Modern society has become spiritually energized, but invests that energy in everything BUT the Biblical Jesus.  Anything goes in this modern cafeteria of spirituality, EXCEPT guess who?

The world is for the most part suffering from Biblical illiteracy.  The average person has no idea what the Bible says.  There is no understanding about how the Bible was written and no understanding of its reliability.  Instead, myths have been promoted and accepted about the Bible:

1.  It has been changed
2.  It was written by men with an agenda, who were less than truthful and accurate.
3.  The Bible is not authoritative.
4.  The Bible is just a book of nice ideas that we can pick and choose from to make any point we want to make.

Unfortunately, many professing Christians are equally ignorant of Biblical facts.   Many refuse to accept it as the absolute word of God, that reveals Him as he is and who he is.   Modern Christians like to pick and chose what they believe about their faith and they actually make God up as they go -  relying on their feelings rather than Biblical truth.

The reason the Bible and the Biblical Jesus is resisted is because human beings are rebellious and the Bible clearly teaches that the rebellious will never enter God’s kingdom or his presence.  The moment that a rebellious heart acknowledges the authority of the Bible and the truth presented there about the Biblical Jesus, the smell of spiritual death begins to rise in their nostrils.  Denying the authenticity of the Bible creates a license to continue in rebellion and avoid conviction about their true spiritual condition (spiritually dead to God in their sin).

The authenticity of the scripture and the historical truth about the Biblical Jesus is available for any honest person seeking truth to pursue.  Unfortunately, far too many really don’t want to know the truth, so they accept false allegations and misleading charges about the Bible and about Jesus.

Over 90% of the people who have ever been born on this earth are alive today.  The vast majority are spiritually lost and will be so eternally, unless they come to know and accept  the Biblical Jesus.

Do you ever have a sense of impending doom?  By that I mean, do you sometimes feel that ‘something bad is about to happen’ but you can’t pinpoint the specific thing that is producing the feeling?  Well, that is the feeling that destructive fear produces and it has the power to take over our thought processes and lead us into all kinds of troubling choices and behaviors.

Destructive fear is the result of emotionally living in the future and removing ourselves from the present.  The problem is that the present is reality and the future is not.  The future is largely speculation and conjecture.  Usually, most of our future speculation is based on what we want to happen, or what we don’t want to happen.  In both instances the creation of fear is a potential by-product.

If we think obsessively about what we want to happen we may become fearful that it won’t happen.  If we think obsessively about what we don’t want to happen, we may  fear that it will happen.  Either way, the result of putting ourselves emotionally into the future is perilous because the moment fear is birthed we begin to worry and fret about it.  Some of us worry and fret to the extent that we seek out situations or substances that will help us change the way we feel and help us temporarily bury the terror and the anxiety the fear is causing.

God tells us we are to live in the present moment and we must do that by faith.  Faith is nothing more than believing that God is going to do what he says he will do.  Scripture tells us he works everything for good, according to his purpose.  If we believe that, the future becomes unimportant.  It is in the present moment that we find God and that is what is important.

In the history of the Jews the nature of man’s relationship to God is totally exposed.  Human beings are left without defense before the awesome, transcendent God who claims to be the author of life itself.  In the sin revelation, the message is clear that the best efforts of man are not enough to achieve righteousness or please this holy God.

Sin may be the most hated word in the history of the human race, and one of the most misunderstood in our modern day.  Many have come to believe there is no such thing, and if there is, it does not present any problem for them in their relationship with God.

No human being in their right mind would have voluntarily created such a religious doctrine out of their own thinking, because they would have created an  impossible problem to overcome by their own effort.  In the Old Testament Bible revelation man always fails and no solution is provided that will produce a permanent, peaceful relationship with God.  Man is portrayed as dust and beyond hope.

Man on his own would never have written it that way.  Man would have created a theology by which he can triumph and appease God, thus fulfilling his dreams and desires.  We do not see this as it is revealed in the history of the Hebrew people.  We see sin, death and judgment.  Man’s desire is to embrace ideas and concepts that will produce the results he wants.  The things that man wants are found in naturalistic concepts of deity, and in bizarre idealistic theories.  That fact indicates  naturalistic religions are primarily functions of human thought, no matter how convincing the human explanations may sound.

The concept of sin is a foundational difference between the revelation of the Hebrew God, and the god-concepts of other religions.  The uniqueness of the Hebrew revelation is in a personal God, and the revealed nature of sin which other theologies and secular ideas do not embrace.  Sin is a hated concept and humans want to reject it as truth.

The doctrine of Sin indicates that man is a dead duck.  The only way a person who thinks they are alive can come to understand that they are really dead, is by revelation.  Because we are talking about spiritual death, it is a hard concept to grasp in a biological brain that thinks it is alive.

Moses and his two-million destitute people departed Egypt and lived in the Sinai desert with no visible means of support for forty years.  During this period, God gave the timid sheep-herder the Ten Commandments and a detailed system of orderly living that essentially survives among Orthodox Jews to this very day and serves as the basis for common law throughout the world.  This is no small accomplishment in any age and ranks as one of the most astounding facts in the history of mankind.  If someone led two million people into a desert today, how long could they survive?  A huge UN relief program would probably have to be organized to save them.

After Moses and his people wandered around in the desert for forty years, his rag-tag outfit eventually moved into the land of Canaan and subdued established cultures living in fortified cities with virtually nothing in the way of armament that compared with their enemies defenses.  Yet, they somehow succeeded.  The only thing they had going for them was God.

A Stormy Relationship

The rest of the story is of a people struggling with and against their God.  At times they experienced great highs and amazing national success.  More often, they were involved in corruption and rebellion.  About 800 B.C., individuals began to appear who were called prophets.  Though he was not labeled as such, Moses was actually the first prophet.  He had warned those who were in the desert with him of what the future history of Abraham’s people would be.

Moses’ warnings were periodically ignored or forgotten by subsequent generations and their descendants also discounted the messages spoken by later prophets who were sent to them.  These prophets claimed to be uttering the very words of God to this stubborn people and predicted their future fate if they continued to ignore the commands of their God.  The warnings were quite specific and the news was not good.  The prophets told them what would happen and who would cause it to happen.  Every bit of what was prophesied happened.

Because Abraham’s descendants persisted in ignoring God, time and time again they were conquered by other nations and carried away into foreign lands.  But God always preserved a remnant and continued to nurture and develop them as a people.

Abraham’s descendants were restored as a recognized nation in their ancestral homeland of Israel in 1948, and to this day, their national existence is continually threatened by the hostile nations that surround them.  Yet, they continue to survive.

The revelation in the Old Testament is of a transcendent, personal God, who literally created this people from nothing and owned them body and soul.  Creating something from nothing is a characteristic of this God.  He relentlessly pursued this people as they fell away time after time.  They were truly a people He had called to be His possession, and He expected them to respond accordingly.  They rarely did.

In the midst of this sprawling epoch that reminds one of a bad marriage taken to the extreme, there appear great shafts of spiritual light that burst on the scene in various forms.  Revelations concerning the holiness and righteousness of God abound from beginning to end, as well as, the revelation of the nature of sin.  In these revelations, God clearly claims to be the author of life, perfection, goodness, love, and the absolute owner of eternity and time.

At center stage of the entire Bible revelation is a striking theme positioned at the heart and soul of these people.  This theme is built around prophecy that the day would come when God would raise up a deliverer for His people and he would be their king.  In these prophecies, the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus is foretold, hundreds of years in advance of his appearance, down to the last detail.  The prophecies indicated this king would come into the world for the purpose of redeeming mankind from sin and to make them righteous.

Eventually, God told Abraham that through his descendants He would create a nation of people who would be His people, and through them God would reveal Himself to the world.  At that time Abraham had no children and no prospects of having any.  He was very old and his wife, Sarah, was considered well beyond childbearing years.  From a human perspective, the probability of Abraham’s descendants becoming a nation was very unlikely, especially since God had sent him to a strange land.  But Abraham believed God and went where he was told to go.  It was at this point in time that God introduced the principle of faith.  God declared Abraham righteous because he believed God would do what He said.

When Abraham was well into his ninety’s, he had a son named Isaac, and Isaac produced a son named Jacob.  Jacob had twelve sons.  Two generations removed from Abraham, Jacob’s boys were busy marrying the daughters of the Canaanites and were well on their way to being absorbed into the local Canaanite community.  But that is not what happened.  If another generation had passed without some means to hold them together, Hebrew history would have come to a screeching halt.

One of Jacob’s sons was named Joseph and he was somewhat of an irritant to his eleven brothers.  Joseph was his father’s favored son and they were jealous of him.  So one day, when Joseph was still a teenager, his brothers sold him to a passing slave caravan and explained his absence to their father by saying Joseph had been attacked and eaten by an “evil beast.”

Though he was a slave, Joseph eventually became the number-one man of the Egyptian Pharaoh and through some rather miraculous circumstances he wound up managing the entire Egyptian government.  When a famine struck the middle-east, Jacob’s sons went to Egypt in search of food and the brothers were amazed to find Joseph in charge.  To shorten the story, Jacob, his sons and their wives all moved to Egypt.  There were about seventy in the immediate family at the time and Joseph arranged for them to live in a segregated portion of the land, a factor that kept the Hebrew people from assimilating with the Egyptians.

Four-hundred-and-thirty years passed and Abraham’s descendants had multiplied to number nearly two-million, enough to be called a nation.  However, during this time period all of them had become slaves of the Egyptians.  Though their circumstances were not pleasant, God managed to create a situation that held Abraham’s descendants together long enough to give them their own, distinct, cultural identity.

The ability of many to see the truths of the Bible has been restricted by a sensed obligation to view the Bible as a science book first and a spiritual book second.  However, if the Bible was a science book and spelled out the specifics of all science, and had revealed those specifics in the age it was written, it would have been rejected as lunacy.

The Bible reveals the details of the relationship between God and man.  That is its purpose, and that is what it does.  Some people do not like the news.  To deny the truth of the Bible, they insist it should be a science book first.  In truth, the Bible does pass the test of science, if the possibility of the supernatural is permitted a place in the discussion.  To deny the possibility of the supernatural is the ultimate presupposition and may even be irrational in view of the likelihood that the entire physical universe is probably the result of a supernatural act.  There is no factual basis for denying the reality or the possibility of supernatural activity in the natural world.  The writings of the Hebrews indicate supernatural events are a part of the history of humanity.  The existence of the Hebrew people is living proof of that fact.

In their defense, these Bible critics are forced into taking these positions if they hope to continue their careers as critics.  The prophetic record of the Bible is astounding.  The position of prophecy in revelation is critical, because the prophecies are always fulfilled down to the last detail.  As a matter of fact, it is the unfailing fulfillment of the prophecies that creates suspicion in the minds of the critics, and causes them to look for other explanations.  They just do not believe such a thing is possible, over and over again, without error.

The unfailing accuracy of Bible prophecy should not be difficult to accept as truth, if the capabilities of the God who owns and occupies eternity are properly understood.  If God fully occupies eternity, it means that God is omnipresent.  He sees past, present and future as the same.  And if God is purposely revealing Himself to people in the natural world, it is a safe assumption that He might speak directly to a few of them.

Pure eternal existence transcends time and must be aware of every instant within time.  Every instant includes what we call the past, present and the future.  If God is really God, why do we think it would be impossible for Him to tell a few people what was going to happen in the future?  It may be that I have become too gullible and simple-minded about this issue, but I just do not think prophecy is a very big deal for God to accomplish.  I am referring to the same God who created all we can see out of nothing and has produced at least one instance of the bodily resurrection of a dead man.  Is prophecy considered to be more than He can handle?

It is harder for me to believe the critics than to believe God is incapable of doing what the Bible reports He did.

The idea is that thought matters when it comes to criminalizing certain activities.  American rights to free speech allow people to say what they want to say and express opinions that may “offend” certain other Americans.  The trend of government passing hate crime laws in America and around the world will provide the opportunity to persecute Christians.

The Bible establishes moral standards for human beings and many of those standards create problems for people who want to establish their own personal standards of right and wrong.   As the modern world moves to allow truth to be variable based on personal preferences, the idea about absolute standards decreed by an omnipotent God are terrifying to those who seek to be their own Gods.

In Great Britain a Christian is in danger of being prosecuted criminally for quoting scripture from the Bible that condemns specific sinful behavior, such as homosexuality.  To do so is considered “hate speech” and it violates hate crime statutes.  This movement is coming to the United States and in not too distant future the possibility exists that Christians will be imprisoned for preaching the Bible as absolute truth.

This little theoretical concept is great way to understand the way man-made religions have been created throughout history and nothing has really changed about man-made religions in modern times.  Humans haven’t come up with anything really new for thousands of years.  They have merely couched their theories in different terminology and jazzed up the images to make them sound more intelligent and logical.  All of their ideas are still based on human reasoning and logic and there is no divine revelation supporting any of it.  Human, man-centered religions are all birthed from a belief that man can define God.  In doing so, that belief sustains rebellion against the true God – the God of revelation and of life.

The Bible testifies that God has in fact landed on our beaches for the purpose of revealing Himself:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…(Heb 1:1-3 NASB)