Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Saturday, December 16, 2023
There isn’t a single ancient document, letter or piece of evidence indicating any of the Christian eyewitnesses (the apostolic disciples) ever changed their story or surrendered their claims. Given the reasonable expectation of this Roman effort and the evidence from history confirming the trials of Christians, it’s remarkable none of the eyewitnesses ever changed their claims. Our willingness (as non-witnesses later in history) to die for what we believe has no evidential value, but the willingness of the first disciples to die for what they saw with their own eyes is a critical piece of evidence in the case for Christianity.

Many of us, as committed Christians, would rather die than reject our Savior. Around the world today, Christians are executed regularly because they refuse to deny their allegiance to Jesus or the truth claims of Christianity. But their deaths, while heartbreaking and compelling, have no evidential value. Many people are willing to die for what they don’t know is a lie. Martyrdom doesn’t confirm the truth, especially when the martyrs don’t have first-hand access to the claim for which they’re dying. But this wasn’t the case for the disciples of Jesus. They were in a unique position: they knew if the claims about Jesus were true. They were present for the life, ministry, death and alleged resurrection of Jesus. If the claims about Jesus were a lie, the disciples would have known it (in fact they would have been the source of the lie). That’s why their commitment to their testimony was (and is) so compelling. Unlike the rest of us, their willingness to die for their claims has tremendous evidential value. In fact, the commitment of the apostles confirms the truth of the resurrection.
The traditions related to the deaths of the apostles are well known. According to local and regional histories, all of the disciples died for their claims related to the Resurrection:
Andrew was crucified in Patras, Greece.Bartholomew (aka Nathanael) was flayed to death with a whip in Armenia.James the Just was thrown from the temple and then beaten to death in Jerusalem.James the Greater was beheaded in Jerusalem.John died in exile on the island of Patmos.Luke was hanged in Greece.Mark was dragged by horse until he died in Alexandria, Egypt.Matthew was killed by a sword in Ethiopia.Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem.Peter was crucified upside down in Rome.Philip was crucified in Phrygia.Thomas was stabbed to death with a spear in India.
As a detective (and a very skeptical one at that), I don’t necessarily accept all these traditions with the same level of certainty. Some are better attested than others; I have far greater confidence in the history related to Peter’s death, for example, than I have in the claims related to Matthias’ death. But I am still confident these men died for their claims, even if I may be uncertain about precisely how they died.
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Written by Jason S. DeRouchie |
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
God’s promises are often associated with life or death and conditioned on whether his covenant partner obeys….Representing Abraham and Israel, Jesus actively obeyed and secured Old Testament promises for all who are in him. 

Four Ways Jesus Makes Every Promise “Yes”
When Jesus fulfills the Old Testament Law and Prophets, he is actualizing what Scripture anticipated and achieving what God promised and predicted (Matt. 5:17; 11:13; Luke 16:16; 24:44). Truly every promise in Scripture is “Yes” in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20), and in him God secures every blessing for believers (Gal. 3:14; Eph. 1:3).
Yet Jesus fulfills the Old Testament’s promises in more than one way, and this means Christians cannot approach Old Testament promises all in the same manner. Believers must claim Scripture’s promises using a salvation-historical framework that has Jesus at the center. Christ is the lens that clarifies and focuses the lasting significance of all God’s promises for us.
With a firm grasp of the progress of salvation history, this accessible guide helps Christians interpret the Old Testament, see how it testifies to Jesus, believe that Jesus secured every divine promise, and understand how Moses’s law still matters.
1. Christ maintains some Old Testament promises with no extension.
Christ maintains certain promises without extending them to further beneficiaries. Many of these are explicit restoration promises that include a vision of a global salvation after Israel’s exile. Consider, for example, Daniel’s prediction: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). Alluding to this passage, Jesus associated this same resurrection with his second coming: “An hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of Man’s] voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29; cf. John 11:11, 25; 1 Cor. 15:51–52).
Jesus noted that the Old Testament indicates that the Messiah’s resurrection would precede and generate our own: “Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46–47; cf. 1 Cor 15:3–5).1
The resurrection from the dead and eternal judgment are two of “the elementary doctrine[s] of Christ” (Heb. 6:1–2). Christians should claim the promise of resurrection in Daniel 12:2 as our own. We do so, however, recognizing that we will only rise because Christ was first raised. “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. . . . Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (1 Cor. 15:20, 23). As Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25; cf. Rom. 6:5). This resurrection has an already-but-not-yet dimension, as the redeemed saints from both the Old and New Testament epochs benefit from it. Jesus maintains the Old Testament promise without altering those profiting from it.
2. Christ maintains some Old Testament promises with extension.
When Christ fulfills some Old Testament promises, he extends the promise to all parties related to him. For example, consider how the Messiah’s promised mission gets extended to the church. Isaiah portrayed the coming royal deliverer as speaking in first person and declaring that Yahweh called him from the womb, named him “Israel,” and told him that his mission as God’s servant was to save some from the people of Israel and the rest of the nations:
It is too light a thing that you should be my servantto raise up the tribes of Jacoband to bring back the preserved of Israel;I will make you as a light for the nations,that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.(Isa. 49:6 cf. Isa. 49:1, 3)2
By this act God would fulfill his earlier promises to Abraham (Gen. 12:3; 22:18; cf. Isa. 51:1–4; 54:1–3).
Paul saw Jesus as the most immediate referent to Isaiah’s servant-person, for he said he was “saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Christ must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:22–23). Yet Paul also saw the Old Testament promises reaching further to the mission of all who are in Christ:
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The whole point of the discussion of the “marks of the church” is to help ordinary people make judgments about the church–especially which one they ought to attend. Thus there are three things which should be present: 1). The pure preaching of the gospel 2). The pure administration of the sacraments 3). The practice of church discipline.

Reformed Confessional Teaching on the “Marks of the Church”
The discussion of the marks of a true church is important—especially in our day and age—because of the competing claims of various religious bodies and organizations to be “Christ’s church.” There are a myriad of churches who make such a claim–some associated with recognizable church bodies. Other groups who identify themselves as “churches” are more the product of the American entrepreneurial spirit, possess a trendy name, and an undefinable identity. They see themselves as radical and relevant, not stale and stuffy.
Reformed theologians have understood the marks of the church to be an especially important matter since multiple church bodies claim to be the only (or the true) church, yet their various claims are questionable in terms of biblical teaching and doctrine. This raises the question under discussion here: “how do we distinguish valid claims to be a true church from invalid claims?”
Louis Berkhof points out that there was not much of a need to consider the marks of the church when it was clearly one (i.e., during the apostolic church), but after heresies arose it became increasingly necessary to speak in the terms of a true/false, biblical/unbiblical dichotomy of any assembly of people professing to be Christians and followers of Jesus. Responding to heresies requires a response and doctrinal explanation. Oftentimes these explanations lead to further division.[1]
James Bannerman, a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, puts the matter well in his highly regarded book The Church of Christ (1869).

In the case of a number of organized societies, no less widely differing from each other in profession and in practice, in the confession of faith that they own, and the form of order and government they adopt, yet all of them claiming in common to be called Churches of Christ, and not a few of them denying that name to any body but their own, there must be some criterion or test by which to discriminate amid such opposite and conflicting pretensions . . . [2]

In our time, the traditional marks which were thought to identify the “true church” have been eclipsed by pragmatic, and experiential “marks.” Many now understand a church’s size, how they felt and what they experienced, a charismatic, celebrity preacher, and the church’s social media presence, along with a menu of activities as indicators of places where “God is working.” The category of a “true church” is long forgotten or ignored as a sectarian relic of the past.
The Belgic Confession (1561)
The longest statement on the question of the “marks of the church” in the commonly used Reformed standards is The Belgic Confession, Article 29. The article on the marks of the church makes clear the occasion for the questions: “What is the true church?” “How do we find it?” “What do we look for?”
To start with, the Belgic Confession (BC) clarifies that this is not a question about hypocrites within the church, but rather about how to distinguish among Christians assemblies which make competing claims to be “the church.” Then the BC lists three marks that give assurance of recognizing “the true church”
1). The pure preaching of the gospel
2). The pure administration of the sacraments
3). The practice of church discipline
After a brief discussion of the marks of true Christians who belong to this church (something not to be overlooked), the BC moves on to describe “the false church,” which manifests the following three characteristics:
1). The false church assigns more authority to itself than to the Word of God, and does not subject itself to the yoke of Christ
2). The false church does not administer the sacraments as commanded in the Word, but adds to or subtracts from them
3). The false church rebukes those who live holy lives and rebukes the true church
The last statement is striking: these “two churches” are easy to recognize and distinguish. This was true at the time the BC was written (1561), because the author knew only of the Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Anabaptist churches, a matter which is far more complicated now.
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563)
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) does not address this issue explicitly, but Q&A 83 of the catechism calls preaching the gospel and discipline the keys of the kingdom
Q 83: What are the keys of the kingdom?
A. The preaching of the holy gospel and Christian discipline toward repentance. Both of them open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers.
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647)
The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) chapter 25 approaches the subject somewhat differently from the BC.
CHAPTER 25 – Of the Church

1. The catholic or universal church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.
2. The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

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