There’s a tendency these days to equate faith with wishful thinking, and that’s not a good comparison. Biblical faith is not simply wishing it’s so. Faith, true faith, is not based on an amorphous hope that it’s so. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
There are people who hear the Gospel Message and think, “Yup. That’s for me,” and don’t look any deeper. But a deep faith is based on real information and correlation with known and demonstrable facts.
A couple of months ago I posted on FB a shorter version of what I’ve written above. One of the comments was to the effect that faith IS wishful thinking. I hope some of the things I’ve written on this blog over the last two years provides some evidence to refute that.
There is, I think, a concerted effort to keep people from critically thinking about Jesus. If you study the issue of the Gospel Message you have to make a decision. “Is this for me, or not?” Not thinking about it gives a sort of blind comfort because, “I haven’t discounted it, so I’m good, right?”
Wrong.
Romans 1:20 says even nature attests to the truth of God, so if someone claims they didn’t know, they are “without excuse.”
Back to faith.
Real faith is backed up by a track record. You trust one movie critic because he’s given advice about which movies he liked, you agree, so when he says “Bomb Garden” is a good movie you’ll go see it simply because he said it was good. A weather forecaster says it’ll be sunny tomorrow, and he’s been right more often than other forecasters, so you’re confident - you have faith - it’ll be sunny tomorrow.
The thing about the Bible is it’s been proven true so many times it would take delusion to think it’s wrong. Sure, there have been times it’s “proven wrong,” but it turns out that proof is what was wrong. For instance, Nineveh. No evidence Nineveh even existed, so the whole book of Jonah is fantasy, and it’s included in canonical literature, so the whole Bible is wrong. Right?
Then there was this expedition by “Austen Henry Layard and Paul Emile Botta rediscovered in northern Iraq the ancient remains of three Assyrian cities [including Nineveh] and evidence of the military panoply that had crushed all resistance from the Tigris to the Nile.”
Even when the Bible is “proven wrong,” think twice. Sodom and Gomorrah may have been found, so that’s about to be taken off the table, too.
The fact is, there are more ancient copies of New Testament books than Homer’s Illiad, the writings of Sophocles, Aristotle, Tacitus, and Euripides . . . COMBINED. And the accuracy rate of these New Testament books is higher than anything listed on the chart I’ve linked to above.
Take that, and you can extend that to Jesus quoting the Old Testament. Why would a guy with the demonstrated track record talk about fiction as if it were fact? But He does talk about the OT as fact, so it must be so. His most-quoted book is Psalms, and when He was tempted by the devil He refuted the Accuser using Deuteronomy.
I think the reason people disbelieve God is they start with the premise that anything beyond nature doesn’t exist. That means they’ll discount evidence of the supernatural. They want, in fact, natural proof of the supernatural. “Miracles can’t exist, so don’t use miracles to substantiate God.” That’s like saying microscopic evidence can’t exist, so DNA isn’t proof.
Foolishness.
And bad logic.
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