Wait, no, don’t run away! I can see your eyes already starting to glaze over when you see that title. Please think of this as a small bolster and support to your faith, at a general level but profound. (And isn’t that true of Jesus in general, that He is very accessible at a general level yet is amazingly profound?)
Let’s get right to the issue in this first article: how can we determine the truth of statements that claim knowledge about something beyond our experience (that is, the metaphysical)? For example, Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he shall live forever,” and “I have come as light into the world, that everyone who believes in Me may not remain in darkness.” How can these be validated?
After all, anyone can make claims about what is true in the spiritual realm. The comedian George Carlin had a joke about an ex-hippie who founded a religion which teaches that “when you die, your soul goes to a garage in Buffalo.” Here in Berkeley, I have often had the thought that a person is permitted to believe just about anything so long as it’s not the Bible. So how can we determine what is true? What are some things Jesus says and does to bolster His own claims?
For this we look at Mark 2:1-11, the story about the paralytic who is healed by Jesus after being lowered through the roof by his friends. Jesus says to him, “your sins are forgiven” (which is a claim about the spiritual realm, that He has authority to forgive anyone’s sins). But in vv. 6-7, the scribes wonder, “How can this man say that? No one can forgive sins except God alone.”
So Jesus backs up His claim by doing something empirically verifiable, something in their experience: “Which is easier, to say to him, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Arise, take up your pallet, and walk’? But in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins,” He said to the man, “I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home”– and the man did just that!
Do you see? He backed up His claim about the spiritual world by something miraculous yet very visible in their experience. The feeding of the 5,000 in John 6 is another instance of this, as is His promise of His resurrection in John 2.
How can this work, when we are engaged in conversation with non-believers? There are two pieces of empirical evidence to which I frequently return: the evidence for the Resurrection, and the fact that something happened, way back when, which caused a group of Sabbath-worshipping Jews to become Sunday-worshipping Jews. It is worthwhile for every Christian to have, readily available in their minds, those facts which demonstrate that the Resurrection really took place, in real time and real history. The empirically verifiable validates His claims about the spiritual realm.
“Which is easier, to say this or to do that? But in order that you may know …”
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In the first article on this topic [above], we saw how in Mark 2:1-11 Jesus used something that was empirically verifiable (the healing of the paralytic) to validate His claim of something that was not empirically verifiable (that He has authority to forgive the sins of any human being). And we considered how we now have a verifiable event of more weight and significance, which is the resurrection of Jesus, predicted by Him and by the Scriptures, and which took place in real history, not in some mythical ‘religious history.’
We now turn to another incident which displays an interesting phenomenon, viz. , that people’s very perceptions are colored by their receptivity to Truth.
In John 12:28-30, in the middle of a rather intense and brief discourse, we hear Jesus crying out to His Father, and the response of the crowd:
“Father, glorify Thy name.” There came therefore a voice out of heaven: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The multitude therefore, who stood by and heard it, were saying that it had thundered; others were saying, “An angel has spoken to Him.”
Now, please note here that there was one phenomenon, one event: the Father spoke to the Son, and said comprehensible words. But there were three different perceptions of this one phenomenon:
– Jesus (and presumably at least John) heard actual speech;
– others who perhaps had some spiritual interest but in some way were not fully receptive to God identified what they heard as ‘the voice of an angel’;
– a third group heard nothing more nor other than thunder.
Curious, isn’t it? The very same event received three distinct interpretations. C.S. Lewis depicts this same kind of phenomenon in the Creation scene towards the end of the Narnia book The Magician’s Nephew , where Uncle Digory cannot perceive that the animals are talking, only that they are bellowing and braying. (He shows a similar effect in the great gathering scene in Out of the Silent Planet , the first book in the under-rated space trilogy.)
What this should tell us is that people’s perceptions of spiritual phenomena — such as the Resurrection, the Bible, the life of Jesus, His claims on every human being — can be fundamentally affected by whether or not they are receptive to spiritual truth. This is all the more reason to pray , to beseech God to open the eyes, ears, hearts, and minds of those around us who so desperately need to hear and heed His voice!!
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The first article in this brief series showed that Jesus validated His claims to authority (and indeed to Deity) by the empirically verifiable event of healing a paralytic, and that the most potent and fundamental verifiable event to validate everything He claimed was and is the resurrection. In the second article, we saw that a person’s perception of spiritual truth can be quite dependent on their receptivity to this truth. (Perhaps this could be summarized as “Receptivity brings perceptivity”?)
Here in this final article we will see a similar truth to the second, yet phrased quite bluntly by the Lord Jesus. He says explicitly that a person’s willingness to obey the Father is an essential condition for being able to perceive the truth of what Jesus says.
John 7:16-17:
“Jesus therefore answered them and said, “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself.”
Do you see? This is as true of us who follow Jesus as it is of those who do not, that our willingness to obey will have a huge impact on our perceptivity, our ability to receive it as coming from God.
As the philosopher J. Budziszewski says in a wonderful article, “Escape from Nihilism” ( http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9801/budziszewski.html – perhaps taken from a speech?), “modern ethics is going about matters backwards. It assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive – that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don’t know what’s right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional – it has to do with the state of our will. In other words, by and large we do know the basics of right and wrong but wish we didn’t, and we are trying, for one reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance.”
The human Will, left to itself, rebels against God. This is why Jesus says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him,” and this too is why we must pray for those whom we care about. It is the cause as well that the best reasoning of those opposed to the Gospel, no matter how impressive or high-sounding, is flawed because at its heart is a self-destructive problem of the Will. Reason itself is tugged wayward by human sin.