Tag Archives: jesus

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Daily Broadside | Maybe Jesus Didn’t Really Die on the Cross and Come Back to Life

It’s Good Friday and I always take a break from the political nonsense going on in our country to deliberately reflect on what is ultimately important in this life — a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. (See 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.)

Because I don’t write on the weekends, I never specifically write about Easter Sunday and the resurrection of Jesus, which are inextricably bound up with the events of Good Friday. I want to do that today by examining some of the explanations posited by unbelievers who object to the idea of a physical resurrection from the dead.

To claim that Jesus was put to death and was really, indisputably dead — no heartbeat, no pulse, no brainwaves, no breath, fixed pupils, cold to the touch, completely unresponsive to any stimulation — and that he remained that way for some 40 hours and then came back to life, is extraordinary. It defies our reason, logic and experience.

When my father died, I was there. He was really, indisputably dead. If I had been told that he was up and walking around a few days later, it would be inexplicable and frightening and “unbelievable.” In our world, there is no “coming back” from the dead. Death is final. Dead is dead.

Yet we have four documents that describe an individual named Jesus who died and came back to life some 2,000 years ago. Could it be? Is it true?

Those who don’t believe say that what the Bible claims is impossible, and there must be another explanation. It was a hoax that the disciples pulled off by stealing and hiding the body; His appearance after death was a hallucination; Jesus didn’t die on the cross but was revived later; the entire story is a myth.

To say the disciples stole the body and just claimed Jesus was alive doesn’t stand scrutiny because they all went to their deaths proclaiming that Jesus was alive. One might die for something he believes to be true, but twelve will not die for something they know to be false.

Same with the theory that the appearances of Jesus were hallucinations driven by a fanatical wish for it to be true. But the Bible says that Jesus appeared to groups of people, including a crowd of more than 500. Individuals may hallucinate, but groups of people don’t all hallucinate the same thing at the same time.

As far as the whole story being a myth, the textual evidence doesn’t support the theory. A myth requires time to develop, so the closer a writing is to actual events the less time there is for the truth to be contaminated by mythology.

For example, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 Paul refers to a creed, a creed being a formal statement of belief.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in the mid-50s. In this passage, he’s referring to an even earlier statement about Jesus’ life, death, burial and resurrection. Paul likely “received” this creed directly from Peter and James, both of whom were eyewitnesses and with whom he had met following his conversion. The features of Paul’s language dates the creed to the 30s, probably within a couple of years of Jesus’ death, which precludes any legendary developments.

So Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a myth, it wasn’t the product of mass hallucinations, and the disciples didn’t steal the body. What about the theory that Jesus simply passed out but recovered after he was removed from the cross?

It’s known as the “swoon theory” and it collapses under close scrutiny. Rather than summarize it for you, I’ll let the writers at CARM do it:

The Swoon theory falls apart quickly when you consider that Jesus had undergone six trials, was beaten, then scourged with 39 lashes that left His back raw, exposed, and bloody.  He had a crown of thorns forced upon His head, ripping His scalp.  He had been crucified with nails in the hands and feet; he hung there for six hours bleeding and dehydrating; his spear-pierced side emitted blood and water.  He was left in a tomb for three days and was tightly wrapped up.  Was anyone in this condition able to revive, get himself out of the tight wrappings, and then walk on pierced feet?

Could he single-handedly move a large stone with hands that were unusable due to the wrist piercings which severed the median nerve and paralyzed them?  Could he then somehow get by the armed guards given the charge of watching the grave-side?  Are we to believe further that Jesus managed to walk a long distance on feet which had been pierced and then appear to the disciples as a victorious conqueror of death?  The Swoon theory makes no sense.  In fact, it would take more to believe this ridiculous conjecture than it would to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

Exactly so.

The resurrection of Jesus is the lynchpin of the entire Christian faith. If Jesus is still dead, then the entire ediface collapses. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:17-19,

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins … If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Fortunately, the tomb was empty and the only reasonable explanation is what the Bible declares: we have a risen Savior.

Happy Easter!

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Daily Broadside | Jesus Didn’t Condemn You But Offered A Way Out

Today is Good Friday, the day we remember on which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was put to death on a cross to pay the penalty for sin on behalf of all mankind. For Christians this is a day for sober reflection on our personal contribution to the sin of the world and the great love that motivated God the Father to send his Son on a mission to rescue us from our natural state of condemnation.

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 

—John 3:16-18

Many people have gotten the impression that Jesus came to send people to hell; that he stands above us pointing an angry finger that threatens us with condemnation if we do not “repent and believe.” The truth is very different. The Bible says that we already exist in a state of condemnation; it’s our natural state of being. To “stand condemned” means we have already been found guilty — guilty of sin against God.

It’s not like Jesus came into a world that existed in a neutral state, neither judged nor unjudged, and then handed out red cards (condemned) and white cards (not condemned) based on how we responded to him. The Bible says all of us were already holding red cards.

Jesus came, offering to give us white cards for our red cards. Note that we weren’t allowed to drop our red cards on the floor in order to take his white card. We had to give him our red card, which he keeps, in exchange for his white card. He took our condemnation on himself.

To use another metaphor, we’re born separated from God and doomed to die separated from God unless we grasp the life ring tossed to us as we tread water on the open sea. The life ring is Jesus, who tells us that if we believe in him, we are no longer doomed to destruction.

It’s a remarkable thing to contemplate on Good Friday: the sinless Son of God willingly abandoned the comforts of his position to become human for the express purpose of securing our freedom from the consequences of condemnation.

5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

6 Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

—Philippians 2:5-8

May Good Friday find you contemplating your rescue, and may you have a wonderful Easter as we celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death.

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Daily Broadside | A Brief Reflection on the Amazing Name of Joshua

Daily Verse | Joshua 2:9
“I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.”

Friday’s Reading: Joshua 6-8
Saturday’s Reading: Joshua 9-12

Happy Friday and welcome to the weekend. If you’re following the Bible reading plan, we’re now in the book of Joshua—which is an amazing name.

Why? Glad you asked.

Joshua was the successor of Moses, the man brought up in Pharaoh’s household and the leader who brought the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Joshua is described as Moses’ “young aide” (Exodus 33:11) and one “who had been Moses’ aide since youth” (Numbers 11:28).

Joshua was commissioned by God Himself to lead the Israelites just before the LORD took them into the land of Canaan (Deut. 31:23):

The Lord gave this command to Joshua son of Nun: “Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath, and I myself will be with you.”

Here are some facts about the name “Joshua” that give us a more robust (and inspiring!) understanding of how the Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh) points to Jesus.

In Hebrew, Joshua is spelled יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshu’a) (and always reading right to left in Hebrew). It means, “Yahweh is salvation,” from the roots יְהוֹ (yeho) referring to the Hebrew God and יָשַׁע (yasha’) meaning “to save.”

Included in the name Joshua is a shortened form of the Tetragrammaton, i.e. the name of the Lord: YHWH (יהו). YHWH is unpronounceable,

“… and wherever the text called for YHWH, a reader would pronounce the Hebrew word for lord, namely Adonai. In the Middle Ages, the Masoretes began to fear that the traditional pronunciation of the written text might become lost and inserted symbols to help preserve it. That caused the pronunciation of the word Adonai to be linked to the spelling of YHWH, which in turn resulted in the impossible hybrid “name” Jehovah.

Other Jewish traditions handled the vocalization of YHWH by inserting the word Hashem, which is the word for “name” … plus the definite article: The Name.

The name Joshua, then, is associated with God and with salvation.

Second, Joshua is the original Hebrew form of the Greek name Jesus, which comes from a Greek translation of the Aramaic short form יֵשׁוּעַ (Yeshu’a). As The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (ed. Colin Brown) puts it,

Iēsous is the Gk. form of the OT Jewish name Yēšua‘, arrived at by transcribing the Heb. and adding an -s to the nom. to facilitate declension. Yēšua‘ (Joshua) seems to have come into general use about the time of the Babylonian exile in place of the older Yᵉhôšûa‘. The LXX rendered both the ancient and more recent forms of the name uniformly as Iēsous … It is the oldest name containing the divine name Yahweh, and means “Yahweh is help” or “Yahweh is salvation” (cf. the vb. yiisa’, help, save).

The name Joshua, then, is also associated with Jesus.

Finally, the name Joshua is the exact reverse of the name Isaiah (ישעיה).

The name Isaiah(u) consists of two parts: The final part is יה or יהו, both abbreviated forms of יהוה; YHWH or Yahweh. The first part of the name Isaiah comes from the verb ישע (yasha’), meaning to be saved or delivered … The verb ישע (yasha’) means to be unrestricted and thus to be free and thus to be saved (from restriction, from oppression and thus from ultimate demise). A doer of this verb is a savior.

Where have we heard that before?

The name Joshua, then, is also associated with Isaiah and thereby reinforced in its meaning of “Yahweh is salvation.”

One more interesting and related fact. The name Moses is the Latin version of the Greek name Μωσης (Moses), which in turn is a transliteration of the Hebrew name משה (Moshe). If you spell the name of Moses backward in Hebrew (השם), it spells the word Hashem, which is Jewish for The Name.

Remember that from above?

Mind, blown.

Let’s put it all together. Moses, whose name is associated with “The Name” leads the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage into the Promised Land with the help of his young aide, Joshua, whose name means “Yahweh is salvation” and is associated with Jesus.

What you’re reading in the account of the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) is a type which, in scripture, is a person or thing in the Old Testament that foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament.

An Old Testament type’s details don’t all necessarily have a one-to-one correlation in the New Testament, but the broad parallels in the account of Moses, Joshua and the Israelites with Jesus Christ and his work are pretty hard to miss.

Exciting!

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | That Time Jesus “Transgendered Himself” in the Gospels

Daily Verse | Exodus 15:11
Who among the gods is like you, Lord?
Who is like you—majestic in holiness,
awesome in glory, working wonders?

Tuesday’s Reading: Exodus 19-21

Happy Tuesday and if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know that it’s mostly focused on the crazy of our political class and its intersection with American culture. I also try to pay attention to where faith is making a statement in our culture, but come at all of it as an unapologetic conservative evangelical Christian.

With that in mind, I recently came across an article that showcases how the culture has, at least in one instance, twisted the very person of Christ himself in service to an agenda. In the following video, Simon Woodman of London’s Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church holds forth on his unique interpretation of Jesus’ activities. (Yes, I know it’s Britain, but “woke” is international and we know this stuff is here in the U.S.)

In case you don’t have time to watch it all, here’s what this misguided pretender said (my transcription):

So, if we think of Jesus as, um, the one who reveals God, uh, I was really struck by Angela saying earlier that “God is queer.” And, uh, I, I think, as humans we have a tendency to construct God in our own image, rather than to recognize that we are made in the image of God. And, therefore, the dominant expression of humanity ends up writing itself onto God, and making that God. And, and I think, in, in the story of Jesus, the stories of Jesus’ life, we, we find that being very condemned, um, in, in some quite radical ways, which is then having the ‘knock-on effect’ of altering the way we understand who God is in relation to humanity. So, I think Jesus, um, transgenders himself on a number of occasions. Um, I, I think, you know, just, just the little phrase, uh, Jesus is lamenting over Jerusalem, longing to gather Jerusalem as a mother hen gathers her chicks. Um, I think if you look at, um, the foot-washing from John’s gospel, foot-washing elsewhere in both Old and New Testaments, that it, it’s consistently done by, by women. And, yet, Jesus takes this on. People often cast that as being the servant’s role — it was the women’s role. And, and Jesus does it and becomes the woman at that point. And, and, I think, you know, we’ve observed that either he’s a marriage [sic], he’s childless, he defies gender and sexual norms of his day, he’s known for associating with those whose own sexual history or gender identity may be ambiguous. So, I think in Jesus, we’ve got a revelation of God as encompassing far more, than what historically and recently, at least, um, Christians have tended to construct God as being. And I think there’s a bit of an antidote to, uh, heteronormative idolatry hidden in the story of Jesus.

This statement is so full of holes and absurdities and contradictions and half-truths it’s hard to know where to start. But let me try. The logical flow of his argument is:

1) Jesus reveals God;

2) Humans “construct” God in their own image;

3) Therefore, the “dominant expression of humanity” makes God “heteronormative” (i.e. men attracted to women and vice-versa);

4) But, Jesus condemns that understanding of God by “transgendering” himself multiple times;

5) Ergo, Jesus reveals God as embracing transgenderism, which is an antidote to “heteronormative idolatry.”

So much theological nonsense, so little time.

We agree that Jesus reveals God. Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). We can also agree that people often imagine (“construct”) God according to their own ideas or “image.” After that, we disagree with everything else he says.

God Himself is not “heteronormative” nor “transgender” because he is Spirit and “not a man.” Woodman argues that the “dominant” practice of humanity is heterosexuality (true), which mankind has projected (or written) onto God. The scripture says otherwise from the very beginning: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). God “wrote” that onto humanity.

Woodman claims that Jesus “transgenders” himself. What the heck does that even mean? Nobody saw Jesus as a “transgendered” individual. For instance, the Jews were ready to stone Jesus in John 10:33 because “you, a mere man, claim to be God.” Is Woodman suggesting that Jesus “pretended” to be a man pretending to be a woman? And then went back to being a man?

It’s sheer nonsense.

Woodman also claims that foot-washing is done by women in both old and new testaments. This is not at all clear from the texts that mention washing feet. In fact, it seems like most of the time guests were expected to wash their own feet (see Genesis 18:4, 19:2, and 24:32 for three quick examples).

As far as Jesus hanging out with sexually “ambiguous” people — Woodman gives no examples of such people in scripture. However, the people that Jesus was most often associated with in the gospels were “sinners and tax collectors.” Some of the sinners were sexually immoral, like the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) or the Samaritan woman who had five husbands and was living with a sixth not her husband. All heteronormative relationships, I might add, even if sinful.

What’s so ironic is that Woodman starts off his argument by admitting that “as humans we have a tendency to construct God in our own image,” and then proceeds to do exactly that. None of his arguments hold up under scrutiny.

This is a case of someone with an agenda who “writes” onto God what he wants to see. You know how I know? Count the number of times he says, “I think.”

I’ll save you the trouble: eight times.

Eight times in roughly 13 sentences Woodman starts his thought with, “I think.” His entire statement is what he thinks—not what God thinks and not what the scripture teaches.

And when he concludes with the charge of “heteronormative idolatry,” that gives away the game.

Wokeness is envy run amuck.

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Morning Links

YOU DON’T LOOK A DAY OVER 29. 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’

Because radiocarbon dating does not produce exact dates, they believe that she could have been as “young” as 272 or as old as 512. But she was most likely somewhere in the middle, so about 400 years old.

It means she was born between the years of 1501 and 1744, but her most likely date of birth was in the 17th century.

“Even with the lowest part of this uncertainty, 272 years, even if that is the maximum age, it should still be considered the longest-living vertebrate,” said Mr Nielsen.

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IF YOU’RE IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP, GET HELP. Authorities Brace For Increase In Domestic Violence

“Regardless, though, there’s absolutely no excuse to get physical with your partner. At a minimum, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate your need for some cool-off space. Force the issue if you have to, but do not allow yourself to lose control.

“If your partner is the one who might lose control, though, get away if you can. I have no idea if the shelter in your area is open or not.”

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I NOTICE THEY HAVEN’T DEMANDED AN INVESTIGATION INTO WHY THE WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT FORM WAS SECRETLY REVISED. One Word Used By Kushner Set Off The Left, Investigation Demanded

“So, four Democrat senators – Sens. Tammy Duckworth, Mazie Hirono, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey – signed a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) office of inspector general. They want an investigation to be launched into why the description has been changed.”

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HOLY WEEK PRESENTS AN OPPORTUNITY TO CONSIDER THE BIBLE’S CLAIMS. HARD FACTS: Is the Claim Jesus Rose From the Dead Just Another Fairy Tale Like the Easter Bunny?