The God of the Bible We Trust | What's The Deal With? | Shane Wood

Well, you know, whenever you get invited and go speak somewhere, especially when you're kind of like a long-haired hippie, you never know if you're gonna get invited back.

So, first of all, thanks.

Second of all, some of you all are like, I don't know who this guy is.

Well, here's the reason why is because you were a good Arizonian and you left in July whenever I came.

So it's a little cooler than I was here last time.

Um, nonetheless, I'm very grateful uh to be able to be back here at Central to talk about an important question.

Uh the question simply is this how can we know the Bible is true?

Like, like, like, how can we trust this book?

How can we trust what it says?

How can we trust what it demands?

How can we trust what it reveals?

How can we trust that this Bible is true?

Trust.

Oh my goodness, that's been a theme in my house for the past several months, uh, really the past year, definitely the last couple of weeks, especially with my youngest.

I, yeah, I'm a professor and all that stuff, but really I'm a dad of four kids.

Now, I say kids, but that isn't exactly accurate anymore.

I have a 22-year-old, a 20-year-old, an 18-year-old, and God love him a 13-year-old.

And I say it that way for a couple different reasons.

Being 13 is a lot different in 2026 than it was whenever I was 13.

It's just very different.

And it's also a bummer when you're 13 and your oldest sibling or your closest sibling to you is a senior in high school.

Like, I'm always trying to convince my 13-year-old, I'm like, you're not being punished.

You're just like younger than them.

That's it.

Like, he's like, oh come, I have to go to bed, but they get to stay up.

Because my kids, they're all three adults, and you're you're just, you know, getting started, you know?

Like, it's not it, not it's not about you.

It's just, you know, you're young.

But my youngest, he does have a unique relationship with secrets.

He, he, he, they're his friend.

He likes to have them around.

And it's interesting because sometimes it's not even on big issues.

Sometimes it's just on little things.

Like, well, you know, he was like, Dad, this was this was like a month ago.

He's like, Dad, I saw some ants in my room.

And I went, okay, sure enough, saw some ants.

I said, Okay, son, first of all, it's, you know, it's springtime, it's gonna happen.

Second of all, if you would quit sneaking food in your room, this would be taken care of.

Like, it's not hard.

Keep the food in the kitchen.

But secrets, he loves them.

Well, a couple weeks ago, we were putting him down to bed, said our prayers, said what we were thankful for.

And then my wife Sarah left the room, and Robert goes, Hey Dad, can you wait for a minute?

I'm like, sure.

And God love him.

He's just my son Robert, he is the way I describe him is he's all heart.

It's like that kid's heart is so big, he will, he'll either save the entire world or burn it to the ground.

Like there will be nothing in between.

His heart is all consuming.

And he starts weeping.

He's just like, dad, and he's I mean, he's saying stuff I don't even a lot, I didn't even know a lot of what he was saying.

But it ended with this.

And if you would just get me a phone, it would make all of the things go away.

I'm like, okay.

I mean, yeah, maybe we are, you know, those Midwest parents that are too protective.

At the same time, I've always told my kids, listen, you guys won't have the same rules because you're not the same people.

You're not gonna get the same things at the same time because you're not, you're not gonna have the same curfew.

You're not the same person.

You don't struggle with the same things.

That would be ridiculous for me as a parent to give every one of my kids the exact same thing because they're not the same person.

And I just told my son, I said, hey, listen, buddy, first of all, look, let's celebrate this.

Said on a scale of one to ten, one being, ooh, can't trust you at all.

Ten being, wow, I can trust you with my life.

I was like, you, you've you've grown.

I was like, man, a year ago you would have been like a three or a four.

I was like, man, recently you've been like a solid seven.

And that's incredible.

I was like, we've been working on this for years, and it's taking root.

But I said, son, when it comes to trust, two things matter most quality and quantity.

I said, here's what I mean.

I said, there are certain moments, buddy, there are certain moments where your trust matters most.

I said, remember when we sent you to your friend's house, you know, you wanted to stay the night, we let you stay the night like a week ago.

And then you came back and you were telling us the movies that you watched, and I said, son, you know we don't watch those movies.

I said, and I told you, this is a trust moment.

I said, there's just some moments, they're high quality moments.

And if I can trust you in the high quality moments, that means I can trust you in a lot of other places.

I said, but also it's quantity.

It's like, I know when you cross those lines you feel bad.

But I said, the problem is you think if you say you're sorry, then we should forget about it for the rest of the night and then give you a phone the next day because apparently you're cured of secrets.

I said, no, making the right choice over a long period of time in a lot of different locations eventually leads to deep trust.

Trust is centered on quality and quantity.

One of the things I find interesting is that the older we get, we we have a just a deeper relationship with trust.

We live our lives every single day relying on trust.

We trust that our elected officials will do what we elected them to do.

Both in the quality moments and in the quantity.

We trust that when our spouse says they're going to work, they're actually going to work and not with the person they're having an affair with.

We trust them with quality things and quantity.

I mean, we trust our car to get us to our job so that we can pay for our food.

We trust it in quality moments, like when we're late.

And quality, and quantity, like all the time.

Get us there and have air conditioning.

You live on the sun.

Like, I mean, I've never seen a people so dependent on air conditioning.

But y'all, it's real out here.

It is real.

As adults, trust becomes ever more, ever more important, ever more fragile, ever more valuable.

And when it comes to issues of faith, issues of devotion, issues of God, trust is trust is in high demand.

Because you see, when it comes to faith, it doesn't just require you to believe something with your mind, it requires you to put your entire life in the hands of a God you can't see.

Like when it comes to faith, it requires you to open your past and let Jesus in to allow Jesus to lead you through every single moment in your present.

Like whenever it comes to faith, it requires you to open up your future and to trust Jesus, even if he leads you to a tomb of your own.

Like when it comes to faith, trust kind of matters.

In a question like we're asking today, can we trust the message of Christianity?

Can we trust this book that says the things that Jesus says, that teaches us the things that Jesus did?

Can we trust this book?

That's a question that that frankly is pretty heavy.

Pretty significant.

Because it's not just about what you think, it's about how you live.

What I want to do tonight then is I want to lay out some evidences.

This is gonna be a lot of like facts and stuff.

Now we'll get to the heart stuff later.

Why?

Because that's just kind of like who I am.

I love looking at the head, but if it doesn't lead to the heart, I'm kind of lost.

We'll get there later.

But we really do have to just kind of unpack some of the facts, some of the evidences of this book that we call the Bible.

And that is fact number one.

Like all religions, like all faiths, we have a sacred text and we call it the Bible.

Here's some facts about the Bible.

In this book, there are 66 other books, and they're divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament.

And these 66 books were written over a period of around 1,500 years by around 40 different authors in at least three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

Facts.

But those facts we all can be like, okay, that's interesting.

Oh, but but this book doesn't just span time, it just doesn't just span authors, it also spans like every facet of life.

Like this book talks about marriage and it talks about divorce.

It talks about your anger and it talks about your need for forgiveness.

Not just your need to receive forgiveness, but your need to actually give forgiveness.

It talks about the hatred and what it does to your heart.

It talks about the danger of money and the importance of actually being free from the shackles of wealth through giving.

This book doesn't just have a lot of other books and a lot of authors and a lot of languages.

It talks about like every area of your life.

The question is, though, can we trust it?

Like, can we trust this text?

Or is it just some book that over the last you know 2,000 years humans have just put it together so they can control other humans?

I'll never forget once where I was at my first full-time ministry and uh had this very wealthy donor very upset with me and the senior minister because he found out that somebody we had been ministering to had AIDS.

And he was angry that we hadn't told everyone.

And he said this to us He said, if you don't get up this next Sunday and announce to everyone that he has AIDS, then I'm take I'm leaving and I'm taking my money with me.

I sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my head.

Because I just, without thinking, I just said, Don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out.

And then I looked at the senior minister, like, I'm sorry, that's your line.

Like, you do what you think is best.

But he he looked at us finally, and I and I I said this, I did say after that, I said, Listen, what I mean is this.

If if every single person wants to get on stage and tell every secret and every one of their sins first, then I'll consider this person being able to share their story.

It's like, but we're not gonna embarrass him.

That's not happening.

This is what he said to me.

He goes, listen, you need to realize there's some times in this life that you can't just follow some book from the 1830s.

And I was like, okay.

Um you trust this book, though?

In all areas of your life, can you trust it?

Trust comes down to two things: quality and quantity.

Quality and quantity.

And when it comes to the actual evidences of the trust of the Bible, when we talk about quantity and quality, we're talking about manuscripts.

Manuscripts, these handwritten copies that you're gonna see on the screen.

These handwritten copies that scribes were either paid or they were through their devotion, they they meticulously wrote out copying the sacred text.

And you can see there's a wide variety of manuscripts.

Like we have some fragments, we have some really elaborate ones, we have complete versions of the Bible, we have some mere portions of the Bible.

But what you have is you have scholars working to produce and to preserve these manuscripts in high quality and in vast quantity.

And the goal of scholars over the last couple of hundred years is to take those manuscripts, to pour over every single word, to pour over every single variation, even the way in which something is spelled, and their goal is simply this: to come up with the biblical text as accurate as possible to the original words from the original author.

That is their goal.

With all of those manuscripts, their goal is to figure out what was the original words by the original authors, and how can we wrestle with this?

The process is meticulous, but the goal is clear.

The goal is to produce a text that you can trust.

A text that says this what the original authors meant to say, this is what they said.

How do we measure this trust?

By looking at the evidence of quality and quantity.

Now, before we dive in, I want to go ahead and uh give a shout out to the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, where a lot of the information we're gonna be going through in the next 10 minutes or so, it comes from them.

And specifically this magician of the manuscripts named Dr.

Daniel Wallace.

He is he is a brilliant and quirky individual.

I've never heard him give a lecture where he wasn't wearing some Hawaiian shirt of some flavor.

But but he has dedicated his lives to not just studying these manuscripts, but to actually making the copies available online so that you can go through the manuscripts yourselves, so that you don't just have to take their word for it.

So big shout out to them.

Also, before we dive in, I wanna I want to say a thing or two about myself in this.

Now, you heard earlier I'm a professor of New Testament.

My actual title is Professor of New Testament and Its Origins.

Why?

Well, I am a biblical scholar.

Like I have been trained, I teach the Bible, I teach the Gospel of Matthew and the book of Revelation and write books on those.

Like I am a biblical scholar.

But one third of my PhD is actually in Roman history.

Like I'm a trained historian.

And so there's gonna be times whenever, yes, I as a biblical scholar, I can't help but talk about some of the Bible parts of it to get me excited.

But I really want to communicate to you primarily from my historian hat.

Because whenever you look at this evidence from a historian's perspective, frankly, here's the result when it comes to the New Testament, when it comes to the Bible.

The evidence is ridiculous.

It is so absurd.

We don't even have a category for it as historians for the amount of evidence that we have when it comes to the Bible.

It's it is astronomical.

And sorry if that's me showing my cards a little too early, but that's like the historian's verdict.

So let's dive in and look at what I'm talking about.

I want to start by looking at quality.

And what I mean by quality when it comes to manuscripts is I want to look at the substantial copies, not just the fragments.

We'll set the fragments aside for later.

But I want to look at the substantial copies of the New Testament and how early we can get them, how close we can get them to the original author's words.

The fancy word for the original author's words is the autograph.

I want to see how close our manuscripts can get to the autograph, substantial copies.

But first, let's look at this from a historian's perspective.

When it comes to historians, an average ancient historian, a trusted ancient historian, where we get a ton of information from.

Like I'm talking like the historians where we learn about who Julius Caesar was, or what Alexander the Great did, we actually only have five sources that even tell us about the existence of Alexander the Great.

But those sources are really valuable and really good.

But whenever we're looking at an average trusted ancient historian, we typically have to wait several hundred years, on average, 500, about 1,500 years, before we get the first substantial copy of their written work.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

We're gonna look at um several of them.

I'm gonna tell you why they're significant, and we're also gonna see how long it took to get the first substantial copy.

First figure is Pliny the Elder.

Now, in the parentheses, I have our rough approximate of when they died, and then the 700 years later, that's how long it takes to get the first substantial copy of their work.

We know when Pliny the Elder died.

He died in AD 79 because he was in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the whole city with lava.

Pliny the Elder was writing the first real like encyclopedia in existence called The Natural Histories.

As a matter of fact, at the beginning of Natural Histories, Pliny the Elder says, My goal is to give you the summation of universal knowledge.

And when you read it, holy cow, sometimes you're like, wow, this is really fascinating, this culture and this person and this event.

And then he's like, let me tell you about these little trees and these little plants on the side of the road when I'm walking on the Via Ignatia.

And you're like, okay, I guess you really are giving me universal knowledge.

Natural histories, though, is a treasure trove of information of the ancient world.

And yet it takes almost 700 years before we get the first substantial manuscript.

And from a historian's perspective, I'm like, that's not bad.

Why?

Well, because it usually just gets worse.

Like Plutarch.

Plutarch writes the lives of illustrious men, where he actually takes a Greek figure and places him next to a Roman figure so that he can tell their story and you can see which virtue actually you want to be like.

Like he's one of those five that tells in detail Alexander the Great's story.

But lives of illustrious men, we don't even get a good substantial copy until 800 years after Plutarch.

From a historian's perspective, that's not bad.

Josephus, who writes Jewish Wars, where we get a detailed account of all the different events that led up to and resulted in the destruction of the temple in AD 70, it takes 800 years before we get one of his first substantial copies.

Polybius, who writes on the rise of the Roman world, Roman Empire as the world's superpower, it takes 1,200 years.

Pausanias, 1,400 years.

Herodotus, who is considered by Cicero the father of history.

It takes 1,500 years before we get a substantial copy of a manuscript from him.

And as a historian, I go, yeah.

Because that's like what we build our history off of.

Like, hear me, hear me.

I'm gonna pause right here and say this.

I'm not saying those are unreliable.

I'm saying that's normal.

Like that's normal.

From a historian's perspective, that's what we piece history together with.

Rocks and manuscripts that are 500 to 1500 years after the first one was written.

That's a normal historian's job.

That's what we do.

The problem is the New Testament, when it comes to quality, it just kind of like blows these numbers out of the water.

Let me just give you two examples.

Papyrus 66, which is 156 surviving pages.

This isn't just a fragment.

This contains nearly the entire Gospel of John, and it is about 80 to 90 years after John wrote his gospel.

It's like two generations, and we have almost the entire gospel intact in a substantial manuscript copy.

Or papyrus 46, which is 172 surviving pages, not fragments.

This is about 125 years after the book of Romans is written.

It has the majority of Romans in it, it has portions of 1 Thessalonians, and it has the entirety of Hebrews, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians.

Like from the quality perspective, like historians, we're used to dealing with manuscripts 500 to 1,500 years after, and we go, yeah.

But 80 to 125 years, we're like, that's a That's not possible.

Like, do you know the material this stuff was written on?

Do you know how many things have to go right in order for a papyrus to actually make it 2,000 years?

It's so brittle.

And the elements can do so much.

The fact that we have anything in history to me is a miracle.

The fact that we have to wait 700 years for some manuscripts, I go, that's incredible.

But that's that's that's normal.

But 80 years, that's that's astronomical.

When it comes to the quality of the New Testament manuscripts, that's just two examples.

But there are dozens and dozens and hundreds more.

But that's the norm for the New Testament, which as a historian, we we we don't have a category for.

It's kind of like a different thing because it is so absurd.

But quality is only half of the equation.

Quality, if you just have one or two good manuscripts, you can't go running around going, see, now you can trust it.

No, you just have one or two good manuscripts.

Quality must be balanced by quantity.

Quantity also matters.

And again, when it comes to the New Testament, it's it's actually ridiculous.

So I'm not even gonna do the whole Bible, I'm just gonna do just the New Testament.

When it comes to the New Testament, we have, from the Greek manuscripts alone, we have 5,541 approximately.

And I say approximately because that's a really conservative count.

Some people like to bump it up, but I wanted to find the lowest.

When it comes to Latin, so Greek is the language of the Greek Empire, which was what the New Testament was written in.

But Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, which is what eventually the New Testament was translated into very early on.

We have around 10,000 Latin manuscripts.

Whenever then you start adding other languages that were around in some of the regions that the Christians were living and preserving, like Coptic and Hebrew and Gothic language, it adds another 5,000.

Some scholars say over 10,000, but I went with the lower number again.

That means when it comes to the quantity of manuscripts, when it comes to just the New Testament, we have around 20,000 manuscripts to try to figure out are the words that we have in the New Testament the actual words that the original authors wanted to say?

Now, the problem is with numbers is it sounds big, but it's hard to really digest.

How significant that is compared to the rest of history.

So I want to give you an illustration that I'm indebted to Daniel Wallace.

I want to cite my sources.

This next illustration is a Daniel Wallace one, and it is brilliant because it paints the picture very clearly.

When it comes to the average classical Greek writer, so a good trusted historian, we have about 15 copies typically of their works in existence.

And if you stacked those copies up, it would be about four foot in height.

Or like the size of like a music stand.

So let's go ahead and have a music stand, about the size of this podium, size of the music stand, about four feet tall.

If you stack the 15 copies that you have of most trusted ancient historical sources, it's about four feet tall.

And that's pretty impressive.

Like as a historian, I see that and I get excited.

Because then I'm like, oh, I wonder if we compare them all.

Like, are there places where we have to figure out what was really being said?

Four feet tall is impressive until you take that music stand and you put it next to like the Empire States building, which is 1,454 feet tall.

Have you ever been to the Empire States building?

I was just there like a couple months ago and I was trying to take a picture of me and my son in it, and I couldn't even get to the top of it.

I'm like, that's it's so stinking tall.

But whenever those graphics next to each other, you don't really get it.

We need to probably do this to scale.

So can we make it to scale?

Uh have there.

The music stand next to Empire State, it's more like that.

You see, can you see it?

Can we get an arrow to point where there it is.

That's the so that little pixel is the height of the average 15 copies of an ancient source.

Here's where it gets wild.

The Empire States building's actually not the size of the New Testament manuscripts, because the New Testament manuscripts, if you stack them up, it is 6,660 feet or four and a half Empire States buildings tall.

What category do we have for that?

Like as a historian, I'm going, that's not, that's not, that's like Wilt Chamberlain's basketball records.

Like, we don't, those don't count.

Because how does that even compare to what is normal?

That is so absurd.

There is such a preposterous amount of evidence that when you compare it to anything else, you start to ask the question, okay, now wait a minute.

Why are we comfortable with what we know about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, but for some reason we have an issue with Jesus Christ?

Like if we're just like basing everything off of evidence and we're just talking all about reason and all about logic and all about, okay, fine, then what do you do with that evidence?

I do think that's an important place to land, though.

I mean, from a historian's perspective, quality and quantity, New Testament passes with flying colors.

But here's what I know is absolutely true.

There are people in this room that it does not matter how many statistics I put on the screen or how many scholars I bring to bear or how many letters I have behind my name.

You will hear it all and you still won't believe it.

Why?

Why?

Why do we struggle to believe that this is true?

Several years ago, I um I had a student.

He he came to Ozark and he was very honest about why he was coming.

Even in his enrollment, he said, Listen, I am an atheist.

And I am coming to Ozark because I want to investigate this faith.

I I believe it is worth the time and the money to come here to say, if you guys really believe what you say you believe, this changes everything.

And I don't believe it, but I want to hear what you say.

I love that.

I'm like, I can I can work with that.

Indifference I struggle with, but somebody that's like a doubting seeker, I'll hang out with them all day long.

So by God's grace, he got put in my acts class, which all freshmen take at Ozark.

So, you know, him and I just kind of connected, and then he was like, hey, do you mind if I like come by your office?

I'm like, shoot, that's no problem.

Like swing by on Monday.

So we did, and that first Monday, we we talked for probably three hours.

And he just had question after question after question.

But by the end of it, I was like, man, that was fun.

And he left, and then he came back the next Monday with a whole new set of questions.

And some of them were about like, you know, can we trust the Bible?

Some of them were about like about the problem of evil, and some of them were about like, you know, is it even rational to believe in a non, you know, a being that is boundaryless?

And so, whole new set of questions, whole new three hours.

After he was done, hugged him, left, came back the next Monday, whole new set of questions.

This happened for six Mondays in a row.

Three hours of talking, answering questions.

Next week, a whole new set of questions.

On the seventh Monday, we get around two and a half hours in.

And I said, Hey, I love you and I've loved this.

I said, but we're not, I'm not gonna meet with you next week.

And he was like, why?

Like, what's going on?

Did I do something?

Did I offend you?

And I was like, No, you didn't, you didn't offend me.

I just said, but come on, man.

We're playing games.

And he goes, No, I'm not playing games.

I just have questions.

And I just, I said, no, I said, that's right.

I said, okay, look, answer me this.

I said, each week you came in with a set of questions.

I said, and each week I did my best to give as good of answers as I could.

Did I disappoint you?

He goes, no, you satisfied every one of my questions.

I said, then, but the next week you come back with a whole new set of questions.

He goes, well, it's just because I'm a, you know, I'm a thinker.

And I said, No, that's actually not why.

I said, you want me to tell you why?

You want me to tell you why you keep coming back every single Monday?

He goes, Yeah, man, just tell me the truth.

I just want the truth.

I said, it's fine, but this is gonna hurt.

He said, just tell me.

I said, I think you will have an infinite amount of questions that can never be answered.

Because the true issue is you were still angry at the God that you felt abandoned you whenever you were nine years old and your mom was diagnosed with MS.

I said, next week, if you want to come and talk about that, come on in.

And he gritted his teeth.

And with tears in his eyes, he said, I will not talk about that.

I said, then we're done meeting.

And I know.

I know some of you are like, man, this hippie's callous.

Like, that's uncaring.

But for me, it's it's the exact opposite.

Like, I care about him so much that I refuse to keep dancing around the real issue.

I refuse to keep looking for new evidences or new ways to ask old questions just because we want to be more committed to running than to submitting.

To familiarity more than health.

To our own sin than into the transformation that Jesus offers through his cross in Christ and sacrifice through his resurrection.

Like, whenever it comes to weighing the evidences, it's really not that easy.

It's not that hard of a conversation.

But what makes this hard is our addiction to our own running.

Like one of the things in my own life that I've learned through many mistakes and countless hours of therapy is this simple truth.

Wounds can keep you from Jesus.

But only Jesus can heal your wounds.

And where did I learn that?

In this in this book.

In these 66 books written over 1500 years by 40 different authors in three different languages.

Like, can you trust the Bible?

Sure.

But that's not the invitation today.

The invitation is not to trust a book.

The invitation is to trust the person the book is pointing to.

Yes, you can trust that the Bible is the words that they wrote, but have you heard the words they wrote?

I'm just gonna warn you, it'll cost you everything.

But you can trust the word.

Not just this word, but the word that became flesh and dwelled among us and died in our place so that three days later he can give us the hope of a new life.

Lord Jesus, teach me to listen.

Father God, give me the patience to lay still as the scalpel of you, the good physician, puts it to my heart.

Holy Spirit, give me eyes to see and ears to hear what only you can speak.

And I ask this in the name of Jesus, our King.

Amen.