Can We Trust the Bible?

Today's first Bible reading is from Psalm 119, starting from verse 89 to verse 96.

Psalm 119 verse 89 to 96. Your word, Lord, is eternal. It stands firm in the heavens.

Psalms 119:89–96

Your faithfulness continues through all generations. You established the earth,

and it endures. Your laws endure to this day, for all things serve you. If your law had not

been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts,

for by them you have preserved my life. Save me, for I am yours. I have sought out your

precepts. The wicked are waiting to destroy me, but I will ponder your statutes. To all perfection,

I see a limit, but your commands are boundless. The second Bible reading will be from 2 Peter

2 Peter 1:16–18

chapter 1 verse 16 to 18. 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 16. For we did not follow cleverly devised

2 Peter 1:16

stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in our power, but we were

eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to

him from the majestic glory, saying, This is my son whom I love. With him I am well pleased.

We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

Alright, well good morning again everyone. It's great to be here with you and I bring greetings

from Bull Creek where I serve typically. So wonderful to be joined together in our fellowship,

our wider WPC fellowship. There's a number of us, our churches across our state. It's great that we

can serve one another in this way. So I will say as well, it's been a little while since I've been

here. I don't think I've been here since Michael has been here and so I can see already the place

looks a bit different than it did before. So wonderful to see some new faces too. So yeah,

praise God for what he's doing among you guys. Now for this morning, so we're going to be doing

a looking at a sermon called Can We Trust the Bible? Now this is from a sermon series that we

did at Bull Creek earlier this year and really what we were trying to do in these sermons was

think about important questions that people raise about the Bible, about Christianity in general,

and one of these was this one that we're going to look at this morning. So looking forward to

getting into that. It's more of a topical sermon for us today so we're going to think about the

reliability of the Bible. But before we do that, let me pray. Please join me. Our great and gracious

Father in heaven, we praise you for revealing yourself to us, for giving us your holy, inspired,

inerrant word. We thank you that we get easy access to this, that each week, each day we can open it

and turn and see the truths written within it. We pray this morning as we think a little bit about

its reliability, would we come away from this morning with great confidence in your word,

in the truth of Scripture? May that move us to be more faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In his name we pray, amen. Okay, well, back in 2019, the Christian pastor and author, a man named

Joshua Harris, perhaps you've heard of him, he made this post on his Instagram account, one of

his social media accounts. Now he had already, by this point 2019, he had disowned a very popular

book on Christian dating that had actually made him famous a number of years before. This is one

he'd written in 1997 called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Maybe that's a book you're familiar with,

it's kind of a thing that made him famous in the Christian world at least. But more surprises were

in store because in this post that he wrote on his social media, he announced to the world,

firstly that he had separated from his wife and secondly that he had gone through a process

called deconstruction. What is that? What's deconstruction? What does that mean in this

context? Well, the term itself is actually, it's a little slippery, a little hard to define exactly,

but for those who use it, the noble aim behind this is usually to examine your own beliefs,

to try and separate what's true from what's fiction. To separate what's true from what's

fiction. To figure out in what you believe what's actually true and what's not true.

But as another Christian man, a apologetics expert named Neil Shenvy said when he was

recently asked about this, he said, the question is how do you decide how to do that in Christianity?

How do you decide in Christianity what's true and what's false? Now that's a really important

question to know the answer to, right? Because that is going to greatly impact our faith. Now,

Neil Shenvy, this man, he goes on to answer this question. He said, the reformers, men like Martin

Luther, John Calvin, they knew that the Bible is our ultimate authority. The Bible is our ultimate

authority in matters of faith and practice. That's where we turn to determine what's true

and what's false when it comes to Christianity and the Christian life. But for the man, Joshua

Harris, and for many other people who say they're doing this thing called deconstructing, well,

the Bible sadly is often the first thing that gets determined as false. They say the Bible's

not really true. And sadly, from that point, often it's a slippery slope away from the faith

until in the case of Joshua Harris, the man we were looking at, you get to a conclusion like this.

Here's what he said on this post. I'm going to quote him. He said, the information that was left

out of my announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus.

The popular phrase for this is deconstruction. The biblical phrase is falling away. By all the

measurements I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Now, the truth is that when

someone comes to decide or comes to the point where they say the Bible's not true, it's not

reliable, it's often maybe the most key part of them turning away from Christianity altogether.

But it's not just former Christians who think this, it's also those who have never been

Christian. We hear this in other places as well. So in the well-known work from, again,

about 20 years ago, a man named Richard Dawkins, an atheist, he wrote a popular book called The

God Delusion. Maybe you've heard of it. And in that book, he states this. I'll quote him. He says,

reputable biblical scholars do not, in general, regard the New Testament, and obviously not the

Old Testament, as a reliable record of what actually happened in history. And that's what he

says. Another atheist, a man who, the late Christopher Hitchens, wrote a book around the

same time, called God is Not Great. And in that he said, there was no flight from Egypt, no

wandering in the desert, no dramatic conquest of the promised land. It was all quite simply and

very ineptly made up at a much later date. All the mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded.

So when you read statements like that, both from people who are formally Christian and those who

are atheist, when you read statements like that, well, who needs to ever look at the Bible to

determine truth? If you believe these sorts of statements, you can just discard the Bible

altogether. So no wonder for many today, outside of perhaps outside of this building, Christianity

is a thing that can be easily dismissed, because to them, the Bible can be easily dismissed. So

what does all this mean? I think it means that when Christians talk with non-Christians, when we talk

with friends and family, one of the key questions that comes up over and over and over again when

we're talking about Christianity is, can you really trust the Bible? Is it trustworthy? Is it true?

Okay, and so for this morning, that's our focus. The next little part of the service, we're going

to think about this question. How can we answer this? Is the Bible trustworthy? There'll be two

main things that we're going to look at. Firstly, evidence from outside the Bible. What do we find

outside the Bible that points to the Bible's authenticity? And what do we see inside the Bible?

What's the evidence from inside the Bible? Okay. Now, when we talk about that first bit of evidence

from outside the Bible, there's actually a wealth of information, a wealth of things that we can look

at to determine actually the Bible is trustworthy. In fact, in the time we've got this morning,

there's not enough time to be able to cover all of it. I'm only going to be able to look at a few

specific things to make this case. So let's, and then we'll jump into Scripture to see more of it

from the inside the Bible. So I'm going to raise a few objections that people often raise with regard

to the Bible's truthfulness, and we'll look at them together. So first, people might say,

we can't trust the Bible because it was written a long time ago. It was written so long ago. Now,

this is actually a relatively easy one to write off. What lies behind a question like this,

if someone believes this, is something you might call chronological snobbery. Now, that's the idea

that old things, old events, just because they're old, are not as good as new and current things.

And that's the thing we see a lot in our society today, isn't it? That you want to be on the right

side of history, right? You don't want to be in the past, the past bad, the now and the future,

that's good. And so if the Bible is written long ago, people would say, well, then it can't be

reliable because they maybe, for example, didn't have the technology that we have today. But it

doesn't take much to show this is actually really shallow thinking. So for example, in the world in

which the Bible was written, that was considered what you'd call an oral culture. Now today,

we've got a written culture. If I want to remember something today, what do I do? Well,

I might get out my phone to take notes. I might have a writing pad in front of me and write things

down. That's the way I remember something. I get my Google Keep is one of the apps on my phone.

That's what I pull out and I make notes on it if I need to remember something. Now, but back in the

day when the Bible was written, they wouldn't do things like that. They wouldn't be able to pull

out their phone, obviously. Back in that day, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to tell

it to each other over and over and over again. That's how they remembered things, remembered things,

by retelling the stories over and over and over. And actually, it's surprisingly easy to do that.

If you're retelling yourself something over and over, it's actually easy to remember it. Now,

my example for this is at the moment for our three and a half year old daughter. Every night,

she wants a story before she goes to bed. And she always picks basically the same story. So I've

read the same book now for months, months and months every night. And I found that it didn't

take me long. I can do it without even looking at the book. I can just point it out and just

like read it without even looking at the pages because it's so burned into my memory just from

reading it over and over and over again. Okay, now that's a little bit like what oral culture was.

That's what it was like in the day the Bible was written. Now, if you don't believe me,

well, let's hear. There you go. Someone's excited. If you don't believe me, well,

what about this? Okay, now here's a Greek scholar, a man whose full-time job it is to study the

original, the New Testament in its original language. He said it was common for children

in ancient Greece, that's more than 2,000 years ago, common for children in ancient Greece to

memorize all of Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. Now those are well-known ancient stories with

about 200,000 words. These are big lengthy stories and it was common for children to memorize them.

Now on top of that, it was common for Jewish Old Testament scribes, get this, to be able to

memorize all of the Old Testament. I wouldn't be able to, I don't think it'd be able to memorize

a chapter of the Old Testament, but the Old Testament scribes would memorize the whole thing.

Now that's the kind of accuracy they had in transcribing things, in keeping things remembered.

That's the kind of accuracy that we're talking about for those whose job it was to know the

Scriptures and to pass them on to others. So when you think about what was happening in the day the

Bible was written, we want to be very careful about saying, because the Bible was written so

long ago, they just didn't have the technology, they wouldn't be able to record things like

we can today, so we just can't trust it. Actually, no, that's chronological snobbery, it's shallow

thinking, doesn't take into account what was happening back in that day. So that's the

first objection. Second objection, we can't trust the Bible because it's full of errors,

full of errors. Now this is a claim based on the fact that when we think about the New Testament,

there are lots of copies of the New Testament or manuscripts of the Bible spread all throughout

history. And now there's a professor in America, a man named Bart Ehrman, who's agnostic, not a

Christian, and he's recently tried to popularize this idea that the Bible is full of errors. And

one of the things he said is that when you add up all the errors, so an error is a difference between

one manuscript compared to another, maybe it's a letter, maybe it's a single letter that's different,

maybe it's a word, things like that. He says when you add up all these differences, that you get an

enormous amount of them. And so people begin to think, well, if that's true, then the process of

recording, getting the New Testament like we have it today, that must have been a little bit like a

game of Chinese whispers. One person says something to the next and then to the next and all the way

down this long, long line of copying. And so surely if someone introduces a mistake at one,

then it gets copied to all the others, right? And now by the time you get to the end, you've got a

completely different translation. Well, while it's true that there are minor mistakes, minor errors,

differences between manuscripts that were used to copy things and transcribe them and continue them

over time, actually that works in favor of the Bible's trustworthiness rather than against it,

as some might say. How so? Well, the more copies that you have of a work and the earlier those

copies are, well, the more chance you have of actually figuring out what is true and what isn't

true. You're more likely to determine when you have two copies that have a slight variation

between them, which one's accurate and which one isn't, because you can compare those two to all

the other copies that are out there. You've got thousands and thousands of copies. You can compare

them all to figure out what's actually true. And so there's a branch of scholarship that's

actually dedicated to this task, and we call this a textual criticism. The whole aim is to try and

better understand the creation and transmission of a text, of a written work. And when it's used

rightly, and it can be used wrongly, when it's used rightly, you can compare all the copies that

you've got of little parts of the New Testament and work your way backwards to determine what was in

the original. And that's what's happened for the Bible. What this means is for the Bible, we can

know actually to an incredibly high degree of accuracy, despite the differences in the manuscripts,

we can know to a really high degree of accuracy that what we read in the Bible today is similar,

almost exactly the same as what was written in the original. Now if you don't believe me, here's the

man Don Carson, well-known faithful Bible scholar. Here's what he says. He says,

nothing that we believe as Christians to be doctrinally true, and nothing that we are

commanded to do, is in any way jeopardised by differences in copies compared one to another.

Nothing is doctrinally true, nothing that we're commanded is in any way compromised by that.

In other words, the fact that there are lots of copies, different manuscripts of the New

Testament floating around, and that there are errors in them, differences, well those differences

are so minor, it doesn't negatively impact the Bible's trustworthiness. It actually helps us

to affirm its trustworthiness. Now before we move on, one more thing to say here, and that is,

not only do we have accuracy in the way that the Bible was transmitted or copied over time

for the scripture, not only do we have heaps and heaps of copies of different parts of the

New Testament, we actually also have endless archaeological evidence. I really do mean endless

here, endless archaeological evidence, because not only has evidence for the Bible been literally dug

up to back up what Bible scholars have said in the last 150 years, it's still happening even today.

We're still finding new evidence all the time. So I'm going to give you a few examples just briefly.

Now before 1947, the oldest manuscript, the oldest copy of the Old Testament that we had dated from

the 9th century AD. So that's obviously 900 years after the time of Jesus, more than a thousand years

after the events themselves. But then in 1947, some shepherds in a backwater part of the Middle

East, they stumbled across a treasure trove of biblical writings that had been stored in a cave

somewhere in the Middle East. Here's a picture of that cave. There it is there. Now more excavations

were done in the nearby caves and what came of it, what was the eventual result, was a thousand

manuscripts, almost a thousand manuscripts being found that dated from the third century BC to the

first century AD. These became known collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls, maybe you've heard of them.

And what they did was they confirmed that what was in those earlier copies, the ones from the 9th

century, were just the same as what was in these new ones that had been found that were much closer

to the original events. So it was new evidence confirming that what the Bible says is true.

Another one, so in 1993, I'm going to say this, the Tel Dan Steely discovery was made. Now if that

word doesn't mean anything to you, all it means is a big stone tablet was discovered and that's the

name. In those days, 1993, there was a growing number of academics and skeptics who were saying

that King David, the well-known Old Testament Bible figure, that he actually must be fictitious. He's

not a real person from history. Lots of academics and skeptics were starting to say that. They were

saying, King David, he's more like King Arthur than someone who's actually real. And then in 1993,

at a dig site, archaeological dig site, what happens? Well, they found this tablet. Found a tablet,

here's a picture of it there. And on the tablet, there was a description of a victory over the

King of Aram by the King of Israel. And what was written there is that the ally of the King of

Israel was the King of, quote, the House of David. Okay, so here was more evidence that at that point

not been discovered, more evidence backing up what the Bible actually says, that King David was a real

person, that he was a well-known King, that he had a dynasty named after him, and that a line of kings

came from him. That's everything that we read in the Bible, exactly as we read it. Now if you think,

look, I'm just picking some from some past discoveries, and this doesn't happen anymore.

Just last year, 2022, okay, last year, another tablet was found. This one was a cursed tablet

found at Mount Ebal in Israel. And this one dated to around 1400 BC, a long, long time ago. And the

thing about this tablet was it contained the personal name for God. That's a Yahweh.

And this was a significant discovery just last year because it was the earliest evidence of that

name, that the name Yahweh had not been found that early before. And so that's a big deal because for

the past 100 years or so, a mainstream view in scholarship is that in the first five books of

the Bible, wherever you see the personal name for God, wherever you see Yahweh, which in our English

translations is Lord, capitalized, well, academics for the last 100 years have been saying that's

been inserted much, much later. In other words, that's not part of the original. Someone's come

in much later and added that to the Bible. But now, 2022, here was new evidence saying actually,

no, it hadn't been added. It was there all along. Here's the early evidence for it, just as it

appeared in Scripture. And in fact, this is such a big discovery that it basically meant the end of

this mainstream view that had been held by so many scholars all over the world for 100 years. And all

that was needed was more time to dig it up. So what else are we going to discover in the future? I

think all we're going to do is keep finding more and more things from the ground that back up the

historicity, the reliability of what we read in Scripture. We just need more time. Well,

okay, a lot there. Hoping I'm starting to convince you now, let's move from evidence from outside the

Bible to instead evidence from inside the Bible. And here I'll be a little bit more brief. Now,

it goes without saying that the Bible itself claims to be God's Word. That's something we can

all agree on. It's not some made up tale, but it comes from God himself. In fact, in 2 Timothy 3,

2 Timothy 3:16

verse 16, we read that it is God breathed. It's come from God's very mouth. Now, you also have

countless references throughout the Old Testament saying, thus says the Lord. We read that over and

over again. It's a thing coming straight from God. You have New Testament passages quoting

Old Testament passages and saying, these are Scripture. So the New Testament considers the

Old Testament to be from God. Basically, you could turn to numerous pages in the New Testament to

see that. So for example, there's one in 2 Peter chapter 3, verse 15 and 16. There's one.

2 Peter 3:15

But I want to read you another one. This one tells us that New Testament authors were

eye witnesses of what Jesus said and did. Okay, eye witnesses. This was the one read earlier before

I got up to speak. So Peter, second letter of Peter, chapter 1, verse 16 and 18, he says this.

Let's go, claim to be God's Word. All right, there it is in front of you. So, four, we did not follow

cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power,

but we were eye witnesses of His majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father

when the voice came to him from the majestic glory saying, this is my Son whom I love. With Him I'm

well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with Him on the sacred

mountain. Eye witnesses, Peter said. That's how we're able to tell you about this because we were

actually there. We heard it, we saw it. And now we can read this in other places as well. The start

of the gospel of Luke, for example. Here's what the author of Luke says. Many have undertaken to

draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. That is all the things that

Jesus has said and done. Just as they were handed down to us by those who were from the first were

eye witnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself, Luke says, I myself have

carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I just too decided to write an orderly

account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know with certainty of the things you have

been taught. Okay, Luke was setting out to make things certain and he carefully investigated

things. He spoke to the eye witnesses, the people who were there. He recorded it carefully. Okay,

so we have the internal evidence for the Bible is crystal clear. Scripture is from God, it's from God

himself and it's communicated to us by the people who were there at the time. Eye witness testimony.

So, now that's a lot of information this morning. I hope though as we've kind of walked through it

that you've seen that there is a mountain of evidence that confirms for us the Bible is indeed

trustworthy. There's evidence from outside the Bible, there's evidence from inside the Bible,

that go a long way to confirming for us that we can believe that the names of the people,

the places, events, the things that we read about in Scripture, we can believe those things

actually happened just as it is written. It wasn't made up like some would claim and then inserted

later. No, it's reliable. It's verifiable. It is authentic and trustworthy. It's not a lie.

It's authentic and trustworthy. But you know what I reckon the best evidence is, the best evidence

for the Bible's reliability is that Jesus thinks the same thing. Jesus, the very founder of our faith,

he was very clear in his belief that Scripture is trustworthy. Okay, that it records what is true

and what is false. So let me give you an example. If you've got your Bible there,

maybe you want to turn with me to Matthew chapter 12. If you've got your Bible,

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

you've got your Bible there, go to Matthew chapter 12. I'm going to read verses 38 to 42 of Matthew chapter 12.

Matthew 12 · chapter mention Matthew 12 · chapter mention

Then some of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to him,

Teacher, we want a sign from you. He answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign,

but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and

three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights

in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and

condemn it. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah and now something greater than Jonah is here.

The queen of the south will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. For she came

from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom and now something greater than Solomon is

here. Now of all the Old Testament stories that we read about, all the ones that could potentially

be accused of being made up, Jonah's right at the top of that list, wouldn't you say?

People are going to say Jonah, that can't be true. A guy lives in the belly of a fish for three days,

that's wild. But what does Jesus think? Well, he seems to refer to it as its history.

He includes it in the same breath as references to the queen of Sheba and Solomon who were,

who are well-known historical figures. And he says that the men of Nineveh will repent

just like they did in Jonah's day. Now that would be very strange for Jesus to say if he didn't

think that what happened to Jonah actually was true. Now here's what Kevin DeYoung, the Bible

teacher, here's how he illustrates this. He says it would be like making a literary allusion to the

men of Gondor, if you know the Lord of the Rings, you know what that's about. And then issuing a very

serious warning to your audience that the orcs of Mordor will rise up to judge and condemn them.

And that's just weird because it's all fictional. It wouldn't make sense. No, Jesus had to be talking

about real history. Now that's what the story of Jonah, when we read it, that's what it presents

itself as, real history. And here is the real historical founder of our faith,

affirming it, saying, yes, it's history. All right, there you go. Okay, that's my case.

The case for the trustworthiness of the Bible. Now having heard all of this, a lot of information

this morning, you might have one lingering question, okay? One lingering question. If the Bible

is so trustworthy, if it is so reliable, so well attested historically, if it claims to be the

ultimate source of authority from God himself and there's good reasons to back it up,

then why don't more people believe it? Why aren't there more people out there looking at the Bible

and going, yes, look at it, this is amazing. I wanna know more about Jesus. Why does so many

people reject it? Why do our friends and family turn away from it? Why? Well, it's because no

matter how good the case is for the reliability of scripture and the case is good, well, reason

alone is not enough to bring people into the kingdom. In fact, it can't. Reason cannot bring

a person, our logical arguments cannot bring a person into the kingdom. Why? Well, because

the truths that the Bible speak of, that the matters it discusses, these are spiritual

realities and that means they must be spiritually discerned. Now this is something the apostle

Paul says, okay, in 1 Corinthians chapter two, he says, the person without the spirit

does not accept the things that come from the spirit of God, but considers them foolishness

and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the spirit.

Now does that mean it was useless, me kind of laying out the case for the reliability

of scripture, should we just forget about that, give it a second thought,

actually convert someone? Well, no, I don't think so, of course not. Reason is a helpful tool,

but reason alone, experience alone is not gonna do the job. It must be a work of the spirit,

it must be Jesus who opens the eyes of those who do not know him. And so that means sadly that we

will continue to see people, men like Joshua Harris, who kind of, you know, he's a very

good, deconstruct their faith and walk away, we'll continue to see that unfortunately.

It means that we'll continue to see the people reject the Bible out of hand, people like

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Why? Because not everyone's eyes have been opened.

So last thing, if I'm here this morning and what if I'm in that boat, what if I'm having trouble

believing all the Bible says, what if I'm having trouble believing it's trustworthiness, what then?

Maybe there's a part of the Bible that I'm having, I'm not too sure about.

What do I do? I think here's some things. I think the best thing to do is to keep reading scripture,

no matter what, keep it open, keep coming back to it time after time after time.

That God's word tells us that it is powerful to change us. So the best thing we can do is keep

reading it. I think as well, we've got to keep asking questions about its trustworthiness.

I think that's a good thing to do. If you're not sure, I think the Bible is robust. It can handle

these sorts of questions. So if you've got those questions, then ask them and be more than happy

to chat to you after the service about that if you'd like or chat with Mike after, I'm sure he'd

be happy to chat to you and Tom as well. Read up, I think, on these arguments. Some of the things,

I've just given you a small taste of all the arguments that are out there for the Bible's

reliability. There's a lot more to discover. It's a good thing to know these things because you never

know when someone might ask you a question about this. You want to be prepared. And so I'll

recommend two resources, two books that can give you some help with this. And they're both from

Josh and Sean McDowell, two American gents, a father and son. The first one there on the left

is More Than a Carpenter. That's a shorter book, easier to read, I think, with evidence for the

truth of scripture and who Jesus is. And then the one on the right, Evidence That Demands a Verdict.

That's a bigger, kind of more full-on tome, but it's definitely worth reading as well. They lay

out all the different things that back up what the Bible says. Okay, so there's just two books

that would be helpful to look at if you want to know more. I think final thing to say, most

importantly, if you've got doubts about what scripture says, the best thing to do is to pray.

The best thing you can do. These are spiritual realities. That means we need Jesus' help to

truly understand them. And the good news is that no matter who you are, no matter your background,

no matter how familiar you might be with the Bible, to anyone who truly comes to Jesus to know

him through his word, Jesus will always answer. He'll always answer that call. So I'm going to

pray and let's do that now together. Dear Lord Jesus, we've read about your word this morning.

We've looked at the arguments for the reliability of all that has been written down about you.

We pray that you would continue to help us learn these truths, to be confident in all that you have

said and all that we read in scripture. Would you give us the motivation to look into these things,

to know them well, so that should we get asked about them, we'll know what to say in the moment.

But we pray as well, we thank you for opening our eyes to see these truths. We pray for any who

might be here this morning who are still not sure, we ask that you would open their eyes as well.

Would they come to you asking these questions and be able to see all that you have said and the

veracity of it. We thank you for these things. In your name we pray, amen.