Mark 11:27-33
27 And they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, 28 and they said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?” 29 Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. 30 Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me.” 31 And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’32 But shall we say, ‘From man’?”—they were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet. 33 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
In my current studies, we were asked by our school to interview five skeptics (agnostics, atheist) on their views about the Christian faith. it was quite revealing to hear what most of them agree and disagree with our faith. Out of the five, many came from religious backgrounds but was either turned off by hypocritical Christians or the biblical standards written in Scripture.
During the conversation, most came with thoughts that you would often hear being said by famous atheist and youtube videos featuring an atheist point of view.
These past few weeks, by God’s timing, we are also going through our series #WordviewPH and we have been studying about the authority, sufficiency, and clarity of Scripture. The more I study the Scripture, the more I am convinced that Christianity makes life clearer and the Christian worldview makes so much sense.
In the passage above, the teachers of the law were trying to trap Jesus with questions that would have a no win solution. In Jesus wisdom, he did not answer the question but rather answered it with another question.
As the world continues to increase in human knowledge, the more we need to know how to engage our culture like Jesus did. We must be prepared in season and out of season to answer for the hope that we have.
1 Corinthians 2:7-10 The Message
6-10 We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on firm spiritual ground, but it’s not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so. God’s wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don’t find it lying around on the surface. It’s not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The experts of our day haven’t a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn’t have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That’s why we have this Scripture text:
No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.But you’ve seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you.
To engage the skeptics, we need to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to illuminate the people hearing the gospel for the first or second time. We, in our most rational arguments, won’t win people. We might win a debate but we might not win a person to Christ.
Lord, I pray that the people I encounter would be illuminated with the Spirit of Christ as the gospel is preached.