Ravi Zacharias was one of the most famous apologists for Christianity. His ministry was international. He owned spas all over the world and used his ministry funds dedicated to “humanitarian effort” to pay for four therapists with housing and monthly support whom he abused.
Soon after his death in May 2020, women came forward whom he had sexually abused sometimes in the name of Jesus. “One woman reports that after she experienced what she describes as rape that Zacharias had her pray with him thanking God for ‘the opportunity.’ He called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God.”[1] He warned this woman that “if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.”[2] Zacharias not only grotesquely abused women but Christian liberty.
Read moreBart Ehrman, one of the most influential atheists/agnostics today admitted: The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church (Ehrman, Bart D., God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition, 2009, 3-4).
Read moreChris Sheeter and I were students at BJU and friends in 1981. Chris was tall, handsome, musical, with a great personality. He was a good preacher. Chris was studying to be a pastor. We attended the same church, Southside Baptist Church, and worked as waiters at the same Seafood restaurant, Old Mill Stream Inn. I graduated one semester before he did and started pastoring in N.C. I drove back to Greenville, S.C. just to fellowship with Chris. During his last semester, he was a lifeguard at a local hotel. At the end of a shift, he dove into the pool just to swim across and go home. His friends noticed he stopped about halfway as he was swimming across the bottom. Chris drowned.
Read moreThere is an array of answers to this question from pastors and theologians.
1) Pastors who present Christianity as therapy and self-help do not present Christianity. They are like the liberals that J. Gresham Machen denounced. Machen said that people who don’t believe the Bible should be honest and stop calling themselves Christians because they have in fact created a new religion that is not to be identified with Christianity. Similarly, the promoters of the American religion of self-help and therapeutic pop psychology ought to be honest: they don’t believe the Bible is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16) (9Marks Click to open).
Read moreWhen Job proves Satan wrong, Satan is no longer mentioned in the book of Job. In chapters 1 and 2, Satan is persistent in attacking Job's faith. But when Job's Christian critics take over in the next section, they do such a good job of verbally pounding on Job, perhaps Satan felt he could leave Job in the hands of his ash heap critics and go destroy some other believer's faith
Read moreChris Sheeter and I were students at BJU and friends in 1981. Chris was tall, handsome, musical, with a great personality. He also was a good preacher. Chris was studying to pastor. We attended the same church, Southside Baptist Church and worked as waiters at the same Seafood restaurant, Old Mill Stream Inn. I graduated one semester before he did and started pastoring in N.C.. I drove back to Greenville, S.C. just to fellowship with Chris. During his last semester, he was a lifeguard at a local hotel. At the end of a shift, he dove into the pool just to swim across and go home. As he was swimming across the bottom, his friends noticed he stopped about halfway. Chris drowned.
Chris studied for seven years, spent nearly $100,000 to prepare to pastor, and never got to pastor one day. I remember asking myself why did God lead him to go through the rigors of four years of undergraduate work and the even tougher studies of three years of seminary and then allow this tragedy to happen.
Read moreYou have probably had a conversation with someone who believed that there are many ways of salvation and that there are many religious roads to heaven. I have had discussions with people who have strongly expressed this view. I was eating out with members of my extended family on this very subject. They described me as arrogant for believing that only my religion out of all the religions in the world today is the only correct way to heaven.
Read moreIn an interview with Ehrman by Ruth Graham (2014) with the Boston Globe, Ehrman stated:
The problem is that Jesus only makes claims for himself as being divine in the Gospel of John .... But what scholars have long noted is that Jesus doesn’t say any of those things in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are [written] much earlier than John .... What I argue in the book (How Jesus Became God) is that it’s virtually inconceivable that if it was known Jesus called himself God, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke would just leave that part out.
Read moreToday the intermural debate rages between evangelicals over the creation of the earth (did God create the earth in six twenty-four hour days or did God employ evolution and take hundreds of thousands of years). This debate is closely tied to the age of the planet (is the earth young because God created it in six twenty-four days or is the earth old because God utilized evolution). It will be helpful to examine what the early church fathers believed and argued for.
Read moreWhat do you think is the most important sign that indicates Jesus is coming back? Wars and rumors of wars? Earthquakes? The love of many waxing worse and worse? Jesus in his end time sermon compared his future coming to the past flood. Jesus is referring to his second coming at the end of the Tribulation in Matthew 24:37-39. Jesus prophesied the sinful people before his coming would replicate the sinful people before the coming judgment of the flood who were “marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered into the ark.” In Genesis six, the godly were specifically marrying the ungodly before the flood. Being unequally yoked in marriage with unbelievers led to the Genesis flood in Genesis 6-8. Jesus warned his and our generation “to be ready” for the coming of Christ and his judgment just like the generation before the flood needed to be ready. Are you ready for the coming of Christ? Do you know Christ as your Savior? Jesus instructed us to learn from the generation that experienced the flood.
Read moreWhen I took high school biology, my biology teacher whom I considered very intelligent, started teaching us the theory of evolution as fact. This view totally contradicted what my pastor had preached and taught from God’s Word. My biology teacher was very convincing, and I began to doubt if God was who my pastor declared him to be. I was very confused. What I was struggling with was a huge worldview question: Where did I come from?
Read moreI am borrowing this title from Dan Kimball’s book by the same title. Dan Kimball is arguing that especially the younger generation has been turned off by what they call “the organized church.”[1] For example, I know a young Christian adult who reads his Bible each night with his family and prays with them. This he said was better than going and sitting in a building on Sunday morning for an hour. What he does is great and more than some who only go to church.
Read moreNew Atheists Richard Dawkins marshals his arguments against believing in God by using His Old Testament command to kill the Canaanites:
The Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland .... The Bible ... it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals .... Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide.”[1]
Dawkins goes on to call God a moral monster: “What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh—and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.”[2]
Read moreI was actually asked this question by a pastoral search committee once. The question was “How would I respond to the church if it was reported by the news media that life had been discovered on Mars?” Recently this issue was brought up by National Geographic Magazine on September 14th. The article title was “Possible sign of life on Venus stirs up heated debate” by Nadia Drake. She wrote: "Something deadly might be wafting through the clouds shrouding Venus: a smelly, flammable gas called phosphine that annihilates life-forms reliant on oxygen for survival. Ironically though, the scientists who today announced of this noxious gas in the Venusian atmosphere say it could be tantalizing, if controversial, evidence of life on the planet next door."
Read more1. What are the strengths of the Intelligent Design Arguments/Movement?
Douglas Groothuis wrties that ID “opens a door for Christian apologetics that would otherwise be closed” (Christian Apologetics, 268). The argument of irreducible complexity seen in the human eye, the flagellum, and DNA irrefutably show intelligent design. Of course, materialistic evolutionists reject this evidence with counterarguments. Groothuis concludes that ID should take its rightful place in the overall circle of evidence. Standing alone, it cannot provide a full apologetic for Christianity.
Read more Dr. John Whitcomb taught and practiced pre-suppositional apologetics. Pre-suppositional apologetics depends not on Christian evidence to win over sinners or skeptics but the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation. The following is Dr. John Whitcomb’s testimony.
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