A sure and certain faith

Luke 1:1-5 & 1 John 1:1-10

For many people, 'faith' is a belief that's not based on evidence - a leap in the dark.

And the BBC with its beloved atheists like Sir David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox, is doing a brilliant job of persuading vast numbers of people that to believe in God is a stupid, ignorant, superstitious thing to do.

To these lovely, kind, tolerant rationalists, Christians are... well, let me read to you from the introduction to the 'new atheist' website.

“Tolerance of pervasive myth and superstition in modern society is not a virtue.
Religious fundamentalism has gone main stream and its toll on education, science, and social progress is disheartening.
Wake up people!!  We are smart enough now to kill our invisible gods and oppressive beliefs.
It is the responsibility of the educated to educate the uneducated, lest we fall prey to the tyranny of ignorance.”

What I want to do this morning is to say that we Christians need to 'Wake up!' and get smart about the true nature of our belief so that we can resist the attacks from the aggressive, pervasive and truly intolerant fundamentalism of this new religion called atheism.

And first of all we need to realise that Christian faith is not based on superstition or myth. It is not a leap in the dark.

It is based on sound evidence coming from many sources – history, rational explanation of the world we live in and experience, science and nature.

So what evidence do we need to believe something is true?

The atheists seem to think that evidence only comes from their microscopes, telescopes, scanners and hadron colliders.

But there are many valid forms of evidence – and each form of evidence is suitable in its own sphere of knowledge & belief.

So, yes, if you want to discover a new planet 600 light years away, then you need NASA's Kepler space telescope.

And if you want to discover something new about particle physics you may need a large hadron collider.

But neither of them were any use whatsoever to us 12 members of the jury at Maidstone Crown Court when we were deliberating on a rape case in which there was no forensic evidence.

We had to rely on the evidence of witnesses. And on that basis we made a reasoned decision.

And this has been happening up and down the country this week, and everyone accepts that on the basis of eyewitness evidence, you can come to a decision 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

Is that a 'leap in the dark'? Is that an irrational belief? Absolutely not.

Now tell me, would you believe me if I told you that in August 1875, a man called Matthew Webb covered his body in porpoise grease and, fortified by cod liver oil, beef tea, brandy, coffee and strong old ale, became the first person to swim the English Channel?

You may doubt my knowledge, but if I told you that this was taken from a report in the Guardian newspaper of 26 August 1875, you would, I guess, trust that this was a reliable, believable event in history.

It is no leap in the dark to believe that this actually happened even though we weren't there, we didn't see it, it wasn't filmed, and there's just a posed photo which could easily be a fake. PPT

But it's rational and sensible to believe that this happened. The evidence is sound, though not strictly speaking scientific.

So evidence comes in different forms - and it's not always the product of a laboratory.

Of course, there are superstitions and irrational beliefs.

But the reason I'm a Christian is because I was brought up to believe the evidence. And the evidence for Xy is, for those who bother to investigate, beyond reasonable doubt.

So how confident are you in you Christ? Give yourself a mark out of 10...

Theophilus was a wealthy and influential man living in 1C Israel. He had heard astonishing – barely believable – things about a man called Jesus, and he wanted to be certain about the truth.

And so Luke – a learned man, a doctor – was either commissioned by Theophilus or took it on himself to write an account of the things that had happened in their days and in their part of the world.

These events had happened recently enough that people were still talking about them, still wondering what they meant.

But Luke wasn't the first person to write about what had happened. Already, just a few years after the events, a number of people had written down what had happened.

These things that had been 'accomplished' (not 'fulfilled', v1 – Luke's not saying here that these events were fulfilments of the OT) were so astonishing, so unusual that many people had spent money on expensive papyrus scrolls, pens and ink to painstakingly write down what had happened.

Verse 2 tells us that these people have taken eye-witness statements. But the sceptic will point out that these so-called eye-witnesses were biased – they were servants of the message.

And Luke admits it. The only reason we know who his eyewitnesses were is because he tells us.

If Luke was Involved in some kind of conspiracy, if he knew it was all fake but was trying to claim it was real, then he'd hardly admit that his eyewitnesses were biased – but that's precisely what he does do!

And in any case, the phrase, 'servants of the word' may not be a comment on what they believed so much as what they did in writing down their accounts – the mere act of writing down what happened was an act of service to the message, whether or not they believed the message.

There are various theories about the documents that Luke refers to here.

It could be Matthew or Mark because they contain much of the same material – sometimes word-for-word the same – and Matthew was certainly an eye-witness. Mark probably got his information from the apostle Peter.

But then there's also some parts of Luke that aren't in either Matthew or Mark, so Luke must have had at least one other source for that information, and probably more than one.

(John's gospel covers almost entirely different events in Jesus' life and was probably written quite a bit later than the others.)

So, says Luke, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account.

For Luke, the historicity of the events is integral to their meaning and significance.

If Jesus did not do and say the things people were claiming he did & said, then there was no religious or theological meaning or significance to them whatsoever.

And it's not just Luke who thinks this way: all of the Bible's authors admit quite openly that Christianity stands or falls with the facts of history – with events that actually happened.

So, in 1 Cor 15, Paul says, 'If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.'

Now one objection is that these events are simply unbelievable – they cannot have happened because they don't happen today.

Well, of course they don't happen today. The whole point of Jesus' coming is that it was unique because he is unique.

If the events of Jesus' life happened every day, he would just be an ordinary man without significance, and no-one would have bothered to write up his life!

But perhaps, people say, Luke and the others made up the miracles and the resurrection.

If they'd done that, there were plenty of people still living who could have denied what had happened. They didn't!

If the Romans or the Jews had taken Jesus' body, why didn't they just produce it and say – 'Don't be stupid – he's not alive, and here's his body to prove it.'?

If Peter and hundreds of others knew that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, why were they prepared to die for a lie?

The evidence for Jesus stacks up.

And so, says Luke to Theophilus, you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Faith need not be a leap in the dark.

It need not be an irrational belief against all the evidence – though, of course, some beliefs are irrational and deny the evidence.

And the superstition of atheism is on the march today – and it has Xy in its sights.

Christianity is the only rational, sensible, evidence-based belief.

But because the events of hx are so extraordinary, because they are clearly from God, they demand a response.

And in 1 John, we hear what that response must be – page 1225.

In verses 1-4, John states that he and others have heard, seen and touched the Word of life – Jesus, who came from God.

And then from v5 he declares the message that Jesus taught:

“God is light in him is no darkness at all.” Light and darkness are, of course, universal images for truth and lies; good and evil.

So John's saying that Jesus' message was that God is truth and goodness. God has no dark thoughts, no bad motives, no lies to hide, no behaviour that is in any way wrong.

But, v8, if we dare to claim that we're like God and have no sin – that we have no dark thoughts, no bad motives, no lies to hide, no behaviour that is in any way wrong - then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us at all.

No, the truth is that we have done wrong in every area of life.

And that wrong – that sin – begins with our wrong beliefs: our rejection of all the evidence that points to the truth – the truth that Jesus Christ was God-made-man.

For some people this 'sin' is laughing at the very idea of God and setting up websites that demand the abolition of belief in God.

For others the 'sin' is just laziness. They can't be bothered to find out about Jesus, and don't want their life disturbed by him anyway.

And very often, underlying this rejection of God, is a deep-seated commitment to living life their own way and not wanting any interference from God.

And they transfer their dislike of God onto Christians – or God-botherers as Dawkins likes to call us - because we're an easy target.

And if you don't believe me that we're now the target for the new atheists, and if you don't believe that they're on a crusade against us – have a listen to Radio 4's 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' series, hosted by Brian Cox.

Or try to find truthful and positive comments about Christians and Xy coming from the BBC or the newspapers.

But John's message in v9 is that we need to admit our ignorance, our arrogance and our rebellion against God.

We need to confess that we have deliberately rejected the evidence for Jesus.

And when we do that, when we admit our guilt to him, we have the wonderful assurance that God is merciful and will forgive us and accept us and purify us so that we can have fellowship with one another and with him.

But, v10, if we persist in our arrogance and continue to claim that we're right in the face of all the evidence that God has given us, and that there's no such thing as sin, then we've called God a liar, and his life-giving word can have no place in our lives. Not now, not ever.

We have consigned ourselves to eternity without him. To an eternity where everyone sets themselves up as master of their world, and so condemns themselves to an eternal battle with everyone else.

And that's not some empty threat to keep people in order as the anti-God squad claim, it's the simple truth and the inevitable consequence of our actions and of who God is.

The choice, as they say, is yours.