Battle Log

Saturday, 12 April, 2008

Posted 19 April 2008, 1:12 AM by Josh Williamson. Permalink

Saturday, 12 April, 2008

Why is it every time I think "quiet night" things always goes nuts! I was expecting a small team tonight. But God's grace brought a fifteen person team out on the street to witness. We spent some time in prayer, and Bible reading. Then we had a time of fellowship.

     At 9pm we made our way into the Queen Street Mall, at about 9:15pm Ralph began to preach. It is good watching Ralph preach, he is doing a good job, and with some time he will turn into a good open air preacher. For someone who has only preached three times, he is sounding like one who is an old professional at the open air preaching game.

He went for about 15 minutes, and then he tagged me in to deal with a heckler who was an Australian living in Saudi Arabia. He was asking questions in regards to Christianity compared with Islam. I did my best to answer his questions, then swung into the gospel. He was very open to hearing the gospel, and he thanked me for presenting the truth to him.

This then created another wave of hecklers. It was good to see one of the hecklers we had from a few weeks back in the crowd. He is one of the friendliest evolutionary hecklers we have ever had, and it is really good to talk to him. But sadly, the hecklers we had tonight, weren't really the friendly ones.

One man screaming about atheism came up next to me with a bag of fries from a fast food place, and proceeded to put the fries in his mouth and then spit them at me. When I didn't respond to him doing this, he got the bag of fries and poured them all over the soap box and the ground. I ignored his antics, as I was dealing with a heckler who wanted to debate on "Can we know what is after death."



I was able to go through the Christian message with this young man, and he seemed convicted as I explained to him that he would have to give an account to God for all his sin. It was then that the pseudo-intellectuals opened fire, these guys had been standing in the crowd for sometime, one of them asked the question "If Christianity is true, then why does it copy older pagan religions? Christianity is just paganism repacked!" I asked him to explain what pagan religion Christianity allegedly copied. The man stopped and thought for a moment, then with a big grin he said "They copied the Egyptian religions!"

That argument was interesting, so I asked him "Are the Egyptian religions polytheistic or monotheistic?" His reply was "polytheistic", then the question was asked, what was Christianity, his reply was "monotheistic". I then pointed out that the central doctrine of God, is not copied from Egypt, so why does he think it was? He made the case from an account of Osiris being the same as Jesus. This argument lacks any support, for if one examines the Osiris myth, you soon see it has nothing in common with the message of Jesus. We went through the argument, and the man conceded that Christianity is not a copy of any pagan religion. 

By now a man wearing what I though to be a dress started heckling me. He started off by telling me that it is not a dress but rather a really long jacket. We debated back and forth on the issue on how we can trust the New Testament. The interesting thing was this man was presenting so many arguments that showed a distinct lack of understanding of the Christian message. But he kept on stating that he had a solid knowledge of Christianity.

For an hour and half, we debated back and for on apologetics and the gospel. The man did not realise the his arguments were being smacked all around the field. It was rather amusing when the atheists in the crowd started to turn on him, and explaining to him that he had no idea on what Christianity teaches. Then Mr. Dawkins Man entered into a debate. We had him a few weeks ago, he would ask a question then run away before you could answer. Again this was his ploy, and once again the atheists turned on him.

By now it was nearing midnight, and I had been up for 150 minutes, so once again we entered into the Gospel, and explained to many people listening the truth of the message of Jesus Christ.  A lot of those in the crowd took tracts, and many one to ones took place after the open air.

Praise God, for the Gospel and His faithfulness!

Soli Deo Gloria!