Hey, friends, this is Michael Bohm with Youth Apologetics Training. Today, I think we're going to finish off this series about Theravada Buddhism. And you know, just talking about basically ways that we can reach Buddhists. All right, different things that we can talk to them about that hopefully will sway their minds to understand the truth. Yes, my voice is still crusty. I'm still experiencing a cold. It's the middle of the summer. I have no idea how I get a cold in the middle of summer. I don't think this has ever happened to me. And I've always looked at people who got colds in the summertime and thought, wow, you sissy. And here I am. I'm the sissy now. So I apologize. My voice has given out on me. But anyway, it is what it is. I'm just going to keep on going. So let's talk about some other things that are impressive to things that we can talk to him about. One thing I would like to bring my Buddhist friends to is the evidence for the resurrection. If you haven't checked out my series on the evidence for the resurrection, you've got to listen to that. It was way back when I started this podcast, all the way back about a year and a half ago, I did this series on the resurrection and I brought up mainly just secular arguments that you can use to show that the resurrection is a historical account. I mainly relied on this book by Mike Lacona and Gary Habermas called, oh boy, I think I might mess up the title. I'm drawing a blank here. I think it was The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus or something like that. Just look for a book by Gary Habermas and Mike Lacona. You'll find it. An amazing book about the evidence for the resurrection. And they use this tactic called the minimal facts approach. This way of looking at the resurrection using just five facts that nearly every even secular scholar will acknowledge as a fact. Only one of those facts, the fifth one, is a little shaky. Some scholars will try to deny it. All right, but it's a fact. By golly, it's a fact. And I found that I can memorize these five facts by remembering this. Christ's disciples preach Jesus everywhere. Take the first letter of each of those words. Christ's disciples preach Jesus everywhere. And I use those words And I use that to memorize these five facts. The sea of Christ's was Christ and well crucifixion. We know for a fact Jesus was crucified. It's just a fact. It's a fact of history. Even secular scholars will acknowledge that Jesus was crucified. It's just a fact. Okay. Disciples. The disciples Whether they were right or wrong, they were willing to die for what they believed to be the truth. They claim to have seen Jesus rise from the dead. They claim that they saw him die and then rise from the dead. And they lived that out. They were beaten. They were stoned. One of them was thrown off of a temple. And then when he hit the ground and splattered, he wasn't dead. So then everybody ran down there and threw rocks at him until he was dead. That was James. John was boiled in oil. I think he lived. It's kind of hard to say, though. Most of these disciples were heavily persecuted and ended up dying horrible, brutal, painful deaths defending what they knew to be true all right now whether it was true or not according to this minimal facts approach is i guess irrelevant to the argument they did die horrible painful deaths when all they had to do is recant and say okay i was kidding i'm lying i'm lying let me go and they could have avoided these horrible deaths seriously in almost every case. They could have avoided that final, horrible, painful death by just simply throwing up their hands and saying, I give up. I was just kidding. I didn't see Jesus rise from the grave. All right. But no, they went to their deaths defending what they believe to be true. Now, nobody dies for what they know to be a lie. After disciples was preached, and that P stands for Paul, Paul was an enemy of the faith and suddenly he had this encounter with the risen Christ. He was the guy running around persecuting Christians and having them thrown into prison and having some of them stoned to death. He was the leading persecutor of the church at that time. And suddenly he has this encounter with Christ, the risen Christ, and he does a 180. Next thing you know, he's the one running around and getting persecuted and getting stoned and shipwrecked and beaten with sticks. put in prison and all these horrible things happened to Paul because he was defending what he knew to be true. The next letter, Jesus, actually stands for, the J of Jesus stands for James, Jesus' brother. This was Jesus' brother. He thought Jesus was beside himself, but Jesus was in the flesh. He was like, this guy's nuts. All right? I mean, come on, any one of you have a brother running around claiming to be the Messiah? You'd be like, are you kidding me? But then, James encounters Jesus after he was resurrected and he's convinced. He's like this guy's God Okay, next thing, you know James is leading the church in Antioch. Okay, he's the real deal now. He's like, I am in this for keeps. And James ends up again, living a life for Christ, being persecuted and ended up being martyred for his faith. Pretty painful death. All right. And everywhere. So you know, Christ's disciples preach Jesus everywhere that he stands for empty tomb. When they showed up, when the Romans showed up, when the disciples showed up, when the Marys showed up, when the Jews showed up, and when the angels showed up, everybody found the tomb empty. Okay, wait, maybe the angels didn't find it empty. They rolled back the stone and Jesus kind of walked out. The tomb was empty. Now, not all scholars acknowledge that. Most of the secular scholars will, but not all of them. The other four facts, pretty much all secular scholars will acknowledge. So use these five facts to make a strong case for the resurrection. There are so many more lines of evidence to show that Jesus rose from the dead. But that was what I focused on in that series. I ought to do another series where I focus on the other evidence. I think I just talked myself into it. It's going to happen. It's going to happen, God willing. That's going to be another series. Look for it in the future. So anyway, the evidence for the resurrection. Take the Buddhists to that. It's amazing. It's fascinating. Listen to some podcasts out there. Read some books about the other evidence for the resurrection and share that with your Buddhist friends. It's fascinating. And I think it'll make a great impression on them. We're just trying to bring them the truth, right? We want them to know the truth. Another thing. What about this fulfilled prophecy? The Bible is filled with amazing, accurate prophecies that came to pass years, hundreds of years, and many cases later. Check out my series on the evidence for the divine inspiration of the Bible. That evidence that shows that God himself wrote the Bible through the lips and hands and personalities of man. It's amazing. You find that God himself predicted. He stands outside of space and time and is able to call out future events in a very specific way. And in a Buddhist worldview, there is no supernatural. There is no God. There is no souls. And so when a Buddhist encounters good evidence that there is some kind of being that is outside of space and time, and can predict the end from the beginning, can predict future events before they happen with amazing accuracy, that I believe will weigh heavily on a Buddhist mind. It's amazing stuff, and it's hard to contend with. I think it's, well, I love bringing up prophecy with anybody who doesn't believe the Bible. But again, I think it's great to bring Buddhists to this as well. It also encourages them to look into the Bible because the Bible is what leads them to truth. Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, right? So Show them some prophecies, you know, take them to Isaiah 44, 28, where God calls out this Cyrus, this King Cyrus, hundreds of years before he was on the scene and talks about what he's going to do in his life. Or Micah 5, 2, where we find that Jesus will be born in Bethlehem. among the thousands of Judah. And that this Jesus, this man who will be born, he will be a ruler in Israel. this ruler that will come from Israel, from the line of Judah, and it says he will be from everlasting. All right, this is a claim of divinity. Only God is from everlasting. But we have this Messiah coming from everlasting. But that was Micah 5.2. You have scriptures like, I don't know, Zechariah 12.10. We find that this Messiah, he'll be of the house of Judah, okay? Or I'm sorry, of the house of David, the Judah. That's a different prophecy, right? That would be the previous one. And God says, and they shall look upon me, God says this, they shall look upon me whom they have pierced. and they shall mourn for him, wait, me, him? What's going on here? Trinity, as one mourneth for his only son and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. Cool stuff, guys. Zechariah 11, verses 12 and 13, if ye think good, give me my price, and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price 30 pieces of silver. Jesus was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, and the Lord, Okay, and God's saying this is the price I was prized at, okay? God. And the Lord said unto me, cast it unto the potter. Okay, that price that was used to buy the potter's field. A goodly price that I was prized at of them. And I took the 30 pieces of silver and cast it unto the potter in the house of the Lord. What about Isaiah 53 the most amazing long prophecy about the coming Messiah Psalm 22 or I talked about this in my series for the evidence for the divine inspiration the Bible Daniel 924 I I don't think you'll have the time, but you can take them to Daniel 11 Wow that one took up many episodes of the evidence for the divine inspiration of the Bible series because I There was so much there, so much amazing prophecy being fulfilled through that one chapter of the Bible. I mean, it's like Daniel just walks through a couple hundred years of history and just nails it. One event after another, just bam, bam, bam. We look back and it's just like, what? It was so amazing that it leads some scholars to believe that somehow Daniel was written far later than when it was written because they're like, it's impossible. There's no way somebody could write this before the fact, you know, because they come from a naturalistic worldview. They're thinking there's no way. And I love that because yeah, the prophecy is so amazing that they have to deny it. in that way. So anyway, yes, prophecy is another thing that we can take Buddhists to, to show them the validity of Christianity and God's word. So friends, I urge you if, boy, if you know a Buddhist, get to know them, talk to them, ask them questions, see if you can't find out what they believe, because again, good luck finding a Theravada Buddhist in the United States, That's going to be like a needle in a haystack. If you're in another country, somewhere out in the east, well, heck, you'll probably find lots of them. But nonetheless, you're going to find a lot of different Buddhists here in the United States, Zen Buddhists and other schools of Buddhism. Find out what they believe, okay? It's going to be a little different than Theravada, and we'll get into that in future series. Find out what they believe, and engage them. And bring them the truth. Let's get some Buddhists saved. So, anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this series. I have to admit, this was an incredibly challenging series for me. Buddhist thought in general is very difficult for your typical Western mind. We're so logical, well at least some of us, we're getting into this post-modern mindset that's starting to make us all crazy, but the typical mindset here in America is logical and we look at some of these beliefs of Buddhism and your eyes go crossed and you're thinking, what? How and where and what's going on here? Well, it challenged me. I really enjoyed it nonetheless and I can't wait to get to the other forms of Buddhism and talk about those. Friends, get this foundation figured out first because when we get into these other forms that's where my eyes really went crossed. Seriously, when you just study Theravada, it's not too difficult, okay? It makes sense in its own way. When you start getting into some of these other forms, you will fall off your chair and go into convulsions. Zen Buddhism especially, because then you get this embrace of paradoxes and you start getting into these strange, unanswerable questions and logical, impossibilities, and I mean really you won't know what to do with yourself. You'll just plug your ears and scream sometimes. It's wild stuff. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this series. I certainly have. Friends, if you would like to help support what I'm doing with Youth Apologetics Training, You certainly can and I would very much appreciate it. You can send donations to P.O. Box 2392 Loveland, Colorado. That's Loveland, one word, 80539. And with that, I love you guys and I'll see you tomorrow.