You Can’t Follow Jesus If You Don’t Trust His Word
If our defenses of the Christian faith never go beyond providing historical evidences for the miracles of Christianity, we may be overlooking people’s most pressing doubts about the faith
“Well, I actually do think Jesus was probably raised from the dead,” the young woman measures each syllable carefully as she turns her gaze toward the ceiling. “I just don’t believe the Bible, and I don’t want to be a Christian if that means I have to believe everything in the Bible.”
A few minutes earlier, I had wrapped up a five-week series on the Bible and sexuality with an exposition of Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness. Consequently, anyone who rejects this does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 4:7–8 CSB). I closed my message with an appeal for anyone who hadn’t yet trusted Jesus to believe the gospel. That’s part of what brought this ninth-grader to the edge of the stage after the service ended.
“So what is it that keeps you from wanting to become a follower of Jesus?” I ask. A year ago, this young woman had never set foot inside a church building. Now, she’s been participating in student ministry for several months, and she’s even attended Sunday morning services a couple of times.
“It’s not that I don’t want to follow Jesus,” she replies quickly. “I’m great with following Jesus. I just don’t know that I can believe all the things the Bible says.”
“And what is it about the Bible you don’t want to believe?” I’ve already had a couple of interactions with this student, and I’m fairly sure I know where the conversation is headed.
She draws a deep breath. “Like I told you before, I think I might actually be a guy even though I was born a girl. According to what you said tonight, the Bible isn’t in favor of being transgender. I think Jesus is alive. I just can’t believe what the Bible says if the Bible won’t let me be who I feel like I am.”
This young woman was willing to believe the miracle of the resurrection. Yet she also recognized that Christian faith requires more than mere assent to the resurrection. And so, despite her acceptance of the evidence for the resurrection, she was unwilling to embrace the Christian faith. She wanted to accept the parts of Scripture that described Jesus and his resurrection while rejecting the sections that challenged her own confused self-conception. She was open to the possibility of a risen Jesus but she didn’t want the moral teachings of Scripture.
She’s not alone.
Less Skeptical about Miracles, More Skeptical about Scripture
An increasing number of people today are willing to accept the miracles described in Scripture while rejecting the moral witness of Scripture. Of course, the tendency to accept the parts of God’s Word that please us while ignoring the portions we don’t like is not new; that inclination is as old as sin. What has shifted over the past few decades has to do with which aspects of God’s revelation seem most scandalous to those whose hearts are not submitted to God. At one time, the miracles described in Scripture seemed like the most difficult texts for people to trust. In response, defenders of the Christian faith focused on providing evidence that Jesus was the risen Lord, not merely a human teacher. “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God,” C.S. Lewis declared in the middle of the twentieth century. “But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
I’m not suggesting that any of us should stop contending that Jesus was more than a great human teacher. Christians should persist in providing evidence for the living Lord and the miracles in Scripture. And yet, the miracles of Scripture may no longer be the aspect of Christian faith that seems the most scandalous.
According to a recent analysis of more than three decades of data, belief in miracles has increased in the United States, despite the rise of secularity. And yet, throughout the same era, people have grown more dubious about the reliability of Scripture. A widespread rejection of biblical sexual ethics has been multiplying as well. Thus, in many Western contexts, it has become less offensive to confess that Jesus is the risen Lord than it is to declare that the cosmos created by Jesus is one in which gender doesn’t change and same-sex marriages aren’t marriages at all. In the simplest possible terms, people seem to have grown less skeptical about miracles but more skeptical about the Bible and its moral witness.
If our defenses of the Christian faith never go beyond providing historical evidences for a miraculous event, we may be overlooking people’s most pressing doubts about the faith, which have less to do with the miracles and more to do with the Scriptures and Christian morals. Every Christian should be able to give evidence for the historicity of Jesus’s miracles and the resurrection—but we should never stop there. The lordship of the risen Jesus is inseparable from the truth and authority of God’s written Word.
The Miracle of the Resurrection and the Authority of Scripture
Modern defenders of the Christian faith have rightly emphasized the strength of the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. The apostolic eyewitnesses would have known if the resurrection of Jesus had been uncertain or untrue. These witnesses endured intense persecution for their claims about Jesus, and none of them changed their story. Since people won’t typically suffer and die for a claim they know is a lie, their persistence in their profession all the way to the point of persecution and death provides strong evidence for the truth of the resurrection.
But these witnesses provided evidence for far more than the miracle of the resurrection.
The apostolic witnesses also linked the reality of the resurrection to the reliability of the written Word of God. Jesus did not merely die and rise again as a historical curiosity. According to one of the earliest Christian confessions of faith, Jesus died and returned to life “according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Simon Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost likewise linked the resurrection of Jesus with the Scriptures, declaring that this miracle fulfilled the words of a psalm: “You will not allow your faithful one to see decay” (Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:31). The reality of the resurrection was inseparable from the testimony of the Old Testament. What’s more, the same early witnesses who wrote about the resurrection also described how Jesus trusted the truth of these Scriptures (Matthew 12:38-39; 24:37-38; Luke 11:29-32; 17:26-27; John 6:32; 10:35). For Jesus, the truth-telling nature of God his Father guaranteed the truth-conveying nature of the Old Testament.
The New Testament is linked to the resurrection of Jesus no less than the Old Testament. Every text in your New Testament originated with a Christ-commissioned witness of the resurrection or with a close associate of one of these witnesses. Matthew’s and John’s Gospels derived from two witnesses within the initial band of disciples. John also penned the three epistles that carry his name as well as the book of Revelation. Mark wrote his Gospel based on Simon Peter’s firsthand testimony about Jesus, and Peter himself wrote two epistles. Paul was commissioned by the risen Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus and produced thirteen letters addressed the churches and individuals. Luke, the author of the third Gospel and Acts, was one of Paul’s close associates (Colossians 4:14; Philemon 1:24). Although no one knows for certain who wrote the book of Hebrews, the writer was closely connected to Paul through Timothy (Hebrews 13:23). The authors of the epistles of James and Jude were among the half-brothers of Jesus who saw him alive and trusted him as their Lord (Acts 1:14; 1 Corinthians 15:7; Galatians 1:19). Because these texts could be traced to Christ-commissioned witnesses of the resurrection, they carried the authority of Jesus himself (1 Corinthians 14:37; 1 Thessalonians 4:15). Thus Paul placed a teaching of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel alongside a quotation from the Old Testament and treated both texts as Scripture (Luke 10:7; 1 Timothy 5:18). Peter likewise grouped Paul’s epistles with the Old Testament Scriptures (2 Peter 3:15-16). This pattern of recognizing divine authority in the apostolic writings persisted throughout the earliest generations of Christians. In the second century, a pastor named Serapion declared that he received the writings of apostolic eyewitnesses “just as we receive Christ.”
The resurrection produced Christ-commissioned witnesses, and these witnesses produced Spirit-inspired texts that were received as the words of Christ himself. Thus the miracle of the resurrection cannot be unhitched from the authority of the written Word of God. To follow the risen Lord Jesus is to submit to the absolute authority of the Triune God as revealed in Holy Scripture. If I claim to follow Jesus but I don’t trust the texts he trusted and commissioned, I’m not actually following Jesus.
Declaring the Whole Truth of God’s Word
I pause and pray silently before continuing my conversation. This young woman is deeply confused, but she is also a precious image of God whose life will last past the rise and fall of all the kingdoms of this earth. I want her to hear God’s truth spoken not only with clarity but also with “gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:16).
“You said you’re open to following Jesus, but you’re not ready to believe the Bible,” I say. “Would you be willing to look with me at what Jesus believed about the Bible he knew?” And so we begin looking together at what Jesus said about the Scriptures.
Defenses of the Christian faith may start with the order of the cosmos or the historical truth of the resurrection or any number of other evidences, but our defenses should never end there. Until we declare the full truth and authority of God’s written Word, our apologetic will always remain incomplete. What we confess regarding the Scriptures is simply that—in the words of Sinclair Ferguson—“the Father does not lie to his Son. The Son does not lie to the Spirit. The Spirit did not lie to the apostles … and the apostles did not lie to us.” Thus the foundation of our defense is nothing more or less than truth-telling character of God himself.