the punk rawk bible : q & a : Why do you believe in God?

Why do you believe in God? Specifically. What I mean is, do you have any reason beside "faith"? Or the bible? The thing is, there are plenty of people out there who have just as much faith and they too have book to tell them what to do and they aren't Christians. You're morals aren't all that backward. I'm not offended by those. I am just a little sad that people like you need some omnipotent being to keep them in line.

I borrowed a lot of information from Josh McDowell, though I never directly quoted him, because he understands your point of view a lot better than I do. Let me give a brief biography of him so you can understand where he comes from.

Josh McDowell was a college student who thought Christians were weak, that their "faith" was basically based upon fairy tales, and that they were just completely off-base. Thinking these things, he set out to prove Christianity to be a farce. He worked hard to make the strongest case he possibly could against Christianity and after studying all the evidence he was compiling, made a rational decision that he was wrong.

Now why do I believe in God? Because I believe the Bible to be the word of God himself, written down by men inspired by God. My faith is based upon the very fact that the Bible cannot be disproved. The Bible is a very unique book in that it is the only book to make several claims about its self. It claims to be the word of God. It claims to know the future, and has self proved itself through the person of Jesus Christ. I heard somewhere that Jesus Christ fulfilled nearly 500 prophecies (I can't remember the exact number, 500 may be an exaggeration or the number may be larger, I heard that a long time ago) about the Messiah, or savior, who was to come to the Jews.

The Jews. Thinking of them brings me to another interesting notation. History proves that when a group of people get uprooted from their homeland, they just get melded into the new culture they are placed in within about five generations. Whoever heard of a Greek-German? or an English-Mexican? But all over the world you can find English Jews, and Canadian Jews, and French Jews. They are the Jewish nation--that's right, nation. The Jews are considered a nation. In 4000 or so years, "God's people" have never lost their identity. That's astonishing in and of itself.

Archaeological evidence also points towards the accuracy of the Bible. Let me just give one example. For at least a couple of centuries, it was thought that the story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt was greatly exaggerated because it said that Pharaoh and his army were racing after the Jews, and that some 600+ chariots were used in this. But archeology had only found a few chariots and stables, and they haven't found one picture that depicted more than a couple of chariots at a time. Recently, within 2 years ago, archaeologists dug up some astonishing new evidence. They found a stable that could house a couple hundred chariots, and they found evidence of other stables that would have been of equal size. That's just one example, but there are many others.

Another piece of evidence that allows me to believe the claims of the Bible is the fact that almost all of Jesus' disciples were martyred for their faith, and why would they die for a lie? Another compelling thing about the story of Christ is that if it were just something that was made up, why would the writers include writings about their own weaknesses? If you're going to make up a story about something, don't you usually try to make it fantastic? And here's something else: the main character of the story dies the most horrible death ever known to mankind--crucifixion. Here's the beautiful part, though.

Jesus Christ, speaking of Himself, said, "If you tear down this temple, I'll rebuild it in three days." Meaning, "If you kill me, I'll come back to life in three days." Now the religious leaders of the day knew the claims that Christ was making about Himself, and they didn't want His followers to do anything that could be considered trickery, so they paid Roman soldiers--the best of the best soldiers of the time--to watch over the tomb where Jesus' body was lain. There was no way that Jesus' followers could have gotten to the tomb to snatch away the body. None, and besides, the tomb was also closed with a large boulder and sealed shut so that no one was getting in or out. Now let's suppose that Jesus' followers were able to slip past the guard somehow. How were they supposed to get the sealed tomb open without drawing any attention to themselves? Were the guards sleeping? The penalty for sleeping on post was death.

Here's another neat little tidbit of information before I close. All the religious books of the world tell man what he is supposed to do to reach God--except the Bible. The Bible is altogether different because the entire 66 volumes point to one event: God reaching to the people of the world through Jesus Christ. So instead of telling what mankind must do to reach God, the Bible tells what God did to reach mankind.