Sunday Motions

April 5, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

We can go through the Sunday motions, we can carry out the religious exercises, we can pack a Bible under our arms, and sing familiar songs from memory, yet we can still hold grudges against the people who have wronged us. In our own way—and it may even be with a little religious manipulation—we’ll get back at them. But that is not God’s way.

Source: Charles Swindoll, Great Days with the Great Lives (Nashville: W. Publishing Group, 2005), via Insight for Living Newsletter.

Filed Under: Random Posts · Tagged With: ,

Worst Religious Cover-up

April 4, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.

When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.”

So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. (Matt. 28: 11- 15)

The priests were so determined to cover-up the resurrection of Jesus that they resorted to bribing the guards. This wasn’t an ordinary bribe. By lying for the Pharisees, the guards knew that they could be executed for telling their superiors that they slept while they were on duty. According to D. James Kennedy, in the entire jurisprudence, there has never, under any circumstances, been a witness who has been allowed to testify to what transpired while he was asleep.

What was so unique about the resurrection of Jesus that down through the ages, unbelievers try their hardest to explain it away and cast a shroud on its historicity? That question requires volumes to answer but for our purposes here, suffice it to say that the entire credibility of the Christian religion and the church of Jesus Christ is hinged on whether Jesus rose from the dead or not.

Filed Under: Apologetics · Tagged With:

Mary Could Have Stopped the Crucifixion

April 4, 2011 by · 4 Comments

“Mary could have stopped the crucifixion. Very simply, she could have stopped the torture and the agony of her son’s death on the cross. How? [Jesus] was crucified for one reason: He claimed that God was His Father.

If that were a lie, if Mary had been unchaste, she would have had to admit that she was immoral, but she could have stepped forward at any time and said, “Stop this horror! I’m ashamed! I confess! I will tell you who His real Father is!” She could have destroyed [Jesus'] whole pretensions and saved Him from the cross.

No mother, to save her own reputation, would allow her son to be horribly mutilated and killed. Mary could have and would have stopped her son’s horrible death, as any mother would have, except that she knew who His Father was.

She knew Jesus’ Father was God.”

Source: D. James Kennedy, Why I Believe (Thomas Nelson; Revised Edition, 1979)

Filed Under: Apologetics · Tagged With: , , ,