Why I Believe In Jesus Christ

There is one major and several minor reasons why this BLOG's author personally believes in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour, Redeemer from sin. The minor reasons are those which merely enable intellectual assent to this divine proposition, without acceptance for one's own life of its true spiritual efficacy. Let us look at those first. 1)Mutually-conspired collusion by the Old Testament prophets to fake a prediction of Christ's coming is virtually impossible: they were not all chronological contemporaries of one another; yet, every prophecy about Christ was fulfilled by His life. 2)Jesus Christ could not have had personal human control over every Old Testament prophecy made about Him, such as His family ancestral lineage, His betrayal by Judas Iscariot for exactly thirty pieces of silver, the gambling of Roman soldiers for His clothing at the foot of the cross, the location of His birth, His abuse and suffering at the hands of the local Jewish crowd on the road to Calvary, and His burial in a tomb borrowed from a rich man(Joseph of Arimathea). 3)Concerning His resurrection from the dead, some cynics say Jesus merely swooned--fainted into temporary unconsciousness on the cross--but later revived in the tomb. Rebuttal: A Roman soldier's spear thrust into Jesus' side should put final end to a mere swoon on the cross. 4)Also concerning the resurrection: Roman soldiers were posted in front of the boulder closing the entrance to the tomb, to assure that Jesus' body would not be stolen. The boulder was huge and heavy, rolling it away would have been a very strenuous task taking too much time to escape the Roman guards' notice. The punishment for a Roman guard sleeping on guard duty was death. So, the body of Jesus Christ could not possibly have been stolen. 5)Jesus Christ re-appeared to His disciples after the crucifixion. All of them acknowledged Him. It is virtually impossible that all were simultaneously experiencing the same hallucination. 6)Cynics say the whole New Testament is a fictitious concoction by the ancient historian Josephus Flavius. Rebuttal: It is highly unlikely that Josephus Flavius had all the Old Testament writings collected together in hand, to invent a New Testament fulfilling of all the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus Christ with such uncanny accuracy. The entire Bible was not formally compiled and canonized into a single book until the time of the early church councils, a few centuries after the lifetime of Josephus Flavius. The authorship of the New Testament apostolic letters after the Four Gospels is well-corroborated and attested as the Bible claims. 7)Finally among the minor reasons why I believe in the Bible is that it is possible to deceive just so many people for just so long: had the whole Bible--or at least the New Testament--been a baloney-sausage, it would have been discredited and forgotten centuries ago, and no Christian church would exist anywhere today.

Now to the major reason why I believe in Jesus Christ. At the outset, it should be said that no man can choose Jesus Christ on his own initiative, nor will he: Jesus Christ must choose men. John 6:44, 15:16. But the main reason for belief is the radically-fundamentally transforming power of people's lives by Jesus Christ today: gamblers, drunkards, drug addicts, liars, rapists, robbers--sinners all--are changed to sainthood by the power of Jesus Christ living in them. No amount or severity of prison incarceration alone can reform wicked and evil sinners like this, as repeat criminals untouched by Jesus Christ prove daily. No external pressures can change the inner heart and soul of man: change must come from inside the man and work its way outward. This is the meaning of "born again" as used by Jesus Christ in conversation with Nicodemus the Pharisee. John 3:1-8, I Corinthians 2:14. Natural men have no spiritual discernment.

Finally, it must be asserted aggressively and unequivocally that science does not refute religion, but is complementary to it. Science is one realm of truth while religion is another realm of truth. Spiritual truth cannot in any way be tested and evaluated within the physical realm of science. Notions of right and wrong can in no wise be measured and tested in science laboratories for corroboration or refutation. From where comes man's unique ability to love, appreciate, value and esteem, as no lower animals can? Science has no answer here.

Jesus Christ is the real deal because He and His followers have faced persecution and opposition to an unprecedented magnitude. Satan the father of lies and ruler of this world leaves his own alone. Nobody ever hears of persecution of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists or Confucionists. Even Jews, for all the persecution and hostility they have faced down through the centuries, cannot claim a scope and magnitude of persecution matching the experience of Christians. Unfortunately, persecution of Jews since the era of Jesus Christ has been intimately related to alleged Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ, based on Matthew 27:24-26. Still, salvation and reconcilliation to God is open to all men today, to Jew and Gentile alike.

-LKM