by Hansol An
Last school year (2017-2018) was one of many transitions for the Youth Ministry at Lighthouse Bible Church San Diego – I, along with several other members, joined the Youth Ministry Staff; on Friday nights, we spent the first half of the year finishing a series in Ephesians that continued from the previous academic year; after returning from winter break, we split the group during the teaching time between the high schoolers and middle schoolers; Johnny Kim started a series on the book of Romans with the high schoolers; and I started a series from Children Desiring God (now Truth:78) called The Fighter Verses. These changes occurred for several practical reasons but ultimately, they all came from a desire to find the best ways to minister to the youth and equip them with God’s Word (1 Timothy 1:5).
This year we reinstated Sunday School for the youth so that the students would have another opportunity, besides Friday nights, to learn and fellowship on a week-to-week basis. When it came time to select a topic for Sunday School, we wanted to cover a topic that would not only educate them but also provide them with very practical knowledge or wisdom. One area of direct attack and challenges to the Christian faith comes from those who contend that there are no logical reasons for being a Christian or believing in a literal interpretation of the Bible. This is the presupposition of all public-school curriculum so we decided on Reasons We Believe by Nathan Busenitz. It is a concise and easy to understand book that gives an overview of the reasonableness of the Christian faith and it was familiar to our church because College Life went over it in their small groups a few years ago.
Busenitz’s book is not a comprehensive treatise on Christian apologetics. Instead, it is a survey of the reasonable case for the reliability of the Bible and person of Jesus Christ with enough references in the bibliography for someone to delve deeper, if they so desired. As its subtitle states, it provides “50 lines of evidence that confirm the Christian faith broken” down into three reasons: Reasons We Believe in God, Reasons We Believe in the Bible (two parts) and Reasons We Believe in Jesus (two parts). Since the beginning of the school year, Johnny, Cesar Vigil-Ruiz and I have been taking turns teaching through the book. Each week we cover 2 reasons.
In the section about the reasons for believing in God, some of the reasons include “Because the Existence of Our Universe Points to a Creator,” “Because the Flow of Human History Conforms to a Divine Plan,” and “Because Other Belief Systems Are Inadequate Alternatives.” In this section, Busenitz tackles the scientific and philosophical arguments against the “possibility of a personal, all-powerful deity who demanded repentance and worship from sinful human beings.” Busenitz rightly points out that without God, science and philosophy must provide an explanation as to why anything exists at all, rather than nothing. Needless to say, the academic elites have yet to provide an explanation.
He also discusses the way history has consistently supported what the Bible has revealed. He points to the tremendous success of biblical prophecy that can’t be explained away as simple luck or coincidence. “It has been calculated that the chance of only forty-eight prophecies coming true in one person is 10 to the 157th power, making it a statistical impossibility. Yet Jesus fulfilled many more than that.” In short, biblical prophecy is one evidence that history is the outworking of God’s divine purpose and not merely the culmination of chance events.
Having completed the section on the reasons Christians believe in God, we are currently in the Reasons We Believe in the Bible. It has been an encouragement to me to see our youth equipped in ways that will prepare them for what awaits them in the world. Particularly so for me as Jonas, my oldest, is now in the ministry. I pray that he and the rest of the group will someday draw upon the truths in Reasons We Believe to find confidence in the veracity of Scripture as well as to defend the faith.