Big-Brain Belief 1: The Revelations

A quick note for the instructor:Teacher’s notes are typed in bold text, while items meant to be read for class are in regular. Have fun, and feel free to expand and edit to suite your style! You have about an hour for the session.

Some Opening Questions

Ask these questions of your group, giving them a few minutes to come up with answers. (Please note: this lesson is specifically geared towards the skeptical/scientific/analytical unbeliever, so you will be asking some expansive and perhaps difficult questions! Read through beforehand to prepare)

What do you believe is the best way to lead an unbeliever to Christ?

What do you say when asked why you believe?

What opinions do unbelievers have about the Bible?

Is it possible to defend our belief system with other forms of evidence?

Is it right to defend our belief with evidence outside of the bible?

As you encounter unbelievers in the world around you, you may find that scriptural evidence is sometimes ineffective in making a strong case for your belief. Does this mean that scripture isn’t effective? Of course not! It just means that the personal experience and background of the individual has trained them to disregard the evidence within scripture. We, as Christians, have been given numerous ways to defend our belief and potentially open up the minds of the people in our life to the case for Christ made in scripture.

If you have a friend that is an atheist, it may be more effective to use evidence outside of scripture to make a case for a God, and then move to the powerful case made for our God through the impressive library of literature that now composes the Holy Bible!

In today’s lesson, we will:

Identify the different ways God has revealed his existence and his goodness to us.

Develop tools to help us reach unbelievers in terms that they appreciate and understand.

See an example of this approach in action in Scripture.

The Revelations

When you hear the word Revelation, what typically comes to mind? give time for answers (Apocalypse, the rapture, etc…)

Today we are going to break down two distinct ways that God has revealed himself to us as humans throughout history!

General Revelation

General revelation- refers to God’s self-manifestation through nature, history, and the inner being of the human person.

This means that the entire universe and everything in it points to the existence of God!

The beauty and organization of the natural world around defies the notion of incidental creation!

An Example from Nature:

Who here likes science? Who knows someone who thinks that science disproves the existence of God?

What do you know about DNA?

Fun Science Fact: for every DNA sequence that generates a meaningful/functional protein of 150 amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th combinations of these proteins that produce nothing. To put that in perspective, there are only estimated to be 10 to the 65th atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy! When this 10 to the 77th figure is compared to the 10 to the 40th organisms ever thought to have inhabited earth, this means that the odds of the random generation of a meaningful DNA sequence for even the simplest of organisms is less than 1 to 10 trillion-trillion-trillions!

1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000… that’s 37 zeroes! You might need to read that again for it to sink in!

An example from History:

Who here likes history?

History Fact 1: There are over 200 distinct historical flood accounts, spanning from South America to China.

History Fact 2: Remember Uriah the Hittite? Bathsheba’s first husband?

...Well, most archaeologists believed the biblical accounts of Hittite culture to be a biblical fiction, and the lack of evidence of the Hittite culture was touted to be proof of the historical inaccuracy of the biblical narrative. This continued until the mid-1800’s, when too much evidence of Hittite culture was unearthed to persist in this argument! The Bible has consistently been proven to be the best road map available to archaeologists and historians for centuries, even though they often don’t acknowledge it!

An example within human nature:

By show of hands, who here thinks people are just the worst? Give a moment for the class to respond, maybe even encourage them to agree with the premise...

Why do we think that? wait for someone to respond that people do a lot of evil things.

Well, how do we know that people do evil things?

How does everyone everywhere seem to know that stealing is bad? that murdering someone who’s innocent is bad? Be prepared for students to bring up exceptions, remind them that these exceptions are notable because they are so contradictory to social norms and ethics generally speaking.

Humans tend to understand the difference between good and evil, even if we are incapable of enacting true justice or being truly righteous! It’s almost as if there is a universal standard for what constitutes good that has been written into the very heart of humans! If you speak to any atheist, they still wholly agree that murder is wrong! Well, why is murder wrong? If there is no God, if there is no universal standard, why isn’t it okay for us to take what we want and exterminate an entire people group if they are in between us and the object of our desire? Wouldn’t that be survival of the fittest?

Once we ask these difficult questions of the unbelievers in our life, then we can point them to the answers that we find in scripture!

Nature

Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

Romans 1:20 “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

History

Job 12:23 “He makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away.”

Psalm 47:7-8 “For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm! God reigns over the nations; God sits on his holy throne.”

Acts 17:26 “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,”

Humanity

Romans 2:15 “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them”

Acts 14:15-17 ““Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.””

It’s almost as if… we can take the subjects that our unbelieving friends and family members use to defend their lack of belief, and use them to explain why it is that we do believe!

Big Question here… But even if a person can believe in a God… Why should they believe in our God?

Well, if we can successfully use Nature, History, and Humanity(General Revelations) to open a person’s mind to the existence of A God, then we can begin to make our case for why we believe that the Holy Bible(Special Revelation) provides the best answers to questions of who God is!

Special Revelation

Special Revelation refers to God’s manifestation of himself to particular persons at definite times and places, enabling those person to enter into a redemptive relationship with him.

We, as Christians, make the case for the Holy Bible as the primary and best example of God’s special revelation among all other forms of scripture.

How do the unbelievers you encounter tend to view the Bible? Give time for answers, highlighting the secular notion that scripture is unreliable or that the God of the Bible seems cruel and inhumane.

But is the Bible really unreliable? Is God cruel?

A few Fun Facts about the Bible:

The Holy Bible is comprised of 66 books with over forty writers, written over the course of almost two millennia, with each successive writer conveying staggeringly consistent messages from God and descriptions of God’s character.

There are over five thousand surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, many of which are independently corroborating copies of manuscripts written within a century of the events depicted in the Gospels. Explain that this means that there are multiple copies of the NT texts in multiple languages, written in different places and in different languages, that all match each other without any meaningful differences between them. This is still the case with the English version of the Bible! We can know with confidence that what we read in our Bible is what was written by the actual witnesses to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection!

To put this in perspective:

There are only 10 manuscripts of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, with the earliest textual evidence dating to 1000 years after the original.

There are only 5 manuscripts of Aristotle’s Poetics, with the earliest manuscript dating to 1400 years after the original.

There is little question by secular historians that the words we read in either of these documents are actually the words of their original authors. Why should we believe that Julius Caesar existed? Why should we believe that Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates ever existed?

The Bible is hands-down the most well-sourced and well-documented historical and religious text that has ever been written, and what does the Bible say about God? Allow the students to give a few answers, and then supply these answers.

He is patient:

Exodus 34:6 “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,”

That he is the source of all love:

1 John 4:7 “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”

He is self-sacrificial:

Philippians 2:8 “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”

Conclusions