OYC 2010: Awakened Hope

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Oregon Youth for Christ

Jed Daniel Lee: Substance & Evidence

Jed Daniel Lee

Substance & Evidence, Session 1

Father, this morning we come to you, thanking you for the life that you've blessed us with and for waking us up.

And as we spend time together now in class to talk about substance and evidence, We ask that you bless us with the Holy Spirit.

And may each of us be inspired by Him to become more like Jesus.

How many of you are familiar with concepts of, well, I'm sure we've all heard of creation and evolution and those kinds of things, right?

Doesn't that mean whatever you want to believe?

Alright, You know what plural means, right?

When you do this, you have singular is 1, right?

And so pluralism is the idea that there are many ideas or many ways to know truth.

So what might be right for you might not be right for me, but I'm not going to invalidate you.

And in fact, in the world today, we live in a society where wrong is not wrong anymore.

In fact, the only time you're wrong is when you call somebody else wrong.

So if someone has this idea, and it's so divergent, even from the societal norms, oh, no, we have to be tolerant, we have to be accepting, we have to be unified in the way we deal with things.

And yeah, they might be a little bit different, but we can't shun them or put them off and write them off because that's not politically correct.

You've heard that kind of thinking before, right?

Unfortunately, that idea has crept in from the political realm all the way over into even our religious and spiritual realm.

And so spiritually speaking and quite frankly it's even from the beginning of time, we've had it where there have been many ways to reach salvation or many ways to reach, obtain eternal life or many ways to know God.

There are many paths to know God and some would argue that Buddhists and Muslims and the Baha'i or the Hindus, all these other faiths, that we're all actually serving the same gods as the Christian God, except we just call them by different names.

I don't know if you've ever heard that before, but I've actually heard in a church someone pray a prayer.

It was actually repugnant to me, but the person got up and said, you know, our mother, Gaia, and you know, We know that in some cultures they call you, and he used all these deities' names, and then in the end he would pray in the name of Jesus.

And obviously he's very influenced by what we are talking about, pluralism.

So what we're trying to do today is in the idea of awakening the hope, we're going to be looking at a verse here right now.

If you have your Bibles with you, Hopefully you all do.

We're going to be turning to 1 Peter, 1 Peter, chapter 3, verse 15.

1st Peter chapter 3, verse 15, and when you find it and you want to read it out loud, yes.

Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks of you in a reason of the hope that is in you which makes men sincere.

Now those of you who are looking in your Bibles, have you found it?

First Peter, it's towards the end of your Bible, chapter 3, verse 15.

Now I have this in the modern King James.

Sanctify the Lord God in your heart and be ready always to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

Now I want you to focus on this 1 word with me, answer.

In the original Greek, this word that we've translated into the English answer is apologia.

Jesse asked me, what do you mean by that this morning, down at breakfast?

I told him if you come to the class, you'll find out.

Have you discovered in the meantime what it was?

Could you say it's a response to something else?

OK, you could say it's a response to something else.

1 thing I did tell you that was that it's not it's not what we say typically in English.

And what are we trying to say when we say that in English?

This is not what the original meaning is.

As you can see in English, we've translated it into answer.

The Greek apologia is actually, literally, answer.

To give a defense or to give your reasoning.

So initially when someone said I want to apologize, what they're basically saying is they weren't really saying they're sorry, they were trying to tell you I want to give you reasons for what I did.

But throughout the years, that's come to mean now, I'm sorry.

What we're going to learn from a biblical perspective about this word is that Christian apologetics is something that seeks to demonstrate that there is a correspondence between truth, universal truth, truth with a capital T, and what the Bible teaches.

Would it be fair to say that almost every single field out there is a quest for truth?

Why do people want to look out, cosmologists, why do they want to look out in the heavens and put out satellites and telescopes out there to look at the universe?

Is it because we don't know everything yet?

So in other words, we are innately curious.

I have a three-year-old, and he's starting to speak a lot of English now.

But at that age, kids, what's their favorite word?

But right around 3, maybe, I don't know, yeah, they start asking why, you know, and then you give a reason, But why?

Substance & Evidence, Session 2

Our gracious Father in Heaven, we want to thank you for the blessings of the upcoming Sabbath day.

And we've been so inspired so far about our need, our need for being more vivacious and more outgoing and Seeking others to witness to not only for the benefit of others, but actually for my own benefit and We ask that you be with us now Send us the Holy Spirit and may He teach us important lessons and truths So that we may be able to share these with others that we come in contact with.

Amen All right, so we had 7 different lines of evidences that we're going to look at.

And then we're going to look at the last 3, the cosmological argument, the experiential argument, and the law of biogenesis.

So we're going to talk about the cosmological argument first.

And then we'll talk briefly about the law of biogenesis and the experiential argument.

That one's so simple, you'll understand it as soon as I mention it.

This 1 addresses the fact that the cosmos exists.

Now does anyone know what the cosmos refers to?

So the cosmological argument addresses the fact that the universe exists, so thusly it should have an explanation for its existence.

In his book Not a Chance, Robert Charles Sproul observed the following.

Traditional philosophy argued for the existence of God on the foundation of the law of causality.

The cosmological argument went back from the presence of a cosmos back to a creator of the cosmos.

In other words, traditionally people were saying cause and effect.

Well, because we have the universe, therefore someone must have caused the universe.

This is what he says traditionally people said.

And then he says, it sought a rational answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing?

It sought a sufficient reason for a real world.

You see, it's an observed and accepted fact that the universe actually does exist and it's real.

So, atheists and agnostics, everyone in the universe has to acknowledge that the universe does exist.

But the thing is, this universe is an effect.

But not only is it an effect, it is actually a contingent effect.

Now, I'm using very technical terms here, so if it's not making a whole lot of sense, go ahead and pause and stop, and we'll try to answer and clarify a little bit.

But basically what we're talking about right now, for those of you who just came in, we're talking about the cosmological argument, which is saying, based on the fact that there is a cosmos or a universe, this proves that someone or something caused this universe to exist.

All right fine, but where did the store get it from?

That's a smart response, I like that, from China.

Okay, in other words, your cell phone didn't come into existence by itself, right?

Someone had to cause it to exist, all right?

This universe exists, so something had to cause it to exist, and this is what cosmologists are always trying to answer.

They're answering, why does all this exist?

And so they've talked about how it's a grand effect.

There are people like Jastrow and others that talk about the universe being a grand effect.

If an entity cannot account for its own existence, In other words, it's not sufficient for itself to exist on its own.

Then it has to have depended on something else for its existence.

We know that the Bible teaches us that there is only 1 being that has ever self-existed.

Yeah, Jesus, God, you can call him by different titles and names, but his true name you'll find out in the Old Testament, repeated at least 6, 000 times.

Around 6, 000 times in the Old Testament is Yahweh.

You'll find it in your Bibles in the Old Testament.

It's capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D.

If you look in your Bibles, you'll see that.

The word Lord in all caps, why do they do that?

To get into that would take a whole hour, so I'm not gonna do that, but you will see sometimes they use capital L and lowercase O-R-D, Lord.

Other times they use all caps, L-O-R-D, Lord.

The reason for that is in the original Hebrew, the capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D referred to a tetragrammaton, which is the 4 letters that represented the name of God.

We've transliterated that into English as Yahweh.

Okay, Yahweh actually comes from the root, Yah, which literally means be, or exist, to be.

That's actually the name of God, and he says this is my name.

And that name is actually repeated about, you know, 6000 times in the Old Testament, and yet we gloss over it because of the way it's been translated in the English.

So anyway, the only entity that it can account for its own existence is God, but everything else is a contingent existence.

In other words, it depends on something else, okay, because it's inadequate to cause or explain its own existence.

Sproul continues, he says, logic requires that if something exists contingently, it must have a cause.

That is merely to say if it is an effect, it must have an antecedent cause.

Okay, you know what cause and effect is, right?

Well you have to remember most scientists will not firstly readily admit that there is a thing called God.

In fact, most theistic scientists don't even really believe in the Creator God.

They believe in a God, but it's not the Creator God of the Bible.

He is a God that created exactly like he said in the Bible.

A theistic scientist is 1 who believes in God, but he doesn't believe in the biblical God, biblical creator God.

He believes in a God that created maybe the spark of life and let evolutionary process take its time, and that's how life appears today.

You call those people actually theistic evolutionists.

And I don't know whether we'll have time to get into how repugnant that idea is, but it doesn't match with the Bible.

So, here is an analytically true statement, okay?

Substance & Evidence, Session 3

Our gracious Father in Heaven, we're so grateful for the blessings of new life and this new day.

Thank you for such a beautiful day for us, wherein we can practice being like Jesus Christ.

But Father, we can't practice that in our own strength.

And so we ask and implore and beg and plead the Holy Spirit to come fill our lives, inspire us to be like Jesus, give us the mind of Jesus Christ because we need your heavenly wisdom, help us to understand and comprehend the truths that you have for us today.

For we ask this and pray this in Jesus name, amen.

Well, last time we covered in depth, does God exist and what does the evidence say?

And we sought to answer that question, and we determined that the Bible basically starts out with presupposing and assuming that we all understand that God does exist.

In other words, the Bible never questions the existence of God.

It just simply declares his existence and tells us in the very first few words that God created.

So this is simply understood, this is just a given, and when the Bible says this, it's implicitly testifying to the simple, precise proposition that God exists.

You see, remember we talked about how, if there was this supreme, divine, omnipotent, powerful being, how would we know anything about him unless he revealed himself?

And so we submitted that the only reason we know about a God is because he has revealed himself.

And we were looking at things in nature, and today what we're going to be looking more is what theologians would like to call special revelation.

When you look at the nature and things around us, that's called general revelation.

And so today we're going to be looking at the Word of God.

And before we do that, what we need to establish is the classical laws of thoughts.

Now this is probably gonna be a little bit headier than for, for someone who's 8 years old.

But Aristotle is attributed to coming up with these rules of logic, so to speak.

This foundational to the scholastic, scholastic logic, we have these things.

But what I wanted to do is just point out that basically what these logical tests tell us is that when you have a precisely stated proposition, It can't be both.

So the example I gave yesterday was, if I said Jed is a woman, it's either true or false.

And the way you determine that is you examine the evidence, and please don't ask to do that right now.

I can't be both man and woman at the same time.

Although modern day medical science will probably beg to differ at that notion, but simply put, this is what this law is talking about.

And we remember talking about this famous, famous Islamic philosopher who basically said anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten.

And to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.

So the test of logic is basically saying P or not P.

You cannot be burning and not not be burning at the same time.

In the same sense, when the Bible is implicitly testifying that God exists, this precisely stated proposition, it's either true or false.

It's going to cause a division, which tells us and explains why Jesus said, I've come to bring a sword.

You have to make a choice for this or for that.

You know the proverbial sitting on the fence analogy?

So this is what we're declaring, that God exists.

And remember we talked about how Ellen White said in Steps to Christ, God never asks us to believe without giving sufficient evidence upon which to base our faith.

His existence, we talked about this yesterday.

His character, the truthfulness of his word, this is what we'll be talking about today, are all established by testimony.

Now testimony is another word or you can use the word testimony to describe evidence, couldn't we?

So in other words, what we're saying is, or what Ellen White is saying is, the evidence for his existence, the evidence for his character, the evidence for the truthfulness of his word, those evidences are both reasonable, in other words, it's intelligible, you can understand it, and also abundant.

And then we set forth to give you 7 lines of evidence wherein to prove the existence of God.

And what we did was talk about, well, we didn't talk about it, but what I said was we were gonna give you evidences about the Bible, evidences about Jesus Christ, evidences about the catastrophic universal flood, evidences about a special creation, evidences from the cosmological argument, evidences from the experiential argument, and the evidence from the law of biogenesis.

And what we did in our last time together was cover these 3.

But what we discovered was from the cosmological argument is basically what this is saying is, look at the cosmos.

It's here because someone put it into motion.

And we talked about and looked at different scientists who've come up with all sorts of different theories.

And basically, most of the cosmologists out there, or the more intelligent ones, are now recognizing, look, maybe what we're observing in the cosmos and what the Bible records happen, maybe it's the same thing.

Because they are now recognizing that the cosmos wasn't an eternal thing.

They're recognizing that the cosmos had a distinct beginning.

They also recognize that the cosmos couldn't come up and create itself out of nothing.

So they recognize that the cosmos is of an effect and an effect by definition must have a cause.

They don't know what the cause is but you and I as believers of the Bible know who that cause was.

And that was none other than the uncaused cause, God.

The experiential argument is 1 that talks about your personal experience with God.

This is by far the best evidence you can give to someone that you come across and they say, do you really believe in Jesus Christ?

Well if you really do, what was your personal relationship and your personal experience with him like?

There is no 1 in the world who can discount that from you.

Remember we talked about Uzbekistan, right?

How I've been there, how I lived there, how I experienced the culture.

You guys can all go to Uzbekistan but you will never ever ever have the same experience that I did when I was there.

There is no way possible and I can never have the same experience as you do.

You can have a unique experience with God, which is the best evidence for the existence of God.

And then we talked about the law of biogenesis.

Basically what we said was, life cannot arise spontaneously.

Life has to come from another source of life.

And so with those 3, we are going to now talk about the scriptures and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And what we have entitled this is, has God spoken?

What I want to do is remind everyone about the difference between scientific and empirical evidence, which is often used to prove the validity of a case.

Remember we talked about empirical evidence is something that you can measure.

If I told you my daughter weighs 100 pounds, right?

And you can test that by picking up my daughter and putting her on the scale and look and lo and behold, she weighs under 20 pounds.

And so you know that what I had stated previously is incorrect, right?

This is how you can test things through a scientific and empirical method.

Unfortunately, there are more things in life that are not testable empirically than that are.

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Jed Daniel Lee: Substance & Evidence

Substance & Evidence, Session 1

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