Every society believes in the supernatural. Ancient Egypt worshiped Isis, Ra, Anubis, and Horus. Hindus bow before Shiva, Krishna, Vishnu, Kali, and believe in three hundred million other gods. The Buddha sought enlightenment as a mechanism for dealing with human suffering. The Greeks believed in Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Prometheus, and Apollo. The Norsemen served Odin. The Germanic people worshiped Thor, the god of thunder. In the East, people worship their ancestors. The Mayans worshiped Kukulcan, Chac, Kinich Ahau, and Yum Cimil. 

Atheists like to say, “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” They point to the existence of many different gods as proof that no god exists. But the fact that for thousands of years humans have believed in supernatural entities is actually powerful proof that there is deep need inside of humans that is searching for something greater than ourselves. Humans search for God because they know He exists and that they need Him. 

Saying that someone is an atheist just because he doesn’t believe in all gods is like saying everybody is single because no one is married to everybody. The word “atheist” means “no god.” That means if I believe in one God, I’m not an atheist. Just because the math problem “What is 1+1?” has millions of wrong answers does not mean the question does not have one right answer. 

A monotheist believes in one God. A polytheist believes in many gods. An atheist believes in no gods. To point out that a monotheist is not a polytheist does not make him an atheist. 

Besides, the Bible tells us there are other gods. The Ten Commandments say, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Christians believe there is One Supreme God who created the universe. But we also believe there is a “god of this world” known as Satan who actively works to deceive people. I don’t disbelieve in Thor, Odin, Zeus, and Baal. I think they are manifestations of demonic powers that are masquerading as the one true God. 

1) All of human history shows that humans have an inward sense of God’s existence. 

2) It is probable that that this sense of the divine (Latin: senses divinitatis) was given to humans by One who is higher than humankind. 

3) Therefore, God exists.  

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About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

There is much in the Christian faith that appears unreasonable: a baby born to a virgin, a man comes back from the dead, a giant flood covers the whole earth, an angel shuts the mouths of lions. All these miraculous events stand contrary to observed phenomena. But, the faith of the Bible is not antithetical to reason. Christian faith is not willing to believe something despite evidence to the contrary, rather faith in Christ is built on the foundation of who Jesus is, what He has done, and what He continues to do in the lives of those who believe in Him. If one allows for the evidence and experience that there is a God who can do miracles—as the Bible clearly shows—then Christian faith is reasonable.

Reason and faith are often presented as opponents, especially by atheists. But Christians know that reason is not opposed to faith. Saint Augustine wrote, “I believe in order to understand.” He also frequently quoted a version of Isaiah 7:9, “Unless you believe, you cannot understand.” Augustine said, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” 

Anselm also applied reason to questions of faith. He believed faith was the beginning of knowledge, and that, once someone accepts a truth by faith, they can learn more about it through reason. As a result, one’s faith becomes greater as one applies reason to what one believes. He said, “Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.” 

Aquinas argued God can be known through both faith and reason. Truth about God is known through two ways: natural revelation and supernatural revelation. Reason discovers what can be known about God from the natural world; faith discovers what can be known about God supernaturally (through the Bible, through miracles, through prayer and the like). Rather than being opponents, for Aquinas faith and reason are allies.

Both faith and reason can lead to God. However, in matters of faith and reason, one must follow either Plato or Aristotle. Either one begins with faith by receiving “a word from on high,” or one begins with reason which is “a word from within.” When using faith, a person begins with what God has chosen to reveal and then works their way down from “on high” in order to understand themselves and their world here below. This deductive approach was used by Anselm. When using reason to understand God, a person begins with what is seen with the eyes here “below” and works their way up to understand who God is. This inductive approach was used by Aquinas. In the inductive approach, reason leads to faith; in the deductive approach faith leads to reason. In neither are faith and reason opposed. 

According to John Locke, to believe something, apart from reason, is an insult to our Maker, the One who created reason. Galileo wrote, “I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.” The Bible commands Christians to, “Love the Lord your God…with all your mind” (Luke 10:27). Thus, the Christian should strive to use, understand, and improve his faculty of reasoning. God wants us to be rational. Reason is not contrary to faith, rather it should be complementary to faith. 

Faith is bigger than reason

Most humans do not believe because of reason, they believe because of emotion, feelings, intuitions, prejudices, and impressions. They believe because of what is in their hearts. When the Bible talks about the heart, it isn’t referring to the physical organ that pumps blood, but to the center and essence of a person. The Apostle Paul reminds us that it is “with the heart that one believes” (Romans 10.10). Because of what is in a Christian’s heart, she believes in God. Because of what is in an atheist’s heart he does not believe in God. This makes it hard to reason either the Christian or the atheist out of their deeply held beliefs. As Jonathan Swift, the Irish author and satirist pointed out, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” Blaise Pascal wrote, 

The heart has its reasons which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself? It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith; God felt by the heart, not by reason. 

Faith could be called a “sixth sense.” The idea of a sixth sense is a sense that operates beyond our five senses of sight, touch, touch, hearing, and smell. Even so, faith does not go against reason, faith goes beyond reason. By using faith, we sense things in the spiritual realm. When we sense a truth by faith, we do not need to experience it with our other senses to know it is real. This truth can be demonstrated by how we use our other senses. When you see a building off in the distance, you do not doubt it’s existence until you are close enough to touch or taste or smell it. No, you believe the building is there even when only one sense confirms that it is real. When you smell a delicious BBQ, you don’t need to see the meat roasting before you will believe that someone is cooking a steak.

Faith is similar to the title deed to a property you have never seen. Once the title of a property belongs to you, the property also belongs to you. You can say with assurance, “I own this land” even though you have never seen it. Recently I purchased a plane ticket. When I bought the ticket, I did not demand to see the plane I would be riding in. I had faith the plane would be at the airport when the time arrived for me to leave on my trip. The ticket represented the promise of the airline. Faith is like that ticket; it is the substance that guarantees God’s promises will come true. Faith is your ticket to heaven. 

We should “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). Ultimate proof of God’s existence comes from faith. One must use the proper instrument for the object of study. To study the stars, one would not use a microscope. To study an amoeba, one would not use a telescope. The proper instrument for the study of God is faith. Faith is the telescope we look through in order to see God.

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About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

The good news is that God does not leave the people he created alone in the midst of pain and suffering. God is the answer to the problem of evil. The existence of evil should not turn us away from God; instead, it should make us turn toward him. And it should do so for several reasons.

Firstly, God is the greatest victim of evil. Even though suffering is bad, God chose to experience it Himself. God came and experienced our suffering with us when Jesus came to earth. Dorothy Sayers wrote: 

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as He is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine […]. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and thought it well worthwhile.” 

God does not prevent suffering, but He is with people and for people in their suffering. 

Secondly, since God has given humans free choice, it becomes our responsibility to stop evil in this world. One day, I got upset with God and shook my fist at him and said, “The world needs you. Can’t you see the hurting, the dying, the poor, and the lost? The world needs you!” God spoke back to me in a quiet whisper, “Daniel, the world needs you.” Part of God’s answer to the pain in this world is for people to help alleviate that pain. That’s why I’m an evangelist, and why the ministry I lead has given away 270,000 meals to the children of Belize, dug water wells for villages in India, and works to convince people to live their lives by faith in Jesus. By living godly lives, we can cure some of the evil in this world. 

Thirdly, while we may not be able to solve all evils in this life, the problem of evil will be solved completely in the next life. God’s viewpoint is eternal, to Him, evil is but a small blip on the timeline of forever. Evil may be a problem for us, but evil is not a problem for God, because He knows the ultimate end of evil and the sad end of every evil doer: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5.10 NIV).

Finally, God will ultimately bring good out of every situation. Romans 8:28 says,“All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Even as we suffer, God is working to bring about ultimate good. Ecclesiastes 3.11 says, “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” From our finite position it might be difficult to see all the good that God is doing, but the truth is that God is at work, and He knows how to turn our suffering into rejoicing. 

Yes, God cares!

Christians know that a good God exists. Christians aren’t Christians because they are good, they are Christians because they are honest about the existence of evil. Evil will continue to grip the heart of humankind until we have an encounter with God’s goodness. Popular culture dishonestly claims that people are basically good. Christians, however, acknowledge the truth: God is good and sinful people are desperately in need of Him to save them from the terrible consequences of their endlessly selfish choices. 

Consider this: If God did not care for people, He would not save them. God saves people from sin through his Son, Jesus Christ who died on the cross. Therefore: God CARES! 

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

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Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

In the Christian worldview, God is good and He created everything to be good. “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). God is not the author of evil, rather evil is simply a corruption of God’s perfect plan. Saint Augustine, one of the Early Church Fathers, argued that evil is a lack of good. Nothing is evil in itself; it is simply the absence of what is good.  Good is normal, evil is an abnormality. For example, cancer is caused by cells that misbehave. Rape is a perversion of a normal, good, God-created impulse to procreate. God made everything to be good, and it only becomes bad when it is misused or corrupted. God made gravity, and it is good—it keeps us on planet earth and keeps planet earth in its orbit. But when someone falls into the Grand Canyon, as happens almost every year, the goodness of gravity certainly seems evil. 

All evil in the world can be traced back to sin. Sin is an abnormality. When God created the world, He gave humans dominion over all of creation (Genesis 1:28). But, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, brought sin into the world. They did this by disobeying God, who, after giving them the whole world, told them of only one thing they were not to do: “…of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (Genesis 2.17). Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, and it was through them that sin entered the world. With sin came death, disease, and natural tragedy. Sin corrupted God’s perfect creation. 

There are two categories of evil: general evil and specific evil. General evil is the result of general sin. When Adam and Eve sinned, they introduced a foreign abnormal element into God’s perfectly functioning universe. It was like throwing sand into the gas tank of a car: the car might continue to run for a while, but eventually the gears will start to grind and the car engine will come to a halt. In the same way, since sin was introduced into the world, the world continues to run but now there are problems like earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, and species that are going extinct. Romans 8:20-22 explains, 

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 

Paul’s idea of creation groaning is like the sound of sand grinding in the gears of a car. When we look at creation, it is obvious there are imperfections. Earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes cause enormous destruction. Because of sin, the further we get from the moment of Creation, the more grinding we see and hear in the world. In fact, Jesus taught that in the last days we would see increased war, pestilence, famine, and earthquakes (Matthew 24:11). 

The second category of evil, specific evil, is caused by specific sinful actions of specific sinful individuals. Often poverty is caused by people making poor choices—some people are greedy and grasp at too much; other people act foolishly and end up in want. Obesity is caused by eating too much food—an example of the sin of gluttony. Car wrecks are often caused by someone breaking the law by choosing to speed. War can be caused by greed, hate, and pride. On 9/11 when two planes flew into the World Trade Center, the loss of thousands of lives was the result of the evil choices of the hijackers. 

Free-Will is the reason evil exists 

God did not cause Adam and Eve to sin. He simply allowed them to have free choice which led to sin. Adam and Eve sinned of their own free-will. For free will to exist, choice must also be allowed to exist. The choice that Adam and Eve were given was the choice to obey God or to disobey God. Adam and Eve needed to have the option of disobeying God or they would not have been truly free. The exercise of his freedom to choose brought sin, pain, suffering, and death into the world. God knew he was taking a risk by making humans free; but, if he didn’t make us free, we would also not be human. 

The existence of free-will makes evil necessary. Alvin Plantinga wrote, 

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

A world without the possibility of evil, is a world without free-will. A world where free will exists, means the option to choose between something that will have good consequences and something that will have evil consequences. It is a tragedy when people choose evil, but the good of free-will supersedes the tragedy of evil.  

We all agree it is a tragedy when a drunk driver hits another car, killing its innocent passengers. We could stop the evil of drunkenness and its consequences from ever happening by outlawing all drinking of alcohol. The United States tried this during Prohibition but gave up the experiment after thirteen years of chasing down bootleggers and moonshiners who illegally provided alcohol to the thirsty public. Perhaps if America had adopted the policy that Singapore has of dealing with drug dealers (executing them) Prohibition would have been more successful. Executing someone for getting drunk would likely go a long way to preventing drunk driving from ever killing another man, woman, or child. But, as a society, we have decided that it is better for people to have the freedom to drink than it is to stop the evil of drunk driving and its sometimes terrible consequences. 

God made a similar decision in creating humanity. He decided it is more important for humans to have free will than it is to stop evil from existing. He has the power to stop all evil from occurring, but in order to do so, He would have to remove our free will. God could have created people to be robots, programming them never do anything evil. But a robot has no free choice and experiences no rewards for doing what it is programed to do. When a robot puts a screw in a car, the robot does not earn wages from the company. It is simply doing what it is programed to do. Human robots who did the good they were programmed to do, would not feel rewarded by doing good. C. S. Lewis wrote, 

Why, then, did God give [people] free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other […]. And for that, they must be free. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. 

Some might say that God could create a world with both free will and an absence of evil, but this is logically impossible. God can do anything, but God cannot do what is logically impossible to do.  It would be like creating a square circle or declaring that 2+2=5. Creating a world with both free-choice and no consequences from making bad decisions is impossible. So, God chose the best possible option which involved giving humans free-choice, even though He knew this free-choice could and would lead to sin, pain, suffering and all sorts of evil.

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

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Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

Premise A: If a good God does not exist, evil also does not exist. 

Premise B: Evil exists 

Conclusion: Therefore, a good God exists. 

The preceding chapters have provided several proofs for the existence of God, but I can understand not being ready to trust in God if all you know about Him is that He exists. I know that my next-door neighbors exist, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to let them take care of my children. Before I let someone do that, I want to know that I can trust them with the most precious things in my life. So, if God exists, the question must be asked, “What sort of God is He?”  

With seven billion people on a planet that is part of a star system that is one among billions in the universe, someone might wonder: Is He the sort of God to care about individual people? Does He see my pain and understand my sorrow? Does He know what brings me joy and shake His head at my pet peeves? Does He listen when I pray at night and watch over me as I go about my day? Is He willing to do things to help me when I need help? When I’m are sick, or sorrowful, or disappointed, or going through a dark time in life, is God there for me? Will He be waiting for me when I die? Psalms 8:3-4 asks the same questions, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?” So many questions, and at the core of them, just one question: Does God care about me?

Christians answers this question with a confident, “Yes, God does care.” According to the Bible, God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and all-good (omni-benevolent). Christians believe that every good thing that a person can experience can be traced back to God. But human experience proves another truth: evil exists. 

It is undeniable that there is evil in this world. There are natural evils like tornados, earthquakes, hurricane, tidal waves, and floods. There are physical diseases and conditions like cancer, strokes, Alzheimer’s, birth defects, genetic disorders. There is also evil caused by humans. Some human-caused evil is unintentional, such as pain caused by car wrecks and medical mistakes; other human-caused evil is intentional like theft, murder, slander, and rape. Every human being goes through times of emotional pain and physical suffering. During these times, there is a tendency for people to wonder if God is real and to question if He cares about their pain. 

The existence of evil is one of the main objections to the Christian God. A commentator on Reddit asked, “Does it make sense to believe that an all-powerful, infinitely loving and merciful deity is out there who refuses to stop genocide, cancer, child sexual abuse, and starvation?” Another person wrote, “What causes a little girl to get a tumor in her brain? And don’t give me the god-works-in-mysterious-ways copout.” George Barna, the Christian pollster, conducted a nationwide survey asking the question, “If you could ask God one question and you knew He would give you an answer, what would you ask? The most popular response—it was proposed by 17% of the respondents—was “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?” 

Atheists and the problem of evil

Atheists often use the problem of evil to argue there is no God. In his essay “God and Evil,” H.J. McCloskey wrote, “Evil is a problem, for the theist, in that a contradiction is involved in the fact of evil on the one hand and belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of God on the other.” David Hume phrased the problem this way: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Various thinkers have tried to resolve this dilemma by denying different characteristics of the God of the Bible.  After his son died of a rare and painful disease, Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, denies the validity of God’s omnipotence. While God knows about your pain and wants to help you through your pain, Kushner came to believe that God is unable to alleviate your pain. He portrays God as a “kind-hearted wimp.” Others have denied the omni-benevolence of God. Alan Carter proposes the possibility of an evil God and suggests that God is not as good as we think He is and that He is just playing a trick on us. 

Another way to dodge the problem of evil is to deny that evil exists. This is the approach of some forms of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, some New Age religions, and mind-science sects like Christian Science. Rather than saying that God is not all-powerful, or all-knowing, or all-good, this approach says that evil is not real because it is just a problem of perception. Good and evil and right and wrong exist in the mind and do not have objective reality. 

A final way to reconcile the nature of God with the existence of evil is to demonstrate that it is possible for God to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good and for evil to exist at the same time. This is the Christian understanding of the dilemma.

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

Atheists and non-believers object to the resurrection by asserting that dead people do not rise from the dead. Because dead people do not rise from the dead, then Jesus did not rise from the dead. This objection is based on a worldview that rejects the supernatural. But if one’s worldview rejects the possibility of miracles, the existence of God, and that facts of Christianity, then one must come up with an alternate explanation to account for the historical evidence of the resurrection. There is a set of “minimal facts” about the resurrection of Jesus that almost all scholars, both believers and unbelievers, agree on and that must be explained. These facts are as follows:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion and was buried. 

2. Jesus’ tomb was empty, and his body was missing. 

3. The disciples had actual experiences of what they thought were real appearances of a risen Jesus and they genuinely believed He had risen from the dead. 

4. The lives of the disciples were completely changed by their experience of a risen Jesus to the point that they were willing to give their lives for their new-found faith. 

5. The tradition of Christ’s resurrection was communicated very early. 

6. Men like James, the unbelieving brother of Jesus, and Paul, the persecutor of believers, became believers because of meeting what they thought was the resurrected Jesus.   

Let’s consider five explanations of the empty tomb of Jesus and how they are supported by the facts. 

1. The Swoon Theory. This theory proposes that Jesus did not really die on the cross; he only passed out and was later revived. This theory is problematic for a few reasons. First, the Romans knew how to kill people. People crucified by the Romans did not survive. Second, even if Jesus could have lived through the crucifixion, there is no way he could have escaped the tomb in his weakened condition. When the Jews buried their dead, they wound them up in strips of cloth, binding their hands and feet. The difficulty of getting free of his graveclothes would have been extraordinary for any man, and much more so for Jesus who had been crucified. Of course, if He had managed to do so, in the mouth of the tomb where he was buried was an enormous stone, and beyond it was a guard of Roman soldiers. It would have been impossible for Jesus to move the stone or sneak past the guards. Third, even if Jesus had survived the crucifixion and managed to escape the tomb, His body would have been in such a horrible state that no one would have mistaken Him for being resurrected. The people who saw Jesus reported He had a glorified, resurrected body, not a body recovering from a crippling ordeal. 

2. The Conspiracy Theory. In this scenario, the resurrection is a deception perpetrated by some disciples who stole Jesus body.  Some objections to this theory are that, first, if it was a conspiracy, how did the disciples steal the body? It was being guarded by Roman soldiers. The guards knew their lives would be forfeited if they failed in their assignment to guard the body. Second, as mentioned above, the disciples all gave their lives for their belief in the risen Christ. People may lie for personal profit, but few people continue the lie when their lives are on the line. 

3. The Hallucination Theory. This hypothesis suggests the disciples hallucinated about a resurrected Jesus. Jesus was still dead and still in the tomb; their belief in His resurrection was simply the product of their overactive imaginations. Problems to this hypothesis include, first, that there was little precedent for thinking that someone could come back from the dead. The Pharisees believed there would be a general resurrection at the end of time, but no one imagined that an individual would resurrect. Second, some of the people who witnessed the resurrected Christ were not his disciples before the resurrection. They only became disciples because of witnessing his resurrection. Third, the reports of Christ’s resurrection are not of the type that can be produced by a hallucination. Hallucinations are always individual occurrences, but Jesus was often seen by groups of people, and in one instance, over five hundred people saw Jesus at one time. 

4. The Legend Theory. By this theory, the account of Jesus resurrection is a legend, a myth that grew up over a long period of time. The primary objection to this theory is simply that the written record does not bear it out. The time between the death of Jesus and the written records of his resurrection are short. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians within twenty years of Jesus’ resurrection. The witnesses to the resurrection that he mentions were still alive and available for anyone to interview. Paul’s words are written too soon to be myth. He regards the resurrection as a verifiable historical fact. 

5. The Truth. Jesus really rose from the dead. The evidence rules out all natural options that explain away the resurrection, leaving only the supernatural to account for the resurrection that so convinced the first Christians. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes famously said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” As N.T. Wright says, “The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.”

Some people dismiss the story of Jesus as nothing but a fairy tale, or a myth, but I like what C.S. Lewis said after J.R.R. Tolkien witnessed to him. He wrote, “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” The implications of the historical evidence are enormous. They are that Jesus rose from the dead, that Jesus is the God He says He is, and that what the Bible says about God, creation, sin, judgment, eternity, and heaven and hell are true. Two more implications of the resurrection are:

That, yes, indeed, God CARES for you. And that because of this you have a choice to make.

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

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About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

No one in all of history has had as much impact as Jesus. Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe, said, “I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.” 

H.G. Wells, the original science-fiction writer and historian, said, “I am a historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.” 

Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote, “As the centuries pass, the evidence is accumulating that, measured by His effect on history, Jesus is the most influential life ever lived on this planet.” 

Philip Schaff observed, “Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of school, He spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, He set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.”  

J.B. Phillips said this about Jesus, “God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man–suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal’s death–and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched.” 

Famous and influential people have acknowledged Jesus as the most famous and influential man in history, but the truth is that Jesus claimed to be far more than a man. He claimed to be God.

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

In a Hindu context, it would not be notable for someone to claim to be a god because the Hindus have millions of gods in their pantheon. Likewise, the Greeks and the Romans worshiped many different gods, and the Roman emperors were worshiped as deities. But, Jesus was a Jew and He spoke in the context of a Jewish culture. The foundation of the Jewish religion is monotheism: “Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6.4). Jews worshipped only one God. So, for Jesus to claim to be God was extraordinary. His claim instantly subjected Him to the closet scrutiny of the Jewish religious leaders. Did He in fact claim to be God? 

1. Jesus used God’s name to speak of Himself. When Moses saw God in a burning bush, he asked, “Who are you?” God answered, “I AM who I AM.” Jesus used the same terminology when He said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

He also said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he is dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25), “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), “I am the living bread” (John 6:51), “I am the door” (John 10:9), “I am the Good Shepherd” (John 10:11), “I am the true vine” (John 15:1), and “I am the Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 1:7-8). 

In using this terminology, it was clear to his listeners that He was equating himself with YWHW,  God, as he revealed himself of the Old Testament. To His Jewish listeners, this was blasphemy. For Jesus to call Himself, “I AM” was the ultimate in hubris. The use of God’s name to describe Himself is proof that Jesus considered Himself to be God. 

2. Jesus called Himself the “Son of Man.”  Eighty times throughout the Gospels, Jesus refers to Himself as “the Son of Man.” When casual Bible readers hear this term they equate it with Jesus claiming humanity. But, the use of this term must be understood in the context of a vision that the Old Testament prophet Daniel saw: 

I was watching in the night visions,
And behold, One like the Son of Man,
Coming with the clouds of heaven!
He came to the Ancient of Days,
And they brought Him near before Him.

Then to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom,
That all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
Which shall not pass away,
And His kingdom the one
Which shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13-14) 

In Daniel’s vision, the “Son of Man” is much more than a man. He is the One before whom the whole world bows to worship. When Jesus said of his coming again, “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21:27), He is clearly referencing this vision. When Jesus called Himself “Son of Man,” His listeners knew He was equating Himself with Almighty God.   

3. Jesus called Himself the “Son of God.” When Jesus heard His friend Lazarus was sick, He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). When the religious Jews heard Jesus use the term “Son of God” in speaking of Himself, they immediately knew He was claiming much more than to be a son of God. The Jews would not kill someone for claiming to be a son of God. But Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, and therefore divine. It was for this reason they wanted to kill Him. They said, “We have a law, and according to our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God” (John 19:7). 

4. Jesus claimed to be one with God the Father. Jesus told his disciples, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him” (John 14:7). In the next verse, Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” At another time, when He was speaking in the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus said, “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30). When the religious Jews heard Him say this, it is obvious that they understood Him to be claiming to be God because they immediately tried to kill Him: “The Jews answered Him, saying, ‘For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, and because You, being a Man, make Yourself God’” (John 10:33). 

5. Jesus claimed to have ultimate authority. Jesus said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). How could Jesus claim all authority unless he was also claiming to be God? 

6. Jesus allowed others to worship him. The first of the Ten Commandments states: “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). Accordingly, the worst heresy for a Jew to teach was the worship of anyone other than the One True God. Yet, Jesus accepted the worship of His disciples. When Peter, responding to Jesus question of “Who do you say that I am,” said, “You are the Christ the Son of the Living God,” Jesus did not stop him as any good Jew was instantly bound to do. Instead He says to Peter, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16.15-17). 

Thomas doubted that Jesus rose from the dead and he demanded proof.  He said, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe” (John 20.25). Eight days later, Jesus suddenly appeared where the disciples were gathered. Jesus offered His hands for Thomas to examine. Thomas responded by crying out, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Thomas worshipped Jesus and Jesus did not rebuke him or tell him he was worshipping the wrong person, instead, Jesus accepts the worship as His rightful due. 

7. Jesus claimed to be the Alpha and the Omega. In the book of Revelation, Jesus is revealed to the Apostle John in all His glory: 

In the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. (Revelation 1:13-16)

John writes, “Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away…” (Revelation 20:11). The figure on the throne says to John, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 21:6). When Jesus claims to be the Alpha and the Omega, He is claiming to be the A to the Z and everything in between, the beginning to the end, the One who created the world, and the One who judges the world at the end. In John’s vision, Jesus is awe inspiring and deserving of all glory, and honor, and praise. 

Jesus acted like God. 

Not only did Jesus claim to be God with His words, He also acted in ways that only God could act. 

1. Jesus forgave sins, an act only God can do.  Jesus said, “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6). By claiming the ability to forgive sins, Jesus was claiming to be God. Once when a paralyzed man was brought to him, Jesus said to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” The religious Jews who heard him said to themselves, “Why does this man speak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?” Jesus who understood their thoughts, replied to them, “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’?” Then he healed the sick man as proof of his power to forgive sins (Mark 2.5-11). 

2. Jesus controlled nature. He caused a storm to be stilled by saying, “Peace be still” (Mark 4:39). When was the last time a mere man could control the wind and the waves with his words? 

3. Jesus raised the dead. He raised Lazarus from the dead by saying, “Come forth” (John 11:43). You try that at the next funeral you attend. People will think you are crazy. But they wouldn’t think so anymore if the dead person sat up. 

4. Jesus promised to do what only God can do. He claimed that he would return to judge the world (Matthew 25:31-32). 

The Biblical evidence is clear, not only did Jesus claim to be God, He also acted like God. But, even if someone claims to be God, while it’s possible that the claim could be true, it’s also very possible they could be lying or they might even be crazy. Which one was Jesus? Let’s take a look at these three options. 

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

Premise A: If God cares for people He would use His power to help them

Premise B: Jesus, the God-man, healed this sick, loved the outcast, died to save sinners, and rose from the dead to give them eternal life

Conclusion: Therefore, God cares for people

Some philosophical ideas of God do not offer much comfort to those who are hurting. One idea is that God is an abstract concept, an impersonal and distant force. This force created the universe, but it neither knows your name nor cares whether you live or die. This concept of God is called Deism. The deistic worldview sees God as a clockmaker who built a clock, started it ticking, and then left it to run on its own laws and mechanisms. The God of the deists simply programs the universe. He orchestrates the Big Bang, gives an initial nudge to the evolutionary process, and then steps back and disinterestedly watches the results. This God never reaches into the universe He set going to interfere or intervene. 

Others picture God as an elderly figure sitting on a throne way up in heaven. He is “the man upstairs.” They think He peeks through the clouds at His creatures far below and the distance is so great that people look like little ants scurrying around. It is hard to imagine the figure on the throne caring about what happens to any individual ant. 

But, the New Testament offers us a different picture of God. In the four Gospels, we discover Jesus, and His life proves that God cares for us. Jesus is not just a messenger from heaven. He is far more than an angelic being. Jesus is God and as God, He came from heaven to earth in order to help us in our suffering. One of the most well-known verses in the Bible says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). The story of how God became a human is the greatest love story ever told. Let’s take a few moments to look at the story of Jesus. The evidence for how much God cares for people is found in the life of Jesus. 

The birth of Jesus is proof that God cares 

Christianity is rooted in space and time; it’s claims about Jesus are historical. Two thousand years ago, God Almighty humbled Himself and became a human. He was born to a virgin named Mary in the town of Bethlehem, a few miles from the city of Jerusalem. The King of the Universe was born in a stable and spent his first night on earth with the eating trough of animal as his cradle. Sometimes, when a child leaves the front door of the house open, you will hear the parents say, “You’d think you were born in a barn.”  Well, that’s exactly how Jesus was born. God did not arrive on earth riding in a golden chariot. He did not appear surrounded by ten million angels. No, Jesus was born as a helpless baby. He experienced the trauma of passing through the birthing canal. When He caught his first breath, the “silent night” was disturbed as he wailed like any other human child. C.S. Lewis wrote, “The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say God became Man.” 

The reason God did this was not because He was curious about what it would be like to be a man. He did this so that we could understand who He is and how much He cares. Imagine that you wanted to communicate with an ant. As a human, you could talk to an ant, pick it up from the ground, cuddle it, blow on it, write it a long letter, sing it a song, paint it a picture—but the ant would not understand your attempts to communicate. The only way to really get an ant’s attention is to become an ant and speak to it in terms it could understand. In a sense, this is what God did for us. In order to reach out to humans in their pain and brokenness, their great Creator became a man. He walked on the earth, ate our food, shared our sorrows, experienced our pain, and shared a message from heaven with us. 

Christians have believed in the virgin birth from the earliest times. The Apostle’s Creed, which goes back in its earliest form to the second century, reads: 

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.

Many of the arguments for God’s existence are abstract and philosophical, but in the person of Jesus, God concretely entered human history and revealed Himself to humanity. Jesus shows that God is not an abstract concept, He is a concrete reality. The Gospel of John explains this mystery, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God […] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1,14). When I hear about Jesus leaving the heavenly streets of gold to come walk the dusty roads of Judea with humanity, I say, “Yes, God CARES!” 

The life of Jesus is proof that God cares 

Jesus grew up, spending his infancy in Bethlehem and Egypt, and then as a child moved to the small town of Nazareth. He learned how to walk, and how to talk. Like other boys, he fell and skinned his knee and went running to his mother for comfort. He experienced the joys and the frustrations of childhood. He went to the synagogue and learned about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He heard stories about the life of Moses and King David. He studied the writings of the prophets. “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52 NKJV). As he entered puberty, Jesus amazed the greatest scholars of the Jewish religion with his wisdom. 

When he was about thirty years old, Jesus was baptized by his cousin, John. He then went out into the desert wilderness and was tempted by Satan. He experienced the same temptations that every human is offered, but unlike Adam and Eve and the rest of us, He did not give into the temptation to disobey God and live selfishly. When He returned from this place of temptation, He started to preach the Gospel—the Good News that God loves, cares, and is ready to act to help people. Calling twelve disciples to follow him—common men: fishermen, tradesmen, a tax collector—He taught them through simple parables about the Kingdom of God. Besides these twelve, hundreds and thousands would come to hear His words. His teaching transformed their lives. He spoke with great authority and His words captivated His listeners. 

One day, young children came to Jesus. The disciples pushed the children away and told them that Jesus was far too important to spend time with them. Jesus saw what they did and was greatly displeased. He said to them, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14). Throughout His ministry, the people that Jewish society thought unimportant—the sick, the poor, women, children, non-Jews, money-grubbing tax collectors, the uneducated—were the people that Jesus would seek out and show God’s love to. 

The miracles of Jesus are proof that God cares 

But Jesus was far more than a traveling teacher. He also performed outstanding miracles and these miracles prove that God cares about people and their circumstances. One day, a leper came to Jesus. Leprosy was a horrible disease that left people horribly disfigured. It was incurable and was considered contagious because, in Jewish culture, it made a person ritually “unclean.” No one wanted to touch a leper because they would become “unclean” too. This leper asked himself a question: “Is Jesus willing to healing me?” Jesus responded to this man’s need in a beautiful fashion. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man, saying, “I am willing. Be healed.” Immediately, the man was cured of his leprosy. 

Another time, a paralyzed man was carried to Jesus by four friends. Jesus was teaching in a house and the four friends tried to push their way through the crowd that was there listening to Jesus. The crowd was too thick and it proved impossible to get into the house. In a desperate bid to get their friend to Jesus, they carried the paralyzed man up to the roof of the house and dug a hole in it. They then lowered him down through the hole to where Jesus was. Their desperation paid off. Jesus spoke kindly to the suffering man, forgave his sins, and healed him. 

A woman who was bleeding for twelve years came up behind Jesus in a crowd and touched the edge of his clothes. Immediately she was healed. Jesus raised a man’s twelve-year-old daughter from the dead when he touched her hand. He opened a blind man’s eyes. He healed a crippled man. Jesus healed a man who could not speak. He healed Peter’s mother-in-law from a fever. He changed water into wine, so the guest could continue celebrating. He fed over 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two small fish. He cast demons out of many people who were possessed by the devil. He raised His dear friend Lazarus from the dead. Sometimes people brought crowds of the sick to Jesus, and scripture tells us that Jesus healed them all (Matthew 15:30).

The Bible records miracle after miracle of Jesus. These miracles prove two things. First, they prove that Jesus is God. Man cannot do miracles, but God can. Second, they prove that God cares for people. Jesus cared about the plight of the sick. One time a man prayed, “Dear God, I pray that I could meet Jesus.” At his feet lay an open Bible. As the man began to read the four Gospels, he saw Jesus and by seeing Jesus, he met God. The Bible reveals Jesus to us. Jesus shows us what God is like. The Bible clearly shows us that Jesus is loving, that He heals the sick, that He is compassionate, that He seeks and saves the lost, and that He is wise and full of life. When I read about how Jesus healed the blind man, restored the crippled man, forgave the prostitute, and played with the children, I say, “Yes, God CARES!” 

The death of Jesus is proof that God cares. 

Jesus came to earth to accomplish more than teaching His disciples about heaven and performing miracles. Jesus was a moral teacher and a wonder-worker only because they were part of his larger mission in coming to earth. Jesus came to earth to save humans from their sins. As covered in the previous chapter, in the beginning of time, Adam and Eve sinned. They disobeyed God’s commands. All of Adam and Eve’s offspring, the whole human race, became sinners as a result. The Bible teaches, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23 ). And sin has a terrible price: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). 

When the Bible says that God is holy, it means He is different from humans because He is without sin. Sin is the opposite of God, and He cannot tolerate it. It might be more correct to say that sin cannot tolerate God, in the same way that bacteria cannot tolerate boiling water. Sin, and all the evil it unleashes, is offensive to God’s holy nature. Because of this, it is impossible for sinful humans to have a relationship with God or to enter heaven. Anyone who sins is lost and will spend eternity separated from God who is the source of life and goodness. The Bible calls this eternal destination hell, and to spend the eternity that follows this life separated from God is what it calls “the second death.” Jesus came to save us from sin and its terrible penalty. 

That’s why Jesus gave his life on the cross. Jesus did not deserve to die. He lived a perfect life, a life free from sin. He was completely innocent. But, evil men condemned Him to death and nailed Him to a wooden cross. The cross is the ultimate example of God’s power to take something evil and turn it for good. In allowing Himself to be put to death, Jesus did so in order to die in our place. In the Old Testament, when someone sinned, they were required to bring a goat or a lamb to the Jewish temple, where it was killed and sacrificed. The innocent animal died in the place of the guilty person who had sinned. Each time they sinned, they had to bring another sacrifice. When Jesus died on the cross, He became a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. 

Today, crosses are made of stone, wood, marble, steel, plastic, and stained glass. Churches put them on top of their buildings, in their foyers, behind the pulpit, and etched into every pew. Believers wear them around their necks and put them on their bumper stickers. But, the cross is far more than a decoration. “And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him” (Luke 23:33).  

Crucifixion was a cruel punishment devised by the Romans.  Cicero, a Roman statesman, wrote of crucifixion: “It was the most cruel and shameful of all punishments. Let it never come near the body of a Roman citizen.” The eighth amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees “no cruel and unusual punishment.” Because of this, our society does not allow torture or a painful death penalty. Our prisoners watch TV, study for degrees, and have recreation time. But, the Roman Empire had none of our modern protections for criminals. In times past, governments used firing squads, electric chairs, and the hangman’s noose. Today, we execute criminals with lethal injection. Arguably the worst means of execution ever conceived was the cross.  

To say that crucifixion of Jesus was humiliating and painful would be an understatement. Before He was crucified, Jesus was horribly beaten. The flesh on his back was ripped to shreds with thirty-nine lashes of a leather whip laced with sharp bits of metal and glass. The Roman solders ripped his beard out. To insult Him, a branch of thorns was fashioned into a rough crown and jammed down on His forehead. Soldiers beat Jesus with their fists. When they took Him to be crucified, they forced Jesus to carry the heavy cross. At Calvary, Jesus was stretched out its rough wooden beams and large nails were hammered through His hands and through His feet. When the cross was raised upright, the pain became excruciating as His raw back grated against the splintered surface in his struggle to breath. In physical agony, for hours Jesus hung naked on the cross, suffering the shame and humiliation of a criminal’s death. 

When I realize that Jesus died on a cross to pay for my sins, I say, “Yes, God CARES!” 

The resurrection of Jesus is proof that God cares. 

Jesus did not stay dead. After three days, he rose from the dead, and today Jesus is alive! There was nothing special about dying on the cross. The Romans crucified thousands of criminals every year. But coming back from the dead is something special. Everyone dies. Nobody comes back. It was the resurrection of Jesus that caught the religious leaders of Jerusalem off guard. They thought that killing Jesus would solve their problem with him forever. They thought His disciples would run back to Galilee and His message about the kingdom of God would die with Him. But then He rose from the dead.

According to the Apostle Paul, Christianity rises and falls on the resurrection of Christ “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). The cross without the resurrection is impotent and meaningless. If Jesus is still dead, His followers might as well keep their money and lock the church doors on our way home. However, if Jesus died and rose again three days later, then the Bible is true.

The death of Jesus was awful, but his resurrection was amazing. Jesus was buried, but today His tomb is empty. His tomb is the only attraction in the world where people line up to see nothing. I have been to the tomb and crawled around inside and there is nothing there. Jesus is risen! When I see the empty tomb in Israel, when I hear about how God breathed life back into Jesus, when I experience His presence in my life today, I say, 

“Yes, God CARES!” 

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

Each one of the seven proofs I presented in my previous blog posts has its flaws and counterarguments, and it could be argued that no one proof is enough to prove conclusively that God exists. But think of these seven proofs as the stones in an arch. No arch is held up by a single stone. The architectural marvel of the arch is in the capacity that all the stones together have of supporting tremendous weight. In the same way, when all these proofs are considered together, they are strong enough to support the weight of proving God’s existence. When I consider all the evidence—from cause, from design, from reason, from morals, from the Bible, from miracles, and from experience—I say: God is THERE. 

Christianity is not built on blind faith, but on faith supported by strong evidence. The thinking person can embrace the Christian faith on a rational basis. But even with all the evidence, believing in God is still a matter of faith. As William Lane Craig has said: “Pascal was right in maintaining that God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed.” Having a closed heart to God isn’t unnatural in life or abnormal in any way—because of sin, every human is naturally closed hearted. But the evidence for God IS there, and I encourage you to lay aside disappointment, or weariness, or skepticism, or whatever else may be closing you off. According to Pascal, “Those who seek God find Him.” If you will open your heart to the evidence for God, you will find that God is waiting for you. You will discover: God is THERE!

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

Premise A: People claim to have experienced life-change by encountering God

Premise B: There is no reason for these people to lie about their experience.

Premise C: Others bear witness to the miraculous change in these same people.

Conclusion: Therefore, a life-changing God exists. 

The testimony of the Apostle Paul 

There is often a remarkable change when someone becomes a Christian. When people give their lives to Christ, their habits change—people who were compulsive gamblers don’t gamble anymore, a husband who abused his wife turns things around, an alcoholic is freed of a desire to drink. Thousands of Christians have testimonies about how their lives have been changed by the power of God. The Apostle Paul explained these stories of transformation: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). 

There is no greater testimony to the life-transforming power of God than the story of Saul of Tarsus who became Paul the Apostle. He was born a Jew and studied under Gamaliel, the greatest rabbi of his time. He was passionate about his Jewish traditions, and, as a result, he fervently hated the new sect of Jesus’ followers. He was a witness to the martyrdom of Stephen, holding the cloaks of those who stoned him. He threw Christians—whole families of them—in prison. In his determination to persecute believers, he received permission to travel to Damascus and oppress any Christ-followers there. Saul was a Jew, he was totally committed to his Jewish community, and his status and prospects depended on his love for his Jewish faith and nation. 

But on the road to Damascus, he had a surprise encounter with the risen Christ. Jesus appeared and spoke to him in a blinding light that knocked him off his horse. Because of this encounter with Jesus, Saul became a Christian. Initially, other Christians were skeptical about his conversion, but it soon became obvious that he was as passionate about preaching his new faith as he had ever been about persecuting it. As the Apostle Paul, he spent the rest of his life traveling around the Roman Empire and telling people about Jesus. He also wrote over half the books of the New Testament. Saul went from murdering Christians to being one. He went from being a Jew, with all the advantages that conferred on him, to being a follower of Jesus and exposing himself to a life of persecution. He went from someone who hated Jesus to someone who died for his faith in Jesus. The reason he gave for this tremendous change was his encounter with the living God. The same God still changes people’s lives today. 

How God changed my father’s life. 

My father was accepted to West Point, the elite military academy of the United States. He was a proud man, intellectual and arrogant. He had read lots of philosophy and thought he was one of the five smartest men in the world. He said, “I never met the other four, but I figure I am in the top five.” However, two weeks before graduating from the Academy, my father’s arrogance got the better of him. He walked into the campus bookstore and saw a jacket that he liked. While he had the money to buy it in his pocket, instead of taking it to the till, he tucked the jacket under his arm and walked out of the store. Two military policemen saw him do this and he was arrested for theft. He told the officers, “I just forgot to pay”—but they didn’t believe him. Because of this incident he was not allowed to graduate. 

If my father had graduated, he would have entered the military as a second lieutenant. But, because of his mistake, he had to serve as a private. The Army sent him to Germany where he was assigned to be an orderly at a military hospital. There he met a Christian. The man tried to witness to my father, but my father argued vehemently with him. My father thought the Christian was foolish and stupid because he had no answer for my father’s philosophical diatribes. But one day, my father realized he was miserable, and the Christian was happy. My father asked himself, “Why am I so miserable while this dumb Christian is always happy?” Being a smart guy, he decided to investigate Christianity. 

He began by reading through the entire Bible in four months. He started in Genesis, and by the time he finished the book of Revelation, he realized that he believed what he was reading. He became a Christian, and from that time on his life was completely transformed. His arrogance and pride were broken and he started caring about other people. Some years later, after my father had met and married my mother, he was called into Christian ministry. He remembered that the Christian who had witnessed to him had talked about attending Oral Roberts University, so my father decided to apply to the seminary there. When he arrived on campus, he found the man’s apartment and knocked on the door. On opening the door and seeing the proud man who had always argued with him, the Christian tried to slam the door in my father’s face. But my father stuck his foot in and exclaimed, “No, you don’t understand—I’ve changed. I’m a Christian now!” 

History is proof that Jesus changes lives

The Bible and history record life-changing encounter after life-changing encounter of humans with God. Adam walked with God in the Garden of Eden. Abraham heard God’s voice; Moses saw God’s face; David experienced God’s presence. Peter, James, and John walked the dusty streets of Israel with Jesus, God Incarnate. On December 6, 1273, the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, experienced a heavenly vision. Both Saint Augustine and Martin Luther encountered God’s grace in the book of Romans. Joan of Arc (1412-1431) had visions from God. 

These encounters with God have led people to live lives of sacrifice in order to spread the Gospel and see people set free. David Brainerd (1718-1747) took the Gospel to the American Indians; William Carrey (1761-1834) became a missionary to India, Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) went to China, and Adroniram Judson ministered in Burma. Jim Elliot gave his life to take the Gospel to the Auca Indians in the Amazon jungle. William Wilberforce, a British politician, worked tirelessly to end the scourge of slavery. A thief before he was saved, George Muller established homes to help thousands of orphaned children. Because of her faith in Christ, Corrie Ten Boom was able to forgive the Nazis who imprisoned her family and tormented her sister (who died in a concentration camp). 

John Chrysotom, an early church father, said, “Let us overcome by our manner of living rather than by our words alone. For this is the main battle, this is the unanswerable argument, the argument from conduct.” In the course of American history, many men and women who have been the living example of this statement. George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Asbury, Charles Finney, D.L. Moody, Billy Sunday, R.A. Torrey, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham have all testified to the life-changing power of God. Each of these people dedicated themselves to the proposition that the God of the Bible exists. They preached about Jesus, took care of orphans, opened hospitals, fed the hungry, and defended the faith. They gave their wealth, their energy, and some their lives because they believed in a living God. 

Luis Palau, a fellow evangelist, shares a story about an atheist, who, during a debate, proclaimed that atheism had “done more for the world than Christianity.” In response, Palau promised to produce one hundred men whose lives have been changed for the better by Christ if the atheist could bring in one hundred men whose lives have been changed for the better by atheism. The atheist was forced to sit down because he knew he would lose the challenge. While Atheists mock the Christian faith by pretending to worship the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or the “Invisible Pink Unicorn,” such ridicule is rendered powerless in the face of clear evidence that people have been transformed by their faith in Christ. When did the Invisible Pink Unicorn ever cure a drug addiction? When did the Flying Spaghetti Monster ever turn a wife-abuser into a loving husband? But the reality that Christianity changes peoples’ lives in an instant is beyond dispute. 

Ad Populum proof for God’s existence

The atheist might say that this accumulation of evidence just proves that people have been deceived for a long time about the existence of God. Claiming that people are deceived about the divine is one of a four responses available to people who are presented with the evidence from religious experience: 

1. The person may be lying. For personal gain or glory the person has falsely claimed an encounter with the divine. 

2. The person may be deceived. They are not lying, but the experience they had was not a legitimate experience of the divine. Rather, it was some trick that they are the dupe of. 

3. The person may be misinformed and improperly interpreting the evidence. No one is tricking them, but the experience they had is not really supernatural. Instead, it was a hallucination, or a mirage, or some other kind of unexplained natural phenomenon.  

4. The person is telling the truth. They really had an encounter with God. 

Given the sheer number of testimonies to the existence of the divine and of lives that have been changed by God, the last of these responses cannot be dismissed. Imagine you are on a jury in a court of law. For the case being tried, you hear the testimony of one witness after another–and the witness of one is only confirmed by the witness of the others. Now, given the possibility that one person may be deceived, and that ten people might be trying to pull off a practical joke, and that hundreds more might be crazy, what are the chances that the testimony of millions and millions of people could all be wrong? In the court of human history and experience, the evidence from the witnesses is overwhelmingly in favor of the existence of God. There are too many witnesses to refute. There are too many who say, “I saw Him!”—“I heard Him!”—“He healed me!”—“I know that He exists!” 

Two thousand years of testimonies gives me great confidence in the value of believing, not just in the supernatural in some general way, but in the God of the Bible specifically, and in Jesus Christ his Son. I add my own experiences of God to the tide of that testimony. God has spoken to me. I have seen him do miracles. He has answered my prayers, not just once or twice, but hundreds of times. As Alfred Ackley, the hymn writer, sings, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!”

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

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Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

David Hume (1711-1776), a Scottish philosopher and atheist, believed that miracles were impossible. In 1748, he published an essay “Of Miracles” that argues against their existence. Hume begins his discussion with the presupposition that miracles are impossible since “a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” By assuming that miracles are impossible, he tried to prove that miracles cannot exist.

Hume rightly observes that the proof for miracles relies upon the testimonies of those who witness them. He writes:

…we may observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators […] It will be sufficient to observe, that our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses.

But when eyewitness accounts of miracles are presented, Hume immediately rejects the credibility of these accounts because “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle.” The only way a miracle could be proved to have occurred is if “the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous.” According to Hume, a person who claimed to have witnessed a miracle was either “deceived or trying to deceive.” In other words, for a miracle to be believable, there needed to be a greater chance of the miracle happening than that the person reporting about the miracle was telling a lie. Since Hume had never witnessed a miracle and believed that miracles were impossible, it seemed to him that the greater chance was that those who reported miracles were lying. 

For Hume, “barbarous and ignorant peoples” are those who report the most miracles—people who, because they don’t have access to science, can be led to believe in the miraculous as the explanation for phenomena they cannot otherwise account for. Miracles, wherever they seemed to have occurred were just hoaxes. Or if they were not hoaxes, they were simply some psychosomatic effect that could be explained by science or by an unexplained natural law that science had not discovered yet. 

Hume also argued that miracles could not be used as proof that one religion was more true than another, since, as Hume points out, each religion makes miraculous claims. He writes: 

Let us consider, that, in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary […] Every miracle, therefore, pretended to have been wrought in any of these religions (and all of them abound in miracles) […] has the same force […] to overthrow every other system. […] therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any system of religion.

So, where Christians point to the miracles of Jesus as proof for the truth of Christianity, Hindus and Muslims also claim to experience miracles. These competing claims, according to Hume, cancel out miracles as a proof for the claims of different religions.

Hume’s essay was much discussed in his own time and continues to receive attention from atheists. Like Hume, modern atheists believe that reports of miracles are lies and that those who believe in the miraculous are either ignorant or have been imposed on. They point out that ancient societies attributed anything they did not understand to magic or to a god. For example, the Norsemen believed that Thor caused lightening because they had not discovered the scientific explanation for lightening. But now that science can explain lightening, no one believes in Thor anymore. As scientific knowledge increases, atheists argue that there is less and less room to believe that God is the explanation for what science has left unexplained. 

But the arguments of Hume and the atheists are flawed

1. Hume fails to account for the unusual event. In rejecting miracles, Hume believed that massive amounts of daily experience when miracles do not occur count as far greater evidence against miracles then the occasional report of a miraculous event counted for them. However, his reasoning is flawed because it fails to account for the occasional event that is outside the ordinary. For example, in daily experience, it is exceptional for someone to win the lottery. It is likely true to say that none of us have won the lottery or know anyone who has. Using Hume’s reasoning, we would be justified in disbelieving that someone won the lottery because the event is outside the ordinary. The improbability of the experience would be proof enough that the report of someone winning is a lie. But, no matter how unlikely it is for a person to win the lottery, every week someone does win. 

Another example of an unusual event would be a person being hit with lightening. It is not often that people are hit by lightning, and people who are hit by lightning don’t always survive to tell the tale. But Roy Sullivan, a US Park Ranger was struck by lightning, not once, but seven times over the course of 35 years. To be struck by lightning on average once very 5 years is very unusual. But however unusual, Mr. Sullivan’s experiences were documented and have secured him a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. In the same way, even if it is unusual (based on one’s daily experience) for miracles to occur, it is wrong to completely reject every report of miracles just because they are unusual. 

2. Hume fails to account for the fact that the God who created the laws of nature can supersede the laws of nature. One cannot argue against miracles by pointing to natural law, because miracles (by definition) are supernatural. If there is an all-powerful God, then it is obvious that he could perform miracles. When God does a miracle, He is not violating the laws of nature, rather He is adding a new element to nature. The law of gravity says that an apple dropped from my hand will be drawn toward the center of the earth, but that fall can be stopped if someone else’s hand intercepts the apple. The intervening hand does not violate the law of gravity, it simply adds something new to the equation. In the same way, a miracle does not suspend the laws of nature; it just adds a supernatural dimension to the laws of nature. When God heals a sick man, that man is still subject to the natural process of decay.  

3. Hume fails to account for the truth of experiences he has never experienced. Once there were some Dutch traders who visited a king of Siam. The Dutch traders told the king that in their country, the weather got so cold that the rivers froze solid and horses could walk on the ice. The king immediately concluded the traders were lying to him because he had never seen water freeze. By Hume’s reasoning, the king was perfectly justified in refusing to believe the traders because the experience they related was one he had never seen for himself. But, that the king refused to believe the traders’ testimony had no bearing on the fact that, in cold weather, rivers undoubtedly freeze over. Lack of personal experience cannot be proof that an experience had by others is invalid or untrue.

4. Hume’s argument is meaningless to the person who experiences a miracle. Ultimately, the proof Hume is wrong are the words of the man in John 19:25, “One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.” No one can take this blind man’s testimony away from him. He will forever believe in miracles because he experienced one for himself. The Siamese king would never be able to convince the Dutch traders that water cannot freeze just because he had never seen it happen. They had seen it happen, and that would be that. 

5. Hume failed to accept testimony, no matter how strong the witness. “There is always more reason to disbelieve the report of miracles then to believe the report” wrote Hume. Such a statement is only meaningful if someone has decided already that miracles are impossible. However, the possibility of miracles must not be judged by belief to the contrary, but by the record of historical evidence. Craig S. Keener, a Christian theologian, professor and author, has recorded thousands of modern-day miracles from all parts of the world. I have witnessed God do many miracles in Gospel festivals that I have led. Thousands of Christians over the centuries have experienced miracles. 

Can all this testimony be wrong? The argument against miracles is like the old story of the conversation between the atheist philosopher and the Christian. One day the two were arguing about whether miracles really occur. The philosopher brought up the miraculous delivery of the Israelites from Pharaoh as an example:

“Remember the children of Israel who crossed the Red Sea? Well, that was not really a miracle. You see,” he explained, “at the point where they crossed the sea, it was shallow. The ‘miracle’ was that Moses found water that was only one foot deep.” 

“Only one foot deep!” the Christian exclaimed, “That makes for an even greater miracle.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the philosopher.

“Well,” the Christian replied, “that means God drowned the entire Egyptian army in only one foot of water.”

In the same way, for the sea of testimony in support of miracles to be all wrong, “an even greater miracle” would be required—one that could make those who had been blind believe they always saw, or make those who had been crippled believe they never needed a cane, or make those who had been sick believe that the sickness had just been a state of mind. No matter what anyone else tells me about miracles, the best evidence I have is my own experience of God’s supernatural power. And my experience tells me: God is THERE!

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.

As an evangelist, part of my mission in life, is to preach about Jesus to people. I have had the privilege of going all over the world to preach the Gospel. When I preach in Muslim nations and hold up my Bible with its black leather cover and gold-edged pages, the Muslims in the audience hold up a copy of the Koran with a black leather cover and gold-edged pages. What right do I have to say that my book is the truth? The answer: Miracles. 

When I preach about Jesus. I tell stories about the miracles Jesus did in the Bible. I tell them, as it says in Hebrews 13:8, that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” I announce that if Jesus is truly alive, He will perform miracles. Then I pray for the sick in the name of Jesus. After we pray, I invite people who have been healed to come to the platform and testify. Often dozens and sometimes hundreds of people come forward to share they have been healed. 

In my ministry I have seen blind eyes opened, deaf ears hearing, and cripples walking. These miracles prove that Jesus is alive today. The Bible says that God confirms the preaching of His word with miraculous signs (Mark 16:20). When I ask people to take the leap of faith and surrender their lives to Jesus, thousands pray with me to receive salvation. Many of them do so because of the miracles they have seen with their own eyes during the service. 

The Story of the Ethiopian Mohammad

One time I was preaching in Metu, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is about 30% Muslim and there is a high concentration of Muslims in Metu. The Muslims in Metu were not happy that I was going to be preaching about Jesus in their town. Some Muslim young people followed our team around and tore down the posters that we put up to announce our Gospel festival. At one point, these youth started a riot and threw stones at our team, with one of the stones breaking the windshield of our publicity vehicle. Because of the public disturbance, the police were called in. The Muslims blamed the riot on our team (not that that made much sense, since it was our own equipment that was being damaged). Seventeen of our team members were thrown into jail, and we had to hire a lawyer to help us get them free. Despite these problems, the festival still went forward.

However, on the first night we were disappointed because not many people attended the service. Since all our posters had been torn down, very few people knew of the festival. After the service, I prayed and asked God to do a miracle. The next night, a crippled man attended the service. This man was well known in the community, as he was always seen hobbling around on a stick and asking people for money. When we prayed for the sick that evening, Jesus touched this crippled man and he suddenly began to walk. He held his crutch up in the air and ran up to the platform to show everyone what had happened. He kept shouting, “Jesus healed me! Jesus healed me!” We asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Mohammad.” Immediately, everyone in the crowd knew he was a Muslim. Because he was healed, word began to spread that Jesus was healing Muslims. The next night, the crowd size doubled. The following night, it doubled again. By the end of our five-day festival, over fifty-five thousand people were gathered on the field to hear about Jesus. Many of these people were Muslims who wanted to see Jesus do miracles.

Miracles are a vital proof of God’s existence.

Healing evangelist Reinhard Bonnke believed that some Christians put too much emphasis on logic and not enough emphasis on miracles. He preached:  

The church has too often trusted scholarship, genius, logic, and philosophy. According to 1 Corinthians 1:27, God has chosen the foolish things to confound the wise. The apostles did not preach logic, they preached the power of God. Far too often, Christians become like lawyers in a court. We argue about Jesus to get a positive verdict on Him. This is human wisdom. Jesus needs no defending. You don’t need to defend a lion, all you need to do is open his cage. Jesus will be the judge of all the earth. We are not called to be lawyers or attorneys or barristers, we are called to be witnesses. Jesus said, “You are my witnesses.” A witness only tells what he has seen or experienced. He does not give speeches, he does not debate. The witness becomes a living piece of evidence. The living Jesus needs living witnesses. I want to be a living piece of evidence that Jesus is alive. 

Bonnke witnessed thousands of miracles during his years of ministry in Africa. The miracles he witnessed made his faith unshakable. 

Many apologists emphasize the miracles of Jesus but fail to defend the idea that miracles can happen today. In fact, there is little difference between the attitude of the cessationist (Christians who believe that miracles only happened in Bible times) and that of an atheist with regard to miracles that happen in the present: they both think that miracles do not happen. Cessationists make this mistake to avoid the difficulties of answering questions about why some people do not receive miracles and why some miracle stories appear to be hoaxes. They also want to avoid being lumped in with faith-preachers who they see as flamboyant conmen. 

But the argument against miracles is often an argument from a lack of experience. Atheists often say they have never witnessed a genuine miracle. However, once someone experiences a genuine miracle, his or her personal experience is a powerful proof of God’s existence. Healing evangelist Mike Francen says, “A miracle settles the issue.” Once someone sees a miracle with her own eyes or experiences a miracle in his own body, there is no more argument about the reality of miracles, and by extension of the existence of God. It is difficult for an atheist to talk a believer out of his or her deeply held beliefs when the believer has had significant experiences of God. Personal experience is much stronger evidence then a philosophical argument. As one evangelist said, “A man with an experience is not at the mercy of a man with an argument.”

Get your copy of Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3kIEOyA 

Buy a Study Guide for Proof God is Real: https://amzn.to/3ozDlfq 

Enroll in the Proof God is Real School of Apologetics: https://www.danielkingministries.com/proof 

About the Author:  Dr. Daniel King is a missionary evangelist who has traveled to over seventy nations in his quest for souls. His goal is to lead 1,000,000 people to Jesus every year through massive Gospel Festivals, distribution of literature, and leadership training. Because of his experience and research on evangelism, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts in mass evangelism. As an evangelist, he has a deep interest in using apologetics to convince skeptics that God is real.