can truly cover our sin is a sacrifice that God initiates, that he can accept, and includes the shedding of blood.
But more than an animal sacrifice is required to atone for human sin.
Only another human being in God’s image can stand in the place of another person.
Only a perfect, spotless human being can stand in the place of a condemned, guilty person.
Divine Determination
Christ, the Final SacrificeThe good news is that God’s attitude toward sin is not only to punish it. God also determines to cover the sin that we have brought into the world.
Animal sacrifices in the OT were only provisional and temporary.
Only the perfect God-man, Jesus Christ, could truly atone for our sins.
Christ’s whole work from Bethlehem to Jerusalem and then to heaven is necessary for our salvation:Incarnation as a man to represent us.
Life of perfect obedience.
Sacrificial, blood-shedding death as an atonement.
Resurrection as validation of his atonement and victor over death and the forces of evil.
Ascension to reign at God’s right hand.
The sacrifice that God requires was now met in the Son. It was met because God provided it. He provided it in his own Son.
He alone was able to accomplish what we could not accomplish in order to provide a solution to the problem that we ourselves perpetuate in the world.
Response
Unless we respond properly to what God has done, we will remain in our sins and will suffer the deserved penalty, which is eternal death.
What Christ has done has to be applied to us to be effective in and for us.
What is the response?Believe the Lord Jesus Christ.
What does this mean?
Saving FaithNot just a mental acknowledgment of facts about Christ
Acknowledgment of sin and rebellion and a renouncing of it and desire to turn from it
Acknowledgment of personal inability and insufficiency to save ourselves
Trust/reliance on Christ aloneWhen we trust Christ, we place ourselves—our very lives each and every day—into his hands.
Saving Faith Is a Work of GraceIt is an awakening and transformation by God himself.
Our eyes are opened to see things properly for the first time. We see the world as God’s world.
We see Christ, our Savior, as the only one capable of delivering us from eternal peril.
He transports us from the darkness of our sin into the light of his glorious grace.
Conclusion
We can’t believe in salvation without believing in sin (our sinfulness).
We can’t believe in sin without believing in the holy, righteous God whom we have offended.
When we see God as he has revealed himself to us in creation and in his Word and when we see ourselves as we truly are, we recognize that we need God’s salvation.
We believe in salvation, because without it we perish.
A further argument for the truthfulness of biblical salvation is that it is so unlike every other religion in the world.Every religion has some way of reaching the “right” place, but it is always by human effort.
Christianity is unique in that it tells the story of a holy God who in grace condescends to save those who rebelled against him.
Questions
What would God be like if he did not punish sin?
Why is death deserved for those who sin?
Are there different kinds of “belief”?What is biblical saving faith?
What are some reasons why people do not trust in Christ to be saved from their sins?

"Why Believe Jesus Rose from the Dead?" - Chapter 5 of Know Why You Beleive

KNOW WHY YOU BELIEVEBy K. Scott Oliphint
Why Believe Jesus Rose from the Dead? – Chapter 5
Reasons⦁ Historical Reasons⦁ Christian Reasons
Historical Reasons⦁ How can we prove that an event actually happened in history when all of the original people and witnesses involved are now dead?⦁ How can two people investigate all of the historical evidence and have the same information and come to opposite conclusions?
Two Reasons:○ The nature of historical investigation
► Uses limited resources► Gaps in knowledge and data► Purpose not to give absolute certainty► Historical evidence can only bring us to a probably conclusion.
○ The nature of presuppositions
► Presuppositions are even more stubborn than facts.► We all have basic commitments that force us to interpret facts a certain way.► Our basic commitments lead us to different conclusions.
Christian Reasons⦁ The historical reasons point to the probability of the resurrection of Jesus.⦁ Historical reasons point to the credibility of the Christian faith.⦁ Christianity has more historical evidence than any other religion.⦁ Historical data can support our belief in the resurrection, but this evidence is insufficient to conclusively answer the “why” question.
○ Why believe Jesus rose from the dead?
⦁ The center of our response to the “why” question is that, without the resurrection of Christ, there is no Christianity at all.
○ The historical fact of the resurrection and the “meaning” of the resurrection go together.○ The resurrection is the “key” that unlocks the whole of Christianity.
⦁ Three aspects of the resurrection make it central to Christianity:
○ “According to the Scriptures”○ “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith…”○ “The firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep…”
⦁ Christians believe in life after death because Jesus is risen.
○ He is not probably risen or probably alive.○ That only leads to the conclusion that our faith is probably in vain.○ But if he is risen indeed, and because he lives, we will live.
⦁ Only Scripture testifying of itself through the Holy Spirit can give ultimate certainty.⦁ Our belief in life after death hangs on the resurrection of Christ.
○ Life and death are more than physical concepts in Scripture○ Death in Scripture is an existence without fellowship and communion with God.○ Life is union with Christ and eternal existence in the presence of God in his eternal kingdom.
Responses⦁ Objections based on Historical Evidence⦁ Objections based on the “problem” of miracles⦁ Objections based on presuppositions and impossible demands of proof on Christians.
Conclusion⦁ Historical Evidence is helpful but insufficient⦁ The Holy Spirit must open the eyes of faith through the testimony of the Scriptures.⦁ “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:27-31)
Questions⦁ How does Scripture make clear that the resurrection of Christ was a public event?⦁ Why couldn’t Jesus just come to earth and give life to any who trust in him? Why did he have to be raised from the dead?⦁ What do you think is the most significant objection to the resurrection of Christ? How would you respond?

"Why Believe in Miracles?" - Chapter 4 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
“Why Believe in Miracles?” – Chapter 4
Lesson Overview
ReasonsFrom Hume to Hitchens
Theism to the Rescue?
Christian Theism to the Rescue
Responses
Conclusion
Reasons
From Hume to Hitchens
Objections to the Idea of MiraclesDavid Hume (1711-1776)Empiricism – we can know only what we experience through the senses (“naturalism”). Everything else is illusion.“A wise man…proportions his belief to the evidence.”
If there is no evidence for a miracle, or if the “proportion” of evidence is only slight, the possibility of the miracle must be rejected.
Probability – the likelihood of something happening or taking place.Probability is in part determined and dependent on other things.
The probability that I will drive to work depends on what day it is.
Hume’s philosophy:Can it be measured or quantified?
Can it be sensed by experience?
Is it matter or physical?
No to all of these: “Commit it then to the flames: for it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Christianity is by definition ruled out of bounds in this philosophy.
No place for miracles or “supernatural.”
Hume’s definition of a miracle: “an act which is a violation of the laws of nature.” Since the laws of nature are unalterable and fixed, then there can be no such thing as miracles which violate these fixed laws.
Which is more probable? To think that a man was raised from the dead or to think that a person was deceived into thinking someone was raised from the dead?
So, Hume rejects miracles on the basis of empiricism (what is experienced through the senses) and probability (miracles are not as likely as other more likely explanations).
Hume’s argument against miracles is still followed today by many atheists. It is viewed as the preeminent argument against miracles and the supernatural.Christopher Hitchens is a modern example.
Theism to the Rescue?
There is a major flaw in Hume’s argument: his understanding of “nature”It assumes that no one has ever experienced a miracle.
Empiricism only works as an argument against miracles if miracles have never happened in anyone’s experience and perceived by the senses.
The only way to know with certainty that no one has ever experienced a miracle is if miracles are impossible.
Arguing in a circle: miracles are impossible because no one has ever experienced them; no one has ever experienced them because miracles are not “normal” and “natural” – thus not possible.
What if we suppose the existence of God—that there is more to what is “natural” than what can be seen or experienced empirically?
Would establishing God’s existence prove the possibility of miracles?
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) didn’t think so.A Jewish theist who reasoned that the unchangeability of God required the unchangeability of nature – no miracles.
The miracles of the Old Testament were “natural” occurrences that only appeared new or supernatural because of man’s ignorance.
So, like Hume, Spinoza thought that “witnesses” of miracles were themselves deceived or confused.
Bare theism alone does not solve the debate over miracles.Deism would deny miracles based on the unchangeability of the nature God made. He wound it up and let it go.
Christian Theism to the Rescue
Some flaws in definitions that need correcting:The assumption that “nature” is all there is and that it moves on its own according to unchangeable laws/forces.
The assumption that God’s unchangeability prevents him from disrupting or momentarily changing the “laws of nature.”
Is “nature” moving on its own?The Scriptures know nothing of a “nature” or creation that moves on its own.Psalm 104:10-13: “He makes springs pour water into the ravines… He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.”
The workings of nature are the workings of the God who made it.
The “laws of nature” are actually the faithful activity of a faithful God.
Hume denied miracles because he defined nature as a predictable, closed system.
Spinoza denied miracles because he defined nature as invariably law-like.
Both of these conclusions misunderstand “nature.”Nature is what it is because God is working in and through it – actively and dynamically.
Why would God want to act differently in his world at special times?Miracles are not God’s magic tricks.
They are not arbitrary displays of God’s power.
They are given to point toward the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
Miracles are testimonies; they communicate a message. That message is ultimately pointing to salvation through Christ.
Example:Jesus calms the sea (Mark 4; Matt 8; Luke 8).Given to increase the faith of his disciples in their Savior.
This miracle demonstrated the nature of the kingdom of God that Jesus had been teaching his disciples about.
Miracles are given to authenticate the message and the messenger.
The works affirm the words.
The calming of the sea was intended to point the disciples to Psalm 107:“He stilled the storm to a whisper… Let them gives thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind.”
The disciples were meant to see that Jesus was himself the Lord of creation who calmed the sea in Psalm 107.
Miracles are intended to point to something higher. They accompany the proclamation of redemptive truth.When you come across a miracle in Scripture, ask “What redemptive truth is God communicating through this miracle?”
Responses
Are Christians arguing in a circle in the same way as David Hume?There is an important difference:When Hume assumed “nature” as a closed, law-like uniformity he was making an assumption that he could not prove because he had not experienced all of nature. He had not experienced the entire system that he speculated about.
When Christians begin with God, we are not beginning with our limited experiences. Our belief in God is grounded in what he has said and done.
We begin with God not because we “sense” him, but because he has spoken.
We do not believe that we can know only what we experience. We can know because of who God is and what he has done.
How can we believe in an unchangeable God who at times disrupts the normal pattern of nature/creation?The unchangeable God is not aloof, disconnected from his world.
We believe in the Triune God; we believe that God the Son became flesh and lived among us. This was the “Grand Miracle” and certainly a disruption of the normal order of things.
God is dynamically, actively involved.
God is at work in his world and in history to save a sinful people.
All the miracles in the Bible are meant to point to, explain, and testify to that great and glorious “Grand Miracle” of God coming to man by becoming a man.
All other miracles serve that one redemptive act of God.
Conclusion
We believe in miracles because we believe in Christ.
When we believe in Christ, we believe that he is the greatest miracle of all.
Once we believe in him, it is no step at all to believe in those great acts of God that show us his plan of redemption, in and through his Son.

"Why Believe in Jesus?" - Chapter 3 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
Why Believe in Jesus? – Chapter 3
Introduction
⦁ What makes someone worthy of worship?
⦁ Teaching?⦁ Miracles?⦁ Creator of a movement?⦁ Sacrificing for others?
⦁ Many have done these things, so why worship Jesus? What makes Jesus worthy of worship?
Where Do We Begin?
⦁ Will we start with a search for a “historical” Jesus where only the natural is allowable?⦁ Beginning with this premise, the conclusion is already predetermined. Jesus can be nothing more than an influential teacher who started a movement. ⦁ If we start with our own assumed authority, rather than the Bible’s authority, we wind up with teachings and ideas that have no more authority than our own basic prejudices.⦁ We cannot begin with our own prejudices based on our own authority. ⦁ Why believe in Jesus?
⦁ The Bible gives us the answer. The Jesus we are to believe in must be the Christ of the Bible. The Jesus we create with our own ideas is not the real Jesus.
The Jesus of the New Testament
“In simple fact, Jesus’ career was not that of an ordinary man: and the dilemma is inevitable that He was either something more than a normal man or something less. We, like His contemporaries—and His contemporaries like us—have only the alternatives: either supernatural or subnormal, either Divine or else `out of His mind.’” Benjamin Warfield
⦁ The Bible’s claims are too extraordinary for Jesus to be just an ordinary man:
⦁ Jesus is both God and man.
⦁ John tells us that Jesus Christ is the one who was in the beginning, who created all things, who is, as fully God, with God and who took on human flesh in order to live among us. (John 1:1-3, 14)
⦁ From the very beginning, Jesus’ life was supernatural; nothing was ordinary.
⦁ From his virgin conception and birth to his death, resurrection, and ascension, nothing was ordinary.⦁ His birth marks the center of world history.
⦁ Jesus’ mission was to rescue sinners and end the reign of sin and its devastating effects.⦁ The eternal divine Word took on human nature and lived among us. He did not remain distant and aloof. He lived among the people and exposed himself to the hardships, ridicule, and persecution.⦁ Jesus engaged in a public ministry, healing the physically afflicted, liberating the demon possessed, and encouraging the downtrodden.⦁ The claims that Jesus made about himself do not allow us to think of him as a normal teacher:
⦁ Authority to forgive sin⦁ Existed before Abraham as the “I Am”⦁ Identified himself as the Son of Man (Messiah) and Son of God⦁ Predicted that he would rise from the dead on the third day after his death
The Jesus of the Old Testament
⦁ The revelation of who Jesus is does not start in the NT; the biblical picture of Jesus begins immediately after the entrance of sin in humanity.
⦁ He is the eternal Word and Creator.⦁ He is the “seed of the woman.”⦁ He is the Angel of the Lord.⦁ He is the “Man” who appeared to Abraham.⦁ He is the fire in the burning bush appearing to Moses.⦁ He is the Captain of the Lord’s army who appears to Joshua.⦁ He is the “fourth man” in the fire in Daniel 3.⦁ Ultimately, he is the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, born of the virgin Mary.⦁ The Son of God is the “revealer” of God from the beginning.⦁ The NT writers routinely apply to Jesus texts that speak of Yahweh.⦁ After his resurrection, Jesus taught his disciples how all of Scripture pointed to him.
⦁ All of Scripture reveals to us who Jesus, the Son of God, is—not just the New Testament.⦁ The same Son who permanently took on a human nature and came to earth was the one who had been coming to all of the saints ever since sin entered the hearts of people.
Jesus and the End of History
⦁ Jesus ascended to heaven to reign as King over the earth with all authority.⦁ One day he will return to judge the earth.⦁ John’s record of his vision in Revelation points to the reign of Christ over all the kingdoms of men.⦁ The lordship of Jesus is moving toward a specific goal: the return of Christ as judge over every human being and the consummation of history.⦁ This final judgment will seal the fate of every human being who has ever lived:
⦁ The unbelieving (the default condition of everyone) will be eternally condemned.⦁ The believing (by God’s grace) will live eternally in a new creation.
Why Believe in Jesus?
⦁ Son of God, Messiah, and Savior?
⦁ Hundreds of years of prophecy fulfilled⦁ A supernatural birth⦁ A ministry of authoritative, clear teaching⦁ Healing the ill and disabled, liberating the demon possessed, raising the dead to life, controlling nature⦁ Predicting his own death and resurrection⦁ Voluntarily laying his own innocent life down in sacrifice for the sins of others⦁ Rising from the dead the third day⦁ Ascending to heaven 40 days after his resurrection⦁ All of his ministry, death, and resurrection testified to by hundreds of eyewitnesses.⦁ The radical transformation of lives, including Saul of Tarsus.⦁ The endurance of his church and disciples for 2,000 years.⦁ The abundant written manuscript records of his life, ministry, and impact.⦁ Starting a movement that served as the foundation for all of western civilization.⦁ The current and ongoing transformation of lives, families, and societies.⦁ The powerful and divine testimony of Holy Scripture.⦁ The living and active testimony of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of people.

"Why Believe in God?" - Chapter 2 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphant
“Why Believe in God?” – Chapter 2
The New Atheism
Recent ResurgenceRichard Dawkins
Christopher Hitchens
Sam Harris
Daniel Dennett
Hostile and “Evangelistic”
Religion is “Destructive.”
Reasons
Reasons to Not BelieveReligious Abuses and EvilsWorst possible caricatures
Argument is not about religion per se but about the adherents of that religion.
Must distinguish between what Christianity is and what Christians do.
A skewed view of God based on a distorted reading of Scripture.Reflects more the bias of the reader than a legitimate, fair reading of the Bible.
All the things that are wrong and all the suffering in the world.If all the wrong in the world proves that everything is random and meaningless, then why is it so evil to believe in God?
Reasons to Believe“Agreement of the People” argument75% of people believe in a god.
Has been the dominant belief of people through the centuries
Not a sufficient proof, but does point to something deeper.
“Internal” ReasonsThere is a reason why most people throughout time have believed in deity.
There is in every person a “sense of deity.”
“since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.” Rom 1:19
We know God through general revelation.
Our sin is direct rebellion against our Creator, because we know him.
Because of this knowledge, we are without excuse.
This knowledge is continually suppressed by sinful humanity.
These truths help to explain why there is a general agreement of the people
regarding the existence of deity.
The false deities that people have worshiped are evidence of the suppression and distortion of the basic knowledge of God available to us in conscience and nature.
“External” ReasonsGod’s revelation in and through creation is always and everywhere both “internal” and “external.”“Internal” revelation is that which God “implants” in us that speaks to our consciences.
“External” revelation is that which God is showing us through the world that we experience every day.
God’s revelation is in all creation, inside of us and outside of us.
This general revelation gives strength to so-called “proofs” for God’s existence.Cosmological argument – argument from cause and effect.The world is the “effect,” and God is the eternal “first cause.”
An atheist will not make the connection between this argument and the general revelation of God, because they have suppressed that knowledge.
It is easier and “more free” to believe in an uncaused universe than to believe in an uncaused God to whom we are accountable.
Ontological Argument – argument of necessary beingOur existence is limited and dependent, so there must be a being who is infinite and independent.
Teleological Argument – argument of design and purposeThe intricate design of the universe points to a master designer.
All of these “external” reasons for God testify of his existence. They ought to be obvious to everyone.
But sin clouds, distorts, and hides the obvious. Sinners distort and suppress the knowledge of God and reasonable arguments for his being.
How can the blind see?
Digging Deeper
What is the root cause of the denial of God and a rejection of reasonable arguments for his existence?
The atheist opts for a blind faith in an uncaused universe rather than a reasonable faith in a personal Creator God because the atheist does not want there to be a God.
The “internal” and “external” reasons for God will not alone change the mind of an atheist because deep down they don’t want there to be a God.
They have libertarian reasons for rejecting the existence of God that are stronger than any compelling arguments.
Responses
So what do we do if the problem is in what people want rather than what they think?
Atheistic arguments are inherently contradictory. They argue that religion poisons everything because it tries to influence everyone. But aren’t atheists trying to influence others?
If everything that exists is by chance and meaningless, how do we determine good and bad?
Why is it a bad thing for Christians to seek to evangelize others? By what standard?
Why is opposition to evolution bad? Their strong defense of evolution proves that things do have meaning, which undercuts their belief in a meaningless universe.
What makes evolution “better” than religion and creationism if everything is morally indifferent and neutral?
Conclusion
No matter how articulate and educated the denial of God is, the diagnosis is always the same.
The unbeliever lives as if there is no God, and deep down they don’t want there to be a God.
Unbelief is not due to a lack of evidence but to an inward rebellion.
The only thing powerful enough to change the rebellion of the human heart, which itself is enslaved to sin, is the truth of God in the gospel.
The sinful chains that bind the heart must be broken. Only the gospel can do that.
We make our appeal to unbelievers based on the shared truth that all humanity has access to in conscience and in nature.
We show how Christianity helps us to see everything else more clearly. It illumines the world and provides it meaning and purpose.

"Why Believe in the Bible?" - Chapter 1 of Know Why You Believe

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphint
Why Believe in the Bible? – Chapter 1
Introduction
Especially in our current cultural climate, people generally approach the Bible with a skeptical mindset.How credible are the Bible’s claims?
Are there really people who believe it?
Can it be proved?
What about its contradictions?
Reasons
There are two kinds of reasons or types of evidences for believing the Bible:External Reasons – evidence or reasons that come from outside of the Bible.
Internal Reasons – evidence or reasons that come from inside the Bible.
External Reasons
There are several types of external reasons:Historical Reliability Historical Records
Archaeological Evidence
Transmission ReliabilityHow can we be sure the manuscripts are accurate?
Abundant manuscript testimony in agreement.
Canon ReliabilityHow can we be sure the books we have are the right books?
No councils met to decide on which books to include or exclude because it was never a matter of serious disagreement in the early church.
On the whole, the churches were in harmony on recognizing the authoritative books.
Internal Reasons
External evidence is inconclusive. It can never produce certainty, only probability or plausibility.
The Bible’s truthfulness runs deeper than just external historical testimony. It begins with a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Bible is personal and relational.
Belief in the Bible is like a marriage. You cannot experience what marriage is really like without the commitment of marriage.
Only a personal commitment to Jesus Christ brings to light what Christianity really is.
The best reasons for believing the Bible come from the Bible itself:Its unity in diversityThe Bible was written by dozens of writers over a period of 1500 years.
This diversity results in a collection of books that is amazingly unified in its message.
“the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof.”--Westminster Confession of Faith—
In order to discover the internal reasons, one must sit down and read what the Bible says. It requires a familiarity with the content of Scripture.
But even more than external and internal reasons are needed to bring us to a point of believing the Scriptures.
Divine Reasons
“Yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”--Westminster Confession of Faith
The only way that one can be fully persuaded and assured of the “infallible truth and divine authority” of Holy Scripture is when the Holy Spirit himself testifies of the truth of Scripture in our hearts.
The Holy Spirit does not do the internal work by himself. He works “by and with the Word in our hearts.”
We must expose ourselves to what Scripture says. Only then can we hope to see its heavenliness.
Without that exposure, the best answer to the why question is little more than a historical probability, and the power of what the Scripture says can never be known.
Responses
Isn’t this reasoning in a circle? Beginning with the Bible to prove the Bible?This is a misperception of the Christian understanding of the Bible.
Can you prove that your senses are a reliable guide to experiencing the world without using your senses?
There are no external sources that establish the reliability of the use of your senses.
So it is with the Bible, no outside authority can ultimately prove the reliability of the Bible. It’s authority and reliability are axiomatic.
Because the Bible is the ultimate authority for Christians, then there can be no other authority that can establish its authority.
If another authority were to establish the Bible’s authority, then the Bible would get its authority from something else and, by definition, would not be the final authority.
What about all the contradictions in the Bible?It all depends on your starting presupposition.
Does a doctor detect a problem in the body and assume that the Bible is a collection of parts that don’t work together? No, he begins with the assumption that body is mean to harmoniously work together.
The only way to diagnose perceived problems in Scripture is to study Scripture.
When Scripture is studied with the commitment that the parts will be coherent because God is the primary author from beginning to end, contradictions disappear.
But when Scripture is studied apart from that commitment, one encounters contradictions and problems because one begins with the premise that the Bible is full of contradictions.
So, the starting presupposition matters.
Conclusion
The only way someone can acquire a “full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority” of Scripture is, as in marriage, by first making a commitment to Christ himself.
This commitment/belief can only come through reading the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit opening our hearts to believe it as God’s Word.
By believing Christ, we are able properly to see everything else.
Unless we recognize the truths about the Bible, we will not be able to understand why we believe anything else about Christianity.
In trusting Christ and believing his Word, we begin to see the world and everything else in its proper light.

"Know Why You Believe": Introduction

Know Why You BelieveBy K. Scott Oliphant
Introduction
What is this study about?
In this study we are essentially doing “Apologetics.”
Apologetics – “a defense”
An example would be Paul’s defense before the Jews in Acts 22.
We are defending what we believe and offering reasons why others should believe as well.
1 Peter 3:15-16
But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.
“Always be prepared to give an answer”
More literally “be ready always with an “apology.”
Apology – not in our standard usage of saying “sorry,” but a defense, a reasoned answer for our Christian hope.
Peter’s audience was a group of scattered and persecuted Christians, probably living during the time of the reign of Caesar Nero (A.D. 62-64)
They needed to know in their hearts why they believed and were willing to die, but they also needed to be ready to explain that hope to others.
“In your hearts, revere Christ as Lord.”
The emphasis in the statement is on the “Lord.”
Peter wanted his readers to be firm in their conviction of the absolute lordship of Christ.
“Always be prepared to give an answer.”
Ready always with “an apologetic” (a defense).
Addressed to all Christians
What do we need to be prepared?
The Bible is the primary tool used to defend our faith and give reasons to others for our hope in Christ.
“To anyone who asks for a reason”
“Reason” is the Greek word logos (λόγος) or “word.” It is also where we get our English word “logic” from. In this context we are to be ready to give “a reasoned word” or “a logical, reasoned response” for our Christian hope.
Our ultimate “reason” is the reality of the Triune God. Christianity’s “logic” begins with the reality of God.
Without God and his Word, we really can’t understand anything in his universe.
"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." (C. S. Lewis)
As we give our reasons, we draw them from Scripture.
Scripture alone has the power of God to change hearts and minds.
It ultimately does not depend on our speaking ability, intelligence, or logical persuasion. It depends on God’s Spirit through his Word.
“With gentleness and respect”
Even to those who persecute and mock and slander, our reasoned apologetic from Scripture should be clear but gentle and respectful.
Order of the Study
We begin with Scripture, because it is God’s Word and by it we know him and his will.
We then will discuss why we believe in the Triune God of the Bible.
All the topics are important, but the first two (God and the Bible) are foundational.
Two Final Thoughts
One concession: There is no amount of evidence, or discussion, or argument that will, by itself, change anyone’s mind to a belief in Christianity. Christianity is only properly understood by knowing and trusting Jesus Christ. It is ultimately a work of grace.
One challenge: While reading the book, there may be things you simply cannot believe. If so, ask yourself this question: “What am I trusting in that will not allow me to believe this?” We all trust in something—or in some things.
Do I believe this? Why or why not?

"God, Where Are You?" (Psalm 10)

“God, Where Are You?” (Psalm 10)Pastor Cameron JungelsEastside Baptist ChurchWednesday PM, January 10, 2018
Psalm 10:1–18 (NIV)
1 Why, Lord, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
2 In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.
3 He boasts about the cravings of his heart;
he blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
4 In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
in all his thoughts there is no room for God.
5 His ways are always prosperous;
your laws are rejected by him;
he sneers at all his enemies.
6 He says to himself, “Nothing will ever shake me.”
He swears, “No one will ever do me harm.”
7 His mouth is full of lies and threats;
trouble and evil are under his tongue.
8 He lies in wait near the villages;
from ambush he murders the innocent.
His eyes watch in secret for his victims;
9 like a lion in cover he lies in wait.
He lies in wait to catch the helpless;
he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.
10 His victims are crushed, they collapse;
they fall under his strength.
11 He says to himself, “God will never notice;
he covers his face and never sees.”
12 Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
13 Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself,
“He won’t call me to account”?
14 But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted;
you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless.
15 Break the arm of the wicked man;
call the evildoer to account for his wickedness
that would not otherwise be found out.
16 The Lord is King for ever and ever;
the nations will perish from his land.
17 You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
18 defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that mere earthly mortals
will never again strike terror.
1. God, where are you when evil is running rampant? (1–11)
2. God, please arise and act on behalf of the oppressed! (12–15)
3. God, I believe you are the just and righteous King who defends the oppressed (16–18).

"A Praying Life" (chapters 32-34)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting WorldBy Paul E. Miller
“Prayer Journaling: Becoming Aware of the Interior Journey” - Chapter 32
Journaling is a historic Christian practice.
Life is a journey, a spiritual adventure. Writing down the adventure as it happens gives us a feel for our place in the story God is weaving in our lives.
Many of us rush around without much conscious knowledge of the pilgrimage God is leading us on. Writing in a prayer journal helps us take stock of our location on the journey.
Aware of Self
As we walk with the Shepherd, we become aware of our true selves.
The spiritual pilgrimage is the discovery of self in relationship to God, which leads to a lifestyle of repentance.
You can’t walk with the Shepherd and not begin to change. His presence allows us to take an honest, interior look.
Journal for a Year
Journaling allows us to discover the story that God is writing in our lives. Instead of rushing through life, it allows us to pause and reflect.
Write down areas of your life that the Word and the Spirit reveal to you that need sanctification.
Journal the spiritual journey (ups and downs) of your progress in that area and see how God is working.
Morning Prayer Journal
Starting the day with prayer and journaling can help us slow down and reflect on our own hearts and where we need to pay particular attention throughout that day.
The key is being honest about what we are feeling and then letting Scripture speak to our hearts. By being honest, the real me will be talking. We don’t have to try or pretend to be good.
When we look at our life through the lens of Scripture, we seldom lose our way. We can be real, but we don’t get lost in our feelings.
You don’t have to write well to keep a prayer journal, nor do you have to be consistent.
It is just a written version of childlike praying, except more organized. Begin with what’s on your heart, what’s bugging you, what you are thankful for. If you are real before God, then everything else flows.
The act of writing out your worries, joys, and prayers helps you focus and keeps your mind from wandering. But the best part is that over time you will begin to see patterns of what God is doing, to pick up the threads of a story.
If we see our lives as a pilgrimage, then it becomes an integrated whole. It makes sense.
“Real-Life Praying” - Chapter 33
Prayer is where we do our best work—as a husband/wife, father/mother, worker, and friend.
We can manage our whole lives—everything that we are—through our daily prayer time. It will shape our loving, parenting, working, etc.
We don’t need a praying life because that is our duty. That would wear thin quickly. We need time to be with our Father every day because every day our hearts and the hearts of those around us are overgrown with weeds.
We need to reflect on our lives and engage God with the condition of our souls and the souls he has entrusted to our care or put in our paths. In a fallen world, these things do not come automatically.
“Unfinished Stories” - Chapter 34
The stories that God is weaving in our lives do not always have an ending that we can see. They appear to us as unfinished stories.
As we abide in God, he usually shows us what he is doing. But sometimes he doesn’t.Job never new why he suffered.
We will all have unfinished stories from time to time. We must remember that, ultimately, it is God’s story, not ours.
Israel’s Agony
The people of Judah who returned from captivity returned to just a small remnant of what the kingdom of David and Solomon had been before.
The prophets prophesied a future time of glory coming, but the people of Judah of that day died without ever seeing it. God’s story was moving forward but at his pace.
The Weaving of God
The way God answered the hopes and prayers of the weeping Judahites in Psalm 137 is mind-boggling.He created a new Israel that included Gentiles as well as Jews.
He destroyed the temple and gave them Jesus, “God with Us.”
The captivity saw the rise of synagogues, the pattern of the local church.
The Old Testament Scriptures were completed and collected during this time in captivity and shortly thereafter.
With the kingdom and temple destroyed, the Word of God became more precious.
God cleansed Israel of its mixture with other religions.
The dispersion of the Jewish people served to advance the church in its early years.
Israel was purified of outward idolatry.
God was weaving a spectacular tapestry through the suffering of Israel. Without the Babylonian captivity there would be no Israel, no cross, no Christianity, and no Western civilization.
Not Your Story
The more distant we are from a story, the less we know what God is doing.
It’s not our business to know or have all the answers to someone else’s story.
Just as it was not Peter’s business what God decided to do with John’s life (John 21:22).
Peter only needed to keep his eyes on Jesus and follow him. His story would be different than John’s.
“God Know What He Be Doing”
“Well, izz hard, but, you know, God know what he be doing.”
God is not a ‘cosmic Santa’ who will always give us what we ask for.
Through trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations?
Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?”
Come Quickly, Lord Jesus
Some stories aren’t tied up until heaven.
Living in unfinished stories draws us into God’s final act, the return of Jesus.
As the people of faith in Hebrews 11, many will die before the promises are fully fulfilled. But we, like they, are looking forward to a better city, a heavenly one, when God’s story will be complete.

"A Praying Life" (chapters 30-31)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting WorldBy Paul E. Miller
“Prayer Work” - Chapter 30
How often do we pray for difficult people?
We do our best to “live at peace with all men” and be kind to them, but have we ever prayed that God would change them?
Do we believe that God is in the business of changing lives?
We could write up a prayer card with the name of a person that is particularly hard on us and pray the Scriptures over that person. Then we wait and see what God does!
If we pray for God to “soften” someone or give someone patience or to humble them, God may answer our prayer by bringing difficulty and suffering into that person’s life.
If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son.
The Father can’t think of anything better to give us than his Son.
Suffering invites us to join his Son’s life, death, and resurrection. Once you see that, suffering is no longer strange.
Working Your Prayers
If God does answer our prayers for that person by humbling them through suffering, are we ready to roll up our sleeves to serve them?
God will often provide opportunities for us to “work” our prayer request.
God may involve us personally in our own prayers, often in a physical and humbling way – teaching us to be a servant.
God told his disciples to pray that the Lord of the harvest would send out laborers, then he sent out the ones he just told to pray! (Matt. 9:37ff.)
In Jesus’ parable of the growing seed, there is a three-step pattern: Planting
Waiting
Working the harvest
It doesn’t occur to us that our prayers may follow the same pattern.
First, it doesn’t occur to us to plant the seed of thoughtful praying because we may think that difficult people don’t change.
Second, if we do pray, we don’t watch and wait. We want the answer now.
Third, we don’t recognize the harvest when it comes, and we forget that reaping the harvest involves our participation.
Too often we end up reversing the pattern and attack the problem first.
We confront the person over their behavior, then the relationship disintegrates, then we pray after nothing else has worked.
By then we’ve often concluded that the person can’t change, and prayer doesn’t work.
But what really doesn’t work is us.
Our “prayer doesn’t work” often means “you didn’t do my will, in my way, in my time.”
Only by praying and watching do we realize the unlikely connections God makes in the kingdom.
God may answer our prayers for another person by involving us in their lives as a humble servant in the midst of their suffering.
Suffering opens the door to love. Suffering reaps a harvest of real change.
“Listening to God” - Chapter 31
How do we discern the leading of God or the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives?
When we commune with God in prayer are we sensing God’s direction or just our own thoughts?
Two Dangers
“Word Only” – Not listening to the Spirit.If we focus exclusively on God’s written Word when looking for God’s activity in our lives but don’t watch and pray, we’ll miss the unfolding story of his work.
We’ll miss the patterns of the Divine Artist etching the character of his Son on our hearts.
The Spirit personalizes the Word.
If we believe Scripture only applies to people in general, then we can miss how God intimately personalizes his counsel to us as individuals.
We can become deists, removing God from our lives.
But everywhere in Scripture we see God speaking to us with a personal touch, prompting us to obey and love.
Seeing the finger of God in our circumstances, creation, other Christians, and the Word keeps us from elevating our thoughts to a unique status. God is continually speaking to each of us, but not just through our intuition.
Seeing God’s activity in the details of our lives enhances the application of God’s Word. We actually undermine the impact of God’s Word if we define God’s speaking too narrowly.
What is at stake here is developing an eye for the Shepherd.
We need to tune in to our Father’s voice above the noise of our own hearts and the surrounding world—what C. S. Lewis called “the Kingdom of Noise.”
“Watch and Pray.”
Don’t pray in a fog. Pray with your eyes open. Look for the patterns God is weaving in your life.
“Spirit Only” – Elevating Human IntuitionThere is a danger in thinking we hear God speak.
When people call their own thoughts or feelings “God’s voice,” it puts them in control of God and ultimately undermines God’s Word by elevating human intuition to the status of divine revelation.
Unless Scripture guards and directs our intuitions, we can easily run amok and baptize our selfish desires with religious language.
The danger is in elevating our own thoughts (what we can mistakenly think is the leading of the Spirit) to the level of biblical authority.
The problem is that the Holy Spirit comes in on the same channel as the world, the flesh, the Devil.
The Lord does lead—we just need to be careful that we aren’t using the Lord as a cover for our own desires. If we frequently interpret random thoughts and desires as “God speaking,” we can end up with some very unbiblical and immoral plans – not God’s will at all.
An overly mystical view of God speaking to us can end up with us just listening to the darkness of our own hearts.
To correctly discern when God is speaking to us, we need to keep the Word and the Spirit together.
The Spirit personalizes and applies the written Word of God to our lives.
Without the written word, “being led by the Spirit of God” can turn into us doing what we want to do. What they “hear” from God might be masking their self-will.
Without the Spirit, the written Word can become dry and impersonal, with no personal application leading to a life of listening and repentance.
Listening to and obeying God are so intertwined in biblical thought that in the Hebrew they are one word, shamar.
Under the cover of being obedient to the Word, Word Only folks can be rigid.
We need to guard against rationalism as much as we need to guard against emotionalism.
The Word provides the structure, the vocabulary. The Spirit personalizes it to our life.
Keeping the Word and the Spirit together guards us from the danger of God-talk becoming a cover for our own desires and the danger of lives isolated from God.
Cultivate a Listening Heart
There is nothing secret about communion with God. If we live a holy life before God, broken of our pride and self-will, crying out for grace, then we will be in communion with God. It is really that simple.
You can’t listen to God if you are isolated from a life of surrender that draws you into his story for your life.
There is a tendency among Christians to get excited about “listening to God” as if they are discovering a hidden way of communicating with God that will revolutionize their prayer lives.
This subtly elevates an experience with God instead of God himself. Without realizing it, we can look at the windshield instead of through it.
The problem isn’t the activity of listening, but my listening heart. Am I attentive to God? Is my heart soft and teachable?
The means of communication is secondary to a surrendered heart. Our responsibility is to cultivate a listening heart in the midst of the noise from our own hearts and from the world, not to mention the Devil.
The interaction between the Divine Spirit and my own spirit is mysterious. David captures this mystery in Psalm 16:7—“I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.”
Is David’s heart talking to him, or is God giving him counsel? The two are impossible to separate.
Tuning in to your Father’s voice has a hard-to-pin-down-but-nevertheless-real quality.
We don’t have the capacity to analyze this interaction.
The counsel God gave David is inseparable from David’s active pursuit of God: “I have set the LORD always before me” (16:8).
The counsel from God doesn’t function like a fortune teller; it is inseparable from a humble seeking after God.

"A Praying Life" (chapters 28-29)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting WorldBy Paul E. Miller
Praying in Real Life: Part 5
“Using Prayer Tools” - Chapter 28
Why do most people write down their schedules, but most Christians do not write down prayer requests?
The bottom line is we don’t write down our prayer requests because we don’t take prayer seriously. We don’t think it works.
Paul prayed for many churches and individuals by name; he likely had an extensive prayer list.
Using a written system to pray for people helps us to connect to their lives and be genuinely interested.
Disabled by the Fall
We are not normal children learning how to pray; we are disabled by the Fall.
We have a disorder that hinders our ability to talk with God.
Written aides help us talk with God.
Some feel that using a written system makes prayer “less natural,” but this is based on a false romantic idea that if it doesn’t feel “natural” then it isn’t real.
We think spiritual things—if done right—should just flow. But if you have a disability, nothing flows in the beginning.
Prayer will not feel “natural” at first, but we must persist, especially during the learning stages.
Prayer journals and prayer cards are a couple of systems that can guide our prayer lives.
Be Careful of Systems
Systems can be useful, but if we are not careful they can also become rote and robotic, desensitizing us to God as a person.
We can easily become mindless or wooden as we pray.
The other side of the coin is to be suspicious of all systems, thinking that it quenches the Spirit.
But we all use systems with things that are important to us.
So, well designed systems have a place in our prayer lives, as long as we don’t allow them to make our prayer lives wooden or robotic. They need to be able to flex along with real life.
“Life is both holding hands and scrubbing floors. It is both being and doing. Prayer journals or prayer cards are on the ‘scrubbing floors’ side of life. Praying like a child is on the ‘holding hands’ side of life. We need both.”
“Keeping Track of the Story: Using Prayer Cards” - Chapter 29
Guidelines for Prayer Cards
The card functions like a prayer snapshot of a person’s life.
Linger over a prayer card for only a few seconds while praying.
Put the Word to work by writing a Scripture verse on the card that expresses the request for that particular person or situation.
The card doesn’t change much over time. Every once in a while, add another line.
It’s not necessary to write down answers to prayer. They will be obvious and remembered since the cards are seen almost every day.
Putting a date to the prayer card is optional.
Prayer Cards vs. List
A prayer card focuses on one person or area of your life.
It allows you to look at the person or situation from multiple perspectives.
Over time, it helps you to reflect on what God does in response to your prayers.
You begin to see patterns, and slowly a story unfolds that you find yourself drawn into.
A list tends to be more mechanical.
We can get overwhelmed with the number of things to pray for.
Because items on a list are so disconnected, it is hard to maintain the discipline to pray.
Having only one card in front of you at a time keeps you focused, and you can concentrate on that person or need.
Prayer Cards for Family
Have a separate card for each member of the family.
Have specific requests for various areas of his/her life – physical, spiritual, academic, career, etc.
Write Scripture for one ore more of the prayer areas to pray God’s Word for them.
Have “big” and “small” prayers.
See how God writes the story and answers your prayers over time.
People in Suffering
It is easy to get overwhelmed in praying for the needs of those in suffering, especially when the diagnosis isn’t clear or there is no end in sight.
Don’t just tell people that you are “praying for them” but add them to a card dedicated to people going through suffering.
You will be better connected with them and can follow up.
Non-Christians
Have at least one card for non-Christians that you are praying for.
Pray for specific areas of their life, or areas where they are struggling with the claims of the gospel.
Watch how God may draw them to himself over time, using a variety of different circumstances in their lives.
Friends
We won’t regularly pray for friends if we do not write them down and make it a part of our life of prayer.
Building a Deck of Cards
Some cards can be prayed through daily; others can be rotated one or two cards a day.
It doesn’t have to become overwhelming.
Use prayer time to write them out over a period of time. Slowly build your prayer cards.
Begin with a partial card and add items over time.
The hardest part of writing out prayer cards isn’t the time; it’s our unbelief.
We seldom feel unbelief directly—it lurks behind the feelings that will surface if we start to write prayer cards.
We might be skeptical at first or feel like it is unnatural.
In reality they will help us to be regular and personal in prayer.
Get Dirty
Prayer is asking God to incarnate, “to get dirty” in your life.
Take Jesus at his word; ask him; tell him what you want; get dirty – in the nitty gritty of life.
Don’t fall into the trap of busyness.
“If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.”

"A Praying Life" (chapters 26-27)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting WorldBy Paul E. Miller
“Hope: The End of the Story” - Chapter 26
Hope is a new idea in history, a uniquely Christian vision.
The gospel is Good News. Because God broke the power of evil at the cross, we can, along with Sarah, look at our cynicism and laugh.
Tragedy doesn’t have the last word. God saves the best for last.
The infinite God touches us personally. We can dream big because God is big.
Dreaming Big
I have prayed for humility, and it dawned on me that God was answering my prayer.
I would have preferred humility to come over me like magic. Instead, God teaches humility in humble places.
What I thought was a stone was really a loaf of bread.
Our prayers didn’t float above life. Our family was focused on both the reality line and the hope line.
Praying was inseparable from working, planning, and good old-fashioned begging.
Willing to Be Enchanted
As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder.
Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds.
We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.
If you wait, your heavenly Father will pick you up, carry you out into the night, and make your life sparkle. He wants to dazzle you with the wonder of his love.
To see the marvel of the stories that our Father is telling, we need to become like little children.
C. S. Lewis was characterized by a willingness to be enchanted—his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story.
God delights in turning our tragedies into comedies.
“Living in Gospel Stories” - Chapter 27
What we think are mistakes and frustrating situations are opportunities for the kingdom of God to show up in our lives. It is always that way with the kingdom. It is so strange, so low; it is seldom recognized.
It looks like a mistake, but later we realize that we were in the middle of God’s story.
The downward journey is a gospel story. Humility comes before exaltation.
Gospel Stories
My trip with Kim was a gospel story. I gave up a piece of my life for Jill. In the gospel, Jesus took my sin, and I got his righteousness. That is how gospel stories work. Jill gets a restful weekend, and I get a stressful one. Whenever you love, you reenact Jesus’ death.
Gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” So we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us. When I was sitting on the plane thinking, Everything has gone wrong, that was the point when everything was going right. That’s how love works.
The Father wants to draw us into the story of his Son. He doesn’t have a better story to tell, so he keeps retelling it in our lives. As we reenact the gospel, we are drawn into a strange kind of fellowship. The taste of Christ is so good that the apostle Paul told the Philippians that he wanted to know “the fellowship of sharing in [Jesus’] sufferings” (Philippians 3:10, NIV).
Living in a gospel story exposes our idols, our false sources of love.
When our idols are exposed, we often give up in despair― overwhelmed by both the other person’s sin and our own.
But by simply staying in the story, continuing to show up for life, even if it seems pointless, the kingdom comes. Poverty of spirit is no longer a belief. We own it. It describes us.
Repentance, in a strange way, is refreshing.
When we remove our false selves, repentance creates integrity. We return to the real source of love―our heavenly Father. We become authentic.
Enjoying God’s Story
If we stop fighting and embrace the gospel story God is weaving in our lives, we discover joy.
If we pursue joy directly, it slips from our grasp. But if we begin with Jesus and learn to love, we end up with joy.
Meaning to Suffering
Gospel stories give meaning to suffering.
Looking at suffering and tragedy through the lens of the gospel helps us to see the redemptive value of suffering.
God brings grace and freedom through suffering.
This view of life requires a firm confidence in the sovereignty of God. God is the weaver of stories.
Unseen Connections
We should be on the lookout for unseen connections.
To see a gospel story, we need to reflect on how seemingly disparate pieces are connected.
The best place to pick up the unseen connections of our designer God is in disappointment and tension.
Unseen means that there are no visible, causal links. As we bring God’s mind to our stories, we can see his hand crafting connections behind the scenes.
Nothing in the modern mind encourages us to see the invisible links binding together all of life. We have no sense that we live in the presence of a loving Father and are accountable for all we do.
We need to remember by faith that this is My Father’s World.
Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming.
Everything you do affects those you love.
All of life is covenant.
Imbedded in the idea of prayer is a richly textured view of the world where all of life is organized around invisible bonds or covenants that knit us together.
Instead of a fixed world, we live in our Father’s world, a world built for divine relationships between people where, because of the Good News, tragedies become comedies and hope is born.
 

"A Praying Life" (chapters 24-25)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting WorldBy Paul E. Miller
“How God Places Himself in the Story” - Chapter 24
When we are in the middle of the desert, we feel like God is absent.
We long for God to show himself clearly, to make sense of the mess.
The Canaanite Woman
Jesus’ interaction with a Canaanite woman and her needy daughter are instructive for us in our understanding of how God is present in the midst of our story.
Jesus is aloof, ambiguous, even demeaning to this Canaanite woman. Why?
Jesus draws out the full measure of her sincerity, humility, and faith.
If Jesus were a magic prayer machine, he’d have healed this woman’s daughter instantly, and we would not have discovered her feisty, creative spirit.
Likewise, Jesus’ ambiguity with us creates the space not only for him to emerge but us as well. If the miracle comes too quickly, there is no room for discovery, for relationship.
The waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship.
Another Woman & Her Needy Daughter
God left Jill in confusion in order to grow her faith, her ability to connect with him. To become like a child, Jill had to become weak again.
Jesus’ ambiguous interaction with both Jill and the Canaanite woman is a mini-course on prayer. God permitted a difficult situation in both of their lives, and then he lingered at the edge.
If he were at the center, if they had had regular visions of him, they would not have developed the faith to have a real relationship with him.
When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story—to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life.
But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God.
Mary Magdalene in a Mini-Desert
Jesus stands at the edge of the story, unwilling to overwhelm her so that a richer, fuller Mary could emerge.
He allows her pain to continue for just a moment so Jesus the person could meet Mary the person.
Many of us wish God were more visible. We think that if we could see him better or know what is going on, then faith would come more easily.
But if Jesus dominated the space and overwhelmed our vision, we would not be able to relate to him.
Everyone who had a clear-eyed vision of God in the Bible fell down as if he were dead. It’s hard to relate to pure light.
When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story and, most of all, to show himself.
But if he showed himself fully and immediately, if he answered all the questions, we’d never grow.
Jill was profoundly changed in her twenty-year wait. If God had instantly explained everything to her and healed Kim, that change would not have taken place.
No one works like him.
“Praying without a Story” - Chapter 25
What happens when you don’t have a sense of your life as a story being told by your Heavenly Father?
We don’t like the messiness of unanswered prayer—or answers that are different from what we requested.
A distraught heart makes us uneasy, but it reveals the mystery of prayer.
Reflecting on the Story
Prayer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Prayer interacts with all the other pieces of our life. The praying life is inseparable from obeying, loving, waiting, and suffering.
If we don’t get passionate with God in the face of disappointment, like the Canaanite woman, then cynicism slips in, and our hearts begin to harden. We begin a living death.
No Story
Story
Bitter
Waiting
Angry
Watching
Aimless
Wondering
Cynical
Praying
Controlling
Submitting
Hopeless
Hoping
Thankless
Thankful
Blaming
Repenting
Another Story of God’s Weaving
God responds to our prayers in the context of the story he is weaving with our lives.
If we do not recognize the presence of the story or realize that God is writing one, then our prayers will just be isolated, individual requests. We won’t see how everything is being woven together for the purpose of our growth in faith and holiness.
There is a significant difference between making an isolated prayer request and praying in context of the story that God is weaving.
The answer to prayer is inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, and waiting.
Most of our prayers are answered in the context of the larger story that God is weaving.
Living in our Father’s Story
Living in our Father’s story means living in tension.
To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things: Don’t demand that the story go your way (surrender completely).
Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing.
Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way.
This last one, staying in the story, can be particularly difficult. When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts.
Sometimes when we say “God is silent,” what’s really going on is that he hasn’t told the story the way we wanted it told.
He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we live in, he is seldom silent.
To see the Storyteller we need to slow down our interior life and watch.
We need to be imbedded in the Word to experience the Storyteller’s mind and pick up the cadence of his voice.
We need to be alert for the story, for the Storyteller’s voice speaking into the details of our lives. The story God weaves always involves bowing before his majesty with the pieces of our lives.
Watching for the Divine Artist
We can see the Divine artistry of God in the story he wrote for Joseph’s life.Joseph’s life was marked by suffering and disappointment, but God was writing a story.
Joseph has not given in to bitterness and cynicism; instead he discovers the gracious heart of his God, grace he extends to those who have harmed him. Forgiveness flowed.
When confronted with suffering that won’t go away, we instinctively focus on what is missing, such as betrayal in Joseph’s story, not on the Master’s hand.
Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story.
If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you, like Joseph, will begin to see the patterns. You’ll become a poet, sensitive to your Father’s voice.