Check The Claims

Salutations.

We live in a world where skeptics question and attack God’s Word ceaselessly. I have numerous friends who state they do not believe the Bible, primarily due to ‘all of the errors’, ‘contradictions’ or ‘heinous acts’ in it. Ironically, when I ask them about their concerns, most struggle to even explain in detail the challenges they find in God’s Word. At best, they simply parrot sound bytes they heard or read off of the internet. Yet, many of those challenges were debunked or answered many moons ago.  And many more are completely without substance.  Today, I go over just a couple of categories of claims.

Contradicting Verses?

A friend asks how the Bible reconciles when it has seemingly conflicting verses.  Here’s a great example…

Luke 14:26  26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.

1 John 3:15   15 Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

One of the challenges with segmenting the bible into teeny, tiny little chunks called verses is that we tend to divorce snippets of ideas that were never meant to be pulled apart from the context around it, and/or the rest of the Bible.  Let’s take a look, first, at the Luke verse in context…