February 20, 2018 Show with Elias Ayala on “The Need for Biblical Apologetics for the Young in the Age of School Massacres”

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A Visit to the Pastor's Study. But Pastor Bill Shishko, who's been a dear friend since the 1980s, strongly recommended that I interview a young man named Elias Ayala, and he is a Christian apologist, a graduate of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, where he earned his Master of Arts in Theological Studies and Master of Divinity.

He is a middle and high school teacher at Valley Stream Christian Academy on Long Island, New York. He's a youth director at Massapequa Reform Church on Long Island, New York, a church that I passed by many, many, many, many times over the years while I lived on Long Island.

He's a team member at the Historical Bible Society, founded by my friend Dan Buttafuoco, attorney at law, and he's also a traveling speaker, and today he's going to be addressing a very timely theme, the need for biblical apologetics for the young in the age of school massacres.

Yesterday we had my friend Pastor Vinnie Sawyer on the program. You may recall that Pastor Vinnie Sawyer, who I have also known since the early 1990s, used to pastor at the Faith Baptist Church in Corona, Queens, New York, but is now pastoring Victory Baptist Church in Florida, and we spoke about the need for biblical parenting in the age of school massacres yesterday.

In fact, last week we even had a brother on the program who addressed his own Christian outreach that he is a part of to the Broward County area in Florida, and the Christian clubs that he operates for 88 schools, 88 high schools in Florida, includes the high school where the tragic massacre occurred on Valentine's Day.

So today we are continuing in that theme, and this time speaking about the need for biblical apologetics, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, Elias Ayala.

Thank you for having me on. I'm really excited, I enjoy your show, and I'm looking forward to.

Talking about our topic. And before we get into your own personal testimony of salvation, which is something that I try to do every time I have a first-time guest on the program, I want you to tell your listeners how you discovered Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio,.

Because I really got a kick out of it. Well, my wife and I went to Wisconsin, where my brother-in-law needed our help. This is not the reason why we went, but the emcee at a wedding backed off, and my brother-in-law was asked to be the emcee at the wedding, and so he needed to borrow my iPod.

And so I lent him my iPod, and he put all of his content on my iPod so that he used the music for the wedding. And by the time the wedding was over, he gave me my iPod and never took his stuff off. So on my way back, I'm listening to Iron Sherpa and Zion, hearing names like James White, Greg Bonson, and a bunch of other Reformed apologists and theologians, and that really opened things up for me, not just to your show, but just to Reformed theology in general and apologetics.

So this is kind of a weird indirect way that I came to know about your.

Show. So it's kind of interesting that Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio was shuffled in the mix with all these disco songs. And we'll now tell our listeners about your personal testimony, what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in, if any, and how the Lord providentially drew you to Himself, saved you, and also led you into the ministry, and to teaching, and so forth.

Sure. As far back as I can remember, I'm sure there's a specific...born again and then adopted into his family, but I've been a Christian...for me to identify that moment...Pentecostal Church, which was a very interesting story in and of itself, in that I am terrible at Spanish.

Even now, I understand a lot of it now, but I don't speak it. And our services used to be super long. I remember sometimes three hours long. That's mostly the sermon would be, you know, like an hour and a half, two hours long.

And while the sermons were spoken in Spanish, and I didn't understand a lick of Spanish, I would just pick up my Bible and start reading. And we had church Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sundays. We had an early morning Sunday service, and we would come back in the evening, Sunday evening, for another service.

So since I didn't understand anything, I just read my Bible. And I did that for years and years and years, all the way up until I graduated high school and went into my first years of college. And it was when I took, in my...during my associate's degree, I took a class called the Literature of the Bible.

And I figured, you know what? That's an easy class. It's an elective. I can choose it. I know a lot about the Bible. You know, why not? And so I enrolled in this class, Literature of the Bible, which the class was supposed to look at the Bible in regards to its literary contribution.

But instead of going through that, the professor would take a good 15 to 20 minutes to just bash the Bible and go over why he didn't believe it was the Word of God. And so, of course, while he did that in the class, it challenged a lot of the Christians in the class.

And because I had background in the Bible, I often raised my hand and challenged him at various points. But then he began to bring up contradictions in the Bible. And that really challenged me, because in the context in which I was raised, I read the Bible and understood the story.

I never...verses that he brought up, I never saw them as brought up as a challenge, as apparent contradictions. And so he really challenged my own faith in that he presented things that I really never thought about before.

So I did a little experiment. I pretended for a short time to be an atheist. I was not an atheist, but I pretended. And I tried to look up some of the arguments that are usually posed against the Bible and against the Christian worldview.

And as I did that to my own satisfaction, I then assumed the role of a Christian and said, okay, Christianity is over 2 ,000 years old. There has to be something in which Christians have responded to all of this stuff.

And when I was going through this kind of line of thinking, it was around that time where I was also introduced to your podcast and Christian apologetics through that kind of iPod incident. So when I began to explore these things, the whole realm of apologetics was introduced to me.

And I not only saw that Christians had answers to many of these issues, but they were refuted, these objections. And a lot of the objections that were brought up, I learned, were not just objections that people use today, they were old, rehashed objections that have already been refuted in the literature.

And so this really reinvigorated my confidence in my faith, my confidence in the Word of God, and it really consumed me. And I wanted to let other people know that there were resources out there. Within my own particular context in the Spanish Pentecostal Church, not many people were aware of apologetics, and unfortunately, not many people are encouraged to even think intellectually about their faith.

And so I became really engulfed in the topic of apologetics, and that made me want to kind of shoot off into a different context, and where that intellectual life of the faith could be developed. And so I've been doing that ever since, and while I was in college going for education, I wanted to be a social studies teacher.

My desires and goals shifted a bit, and I ended up doing seminary. And with that, I got a job at the Valley Stream Christian Academy, and eventually I began teaching not just the social studies classes there, which is the reason why they hired me primarily, but I began to also take over the Bible classes there.

And so now I teach from seventh grade through twelfth grade Bible, theology, Bible doctrine, comparative religions, and for my seniors, I do apologetics. And so I've been there for the past seven years, and whenever I get a chance, I also go around and speak at different churches and places and.

Train people to do apologetics. And so here I am. Well, praise God. And I know that my friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries will be thrilled when I inform him that yet another young person has come to the Reformed faith as a result of his ministry, and I can't even count the number of times that people have told me that when I speak with them.

And I am so blessed that a large portion of those times when I hear people say that, it is as a result of them attending or viewing either on the old style VHS or on DVD or on YouTube, the debates that I orchestrated with Dr. White, probably over 20 debates, 10 of which were with Roman Catholic apologists on Long Island.

And by the way, you could see most of those debates on YouTube, and if you can't see them there, you can see them at AOMIN .org. That's the Alpha and Omega Ministries website, AOMIN .org. For a decade on Long Island, I had Dr. White coming out every year to debate a prominent Roman Catholic apologist, until we ran out of Catholic apologists that wanted to debate him, other than young up-and-coming novices that wanted to make a name for themselves and debate James.

But we drew that Catholic debate series to a close. I hope I can revive it here in Pennsylvania. I've already started one not long ago with Dr. Tony Costa, who if you don't know him, you should get to know him.

But last year, Dr. Tony Costa, who is the professor of apologetics at Toronto Baptist Seminary, he's also a Reformed Baptist, and I had him come out to the Carlisle Theatre last January to debate my friend Robert St. Genes, who's a Roman Catholic apologist, on the immaculate conception and perpetual sinlessness of Mary, and it was quite a fascinating debate, which you can also see on YouTube.

Maybe it would be a good idea for you to define apologetics.

All right, sure. Just real quick, did you moderate the debate with Dr. White at Medford Elementary.

On Long Island? I organized that debate. That was the debate with Robert Sabin,.

The one that's been a costal. Okay, okay, because that's my elementary school.

Oh wow. Well, I organized that, and a friend of mine, the late Larry Carino, who's now with the Lord, he passed away about a year ago, I think, but he moderated it. Okay. That was an interesting debate because it really devolved into not being a debate.

Robert Sabin, who we selected because he is one, he's considered one of the foremost knowledgeable representatives of oneness Pentecostalism, and unfortunately, rather than giving an exegetical defense of his view, he gave a, what's, oh man, what's the phrase when you're, eulogy, he gave a eulogy for Michael Servetus, who was the anti-Trinitarian that was executed by the Genevan government when John Calvin was reigning as a noted theologian there in Geneva, and he tried to blame that on Calvin and basically on Calvin's descendants, theological descendants, and he basically was just trying to work up a motion in the audience so that they would feel sorry for oneness Pentecostal.

So it was a big letdown that he chose to take that path because we were all prepared to hear a rigorous, robust, theological, and exegetical exchange between the two of them. Yeah. Now, were you in school when that was held there?

Uh, well, I don't know what, for kindergarten. When did you graduate? I graduated from elementary school or high school. 2001, I graduated from Patrick Bedford High School.

It might have been that year or close to it. I can't remember. I'll have to look that up.

All right, well, you did ask me what apologetics was. Again, when we introduce the topic of apologetics, we kind of go to the famous verse, 1 Peter 3 .15, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet doing so with gentleness and reverence.

That's really where we get the idea of giving a defense or giving an answer, which you have the Greek word there is apologia, which in English is apologetic. In a very simple way, apologetic can be defined as the defense of the faith.

But I like how a Reformed apologist, Cornelius Mantill, defined it. He said that apologetics is the vindication of the Christian worldview over and against non-Christian worldviews. So I like that wording, because we are vindicating our position.

We're not merely defending it. But in our defending of the faith, we are also trying to demonstrate its truthfulness as well. And this is, I think, a very important distinction to recognize when we're talking about apologetics.

It's not mere defense. It also involves, you know, attacking non-Christian positions. Intellectually, of course. And of course, it's not saying, I'm sorry for being a Christian. Well, tell us about your role as an apologist.

When you deal with young people. What are the crucial things that you want them to know? Obviously, the gospel is first and foremost. But we are talking, obviously, about the need for biblical apologetics for the young in an age of school massacres.

And there are many Christian ministries that are focused on ministering to young people that only focus on the gospel or their version of it, because sometimes they're not really all that reflective of what the Bible has to say about the gospel.

But there are some very good ministries for the youth out there as well. But they very often think, well, we can't really get these kids to be thinking about the deeper things. Let's just have them know what the gospel is.

And of course, sometimes they will phrase it unbiblically, you know, we just got to invite Jesus into your heart. And one thing that disturbs me is that I have been present at some events that I was invited to that were ran by Christian youth ministries.

And it seemed that the youth ministries that a couple of them that I have been, had the misfortune of being in their presence during a special public event, their main emphasis to the public was, you can still be cool and love Jesus.

It was almost like they were trying to, the main concept was getting Christians to reach out to their lost friends by telling them, hey, you're not going to become a nerd when you become a Christian. It's cool to be a Christian.

And that was a very big letdown, and obviously that is not your approach.

To the subject that we are talking about. Interview here, the need for biblical apologetics, not just merely apologetics. I've spoken with people who don't actually think that the Bible lays out an apologetic method, a way that we're to do it.

So I think emphasizing the biblical nature of apologetics is super important. When I teach young people, before I get into the ins and outs on how to give an answer, I try to focus very much on the role of the authority of Scripture.

A lot of young people who are either, they either grew up in the Church or they become Christians along the way, their souls are saved, but their minds are not, if that makes sense. They're saved, but they don't think like Christians.

And this is prevalent even with seasoned adult Christians. You know, they love the Lord, they go to church, they read their Bible, but they have not allowed the biblical worldview to shape the way that they think.

And I think this is something that is super important when we're teaching apologetics to young people. You don't want to just teach young people what to think. I think what the Bible emphasizes in regards to a biblical apologetic is that it teaches us how to think, how to think biblically.

Yeah, and.

That seems to be the credo of classical Christian education. I know the Grace Christian Academy over there in Merrick, that is, I believe, their motto, or at least one of their, one element of their mission statement, is to teach children not what to think, but how to think.

Right.

Important because we can do apologetics, which is honoring to God, in a dishonoring fashion, right? And so a lot of people, especially young people, teenagers who, you know, Mr. Ayala, how do I learn to crush an atheist in an argument?

I mean, people are very drawn to the intellectual power of applying logic and argumentation to support a position. But if you're not having your mind submitting to Christ, I mean, look at 1 Peter 3 .15.

A lot of people, when they teach about apologetics, the emphasis is on making a defense, while, you know, all the while ignoring the first part of the verse, which says, it says, sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart.

When the Bible refers to heart, it's not necessarily speaking about the organ in your chest. It very much is related to the idea of the aspect of our intellect, which is called the seat of the will, that aspect of our mind that goes into decision-making.

The very core of our being, the core of our thinking, needs to have the Lordship of Christ. Christ needs to be sitting on the throne of our hearts and minds. And when that happens, we begin to submit our thinking, right?

Bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We intentionally do that, so that our unbiblical thoughts, our unbiblical worldview, slowly becomes conformed to a more consistently biblical worldview.

And when we begin to think in those categories, we then apply biblical truth to different facets of our life. Scott Oliven, who is the professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, he, I like how he defined apologetics, where he said it's Christian theology applied to unbelief.

Christian theology applied to unbelief. We take Christian theology, which is derived from the authoritative Word of God, and we apply it to that aspect of our interactions with unbelievers, just as we would apply it to, say, our marriages, or how a young person would apply it to their friendships and their relationships.

We need to take the biblical way of thinking and apply it to those different aspects of life. And when we get the authority of Scripture down, I think at that moment, that's a good place to start in learning how to give an.

Answer. By the way, some of our listeners may be interested to know that the individual that Eli just mentioned, Scott Oliven, he is going to be speaking at the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology April 27th and 28th at the Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

I plan to attend this, and there are a number of other speakers at the conference that I will be listening to and hearing and seeing on the roster there. And if you want more information about that, you can go to Alliancenet .org.

Alliancenet .org. Click on Events at the top, and then click on The Spirit of the Age, The Age of the Spirit, Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology 2018, and you'll be able to register there. And I'll be giving you more details later on after the midway break.

Teaching Young People to Think Biblically and Ask “How Do You Know?”

What are some of the specific areas, especially when we are considering an age of school massacres, that you would approach young people with in the realm of.

Apologetics? I think addressing apologetics from the worldview perspective is very important. Apologetics can have a very specified focus, I mean, an emphasis on science or history or philosophy or any specific kind of subdiscipline.

But I think teaching kids at the worldview level allows them to really bypass some of the endless debates we could have over some of the specifics.

Does that make sense? Oh yeah. And obviously, there are a lot of things that Christians may believe that aren't even biblical, because they have had their minds, their brains washed, really, by the secular society, and they are unconsciously looking at the world in different.

Areas through the lenses of secular humanism. I think teaching young people at the worldview level, here's how, this is how we think biblically, and then teaching them how to apply that in certain areas.

And I think when you're talking about school massacres and things like that, there's a lot of discussion about gun control and all that, you know, the political aspect that's usually thrown in there. But as you know, the real issue is the issue of sin.

There's sin in the world. You know, young people, teenagers, are sinners. And with a system that rejects the authority of God's Word, you're not going to have an adequate, you know, a fix for this situation.

What we can do as Christians is really live out the Gospel, both in our relationships, but also as we express why we believe the Bible to be true, and why there are good grounds for holding it. Talking to our fellow classmates from the Christian perspective, this is why I'm a Christian, and being a resource for unbelievers in school, that opens pathways to bring people to Christ.

And when we do that, you have a slow transformation of the heart, right? This is a quote from a movie, but it always stood out to me. I think it was Jesus of Nazareth, that movie made in the 70s, back in the day.

It said, before kingdoms can change, men must change. Before kingdoms can change, men must change. Before schools can be changed, students' hearts have to be changed. And how did that happen? Through the preaching of the Gospel.

And the preaching of the Gospel needs to be done by faithful, biblically grounded students who are also equipped to defend the truth claims of the Gospel. And so, coming at it from that worldview perspective, and seeing that as we proclaim the Gospel in the schools, we are thinking in kingdom expansion categories.

Young people need to be thinking in those categories. We're not waiting for the government to pass certain laws so that they fix everything. We want to have internal transformation, and we want to be used as the means whereby God does that, by sharing the Gospel.

But we need to know what the Gospel is, and so we need to be biblically grounded, and we need to know the reasons why it's true and be able to share that.

We're going to our first break right now, and I just emailed you, or I forwarded to you, Eli, a listener's question from Slovenia. And so I wanted you to have that so you could look it over during the station break, because it's a little bit lengthy.

It's not too long, but it's a little lengthy, so I thought it'd be good for you to have it in front of you. And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA. Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back with Elias Aiella and more of our discussion of the need for biblical apologetics for the young in the age of school massacres.

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And we are now back with our guest today, Elias Ayala, also known as Eli, and we are discussing the need for biblical apologetics for the young in the age of school massacres. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. We have Joe from Slovenia who has sent us a question that Eli has in front of him now.

Wow, what a daunting topic. Maybe I'm missing something, and I hope I am, but I personally haven't seen a church youth group that was based on much more than pizza parties, silly games, and social gatherings with a light, seeker-sensitive devotional thrown on top.

Where are these Christian youth who are up for learning and engaging in apologetics if my perception of the current state of youth ministry is generally accurate, though stated here overly simplistically, what needs to change in youth ministry generally in order that Christian youth could and would seriously engage in apologetics?

Very good question.

Well, first, being in youth ministry myself, there is nothing wrong with pizza parties, when the youth group is based upon those things. Or as Todd Friel said, these frighteningly.

Disgusting activities that go on where youth leaders are smearing peanut butter on children's feet and licking it off. I mean, this is like bordering on perverse and, I think, crime.

Yeah, I guess it might be incorporated in that as well. But again, it's really important to be balanced in this area. When you're working with—sometimes that requires parties and things, okay? That's one—often the case that most youth groups—sprinkle Jesus at the end of how many young people we can get.

I'm with young people, right? I don't want them to not like me. People, in my own experience, a lot of the kids come up to me and say, why haven't I learned this in church? Content in church and in youth groups, so much—people will be very surprised how—reasons why youth leaders don't go into the details is,.

A, the people that young people are asking. So how is this going to change? It's the Bible doctrine and apologetics, and then as they—the church kind of—. Yeah, don't you think that.

Adult Christians—and it's actually not even necessarily isolated to young people that they have this view, but very often those in ministry underestimate the mental capacities of those that they are preaching to or teaching.

And that might be especially true with young people, but it even goes as far as anybody of any age in a congregation because that's why so often sermons around the United States and probably the globe, the sermons are dumbed down because there is an anti-intellectualism that basically says that if you teach the deeper things, you're going to drive people away from Jesus, and they'll die in a lost state because they're not going to understand what you're saying.

And obviously, there are vain, proud intellects that do teach in such a way where they are purposely teaching far above the heads of those in the audience, but there is a difference between that and people like James White and the late Dr. R .C. Sproul and others who would not dumb down a message, but they will explain in clearer language what they may begin with, with, you know, 16-syllable words and so forth.

They will define their terms. They will bring the content down after first teaching it or while teaching it. They will also make sure that everybody within reason is understanding what is being said. Am I making sense here about the dumbing down of this?

Right, right. We need to.

Be able to simplify without dumbing down, and it can be done, and it should be done. Jesus did this. We follow the model of Jesus. Jesus took very complex concepts, and He used everyday language in a way that people could understand it.

I mean, it's simple in one sense. You know, we're taking biblical truth, and we're conveying it to an audience, and we're catering, you know, the manner in which we express these truths. We're catering it to our audience.

You know, if I'm talking to an intellectually astute audience, I don't want to dumb things down. I want to challenge them and kind of challenge them to go deeper. If I'm talking to a younger group of people who may not have a background in these concepts, I want to cater my message to those people as well.

But in that, we do not want to, you know, dumb down the content. And also to say that, you know, if we teach these truths to the people, oh, they're going to get lost, and then kind of like, I don't want to listen to this.

How much faith are we putting in the Holy Spirit? Right. We forget the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this, and that we...this is in apologetics as well. You know, what if I say an argument that doesn't convince the unbeliever?

You see, this is a common mistake in apologetics. We know what apologetics is because we can define the term, but very little do we understand what the purpose of apologetics is. Greg Bonson, the late Greg Bonson, one of my favorite Christian apologists, he summed it up very easy for me.

I love the way he summed it up, because in this quick summary is incorporated his theology of the Holy Spirit's role in apologetics. He says, the role of apologetics is to shut the mouth of the unbeliever.

You see, notice that the role of apologetics... That's perfect, that's perfect, so they listen. Yeah, well, when you shut the mouth, the purpose of shutting the mouth of the unbeliever is giving such good answers that the unbeliever cannot be with excuse.