Darren Tappouras - The Man Who Changed the World - Study 3 - The Evidence of Christ

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

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   We're going to start with Brother Darren Teporis and his series, The Man Who Changed the World, and this time, The Evidence of Christ. We'll get started this morning with a reading of Luke chapter 1 and the first four verses, and I'll call forward Mitchell Pitts to come and read that. Thanks, Brother Mitch.

2. 0:16

   And now we look forward to hearing our Brother Darren Teporis on The Man Who Changed the World, Evidence for Christ Having Not Seen Yet Believed. Thank you. Good morning, Bible School. Good morning. This morning, our session is going to be based on a verse from 1 Peter 3. It's a verse we probably have heard many times.

3. 0:40

   I'll quickly read it here from the King James. But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you. Here we've got an imperative, if you like, or a commandment, if you want to take it that way, given to the ecclesia in a time of persecution.

4. 1:06

   That's the context we've got here. Severe persecution has come upon the believers, and there is fear and even terror. I think it's mentioned in verse 14. In the face of that fear and that terror, Peter writes, but. So he starts this verse with a but. So although you're experiencing the fear and the terror and the opposition and the negativity that society at that time was applying towards the believers, but still, Scripture says, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and be ready to give a defense or an answer, I think the King James has, to everyone who asks you a reason of the hope that is in you.

5. 1:59

   It's a slightly different reading from the, from other translations. The NET and the ESV, et cetera, have Christ in this particular passage. And most scholars, the unanimous view among scholars is this is a correct reading, but it says in the ESV, set Christ apart as Lord in your heart. And that follows the theme of our, of our thoughts during the week so far.

6. 2:30

   So, so make Christ special in your hearts, sanctify him in your hearts. So it's an internal disposition or state of mind and be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you about the hope that you possess. And I just want us to link together these two ideas that this verse presents in the, again, in the context of negative resistance to, to the truth in, in that culture, it was physical, but in, in, in face of hostile response to the gospel, et cetera, sanctify the Lord in your heart is linked to an attitude that has a readiness, that is ready and prepared to give a defense or an answer for the things that the believers held dear.

7. 3:25

   And so we can see connection between those, those two ideas. And the verse goes on and follows on and says, you do that not in an arrogant way, but you do it with, with meekness and in humility and respect. So these are the, the way that a believer responds. But I just want us to see this heart issue.

8. 3:48

   It's to do with sanctifying Christ in our hearts, equated to this mentality or this approach of being able to defend what we believe. And I think that's really something we want to get to the bottom of in our, our thoughts this morning to be ready. And so it implies there that there's a sanctifying process going on in our hearts by being prepared to give an answer.

9. 4:14

   And I hope that, that becomes clear. So the believers would have felt some sort of despair. They would have felt the overwhelming opposition that they would have faced in, in the Roman empire at that time. And yet this is given as an antidote to that in a sense, to be ready, to be prepared, to, to give a defense, to give an answer for the faith that you hold.

10. 4:38

    And so implied in those words, from my perspective anyway, implied in those words is a call to engage with our culture, not to hide from it, not just to put up barriers or put up walls and just say, well, that's the world and this is us and they can go to somewhere else and we just do our own thing.

11. 5:01

    The sanctification process in the midst of this opposition is, no, be ready, be prepared, be able to defend what you believe in this culture. And I think there's a power in that. And I think that's extremely relevant to us today. Our resistance and the negativity we feel as believers is not physical in the same way it was when Peter wrote, but there is definitely a hostility to people who believe the Bible and take seriously the things of God.

12. 5:30

    And we know that. Our own education system, our media, the entertainment world around us, if you listen to the ABC or just hear the tone in a talkback host's voice when they talk about people who believe the Bible and take it seriously, you can feel the way that our culture looks at those things.

13. 5:57

    Even, you know, watching a sitcom, the religious person or the person who takes the Bible seriously is often depicted as the simple person or the stupid person or the hypocritical person often. And the same applies in movies and novels and things that our culture perpetuates. So people are seen to be, that are religious or take God seriously are often seen as a little bit silly.

14. 6:25

    And I feel that even at my advancing age, even in my world, I feel that. For a job, I'm a consultant of sorts, and I give people advice. And sometimes when my clients find out that I believe in the Bible and I believe in God and I take things of the Bible seriously, there's this, like, incredulity from the, like, you?

15. 6:50

    Really? You? You're supposed to be smart. We're paying you money and you believe in this. And I feel the resistance to that at my age, being a fat, arrogant person that I am. I feel it. So I'm thinking, how do our young people withstand that? That is pretty tough, isn't it, in this particular world in which we live?

16. 7:10

    And I say with respect to, you know, my parents' generation, that they would struggle to appreciate what the young people go through in that regard. I think sometimes it's harder to resist physical opposition is sort of... has a sort of rallying effect, and it's sort of easier to resist that than to be ridiculed and seen as sort of silly in that particular way.

17. 7:35

    And it's sort of more subtle in that sense. So this morning we want to sort of think about that in relationship to our subject, the concept of making Christ Lord in our life, being supreme in our life, and living our life for his sake and committing ourselves to him. Now, our community has a history and a tradition of engaging with the culture around it.

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    Now, I'll give you a few examples. Here's Brother Robert Roberts. This is 1876. And what I find amazing about this, that Brother Roberts put so much resources and so much of his time and energy into debating these issues, and he lived in a totally different culture where the majority position was religious. Most people went to church, and most people were religious, and he saw rationalism starting to come into the English society, and he puts a lot of time and effort into combating that, where he could quite rationally have said, oh, that's just such a marginalised, small group of intellectual sort of boffins that I won't even deal with it.

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    But he puts a lot of effort and time into that. And here's a famous debate of Brother Roberts, which is well worth reading. It's a really good debate. It's a six-night debate. And it's not against anyone. It's against a gentleman called Charles Bradlaugh, who was a member of parliament and the leader of the rationalist movement in England.

20. 9:00

    So it's not just some local sort of nobody. This is a member of the British parliament at the time, and it's a six-night debate. And it's quite an awesome debate to read. And Brother Roberts is presenting a rational argument for the divinity of the Bible, or the fact the Bible is inspired and connected to God.

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    And I think just there's a good lesson in that for us, that he thought that was an issue that he put resources and time into taking on. As one of the rare debates of Robert Roberts, I like reading his debates because he was so quick-witted and knew his Bible extremely well, but this is one of the rare times when the audience is on his side.

22. 9:38

    Normally in the debates, he's arguing against the Trinity or something like that, and the audience are against him. And this one, because of the culture in which he lived, most people believed in the Bible. So when Brad Laugh brought up sort of semi-blasphemous criticism of the Bible, the audience would hiss. Ever heard a hiss before?

23. 9:58

    I don't know what that sounds like, but if you read the transcript of the debates, it says audience hiss. So they're hissing against Brad Laugh. So that's interesting. I'd join that hiss. That'd be a hiss. We just don't hiss enough these days, do we?

24. 10:15

    And Brother Roberts went on to write a number of articles which became books in due course. Is the Bible true? Is there a God? Again, he lived in a culture where the vast majority, 90-something percent of his society would have believed in God and the Bible anyway, and yet he put time and effort into combating these things.

25. 10:36

    Here's an awesome book that Brother Roberts wrote called The Trial. Many of you may never have heard of this book because I don't think it's in print anymore. It's a court drama. So it's a dramatised court case where Brother Roberts depicts these different characters in this court case. They've all got funny names.

26. 10:59

    He actually calls the main spokesman for atheism, he calls him Mr. Bad Laugh, which is a play on Brad Laugh that he debated earlier. So he sort of thinks that's funny, obviously. And I think he calls the judge Lord Penetrating Impartiality. You can see that's the name of the judge. But it's a little dramatised court scene, and there's arguments going back and forth about the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence of the resurrection of Jesus.

27. 11:31

    We're going to get to that in Friday's session, and I've actually taken a few ideas from Brother Roberts' arguments, and we'll look at those on our Friday session. But I just want to present to you that our community has a history of answers of reason, if you like, putting our position in a way and engaging the culture, not just hiding away from it and pretending it doesn't exist or pretending that's them and this is us and we can just live a totally non-interactive way.

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    Here's another amazing Christadelphian writer, probably my favourite Christadelphian writer, Islip Collier. He wrote some amazing books, The Guiding Light and Principles and Proverbs. But he also was quite prolific in writing about the defence of the Bible and defence of God. He's an awesome book. I don't know if it's in print, but I'm sure your younger ones, your parents will have it in the bookshelf, called Vaudet, The Voice of God.

29. 12:27

    And he looks at evidence. And he presented the idea that has stuck with me ever since, the cumulative concept, that there's no one piece of evidence that's going to be the knockdown sort of absolute answer, but when you accumulate the evidence and put it together, it's really, really quite powerful. So he wrote that.

30. 12:46

    He wrote Conviction and Conduct, which is sort of looking at the rational side of faith and how that then has an impact on our behaviour and our activity in life. And it sort of captures what Brother Ken's been talking about in regards to faith. The examples Brother Ken's put forward are that faith is not just this turn-your-brain-off sort of passive thing where you just sort of have a blind acceptance.

31. 13:10

    There's a rationality behind it. And all the characters Brother Ken's talked about, the centurion and the Syriophoenician woman, etc., they are using their rational faculties in coming to faith and then expressing their faith. So I think that's quite a powerful thing. We had read for us, it's a very short reading, you know, a couple of verses because there's a lot of Queenslanders here and I wanted to keep it simple.

32. 13:35

    Just joking. But it's... Yeah, back to the subject. There is this presentation of the Gospel that has this rational power behind it. And I'm going to give you this example from Luke's writing, the preface to Luke's or the introduction to Luke's Gospel record. Just want you to read it and soak it up because you were getting, I think, an insight into how the Bible was presented.

33. 14:12

    It was an evidentiary-based document. It's evidence that's been presented. The apostles were eyewitnesses, which is a legal term and a historical evidentiary term. They were witnesses and in fact when Judas gets replaced, remember the criteria to replace Judas, it had to be someone who had been with the Lord and who had witnessed the risen Lord.

34. 14:34

    They had to be a witness. That was the whole purpose of the apostles' role was to witness, to give evidence for the reality of what the Bible is teaching. So we don't turn our brains off when we read the Bible. We engage it from even a sceptical point of view or a sense of inquiry and wanting to know what's right and what's wrong.

35. 14:56

    So this is from the RSV. Let's read through those verses and just soak up the tone and the tenor of how Luke presents the Gospel record. He says, inasmuch as others, many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished amongst us. So there's been many acknowledges. There are other sources out there.

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    There are other people, early believers in the early ecclesia who have documented what had happened, what had happened in Christ's life. So a lot of those sources, of course, have gone. We don't have them anymore. But Luke had access to them and could use them and utilise them in his record. He says, just as they were delivered to us, so these sources, some of them were verbal sources, if you like, and delivered orally.

37. 15:44

    Others were written down. Just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses, so he's appealing to eyewitness account. And remember, when Luke writes this, those eyewitnesses, by and large, are still alive. So they could be questioned about the veracity of Luke's account. It seemed good to me also.

38. 16:06

    He says, he's educated. We believe he's a medical doctor of sorts. He's literate. He says, it seems good to me also, having followed all things closely. I've looked at this closely for some time past. I've spent time on this. I've looked at it carefully to write an orderly account, to give a nice, logical, flowing, referenced account here for this person called Theophilus.

39. 16:34

    That, and here's the objective of his account, that you might know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. That sounds rational to you, doesn't it? Because people today have this idea the Bible's just all these crazy sort of little stories that are all patchworked together in some crazy way, and there's miracles here, and there's things there, and there's visions, and they have no idea.

40. 16:58

    To them, it just seems like a collection of mythology and ideas that have evolved over centuries, but here you can see it's approached by Luke here in this very methodical and researched way. We're going to touch on this Friday. I'll just jump in a little bit ahead. The word delivered there is a technical term used for when a tradition is being passed on to other people, particularly in oral cultures where there was a lot of people, a lot of people were illiterate, and, you know, four verses would have been enough for them as well.

41. 17:35

    So there's this technical word that's talking about delivering and passing on tradition and this culture of verbal passing on, if you like, by eyewitnesses. I just also cut it from the NIV. It's in a more contemporary language, as if it was written today. So how would this have been written today or more closely worded in today's terminology?

42. 18:10

    He says, Many of us, many have undertaken to draw up an account of things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things that you have been taught.

43. 18:39

    I mean, that sounds very rational, doesn't it? Very logical. And I think that's a good place for us to start and to think about and to see that the writers and the people who participated in the life of Christ were eyewitnesses and be reminded of that. As I said, we'll come back to that a little bit on Friday.

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    For now, I just want to focus on a question and it has profound implications, this question. And it's such a good question from a number of perspectives. It's also an awesome question to pose to people in our culture, in our world, who have never really heard the evidence and never had the evidence presented to them.

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    The question of did Jesus exist? Because the impression most people have is that Jesus is a mythological, literary figure from history and from partial history that's been constructed and modified over time. So, we're just going to spend a few minutes thinking about this particular question. And as I said, it is an anchor question because once we anchor that to facts, then we can move off in different directions in the past and in the future and use it as a bedrock reality that we can build on, logically build on.

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    So, we'll get to that in a second. Now, in order to answer this question, I'm going to draw on an argument that's been put together by a research professor in the United States at Liberty University by the name of Gary Habermas. And I'll just introduce to you his argument in a minute. It's really quite a good argument, I find, for engaging with people at work and in our world.

47. 20:28

    And it's called the minimal facts argument. So, what Gary Habermas does, as I said, he's a research professor, he maintains a Word document of about 600 pages. And what he does in his professional life is he surveys research that's taking place all over the world and being published. And how research works is experts in different fields, so fields like, relevant fields like archaeology, textual criticism, history, classical history, the classicists in Roman and Greco history, of course, ancient manuscript scholars and those sorts of professionals.

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    Part of their job is to publish their research. The research gets peer-reviewed by those who understand their language and their methodologies, and then it gets published and once it's published it can be cited by other research people. So, what he does, he surveys the publications and the literature as researchers produce it all over the world.

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    And he makes it clear he's looking at the scholarly publications from the whole spectrum of scholars in the world, in history and archaeology, from atheists, agnostics, Jewish, Muslim scholars, not just Christian or scholars that are believers or evangelicals. So, he's calling on scholars right across the spectrum when he does this survey. And they could be French scholars, German scholars, you know, Swedish scholars, English scholars, scholars from all around the world from different research centres and think tanks and universities that are publishing this research on Jesus particularly.

50. 22:18

    And what he maintains in his Word document is two lists. And the lists are sort of dynamic. They may, over decades, they may change or new features might get added or might be taken off. And these two lists I just want to introduce to you are the first list are events about Jesus and facts about Jesus that virtually all scholars agree are historical facts.

51. 22:42

    Can you see the power of that? You don't need to argue about these things. The experts right across the spectrum, right across whether they're atheists, agnostics, Jewish, Muslim scholars, all the scholars agree on these bedrock facts about Jesus. So he has six items in this list and he maintains that by reviewing the publications constantly.

52. 23:06

    Why do we say virtually all? Of course, in the world of scholarship you always get sort of crazies of course. There are some scholars, historical scholars who don't believe the Holocaust happened or believe the Holocaust was not as extant as we would believe. So they are a tiny minority and so they in a sense can be ignored when you're looking at history broadly.

53. 23:31

    So he says yes, there might be a very small portion of scholars who disagree but virtually all scholars right across the spectrum believe in these six facts and I'll have a look at them in a minute. Then there are another list, currently has 12 items on this list of facts that the majority of scholars believe are actual historical facts.

54. 23:54

    So you've got the majority of scholars and you've got basically all scholars. So let's just have a look at these facts. And this is a good way to start the conversation in a way with people because people are not aware of this. You're not going to hear it on the ABC for sure.

55. 24:09

    You're not going to hear it on Channel 9. You're not going to get this information in the normal course of everyday life. So all scholars, historical, archaeological, textual scholars across the world of all the different philosophical stripes and colours all agree that Jesus existed. There's no absolutely no doubt that Jesus existed. If you deny Jesus existed you're like a Holocaust denier or someone like that.

56. 24:36

    You don't reflect the facts. And that he died by Roman execution. He was executed by crucifixion at the hand of the Romans. That is a bedrock fact. That's a fact. So you can plug that into this is a fact. The other fact that all scholars agree looking at the historical data is that the immediate followers of Jesus, call them the disciples if you like, or the followers of Jesus, immediately, we're going to look at Friday within months, we've got evidence that goes back within months of Jesus' death, immediately believed that they saw the risen Jesus.

57. 25:18

    Now the scholars will refer to that as experiences because they don't make a call on whether it was a real resurrection or not. That's not what scholars can do. They can only get you so far. But the disciples proclaimed that they had seen the risen Jesus. This wasn't something that evolved over decades and centuries that Jesus had raised from the dead.

58. 25:40

    These followers who were simple people, fishermen by and large from Galilee, immediately identified Jesus of Nazareth with the messianic figures of the Old Testament prophecies, immediately, even though they didn't believe it a few days earlier, immediately they identified him in that way and immediately they said they had witnessed the Lord post-resurrection, post-mortem, in a resurrected form.

59. 26:09

    Also the evidence is undeniable that very soon after this event happened, they were proclaiming this gospel of a resurrection initially in Jerusalem, immediately. It wasn't something concocted over time. So these shattered men who just saw their leader executed in this horrific way, instantly within days responded with this message of the gospel and the resurrection.

60. 26:38

    Also, this is a bedrock fact, due to these experiences, as the scholars say, their lives were transformed. So there were some that were direct relatives of Jesus who didn't even believe in him, in his messiahship. Their lives were transformed in a very dramatic way to the extent, now this is going to become very important in Friday's session, to the extent that they were willing to die for this belief that Jesus was resurrected.

61. 27:10

    Another historical fact is James, the brother of Jesus, was converted to become a follower from having first not accepted that claim of Jesus. And then this is really bedrock facts. Until I looked at this in more detail, I didn't realise how firm the fact of Paul of Tarsus or Saul of Tarsus and his conversion is in history.

62. 27:35

    So a few years later, Saul of Tarsus, who later called Paul, once persecuted the early believers, also had an experience, also saw the risen Lord and gave his life to follow. So those facts are your bedrock facts of history. No one seriously denies those facts. It's a good place to start. There's another set of facts, a lot of them sort of overlap.

63. 28:03

    Jesus was buried in a private tomb, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved and despondent, the tomb was discovered to be empty by his followers soon after his internment, the disciples had experiences where they saw the risen Lord, there was an early proclamation of the gospel, their lives were changed and transformed, this initial report of the resurrection took place immediately afterwards, wasn't something that progressed and evolved.

64. 28:35

    Converts believed this report and they started to meet together in groups and communities for worship to commemorate his death. It happened very quickly and this message centered on the preaching and the cross of Christ and his resurrection. James became a follower of Christ and then Paul as well. So that's a broader set of facts that the majority of experts in this field believe.

65. 28:59

    So you are really in, it's sort of rare for us to be in such company in a sense that the scholarship and those who study this subject and publish in it and research in it hold these facts as bedrock facts of history which is quite amazing. Now just to give you some examples as to why scholars are so absolutely sure that these facts are bedrock facts, that they actually exist.

66. 29:31

    I'll give you some context and some examples of how come they're so sure about this. If we were to ask the question how many what we call non Christian sources do we have for the existence of Jesus? These are what we might call unfriendly sources. These are references to Jesus not from the Bible, not from followers of Jesus, from Roman historians or authorities that are referring to Jesus.

67. 29:59

    What is the number that we have? Well we have about ten non Christian, non friendly references to Jesus within 150 years of his life. Now is that good or bad? That's the question you have to ask. We're not professional historians we say okay there's ten references to Jesus' life. Is that good? Is that bad?

68. 30:23

    Is that awesome? How do we get a reference point for that? Well you can compare that and contrast that to Tiberius Caesar. So he was the Caesar that ruled the Roman Empire, a very powerful Caesar, a very significant Caesar in the history of the development of the Roman Empire. Tiberius Caesar during the time of Jesus.

69. 30:47

    Now remember this is Caesar. He rules the entire world. He has hundreds of thousands of officials scattered throughout his administration. He has people on his staff who administer things and do things on his behalf. He is the centre of political focus and attention in the Roman Empire.

70. 31:07

    For Tiberius Caesar we only have nine historical references to the existence of Tiberius Caesar. So now you've got a reference point. A peasant carpenter from a village called Nazareth in the backwater of a backwater country has more references, historical references from non-Christian sources than the emperor, the Roman emperor himself. That's pretty phenomenal, isn't it?

71. 31:34

    That's pretty interesting. That's why there's no real debate about the existence of Jesus and the facts around his life. So in fact Jesus has one more reference than Caesar himself.

72. 31:49

    Could you just think about Pontius Pilate? Pilate seems to waver in the end. He tries to defend Jesus initially but he wavers in the end when the claim gets thrown at him that you're not Caesar's friend and he starts to get paranoid about that because it's not a good position in the Roman Empire to not be Caesar's friend and to go against Caesar and that seems to be a turning point in his dealings with Jesus.

73. 32:14

    He's worried about the power of Caesar because he's Caesar's representative. Could Pontius Pilate ever imagine that this nondescript nobody peasant in front of him that he was about to order his execution. One day that man would be worshipped and acknowledged by a Caesar would only be in two to three hundred years time.

74. 32:37

    A false version of his teaching nonetheless but nonetheless the historical fact is that man would influence the Roman Empire in such a way that Pilate's boss Caesar himself would become or declare himself to be Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ the man he's about to. That is phenomenal isn't it that is quite significant.

75. 32:58

    And then of course you can add the biblical references to Jesus which then swamp those of Caesar once you add the references in the Gospels and Paul's early epistles etc. So this is why scholars are on absolute solid ground when they talk about the reality of the facts about the existence of Jesus.

76. 33:21

    Here's a little timeline I'm just going to quickly run through a few examples just so you can feel this is real. There's a timeline there that little sort of vertical thing in the middle is the end of the first century. So we get some facts about who was writing about Jesus. A really significant historian is Josephus.

77. 33:43

    I'm sure many of us have heard about Josephus before. He was initially a commander up in Galilee fighting in the resistance against Rome but he gets captured and he becomes a Roman historian for the emperor himself and eventually moves to Rome to finish his literary works. He mentions Jesus. Some of his references to Jesus are disputed but there are others that are absolutely recognised as genuine.

78. 34:07

    References to Jesus, references to James his brother and the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate and crucifixion. So that's within the first century itself. Here's another non-friendly source. He was a senator who's also become a governor in the area of Turkey by the name of Pliny, Pliny the Younger and we have a letter of his writing to the emperor Trajan about the growth of this community called the Christians and he doesn't know what to do with them because they won't offer incense and worship Caesar and he's asking for feedback as to he says I've tortured them they don't want to change so he's asking the emperor what he should do about them but the importance of that is to show that by the time Pliny is writing the gospel has spread from the Judean base and it has now reached northern Turkey and established in such a way that it's now causing waves and it has reached the attention of first Pliny as the governor and then Caesar within only a decade of the Bible being completed in you know the book of Revelation so so you've got an impact of Jesus teachings very early very early documented which is quite significant now Tacitus those of you who did ancient history at school Tacitus is probably the most valuable source in in Roman history that we have so Tacitus was a Roman historian if you like he wrote these series of documents called the Annals of Roman History he mentions Jesus he refers to his crucifixion by Pontius Pilate so he is how we know about all the a lot of the emperors and the and the

79. 35:54

    wars and the issues that took place in the in the first century is from this writer Tacitus and he mentions Jesus so we've got really serious sources here's a couple more quickly Suetonius wrote a lives of the Caesars series where he documented the lives of the Caesars and he mentions Christus this this Christ figure been and his followers been expelled from Rome so they've been expelled from Rome and persecuted not long after the Bible is finished so you can see that spread all the way to Rome already which is pretty much tracking Paul's missionary journeys if you like and he mentions Christians and their punishment this is a really interesting one this is a writer called Thallus writing in 55 AD okay this is really close to the actual event we don't have his original documents so we don't have the writings of Thallus but he's quoted by another writer in about 160 AD and he talks about the darkness that ascended over the earth at the crucifixion of Jesus so we've got references to here a miraculous event if you like a miraculous event being documented very early in in in in in history following Jesus and another writer writing to his sons he talks about this wise king of the Jews figure called Jesus who who was who was executed etc just just interesting that these are these are more domestic letters but referencing the current events of the of the day and referring to Jesus so I find them quite interesting quite compelling why I wanted to spend some time this morning going through that it's my you might think it's just sort of boring

80. 37:29

    history we have these bedrock facts these are these are indisputable that you can't argue with them they are they are confirmed by historical analysis by those who are experts in the field Jesus existed his followers existed preaching about him existed the spread of his community existed right back in in ancient times so once you'd have these bedrock facts you can then use them to continue to build your argument and this is what we're going to do going forward so we have the fact Jesus Christ is a fact of history an absolute fact undeniable fact we're going to spend a couple of minutes before we finish just going backwards from this fact and saying well we know Jesus existed we know elements of his life are undeniable even outside the Bible we can go back to the Jewish writings which we looked at a little bit yesterday we have absolute undeniable documentation of prophecies about Jesus now we have undeniable documentation that these prophecies are written centuries before he was even born and we can see how these prophecies are fulfilled in the life of this actual historical character and so that is a insight to the miraculous or the supernatural aspect of this story we're now we're now leaving the historical bedrock concept and we're now saying there's something greater going on here in this story than just history and then we're going to probably on Friday we're going to look forward from this we know we have the bedrock reality of Jesus existence we're going to look at what and how Jesus has affected the world in which we live and the effect he's had on history and our

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    culture and our world and say how do you account for that we know he existed we know he's had this incredible impact on our culture you can just drive around Lake Macquarie and every five minutes you're going to see a church with a cross on it and why 8,000 miles away from the Middle East are there churches around Lake Macquarie with a cross supposedly commemorating a person who lived thousands and thousands of miles away 2,000 years ago it's sort of a when you think about it like that it's a phenomena isn't it it's just it's a phenomenon that beggars belief of how a peasant from 2,000 years ago is now being memorialized in our culture so we'll talk a little bit about that as we as we go through so just to finish up just to finish up just going to do the first take the first pivot if you like we know Jesus is a fact of history let's go back and see what the Jewish scriptures were predicting about him and what evidence we have for them as well and then we've got a as I said a supernatural connection to this historical figure so I'm going to start with part of the what we call servant prophecies in Isaiah that predicted this this character that we talked a little bit about yesterday this this male character that sort of punctuates the the narrative of of Israel's history that would come in the future that the Jews were were sort of anticipating and looking forward to and we have some details about this suffering servant if you like from Isaiah 53 and I'll put these

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    references on the screen I'm sure for most of us you'll be familiar with them this character would be is and he's talked about in these terms he was oppressed and he was afflicted yet he opened not his mouth he was led as a lamb to the slaughter as a sheep before its shearers is silent so he opened not his mouth he was taken from prison and to judgment and who should declare his generation that he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgressions of my people was he stricken and they made his grave with the wicked but with the rich at his death because he had done no violence nor was any deceit in his mouth therefore I'll divide him a portion with a great he shall divide the spoil with a strong because he poured out his soul unto death and he was numbered with the transgressors you know executed with transgressors and he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors now I'm submitting that the Jewish people although they saw that there was this coming figure it was still they were seeing this through a glass darkly they didn't see the whole reality of what that would be and how that would eventuate and we'll maybe reference that a bit later on as well now do we know these words were really written about this Messiah that would come these words that are fulfilled in the life of Jesus do we know those words were written before the event happened before Jesus came well we do have some incredible documentation those who have been to

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    Israel may have actually seen this in the Jerusalem Museum there's a monument there I think it's called the something of the book or something I can't remember the name the shrine of the shrine of the book shrine of the scroll whatever it is that's and you can go and see this actual scroll of Isaiah in it perfectly preserved and you can if you if you knew Hebrew you can literally track the consonants and read it in that incredible way it's the great Isaiah scroll 1 q l s double a it's there you can read it and look at it so you have absolute bedrock evidence again that this prophecy about this suffering servant that resonates and echoes in the life of Jesus in such an incredible way was written definitely before Christ came it's preserved in that was preserved in the Dead Sea scroll scenes the scenes preserved it in the Dead Sea area of Israel of course it was discovered in I find this bizarre and amazing as well discovered 1947 significant year anyone you know it's it as the prophecies were being fulfilled in the in the state of Israel literature is found in the ground that actually confirms it which is quite amazing another story for another day and the beauty of this is we can actually trace the wording in Isaiah 53 through to the Bible that we hold in our hands today so that the Bible and the Old Testament of the Bible particularly the King James version of the Bible was based on what we call the Masoretic text which is which is dated about AD 900 so you got you've got a

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    thousand year gap if you like between the Dead Sea scroll that we have in in in Jerusalem and the Masoretic text upon which our Bible is based you got a thousand year gap so how does Isaiah 53 fair when we look at it has it over a thousand years how has it been transmitted what's the transmission quality like over that period of time has has it just evolved and changed and been added to and different people have inserted different stories and different ideas into it how is it how's it traveled through time has has it been providentially cared for by God and transmitted carefully or has it just evolved as a mythological construct well you can compare it you can literally get online and there are tools you can get online and actually compare and look at the the differences between our Bible today and the IQ LSAA scroll a comparison of Isaiah 53 shows that there are only in the whole over a thousand years there are 17 letter differences in the whole chapter from the Masoretic text ten of these are just spelling differences and four are very very minor don't alter any of the any of the meaning or any of the any of the references at all just just very minor changes in in the less changes than you would see probably just by comparing another translation of the Bible so this is quite phenomenal isn't it you can you know Jesus existed now absolutely absolutely fundamentally bedrock evidence you know this scroll existed you can go and see it today if you like and you know that these prophecies have been

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    fulfilled in the life of of Jesus Christ another way of anchoring the thank you the the prophetic um power the the ability to foretell the future and its outcome in the New Testament another way to anchor that before Jesus is um a translation of the Bible you've probably heard of called the Septuagint have you heard of the Septuagint okay which which is a word that means 70 and sometimes it's referenced using LXX the Roman numerals for 70 um we know it existed in Alexandria two to three hundred years before Christ so we know that tells us even if we're going to be really skeptical and really demanding in our criteria we know that this scripture had to have been written before that it existed in Hebrew we know it had to have been accepted as authoritative by by the Jewish people we know it circulated throughout the world and it's now it's found its way to Alexandria which was a very prominent city in Egypt in those days and then um the king commissions these 70 scholars to to convert it from Hebrew into into Greek we've got the Greek Septuagint so even if you just want absolute proof of something you have absolute proof that at least two to three hundred years before Christ the Old Testament was complete and finished and available and so the prophecies in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in Christ are just undeniable just totally undeniable and I said as I said it gives us this this supernatural miraculous insight into this subject that you human could not have ever ever done that just to finish up in the last few

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    minutes there's another amazing messianic prophetic section of the Old Testament it's Psalm 22 we haven't got time to really drill down into it now it's an awesome psalm and just to see the connections and the detail of this psalm detailing the crucifixion of Christ and his experiences and to see how it gets outworked in the book of Matthew is quite amazing I've picked out a few samples just to rush through it at the end here it contains that famous statement that starts with that statement my God my God why have you forsaken me which Jesus also expresses in Matthew 27 recorded in Matthew 27 the same which which is like a sign post that links us back to that particular psalm we know it's messianic we know Jesus saw it as such Psalm 22 says all those who see me they laugh me to scorn they ridicule me they shoot out their lip they shake their head saying he trusted in the Lord let him rescue him let him deliver him seen he supposedly delights in him these words are almost verbatim repeated aren't they in Matthew 27 all those who pass by the scene of the crucifixion when Christ is there in shame and degradation they wag their heads they're saying you who will destroy the temple you think you're the son of God come down he trusts in God let God deliver him if he desires him or delights in him you can see the almost verbatim reflection here in Matthew Psalm 22 predicted that they would divide his garments and they would cast lots for his clothes you know one of the one of the answers to messianic prophecies is oh the disciples knew that they

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    knew what the Old Testament prophets predicted and they were just orchestrating events to to make them happen how could you orchestrate that how could you make the Roman soldiers cast lots for your clothing you couldn't do that it's just not a it's a non-answer and so it goes on to say in Psalm 22 says they pierce my hands and my feet even the method of execution the the way the Romans would use crucifixion we'll talk about a bit later on but even that method of crucifixion was predicted there in in this psalm they crucified him they divided their garments and cast lots for his for his clothes and then it ends this is how I want to finish this morning it ends on a very positive note at the end of this psalm it starts off with this cry my God my God it looks like you've forsaken me it looks like I'm forsaken and rejected and and and punished by you in a sense and yet it ends with this really positive you have answered my prayer you have so Jesus moves through this emotional expression of of despair in a sense while he's on the cross and then we get to the end of the psalm and he says you have answered me and I'm sure as he as he came out of that tomb these words would have been echoing in his mind he says I will declare your name to my brethren to the your eyewitnesses to the apostles I will declare my name in the midst of the assembly or the ecclesia you know the great congregation to to us this this witness would come from Jesus post his resurrection through the his

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    brethren through the apostles and would reach us today and they will come and declare his righteousness this is what it's all about the righteousness of God that we have as a gift of grace through faith I will declare this righteousness that came from the from the cross of Christ and his sacrifice to a people who are yet to be born that's you and me yet to be born when that psalm was written even when it was enacted by Christ and lived out it was still we were still yet to be born of course and so Jesus basically repeats these words in his instruction to the followers don't be afraid go and tell my brothers my brethren to meet me in Galilee and there he gives them his commission to take the message and make disciples of all people so this is where we'll we'll sort of leave it at this point and we'll pick it up a little bit later on Jesus Christ is a fact of history you can't deny it it's an absolute fact the fact also can be established that God predicted the events of his life his coming his life the events of his life his crucifixion and his resurrection absolutely predicted by God and then we're going to look at tomorrow the effect that Jesus has had on our world as another piece of evidence to show that this is undeniable this is real Jesus Christ lived and Jesus Christ is returning to fulfill God's purpose thank you