Question of the week: So many religions seem to say the same thing. How do you know your religion is true and the others are false? How do you know your religion wasn’t just made up to account for what we do not know? How do we know that the fear of death didn’t give rise to the gods? Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Isn’t that more than enough time to make all this stuff up?
My answer: I thought this way too until I examined the different holy books that undergird the world’s major religions. I did find that they all taught some version of the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you). However, that is where the similarity ended.
The Bible stood apart from the other holy books in several dramatic ways. First, it accurately and consistently predicted future historical events and future scientific discoveries. No mere human would be capable of such predictive power. Second, it stated and provided evidence that no human is able to live up to the moral standard that is written upon their conscience. It stated that our consciences can only be satisfied if we receive the offer of redemption that God provides to anyone who asks and is willing to make God their Lord and Master.
Third, Jesus proved that he was the Creator and Redeemer through the perfectly moral life he lived on Earth (even his mother and brothers agreed that he was morally perfect) and the miracles that he publicly performed. The most significant of his miracles was his bodily resurrection from the dead. The historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead is overwhelming, more so than for victories and defeats of Napoleon in battle. If Jesus can raise himself from the dead, he can raise us from the dead. Not so incidentally, the best scientific dates for the origin of human beings are 45,000–300,000 years ago.1 So, we humans may have only been here for several tens of thousands of years.
In his classic story A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens describes the Advent season as “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.” At RTB,...
