A Case For God Iii by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Christianity stands apart from every other religion in one basic way: in most systems, a person has to travel to find their god. In Christianity, God comes to the person, not merely to visit, but to journey with them until they become like him. That is the whole idea, to come as you are, but never to remain the way you came.

Archaeological Confirmation

For centuries, critics dismissed large portions of the Bible as mythology, and archaeology has steadily overturned that dismissal. The Hittites, once considered a fictional people invented by the biblical writers, were confirmed as a real historical people group. Pontius Pilate's existence was doubted until a stone inscription bearing his name and title was discovered. The Pool of Bethesda in John 5, once treated as pure symbolism, was excavated and found exactly as Scripture described it, porches and all. The Tel Dan inscription confirmed the historical House of David.

David Rohl, an agnostic Egyptologist trained in ancient history, archaeology, and ancient Greek at University College London, concluded after his own research that the Bible is among the most authentic historical documents from the ancient world, though he stops short of calling it the word of God. The manuscript evidence alone sets Scripture apart: no other document from antiquity comes close to the New Testament in the number of surviving, authenticated manuscripts, now numbering more than twenty-five thousand, or in how closely those manuscripts date to the events they describe.

Jesus in Secular History

Even scholars hostile to Christianity no longer argue that Jesus never existed. Michael Grant, a classical historian and non-Christian, said he did not know of a single respectable critical scholar who still claimed Jesus was a fabrication. Rudolf Bultmann, a skeptical German theologian who spent his career questioning the Gospels, still conceded that there could be no doubt Jesus performed deeds his contemporaries understood as miracles, healing the sick and casting out what they believed were demons.

The earliest known non-Christian reference to Jesus comes from a historian named Thallus, writing around 52 AD, whose original work is lost but survives in fragments quoted later by Julius Africanus. Thallus tried to explain away the darkness reported at Jesus' death as a natural solar eclipse. The attempt itself is telling: a skeptic arguing against the supernatural explanation only makes sense if the event itself was already public knowledge being discussed and debated.

This points to a basic principle of historiography: when independent accounts of an ancient event vary in detail, that variation is usually evidence the event happened, not evidence that it did not. Differing numbers or details in separate written records typically trace back to different oral traditions, meaning different witnesses were interviewed by different sources, which means multiple people really were present when it happened.

Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian and former military commander born in Jerusalem in 37 AD, wrote around 93 AD, only about sixty years after the crucifixion, and mentioned Jesus twice in his Antiquities of the Jews, once referring to "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ" in connection with the execution of James, a detail that lines up with Matthew 13:55, 1 Corinthians 15:7, and Galatians 1:19. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 AD, recorded that Nero blamed the great fire of Rome on a group called Christians, "named after Christus, who was executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius." The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls added further weight to the reliability of the Old Testament text. Among historians, even skeptical ones, the existence and death of Jesus are simply not in dispute; the real argument has always been about the resurrection.

None of this makes Christianity a borrowed or foreign religion either. The prophecies of Isaiah repeatedly describe God's plan for "all peoples" to become his own, long before the gospel reached beyond Israel. Jesus is called Redeemer as much as Savior and Lord; the Hebrew word behind that title, go'el, describes a relative who buys back what was lost, which is exactly how Scripture frames the inclusion of the nations, not outsiders being let in, but lost relatives being bought back.

The Transformation Argument

The last and most personal argument is the fruit the Bible produces in a human life. Nothing has transformed human wickedness the way Scripture does when genuinely received: it has broken addiction cycles that therapy alone could not touch, turned a violent persecutor like Paul and a coward like Peter and a doubter like Thomas into people willing to die for what they witnessed, and given rise to hospitals, universities, and the abolition of slavery, ideas that were largely foreign to the ancient world before biblical influence took hold. A corrupted source could not consistently produce transformed lives across every century and culture it touched; if the Bible were not from God, there is no good account of why it works exactly the way it claims it will.

1 Peter 3:15-16 makes clear that this kind of defense of the faith always comes paired with a life, not just an argument: "Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear, having a good conscience, that whereas they speak evil of you as evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ." Apologetics without a changed life persuades no one; the two have to travel together.

That change is what Scripture calls repentance, from the Greek metanoia, which does not simply mean a change of behavior but a change of mind. Someone can stay away from food to lose weight and call it discipline, and someone else can stay away from food as an act of fasting; the outward act looks identical, but one is governed by an internal disposition toward God and the other is not. Repentance means judging life by an internal law rather than by surface appearance, being able to be correct in behavior and still wrong in spirit, or the reverse.

A well documented case of this transformation is the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, once one of the most violent prisons in the country, where inmates were issued knives on arrival because assaults between prisoners were so common. When a Christian warden took charge, the first move was not to address the general population directly but to establish a seminary inside the prison and train inmates as pastors, on the conviction that every institutional problem is ultimately a leadership problem. Weekly Bible studies followed. Violent incidents that had once numbered in the hundreds each year dropped dramatically over the following two decades. One inmate serving a life sentence, when asked how he could worship God with no prospect of ever leaving, answered that he wanted his family told he was free and they were not, because he had experienced more freedom inside that prison than he ever had living under sin on the outside.

A different kind of testimony comes from the televangelist Jim Bakker, once one of the most publicly disgraced preachers in America after a scandal and prison sentence. After his release, reportedly reluctant to see anyone, he was persuaded to come out and found Billy Graham and his wife waiting for him, and wept in Graham's arms for several minutes, the most hated preacher of his era being embraced by one of its most respected. The point of the story is not Bakker's fall but what it says about anointing without discipleship: spiritual gifting can carry a person a long way publicly while their private life quietly falls apart, and gifting alone was never meant to be treated as evidence of spiritual safety. Anyone who chases visibility without pursuing discipleship is building on sand, however well the gifts themselves may be functioning.