Questions and Answers

Two weeks ago I was invited to an event put on by ABU (the parachurch organization that I often work with here in JP) to talk about the validity of the Bible for the History department at the Federal University. At first, the idea of talking to history students, and maybe professors, about the Bible got me so excited; they would be able to ask good questions and understand more about ancient writings. But I also realized that I had to know my stuff forward and backwards. It was going to be a question and answer session, so people were allowed to ask anything to try to stump me!

Fortunately, I had already studied the validity of the Bible prior to being invited to this event. But I felt like I needed to brush up on some facts to be able to provide statistics when necessary, and do so as accurately as possible. I wanted to be prepared for the harshest critics of Christianity to step forward to challenge the Word of God.

So for a week prior to the event, I was reading and watching videos about the Bible. I made a sheet of notes to have with me so that specific numbers and dates would be precise. I even watched videos online from atheists and other anti-Christian groups to understand their arguments and to find the answers in case someone came to the event with the same arguments. I wanted to be prepared for anything.

When the day of the event finally came, I was pretty nervous. I am not a person who gets nervous to stand in front of people and teach; public speaking is actually fun to me. But I was nervous to see what type of crowd would come out since the guys who organized everything put fliers all over the campus! There could potentially have been tons of people there.

But when the moment of truth came, only 10 people showed up and most of them were already Christians. People asked very few questions about the Bible, just general things about Christianity or about specific passages in the Bible. I had to sort of take the initiative to explain some of the basic supporting facts for the Bible. I did my best to answer every one of their questions. But when it ended, I left feeling really over prepared! I guess it is always better to be over prepared than under prepared.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed. Ideally, I would have liked to have had tons of skeptics come to challenge the validity of the Bible. I wanted to provide all the information and arguments that I had learned to show that the Bible is truly more than just another normal book. It really stands alone in terms of ancient historical documents for reliability and then when you get into the spiritual side of the book, it is simply amazing. But most skeptics do not know much about the Bible; they refuse to believe without ever reading the whole book and understanding the depth of spiritual and practical wisdom it possesses. The ones who do know something attack it with the most liberal of theology and discount it based upon weak theories, not facts. I read one skeptic foolishly saying how Bible prophecy is completely disregarded based upon a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis, which basically states that Moses did not write the first 5 books of the Old Testament. But this atheist discredited all Bible prophecy based upon 1). a theory written in the 1980's by a super liberal; 2) a theory that only accounts for the first five books of the Bible; and 3) a theory that has been widely criticized with parts of it already proven incorrect! It is really sad to me, because this book changed my life and is truly inspired by God. If people actually took the time to read it and do a little bit of background research about it, they would see for themselves how amazing it really is.