The Old Testament and Jesus both foretold Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. He said: “I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth my bread lifted up his heel against me. From henceforth I tell you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he.” (John 13:18-19). Christ had just said: “If ye know these things blessed are ye if you do them.” (John 13:17). However, He knew that Judas’ “knowledge would not issue in the happiness of doing.” Christ knew those whom he had chosen; therefore, he knew the nature of Judas (John 6:70), and that he would lift up his heel against him (13:18). “There was no surprise to Christ in the faithlessness of Judas, though there was to others.” Christ now told his apostles that one of this inner circle of disciples would oppose him. He told them about it, before it came to pass, that when it came to pass they would have additional evidence of his foreknowledge and reliability. He did this “in order that what might have seemed to be a fatal miscarriage, should be shown to have been within the range of the Master’s foresight. Thus the disciples would be enabled to trust in him absolutely. His knowledge was not only of the main fact but of the details.” (Westcott).
Read MoreJames D. Bales
James David Bales (1915-1995) was born in Tacoma, Washington, the fifth of eight children. In 1930 he enrolled in the Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy) in College Park, Georgia. He graduated from Harding College with a BA in 1937 and received a master’s degree at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1938. Bales received his PhD in 1944 from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1944 to 1980, James David Bales was a professor of Bible and theology at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.
Both in public and in print, Bales earned a national reputation as a fearsome debater of theological issues and political ideologies, becoming especially well known for his anti-communism stance. Bales wrote and published more than seventy books and many more articles for religious periodicals. While Bales’ style was at times unabashedly confrontational, bold, aggressive, and often tinged with biting sarcasm when he felt he had the facts on his side, he was also committed to fair play and giving his opponent an honest hearing.
J. D. Bales served as moderator for Dr. Thomas B. Warren during his monumental 1976 debate on the existence of God with Dr. Antony G. N. Flew.
Percy B. Shelly, the English poet, once wrote a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, which, however, A. M. D. Hughes said should be called The Uncertainty of Deism (66). Shelley was not an atheist. After he was expelled from Oxford for writing this pamphlet "he wrote to someone . . . complaining bitterly of the excessive penalty for what he had written as 'amusement on a rainy day' [he had published and scattered the pamphlet], and 'carried perhaps a little too far some of the arguments of Locke.' He had been classed with 'wretches, the bane of society' whose openly professed atheism was the last effusion of depravity' and a menace to all virtue and happiness"
Read MoreThere are those who maintain that the sense of guilt is terrible and useless, and that at all cost it must be abolished. It is true, of course, that the sense of guilt does demoralize a man if he continues to feel it keenly and over a long period of time. He should not continue in this condition, but should get rid of it through seeking and finding forgiveness. The sense of guilt should lead one to repentance and to a change of life. And one of the wonderful things about the Christian religion is that it offers to man cleansing from sin and thus releasing from the accusing cry of a guilty conscience.
Read MoreIf the Genesis account is true, there was never a time when nothing existed. The atheist and the theist both agree that we cannot begin with nothing.
Read More"The roots of our convictions concerning the dignity of the individual are religious, whether we recognize it or not. There are non-religious individuals who have been so influenced by religion that they continue to cling to certain of its values long after they have denied the validity of all religion.
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