Jesus' Miracles: Myth Or Verified History? - 2 Peter 1:16 Series

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Introduction

What Is the Best Way to Discover Truth?

What is the best way to discover and verify truth? That’s an age-old question. It’s a whole branch of philosophy known as epistemology—the study of knowing. And it’s important because knowing is what connects you to reality. And connection with reality is the difference between being sane or insane. Insanity is when the world you’re living in isn’t the real world. The things you see, the voices you hear, the things you believe—they aren’t real. The more your beliefs and perceptions and experience match up with what’s actually out there, the more sane you are. So the question is, how do you move in the direction of sanity—true knowledge?

Some ways of gaining knowledge are sketchy—you don’t know how trustworthy they are. Other methods are more reliable—but what’s the most reliable method of all?

Science?

Ask that question in our society and a million people jump up and say, “That’s easy—science!” Science is great for some things but it’s very limited. Science can’t tell you anything about realities that can’t be tested or observed, like morality or God or anything in the spiritual realm. Science can’t tell you if kidnapping and slavery or stealing or murder are immoral. It can study the effects of those things, but not the morality. Science can’t even tell you why the scientific method is a good approach.

Sometimes people try to overuse science as if it were useful for every category of knowledge. If someone says, “Prove to me scientifically that God exists,” that’s kind of like if your spouse says, “I love you” and you say, “Oh, really? Prove that using mathematics.” It’s the wrong category. You can’t prove you love someone with a calculator, and science is out of its depth when it comes to knowledge about spiritual things.

Philosophy?

What about philosophy? Philosophy is when you just try to find truth about the non-physical world just by figuring it out. Apply logic and reason and human wisdom to figure out spiritual truth.

The problem with that is, how can you know whether what you figured out is actually true? One culture figures out that slavery is wrong and another culture figures out it’s perfectly okay. Someone figures out there are demons; someone else figures out there is no such thing—how can you know who’s right?

Philosophy can raise some interesting questions, but it can’t figure out spiritual truth.

Mythology?

For spiritual truths, people very often turn to mythology to discover truth. Mythology is when you interpret religious stories as parables or allegories that teach a moral lesson. Like Aesop's fables. Made-up stories from which you can draw life lessons.

And when you do that, there’s no right or wrong answer on what the moral lesson is—just whatever you find helpful. That’s why people like it—you’re the boss. You sit in judgment on each principle in the philosophy. If you think it will be helpful, great—adopt it as part of your worldview. If not, then toss it aside. That’s the approach most people like because it makes you the source of your own truth, and no one can tell you you’re wrong.

And there are a lot of people who want to make Christianity a myth-based religion. These are the eggheads and academic types who can’t bring themselves to believe in miracles but they still want to be able to say they believe the Bible. So whenever they see a miracle story in the Bible, they say, “That was never meant to be taken literally. It’s a myth. Those stories about creation and miracles and resurrections and the Second Coming of Christ—those aren’t history. They’re like parables or metaphors that teach a lesson.”

Are there parables and allegories in the Bible? Yes. But are all the stories in the Bible parables and metaphors and myths? What about the promise of the Second Coming of Christ? That’s what Peter has in mind in this passage. All that stuff about Jesus returning someday... , coming in the clouds... , showing up with all the spectacular glory and power... , Judgment Day—is all that language literal? Literal clouds? A real trumpet blast... , actual bright, blinding light that you can see with your physical eyes... , literal resurrections from the dead—physical bodies coming out of graves... —are we to understand these to be real events or is it mythical, metaphorical, parable-type stuff? Peter begins today’s passage by answering that question definitively.

We Didn’t Follow Myths

2 Peter 1:16 We did not follow sophisticated myths when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ

When you read a religious story, how can you tell if it’s intended to be taken literally or as a myth? Well, one way you can know is if the person telling you the story says, “This is not a myth! What we told you about Christ’s power and coming were not myths.”