Unexplainable or Undeniable?

I’d like to show you an example of why thinking you have to have all your questions answered before you can believe in God is just the wrong way to go about life.

Yale Physicist Robert Adaire has done research, the results of which say that from the time the ball leaves the fingertips of the pitcher to the time it crosses home plate, a 90mph fastball is in the air for 400 milliseconds.

Less than half a second.

While that’s kind of interesting, what the results show next are far more interesting. Adaire found that it takes the batter’s brain 200 milliseconds to find the ball in the air, pick up the spin on the ball and decide whether to swing or not.

If he’s going to swing, it takes the batter another 100 milliseconds to decide WHERE to swing the bat in order to connect with the anticipated route of the ball. High. Low. Inside. Outside. Or some combination of these.

The swing itself takes 150 milliseconds. The batter can check his swing up to and including 50 milliseconds after he’s begun, but after 50 milliseconds into the swing the bat is moving too fast to restrain and should he miss the ball the umpire will call it a strike.

In order to get the bat across the plate in time to hit the ball, the batter has only a 7 millisecond gap in decision time that will cause the batter to hit or to miss the ball as it goes over the plate.

If you’re keeping track you can see that we’ve got a problem. On paper at least, science has proven that hitting a 90mph fast ball is impossible. But you and I know that it’s not impossible because not only have we seen it done, we’ve seen people hit 98mph fastballs.

Now I’m not suggesting that those who’ve accomplished such a feat are supernatural. I’m just saying that things that are “impossible” have and do happen.

Some say that a person who has died can’t come back to life. They say this even in the face of significant evidence to the contrary. Well, certainly all evidence points to the fact that a person can’t come alive again by NATURAL means. If someone has come to life again, it suggests that there may be more going on in life than what the senses can detect.

Now a batter who hit a 95mph fastball might have guessed right. He might have started early. He might have been very lucky. This I know. Jesus was seen alive again after His crucifixion by several hundred, perhaps as many as a thousand people and it didn’t happen because He got lucky.

Anyone with experience in life has learned to say to h/herself, “I must not choose to say, “Event X did not happen,” because it is unexplainable when the fact that it did happen is undeniable." Sadly, there are people commenting on this blog who say that some things did not or cannot happen precisely because their narrow and biassed world-view renders the event unexplainable.

Now, not just one person but a whole bunch of people have seen guys hit 90+mph fastballs.

It’s unexplainable but it is ALSO undeniable.

It’s been recorded that over 500 people saw Jesus alive again after He was undeniably dead and buried. Since in those days those writing these accounts usually only counted the men, it may have been well over 1,000 people who saw the resurrected Jesus. Nevertheless, it was no small number of people who saw Jesus alive after He was crucified, died and was buried.

These people wrote about it.

They preached about it, and

They died for having the gall to keep on making the claim that Jesus was alive.

They didn’t die for talking about what they believed -

They died for talking about what they SAW.


There are two types of sceptics. Open minded and closed minded. The Bible gives us examples of both.

It should be noted that when it comes to believing that someone has risen from the dead, every single person living then and now is a sceptic. “It is said that an Argument is what convinces reasonable men, and a Proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man.”

An example of an open minded sceptic is seen in a follower of Jesus whose name was Thomas. After the crucifixion, Thomas had been told by his closest friends that they had seen Jesus alive. They had touched Him, they said, and talked with Him. They had even seen Him eat. Although Thomas trusted his friends, although he wanted to believe his friends, this unlikely event caused Him to say, “Unless I see Jesus with my own eyes, and unless I touch Him with my own hands, I won’t believe what you guys are telling me.”

Here we find Thomas speaking for many a modern day sceptics who can identify with what he was thinking.

However, the very next day Thomas did see Jesus with his own eyes and he did touch Him with his own hands and in response, because he was open minded, Thomas confessed to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

Unlike closed minded sceptics, this is an appropriate response by Thomas to what could only have been a supernatural event. Closed mined sceptics of the time saw the undeniable, or at least heard about it but came up with a naturalistic excuse to do away with the unexplainable - unexplainable that is from a naturalist perspective.

For the open minded sceptics, what they experienced, what took place, happened right in front of them in history, in time, in space and they wouldn’t shut up about it.

Jesus resurrection was a 120mph fastball that was hit clean out of the park, across the parkway and into the bay. No one could explain it, but there He was. Undeniably alive. Not in a beat-up barely surviving body but in a brand new resurrection body. It wasn’t supposed to be possible but it happened.

Killing Jesus was supposed to have killed the movement. Instead the movement was getting huge and there is only one reason for that happening.

Jesus rose from the dead!

His tomb was empty.

His followers interacted with Him, ate with Him, walked and talked with Him - after His resurrection!

So real was their meeting with the risen Jesus that these people came out of hiding, went to the Temple (they were Jews after all) and began relentlessly and tenaciously teaching that Jesus was the Messiah. When persecution drove them out of Jerusalem, these early witnesses - eye witnesses - merely went to other towns and eventually other countries telling people about the Gospel of Jesus who was crucified, died and was buried and on the third day He rose again from the dead.

Jesus’ resurrection is why Christianity began. There is no other reason!

Do not allow atheists to convince you to choose the unexplainable over the undeniable.

One of Jesus’ closest friends wrote, “I wrote these things so that you might also believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”

Of course when you’ve been right there, in the midst of it all, when you’ve been a disciple of the Rabbi for a really intense three years (as Plato said, “A disciple is a vessel so tightly sealed that not one drop of your leader’s teaching leaks out”), it would be hard for John to comprehend how someone - anyone - WOULDN'T believe what he’d witnessed and was now writing about.

That’s why he, John, gives us only seven unexplainable, yet undeniable “signs” (miracles) that Jesus is God.

For John and the other eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, saying, “It couldn’t happen” was overridden but the fact that it did happen.

Do not allow atheists to convince you to choose the unexplainable over the undeniable.

“One day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.”

Notice that it doesn’t say, “One day when Jesus returns to earth, all your questions will be answered.” It says that one day when Jesus comes in glory, you won’t even remember that you had questions of what is possible and impossible. You along with every one else is going to fall on your face and confess that

Jesus is your Lord,

Jesus is your King,

Jesus is your Master

and Jesus, depending on what you have done with the knowledge of His existence during your life on earth, will either welcome you into heaven or condemn you to hell.

Do not allow atheists to convince you to choose the unexplainable over the undeniable!