Even if the entire cross of Jesus was discovered intact, there would be no spiritual value to it.

I've never heard a Protestant just say, the cross is worthless.

Like the cross, if you found it tomorrow, fully intact and you knew it was the true cross,

is of no spiritual value.

And that strikes me as just so outrageously unchristian of an attitude to have.

Welcome back to James Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmire.

And today I want to look at both the biblical case for relics and some attacks on relics

that have been made by three Protestant pastors, Isaiah Saldivar, Vlad Savchuk, and Mike Signorelli.

Now, when we're talking about relics, we typically mean either something that has been

touched to the body of a saint or part of that saint's body. Now, we treat these things with

reverence and we believe that God can and does work through these things mightily. Now, if your

objection to this is just, wow, that's weird and foreign to my background as a Protestant. I totally get it.

But relics are very obviously biblical. And we're going to see this both from the positive case,

as well as the weakness of the cases made against relics by Isaiah, by Vlad, and by Mike. And I think

you'll see there is no good biblical argument against relics and very clear biblical

evidence for it. So let's lay out that positive case first. What is the biblical argument for relics?

Well, start with kind of what we know about Jesus' ministry, that Jesus comes to heal not just souls,

but bodies as well. And that he does this by giving a great dignity to matter,

meaning like to material things. So to give just a couple examples. First, you have the fact that he's

healing bodies in the first place. In Matthew 4, we're told that he's healing every disease and

every infirmity among the people. This shows a dignity to the material world because your body is matter.

...