Some years ago, I received a letter from a pastor out in western Canada who was asking a number of questions about what he perceived to be contradictions in the pages of the Word of God. I could not tell from his letter whether these were genuine questions, or whether he was one of those people who already had already made up his mind and was just giving in the form of questions the reason why he would not believe that the Bible was the Word of God. I took his letter seriously and I answered it at some length.
I remember he had a number of questions. One of them had to do with the time that elapsed between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension into heaven. This pastor pointed out that two of the gospels, Matthew and John, do not even mention the ascension. He thought that was a problem, although I cannot see why. He then pointed out that in his opinion, there was a contradiction between Mark and Luke, on the one hand, and the book of Acts, on the other. He went on to say that Mark and Luke seemed to imply that Jesus ascended to heaven immediately after His resurrection, or at the most after one or two days. But Acts says quite clearly that it was forty days later that Jesus ascended into heaven. He said, “There’s a great contradiction. You can’t get around that no matter what you do.”
Well, I looked at the passages, studied them a little bit, and wrote back to him. I said, “If you just read these passages with the assumption that the writers really did know what they were talking about and read them carefully, you’ll find that there’s really no real contradiction there.” I said, for example, at the end of Mark’s gospel, he does not spell out days the same way that the author of Acts does. But there are three indications there in the very last chapter that there is a certain passage of time. Three times in just one chapter, Mark says, “after these things,” “after this,” and “after a little while.” That is obviously a greater passage of time than three days. Why should we not assume that Mark knows what he is talking about? Mark is merely not being as detailed in his presentation as Luke is in the book of Acts. I said, moreover, it would be a very strange thing, would it not, if Luke, who wrote both the gospel and Acts, contradicted himself from one book to the other? When we read a human author, we would naturally give him the benefit of the doubt in a situation like that. I said that you have to do the same sort of thing here.
Another question he had was about the thieves who were crucified along with the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the gospels says that there were two thieves, who were both cursing Him. And another of the gospels says that one thief was cursing, but the other believed in Jesus and called out on Christ to save him. He considered that to be another contradiction. I answered that most of the commentators down through the whole history of the Christian Church assume that both thieves began by cursing. But during the crucifixion, one was won over by the patient endurance of Jesus Christ, converted on the spot, had a change of nature, and turned to Jesus and said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It did not seem to be any kind of difficulty to me at all. The pastor wrote back and said that he found my answers unacceptable. So I just put it down as an exercise in futility and went on to answer, I suppose, several hundred other letters of that same nature that have come in over the years.
Now the reason I tell this story is to say this. Recently I was teaching a series on Friday afternoons for a men’s luncheon. It was on Scripture, talking about such themes as what it is, how we received it, and how we understand it. On one of these Fridays I was to give an address on dealing with Bible difficulties. I had given this talk in other places, and one of the illustrations I had for this was the story of this man from out in western Canada. The reason for using this illustration was to point out that it is not really a question of overwhelming difficulties. It is really a question of how you approach the Word of God. Will you give it the benefit of the doubt? Will you try to understand it honestly and fairly, or will you come to it first of all with a frame of mind that is convinced there are difficulties before you even begin to study it?
Just before I went to give that particular address, beginning with that very illustration, I looked in my mailbox to find what mail had arrived that morning. And when I looked through it, lo and behold, there was a letter from this man out in western Canada. I thought, “Isn’t that interesting? I’m going to talk about this man, and here’s a letter from him. I wonder what he has to say. It would make a good illustration if the man had come to a correct view of the Bible. So I opened the letter, and to my surprise, what I found was an objection to the doctrine of inspiration, raising precisely the same questions in the same words I had answered five or six years before. I was very tempted to take the two letters, put them over one another, and hold them up to the light to see if the man had traced them. He had forgotten that he even asked me the questions years before because apparently the answers made so little impression on him.
