Category Archives: History/Apologetics

Video of “Chain of Custody” of the Bible and “Did Jesus claim to be God” from J Warner Wallce, Cold Case Christianity website

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Chain of Custody video J Warner Wallace – Cold Case Christianity

Did Jesus Claim to Be God? (Cold-Case Christianity Broadcast #10)

Online home to J. Warner Wallace, author of Cold Case Christianity and Christian apologist.

http://coldcasechristianity.com/2014/did-jesus-claim-to-be- . . .

I do not claim to be an expert in any areas of theology/Christianity. I have a Master’s of Divinity Degree and so I am considered to be professionally qualified as a Pastor and as much as possible an authority on Lutheran Doctrine and pastoral practice. Point is, there are people out there who have become very expert in different aspects of Christianity and one of those is J Warner Wallace. Pastor Wallace was a cold-case police detective in the Los Angeles Police Department who looks at the history and authenticity of Christianity and puts it under scrutiny as a detective, particularly a cold-case detective. A cold-case detective almost never has any physical evidence and therefore has to build a case on a lot of different aspects of the case, which is presented in court to prosecute the suspect.

As a detective Pastor Wallace is also very familiar with the “chain of custody”. As a Federal Police Officer in the Coast Guard I was also very well trained in the “chain of custody”. Any evidence recovered from a suspected crime scene has to be handled with utmost security in order to assure that lawyers, judges, etc, have complete confidence that this evidence hasn’t been tampered with in any way. If there is any serious question as to the chain of custody important evidence can be excluded from a trial, obviously the effect of that could destroy a case. Wallace applies those same parameters to test the “chain of custody” of the Bible and he shows that there is very little doubt that the chain of custody has been faithfully maintained dating back, in the case under discussion, to the Apostle John. The first link is to that video, you can paste that link into your browser to see the video on the “Cold Case Christianity” website.

The other link is to Pastor Wallace’s podcast which raises the issue whether Jesus actually claimed to be God. This is an issue that Bible opponents love to raise, did Jesus come straight out and say “Hi, I’m God.”? Well he did, too often we try to put everything in our own context, 21st century Americans, and when we don’t see that in other times and places we dismiss the claim. Jesus made it very clear to His 1st century Jewish listeners that He was very much God and they understood Him very clearly. Listen as Pastor Wallace explains how Jesus made it very clear who He was.

I do want to make it clear, that as Christian disciples we are not made Christian disciples by the evidence. We are brought to faith in Jesus by the Holy Spirit, we don’t want to make our Christian faith a test of physical evidence. By the same token when we leave questions unanswered to people who are obviously antagonistic to the faith, we raise questions in others as to the authenticity of the Christian faith. Often I’ve found myself acting more as an “apologist” a defender of the faith, not for the benefit of the person who is challenging what I’m teaching, but the benefit of the weaker brother or sister whose faith might be undermined because of an antagonist. Our faith is in Christ, He is the One who leads and guides us, the Lord of our lives. We do not need the physical evidence, but often we are challenged by a hostile world and we want to: “but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you;” (1 Pet 3:15 ESV) I would really encourage you to check out Pastor Wallace’s website, he has a lot of great blogs, podcasts and videos on many fascinating aspects of “…the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3 ESV)

Sure it’s all about smoking marijuana, what makes me happy

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Gonna kind of step off the deep end here so stand by for serious squawking.
Burt Helm in Inc Magazine (Dec 2013/Jan 2014 p 56) about the corporate culture in Boulder, Co. Their local historian pleading not to “unfairly reducing Boulder to a playground where smug eco-liberals puffed legalized marijuana and compared triathlon times.”
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, gotta be a duck. “We’re so much more complex than that” says local historian Carol Taylor. No, no you’re not you think your sophisticated intellectuals with your degrees in Women’s Studies, how is that any kind of serious academic pursuit. Degrees issued from “prestigious” colleges, that are just really “degree mills”. No academic benefit, just a huge amount of money for a name and connections.
These are people who sit around and tell each other how good they are because they lobby for government to spend more taxpayer money, while they don’t give to anything and find ways to avoid any kind of tax.
They tell each other how good they are by finding ways to justify killing babies, elderly, anyone who really doesn’t stack up so that they can of course pursue much higher goals like legalizing marijuana. These are the same people who in the 60s and 70s told everyone that abortion, divorce, should be easier, but would never become common place. Yea, welcome to your short-sighted ignorance, where both are epidemic, tearing apart families, creating the last two generations that have known the most unstable, insecure lives in history outside of war zones, famine zones, etc.
Yea, good for you, you have so much money, most of which is mommy and daddies, who just gave you money petted you on the heard, and sent you on your way. That way you could have teen-age sex, abortions, drugs, you know the 90210 life-style that you strive for and that yo think is so edifying.
Good for Burt Helm, he writes “it’s hard to keep a straight face”. I may be taking his comment a little out of context, but boy it is. You have a bunch of people who are an inch thick and a mile wide.
Yea, good for you , you make big bucks. Yea, people who have very little integrity, who expertly appeal to the lowest common denominator (yea, marijuana for example). Principle takes a back seat to “what’s in it for me” (actually that is the principle they live by). There big social solution is legalizing marijuana, and they couldn’t care less how it affects the vast majority of people. Try being in my inner city church office where people spend so much time trying to con you out of a bit of money. How many times have I heard about someone who was just at our food bank, who just went out and sold about $40 worth of groceries for a joint. “Yea kids get free lunch and breakfast at school, I don’t have to worry about food.” Wow, if these pretentious fops from Boulder ever lived in a real place, got a dose of reality, these boors from Wellesley, Harvard and Smith Colleges who have always lived on “opm” (other people’s money). They don’t know what they’re talking about and they don’t care, “don’t try to confuse me with the facts, I’m so much smarter than you.”
So long as I get my way, because I have all my life, I really don’t care how much what I do creates a more decadent, debauched society.
Common denominator? It’s all about me, I’m my own “god”, it’s what makes me happy, yada, yada. Then when it all falls apart, they get bailed out by others, but of course, it’s someone else’s fault. Someone didn’t let me smoke a joint and get mellow. Yea, they really think that way. God is God, we are saved, we are only fulfilled in our lives through Christ. It just baffles me, I am showing you Christ, you show me a joint. There is life and life more abundant, or there’s sitting around with a joint, making money off of your self-centered lusts.

The Day after Labor Day, the most depressing day of the year.

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I really loathe this time of year, I mean reallllllllyyyy, loathe. God definitely did summer right, summer in New England is such an amazing time to just go out and live. Nice and warm, long sunny days in stark contrast to what we are rapidly sliding into. Oh yeah, summer days are long, sunny, humid. We’d play basketball on Fridays at the YMCA, there were times when I could literally wring my t-shirt out. But it was a time when you could really live, be out in God’s creation and just go on and on. Winters in New England are days that end, that’s right, come to an abrupt stop at about 4:30pm. Daytime in the summer could go until 9:30pm and then just quietly slide into darkness. Taking summer nighttime patrols on a Coast Guard boat are so peaceful in the darkness, flat calm seas, clear star-filled skies, the ocean is entirely different at night.
In stark contrast the weather in the fall starts to breakdown, sometimes quickly, the crummiest weather by far is the fall. Think “Perfect Storm”, lesser scale, but continuous, every season crummy seas to one degree or another.
My earliest memories of fall started about 11 years old playing midget football, football went on until I was 16. Oh yeah, gotta love it, most practices going into the dark, where the temperature falls, at least, into the forties. Which of course means everything hurts more, hands and feet smashed up, and every so often going into snow.
One fall was definitely my best sea story. The night before we were out until about 1am, the next morning was a Sunday, so with no prior warning the expectation was to sleep in, have a calm quiet Sunday, clean things up for Monday, go home.
Ah yea, not…
Whenever it’s a matter of an imminent threat to life, the SAR (Search and Rescue) alarm rips through the station, the thinking was it could wake the dead, maybe not, but certainly the comatose. Well it went off after we had only a few hours of sleep. Now the night before had been very calm and comfortable, no need for a coat, anything. Well no one had decided to share with a sleeping crew that the weather had taken a turn, a really major turn. So the SAR alarm goes off, all you do is fall out of bed, throw on what clothing that you didn’t wear to bed. At that time of night boots. Shirt, if you still had the stamina to unbutton a shirt and then crash. Running like the Devil is chasing you, gives you only enough time to share what boat to go to. Does not give you time to share the fact that you might want to take more serious outerware, oh well. The tipoff being that you have to get on the 44 foot Motor Life Boat. The “44” is the boat that goes into, at least fifty foot seas, rolls over and comes back up (if necessary, not as a matter of course). Get down to the boat, light it off, get underway, so far so good. Doesn’t look wonderful but still no real understanding of what’s coming up. Hey you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back, as we used to say in the Old Guard.
The station’s in a little cove area; go out a narrow inlet (Hull Gut), then Nantasket Roads out passed some islands and then, open sea and all of a sudden a roller coaster ride. Now in contrast to the much newer boat you see in the picture, the “44” is pretty much open. You can go down below which usually results in immediate sea-sickness, versus on deck which delays it somewhat. So there we are rock-and-rolling, we are in about fifteen foot seas, the sea is crashing over the boat which usually means everyone’s getting hosed down to some extent. The boat is rolling so far side to side, that the communications antennas are actually whipping off of the waves. (Hey we haven’t rolled, so that’s good). I am cold and wet pretty fast and starting to get queasy. There’s four other guys, at least one extra crewman because this is a serious case. Hey, give me credit, two other guys got sick before me, so there we are getting hosed down, leaning over the side, with a boat that was painfully slow. Folks you have not lived until you are hypothermic, having dry heaves and still trying to run a case.
The reason we are on this rock and roll adventure is because a man down in Marshfield decided he needed to move his wooden boat up to Boston to calmer water. He never made it out of the inlet. Another Motor Life Boat was dispatched, that one ended going aground, the boat coxswain, the engineer and another crewman ended up in the water. (This also meant that there were no other boats with heavy seas capability in case something happened to us.) The original man was medevaced, but he was gone, the engineer was medevaced, and the coxswain had no choice but to walk to shore. This left one crewman in the boat, who had only been at the station about a month and was nowhere near qualified to do anything on that boat. (Break-in crew are often taken on cases in order to gain experience and knowledge in order to get qualified.) (I met him again just a few months before I retired, we got to share that adventure, he said he was absolutely terrified during that case.)
We finally get the boat in tow get it to a mooring, get a little together and head back to the station. Still crummy, but not as bad as before. The case started at around 9am and we got back to the station after 5pm. Yea, office hours, but definitely not routine. Eight hours under way, no food, cold, sea-sick, but still that little cocky spring in the step (which was about all I was physically capable of). The Atlantic Ocean thew a lot against us, but we made it down and back. I spent about twenty years out of 29 years at Coast Guard Station Point Allerton. “PA” is one of the most renown stations in the Coast Guard. I read about it in boot camp, before I had ever heard of it. Being a part of that station is to uphold an honored tradition that extends back to the 1870s and I was a proud part of an amazing tradition.
Semper Paratus. I have others, this was definitely the most miserable one. Please check out my short post about the station itself. I would like to write a more detailed history at some time. But when you hear me whining about being cold and really loathing the autumnal season, well this is definitely a part of the reason.

Kidron Valley, site of the judgement?

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This is the Kidron Valley. It is located between the city of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.
I was fascinated with the incredibly hilly and rocky soil in Israel in general and Jerusalem was no exception. You also have a little idea of the distance between the Mount of Olives, where Jesus and the disciples frequently retreated to and to Jerusalem proper. The gold dome in the foreground marks the location of the temple. This was the center of Jewish religion during Jesus’ time and where they visited frequently. You get an idea of the distance of the walk, while walking down and up hills over really rocky soil.
They are hard to make out, but all the stoney structures are tombs. The valley was a popular area to bury the dead perhaps because of the legend that said this was where Messiah would appear and judge in the final judgement. Legend has it that the people buried here would be at the head of the line for judgement.

Wired by God, for God

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Interesting how you can hear of the Higgs-Boson particle (yeah, I know what?). The so-called God particle from a year ago, published all over until reporters and editors found out what it really meant, then not so much yada-yada.
But when genuine scientific findings are made confirming over and over how, not only are we designed, but how the entire universe is designed, well that doesn’t get any newspaper ink.
Case in point, the recent “Leadership Journal” (Summer 2014) which goes into detail as to how our brains can be or are wired to be receptive to God.

Leadership Journal develops this rather extensively and it goes into some heavy detail, which I will attempt to lighten. I’m going to do a few blogs on this so that I can digest it betterand hopefully spew it out to you somewhat intelligentyl . I would like to add that if you are in ministry or any kind of lay leadership you really should get Leadership Journal it’s just an outstanding publication.

John Ortberg points out that our brains are wired so that “mostly our behavior does not consist of a series of conscious choices. Mostly, our behavior is governed by habit.” (p 21)
We usually think in terms of “bad habits”, which we all have much too much of. Ortberg points out: “Habits are enormously freeing. They are what allows my body to be driving my car while my mind is planning next week’s sermon.” Yea, right, texting on my phone, shaving, applying makeup, eating a big sloppy burger (not my imagination, I’ve seen each in real life). Point is, there is so much we do in life that doesn’t require us having to make a deliberate action, much of what we do is habit and happens because of conditioning.
“But sin gets into our habits. “…what Paul meant when he talked about sin being ‘in our members.’ He was talking about human beings as embodied creatures – sin is in the habitual patterns that govern what our hands reach to and where our eyes look and words our mouths say. Habits are in our neural pathways. And sin gets in our habits. So sin gets in our neurons.” (p 21)

Quoting St Paul “…there is nothing good in our sinful nature.” Ya, I know a little harsh, but let’s face it, we have developed a lot of bad habits. “Paul is a brilliant student of human life who knows that evil, deceit, arrogance, greed, envy and racism have become ‘second nature’ to us all.” Harsh? Ya, but true. Even our best qualities when you hold them up to the perfection of our God, then ya, our “bad” habits are much more obvious and our good habits, at best, ho hum.

Ortberg notes that our willpower is just not going to cut it. Let’s face it, we try to do it alone and usually we are back to the races. “…acquiring new habits through which we can receive power from God to do what to do what willpower never could.”

Ortberg’s next line is compelling because there has been a long standing belief that the physical really doesn’t affect the spiritual. The physical is certainly about the mind. Is there really any doubt that when we abuse our body it affects our mind. I doubt that anyone would seriously question that physical abuse, bad diet, drugs, lack of exercise, affects the mind, certainly affects the chemical composition of the mind. Couldn’t the physical/mental attributes of the mind, if they are abused, affect our spiritual outlook? Trying to separate the physical/mental/spiritual is just a false paradigm. As Ortberg notes: ” Neuroscience has helped to show the error of any spirituality that divorces our spiritual life from our bodies.”

I say AMEN! There are many belief systems that try to make it just about the spirit, that the body is just a husk. POPPYCOCK. Gnosticism, an heretical Christian belief tries to make the material evil, the spiritual, as it were, good. That when the spiritual separates from the physical then it will be hunky-dorey. That attitude has infused itself through orthodox Christianity. the image of spirit beings sitting on clouds in heaven. Certainly physical beings can’t sit on clouds, but the question is; is heaven the end? Eastern religions believe that once we get it right, we leave the evil of the bodily and the material world and then (yippee, skippee), we become some sort of ethereal being and then drop into the ocean of all ethereal beings where our ethereality (no I doubt seriously that’s a real word) merges us with the universe. Again, yippee, skippee.

Why the gratuitous sarcasm? God created the material and He pronounced it good. This also includes our body which He intended to be perfect, incorruptible and eternal. Where else could it have come from? Unless the rapture happens tomorrow, our body will give out and we will, in the spiritual, be in the presence of the Lord. But again, is that the end? No! Not by a long shot. At the final judgment we will all be restored to physical bodies, those who are in Christ, the “Lamb’s Book of Life” will proceed from the judgment to the New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem will be the world as God had intended. No doubt, it will be much like the world that we left, but it will be restored to perfection, it will be familiar but it will be restored to a perfection that we can’t imagine. Certainly we will be restored to our physical bodies, again, the way they were intended to be before we messed them up with our sin. These bodies will be strong, healthy, immune to injury or damage. We were made by God to be both physical/mental/spiritual and we will be restored to eternity perfectly in all aspects of our being.

In the meantime we will continue to discuss how the physical/mental changes our spiritual outlook as we continue to affect the mental by our habits old and bad or new and good. OK, at least hopefully.

 

Judgment Seat

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In sermons and in reading the Scripture you probably saw something about a “Judgment Seat”. This was common to a town of any decent size in Israel. In the Book of Ruth, for example, when Boaz goes to gates of the city where the judgment seat is to “redeem” Ruth and Naomi. In that time an unmarried/widowed woman would rely on family to provide for her. The closest man relative would take her in and provide and that man would be the “kinsman redeemer”.
The leaders of the town would meet regularly at the city gate to conduct the business of the town, they would meet where the “Judgment Seat” would be. Today we would go to a courthouse if there is some legal issue we needed to handle. In that day a person would go to the city gate and that is what Boaz, who was the next closest relative to Naomi, did to formalize the arrangement regarding Ruth and her mother in law Naomi, to be their kinsman redeemer. The featured picture shows the judgement seat of this particular town where it has stood for centuries in front of the gate of this particular town in Israel.

Sea of Galilee fish fry, hosted by the Lord

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Been out all night, nothing! Just starting to be daylight and a voice from the shore calls “Children, do you have any fish?” They’re all adults, so don’t know how the “children” went over. Of course nothing like having someone remind you “…do you have any fish?” that your whole night’s been wasted effort. The same man’s probably becoming more visible and then says, throw the net on the right side of the boat (that’s starboard for you landlubbers). What??? That’s not going to make any difference. But they did, hauled in 153 fish, probably a record single haul.

They get close enough to land and realize it’s Jesus, but by now they’ve probably figured it out. Not only does He give them an enormous haul, but He’s got dinner ready. So nice after a long night of bouncing around the Sea of Galilee. He won’t be with them much longer, He will be ascending to the Father very shortly. This is one of His resurrection appearances, and it’s back in the calm of Capernaum, away from the bustle of Jerusalem.

This is a picture of the beach that tradition has set this scene. I can just picture the Lord with the disciples, sitting around talking, laughing, comforting them, providing for them and giving them the promise of God the Son.

The Sea of Galilee

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This picture is on the side of the Sea of Galilee that Jesus lived on. This is where Capernaum is where Jesus spent over 60% of His earthly ministry. This is where He gave the Sermon on the Mount, fed the 5,000. So much of the Gospels happened in this area, this is where the disciples, except for Judas, were from. It is a very placid area. My fondest memories of Israel are in this area and I can definitely see why Jesus would have spent His ministry in this area.

Herod the Great, the King of Israel, placed there by the Romans, was without question one of the greatest builders in Israel’s history. The reason he is called “Great” is for the many buildings, built during his reign. Israel has no real port on to the Mediterranean. Herod built this mostly to accommodate the Romans. It is a very Roman city with aqueducts, coliseum, made to be a very contemporary city of the time.

God is “not” dead.

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The arrogance of secularists is astounding, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, they just continue to assert that there is no God, or that He is either irrelevant or all about enabling us, i.e., whatever we want, however we want to do things, it’s His responsibility to make it happen and then to make sure everything works out in the end for everyone. The Great Enabler, the Great Creampuff, Santa Claus. There is an estimated 2 – 5 % of the American population that calls itself atheist. This alone indicates that a lack of believe in God is aberrant, such a tiny sample is not statistically indicative of a valid position. In or about 80% of the population calls itself Christian. The atheists segment, so tiny, even really, statistically speaking just aberrant and not really statistically valid, still tries to make a case for their being no God. An arrogance that is absolutely breath taking, they take all the scientific evidence, all the philosophical evidence, pick and choose what they like, make their case on tiny, usually irrelevant arguments and say “oh, yeah, there’s no god and if anyone believes likewise they’re stupid, bigoted, hypocrites.” Really? Tell me I’m wrong.
When people really have no valid argument, they always turn to ad hominem attacks and in their stunning arrogance, basically make their case against god by calling other people names. They are certainly entitled to make their case and challenge the status quo, but for the most part these people are just cranks [yea I know I just called them a name, but by definition…] who really make no case except a personal one and then in nasty, spiteful arrogance, they throw names at anyone who dares to disagree with them.
In “Answers Magazine” (July-Sept 2014), Ken Ham describes the interview that Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” with Richard Dawkins, describes as “one of the most outspoken atheists in the world – the author of the the best selling anti-Christian book “The God Delusion”. (p 40)
John Stewart: So where do we go when we die?
Dawkins: Bertrand Russell – well – we either get buried or cremated. Or we give our bodies to science. Bertrand Russell said –
Stewart: But you actually don’t know what happens to us?
Dawkins: I don’t know what happens to us, but I know that our consciousness is wrapped up in our brains. I know that our brains rot…
So Richard Dawkins, a man who is so certain there is no God, is not totally certain about what going to happen to him when he dies. And yet he speaks with certainty as he tries to indoctrinate people to believe in his religion of atheism!”
“Because Dawkins, like all human beings, is finite, he has to admit he doesn’t have all evidence and so he can’t prove his atheism.”

The following is a U-Tube link on an interview with Stewart and Dawkins.
http://youtu.be/pcbV53uAURg
Everything Dawkins says he concedes he can’t prove, there’s no evidence for his claims, but “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it”, although he doesn’t even have the integrity to say that straight out. The fact of the matter is that atheism is a faith paradigm that is groundless. He makes a claim “well there’s billions of stars, there has to be other places that could produce life.” But the fact is that when you calculate the chances of life for earth all the factors that had to come together to create an incredibly narrow environment on the broad spectrum of the universe, that man could actually live in, to say that happened by chance and “should” happen by chance based on the supposition that there are so many other stars out there, there has to be other life, is an ignorance of statistical probability that is staggering. He would have at least a little integrity if he admitted that according to physical law, that human life here on earth is so aberrant that the chances of life somewhere else is just out of the bounds of probability. I’m saying that solely on the basis of the numbers, the fact that we are here is so statistically aberrant as to be absurd that to say, based on nothing at all, if Mr Dawkins could at least admit that, he would have some scientific integrity instead of babbling on Stewart’s show that he doesn’t have anything for anything. Stewart really does draw it out of him, that his beliefs are as much faith based as Christianity.
This is my story and I’m sticking to it, there is a God, He has told us what we need to know about Him. He has sent His Son, Jesus Christ, in order for us to know Him first hand and to know how our relationship works with Him. The Bible is 66 books written over 1,500 years on three continents, people from different backgrounds all with the same string running through it and ending with the predicted coming of Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us how the universe was created in a way that is plausible. Yea, you can’t account for God statistically, but to say that you can account for all creation and disregard mathematical probability is lacking in any kind of integrity.
If you would like to check out some of the other resources in “Answers In Genesis”, click on the following link:
https://answersingenesis.org/