Sunday, December 27, 2009

Why Haven't They Gone Back POST ONE

“Why haven’t they gone back?” That’s the question given as a final proof in the minds of those who reject the moon landings; that it was indeed a hoax. And it explains the reason why today’s youth simply can’t embrace the concept. The net result of the space program was the effect it had on the children of the time. I was too young to see “Star Trek” and “The Jetsons” in their first runs but they were alive and well in syndication by the time I came onto the scene in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. People my age and slightly older who had watched these TV shows suddenly said within their hearts “hey this could really happen” when they saw the moon landings. Those same young adults then devoted themselves from that point on toward the goal of achieving that dream. It’s the state of mind these people cherished that is ultimately responsible for the incredible technological progress we have made in the last 40 years.

You may remember a TV commercial about 10 years ago with Avery Brooks of “Star Trek Deep Space Nine” asking “where are the flying cars?” (You can actually find the commercial on Youtube if you look for his name and that question.) Well “where are the flying cars?” is really “I don’t see that we’re any better as a world. I still feel empty inside even with all my gadgets.” Whether they’d be willing to admit it to themselves or not, the youth of today reject the moon landings for this one reason above all others. The rest of their arguments against the moon landings are really just excuses. The promise of heaven on earth science was supposed to create simply has not happened. People don’t feel any better inside no matter how many conveniences we have today. And of course, the only way to feel any better inside is to be changed within by surrendering your heart to the Lord. Romans 12:2 puts it this way “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Still the lingering question remains, why haven’t they gone back? A history buff will give you several different answers and opinions. The most popular of which is that the U. S. only did it to beat the Soviet Union in the first place and therefore another moon shot is not needed. The USSR actually had a robot spacecraft on its way to the moon at the same time as Apollo 11. It was supposed to land, retrieve a soil sample and return before Armstrong and Aldrin, but it crashed. Another reason is that no one can afford it today. The United States spent a full 25% of their GDP on the moon project and would have been bankrupt if they continued.

“I was there” proves that Jesus did rise from the dead as we have seen. For those who refuse to believe in Him, there is also a similar comeback. “Why hasn’t He returned yet like He said He would?

I want you to imagine you are a member of the early Christian Church living at the time of John receiving the book of Revelation. This was about 96 AD. Three generations of believers have now come onto the scene. The 1st generation, those who were there, has all gone into their graves. The 2nd is now very old and the third is coming into adulthood and filling the leadership roles their fathers once had. You have lived through years of persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire, but you have grown up in the church. After hearing all those wonderful stories over and over of Jesus, how good He was and the truth that He did indeed rise from the dead to offer life to all, you are 100% sure nothing will ever take your faith in Him away. Still there is one lingering, nagging thought that has crossed your mind lately, especially as the last living disciple, John, will soon go to his grave too. That thought is “why hasn’t Jesus come back yet?”

Anyone today who reads the New Testament can clearly see in the tone of its writing that the first generation of Christians did believe Jesus would return for them in their lifetime. In John 21:23 (written a few years after Revelation) John himself tells of and refutes a common error held by many that he would not die before Jesus came back. By 96 AD that question must have grown larger and larger in the minds of those who were still waiting for Him. So if Jesus really was who He said He was, why didn’t He come back?

The explanation comes from a concept I like to call “multi-level prophecy”. This is something that we see in many parts of the Bible. One of the best examples is from the Old Testament in Isaiah chapter 65:17-25. In this text God makes all kinds of promises that obviously will never happen in this world but are promises of Heaven. These include creating a new world (17), taking away all sorrow (19), complete physical security (21, 22), the promise of His presence (24) and that of a world where everyone is nice to each other all the time (25). Yet in the middle of all these wonderful promises is verse 20 “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, Nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; For the child shall die one hundred years old, But the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed.”

How can this be? Doesn’t the Bible say that we’ll live forever in Heaven? The answer is this is a multi-level prophecy. At the time Isaiah wrote these words God knew that about a century afterward the Babylonians were going to invade and destroy Jerusalem. This prophecy then was given as a promise to the people of that time that their Jerusalem would be restored. The promises of Heavenly Jerusalem were partially fulfilled in earthly Jerusalem’s restoration and the experience was used as a model to illustrate the eventual complete fulfillment of these promises at the end of time, which will take place very soon.

The prophecies Jesus gave in Matthew 24 were exactly the same as those in Isaiah 65, multi-level. Compare Matthew 24:15-18 with Luke 21:20-22 (this time the references are from the King James Version):

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.

These are both taken from the same discourse yet they have one important difference. Luke quotes Jesus as speaking of an event that happened in the lifetime of the first generation, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; while Matthew remembers Jesus speaking about something different, the “abomination of desolation”. This is taken from a time prophecy in Daniel 12:11 and did not come to pass for hundreds of years afterward. As Matthew warned, it’s one of the most complicated things in the Bible to understand; therefore I won’t spend any more time on it here. I’ll give you a clue as to what it means. It’s about the decline of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages when through a union of church and state, oppression and persecution took place in the name of God.

Here’s a statement from the book “The Desire of Ages”, Page 628, which further illustrates this point and shows that this prophecy was for our time as well:
... when He was alone, Peter, John, James, and Andrew came to Him as He sat upon the Mount of Olives. "Tell us," they said, "when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world?" Jesus did not answer His disciples by taking up separately the destruction of Jerusalem and the great day of His coming. He mingled the description of these two events. Had He opened to His disciples future events as He beheld them, they would have been unable to endure the sight. In mercy to them He blended the description of the two great crises, leaving the disciples to study out the meaning for themselves. When He referred to the destruction of Jerusalem, His prophetic words reached beyond that event to the final conflagration in that day when the Lord shall rise out of His place to punish the world for their iniquity, when the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain. This entire discourse was given, not for the disciples only, but for those who should live in the last scenes of this earth's history.

The best example to show that the early Christians did expect Jesus to return in their lifetimes probably comes from Acts 1:6, 7 “Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.’” The disciples are seeing Jesus for the last time here as He is literally minutes away from leaving for Heaven in a cloud and they want to know when it’s going to all be over. As we already saw from the quote above, they couldn’t have handled it if He’d told them that 2 more millennia would go by before that happened.

1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 gives us additional evidence of what the first generation’s expectations were. “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” These words were given as a promise to those believers still living that their loved ones who “fell asleep” (a metaphor for death) would see Jesus and them again. We see in these words an attempt by Paul to comfort those who may be upset that their loved ones died before Jesus came back. Yet Paul is speaking as if he also thinks Jesus will return shortly.

It stands to reason then that since the first generation wasn’t ready and the lingering expectation of the Second Coming continued at least until the end of the first century, that the timing of the book of Revelation was ideal for the early church. Just when people might have been ready to give up, God came through with a new set of visions given to the last living disciple who put them together into a message to tell the church what was still to come.
Matthew 24 and its parallel references in Mark 13 and Luke 21 speak of wars, famines and earthquakes. These things happened on one level in the first century. One famine from the days of Claudius Caesar is mentioned in Acts 11:28. They also were fulfilled on a gradual on-going basis through the entire Christian era. And who can doubt they have been happening on a greater level of fulfillment than ever before during the last 100 years. They are multi-level prophecies so that any one in any time could see something in them to make that person aware of the need to be ready for Jesus. As Billy Graham put it “Christ will come back at the end of the world. But when you die, that’s the end of the world for you.” The decision to accept Him is a decision we have to make here in this lifetime. The first generation of believers had to make it then and we have to make it now.

The statement made by Peter in 2 Peter 3:3, 4 has been fulfilled on an on-going basis in every generation since his time “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”

Do you see the answer to the question now of why Jesus has not come back? Those who ask that question as scoffers are often people who have looked into the prophecies of His coming, saw some part of them come true in their lifetimes; believed them, hoped for Him and waited; and waited and waited and finally got sick of waiting and abandoned them altogether. The prophecies of His coming are true and reliable. They’re just broader and wider in their scope than any one generation of people can understand. Just like those who scoff today at the moon landings and try to prove their position with the question of why haven’t they gone back, many today use the fact that they don’t understand why Jesus has not returned yet as an excuse to deny Him.

At some point though, Paul must have realized the expectations of the early church would have to wait. Though he was not alive when the book of Revelation was written, its companion book from the Old Testament, Daniel, was available to him. It’s likely that with a study of those prophecies, many of which had not come true in Paul’s day yet, that he wrote in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition”.

We know this person today as the antichrist. And one very important thing that must be said about him is that some of the prophecies concerning his arrival are also multi-level! Jesus warned in Matthew 7:15 to “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” What does this mean? Beware of those who claim to be followers of Christ, but aren’t really. And this trend was also in motion by the time the first generation had died as is shown by Acts 20:28-31 “Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.”

Years later John concurred with Paul. Having seen the beginning of this trend near the end of his life, he wrote in 1 John 2:18 “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.”

Most people today look at the various Bible prophecies and are expecting one person to come and be “the” antichrist. However, in every generation these prophecies have been fulfilled to some degree. Though they will be fulfilled again on one final, grand scale across the whole world just before Jesus returns, we can’t wait for that to happen. We have to be ready now and have our hearts right with God now. Revelation 13 makes two descriptions. There’s “the beast” and “the image of the beast”. There is only one “beast” yes. But the image of the beast can be anyone else who acts like the beast, who is like the beast in spirit.

This is one of the main points of this entire blog. The modern world claims to have triumphed over the church, the Bible and God because of all the great scientific discoveries we have made. The teachings of the church during the Dark Ages are thought of as the teachings of the Bible. However this is simply not true. The Dark Ages were just as much a spiritual as well as an intellectual darkness. The church Jesus started on earth fell away from the simplicity and beauty of the gospel.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

One very important thing must be mentioned here. Jesus warned of “false Christs” and “false prophets” in the last days. Another description Jesus gave was of “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Satan has the ability to pull of miracles as well and will use that ability to the best advantage he can in order to lead as many of God’s people astray as possible. Though Jesus offered many miracles and healings as proof of His divinity, in our time miracles themselves cannot be enough. We have to be ready to test a miracle by the Bible. If that miracle is the kind of miracle God would do and not just some cheap, dime store psychic’s trick; if that miracle has a purpose and a message behind it that agrees with the principles of the Bible; and if that miracle glorifies God; then it is a true miracle. If the purpose of the miracle is just to put on a big show and wow those who see it without really helping them in life or if the one performing the miracle ends up getting all the credit for it, even if that person claims to get his or her power from God, then it is a false miracle. No matter how powerful and compelling it may seem to be, “I was there” can’t enough today.

“I was there.” “I saw Jesus” is what the disciples have said. His miracles and infallible proofs did come from God and do agree with God’s word. “I was there, I saw Him too” is what Paul said. “I was there”, is my own personal testimony both to the moon landings and to Jesus. I saw Him because I was full of guilt and He made me clean and pure again is what anyone today can say if they will turn to Jesus. Just like the moon landings, Jesus is real. I know because I was there.

From an engineering point of view, the moon landings were the highest and greatest technological achievement our modern world has created. Here’s something interesting to think about. How many men have walked on the moon? Twelve! How many disciples did Jesus have? Twelve! What does that tell you? I agree wholeheartedly with Marvin Moore, whom I quoted in the last chapter. This event definitely was the crowning achievement of man’s quest to reclaim heaven.

After all my attempts to set my friend Neil straight he always counters quite firmly with one statement “if it’s really true that they landed on the moon, why haven’t they gone back?” We’ll examine this next.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Of Course They Landed on the Moon POST TWO

Paul’s experience makes the situation quite a bit more interesting. What he saw he spoke of several times, one is in Acts 26:12-23 ““While thus occupied, as I journeyed to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests, “at midday, O king, along the road I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and those who journeyed with me. “And when we all had fallen to the ground, I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ “So I said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ‘But rise and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of the things which I will yet reveal to you. ‘I will deliver you from the Jewish people, as well as from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you, ‘to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me.’

“Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, “but declared first to those in Damascus and in Jerusalem, and throughout all the region of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent, turn to God, and do works befitting repentance. “For these reasons the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. “Therefore, having obtained help from God, to this day I stand, witnessing both to small and great, saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses said would come— “that the Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead, and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.”

Paul’s encounter with Christ was just as supernatural as what Peter described. Yet Paul saw Jesus at least three years after He returned to Heaven. The Lord was not a ghost, just as He said to the disciples that Sunday night in Luke 24:37-43, He was still the same Jesus! Paul never met Him that we know of before the cross yet his account harmonizes well with those who did.

Do you trust these men? A liar can’t keep his story straight indefinitely and will always slip up somewhere because he has to make an effort to remember what lies he’s told to whom. And what are the odds that liar would remember his story perfectly 30 years later in Peter and Paul’s case and 60 years later in John’s? When one is telling the truth he or she does not have to remember it in that sense because the truth just is what it is. The overwhelming changes in the disciples from their encounters with Christ testify to the fact that they did experience something real. They all abandoned Him in the garden that Thursday night and their entire world was crushed when Jesus was put on the cross. Yet 50 days after that in Acts 2 and for the rest of their lives we see nothing but courage in them. They might have gone to their graves for a lie to avoid shame and embarrassment but would they have lived so courageously for that same lie until then?

Paul also said in First Thessalonians 2:4, 5 “But as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, even so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God who tests our hearts. For neither at any time did we use flattering words, as you know, nor a cloak for covetousness—God is witness.

Verses 9-13 of the same chapter say “For you remember, brethren, our labor and toil; for laboring night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, we preached to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how devoutly and justly and blamelessly we behaved ourselves among you who believe; as you know how we exhorted, and comforted, and charged every one of you, as a father does his own children, that you would walk worthy of God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory. For this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe.

What the men of God had to say was the word of God. Their character backed up their words. When someone initially searched for God who has no previous knowledge pf spiritual things, that person will look to the one sharing with him and base his decision to some degree on that person’s character. The student looks to the teacher and says “what is truth” but is also saying “does this work for you.” Once the student comes into his own faith relationship with God he will have that faith tested by being allowed to see that his teacher is not perfect after all. Therefore it behooves Christians to live out what they believe every day. The consistency of character these men showed for the rest of their lives is evidence they can be trusted.

It is the Lord who ordained that humans would be used to reach each other. Not everything therefore, will come to us individually straight from God. He will raise up and call some, so they can help others. He will show it’s His word by the changes in your life He makes.... that’s the proof! Just like the proof of creation we’ve already seen, the life, death and resurrection of Christ is proven the same way, by the peace of mind Jesus brings to those who receive Him. Psalm 51:10 says “create in me a clean heart

Remember Jesus words to doubting Thomas in John 20:29? “Jesus said to him, ‘Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” Ultimately none of us were there. We have to trust those who were. The ultimate proof of creation, Psalm 51:10, is also the ultimate proof Jesus is the Saviour of the world. How could His salvation mean anything if He hadn’t made us in the first place? How could His creation mean anything without His saving Grace either? To repeat the verse, it says “Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”
The fact that there are people today who reject the moon landings is proof of the principle of human nature that ultimately one has to experience things for oneself in order to believe them. They youth of today weren’t there so they can’t believe it. If mankind did return to the moon then many of those same youth would likely admit it was true after all. We all need a continual refreshing like this in order to sustain what we believe in. It’s the same in spiritual things.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Of Course They Landed on the Moon POST ONE

OF COURSE THEY LANDED ON THE MOON

I’ll give him a fake name – ‘Neil’. He is a composite character taken from a few people near me in life. A modern minded person, into science, philosophy and science fiction/fantasy, he is a lot like I was when I was his age. There is one crucial difference though. My friend, like many young people today, does not believe the moon landings were real. There have been books, TV documentaries and websites speaking about the issue and calling into question what was once fully accepted. The lack of stars behind the astronauts in any of the lunar surface pictures, the way those pictures were lit, the way they seemed to walk in their spacesuits, the way the shadow lines cross the ground, the waving of the U.S. flag; all these and more are given as “proof” that the moon landings couldn’t possibly be real. These have also clearly been debunked in other books, TV documentaries and websites. Those things that couldn’t happen, like the uneven shadow lines, are shown there to be everyday occurrences.

What shows those in the “against” camp to be completely incorrect and what I find fascinating about the whole debate is the incredible amount of evidence they ignore. Thousands of people were involved in the launching of the spaceships. After all these years and not one has cracked and spilled the beans, what does that say? Where did the rockets go each time they launched? They went up; if it was a fake they would have had to come down somewhere. Could you hide a 300 foot tall rocket? As my wife suggested to me in our conversations on the issue, how far would the conspiracy have had to go? Was every single Mercury, Gemini and pre-landing Apollo mission also a fake or was it just the actual moon landings? Do these same people who watch TV every day believe the satellites those TV signals come from are unreal? If the helicopter had the capsule in tow and dropped it into the ocean before it picked it up, where did it come from? There would have been thousands of people on the navy ships to see this part of the hoax. They never said anything. What about the total and complete disdain any living astronaut has for the issue. It’s entirely beneath them to even discuss it at all. If it was faked, then why have an Apollo 13 near disaster? Surely anyone who would lie to that degree would gloss things over so well that they would be seen to succeed without any problems. Not one of these points is ever dealt with by those who discount the success of the Apollo missions.

I have never doubted for one second that the moon landings were real. One thing that confirmed my beliefs over the years and closed my heart to any doubts was when I saw the video of the astronauts proving Galileo right. As a young person I greatly valued seeing this in light of being taught the story of Galileo’s persecution. What the astronauts did was to take a hammer and a feather up to the moon and drop them both at the same time. People disagreed with Galileo’s statements that all things fall at the same rate and used the feather as their example. Without air on the moon, the feather and the hammer fell at exactly the same rate landing on the moon’s surface at exactly the same time. This was not something that could be faked.

When you take all of the supposed reasons for the moon landing to be faked into account, what those who believe and promote them are really saying is not that they don’t believe, but that they can’t bring themselves to believe. It’s just too far beyond their worldview to surrender their preconceived notions.

In a way it’s not surprising that today’s youth do feel this way. The situation is the same one that we were in during the 1970’s with the book “Chariots of the Gods”. Its premise was essentially “how could those ancient peoples have built such great monuments when as far as we know they were nowhere near as advanced?” Today’s youth are well aware of the factoid that the average car has had a more powerful computer chip in it than was on the Apollo spaceship for at least the last twenty years. Therefore, how could they have done it? Your car couldn’t make it to the moon right?

The answer is simple, they were smart. I was quite adept at doing math in my head until I started using a calculator. Then I lost that skill. The entire world is the same way today. A slide rule may not be as fast as a computer, but the engineers at NASA could get the same results with it if they needed to. The kind of computers we have now were not what they had then. What they couldn’t get their computers to do, they did themselves. I’m not the first to say this but it’s something everyone should know. That is even though today’s computers are much more powerful and much smaller, they run complicated applications for processing video and picture files that the computers back then did not do. All they used those giant, room-sized computers for was number crunching. There were no operating systems to load up on the Apollo Command Module. Neither was there a mouse, printer/scanner nor a wireless router for high speed internet with their associated driver programs. There wasn’t even a monitor in the capsule the way we think of one. The display screen simply showed the numbers they needed to see. The majority of the computing was done on the ground anyway.

Computers are only as popular as they are today because they have been made so user friendly. They’re nothing more than glorified video game consoles, typewriters and stereo systems. Have you the average layman reading these words ever wrote any programs on your home computer yourself? People today take these things for granted, which leads them into error. Having been raised with them their whole lives and knowing nothing else, its no wonder young people today can’t picture the world any other way. The thing is; it was.

I know it’s true that they landed on the moon because I was there. I was four years old watching the rocket lift off live on television. I will never forget the wonder that filled my heart as I saw the great blasts of smoke and steam shoot out from the side of the Saturn V booster to a distance beyond it that was greater than its height. I remember the scene a few days later with the helicopter coming to the capsule, already in the water, and the frogmen leaping out into the ocean to gather and collect the astronauts and bring them home safely. No one will ever be able to convince me of anything other than the truth of the matter. They did land on the moon every one of those six times.

It was not my purpose to get into a major discussion on the topic of the actual moon landings. Instead rather, to springboard into why there is so much doubt among the young of today and what lessons we can draw from this controversy as it applies to the spiritual things we’re discussing here on this blog.

What about the stories of those who can say “I WAS THERE“ to seeing Jesus rise from the dead, were they fakes, yes or no? What does that mean for us today in the age where so many think they no longer need God?

Acts 1:3 says “to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Take the example of the Lord’s appearing to 500 at once mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:6. How could that possibly be attributed to mass hysteria? Note that the text here says “He presented Himself”. The crowd didn’t control the appearance.

John was one of those who saw Him many times after His resurrection. 1 John 1:1-4 says “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us— that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.”
John was the youngest disciple. He wrote these words at least 60 years later. Growing up a Jew he knew of the hopes Israel had in the coming Messiah. He knew the true God, the God of the Bible, was not the same as the statues worshipped by every other culture in the entire world.

The Lord is beyond our reality and yet here he tells us that same God came into our reality to give us life. He was an eyewitness and he shares what he knows to be indisputably true. Even more so, he not only saw Jesus he touched Him! John’s main concern is not all that Jesus did to prove Himself after He rose form the dead, but the way He lived His life during the time of His ministry when He taught so much truth, gave so many practical demonstrations of His love and reached out to save those who would reject Him.

Peter actually uses the word “eyewitness” in 2 Peter 1:16-19, specifically talking about transfiguration of Luke 9:28-36, when he, John and James were with Jesus. They saw Jesus in a glorious white light and saw Moses and Elijah. They also audibly heard the voice of God the Father. Peter wrote these words many years later. “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts;"

Elsewhere Peter speaks of the “more sure word of prophecy”. In other words, even though he did have eyewitness experiences, the real proof of Jesus Messiahship is found in the prophecies of the Old Testament that the Lord fulfilled while on earth. Some of those prophecies, like how Judas would betray Him, were not ones Jesus could personally control. Here in the above passage Peter notes how those prophecies were confirmed by this supernatural encounter.