Gooding, David: 1 - The Problem of Miracles

Now we focus our minds on some of the topics that we shall be dealing with by reading, first of all, from Holy Scripture, the book of the Acts of the Apostles and chapter uh twenty six. The Acts of the Apostles, chapter twenty six. Beginning to read there from verse four, We are reading from the speech made by Paul before King Agrippa. My manner of life then from my youth up, which was from the beginning among mine own nation and at Jerusalem, know all the Jews, having knowledge of me from the first, if they be willing to testify, how that after the straightest sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee. And now I stand here to be judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our Father, unto which promise our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God night and day, hope to attain. And concerning this hope, I am accused by the Jews, O king. Why is it judged incredible with you if God doth raise the dead? I thank you for your kindness in inviting me to spend these four occasions with you, discussing the interpretation of Holy Scripture in the light of science, archaeology, philosophy, and literature. That sounds a very pretentious title, doesn't it? So I want to apologize for it to start with. We shall be dealing with a very tiny fraction of these four things. Secondly, let me explain briefly what I shall not be attempting to do. I shall not be attempting to prove the truth of God by science, philosophy, archaeology. Let me say that again. I shall not be trying to prove that God is true by science, philosophy, and archaeology. That's a thing that can't be done anyway. The great truth that God exists is not arrived at by science or philosophy, and certainly not by archaeology. The great truth that God is love cannot be proved by archaeology or philosophy. The tremendous truth that Jesus Christ is God's son, come into our world for us because God loves us. The truth that Jesus Christ's death on the cross is the means by which forgiveness can be obtained and reconciliation affected between man and God. That cannot be proved by philosophy or science or archaeology. The fact that Jesus Christ is alive again, that cannot be known in all its fullness by the techniques of science. Therefore, I shall not be trying to prove the truth of God by these things. And I hope you never fall into the trap of trying to do it either. There are some folks who seem to think that faith in God depends on whether the recent, most recent discovery in archaeology, uh, proves that God is true. Well, you're going to have a very uncomfortable time, because the best archaeologists in the world don't fully understand even their own discoveries, and often make the wrong deductions from them. And Almighty God is bigger and greater than that he should need these things to prove his truth. We don't come to know God by dint of philosophy or science. We know God because the Almighty God has been pleased to reveal himself to us through Jesus Christ our Lord, through his word, by his Holy Spirit. And in the end, we come to know God personally through the direct operation of God's Holy Spirit with our spirits. And when God speaks, God is his own authority. If you should hear God speaking, and you should then need to go off and ask somebody else if God is telling the truth or not. You would be in a sorry way, wouldn't you? Wow, imagine getting to heaven and meeting God, and God declaring himself to you that he loves you. And you say, yes, but I don't know whether I can trust what God says. I better go and find somebody. Where's there a scientist around here that could tell me whether God is speaking the truth? Suppose you found Michael himself, and he's a pretty decent scientist by all accounts. Suppose you found Michael or Gabriel, and you had to say to him, now look here, God has just told me that, uh, he loves me. But is God speaking the truth? That would not only be an insult to Almighty God, would it? It would be a sign of rather less intelligence than you ought to have. Because by God we mean the great creator that created all things that are, Michael included, and all the scientists included, and everything that is. There is nothing and nobody that is not dependent on God. There is no outside witness apart from God. Has that, uh, come home? Let me repeat it again. Because God is the creator of all. There isn't anybody independent of God, is there? For whom you could go and get, from whom you could get an independent assessment of God. Why he holds the breath of all of them in his hand. And it's God that has to tell you whether they are speaking the truth, and not they who have to tell you whether God is speaking the truth. So that even philosophically, uh, considered, God is his own evidence, for all comes from him. And we in our modern world must be very careful of making the old mistake that the pagans of old made when they fell into idolatry. They felt somehow that there were, uh, there were many gods. That there was God here, and that there were physical laws over here, and scientific laws over here that were somehow independent of God. But that's not true. The true God is the creator God who made all things that are. There is nothing independent of him. No one apart from and independent of him to whom you could go to get an independent assessment. We must hold fast to this basic fact of God as creator of all, and not give in to the modern idolatry that alongside God would set up other courts of appeal as though they were equal with the Almighty God. We do honor to the scientists then, but then we remember that he is merely using the brains God gave him to study the universe that God made. He wouldn't have any brains to use, nor universe to study, unless God had first made both of them. We honor the philosopher and are grateful for his techniques in thinking. But philosophy would never disclose God to us by its own unaided powers if God chose to keep back and behind the shadow and not reveal himself. Philosophy at its very best would never have discovered him. We know God because God took the initiative and broke through the barrier and spoke to us. And when he spoke, he spoke in words that the simplest of his creatures could understand, and oh, thank God. While philosophy can be good, you don't need it to come to know God. Any more than the babe in his mother's arms need us- needs a course in philosophy before he can know his mother and trust his mother and enjoy his mother's love. So if I would know God, I may come directly to God and hear him speak to my heart in words suitable to my, uh, position and status, and know him as certainly and more certainly than an infant knows its mother. So let me just say that from the beginning, otherwise you might misunderstand what I shall be trying to do in these coming weeks. I shall not be trying to prove God true by the use of archaeology or science or philosophy. Then what shall I be trying to do? Well, I shall be trying to make a few comments on a number of problems that people meet, in particular relative to the Bible. For one reason or another, many people will tell us that, look, all right, you say God exists, but then you go on to say that this Bible is the word of God, and that can't be true. How can that Bible be the word of God? And if you say, well, why couldn't it be? Then they'll come out with all sorts of reasons why to them it is impossible to think that this Bible is the word of God. With one of those difficulties, I propose to deal very briefly with these this evening. It runs like this. That Bible can't be the word of God because, eh, it tells of miracles. And, say the objectors, you see, we now know through science that miracles don't happen. Indeed, they can't happen. And therefore, if the Bible tells us that miracles did happen, then the Bible must be wrong, and therefore we couldn't possibly believe it is the word of God. That objection takes many forms. It is an objection that is advanced by the outright atheist and by the agnostic. That's perhaps not surprising. You'll also find it, uh, advanced sometimes by teachers of religious knowledge in schools, and that is unexpected and unfortunate. People will be told sometimes that, well, look, the Bible says that, uh, God did a great miracle, and he divided the Red Sea, and the Israelites went over, and this was some astounding miracle, but of course we can't believe that God did it. What happened was there was a big wind that did it, and that was that. So God isn't really a miracle. Or they will tell us, look, that story in the gospel where Jesus is supposed to have, uh, uh, multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed a crowd of five thousand— No, we can't believe that happened because it's a miracle, and miracles don't happen. They can't happen. Science has proved they can't happen. So we can't accept the Bible just like that, and therefore we shall have to reinterpret the Bible. What shall we say now? Or we'll say that what happened was this, that there was a little boy there, and he got a little lunch in his paper bag, and our Lord took the lunch, and he said, now look, everybody share out what you've got. So they all got their lunch out of their pockets and, uh, shared it around, and that was a miracle because folks don't normally share their lunch, and if anybody shared his lunch with you, it's a miracle. Or that story, for instance, you remember that the Gospels record that, uh, one night our Lord came walking on the water? Ah, they say, no, we can't believe that, for that would be a miracle. And miracles don't happen, and science proves they don't happen. So what do we do now then? Well, some people say, we'll throw the Bible out, and other people say, well, no, we wouldn't like to throw the Bible out completely, but we shall have to reinterpret it in the light of science. So we shall say he wasn't walking on the water at all. He was walking to the side of the water. Or else we should say he was, uh, just paddling in the, in the edge of the lake, and, you know, when the disciples saw him, it was dark, and they thought he was walking on the water, but they soon found out he wasn't because, uh, when he got into the boat, immediately they were at the land, you see, they were already in the shallow water, and they didn't know it. So it wasn't a miracle at all, only they thought it was. Well, if the Bible be founded on such mistakes, you can count me out at once. I would have very little truck with a book that had to be apologized by that for, by that kind of method. Some of those explanations are, of course, absurd on the face of things. That story of our Lord walking on the water was written by men who were fishermen, had worked that lake for many years, and it ain't a very big lake. I know every inch of it, and all the landing places. Suppose they thought they were in the middle of the lake when in fact they were on the edge. He's asking us to believe a lot, isn't he? So let's dismiss those rather silly explanations and come at the basic proposition. The objection is this, that we can't believe the Bible is the word of God because it contains accounts of miracles, and we know that miracles can't happen. Why can't they happen? Well, somebody says that we've now discovered all about the laws of nature, you see, and that the laws of nature are one hundred percent uniform. They never vary. They always remain what they always have been and always will be, absolutely in varying, unvarying, and therefore miracles cannot happen. And some of these folks say, you see, why you'll find stories of miracles in the Bible is this, that in those ancient days, the people didn't understand the laws of nature, you see. And because they didn't understand the laws of nature, they thought any old thing could happen. They thought, for instance, that virgins could have a child, because they didn't understand the laws of nature. And therefore they happily reported that Mary was a virgin and yet gave birth to the blessed Lord Jesus. And they didn't find any difficulty in that because, well, they believed any old thing could happen because they didn't understand the laws of nature. Oh. Let's examine that for a moment. Suppose they didn't understand the laws of nature. Suppose they thought any old thing could happen, and was in the habit of happening any old Tuesday, you know, virgins gave birth to children, well, any old Friday afternoon or Saturday or Monday morning. There was nothing to say why they shouldn't, because they hadn't discovered the laws of nature. Well, then they never would have recorded it as a miracle, would they? You wouldn't expect me to come to Castle Ray and say, what do you know? I was, I was up in that Tyrone, right in the middle of Tyrone the other day, and you know, a whole flock of sheep came across the road. What a miracle. Say, well, goodness me, my man. A flock of sheep crossed the road in Tyrone. Well, goodness, it could happen any Monday afternoon, Saturday evening, or Tuesday at 12 o'clock. It's one of those things that can happen. Ain't a miracle. And if the ancients and the writers of the New Testament hadn't known anything about laws of nature and therefore thought that virgin births could happen any old day of the week, they wouldn't have recorded it as a miracle, would they? The fact they recorded as a miracle shows that they perfectly well understood the laws of nature about the birth of children, anyway. And they recorded this virgin birth because they knew it contradicted the laws of nature. We are told, let me diverge a moment. We are sometimes told in our school books, and sometimes even in very learned commentaries on the New Testament, that the New Testament was written by gentlemen who were very primitive in their science, and thought, for instance, that the universe is a three-decker place. Oh no, flat earth. Heaven up here, earth here, and hell. And therefore, all the stories they tell you of Jesus Christ, God's son, coming down from heaven onto earth and dying and being buried and going back to heaven are told within this framework, so they didn't know any better, poor dears. They thought that the there was a flat earth, heaven here, earth here, and hell beneath. I wonder where folks get that idea from. Centuries before Christ was born, the learned Eratosthenes in Alexandria had already shown that the world was round and had a very good shot at me- measuring its circumference. He had a shot at measuring the distance from the Earth to the moon. And dear old Julius Caesar, beloved of every schoolboy, had, uh, altered the calendar in the light of these new scientific facts. And the Stoic philosophers believed the world was round. They had to think it was in the middle of everything, but they thought it was round. That is true that some scientists thought the Stoics were a bit queer when the Stoics went on to say it wasn't only round, but there were people living on the bottom side of it, literally, because everybody thinks he lives on the top of the earth. And the Serfs not only believed it was round, but they believed that they were close on the bottom of it, you know, hanging on by their feet like the Australians are to have it doing. Sometimes I thought that's a bit queer. My point? There's a much traveled man like Luke, for instance, who wrote the third gospel and told us about the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his ascension back to heaven. You must not suppose that he was some primitive savage who believed in a three-decker universe. Where do you think he'd been all his life? It is surprising what things find themselves into school textbooks and learned commentaries, quite in defiance of the actual fact. Of course, the ancients didn't know as much as we now know about the laws of the universe. We should remember that we don't know everything there is to be known. Once upon a time, there was a thing called classical physics. Its laws were called absolute. Then the physicists went on learning, as all good physicists do, and found that there comes a point in subatomic nature when the normal laws don't seem any longer to apply. Once upon a time, scientists thought space was infinite. A good many of them don't think so any longer. We should have the humility to remember that not the best scientist living understands everything there is to be known about the laws of nature. But suppose we did. And suppose the laws of nature were shown to be, in their working, always unvarying. Would that prove that miracles couldn't take place? Of course, it would prove no such thing. For the question whether miracles can or cannot take place is not a scientific question, actually. It's a philosophical question. Only since you have asked me to deal with such matters, I must reply, therefore, in philosophical terms. If you find it a bit difficult, never mind, it's being recorded, and, uh, you can listen to it another occasion. Let's think about it then. Suppose the laws of nature are in fact unvariable, unvary. Does that prove that miracles are impossible? No, it proves no such thing. For the issue is not whether nature's laws are unvarying, but whether God from outside nature has the power to intervene in nature. That's the problem. Nature's laws can't tell you anything about that. In his book on miracles, if you haven't read it, perhaps you should. C. S. Lewis uses a very interesting illustration of the issue. He bids us consider the laws of arithmetic. One plus one equals two, which, as far as most people are concerned, is absolutely unvarying. One plus one equals two, and three plus two equals five. Absolutely unvarying. Right. So, one of these days you go to your drawer and you put in two pound notes, one and one, and that makes two. And sometime later you come along and you get three pound notes, and you put them in the drawer, and you say to yourself, two plus three equals five. Another day you come along, and because your wife has been very generous, you've got five spare, uh, 5 pound notes to spare, and you put five pound notes in there, and you say to yourself with great confidence, uh, two plus uh three plus five, that's ten. Ten pound notes in that drawer, by the law of arithmetic. A week later, you come to your fir- to this drawer to take out these ten pound notes, and you say, now when I go to that drawer, thank the Lord, there will be ten pound notes in that drawer because the laws of arithmetic are absolutely unvarying. And you come to the drawer and find that there's only six pound notes in it. You say, what's gone wrong with arithmetic now? Well, nothing's gone wrong with arithmetic. It is simply that in the interval I went to the drawer and took out four, Somebody's interfered from the outside. The laws of arithmetic still hold. Ha, but I took four out. So now you've only got six inside. The question is before us, yes, nature's laws, by her own working, invariable. So what? That doesn't prove that miracles can't happen. It remains God's sovereign right and ability to come and put his hand in the drawer, to To interfere interfere for from outside nature into nature. That is normally what we mean by miracles. And to sit there and say miracles of that sort can't happen is not to show yourself very scientific. You will pardon my saying so, won't you? It would show you as being very dogmatic. Perhaps even it might suggest that you hadn't really understood what the philosophical question is. Can God from the outside interfere in nature? Well, if he's God, of course he can. But now the question becomes, yes, but has he? Has he ever done so? How would I know that? Well, not by going and consulting a scientist. All he can tell me is what nature can do. The person I must hear consult is the historian who studies what has happened in our big world. To ask whether there is any evidence, reliable evidence, that God has at certain times interfered in history, in the world, in nature, interfered from the outside. It is simply a matter, therefore, at that level, of historic evidence. And if you come to the examine the historic evidence with a mind already closed and made up, because you say, but I know miracles can't happen, then, sir, you're not being scientific, you are being obscurantist and prejudiced. And that's, they're not very nice things to be. You say, yes, but aren't miracles very rare things and very unlikely things? Why, of course they are, by definition. But the fact that the miracle is an unlikely thing doesn't prove it hasn't happened, and certainly doesn't prove it can't happen. It is an exceedingly unlikely thing that when you're in bed tonight, number forty six Hawthorne Drive, that an airplane will fall out of the sky and crush number forty Hawthorne Drive. How do you rate the likelihood of this happening? Pretty remote, hey what? And as far as us, uh, in this room tonight are concerned, it is, we could say it with certainty, it is ninety nine point nine percent certain that an airplane will never fall out of the sky on your particular house. Does that prove that airplanes have never fallen out of the sky on anybody's house? Oh no, you say there was one, there was one, uh, in Manchester. Uh, other year it fell, it didn't quite make it and fell on people's houses. I know because I was coming out of Manchester a few days afterwards, and I felt very uneasy in the next plane. So I remember it. Yes, miracles are rare things, but the fact that they are rare and unlikely doesn't prove they have never happened. How would you know whether an airplane has ever fallen out of the sky on somebody's house? Well, not by asking a scientist, is it possible? Nor a statistician, is it likely? But the newspaper men and the historians, has it ever happened? And there in this book you have evidence, not only of many individual miracles, but of the supreme miracle. Jesus Christ, dead and buried, rose again the third day, according to the scripture. You want to know whether it happened or not, your first thing is not to consult the scientist, nor even the philosopher, but to examine the evidence. Did it happen, or didn't it? Just a few remarks on a few other miracles, and then we shall come back to conclude with this major miracle of the scripture. If you look at the miracles the Bible records, you will find them, so to speak, of different kinds. Take that famous one, you take it simply because it is frequently quoted. School children are sometimes told that, um, the crossing of the Red Sea was no miracle. It was a wind that blew. Well, a little bit side point, isn't it, because the Bible itself said a wind blew. God caused a wind to blow all night, and it, yes, the wind piled up the waters and they went through. That isn't very clever, is it really, to observe that couldn't be a miracle since the wind blew because God tells you the wind blew. Doesn't mean it wasn't a miracle. Well, God very frequently uses natural means to do his work with. Miracle was that at that precise time, God said to Moses, now I'm going to take you through, and just at that moment, when old Pharaoh was coming up with his tanks, that moment God had the wind blow. You know, it's an easy thing for our good, good Christian brother over here, who has full dos and things, to not hold the wall. But he's done it many times. But if I told you I was on my bicycle coming down a very steep hill when I found the brakes failed. But a friend of mine had told me, look here, old chap, get on that bike. You'll find when you get halfway down here, your brakes will fail, but never mind, just as you're going to go into that brick wall at the bottom, a bulldozer will appear and open the brick wall, and you'll go right through. Would you get on the bike? And if I told you, yes, somebody said in my ear, get on your bike, go down that road, and when the brakes fail, uh, just in the nick of time, a bulldozer will appear and open the thing through the wall, and you'll go through unscathed. And I said, you know what? I got on the bike, went down the hill, the brakes failed, and just as I was going to crash my head a bulldozer, part of the wall. Oh, they said, well, that's no miracle. Bulldozer, you see, did he? You see the point, I hope. Miracle day in this, that God told Moses, yes, now in this moment of extremity, Moses, I'm going to do something, and use the wind, open the sea, and make your way of escape. Our Lord, in some of his miracles, used, uh, natural means, didn't he? Some of them, as people have often observed, are simply speeding up the processes of nature. They're not against nature, they're just speeding up her processes, such as when he took water and turned it into wine. You will notice he didn't sit there and say, abracadabra, wine come out of the ceiling, and wine came out of the ceiling. No, he took water and turned it into wine. God is always doing that, year after year. And he normally, he uses natural means. He created the means anyway. He created the processes by which year after year water is turned into wine. And he created the processes so that we, his creatures, could have a part with him in the process each year, in tilling the ground, and us and us and us, and eventually producing the wine. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that the God who made the processes chooses to dispense with a few of them and speed the process up to get the same result. You find that incredible? Hm. I toiled at arithmetic in my youth. I gave it up. It was not a subject designed for my capability. I used to do a thing called long division, and then further the extracting of square roots. I used to take pages by the laws of arithmetic. There was a wizard or two in my form who would be superior to me. They came along, they cut out the whole end of the stages. They knew a bit more arithmetic than I did on how to cut the corners. Is it a thing incredible with you that Almighty God should, on occasion, have cut out some of the intermediate steps and processes in his created world? But of course, there are other miracles, are there not? That are not a speeding up of the processes of nature, but a going against and a reversing of the whole course of nature. As when our Lord called Lazarus out of the tomb. You say that's a bigger difficulty. Well, you there confront, theoretical question, of course, it's almost absurd to ask it, isn't it? For the God that created nature the way it is. Can do anything he likes with nature. As a question of history, it is a question of the evidence. Did Jesus Christ actually rise from the dead? As I say, the evidence is before us in this book and also elsewhere in history. Let me here interject the fact that the New Testament itself advertises and emphasizes. If it is impossible that God should thus reverse the process of nature and raise Jesus Christ from the dead, then there is no gospel to preach. Or if God can't reverse the physical processes of nature, how would he undo the moral ravages of sin? So let's get it clear. Sometimes people who want to make Christianity palatable to the atheist and agnostic say, well, the best way to attract them to the faith is to cut out the miraculous, and then modern man will be brought to believe it because it doesn't contain anything miraculous. That, of course, is folly, isn't it? For when you cut out the miracle, you cut out the gospel, you haven't got anything left worth giving anybody. If Christ be not risen, you are yet in your sins. Your faith is vain. There is nothing in Christianity. Righto, then it will resolve itself, this greatest of all miracles, into the question of has it actually happened? Now, let me observe that as far as miracles go, in the Bible, miracles are very rare, aren't they? Read the earliest book of all, the book of Genesis, miracles, apart from creation itself, are very sparse. Contrary to what people think, miracles don't happen every other page of the Bible. In the whole of the Bible, they are exceedingly rare things. You will find they tend to cluster around very important occasions. There was a great outburst of miracles when God called Israel out of Egypt. There was a great outburst of miracles when God's own son invaded our planet, rose from the dead, and set up his church. Miracles are rare things. Let that comfort you, if you will. But the Bible is equally adamant that these miracles have happened. I cannot now relate to you the evidence. I do not propose to. I merely ask you to see what the problem is, where you must look for the answer. You must look for the answer in the evidence of history. I merely, at this level, quote you one very big bit of evidence. The fact that this is a Sunday night that we are sitting here in this place. You say, how is that a bit of evidence that Jesus rose from the dead? Well, this, that Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews for century, centuries had always met on a Sabbath day. Why are you sitting here on a Sunday? Why? For the good reason that Christians from the very start began to meet on Sunday, the first day of the week. Why on earth did they do that? Orthodox Jews, brought up to observe the Sabbath with a tenacity that defied even the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. Why did these Orthodox Jews start suddenly to meet on the first day of the week? Well, they tell you themselves. It was because on the first day of one particular week, Jesus Christ, their Lord, rose from the dead. Something happened, didn't it? They didn't start meeting on Sundays just for nothing. If you don't believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that's what started it, well, you'll have to find some reason for accounting for the fact that the change took place. And that's only one tiny little bit of the historic evidence. There is much, much, much more. Now I finish. I want to finish where I started. How can I be sure that this great miracle did in fact take place? One way is to consult the evidence, the historic evidence that tells us it did, and to evaluate it with all the honesty and critical ability we can bring to bear upon the topic. But even that by itself, even suppose it convinced you that Jesus had risen from the dead, wouldn't bring you, would it, personally to know God? There are many folks in the world today, there were a good many after Pentecost, that believed Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. They couldn't do anything else because the evidence was straight in front of their eyes. But they didn't want to know that Jesus. They didn't want to bow to him as Lord. They didn't want to know him personally as friend. You really want to know that Jesus has risen from the dead, and through Jesus Christ to find God and to discover that God's word is true when it says there is a God and that God loves you and Jesus Christ is his son and he died for you. And there is, alongside of the evidence, another and very important, in fact, a more important bit of the evidence. It summed up for us in the story of what Christ did and said to Thomas. Thomas was a dear old boy, wasn't he, and faithful to the Lord, prepared to die for him. But one thing he said he couldn't stomach, he couldn't take, sorry, he was too much of an intellectual for that. He couldn't take, he couldn't possibly stomach this notion that a man could rise from the dead. Well, if dear old Peter liked to believe it, well, you know, Peter was a nice chap, but then he was just a bishop. And if John liked to believe it, well, he was a nice chap, and I believe he was a bit sentimental and always talked about love and things. Well, he'd believe anything. But not. He couldn't believe that, you see. He was a hard-headed intellect. At least he wouldn't believe it without the evidence. Jolly good attitude in a way, isn't it? He demanded the evidence. What kind of evidence would satisfy him? Well, he wanted to feel hands and enough and enough and enough. Next week, we're told something happened that made of Thomas a believer. Christ appeared. Today, our Thomas, there's the evidence you were asking for. I don't know whether Thomas actually put his hand into the side or not. I do know, according to the record, he fell on his knees and said, my Lord and my God. For this man, whom Thomas thought was in a tomb, had heard Thomas's demand for evidence and loved Thomas. Thomas wanted to believe and wanted evidence, but then he'd give him the evidence he wanted. Thomas that day discovered that there was alive a savior that could read the very secrets of a man's heart. And then he heard the savior say, but Thomas, you know the evidence of your eyes isn't the very best evidence you could have. You ask for the evidence of sight and touch. Well, they're, they're all right, but they're not the best, are they? Sight and touch. They can be very deceptive. There's bigger and better evidence than that. What kind of evidence? Well, if you'd like to know that kind of evidence, and this is the evidence of personal contact with the living God. To open up your heart, soul, mind, personality to God. And to say, God, if you really dare, speak to me. If this is your word, indeed, speak to me through it. You are willing to do God's word when you hear it. This book and Christ tell us together that God will speak to you by his spirit in such way as you can know and know unmistakably, yes, this is indeed God's word and God's voice. As you hear him, you will find the faith to respond to. So shall we just bow our heads and talk to him now? Father, we have done our best now to think about this problem. We thank thee that thou art the God of truth and the God of creation. Thank thee that we have nothing to fear in investigating all thy creation and history and archaeology, and using our brains to the best. And we ask thy strength thus to use our powers of thinking. In fact, we ask particularly thy grace that we have the courage and determination to study the evidence that thou has given us, particularly in thy word, and not to make unbelief an excuse for lateness. But Lord, we ask more now, for these are momentous issues. And this word in our hand, spoken by the voice of Jesus Christ, tells us that thou are prepared to make thyself known to us on certain conditions. And that thou canst make thyself known by thy spirit to the greatest and to the least, to the cleverest and to the most ignorant. Therefore, we submit ourselves now to thee. Grant that all of us who here have gathered tonight, we have the honesty, the wisdom, to open our hearts and minds honestly, to seek things, to be prepared to hear and to do thy word. Thank thee for thy promise that if any man is willing to do your will, he shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God. Help us further in our thinking. Bless us in our work this coming week. Strengthen our minds and clear our perceptions for what studies may lay ahead. And now, Lord, bless the food and the fellowship we have together, that we may help each one the other in the great battle of life and our pilgrimages from this world home to thy heaven, through Jesus Christ our Lord.