Month: July 2019

I think I’m a rational person, as do most people. But I’m telling you that I believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Am I a credulous and gullible believer in fairy tales? Have I been touched by a supernatural experience which revealed to me something hidden from everyone else? I’m neither of those things, and I’d like to share the extraordinary evidence available to support such a belief. When I say, “I believe”, what I mean is that I have considered a body of evidence and concluded that one conclusion provides the best explanation. It’s not blind faith. Considering the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is a little like examining the scene of a crime. We can sift through the objects in the room, observe what the suspects did after the crime was committed, take statements from witnesses and try to piece together what happened. But we can never

As human beings we are driven by certain basic needs. Our moment-by-moment decisions are often driven by sub-conscious ‘programming’ to meet our physiological and psychological needs. The ‘need to belong’ is one of these, second only to our most fundamental requirements for food and physical safety. The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a famous paper in 1943 on “A Theory of Human Motivation”. In it, he described a hierarchy of human needs, a sort of pyramid with the most basic at the base and those things that lead to greater fulfilment at the pinnacle. At the very bottom are our needs for food, water, warmth and rest; the next level is our physical security and safety. Maslow’s theory is that we will seek to fulfil our needs in order from bottom to top. Based on this, once we have physical sustenance and safety, the very next urge which will drive our

IN this short piece, we are going to think about one of the arguments for the existence of God. The argument is about the fine tuning of the universe and relies on the work of experts found in physics departments or observatories. We should be very clear: this argument doesn’t prove that God exists, or that the God in question is the God of Christianity. What this argument does however, and it does it very well, is to make us think rationally about why the universe is the way it is – and what may have caused it to be so. We’ll briefly think about the evidence, draw some conclusions, and then finish with a question. The Evidence Physicists have observed that the laws and forces of nature (such as gravity), the constants of physics (such as the speed of light), and the initial conditions of the universe are finely

Last week, I knocked a picture off our living room wall. Thankfully it wasn’t broken, and I was able simply to put it back up. However, at first I had some difficulty – the picture was of a reflection which was so clear that I couldn’t work out which way up it should go. Whether we think about a reflection in nature, or when we speak about one thing being a reflection of another, the concept is the same. The original is the benchmark, the standard, and the reflection will be an image of the same – maybe very clear, maybe not, depending on the material doing the reflecting. Reflecting God Throughout the Bible, we are directed to this idea. God has always existed, and He is the standard for what is right and good. He wants men and women to develop characters that reflect His own – and this

The front cover picture shows an idyllic scene, the river Anker as it flows through Nuneaton in Warwickshire, UK. Rivers are a place of life, where plants grow, fish swim and animals come to drink and feed. It makes them a pleasant place to pass the time and meditate. For the Jews in exile some 600 years before Jesus, this meditation was a painful one: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it. For there those who carried us away captive asked of us a song, and those who plundered us requested mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1–4). Popularised History You may know this from the popular song from the 1970s, but it