Let’s recognize the importance of biblical reliability and help our skeptical friends recognize the nature of personal, reliable eyewitness testimony. Many of us have seen or heard something forever changing the way we thought about the world around us. That’s precisely what happened to the gospel writers. Their observations changed them forever, and their testimony can change the world we live in. (Wallace, J. Warner, “Cold-Case Christianity”, 2023; pg. 93)
Happy Friday y’all. When I read Chapter four, “Test Your Witness”, from J. Warner Wallace’s work, I closed the book and said to myself: welp, that’s all the proof I need.
Chapter four is about validating the character and credibility of a detective’s witness. Some of the factors in the litmus test of a good witness that Wallace explains are: were they even there? Have they been accurate and honest over time? Can their statements be verified? Do they have an ulterior motive?
Wallace admits that “growing up as a skeptic”, he never viewed the Gospels as actual eyewitness accounts. He viewed the four books from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as more of “religious mythology” then for what they actually are: true witness accounts taken from two men who were actually there with Jesus (Matthew and John), one man who witnessed Jesus as a teenager (Mark), and a wise physician who did thorough research to capture what he realized was the most important time in humanities history (Luke). In his investigation, Wallace discovered that the appearance of contradictions between the four Gospels, the idiosyncrasies, how one author focuses on one specific event more than another, how some leave out significant events while others include them; all of these pointed Wallace to accept and realize that these were true eyewitness accounts from four different men. These men wrote their Gospels independent of one another, a further validation that each man knew the importance of ensuring the world would forever know what happened in Judea around the years of AD 30-33.
This next tool for our “Christian Call-out” bag is to learn how to test your witness. For Wallace, when he tested the witness of the Gospel writers, he learned what he was missing all along. The words written by these Saints were the accurate recordings of all they experienced, or what was researched and recorded from all those present, of the ministry and life of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is another new release day for Christian music, but I have not finished sharing all the incredible drops from last week. Besides the full length albums from Anne Wilson and Sanctus Real, Phil Wickham released a “Hometown” version of his “I Believe” album. Vineyard Worship gifted us with a short, but powerful, EP of worship songs. From that list, my favorite is “Real Thing”. There were countless singles that would take me way to long to list here, but of those, my favorite is the one below. Click on the image to hear this beautiful testimony by an artist with the coolest name in the industry.
Common Sense Reborn 