Before Jesus began his ministry in the first century, the Jews had a long tradition of accepting the Old Testament Scriptures as being the word of God. They had scribes that had used extreme measures for centuries to accurately copy the Old Testament Scriptures. However, there had been a long hiatus without God sending a prophet for some 400 years. Then came John the Baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus called out a group of 12 disciples to follow him. He taught them more in a life-mentoring manner than in an academic manner.

In the period of Jesus doing his ministry in Israel, someone might have asked the disciples, “Why are you following Jesus?” The various disciples of the time may have had different answers to this question. But I think their answer would revolve around what they had seen and heard personally from their direct interaction with Jesus. They could have mentioned his miracles and how no one else did miracles like Jesus. They could have mentioned his authoritative teaching and argued that he was the Messiah, that he was a prophet and much more. They could have mentioned his character and how he conducted himself and how he led them. Or they could have mentioned the special intimate kind of relationship he seemed to have with God. The point is they followed him because they met him and he asked or invited them to come with him. It was a personal relationship.

But today we are far removed from the times of the writing of the New Testament and Old Testament. We have not had the direct interaction with Jesus that the original disciples did in the first century. So today questions come up like how can we believe what the Bible says? There can be questions about the Bible writers and questions about the transmission of the text for example. How do we know what we have is like the original manuscripts? There are good answers to these questions but that is not what I’m addressing at the moment. Other confusing issues come up in which people ask how two different statements or verses in the Bible can both be true? These issues are alleged contradictions in the Bible. To the original disciples, these questions did not come up, because they knew Jesus personally in a day-by-day manner.

So in the first century, the question about ‘why believe?’ was mainly a personal question, not an academic question. So if you asked the disciples in the first century, “Did Jesus pay his taxes?” The Apostles Peter or John could have told about incidents when Jesus paid his taxes or taught about taxes. Jesus could answer their questions directly. When the phony religious leaders of the time tried to trap Jesus in what he said, they always failed. But what if the disciples in the first century said something incorrect about Jesus? At that time other people could have verified or caught the mistake, since there were many other people around who also saw many of the same incidents in Jesus ministry years. So, many outside of the small group of 12 disciples could have confirmed what the Apostles said about Jesus. The Apostle Paul encountered questions in his dealings with Roman Gentiles which were different from what he would have heard from Jews. We have an example of this in Acts chapter 17 for instance. Paul had both a Greek/Roman education and a Jewish education. He seemed to often speak of his conversion and how he met Jesus personally. But he could also reason with Jews and Romans.

So what is the role of reason for us today, in putting faith in God? I would think of it in the following way. This may be simplistic approach, but I hope it is useful. There is a personal relational side of the issue and a more rational or mental side of it. We are born with a bias against God. But I think children are more open than adults. I think this difference between children and adults is largely from learned attitudes and ideas we pick up in life as we grow to adulthood. But we have the ability to choose also. I would imagine our journey to coming to faith in God as like traveling on a road. We have a seemingly innate knowledge that this road heads toward God, or away from God. On the road toward God we tend to put up on it roadblocks and obstacles that we ourselves make. We may also add to it obstacles made by others. Friends or family may give us blocks to add to our path. A child may have fewer and smaller blocks on their path, but as they get older they tend to add to the roadblocks, to make them higher, or to add more of them. It is each person’s choice how big an obstacle is and whether to go around the obstacle or not.

Having a question does not in and of itself make that question a roadblock. To make a question a roadblock involves making a choice to put the block in your own path. If you find an answer to the question, you can remove the roadblock, find a way around it, or you can leave it in the path. To go forward toward God, you may be able to step over or climb over a roadblock and keep going forward in spite of it. Or you may decide it is such a tough roadblock that you can’t go any further. I would think of apologetics, or reasons for faith, as like learning things that make the roadblocks or obstacles smaller and fewer in number. The blocks are never 100% removed, but it is possible to remove most of them. However, removing the roadblocks requires a choice. So finding reasons to believe are not enough in and of themselves to come to faith because there is a relational aspect of the problem.

I was consciously an agnostic as a young man in high school and early years of college. But I had personal problems that became serious, including serious depression for a time. In the midst of personal pain (of whatever form) you can become desperate. In desperation you may ignore the obstacles and go around them and “take a chance” by reaching out to God in some way. I did this in asking God for help as a young man. I did not think of “why believe” questions at the time, because I felt my need was urgent. Why I made the choice to move in a direction toward God and not away from God is something I just cannot explain. I think I have to attribute this inexplicable aspect to God. Another person may deal with it differently than I did. I essentially decided to skip the obstacles and move toward the end of the road toward God.

Other people may react to desperation in a different way. They may change to a different road altogether, one that goes away from God, and ignore the dangers. Personal pain can lead you to ignore reason and try to jump to the end. This leads some people in a very unhealthy or destructive direction. Also, asking questions like “why should I believe” can be either honest or dishonest. An honest question is not an obstacle, it is an unknown. An unknown is not a reason not to believe in and of itself. A dishonest question is something that you have latched onto because you want to make it an obstacle on the road toward God. You may not want a clear path, whether the question can be answered or not. It is not easy to sort out your own real motives and determine what really matters.

Now if someone who is not a believer would have talked to me at my moment of desperation, they may have advised me not to ask God for help. Perhaps they would have advised me to do something else instead. This was actually more like the advice I was actually getting from counseling I received at the time. So to someone who is traveling on the road in the opposite direction that I’m going, it appears to them like I am going the wrong way. But because of certain things I was experiencing I decided to consider something no one was advising me to do, to ask God for help. We do not have the direct interaction with Jesus that his original disciples had in the first century. But we can have a kind of indirect interaction. Answers from God are almost never like  bolts of lightning, they are more often quiet subtle things. But they can also be great insights now and then, if we are ready for them. Asking God for help did not make me a Christian yet, I don’t think. But it started me moving toward a different way of thinking that eventually led to me becoming a Christian. Talking to some Christian friends were an important factor for me as well. So I did have friends who pointed the way. Someone might say that in my desperation I made an irrational decision. This may have been true when it happened, but it was the right decision. There are also plenty of rational reasons to make the decision I made. This is true whether I knew it at the time or not. Many others have made the same decision to follow Christ, and it was a decision with good consequences for them, and for me.

All this is to say that there is much more that goes on in someone’s head and in their motives than just asking a question like “if this is how it is, why should I believe?” I do not mean to imply that the questions do not matter or that they do not deserve answering. They do deserve answering. But finding the answer to such a question is not necessarily making progress in and of itself unless you can get past it being an obstacle. Different people have different obstacles that hold them up. But obstacles or not, Jesus can get through somehow if that is his purpose, in spite of obstacles. Think about the Apostle Paul, or Saul as his given name was while a nonbeliever. For Paul there were many obstacles because of all the baggage he had that made him feel compelled to arrest Christians. Yet he met Jesus and he responded properly by doing as Jesus told him. He gave up his intended plan to arrest Christians and became one of them instead! For a while Christians had trouble trusting him. But God was very evident in his life. All the reasons Paul had against believing in Jesus evaporated into nothing when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus. So I think the relational side actually outweighs the rational/mental side. So it takes more than a rational answer to remove an obstacle. How a Christian treats the nonchristian can be a major factor in whether the nonchristian makes their question an obstacle or not.

There is a passage in the New Testament book of John that kind of illustrates what I’m saying here. Jesus taught something that kind of shocked people and as a result some stopped following him. So he spoke to the twelve who were still there, and he said ” ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.’ “ (John 6:67-69, NIV)

I have searched for some good websites that deal with answering contradictions or difficulties with certain Bible passages. The sites below are pretty good in dealing with some common questions and the topic of the inerrancy of the Bible.

This is like a list of alleged contradictions with links that go to more detailed pages on each issue.
https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/

This is a list of 52 issues. It is answers to issues brought up by a Bible skeptic.
http://tektonics.org/lp/merrit01.php

This is a website from a man named Mike Winger. He also has some good videos on YouTube. He deals well with answering apparent contradictions and various common questions about the Bible
https://biblethinker.org/index.php

This is a good site about the issue of inerrancy, what it means, and some issues skeptical scholars have brought up about the Bible.
http://defendinginerrancy.com/bible-difficulties/

So to sum up, why do people believe the Bible?  Really, it’s because they need to.  But whether you are aware you need to or not, there are good rational reasons to believe it.  The reasons come from logical evidence, textual evidence, archeological evidence, scientific evidence, and the evidence of changed lives.

My last blog post was about the long day of Joshua.  This was when the Jews began their conquest of the land of Canaan, as described in the Old Testament book of Joshua.  Recent news has brought up something related to another place conquered by the Jews after the Exodus – a little place called Ai (pronounced like the letter “i”).  I keep up some with an organization that does archeological research related to the Bible, called Associates for Biblical Research (ABR).  They have done some great research that confirms the accuracy of the Bible.  So what is Ai?  Ai was the second place conquered by the Jews in Canaan.  They first took Jericho, where the Jews marched around the city for 7 days and then the walls fell down (from an earthquake apparently).  The second place (Ai) was Northwest of Jericho and is a short distance East of Bethel.  Ai was not actually a city, but just a fortress.  In Joshua chapter 8 in the Old Testament, it describes Joshua using the topography of the area to hide an ambush force and draw the soldiers of Ai out of the fortress.  This led the men of Ai into a trap, and so Joshua was victorious.  After Ai the Israelites did the battle for Gibeon, which was when the long day happened.

Ai has been somewhat of an archeological controversy because archeologists and scholars who’ve looked for Ai have said it doesn’t exist where the Bible seems to indicate.  Scholars had been identifying Ai to be at a site called et-Tell that they know does not fit the Biblical account and so it has raised questions about the accuracy of the Bible.  Scholars have a great tendancy to underestimate the Bible on historical detail and assume that what scholars come up with today is more reliable than what the Bible has said.  But it is not a good idea to assume scholars today will give more reliable historical information than the Bible.  If it appears the historical data is in disagreement with the Bible, it generally just means we don’t have all the relevant information, or someone just hasn’t done a proper investigation of it yet.  Assuming the Bible is not historical leads scholars in the wrong direction in history and archeology, just as wrong assumptions about evolution leads scientists in biology or geology in the wrong direction.  Regarding the conquest of Canaan by the ancient Jews, either the Exodus is assumed to have never happened at all, or it is understood to be at the wrong time.  There are two views Bible scholars and historians tend to have on when the Exodus and conquest of Canaan took place.  For the beginning of the conquest of Canaan, one date is around 1200 B.C. and the other is around 1400 B.C.  The date that fits the Bible is 1406 B.C.  Sadly, this makes the old Cecil B. DeMille movie on the Ten Commandments wrong about the Pharoah of the Exodus.  DeMille’s view of the Exodus was incorrect on the date and which Pharoah it was.  But many scholars go along with the same view, which puts Rameses as the Pharoah of the Exodus and the Exodus as the later date.

But is there evidence for the earlier date of the Exodus and for the Jews conquering Canaan?  Absolutely!  I won’t go into all of it on Jericho here, but ABR has good evidence for the fall of Jericho around 1400 B.C. that beautifully fits the Biblical account.  The location of Jericho is well known and there is evidence that the walls collapsed and evidence of fire.  These and other details fit the Biblical account.  ABR has also been excavating at Ai for years at a site that is now called Khirbet el-Maqatir.  ABR has found pottery that suggests the 1400 B.C. date.  They’ve found clear evidence for the city gate of Ai from large stones that have pivot holes in them used by the city gate.  Now there is also evidence from an Egyptian scarab that further strengthens the date at around 1400 B.C.  The scarab is about 3/4 of an inch long, oval in shape.  The scarab is important because it can be dated well to be from between 1485 and 1418 B.C., according to Associates for Biblical Research.  So this provides a means of dating the evidence that is independent of pottery dates.  The ABR research on Ai fits what the Bible describes nicely and also agrees with the 1446 B.C. date of the Exodus and the 1406 B.C. date for the start of the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan.  To see a picture of the scarab and more archeological evidence in Israel, go to this page from Christianity Today, or this page from ABR.