I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (60 page)

Woe to you, makers of the law, you hypocrites! You do not practice what you preach. You put heavy burdens on the citizens, but then opt out of your own laws!

Woe to you, federal fools! You take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but then you nullify the Constitution by allowing judges to make up their own laws.

Woe to you, blind hypocrites! You say that if you had lived in the days of the Founding Fathers, you never would have taken part with them in slavery. You say you never would have agreed that slaves were the property of their masters but would have insisted that they were human beings with unalienable rights. But you testify against yourselves because today you say that unborn children are the property of their mothers and have no rights at all! Upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed in this country. You snakes! You brood of vipers! You have left this great chamber desolate! How will you escape being condemned to hell!

Of course such an address never really took place (if it had, you certainly would have heard about it!). Who would be so blunt and rude to address the nation’s leaders that way? Certainly no one claiming to be a Christian! Are you sure?

While we’re not sure that Jesus would make such comments to today’s political leaders, he actually did make similar comments to the religious leaders of his day. What!? Sweet and gentle Jesus? Absolutely. If you read the twenty-third chapter of Matthew you’ll see that much of our fictitious speech is adapted from the real speech Jesus made to the crowds and the Pharisees. Contrary to the spineless Jesus invented today by those who want to be spineless themselves, the real Jesus taught with authority and did not tolerate error. When religious people were wrong, he made righteous judgments and let everyone know what those judgments were. And who could be better at correcting error than God himself? Since Jesus is God, whatever he teaches is true.

The historically reliable Gospels record Jesus’ teachings on many subjects. But no teaching of Jesus has more far-reaching impact than what he taught about the Bible. If Jesus taught that the Bible is the Word of God, then the Bible is our primary source of divine truth. So what did Jesus teach about the Bible?

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The Old Testament

Jesus taught that the Old Testament was the Word of God in seven ways. He said it:

1. Is Divinely Authoritative—
When tempted by Satan, Jesus corrected him by quoting from the Old Testament. He said, “‘It is written, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” . . . Jesus answered him, ‘It is also written: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” . . . Then Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only”’” (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10). Why would Jesus so confidently quote from the Old Testament if the Old Testament was not authoritative? He must have considered the Old Testament to be a source of truth in order to dismiss his most powerful enemy with it.

In fact, on ninety-two occasions Jesus and his apostles supported their position by saying “it is written” (or the equivalent) and then quoting the Old Testament. Why? Because Jesus and his apostles considered the Old Testament Scriptures to be the written Word of God, and thus the ultimate authority for life.

2. Is Imperishable—
In the Sermon on the Mount, a passage loved by conservatives and liberals alike, Jesus claimed that not even the smallest little mark in the Scriptures—the equivalent of a dot on an “i” or a cross on a “t”—will ever perish: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets,” he declared. “I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled” (Matt. 5:17, NKJV). Jesus could not express the imperishability of the Scriptures more forcefully.

3. Is Infallible—
In John 10, Jesus was about to be stoned for blasphemy. To get himself out of this jam, Jesus cited the Old Testament and declared, “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35, NKJV). In other words, when his life was on the line, Jesus referred to an infallible authority that cannot be broken—the Scripture. Furthermore, he later affirmed the truth of the Scriptures when he prayed for the disciples, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

4. Is Inerrant—
When the Sadducees tried to trap Jesus with a question, Jesus said to them, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). The implication, of course, is that the Scriptures are inerrant. It wouldn’t make any sense for Jesus to say, “You are in error because you don’t know the Scriptures, which also err!”

5. Is Historically Reliable—
In addition to declaring that the Old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, and inerrant, Jesus affirmed two of the most historically disputed stories in the Old Testament: Noah (Matt. 24:37-38) and Jonah (Matt. 12:40). Jesus spoke of those stories as being historically true. And why wouldn’t they be true? The miracles associated with Noah and Jonah are child’s play for the all-powerful God who created the universe. With our limited intelligence, we build great ships and keep people alive for months underwater. Why couldn’t God do the same?

Jesus also affirmed other aspects of the Old Testament that the critics deny. Jesus taught that Daniel was a prophet (Matt. 24:15) while many critics say Daniel was merely a historian. (The critics claim a later date for Daniel, because surely he couldn’t have made all those predictions. Their anti-supernatural bias is revealed again.) Furthermore, Jesus specifically quoted different sections of the book of Isaiah (e.g., Matt. 7:6-7; 13:14-15; Luke 4:17-19), never once suggesting that there were two or three Isaiahs as many critics claim.

6. Is Scientifically Accurate—
Jesus made other claims that contradict those of today’s critics. When asked if divorce was acceptable, Jesus cited a scientific fact out of Genesis. He said, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate” (Matt. 19:4-6). In other words, the nature of marriage is bound up in the scientific fact that Adam and Eve were created for a purpose.

Moreover, Jesus did not accept the false idea that the Bible could tell you how to “go to heaven” but not “how the heavens go.” He told Nicodemus, “If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” (John 3:12, NASB). In other words, Jesus taught that if the Bible does not speak truthfully about the physical world that you can see, then it cannot be trusted when it speaks about the spiritual world that you cannot see. Indeed, Christianity is built on historical events—such as Creation and the Resurrection—that can be tested through scientific and historical investigation. While adherents of other religions may accept a complete separation from science, Christians do not. Truth about the universe cannot be contradictory. Since all truth is God’s truth, religious beliefs must agree with scientific facts. If they do not, then either there is an error in our scientific understanding, or our religious beliefs are wrong. As we have seen, many of the claims of Christianity are affirmed by scientific investigation. Christ knew it would be this way.

7. Has Ultimate Supremacy—
Since Jesus taught that the Old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, inerrant, historically reliable, and scientifically accurate, you would expect him to assert that it has ultimate supremacy over any teaching of man. This is exactly what Jesus said. He corrected the Pharisees and the teachers of the law by claiming that they should be obeying the Old Testament Scriptures instead of their own man-made traditions. He said, “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? . . . . You nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition” (Matt. 15:3, 6). He then blasted them for failing to live up to the Scriptures by quoting from the Old Testament: “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men’” (Matt. 15:7-9). Why would Jesus correct the religious leaders of Israel with the Old Testament unless the Old Testament had ultimate supremacy over their own ideas?

In light of Jesus’ teaching, there’s no question he considered the entire Old Testament to be the inerrant, written Word of God. He said he came to fulfill the entire Jewish Old Testament (Matt. 5:17), which he referred to as “the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 5:17; Luke 24:26-27). And he told the Jews, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).

So Jesus came to fulfill the Scriptures that testify of him. But what did that Old Testament comprise? To what books was Jesus referring when he spoke of “the Scriptures”? In his rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23, Jesus covered every book in the Jewish Old Testament, first to last, when he declared, “Upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (v. 35). Abel was killed in the first book of the Jewish Old Testament (Genesis), and Zechariah was killed in the last (Chronicles).

In fact, Jesus and the New Testament writers cited every section of the Old Testament as authoritative as they referenced events in 18 of the 22 books of the Jewish Old Testament.
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The historicity of many of the events listed in table 14.1
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have been disputed by critics. But Jesus and the apostles reference them as if they are historically true. In addition to Noah and Jonah, Jesus himself affirms the historicity of Creation (Mark 13:19), Adam and Eve (Matt. 19:4-5), Sodom and Gomorrah (Luke 10:12), and Moses and the burning bush (Luke 20:37). This shows that Jesus linked the historical reality of the Old Testament with the truth of his own spiritual message.

But Could Jesus Have Been Wrong?—
So Jesus declared that the entire Old Testament is the inerrant Word of God, and he and his apostles affirmed Old Testament events that many critics deny. But could Jesus have been wrong? Perhaps he wasn’t saying that those events in the Old Testament really happened, but just that the Jews believed they did. In other words, maybe he was just accommodating to the beliefs of the Jews, in effect saying, “just as you believe in Jonah, you ought to believe in my resurrection.”

This accommodation theory doesn’t work. As we have seen, Jesus did not tolerate error. He wasn’t accommodating to the beliefs of the Jews, as some skeptics have suggested. He rebuked and corrected them repeatedly, from scathing public tongue-lashings (like Matthew 23) to correcting their false interpretations of the Old Testament (Matt. 5:2143), to overturning tables in the temple (Matthew 21; Mark 11; John 2). Jesus didn’t back down on anything, and he certainly didn’t back down on the truth of the Old Testament.

The skeptic may say, “But couldn’t Jesus have erred because of his human limitations? After all, if he didn’t know when he was coming back, maybe he didn’t know about errors in the Old Testament.” No, this limitation theory doesn’t work either. Limits on understanding are different from misunderstanding. As a man, there were some things Jesus didn’t know. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong on what he
did
know. What Jesus
did know
was true because he only taught what the Father told him to teach (John 8:28; 17:8, 14). So to charge Jesus with an error is to charge God the Father with an error. But God can’t err because he is the unchangeable standard and source of truth.
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Furthermore, Jesus affirmed the truth of his teaching when he declared, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” (Matt. 24:35, NASB), and “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18).

So where does that leave us? We need to ask only one question: Who knew more about the Old Testament, Christ or the critics? If Jesus is God, then whatever he teaches is true. If he teaches that the Old Testament is divinely authoritative, imperishable, infallible, inerrant, historically reliable, scientifically accurate, and has ultimate supremacy, then those things are true. His credentials trump those of any fallible critic (especially those whose criticisms are not grounded in evidence but in an illegitimate anti-supernatural bias).

Other Evidence Supporting the Old Testament
—In addition to the claims of Jesus, there are many other reasons to support the truthfulness of the Old Testament documents. For example, the Old Testament has many of the same characteristics that make the New Testament believable: strong manuscript support, confirmation by archaeology, and a storyline that its authors would not invent.