Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Friday, September 22, 2023
For more information about the nature of Biblical faith and a strategy for communicating the truth of Christianity, please read Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith. This book teaches readers four reasonable, evidential characteristics of Christianity and provides a strategy for sharing Christianity with others. 

Last week while talking on the phone with my friend and fellow Christian Case Maker, Rice Broocks (author of God’s Not Dead), the topic of evidence was raised. Both of us present the case for Christianity on university campuses around the country and we’ve discovered a great deal of cultural confusion related to what qualifies as evidence when trying to make a case. Many people simply don’t understand the basic categories of evidence and mistakenly think prosecutors need a particular kind of evidence to be successful. As it turns out, evidence falls into one of two categories: direct and indirect. Direct evidence is simply eyewitness testimony. Indirect evidence (also known as circumstantial evidence) is everything else. When I say “everything else” I mean precisely that: everything has the potential to be considered as evidence. In the many years I’ve been making criminal cases in the State of California, I’ve presented physical objects, statements, behaviors and much more to make my case. Take a look at the variety of evidences typically presented in criminal jury trials:
Forensic physical evidenceNon-forensic physical evidenceWhere the victim was attackedWhere the victim wasn’t attackedItems discovered at the crime sceneItems missing from the crime sceneWords the suspect said
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As we enter into the spiritual battlefield of 2023, we would do well to remember that while Herod did his worst in the early years of Christ’s life, he did not ultimately succeed in thwarting the redemptive purposes of God. When Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” He meant what He said. But as we play our own small part in that work, we must not lose sight of the fact that we do so in a world where many operate according to the same devilishness as King Herod.

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,weeping and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children;she refused to be comforted,because they are no more.”Matthew 2:13-18
Dear Friends,
These verses from the second chapter of Matthew’s gospel remind us that following His birth, the earliest months of Christ’s life were set against a backdrop of terrible evil and profound darkness. The celebratory hymn of the angels (in Luke 2:14) was followed by the sound of weeping and loud lamentation as Herod, in his twisted attempt to destroy the Messiah, ordered the murder of every male child under two years of age in Bethlehem.
As we remember and rejoice in the coming of our Saviour 2,000 years ago, let us not lose sight of the fact that the world is not any less dark now than it was then. We may not live in the wake of Herod’s violence, but the actions of civil governments continue to demonstrate the same contempt for what God has ordained – particularly when it comes to the sanctity of human life and His created order.
It is astonishing that just three days before Christmas, the Scottish Government has just this week secured parliamentary support for its Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The age requirement for those wishing to legally change their gender has been lowered from 18 to 16, there is no longer any requirement to secure a medical professional’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the period of time a person is required to live in their ‘acquired gender’ has been reduced from two years to three months (six months for those under 18s). Not only does this immoral and irresponsible legislation have the potential to place true women and girls in danger, it will cause untold damage to many teenagers at a time in their lives when they already face many pressures and experience much confusion.
Meanwhile, Liam Macarthur MSP’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is due to be introduced to the Scottish Parliament in early 2023, which if successful, will make assisted suicide (a form of euthanasia) legal in Scotland. Where similar legislation has been passed in other countries (for example, Canada), previously agreed safeguards are already being disregarded by some Doctors who are proposing assisted suicide to patients who are not terminally ill and the list of those who are eligible is likely to be widened next year to include even those with mental health issues.
While on the subject of the sanctity and preservation of human life, I would direct you to a recent speech given by Andrew Bridgen MP in the House of Commons and to the call from UK Doctors for a Government investigation. I realise that to question either the efficacy or safety of Covid-19 “vaccines” is, in the eyes of many, to tread on sacred ground. However, as one who continues to have concerns about the mRNA experimental gene therapy injections (as I highlighted in a letter in September 2021 and to our denomination’s Covid-19 committee the same year), I could not in good conscience fail to alert you to these developments. I don’t know what is more alarming, the fact that there have been thousands of serious Covid-19 vaccine-related adverse events and deaths reported in official national databases, or the apparent unwillingness of health bodies and governments of the world to take any notice.
Whatever may be the reason for this, and whatever people’s motives might be for such sinister policies as the Gender Recognition Act and Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, the fact remains that we are living at a time when the sacredness of human life is disregarded and the most basic foundations of a God-honouring society are being systematically overturned and destroyed.
Scripture tells us that whereas Christ came into that world to give life in all its abundance Satan exists to kill and destroy (John 10:10). Our battle then, is not ultimately with flesh and blood, but with the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
With this in mind, I am convinced that we must truly give ourselves to prayer. In particular, we must pray that:

The bride of Christ would take up the whole armour of God, that she might be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm (Eph. 6).

Those responsible for such destructive evils of our day would be brought to repentance, silenced or removed (Dan. 4:31-32).

Those seeking to identify as a gender other than the one given to them by God would be delivered from a corrupted mind (Rom. 1:28) and find salvation in Christ.

The church would recover her prophetic voice to the world and not be guilty of giving an indistinct sound (1 Cor. 14:8; Isaiah 1:17; Prov. 31:8-9). See our friend David Robertson’s recent blog post, for example.

As we enter into the spiritual battlefield of 2023, we would do well to remember that while Herod did his worst in the early years of Christ’s life, he did not ultimately succeed in thwarting the redemptive purposes of God. When Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” He meant what He said. But as we play our own small part in that work, we must not lose sight of the fact that we do so in a world where many operate according to the same devilishness as King Herod. Let us not therefore neglect our God-given responsibility – individually, locally and as a denomination – to pray hard and to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
May God have mercy on our land, grant repentance and revival to His bride, and may each of you know the blessing and peace of the True King, our Lord Jesus Christ, in all the days to come.
With love from your pastor and friend, in Him,
Paul Gibson is a Minister in the Free Church of Scotland and is Pastor of Knox Church in Perth, Scotland. This article is used with permission.
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We are all called to honor the gray hairs, to be grateful for God’s gifts to the church, and to sit at the feet of our elders with reverence, respect, and deference, like the fathers in the faith that they are. This will also teach our children, it will teach our churches, it will teach society outside the church how we deal with things: with the principle of grace, respect, forgiveness, redemption and mercy.

It can be an inglorious task to say anything about the current generation. Some concepts that would have been considered “conventional wisdom” a few years ago and wouldn’t require a lot of explanation are now under scrutiny and being reframed in an impressive and frightening exercise of deconstructing ideas that we see today.
I want to reflect on something that seemed like commonplace knowledge not so long ago, but is now under this sort of re-signification, which is the respect for the elderly.
It seems that we live in a time when the elderly represent a way of thinking and doing things that no longer works in our society (and, to our astonishment, in some churches) and therefore it is necessary to distance oneself from them (or from us). My subject is brief and I want to deal with it in the context of the Christian faith, for my concern is with the state of the church, I mean, the state of those who professes faith in Jesus Christ.
A huge number of young people from the “Z” generation, that is, people born from 1995 and on, seem to be leading a relentless patrol to everything that stands in the way of the new ethics that the so-called “woke” movement established as the immutable clause of our society. This new ethics is comprehensive and incorporates practically all the ideas that have emerged from the progressive narratives of the last 25 years that give new guidelines on what it means to live well in society. The escalation of change in core values was very fast, and, it seems it started to be implemented even more aggressively after the 2020 pandemic. From areas related to the environment to complex issues in medicine, science, politics, sexuality, psychology and religion, in short, for everything there is a new norm that does not accept any discussion. Its imposition becomes violent, whether due to the cancellation culture, very strong in the press and social media environment, or, even more dangerous, as we see in Western governments, due to the creation of new bills and jurisprudence that criminalize public opinion and the discussion of ideas. Thinking in an old-fashioned way in the 2023 can be very dangerous and even get one arrested.
It is curious, however, that the method of this new ethics takes place through the fragmentation of truth, through the end of empiricism and common wisdom and through the use of broken narratives, disconnected of a metanarrative in favor of a broad pluralism. This has been called post-truth and means that each person or social group has its own truth and values, which can never be questioned.
It is very disconcerting to realize that this trend has infiltrated the Christian church as well. Many among God’s people are strongly influenced by this new post-truth ethics and begin to confuse Christian ethics with the new (and suffocating) ideas that regulate the life of Western society in this 21st century. Alisa Childers, American Christian author, addressed this issue in her moving testimony published in book form under the title Another Gospel? A response to progressive Christianity, and also in here more recent title, Live your Truth.
But I digress. Let me get back to the point. Elders are being canceled left and right and it is happening in the church too, right under our nose. So, let me first bring the biblical principle to tackle this issue.
The fifth commandment of the Decalogue, written by God’s own hand (and spoken before His people in the Sinai) says: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you”.
In this commandment, God’s people are called to love and obey their parents. A first and important element that must be highlighted is that the commandment is not addressed to children only, but to all who have living parents (Proverbs 19:26; 23:22). This commandment, in distinction from most commandments in the Decalogue, is put in positive terms and, furthermore, is bound up with a promise. The promise has to do with the effects of obedience. As we see in the wisdom books of the Bible, taking good advice from our parents, listening to and respecting our elders, dealing respectfully with authorities are generally attitudes that will prolong one’s days and make life easier. Add to this the fact that God himself promises to bless those who seek to keep the fifth commandment and preserve its spirit.
The expression “honor” comes from the Hebrew kabod and has a sense of weight, importance, glory and prestige. It is the respect that an inferior offers to a superior. The Westminster Larger Catechism, in question 126, proposes that the scope of the fifth commandment is the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors or equals.
The Reformers went even further and expanded the understanding of this commandment to all who are in authority over us—primarily and immediately our parents, but also the elderly, the magistrate, educators, and spiritual fathers. French reformer John Calvin, commenting on the fifth commandment, highlighted three expressions of honor—“reverence, obedience, and recognition”—and demonstrates how the principle of honoring parents can extend to all in position of authority: magistrates, elders, fathers in faith, pedagogues. In his elaboration, Calvin will condition this obedience to obedience “in the Lord” (Ephesians 6.1).
A very important point of the commandment is that honor, respect and consideration begin in the heart. Reverence for our parents and other authority figures should be a reflection and evidence of our honor and reverence for God in the first place.
We also read in Leviticus 19:32: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” Proverbs 16:31 and 20:29 reinforce the teaching of Scripture that elders should be honored. This principle is there because normally the elderly are associated with maturity, experience, wisdom, and the accumulation of knowledge and a better sense of realism of life. In the Bible, the elderly are treated as a reservoir of tradition, of family history, as the living archive of a society that lives through oral tradition.
The influence of the Christian faith in the world did a good job of carrying this principle of life forward. Societies that preserve the value of respecting their elders are usually prosperous and very well organized.
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