Biblical Proof that Mary did not Remain a Virgin

There are at least 3 Biblical reasons that Mary did not remain a virgin and had other children after Jesus that are rarely mentioned. Everyone talks about how Joseph only kept Mary a virgin until Jesus was born and how Jesus had brothers and sisters mentioned in scripture. Those are good arguments. However, there are even stronger arguments that should be mentioned.

1) If Joseph had children before Jesus was born, then Jesus was not the rightful heir to the Davidic throne and could not have been the Messiah. Matthew 1 shows the kingly lineage through David all the way down to Joseph. Jesus was Joseph's legal firstborn son, and thus the rightful heir to the throne. If Jude or James or one of Jesus' other brothers was actually an older son of Joseph, he would be the rightful king instead of Jesus.

2) Sex is and has always been an integral part of what marriage is. From the very beginning in Genesis, God defined marriage as a man joining to his wife and they become one flesh. We refer to sex after the marriage ceremony as consummation because it completes the marriage. If Mary did not become one flesh with Joseph, she wasn't married to him. The union was never completed. Yet scripture tells us she was his wife. Catholics are thus arguing that there can be such a thing as a sexless marriage which is never completed with a one flesh union. This is unbiblical, not only about Mary but about marriage itself.

3) The Old Testament specifically prophesies that the Messiah will be rejected by His mother's sons. If Mary had no other children, then this prophecy failed and Jesus was not the promised Messiah.

Psalm 69:7-9
For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that dishonor has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother's sons. For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.

We know this is a Messianic passage. In fact, verse 9 is specifically quoted in John 2:17 as referring to Jesus when He cleansed the temple. Yet verse 8 is only fulfilled if Jesus had brothers who were specifically sons of Mary who then rejected Him. Scripture records their rejection. They believed Jesus was crazy initially. It was not until He rose from the dead and appeared to them that they believed. These must have been sons of Mary, as scripture foretold.

There's also no reason that Mary needed to remain a virgin after Jesus was born. The sign had already been given. Mary's virginity at the birth of the Messiah was a sign about Jesus, not about Mary.

The Creeping Influx of Female Teachers in the Church

In conservative churches, we know that women are not to be pastors. Most conservative churches will never select a woman as pastor and probably not even youth pastor or any pastor title. Scripture is very clear that pastors or bishops are to be men of proper character and reputation and with the ability to teach because this is their primary role.

1 Timothy 3:1-7 This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?) Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

Titus 1:5-9 For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee: If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly. For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate; Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.

Obviously, women cannot fulfill the requirement to be a pastor in the church. There are also many other reasons in scripture that the pastorate is limited to men. However, the official title of pastor is not the only thing limited to men in scripture. The scripture also forbids a woman to teach in the church congregation.

1 Timothy 2:11-12 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

Now, we know that, in context, this is talking about women speaking publicly, in a teaching role of the church, not merely a woman saying anything to anyone in a church building. There were no church buildings in the 1st century. The church is the gathering of believers, not a building. So this is not saying women can’t speak a word in a church building.

Women are also described in scripture as singing, prophesying, and praying in the church gathering, but women are forbidden to take a teaching role in the church gathering—to be the one discerning and teaching doctrine with the authority of the church. One woman speaking to another person in a home or a business or wherever else about what scripture says does not have the authority of the church, and thus she is not forbidden to speak in these situations. All believers, whether male or female, are instructed to share the gospel and to love sound doctrine. However, the teaching role of the church is another level that has a grave authority and responsibility which is to be carried by qualified men.

2 Timothy 2:1-2 Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.

The teaching role in the church, according scripture, is to be performed by qualified men, not by women. I don’t see any exception given in scripture if we form a special class of only women. A gathering of the church to be taught doctrine should have male teachers.

Now, the reason that many conservative churches have traditionally allowed women to teach if they’re only teaching women is that it is often believed that the real problem is that women should not be teaching men. It is certainly true that women should not be teaching men doctrine in the church. But scripture doesn’t say that women can teach in the church gathering if it’s an audience of women. It says that women are not to teach, and that the teachers in the church are to be faithful men. In short, both men and women need to be taught by qualified male teachers. I think we have let tradition overshadow the text of scripture in this matter.

So, where do women learn the specific things that relate to women? There is certainly a need for women to be taught things specific to their roles as daughters, wives, mothers, and similarly womanly tasks. The scripture provides for this need.

Titus 2:3-5 The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.

Here we see that the older women of good character are to teach the younger women these specific female-related topics. This is not carte blanche for a woman to teach other women every doctrine of the scriptures. What the older women are to teach is listed for us.

1. To be sober. This could include staying away from alcohol and drugs as well as to be serious rather than emotional or flighty or foolish.
2. To love their husbands. Helping a young woman understand how to love her husband is something we need the more experienced wives to teach because it doesn’t necessarily come naturally. Happily married mentor figures are a huge help in solving marriage conflicts.
3. To love their children. Loving our children, such as applying the loving discipline they need and being the careful nurturers of their hearts and bodies, is something we need to learn. The older women are a valuable resource here.
4. To be discreet. Discretion is a moral skill that needs to be taught. How not to draw attention to ourselves, not to display all of our lives to the world, not to share private matters, when to speak and when to be silent—these are things the younger women must learn.
5. To be chaste. Chastity is hugely important, both before and after marriage. We need older women to teach the younger women to save sex for marriage and to be faithful to their husbands.
6. To be keepers at home. Keeping a home is an important and also difficult task. The knowledge and skill necessary to cook, clean, train children, and make a home a beautiful and inviting sanctuary for our families is something we learn primarily from other women. The importance of prioritizing our calling in the home is something the world won’t tell us, but the church women should.
7. To be good. We all need encouragement to live a holy life, including from older women.
8. To be obedient to their own husbands. It’s not just that a woman is to love her husband, but she is also to submit to his authority as head of the home. This is something older women are to teach the younger women. It doesn’t come naturally. We have to learn it.

Note that all of these topics which the older women are to teach are practical matters about how a woman is to live out God’s will for her life in her home and her family. They are not the overall doctrine of the church on salvation, baptism, morality, and so on. It would be extremely awkward and probably not very effective for a man to try to teach a woman how to be a better woman, so we need women to teach these things precisely because they are practical matters that are learned with experience. We learn from those with more experience who have evidence of godly character.

Also note that the scripture does not say that any woman or group of women should have a position of teacher to women. In the book of Titus, the Apostle Paul is instructing a pastor named Titus on what he is to teach his congregation. One of those things is that the older women (plural) are to teach the younger women these specific things. It doesn’t say Titus should have his wife teach the other women. In fact, the pastor’s wife has a responsibility to the pastor as her husband, but not to the church. She has no position in the church (despite our traditions). She will not give an account to God for guiding or teaching the church. Her husband will because he has the office of pastor.

In general, these female topics to be taught by the older women of the church seem to be the kind of thing a woman might help other women to learn while they’re visiting together, working together in their community, or while one is mentoring the other, not necessarily in an official class of the church. I suppose one could argue that it could be done in a Sunday School class as an occasional thing. Perhaps that is the case. But if so, the class should focus solely on the topics that women are allowed to teach, if it is taught by a woman. The normal teaching of the church on matters of doctrine should be done by faithful men. This doctrinal teaching is needed by both men and women, so women should not miss out on it. Women are not lesser Christians. They need doctrine too.

It has been my experience that these scriptural instructions on teaching in the church are widely ignored in most of the Western churches today. Many churches are letting women be pastors, which is obviously wrong, but even the more conservative churches often have their own women’s groups which form essentially a parallel female church, led by what amounts to female elders. This is not only incorrect in form, but often leads to further problems. I have seen great errors arise from this.

For example, women have a naturally more emotional nature. That’s not a bad thing as we were designed this way to be nurturers and relational helps to our husbands. But when it comes to letting women be the source of doctrinal teaching for the other women, this can lead to all kinds of false doctrine being taught and reinforced in women’s groups because they tend to follow their feelings. Women can also be too nice, which can lead them not to confront false teaching when it occurs. This is one of the many reasons that God gave the role of bishop to men and not to women. We need bold, fearless shepherds to dispel the wolves. I think we must be careful not to fall prey to the comfortable and common errors of our time. Female doctrinal teachers are a scourge on the church today.

There are so many things we women can do in the church. There are so many things that godly women do need to teach other women, as scripture has commanded. But we need to recognize our place. We can discuss any theology with one another as equals, as I am doing with my readers now. We can exhort and encourage one another to live a holy life and to follow the scriptures. We can and should share the gospel with unbelievers. We should teach and disciple our children. We can be prayer warriors. We can do good for our communities. But we are not to have a teaching role or position in the church gathering to teach doctrine with the authority of the church. That is role for qualified men.

This is a topic I have studied carefully, and I believe scripture has given us instructions on this matter that don’t match the way many churches today are operating. Even many well-known, very conservative churches that are otherwise great have slipped in this area. Our culture pushes us toward feminism, and it’s easy to compromise (sometimes without even realizing it). Please consider this prayerfully.

Apologetics Resources for Parents

These are some apologetics resources that we have used with our family and that I recommend.

• Cold Case Christianity and God’s Crime Scene by J. Warner Wallace (and the kids’ versions of both for younger children)
• Evidence for the Bible video series by Mike Winger – FREE on YouTube 
• Expedition Bible videos from Joel Kramer on archaeological evidence for the Bible – FREE on YouTube 
• Where God Came Down by Joel Kramer
• Drive Thru History video series – The Gospels, Acts to Revelation, and To the Ends of the Earth are the relevant seasons covering Biblical topics – FREE on Tubi TV
• How We Got the Bible by Neil Lightfoot
• Know What You Believe by Paul Little for a great overview of basic Bible doctrines
• On Guard and Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig
• Creation.com for abundant free articles on many topics, especially creation science
• By Design by Jonathan Sarfati on evidence for God as Designer and against evolution
• Evolution’s Achilles Heels edited by Robert Carter for evidence against evolution
• Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side by Natasha Crain
• Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl

How to use these resources can vary, depending on your child’s age, the type of resource, and the questions they are asking.

Video resources work well to watch and discuss as a family. Even younger children can learn a lot this way. We watch apologetics videos on Sunday evenings while eating dinner and then discuss them with our children. You can assign video content to kids, but it works better when parents are engaging with their children. Parents can explain concepts that might be a bit over their children's heads so that they understand the information better.

For some older children or teens, you could hand them a book and let them read it. If they’re self-motivated and want to learn, this can work. It’s still important for parents to engage with the material and be ready to discuss it more or to look for more resources on specific topics.

Regardless of whether your child can read or watch resources on their own, it is VITAL that parents read and watch relevant resources and then prepare to have conversations about these topics with their children. There is no substitute for informed, active parenting on this matter. Your child will naturally look to you for answers about the big questions of life. If you can’t provide objective evidence for your beliefs, they may decide that your faith has no evidential basis and reject it. Parents have a sacred duty to know the reasons for their faith and to share them actively and regularly with their children.

1 Peter 3:15 – But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:

Ephesians 6:4 – And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 6:5-7 – And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Fight the Cultural Current toward Feminism

The effect of culture on a person's thinking and values is profound. It can be hard to overcome. We're all products of our culture in various ways. We're often harsh on the antebellum slave holders for supporting such an overtly wicked practice, but they were influenced by the teaching of their time, including the teaching from their churches. Rather than feel morally superior, it's important to examine our own ideology to see where we may be leaving the teaching of the Bible to follow the norms and ideas of our culture.

 
This is a lifelong process of examination. If you don't actively root out unbiblical ideas, you will drift with the cultural current. Drifting is the default state if you're not paddling upstream. Standing against the culture requires work. It requires being unpopular with your friends who are drifting along and fitting in. It means finding friends who are willing to join you as you work to renew your mind with Biblical truth.

 
One area where I see a LOT of Christians compromising with the world is feminism. It has crept into everything, including nearly all churches. Women are leaving their homes and children to seek careers, disregarding the God-given authority of their husbands, and even pushing their way into church leadership. It's sneaky. It's packaged to sound like it's good. It's "empowerment" and "ministry" and "setting a good example for our daughters" and "being a witness in public schools." These are the lipstick on the pig. They're rationalization for not obeying God's instructions.

 
Titus 2:3-5
Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.

 
Did you catch that? When women disobey this passage and leave their God-given role, they cause the word of God to be dishonored. That's very serious.

 
Yet so many women outsource the discipleship of their own children to non-Christian strangers for hours every day (public schools) and leave the ordering of their own household to seek acclaim in the business world or popularity in the church for their "ministry." If you're a mother with young children still at home, the primary ministry to which God has called you is the discipleship and care for your very own children. Never give that up for anything! If you want to do something important for God, there it is. You have a ready-made ministry in your own home. No one can have the influence you have there. You're replaceable in the workforce. You're replaceable in church ministry. No one can replace you in the lives of your children.

 
Of course, this ministry of discipling our own children is HARD! There are several things against us.

 
First of all, raising children takes a lot of work. It can be exhausting and emotionally draining. And there's not a lot of immediate gratification. Kids rarely say thank you for all the training you put into them, and they will shortly undo the housework you just finished. They will push your buttons and test your patience. Parenting is not for the faint-hearted. In the office, you get applause for your finished project. In the church, you get applause for your ministry. At home, not so much. Wiping runny noses and making dinner and vacuuming the floor (again) don't seem so adventurous or important, and yet they're a lot of hard work. It's easy to think our efforts would produce more return somewhere else.

Second, we have our own fallen nature to fight. We all tend to want what we don't have. We all tend to find it easier to do the wrong thing. So the man who was called to be the provider and leader often finds this calling to be difficult and burdensome. Meanwhile, the woman who was called to keep the home and care for children and submit to her husband finds this calling burdensome. They each feel the other has the better role precisely because of the curse. Doing our own role requires fighting our own desires sometimes. We tend to think God made a mistake and we can fix it. It seems easier and more pleasant doing it our way.

 
Third, there's the allure of money. A career brings in money, and money is extremely useful. It can give us things we want, and sometimes things we truly need. It's very difficult to live on one income. It's a sacrifice because our society is built around double incomes and luxury. There's social pressure to make more and have more. There's the rising cost of everything.

 
Fourth, there's the social pressure of the culture which says women should break the glass ceiling and pursue high-powered careers. If a woman cooks food in a restaurant, that's esteemed as a great career. If a woman works as a secretary, handling scheduling and appointments and filing paperwork and paying bills for a boss, that's a good use of her time. If a woman cares for small children all day in a daycare, that's laudable work. If a woman works as a cleaning lady, cleaning homes and businesses, she's doing important work. If a woman teaches children their ABCs or multiplication tables in a school, that's such an important career. But if she does all that and more for her own husband and children in her own home, that's drudgery and beneath her. She needs to escape that life and join the exciting career world. This is what our culture tells us.

 
The culture also pushes egalitarianism, treating men and women as having identical and interchangeable roles. In the church, this turns into women taking church leadership roles, wanting to be pastors and teachers. This is often pushed as a good thing despite the teaching of scripture, which must be explained away with appeals to ancient culture or translation mistakes rather than simply obeying it.

 
With all these factors against us, it's difficult to stand firm on what God's word teaches. It's easy to drift. Doing the right thing takes determination to be obedient to God, no matter the cost. And it will cost you. It may cost you in lost income, lost dreams, lost friends, lost popularity, lost sleep, and much more. So why do it if it costs so much? Because obedience to God is worth it. He will reward you. There is no better place to be than in the center of God's will. Count the cost. Then choose to be obedient. Fight the current. Stand for Jesus.

Evidence for the Authenticity of Daniel

The book of Daniel in the Bible is an amazing book! It contains hundreds of very detailed prophecies, most of which are known to have been fulfilled. They include such things as the sequence of world empires from the Babylonians through the Medo-Persians, Greeks, and Romans as well as many specific events like the premature death of Alexander the Great at the height of his power, the division of his kingdom into 4 main empires, and the squabbles of the Seleucids and Ptolemies in the centuries afterwards. This presents a problem for skeptics of the Bible, which they resolve by claiming Daniel was written after most of the events it describes, and thus that the prophecies weren't prophecy. They were just history.

Because Daniel clearly describes the events of the mid-2nd century BC when the Maccabees revolted against king Antiochus of the Seleucid empire and cleansed the temple, the date assigned to the book is right around 164 BC when these events took place. This is in contrast to the traditional date for Daniel around 603-536 BC when the prophet Daniel lived. This earlier date was during the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people and during the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar of Babylon and Cyrus of Persia. In other words, the traditional date assumes the book is authentic, written by the actual prophet Daniel during the time the book describes. The late date assumes the book is a fraud, written in the time of the Maccabees but pretending it was written by the prophet Daniel hundreds of years earlier. The fraudulent author was thus writing known history as if it was prophecy. 

These two views of the book of Daniel are in stark contrast. Defending the Bible requires defending the early date of Daniel. There are many other lines of evidence for the Bible, of course, but Daniel plays an important part in showing the supernatural inspiration of scripture through accurate, fulfilled prophecies.

As it turns out, there are many lines of evidence that support the earlier date for Daniel while the late date is mostly wishful thinking and bias against the supernatural. If someone rejects the inspiration of scripture or the existence of God, they need Daniel to be written late. It's the only option. Daniel's prophecies are too detailed and too clearly shown in history to deny unless they were written after it all happened. So the late date exists because skeptics need an explanation. In contrast, the earlier date relies on the evidence.

Here are some major reasons to accept that Daniel was written in the 6th century BC when it claims to have been written.

1) The book of Daniel recorded history that wasn't known at the time of the Maccabees.

The book of Daniel has been mocked and ridiculed for its supposedly false claims, yet newer information has vindicated Daniel. For example, skeptics claimed for many years that King Belshazzar never existed. The book of Daniel records a King Belshazzar who was ruling in Babylon at the time the Persians conquered it. However, secular historical records, such as the list of Babylonian kings compiled by Herodotus, did not list any ruler named Belshazzar. The last Chaldean king of Babylon, according to Greek historians, was Nabonidus. He was king when the Persians conquered Babylon. So this was widely used as evidence that Daniel contained errors, probably because it was written much later by someone who wasn't familiar with that time in history. 

However, in the late 19th century, the Nabonidus Cylinders were discovered which identify Belshazzar as the oldest son of Nabonidus. Further information has revealed that Nabonidus was away from Babylon during much of his reign. Thus, it is now believed that Belshazzar was acting as ruler of Babylon while his father was away, but without holding the official kingly title. He reigned in his father's name, but he was the acting ruler. 

This information is good evidence that the book of Daniel was written by someone who was living in Babylon in the 6th century BC. A later writer in the 2nd century BC would have known the Greek history with the official king list that didn't include Belshazzar. Thus, a later fiction pretending to be written by Daniel would have said that Nabonidus was ruling in Babylon when the Persians invaded. Only someone living there at the time would have known to write about Belshazzar. 

Not only does Daniel include Belshazzar, who was unknown to secular history until fairly recently, but the details are accurate. In Daniel 5, the prophet Daniel intepreted the writing on the wall during Belshazzar's party. This prompted Belshazzar to promote Daniel to third highest ruler in the kingdom. Why third? Because Nabonidus was the official king, Belshazzar was under his father, and so the highest honor that Belshazzar could give was third place. These are details we can fill in now, but a writer in 164 BC could not have known them. This shows that Daniel really was written in the 6th century BC, as it claims.

2) The language and customs recorded in the book of Daniel are accurate to Babylon in the 6th century BC. 

There are many details under this one heading. I can't go into all of them here, but I can give some examples. Daniel records that the laws of the Medes and Persians could be issued by the king, but the king was then unable to alter them. This is extremely unusual in history. Usually, kings are able to issue and rescind decrees as they choose. Yet King Darius was unable to change his decree that those who worship anyone other than the king would be thrown into the lion's den. He tried to change the law to save Daniel, but the law could not be changed. This has been found to be true of the Medes and Persians during this time period. Kings could issue laws, but the laws applied to everyone, including the king, and could not be changed. So Daniel accurately reflects the customs of the correct period that later writers are very unlikely to have known.

One of the main criticisms of the early date is that the book of Daniel contains some Greek words. Since Greek influence and language spread around the world with the conquests of Alexander the Great, some 200+ years after Daniel lived, the inclusion of Greek words seems to support a later date. However, the Greek words in Daniel are of musical instruments. Musical instruments tend to retain their original names without translation, and they often spread to other cultures without requiring conquest or force. That's why we still refer to a ukelele by its Hawaiian name, even for those of us who don't speak Hawaiian. It's not because we were conquered by the Hawaiians and adopted their language. Thus, it is not surprising that the kingdom of Babylon in the 6th century BC would have musical instruments from the Greeks which retained their Greek names. 

3) The book of Daniel was included in the Jewish scriptural canon in time to be translated as part of the Septuagint.

The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah portion was translated about 280-250 BC in response to a request from King Ptolemy II Philadelphis of Egypt since he desired to add all the books of the world to his great library in Alexandria. The rest of the Hebrew scriptures were translated after that, but the exact dates are not known for sure. It is certain that they were translated by the end of the 2nd century BC (around 100 BC) because we have copies from that time period. 

In the best case for skeptics, there is, at most, about 60 years between the late writing of Daniel and its inclusion in the Septuagint. This essentially rules out a late date. While it's theoretically possible, in the real world, it takes a lot of time for a new document to be copied, disseminated, accepted, and canonized. Sixty years is not enough time. It wouldn't become widely known in that time frame, much less accepted as part of the Jewish canon that would be included in the Greek translation.

The short time frame is further complicated by the fact that the Jewish leaders would never have accepted a late forgery as scripture. A book of known authorship, written by a proven prophet like Daniel in the 6th century BC, would be revered and added to the canon of scripture. A much later document from the 160's BC pretending to be written by the prophet Daniel some 400 years earlier would have been easily identified as a fake. As a comparison, suppose someone writing today were to claim to have found a previously unknown document from the Jamestown colony in Virginia back in the early 1600's. Everyone would be immediately suspicious. How could such a document lie undetected all this time? Wouldn't it be obvious that the writer sounded recent and not like someone writing in the 1600's?

Further complicating this issue is the location. An authentic book of Daniel would have been written in Babylon in the 6th century BC and brought back to Israel with the returning captives. There would be a known history among the Jewish people. Yet in the 2nd century BC, at the time of the Maccabees, they were living in Israel. A forgery would be written in the land of Israel. You can't simply "discover" a previously unknown, 400-year-old Babylonian document in Israel. How would it arrive in Israel without anyone knowing about it? The Jews were not stupid. They would have recognized the forgery. 

4) The book of Daniel was included in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls date from the late 2nd century BC to the middle of the 1st century AD. Among the documents discovered are 8 fragmentary copies of Daniel. Daniel is the third most represented book, after Psalms and Exodus. The oldest copy of Daniel dates to around 100 BC. If the late date of origin were true, then this copy of Daniel is only a few decades removed from the original writing, which would be extremely unlikely. The entire collection of Daniel manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls also argues against a late date. Why would there be so many copies of this one book if it's a late forgery that had only recently been written and had not yet circulated widely? How did this one fringe sect of Essenes living in isolation in the desert get such an early copy of the book if it had just been written? These complications argue strongly against a late date. 

5) Josephus records that Alexander the Great was shown a copy of the book of Daniel when he arrived in Jerusalem.

From secular history, we know that during Alexander's conquest of Tyre, he sent a letter to the Jews in Jerusalem asking for troops to help him in his conquest. The Jewish leaders refused, claiming they had vowed not to take up arms against King Darius of the Persians and could not aid Alexander. Alexander was a hothead. In fact, he was attacking the island of Tyre because they had refused his request to worship in their temple and had killed his messengers. He was so angry that he set his soldiers to throwing the remains of the mainland city of Tyre into the sea to build a causeway out to the island. In doing this, he fulfilled the prophecy of Ezekiel 26 that Tyre would be thrown into the sea and made bare like the top of a rock. The location of Tyre is a peninsula to this day because of the actions of Alexander's army.

Everyone knew that Alexander was coming for Jerusalem next. It was only a matter of time. Yet history also records that Alexander became a great friend of the Jews, left Jerusalem unconquered, and gave Jews equal rights with other citizens in Alexandria, Egypt, which he founded. This seems like a very strange outcome. Here we have the greatest military leader the world has ever seen, who conquered the entire Persian empire and more in just 13 years. He had just come from conquering the island city of Tyre, which had stood for over 2000 years, because they insulted him. He had been denied by the Jewish leaders when he asked for their aid. Yet when he arrived in Israel in 332 BC, he didn't attack. He made peace instead. Why?

Well, as it turns out, the story recounted by Josephus explains this strange turn of events. The high priest received a dream that instructed him to wear white robes and take a procession out to welcome Alexander as he approached. Alexander was stunned and said that he had seen the high priest in white robes in a dream back in Macedonia where he had been encouraged to take over the Persian empire and assured of victory. Alexander went into the city with the Jewish leaders and sacrificed at the temple. He was shown a copy of the book of Daniel which prophesied that a king from Greece would destroy the Persians. Alexander made peace with the Jewish people and granted them a reprieve from taxes every 7th year. He then left Jerusalem intact and moved on southward toward Egypt.

This account has been dismissed as false, mainly because the late date for Daniel is so widely accepted, and that would mean that the book of Daniel would not have existed yet. However, the account does explain some otherwise inexplicable known facts, and we have no other reason to believe it is false. On the contrary, the Talmud agrees with the account, suggesting this was a well-known story in ancient Israel, not an invention by Josephus.

It also makes sense that Alexander, as a student of Aristotle, would have been aware of his teacher's view that the Greek pantheon was false and there must be some Creator who was an uncaused cause of the universe. This may have made him more open to hearing about the Creator God of the Jewish people and more sympathetic to their monotheistic religious views, which most other peoples found very offensive.

If this story is indeed authentic, it proves definitively that the book of Daniel existed at the time of Alexander the Great in 332 BC, some 170 years before it was supposedly written at the time of the Maccabees. This would then require the early date for Daniel and prove its prophetic nature.

6) The book of Daniel still contains prophecy about later events, even if we accept the late date.

Even if we assume that Daniel was indeed written in 164 BC and all the events before that were actually written as history and not prophecy, Daniel offers prophecy of events after that time which have been fulfilled. As I mentioned earlier, the oldest manuscript of Daniel that still exists today dates to about 100 BC. Yet Daniel prophecies the death of Jesus which took place in 33 AD and the destruction of the 2nd temple in 70 AD.

In Daniel 9, a prophecy is given that there will be 70 sets of 7 (sometimes translated as 70 weeks) which begin with a command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. These "weeks" are simply the word for a set of seven, and the context shows them to refer to years because of the 70 years of Babylonian captivity that are mentioned. This was in turn because of the refusal of the Jewish nation to keep the Sabbath years by refraining from plowing and planting the land every 7th year. They had not kept 70 Sabbath years, and so they were punished with 70 years of captivity in Babylon so that the land would lie fallow and receive its Sabbath years while they were away. It is in this context that Daniel is told about this set of 70 sevens. 

The 70 sevens would be composed of 7 sevens and 62 sevens and then a final seven. The temple would be rebuilt and the wall. After the 7 and 62 sevens, then Messiah would come. So this places a timeline on the coming of the Messiah. Daniel's prophecy says that the Messiah would be cut off after the 69 sevens, but not for himself. Being cut off is a judicial term, meaning a legal sentence of death, not death from injury or disease or war or old age. Yet He will die for others, not for his own crimes. After that, a prince will come to destroy the city of Jerusalem and the temple. All of this is prophesied in Daniel 9, which we know for sure predates the time of Christ. All of this happened, which we can verify from historical records.

The exact date of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem is debated as there are a few possible options, but regardless of the exact date, the 69 sets of seven years (483 years) put the Messiah somewhere in the early 1st century AD. By one way of counting, where the years are 360 days (suggested by some Biblical passages) and the command is the one in 444 BC at the time of Nehemiah, the end of the 69 sevens lands in the spring of 33 AD, exactly when Jesus was crucified. 

Not only was the Messiah cut off exactly as prophesied, but the temple was also destroyed after that, just as Daniel said. The Roman army was led by Titus, the son of the reigning Emperor Vespasian (and thus a prince, just as Daniel prophesied). They destroyed the Jewish temple and the city in 70 AD. 

So even by the late date, Daniel still contains accurate prophecy. Since it contains accurate prophecy, it must have been written by a true prophet, not a lying forger who pretended to be writing during the Babylonian captivity and who falsely claimed to be Daniel. The accuracy of the known prophecies of Daniel argues for an early date by a true prophet. Either way, the prophetic nature of the book of Daniel is evident.

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In conclusion, the Bible contains information that could not have come from the mind of man. It demonstrates its divine inspiration with objective evidence. The book of Daniel provides many of these evidences that show the God of the Bible exists, that He is active in history, that He knows the future, and that He has revealed His word in the writings of the Bible.

The Hawaiian-Emperor Chain Provides Evidence for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

Here's a breakdown of just how explanatory the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT) model is in comparison to both slow and gradual plate tectonics and the Hydroplate model. Let's take a look at the North Pacific. You'll need a map which shows the sea floor. Here's a link for your convenience. Bring up this link in a separate tab or browser and follow along here or reference these pictures:

The first thing you will notice about the sea floor in the north Pacific is that it shows a long line of seamounts and islands stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, toward the south, and then going southeast to the Hawaiian islands. These are a long chain of volcanic mountains known as the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, formed from lava flows on the sea floor.

The conventional explanation for this chain of volcanoes is that there is a hotspot in the mantle which sends up heated plumes of magma in a particular location due to convection cycles in the mantle. The Pacific plate, one of several tectonic plates that together form the crust of the Earth, is moving across this hotspot, and this forms a series of volcanic mountains that may or may not reach the surface of the ocean to form an island.

This conventional explanation is a good one. The Hydroplate theory does not even have an explanation for volcanism in the middle of a plate, as far as I am aware. The Hydroplate model suggests crustal plates with water chambers underneath that broke up catastrophically during the global flood and which may have moved sideways as the water was expelled from below. In that model, volcanoes occur at the margins of plates as they collide with each other. I have yet to find any reasonable explanation within this model for the existence of the Hawaiian-Emperor chain at all. The conventional model, in contrast,  does fit a number of lines of evidence and at least explains the existence of this chain.

However, there's more to this explanation. The CPT model involves rapid plate movements during the Biblical flood. In particular, at least one crustal plate subducted down into the mantle in a very short time (several weeks), setting off a catastrophic chain reaction around the globe and rapid tectonic movements that produced global flooding. The plate movements we observe today are remnants of these movements, but much slower than in the past. The conventional plate tectonics model, unlike CPT, assumes that current plate movements have been more or less constant for many millions of years at today's very slow rates.

How could we test which of these models is more explanatory? Well, here's one way of doing that. And you can do it from your home by looking at a map.

You have to understand that we can use the size of a volcanic mountain to estimate plate speed. If we assume a relatively constant rate of heated magma rising from this hotspot in the mantle, then the slower the plate moves, the more magma will accumulate in that spot. This forms a larger seamount. If magma continues to accumulate in the same spot, the seamount will reach the surface and become an island. If it continues even longer, the island will become larger and larger. If the plate is moving more rapidly, the seamounts will be smaller because lava did not have time to accumulate before that location on the plate moved away from the hotspot in the mantle. So how large these volcanic mountains are, and how far apart they are spaced, can tell us about the speed the plate was moving when they formed. There are going to be variations, but we want to look for overall trends.

We know where the hotspot is today. The largest and easternmost island of Hawaii is still experiencing lava flows today. It is still over the hotspot. If you move backwards along the volcanic chain, you are looking backwards in time. Not only do current measurements of plate movement indicate this, but radiometric dating concurs (though we can debate about the exact ages).

So let’s take a look at the chain. This is where the Google Earth link is handy because you can zoom in and rotate in order to look closer. Where the chain begins, the seamounts are all fairly small. If you compare them to the size of the largest Hawaiian island, there is a huge difference. This implies that the Pacific plate was moving much more rapidly than it does today when these sea mounts were formed. In fact, the entire chain of seamounts is much smaller than the Hawaiian islands at the end of the chain. This seems to imply rapid plate movements for most of this history, and then a profound slowing of the plate toward the end.

The most interesting feature of this entire chain is the very abrupt change of direction. The volcanoes were forming in a southward line (indicating that the plate was moving northward) and then they abruptly begin to form toward the east and only a little south. It's a very distinct inflection point. The seamounts immediately get smaller at the same time the direction changes. Not only are these first eastward seamounts smaller, but they are farther apart. All of these indicate an increase in speed. This tells us there was an impact on the east side of the Pacific plate that accelerated it toward the west. The plate increased speed and changed direction due to this impact. The plate which impacted the Pacific plate must have been the North American plate. So we can see evidence, in the seamounts, that the North American plate has crashed into the Pacific plate and altered both its speed and direction.

As you go from west to east (i.e. forward in time) after this impact, the seamounts grow gradually larger and closer together and then, as the speed of the Pacific plate drops off considerably, they begin to form islands. The islands grow larger and larger until you reach the largest island of all where there are still active volcanoes and slow plate movements and you have caught up to the present day. But this chain of volcanoes tells a story of much faster plate movements in the past.

Notice that I told you this assumes a constant rate of magma rising from the mantle hotspot. We can examine our assumption here. Is it reasonable? There are only three options: Either the hotspot is growing hotter, it is growing colder, or it is staying the same. If the hotspot is staying the same, we naturally come to the conclusion that the Pacific plate was moving much faster in the past and is now moving much slower. If the hotspot is growing colder over time, then the deceleration is even greater. If the Hawaiian islands are successively larger and larger even though the hotspot is now cooler than it was, then the speed in the past was even greater and it has slowed even more than we expect from a model in which the hotspot has remained unchanged.

The other possibility is that the hotspot is growing hotter and thus sending up more and more magma over time. This would make it possible for the plate movements to have been very slow the whole time. This is essentially the mainstream view. If the plate has been moving at a constant slow rate, then we would explain the increasing size of the islands by appealing to increasing temperature in the mantle hotspot. But that has a problem of its own. If the hotspot is growing hotter, what is causing that? And should we be concerned that it appears to be growing so much hotter than it used to be? In any event, it does not appear that these processes have always been occurring at a constant rate. Either the plate has slowed considerably or the hotspot has grown much hotter. I find the former much more reasonable for several reasons.

In this one volcanic chain, we have evidence, not only that the crustal plates are moving, but that they moved much faster in the past. But there’s more. We saw that the North American plate crashed into the Pacific plate and changed its speed and direction. This affects not just the Pacific plate, but the North American plate as well. This is most likely the impact that pushed up the Rocky Mountains. Conservation of momentum says that if the Pacific plate accelerated rapidly due to this impact, then the North American plate must have decelerated rapidly. This abrupt stop would crumple the North American plate along its western side. Not surprisingly, there’s a mountain range there.

These features are a lot easier to explain in terms of acceleration and deceleration of plates than if they were the result of slow, gradual processes with unvarying rates. This is just one piece of the puzzle for the CPT model. Yet it forms a handy side-by-side comparison of the competing models. 

The explanation commonly offered by mainstream geology for the larger size of the Hawaiian islands compared to the older seamounts is that the older mountains have shrunk over time due to erosion and subsidence. This explanation fails on multiple points.

1) There's no experimental evidence for this explanation, as far as I know. It is just thrown out there as a possibility.

2) It doesn't make sense of the similarity in size of most of the chain of seamounts. Do they shrink until they reach a certain size and then stay the same forever? Subsidence and erosion might be a potential explanation if we had a nice gradual increase in size all along the chain. Instead, we have what is supposedly tens of millions of years of seamounts that are roughly the same size, then a fairly rapid transition to much larger islands. The older north-south section is not significantly smaller than the younger east-west section.

3) The greatest erosion should take place on islands, not seamounts. Erosion forces should be stronger for the land above the water due to wind and rain and wave action. Once an island drops beneath the waves, that should slow its shrinking considerably. This should, again, result in a more even chain. That's not what we observe.

4) If we're suggesting that all of the islands and seamounts in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain were originally of similar size and some merely shrank due to erosion and subsidence, that simply doesn't work. If you take any of the Hawaiian islands, its footprint would cover several of the smaller seamounts in the chain. If the small volcanoes were widely spaced, it might make sense to suggest they had once been sizeable islands. But most of them could not have been that large initially because they are too closely spaced. A large mountain doesn't erode away into several small mountains. Subsidence might work if a tall mountain with several peaks sank until it appeared to be several smaller mountains, but it really doesn't look like that happened. Especially for the smaller seamounts, the ocean floor around them does not show signs of a larger mountain sinking. It appears relatively flat and undisturbed.

5) The older seamounts are not all that eroded. They're not gently sloping and rounded off. They don't appear to be the small remnants of eroded islands, in other words.

6) The erosion/subsidence hypothesis still doesn't account for the sharp change in direction or the drop in seamount size and increase in spacing afterward. The CPT theory accounts for all these facts at once.

Because of these lines of evidence, the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics theory has more explanatory power than either the mainstream Gradual Plate Tectonics view or the Hydroplate Theory, at least when it comes to explaining the Hawaiian-Emperor volcanoes. This is just one way of comparing and testing models. Creation science actually does offer testable models that hold up to scrutiny.

Online Church is Not Being the Church

Having online church services is not all bad, but it does have some major potential problems. In our impersonal, consumeristic society, it is too easy for people to stay at home on the couch and watch a screen for "church" instead of taking the trouble to actually go to church. This has become a significant issue in the last couple of years. Many of those who stayed home from church during the pandemic have not come back even though it is now mostly over. Too many have gotten lazy and no longer gather together with other believers at all.

Of course, there are positive uses of online services too. Having sermons available for those who can't be physically present is a generally good thing. Shut-ins or people who are traveling can still watch the service. People who are looking for a new church can view some services before they attend to help them know if the teaching is Biblical. These are valuable uses of our technology.

However, pastors and church leadership should be careful to explain that watching online services is not the same thing as being physically present in church. They need to call the people to actually attend in person, if possible. Watching church is not the same as being the church. It's better than nothing, but it's not a substitute for the corporate worship, fellowship, and accountability that actually going to church is meant to provide.

We are physical creatures, and God has called us to physically gather to worship Him together. There is something that happens when the people of God gather together in one place, in one accord, to worship their Savior as the body of Christ. God is present in a distinct way when we gather, when we sing in praise, and when we pray together. Staying home and watching church online is a little like watching heaven remotely on a screen. Nobody wants to do that! It's just not the same experience as being there. The Bible tells us that when any two or three gather in His name, He is there in our midst. He is in that place. There is a glorious, awesome presence of God in the physical place where believers have come together to bring Him praise and honor. We have to gather together to get those special benefits. We come together as the church to do corporately what we cannot do alone. Alone, we are believers. Together, we are the church. And that's a powerful thing. It's not just about hearing the message or singing the songs. It's about being the body of Christ. 

In addition to that, we need the church family, and the church needs us. All of us. We need to pray for each other, bear one another's burdens, and sharpen one another as iron sharpens iron. God has a right to have our full participation and to use our spiritual gifts for the benefit of our local church body. We are not called to be consumers, but givers, encouragers, servants, teachers, and exhorters of our fellow believers. We used to have a saying in church circles that being a pew sitter is not one of the spiritual gifts, but so many people aren't even sitting in the pews any more. They're withdrawing from the body and leaving all of us poorer for it. I don't just mean monetarily, though that is also a challenge for many churches, but we're lacking the talents and labor and fellowship that those missing believers were meant to be investing in us. And they're missing what we could be investing in them.

There's also another reason that we should be gathering physically as the church. God commands us to do so in scripture. It wasn't just a suggestion.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching. Hebrews 10:23-25

Lacking a valid reason that one cannot attend, it is disobedience to sit at home and consume content instead of gathering as the church. Disobedience to God is sin. 

God calls us to leave our comfort zone and come together as the church, messy and uncomfortable though it may be at times. Without the church, we will be anemic Christians -  weakened, impoverished, and prone to spiritual attacks. Just as the predator wants to separate the prey from its herd, our spiritual enemies want us divided, isolated, and vulnerable. This is why God instructs us to gather together and lift one another up. He knows what we need and has provided the church to meet those needs. If we neglect the provision of God, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

It's time to get back to church.

If Resurrection is Impossible, so is Abiogenesis

A resurrection from the dead is much more likely than abiogenesis (generating life from non-life by natural processes). After all, a dead body has all of the necessary parts for life present already. It already has many proteins produced and folded correctly. It already has a genetic code built within DNA. It has phospholipid membranes already in place. It has cellular machinery. By far the biggest problem for abiogenesis is producing all of these things by chance. Just getting any functional protein without guidance would take billions of years of chance chemical reactions. A dead cell already has many proteins in place as well as all the other chemicals and parts needed for life.

So why don't we observe resurrections all the time in nature? Why don't bacteria, for example, spontaneously return to life after dying? That's many orders of magnitude more likely than abiogenesis, yet we have never observed it. That ought to tell you that abiogenesis is impossible. Generating life from non-life, like rising from the dead, requires supernatural activity.

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Note that this is a very straightforward and obvious logical argument. It will always be easier to do one step than to do that same step plus extra steps. Both abiogenesis and resurrection require turning non-life into life. That part is the same for both. But with abiogenesis, you don't have the parts present yet so you also have to build and arrange them. Thus, it is necessarily true that resurrection is easier and more likely than abiogenesis.

What continually boggles my mind is how hard the atheists fight this very straightforward logical deduction. I've posted this argument in multiple online groups, and I continually get atheists who deny that this is true. They consider abiogenesis a "scientific" pursuit and resurrection the crazy ramblings of religious people. They refuse to consider that it is necessarily easier to animate a dead organism with all the needed parts already present than to build the parts, get all of them present at the same time and properly arranged, and then animate it. They laugh at the idea of even a microbe coming back to life and accept abiogenesis as necessary in order to avoid God as Creator. And they think they're being the rational ones.

I can only conclude that rebellion against God forces people to descend into absurdity to avoid the obvious truth that there is a Creator to whom we owe honor and obedience. Rejecting God eventually means rejecting rationality.

The Biggest Mystery in the Bible

This is the lesson I taught the Children's Church class at my local church this past week. I thought others might find it useful for teaching their children as well.

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Today we're going to talk about the biggest mystery in the Bible. Did you know the Bible has mysteries? This one is the biggest mystery and remained a secret for thousands of years. But before I can tell you about the mystery, you need a little background information.

First, did you know that Jesus is in the Old Testament? The New Testament tells us about Jesus being born, growing up, teaching the people, dying, and rising again. But Jesus is God, and He already existed before He was born. He appeared several times in the Old Testament and talked to different people. 

Let's take a look at some of those times. 

Remember when God created Adam and Eve and put them in the garden, He told them not to eat of the fruit of just one tree. So then the serpent came and tempted Eve.

Genesis 3:6-8  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 

Now, you probably know the rest of the story. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and brought sin into the world. They had to leave the garden and the special relationship they had with God. 

But notice that God came to walk in the garden with Adam and Eve. How does God walk? Wouldn't He need a body of some kind in order to walk with Adam and Eve? Adam and Eve seem to have had a very close and personal relationship with God before sin, and He came and walked with them. 

I John 4:12 says that no one has seen God at any time. This must be talking about God the Father. No one has ever seen God the Father. But did anyone ever see Jesus? Yes. Jesus came to Earth and we know people saw Him and touched Him. The Holy Spirit is sometimes seen, but not as a man. He appears like a dove descending on Jesus at His baptism or as tongues of fire on the disciples of Jesus at Pentecost. But he's not a man. So if someone is seeing God and He looks like a man, it can't be God the Father or the Holy Spirit. It must be Jesus. So it sounds like Jesus is the one who came to walk and talk with Adam and Eve in the garden. He was there in the beginning.

But there's more. A lot more. 

Let's go to Genesis 18 when God comes to visit Abraham.

Genesis 18:1-22  And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.
When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, "O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant."
So they said, "Do as you have said."
And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, "Quick! Three seahs of fine flour! Knead it, and make cakes."
And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man, who prepared it quickly. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them. And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
They said to him, "Where is Sarah your wife?"
And he said, "She is in the tent."
The LORD said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son." And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?" The LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?' Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son."
But Sarah denied it, saying, "I did not laugh," for she was afraid. He said, "No, but you did laugh." Then the men set out from there, and they looked down toward Sodom. And Abraham went with them to set them on their way.
The LORD said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him."
Then the LORD said, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know." So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the LORD. 

After this, Abraham talks to God and asks Him if He will spare Sodom if there are still righteous people in it. He starts by asking if He will spare them if there are 50 righteous, then 45, then 40, then 30, then 20, then 10. So God promises not to destroy Sodom if there are even 10 righteous people in it.  

The text is clear that this is actually God speaking to Abraham, not just an angel. It says this was the LORD, which is the specific name of God, Yahweh. Yet He looked like a man. He even ate with Abraham. A vision can't eat food. He had to have some sort of body. 

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a ghost tries to eat food and the food just plops on the floor because he has no stomach to hold it? That is what would happen if there's no physical body. But that's not what happened here. God ate food with Abraham. 

So which person of the Trinity would this be -- God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit? This would be God the Son. He appeared as a man. This is Jesus in the Old Testament. 

Ok, so now that we know that Jesus appears as a man in the Old Testament and is identified as God, let's get back to the mystery. Remember that Jesus was prophesied throughout the Old Testament, that He would come and be God with us and save us from our sins. So the whole Old Testament is building up expectations for the Messiah. He was coming, but they had an incomplete picture of who He was. 

Take a look at Genesis 32. This takes place when Jacob, Abraham's grandson, is finally coming home to his family. His brother Esau hated him and wanted to kill him after he tricked him out of his birthright and blessing. Jacob went far away and he had been away a long time. But he's coming home and he doesn't know whether Esau is still angry with him. So he sends gifts ahead and then sends his family on ahead, and he stays alone on the other side of the river. 

Genesis 32:24-30  And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.
Then he said, "Let me go, for the day has broken." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
And he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."
Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed."
Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him.
So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered." 

So Jacob wrestles with a man, but then the man says that Jacob has wrestled with God. Jacob asks the man's name, but He won't tell him. It's not time yet for anyone to know His name -- the name of the coming One. 

It happens again in the book of Judges. The parents of Samson get a special visit.

Judges 13:2-22  There was a certain man of Zorah, of the tribe of the Danites, whose name was Manoah. And his wife was barren and had no children. And the angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her, "Behold, you are barren and have not borne children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Therefore be careful and drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. No razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines."
Then the woman came and told her husband, "A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like the appearance of the angel of God, very awesome. I did not ask him where he was from, and he did not tell me his name, but he said to me, 'Behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb to the day of his death.'" 
Then Manoah prayed to the LORD and said, "O Lord, please let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the child who will be born." 
And God listened to the voice of Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field. But Manoah her husband was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, "Behold, the man who came to me the other day has appeared to me."
And Manoah arose and went after his wife and came to the man and said to him, "Are you the man who spoke to this woman?"
And he said, "I am."
And Manoah said, "Now when your words come true, what is to be the child's manner of life, and what is his mission?"
And the angel of the LORD said to Manoah, "Of all that I said to the woman let her be careful. She may not eat of anything that comes from the vine, neither let her drink wine or strong drink, or eat any unclean thing. All that I commanded her let her observe."
Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, "Please let us detain you and prepare a young goat for you." And the angel of the LORD said to Manoah, "If you detain me, I will not eat of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, then offer it to the LORD." (For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of the LORD.)
And Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, "What is your name, so that, when your words come true, we may honor you?"
And the angel of the LORD said to him, "Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?"
So Manoah took the young goat with the grain offering, and offered it on the rock to the LORD, to the one who works wonders, and Manoah and his wife were watching. And when the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the LORD went up in the flame of the altar. Now Manoah and his wife were watching, and they fell on their faces to the ground. The angel of the LORD appeared no more to Manoah and to his wife. Then Manoah knew that he was the angel of the LORD. And Manoah said to his wife, "We shall surely die, for we have seen God."  

So it says here that the angel of the LORD appeared to Manoah and his wife, but then this person is identified as God. This happens again and again in the Old Testament. This "angel of the LORD" is identified as God Himself, not just an angelic being. But notice that they ask His name and He won't tell them. He says it is wonderful. In some translations, it says secret. It is not something that has been revealed yet. It's a mystery. 

So this is the biggest mystery in the Bible. The Old Testament reveals that there is this person coming to be the Messiah, but they didn't know His name. 

There's yet another time this mystery is pointed out.

Proverbs 30:2-4  Surely I am too stupid to be a man. I have not the understanding of a man. I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One. Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in his fists? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name? Surely you know!

This is an interesting and unusual prophecy. He says he is ignorant of something important. He's lacking some knowledge. He asks a series of questions, which can only apply to God. God is the one who controls the winds and the waters and established the ends of the Earth. But then he asks what is the name of this God and what is His Son's name. So God has a Son. This is revealed to us in the Old Testament, long before Jesus was born. But they don't know His name. It's a mystery.

This question hangs unanswered for thousands of years. Adam and Eve walked and talked with Him. Abraham ate with Him. Jacob wrestled with Him. He told Manoah and his wife about their son who would be born. He was prophesied to save the people from their sins. He would bear their iniquities and by His stripes they would be healed. He would come from Abraham and from the line of Judah and then from the line of David. He would be a king forever. He would be pierced for their transgressions. He would be born in Bethlehem. All this and many other things had been prophesied about Him. But what was His name?

About 2,000 years ago, the mystery was finally revealed.

Luke 1:26-33  In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!"
But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." 

So what was His name? Jesus. The most wonderful name of all time. Jesus means salvation. He came to save us from our sins. This was God's plan from the very beginning. He knew we needed a Savior. We can't save ourselves. Only God Himself could be the perfect sacrifice to take our place and be punished for our wrongdoing so that we could be forgiven. God gave us lots of information about the coming Messiah in the Old Testament so that we would know Him when He came. And finally, He came. He lived a perfect life. He died a horrible death on the cross. He rose from the dead. And now He offers us salvation if we simply trust Him. Salvation is His name. Jesus.

 

Top 3 Reasons to Believe Christianity

If you're a Christian, what kinds of evidence do you use when sharing the gospel with non-Christians? We all have our subjective experience of how we came to faith, but those may not convince others that Christianity is objectively true. Here are 3 objective lines of evidence that every believer should be able to share with others. These are the biggest reasons we SHOULD be Christians and why they should too.

1. The God of the Bible is consistent with the cause of the universe

Science has shown us that the universe is not eternal and must have had an absolute beginning. Because time, matter, and space are all parts of this universe, the cause of the universe must be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. It must also be extremely powerful and highly intelligent in order to have designed this universe. This begins to sound very much like the God of the Bible. There is much more that could be said here and many lines of evidence to back up these statements, but this is the very quick intro.

2. The evidence for the actual, historical resurrection of Jesus proves Christianity is true

This is the number one evidence for Christianity. If you give your children nothing else, this is vital. Even the Apostle Paul said that if Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain. They must know and understand the evidence for the resurrection. It is on this one historical event that Christianity rests.
We have 4 separate eyewitness accounts in the 4 gospels that verify the resurrection event. We also have independent attestation from non-Christian sources as to the major claims of Christianity very early on and we have the writings of the early church fathers to show that Christian claims have not changed over time.

 
There are several historical facts that even non-Christian historians agree are true based on these lines of evidence:

• Jesus really did die on the cross
• The tomb was empty
• The disciples really believed Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them
• Christianity exploded out of early 1st century Israel based on the testimony of the apostles

The best explanation for these 4 historical facts is that Jesus did actually rise from the dead. People may die for a story they believe to be true, but people don't die for a story they made up and know to be false. The apostles were in the position to know whether the resurrection actually happened and they went to their deaths without recanting. Again, there is much more to be said here, but this is the core of the issue.

3. The morality given in the Bible is consistent with natural law

This is a very neglected line of evidence, but very useful in helping young people see that Christian morality is not unreasonable and helping them stand against the ridicule of the culture. This one is more difficult to explain in a nutshell, but we see over and over again that immorality violates our design, not just a set of arbitrary laws.

 
For example, God commands us to abstain from sex before or outside marriage. That's not an arbitrary command. Premarital sex produces heartache, disease, poverty, abortion, and children who are raised in broken homes without a mother or father and thus are more likely to commit crimes, be promiscuous, drop out of school, and have emotional problems. Adultery produces many of the same effects, breaking up homes and harming men, women, and children in the process. These kinds of results show that extramarital sex isn't just immoral because of God's law, but because it deeply harms us by violating the way we were designed to live. We weren't meant to treat our bodies as playthings to be used as we please. Sex means more than just rubbing body parts together for fun.

 
Our design as humans involves not only our physical design, but our emotional and spiritual design as well and immoral sex violates that design. We can see from nature that extramarital sex is harmful and that shows us that God knew what He was doing when He gave us His laws.

There are many more lines of evidence and much more detail that could be covered for each of these, but these are the big main points every Christian should be able to explain.

Husband as Head of the Wife does NOT mean Source

It is a common egalitarian argument to claim the husband being the head over the wife doesn't mean he's the leader or authority, but only source. That's simply not true. Some have apparently noticed that the word head is used for the source of a river and thought they could explain away the Biblical teaching that husbands are head over their wives by claiming it just means the husband is a head in the sense of a river's head is its source. There are multiple problems with this line of argument.

First, the original word in Greek, kephale, actually means a head, like the part of your body where your face and brain are. Figurative meanings like the head of a river are secondary and derive from the literal meaning of a head on a body.

Second, the Biblical passages in question clearly use head and body metaphors for the relationship between husband and wife, not river metaphors.

Ephesians 5:22-33
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

Note here that the analogy given is that the husband and wife are like Christ and the church. Just as Christ is the head and the church is the body of Christ, so husband is to be the head over his wife and treat her as his own body by cherishing her. So this is clearly a head/body comparison, not talking about the head of a river. Just read the context. It's clear.

Third, we see that the very text using this head metaphor clearly states that wives are to submit to their husbands. So again, we have clear contextual evidence to show us this is about submission to authority. It doesn't make any sense for Paul to be commanding wives to be sure they originate from their husbands because he's the head and she's the river. That's not what it says. The Bible says submit. This is about authority.

Fourth, the husband is not the source of his wife. My source is my parents, not my husband. The ONLY case where the husband was actually the source of his wife was Adam and Eve, but that doesn't apply to any other marriage. So it doesn't make sense for Paul to tell people in his day (or people in our day) that the husband is the source of his wife. If anything, that's way weirder than teaching that the husband is in authority over his wife. I mean, think about how weird it would be if Paul was really telling us that the husband is the origin and source of his wife in some way, like that she doesn't exist as a person until she marries and somehow originates from her husband. Creepy. I think I'll stick with the Biblical teaching, thanks.

This line of argument that head only means source and not authority is just a really bad attempt to get around the clear teaching of scripture. It has been repeated so often that people just keep passing it around, but it doesn't take a scholar to see that it doesn't fit the Biblical text.

The Bible does actually teach that husbands have authority over their wives to which the wives have a responsibility to submit. It's not an unlimited authority, obviously. Only God has unlimited authority. But an authority structure in marriage where the husband leads and the wife submits is taught in scripture.

Homosexuality Violates the Design of our Bodies

Homosexuality, at its root, says that my body tells me nothing about how I should function sexually, and that I can do what I feel like rather than fulfilling the design of my sexuality which is rooted in the biology of the human body. This treats the body as if it is inconsequential and pointless - just a shell of meat that we wear rather than part of who we are. The "true self" in this view is the soul or mind or some non-physical entity that is inhabiting our bodies. The body is viewed as separate and unconnected to the true self, to be used as we please.

This mind/body dualism is actually a very low view of the body compared to the traditional Christian view, which says the body is inherently good, created by God, and part of who we are, not just a shell we inhabit. A lot of Christians today have lost this understanding, but this has been the historic Christian view since the beginning.

This presents a powerful way to reach those struggling with homosexual desires or similar issues (like transgenderism) with a positive message that their bodies are not irrelevant to who they are, but are good and integral parts of their being. Our bodies do have a lot to show us about who we are because they exhibit features that have a design. Behaviors that fit with our design are good and behaviors that violate our design are bad - not just morally bad, but bad for us as well.

Rather than a negative message that they are evil and twisted for having same-sex desires, we can present a positive message that their bodies are good. Our design tells us how we should live.

For example, we can study the digestive system to see what it is for and how it works. But that study also shows us good ways and bad ways of treating our bodies. If we eat nutritious food, then our bodies are helped. If we eat junk food or overeat or binge and purge or starve ourselves, these violate the way our bodies are supposed to work and cause harm. We can see that anorexia and bulimia are disorders precisely because they violate the way the body is designed to work.

It is exactly the same with the sexual organs. Our bodies have a way they were designed to work. They are designed as either male or female and the sexes are designed for their sexual organs to fit together and through that action to create new life. Our desires or attractions do not trump the design of our bodies. If we treat our bodies incorrectly, it causes harm.

This is a high view of the body that treats the body as an important part of who we are and which gives us valuable clues about how we should live so that we can flourish. Note that we do not have to rely on Christian moral teaching at this point. This is an argument from natural law, which is accessible to anyone, even if they don't believe the Bible. And that makes it easier to reach those who are not Christians.

It is worth noting at this point that Christian teaching, not coincidentally, is in line with what we can see in nature. This is good evidence for the truth of Christianity. Christian morality doesn't violate our design. It fits perfectly.

For more arguments like this about the design of human bodies and human sexuality, check out my new book The Bible and Science on Gender, Sex, and Marriage.