"Faith and Authority: Why Trusting the Bible Matters in Today's World"

Greetings, and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast. My name is Jason,

and I'm the pastor of Faith Chapel.

We are beginning Season 2 of this podcast where we will look at why we should

have the Bible as an authority in our lives,

and then go into some of the issues in our society today to see what the authority

of Scripture says about those subjects.

We begin this first episode of Season 2, looking at a few reasons why we should

submit ourselves to the Bible as our guide to know God better.

Thanks for joining us today.

I wanted to start with have an understanding of why we have the Scripture as

an authority in our lives.

That's something that's really important for us to be able to wrestle with,

because we have lots and lots of things that we are under the authority of.

Being citizens of the United States, like we have a constitution and we have the rule of law.

Being in the specific state of

Indiana, we have certain procedures that we need to do and to go through.

Building permits vary if you want to build something or there's different fines

for things if you don't follow through the code.

So we have plenty of things that we have authority over us.

And authority, according to the Oxford languages, means able to be trusted as

being accurate or true, something that is reliable.

And so if you come under the umbrella of the authority of somebody,

maybe a job or something that doesn't have those attributes in them,

it could be something that you lack respect for or someone that you don't really give authority.

You don't really care what that person says. And so it's important to be able

to trust who has authority over us.

And so there are lots of different things that we have in authority over us.

We have the constitution, the speed limits, we have rules and procedures for

our places of work. We have rules and procedures that we expect of ourselves.

And so there's an authority of ourselves over us. Our culture also can sometimes

have authority over us, driving us to the way we think, the way we process through things.

All of those sorts of avenues have authority over us.

And as we have those many things that are in authority over us.

The question becomes, why would we voluntarily subject ourself to another authority?

And in this case, the Bible.

And so we're going to try to wrestle with that question because Jesus does ask a lot of us.

In Luke 14, Jesus is describing what the cost of discipleship is.

And this is where he says, you need to deny yourself, you need to pick up your

cross, and you need to follow after me.

And right after this, he gives this description in verses 28 to 30.

But don't begin following after Jesus, letting him have authority over you.

But don't begin until you count the cost.

For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the

cost to see if there is enough money to finish it?

Otherwise, you might complete only the foundation before running out of money,

and then everyone would laugh at you.

They would say, there's the person who started that building and couldn't afford to finish it.

The idea that we need to really wrestle with is, why should we put Jesus as

the authority of our lives?

Why do we need to do this?

The answers that we are going to come up with tonight are going to be answers

about the reliability specifically of Scripture and why we trust what Scripture says.

Because one of the things that the Bible really drives home is a historical.

Perspective, a historical narrative of the events that were happening.

God is not a God who just stays out in the fringes.

He is a God who gets his hands dirty and gets active in our lives.

And an example of how God is, that the Bible is, that God is working in our

lives comes from Acts chapter 1 verse 3, and this is Luke's introduction to the book of Acts.

Acts 1:3

He writes, During the 40 days after he suffered and died, he,

Jesus, appeared to the apostles from time to time, and he proved to them in

many ways that he was actually alive.

And he talked to them about the kingdom of God.

And so the disciples here weren't going on blind faith.

Like they had the physical resurrected Jesus in front of them.

They could see the marks in his hands. They could see the wound at his side.

They were listening to him.

There's a story in the Gospel of John where Jesus was making them breakfast.

They've had so much evidence of it.

That Luke here is writing, I am telling you about the ways he proved to them

that he was alive, that he really resurrected from the dead.

And so Christianity is not based upon blind faith, but on witness testimony

of what happened back in the first century.

And that's a really important thing to drive home because it's really easy to

listen to the waves of culture that talk about how all religions,

not just particularly Christianity.

But they're all antiquated.

We don't need to really adhere to them.

We have our own societal morals, and that's what we need to live by, so on and so forth.

But if Jesus really did resurrect from the dead,

then we have an authority that we should voluntarily surrender and submit to

because it is the greatest event in human history if it is actually true.

So how do we know it's true? And I'm not talking about 100% foolproof truth.

That's not something that we can provide.

God does ask us to take a step towards him when we don't have all of the answers,

when we sometimes have doubts in our own hearts.

And that is perfectly fine. So I'm not talking about 100% proof.

I'm just talking about we're us stepping out in faith based upon the facts that

we do have about who Jesus is, what scripture is about, and those sorts of things.

So not blind faith. It is still faith.

And God wants us to really love him in the way in reciprocation of his love

for us so that he can move us closer to him.

Surrendering our wills to the spirit inside of us and that sort of thing.

This is the basis for tonight, what we're going to be covering.

And we're going to start with something that's pretty obvious,

that the Bible describes God as supernatural, that he, and what that means is

he's above nature. He is outside of nature.

And this is an important concept for us because to really know who God is,

because we can't study him the way we can study the cycle.

The life cycle of a bird, because that's in nature and we can put up all sorts

of measurements around it. We can measure how long it was.

We can measure how far they fly and that sort of thing because it's inside nature.

But since God is outside of nature, then we need help to be able to learn about him.

And the way God does that is through revealing himself to us.

The most common way that God reveals himself to us is through his creation.

And so Romans chapter one, verses 18 through 20 describes it in this way.

But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress

the truth by their wickedness.

They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them.

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky.

Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities,

his eternal power and divine nature, so they have no excuse for not knowing God.

So this is the argument from Paul, that we can see the seasons,

we can see how the birds migratory process,

and we can look at that there is a planting season and a harvest season.

We can see how the plant grows and matures, and we can know in our hearts that

this didn't happen by accident, that this wasn't a mistake, that God was the

orchestrator behind this.

But some people choose to ignore that.

And some people do what they want to do. They become the authority of their

lives instead of surrendering and submitting to him.

And so you can pick your favorite aspect of nature.

You can see him in a sunrise or a sunset. You can see him in a grand landscape,

like looking at far distant mountains and seeing how far they reach up into the sky.

You can see the beauty of God and how each individual snowflake is unique to itself.

There are so many ways that God reveals himself through nature,

and that's how God shows us and calls us into a relationship with him.

One of the ways that this is seen today, Paul wouldn't have known these things

because they didn't have the instrumentation to study it the way we do today,

but in what is called fine-tuning.

Fine-tuning is looking at the universe and seeing very specific categories and

how close they have to be.

There's a very tight tolerance between several, multiple scores of.

Natural processes that allow life to happen.

The one I'm going to reveal to you, or maybe you already know it,

is the strong nuclear force constant.

All right. So atoms make up all of human life, all of life.

All of this world is made up of atoms and atoms are held together by a by a force.

What's unique about atoms is that this force is strong enough that it can hold

oxygen atoms that together because oxygen has eight protons in it.

And if you've ever held up magnets together, you know that there are two sides

that attract. And then if you flip one of them over and put those together,

they will repel each other.

Positive against positive is going to repel each other.

But in an oxygen atom, there are eight positive protons. And so it's only held

together by this strong nuclear force.

And the crazy thing about it is in our world,

this force is in such tight a tolerance that if it was 2% higher than what it

is or 2% lower than what it is, there is no life that could happen.

Like it is very, very tight because if the force was reduced,

oxygen would not exist because the force of it needs to be in such a way that we can.

That oxygen, those eight protons can stay together.

But if you lessen, that's if you lessen the force, if you strengthen the force

just by 2%, hydrogen, which only has one proton in it, would not exist.

Like it would just pull it all apart. And so the basic building block for life,

hydrogen, which is two parts of what water is, H2O, would not exist if it was

two percentage points higher.

And so this is just one example of scores of others that help us to see that

God is revealing himself through his creation. It is completely remarkable.

And so God reveals himself to us through these natural means.

But if he only revealed to us through the natural means, we're not going to

know specific criteria about him. We can know that he is brilliant.

We can know that he is strong.

We can know certain aspects of him, but we wouldn't know anything about his character.

And so he has to present us with a special revelation of himself.

And for us as Christians, we believe that is the Bible.

God has revealed himself to us through scripture.

And this happens in scripture. It describes how God reveals himself to us.

So in 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17,

2 Timothy 3:16

it says, all scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is

true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives.

It corrects us when we are wrong. It teaches us to do what is right.

God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.

And so Paul here, as he is writing this, he's talking about what we would call the Old Testament.

And Paul says that this is God breathed, that this is coming from the mouth

of God. It is inspired by him specifically.

And so this is something that we need to really process through and take into consideration.

If we are putting the Bible as the authority over us in our lives,

this is something we really need to consider because there are some that will

pick and choose what to believe out of scripture.

But if all Scripture is God-breathed, then we have to come under the authority of all of it.

And while Paul was talking specifically here about the Old Testament,

we get in the 2 Peter passage here the idea that the disciples realized that

God was speaking again in what we would call the New Testament.

So in 2 Peter 3, verses 15 and 16, we read, and remember, our Lord's patience

2 Peter 3:15

gives people time to be saved.

This is what our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom God

gave him, speaking of these things in all of his letters.

Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and

unstable have twisted his letters to mean something quite different,

just as they do with the other parts of Scripture,

and this will result in their destruction. And so, first of all.

Peter here says that Paul is speaking with the wisdom God gave him.

God gifted this to Paul.

And so he's sharing it with other people. God revealed himself to Paul and now

other people can see it through the letters of Paul.

And then he says something quite profound.

He says, after he's talking about them twisting it, he says,

just as they do with other parts of scripture.

And so what this is doing is putting Paul's letters on the same par as Genesis,

Exodus, Leviticus, and all of the Old Testament. He's saying they are equal in their authority.

And so that's a huge piece for us to understand.

One of the books I have up here with me is A Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem.

And in that, he writes this about Scripture.

To disbelieve or disobey any of these words would have been to disbelieve or

disobey God and therefore would have been sin.

And so because of what Paul says here, what Peter says about Paul's writings,

what Paul says about the Old Testament, like this is why we have Scripture as our authority.

We're going to come back to this. I don't know if it will be tonight or later,

but the idea here, some people can get the wrong idea here and think this is

the only reasons that we have for our faith, but that is not true or accurate.

We have proofs, as we talked about earlier, of these things,

of how the Bible is reliable, about how the Bible can be trusted.

Right now, we're just going through the points that Scripture says about itself,

but we will get to extra biblical reasons for why we believe that the Bible has authority over us.

All right, so we have, moving on to the next category, God reveals himself to

us in a multitude of ways.

One of those ways is that God speaks to people personally.

And there is someone in my family that has physically, audibly heard the voice

of God and what God revealed to that person actually came to fruition.

And so, like, I still believe that God does this today, but obviously he does

it in scripture, In Genesis 12, 1, it says, The Lord had said to Abram,

Leave your country, your relatives, and your father's family,

and go to the land that I will show you.

These are attributing these words to God. God spoke to Abram in this way.

In the next book of the Bible, Exodus, we see the same thing at the burning bush.

Do not come any closer, the Lord warned. Take off your sandals,

for you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your father,

the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

And so here he has spoken to Moses at the burning bush.

Like these are literal words that God is speaking.

And then in Matthew, this is at the baptism of Jesus.

It says, and a voice from heaven said, this is my dearly loved son who brings me great joy.

So God is intermixing into our humanity. He's intermixing into a way of revealing

himself to us that we as humans can understand and comprehend.

God is speaking to us to reveal himself to us in certain ways,

whether it's to announce that Jesus is his son or to Moses that he will have

an assignment to do as going and freeing the Israelites from Egypt or to Abraham

that he wants him to become a nomad for the rest of his life and go to a land

that God will give to his descendants.

God speaks and reveals himself to us in this way.

It's an easy argument to come back against that those can just be hallucinations.

Those can just be things that you are making up or things that you think happened,

but you had bad digestion that night and it was just a crazy dream that you had.

And from a Jewish perspective, that does not fit with the narrative because

they really held God to be in a high standard.

And that's what the Ezekiel passage reveals. What would happen if you spoke

words that you say were from God, but were not from God?

And so let me read Ezekiel 13 verses one through nine.

Then this message came to me, Ezekiel, from the Lord.

Son of man, prophecy against the false prophets of Israel who are inventing their own prophecies.

Say to them, listen to the word of the Lord. This is what the sovereign Lord says.

What sorrow awaits the false prophets who are following their own imaginations

and have seen nothing at all.

O people of Israel, these prophets of yours are like jackals digging in the

ruins. They have done nothing to repair the breaks in the wall around the nation.

They have not helped it to stand firm in battle on the day of the Lord.

Instead, they have told lies and made false predictions.

They say this message is from the Lord, even though the Lord never sent them.

And yet they expect him to fulfill their prophecies.

Can your visions be anything but false if you claim this message is from the

Lord when I have not even spoken to you?

Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says. Because what you say is false

and your visions are a lie, I will stand against you, says the sovereign Lord.

I will raise my fists against all the prophets who see false visions and make

lying predictions and they will be banished from the community of Israel.

I will blot their names from Israel's record books and they will never again

set foot in their own land.

Then you will know that I am the sovereign Lord.

And so there are very severe penalties that happen when people prophecy in the

name of the Lord, but God doesn't really speak through them.

It's not really from God.

And so the idea here is that if someone says God spoke to them,

like that has to be verified, that has to be verified.

That has to be something that will come to fruition. Just as God said to Moses,

go and free my people Israel.

If Moses hadn't freed the Israelites, then God would not have spoken to him.

It would have been a lie, a fabrication of Moses. But since God said,

this is what you're going to do, and that's eventually what happens,

that is proof that Moses did actually hear from God.

And so this is one way that God speaks in Scripture and still speaks to us today.

We're going to finish with one more, and this is God speaking to people by human lips.

And this is what we're familiar with.

This is when the prophets are hearing a message from God, and they go and tell

other people about it. So, Jeremiah chapter 1, this is his call from God.

Jeremiah 1 · chapter mention

He writes, The Lord gave me this message. I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb.

Before you were born, I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.

O sovereign Lord, I said, I can't speak for you. I'm too young.

The Lord replied, Don't say I'm too young, for you must go wherever I send you

and say whatever I tell you.

And don't be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and I will protect you.

I, the Lord, have spoken. Then the Lord reached out and touched my mouth and

said, Look, I have put my words in your mouth.

And so God is declaring to him, you're going to speak my words to people.

People may or may not believe you. That's not on you, but I need you to go and

tell them what I'm telling you to do.

And this is what the prophets did.

Isaiah chapter 30. This is the reply of the Holy One of Israel.

Isaiah 30 · chapter mention

Because you despise what I tell you and trust instead in oppression and lies,

calamity will come upon you suddenly like a bulging wall that bursts and falls.

In an instant, it will collapse and come crashing down.

Again, Isaiah heard those words from God and then reported those to the people of Israel.

He was God's messenger.

God gave him those words and he spoke them to the people.

And lastly, Jeremiah chapter 6 verses 11 and 12, I will pour out my fury on

Jeremiah 6:11

children playing in the streets, and on gatherings of young men,

on husbands and wives, and on those who are old and gray.

Their homes will be turned over to their enemies, as will their fields and their wives.

For I will raise my powerful fist against the people of this land, says the Lord.

Jeremiah is attributing those words to God himself.

God spoke those words to him, and Jeremiah spoke them to the people of Israel.

And so that's how the first part of this is going.

Let's recap that, I guess. So we all have authorities, and sometimes we submit

to our own authorities on our own.

If we have a job, we're submitting to the rules and regulations of that job.

We give them authority to tell us what time we need to be at work,

what time we can go home, what time our breaks are, what we are to do and the

processes we are to follow.

We voluntarily give them that authority.

And so we are very careful and cautious more than likely about who we let have authority over us.

And my hope is that we can see through our time together on Wednesday nights

here, that God is worthy of giving our authority to,

that we surrender and submit to him, and that we pursue what he says and not

what our own society says or not what our own hearts desire.

It's about letting him have authority to us.

And we do this first and foremost because the Bible tells us to do this,

that God is in charge, that he is in control and that we should,

we will live a better life if we really do surrender to him.

This is what he promises to us. This is what he brings us into.

At the end of this talk, we open it up to questions and comments.

Unfortunately, the feedback from the audience has not been captured in a way we can use.

So these next few clips are my responses to the questions and comments of the

people in the audience at the time of this taping.

So what's stopping us from saying that because these authors say this is true.

That makes it true? Why would we do that?

So that's a very great question, and that's something that we have to wrestle with.

So the idea behind ascribing worth to the Bible in particular is something that

I would go back to what Jesus' words are.

Like, you've got to count up the cost of whether or not you are going to follow me.

That's hopefully what we'll get to. There is some evidence.

Josh McDowell is an apologist, and he put together this book,

and it's pretty remarkable, some of the evidences for why we would take these words seriously.

For a really long period of time from when critical scholarship was looking

into biblical accuracy and historicity, they doubted that David was a king.

They doubted that he was king in Israel, that they thought that he was just

this made-up character that we're supposed to drive home a point.

But they have archaeological evidence now that David was truly a king,

that there is inscriptions on things that have survived that they have found

in the desert that describe David as a king.

And so based upon that, there is evidence outside of the book that it is reliable

in many, many different facets.

It is not just people buying into blindly following after Jeremiah,

who said God put words into his mouth.

It is taking that into context, seeing if what Jeremiah said did come true.

And in Jeremiah 29, 10, right before that famous passage in 29,

11, he talks about how Israel will be in captivity,

I believe the number is 70 years, and they were in Babylon for 67 years.

That's when the first wave came back, 67 years after they went there.

So that's a very accurate prophecy from Jeremiah, and nothing he could have known.

That's not when he would not have survived to the end of their captivity.

So it is things like that, that you count up the cost.

All right, this happened. He said 70 years. He was very close on his prediction there.

God must have been speaking through him in that.

The time span of the Bible covered about 1,500 years, so 15 centuries.

So over that 1,500 years of when the Bible was put together,

the consistency of it is tremendous.

40 different authors put it together, and it is crazy to see how it flows very flawlessly.

So all the way from Genesis 3, we have the picture of a descendant of Eve stamping

out the physical representation of evil in the serpent.

And while the serpent is striking at its heel, which is a precursor to what

happens to Jesus on the cross.

So Genesis 3, written by Moses, about say 1400 years or so before Jesus came

on the scene is predicting that victory over evil and it comes to fruition.

And so whether it's the Heidelberg confession that really annotates well where

all of the different beliefs of Christianity comes from or it's looking in a

study Bible at the notes and seeing how this scripture connects with another scripture,

it is very coherent in what it says.

It is beautiful.

God forgives sins. When we repent and confess of that, when we surrender ourselves

to him in that way, like divorce, adultery, those are not unforgivable.

And let me reclassify that.

Every time we even try to hit the mark.

Pretend that you're playing darts and your goal is to get the bullseye,

but you throw it up there and you miss the bullseye.

If your goal and objective is the bullseye, then that's basically the root of the word sin.

But it's not our standard that we are holding ourselves to.

It's God's standard. And I have no idea what the point value is of darts.

If you get so close to your goal in those three bullseyes, and yet you're one

point short of that, you fall five points short of that, you're going to take

that to be a pretty good round.

But in God's standard, if that's what we're looking for, that's still sin.

You've sinned five points worth in that capacity.

And so that's the difference. and that's

the reason that we need the grace that Karen

was talking about and we need Jesus's death on

the cross because all of us none of us will get a 300 score or whatever the

the top score in darts is we're just not going to do that we sin and fall short

of God's glorious standard but thank God for his grace which we need every every day.

Yeah, there is no clause. God's forgiveness is available for us.

There is one unpardonable sin, which is denying the power of the Holy Spirit.

And when, I believe it's in Mark, when he was quoting Jesus as saying that,

the Pharisees and the Sadducees were calling him Beelzebul, which is Satan, basically,

and saying that he was doing this by the power of darkness, not by the power of God.

And the idea there is attributing what God is doing to demonic forces.

And it's really denying what the Holy Spirit is doing in and through us.

So the rejection of the Holy Spirit is something that we should not be about.

We should be letting the Spirit lead us and guide us in that way.

But grace is available for all of us who have fallen short of God's glorious standard.

Music.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the reasons why we should

give authority to the Bible.

If you are interested in learning more about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit gofaithchapel.org.

In season two, we will look at such issues as the reliability of the Bible,

and then later dive into the societal issues of life, hope,

love, and what the Bible says about our political leaders. Thanks for joining us today.

Music.