The Big Picture and Particular Truths

There is nothing like the Bible in all of history, considering the span of its writing and the varied writers. Nothing. The genre of literature behind the New Spirituality doesn’t compare. The cumulative evidence for Jesus’ claim to divinity and the prophetic specifics that had to congeal clearly make for a book with the power of the supernatural. That is why writers such as Peter, Paul, John, Jude, and Luke, from highly different backgrounds, nevertheless paint a similar picture of the Word of God who became flesh and dwelled among us, whose pure and impeccable life accompanied his teaching, and that he was the fulfillment of the prophetic voices from Moses to Malachi, who, over more than a thousand years, predicted his coming, his death, and his resurrection. From carpenters to fishermen to educators to theologians to civic leaders to a medical doctor—they all converge on the same truth. These don’t sound like people who would make up a story and one by one go to an early death to support it! Take Paul alone—a Hebrew by birth who studied in Greece and was a citizen of Rome, a highly educated man and a leader in his community. There was nothing he wanted to do more than to disprove Jesus as the Messiah. Yet he ended up writing one-third of the New Testament and paid for his faith in Christ with his life. Why would he make up such a thing?

One of Ehrman’s criticisms is that Jesus, he said, could not have been God because when he was asked when he was going to return from heaven, he answered that no one knows about that day, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. It is fascinating how colored one’s glasses can be! I remember that the first time I read that passage of Scripture (Mark 13:32), I put the Bible down and shut my eyes, filled with awe at the beauty of this Savior. If he were a self-aggrandizing charlatan, why would he have answered the question that way? He wouldn’t have. He would have answered it by saying, “I know the date, but I am not going to tell you.” No one could have proven him wrong. He could have said, “About forty years from now,” when he wouldn’t have been around to face the embarrassment. Nothing would have been more Western than for him to have given an unfalsifiable date. Nothing would have been more Eastern than for him to have answered it in a riddle, and no one would have been able to discern whether he knew the date or didn’t.

Instead, he said the most extraordinary thing… that he didn’t know. So often he spoke of emptying himself of his divine prerogatives and of denying himself access to the power that was legitimately his in order to become the Word of God in the flesh. Paul says of him in Philippians 2:7 that “he made himself nothing” (NIV). In his self-denial, that knowledge was not his to demand as he humbled himself before his own creation, even to death. Is this any more a mystery than his agonizing prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane? Renouncing his rights as the Son of Man, he made it possible for the Son of God to be the sacrifice that he was. Everything about his story has the ring of authenticity to it.

After one gets the big picture, by all means the finer texts can be studied and the verbs parsed and the truths examined and the forms, the texts, and the extrabiblical sources studied. That is fair and expected. But so many critics take a pen and treat it as a penknife, coming to so many different conclusions that it evidences at the least that they themselves are at variance on what the variants really are. Maybe, just maybe, it is because whatever the cost, they want to find any way other than the one Jesus offers. Actually, he wished there were another way, too. But he committed himself to pay the ultimate price for us to be able to come to the Father. C. S. Lewis, who seldom replied to his critics, once made the comment that they were so wrong about certain sources attributed to him, some of which he had never even heard of, that he wondered how much more in error would they be in their critiques of a text two thousand years old.

Jesus said that the Word of God abides forever. His very life was the fulfillment of numerous verses of Scripture—an amazing confluence of hundreds of passages that would be almost impossible to design by collusion. When the tempter faced off with Jesus in the wilderness, he used Scripture texts to try to seduce Jesus. And in response to each temptation Jesus put those texts back into their contexts, which enabled him to resist Satan’s schemings. Psalm 119 gives us scores of valuable insights into the Scriptures. It reminds us that it is a lamp for our feet and a light on our path. In the grim darkness of temptation, the light of Scripture shines upon the seduction and sends the seducers scampering. Truth will ever trump deceit when the text is applied within its context.

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