The Need for Apologetics and Testimony of Scripture

I want to start by thanking you all for taking the time out of your weekend to join us for this short series on apologetics. Before we dive in, I want to give a few warnings and insights. This is I believe my 3rd or 4th time, teaching a class on apologetics, I love apologetics. However, I am by no means, a know it all and I’ll tell you what I tell my students, there will be times probably during our discussion or Q&A time where you ask me something and I respect you all too much to just bull crap an answer and there will be times where I might not know something or remember a verse that could apply to what we talked about but when that happens, I will do my best to get you an answer by the following week. Speaking of questions, we are going to attempt to cover a lot of ground in not a lot of time so if possible, try to save the questions until the end of our study each night. To give you an idea of just how much I’m trying to fit in, next week when we look at the evidence for the divinity of Christ, my first time teaching that took 5 weeks, 5 Sunday school lessons at my old church, and I’m going to try and squeeze it into 45 minutes and if you’ve heard me preach before, you would have better luck pushing a camel through an eye of a needle than having me finish on time. With that being said, I’m going to dive right in tonight and we’re going to look at 3 things and not spend a whole lot of time on any of them but I think we are laying a good foundation so here is what we are going to talk about tonight: 1. What is apologetics? 2. Why do we need apologetics? 3. The foundation of apologetics in the Word of God. That’s our plan for tonight, we’ll see if we get through it all, I’m hopeful. So, let’s dive in and open up with a word of prayer.

What is Apologetics?

What is apologetics? If you have grown up in the church, this word may sound familiar or maybe this is the first time that you have heard of it. Apologetics, while often associated with Christianity, does not stem solely from Christianity. Apologetics is used for a number of different things and this comes down to the actual meaning of the word. Apologetics comes from the Greek word, Apologia. Apologia means to give a defense of what you believe. It does not mean that you are apologizing for those beliefs but you are instead defending and making a case for what you believe. We see this in what is probably the most well known verse that is associated with apologetics and that is in 1 Peter 3:15 “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,” In that verse, the word defense that Peter uses in Greek is Apologia. Now apologetics did not start when Peter wrote this verse, if you go through the book of Acts, you see apologetics in action. You see it numerous times when Peter, John, Stephen, and Paul are standing on trial. What are they doing? They are giving a defense of what they believe. I think one common misconception with apologetics is that it solely addresses the historical evidence and support for Christianity. Now that is certainly part of it, in fact we will talk about some of that tonight, but that isn’t all of it. You don’t necessarily need to provide historical evidence in order to be an apologist but you need to be able to lay down a foundation for why you believe what you do and the historical aspect of that is a fairly large aspect of it. I think of in a few weeks when we look at the evidence for the resurrection and we will obviously look at the historical support for it. When we talk about apologetics, we’re not apologizing for our faith but we are stressing why we believe what we believe. God has not hidden Himself so that He is unknowable. When we look at things like general revelation, when we look at the created universe, when we look historical truths, and the testimony of Scripture, we are not asked to defend blindly. In the words of one of the greatest apologists, in my opinion, Francis Schaeffer, God is there and He is not silent. So, here we have a somewhat definition of what apologetics is. It is giving a defense for what we believe. So, why do we need apologetics?

Why Do We Need Apologetics?

J.I. Packer wrote, “Theology is for doxology. The first thing to do with it is to turn it into praise and thus honor the God who is it’s subject, the God in whose presence and by whose help it was worked out.” We could very easily take that word theology and substitute in the word apologetics. Everything that we do should center on giving glory to God. Doxology means to praise and as we defend our beliefs, we are ultimately praising God by testifying to that which we believe. Apologetics is ultimately in service to God and then it is necessary for our fellow man. People need to know what we believe and why. We aren’t saved to keep this faith and knowledge to ourselves. We’re all apologists whether we realize it or not because we all give defenses for our beliefs, do we not? People need to know what we believe and why we believe it. Jude 3 says, “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” It is necessary for Jude to write about these things. Why? Jude 4 “For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” C.S. Lewis said, “If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground -- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.” Christianity is being challenged and we need to address the challenges that come. Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:1-5

2 Timothy 4:1–5 ESV

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

We need to defend what we believe because people do not know the Lord, because people are creeping in and attempting to lead the sheep astray, and because people are perverting the truth of Scripture. Perhaps the most pressing reason for why we need to do apologetics is simply because God has told us to. I think of commands like Ephesians 5:11 “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” Or I think of 1 Peter 2:15 “For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.” John Gerstner and R.C. Sproul wrote, “God commands Christians to give a reasoned defense of the Christian religion. That is enough for any reasonable person. If the all-wise God says that we should reason with anti-rationalists, then we know for certain it is able to reason with the unreasonable. The God who knows all, knows why we should reason when it seems not to be reasonable.” Take a look at the world today and you will see that there is a great need for apologetics. So, let’s start looking at the groundwork. Where do we find a foundation for apologetics? Mainly, what does the Word of God have to say about itself? Chances are you believe what you believe because it has been revealed to you through the Bible. So, how can we trust what that book says and what went into the bringing together of this book?

The Foundation of Apologetics in the Word of God.

What is the Bible? What is it that the Christian believes about this book? B.B. Warfield says that the Bible is, “the very word of God itself, spoken by God Himself through human lips and pens.” The Bible is unlike any other book that has ever been written and that is because it is the only book that God is the author of. The Bible is a collection of 66 books, written by 40 different authors, over the span of roughly 1,500 years, in 3 different languages, across 3 continents and all testifies and points to 1 thing. This is God’s book and this is God’s story. From Genesis 1:1-Revelation 22:21, it all points to one person, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible is the most applicable and relevant book ever written and this is a testimony to God as its author. There are things that Paul writes about that sound just like today because man’s problem has not changed since the fall. There are things that Moses writes that sounds like it should be in this morning’s newspaper. God has protected and preserved His Word for our benefit. 2 Timothy 3:16-17

2 Timothy 3:16–17 ESV

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

It sounds to me that we need this book. The Church and the world needs this book because what we all need is Bible men and Bible women. What made the time of the Reformers and the Puritans such a rich time for Biblical knowledge, heart change, and theological growth was that these men were Bible men. These men understood the wealth that they had in this book and they recognized that the Bible itself was something that everyone, young and old, male and female needed. And it was something that all could understand. This is known as the perspicuity of Scripture and that means that the Bible is absolutely clear on what is essential and everyone from the dumbest to the smartest not only needs those truths but is capable of understanding those truths. The truths of the Bible are not hard to understand; they are just hard for many of us to swallow. One may argue though that the Bible is nothing more than a compilation of ideas assembled by the Jews in order to support their beliefs or by Christians to support there beliefs. Some argue that the people that brought together the Bible only included the things that supported their beliefs but what I want to do tonight is look at the support for how we got this book. The things that are testified in this book happened in history and we have a great deal of support for recognizing that this book has not been altered and that God Himself is preserving this text. For thousands of years, God has preserved what has been written about Him. I want to talk tonight about the manuscripts of the Word of God. What is a manuscript? A manuscript is a handwritten piece of a book or music or pretty much anything that someone chooses to write down by hand. I would also say that you should leave your Bible open to 2 Timothy 3:16-17 because I want you to keep that verse at the front of your mind as we go through this tonight. What we read today highlights to us that all of Scripture is the inspired Word of God and that it is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. Now that would be a hard claim to make if there was not some form of consistency in the copying of the Scriptures. We are going to start with the Old Testament process and then we are going to hop over to the New Testament process of copying and preserving Scripture. So Old Testament, here we go: First thing we need to understand is that there were Jewish scribes that would copy by hand the Old Testament. This was before the time of Gutenberg and the printing press so everything that was written had to be done by hand. Most of the writings would be written down on calfskins and it would usually take about 80 calfskins and several months just to prepare the parchment in which the text would be written down. Now the Jews would not allow just anyone to copy the text of Scripture, because remember, they were writing down the very words of God, the holy Scripture. You had to be a scribe and in newer culture, you have to be certified to handle the copying of the text if you are going to do it by hand. Now before a scribe could even begin to copy down the text, he had to have memorized the 4,000 laws that are found in the Old Testament. So, if you think memorizing a couple verses is hard, try memorizing 4,000 of them. Now if you think that was a lot of precaution, know this: the process of handing down Scripture was passed through history from one group of scribes to another. The reason that they would memorize the 4,000 laws was so that they would be able to ensure that they were copying it correctly, pronounce it correctly, and interpret precisely. We’ll get to that a little more later. Around 400 AD, 400 years or so after Christ, the Masoretes were tasked with preserving and copying down the Hebrew Old Testament. Not wanting to make any mistakes on this holy document, they created multiple safeguards to avoid messing up. What they would do is they would count every letter in the Hebrew Old Testament, that is 304,805 letters. Each time a letter appeared in a book, they pointed out the middle letter of the Pentateuch and the middle letter of the whole Hebrew Bible, and they made sure that all the lines had the same number of words in them and that they were spaced out exactly the same way. They had so many safeguards that they could easily tell if one consonant was left out of the entire book of Jeremiah or the entire Bible. They put in so many safeguards that they knew that what they had when they finished was an exact copy of the original. Josephus, a Jewish historian from the first century says this of the copying of Scripture, “We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an intrinsic with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully die for them. Time and again ere now the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theatres, rather than utter a single word against the laws and the allied documents.” So, one thing you would not do is purposely mess up the Word of God. Now when a Jewish scribe would write down the Law, he would have to do a number of things to prepare himself to write it down. He would have to clean his entire body, clean his writing materials, and put on clean clothes. Now when writing down the Scriptures the scribes would write by candlelight because they didn’t want the sunlight to hinder the document in any way. The scribes were only allowed to make 4 mistakes in the whole document, if they made more, the whole document would have to be buried and then started over from the beginning. If the letters were touching in any way, they would consider that an error. How long would this entire process take? It would take at least a year to finish a whole copy of the Law, even longer if they were copying the entire Old Testament. It would take a whole year to just write the first five books of the Bible. It would probably take 3-5 years to do the remainder of the Old Testament. Scribes would spend their entire lives devoted to ensuring the accuracy of the Bible. Now before they gave the scripture to the public, three different scribes would come and inspect it for error. Due to the poor lighting that they were used to while writing down the text, many scribes would go blind in their old age. Something else to keep in mind is that as the Scribes were writing the text down, any time that they came to the holy name of God, Yahweh, they would have to get a new pen to write the name. After they wrote the name of God down, they would toss the pen away and get a different one to continue writing. A scribe would be trained from childhood to copy the Scriptures and their entire lives would be devoted to the preservation and the copying of the text. There was an incredibly long line of Jewish scribes that continue to this day that were and are devoted to accurately copying the Word of God. Let’s look at the New Testament. We know that some of the earliest manuscripts that we have in possession from the New Testament are from about 20-25 years after Christ’s ascension. In many books, especially in the books written by Luke, that there is such detail in the writing that it is easy for us to date when these events occurred. Luke describes things in such vivid detail that we have no problem dating his books and the timeline of Christ. Now the copying of the letters was incredibly common in the New Testament. The original books of the New Testament were not written by authors after the time in which the event occurred but by authors that were writing down events as they saw them occur in their own lifetime. When Paul would send a letter, often the church that would receive the letter would write down copies of that letter so that the letters could be passed around in other churches. There is an incredibly short amount of time between when the original letters were first written and when the first manuscripts have been discovered. And the amazing thing is that we are continuing to find manuscripts around the world that the dating is getting earlier and earlier to the original writings. Jesus Himself testifies to the reliability of Scripture. Matthew 5:18 says, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” Who here can stand up and tell me what a jot or a tittle is? A jot is the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It looks like a slightly fatter apostrophe. Now a tittle looks like small markings on top of letters in the Hebrew alphabet to emphasize a words importance. They are like little hairs that come out of the top of the letters. I took half of a year of Hebrew and I still can hardly recognize when these things show up, that’s how small they look on the letters. Now each tittle has a slightly different meaning depending on how it is arranged, like if it is arranged in a group or if it is on its own, or if it has what looks like a crown on it. Each tittle emphasized something. Now the reason the Scribes would put this on a word was so that the reader would know to pause and then to pray because they were about to read God’s law. So what Jesus is saying is that not one jot or one of those teeny tiny tittles will disappear before everything is fulfilled in the Word of God. You can look at newer Hebrew scrolls today and compare them to scrolls from hundreds of years ago and it is all still there, it is all the same. So not only is God giving us the Word of God, He is protecting it. One of my favorite things to research and look at are the manuscripts of Scripture. Here’s how the manuscripts work, the more manuscripts that you have, the more reliable your source of information is. A lot of skeptics like to argue about the reliability of Scripture and yet they don’t question other historical documents and their manuscripts. If you were to have 20 manuscripts of the Gospel of John and you noticed that John 3:16 had 3 different variances, one says, “God so loves the World”, another says, “God thought highly of the world”, and the other says, “God thought the world was ok.” If that were the case, it would be difficult to figure out what the exact original wording was but if you have 500 manuscripts, it becomes substantially easier to find out what the original text said. So, what does this mean for the Scriptures? Who here knows what the Iliad is? The Iliad is a book by Homer that was written in about 800 B.C. The earliest surviving manuscript that we have of the Iliad is from 400 B.C. So that is a 400-year gap between when it was originally written and the earliest copy that we have today. There are currently 643 known manuscripts of the Iliad. If you think that is impressive, that’s nothing. How many of you have heard of the philosopher, Plato? Plato is one of the most quoted, respected and well-known philosophers to have ever lived. Of all of Plato’s writings, there are only 7 manuscripts. Most of Plato’s writings were written in 400 B.C. The earliest copies that we have of Plato are from 900 A.D. That is 1,300 years between when it was first written to the earliest manuscript that we have. Tacitus is considered one of the greatest Roman historians who ever lived and of his writings; there are only 20 manuscripts and the earliest one that is still around has a 1,000 years gap from the original. Aristotle, everyone has pretty much heard of Aristotle: only 49 manuscripts. Do you want to know how many there are of just the New Testament? As of 2017, Josh McDowell has been able to document that there are at least 24,633 New Testament manuscripts. That is 24,000 more manuscripts than the next closest book, which is the Iliad. That’s just the New Testament! Remember how I said that there was a 400-year gap between when Iliad was first written and the earliest surviving manuscript that has been found? Well of the New Testament, the earliest manuscript that we have in our possession, there is only a 50-year gap between the original writings and the earliest found manuscript and at the rate that we have been discovering these manuscripts, I wouldn’t be surprised if that gap becomes even smaller. That’s incredible. But here’s the thing: That is just the New Testament. What about the Old Testament? Well what Josh McDowell has been able to find is this and this number is insane. Of just the Old Testament manuscripts, and this includes scrolls and codices, there are over 42,000 known manuscripts of the Old Testament. That means that in terms of Biblical manuscripts, between the Old and the New Testament, there are over 66,000 manuscripts of the Word of God. That is a fairly large difference, isn’t it? And yet no one will question the authenticity of the Iliad or the writings of Plato. So, if you were to stack all the manuscripts of Homer or of a classical writer, on average, it would go up about 5 feet. However, if you were to take all the manuscripts and partial manuscripts of the Word of God, it would be 2 and a ½ miles high. There are over 2.6 million pages of manuscripts that all point to the accuracy of Scripture. How do people still question the Bible? Here is something else that is incredible: we are still finding new manuscripts of the Bible every year. About 10 years ago, there was an archeological dig and the archeologists discovered an Egyptian burial mask. Now Egyptian burial masks will often contain writings and manuscripts and in one of these burial masks they found a partial fragment of a New Testament manuscript and in that manuscript they found the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Dating has found it to be from about AD 90 and it is one of the earliest known surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Discoveries like this are happening all the time. God has kept His promise that He would preserve His words. That’s all we are going to go over today. I hope that it was interesting to look at the process that was involved with preserving the Word of God and I hope that it helps to build your faith and your confidence that the Bible that you have in your hand is truly the Words of God. Let’s pray and then we will take some questions if you have any.

If time allows mention the handing down of events and how quickly word spread of Christ’s resurrection and Luke’s attention to sources.