Why the Bible

I'm curious now, just a little side note.

How many people in here have Facebook?

This is probably a lesson in demographics up here.

Raise your hand if you have demographics.

Okay.

Okay, put your hands down.

If you are under the age of 25 and have Facebook that you actually look, not just an account that's open, but one that you use, raise your hand up high.

We have a few holdouts still in the younger generation because as I've been told by students that I worked with is Facebook is for old people now.

So I don't know if you know that or not, but there's some great things about Facebook because in Facebook you you know you get a post pictures of your kids up there so that like my mom, who's in Nebraska, can see that my son Devin, my oldest, got his braces off this week.

That's great.

And oh what a delight that is.

Now we just have to remind him to wear the retainer all the time.

But um that's a different story.

And uh pictures of my daughter running hurdles.

She ran hurdles again this week.

She didn't trip over any, she did catch one, but she didn't fall.

One other girl.

That's the thing about hurdles, is sometimes they go down hard, don't they?

But uh maybe you heard this story on Facebook.

Um it's been a few years ago about uh the woman who was with her daughter at uh McDonald's back when they had the playplaces with the ball pits.

And this was in California, so if I lived in California for 10 years, so I experienced this that the playplaces are actually outside, not all inside.

And so um this woman had her daughter, or her not her daughter, but her child, her son, who was playing in the ball pit, and he's just he screamed for a bit, and she didn't know what happened, if he was startled or what happened, and she came over, she comforted him, and he seemed fine for a bit.

But then later he he passed out and she ran him to the hospital.

It turned out that he had been bitten by a rattlesnake, baby rattlesnake that was in the ball pit.

Now, just rest assured that's an urban myth.

But did you see this story?

The story's been around for a long time about baby rattlesnakes in ball pits.

It does it didn't really actually happen.

Sort of like the day that NASA has proven uh that they didn't where the sun stood still, NASA has not done that.

But how do we know in this world, this marketplace of ideas, with so many things coming at us, what is real and what is not real?

What to stake our life on?

You know, should we forbid our children from ever playing in ball pits again?

It would only make sense if there were baby rattlesnakes in ball pits.

But the bigger issue that we're going to address today is why do we believe the Bible?

Now, oftentimes when you go to the grocery store, you stand there and the tabloids, they don't seem quite as prevalent as they once did, or at least not in such an obvious place, but we're gonna we're gonna have a little interaction this morning.

And I know it's just barely after nine o'clock.

Now, most of you do some of your best thinking prior to nine, uh, so so you should be good at this.

So I have some tabloid headlines.

And what I would normally do is make you choose sides of the room, but I know it's early, so we're not gonna do that.

I shouldn't make you stand up though, get your blood flowing.

I don't know.

That's it.

That might be pushing it at the early service.

So what we'll do is we'll just by show of hands or nod or whatever you like to do.

You'll have to choose in your own mind.

I have two headlines, and you have to choose which one is a true, well, at least uh a headline that actually appeared in the tabloids, okay?

So here's your first section, your first set of choices.

First one is this Headline number one a blind woman flies a plane 300 miles to save her dying child's life.

Okay, that's your first choice.

A.

Choice B.

Boy shrunk to the size of a cereal box and kidnapped by the UFO, by a tiny UFO.

All right.

If you say A, blind woman flies a plane 300 miles is true.

Raise your hands.

If you say boy shrunk to the size of a cereal box, raise your hand for B.

Okay, A is the correct answer on that one.

So we're keeping score because life is about competition.

Ask my watch, she'll tell you that all of life is a competition.

Yes.

Uh all right, next one.

A.

Baby born with angel wings?

Or B, man frozen in 1919 revived?

I have to make sure I know the answer to this one.

Yeah, it's okay.

All right, who says A, baby born with angel wings?

All right, who say man born in 1919 revived, or frozen in 1990?

B is the correct answer to that one.

Good, good.

So you keeping score?

Who's winning?

Alright, next one.

Choice A.

Aliens dan alien dance show picked up on satellite dish.

Or B.

Bizarre disease turns girl into statue.

Which one is the accurate one?

Who said A?

Who said B?

The correct answer is A.

Alien Dance Show.

I wonder who their MC was.

If it was Ryan Seacrest or who it was.

I don't know.

Alright.

Next one.

Man continues to live normal life after doctors remove his brain.

Okay, ladies, no jokes.

Or B, man sneezes brain tumor out of his head and lives.

Who says A, man lives normal life without a brain?

Who says B, man sneezes B is the correct answer?

True headline.

And the last one.

A samurai swordsman chops off man's arm for hunking his horn.

Or B, ten-year-old pitcher stops purse snatcher with the fastball.

Who says A, samurai swordsman?

Who says B, fastball?

Correct answer was A.

Alright.

If you have got more than three correct, raise your hand.

Okay, keep it up if you got four or more correct.

If you got all five correct, keep your hand up.

So we have a cut.

Did you say four?

And you said, so anybody else have four?

I saw these two.

Oh, we have a three-way tie.

Congratulations, you are the proud owners of bragging rights.

They were expecting so much more.

Well, the challenge in our life is trying to figure out what is true, isn't it?

Most of those headlines, I think if if we were really honest about them, we'd say none of them were true.

Now they were truly in a tabloid, but most of them would say that's ridiculous.

Something like that could never possibly happen.

You know, in Joshua chapter 1, verse 8.

Joshua 1:8

It says this: do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth.

Meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.

Then you will be prosperous and successful.

Then you will be prosperous and successful.

How do you f you know we there are a lot of books out there, aren't there?

That tell us how to be prosperous and successful.

Five steps to success, twelve steps to riches, all these, in fact, you know, Facebook again, I've seen numerous ads lately of some guy coming to Fargo to tell us how to be prosperous and successful.

And here's what it says for us in the Bible is do not let these words depart from you.

But for so many people, this is a stumbling block, a hurdle to faith, because they're saying, how can you believe a book that is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old?

It was passed on from generation to generation.

How can you trust something like that to be accurate?

Certainly something to which you would stake your life.

The Bible is foundational to our faith, and this morning we're going to talk about why do we believe that the Bible is true?

Why do we believe the Bible is true?

You know, reason number one.

The Bible's supernatural unity.

Now, again, as I mentioned last week, we're just going to give a very short, try to put the words short and brief together into one word.

It's a challenge.

A very short, brief, not shreaf, a very short and brief explanation.

There's lots of great references out there for you to turn to that uh will help you go a lot deeper into this conversation.

But we'll give you just some kind of broad brush strokes this morning.

And supernatural reason number one is this the Bible's supernatural unity.

And what I mean by that is the Bible was not one man sitting down writing a book.

The Bible is actually 66 books that have been put together by 40 authors from a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.

Joshua, for example, was a was a general, Daniel, a prime minister, Nehemiah, a court servant, Amos, a shepherd, Luke was a physician, Paul, a rabbi, and Peter and John were fishermen.

A broad spectrum across the board of levels of wealth, levels of education.

The Bible was composed in a variety of places on numerous continents, in numerous cultures.

Ezekiel wrote his book while a captive in Babylon.

Paul wrote some of his letters from prison in Rome.

David wrote some of his Psalms while a fugitive in the wilderness, and Jeremiah was in a dungeon.

The books were written in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

It's composed of three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And yet somehow, despite the distance in regions, demographics, languages, the Bible, in all of its diversity, has unity.

It remains remarkably unified in its message, its story, about the promise, about a God who created humankind.

And because of sin that entered into the world, there was this longing, as it says in Genesis, about the one, the seed of the woman that would crush the head of the serpent.

And the story begins to unfold from generation to generation, looking for the promised one who would be the one that was promised, that would overcome the power of sin in our lives.

There's unity throughout the story.

It's not a bunch of disjointed messages, but one unifying story.

Reason number two is this is the text reliability.

You've maybe heard some that say the Bible can't be trusted because we don't have any of the original manuscripts, any of the original writings of the authors.

This is true.

We don't.

We don't have what Paul actually penned.

We don't have what Peter actually wrote.

We don't have these writings.

We don't have what Moses said or Peter said or James put down on paper.

All we have are copies of texts that have been passed down from generation to generation.

But you have to understand the intentionality and the very diligent efforts that were put into communicating, transcribing, to passing on.

They didn't have xerox back then.

Instead, scribes would take the text and they would write down the text and they would create a new a new text of it.

And what they would do was they would they would sit there and they would count, for example, the number of letters in the book of Isaiah.

And then they would divide that by two to find the middle letter of the book.

And then they would go and they would find, first of all, they'd have the exact same number of letters.

Was the middle letter in the book, the exact middle letter in their book.

They were very intentional about how they put it together.

In 1947, there was a young Bedouin goat herdsman who was, oh, I suppose killing times like a young boy might do and throwing rocks into a cave to see what kind of sound or bear or something that he might be able to stir up.

And he throws it in and he hears a and he goes in and he finds that he smashed a pot.

And he opens it, he pulls it out and he finds it and he begins to unveil it.

And it's what has come to us to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And the Dead Sea Scrolls included a complete book of Isaiah that had been transcribed.

It contained fragmented copies of Isaiah and other books from the Old Testament, almost every book of the Old Testament.

And these scrolls were dated around the age of 100 years before Christ.

And when they began to compare the Dead Sea scrolls with the text that we have today, there were only very minor differences in perhaps the grammar, grammar or spelling of a word, but really nothing that changed the meaning of our text.

And this is something that was way preceded the time of what we had previously had recorded accounts of, recorded copies of.

And the accuracy was still remarkable.

Another test that they often use to prove the accuracy of the Bible is called the bibliographic test.

When it comes to the New Testament, scholars use this science of textual criticism.

And they begin to assess the reliability of all ancient documents, whether Caesar, Plato, or Aristotle, they'll use this test for all of those to say, is it accurate?

You know, when you go to college and you read a little bit of Aristotle or Plato, Descartes, okay, I know it's Descartes, but if you were here a few weeks ago, I believe I shared with you how I once taught a course in history and philosophy of education and said Descartes.

I've come then since then to learn that it's Descartes.

I knew it then, I just wasn't thinking.

But here's the thing is nobody says, I don't believe Aristotle's texts are accurate.

They don't call into question the philosophy of Descartes or Plato.

They take those things for granted.

Why?

Because your life does not depend on it.

Your spiritual eternity does not depend on it.

The moral values of Descartes and Plato and Aristotle are not so all-encompassing as Scripture is.

Yet they'll use all of those.

And I have a chart, if I can get that up on the screen.

It made it.

And what this chart is kind of explains the text that we have.

So if you look, there's Caesar and Plato, Aristotle, Homer's Iliad in the New Testament, just for some comparison.

And what they do is they look at the time in which it was written.

For example, Caesar was written between 144 BC.

The earliest copy we have of Caesar's writing was 900 AD, a difference between when it was written and its earliest copy of around 1,000 years.

How many copies do we have in that frame, time frame?

10.

Not bad.

Nobody takes it for granted, right?

Plato, written between 427 to 347 BC, the earliest copy of which was which we have was 900 AD, a difference of 1200 years, and we have seven of those.

Aristotle, you see there, 384 to 322 BC, 1100 years, or 1100 AD was the earliest copy, 1400 years we have 49.

Now, Homer's Iliad is a good, when it comes to textual criticism, a pretty good example because it was written in 900 BC.

The earliest copy is 400 BC, only a 500-year difference, so probably not a lot of loss in its original writings.

So a total copy of 643.

That's a pretty sound evidence for the accuracy of Homer's Iliad.

But look at the New Testament.

The New Testament was written between 400 and 100 AD.

The earliest copy we have was 125 A.D., a difference of 25 years from its original writing to the first copy that we have.

And how many copies of it do we have?

20, over 24,000 copies.

And yet people say, Well, how can you trust the Bible?

How can you trust the New Testament?

How can you believe these things are true?

Not once do they ask whether or not Homer's Iliad, whether he really went on this adventure, or the adventure was really what he intended to write about.

The Bible can be trusted because we have clear evidence that what we have is accurate and trustworthy to what the original authors had written.

We can take that down if you'd like.

So there's a supernatural unity, there's textual reliability, there's the fact that we can believe in the textual criticism of the pieces.

And this next argument is historical dependability.

And what I mean by that is this if the Bible is accurate in its description of persons, places, and events, then the Bible can be taken seriously.

Isn't it interesting how always around Easter or Christmas time or someone comes out and they address the historical events and they call into question from time to time what it is?

But there is no archaeological discovery that has yet to disprove that the Bible's claims are true.

The specific event, of course, upon which the Bible hangs, is this is that did Jesus truly die on the cross and rise again from the dead?

Did he really suffer at the hands of Pontius Pilate?

Was he really crucified?

Archaeology and historical record can must confirm.

If the Bible is true, these things must be confirmed through historical research.

And archaeology has yet to prove otherwise.

And this is one of the things, in fact, I was just listening to the radio yesterday, and one of the one of uh one of the things that it was saying is just go to any other world religion's prophets or priests.

You can go to their tombs and you can pay honor to them, but there is yet to be found the body of Christ in the tomb.

He's not there.

The walls of Jericho were discovered.

Interesting fact.

If the Bible's true and it talks about the walls of Jericho falling, the interesting fact about it is when they discovered it, apparently the walls had fallen out instead as if a normal invasion would have brought them in, right?

The walls of Jericho have been discovered.

The census taken at the time of Jesus' birth is a historical reality.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, now I know an atheist might want to debate this because I'm using the Bible to reason about the truth of the Bible, but here's what it says.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he was uh sorry, I skipped a line, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, and that's important.

See, when Jesus rose, he appeared to Cephas, then he appeared to twelve, and after that he appeared to more than five hundred others, brethren, at the at one time, most of whom remain until now.

So, in other words, when this was written, there had been eyewitness accounts who had seen Jesus raise from the dead.

Imagine after JFK's assassination, if someone a short time later began to say, Oh no, JFK is alive.

I think people still uh say that Elvis is alive, right?

But has anyone seen Elvis?

Is there an eyewitness account yet that says Elvis is alive?

So most of us think that's a ridiculous claim because it simply isn't true.

There are those who say that 9-11 did not happen, yet there are eyewitnesses who have seen who saw it happen.

If someone said that JFK was not dead, there would be an eyewitness, but would they be taken seriously?

Maybe not with one, but you take it to a court of law if you have, okay, two, three, five hundred, that's a pretty strong case that it really did happen.

And for Jesus, there were hundreds who saw it.

And if there were any other way to prove that it didn't happen, certainly the naysayers would have come out at that time and said, No, Jesus did not rise from the dead.

But there were hundreds of people who saw Jesus raised from the dead.

The Bible is historically reliable.

Another strong case for the truth of the Bible is this is the fulfillment of prophecy.

In Deuteronomy 18, it says, I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and then I will put words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command.

But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.

I always take that verse a little seriously, especially when you begin to hear people saying, well, no, the end of the world will be here on October, I think, what's the latest prediction?

October 13th, I think I heard.

If it doesn't come true, that prophet should be stoned, is what the Old Testament says.

But many people have claimed to speak for God.

But here's one truth about all the world religions that is unique to Christianity.

There is no other world religion that has claimed a prophecy, save the exception of Islam, in which Muhammad said, I will go to Mecca, which was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So in other words, he says, I'm going to go to Mecca.

He gets a bag and he goes to Mecca.

Sort of like you saying, I guess you would be considered a prophet if you're saying, I'm going to go to lunch today.

It's really nothing more than that.

But that was entirely within his control, wasn't it?

Now you look at Jesus.

You will be born of the virgin.

He didn't have much control of that.

You will be born in the city of David.

No control over that, did he?

You will rise again on the third day.

Did he have control over that?

You know, the Bible is filled with over 2,000 prophecies in the Old Testament, over 300 of which relate to Jesus Christ alone.

A number of years ago, Peter W.

Stoner, Robert C.

Newman, wrote a book entitled Science Speaks.

And in the book, it was based upon the probability of the prophecies about Jesus being fulfilled.

It set out the odds of any one man in all of history fulfilling, even only eight.

How many did we say we said 200 that had or 300 that had been prophesied about Jesus?

Now, just to fulfill eight of the prophecies that had been spoken about Jesus, they began to do the statistics, and they said the chances were one to the one times ten to the seventeenth.

That's 17 zeros after the one.

That's a lot of zeros.

In fact, they compared it to this in the book.

They said, imagine taking silver dollars and covering the entire state of Texas with silver dollars two feet deep.

And on one of those you put an X and you have this giant blender, right?

And you take all those silver dollars and you blend it all together so it's a random chance, and you pour it out.

I don't know, you take a C-130 or something cargo ship, and you drop it out across the state of Texas, so it's two feet deep, and then you take a blind man and you say, Go.

And he reaches in and he pulls it out.

The odds of Jesus fulfilling just eight of the prophecies about him, but there were 300 that were made, and Jesus has fulfilled those prophecies.

The Bible is true.

Another way that we know the Bible is true is because the prophets that were spoken come true.

If you have your Bible, turn with me to Luke chapter 16.

Luke 16 · chapter mention

Last week I spoke to you about a girl who had come up after a youth event and wanted to talk to me about knowing Jesus, but her sister had been killed in a car accident just a few months prior to the event.

And so her sister, who had never trusted in Christ, so this girl said, I would rather spend eternity in hell than to go to heaven and be separated from my sister.

Now, this is one of those things that finally a week later I had the answer.

You know, in those moments you just sit there and go, ah.

But about a week later I came across this verse, this passage in Luke chapter 16, beginning at verse 19, it talks about there was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day, and at his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

Luke 16 · chapter mention

Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

Kind of a sad state of affairs.

The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham's side, and the rich man also died and was buried.

In hell in Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.

And so he called to him, Father Abraham, have pity on me, and send Lazarus just to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I'm in agony in this fire.

But Abraham replied, Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things.

But now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.

And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.

And he answered, Then I beg you, Father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers.

Let him warn them so that they will, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.

Abraham replied, They have Moses and the prophets.

In other words, that's a slang for they have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, they have the Pentateuch, they have Moses, they have the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they have the word, the Bible is what we would say today.

They have the word.

And what he's saying is this they have all they need to settle their eternal destiny.

God's word can be trusted.

And here's what it tells us to do is trust him in God, who sent his son, Jesus Christ, into this world, that we can trust the promises of his word, that if we trust in Jesus, we will be saved.

As it says in Joshua, it says that we can find prosperity, we can find success.

How do we do it?

Through this.

This is our text, and this is reliable, and this is true.

And we can trust that what we have written is a very accurate record of what was originally written.

We can stake our life on what is written in these words, and we must.

If the Bible is true, we will choose whether we obey it or reject it.

And even depend on it to tell others about what is in it that can make a difference in their lives.

This doesn't need to be a hurdle because we can trust it.

The Bible has a life-giving message.

It says in Psalms, the law of the Lord is perfect in every way.

God's word is perfect, God's word is true, and are you willing to live your life by it?

Are you willing to shape your life by it?

I recently, you know, sometimes people wonder about well, do I read the NIV?

Do I read the New Living Translation?

Do I read the New American Standard?

Do I read the message?

You know, the best Bible to read is the one that you read.

Don't just let it sit there and gather dust, but let it shape your life, inform you, and make you into the person that God wants you to be.

For all scripture it says in 2 Timothy, is God breathed and profitable for teaching and reproof and rebuke and all these things, that it will shape your life.

Are you letting God's word shape your life because it's a reliable source that you should allow to shape your life and use to impact the lives of others?

Will you pray with me?

The law of the Lord is perfect in every way, reviving.

That's simple.

I pray, Lord, that you would revive us.

I pray, Lord, that you would, by the power of your word, which is able to divide our heart and our soul and our bone and our marrow, able to convict us of sin, to point us in the direction of forgiveness, that we might find faith in Jesus.

I pray, Lord, that we would use your word as the guide for our lives.

So many other sources out there offer their options.

But we know, Lord, that your word is beneficial, profitable, and will give us success, not in just this life, but in eternity.

May we stake our lives on it.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.