Warning to the church an ancient foe is on the move:  Modern Gnosticism

It is back.  Well maybe it never went away.  Modern Gnosticism is once again spreading its version of the truth and trying to convince us that dark is light, up is down and it has the secret knowledge to joy, peace and salvation.
Over my years in ministry, I have met with several individuals who were excited to share with me their secret wisdom and message from God.  I love it when the Spirit (of the Lord) speaks, but I am always cautious and the first question I have is, “How do you know it is from God and not from a demon?” 
I have never met anyone who claimed that their message was from a demon and not from God, but I have encountered many who clearly had been let astray be it by voices or ancient texts that were not from God.  With some individuals I was able to use reason and logic and lead back to the truth.  Once the error of their thinking was pointed out, they rejoiced and were self-ashamed by how easily they were deceived.  I remind my friends that "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light," (2 Corinthians 11:14), and one of his greatest tricks is his ability to make evil appear good or godly.  I encourage people to not live into the shame of being deceived but live into the joy of knowing Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  Sadly, some individuals refuse to engage in a logical discussion and move further into the darkness of their “secret knowledge.”  Because their reasoning is not based in logic or reality it is always difficult to converse with an individual deceived by the trappings of Gnosticism.  This is not a new movement but one that existed form the beginning of the church and as always it must be confronted. 
One of the most difficult groups to reason with is the modern Gnostic movement.  You may not have heard of some of these cults, but you have probably heard of some of their teachings.  Modern Gnostic cults promote a secret revealed knowledge of God apart from Scripture.  They believe that the Bible has been corrupted and that a new revelation from an angelic source as in the “Course in Miracles,” “Christian Science” or an ancient text has given them “secret knowledge.”  The ancient texts referenced are known as Gnostic Gospels or Apocryphal Gospels.  In either case individuals in these cults claim a mystical secret knowledge that must be believed in first and later understood.  These Gnostic teaching always demand a blind faith where an individual must first have faith or belief in the material in order to understand it or receive the “secret knowledge” available.  The phrase “secret knowledge,” is the tell card as Gnosis literally means “secret knowledge.”
It is important to first recognize that for a devoted Gnostic believer, the act of faith or believe in must precede understanding.  Their circular argument is always “You don’t understand because you don’t believe.  If you would first believe then you would understand.”  Rational thinking and logic are quickly dismissed because the rest of us are unwilling to open our minds and be enlightened to the “secret knowledge” that only a select few possess.  Another way to state the belief in Gnosticism is that once you believe without evidence your faith will bear witness to a truth others cannot comprehend because their minds and souls are closed to the work of the supernatural being.  “Enlightenment” is the key buzz word for modern Gnosticism. 
For those of us who use logic and reason to support our faith (Biblical faith is based on reason and evidence), we are deceived by the Biblical teachings and indoctrination of the church.  Our minds are closed and unable to conceive of what cannot be understood without first believing.  Like the famous scene from the Matrix, we must choose to take the red pill before we can be free from the illusion of the Matrix we are in.  To be fair to my Gnostic friends, it is possible that we are all deceived and living in a false reality.  I confess that I do live with a closed mind if that means I follow evidence and want my faith to be supported by evidence and reason. 
One of the core sources for the secret knowledge is the Gnostic gospels which were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.  The Nag Hammadi Library holds a collection of thirteen ancient books containing over fifty texts including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth and the Secret Book of John.  All of these books were written after the first century AD (that is between100 years to 200 years after Christ).  These books were written to present an alternative, mystical interpretation of Jesus’s teachings that focused on inner enlightenment rather than his public ministry and teachings.  The Gnostic gospels were authored by early Christian Gnostic groups not by the false titles given them.  The Gnostic Gospels teach that salvation comes through acquiring secret knowledge (gnosis) about the nature of God, the soul, and the spiritual realm. 
The earlies Gnostic Gospel is believed by many to be the Gospel of Thomas, written around AD 140.  (The latest of the four Biblical Gospels is John written around 90 AD).  The Gospel of Thomas was not written by the Apostle Thomas but was given his names to appear as a credible source for the secret knowledge.  All the Gnostic gospels teach that the individual, once enlightened, has a secrete power over their world and has control of their salvation.  Gnosticism teaches that by learning the secret knowledge one can be saved and not by submission to the will of God and reliance upon the atonement of Jesus upon the cross.  This teaching is very seductive because we all want to be in control and have power.  The concept of secret knowledge puts the weight of salvation back on the individual.  This temptation is not new; in fact, it is the oldest temptation and deception recorded in the Bible as the very first sin in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve wanted to be like God (Genesis 3). Adam and Eve wanted to be in control of their own lives and morality.
Gnosticism often has a dualistic view of the universe, where the material world is considered evil or a prison, while the spirit is divine.  Modern Gnosticism if also heavenly influenced by Buddhism, as the two worldviews align to present an illusion of control over one’s life through secret knowledge.  Accordingly, only those with the Gnosis (secret, experiential knowledge) are saved because they have become enlightened while the rest of us live in darkness and ignorance. 
Stop, Pause:  Let’s think this through…
The fact that there is a secret knowledge that God has not revealed to everyone means that the god of Gnosticism is uncaring, not all powerful, not self-existing, not separate from creation, and not just.  This realization alone should cause us to have great concern because we know that God must be self-existing, separate from all creation (God is Aseity), God is all powerful (omnipotent), all knowing (omniscience), all loving, all good, and just.  These are attributes of God that we discover in the Bible and are also evident from the grounds of logic (General Revelation).  As an example, because good exists, God must be good.  There could not be good in the world if God was not good.  Evil is a corruption of good therefor evil cannot exist without good, but good which is from God can exist without evil.  Therefore, because there is good in the world God must be all good.  If God is all good, why would there be a secret knowledge only available to a select few who must ignore their God-given ability to reason in order to believe it?  Is God incapable to communicating effectively.  The Biblical God of logic revealed in both General Revelation and Special Revelation is incompatible with the teachings of Gnosticism.  One must choose between the all loving- all powerful – all knowing etc… God of scripture and the impotent, unloving god of Gnosticism. 
Another way to express the difference is to take the core teaching of Gnosticism “Salvation through secret knowledge and compare it to the teachings of Scripture.  In Gnosticism once one believes they are enlightened with the secret knowledge.  Through this “secret knowledge” an individual earns or enables their salvation, and they have control over their lives.  But to be fair to the teachings of Gnosticism salvation is not from evil but from ignorance.  According to Gnosticism Evil is an illusion which exists only in the mind of the individual not enlightened.  The material world is evil and pulls individuals into darkness, but the enlightened individual is able to separate themselves from the deception of the material world. 
For the Christian evil is real.  For the father who has lost his son to cancer, evil is real.  To the female child molested by the adult male, evil is real.  To the Jews slaughtered in death camps during World War II, evil is real.  Evil is not an illusion.  Evil is a corruption of good and a present reality.  The Gnostic worldview demands that evil is an illusion because we hold onto the things of this world tightly and are unenlightened.  The solution to evil for the Gnostic is to deny it exists, thus denying reality as we all know and experience it.  Those of us who are un-enlightened are trapped in the darkness believing in real evil. 
For the Christian evil painfully exists and is very present.  Evil was invited into the world when Adam and Eve rejected God’s authority over their lives in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3).  Do not miss that the temptation was to partake of the fruit from the Tree of KNOWLEDGE of good and evil.  Since that moment all humanity has lived under the curse of the corruption of evil and its impact.  But God who is all good, all loving, all just created a solution for evil, and it was the cross.  On the cross God himself, fully man – fully God, gave his life as an atonement for sin and evil.  Those who believe in the word, work, and person of Jesus Christ, put their faith in him and repent of their sins receive salvation as a gift.  It is not something earned or a secret made available to only a few.  It is a gift for all people, of all nations, at all times. It is a gift that is rationally received by investigating the reliability of the Bible, the historical facts of Jesus, and the revelation of God’s presence in the world.
Let me return to the discussion of the Gnostic Gospels for a moment since it might be unfamiliar with my readers. 
The Gnostic gospels are not gospels at all.  These books falsely attached the names of famous Christians to their writings, such as the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip, the gospel of Mary, etc.  The reason the Gnostic gospels attached name of the Apostles was to appear to give them legitimacy in the early church.  These books are not hidden in the basement of the Vatican as Dan Brown wrote in the DaVinci Code.  These writings are available at most public libraries and are available online.  When one takes the time to read the Gnostic gospels, they are a fun read.  They present a much for fictional, comic book Jesus as if Marvel or DC comics were making up a story rather than the historical Jesus found in the four actual Gospels.  The books are filled with self-contradicting stories and while there are some similarities between the four Canonical Gospels and the Gnostic gospels, there are direct contradictions in both historical recounting of Jesus life and theological presentation of God.  
Two of my favorite stories in the Gnostic gospels are of Jesus making birds out of clay as a small boy and bringing them to life.  This is found in the Gospel of Thomas.  In the gospel of Peter the cross walks out of the Tomb ahead of Jesus pronouncing the resurrection.  How fun is that, a wooden structure walking and talking.  In these false gospels, Jesus is portrayed as angry an unenlightened to the secrete knowledge which must be learned.  Jesus is often seen using his power for personal glory which contradicts his very nature taught in the Bible.  In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (different from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas), Jesus as a child uses his divine power to kill other children.  Clearly, we are not talking about the same Jesus found in the four Biblical Gospels.
 The Gnostic gospels promoting false teachings about virtually every core Christian doctrine stemming from a distortion of Jesus teachings.  In this we often see the Gnostic gospels take a phrase or teaching of Jesus and distort it, remove it from context or modify it to fit the narrative of the secret knowledge Gnosticism promotes.  The Gnostic gospels can be a good source for the study of early Christian heresies, but they are not taken seriously by historians as to their accuracy of recording the life and events of Jesus.   
The believers in the Gnostic gospels and modern Gnostic movements represent a religious movement moving people not into enlightenment but into darkness.  As the prophet Isaiah wrote, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter,” (Isaiah 5:20).  The Gnostic cults and their teachers must be addressed with kindness and respect, but they must be confronted for their presentations of false teachings.  The core of Gnosticism is in direct contradiction to the teachings of scripture which is based on God’s creation of humanity with the faculties of logic and reason.  The God of scripture has gone to great lengths to reveal himself to all humanity and to clearly communicate to those who wish to examine the evidence of his existence in both General Revelation and Special Revelation.  The best advice when talking with someone who believes in Gnosticism is to help them see that their practical lives are not based on secret knowledge and thus, they live in a contradiction.  They would not encourage someone to get in the imaginary flying car by encouraging them they must first believe it exists then it will exist.  Once a person is invested in self-delusion only then can they feel and experience the non-existent flying car.  Orthodox Christianity encourages someone to first meet the mechanic, study the history of the automobile, and investigate the car, watch the car be driven by someone else, get testimony from a driver and a passenger who have bene in the car and then after all the evidence is collected take a ride.

Jesus In The Passover Meal
The “Last Supper,” was a traditional Jewish Seder held in Jerusalem, remembering the Passover event in Exodus 12-13. Jesus would have been celebrating the traditional meal of roasted lamb, Matzah (unleavened bread), and bitter herbs. It is difficult for modern readers to understand the magnitude of what Jesus did by changing the symbolism at the Seder meal. For over 1,400 years, Jews had celebrated the Exodus story in a very similar manner according to the prescription by God. Then, in one single moment, the 1,400-year-old tradition was changed because Jesus was instituting a “New Covenant.” It would be comparable to myself declaring that next year at Christmas, the entire celebration was going to be about me. We would all say Merry-Aaron, put up Aaron-trees, and give gifts celebrating Aaron’s day. While this would be ludicrous, it is also the reason C.S. Lewis declared that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or God. He did not leave us any room to relegate Him simply as a good teacher. Jesus claimed to be God and therefore had the authority to change the meal that once celebrated liberation from slavery in Egypt, to liberation from slavery to sin.
In the Exodus story, God sent the angel of death through Egypt to kill all the firstborn sons, because Pharoh refused to free the Israelites slaves (Exodus 12-13). All firstborn sons would die unless the family had the blood of a lamb painted on their doorposts. When the angel of death moved through Egypt, he would “pass over” the homes of the Israelites, because the lamb’s blood had been accepted as a substitution for the life of the son. After this event, Pharaoh allowed the Israelites to leave Egypt, and Moses began leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. To help the Israelites remember this dramatic story, God instructed them to hold an annual Passover Seder meal that included elements from the Exodus storyline.
The Seder meal would include honey, bitter herbs, lamb, unleavened bread, and four cups of wine: these different portions serve as symbols representing sanctification, judgment, redemption, and praise. The unleavened bread would be called “Matzah”. The Passover Matzah bread was prepared in a special manner that has great visual symbolism for the modern church. The bread could not contain any yeast. In Biblical symbolism, yeast represented sin and impurity. The bread was also striped because it is baked in an oven, causing striped lines to be on the bread. The third representation of the Matzah bread is that it was pierced with small holes to prevent it from puffing up during baking. The completion of the symbolism of the bread comes into play when Jesus breaks it and declared “This is my body broken for you…” (Mark 14:22). When we examine the Matzah bread and know that Jesus used it as a symbol for his body upon the cross, we should remember the prophetic words of Isaiah:
Isaiah 53:4-5
“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
While the gospel narratives do not reveal every detail about the Last Supper, there are some very interesting connections that should be emphasized. Before the Seder meal, three pieces of Matzah bread are placed inside a special bag called a “Matzah Tash”. At the start of the meal, the leader takes the middle Matzah bread, and he breaks it in half. One half is placed back in the bag, while the other half, the “Afikomen” (Greek word meaning "that which comes after" or "dessert") is taken away from the table and hidden for children to find later. The Matzah that is kept in this bag represent the "bread of affliction" and signifies the hurried exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
The Matzah Tash in which the Matzah bread was placed in a specialized, often decorative, bag or cloth cover with three internal compartments. Each compartment holds three pieces of unleavened bread (Matzah). Hebrew tradition has a few different views on why there are three compartments, but it is interesting to note that the bread which represents Jesus was kept in a bag of three spaces all containing the same element. One cannot help but see a possible reference to the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons, one being.
The Afikomen, the piece of Matzah that was hidden, was and is wrapped in a cloth and taken away from the table, possibly even outside the house. At the end of the meal the children are invited to go find the Afikomen. It is like an easter egg hunt. Once found, the bread is returned to the table, the bread is broken, and everyone receives a piece of the bread for dessert. The Afikomen is to be eaten before midnight. It is the finale of the meal, ensuring the taste of Matzah remains last in both taste and remembrance, as it represents the finality of the redemption where the lamb gave its life as a ransom for ours.
When Jesus changed the Last Supper to signify a new Exodus, he was using familiar symbols and stories while revealing a new act that was about to unfold in the redemption story. The narrative of God’s faithfulness was about to crescendo upon the cross. The act of atonement, where Jesus substituted his life for ours, was just hours away as he broke the Passover bread and shared the cup of wine with the disciples.    
Remember that the message of the 10th plague was that God was holy and just. Love cannot be love without justice. But humanity could not pay the price for our sins. The Apostle Paul wrote, “The wages of sin is death,” (Romans 6:23). Since God is the God of the living, not the dead, (Mark 12:27), sin caused separation from God. Only a perfect, eternal sacrifice could substitute in our place. God, who is just, loving, and holy, is also merciful. In the first Passover, God devised a way in which he could be both just and merciful. When Jesus picked up the third glass of wine at the Passover meal, he was reminding his disciples that God was still both just and merciful, and he would give salvation through his substitution.
There are four cups of wine drunk in the Passover meal. The third cup is most likely the one that Jesus spoke, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them,” (Mark 14:24). The third cup is the “Cup of Redemption.”  The fourth cup is the “Cup of Praise,” but Jesus did not take this cup. Instead, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God,” (Mark 14:25). Just as the lamb’s blood substituted for the life of the first born upon the wooden beams of the door post. So too the blood of the Lamb of God would be the substitutionary payment for the wages of our sins upon the wooden beams of the cross.  Jesus offered us salvation from sin by taking our place upon the cross.  By accepting the gift of salvation from Jesus he is requiring that we submit to his Lordship.  Jesus commands us to take up our cross and follow him.  This act of obedience should change everything about our lives as we seek to be more Christ-like.
The final note I wish to emphasize as we remember the Last Supper is what took place before the meal. The question might be, “who is the meal and the sacrifice for?” Often, I hear people tell me that they are not worthy to take communion. I remind those who feel this sentiment that Jesus original meal of salvation was offered even to Judas. Jesus could have prevented Judas from gathering with him and the other disciples or even kicked him out of the group before the trip to Jerusalem. Instead, Jesus offered one last chance for Judas to discover the beauty of redemption that he was offering. This picture of Jesus offering the one who betrayed him grace gives me hope. The many times I have betrayed Jesus does not exclude me from the table of grace. It does not exclude you either. We are all equal and blessed to be recipients of the atonement of Jesus our Lord.  Judas rejected God gift of grace symbolized in the Last Super communion moment.  Will you reject or submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and receive the gift of grace?

The manger:
A free, necessary gift of grace, which is very costly.

Let us talk correctly about the theology and sacrifice of the incarnation which is found at Christmas time in a manger.
The question might be asked, “I've heard preachers say that God gives us salvation as a free gift. If that's true, then why doesn't God go ahead and give it to everyone?”
The gift of Christmas, which is to say, the gift of the Incarnation, which is also to say that the gift of Jesus’ life given in atonement for our sins, is available to everyone.  But many reject the free, but necessary gift because it costs them too much. 
God's sacrifice, Jesus dying for humanity's sins, is a free gift of salvation from God.  At the same time, it was immensely costly for God as Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity had to leave heaven, add the nature of humanity to his divine nature and sacrifice his life for humanity.  While the gift is free and necessary, it also costs us our captivity to self and sin.  While it seems odd to suggest that someone might prefer captivity to sin verses the surrender of their will to the Lordship of Christ, this is the gift of free will God gives us.  We as humans possess the ability to reject God’s gift of grace or embrace the gift which will demand us living in alignment with God’s will.  This is often communicated as a personal acceptance (faith) from the receiver.  Thus, it is a true statement that the gift of grace is freely given, costly to God and thereby costly to the recipient to embraces the free gift. 
God’s word reveals that salvation is a free gift offered to all humanity.   This is why the angel appeared to the Shepherds and proclaimed,
“But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord,” (Luke 2:10-11).
Notice that the news was good for all people, in all places, at all times.  What was the good news?  Jesus had come to pay the wages of sin by presenting himself as our atonement.  The Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Rome, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).  This is a crucial verse because many translators insert theology into the verse for clarity.  Often the verse is read, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (NKJV).  The word used for “gift” is (charisma, χάρισμα) which is defined as a "a gift of grace, a free gift or an undeserved favor.”  There is no Greek word for “free” in the Greek that could be translated as free.  The English word free is added to emphasize the theological point that the gift of salvation is "free."  Because of the meaning of the word (charisma) which is a gift of grace, ie, free, the meaning is already inherent in the noun itself.
The gift of grace is both freely given and a necessary, and requires a life-altering commitment. While free to receive, it's not "cheap"; it redeems from sin but calls for a transformed, sacrificial life in return, reflecting devotion.  The atonement is a free act in that its motivations come from within God himself.  By way of similarity, I bought a Christmas gift for a friend yesterday from the store.   When I give it to my friend it will be a free gift to him.  At the same time, the gift was not free.  We therefore speak of Christ act of atonement as a free act from God and also a act of necessity.  The historic consensus of the Church is that Jesus had to die for our sins in order for people to be saved.  Once God had freely decreed to save sinners, the death of Jesus was the necessary means by which that salvation was accomplished. 
The Bible also tells us two important truths about God’s gift of salvation. First, it tells us it was a free gift which cost Jesus everything and secondly that it was a necessary gift.  While the gift of the incarnation and sacrifice upon the cross was free for us it cost Jesus his earthly life and the recognition of the price paid for our salvation should never be lost or far from our thoughts.  Jesus death upon the cross should never be diminished to cheap grace which is no grace at all.  Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance.  As Detrich Bonhoeffer wrote,
“Cheap grace means, justification of sin but not of the sinner.  Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways.  Our action is in vain.  The world remains the world, and we remain sinners even in the best of lives,” (Bonhoffer Discipleship pg. 43).
Remember when we sin, we create an eternal debt that only an eternal being can pay.  By offering himself as the Second Person of the Trinity God was exercising mercy while at the same time upholding his character as the one who judges sin with perfect judgment.  In this sense God is both the justifier and just. 
Atonement is to bring about the reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans.  Christ himself, spoke of his blood being shed in such an act of justice, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” (Mattew 26:28).  The author of the book of Hebrews picked up on Jesus New Covenant language when he likened Christ both to the High Priest who offered the sacrifice and the sacrificial animal stating,
“For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant,” (Hebrews 9:15).
Without the sacrifice there would be no hope for sinners to be freed from sin because no amount of good works could offset the eternal debt of sin which we owed.  Again, the author of the book of Hebrews wrote, “In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,” (Hebrews 9:22).
There is no other way to be free from sin than though Jesus Christ.
To avoid the error of cheap grace thinking we must also remember that to accept the gift of grace we must surrender to the Lordship of Jesus over our lives.  A way to think of this is that the gift of justifying grace is offered to everyone.  The gift of new birth is offered to those who repent so that they might become the new creation.  The gift of sanctification while offered to everyone must be received and lived into.  A person cannot follow Christ and relish sin.  The deliverance Christ offered is freedom from the bondage of sin.  The Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Galatia, “He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit,” (Galatians 3:14).  When we surrender to the Lordship of Jesus we can experience the true blessing of Emmanuel, God is with us.  The Holy Spirit is able to reside within a soul that has surrendered to the Lordship of Christ. 
But the Bible also tells us a second truth: Like any other gift, God’s gift of salvation doesn’t become ours until we accept it. Just as we can refuse the gift someone offers us, so we can refuse God’s gift of salvation. But why would we? Don’t let this happen to you, but by faith reach out and accept Christ into your life today.
The doctrine of the Incarnation is that he divine Son, who from all eternity is God in the same full sense that the Creator-Father and the Holy Spirit are divine, completely and permanently joined himself to our human nature to form one person fully-God, fully-human.

Part 2  Christmas: the Eternality and Justice of God
This past month I had the difficult responsibility of helping a family through a very strenuous time.  Their teenage daughter had encountered someone online who had been grooming her for inappropriate photos and information.  The father wanted to kill the perpetrator, the mother wanted to send him to jail for life, and both wanted to provide the best care for their daughter.  In this particular instance the parents had learned to the situation early enough that while things had progressed beyond appropriate there was little legal action that could be taken against the perpetrator.  The mother made the comment, “I can’t believe how bad things in this world have become.  There is no justice for our children.”  In that moment her statement hung in the air with a silent chill.  For days my heart broke with the family as I sympathized with deep feelings of injustice.
Justice is a difficult concept for our culture.   For most Americans getting justice means receiving fair treatment, and having wrongs righted.  Often justice is delegated to the legal system whose responsibility is to protect the innocent and ensure impartial judgments for all sides of a situation.  If you have worked with the legal system or watched enough legal television dramas, you are aware that the correct outcome of a case is not always the conclusion.  There are many situations where evil appears to win and sometimes having the best lawyer who can perform the best show is more important than being right.  But why does it matter so much to us that the right or correct outcome should take place.
If there is no God, then there can be no objective morality and there is no true right and wrong.  Yet I have yet to encounter someone who truly lives consistently with this belief.  Instead, we observe that even in children there is a deep sense of fairness and desire for “right” behavior.  When a child cuts in line for the drinking fountain at school, another child with quickly say, “Stop, that’s not right!”  When a preschooler takes the sucker away from another student who is weaker than they are, someone will complain, “That’s not fair.”  The Biblical worldview argues that humans are made in God's image and therefore we possess innate moral compass reflects His character.  One of the attributes of God that we posses as image bearers is justice.  
Biblically, justice is a term used to describe what is right or “as it should be.”  Justice is one of God’s attributes and is part of His holiness.  Justice and righteousness are often used synonymously in the Bible. When speaking of God's attribute of justice, we are acknowledging that God upholds perfect fairness.  There are no sins overlooked and no evil unaccounted for.  God as perfect judge, holds everyone accountable, punishes evil, and rewards good as part of the outworking of God’s perfect character.  This is all essential to speak correctly and understand the magnitude of Christmas.  What was so important and crucial that God himself had to leave Heaven and become incarnate?  The answer is us.
I regularly hear an argument made against God’s loving nature stated this way: “How can a loving God send someone to Hell?”  It is a poorly thought-out critique of God because love is not the only attribute that is God’s being.  God is also a God of holiness and justice.  My response is usually that God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, he simply does not force anyone to be in Heaven with him.  If the person is willing to listen and engage further in the conversation I often state, “The real question is how could a just and righteous God let any of us evil creatures into Heaven?”  If God is holy, righteous and just, which scripture and logic support as three basic attributes for God, then how could he abide any imperfection in his presence.  The response is that God could not.  Where sin abides the Spirit of God cannot.  Therefore, either no human can ever enter into the presence of God which is Heaven, or humans must be purified from the inside out.  A total transformation of the individual must transpire so that the sinner is justified and made holy.  This is the foundational understanding of why Jesus' sacrifice was necessary to satisfy divine justice.  Through the atonement of Christ God’s attribute of love and justice was balanced upon each side of the cross beam Jesus hung upon.  The cross ensures moral order, and promises ultimate vindication for the oppressed, making His actions meaningful.
Modern culture does not like to talk about God’s justice and righteousness.  In our postmodern minds we resist the idea that there are absolutes, moral laws, and objective standards by which all humanity is measured.  God is most commonly viewed as a senile grandfather who just wants all his children to be happy so he does not care about their behavior.  But this is not the Biblical God.  God does not age, does not change, does not become anything, so God cannot become senile.  God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  But God is not on trial in this document, humanity is on the dock.
We are rebellious, sinful creatures.  Sin is part of our identity, not taught.  A parent does not have to teach a two-year-old child to be selfish.  A parent does have to teach their children to share and not beat their infant brother and sister.  There is something broken deep within us and when we truly examine the depths of our soul it is not purity that we discover but a nature that rebels against the authority and holiness of God.  Logically if Heaven is filled with being that are in rebellion against God, then it will not be Heaven, but another type of Hell on Earth.  God’s solution was not to abandon humanity or to destroy us all and start over.  God’s solution was to redeem and sanctify those who would accept the gift of grace and eternal salvation.  To accomplish this God became incarnate and became the sacrifice for our sins.  This is why Jesus came to earth.  This is why the Gospel of Matthew records within the birth announcement the purpose of the incarnation:
“She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins,” (Matthew 1:21).
From the beginning of time and then from the very moment of miraculous conception, the mission of Jesus was a rescue operation.  A mission only God himself could accomplish.  The redemption mission meant that God must become incarnate.  As I stated in part one of this article, when we sin against an eternal being, we create an eternal debt against the eternal being.  For the sacrifice of atonement to be able to reconcile the debt of sin we owed against an eternal being, the sacrifice would have to be an eternal being.  From logic we know there can only be one eternal being, therefore, God himself must become the sacrifice if God is just and righteous.  This act of God becoming human is called the incarnation.  To speak correctly of the Incarnation, we should communicate that at Jesus’ birth the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity.  This took place so that Jesus could take upon himself our sins and in return we receive the gift of grace which is able to transform our hearts and make us holy before God.   Throughout the gospels we see both the incarnation language and the sacrificial language united to describe the person and mission of Jesus.  In the most famous Biblical passage of all, we see the inseparability of the incarnation and the atonement work:
“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  NKJV).
Here I must confess I still love the New King James interpretation of the Greek, still use of the word “begotten” for the Greek word (Monogenēs) which means: “single of its kind, only.”  Jesus was not birthed by traditional sexual relations, nor was he created.  Jesus was begotten as the second person of the trinity that eternally existed as part of the God head, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  In an incredible act of love and sacrifice God invented Christmas by becoming incarnate.  This is why the Gospel of John describes the event stating, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth,” (John 1:14 ESV).  Peterson’s paraphrase is my favorite description of the incarnation, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.  We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”  (John 1:14 Message).  The God of justice, acted out of his attribute of love and instead of keeping his distance, he moved into the neighborhood.  But what God moved in?  From inception the church has been fighting heresies that claimed Jesus was not fully God.
Arianism believed that Jesus was a lesser created being.  This is also true of modern Day church of Latter-Day Saints, (Mormons and also true of Jehovah’s Witness).  Adoptionism claimed that Jesus became divine later in life once he learned that he was God.  Ebionitism claimed that Jesus was a mere man/prophet which is what those who practice Islam believe.  Finally, Gnosticism taught that Jesus was a divine revealer of secret knowledge, which is believed by many who try to harmonize Jesus with Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.  But in order for the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross to be efficacious Jesus had to be fully God.  This is why the Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Colossae describing Jesus, as “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” (Colossians 1:15).
The Greek word used for invisible (aoratos) means literally unseen.  God, the First Person of the Trinity, is not made of material and is not physical.  This is what makes the incarnation so amazing.  That God in the invisible became visible in the flesh.
The Greek word used for image is, (eikōn) which means “an image, figure, or likeness.”
Christ alone is the one supremely who makes the invisible God visible.  Christ is the manifestation of all that is the unseen God made physical in this world.  In 1Corinthians 15:49 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 Paul used the term, (eikōn) for the resurrected and exalted body that we shall share in through Christ.  The new imperishable, physical body that we shall inherit in the Kingdom of God is made possible because the last Adam gave himself as an atonement for our sins.  The eternal became flesh to die for us in order to present the bride of Christ as spotless before the throne of grace.  The resurrection was the supreme expression of the image of God and the event which validated Jesus’ clam to be God.  Where the first Adam failed to be truly human Jesus in the image of God gave us the example of what it means to be truly human.  God created Adam and Eve in his image, Genesis 1:26-27, but they failed to live into their created identity.  From dust Adam was made and from the side of Adam eve was made.  Jesus was not made.  Jesus was not created but is the eternal, invisible God in the flesh.  Jesus is not a similar version of God but is God in the incarnation.
To be clear Adam was made in the image of God, while Jesus existed in the form of God.  Adam, the first human sought to become like God though he was already made in the image of God (Genesis 3:4-5).  In contrast Jesus who is the exact image of God sought to humble himself and refused the privileges of being God in human form as seen in Philippians 2:6-8.  Adam: grasped at a dignity to which he had no right while Christ renounced a status to which he had every right.  The Apostle Paul wrote about his in his letter to the church of Philippi, quoting one of the oldest creeds of the church:
“[Jesus] Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Jesus is not another God.  Jesus is not a replica of God.  Jesus is God.  Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the complete form of God.  In the manager we see the addition the form of humanity to divinity to become something totally unique and unthought of.  The everlasting God wrapped himself in the temporary to rescue us from sin.  Here we should pause in amazement at the length and depth of God’s love for us.  That God would leave all the comforts and glory of heaven and lower himself to a human and then die for our sins.  What love the Father has lavished upon us.  It is from this perspective that claiming there is any other way to obtain salvation is not only folly but to ignore the sacrifice of Jesus and the very love of God.  The birth of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas is a unique event when the one being who created all things and is outside of all things, while sustaining all things, took upon himself the weakness and vileness of all things to save those who want rescued from sin.  Laying in the feeding trough we find God’s infinite love and infinite justice both being satisfied in the mystery of the incarnation.
While earthly justice may be delayed and there are imperfections in our courts of law, there are no imperfections in God’s court.  God is holy, only the holy shall abide with God, and this is what will be the conversation point of the third installment of this article.

Explaining Christmas Part 1
One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O come O come Emmanuel.  The first verse reads,
“O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.  That mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”
My soul feels this verse.  In the darkness, I know the loneliness, captivity, and weight of the sin oppressing my soul.  Daily, I am frustrated with the exile from the Garden of Eden and the presence of God that we were created to experience.  Deep from within I cry out, “O come, O come Emmanuel.”
My cry is not that just anyone would come.  A superhero wearing tights could not rescue me from the separation from God.  There is no political plan or economic answer to the problem of sin.  What is needed is the fullness of the power of God in physical form.  What is required for the rescue of the soul is the Emmanuel.
Why is it that only such a being can rescue us?  S
Sin, regardless of whom the assault was against, is ultimately an offence against God.  God is an eternal being.  The debt created by sinning against an eternal being is an eternal debt.  The only way to pay off an eternal debt is by the sacrifice of something eternal.  There is only one being that is eternal, namely God. Therefore, God himself is the only sacrifice that is able to make atonement for my sins.  The only person who can rescue us is the Emmanuel, the incarnate God.
And that is why Christmas exists.
Our objective is to understand how we might correctly communicate the magnitude and glory of Christmas.  How does one speak of the eternal God taking on the temporal, degrading flesh of humanity?  How can we fathom such love that God would choose to leave Heaven and dwell on earth with us?  What is the proper response to the majesty, magnitude, and mystery of what has been revealed to us and the sacrifice made for us?
As the chorus of the hymn declares, “Rejoice, rejoice!  Emanuel has come to thee, Oh, Israel.”
For most of us Christmas is about the presents, overcrowded malls and holiday rush.  Many of us give the manager a passing ponderance but not in-depth thought about how big of a deal the baby Jesus, fully God, fully human, really is.  I want to invite you to take a moment and let your mind expand as I communicate some of the magnitude of Christmas and the incarnation.
One of the most important questions we can ask is “What actually happened at Christmas?”  It is the largest celebration around the world every year.  The season is filled with commercials, TV specials, parties, gifts, and decorations.  There are stores and even careers that are exclusively dedicated to this one holiday season.  Even our calendars are all based on this one event that transpired over 2000 years ago, which divided history into B.C. and A.D.  Even your birthday is dated by the birth of Jesus.  A long time ago in a city called Bethlehem, a child was born who changed all of history.  If the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
The core message of Christmas is that God became flesh and dwelt among us.
That is a remarkable claim made throughout scripture.  From the very beginning of the book of Genesis to Revelation, all sixty-six books in the Bible point to this one person who was identified as Jesus Christ, the Messiah.  To best grasp the magnitude of what took place that first Christmas, we will have to begin to think critically about important things and ask questions that stretch our minds as we attempt to understand the theological and philosophical truths about the incarnation of Christ.
It is out of my deep love for Jesus and the desire to help others communicate effectively that I write.  Far too often, children of God, including myself, fail to speak properly of the incarnation, which leads others to doubt and even reject the person of Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  For instance, when we speak of Jesus, do we communicate anything beyond a baby in a manger?  Is Jesus the Savior of the world or simply a cute infant in an animal feed trough?  Do we communicate the majesty of the incarnation, which took place as God wrapped himself in human flesh to be near to us?  Do we tell the story with the awe and passion of a soul rescued be a Savior and in love with the living deity?  Or is our Christmas message a children’s pageant void of depth but full of cute folly?  Let me say it again; if the message of scripture is true, then there is nothing more important for us to understand than the implications of Christmas for our lives.
Christmas is the celebration of good news and of great joy for all people, because the Second Person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity. I know that is a mouthful to say, especially compared to “Merry Christmas,” but it is the best communication of the truth of the incarnation at Christmas.  When we speak of the Trinity, we are communicating that there is only one God, one essence composed of three persons.  When we are in a conversation with our coworker about Christmas, we speak of God becoming human, but what is often thought of by our non-Christian friend is more of a Hercules character, half god, half man.  Or just as bad, our Islamic brothers and sisters claim that we are inventing an additional god and elevating Jesus above the status of prophet to deity.
Another common mistake that we make when talking about Christmas is to speak of Jesus being born, implying that is when Jesus came into existence.  It is difficult to comprehend someone being born and existing eternally before their birth, but this is exactly what is meant by John’s opening lines of his gospel,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God,” (John 1:1-2).
The birth of Jesus is unique in all creation, as the eternal God in the second person of the Trinity added humanity to divinity to create an unprecedented mathematical equation, where 100% God and 100% human is present in the person of Jesus Christ.  Often, when we speak of Jesus’ birth, we are unintentionally communicating that Jesus came into existence at that moment.  If this were true, Jesus could not be fully God, as God is eternal.  All created things are temporary, and therefore, if Jesus came into being at his birth, as the rest of humanity has, he could not be God.  If Jesus were not God, then the sacrifice upon the cross is of no value, because atonement required an eternal being to give his life to pay the infinite debt of sin against an eternal being.  To speak of Jesus' birth correctly, we speak of him as begotten, not made or created.  This is why the Nicene Creed states this about Jesus:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father…”
Jesus shares with God, as part of the Trinity, the attributes of God, including the attribute of eternality.
To speak of God’s attributes, we are communicating the fundamental qualities and characteristics of God’s being. God’s attributes include omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful), omnipresence (all-present), immutability (unchangeable), holiness, justice, goodness, and love. God’s attributes are not something God does, but they are who God is.  God is love. God is omnipresent.  God’s attributes are inherent qualities of God's perfect nature.
The attributes of God are often discussed in two categories: Communicable attributes and incommunicable attributes.  Communicable attributes are those that God shares in some way with creatures, particularly humans, such as love, goodness, faithfulness, holiness etc…  While humans or even another creature can be good, they cannot be good in the same way God is good.  I can be good by doing good works, but only God is actually good in his nature and being.  Incommunicable attributes are those attributes that God does not and cannot share with creatures, such as being all-knowing (omniscience), all-powerful (omnipotent), eternal, simple (not composed or parts), immutable, etc… To say that Jesus is exactly, perfectly, like God is to say that he possesses both the communicable and the incommunicable attributes of God.
When speaking of the incarnation of Christ, it is also important to distinguish between attributes of God and the properties of God, or to distinguish between being, which is what something is, and personhood, which is who a person is.  God’s being is best described by his attributes, which are shared by the three persons of the Trinity.  To speak of the person of God is to focus on the First Person of the Trinity.  To speak of the properties of God, is to communicate about the characteristics of the interior relations of the person of the Trinity.  To speak of God as the Father is a property or person that is about the Father.  (First person does not mean a numerical order, but a title that is given to understand the distinction between the persons of the Trinity within scripture).  The Father is not the Son, or the Holy Spirit.  The Father is the person who sent the Son, which is to speak of God’s actions as properties as the sender of the Son.  To say that the Holy Spirit guides us, is to speak of a property of the Holy Spirit.  Again, think of Being as what you are, and person as who you are.  Jesus is fully God in being, but not the same person.
At Christmas, we celebrate God becoming human.  Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, added humanity to divinity to atone for our sins.
Hebrews 2:17
“Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.”
It is imperative that we speak of Jesus not as a lesser being, but as the fullness of God in being as the second person of the Trinity.  To imagine that God loved us so much that he left heaven and became human is truly good news of great joy.  The complexity of what took place in a manger over 2000 years ago should shake our world every day as we comprehend the fullness of God wrapped in the flesh of an infant. This is exactly the message the Apostle Paul wrote about to the church of Colossae,
Colossians 1:19  “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,”
Colossians 2:9  “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,”
Fullness = (Plērōma) completeness or fullness.
In the manger scene, we discover the fullness of God, the Trinity in being, the Second person of the Trinity has come to dwell with us.
Before the first Christmas, it was possible for the people of God to imagine that God would come to earth and roam the lands.  God might would even temporarily reside in a temple built by Solomon.  Solomon said that God would dwell in the Temple but acknowledged that God’s true dwelling place was in Heaven.  This would mean that God was constantly distant.  But Christmas changed everything.  Paul writes that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ.  The very presence and nature (the fullness) of God is found in Christ.  The concept of the Emmanuel, God dwelling with us is called the Incarnation.  This is why Matthew records the words of the angel to Jospeh,
“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us,” (Matthew 1:23).
This amazing act of God becoming flesh and dwelling with us is called the incarnation.  Incarnation literally means “the act of being made flesh.”  It comes from the Latin version of John 1:14, which in English reads, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.”  Theologically we speak of the incarnation as the hypostatic union, a term used to describe how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet remained fully God at the same time.  Jesus always had been God (John 8:58, 10:30).  In the manger, a baby lay as the incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity in human form (John 1:14). The addition of the human nature to the divine nature in Jesus Christ, the God-man. This is the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ, one Person, fully God and fully man.  Jesus’ two natures, human and divine, are inseparable. Jesus will forever be the God-man, fully God and fully human, two distinct natures in one Person.
This Christmas I invite you to think deeply about the majesty and mystery of God. The gift of Jesus Christ is the most expensive gift you will ever be given. The love of God is priceless. The gift of the incarnation will last forever. There will be many gifts given this year that will break and be destroyed within an hour.  Jesus is the only eternal gift. Finally, Jesus is the most practical gift that you will use all year long, for the rest of your life.  The gift of the Emmanuel, God with us is the strength, hope, and will to move forward, looking towards a greater good and greater glory that awaits those who put their trust in Jesus.  All this was delivered literally in a manger over 2000 years ago. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Did Jesus ever go to India?

There is no biblical support for the idea that Jesus ever traveled to India.  The only two recorded times Jesus left the land now known as Israel is when he traveled to Egypt as an infant (Matthew 2:13-21), and when he traveled to nearby areas such as Tyre and Sidon (Mark 7:24).  The only story of Jesus’ childhood is found in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus at the age of twelve was teaching in the Temple, (Luke 2:41-52).  From Jesus' birth to the age of twelve, there is no information about Jesus, and from the age of twelve to about thirty, there is no Biblical information about Jesus.  These two gaps in the story have led many to speculate as to what Jesus did in the years where nothing is recorded in the Bible.
There are several competing views of Jesus’ activity during these years.  The orthodox position is that Jesus grew up in Nazareth and learned the craftsman’s trade under Joseph, his father.  Then, around the age of thirty, Jesus began his ministry.  Jesus himself says that Nazareth was his hometown, where he grew up.  People also knew that he was Joseph’s son, suggesting that Jesus lived a public life in the small town of Nazareth until his ministry. 
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which was not written by the Apostle Thomas and was not written until around the 2nd-3rd century AD, attempts to fill in the gaps of Jesus' life with tales of a temperamental Jesus. In these tales, Jesus uses his divine powers to make birds out of clay, He saves his brother James from a snake bite, and He even curses a boy to death.  The inconsistency in the nature of Jesus and His odd behavior is just one of the many reasons the Gnostic Gospels are not taken as historical accounts of Jesus’ life.  There are few, if any, serious scholars who read these apocryphal tales of Jesus portrayed as the malevolent trickster and see them as historical accounts. 
The third view of Jesus' undocumented years is that supposedly Jesus journeyed to India to learn the secrets of Hinduism and Buddhism from Eastern gurus.  Within Eastern religions, there are several sources that make this claim, but none of them have definitive proof.  Some Eastern traditions even believe that Jesus survived the crucifixion and traveled to India for safety until he died around the age of 120.  In these stories, Jesus is commonly identified as the Kashmiri saint, Issa Yuz Asaf ("Jesus Son of Joseph").  Many of these stories derive from a Russian correspondent who claimed to have visited India in the 19th century, where he learned of the life of Issa. In 1895, James Archibald Douglas, professor of English and History in England, visited the Hemis Monastery to investigate the claims of Nicolas Notovitch. Douglas debunked Notovitch's claims of a secret manuscript detailing Jesus's life and travels in India.
There are many Eastern gurus who perpetuate the myth that Jesus traveled to India. One of the most recent authors to promote this view is Holger Kersten, who wrote, “Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion (1994).  Kersten presents little evidence for his claim and is not taken seriously in biblical scholarship.  Even the Biblical skeptic Bart Ehrman examines many of the modern writings claiming that Jesus traveled to India, and comments that the stories are filled with implausibilities and inaccuracies.   Ehrman wrote, the “The Apocryphal idea that Jesus traveled to India as a child to learn from the Brahmins, comes to us not from ancient forgeries but relatively modern ones.” Ehrman dismisses any possibility of Jesus traveling to India, concluding “The real facts, however, are that these mysterious accounts have uniformly been exposed as fabrications perpetrated by well-meaning or mischievous writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…  Today, there is not a recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter.”[1]
 It is fascinating that despite the lack of historical evidence for the claim that Jesus traveled to India, the mythical legend is still promoted. The best argument for Jesus’ traveling to India is an argument from silence.  An argument from silence is a logical fallacy because it treats the absence of evidence as evidence itself.  In this case, the conclusion of Eastern influence upon Jesus is based not on evidence, but rather on what is missing from a text.  The undocumented years of Jesus' life not recorded in the canonized Gospels leaves the door open for voices of conjecture and fanciful storytelling. 
 To be fair, there are broad connections between Jesus’ teachings and various Eastern religious teachings, such as a shared emphasis on love and compassion, the importance of detachment from material possessions, and the call for inner spiritual transformation. These broad connections cease when we look at the core teachings that divide Eastern theology and Biblical teachings.  Jesus never taught anything that resembles samsara (reincarnation) or anatman (no-self)? Jesus taught of objective morality dependent upon God who is external from creation. In Jesus’ teachings, morality and justice have nothing to do with karma. Jesus was a Jewish teacher, with his instructions spanning the entirety of the Bible, firmly rooted in a Jewish worldview. It is theologically irresponsible to make any suggested connection between the core tenants of Jesus’ teachings about Eastern religions when Jesus claimed to be the only way to God, thus illuminating all other options such as Hinduism and Buddhism. 
 Lately, I have given pause to the perpetuation of these mythological stories and tried to look at the lie from a motive perspective, asking, “Why do so many people want and even need Jesus to have traveled to India?”  My belief is that those who seek to harmonize Jesus and Eastern religious teachings actually harm the core tenets of both religious views.  The perpetuation of the myth of Jesus’ supposed travels to India is an attempt to divert our attention from Jesus’ own claims to be the Son of God. By downplaying Jesus’ deity or even denying his divinity, the door is open for other religions to be true, which leaves Jesus as a liar or a lunatic. Thus, the Eastern religions are constantly referring to Jesus as a good teacher, a rabbi, a prophet, a sage or a guru. In an effort to bring Christ down or lessen his authority, many of the mythological stories of Jesus’ travel to India also deny his death and resurrection. By denying the death and resurrection of Christ, Jesus can be remade in any image we want because we have discarded the historical figure and the very heart of Biblical faith.  If this is indeed the motive behind the perpetuation of this clear lie, then it is the work of Satan to distort the truth of God and lead people astray.  By creating confusion around the identity of Jesus, Satan can disillusion an entire generation and bring the identity and teaching of Jesus down to a level where they are no more important or factual than any other guru or Eastern teacher. 
 There is no evidence of any credible historical account that should be considered factual or within the teachings of Jesus himself that would lead any scholar to believe he was influenced by Eastern theology or travels to India. The evidence against such a claim is solid and firmly based against an argument from silence.  Which takes me back to my original pondering: what is the motive behind such a claim, and why are so many people ready to believe in something without evidence?
 
   [1] https://ehrmanblog.org/did-jesus-go-to-india-a-modern-gospel-forgery/

Love Has Boundaries


Question:
I heard you say that “Love has boundaries.”  This seems to contradict what I hear from my friends and what I see on a regular basis.  I have been taught that “love knows no boundaries,” “pure love has no conditions,” and that “love knows no limits.”  Can you help me understand what you mean when you say love has boundaries, because I disagree with you.

Response:
First, let us define what love is.  The confusion surrounding the definition of love is where I see most of the disconnect resonate from.  Our culture wants to believe that love is affirming whatever a person wants, or whatever makes them feel good.  If I do not affirm a person’s desires, I am considered unloving.  But this is a lie.  Love is willing what is best for the other person.  Sometimes that means willing against the desire of the other individual.  This is common sense when you clearly define what love is.  For instance, my three-year-old son may want to eat the family-size bag of M&M’s, but I love him, and know the outcome of his desire is a sick stomach.  Because I love my son, I will what is best for him and go against what he desires.  I hear one pastor say that his natural desire was to be unfaithful to his wife, but because he loved her (willed what is best for her) he never strayed from his marriage vows.  I have always thought his actions were a beautiful image of what it means to go against what is natural because of love. 
Phrases like “love has no boundaries” can be true in the sense that the love of God is available to all, and there are no boundaries that can be erected that God’s love cannot overcome.  In this sense, love has no boundaries.  But this is not the common cultural use of the phrase, “love has no boundaries.”  Satan has distorted the loving image of God’s infinite love. Just like he did in the Garden of Eden, he has twisted the words of God to mean, “Do whatever you want.  I’ll support you because I love you.”  Supporting improper behavior is not loving.  If my daughter wanted to be a prostitute, I would not support her decision.  Her body is a sacred temple to God and sex is meant to be enjoyed between a married man and woman.  Therefore, I would not support my daughter if this were her decision.  I would not stop loving her, but love does not support self-harm.   
Self-harm is not just a behavior; it is also a reasoning or thinking problem.  It is improper to worship any God besides the one true God of scripture who commanded us to love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matthew 12:30).  This means that I must recognize when my thought process is not honoring God, and deny my natural desires and submit them to the will of God.  Jesus modeled this for us on the Mount of Olives when he was praying before his death, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done,” (Luke 22:42).  We see a moment when the second person of the Trinity displays his full humanity, not wanting to endure the suffering of the cross and the burden of bearing the sins of the world.  Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.”  Was God being unloving toward the Son when the unspoken response is that the atonement upon the cross must happen?  Was Jesus a fool for denying his own natural desires?  By no means!  In fact, this is the model of discipleship and love that Jesus gave us when he invited us to follow him.
“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” (Mark 8:34). 
Because I love God, I deny my sinful desires and nail them figuratively on the cross.  Then in response to God’s love, I follow the Holy Spirit toward Jesus. 
It is upon the cross that we see the love of God breaking the barrier of sin, and it is true, love knows no end.  God is love and God is infinite; therefore, love knows no end.  But again, love is willing what is best for the other person and therefore always has boundaries.  From the very beginning of time, when God first created, he established boundaries between the light and the dark, the sea and the land, between each species and plant because God created things with order and with boundaries.  God created with boundaries because God is loving.  Do not be fooled by social media slogans that sound good but are not true.  Be a wise disciple of Jesus Christ and be discerning.  As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church of Corinth,
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” (2Corinthians 10:5).

Is Hell Real?

Here is the objection:
In order to believe in Hell, you'd have to believe:  That “sky-God” created humankind and orchestrated a scenario where every human person is deserving of eternal punishment as a result of being born.  That the Bible’s creation story is to be taken literally – that there were an actual Adam and Eve who ate a piece of forbidden fruit which resulted in a sin-condition that has caused God to be so angry that he desires his children go to Hell like an abusive parent.  What kind of loving figure would create and then send someone they loved to a place of eternal punishment?  But wait, the Christians have a solution.  To avoid this scenario, God sent his only Son, Jesus, to die on a cross as a blood sacrifice to rescue people from his own wrath.  Let’s just be honest.  This makes no sense.  A loving father would not knowingly create a system where his children would be eternally tormented and separated from him.  If this is the type of God you believe in, then I choose Hell because whoever oversees that place is more morally just than your God. 
BTW: Hell was not even invented until Dana wrote about it in the 1300’s and has been used to scare people into behaving a certain way ever since. 
Response:
In order to believe in Hell, you have to believe in a loving God.  Hell is a place that God created for those who reject His love and therefore do not want to be with Him.  God is not an abusive Father and does not force anyone who rejects his love and kindness to be with him.  The mischaracterization of God that is presented in the question is a typical strawman tactic used by deconstructionists to portray God as a maniacal monster while never really dealing with the complexities of reality. 
Heaven exists. 
The Bible explicitly teaches that Hell is a real place to which the wicked/unbelieving are sent after death. We have all sinned against God (Romans 3:23). The just punishment for sin is death (Romans 6:23). Since all our sin is ultimately against God (Psalm 51:4), and since God is infinitely glorious, the punishment for sin must also be infinite. Eternal Hell—the second death—is the punishment we have earned because of our sin.
Hell was not invented by Danta but was a concept in the Old Testament and even within Greek mythology.  For the Greeks, Hell was called Tartarus and was believed to be a place of fire in an underworld state, ruled by Hades.  In the Old Testament, the Israelites identified Hell as Sheol.  When Jacob hears of his son’s supposed death, he states, "I shall go down to my son a mourner unto Sheol,” (Genesis 37:36).  Sheol means pit or destruction, and it connotes the place where those who had died were believed to be held until a time of judgment.  It is most likely the origin of the concept of the Catholic Church’s purgatory, a place where the dead dwell until God’s judgment.  The prophet Daniel wrote about Heaven and Hell, describing them as having an eternal nature “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt,” (Daniel 12:2).  There are many passages in the Old Testament that speak of Sheol and a place where the dead eternally reside, but it is Jesus in the New Testament that gives us our best understanding of Hell.
Indeed, our modern concept of Hell is not as concrete in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament, but the argument that Hell evolved as a false idea used to control people would be ignoring that Jesus is who taught us most of what we know about Hell.  This makes sense because Jesus is fully God as the second person of the Trinity.  Jesus gave us our most defined descriptions of Hell and spoke more about it than he did Heaven.  Jesus described Hell as a place of eternal fire and punishment, “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” (Matthew 25:41) and “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life,” (Matthew 25:46).  Jesus clearly believed in Hell and taught that it was a physical place that was not pleasant.  Jesus did not speak of Hell as a figurative place, or as a metaphorical concept.  Hell was real to Him and therefore should be understood a truth for us today.
In the Epistles of the New Testament, Peter talks about Hell as a place.  In a moment of irony, Peter is writing a warning for the church to avoid deception by false teachers who “will exploit you with fabricated stories,” (2Peter 2:1).  Peter writes, “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment,” (2Peter 2:4).  In the book of Revelation, John, is given a vision of a future moment when God’s final judgment will occur, and both death and Hades are thrown into eternal separation from God, because there will be no death in Hell of Heaven, “Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.  Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire,” (Revelation 20:14-15).  Suffice to say, the early church believed in Hell as an actual place.
Now that we have briefly established that there is a Hell, and that Jesus and the disciples believed that Hell was an actual place, the better question is “What has happened that deconstructionists want to jettison the clear teaching of scripture and claim that only a cruel God would create such a place as Hell?”
The simple answer is we have abandoned good theology and Biblical reading.  We have re-created God in our image and desecrated the Biblical image of God.  Deconstructionists, prefer to use terminology describing God as loving, caring, nice, and forgiving.  Here we agree.  These could be considered as attributes of God, though I am not sure I have ever tried to describe God as nice.  The division occurs when good Biblical theology also recognizes God as a God of justice, righteousness, grace and truth.   To remove Hell we must remove these attributes from God.  Hell exists because there are some individuals who will never surrender their will to God and will therefore always live destroying themselves and others.    There are behaviors and ways of thinking that are contrary to God’s will and therefore are not permitted in Heaven.   What would the deconstructionist ask of God, that the sovereign Lord force a person to change?  Or would true love allow that person to simply be quarantined to a place specially set aside for those who reject God?
 Hell was created because God gave humanity an amazing gift called freewill.  Freewill enables us to reject God’s love and sovereign rule over our lives, at least temporarily, or embrace the joy of a life lived in submission to God’s authority.  The ripple effect of rejecting God’s authority is clear in scripture.  Immediately after the exile from the Garden, the book of Genesis records the first human homicide (Genesis 4).  Following that, Lamech brags to his wives that he had killed men for simply wounding and injuring him, (also Genesis 4).  By the time we arrive at Genesis 6 humanity is so evil that God’s righteousness cannot bear to see the suffering that humanity is causing one another because love has boundaries.  Hell exists because love has boundaries. 
Boundaries exist because of love.  In the Genesis creation story, the water has a boundary, the nighttime has a boundary, the land has boundaries, and even the different species have boundaries.  When Adam and Eve sin, they are excommunicated from the Garden because love has boundaries.  God’s love will not allow Adam and Eve to live forever, eating from the Tree of Life, but living in a sinful state.  You and I live with boundaries that we set because we love others.  Because I love my children, I do not let them play ball on the busy street.  Because I love my wife, we agree to the sanctity of marriage where we “forsake all others.”    Because God is holy, he cannot abide with the desecration of sin.  The boundary between us and God is for our protection (see Exodus 19:22-25).  Heaven is where God is and in Heaven there can be no sin.  Therefore, Heaven is for individuals who have been made pure, not by their good works, but by the atonement of Jesus on the cross.  We can argue the system and be angry with God for creating a system, but I am not so arrogant to believe I could invent a better system than the omnipotent God. 
Heaven and Hell are eternal because that is the nature of the beings created in the image of God.  We were made to live forever.  We did not get to choose our longevity, but we do get to choose the location where and with whom we will spend eternity.  We can choose to be with God or without God.  Those who are with God must become pure and holy; their sins must be eradicated.  There is only one way to remove sin, the atonement of Jesus. 
Sin has eternal consequences.  If God is a God of justice and righteousness, then he cannot simply overlook sin.  Sin is not permitted in Heaven.  The never-ending nature of God’s justice is directly related to the infinite and eternal nature of God's grace.  When we sin against an infinite God, we create an infinite debt.  An eternal, infinite being was needed to bear the weight of an infinite judgment. God in an amazing act of love, paid the price for our sins.  God did not suddenly become an unrighteous God but instead met the requirements of justice on behalf of his creation in a divine act of love.  This act of love is a gift that is not forced upon anyone.  Every single human can accept God’s gift of love or reject God’s gift of love.  When we reject God’s gift of grace, we are rejecting God’s presence and Lordship over our lives.  What kind of loving God would force anyone to be with him forever, when they don’t want to be transformed by Grace and live in the presence of God?
The problem is not a misunderstanding of Hell or a lack of belief in Hell, but rather a misunderstanding of Heaven.  Heaven is less about a place and more about a person, namely Jesus.  Heaven is the place where we get to be in the presence of God.  Heaven is where we shall fully submit our will to the Divine will of God and behave as Jesus commanded.  It is a place where we are willingly changed into the fully human being that God intended us to be.  But the transformation by grace is not forced upon anyone.  It is an invitation to a Divine party for people who want to submit to God’s will, forever. 
I am glad there is a Hell, though sad that I have loved ones who reject God’s gift of grace.  Heaven will not be Heaven if children still fear sexual predators, if women must live with concern if they take a morning jog by themselves, if people are in bomb shelters because someone thinks that they need more land or power, if hatred is permitted and all the other sinful nature desires, we wrestle against exist.  I am glad there is a Hell and Heaven where we must submit to the authority of God to be in the presence of God.  If there was not a continued transformation in the behavior of those God welcomes into Heaven, and I am just speaking of my personal thoughts and struggles with sin, it would not be Heaven.  It would be like what we experience here on earth, a continued battle between good and evil.  But Heaven and Hell are the promise that one day the battle will be over. 
Personally, I am excited about Heaven.  I long to see my sister and father again.  I desire to walk with my sister again, not in her cancer-riddled body, but her new Heavenly body that is immortal.  I long to enjoy another conversation with my father about God’s word and the beauty he found in the scriptures.  Mostly, I am looking forward to hearing the Heavenly Father’s voice say to me, “Well done.  Welcome to your eternal home.”  I am so looking forward to Heaven, not because I am good, but because Jesus was very good. I am saved by faith, not by my works or my ability, but by the grace of God.  If Heaven is real, Hell must also exist for those who do not want to experience the joy of being with God.

Turning Jesus into a senile grandpa?

There is a movement within the church to turn Jesus into a senile grandfather figure who just wants everyone to get along and be nice.  Senile Jesus doesn’t care about sin, your past or even about other religions he can’t remember why any of those things are important.  This is the new Jesus being taught by some churches in America. The most dangerous aspect of this terrible theology is that it is coming from within the church.  That is right, Satan is up to his old tricks, attempting to take down the body of Christ from within.

Here are a few examples of how the new senile Jesus thinks:

• That the religion bearing his name was conceived by the theories and doctrines of Paul, instead of the truth Jesus lived and demonstrated.
• That the gospel says his death solved the problem of humankind's separation from God, instead of accepting that his life revealed the truth that there is no separation from God.
• That the religion that claims his name, teaches that his wisdom and teachings are the only legitimate way to know truth and God.
• That people think there is magical potency in uttering the name of Jesus, rather than accessing our own natural powers and capabilities to effect change.
• The idea that humankind stands condemned before God and deserving of Divine wrath and eternal conscious judgement, requiring the death of Jesus to fix it.

Here is a quote from my online source that is pushing the above historical revision of Jesus’ theology,
“Joshua ben Adam (the title the author uses for Jesus) would reject any religion that advocates hatred, violence, and division against others. He once said that merely speaking a diminishing term against another person is a violation of his way. And yet too often modern Christianity has fashioned a gospel that is built on demeaning humankind by asserting the idea that people are bad at the core, repulsive to God, and deserve eternal torment.”
To be fair, in some ways I want to agree with the author cited above.  Too many people who claim to follow Christ seem to have missed the transforming power of grace and are missing the ability to treat others with compassion, patience and care.  When compassion and grace are absent from how we interact with others, we do not represent Jesus well.
On the other hand, the same logic Satan used in Genesis three when the serpent said to Eve, “Did God really say…” is being used here.  This makes sense because the best lies are cleverly bound with strands of truth to effectively deceive.  At the core of the senile Jesus movement is a universal Jesus that is ok with everyone, and all behaviors.  There is no longer anything that Jesus does not approve of or even delight in.  There is nothing against the will of God since Jesus just wants us all to get along.  But this was not and is not the message of Jesus.
A passage often used by the “Senile Jesus” pundits is from John eight.  The account is of a woman caught in adultery and Jesus prevents her being stoned by asking, “Those who have never sinned throw the first stone.”  I love this passage as it is consistent with Jesus’ teachings, in Matthew 2:2-5 where Jesus warns about judging.  We must be slow to judge others, but most “Senile Jesus” campers never make it to the last part of the passage where Jesus invites us to take the plank out of your own eye, so that we can “see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
But let us return to John eight and the woman caught in adultery.  When Jesus says to the woman he does not condemn her, that is not the end of the story.  Jesus instructs the woman to “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
The key there is that there are things that are against the will of God.  There are behaviors that love does not accept, embrace, or celebrate.  Jesus was not just about helping us all get along.  Jesus was all about how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  To accomplish this, we are called to “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy,” (Lev. 19:2 and 1Peter 1:15).
For Jesus happiness was not the goal, at least not the real Jesus, though it might be for the “senile Jesus.”  For Jesus, the direction of our lives was to be holy, (which by the way is the only way to experience true joy). No life built upon deception can have lasting peace and that is the danger of the lies being taught and the picture of “senile Jesus” being presented.
When we are taught that “senile Jesus” and the message “conceived by the theories and doctrines of Paul,” are in conflict, the echoes of the serpent should be heard, “Did God really say…”  When we are told that we have the power of Christ or “Christ-consciousness” within us and therefore there is no separation between us and God as a consequence of sin, alarm bells should be going off in our skeptical information filters.  This theology isn’t about making us holy; it is about making God unholy.  When God becomes unholy then “anything can go.”  Ahh… we now arrive at the goal of the “senile Jesus’ movement, where we can behave and believe anything we want because God is no longer God, we have become like God knowing right and wrong.  (sound familiar?).
Paul’s apostolic authority is well documented in Scripture, from his dramatic Damascus Road conversation to the rejection of his Pharisaism into the New Covenant of grace.  Paul did not write decades after the disciples had all died.  He was doing ministry with the disciples, all of whom had the courage and ability to stand against false teachings as attested to by their martyrdom.  The goal of this deception is to remove all of Paul’s teachings on holy living so that “Senile Jesus” is promoted and God can be remade in our image.  Once sin is no longer a barrier separating us from the holy God and the boundaries of love are removed (Senile Jesus can’t remember right and wrong) there is no need for Jesus’ atonement on the cross.  If we can remove the sacrificial act of Jesus death upon the cross, then all religions can be harmonized and the goal of creating “senile Jesus” is almost complete.  The only step left for this lie to be believed is to couch it in nuggets of truth and make it sound more loving than the actual words of Jesus.
Followers of Jesus, beware, there are wolves in sheep’s clothing spreading bad theology that sounds good, (see Matthew 7:15-20).  
New International Version
In Matthew 25:41, Jesus “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

The early dating of the Gospels
 
One of the things that I love about Faith Ignited is our communities willingness to wrestle with doubts and questions.  We are not afraid of any challenge to our faith in Jesus Christ, and we look forward to helping people remove logical barriers between them and God because we love thinking critically about important things.
Recently we received a question about the early dating of the gospels.  The argument is that if the gospels were written in the second through the fourth century then how could we trust that the information they present is accurate.  If the gospels were written at the stated late date, that would explain the miraculous reporting as mythologizing the gospels with the passing of time.  Just as stories about Davy Crocket have grown over time, so did the stories of Jesus. 
The second part of the question we received had to do with the Davinci Code myth, which states that the Catholic church suppressed and hid gospels about Jesus to persuade people to believe a certain way, ultimately as a control device used against the public.  Here we see Marxism begin to sneak into the objection as Marx believed all religion was invented to control the behavior of the simple minded.  The short answer is that the Catholic church did not hide documents or other gospels.  The “secret” gospels referred to in the DaVinci Code are not only available to everyone but were written long after the canonization of the four gospels that are in our Bible. 
 
 
Question:            I have heard that we cannot trust the gospels because they were written long after Jesus’ life.  Is it true that the gospels were not written until the second, third, and fourth centuries?

If we are talking about the four gospels in the Bible, the answer is no.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written before 100 AD.  Mark the earliest gospel was most likely written before 50AD.  This moves the written accounts of Jesus to less than 20 years after his death and resurrection.   
If we are talking about non-Biblical gospels, such as the heretical gospel of Phillip, Thomas, Mary, Peter, and so forth, then yes.  These gospels have always been available to the public but have recently become more popular in public in part because of the misinformation presented in the fictional work of the Divinci Code by Dan Brown.  Remember that the four canonized (they are in the Bible and recognized as authoritative) gospels were all written before 100 AD.  Compared to the dates given by textual critics for other non-biblical writings about Jesus. 

• Gospel of Marcion (mid-2nd century)
• Gospel of Bardesanes (late 2nd–early 3rd century)
• Gospel of Thomas (2nd century; sayings gospel)

The above-mentioned non-canonical gospels were not written until much later after Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and therefore were never viewed as being worthy. 
There were three basic standards that a document had to meet in order to be included in the Bible. 

•  The book had to be written by an eyewitness (example: Acts, John, all of Paul’s epistles) or by someone who was in communication with eyewitnesses (example: Mark, Hebrews). 
• The book had to have been written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to ensure credibility of the information being passed on. 
• The book had to be accurate and true in the information that it presented.

The early church was not about spreading a myth or popularizing Jesus.  The message of Jesus was counter-cultural, and by the middle of the first century, a person claiming to follow Jesus was rising their life with a public profession of faith.  The information recorded about Jesus had to be true or else the spreading of the gospel message would have been attacked for its errors and exaggerations.  If the gospels were fabricated, they could have been proven false by the eyewitnesses who were still alive at the time of their distribution.
Even the most liberal scholars date the four gospels in the Bible at the latest by 100 AD.
Some people stop here and say, "Got you!" the gospels were all written late and therefore cannot be trusted.   
This is a terrible argument.  The time between the resurrection and the writings of the gospels is too short to permit any major exaggeration or myth to be added to the story of Jesus.  Just as a fisherman cannot get away with exaggerating how big his catch was to his wife if there was a crowd who say him and were present when he shared the story, the authors of the gospels had eyewitnesses who would have loved to stomp out the message that Jesus was the Messiah if the accounts recorded false details.
When we compare the time between the recorded accounts of Jesus and the death of Jesus, the historical gap is almost nonexistent for textual critics.  For instance, Plutarch wrote the life of Alexander the Great around about 100 AD.  Alexander the Great died in 323 BC.  That is four hundred years between the recorded history and the actual event.  The gospel accounts are less than 70 years between the event and recording.  Few people doubt the recorded events from Plutarch.  If we hold the Bible to the same standard of evidence as other historical writings, the Bible accounts of Jesus are absolutely trustworthy. 
 
Question:            When were the gospels written?
 
Three of the gospels were written before 63 AD.  Mark is first gospel very short.  Mark's ends with the abruptness of the empty tomb and the angels announcing the resurrection.  Then because we are so deceptive, there is a possibility that an additional ending was added because we don't have verses 9-20 until the second century, therefore, we noted it in the Bible.  Mark is most likely the Mark who fled from the arrest of Jesus and became a scribe to Peter.  There are several places of emphasis where Peter is highlighted in a unique way in the gospel of Mark.
Matthew used the Q (Q is the textual critic's term used to describe the written material about Jesus that preceded the gospels but is has not survived the passage of time.  “Q” is the first letter of the German word meaning source.) source, and most likely Mark, wrote to a Jewish audience.  He uses Joseph’s bloodline to trace Jesus back to Abraham and David, while Luke uses Mary's lineage.  Matthew was a Jewish Tax collector and had a heavy emphasis that Jesus is the new and Greater Than Moses.
Luke writes, possibly using all three sources.  Luke is a doctor and is Paul's traveling companion.  Luke writes both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts.  The book of Acts contains over 90 specific details that verify that Luke was writing in the first century.  He gives specific places, names, dates, rules, ship details, sailing passages, and even sea depths that have been verified.  Luke is so accurate that even non-Biblical scholars often use the gospel of Luke as a reference for information regarding geography and confirmation of other details from the first century. 
John is the only gospel written late.  The earlies dating being in the 60's AD to the latest, being in the 90's AD.  John writes having the three other gospels at his disposal addresses different problems in the early church.  The Greeks wanted to know how a God could be human and still maintain his divinity.  The Jews who had been dispersed after the conquest of Jerusalem wanted to know if there was any hope since the temple had been destroyed.  John does not need to tell the same stories that everyone already knows, so he shares stories that had not been previously recorded.  The details given by John in his gospel are historically accurate and archaeologically verified.  In 1888, archeologists discovered the pool near the Sheep gate called Bethesda, (John 5:2-9).  For years critics of the historical accuracy of the gospel of John claimed that it could not be trusted because the pool of Siloam did not exist.  In 2005, the pool of Siloam, mentioned in John 9 was discovered, and excavation of the pool is on going.    
Why do scholars believe that the first three gospels were written before 63 AD?
The first evidence for the early dating of the gospels is in the recognition that Luke wrote both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts.  The book of Acts is mainly about the ministry of two leaders in the early church, the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul.  Both Peter and Paul were martyred between the years of 63 AD and 64 AD.  The book of Acts does not mention anything about their death.  The book of Acts concludes with Paul in prison in Rome and doing well.  If the book of Acts was written before the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, then that means the book of Acts was completed before 63 AD.  The gospel of Luke was written by the same author before the book of Acts (see Acts 1:1-2); therefore, Luke had to have been written before 63 AD at the very least.  Given the lack of computers and typewriters, it is safe to presume that the gospel of Luke was written at the latest in 60-62 AD.  If Luke used both Mark and Matthew as source material, as almost all scholars conclude, then Matthew was written at the latest 60-61 AD.  If Matthew used Mark, then Mark had to have been written at the very latest 59-61 AD.  Logically, the very latest the first three gospels were written within 10-30 years of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.   Eyewitnesses were still alive who could have refuted the gospel accounts and immediately killed the message being proclaimed by the gospel authors by revealing the writings as a sham. 
The second argument for the early writing of the gospels is from the lack of information regarding the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The temple was destroyed in 70-71 AD.  Not one of the gospel authors records the event.  It is a glaring omission from the gospel authors since Jesus predicted the temple's destruction.  The gospel authors could have easily referenced the invasion of the Roman army and the destruction of the temple, both as verification of Jesus' ability to know the future. 
The third argument is from the writings of the Apostle Paul.  Paul relates early creeds from the church that scholars date to within 3-5 years of Jesus’ resurrection I 1 Corinthians 15:3-9 and Philippians 2:6-11).  Remember, Paul was martyred in 63 AD.  Dead people do not write books or letters.  Therefore, Paul's writings had to have been written before his death.  Even the greatest skeptics will acknowledge that Paul's letters appeared early, with letters like 1 Corinthians written in 52/53 A.D.  Paul quotes Luke's Gospel directly (placing Luke's gospel on the same level of authority as the Old Testament)
"Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.  For the Scripture says, 'You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,' and, 'The laborer deserves his wages.'” (1 Timothy 5:17–18, ESV).
The first quotation — “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain” — comes from Deuteronomy 25:4.  The second quotation — “The laborer deserves his wages” — comes from Luke’s Gospel, specifically Luke 10:7.  Paul also quotes Luke 22:19-20 in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, If Paul quoted Luke’s Gospel in multiple letters, Paul was clearly familiar with Luke’s Gospel.  If Paul quotes Luke’s gospel and Paul’s letters were written in the early 50’s, that means that Luke’s gospel was written by 52 AD at the latest, which means that Matthew and Mark were most likely written in the late 40’s.  That is less than 20 years removed from Jesus' life, death and resurrection.  There simply is not enough time for mythological influence to infect the gospel narratives.  There are too many eyewitnesses who could have destroyed the fragile movement of the early church by providing proof that the disciples or Paul made up the story.

The Best Argument against the New Testament
The best and most rational attack against the gospels is not that they were written late and therefore are filled with incorrect information or exaggeration.  Not that they cannot be trusted because of scribal errors or later additions to the text, but these conspiracy theories are only discussed outside of academic circles where factual verification is unknown or irrelevant.  The best attack against the gospels is to disagree with Jesus himself.  The most honest person who studies antiquity, biblical scholarship and archeology is wise enough not to claim biblical errors or that the gospels are not reliable.  The scholar simply admits that they refuse to believe Jesus claims about himself which is namely that He is God.  All other arguments against the gospels are smoke and mirror tricks used to deceive the uneducated to deceive others. 
Think of it this way; the gospels have been around for over 2000 years.  No other writing in history has been so scrutinized or tested by both believers and non-believers.  Yet not a single valid argument is made by any reputable scholar that the gospels were not what they claimed to be, namely eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.  If there were any decent and logical criticism that could be leveled against the gospels' historical accuracy, it would be worldwide news.  It is best for the critic to simply admit the truth that they do not want to believe in Jesus.  Attacking the historical, archaeological, biblical study or any other scholarly study of the Bible leads to a dead end. 
Closing note:
In this brief document, I have obviously not responded to every single attack or criticism against the gospels, nor have I discussed the questions about the transmission of the gospels over time.  I have also not discussed the variances within the New Testament that amount to about three percent of all scribal errors within the gospel copies of the copies.  Let me simply say that there are no core doctrinal issues affected within the small variances in the thousands of manuscripts that we have.  In fact, that small variances are some of the most useful pieces of evidence for the reliability of the transmission of the gospels over the centuries.  These questions are for another article.

 Thank you for your questions and your passion for seeking to understand how we can trust the gospel authors.