WHY I BELIEVE: Two Unshakeable Reasons I Know Jesus Is Lord

There are mountains of evidence — historical, scientific, medical, archeological, literary, logical, philosophical and more — that point to Jesus Christ as God, Creator and Sustainer of the universe. As the Gospel of John puts it in the first five verses of its opening chapter:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

But at the most basic level, there are two fundamental reasons why at 9:15 in the morning of March 1, 1991, I asked Him to help me and became a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. That morning and that decision literally changed my life.

And that’s the first of the two reasons, He changed my life. Let me explain why and how.

I was born and raised in Oklahoma and Texas in the 1950s and 60s at a time when there were churches everywhere in those two states (and for the most part, there still are). I must have heard that great Baptist invitational hymn “Just As I Am” a thousand times during those years.

So I knew from an early age the Christian lingo, the importance of “being saved,” and the fact of Original Sin. So naturally, it seemed like the logical thing to do as an eighth-grader during one Sunday morning service to “go forward” and be baptized. But I didn’t really take it seriously. I talked the talk but nothing much about my life really changed.

In the years following, I graduated from college, got married, and moved to Washington, D.C. to be a political activist on the conservative side of things. I thought for sure that the four years I would spend working on the Hill and six years in the Reagan administration would be the best thing that could ever happen to me.

In some respects, those were wonderful years, but behind the facade, I grew further and further away from anything remotely resembling a genuine faith in anything but myself. Drinking, partying and “moving up” the career ladder became my total preoccupations, at the cost of my marriage and much else in my personal life.

On the outside, I looked like a success, but the reality inside was the fact the selfish lifestyle to which I’d become addicted had a death grip on me. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that it was wrong but I couldn’t stop, and in fact most of the time had no desire to stop. If you asked me, I would still tell you I was a believer, but the hard reality was I was headed in the opposite direction at an increasing pace. I was, in short, a hypocrite.

In 1985, I thought a career change from government to newsroom and a new wife would make me happy. I also got to fulfill a childhood dream by becoming a race car driver, competing in the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and International Motorsports Association (IMSA) for three exhilarating years.

And I’d risen quickly through the ranks in the newsroom. To this day, I love journalism and from a career perspective, I wouldn’t trade any of my 30+ years reporting and editing for a return to the political ranks.

Ironic, isn’t it, that during those hypocritical years I became very passionate about a profession that is supposed to be devoted to finding and reporting the truth!

Again, on the outside, I looked like a success, but the reality of my personal life told a very different story. When I awakened that morning in 1991 from what proved to be my last drinking spree, the Lord opened my eyes to the ugly reality of my life.

Fortunately, thanks to all those years listening to my Mother’s devotion to making sure I heard all those Baptist preachers and teachers back home, I knew where to turn when the crisis came. I cried out to the Lord to please help me and He did.

I’ve been sober ever since, and, far more importantly, He has, steadily and over time, changed my heart from that selfish preoccupation with pleasures and earthly rewards to being filled with a growing desire to follow Him faithfully, to serve my wife, family and friends, and to help others know what a wonderful Lord He is.

Perfect I am not, but there is a night and day difference between the pre-March 1, 1991, Mark Tapscott and what He has done in me in these years afterwards. Scoff at it, snicker at it, rationalize it away or whatever, but the undeniable reality is, as the classic hymn puts it, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind but now I see.”

And so that brings us to the second reason: Jesus must be exactly who He says He is — “The Way, the Truth and the Light, and no man comes to the Father but through Me” — because the Resurrection is the most reasonable explanation for the fact that His tomb was empty on the morning of the third day after His crucifixion, death and burial.

Here’s why I concluded that the Resurrection is the most reasonable, given the evidence: As Professor Gary Habermas explains, virtually all of the scholars, both those who are skeptics and those who are believers, agree that the tomb was empty when the women who were first there on Easter morning:

So, if the tomb was empty and Jesus was dead when His body was put there, something had to have happened to it sometime after the burial and before Sunday morning. As I have contended here on HillFaith on many other occasions (see here, here and here, for example) there are only a handful of suspects:

• Could Jesus’ friends have stolen His dead body, hid it, then told everybody the Resurrection happened? Here’s why the answer to that question is all but certainly no: Two things are known about the disciples, they were all cowards who fled and hid when Jesus was arrested, and none of them had military experience. How likely is it this bunch of cowards somehow managed to find the courage and ability to overcome the elite Roman Guard protecting the tomb, then steal the body, hide it and pull the wool over everybody’s eyes about the Resurrection?
• Couldn’t Jesus’ enemies have stolen His dead body? Let’s just stipulate that they could have, but isn’t it reasonable to think that had they done so, as soon as the disciples began proclaiming the Resurrection, the enemies would have rolled Jesus’ rotting corpse down the middle of Main Street Jerusalem? They didn’t because they didn’t have the body.
• Couldn’t grave robbers have stolen the body? Well, grave robbers might have had some remote chance of getting past the Roman Guard, but why would they care about Jesus’ body? Everybody knew Jesus was an itinerant preacher with no riches to be buried, so it is impossible to conceive why grave robbers, once they opened the grave and realized there was nothing of value there to them, would say, “well, let’s take the dead body here.”?

In the days following, Jesus appeared to, talked with or ate with hundreds of people, including all of the disciples, all but one of whom subsequently died horrendous deaths because they kept insisting their master had really been resurrected.

And if the Resurrection is true, then everything He said, about Himself and about you and me, must be true. So now, the most important question on the table is this: What will you do with Him?

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