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Oct. 19, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show

36:54

Ep. 127 - The Evidence For The Resurrection Of Jesus Is Overwhelming

Atheists like to say that the Christianity is irrational and grounded purely in blind, unthinking, uncritical faith. This couldn't be further from the truth. Christianity is completely rational, completely logical, and grounded in a real historical event. The evidence for that event is overwhelming. Let's look at the evidence now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Yesterday I did a video about young earth creationism and I explained why, in my opinion, based on what the text says and based on what we know from science, we should not interpret day to mean a 24-hour period.
	And I explained that even if we are taking it literally, I think that in the context of Genesis, the literal interpretation of day would not be 24 hours.
	That would actually be a non-literal interpretation, because the literal interpretation of day all has to do not with how many hours, but with the rotation of the Earth, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that in the first three days of creation, as it's told, that you would have an Earth that is rotating on a 24-hour cycle.
	Anyway, you can go to iTunes or you can go back and watch that video To hear my whole argument.
	Needless to say, everyone agreed with me.
	There was really no debate at all.
	There was no dissension and unanimous consensus was formed.
	Everybody went home happy.
	Just kidding, of course.
	People told me I was a heretic and that I would burn in hell.
	Well, not everyone.
	Some people told me that.
	Many people, though, were very thoughtful and respectful in their disagreements, and it was an interesting conversation.
	Now, during that conversation, one thing that I heard from atheists that I want to use as the springboard for today, one thing I heard from atheists quite a bit is this.
	They said, well, if you're saying that it's scientifically impossible for God to create the universe in six days, then why won't you accept that it's scientifically impossible for a person to be resurrected from the dead?
	And Young Earthers actually make kind of the same argument, but they frame it the opposite way, where they say, well, if you think it's scientifically possible for a person to be raised from the dead, why don't you think it's possible for God to make the world in six days?
	So I'd like to talk about The resurrection and whether or not science disproves it, whether or not it's rational to believe in it.
	But first, before we get into that, just to clarify, I do not believe and did not say that it's impossible for God to make the world in six days.
	God can do whatever he wants.
	God is all powerful.
	God could make the world in six seconds.
	God could make the world in any amount of time that he chooses.
	God, that's what it means to be all powerful.
	But my position is not that he can't Do it in six days.
	It's just that he didn't do it in six days.
	From my reading of the text and looking at science, I think that he did not do it that way.
	It's not a statement of what he can and can't do.
	It's a statement about what he apparently did do.
	Just like if you believe that God did make the world in six days, you're not saying, I don't think you're saying, that he couldn't have, or he couldn't make it in six billion years, or ten billion years, or whatever.
	You're just saying that He didn't do it that way.
	So this is a discussion not of what He can do, but of what He did do.
	I think it's possible for God to make, you know, babies in the sky and then drop them down into our arms.
	Like, He could do that, but He doesn't do that.
	He follows a process for making babies.
	And in learning about that process, We are by no means limiting God.
	We are by no means setting parameters for God.
	He sets the parameters.
	We're just learning the parameters and trying to understand them so that we can understand more about this wonderful world that he's given us.
	So, since we're on the subject, let's deal with the atheist contention that science disproves God and disproves the resurrection.
	Let's ask ourselves whether we must choose between science or the central doctrines of the faith.
	Or perhaps more to the point, is it reasonable, is it rational to believe in the resurrection?
	Must we leave our reason behind if we're going to venture down that road and become Christians?
	So, let's start here.
	Let's start with one basic principle here.
	Science cannot disprove God, okay?
	It cannot disprove the supernatural, by definition.
	Science is a thing for the natural realm.
	The claim of a Christian, or of any theist, is that there is also a supernatural realm, which science can't tell you anything about.
	And I think intelligent atheists, atheists who are careful and measured in their arguments, they know this to be the case.
	They understand this.
	So if you listen to Dawkins or if you read or go and watch a YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens, you'll find that this is the way that they phrase it.
	They'll say something like, well, science doesn't need God or science works without God.
	They don't say that science disproves God because they know they can't say that.
	They know that that would be a sloppy thing to say that they can't possibly support.
	Now, of course, I disagree with their contention that science doesn't need God or works without him, but it's instructive that they do phrase the contention that way rather than saying that science offers positive proof that God does not exist.
	That's more something that like a sloppy kind of atheist in a YouTube comment section would say.
	But the smart ones know better.
	They're not going to say that.
	Naturalism.
	Okay, naturalism is the belief that there is nothing but the natural.
	There's nothing but the physical world.
	What you see is what you get, basically.
	That is a philosophical position.
	It is not a scientific position.
	And if you go into a study of scripture with that presupposition in mind, Then you're going to, of course, rule out all of the miraculous claims that you come across immediately because it contradicts your philosophy, not because it contradicts science.
	Now, Christians and Jews believe in a God who transcends the physical world and is not subject to its rules.
	So you cannot disprove God by applying the rules of the physical world to Him.
	He sets those rules.
	And the fact that the rules are so orderly, the fact that you can do mathematics, and you can do physics, and you can work out equations and calculations and learn about the world, and it all makes so much sense, that is evidence for God, not against Him.
	You know, there's that famous Einstein quote where he said the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
	So he was speaking about the incredible order and discernibility of the universe, which is not what you would expect if we're talking about a random universe that came out of nothing and came out of chaos.
	You would not expect a universe that has ordered itself like this, a universe that can be understood, a universe that follows certain firm laws.
	In a random and chaotic universe, why should we be able to know or understand anything?
	Much less, why should we even be here in the first place as living beings and especially as conscious beings?
	How could these random forces assemble themselves in such an orderly way and then create out of nothing, out of the void, intelligent beings who can grasp these concepts and talk about them and argue about them?
	How could that happen?
	Again, this is evidence for God, not against him.
	The fact that you can do science at all would seem to give credence to the idea that the universe was constructed by an intelligent designer who had a purpose and a plan in mind.
	So we can deduce, I think, from the intelligibility of the universe that there must be a God behind it.
	That's a deduction we can make.
	Now, of course, we cannot perform some kind of equation And then, or work out some kind of, like, you know, do some kind of calculus and then say, aha, well there's God, he's right there.
	You can't do that.
	Any more than you can perform an equation and conjure up love, right?
	God is transcendent, non-physical, all-powerful, not subject to the laws that he makes.
	We cannot say, therefore, that anything is scientifically impossible for God.
	Now we can say that certain things are logically impossible for God or for anyone.
	Scientific impossibilities are different from logical impossibilities.
	God can create a universe out of nothing.
	That is not a scientific impossibility for him.
	He cannot create a round square or a rectangular triangle because those are logical impossibilities in that they are nonsense.
	And God does not, cannot engage in nonsense.
	Nonsense is nonsense.
	So it's like if you were to ask God the question, what's the color of the number seven?
	That's a question God can't answer because it is by definition an unanswerable nonsense question.
	So when confronted with claims, when we are confronted with claims that God did this or We can analyze those claims on two levels to try and figure out if the claims might be true.
	Number one, we can ask, is this claim consistent with the nature of God?
	Number two, we can ask, is it logically possible?
	We can't ask, is it scientifically possible?
	We can ask, is it logically possible?
	When someone says that God instructed them to blow up a school bus full of children, we can say definitively that that claim is false because it is not consistent with God's nature.
	When someone says that 2 plus 2 equals 16 because God told them so, we can say definitively that is false because it is not logical.
	The resurrection, though, does not contradict God's nature and it is not illogical.
	Therefore, we have no rational or scientific reason to disbelieve it.
	But of course, that's not enough.
	To say that there isn't necessarily any reason to disbelieve it, that's not the same thing as saying that there are positive reasons to believe it.
	But I do think there are positive reasons to believe it, and I'll give you two.
	First, history.
	What's so incredible about Christianity is that it makes historical claims.
	Even, I would say, in the grand scheme of things, you might even say recent historical claims.
	Recent in comparison to the whole history of the world.
	It says that a historical event occurred 2,000 years ago.
	And it's very specific about what that historical event entailed.
	Now, if it made that historical claim and provided no evidence to support it, then I think we'd have every reason to dismiss it.
	If a religion is going to claim that God himself entered into human history at a particular point, did a bunch of stuff, and then died and was raised and appeared to people after his resurrection, we should be able to provide documentation to prove it.
	I mean, you can't very well go and say that and expect someone to believe it and just take you at your word.
	Because this is supposed to be a historical event.
	Something that actually, physically happened and that people witnessed and documented.
	So then we can say, well, where is the proof?
	And we have indeed, I think, quite a bit of historical proof.
	What is the historical proof?
	Well, we have the epistles of Paul, first of all.
	And I say the epistles first of all because they were, even though the Gospels come before the epistles in the Bible, chronologically the epistles were written first.
	They're written before the Gospels.
	And though Paul was not one of the original Twelve Apostles, he does testify to what the Twelve reported.
	Paul, I think, gives us maybe the best evidence in the entire New Testament.
	If you look specifically at 1 Corinthians 15, and this letter was written probably in AD 54 or 55, so only 20 years or so after Christ, And this letter is also among the seven of the epistles of Paul that nobody, no scholar, disputes was authentically written by him.
	And that's important because there are secular and atheist scholars who attempt to argue that certain of Paul's epistles were not written by him.
	The pastoral epistles, especially 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, they'll say, many secular atheist scholars will say, well those probably weren't written by Paul because it's a different style of writing and he appears to have changed his perspective on certain things.
	Now, I think that's a bad argument.
	Those letters were clearly written by Paul as well, so the secular scholars are wrong on that point.
	But the point is that with 1 Corinthians, you have a text that even the most skeptical will admit was written by Paul himself, which I think is pretty compelling.
	And what does it say?
	Well, you go to chapter 15.
	Chapter 15, it says, for what I received I passed on to you as a first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the 12, and that he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.
	Then he appeared to James, then all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me also as to one abnormally born.
	So here we have the significance of this is, you know, most scholars that have looked at this text say that this is not just Paul freestyling here.
	This is a very early creed.
	This is a statement of faith that he says was given to him and which he is passing on.
	Which means that by the time of this writing, in fact, by the time of his first visit to Corinth, so a few years earlier than that, this creed had already taken shape.
	It had taken shape very quickly.
	Remarkably fast, actually.
	And it tells us some basic facts about Jesus, including that he was crucified, that he died, he was buried, he rose from the dead, and he appeared to 500 witnesses, and then to the apostles.
	So I think that this, along with Paul's other letters, where he speaks about Jesus' death and resurrection frequently, they all offer, I think, very good evidence for the resurrection.
	But I think even more than that, Paul himself, his story, what he did, his own biography is even more compelling evidence.
	Because we know that he was a very strict Jew who originally considered the Christians to be heretics.
	He helped to round them up and execute them.
	But something happened.
	Something quite sudden occurred and then he changed.
	There was a change in him.
	And he went from a persecutor of the followers of Christ to persecuted in the name of Christ.
	Now, how do we account for that as a skeptic?
	If you're a skeptic, how do you account for that?
	I haven't really heard an even halfway convincing argument.
	The best you can do to try to explain, you've got this guy, persecutor of Christians, strict observant Jew, who comes to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and then goes and travels around the region preaching this, putting his life in jeopardy, writing these letters.
	How do you explain that if the resurrection never occurred?
	The best you can do, I think, your only recourse, really, is to claim that Paul was just a madman, that he was a lunatic, that he had a hallucination on the road to Damascus and then he went insane and he decided to travel all around the region preaching gibberish.
	Now, the problem with that is that we have the epistles.
	We have what he preached.
	We know what he preached.
	We can see it for ourselves.
	We're not getting it second-hand.
	We're getting it from him.
	And it's not gibberish.
	It's not the ravings of a madman.
	It's very dense, very beautiful theology and philosophy.
	This is obviously a deep thinker.
	This is a very intelligent, lucid human being.
	You can tell that if you simply read his letters.
	So that explanation doesn't work.
	You know, you've probably heard the trilemma argument, the three L's, popularized by C.S.
	Lewis, liar, lunatic, or lord.
	And the way that that argument goes, what C.S.
	Lewis said is, well, when it comes to Jesus, although a lot of modern people like to say that, well, he was just a great moral, he wasn't the son of God, he was just a great moral teacher.
	Who said a bunch of great stuff, and then he died, and that was it.
	But C.S.
	Lewis' point, famously, is that, well, you can't really do that.
	You have to either accept him as the Lord, or condemn him as a liar or a lunatic.
	Because a great moral teacher, who is merely mortal, wouldn't go around claiming that he was the son of God.
	So either he was the son of God, or he was an evil person, or he was crazy.
	Now, I used to like that argument.
	I used to think it was a very good argument.
	And with all due respect to C.S.
	Lewis, who is one of my favorite humans to ever walk the earth, I think that actually I've come to realize that that argument is not very good, in fact.
	It's not a great argument because it's kind of a straw man in that it leaves out the L word that almost every skeptic will actually choose, which is legend.
	So actually, it's liar, lunatic, lord, or legend.
	Most skeptics, most atheists, most non-Christians, even those who are theists but are non-Christians, most of them, what they'll say is, yeah, well, Jesus wasn't liar, lunatic, or lord, he was a legend.
	Either he didn't exist at all, or he did exist, but he never said the things that were attributed to him.
	They'll try to say, you know, for instance, well, most of his claims of divinity happen in the Gospel of John, which is the last one written, so John made that up and blah, blah, blah.
	You know, these are the arguments they try to make.
	Obviously, I think that argument is absurd.
	But, if you aren't going to accept Christ as Lord, then legend is really the only option you have to go with, and so that is the option that most atheists and so forth will go with, which is why the trilemma thing just kind of breaks down.
	But, I think a version of this trilemma argument works much better for Paul than it does for Jesus.
	Because with Paul, You have to believe that either he was telling the truth about Jesus, or he was a pathological liar, or he was a lunatic.
	There really isn't a fourth option.
	There is no tenable fourth option for Paul, because we have his writings.
	Jesus, as far as we know, never wrote anything.
	At least we have no writings of Jesus, aside from what he wrote in the sand when the adulterous woman was Going to be stoned to death.
	But with Paul, you know, we do have his writings.
	And so even the most radical skeptics, you know, they can't deny his existence.
	And they can't claim that he didn't say the things that we claim he said because we have his own words.
	So then what's it going to be?
	We know Paul's not a legend.
	So read through the epistles.
	What's it going to be?
	Is this a lunatic speaking?
	When you read the epistles, do you think this is a crazy man?
	No, I think clearly not.
	Is it a liar?
	Well, he certainly appears to be a man of great integrity and sound ethics.
	What's more, he's given his life over to preaching this news around the world.
	He's risking his life in the process.
	Why would he do that for a lie?
	So that seems to leave only the first option, that he's telling the truth.
	He's telling the truth not only about what was reported to him, but also about his own conversion experience and his own encounter with the risen Lord.
	So, I think that's, you know, Paul gives us great evidence.
	What other evidence do we have?
	Well, obviously we have the Gospels.
	We have four canonical Gospels.
	We don't know exactly for sure when they were written.
	We don't know for sure which order they were written in.
	Atheists will try to say that we don't even know who wrote them, that they were anonymous writings, but I think that's completely ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous because we do know who wrote them.
	Their names are on the documents, and their names have always been on the documents.
	You go back and look at the ancient manuscripts, and their names have always been attached to them, so these are not anonymous writings.
	And, you know, these days, in terms of when they were written, these days Markian priority is popular.
	That is that many scholars, especially secular ones, say that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke and then John last of all.
	There does seem to be unanimous consensus across the centuries, starting very early on, that John went last and that he wrote his gospel when he was an old man.
	So everyone seems to agree on that.
	But for a long time, it was thought that Matthew wrote his gospel first.
	The Church Fathers thought that.
	And it doesn't really matter that much, although you can see why secular scholars want Mark to have gone first.
	So they are going to try to work the evidence in such a way so that Mark can go first.
	And why do they want Mark to go first?
	Well, because Mark was not an eyewitness.
	Neither was Luke.
	So it's convenient for Mark to go first in the mind of a skeptic because the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called synoptics because they're so very similar.
	And it's clear that somebody went first and then the others used that first one as a source, though not their only source.
	So, if Matthew used Mark as a source, though Matthew was an eyewitness and Mark wasn't, then the atheist thinks he can argue, well, Matthew must not have been an eyewitness, because what kind of eyewitness would use a non-eyewitness as a source?
	Well, this isn't really a problem at all.
	First of all, there's a very good chance that Matthew did go first, that he was the first gospel.
	The earliest traditions say so, which is a pretty strong reason to believe it.
	These are the people that were around within a century or so of the gospels being written.
	They all believe that Matthew went first.
	But anyway, Mark was a companion of Peter.
	Peter was in a privileged position as an apostle.
	And we know that he saw things and he was likely told things that the others weren't.
	He was closer to Jesus than Matthew was.
	So if Mark did go first and he got his information from Peter, it'd make sense that Matthew, though he was a disciple of Jesus as well, would refer back to Peter through Mark.
	In any case, whatever the order, we have, within a few decades of Christ's death, four Gospels that attest to Christ's life and work and death and resurrection.
	These Gospels are written clearly.
	They are written in biographical fashion according to how biographies were written back in those days.
	They weren't written like modern biographies, but they are written like ancient biographies.
	And they also lack the kind of dramatic detail and embellishment that you would expect if these were made-up stories.
	In fact, we do also have very ancient, made-up stories about Jesus, so we know what those look like.
	If you go to the Apocryphal Gospels, the so-called Gospels of Peter, Judas, Thomas, Mary, Which were made up, fabricated forgeries, and these do contain wild and obviously fabricated stories.
	I think the Gospel of Thomas has a story about, for instance, about the child Jesus murdering another child in the village when he was a boy.
	I'm not sure why you would want to have Jesus doing that, but that's in the, I believe it's the Gospel of Thomas has that.
	But the church uniformly rejected the apocryphal Gospels, and that's important.
	The Church did not just accept any Jesus material it could get its hands on.
	It's not like it had no discerning process.
	It subjected these writings to rigorous analysis and would only accept the ones that were authentic, even if the authentic ones were frankly a bit more boring than the fake ones.
	So, the Gospels are very compelling evidence.
	And we should also note here that, although we don't have the originals of any of these documents, we do have a ton of early manuscripts.
	Thousands of them.
	And what's really incredible, I think, is that these early manuscripts, written over the course of many years by many scribes, match up extremely, extraordinarily well.
	Now, you'll sometimes hear from atheists, you know, you'll sometimes hear them say that, well, there are hundreds of thousands of variants in the biblical manuscripts.
	Differences, in other words, between the manuscripts.
	And then they'll say that, well, it's like the game of telephone.
	You know, the story of Jesus started in the, you know, around the year 30 AD, and then it was passed down, and it's like the game of telephone, and it was morphed and changed, and so on and so forth.
	But that's actually not what you see when you look at the manuscripts.
	That the vast majority of the differences in the manuscripts are irrelevant.
	They're just typos, basically.
	They're, you know, Ancient typos.
	When it comes to the substance, when it comes to the significant information, they're identical.
	There is no evidence at all that anything was added or taken out that would change the fundamental meaning of the Gospels.
	So that's very significant.
	Now, some people demand that we have evidence outside the Bible, and I think that's kind of silly, personally.
	The best eyewitness accounts of Jesus were included in the Bible because they were the best accounts.
	So what you're saying is, oh, I want another eyewitness account.
	Well, if there were other eyewitness accounts of that same veracity, they would have been in the Bible.
	The ones that are really good are in the Bible for a reason.
	So to ask for other accounts, I think, is kind of disingenuous.
	Or, in other words, what I'm saying is, To discount all of the eyewitness accounts that are in the Bible because they're in the Bible is extremely disingenuous.
	But we do have other accounts, as it happens.
	We do have other mentions of Jesus.
	There are some Roman historians who lived in the Apostolic Age who provide independent, non-biblical, non-Christian, even anti-Christian attestation of Christ's life and death.
	Josephus is one.
	I'm sure you've heard of Josephus.
	Jewish Roman historian.
	Now, his reference to Jesus is disputed.
	It's clear that there was some embellishment later on, some Christians added to it, but it's also clear that he did at least mention Jesus.
	And then, even more interesting, Tacitus, another historian, around the same time as Josephus, first century, and this is a guy who didn't like Christians.
	This is what he says in one of his writings.
	He says, Christ, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius by sentence of Pontius Pilate, and a pernicious superstition was checked for the moment only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible and shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.
	So this is extremely significant because it attests not just to Christ's existence, but to his death under Pontius Pilate and to the belief, the superstition he calls it, that Jesus rose from the dead.
	And this is obviously someone who hates Christians and is very insulting towards them, so he has no reason to make this up at all.
	But even he attests to this.
	So you'll notice, there are plenty early critics of Christianity.
	None of them claim that Jesus didn't exist, that the Christians are making all this up, that he's a mythical figure.
	The early critics of Christianity, who would have been in a position to know if this stuff was completely made up, they don't claim that.
	So, a ton of evidence, very good evidence.
	And then the final category of evidence we have is the church itself.
	How it was formed, under what circumstances.
	You know, we know that something happened.
	Something happened to cause the early Christians, starting with the apostles, to believe that Jesus was the Son of God.
	And then to give their whole lives over to this belief, and even to give their lives up to this belief.
	Tradition tells us that the apostles were all martyred.
	I believe that to be the case.
	We don't have documented proof for all of them, but we do for some.
	It's generally accepted by pretty much everyone that Peter was martyred.
	We have very early writings that attest to the fact that Peter and Paul were martyred.
	Well, something happened that made Peter decide that he was willing to die for this man Jesus, who he knew.
	And if the resurrection of Jesus was a lie, then Peter would have known it, he would have participated in the lie, and he would be dying for something that he knew to be a lie.
	And that's very difficult to believe.
	And we know that Christianity spread somehow, against all odds.
	This obscure cult of Jews running around claiming that a criminal who had been crucified had actually come back from the dead and was the son of God.
	This strange collection of illiterate peasants, somehow they managed to start a movement that eventually, and rather quickly, took over the entire world.
	You know, skeptics will want to compare Christianity to other religions and they'll make this kind of plurality of religion argument where they say, well, there are so many religions out there and they're all basically the same.
	I mean, how can you claim that one is true and the others aren't?
	Well, accept that Christianity is not like the others.
	That's a frankly stupid thing to say.
	Even if you don't believe in Christianity, you have to admit that it's different.
	It is unique.
	You can't deny that.
	You can only try and explain away the uniqueness, but you can't deny its uniqueness.
	No other religion in history has done what Christianity did, especially in that context, under those conditions, and so quickly.
	That in and of itself doesn't prove that Christianity is true, but it does mean that you can't go around saying, well, it's just like every other religion.
	You do have to admit that it's unique.
	And once you've admitted that, and then you allow for all the other evidence, and you look at all the other evidence, I think it starts to pile up and it becomes rather overwhelming.
	So, these are all really good reasons to believe in Christianity.
	Rational reasons?
	Historical reasons?
	Scientifically plausible reasons?
	Are they sufficient, though?
	Is this all you need?
	Well, there is a strand of Christian apologetics that would say, yes, this is enough, this is all you need.
	You can prove Christianity historically, you can prove that it's true, and then you can accept it entirely based on the evidence.
	So if you go, you know, you look up guys like Mike Licona, Gary Habermas, Lee Strobel with The Case for Christ.
	I never saw the movie.
	I did read the book, finally, recently, actually.
	And that's the approach that they take.
	You know, they'll say that, well, you know, you believe in Christianity purely because of the history.
	You can prove it historically.
	Habermas is fond of saying that he believes Christianity because of the data.
	Well, I do think the data is good.
	I think the history is good.
	I think the evidence is very strong.
	I think the evidence is enough to make you stop and take this seriously and pay attention.
	But if you're really intent on disbelieving, you can always explain everything away.
	So the evidence is good.
	I would even say it's overwhelming.
	It is not sufficient in and of itself.
	You still need faith.
	So that is the second reason why I believe in Christianity.
	You have the evidence.
	You can't completely discard faith.
	You can't get around it.
	Nor should you try, because there's no shame in it.
	It's not irrational.
	I'm not embarrassed to say that I have faith in Christ atoning death and resurrection.
	The evidence can lead me down a path towards the truth and get me pretty darn close to it, but eventually I'm going to come to a chasm with the truth on the other side and I'm going to have to make a leap, a leap of faith.
	You are going to have to make that leap of faith, but you have to take a leap either way.
	So either you make the leap toward Christ or you make it away from Him.
	Either way you're making a leap.
	I make that leap towards Him.
	God gave us a historical event that we could learn about, explore, come to understand, study, and he also gives us faith through the Holy Spirit, which speaks to us in our hearts and convicts us.
	But the point is, and it's important, it is faith, yet it is a rational faith.
	It's a reasonable faith, as William Lane Craig would say.
	It's a faith that does not ask you to take leave of your senses, or deny your reason, or put your rationality on hold, or to never think logically about things.
	It is a faith that is grounded in an actual, physical, historical event.
	It's a faith that says, yes, this thing happened.
	Go learn about it for yourself.
	Go look at the evidence.
	This is not some secret cult where we're not going to reveal the truth to you until you've been fully indoctrinated.
	That's not what this is.
	Here's the evidence.
	Go look for it yourself.
	So, to be a Christian, it may mean appearing like a fool to the world, but it doesn't mean actually being a fool.
	We can keep our wits.
	We can be intelligent, realistic, rational people, and yet still have faith.
	Because ours is a God of light, of truth, who says, here I am, here's the truth, now enter into it and learn.
	And that, I think, is a really amazing thing.
	Have a great weekend, everybody.

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