Homeschool MACHS Conference Overview – Part 2

 Now I am finally getting around to documenting the things I learned on Saturday, the second and last day of the conference.

John Feakes (which, in case anyone missed Part 1 of this overview, was the principal speaker to the youth present at the conference) started off the morning by defending Biblical Creation. It was good of him to do so, and it was very refreshing to hear someone defend a passage which is almost universally rejected by non-believers and believers alike.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are practically dismissed as nonsense by not only the atheist world, but by a vast multitude of Christians. However, if the first chapters of Genesis are nonsense, the Cross of Christ is nullified. If God used evolution to create the earth, then there was no point in our Lord Jesus Christ coming to this earth and paying the price for our rebellion against God. After all, in that view, God used that which was not 'very good' (namely death and suffering) to bring about His creation of living things. It makes God seem rather arbitrary and self-contradictory, and we know that God is light and that in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Hence, attempts to harmonize evolution with the Bible are not only foolish, but also on the verge of being blasphemous.

Our next session presented by Mr. Feakes focused on the defense of the Deity of Christ. In this session, he presented a lot of internal biblical evidence that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He also spoke about the Trinity, and how God is one being and three persons. His explanation made a lot of sense to me. We as humans are one being and one person. An object is one being but is not a person. God is one being and three persons – the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Mr. Feakes' final session revolved around the Historicity of the Bible, specifically as pertaining to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. He showed how compelling the evidence was for His resurrection. Non-believers have resorted to nonsense trying to explain His resurrection away – suggesting that He did not fully die, His disciples had hallucinations, or perhaps the disciples stole His body and claimed Him to be alive. The evidence is so compelling that even some non-believers have admitted that His disciples sincerely believed they had seen their risen Lord. If not, why did 11 of them die martyr's deaths? Does a person die for something He knows to be a lie?

Furthermore, it takes multiple consecutive generations for a legend to fully develop. Many critics and liberal scholars claim that Christians over time began to develop ideas about Jesus being the Son of God, and so forth. But why then do we see such early dates to the new testament documents which talk about Jesus being the Son of God? All of the Gospels were written before the end of the first century, and the so-called 'synoptic gospels' (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so called because of their similarities) were written before the destruction of Jerusalem. So we see that this argument by critics is nonsense.

This is no means a comprehensive coverage of all that I learned, but rather some basics. There are a good many places you can go to learn about that which I briefly discussed above.