EPISODE 163 1 JOHN CHAPTER 5 " Why Do We Believe What We Believe"

Welcome to Share the Word. The emphasis today is that believing in Jesus as the Christ is the foundation of having eternal life. But why is it so difficult to believe that Christ rose from the dead? Keep listening and open your hearts to the truth. Paul. First John chapter 5.

Why do we believe what we believe? Why do we believe what we believe? That's a complicated question. All kinds of people have pondered that, researched that, written about that. There's no doubt that much of what we believe is because we were early on conditioned to believe it by our parents or others close around us, by our early teachers, by what was prevalent in our community when we were growing up. When we grow older, many of us continue in those beliefs.

But I think it's also normal for most of us to go through a period of rethinking things, questioning things, and then deciding for ourselves what we will continue to believe from the past. When that question comes, when that period of questioning comes, some of us decide, yes, I do in fact believe what I was taught and what I was modeled as I grew up. But other people, when they're challenged as teens or young adults with different ideas, move away from their past beliefs. Some of them abandon them altogether. This happens a lot in America when kids go away to college. Often after only a semester or two at a state college or secular university, they come home smarter than their parents, smarter than their pastor, smarter than all their early life influencers.

Is it because they really are now suddenly smarter at 18 or 19 years old? Have they suddenly been enlightened enough to throw overboard all the beliefs they showed up with on campus? Do the professors, who in many cases intentionally take it upon themselves to deconstruct the traditional or Christian worldview many students arrive on campus with, really, like the Gnostics claimed, have the higher truth, the deeper insights into truth and reality? I had an online discussion with a lady recently on a Q&A site where I contribute. Her name is Deborah. She told me essentially this very story, how as a child she was reared in a Christian home and that she remembered, in her words, accepting Jesus into my heart when I was a child.

But later, when she went away to college at 18, she wised up quickly. She didn't put it exactly this way, but to make a long story short, she quickly became convinced that the quaint things she'd been taught from the Bible actually were not true, but were in reality just legends accumulated over centuries of time. She told me very confidently that the New Testament Gospels were not really written by the early followers of Jesus, and that the biggest claims in them, like Jesus' resurrection, for example, couldn't literally have happened. I asked her how she knew the resurrection of Jesus didn't happen. Her answer was, Because people don't rise from the dead. It doesn't happen.

We all know that. How did she know that the apostles of Jesus didn't write the Gospels? Well, on that one, she couldn't quite remember where, in what class or in what textbook she read it, but she was sure that the consensus of the wise men of the 20th and 21st centuries said so. So Deborah went from believing what her parents believed, what her pastor taught, what her church family believed, to believing what a couple college professors told her was true and what she reasoned about reality from her own experience. Sadly, in my view anyway, that's an all too familiar story. Oddly enough, Deborah claimed to me that she still considered herself a Christian, but by her definition.

She told me that now she only believes and lives by the sayings of Jesus and didn't think the rest of the Bible made enough sense, and so she disregarded those parts. I dialogued back and forth with her for a little bit, trying not to be argumentative, but seeing if I could get her to think a little deeper through these questions. I asked her, Is there any chance that your professors were wrong? Are you sure you didn't just take their word for things because they seemed smart to you? Are you certain they had factual information that, for example, John didn't author the fourth gospel, or that Jesus didn't actually arise from the dead? The more I probed her, I found that she went in circles.

No, she didn't have any inside information that I had never heard before. She had just gone from believing what one set of influencers told her early in her life to believing what another set of influencers told her in her later life, and that was her view now, largely. She thought they were more sophisticated and more knowledgeable. And then she, of course, threw in some of her own reasoning based on her own experience about what's possible, what's not possible. That led her to the conclusion that since the Bible talks about miracles, including Jesus rising from the dead, which she knew couldn't happen, then the Bible shouldn't be taken literally or seriously, except for the parts she liked, of course, like the sayings of Jesus. I thought of this conversation with Deborah when I was reading some of the lines in chapter five of 1 John.

For example, when he writes, Since we believe human testimony, surely we can believe the greater testimony that comes from God, what God has testified about his Son. All who believe in the Son of God know in their hearts that that testimony is true. Those who don't believe this are actually calling God a liar because they don't believe what he has testified about his own Son. John's making a reasonable assumption when he says, Since we believe human testimony. Normally we do. Normally, when two or three serious people affirm they saw or experienced something, we accept their testimony, even in a law court.

But actually, when it comes to Jesus' life and events told about in the Bible, many people don't believe human testimony anymore, even eyewitness testimony. I discussed during our Gospel of John episodes when we got to the resurrection account, chapter 20, that there were a lot of human witnesses to the physical resurrection of Jesus. People who were believers during Jesus' earthly ministry, like John himself, or like Peter, or even the slow-to-believe Thomas. These guys were examples of those who saw and interacted with a very alive Jesus over weeks of time following his public crucifixion. In fact, what they personally witnessed is the only reason they came to believe the resurrection was real.

And there were other people too, ones who did not believe in Jesus at all during his public ministry years, but they also saw him after his resurrection and were forced by the facts to believe that Jesus really had come out of the grave, because there was no other logical explanation for their experiences. That includes people like James and Jude, Jesus' younger half-brothers, who scoffed at him during his ministry years. It includes Saul of Tarsus for sure, who was the major persecutor of early Christians until he was personally confronted by the risen Lord. In fact, Saul, better known to us now as the Apostle Paul, made such a drastic turnaround once he was confronted by the resurrected Christ that to this day we use the expression Damascus Road experience for someone who does a 180 and about-face after realizing they were completely wrong about something.

And Paul, after his own conversion, completely due to his meeting with the risen Christ, remember, says he became aware of at least 500 other people who saw and interacted with Jesus after his resurrection. 500 plus witnesses. That's a lot of testimony. How does a reasonable person ignore that? I pointed that out to Deborah, by the way, but then she reverted to, But how do we know that the real John and Paul even wrote these things that are recorded in the Bible? I explained to her that we know the same way we know other things from history. That is, people who lived at or close to the time confirmed the information.

People who knew John the Apostle have confirmed that he was the author of the fourth Gospel, for example. I'm afraid Deborah, because she was influenced by people she considered too smart to question, had now accepted that the Bible was just not a reliable source and that we can't even be sure who the authors were. But that false information was pressed on her from biased unbelievers. The same professors would never dare tell her that, for example, the Greek poet Homer didn't really write the Iliad or Odyssey, or that Tacitus didn't really write the Annals and the Histories of Rome, although there is no more evidence that they did than that John wrote the fourth Gospel. There are many events considered very important in history no one questions, events we have far less reliable testimony for than the resurrection of Jesus.

Yet her professors would confidently tell her those far less attested things are certain and true historical facts. But the New Testament? You can't believe that. Is this honest to have one set of criteria for all the rest of what you accept from the past is true, and another set of criteria for the eyewitness accounts in the Bible? Just because it's in the Bible, it must be dismissed out of hand as untrue. Why is that?

Why that double standard? I'm convinced it's because many people just do not want to believe what the Bible says about the resurrection, or about the creation, or about heaven and hell, or anything else. Because if they did, then they'd have to view all of their life differently. Then they'd have to deal with the fact that they are answerable to a God who created them, and a Savior who died for them, and they're not willing to do that. The implications, I guess, are too threatening to who they are. That's the only explanation I can think of.

One more thing I pointed out to Deborah before I left her. I hope this all caused her to rethink the wisdom of jettisoning the truth of her parents and early teachers, the things they tried to instill in her. As I mentioned, she claimed to still be a Christian while at the same time rejecting the trustworthiness of the Bible overall. She told me she just tries to live by the teachings of Jesus, and since she followed the ethical teachings of Jesus, she considers herself a Christian. I asked her a couple questions about that. First, those sayings or teachings of Jesus you accept as genuine and try to live by, where did you get those?

Well, of course, they come from the Bible, from one of the four Gospels written by people claiming to be with Jesus in the first century. So my second question was, how then do you decide which parts of the Bible you are going to believe as true and which parts to disbelieve as false? I want her to think through that inconsistency, how illogical it really is for us to kind of cherry-pick which things in God's Word we will believe. If she actually believes the Gospels were written by some later pretenders, not by the apostles of Jesus who were eyewitnesses, then why would she believe anything those fake authors wrote about the teachings of Jesus? Isn't it a little bit presumptuous for any of us to decide which parts of the Bible we will accept as true and which parts we decide are false? Isn't that, if we're honest, just arbitrary?

Isn't it far more reasonable and consistent to accept the testimony of the biblical authors, especially when we have so much of it, and it's coming from people who were in fact eyewitnesses very close to the people and events they wrote about, and in the New Testament's case, coming from people who were willing, and in many cases did, give up their lives rather than deny the truth of the things they wrote and testified? I wanted Deborah to think through better the why do you believe what you believe question. The Bible is not a smorgasbord to pick and choose which parts we want to accept, as if our acceptance gives them credibility. No, the credibility comes from the human witnesses who were really there and wrote down things they saw and heard, their own eyes.

And I believe it also comes from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who supernaturally superintended their writings to preserve these most important truths for all of us. Maybe you've been influenced by 20th or 21st century false teachers just like Deborah has. If so, I hope you'll reconsider the information they've fed you. A lot of teachers today, especially at higher education centers, parrot the same misinformation about the Bible. Some are deliberately false teachers, willingly carrying out Satan's agenda by spoiling young people's faith. Others naively go along because they think they will be respected by their faculty peers as long as they parrot the same conventional wisdom of liberal academia.

But John stresses in his gospel and in his letters that Christianity's basis is founded on reliable eyewitness testimony, people like him who were actually there with Jesus. And here in chapter 5, he also says it's founded on God's own testimony, that God Himself has testified to the man Jesus, being His own unique Son, who came down out of heaven to tell us the truth, and who then laid down His life as an atonement for sin. I think when John says that, he's referring to the time he was first introduced to Jesus by the prophet John the Baptist. Remember, in the first chapter of his gospel, he says that he was a follower of John the Baptist until John the Baptist pointed him to Jesus and said, He's far greater than me. You should follow Him. John the Baptist testified, I saw the Holy Spirit descend like a dove from heaven and rest on Him.

I didn't know He was the one, but when God, who sent me to baptize with water, told me, The one on whom you will see the Spirit descend and rest is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, I saw that happen to Jesus. So I testify He is the chosen one of God. The very outset of Jesus' public ministry, John the Baptist, who was the last of the Old Testament prophets, said God told him how he'd recognize the true Messiah. And the unmistakable sign was he'd see the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove come down and alight on him. When Jesus came to be baptized by John at the outset of his public ministry, that's what happened. A dove fluttered down from heaven, landed on him when he came up out of the water.

That's when John the Baptist knew that was God's sign Jesus was the Messiah. John may also be thinking about the time when Jesus took him, Peter, and James up on a mountaintop, and a cloud enveloped them, and Jesus was transfigured before them into a glorified state. They actually saw Jesus revealed as we will see him one day in heaven in his glorified body and persona. John, with his own eyes, saw that, and those three disciples, during that unforgettable experience, heard God's own voice from heaven affirm, This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him. So John had also audibly heard God's own testimony about Jesus' identity.

He was convinced by what the prophet John the Baptist told him, as well as by his own experience, who Jesus really was. In fact, John had Jesus' real identity confirmed to him time and time again, as he witnessed the Holy Spirit empower him to do miraculous things, especially by his prophecy-fulfilling death and resurrection. All these things unmistakably confirmed to John the truth of who Jesus really was. That's why he confidently writes in this section, All who believe in the Son of God know in their hearts this testimony is true. We know that the Son of God has come, and he has given us understanding so that we can know the true God. And now we are living in fellowship with the true God because we live in fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ.

So there we have it. John tells us why he confidently believed into Jesus. It was based on a lot of profound personal experiences during the years he was with Him. As for me, I believe based on the testimony of John and so many others, as the Holy Spirit has convinced me what they wrote is true. What did any of them have to gain by lying about any of this? And would Christianity have really caught fire the way it did if it was all based on a bunch of lies?

So, again, why do you believe what you believe? Were these apostles of Jesus telling the truth? When they tell us that the Son of God was here in the flesh and they became convinced of that because of things they personally witnessed, do you believe them? There have been many, like the Gnostic teachers John encountered in his day, right up until Deber's teachers at our university, who brazenly dismiss the apostles' testimony. But none of them were there. Keep that firmly in mind.

None of them were there. John and the others who were there insist that it was facts they witnessed which caused them to come to believe into Jesus as the Son of God, that He died and rose again, and so on and so on and so on, all the things they wrote down in the Gospels. As an objective matter, I find their testimony compelling because there were so many witnesses, who those witnesses were, and because they were willing to give up their lives rather than recant any testimony about Jesus. I also find the change in so many people's lives who've come to believe the testimony about Jesus compelling, from Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul. Right up to whose before and after I've seen in my lifetime, people who have been born again through faith in Jesus Christ. Their life change is very compelling to me.

And subjectively, the witness in my own spirit that I've been born into God's family because I've personally believed in Jesus, and the evidence that I passed the tests we've called the tests of life that John writes about in this epistle. But that's not a decision I can make for you. We just hope and pray that you will listen to John and all the other witnesses carefully and think through the evidence, just as I was challenging Deborah to do. I hope that because we are literally talking about questions that affect our entire future, our eternal destiny, I hope that there are no more important things you realize to think through than the things we're talking about. John's words near the end of this letter couldn't be any clearer. This is what God has testified, he writes.

He has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I've written this letter to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you might know that you have eternal life. Maybe if you've listened to the message of 1 John, you've realized that you can't pass these tests of life, which means that right now you can't be sure where you are headed when this life is over. If that's so, I hope you realize that God is offering you eternal life as a gift because of what Jesus came to do, and he wants you to have that gift of eternal life.

If deep inside, as you've been listening to John's testimony about Jesus and why he came into our world. Those things ring true to you. Today would be a great day to put your faith in Jesus Christ and turn your life toward following Him. As we wrap up the book of 1 John, if you sense the need to do that, this would be the time. I urge you not to wait another day. Stop right now and lift up this prayer to heaven, or something like this in your own words.

Father God, I understand why you sent your Son into the world. I understand that Jesus lived a perfect life because I cannot, and that He died on the cross to pay for my sins so that I would not have to pay the penalty for them myself. I know I need Him in my life. I'm receiving Jesus as my Savior right now and turning my life toward following Him as my leader going forward. Amen. If you've made that all-important decision, God sees your faith and hears your prayer, and He will give you the gift of eternal life.

That's what He promises. I wish you would drop us an email at paul@sharetheword.org and let me know that you have. I'd really love to hear from you.