I
feel like I am going to end up apologizing each week at the beginning of my
blog but I promise I will try really hard not to this next week! That being
said I feel like I have so much I want to talk about and so little time to get
it all down. I just finished watching the Vice-Presidential debates; first off
I keep forgetting Missouri is not on Eastern Time… so I missed the first hour
of the debate. So now I get to go back and watch the whole thing again before I
can talk about how much I dislike Joe Biden. Also I have a soccer game tonight
at 11:30 which should be interesting since I haven’t played soccer in years.
All
right! Now that that’s out of the way let’s get down to the good stuff…
This
week we had Jonathan Morrow, the author Think Christianly and
several other books. This man is incredible. He spent three days going over how
to defend our faith. Let me say that I already love this stuff. It’s something
I just get stoked about.
Right
off the bat we hit the ground running. We started by asking the question, “Does
truth exist?” We talked about how claims of truth can be split into 2
categories: subjective and objective. Basically we discussed how people are
entitled to their own beliefs BUT they are not entitled to their own truth.
Then we went into what our job as believers is during apologetics, which is to:
Respond to Objections; Make a Case, and Give Hope. As we discussed this I felt
convicted because I know that in the times I’ve discussed the Bible with people
who don’t believe in it or question things about God, I usually skip the last
and definitely most important step. I get into the heat of the argument/debate
so strongly that I end up losing focus on why I am having this conversation and
will just try to show the person why they are wrong and feel as if I’ve
accomplished something. Which I have done - I showed the person I was speaking
to that I can argue with them, but they know nothing more of the Lord.
We
also learned several arguments that we can make which will lead to proving the
existence of God and in turn give us an opening to share more from Scripture.
One was the “Kalam Cosmological Argument” which is actually very simple and
just deductive reasoning. Here’s a simplified version of it.
1)
Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2)
The universe began to exist
3)
Therefore the universe has a cause
From
here we can move the conversation to how if time began it must have come from
something timeless; if matter began to exist it has to come from something
immaterial, etc.
It’s
so much more complicated, but I love that instead of starting with conflict you
focus on things that anyone would agree on and then you can take things step by
step and create minimal confrontation to make your point. Not that I am against
confrontation, but once people get heated they tend to stop listening to the
message you are presenting and are focused on doing the same to you and you end
up gridlocked.
We
also looked at arguments for God’s existence from the angle of design. How
things came to be. I thought the coolest example he gave us was Mt. Rushmore.
He asked us if we knew who created it, and when none of us could answer, he
asked if we could still be certain that it was created or was it just a
happenstance of nature. He extended this metaphor to the world - just because
we can’t say we saw God make the world doesn’t mean that we can throw away an
Almighty Creator of the world.
I
love history, and we discussed just a few things to support the existence of
Jesus and His resurrection. We have recorded accounts from Roman officials of
Jesus’ death and the “strange doings” that happened after. Then the fact that
every one of Jesus’ disciples died for this belief in His resurrection - why
would men do that who knew it to be a lie? Another thing was that Jesus first
appeared to women. At this period of history women’s testimony meant nothing,
so if you were going to have a believable story of a risen Lord you wouldn’t
use the word of women.
Honestly
I have like 15 pages of notes of stuff; I have so much left to process. I love
what we went over and I think it has given me a greater boldness for defending
my faith.
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