The Certainty of Christ in an Age of Unbelief

And while people are finding their Their seats, especially some of those that are coming over from the fellowship hall. There's a lot of seats over here, guys, up here over on this side in the front. And we got a whole as usual front row that's clear or largely clear. Well, we are extremely blessed to have Dr.

Craig Hazen with us for our service this morning. He spoke during the Sunday school hour just a little bit ago. It was a wonderful launch to our series on postmodernism. And the emerging church.

Doctor Hazen is the founder and director of the Christian Apologetics Program at Viola University. He's been teaching there about 1010 years, and, he is also the editor of the Philosophia Christi, which is a philosophy journal. He's also authored the book, The Village Enlightenment in America. And do we have any of those available?

We do have those available. And then also there's a book, The Five Crossings, that will be, published January 1st, so you won't be able to pick up a copy of that, but be looking, looking for that. he is married. And has 4 children ages 1816, 14, and 14.

so, Anyway, we're very blessed to have him. There, there is some, the books and, other stuff that's out there, on the book table that you guys want to get your hands on. This is a CD, Christianity and the Challenge of World Religions, by him that we would highly commend, to you. but Doctor Hazen, thank you for sharing with us as you did, during the Sunday school hour this morning.

very impacting and enlightening, and we're looking forward to hearing about the certainty of Christ that we have, in Him and in His word. So God bless you as you come, brother. Let's give him a warm cornerstone welcome. thank you.

My pleasure. Well, thanks for having me here. This has, this has been fun so far. By the way, I, I do get, I do get around a little bit, so it's fun to come to churches, but I love this place.

It's just the right size. Some of these places are so big, it's just hard to, you get lost in them, but this is wonderful. But that's, it's not just the size and the And the warm facility, but boy, you cannot escape this church without walking out going, now I know what the gospel is, and that's a great thing. oh my goodness, I think we've lost sight of exactly how holy God is, so we don't recognize how far separated from Him we are in our sins and what a great salvation has been accomplished.

He can't miss that here. Thanks for making that central, my goodness, that is a I wish it weren't rare, but it's, it's a bit rare these days. Well, greetings from Viola University. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You were the ones whose kids got financial aid, I know that. Yeah, I've been, I've been at Viola about 10 years. I remember, I remember my first introduction to biola. I got on campus and some of the faculty were saying, Oh yeah, I've got some great students here, but if you want to really find out what they're all about, you can monitor them online.

this was newfangled stuff 10 years ago. There was this, there was this electronic bulletin board system where students would communicate and you find out what they're up to. Well, this was my first introduction to Viola. The students were having a contest on the best theory on anything.

It's pretty wide open, and so they, they ran a contest and students were posting theories and, and I was very impressed because this was, this was the grand prize winner and the subject is thermodynamics. Yeah, thermodynamics. We don't have an engineering school, so this is particularly impressive, thermodynamics, here's what the student, here's what the student winner posted. When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet.

We're off to a good start. And when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. I propose that we strap giant slabs of hot buttered toast to the back of 100 tethered cats. The two opposing forces will cause the cats to hover.

Spinning just inches above the ground. Using a giant buttered toast cat array. We could easily link Los Angeles and Palm Springs with a high-speed monorail. Cutting hours off of our travel time during spring break.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't have an engineering department. We have a marvelous creative writing department. And that was my, that was my introduction to Viola and a wonderful introduction to this church.

you've got PowerPoint up here, of course they contacted me and said, Now do you have PowerPoint? No, I, I, I haven't learned how to do that yet. I, I can barely use a cell phone. I'm not, so, so I'm in, I'm in, I'm in Finland one time.

Finland is the home of Nokia phones. there are, there are more cell phones in Finland than there are Finns, right? So it's a great Finnish tradition to go into a sauna, go into a sauna, and you're not wearing a whole lot in a sauna, a bunch of old guys in towels, and I hear a beeping. Well, who's got something to beat, but a guy reaches down to his arm, pushes some button.

Was he getting a page, then you hear a ringing. The guy touches his wrist and he begins to talk. And they were way out of my league technologically. So to redeem myself, I went to the restroom.

And came back with toilet paper hanging out of my ear. Told him I was getting a fax. And That's That didn't really happen. I've never been to Finland, but I'll try to tell the truth the rest of the time., I did, I did my doctoral work in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Yeah, yeah, nobody's going, oh, no, go gauchos. Gauchos. It just didn't ruins and, it doesn't seem like it it just rings, what is a gaucho? is it it's not like an out of fashion form of women's pant.

Maybe they're in fashion again, and I got to be careful with that. But I don't know, Argentine cowboy, you say? I'll buy that. So I'm doing my doctoral work in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara.

This was a blast. Here I am, a Bible believing Christian, going off to one of the most hostile parts, pieces of turf on the planet to see what it's all about. I got accepted and it's one of the best doctoral programs in the country, it's like UC Santa Barbara and University of Chicago and Harvard and Yale and, a couple of places. so it's really a top-notch religious studies program.

So I was, I was delighted and honored to get accepted. And I go up there as a Bible believing Christian. And believe me, there weren't a whole lot of us hanging around there. I was a big graduate program, and I was probably the only guy like me in it.

And but I had this marvelous opportunity to compare, right, biblical Christianity with all of the other great world religious traditions. And it was a blast. I, I loved every second of it. And now, I hope some of you do things like that, go off to grad school and learn about Islam and Buddhism and so forth.

But, but if you don't, let me boil it all down for you, right? I'll give you the bottom line as a, as a conservative Christian going into a hostile environment like that. Here it is. Here's the bottom line, Christianity compared to the other great religious traditions.

Christianity is weird. We, I don't know what it is we bought into, but it's, it doesn't fit this category of religion very well at all. I kid you not. In fact, this gospel that was presented to you this morning.

Unique in the history of humankind with regard to any religious reflection, you do not find that in order to get Christianity to fit this category we call religion, you've got to tear pieces off and you've got stuff real hard, and then there's still pieces. is flailing outside the sack, it just, it just doesn't work. It doesn't fit at all. Christianity is really a strange religion, if you want to try to consider it a religion.

It doesn't fit the mold very well at all. Christianity is a strange bird. I give whole semester courses on the differences between Christianity and the other religions. But let me, let me boil it down to one important distinction for you.

This, this is something that really captures my imagination with regard to the differences between Christianity and say, Buddhism and Islam and Hinduism and Native American traditions, and so forth. Here it is. Christianity is testable. It's testable.

That is, you can offer evidence for it. You can offer evidence against it. Alright, and the evidence means something. Right.

Clear thinking, good reasoning, offering of evidence, clear and focused investigation actually means something in Christianity. You can determine whether it's true or not, because it's open to that investigation. Now you're saying to yourself, Well, aren't other religions like that? No, not really.

Some are overtly not like that. Say Zen Buddhism, for instance. You don't, you don't investigate the truth of Zen Buddhism. You don't, you don't do some historical study to find out if the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama taught the four noble truths in the eightfold path in the Deer Park in Benares.

You don't, you don't go and test those kinds of things. It doesn't matter. A Zen Buddhist does not care. A thoughtful, knowledgeable Zen Buddhist will tell you, look, it doesn't matter if the Buddha ever existed.

What matters is my personal journey towards enlightenment. My movement towards enlightenment. In other words, for the Zen Buddhists, it's all about what's going on inside of the Zen Buddhist. It's all about personal religious experience.

Now, I love personal religious experience. I think nobody can hold it, I don't think anybody can hold a candle to what we have as personal religious experience in Christianity, but we don't leave it there, do we? We don't leave it there at all. we have this weird situation where, if, if Jesus did not come back from the dead, the whole thing's bunk.

it doesn't matter what your belief. So in Buddhism, it's all about what goes on inside the Zen Buddhist. There's, there's some religions that sound like they're testable or that you can investigate them, but at the end of the day they're they're really not testable. Say, Mormonism, for instance, Mormonism, one of my areas of specialty.

didn't plan on that, but the Lord just keeps dragging me right back into it. I wish I had a whole hour to tell you what's going on in the ranks of the Mormons around the world. There's some startling things happen, happening. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow in the next 25 to 50 years, the Mormon Church becomes some evangelical body of believers.

That's the, the spirit is moving there, and it's dicey and it's crazy and I can't believe what's going on, but pray for the pray for the Latter Day Saints. But something interesting about talking with Latter Day Saints over the years is that it sounds very historical and testable, but at the end of the day it's not. For instance, let's say you're in a conversation with a Mormon about the Book of Mormon, right? And let's say you've really done your homework and you've discovered that the Book of Mormon really isn't what it purports to be.

It's not an ancient history of the people of the Western Hemisphere. It's just not. There's not a, there's not a single shred of reliable historical evidence to demonstrate that. Right, let's say and you're making a good case with your Mormon friend or professor or neighbor or missionary at your door or something.

You're making your case and you're boy, in fact you're making progress. This guy doesn't really have any answers to your kinds of inquiries and your, your presentation of evidence. I've seen this happen at every level missionaries at my door, local. Mormon teachers, senior teachers at Brigham Young University, and leaders in the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.

I've had conversations with all of them that have gone like this, starting to make progress on some of these subjects. If it gets a little too hot in the kitchen, they'll step back and say, Now wait a minute, you have to understand something. At the end of the day, it's not about evidence. It's about what has happened inside of me.

See, I have an internal testimony. that Joseph Smith is indeed a restoration prophet and the Book of Mormon is the, the latter day testament of Jesus Christ. See, at the end of the day, it's about what goes on inside the Mormon. And so there's no arguing with that at that point because it's, it's all about internal experience.

So sometimes, this is true in Islam and other religions, sounds like they're offering to you some testable information. but, but by the time you're done. exploring it. It's not, it ends up being about what goes on inside of them.

That's not the case with Christianity. In fact, to demonstrate this, let me read to you one of the strangest passages in all of religious literature. You're not going to find something like this in the Bhagvad Gita, in the Book of Mormon, in the Buddhist Tripithaka, in the Koran or anything else. Check this out.

1 Corinthians chapter 15. So blow your mind. 1 Corinthians 15. This verse is so bizarre.

Sets Christianity apart from the pack. 1 Corinthians chapter 15. I'll be starting with verse 12. We're reading through about 19, but In this passage by the apostle Paul, he's dealing with the resurrection of the dead.

And in so doing, he says a couple of things that just seem totally out of whack. With regard to how modern people think about religion. In fact, I won't even explain anything about that. I'll read the passage to see if you can pick up onto the, on the strange parts.

You ready? Here's what Paul writes, verse 12, 1 Corinthians 15. But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless. And so is your faith. Huh. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.

But if he did not raise him, but he did not raise him, if in fact the dead are not raised, for if the dead are not raised, and Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, Your faith is futile. You're still in your sins, then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

Well, what's the strange stuff in there? It's actually repeated twice. If Jesus did not come back from the dead, Your faith is worthless. Your faith is vain.

Your faith is empty. There are many ways to translate this word, and it doesn't come out well anytime. Your faith is worthless. If Jesus did not come back from the dead, Your faith is worthless.

You get the point. this is nice. You have a lovely place here. But if Jesus didn't come back from the dead, I'm not sure I'd rather be here.

it's a very nice day outside. I saw people on a golf course on the way here. That looked, that looked nice. And golf is a religion, people wear strange garments.

And they're baptisms when you hit a bad shot by a lake, sometimes the whole bag goes in, there, there's a communion, right? communion at the when you get to the 19th hole, and you swill beer and eat pretzels, it's all there. In fact, I'm not curious, there's sociologists who actually study the elements of a Japanese religion that have made their way into golf. Very strange.

But, but all of it's there. But why not do that rather than Here or in fact we can continue to meet. This is lovely. This is lovely.

I don't mind getting up early. I'm an early bird. We can come on Sunday mornings, but we, we just won't, put the cross up and we won't talk about Jesus and the gospel. We can have a potluck for breakfast.

You can bring in waffle irons and during strawberry season it would be a glorious feast. Whipped cream, strawberries, the whole thing, and we can continue to enjoy each other, and that'd be great. But let's not keep doing this if Jesus did not come back from the dead. That is really bizarre.

See, this is an objective point of contact in history. If Jesus did not actually come back from the dead, or if it's not in any way reasonable to believe that Christianity's bunk. It's just not true. Let's move on to something else.

it's funny, I've been in churches, a little more on the liberal side, where I've read this passage and people gasp audibly, like, talk to him afterwards. You can't do that. That's giving away the game. it's all about mystery.

No, it's not. It really isn't, if Jesus did not come back from the dead, we're still in our sins. The whole thing's a mess. Let's face reality.

Now why would the apostle Paul make such a crazy claim? Because he'd actually met the resurrected Jesus. He was a pretty secure guy to say such crazy things. Good for him, right?

So Christianity is testable. It's testable in this regard. If Jesus did not come back from the dead, or if it's not reasonable, not a reasonable thing to believe, perhaps we ought to go elsewhere. Maybe we can find some spiritual fulfillment in some other tradition or something like that.

And by the way, this idea that Christianity is testable is unnerving to people out there, that, don't you? I did. I did graduate work in a secular university and the idea that you could actually, test one religion and perhaps find it to be true. That's really not in the framework of what they do in religious studies at an academic level.

Oh, there's a great example of this. I went to a conference, one of the Cal State schools, this must have been 10 years ago now. And one of my old teachers was actually giving a keynote address on a Friday night. This guy's name was John Warwick Montgomery.

Maybe some of you have heard the name. I actually studied under him years ago. And when I saw he was on the docket, I had to get there because it's very rare that some, top level evangelical Christian scholar gives a lecture at a very secular religion and philosophy conference, especially a keynote address in a prime Friday night slot. So I remember it was at Cal State Fullerton and the lecture took place in a big chemistry lecture hall, there was a periodic table of the elements on the wall, and those little, those little college wooden chairs that you sit in they're bolted to the floor and they and they have those little desks that fold up and over.

It's just all so collegiate. And so the evening meal had been finished and scholars, literally top scholars in religion and philosophy from around the world were flowing into this room. I think they wouldn't miss this lecture because it had a very provocative title. It was The Quest for Absolutes, a Sherlockian Inquiry.

Yeah. OK, maybe only I'm interested in that. but anyway, with Sherlock in it, people had to be interested, and, and the lecture was about Sherlock Holmes and his, what if, what if Sherlock Holmes was investigating religion, so the room got packed and I, I got in early and I got a nice aisle seat, got comfortable, had that desk folded up and over, resting on it. And, and Montgomery gives his lecture, he pulls out some papers out of a briefcase and he blows on them and dust flies off.

And it was all part of the drama, because he was, he was pretending to read a long lost, manuscript written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson explore religious truth. Well, if anything about Watson and Holmes, of course, they're, they're only, they're only sticking with the evidence and they're making careful logical deductions and moving. Through the evidence very carefully and coming to some basic conclusions.

About religious truth claims. Well, there was a guy sitting across the aisle from me. I remember he's a tall, fair skinned fellow. And I remember right, the reason I remember that is because his, his earlobes were turning several shades of deep purple during the presentation.

shaking a little bit. Well, Montgomery finishes his presentation. And even before they could call for questions, from the audience, this guy leaps to his feet, forgetting, of course, to fold back that little desk. So, even to this day, we don't know the actual pitch of his voice, but But he's able to eke out this this comment.

We don't know if it was pain or anger. Dr. Montgomery. You, you do a tremendous damage to religion.

Yeah, what was that about? You do tremendous damage to religion. After, all the drama and the dust settles, you start to go, Oh, I know what he was talking about. He thought it was completely nuts and completely out of bounds that Montgomery would take religion by the collar.

And drag it right into the spotlight for examination. You see, religious traditions throughout history and in our modern world make religious or make truth claims about their religious beliefs all the time. And Montgomery was just turning the very careful thinking of Sherlock and Watson. they're turning that loose right on to religious truth claims.

And by the, by the time he got finished, Christianity was the only one left standing. And it was dramatic, and it's very well done, and disturbed everybody in the room, which was a good thing at that particular point. See, Christianity is testable. Christianity is open to that scrutiny and investigation.

The other religions want to run and hide. what was the apostle Paul thinking saying this if Jesus did not come back from the dead, our faith is worthless., that means, that's, that's religious madness if you have not met the real Jesus in person. And the apostle Paul had, but, it's funny because when I was in religious studies grad school, when seminar classes got a little bit boring, sometimes I'd think, how would I start a religion? how would I start my own religion?

By the way, I could, I could make a bundle, L. Ron Hubbard has nothing over me, man. I can make up a religion way better than Scientology. I'm not kidding.

Scientology, you have to suspend all thinking in order to get it. I got some ways to really bring people in. we, we can do it. We can make a lot of money starting a religion.

And like sometimes I think about that, I could have made a bundle, start my own religion, and I would have gotten all the tools I needed by doing graduate work in religious studies. One thing I would not have done, I wouldn't have done this. I wouldn't have hinged my whole system on some verifiable historical event. This is madness.

If you want to start your own religion, you can't have people checking it out. It's all got to be mystical, and it's got to be from a faraway place. And, and if you do get gold plates like Joseph Smith, you got to make sure like he did that an angel carries them off before anybody gets a real, a real look at them. And, and most of the truth of the system resides in you, as angels and those sorts of spiritual beings speak to you and so forth.

That's how you really do it. Because that thing, that thing is not testable and you can keep people going. Christianity doesn't do that at all. Throws the doors open.

Come and investigate this. throws the doors open. Wow. And it turns out that we've got the goods.

The reason the apostle Paul did this is he was a very secure fellow in God, not only had he met Jesus in the flesh, but he knew that God would lay out a tremendous trail of evidence through history, leading back to this resurrection so that we could proclaim it boldly. And defend it boldly as well. And the evidence is startling that the resurrection of Jesus is by far the best attested event of ancient history. No doubt about it.

And nothing even comes close. I wish I wish I had now just to lay out the evidence for the resurrection. Do that the evidence is so strong in our case for the resurrection that you can, you can demonstrate that Jesus came back from the dead using only the evidence. offered up by our harshest critics.

In other words, our harshest critics think there are certain things that are true about the resurrection of Jesus or the, the circumstances surrounding his purported resurrection. And if you take just that evidence, you still get a resurrection. That's how strong the case is. It's amazing.

In fact, I wish, I do have a CD out on the table, little plug. You should buy lots of them. yeah, it's see, all the proceeds will go to needy children. Mine Yeah, my, my, my twin boys need braces, and your support is solicited.

The resurrection of Jesus is the best attested fact of the ancient world. I remember I went to my I want to mention a relative here, but do, do, do you have one of those families where there have been so many marriages and divorces and, and, and things, you're not sure exactly who you're sitting next to at Christmas dinner. So I go, I think it was my mother-in-law's house. I'm sitting next to his stepfather twice removed or something or other, but I'll call him Alan.

So I go in, and Alan is an armchair agnostic. And he, he's retired now and his main activities are watching television and playing golf, and he's very good with the TV remote. In fact, whenever I walk into the room, he knows that I am an outspoken Christian. I walk into the room and he sees me coming and he always gets his remote out and it goes.

Looking for the most outrageous religious programming he can possibly find on television, where people are marching around in blazing white Nehru jackets or hair to the ceiling and they're falling down and frothing, and he'll land on us on the most outrageous program. He'll look at me and say, Hey, here's your people. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember one time that I walked in and it was, it was, I think it was during Christmas. And and isn't it funny during Christmas that these networks and the cable networks and things they show religious programming, they think we religious people like that we like our religious programming on Christmas, and so, but, but this time this was fascinating. He was going he landed on. Some Discovery Channel or History Channel, they're doing a documentary on the historical Jesus.

Well, I got caught up in it right away because some of the people being interviewed were people I know. In fact, there were even a couple of conservatives they were interviewing, unheard of, on network television. So, so I could, I could listen for a little while. And it was fascinating.

They're going through, they were doing like 3D images of ancient Jerusalem, and they were using the skeletal features of ancient Semitic men to try to find out what Jesus might have looked like, it was fascinating. I love that part of it. But then if they're doing a, of course, a biography of Jesus in this documentary, they're going to get to two crucial points. The first one was the crucifixion.

these documentaries go, Oh, the crucifixion. And, and, and then they, after that little title sequence, they'll interview scholars sitting in front of books. Or sometimes out in the quad of the college. And so they're interviewing these people.

And this was fascinating because it didn't matter if they were interviewing very liberal scholars from Duke University or very conservative scholars from Trinity or someplace. no matter who they were interviewing, they all agreed absolutely no history. Take it to the bank. Jesus did exist.

He was a real historical figure, a preacher in the ancient Holy Land, and he was executed by a Roman crucifixion team in first century Jerusalem. Take it to the bank, knowable history. Ink it into the history books. Done deal.

That was pretty impressive. Across the board, liberal or conservative, radical or or kook, you name it, all there across the board. Well, what segment followed. The resurrection, mm.

And then they interview the same set of scholars sitting in pretty much the same set of books in front of the same set of books. Except for the couple of conservatives who addressed the resurrection very carefully. The rest said something like this. Well, who can possibly know what happened in those tumultuous times so very long ago?

That was the sound of my head hitting the coffee table. I was, I was hollering at the television, literally, good heavens, can you believe that? I said, look what they're doing. Alan didn't care.

Look what they're doing. The exact same body of evidence that led them all to believe that Jesus was executed by a Roman crucifixion team in 1st century Jerusalem is you turn the page once, is the exact same body of evidence that definitively tells you he came back from the dead on the 3rd day in his own body. What are we going to do with that? This is knowable history.

This is not a problem with the evidence. This is a problem with certain people's worldview or what they want to be true. It is clear and utterly compelling that Jesus came back from the dead, and it is our great hope. We've got the goods on this.

I, I, I work in the area of the resurrection is one of my scholarly disciplines, and it's fascinating. I love the study of it, not just because God left a tremendous trail of evidence, but it's so hopeful. Everybody in here knows somebody who's, who's, near death, who's sick, who's, we're all going to face death one day. Some of you are either facing it now or know people who are coming close and the hope of eternal life with Jesus through the power of the resurrection is just, I wouldn't cash it in for anything.

And God left it for us. It's time we really recapture these great ideas. We've got the goods on this. I'll give you another example.

I got a, I got a call in my office one day from the UCLA School of Medicine. I don't get a call from them very often, and they're saying, Hey, we want, we want a guy to come out, one of your professors to come out and speak on the resurrection, coming up on Easter time, we do special lectures on occasion. We want to bring out some local Christian kooky guy to talk about the resurrection. Actually, the invitation came from a couple of evangelicals who were on the the medical student body, and they knew something about biola and that we might be able to give a good take on this, so they invited me out and I went out and I thought, on the way out I'm going, this is a good thing, if, if, if dead people can come back to life, medical students ought to know something about this.

So, so I got there and I was lecturing in a, it was an anatomy lecture hall. You ever seen one of these, a medical school? the, the, the thing goes straight up in the air and people peer down at you. You're basically lecture to people up there.

They're all, they peer down at the slab, where they usually dissect things. So I'm, I'm lecturing to them and And some bright fellow brought in sandwiches so that they'd get a big turnout, and it was jammed, although the entire freshman and sophomore medical class, they tell me, were jammed into that room eating sandwiches. So I did a presentation on the evidence for the resurrection and knowing that this was a medical school group, I didn't use a lot of A lot of biblical texts and a lot of flamboyance.

I simply made a solid historical case that went something like this.

Jesus was alive at point A. He was dead at point B, and he was alive again at point C. The historical record is clear and compelling on that. There it is.

Now that doesn't sound all that stunning, does it? They were stunned. I was stunned that they were stunned. Really, I just didn't expect that reaction.

But I could, I could actually see what sandwich they were eating, because their mouths were hanging over. And I honestly this is a lesson I think from the Lord for me about, about the power of this message, and the fact that God really has provided us some tremendous evidence it's compelling and persuasive too. And, and, and I think Afterwards I think I got a handle on this because one of them comes up and he says this. He goes, this was wild.

I had no idea what to expect. I thought we were going to hear some, religious mythology, but boy this was very different, you see, I grew up in a Baptist home and I knew all the Bible stories and, and, I consider myself a Christian believer and things, but boy, you are, you approach this very differently. You made it sound like it's true, true. What did he mean by that?

What you're making it sound like it's true, true. After reflecting on it, what he meant was you're making it sound like it's not some weird religious truth that you access only by blind faith. And that's what the world thinks we do, by the way, it's all about our closing our eyes and leaping into this mythology we call Christianity. He says, You're not making it sound good.

You're offering the goods. You're, you're investigating this in the same way that I investigate issues in medicine. That in the past I've, I've investigated in terms of history and, and law and those kinds of things. You're doing a You're, you're making this seem that we can actually know it to be true.

We can actually know it. And what he meant by no was objectively know it, know it in time and space, real, not just some internal religious knowledge. And that catapults Christianity apart from the rest of the religious pack. We make bold, brash claims, and we demonstrate them to be true.

God left us a tremendous trail of evidence. Now, Jesus was big on this, by the way, so were the Old Testament prophets, and so were the apostles that followed Jesus. the apostles were, were, were consumed by this idea., 2 Peter 1:16, we did not follow cleverly invented stories. The Greek word there is muthoi myths when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His Majesty.

The New Testament documents are just rife with this empirical language. We saw it, we touched it, we handled it. No, no, no, we investigated these things. It's true.

or they get this? I think Jesus set the stage for this. And clearly, the Old Testament prophets were big on this. Think of Elijah and the prophets of Baal.

he was big on demonstrating the truth of his teaching, wasn't he? Elijah, You guys worship Baal. I worship the God of Israel. Let's let's have a little contest.

So they set up, some, some altars. They put slabs of beef or some meat up there, and the prophets of Baal dance around and slice themselves, and at the end of the day, nothing's happening. And so Elijah, just to taunt them, he has people dump huge, barrels of water over the sacrifice. By the way, I taught, I taught about that in a Sunday school class one time.

some young kids, and I said, Why do you think, why do you think Elijah was dumping water over the sacrifice? And one kid said, To make gravy. I thought that was so clever. That's a that was a keeper.

But, but down comes the fire and licks up all of the water, the sacrifice, the altar, and, all of the Lord's enemies, that was a great demonstration. God actually likes us to know these things are true. Jesus did too. Mark chapter 2 is probably my favorite passage about the demons the Lord's interest in demonstrating the truth of His teaching outside of the resurrection.

Mark chapter 2. I'm not even going to turn there. I've got this passage memorized. I could, I could probably, I could probably give it to you an interpretive dance if I needed to.

No, I won't do that. I didn't bring my leotard. Mark chapter 2, great passage. Jesus has become known, it's early in his ministry.

He's become known as quite a compelling itinerant preacher. he's hot stuff. This is a day when there are no Googleplexes, no sports stadiums, no video games, not a lot to entertain people. So when an itinerant preacher of the status of Jesus comes to town, it's a big deal.

So people hear he's coming and they get probably to Peter's family home early, right in the city of Capernaum. north of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is coming. This is hot stuff.

People get there, they're filling the place. Jesus arrives. I always picture him standing in the middle of the place. teaching and the text says that the home was filled to overflowing, literally people standing out in the streets trying to hear what Jesus has to say.

Well, the story takes a little twist at this point when we, we, we learn about some great guys in town. I love these guys. There's probably guys like this in this church body right now. I've no doubt about that, who run to get their friend the paralytic, some local guy who's paralyzed probably, probably since birth.

They probably all knew about him sitting at the, sitting on the ground at the city gate, begging for money because it was a tough thing to be a paralytic or not have the use of your legs. At that, in that age. So they run and get him. They had a lot of compassion on him, and they, they haul him down to the place where Jesus is.

I think they probably did it on the map, and they somehow they get the guy up on the roof. Now I'm not clear on this. they have a couple of guys up catching and a couple of guys down throwing, or do they use ropes? I don't know what they did.

Mel Gibson will certainly make the movie and we'll, we'll get a picture on this. But somehow they get the guy up on the roof, and Jesus is teaching inside and these guys decide to dig through the roof in order to have access to Jesus. So Jesus is teaching a wonderful message on the kingdom of God and dust starts to fall. And then a leaf And then A beam of light breaks through, it's a dark room, and of course the beam of light is catching all the dust in the air and it's looking really ethereal and the guys who got there earlier are going, Oh, it's getting good now.

Jesus is getting a little distracted, especially as the hole grows bigger and more dust and dirt and leaves are falling in on people. This is, this is a great scene. I, I'd have paid admission for this. The hole gets a little bigger and you can imagine a head suddenly popping through.

Looking around, popping back up, gets a little bit bigger, and then it really gets crazy because They start to lower this guy on some mat, probably held with ropes, and down he comes, and I always picture him landing in the middle of the room where Jesus is standing, and so there's the guy laying on the floor just lowered through the rope in this dramatic scene. Everybody's hushed, waiting to hear what Jesus had to say, and he says, So, Your sins are forgiven. That's probably their reaction too, like.

Good for him.

That's neat. I wonder if Jesus will make us lunch. That's great. Why weren't they very excited?

Hallelujah. Jesus has forgiven this man's sins. This is great news. Well, I can imagine.

I can imagine one reason that they didn't do that is because, if sins are actually being forgiven, that's an invisible spiritual act, isn't it? So it's taking place in the spiritual realm. You can't, you don't have like physical indicators that that's taking place, right? So, your sins are forgiven.

Yeah, good for him. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. What else is going on? So after all this drama, your sins are forgiven.

Well, that was a letdown. think about this. What if, what if I burst into the room through the side door, right, right here, and I'm wearing long white, I've got the whole religious thing going. I've got long white robes going, a beard, a staff, and sandals, I have a big hat, I look like Gandalf the White.

And maybe even I have disciples following me or something, and I come up to the podium and I say, behold. or maybe I say low. Maybe I really hit it out of the park and say lo and behold. And I stand up in all my religious drama, my religious finery, and I say to you, My children.

Your sins You are forgiven. You're thinking the same thing. Yeah, it's neat. Good for us.

You see, and this is, this is something very important about the nature of Christianity and the character of Jesus and, and his, his plan for displaying the gospel. Jesus did not want to leave it there. He knew what the people were thinking. In fact, there were a couple of Jews in the back of the room going, Hey, wait a minute, he can't forgive sins.

only God can forgive sins. And Jesus knew that. But that's that's another part of the story. But Jesus said, Wait a minute.

He knew, he knew what the problem was. These people needed a good dose of demonstration, he said, he said this. So that you will, and here comes the operative word, so that you will know. So that you will know, so that you will know.

That the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins. Rise and walk. The man gets up, he picks up his mat, and you can imagine a path clearing to the door as the guy wanders out to the door, and the text says use the strongest Greek word possible. They were astonished.

And the guys who got there earlier were like, Yeah, I can't wait to tell everybody about this. This was big stuff. But Jesus did not want them to wallow around in some religious unknowing. He wanted them to know.

And that's why when Jesus was asked for a sign, give us a sign. he says, I'm not going to give a wicked and adulterous adulterous generation a sign except for one, right, the sign of Jonah, and we know what he meant, the sign of the resurrection. He was going to come back from the grave just as Jonah came out of the mouth of the big fish. On another occasion in John, show us a sign.

tear down this temple and I'll raise it up again in 3 days. And he was speaking of the temple of his body. He wanted us to know, and that sets Christianity apart from all of the great religious traditions. We've got the goods on this.

I wish I, I really do wish I had an hour and a half right now to give you an extraordinary lecture on the evidence for the resurrection because it is utterly compelling. We've got the goods on this. Our Heavenly Father, our great King, what a joy it is to serve a God who cares so much, not to leave us stranded in our day and age. You left a tremendous trail of evidence, leading back through history to these great and glorious events.

We can know these things to be true. We can know them. Lord, this is something very important to keep in mind. Give us your spirit.

Give us encouragement. pave a way for us to be great proclaimers of the gospel. In your day. Lord, this might be the last time.

This might be the last generation and we need to get the word out. Lord, help us not to neglect these great, great truths and the great evidence you've left in our hands in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's give a thanks to Dr.

Thank you so much for coming and And speaking in the seminar and also just the sermon this morning was great. I hope we can have you back again. just a reminder that Doctor Hazen does have some books and materials. If you head out and see the, the information booth, there's some stuff there and, and he'll be