Testimony Biblical Quotes

We are sometimes told that we are not a biblical church. We are a biblical church. This wonderful testament of the Old World, this great and good Holy Bible is one of our standard works. We teach from it. We bear testimony of it. We read from it. It strengthens our testimony. And we add to that this great second witness, the Book of Mormon, the testament of the New World, for as the Bible says, "In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall [all things] be established" (2 Cor. 13:1)

The testimony of the apostles is some of the most compelling evidence for the truth of the Resurrection. That a band of persecuted men would willingly suffer and even go to grisly deaths rather than break down and confess something that every one of them knew to be a lie stretches credulity beyond the breaking point. If Jesus’ Resurrection had been a fraud, the apostles, of all people, would have known it. While a fanatic might die for a lie he thought to be true, only a lunatic would die for a claim that he knew to be false. Yet even the apostles’ enemies knew that they were far from mad; they marveled that such untutored fishermen were so erudite (Acts 4:13).

When you lack the courage to publicly defend biblical truth, it is a clear testimony that you lack the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Holy Spirit is a gift of no fear.

The question isn’t always which account of Christianity uses the Bible. The question is which does justice to as much of the biblical witness as possible. There are uses of Scripture that utter a false testimony about God. This is what we see in Satan’s use of Scripture in the wilderness. The problem isn’t that the Scriptures that Satan quoted were untrue, but when made to do the work that he wanted them to do, they distorted the biblical witness. This is my claim about the slave master exegesis of the antebellum South. The slave master arrangement of biblical material bore false witness about God. This remains true of quotations of the Bible in our own day that challenge our commitment to the refugee, the poor, and the disinherited.

There are no known non-biblical references to a historical Jesus by any historian or other writer of the time during and shortly after Jesus's purported advent. As Barbara G. Walker says, 'No literate person of his own time mentioned him in any known writing.' Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE)—alive at the purported time of Jesus, and one of the wealthiest and best connected citizens of the Empire—makes no mention of Christ, Christians or Christianity in his voluminous writings. Nor do any of the dozens of other historians and writers who flourished during the first one to two centuries of the common era.

There is no biblical ground in the New Testament to align the Gospel message with a political party or ideology. Christians are rather taught in the Bible to be salt and light within their nations and societies, and to contend for biblical principles. The politically-related action outlined for Christians in the New Testament are chiefly limited to three essential things: praying for those in power, appealing to Caesar, and being good citizens as a witness and testimony while not bowing to man’s laws when they directly contradict God’s laws.

As we read the Bible, we see that God's role is not that of a scientist managing robots. Neither is God a frustrated artist who left an incomplete work and chose to start an altogether different one. Throughout the biblical testimonies, God is an involved character who loves relentlessly, judges fairly, and joins wholly in ongoing relationship with creation. The Bible itself has a "to be continued" ending, and God is to be understood as continuing in the action of the drama. God still partners with people today in an ongoing story of renewal.

During the day as serious opinions are being discussed, there is an opportunity to give the biblical view on issues of sin and righteousness or the purpose of life. But each time you speak, you have seen rejection of yourself with your views. Each testimony of truth makes you more unwelcome. Will you be bold for truth today?

As a biblical foundation, the scriptures state that the fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful (Jas 5:16), that everyone in heaven is righteous (Rev 21:27), that people in heaven pray for those on earth (Rev 5:8), that the mother of Jesus could be seen in heaven (Rev 12:1–5), and that her offspring were “those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Rev 12:17). Furthermore, if Saint Paul could claim to be a spiritual father and declare that he was in labor pains for others until Christ be formed in them, how much more would this be true of Mary! None suffered with Christ more intimately than Mary, who was, in the words of John Paul, “crucified spiritually with her crucified son.

Battle scars aren't the only marks of a testimony. Sometimes, the testimony is just the fact that you are unscathed, that the relationship that didn't work out saved you a headache, that the business deal fell through before it even started, or that you're living a quiet, drama-free life. God is just as incredible in those moments as He is in the battle moments.

Since most houses today have running water, the ease with which most Americans can give water to a guest obscures the point that everyone in the biblical culture understood: “cold water” came only from the town well or cistern because water in jars at home warmed up very quickly in the heat. Giving a cup of cold water meant inconveniencing yourself and walking to the town well carrying a container, perhaps waiting in line to draw the water, lifting the water up out of the ground, and then carrying the water back to the house—all so someone could quench his thirst. The fact that Christ connects giving cold water with rewards to be received in the future is a powerful testimony to the value of even the most seemingly mundane good works in the eyes of God.

It is one thing to attempt to understand the Old Testament as the sacred scriptures of the church. It is quite another to understand the study of the Bible in history-of-religions categories. Both tasks are legitimate, but they are different in goal and procedure. The hermeneutical issue at stake does not lie in an alleged contrast between historical process and scripture's final form. To understand the Bible as scripture means to reflect on the witnesses of the text transmitted through the testimony of the prophets and apostles. It involves an understanding of biblical history as the activity of God testified to in scripture. In contrast, a history-of-religions approach attempts to reconstruct a history according to the widely accepted categories of the Enlightenment, as a scientifically objective analysis according to the rules of critical research prescribed by common human experience.

The language of mysticism and spiritual experience cuts a wide swath through the world’s religious traditions, and it presents an alternative theology, that of connection and intimacy. In Christian tradition, Jesus speaks this language when he claims, “The Father and I are one” (John 10: 30), and when he breathes on his followers and fills them with God’s Spirit (20: 22); it appears in the testimony of the apostle Paul, who converts during a mystical encounter with Christ on a road; and it fills the effusive poetry of John the Evangelist, whose vision of God is nothing short of one in which the whole of creation is absorbed into love. When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who comes close, compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts.

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.

Shepherds were not even allowed to give testimony in court because they were considered utterly untrustworthy, the dregs of society. In other words, the shepherd was seen as just a bit above a slave. He was a lowly servant. That is why it was so significant that the first announcement of the birth of Jesus was given to shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem. Those shepherds had the lowest status in the culture of that time. Things were much the same in the time of the first family, and that is significant to what occurred in Genesis

The Bible also affirms that in the end times God’s people will be martyred by beheading.            “And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands.”  (Revelation 20:4)

In the spring of 2004, the FBI arrested Mohammed Junaid Babar, an al Qaeda agent, as he returned to the U.S. from a terrorist planning meeting in Pakistan (CNN News – August 11, 2004). Facing the potential of a 70 year federal prison sentence, Babar confessed that al Qaeda “was planning a spectacular attack on American soil–a nuclear 9/11 that will occur simultaneously in major metropolitan areas throughout the country.” His testimony was confirmed by another al Qaeda participant at the same Pakistani planning session, Sharif al-Masri (The Day of Islam).

This practice of discerning the theological testimony, unity and development of the biblical *canon was a concern of the Reformers, but it began to emerge as an approach distinct from *dogmatic theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Having much in common with *covenant theology, Reformed approaches usually emphasize the unity of Scripture as a *redemptive-historical drama, all of which reveals the person and work of Christ. Notable

The authority of Scripture is never established by means of a rationalistic apologetic. It is established through the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of Biblical authority as not a conservative testimony in fear of facts, but … a conviction of faith.

There is no “of course” about our salvation. By nature, we are deservedly dead and have no prospect apart from God’s wrath. It might be a more biblical approach if instead of starting with the love of God, we begin our presentation of the gospel where Paul does in Romans: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” (Rom. 1:18). That there is another way, as Paul goes on to unfold in what follows, is an astonishing testimony to God’s determination to finish what he started, for his own glory and not for ours. Our salvation is entirely by grace.

The universal testimony of those who have suffered for the sake of Christ and His church is that they have experienced a deep fellowship, an intimate communion with Him in the midst of their sufferings.

The Code of Hammurabi Detailed legal pronouncements for numerous situations can be found also in the Code of Hammurabi, which dates to the 18th century BCE and in which four of the 10 biblical commandments appear repeatedly. For example, the ninth of the Ten Commandments or Decalogue is, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” whereas in the Code of Hammurabi, we read: “1. If a man bring an accusation against a man, and charge him with a (capital) crime, but cannot prove it, he, the accuser, shall be put to death…. 3. If a man, in a case (pending judgment), bear false (threatening) witness, or do not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case be a case involving life, that man shall be put to death.”833

Wingate persuaded British commanders to allow him to put together a Jewish squad to attack Arab marauders, the so-called Special Night Squads. Under his leadership, the SNS attacked the infiltrators, scoring major successes. Before going into battle, Wingate would read the soldiers biblical passages relating to their area of operations, testimony to their upcoming success.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the “alien” witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

This essential truth explains why we do not speak of the Holy Spirit with the same language and knowledge we do about the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit comes to bear witness and testify to the person and work of Christ. The Holy Spirit, therefore, exalts the Son and testifies to his accomplished work at Calvary. This amounts to an important reality check for churches across the world: Where you find the Spirit of God present, you do not find so much testimony about the Holy Spirit as you find a testimony about Christ. Where you find, therefore, a bold, biblical, urgent, accurate, enthusiastic, joyful, and life-changing testimony of Christ, you can rest assured that the Holy Spirit is vibrantly at work. This

This essential truth explains why we do not speak of the Holy Spirit with the same language and knowledge we do about the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit comes to bear witness and testify to the person and work of Christ. The Holy Spirit, therefore, exalts the Son and testifies to his accomplished work at Calvary. This amounts to an important reality check for churches across the world: Where you find the Spirit of God present, you do not find so much testimony about the Holy Spirit as you find a testimony about Christ. Where you find, therefore, a bold, biblical, urgent, accurate, enthusiastic, joyful, and life-changing testimony of Christ, you can rest assured that the Holy Spirit is vibrantly at work.

Critics who deny the primacy of the Byzantine text, preferring to view it as a fourth century revision, often refer to the fact no Early Church Father before Chrysostom (347-407 AD) appears even to refer to it, let alone quote from it. Now this is simply not true. Painstaking scholarly research has shown that Justin Martyr (100-165 AD), Irenaeus (130-200 AD), Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD), Tertullian (160-220 AD), Hippolytus (170-236 AD), and even Origen (185- 254 AD) quote repeatedly from the Byzantine text. Edward Miller, after classifying the citations in the Greek and Latin Fathers who died before 400 AD, found that their quotations supported the Byzantine text 2,630 times (and other texts only 1,753 times). Furthermore, subjecting thirty important passages to examination, he found 530 testimonies to the Byzantine text (and only 170 in favour of its opponents). This was his conclusion: “The original predominance of the Traditional Text is shewn in the list of the earliest Fathers. Their record proves that in their writings, and so in the Church generally, corruption had made itself felt in the earliest times, but that the pure waters generally prevailed… The tradition is also carried on through the majority of the Fathers who succeeded them. There is no break or interval: the witness is continuous”.[21] The plain fact of the matter is that by the fourth century the Byzantine text was emerging as the authoritative text of the New Testament and for the next twelve hundred years (and more) it held undisputed sway over the whole of Christendom.

We have to be careful, however, to distinguish between evidence and artifacts. The testimony of an eyewitness can be properly viewed as evidence, but anything added to the account after the fact should be viewed with caution as a possible artifact (something that exists in the text when it shouldn’t). The Gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts, but you may be surprised to find that there are a few added textual artifacts nestled in with the evidential statements. It appears that scribes, in copying the texts over the years, added lines to the narrative that were not there at the time of the original writing. Let me give you an example. Most of us are familiar with the biblical story in the gospel of John in which Jesus was presented with a woman who had been accused of committing adultery (John 8:1–11). The Jewish men who brought the woman to Jesus wanted her to be stoned, but Jesus refused to condemn her and told the men, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” When the men leave, Jesus tells the woman, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” This story is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Too bad that it appears to be an artifact. While the story may, in fact, be absolutely true, the earliest copies of John’s gospel recovered over the centuries fail to contain any part of it. The last verse of chapter 7 and the first eleven verses of chapter 8 are missing in the oldest manuscripts available to us. The story doesn’t appear until it is discovered in later copies of John’s gospel, centuries after the life of Jesus on earth. In fact, some ancient biblical manuscripts place it in a different location in John’s gospel. Some ancient copies of the Bible even place it in the gospel of Luke. While there is much about the story that seems consistent with Jesus’s character and teaching, most scholars do not believe it was part of John’s original account. It is a biblical artifact, and it is identified as such in nearly every modern translation of the Bible (where it is typically noted in the margin or bracketed to separate it from the reliable account).

In the light of all this biblical testimony it seems to me clear that the “baptism” of the Spirit is the same as the promise or gift of the Spirit and is as much an integral part of the gospel of salvation as is the remission of sins. Certainly we must never conceive “salvation” in purely negative terms, as if it consisted only of our rescue from sin, guilt, wrath and death. We thank God that it is all these things.

Slave masters’ fear of the Bible must bear some indirect testimony to what the slave masters thought it said.

Nevertheless, Reformed epistemology does not regard belief in God as groundless or arbitrary. Plantinga distinguishes between evidence and grounds, the former being what apologists look for in theistic proofs, while the latter is more straightforward. Direct experience provides grounds to justify belief even without argumentation. One’s experience of God appropriately grounds belief in His existence.33 Reformed epistemologists stress the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit as confirming, for example, that the Bible is the reliable revelation from God. Stephen Evans believes that those who dismiss this Reformed approach as fideism (i.e., irrational faith based solely upon personal experience) try to understand it in evidentialist terms.34 He says that it should be understood in externalist terms, which means that the factors that determine whether or not I am justified or warranted in holding my belief do not have to be internal to my consciousness. At bottom the externalist says that what properly “grounds” a belief is the relationship of the believer to reality.35 For Reformed epistemologists such as Evans, the biblical story is self-authenticating in the sense that “through the work of the Spirit the story itself produces a conviction of its truth in persons, and it is in that sense epistemologically basic.”36

shares much in common with Wellhausen’s approach. Like Wellhausen, it too is highly skeptical of biblical texts as a historical source, especially their testimony about the origin of Israel. Another parallel with Wellhausen is the fact that Davies and other scholars want to see the Persian period as a critical era in the formation of biblical literature. By treating biblical Israel as a figment of Persian-era imaginations, their thesis even calls to mind Wellhausen’s description of postexilic Jews as a people that has fabricated its connection to the past, though they apply

In 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl who would soon come to be renowned as Jehanne la Pucelle (“Jeanne, the maiden”) left a small town in northeast France to offer her services as a military strategist to Charles VII, the Dauphin—or heir to the throne—whose forces were losing a protracted war against English partisans threatening to displace him. At first, no one took her seriously, but Jehanne’s determination overcame initial resistance: her skill and insight helped the French develop new battle plans and her courage inspired the demoralized troops. Under Jehanne’s leadership, the French forces successfully thwarted a siege on the city of Orleans. Later she led a campaign to retake the city and cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France had been crowned ever since the Frankish tribes were united under one ruler, allowing the Dauphin to be crowned king in the ancient tradition. Jehanne’s remarkable successes seemed divinely ordained, which necessarily implied Charles’s divine right to rule France. In 1430 Jehanne was captured in battle and imprisoned. An ecclesiastical tribunal stacked with English partisans tried her for heresy. But Jehanne’s faith was beyond reproach. She showed an astonishing familiarity with the intricacies of scholastic theology, evading every effort to lure her into making a heretical statement. Unable to discredit her faith through her verbal testimony, the tribunal seized on the implicit statements made by Jehanne’s attire. In battle, she wore armor, which required linen leggings and a form-fitting tunic fastened together with straps—both traditionally masculine attire—and, like the men she fought alongside, she adopted this martial attire when off the battlefield as well. Citing the biblical proscription in Deuteronomy 22:5 (KJV) which warns, “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a women’s garment, for all who do are an abomination to the Lord your God,” the tribunal charged Jehanne with heresy. They burned her at the stake in 1431.

Your testimony of God’s faithfulness on your journey will leave footprints that others can follow—and who knows, maybe soon you will be guiding someone else down the same path you are traveling

God’s people will be martyred by beheading. “And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands.”  (Revelation 20:4)

What, then, is good preaching? Let me pull all these ideas together into a single description. It is “proclaim[ing]. . . . the testimony of God” (1 Corinthians 2:1)—preaching biblically, engaging with the authoritative text. This means preaching the Word and not your opinion.

The kingdom of God is not advanced or defended through the sword of political power but through the Word of God and the faithful testimony of believers. As an act of love of neighbor, it is right to want biblical values to be reflected in public life. But we should not expect the state to defend the church or its doctrines. We should not expect it to afford us special privileges. Indeed, if we read the book of Revelation seriously, we should expect the state to persecute us. If we try to create Christendom then we deny the cross. The irony is that those who continue to cling most tenaciously to the remnants of Christendom are often from within evangelicalism when Christendom is so self-evidently an unevangelical model. Evangelicals are defined by their commitment to the centrality of the gospel. For them the sufficiency of God’s Word is central. But for some reason, when we engage in the political and social realm, many of us look to the state to defend Christianity. The Word is no longer sufficient to defend the name of Christ or the cause of his kingdom. We evoke the notion of a Christian society or Christian heritage when evangelicals of all people should know that people and communities are Christian only through faith in Christ. No amount of legislation can create a Christian society. The sad reality of this is that our political engagement becomes focused on self-centeredness. Kenneth Myers says: “Surely we ought to be more preoccupied with serving our neighbours than with ruling them. The involvement of Christians in cultural and civic life ought to be motivated by love of neighbour, not by self-interest—not even by the corporate self-interest of the evangelical movement.”20

we do not always (as a matter of “method”)—if we are intelligent, critical people—invest faith in eyewitnesses as opposed to those people who testify to us secondarily, nor vice versa. More generally, if we characteristically believe the testimony of one sort of person rather than another—for example, if we are Caucasians and we consistently accept “insider” accounts of reality that are offered by Caucasians over against “outsider” accounts such as those offered by Asians—then we are considered prejudiced, and not intelligent. Reality, we recognize, is more complex than such method allows. We do not, therefore—if we are intelligent, critical people—allow method overly to influence us in seeking to apprehend everyday reality; or rather, we try to ensure that whatever method we might embrace is sufficiently nuanced and complex that it allows for nuance and complexity in the world outside our heads

For Ephrem, the one who makes a loan to God through almsgiving is not simply doing a human work—he is making a public testimony to his faith. On this view, alms are not so much a human work as they are an index of one’s underlying faith.

Though we need to steer clear of emotional speculation, it will do us great good to think about heaven by using our imaginations in accordance with the Bible. The Scripture is a visionary book, one that engages our minds, fires our thoughts, and rouses us to action. It is not a tame book. It will swallow us whole, transforming our understanding of this world and the next. If we do not let the biblical testimony on heaven and hell play in our minds, it will surely rest lightly on our hearts, causing us to lose sight of the monumental vision the Lord gave us of the age to come.

Baker, Sharon L. Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010. *Batto, Bernard. Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992. Bell, Rob. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Brettler, Marc Zvi, Peter Enns, and Daniel Harrington, SJ. The Bible and the Believer: Reading the Bible Critically and Religiously. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. *Brown, Raymond E., and Francis J. Moloney S.D.B. An Introduction to the Gospel of John. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Brueggemann, Walter. An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009. *———. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.