Biblical faith is defined as ‘the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.’ [Hebrews 11:1] But contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t mean that faith is blind. As one definition in the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, faith is belief based on evidence, testimony, or authority.
This means that, whilst wholly dependent on the Holy Spirit, Christian faith is at the same time rational. It is built on compelling evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb, credible eyewitness testimony of those who saw all that Jesus did, both before and after his death and resurrection, and the authoritative word of the one who still speaks to us today, as His Holy Spirit illuminates what He has already revealed of Himself, through both the created order and the readily available pages of Holy Scripture.
But what I want to consider here is the credibility of the eyewitness testimony, beginning with Luke who gives us the most detailed account of the Christmas story, and begins his Gospel with a statement of great significance. In writing what he calls an ‘orderly account’ of the events that he had followed closely as they unfolded, he states that he has also enquired of those who were eyewitnesses of what he hadn’t seen for himself. This, he says, was in order that his readers ‘may have certainty’ about what they have heard [Luke 1:1-4] – a certainty available to all of us who can read his account now, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
What’s more, Luke was no fool. He was a physician, a man of principle, no more likely to believe things like virgin births or people coming back from the dead without good reason than you or I. Nor, I might add, was he any more likely to be so intellectually dishonest as to disbelieve such things when those he trusted affirmed so strongly that they had indeed taken place.
But if Luke wrote so that we might have certainty, John, another of the gospel writers, wrote so that we might believe – for that is what he explicitly stated was his reason for writing what, he freely admitted, was just a fraction of what he himself had witnessed. This is what he said:
‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.’ [John 20:30-31]
So rather than somewhat foolishly imagining that we know so much better than those who were there at the time, or mistakenly claim that eyewitness testimony is a poor arbiter of truth, let’s read the gospel accounts of the Christmas story with ears to hear what is being revealed.
Because if we do, we may just find ourselves believing what, deep down, we have always wanted to be true – that there really is more to our lives than a few short, meaningless years spent distracting ourselves from the inevitability of death.
And that we have every reason to hope that, though we die, yet shall we live – and the years that follow will not only never end, but will be infinitely better than those we experience today.
To read Day 2 from 2023, click here
To read Day 2 from 2024, click here
Some musings 