Month: April 2020

Matthew was not the first gospel written but it comes first in the New Testament for obvious reasons. Matthew was the only disciple of Jesus who was literate so he was an obvious choice to write about the life of Jesus. Matthew is the most Jewish of the gospels because it was written by a Jew writing to a Jewish audience to convince them Jesus was the promised Messiah. Matthew did this by linking the Old Testament prophecies with fulfillment of those prophecies in the life of Jesus. This made the gospel of Matthew the perfect bridge between the Old and New Testaments and linking them together as one Word of God.

The gospel of Mark was written by a Jew named John Mark who was a disciple of the Apostle Peter. Peter preached in Rome and believers there, both Jew and Gentile, wanted a written record of the gospel message being preached by Peter. Peter was illiterate so it fell to Mark to write down all that Peter was preaching about the life of Jesus. Mark went with Peter everywhere he preached so he knew all that Peter was preaching by heart. Mark is recognized as the first of the gospels to be written. You may wonder why the gospel isn’t named for Peter. Peter didn’t dictate the gospel to Mark. Mark wrote the gospel himself based on his memory of what Peter preached. I’m sure Mark read the gospel to Peter for his approval before finalizing it. Let’s not forget Mark was a powerful preacher in his own right and preached the gospel to all nations alongside the Apostles and was himself martyred for preaching the gospel message.

Luke was a Gentile physician and disciple of The Apostle Paul who based his gospel primarily on the preaching of Paul. There were other eyewitness testimonies, facts and other evidence Luke uncovered by his own investigation. Who better to write a gospel to a Gentile audience than another Gentile? By using Luke in this manner God was showing his salvation was inclusive, that God’s mercy and grace was for all people who believe in Jesus, not just the Jews. Luke and Matthew were written about the same time. Nobody knows which came first but it doesn’t really matter. Both were written after Mark. The gospel of Luke stressed Jesus’ humanity.

Christians should never ever allow any doubts to enter their heads that the Bible isn’t God’s Word. Not only did the Holy Spirt inspire the 40 writers of the Bible to write down every word God intended but God also made sure the Old Testament and New Testament canons have only the books authorized by God. The Old Testament can be summed up in two words, Christ promised. The New Testament can also be summed up in two words, Christ delivered. This theme is woven throughout both Testaments and binds them together as the unerring Word of God. Todays focus will be on the New Testament and God’s progressive revelation from the Gospels to Acts to the epistles and to Revelation. In the New Testament God reveals that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of fallen mankind. Every Christian owes it to himself, and to God, to read the entire New Testament until they know it like the back of their hand.

Every story, every act of Jesus and every spiritual truth spoken or revealed should be absorbed into your soul so it becomes a part of you. Of primary importance is knowing the gospels. The New Testament is not arranged in chronological order. Instead, God has arranged the New Testament so His truth is revealed to us progressively which is why I personally like to read the New Testament in the order presented in the Bible. Let’s review the four most important books in the New Testament and the entire Bible, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. the first three gospels are referred to as the synoptic gospels because they chronicle the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The synoptic gospels give us the visible aspects of Christ’s person and ministry. The gospel of John was written much later than the other gospels and focuses on Jesus’ divinity as the Messiah, God in the flesh.

Very few ancient writings were preserved and handed down to us. It’s remarkable that we have portions of New Testament manuscripts that are only 100 years older than the original texts. Ancient Christians writings are by far the most numerous writings preserved from that time. There was no printing press so everything had to be copied by hand one at a time. There are 28,000 copies of ancient Christian manuscripts in existence. When these copies were compared with our Bible it was found that the New Testament was 99.9% accurate with the original documents. Those errors found were minor like spelling and syntax which had no impact on the spiritual message.

Satan stirred up competing cults and false information in an effort to discredit the Bible as God’s Word. Competing documents on the life of Jesus were created to throw up a smoke screen and prevent people from recognizing the word of God. Fortunately the people living at that time were witnesses to the life and resurrection of Jesus and they fully recognized the glory of God so the false writings and teachings were debunked quickly as the frauds they were. God took extraordinary steps to ensure the Bible’s pedigree was unchallenged. Historians for the most part accept the Bible as true because of the overwhelming evidence that supports it.

By about 400 AD it was clear to Satan he couldn’t destroy God’s Word or keep people from believing it. Satan then decided to compete with God for the worship of man by establishing a competing religion so around 600 AD Satan sponsored Islam. Scripture says Satan has the ability to appear as an angel of light so no doubt when he appeared to Mohammed in the cave it was easy for Mohammed to be fooled into thinking he was dealing with god. No matter what the politically correct say Christianity is in a death struggle with Islam because they are bent on destroying Christianity.

Before the time of Christ Satan did his best to divert man from the truth of God by creating other fake religions like Buddhism and Hinduism in the eastern world. In the western world polytheism prevailed (idol worship). Satan is the god of this world and he has inflamed other current fake religions against Christianity and also those with no religious beliefs. Satan’s most dangerous ploy is to sow lies and discord within the church itself in order to get us to doubt God’s love and God’s Word. False Christs and false teachings are coming in the end times according to Scripture so we have to be ready. We must study God’s Word so we know false doctrine when we hear it. We must ignore what is false and keep on the true path by not turning to either the left or the right.

Before God laid the foundations of the world he knew everything we would ever think and do because God made us. It’s the same with Satan because he’s a creature of God the same as we are. That’s why God will always be ten steps ahead of Satan. Satan is the second most powerful being in the universe behind God but God has more power than Satan in his little pinky. Satan taking on God is like an ant taking on an African bull elephant but the ant doesn’t realize he can’t win.

God has given us the Holy Bible as a revelation of himself and his salvation plan for man through the coming of his Son Jesus Christ to redeem mankind from their sins. Satan has predictably tried to stop the Bible from being completed and believed by the people by stirring up competing cults with false doctrines and sowing doubt with fake written accounts of the life of Jesus. Satan failed because God has made sure the documentation of the Bible as God’s Word is beyond reproach. Nobody can thwart the will of God. God does as he pleases.

Bible scholars agree Christ died between 30-33 AD and all four gospels were written down between 25-50 years later, which was very fast for the oral culture in Palestine at that time. In ancient Israel most information was memorized and retold because writing was scarce. There were no writings about the life of Jesus for many years so the preaching in the early church followed the oral tradition of retelling, or preaching, the account of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. The explosive growth of the church was achieved without any written documents.

More important than anything in the oral histories and later in the writings were the eyewitness testimonies of the Apostles and others who had seen the miracles performed by Jesus and those who knew the true facts of the life of Jesus. More important than either the oral histories or the writings were the verifiable historical facts surrounding the life of Jesus. Everyone realized that the witnesses would not always be with us to tell the tale and facts dim over time so it was important to capture the events of Jesus’ life for future believers while the eyewitnesses were still alive to write down their stories.

The New Testament books were a written account of what the people already knew and what the churches had already been preaching for many years as the truth of God. When the church council met in 397 AD to confirm New Testament canon as the completed revelation of God the 27 books of the New Testament had already been accepted by the faithful and used for preaching in the churches for many years. The council by nearly unanimous consent merely ratified what was already accepted by the people as God’s Word.

Buddha was agnostic toward a belief in god and thought god and the universe were the same. Buddhists believe our world is an illusion. Hindu’s also believe the world is an illusion. To Hindu’s reality is spiritual and invisible. Hindu’s believe in millions of gods and Brahma is the main god, the universal soul of which all people are a part. In Islam Allah is totally removed from people, capricious in all his acts and responsible for evil as well as well as for good. Jehovah is the God of both Christians and Jews. The difference is the Jews don’t believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God. The Jews think Jesus was a great Jew and a great prophet but not deity. The Jews are still waiting for their promised Messiah to appear. Only at the Second Coming of Christ will the Jews finally realize Jesus was their Messiah.

Of the great religious leaders of the world, Christ alone claims to be deity. Other religions tout the teachings of their founders. Christ alone made himself the focal point of his teachings. The grave of Jesus is empty because He is risen. All the other founders of the world’s great religions are still in their graves because they are all fake religions sponsored by Satan to fool man and lead him away from the gospel of truth.

John 6:29 – The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.

We must all be tolerant of other religious points of view and respect their right to be held and heard. No one should be silenced or feel threatened with violence for their beliefs. In the name of tolerance nobody should be forced to agree that all religious points of view are equally valid when they are obviously mutually contradictory.

John 14:6 – I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

All world religions tout the golden rule but only Jesus came to help us keep it. To even begin to understand the nature of God you must reconcile the three seminal characteristics of God. We all know God is loving, holy and just. God never stops loving us even when our sins separate us from a holy God who cannot abide sin. God never stops loving us even when His justice requires that He judge us for those sins. God’s love, holiness and justice all intersect at the cross to become one for our redemption.

John 3:16 – For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Matthew 1:21 – And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.

The work of Jesus on the cross is complete. We aren’t required to do anything else to receive eternal life. We need only accept God’s gift of salvation by accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. All other world religions require men to do things to earn their way to heaven and there is no way to determine if you’ve done enough. That is no way to live. It’s spiritual bondage. Christianity is the largest religion on earth with two billion believers.

Buddhism began with Gautama Siddhartha, “Buddha”, who was born in 563 BC in India. He taught nirvana was achieved by the soul being absorbed in to the supreme spirit through the emptying of self, through eliminating desire. There are 520 million Buddhists. In Hinduism there are millions of gods but Brahma is the main god. Nirvana is the reunion with Brahma by a continuous cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth based on living a good life. You could move up or down from man, animal or insect. Hinduism has no single founder and there are 1.5 billion believers.

Heaven in Islam is a life of luxury with plenty of food and sensuous delights like 72 virgins for personal pleasure. Sounds like a man’s idea of heaven and not God’s. The way to reach heaven in Islam is to follow the five pillars of the faith which are repeating a creed, making a pilgrimage to Mecca, giving alms to the poor, praying five times a day and fasting during the month of Ramadan. Other than that, you’re free to kill, rape, pillage and plunder to your heart’s content. This sounds like something invented by someone bent on enslaving others for their benefit. Mohammed and Satan both qualify on that score. Islam began around 600 AD and today believers number 1.6 billion.

The cornerstone of the Christian message is Jesus Christ – God come to earth, His death and His resurrection. Christians believe this because God says it in His Word, our Holy Bible, and also because Jesus Christ says it. The coming of Christ is woven through both the Old and New Testaments.

Acts 4:12 – Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

John 1:18 – No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.

John 14:6 – I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Christians accept the Bible verses listed above as God’s Word. Christians accept the deity, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Islam, on the other hand, denies the deity, death and resurrection of Christ. Islam denies the Bible is God’s Word. Islam and Christianity cannot both be true. Their beliefs are mutually exclusive. One is true and one is not or they are both false. The overwhelming body of facts confirm the truth of Christianity. Historical records confirm the death and resurrection of Jesus and His resurrection proved He is God. Muslims, of course, strongly disagree. If Christianity is true then Islam is false. It’s as simple as that.

Never fall for the ruse that all religions are the same. Satan wants you to believe that. Never accept the premise that Allah and Jehovah are one and the same God. Satan wants you to believe that. Now is not the time to be politically correct. Allah was originally the moon god for one of the desert tribes of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed adopted the name for the one god of his new religion. Mohammed then used the sword to ram Islam down the throats of the nations of the middle east.

There is not one shred of evidence to support Allah as god or the Koran as a holy book. The Muslim faithful are told their god is unknowable. Of course you would say that if you knew your god was fake and you didn’t want anyone to look too closely. Muslims are kept in line by fear. They are under the threat of death if they dare question the tenets of their faith. False religions dare not allow anyone to question their faith or they would be exposed as the frauds they are.

When light strikes the retina of our eyes it sets off a cascade of chemical reactions all of which are necessary for us to see. Think of it as a chain where all of the links have to be there for us to be able to see. If even one of these chemical reactions is omitted we won’t be able to see. How could this sequence of reactions happen by gradual evolution if they are all necessary for vision? You either have them all and you see or you don’t have one or more and you’re blind. If evolution was searching for the right path for vision how would it know which way to go? The only explanation is the eye was designed and made as a complete functioning biological system by an intelligent designer who we Christians refer to as God. Below are some Bible Scriptures that refer to what God has made:

Colossians 1:16-17 – For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in him all things consist.

John 1:3 – All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.

Nehemiah 9:6 – You alone are the Lord; you have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and everything on it, the seas and all that is in them, and You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships You.

Psalm 19:1 – The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.

Ephesians 3:9 – God who created all things through Jesus Christ.

Psalm 102:25-27 – In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands, they will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like clothing You will change them and they will be discarded. But You remain the same, and Your years will never end.

Romans 1:20 – For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Psalm 139:14 – I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Ephesians 2:10 – For we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which god prepared in advance for us to do.

Those who do not believe in miracles are narrow minded. They cannot see the possibility of anything outside the workings of the natural world they live in. God is outside, over and above natural law, and is not bound by it, therefore miracles are not a problem for God. If you believe in God belief in miracles is not a problem. If you don’t believe in God you won’t believe in miracles either. God and miracles go together. Biblical miracles are an act of creation – a sovereign, transcendent act of God’s supernatural power. All of God’s miracles had a specific purpose which was to confirm faith in God. The miracles of God authenticated the message and the messenger, or they demonstrated God’s love by relieving suffering.

The presupposition of a Christian is that God exists and that he has established natural laws which he can make or break. God can intervene in this world or not at his pleasure. Belief in miracles is easy with this worldview. God doesn’t have to do observable miracles today because we have the documented miracles in the Bible to refer to as proof of God. The miracles of Jesus were verified. The miracles of Jesus were done in public, before unbelievers and over a period of three and a half years covering a variety of powers.

The testimony of those Jesus cured of disease or infirmity is a matter of public record and undeniable. Never before had leprosy been cured before Jesus came. Never before had a man born blind received his sight before Jesus came. Never before had a man been raised from the dead before Jesus came. Never before had a man stilled the wind or walked on water until Jesus came. The miracles of Jesus were verifiable, unique and obviously could only have been performed by God. This confirmed Jehovah as the one true God and helped to establish and authenticate Christianity as the religion of God.

I hold these truths to be self evident: There is a rational body of truth for belief in God and in Jesus Christ. God exists and is a personal, knowable God who desires to communicate with us. God has come to earth in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ to establish a relationship with us. God has used the Bible to reveal himself, his character and his plan. Over the years Hebrew scribes meticulously copied the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Copying was done one letter at a time and the letters of each page were counted for accuracy. If even one error was made on a page it was destroyed.

The Masoretic text from around 900 AD was the oldest Bible text we had until the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in 1947 hidden in caves above the Dead Sea. These scrolls date from 150BC to 70 AD and were virtually the same as the Masoretic text and our Bible today. We know we have the unfiltered word of God. Only the book of Ester was missing.
An expansive body of evidence on the New Testament has scholars convinced it has come down to us with only minute and insignificant errors from the original text. God has ensured his Word survived intact. The Old Testament canon has long been set. It contains 39 books divided into the Law, the prophets and the writings.

The New Testament is more disputed but we can be sure it contains only the books God has decreed. The 27 books of the New Testament canon were included by virtue of their inspiration from God as decided by a fourth century church council at Carthage. The criteria used for the canon: Was it written by an Apostle, does the church recommend it, and does it conform to sound doctrine as preached in the churches.

Luke 21:33 – Heaven and earth will pass away, says the Lord God, but my words will never pass away.