I believe your wrong Jeaniebean. I believe there is good evidence to believe the bible is true. What kind of church is it that your a priestess at.

You are right Billy, I should not have commented, I dont know enough about it, I thought my post was a satisfactory answer.

Are you denying the law of non contradiction Billy?

I have never experienced anything like it in my life. I don't believe its for you to know what He told me. I am being 100% honest. I would not joke or lie about this.

I didnt mean it that way. You said I pulled the "trinity hustle" I thought that was funny. Please forgive me if I offended you.

Yes I truly believe God spoke to me, and it was the only time God spoke.

Check the scholarship, read the whole debate.

Actually it happened to me at bible college. It was absolutly random. I had a genuine encounter with the Holy Spirit.

His word declares he does.

Biblical faith is different from the definition of faith.

yes

I agree.

This is biblical faith.




So what is the right definition of faith? "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," writes the author of Hebrews. A few verses later faith is similarly defined as knowing that God exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.

Perhaps the best word we can use to translate the Greek word “pistis” (usually translated faith) is the word "trust" or "trustworthy." Suppose you tell a friend that you have faith in her. What does that mean? It means two things. First, you are sure the person you are talking to actually exists. And second, you are convinced she is trustworthy; you can believe what she says and trust in her character.

It is in this way that the writer of Hebrews talks about faith in God. Faith is knowing that God is real and that you can trust in his promises. You cannot trust someone who isn't there, nor can you rely on someone whose promises are not reliable. This is why faith is talked about as the substance of things hoped for and as the evidence of things not seen. Both words carry with them a sense of reality. Our hope is not wishful thinking. Faith does not make God real. On the contrary, faith is the response to a real God who has made Himself known to us:

"I am the LORD, and there is no other;
apart from me there is no God.
I will strengthen you,
though you have not acknowledged me,

so that from the rising of the sun
to the place of its setting
men may know there is none besides me" (Isaiah 45:5-6).

Ever since the Church began, the refrain has always been the same: Come, believe, follow the light of the world. It has never appealed for people to leap into the dark; no such invitation is found anywhere in Scripture. Instead, we are called to step into the light. The Christian gospel is not a message that revels in ignorance. It is the revelation of God in the person of Christ, so that we might know there is none besides Him. The Christian is called to see things as they really are, and not as he would simply like them to be. We trust in a God who has revealed Himself. We believe because God is real.

The Christian gospel invites you to delve into reality. It commands you to be honest in your commitment to know that which is true. Is Jesus real? Who did he claim to be? Is he really alive today? Faith comes in response to knowing the answers to these questions, even as Christ is calling you near. But don’t stop after the initial introductions! Just as you are able to put more trust in someone as you grow to know him, so faith increases as you grow in your relationship with Christ. There is a God who is real and true, and He is calling you unto Himself. The great joy of the Christian faith is found in the person who invites us to trust and believe.

No offense smiles

Bahahahhaaahahahahaah

This comes from a debate btw. William Land Craig and Bart Erhman. Craig argues for the affirmative position. Take the time to read. This is why I treat the ressurection as highly probable.







Fact #1: After his crucifixion Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb.

Historians have established this fact on the basis of evidence such as the following:

1. Jesus’ burial is multiply attested in early, independent sources.

We have four biographies of Jesus, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which have been
collected into the New Testament, along with various letters of the apostle Paul. Now the burial
account is part of Mark’s source material for the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. This is a
very early source which is probably based on eyewitness testimony and which the commentator
Rudolf Pesch dates to within seven years of the crucifixion. Moreover, Paul also cites an
extremely early source for Jesus’ burial which most scholars date to within five years of Jesus’
crucifixion. Independent testimony to Jesus’ burial by Joseph is also found in the sources behind
Matthew and Luke and the Gospel of John, not to mention the extra-biblical Gospel of Peter.
Thus, we have the remarkable number of at least five independent sources for Jesus’ burial, some
of which are extraordinarily early.

2. As a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely
to be a Christian invention.

There was an understandable hostility in the early church toward the Jewish leaders. In Christian
eyes, they had engineered a judicial murder of Jesus. Thus, according to the late New Testament
scholar Raymond Brown, Jesus’ burial by Joseph is “very probable,” since it is “almost
inexplicable” why Christians would make up a story about a Jewish Sanhedrist who does what is
right by Jesus.

For these and other reasons, most New Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried by Joseph
of Arimathea in a tomb. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the
burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”

Fact #2: On the Sunday after the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of
his women followers.

Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:

1. The empty tomb is also multiply attested by independent, early sources.

Mark’s source didn’t end with the burial, but with the story of the empty tomb, which is tied to
the burial story verbally and grammatically. Moreover, Matthew and John have independent
sources about the empty tomb; it’s also mentioned in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles
(2.29; 13.36); and it’s implied by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church (I Cor. 15.4).
Thus, we have again multiple, early, independent attestation of the fact of the empty tomb.

2. The tomb was discovered empty by women.

In patriarchal Jewish society the testimony of women was not highly regarded. In fact, the
Jewish historian Josephus says that women weren’t even permitted to serve as witnesses in a
Jewish court of law. Now in light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who are the
discoverers of Jesus’ empty tomb. Any later legendary account would certainly have made male
disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb. The fact that it is women, rather than
men, who are the discoverers of the empty tomb is best explained by the fact that they were the
chief witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb, and the Gospel writers faithfully record what, for
them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact.
I could go on, but I think enough has been said to indicate why, in the words of Jacob Kremer, an
Austrian specialist on the resurrection, “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the
biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”


Fact #3: On different occasions and under various circumstances different individuals and
groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.

This is a fact which is virtually universally acknowledged by scholars, for the following reasons:

1. Paul’s list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances guarantees that such
appearances occurred. Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to his chief disciple Peter, then to the inner circle of disciples
known as the Twelve; then he appeared to a group of 500 disciples at once, then to his younger
brother James, who up to that time was apparently not a believer, then to all the apostles.
Finally, Paul adds, “he appeared also to me,” at the time when Paul was still a persecutor of the
early Jesus movement (I Cor. 15.5-8). Given the early date of Paul’s information as well as his
personal acquaintance with the people involved, these appearances cannot be dismissed as mere
legends.

2. The appearance narratives in the Gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of the
appearances.

For example, the appearance to Peter is attested by Luke and Paul; the appearance to the Twelve
is attested by Luke, John, and Paul; and the appearance to the women is attested by Matthew and
John. The appearance narratives span such a breadth of independent sources that it cannot be
reasonably denied that the earliest disciples did have such experiences. Thus, even the skeptical
German New Testament critic Gerd Lüdemann concludes, “It may be taken as historically
certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to
them as the risen Christ.”


Fact #4: The original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that Jesus was risen
from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary.

Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus’ crucifixion:

1. Their leader was dead.

And Jewish Messianic expectations had no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over
Israel’s enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

2. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and
immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised
Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. But then the obvious
question arises: What in the world caused them to believe such an un-Jewish and outlandish
thing? Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, muses, “Some sort of
powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest
Christianity was.”5 And N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty
tomb behind him."

The Bible does not say the earth is a thousand years old.

The days in Genesis are not necessarily twenty four hour days. The word yom in Hebrew means both a twenty four hour period and a period of undetermined time. So the length of creative days in Genesis is not specified.