Check Our Brain at the Door

Do we check our brain at the door? No! God doesn’t put a premium on ignorance. In fact, just the opposite. He wants smart followers!

God isn’t anti-intellectual. He wants us to think. Our Creator is brilliant. He designed us in His image: able to reason, choose, and feel. He made us with curiosity. He wants us to learn, to use science so we can discover how things work and become better stewards of the earth. 

Being educated is vital. I’m older but I’m a life-long learner. I can remember as a teenager the thrill of first hearing an anointed Bible-teacher open up the word of God. It was like oxygen for my brain. I was learning how truth and Biblical history was connected, things that lined up with my own experiences as a Christian. 

The Bible suddenly made sense. Why was this so impactful? Because I had been raised among Pentecostals. Pentecostals were known back then for their powerful effective preachers and their emotional prayer services. But in the early days of that revival movement, they lacked real teachers or good scholars. Thankfully, this is not the case anymore. 

Pentecostal pastors and preachers could move people to get saved, but they weren’t so good at getting people grounded in the knowledge of Biblical doctrine. We were told what to believe but we were not taught why we believed it. For myself, I needed to be able to defend my faith. I believed the Bible was true, that God was real, that Jesus was alive, but how could I defend my faith to skeptics? 

At High School, I was exposed to scientific rationalism and secular humanism. But God fed my scientific curiosity with His truth,. It showed me how science and the Bible, when rightly understood, do not conflict. 
There are good sources that can boost our faith in the God of the Bible. 

There are three witnesses that confirm my faith in the Bible and that God is true. 1) The Bible, 2) Nature (science), and 3) History.

First, consider the Holy Bible. This is special revelation, given to God’s prophets. The Bible has 63,000 “hyperlink” connections. It was written by 40 authors over a span of 1,500 years, on 3 continents, in 3 languages. We have 25,000 portions of copies of the original manuscripts. It contains predictive prophecies that originate from a source beyond time. Yet it has one consistent integrated theme: God's redemptive work through his Son who is our Savior, Jesus Christ, and his unshakeable kingdom that’s coming to the earth. 

The Book of Nature is general revelation. (Rom. 1:20) Science proves the Bible, according to Dr Hugh Ross, an astronomer and pastor, who hosts Reasons to Believe podcasts. He uses cosmological arguments like The Big Bang to prove the Bible is true. Another scientist, Dr Stephen Meyer, wrote The Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and The Return of the God Hypothesis. He uses DNA and complex molecular machines inside cells to prove God’s intelligent design. Dr. Chuck Missler, a NASA mathematician, wrote Through the Bible in 24 Hours. He discusses the fine-tuning of the universe for life to exist. He said the coded information in the cell’s DNA is from beyond space and time. Dr James Tour, a molecular chemist who specializes in industrial nanotechnology, wrote The Mystery of Life's Origin. He says there is no scientific answer for how life began, apart from our Creator.

Sunday on Resurrection Day, I’ll offer a presentation about a piece of actual history, The Shroud of Turin, the burial cloth of Jesus.