Know God: No Basis! When "The Bible Says So" Doesn't Cut It. with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I want to welcome you back to our No God series.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

In this series, we have been having the real conversations that lie at the foundation of our faith, these big things that we believe.

In week one, we looked at theism.

This is arguments for belief in a God.

And there are some things that we can deduce about this God philosophically, that this God would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal, all-powerful, and perfectly moral.

And we made some arguments, three specific arguments for that.

In week two, we asked the question is the resurrection reasonable?

Because if Jesus really did predict his own death, burial, and resurrection, and pull it off, we have to take seriously everything else he said, including that he is God.

Last week we looked at the primary uh objection to belief that we have today, which is the argument from suffering.

If God is good, then why do bad things happen, or why does God allow bad things to happen?

Today we're going to be turning a corner, but if you are joining us kind of in the middle of this series, I want you to know you can get caught up in a really easy way.

You can go to metachurch.tv slash know God.

That's K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

MetaCurch.tv slash know God.

And there's so much to say about these conversations that not only do we have our sermons on Sunday, we have a midweek stream called Overtime.

That's on the MetaCurch YouTube channel and on our Facebook page.

You can find all of that content at that website.

Today, we're moving on to another critical topic.

My sermon is called No Basis.

When the Bible says so, doesn't cut it.

It's time to dig in and answer what is the Bible?

How was it formed?

Is it reliable?

And most importantly, this is really what we're discovering today.

Is the Bible the basis for our faith?

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

And as we dig into another tough topic, I pray that you would give us clarity, that you would give us humility to just seek you and see what you have to say.

I thank you for a place like Metachurch where all people can come regardless of what they believe.

I ask that we would lay down any preconceived ideas that we have and we would just seek truth together.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to find the foundation of our faith, say amen.

Amen.

When the Bible says so, doesn't cut it.

Now, if you have like a religious upbringing, a Christian upbringing, if you were raised in the church, then even that title might be a little bit stressful for you, maybe even a little bit offensive.

What do you mean when the Bible says so no longer cuts it?

We've acknowledged this every week in this series that as time goes on, people are leaving the church and leaving their faith in record numbers.

Nothing has the momentum today that atheism has.

And many people who were raised up in Christianity are walking out on it.

Last week was an important conversation because a lot of people leave because they can't reconcile why a good God would allow bad things to happen.

But way up there on the list of why people walk away from faith is that people lose their faith, not first in God or Jesus, but they lose their faith first in the Bible.

And because they see the Bible as the foundation of their faith, when the foundation is taken away, their entire faith crumbles.

If you grew up in church like I did, you were probably raised with an extremely high view of the Bible.

In fact, if you were raised Baptist like me, you probably can finish this big idea.

The Bible says it, so that settles it.

Y'all weren't Baptists.

It's fine, it's fine.

Honestly, good for you.

If you were Baptist and you didn't have the Bible says it, that settles it, as a bumper sticker on your car.

I've got news for you.

You weren't really Baptist, okay?

The true OG Baptist had the bumper sticker, the Bible says it, that settles it.

And what happened is a couple centuries ago, as the church, we decided instead of defending Jesus and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we would defend the Bible itself.

And so, the Bible says it, that settles it.

And what you would find inside churches where blind faith was not only a part of the experience, it was encouraged, is that people would begin circular reasoning.

Here's what circular reasoning looks like when it comes to the Bible.

Someone would say, Well, why would you believe the Bible?

And the answer is, well, because it's inspired by God.

And so they asked, Well, why do you believe in God?

And the answer is, because God's in the Bible.

You see how that's a circular argument.

I believe in God because I believe in the Bible.

I believe in the Bible because I believe in God.

It's circular reasoning.

And the truth is we don't have a good defense for this because most people in Christianity and in the church today don't actually understand what the Bible is.

And so we raise our kids inside of churches where you're not allowed to ask difficult questions, and your kids have access to YouTube, and so there are these scholars who have made it their life's work to try and debunk and demystify and destroy the Bible.

And there are people who are really, really good at it, and they will take all these seeming contradictions and they will line the Bible up, which I don't know if you know this, but the Bible wasn't written to be a science textbook, and they'll take some claims of the Bible and they'll hold it up against modern science, and they will make the entire enterprise seem like an ancient mess.

And so kids will ask questions about it, and in many Christian environments, they will say be told, don't question God.

You need to have more faith.

Blindly believe, blindly follow along.

And number one, we've learned all throughout this series, that is not the faith that the Bible calls us to.

Even the word faith in the Greek is derived from a word which means to be convinced by argument.

But here's the other problem.

The other problem of raising your kids in this very dogmatic blind faith culture is your kids are going to grow up.

In the first service, we celebrated our high school graduates moving on to their next season of life.

Next year, my oldest will graduate, move out from under my roof, and our kids grow up.

And they go out into the workforce or they go out to university or to trade school and they encounter people, especially in the university, where there are many professors who are atheist evangelists, and they will evangelize your children more than you ever have.

And that's a real problem because we don't understand what the Bible is, and yet we have set the Bible as the foundation of our faith.

And so what our faith amounts to is kind of this loosely crocheted number of Bible stories.

And as soon as someone out in the real world grabs some of these loose ends and starts pulling, the entire enterprise falls apart.

And when that falls apart, so does their faith.

And countless people have walked away from their faith in Jesus because first they lost faith in the Bible because they never actually knew what the Bible was in the first place.

Think about one of the first things that you and I learned about Jesus.

Jesus loves me, this I know.

Why?

For the Bible tells me so.

And at the earliest age, before you've ever even read the Bible, because it's before you can even read, your faith in Jesus' love is rooted not in the person of Jesus, but in the Bible.

You know Jesus and you know his love for you because the Bible told you so.

And that can be a real problem when we don't actually know what the Bible is.

And so, what I like to do in my sermons is I like to take us all on this long journey because I'm the biggest fan of the big reveal.

And today I'm gonna break my own rule.

I'm gonna give you my big idea right from the start, because it is so important to understand, and then we'll dissect it together.

The big idea today is this Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

Christianity in this movement that we call church, our faith itself, does not exist because of the Bible.

Now, this is a massive break from how many of you grew up in the church, and this is a massive break from the religions of the world.

And the reason is because Christianity was not started as a religion, Christianity was started as a movement.

Here's how religion works.

In religion, a sacred man, and it's it's always a man, a sacred man writes down a sacred text, and that is the scriptures for that religion.

And that text is prescriptive, which means it tells you what to do.

And then that text is propagated and enforced by force or by fear.

The text is written and then the religion starts.

If you think about Islam, it started when Muhammad wrote down the Quran and it was prescriptive, and then Islam was spread, propagated, and enforced by force.

Holy wars.

People were converted at the edge of a sword, convert or die.

A more modern religion that started on this side of the world, which is Mormonism.

Mormonism began when Joseph Smith first wrote the Book of Mormon, and once he had the prescriptions of his sacred text, he propagated it by fear and manipulation.

So that's how religion works is someone writes something and then the religion begins.

That is the opposite of how Christianity started.

Christianity started when something happened, a historical event for which we have already made arguments throughout this series.

And when that event happened, it changed the foundation of the world forever.

And everyone got together to write down what was most notable.

They took note because it was notable.

They didn't write it to then start something.

In fact, the New Testament of the Bible is playing catch up as people are seeking to document actual historical events.

This is not how religions start, this is how movements start.

Historical events that are documented on the back side of it.

And this is really important to understand because Christianity doesn't exist because of the Bible any more than you exist because of your birth certificate.

Your birth certificate didn't create you.

And if your birth certificate caught fire and ceased to exist, we wouldn't have some like back to the future moment where you all of a sudden get erased from history.

Your birth certificate is documenting the historical event of your birth, and the Bible is documenting the historical events of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

The truth is, in the scope of history, things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history.

Things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history.

And I wonder if we were to take a guess of how many books will be written about our lives, yours and mine.

How many biographies do you think will be produced for the story of your life?

You know, a biography is an unbelievable undertaking.

It takes years of research, years of investigation.

It takes talking to every person that you can get a hold of who has ever had anything to do with your life, and that's tough today, even when we have mass communication and Zoom calls and emails and cell phones.

Writing a biography is tough work, which is why the only people who get biographies are the people who have done things in their life that are so notable that they have shifted things in our world.

Statistically, the answer to how many of us are getting biographies is nobody, right?

So I hate to be the one to tell you that, but statistically, it's it's none of us.

Now, at MetaCurch, we break the statistics all the time.

That's your author calling right now.

I know we've got one person who's getting a biography.

Statistically, at MetaCurch, we're breaking the statistics all of the time.

And you guys are an unbelievable group of people.

So I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, some of you are gonna do something so amazing.

Someone's gonna write a biography about your life.

It'll probably be Celeste.

Y'all heard her sing, you know what I'm saying?

The biography of Celeste.

It will call, hit that note, girl, the biography of Celeste, right?

I'll write it.

Here's the question.

If you do something so remarkable during your life, so notable, that you get a biography written about you, how many people are gonna read it?

And the real question, if we're comparing it to the Bible, is how many people will still be reading it in 2,000 years?

And I can answer that for you.

Even if you get a biography, and even if it is dispersed, and even if people care enough to read it in 2,000 years, no one will be reading it.

You see, things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history, and I've brought some examples because we we've got a cross-generation here at MetaCurch.

We have a diversity in all types and a diversity of generations as well.

And so I brought some things that have been lost to history, and so if you're uh, you know, one of our more uh seasoned believers, you know, you might you might recognize some of this, but even for millennials like me, um, there's a good chance you couldn't really identify this, you know?

Uh you can maybe take some educated guesses, but this is like the first Ryobi, the first Blackendecker.

This is a drill, okay, and it's powered by by you.

And my guess is if you had to like hang a picture or whatever, you're not going out to the garage and grabbing one of these because this has been lost to history.

And then for those of you who are in Gin Z and you don't even know what a camcorder is because you just have cameras on your phones, you probably won't be able to identify this.

But this is a video recorder.

Now, it doesn't record any audio, and the picture that comes out of it, you can't even really tell what the heck is going on.

But this is a video recorder, and people don't know what this is because it's been lost to history.

Now, my fellow millennials, you will know what this is, and it makes us feel good, it makes us kind of feel a little bit older, you know, because the Gen Z people have no idea what in the world this thing is.

But we know in the millennial generation, and you know, odds are it first of all, it's multi-use, it's 47 pounds.

If someone breaks in, you can kill them with this, so that's that's nice.

Um, but even if someone in Gen Z could identify this as a phone, I I'd put most all of my money, they wouldn't be able to really dial the number, you know?

It's like got got old school rotary.

So the truth is this is confusing because it's lost to history, and your kids that are in Medikids right now, you couldn't convince them this is a phone because how are you gonna fit it in your pocket?

It's like, no, sweetie, this is a phone that lives at the house with us, you know?

It's it's all very confusing.

It's been lost to history.

And so you have your tools, and you have your phone and you have your video, and and now we have all of that in our pocket, and we have games, you know.

Kids, before we had games, we we had things like this, and this is the whole game, you know?

You just spin it.

That's it.

Hours of fun right there.

And so some of these things we're glad that they're lost to history.

And, you know, for the adults, before we feel like really good about ourselves, our kids are such idiots, they don't know anything, you know.

Most things for us are lost to history as well.

I asked my staff, and I'll ask you, I I think only one person on our staff, because they've dug into like ancestry.com, could answer this, but I wonder if you know your great-great-grandmother's first name.

The vast majority of people don't know someone in their family only four generations removed.

For most of us, your great-grandmother, as sad as it is, is a lot of history.

We know the 16th president was Abraham Lincoln, and the tallest president.

We feel pretty good about that.

But do you know who the 19th president was?

Like, well, that was a long time ago.

What about the 32nd?

These people who were the president of the United States of America, and yet many of them did not do something notable enough for you and I to still know who they were, or much of anything about them.

Things that happened in history overwhelmingly say in history.

You know, when you look at the life of Jesus, he was around in the first century, and if you look at the other rabbis, Jesus was considered a rabbi.

You look at the other rabbis at that time, do you know how many books were written about all of the other rabbis around Jesus?

None.

You know, the Emperor of Rome, the most famous, powerful man on earth during Jesus' life, was Emperor Tiberius.

Do you know how many books were written about Emperor Tiberius, the most powerful, famous man in the world?

None.

He's only mentioned in four letters of antiquity, none of them solely about his life.

Things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history, but not the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

In this scope of understanding that almost everything that happens in history stays in history, Jesus, an impoverished carpenter from the backwoods of a town called Nazareth.

And Nazareth had a slogan attached to it.

The slogan was nothing good comes from Nazareth.

Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, has more documentation, earlier documentation, more eyewitness testimony, and greater historical and geographical corroboration than anything else in ancient history.

I'm gonna say it again.

Jesus has more documentation, earlier documentation, more eyewitness testimony, and greater historical and geographical corroboration than anything else in ancient history, and nothing else even comes close.

Things that happen in history stay in history unless they are notable enough to survive.

And Jesus is still the center of humanity 2,000 years later.

We learn about Jesus in the Bible, which is why we put the Bible at the foundation of our faith.

But if we want a strong, robust, deeply rooted faith, we have to go deeper than that to understand how it all came to be.

We have to ask the question: what exactly is the Bible?

To understand the Bible, we're going to have to unlearn some of the things that many of us grew up with.

We first have to realize the Bible is not one book.

The Bible is a library of books, it is a collection of 66 different ancient documents.

The Bible wasn't written by one author, it was written by dozens of authors over the span of several thousand years in places all across the different continents.

And yet, somehow, across the Bible, it still tells one consistent, coherent story.

Let's start at the highest level of how the Bible breaks down.

The Bible is two in one.

It has an Old Testament and a New Testament.

That can also be translated the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.

Well, why do we have the two different testaments?

Maybe you're unaware.

The truth is that the Old Testament is the Jewish scriptures, and that makes the New Testament the Christian scriptures.

Now, here's what I'm not saying.

Pay careful attention.

I'm not saying that the Old Testament doesn't belong in the Christian canon or the Christian Bible.

I'm not saying that we can't learn from it.

I'm not saying it's not inspired by God.

I'm not saying that it's not the setup to the main story of Jesus' life.

But I am saying we have to be clear about what it is and what it is not.

The Old Testament is the Jewish scripture, and it was the Jewish scripture, which means if you went to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue today, their scriptures are our Old Testament.

And if you're wondering, they don't love that we call it the Old Testament, right?

To them, it's just the testament.

It's their scriptures.

They often call it the law and the prophets.

We're gonna focus a little bit on the Old Testament next week.

Today, I really want to focus on the New Testament.

These are the Christian scriptures which start with the life of Jesus and then progress through the movement that he started called Christianity or the church.

I want us to look specifically at one of the four Gospels of Jesus' life.

We asked, how many books will be written about your life and my life?

And the answer is probably zero.

We have four biographies of Jesus' life in the New Testament, and there were many more that were written that were less accurate, are written far later, that didn't get included in the New Testament.

I want us to look at Luke's gospel.

Luke was a doctor.

He wrote with pinpoint precision and he set out to write the best biography of Jesus' life he could.

Let's just read how he introduces it.

In Luke chapter 1, verse 1, at the very beginning, he says, Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us.

Luke 1:1

Many people sought out to write a story of the life of Jesus.

He also says, I'm writing about things that have already happened right among us.

If we look in verse 2, it says, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us.

He's saying, I'm writing this when the people who knew Jesus and saw Jesus, experienced his teaching, saw him die and saw him resurrected, I'm writing while they're still alive.

I'm not writing a legend.

In the ancient world, it took seven 70 years for a legend to be written down because you had to wait for everyone who possibly was alive to die out.

You can't write a legend if there are people there who can corroborate your story and prove that you are wrong.

Well, as we will see later, the documents in the New Testament were written very, very early, during the time that the believers in Jesus, the disciples of Jesus, the followers and enemies of Jesus were all still living.

In verse 3, Luke says, So it seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first to write to you in an orderly sequence.

How much of Jesus' life did Luke investigate?

He says, I investigated all of it.

I've looked into everything.

I have traveled the world.

Luke knew Peter, James, and John, the three closest friends and disciples of Jesus.

He traveled around the Mediterranean world with the Apostle Paul, the most premier church planner, and the man who wrote the majority of the New Testament documents.

Luke knew most scholars believe he knew Mary, the mother of Jesus, the brothers and sisters of Jesus, that he dug into every eyewitness he could find.

He took years and years, painstakingly putting together this biography, and he said, I'm gonna put it to you in an orderly sequence, chronologically.

Something that makes Luke's gospel unique is he actually starts before Jesus.

He starts with the pregnancy narrative, not only of Mary, the mother of Jesus, but also of her cousin Martha, the mother of John the Baptist.

Luke did his work.

Luke's like, I'm not trying to brag, you know?

Matthew, Matthew, Mark, great job.

I love it.

I am a doctor though, you know, like I did my homework here.

He put it all together.

And we read this, and when it says, I write to you in an orderly sequence, here's what we do because we've been trained, because we have our mind that the Bible says so, the Bible says it, that settles it.

Jesus loves me, this I know because the Bible tells me so.

We read this.

I investigated everything to write to you, and we think he's talking to us.

It's like, yeah, well, Luke was writing the Bible, and so the you is whoever reads the Bible.

And that's wrong.

If we finish verse three, he says, to write in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus.

Well, that's a word that we don't normally use.

Theophysis is capitalized because that's a name.

Any of y'all who are pregnant, that name's available right now.

Theophilus.

We call him Theo.

Here's what you need to know Luke was not writing the Bible.

When Luke put together his biography, when he did all of his investigation, Luke was not writing the Bible.

He was writing a letter to a friend.

We read this and think that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were writing the Bible, that Paul, Peter, and James were writing the Bible, that the author of Hebrews was writing the Bible, that they were writing scriptures, because we have a religion mindset that is hardwired in us by our culture and many of us by our Christian upbringing.

And in religion, you write your text and then you start your religion.

This isn't what was happening.

Luke had been introduced to Jesus, the man who defeated death.

The man who claimed to be God and did what only God could do.

The man who ascended back to heaven with a promise he would return.

Luke was categorizing for a friend the historical facts of Jesus' life.

He wasn't writing these things down because they were inspired, although we do believe they were inspired.

He was writing it down because it actually happened.

Luke is a doctor, he's careful, his reputation is on the line.

He writes to a friend.

Theophilus would have heard all the different stories, you know.

Over here he hears or reads one story about Jesus where he's at a party and they run out of wine, and Jesus turns water into wine.

And Theophilus was like, well, I mean, I could party with that guy.

That sounds good, you know.

And over here he hears a story about how there's only two loaves and a few fish, and Jesus feeds 5,000 people.

And it's like, wow, man, that would be a good guy to have around.

And all of a sudden, Theophilus is hearing another story from another part of the timeline where Jesus is beaten within an inch of his life, hung on a Roman cross and killed.

It's like, man, this doesn't add up.

Jesus is dead, and just weeks later, his followers not only have not abandoned and given up, they are more courageous and powerful than ever.

Eventually, he hears that's because people say Jesus actually came back to life.

Luke's like, look, I'm gonna put this together for you.

I'm gonna go on years-long journey so that you and anyone you care about can have the story from beginning to end.

Luke's letter was not put in the Bible because it was already seen as scripture.

It became scripture because of how valuable and verified it was.

He tells us why he wrote it in the very next verse, verse 4.

He says, so that you may know the certainty, the certainty of the things of which you have been instructed.

I'm gonna do the work, interview the real eyewitnesses, get close to the disciples themselves.

I'm gonna write the history of these actual events so you can know for sure.

This is not the blind faith that you grew up with in your churches.

This is not a call to ignorance.

This is not motivated by fear, manipulation, or force.

This is a free gift of a life lived that you can investigate for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

This isn't Muhammad writing the Quran, this isn't Joseph Smith writing the Book of Mormon, this isn't a group of guys sitting together thinking about how they can manipulate and start a religion.

This is a movement that was already in process that Luke and others are trying to get documented for the world to hear.

What is the Bible?

And is the Bible the foundation of our faith?

To really help drive this home, I want us to understand a little bit of a timeline of how we actually got to the Bible.

To understand, you have to start in 30 AD.

And in 30 AD, this is when Jesus is arrested, crucified, buried, rises again, and then ascends back to heaven with the promise that he will return and has a future for his followers.

Almost immediately, and even secular historians we saw in week two agree, almost immediately the followers of Jesus began preaching that very same message in Jerusalem where Jesus was just killed and buried.

Very, very gutsy.

They were standing up in front of sometimes thousands of Jewish people who had just been crying out, crucify him, crucify him.

And this was their message.

Jesus was God, you guys killed him.

You need to say you're sorry.

That was the message.

You gotta change your mind about this Jesus guy, put your faith in him, and he will accept you.

And people believed that message, the same message we're preaching 2,000 years later, by the thousands.

A movement started that was immediately under persecution, immediately.

It was incredibly dangerous to be a follower of Christ, and thousands of people began following him anyway.

Some of these followers of Jesus began traveling throughout the known world, planting churches, local faith communities just like this.

And then they would go off on another missionary journey and they would write back to their church.

And we have these letters, we call them the epistles, they are in the New Testament.

They're in the Christian scriptures, and and so these documents were so precious to believers.

They would get a letter from Paul, a letter from James, the brother of Jesus, a letter from Peter.

They would get a copy of one of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

They would take it and they would find the people who were the highest educated and who had the best handwriting, and they would painstakingly copy these letters and copy these letters.

There was an explosion of these ancient documents that is unparalleled in the entirety of the ancient world.

The next step is 70 AD, and this really, really matters because it tells us something about the quality of the documents we have in the New Testament.

In 70 AD, Jerusalem fell to Titus, the emperor of Rome.

It was a dramatic event.

Rome had come in and occupied all of the Jewish territory.

And starting in 66 A.D., they began going to the Jewish territories and taking them over and imprisoning the Jewish people.

This is when you have the Jewish dispersion all throughout, leaving the Holy Land to go to other places.

And around that same time, Titus became emperor.

He came to Jerusalem, dug a trench around the entire city.

On the outskirts of that trench, there were hundreds and hundreds of Roman crosses.

And every single day they would fill those crosses with Jewish men and women.

Thousands upon thousands of Jewish people were crucified within sight of Jerusalem.

They were sending a sign.

You're next.

In 70 AD, they breached the city.

Everyone who was not killed was arrested.

They took the temple.

The center of Judaism.

The temple.

And they torn it down to its foundation.

It was the most important moment in Jewish history, maybe since the exodus out of Egypt.

The reason that we bring it up in our timeline is because the events of 70 AD do not show up on one page of one document in the New Testament of our Bibles, written exclusively by Jewish men.

There is no mention of it.

The most important moment, there's all kinds of discussion about Judaism.

Because in Judaism, you had the sacrifice of animals.

It ran on a sacrificial system.

You know what happened at 70 AD?

Classic Judaism died.

The temple sacrificial system died and it never came back.

There's not a mention of it.

More and more scholars consistently agree it does not show up in the pages of the New Testament because the documents of the New Testament were written before it happened.

I mentioned earlier that it was kind of unheard of for a biography to be put together so quickly.

In fact, on average, a biography in the ancient world would take place about a hundred years after the subject lived.

Jesus' life was so important and so notable, and the change that he started and the movement that it produced was so so huge, so earth-shaking, that within 40 years, the documents of our New Testament, with few exceptions, had all already been compiled and put together.

What we see is that this isn't a case of legend.

And one of the biggest arguments against the documents in the New Testament is scholars who, without any evidence backing them up, have decided that these documents were written hundreds of years after Jesus.

It's just like any other religion, they say.

A group of conspirators got together and they came up with this story and they wrote it all down, and it was just legend, hundreds of years removed, and they pushed it forward by fear and force and manipulation.

The events of 70 AD are the nail in the coffin for the theories of super late gospels and super late epistles.

These happened early.

They happened early.

At this point, the gospel began to spread all around the known world, and more and more people were coming to Jesus.

And that's very odd if you look at it historically, because Christianity wasn't spreading by force.

I know we have some really ugly chapters like the Crusades and times where we tried to be like all the other religions, but in the first 300 years, not only were we not spreading by force, Christianity was spreading under persecution.

Squeezed in between Jerusalem, who saw Christianity as a threat to their religious power, and Rome, who saw Christianity as a threat to their political power, persecuted from both sides to claim the name of Jesus was to put you and your family's life at risk.

To copy and protect the documents that Paul and Matthew and Mark and Luke had written was to put your life at risk.

Numerous times people tried to round up all of the pages of what we now see as scripture and destroy all of them because they thought if we can destroy the book, we can destroy the movement.

And they were confused.

This isn't a religion based on it is written.

This is a movement founded on he is risen.

It's different.

You can destroy the birth certificate, you're still fine.

You can destroy the scriptures, the resurrection still took place, and it spread and it spread.

And these are the days where in Rome it was like feed them to the lions, throw them in the Colosseum.

Incredibly dangerous.

And it grows and it grows.

And it makes no sense why it grows, but nothing can stop it.

Just like Jesus said.

The next point on our timeline is 312 AD.

312 is when Constantine becomes the emperor of Rome.

Constantine's mother, years earlier, had converted to Christianity.

She found the claims of Christ so world-changing.

Many, many had begun to believe in Jesus in Rome.

One of the things that happened is in Rome there was what was called exposure laws.

And exposure laws said that you can't commit infanticide, you can't kill your children actively.

But if a children, if a child's an inconvenience to you, then you can take them outside of the city limits and you can leave them, they'll be exposed to the elements and they will die because of that.

And so you're not actively killing them, but you are setting them aside and letting nature take its course.

And in Rome, the vast majority of these children who would be left for exposure were females because females were seen as lower class citizens before Jesus.

And so what the Christians began doing in Rome is they'd go out in the evenings and they would walk the perimeter of the city and they would find these children who were left for death, and they would bring them in as their own and adopt them.

It's like, okay, I don't know what the Christians are, but they're different.

We keep trying to kill them and they keep living with joy.

And more and more and more people believe, and Constantine's mother believes, and Constantine becomes emperor of Rome, and his empire is divided.

He no longer has a unifying force for the empire of Rome.

And before that, it was the Roman pantheon of gods, and the best we see in ancient literature, people didn't really believe in these gods the way that we actually believe in Jesus.

But it was a unifying force.

And these dang Christians showed up and said, You shall have no other God before me.

You will not bend a knee, you will not bow to another God.

And Christians were willing to die for it.

There were so many Christians, so many Christians under persecution.

It had spread so rapidly that in 312, Emperor Constantine claimed Rome as a Christian empire in order to unify the empire.

Christianity had spread so far that his only chance of having a unified state was to declare Christianity the official religion of Rome.

That is the power of the early movement of Jesus.

We've said the Bible is not the foundation of our Christianity.

And here's how we know in the 320 years between Jesus and Rome, there was no Bible.

This wasn't a movement of people who were changing the world because the Bible says so, because there was no Bible.

Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

312, Rome, the most expansive empire, the wealthiest empire, becomes a Christian nation.

Because of that, in 336, we have the first known compilation of the New Testament by Athanasius.

This is the first time all of the documents of our Christian scriptures are actually compiled together.

It isn't until 350 AD, 320 years after Christ, that the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Jewish and Christian scriptures, are actually bound together.

For the first time, 38 years after that, for the first time, it's called tabiblia, the Bible.

Christianity made its greatest strides, had its greatest influence, its most expansive reach in the 320 years when there was no the Bible says so.

Can I tell you something?

Because this is how a lot of churches are coming up and raising us.

And so we say, you gotta do this because the Bible says so, you gotta vote this way because the Bible says so.

You better straighten up because the Bible says so.

Can I tell you something?

Please hear this.

The Bible doesn't say anything.

The Bible is a term for a collection of ancient documents that we as believers believe is inspired by God and the world outside of Christ just sees as ancient documents.

The Bible doesn't speak.

God speaks through those who actually documented the Bible.

It isn't Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible tells me so.

The first 320 years of the church, no one could sing that song because the word Bible wasn't invented yet.

Jesus loves me, this I know, because Luke recorded the life of Jesus, and I see that it's so.

Because Matthew risked his life to bring the actual historical events of the life that changed the world forever.

The Bible doesn't say anything.

Matthew says something, Peter says something, James says something.

God speaks through people.

The Bible is not inspired because of the pages of the book, it's inspired because of the events it records.

It's inspired because God protected it against all odds.

It's inspired because of the life of the most notable human who changed the world forever.

We have to get deeper than a Bible says so type of Christianity.

This is, if you think this is me and this is new and I'm changing everything, this these are the words of Paul.

Paul said, if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain.

And so is your faith.

When Paul wrote that, it was in a letter to a church he started in Corinth.

When he wrote the letter of 1 Corinthians, he was not writing the Bible.

We collected it not to make it valuable, but because it was so valuable for our lives.

Because First Corinthians teaches us deep and abiding truths about the Jesus that we serve.

Jesus came and he didn't start a religion rooted in fear.

Jesus came and defeated fear by defeating death itself.

Jesus didn't come in order to prescribe religious axioms to give you a checklist of how to live your life where you can kind of feel good about being a religious person and then pursue the things of this world.

He came and died on a cross that had your name written on it to show you you have a purpose that is immeasurably greater than anything this world can offer you.

Jesus came to give you hope and plans for a future where you can live a significant life today because when he left, he said he's coming back for you.

We don't live in a it is written faith.

We live in a he is risen faith, and that is a deep-rooted, abiding faith that can change your life and change the lives of the people around us.

This is what we have been called to.

We do affirm the Bible is 100% inspired.

I cherish scripture.

The Bible is not the foundation my faith rests on.

That's Jesus.

I cherish the Bible because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John recorded and documented so much about Jesus.

We believe that the Bible is inspired.

And we believe that Jesus is real.

So many people have walked away from their faith.

They came home from college and said, you know, mom and dad, archaeologists say there's actually very little evidence for a worldwide flood.

And you know, back in Genesis it says that there was Noah and the boat and the animals and there was a flood, and it was across the entire world.

And if we don't have conclusive scientific evidence for a worldwide flood, that means it didn't happen.

And if it didn't happen, that means the Bible's not true.

And if the Bible's not true, then I can't have faith anymore.

And I wonder if you were to make that argument to John.

The scripture tells us was the one disciple who stood right at the foot of the cross with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and watched Jesus die only to have dinner with him a few days later.

I wonder if you said, John, you know, most scientists think there was never a worldwide flood.

John would say, What does that have to do with anything?

My faith isn't in a flood, my faith is in Jesus.

If you walked away from faith, or you're considering walking away from faith because you don't know how to reconcile all of the things in scripture that everyone has pointed out that may or may not be, and all the ancient rhetoric and all of the contradictions, which I have studied and actually believe there are answers for, but maybe you don't.

If that's why you've walked away, you've walked away unnecessarily.

You can't just discount the Bible and discount your faith.

Your faith has to be rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And if you can prove Jesus wrong, then by all means find a better use of your time.

But if there's any chance that God came down, paid your sins by dying, the death that belonged to you on the cross, and rose again, if there's even a chance that that's reasonable, you have to lean back in.

You have to pursue this.

Everything hangs on it.

The Bible isn't the basis for our faith, it's a tool and a gift that God has given us.

Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection is where our hope is.

It's where our faith is.

For those of you who grew up with a Bible says-so mentality, this may actually be a tough sermon for you.

The Bible says-so is an easier way to navigate your faith.

It's quick.

You can keep people at distance who make you uncomfortable.

You can feel a little bit better about yourself because you you know some of the stories.

I cherish the Bible, but I dare not worship it.

And if you find yourself worshiping anything other than Christ, it can only be called idolatry.

The Bible, just like anything else, is a gift, it's a tool, it's a weapon for you to grow your faith and efficiency following Jesus.

Your faith must be rooted in something deeper.

Don't allow your life and your legacy to be lost to history.

Join with Jesus.

Be a part of his story.

Be a part of the movement that has changed and is changing the world.

Not because it is written, but because he is risen.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

We thank you.

We give you praise.

We thank you for your word protected, copied, dispersed, protected at the cost of countless early Christian lives.

I pray we would grow to embrace your word, that we would dig into it, that we would hear from you, that we would seek you.

But God, I pray that we would not set it as the foundation of our life or faith.

I pray we would see it for what it actually is, nothing more, nothing less.

One of the greatest gifts you've given us, but nothing compared to Jesus.

We put our faith in Jesus.

We put our faith in an event.

We put our faith because we believe that you came down, died, and rose again.

And we believe that changes everything, including our own lives.

I pray for those who have walked away from faith, who've never believed in the first place, for all their hangups and objections.

God, I thank you that they are a part of MetaCurch.

I pray they'll continue to come, continue to wrestle, continue to seek you.

And I believe, God, if they seek you, they will find you.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

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You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.