Jesus on Trial

A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel

David Limbaugh

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781621572770
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

In Jesus on Trial, David Limbaugh applies his lifetime of legal experience to a unique new undertaking: making a case for the gospels as hard evidence of the life and work of Jesus Christ. Limbaugh, a practicing attorney and former professor of law, approaches the canonical gospels with the same level of scrutiny he would apply to any legal document and asks all the necessary questions about the story of Jesus told through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. His analysis of the texts becomes profoundly personal as he reflects on his own spiritual and intellectual odyssey from determined skeptic to devout Christian. Ultimately, Limbaugh concludes that the words Christians have treasured for centuries stand up to his exhaustive inquiry—including his examination of historical and religious evidence beyond the gospels—and thereby affirms Christian faith, spirituality, and tradition.

CHAPTER 1

FROM SKEPTIC TO BELIEVER

I have been fascinated with Christian apologetics—that is, the defense of the Christian faith—and theology since before I became a believer several decades ago. I have studied these subjects, off and on, with a fair amount of intensity, and I hope my studies have prepared me for this task.

As corny as this might sound, I believe the circumstances leading to my writing this book may have been providential. A few months ago I was having dinner with two longtime friends and one of them began talking about Christianity, as he had done on numerous occasions before. Both guys are nonbelievers, and the one who invariably brings up religion seems to want to discuss it, perhaps to test the sincerity of his own beliefs by challenging mine. I don’t remember our discussion word for word, but I clearly recall that at one point he announced that he couldn’t understand how any person who uses his reasoning powers could possibly believe in Christianity. He claims, lightheartedly I think, to be a deist—a person who believes in a god who brought creation into existence and then abandoned it to its own devices. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

EARLY DOUBTS

I remember at an early age my incredulity upon learning that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, like all good Communists, was an atheist. When we were leaving church one Sunday, I asked my dad how anyone could believe that all of this—the wondrous glory of God’s creation—came from nothing. I instinctively knew that could not be true.

I am not suggesting I had sophisticated thoughts at age eight or nine. To the contrary, my point is that if I had gained such a clear awareness of God’s existence simply through what I observed about His creation, there must be a self-evident quality about this truth.

I knew God was real—because God created us to know Him and has shown Himself in creation. The Bible confirms it: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19–20).

Sure, I wondered how God could have always existed, and it gave me a headache contemplating it, but I accepted it because it was the only thing that made any sense at all. I would later learn that contrary to arguments from humanists, atheists, and anti-theists, there is a world of difference between the idea that the universe has always existed or sprang from nothing, and the idea that God, an uncaused cause Who has always existed, created it. Even at age sixty-one I don’t have the capacity to comprehend infinity fully, or that God exists wholly apart from time, but I do believe there is no other plausible explanation for the existence of the universe or for man’s presence in it. It is much more difficult to believe that matter spontaneously erupted from non-matter and life from non-life without a non-material, uncaused creator.

My brother and I had an ordinary, but wonderful, Midwestern childhood with loving parents who took us to Sunday school and church every Sunday. Our entire extended family was very involved with the church, and I will always have the fondest memories of those days. Going out to eat after church was a family ritual I will always especially cherish. I trusted my parents, and I had no reason to distrust Christianity or the Bible, but the truth is that, like many kids, I probably wasn’t engaged enough at a young age to give them the attention they deserved. I was more interested in figuring out ways to sneak out of church with my mischievous friends.

We learned about the Bible in Sunday school, and I went through the confirmation process. Whether or not I actually believed in the ideas, I certainly didn’t embrace them actively, and as the years passed I slowly began to have doubts. This was no fault of my upbringing, or of the fine church we attended, but probably stemmed from my lack of seriousness at the time and my other interests. I either didn’t sufficiently absorb the lessons I’d learned from the Bible or they gradually diminished in my memory from disuse. I’m sure this sounds familiar to many people, especially of that era.

By the time I was in college, I don’t think I was a believer, but I often wondered about philosophical questions, including Who God was and what He was like. Like many, I thought I could bootstrap my way to an understanding of spiritual truths through my reasoning powers alone, largely unaware of the actual content of God’s special revelation in the Bible.

I was unconvinced that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Though I always believed in a creator god, I had great difficulty believing in the God of the Bible—as little as I knew about Him, as it turns out. I couldn’t accept that an all-powerful God, if He were also all-loving, would permit such evil, pain, and suffering as we see in the world when it is in His power to prevent it. The concept of an eternal hell was also difficult for me to square with the notion of an omnibenevolent creator.

Additionally, I couldn’t comprehend why God would establish a system of salvation whereby one could attain eternal life simply by believing in Him, or more specifically, in Jesus Christ. I wondered how He could judge us on the basis of what we believe, which we can’t control, rather than on our behavior, which we can. Then again, at the time I didn’t grasp that the biblical concept of faith involved more than mere intellectual belief, but I’ll get to that later. So without even investigating the Bible as a young adult, I had serious doubts about Christianity.

Like my old friend, I flirted with deism for a time when I was initially exposed to it in an American literature course in college. Deism was popular during the Enlightenment, and a few high-profile American Founders such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were thought to be deists. In the course we read a fascinating letter from Ben Franklin to his friend Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, in which Franklin expressed some doubts about the divinity of Jesus Christ.¹ But in retrospect, I doubt that Franklin was a deist, because in the letter he clearly acknowledged his belief in a superintending god. Furthermore, four years earlier he had called the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to prayer during a deadlock²—and why would he have prayed if he thought God did not intervene in human affairs? Nonetheless, it was mildly reassuring to me as a skeptic that someone as brilliant as Franklin had doubts about Christianity.

Deism sounded right to me because it seemed to solve the dilemma of evil. It allows one to believe in an all-powerful creator God Who is not responsible for the evil and pain in the world, since He is not active in it. What a relief. Finally, I could believe what I’d always known in my gut to be true: that God exists, but that He is a good God, not the God of the Bible Who permits, or possibly even causes, suffering.

On closer inspection, however, we might discover that deism doesn’t resolve the problem of evil at all. If some regard the God of the Bible as morally unacceptable because He actively intervenes in His creation yet permits or causes human suffering, how much more repugnant is the god of the deists, who for no apparent purpose at all, cynically created this suffering-infested world and then completely abandoned it? Does this mythical god even have a plan of redemption for us? If so, why doesn’t he tell us about it through revelation like the “mean” God of the Bible? How does he exact justice, or is there any such concept in this belief system? How does he account for evil? How does he draw his creatures closer to him—assuming he cares in the slightest bit? Where is he, anyway?

My purpose isn’t to ridicule skeptics—as I said, I used to be one. But at some point I realized it was foolish and arrogant of me to pretend to form final conclusions about the Bible and Jesus Christ when I hadn’t begun to seriously study Scripture or Christian doctrine. It was reckless of me to make a potentially life-determining decision on nothing more than my naked ruminations. So I resolved to examine the evidence.

As it turned out, the more I studied it the more I came to believe that Christianity is true. It is important for doubters to understand that many of us believers came to the point of faith by first studying the evidence and using—not abandoning—our reasoning powers to analyze it. I discovered that to believe in Jesus Christ does not require us to discard our intellect. Reason is perfectly compatible with Christian doctrine—though admittedly, saving faith in Christ requires more than sterile analysis and intellectual assent to the basic propositions of the Christian faith.

Yes, we must believe that Christ is the Son of God, that He took on human form, lived a sinless life, and died a sacrificial death for our sins (2 Cor. 5:21). We must acknowledge our own sinful state and repent (Luke 13:3), turn to Christ, and trust Him for the forgiveness of our sins and for our eternal salvation, based solely on His grace and nothing we have merited. But the Christian faith requires more than the intellect because it involves more than the intellect. It involves the will: a conscious decision to place our trust (faith) in Christ for eternal salvation as if our life depended on Him—because it does. But it’s a little difficult to take that final step of faith when you have serious doubts about Christianity and the Bible.

I want to tell you a little bit about my own spiritual journey from this point forward, not because it’s anything to be proud of, or even that remarkable, but because it might be encouraging or helpful to some who are open to believing but are plagued with doubts similar to those I experienced.

INVISIBLE SEEDS

I was constantly seeking the truth, but usually through my own feeble efforts and presumptuous ponderings, and without studying the Bible itself or examining Christian doctrine more carefully. One Christmas not many years after I’d graduated from law school, my close friend Peter Kinder (who is now lieutenant governor of Missouri) invited me to his parents’ home to visit with a few of his law school classmates who were in town.

Somehow the subject of Christianity came up, and Peter’s friend Steve Springer began to talk to me about it. I shared with Steve certain doubts I had about the God of the Bible and told him I just didn’t buy into Christianity. I will never forget a couple of things about this exchange. Steve did not fit my perception at the time of the stereotypical young Christian—a judgmental holy roller who accepted Christianity uncritically. He exhibited an extraordinary measure of grace. He not only didn’t take offense at my skepticism, but he patiently retrieved his Bible from his bedroom and began to walk me through a few fascinating verses. This might have been the first time outside of Sunday school or church that someone went directly to the source and shared it with me.

Undaunted and unoffended by my challenge, he gave a model Christian response. Despite my skepticism, I was not close-minded and was genuinely interested in learning. I knew, after all, that I hadn’t really given the Bible itself a hearing, much less a fair one. To my surprise—and this is embarrassing to admit—Steve showed me how verses of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, were tied to others in content and theme with remarkable frequency. Amazingly, I had never looked at a reference Bible before, and I was blown away. My ignorance was on display, but Steve wasn’t remotely judgmental—to help me learn more, he even gave me that Bible.

I was genuinely intrigued to discover that the Bible was not simply a mishmash of stories, allegories, alleged historical events, and moral lessons. There was obviously a pattern here, and for the first time in my life the Bible appeared to me to be thematically integrated. The scales on my eyes started peeling away.

Though Steve didn’t realize it at the time, he had planted a very important spiritual seed. But sometimes it takes the planting of many such seeds before the Christian root springs up in one’s life. As often as not, the planter won’t even be aware he planted the seed, much less that it would later grow and bloom. So believers should not be discouraged by an apparent lack of response to their witnessing, as it won’t always be clear to them or to the person to whom they are witnessing that they made an impact. We must do what we can and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.

While I was intrigued by Steve’s demonstration that Scripture was connected, I was still far from becoming a believer. Yet the planting of that seed was pivotal in my ultimate acceptance of Christ, which I would only rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: From Skeptic to Believer
• Chapter 2: “Aha” Moments, Part 1
• Chapter 3: “Aha” Moments, Part 2
• Chapter 4: Paradoxes of Christianity, Part 1
• Chapter 5: Paradoxes of Christianity, Part 2
• Chapter 6: Jesus Christ, Fully Human and Fully Divine
• Chapter 7: The Amazing Bible, Part 1: Unity
• Chapter 8: The Amazing Bible, Part 2: Prophecy
• Chapter 9: The Amazing Bible, Part 3: Reliability and Internal Evidence
• Chapter 10: The Amazing Bible, Part 4: Reliability and External Evidence
• Chapter 11: Truth, Miracles, and the Resurrection of Christ
• Chapter 12: Science Makes the Case—for Christianity
• Chapter 13: Pain and Suffering
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• The Emmaus Code