Since Islam has and continues to be in the news more and more, today we're going to cover a kind of “Islam 101” class.

There are many, many topics that we might talk about when discussing Islam from a Christian point of view, but today I want to talk about the basics of what Islam is and where it came from. Perhaps we'll get into a little of how Christians should think about their Muslim neighbors.

One of the first things to point out when talking about Islam is that Islam, like Christianity, is a theistic religion. They believe that there is one God. Christians believe that there is one God. Where we part ways is in that Muslims believe that there is one person in God. Christians believe that God is tri-personal, that there is a Trinity, that there are three persons in one being. Christians are trinitarian and Muslims are unitarian. This is a huge divide because, to them, one of their greatest sins is basically a belief in the Trinity. They say that you can't add anything to God. They think, if you're saying God is a trinity, you are adding to the one person or being of God. They see this as a very large issue. We also see this as a very large issue.

It's important to understand that there are theological differences at the heart here. It’s not just how we interact in the world or how we dress, but our very conception of God is different because we are trinitarian and they are unitarian. They believe that there is one person in God.

Now that we've talked (very briefly) about the differences at a God level, I want to give you a little history of Islam.

The first thing to start out with is terms. It's interesting to me that many Christians don't know the difference in the term “Islam” and the term “Muslim”. Islam is the religion, just in the same way that Christianity is a religion. A Christian is someone who practices Christianity. A Muslim is someone who practices or follows Islam. Islam and Muslim are not interchangeable terms. A Muslim is someone who follows the religion of Islam, like a Christian is someone who follows the religion of Christianity.

Islam means “submission,” submission to God first and foremost. Muslim is a term that means “one who submits to God.” There's a very heavy submission theme in Islam.

Islam was established by Muhammad on the Arabian Peninsula in the year AD 610. This is when Muhammad started receiving (he claimed) divine revelation through the angel Gabriel. God, (Allah in Islam), would speak to Muhammad through Gabriel and dictate what came to be the Koran. The Koran is kind of like a Muslim's Bible. It is what contains their inerrant scripture.

You'll notice that this dictation of Muhammad receiving the scripture is different than Christianity. Now some Christians think this is how the Bible was given, but this isn't actually what the Bible tells us. The Bible has a dual authorship. There is a a divine author, God, and there is also a human author. There are two authors, such as that when Luke writes the Gospel of Luke, they are his words. He chose them. He has his own syntax. He has his own perspective. But they are the words of God. You can't separate these two. There is a dual authorship there. As it says in 1 Peter, "Men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” so, they are men's words and God's words. This is different than Islam, where God dictated and Muhammad wrote it down or memorized it.

Then, after its start in around AD 610, it expands. Islam grows as a religion, and by force and persuasion, Islam spreads across North Africa and the Middle East, ultimately reaching India by about the 11th century. It conquered (I use that word intentionally), largely by force, an area larger than the Roman Empire, ultimately, and in 500 to 600 years. That is a huge …

Do Christians need to keep the Old Covenant?

There are multiple groups of people who believe that Christians should keep the Old Testament law, and that we are under, still, the Old Covenant. The first of these groups of people are those who claim to be Christians, and yet say we need to keep the law to be holy before God. The second group of people, broadly speaking, are non-Christians who don't understand how covenants in the Bible work. You may have had a conversation with someone where you say that the Bible says that homosexuality is wrong, and they say, "Yeah, well where's that?" You might say, "Well, Leviticus 18:22." They're like, "Oh, that's part of the old law, so if you're going to follow that commandment and say that homosexuality is wrong, well then you can't wear clothes that have multiple fabrics in them. You can't plant crops of two different types in the same field," etc., etc. Don't eat shellfish, etc.

There is a confusion that is pervasive, about the Old Testament law. and the Old Covenant more specifically. An easy way to address this question of if Christians should keep the Old Covenant is to say, "Well, do you keep the laws of Europe?" Now if you're a citizen of Europe, hopefully you say yes, and you should. But if you're a citizen of any other continent or country, or nation group, the answer should be no. You don't keep the laws of that nation because you're under the laws of another nation.

It's the same way with covenants, broadly speaking. Growing up, I didn't know what the word “covenant” meant. A covenant is an agreement; it's an agreement between two parties. It's interesting that our Bibles are divided into an Old “Testament” and a New Testament. “Testament” is another word for covenant. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is about one covenant. Now there are actually several in there, but mainly speaking, it's about the Old Covenant, also called the Mosaic Covenant. That is an agreement-a covenant-that God made with Moses for the Nation of Israel. That's the Old Testament-the Old Covenant.

Then there's the New Testament and the New Covenant, which is an agreement that God makes, or will make, with all peoples. Let's go back to that Old Covenant. Let's learn some more about it to determine if we even should keep it. Here is what Deuteronomy 30:15-18 says.

“See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. 16 If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. 17 But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.

This is an agreement. This says, "If you do this, I will do this. However, if you don't do this, I'm going to do this other thing." God is making an agreement with the people of Israel, with Moses and his descendants. This is the Old Covenant broadly. From this, the Old Testament law becomes a part of that. Surely the Ten Commandments, but also the 613 laws in the Old Testament legal code in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Among those are: Don't have sex with animals. Don't lie with a man as one lies with a woman. Don't walk more than 1,900-something paces on the Sabbath. Among those would also be tithing. Along with that would also be regulations on how to sacrifice animals, when to do that, when not to do that. What to do if someone came in contact with blood. All of that comes al…

There are a couple of questions that seem like they should be easy for Christians to answer and yet they provide a lot of difficulty and challenge. One of those questions might be, “what is the gospel?” Now, there are some clearly wrong answers to this question, some clearly right answers, but there are potentially a lot of different ways of characterizing the one true gospel. We've done an episode on this before. It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Because on the one hand you might want to say, "Well, it's the good news of Jesus." Okay, well it is good news, but what is that good news? You didn't tell me the news yet. Is the gospel the saying that there is good news without telling you what that news is or not?

I would say it's actually the news itself, it's not simply the proclamation that there is news. This just illustrates, very briefly, that sometimes there are some simple questions that are difficult to give good answers to. Along with the question, "What is the gospel?" Is the question, "What is a gospel?" By that, I mean, one of the four gospels in our Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are called gospels, but what are they? What makes them a gospel? What makes it different than Romans? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.

I want to tell you why this matters, first off. Because, when we come to Scripture and we treat it like it's one book with one binding, we have this tendency to read everything in the same way. That's dangerous, because poetry in Psalms is not going to read the same way as the legal code in Exodus. It's not going to read the same way as Paul writing to the Galatians. It's not just that they're going to feel differently, they're different genres. Just like what makes good heavy metal music isn't going to necessarily tell you what makes good jazz music because the genres are different, we need to know what makes a gospel a gospel. What is that genre of gospel? How does that compare to, let's say, law or apocalypse (which is what Revelation is)? The genre of something really affects how we read it.

Now, this is an apologetics oriented podcast, so “why does this matter apologetically,” you might ask? Well, because how we read Scripture often will either create or answer questions, it will either create or answer problems. Some people have a very, let's say, wooden way of reading certain passages of Scripture. It actually creates something that looks like a contradiction because of the way they read it. As apologists whether you speak on these topics on a weekly basis or whether you just are faithful to have conversations with co-workers (which is probably much more of us than the former group) we still need to know how to rightly divide the word of truth, how to correctly understand different biblical genres so we don't create problems where there aren't problems, and so we can answer questions when those questions arise.

I want to talk about gospel today. What is this genre called gospel? Well, the word gospel does mean good news, and the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do contain good news, but they're more than that. It's actually difficult to describe what a gospel is, because gospels are somewhat unique. There's nothing totally like them outside of the Bible. Now, there are other genres in the ancient world that are very close to our gospels, but our gospels are unique, and so they have some unique considerations. The gospels in our Bible are really the culmination of three different things, and this is really important.

They are history, narrative, and theology all brought together. You can't always separate the historical events that Mark is describing from the theological point that he's trying to make. It's the same way with narrative of…

Recently, on Twitter, the pope said, "Let us entrust the new year to Mary, mother of God, so that peace and mercy may grow throughout the world." Now the question becomes is: How should Christians think about this? Behind this is the Roman Catholic Church's concept of Mariology, doctrine about Mary; and also, the authorities that we as Christians have in our lives. Is it just scripture alone that is the highest infallible authority in the possession of the church, or does the pope also speak for God? Does the Roman Catholic Church speak for God?

There are several issues here to think about and talk about together. The first is: Should we entrust the year to Mary, and what would that even mean? To step back a little bit, let's ask: What would it mean to entrust our lives, entrust the passage of time, to a person who is dead and yet in heaven with God? What would it mean? What are they going to be able to accomplish? It's interesting, because the Roman Catholic Church encourages people to pray to Mary, that she is a co-mediatrix with Jesus, and she helps mediate on our behalf.

Let's just ask the simple question: If I could pray to Mary or I could pray to Jesus, under what circumstances would I ever choose Mary? Or: Under what circumstances would I choose anyone besides Jesus, and how would that make sense? If you can ask God for something, why would you ever ask anyone else for that same sort of thing? You wouldn't. That doesn't make sense. So why would I entrust the year to someone who's not God, who is just in the same state I'm going to be in one day when I die? I wouldn't, not if I could entrust that year to God.

Because Mary is incapable of affecting things down here on earth. Mary is incapable of hearing our prayers here. How could a human being who now lives in heaven with God hear and understand all the prayers that are coming at them? They couldn't. There's no evidence that we suddenly gain this new skill and ability of being able to hear prayers in multiple languages at the same time just because we die. That's an attribute of God, not of man.

I'm not going to entrust the year to a person besides God. I think it's interesting that Paul's speech that he gives at the Areopagus in Acts 17 actually has something here to say. Here's what he says.

”The God who made the world and everything in it is the lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in temples made by human hands. Nor is he served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation to inhabit the whole earth, and he determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.

”God intended that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he's not far each of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring. Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man's skill or imagination. Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, he now commands all men, everywhere, to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

There is a lot in there. I want to be sensitive to the original context here, but one thing Paul's saying here is it's in God that we live and move and have our being. Without God nothing would exist. Nothing would continue to exist except for God's sustaining influence. “He holds all things together," Colossians 1 says. Why would I pray to Mary instead of the God in whom I find life and breath and in whom my life has meaning? Why woul…

I don't know if you've thought about this, but you can actually talk about Christianity like it's a story. Now you might be thinking, "I'm pretty sure in the past, Brian, you've mentioned that we shouldn't talk about ‘stories’ in the Bible. We should talk about accounts, because stories are things we tell our children before bed, and accounts are things in history that actually happened." Indeed, I have said that, but Christianity is a true story, and this is what Greg Koukl in his book The Story of Reality wants us to be able to understand. He wants to show Christians—so they can show other people—that Christianity is the true story of the way the world began, of how it ends, and of everything important that happens in between. Christianity is a story, but it's a true story. It has meaning and explanatory power for our world.

You'll notice the title of this book is The Story of Reality. That's really the big picture of what Koukl wants to impress upon us in this book. He wants us to understand the big picture of Christianity. That it's actually a picture of reality. When we talk about little points here and there in theology and the Bible, and about man and about Jesus, these are all individual pieces of a greater puzzle that really gives us a picture of the way the world is as it actually exists.

What I want to do today is give you an overview of the book. It has just started shipping, but I was actually privileged to get a pre-release copy, so I've read and it and I would like to talk with you about the content and why you should read it too. I don't often recommend books but this is a book you should certainly read.

You know it's interesting, when you ask many people: “What is Christianity? Tell me the big picture of Christianity.” They can't do it. They maybe say, "Well, it's about Jesus loving us, or it's about God creating people, or we're supposed to transform the world," but they can't give you the big picture. We don't often talk about the big picture. Some churches will spend eight years in the Book of Romans but when do we ever zoom back out and say, "What is the big storyline of the Bible, and indeed, of all of history?" That's what Koukl does in this book. He does that by breaking Christianity, and in fact, reality, into five main areas.

The first one is God. Every story starts somewhere, and our story, our true story, starts with God. Then our story says something about man—you and I. Namely it says that man is beautiful. He's made in the image of God, but he's also deeply broken, and lost, and evil. As a result of this willful acts of evil that man commits, he will experience the wrath of God.

We've got God. We've got man. And the third part of our story is Jesus. Up to this point, our story is not looking so good. Like many stories, if you were to read a book or go to a movie or watch a play, they start out well, but then something goes wrong. Something breaks in the story. It's the same way in the true story—Christianity. God created the world and it was good, but then man sinned.

This is where the story takes a turn. It's not looking so good. Everyone acknowledges that the world is broken in some way. One of the things, one of the notable lines that sticks out to me from this book, The Story of Reality, is when Koukl says that when man and woman sinned, “they broke the world.” I just had to sit there for a second and I'm like, "You know what? That's true." That's a simply profound way to say what happened. It's not just that things went wrongs. It's not just that they disobeyed God, though they did those things. They broke the world and nothing was the same after that.

That sets us up for a not-so-happy rest of the story. Man has sinned against a perfect God, and there's wrath because G…

I don't know if you've thought about this, but you can actually talk about Christianity like it's a story. Now you might be thinking, "I'm pretty sure in the past, Brian, you've mentioned that we shouldn't talk about ‘stories’ in the Bible. We should talk about accounts, because stories are things we tell our children before bed, and accounts are things in history that actually happened." Indeed, I have said that, but Christianity is a true story, and this is what Greg Koukl in his book The Story of Reality wants us to be able to understand. He wants to show Christians—so they can show other people—that Christianity is the true story of the way the world began, of how it ends, and of everything important that happens in between. Christianity is a story, but it's a true story. It has meaning and explanatory power for our world.

You'll notice the title of this book is The Story of Reality. That's really the big picture of what Koukl wants to impress upon us in this book. He wants us to understand the big picture of Christianity. That it's actually a picture of reality. When we talk about little points here and there in theology and the Bible, and about man and about Jesus, these are all individual pieces of a greater puzzle that really gives us a picture of the way the world is as it actually exists.

What I want to do today is give you an overview of the book. It has just started shipping, but I was actually privileged to get a pre-release copy, so I've read and it and I would like to talk with you about the content and why you should read it too. I don't often recommend books but this is a book you should certainly read.

You know it's interesting, when you ask many people: “What is Christianity? Tell me the big picture of Christianity.” They can't do it. They maybe say, "Well, it's about Jesus loving us, or it's about God creating people, or we're supposed to transform the world," but they can't give you the big picture. We don't often talk about the big picture. Some churches will spend eight years in the Book of Romans but when do we ever zoom back out and say, "What is the big storyline of the Bible, and indeed, of all of history?" That's what Koukl does in this book. He does that by breaking Christianity, and in fact, reality, into five main areas.

The first one is God. Every story starts somewhere, and our story, our true story, starts with God. Then our story says something about man—you and I. Namely it says that man is beautiful. He's made in the image of God, but he's also deeply broken, and lost, and evil. As a result of this willful acts of evil that man commits, he will experience the wrath of God.

We've got God. We've got man. And the third part of our story is Jesus. Up to this point, our story is not looking so good. Like many stories, if you were to read a book or go to a movie or watch a play, they start out well, but then something goes wrong. Something breaks in the story. It's the same way in the true story—Christianity. God created the world and it was good, but then man sinned.

This is where the story takes a turn. It's not looking so good. Everyone acknowledges that the world is broken in some way. One of the things, one of the notable lines that sticks out to me from this book, The Story of Reality, is when Koukl says that when man and woman sinned, “they broke the world.” I just had to sit there for a second and I'm like, "You know what? That's true." That's a simply profound way to say what happened. It's not just that things went wrongs. It's not just that they disobeyed God, though they did those things. They broke the world and nothing was the same after that.

That sets us up for a not-so-happy rest of the story. Man has sinned against a perfect God, and there's wrath because G…

(Originally posted December 2015)

Which virgin birth do you believe in?

In today's day and age, talking about a virgin birth just sounds like foolishness. There aren't many virgins out there to start with, and they're certainly not giving birth to babies. Then, when we say that we can know someone was a virgin 2,000 years ago and actually gave birth, people throw their hands up and say, "How can you believe something that just seems so foolish?" Only they probably leave out the word seems, because they actually think it's foolish.

That's what we're going to talk about today: the virgin birth of Jesus. We're also going to talk about a different virgin birth. There are actually two virgin births. Christianity believes in the virgin birth of Jesus, and, from another perspective, the atheistic world and culture believes in the virgin birth of the universe. This is pointed out just beautifully in a quote by Glen Scrivener, when he says, "Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle."

I think that's a great, insightful little quote. Because what it does is show that yes, Christians do believe in something that is miraculous and can't be explained by any natural means: how even a normal man could be born from a woman who had not had sexual intercourse. But, the other side, the materialistic side, would say that the universe came about without any cause for no purpose, from no person. Choose your virgin birth. I think that's a very interesting way to think about the divide between Christianity and atheism or materialism.

Just as a recap from previous episodes, materialism is the belief that only material things exist. There would be no God since God's not made out of material. He's not made out of stuff. He's immaterial. There would be no soul. There would be no mind. You are just your brain in your body. That's it. You are reduced to your physical components on a materialistic worldview.

On that worldview, like I've just pointed out, it has its own sort of virgin birth, the virgin birth of everything, mainly the universe and everything it contains. On the other hand, Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Now I want to answer a question. Is it reasonable to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus? I actually think it is.

There's this interesting kind of dynamic that comes into the Christian life sometimes where you'll hear someone say, "I struggle when I tell people that Jesus rose from the dead." It's like they pause because they know what they're about to stay just smacks a little of the ridiculous. Because to most people, it does.

That same person wouldn't bat an eye a lot of times at saying, "God created the whole universe. God created the world. God created man." When we start to say this guy rose from the dead, that feels different. I think it's also the same type of feeling we get sometimes when we start talking about the virgin birth. We pause because we believe it but we know it just sounds a little silly or ridiculous.

Now I think this is evidence of us living in a very secular society. Even though we don't intentionally go out to believe things that secular society says, I think nonetheless it influences how we think just existing in this society. We have to be very careful about how we think about the core truth claims of Christianity, things like the virgin birth and the resurrection.

I myself have at times felt this tendency to shy back a little from these types of claims, the miraculous claims. Now I still believe them; don't misunderstood me. Nonetheless, there's a slight hesitation because I know this just sounds weird.

I want to put forth a helpful thought. If we're…