Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Recently, the Israeli Antiquities Authority uncovered burned wooden beams in Jerusalem that dates from just before 600 BC. That would place them about the time of the destruction of the city as recorded in 2 Kings 25. The attack by Nebuchadnezzar around 586 BC marked a culmination of God's judgment on Judah after generations of idolatry and corruption.
Finds like these not only confirm the basic storyline told in scripture, it's something of a fluke that the remains have survived this long. After all, Jerusalem was attacked many times in the last 2,600 years. It could be that the returning exiles are the ones responsible. As one article about the discovery put it, and I quote, the excavation directors believe the remains were intentionally left untouched when Jerusalem was rebuilt after the Babylonian destruction to preserve the memory of the catastrophe for future generations. That would certainly be consistent with the practices of the people of God in ancient times as described throughout the Old Testament.
It's a consistent theme in the Bible, the call to mark and remember God's faithfulness. For example, when the Israelites crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land, they built stone memorials to mark where God brought them safely through. Yeah. 1 Samuel 7 describes how the prophet constructed a memorial when God defeated the Philistines. In Psalm 77, Psalm 105, Isaiah 46, throughout the Old Testament, God's people were instructed to remember what he had done for them, both to give them hope and also to warn of his judgment.
Now, whether or not their foundational stories reflect reality is irrelevant to most other religions, but not to Christianity. The pagan myths made no claim to be real. Even if some of the Iliad actually took place, made zero difference to people's faith and practice. Likewise, most of the Quran consists of aphorisms and rules. There's no clear context that can be investigated or evaluated.
And despite Joseph Smith's claims, there's no evidence whatsoever, genetic or archaeological, that Israel's 10 tribes ever ended up among Native Americans. In other words, most claims of most religions are not testable. To put it in the language of logic, they're not falsifiable. But it matters immensely to Christianity whether or not the events that are described in Holy Scripture really happened. In 1 Corinthians, Paul pointed readers to hundreds of people who had seen the resurrected Jesus.
It was in part an invitation to test his claim. Likewise, Peter insisted that what they believed was not a myth, but history with eyewitnesses. Even Christ himself, when challenged by Thomas, offered his own body for inspection to prove he had really died and was now really alive. Christianity, including its core creed, is not built on abstract truisms or pieties, but on history. The creed names a specific man, Pontius Pilate, who was a real Roman governor in Judea at a specific time in history.
Each year, millions of people traveled to Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey to see where the events of the Bible took place. And each year, more and more discoveries are dug up from the ancient world. that confirm the stories told in Holy Scripture. The events of the Bible did not take place once upon a time or long ago in a galaxy far, far away. They happened in this world, in measurable history.
Christianity is not true in some abstract sense. King David was an actual ancient warrior king. When Jesus turned water into wine, it was real, not just some kind of spiritual metaphor. Lazarus was a real dead body that came back to real life. All of this is because Christianity is true.
Christianity is historical. Christianity is a description of reality as it actually is. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett.
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