The Bible is True

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see you all here.

I have a few announcements in your bulletin that I’d like to highlight before we begin.

First off, I’m sure you’ve noticed we have quite the display up here. We’ll be talking about the shoeboxes in a minute, but I want to thank you, Brenda, for the lovely cornucopia.

The men’s group will meet tonight, discussing the harsh truths of Christianity. All men are invited to attend.

Our November church council meeting is tomorrow evening. If you’re on the council, please try to attend.

That will be followed on Wednesday by our next business meeting. Please try to attend that.

It’s also getting to be poinsettia season. You’ll find a form in your bulletin if you’d like to order one of those. The cost is $10.50, and that will be due by December 3.

And don’t forget we’ll be helping at The Gathering Place next Saturday. If you’d like to take part in that, please see either Della or Sandy Harper.

Joanne, do you have an announcement this morning?

Jesyka, do you have an announcement?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we are so thankful for this day to come together as one family and worship You, and we are especially thankful this day for the guidance, the wisdom, and the comfort You give us through Your holy Word. We ask that You cover every care and concern this morning, that You comfort those who are sick or hurting, and that You remind us all of Your continual presence and love. Lift our voices in song. Lift our minds in the study of Your Word. And remind us all that You are beside us in all things each day. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

We’re continuing to look at what makes up the Christian worldview this morning, and so far we’ve talked about God, we’ve talked about absolute truth, and we’ve talked about the devil.

Today we’re going to talk about how and why we can trust the Bible, and I thought this week that this is probably one of the most important sermons I’ve ever preached.

Because when I stand up here every Sunday and start talking, I’m not giving you my opinion. I’m not telling you what I think. I stand up here and tell you what this book says, because that is what God says I have to, and that is what God is going to hold me accountable for.

This Bible right here and that Bible in your hands (and again, that Bible better be in your hands) is God’s book. The words in there are God’s words.

If the Maker of the universe, the Lord of all creation, sat down and wrote you a letter, wouldn’t you want to read it? Wouldn’t you want to read it over and over again? That’s what this book is. It’s God’s letter to you.

The words in this book are the words we live by. They’re the words that define our faith and the way that faith is passed down from one generation to the next. As Christians, we believe the Bible reveals God’s character and power, His goodness and grace, His holiness and justice, and His mercy and compassion. We believe this is a life-giving book. It’s alive and powerful, and it shows us God’s will.

But how do we know all of that is right? How do we know the Bible is true?

Have you ever thought about that? Because the Bible isn’t one book. It’s been bound up that way, but that’s not how it started. It’s really two books made into one — the Old Testament, and the New Testament.

And even those two are made up of a bunch of other books. The Old Testament is made up of 39 books, while the New Testament has 27, with most of those not being books at all, but letters that were sent to various churches and then recopied and sent elsewhere.

We say this book is God’s words, but God used people to write them. About 40 people wrote all the books that make up the Bible. And it wasn’t all written at once, either. From Genesis to Revelation, the writing took about 1,500 years.

Forty people over 1,500 years. How can we know what they wrote was true? How can we know that, especially since the last letters written for the New Testament, which most scholars think were 1,2, and 3 John, were written between 90 and 95 A.D.? That’s almost 2,000 years ago. How can we trust something that old?

And how can we trust it if the originals of those books and letters are lost? We don’t have them. All we have are copies. Who’s to say that somewhere along the line, somebody copied something wrong?

More importantly, how can we convince people who aren’t Christians that the Bible really is everything we say it is? Because to them, this is just another book, no different than anything else you pick up at the bookstore.

If you say to them, “The Bible is God’s word for us,” and they say, “Well, how do you know that?” how will you answer that?

You can’t say, “Well, the Bible is God’s word because that’s what the Bible says.” That’s not going to convince them of anything. They don’t care what the Bible says, because to them it’s just another book.

So what can you say? And more importantly, how can you know personally that the book you’re holding is God’s eternal word for you, His source of comfort for you, and His instruction manual for your life?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to be looking at several verses, and they all make the same argument — the Bible in your hands is three things: it is reliable, it is accurate, and it is the word of the Lord.

Let’s take those one at a time.

First, the Bible is reliable, meaning you can depend on the fact that what the Bible says is what really happened.

We’re going to start by talking about the Old Testament, but we’re going to use a New Testament verse. Turn with me to Romans chapter 15. Romans may be the most important book in the New Testament outside of the gospels because so much of Christian doctrine is based on these words by Paul. And in Romans 15:4, Paul writes:

“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

When Paul says “whatever was written in former days,” he’s talking about the Old Testament. He’s saying that all of the Old Testament was written down for our instruction and encouragement, which means that all of the Old Testament are the words of God, words that He directed to be written not just for His purposes at the time they were written, but also for any future time.

That’s important, because it’s shocking how many pastors don’t bother preaching from the Old Testament anymore. There’s actually a pretty big movement now among certain churches to just get rid of the Old Testament all together, because they say the Old Testament doesn’t apply to us.

What these people seem to forget is that Jesus quoted scripture all the time, and the only scripture he had to quote was from the Old Testament.

We are a people of the Bible, and when I say that I mean the entire Bible, not just half of it. We don’t follow the laws of the Old Testament because we have Christ, but it’s important to remember that in the Old Testament we meet the same God, in the Old Testament every word is inspired by God, and the entire Old Testament points to Jesus.

So is the Old Testament reliable?

In 1947, a shepherd following one of his goats tossed a rock into a cave and heard a cracking sound. That rock had broken a ceramic pot, and inside that pot was an ancient scroll that was almost twenty centuries old. After ten years of searching and digging, eleven caves around the Dead Sea were found to contain thousands of documents that we now call The Dead Sea Scrolls.

They found either whole manuscripts or parts of every book of the Old Testament except for Esther, and almost all of them were copies from the Old Testament that were written from 200-300 years before Jesus was born.

And here’s the amazing part: when scientists studied all of those scrolls, they found those words almost exactly matched every word in your Bible’s Old Testament. A missing letter there, a word misspelled there. That’s it.

How is something like that possible? How can something written over a thousand years in two languages and by writers who lived on three continents do something like that? How can something so old be so reliable in what it says after thousands of years? Scientists couldn’t believe it. Christians could.

God was at work, for one. For another, the Jewish people had scribes called Soferim who were responsible for copying the books of the Bible by hand. They understood the words they were writing were God’s, and they treated their job accordingly. They were so careful about copying every word perfectly that they counted all the paragraphs, all the words, and even all the letters so they could make sure they’d had copied correctly. They even knew the middle letter of each book so they could count back and see if they had missed anything.

That’s why you can trust that the words of your Old Testament are the original words and thoughts first written down by Moses, by Isaiah, by Jeremiah, by David, and all the rest. They have not been changed one single bit.

But more than that, there is thousands of cases where science has confirmed something in the Old Testament. For hundreds of years, scientists doubted people could have lived in cities like Ur, which is described in Genesis 11. Then they found ruins of those cities.

Same thing with the Hittites. They’re mentioned all through the second half of Genesis, but for centuries scientists doubted the Hittites ever existed. Until they found the remains of a Hittite city in Turkey.

Clay tablets from 2,300 B.C. — over 3,000 years ago — have been found in Syria that support Old Testament stories and geography.

We’ve found ancient Babylonian records describing a confusion of language that matches the story of the Tower of Babel. Those same records talk about a flood that covered the whole world.

Archaeologists have found the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah, and guess what? Something terrible completely destroyed both of those cities thousands of years ago, a fire so hot that it melted pottery and bones and left a solid layer of ash. The destruction was so complete that nothing was ever built there again.

In fact, no archaeological finding has ever disproven anything that is written in the Bible.

There are over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament about the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. Every single one of them came true. Every single one. The odds of even a few of those being accurate are almost impossible. The odds of all of them being accurate is completely impossible — unless God is involved.

Do you know how many facts written in the Old Testament have been proven to be false? Zero. Not one. That book is completely reliable.

The same goes for the New Testament, plus a whole lot more. And this really is kind of the important part, isn’t it? Because the New Testament is all about Jesus — his life, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection and ascension. How can we know that the New Testament we have is the gospels and the letters that the apostles really wrote?

Here’s how historians judge the truth of what ancient manuscripts say and the truth of the people those manuscripts talk about. And when I say manuscripts, I mean copies of the letters or books these people either wrote or other people wrote about them.

The closer a manuscript is to the actual time those people lived, the better. And the more copies of a manuscript we have, the more we can compare them to see if the words are pretty much the same or completely different.

So, everyone agrees Plato was a real man who really existed. Historians agree on that because they have 7 manuscripts about Plato, with the oldest one written 1,200 years after his death. That’s pretty good.

There are 251 copies of the works of Julius Caesar that still exist. The earliest one of those we have is only 950 years after he wrote. That’s better than Plato, so historians say we know with more confidence that Julius Caesar really existed.

Archaeologists have found over 1,800 copies of the works of the Greek poet Homer, and the earliest one of those is from about 1,000 years after he died. Historians say that having that many copies from that close to Homer’s life means that if you go down to the bookstore and buy one of Homer’s books, they’re 95 percent confident that what you’ll read is exactly what Homer wrote.

So what about the gospels and letters that make up the New Testament? Do you know how many copies of those manuscripts we have? We have 1,800 copies of Homer, and historians say that’s about as good of proof there is. But we have over 5,000 copies of the New Testament. Five thousand.

And how far back do those copies date? Homer is 1,800 years, Plato is 1,200 years, Julius Caesar is only 950 years — historians say that’s amazing.

But most of the early copies we have of the New Testament date back to just 200-300 years after Christ’s resurrection, and some of those are less than 100 years. That gives historians a better than 99 percent confidence that the words in your New Testament are exactly the words the apostles wrote.

That is how reliable your Bible is.

So people can say, “Fine, I’m willing to admit that what we have in the New Testament now is what the apostles originally wrote. But that doesn’t mean that what the apostles wrote is true. That doesn’t mean the Bible accurately describes what actually happened.”

How do you answer that?

Well, historians judge the accuracy and reliability of an ancient book three ways, and in all three ways, the New Testament stands up as the most accurate and reliable ancient book ever written.

The first way is one we’ve already talked about — it’s the amount of manuscripts we have and the time between when those manuscripts were written and when the events actually took place. So the question then is, When were the books of the New Testament written?

Here’s what most Bible historians say, and they begin with the book of Acts, which was written by Luke. Because Luke doesn’t mention anything about the Temple being destroyed and because the book of Acts ends with Paul still being in prison, historians say Acts had to have been written before AD 70, because that’s when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans.

Since Acts is like part two of the Gospel of Luke, that means Luke had to have written his Gospel even earlier than that, probably in the AD 50s. That puts Luke writing his gospel less than 20 years after Christ’s resurrection. And since everyone agrees that both Matthew and Luke borrowed material from Mark, that means Mark’s Gospel had to have been written even earlier than that, just a few years after Jesus’s resurrection.

Why is that so important? Let’s take a look at something Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15. Turn there with me, 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3-8:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,

that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

What’s so amazing about these few verses is that these aren’t Paul’s words. Paul isn’t writing something new here, he’s repeating something that was taught to him. In fact, historians believe these are the oldest words in all of the New Testament.

He says in verse 3, “I delivered to you what I also received.” Then from the rest of verse 3 through verse 7 we see exactly what Paul received, and those verses are known as a creed, which was a very early way of teaching. It’s the entire Gospel story shrunk down to as few words as possible so it could be passed on by word of mouth, because it was so early that nothing had been written down yet.

There’s every good reason to believe that Paul was first told this creed by none other than Peter, who was one of Jesus’s disciples.

In Galatians 1, Paul writes about going to see Peter soon after Paul became a Christian. These are the words Peter most likely gave him, this creed that was being used to teach new disciples. Which means that verses 3-7 of 1 Corinthians 15 were first preached by the original disciples only a few years — or even a few months — after Christ’s ascension to heaven.

Isn’t that amazing? Those verses in your Bible are the same words that were being repeated by Christians just months after Jesus rose.

More than that, if you notice in verse 6, that creed says that Jesus “appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive …”.

Historians say that Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians around AD 53. That’s just twenty years after Jesus was crucified. Which means most of those 500 witnesses would still be alive when this letter from Paul was being sent out to the church in Corinth, and then copied and sent out to all the other churches.

There is no way — no way possible — that the book we know as 1 Corinthians would have ever survived unless most of those 500 witnesses were still alive and they all said, “Yes, this is exactly what happened. We saw the risen Christ ourselves.” Because if that creed was a lie, and if Paul included it in his letter, there would have been people who said, “There’s no proof of this at all” and then they would have just thrown that letter away. But that’s not what happened.

But Paul says, “There are plenty of witnesses who will say that what I’m writing really happened. Go check with them to make sure what I’m writing is true.” And because of that, his letter to the Corinthians was copied so much and sent around to so many places that it’s ended up right in your Bible.

So that first test about the time of the earliest manuscripts we have and the time between those manuscripts and the actual events? The Bible passes that test with flying colors.

Here’s the second test that historians use to judge the accuracy of an ancient text: they gather all the manuscripts they have from all the years they were written and check to make sure they match.

This is an easy one. Copies of the Bible that we have from the 1300s are almost identical to the copies we have from the 200s. The differences that are there are so minor that they’re barely worth mentioning. Sometimes words are spelled differently, like the way we spell “neighbor” and the way the British do, with that extra “u”. Or sometimes there are words switched around. One manuscript might say “Jesus Christ,” and the other might say, “Christ Jesus.”

In fact, over 99 percent of the biblical text isn’t questioned at all, and the less than 1 percent that is questioned has nothing at all to do with any sort of Christian doctrine.

So the Bible we have hasn’t been corrupted, or altered, or edited, or tampered with in any way. It is completely accurate.

The third and last test that historians use is called the external evidence test. What evidence do we have from outside the Bible that says the Bible is true? For that, we can go back to archeology. Every year there are dozens of archeological finds that prove what the Bible says is accurate.

And we have scores of evidence from outside the Bible that show the proof of Jesus’s life and teaching. Jewish writers like Josephus, Roman historians like Tacitus, and Syrian writers all mention Jesus in their works.

But there’s one other way the Bible is set apart from any other book as far as it’s reliability and accuracy, and that is its prophecy.

Twenty-five percent of the Bible is prophecy. More than one in every four verses predicts an event that will take place, over 1,800 of them. And already, over half of those prophecies have already come true exactly in the way that God declared. The rest are coming as history unfolds itself.

Every writer in the New Testament had a single goal: to tell the truth about the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. Luke said it best in Luke 1:1-4. He writes to a friend named Theophilus:

1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us,

2 just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us,

3 it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,

4 that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.

Luke did what any good historian and biographer would do. He was very careful in his reporting, and he spoke directly to the people who were witnesses so that we can be sure of everything we’ve been taught.

Have you ever noticed that only Luke shares the Bethlehem story about Jesus being born? None of the other gospels do that.

None of the gospels ever mention Jesus sharing the story of his birth either. And if you think about the time when the gospels were written, there was only one person alive who would know the truth of what happened that night — the shepherds, the angels, the fact that there was no room in the inn.

Joseph, Jesus’s father, was dead. Jesus had ascended into heaven. That only leaves Mary, doesn’t it? Which means that in order for Luke to write this and to keep his promise of writing an orderly account of Jesus’s life that everyone could trust, he had to sit down and talk to Mary. Every Christmas when we read from Luke 2 about the birth of Jesus, those words are directly from Mary herself.

So the Bible is absolutely reliable. And the Bible is absolutely accurate. That means we only have one last argument to knock down, and it’s this one: How do we know that the Bible is much more than the words of human beings, it’s the Word of God Himself?

For that, let’s turn to 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 16-17. Paul writes,

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

“All scripture,” Paul says. Every word “is breathed out by God.” What does that mean? It means that every bit of scripture, even those ones we like to skip over like those long genealogies and all those rules of the law, come from the God of the universe. And because it all comes from God Himself, all of it is profitable, all of it is necessary, and every single bit of it is true.

Paul says in verse 17 that scripture makes us “complete,” meaning that the Bible tells us everything we have to believe in order to be saved and everything we must do in order to please God.

To be included in your Bible, every book had to be recognized by the early church as being divinely inspired. The words themselves might have been written by human authors, but they were each moved by the Holy Spirit and spoke from God.

Over and over in the Old Testament, you’ll see the phrase, “Thus says the Lord.”

In John 14:26, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will teach the apostles all things and help them to remember everything that Jesus taught so they could write them down. And that’s exactly what happened.

There are only five books in the New Testament that aren’t written by apostles: Mark, Luke, Acts, Hebrews, and Jude. Mark was accepted because he was a disciple of Peter. Luke was accepted because he was a disciple of Paul. Jude was accepted because he was Jesus’s brother. And even though there’s some question of whether Paul wrote Hebrews or not, there was no doubt to the early church fathers that letter was divinely inspired, and so it was included.

For every word of the Old Testament and the New, God is the one who spoke and still speaks it. And since God cannot lie, every word in your Bible must be true.

If you put all of this together, every argument and every reason, it’s easy to believe that the book you hold in your hands is nothing less than God’s words to you. And if that’s the case, what you’re holding in your hands is the most powerful thing in this world.

History has shown that to be the case. How many millions of lives have been changed because of that book? How many truths must be included in that book for it to be considered so dangerous? And let me tell you, time and again the Bible has been called dangerous. It’s even been called evil.

The famous French philosopher Voltaire lived during the 1700s. He hated Christianity. In 1776, he wrote this: “One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”

One hundred years later, the house that Voltaire lived in was being used as a storehouse for Bibles and Gospel tracts by the Evangelical Society of Geneva.

Kings and dictators and entire societies have tried to get rid of it, but it still remains the top-selling book of all time. It’s words have transformed murderers and tyrants and entire nations because it speaks truth to the deepest part of the human soul and it always will, for Jesus says in Matthew 24:35 that “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

Do you understand how precious, how holy, this book is? And yet many people who say they’re Christians never open it, never study it, never try to grow from it.

I spoke with a friend this week who’s leading a Bible study, and one of the people in the group is an older woman who had been Catholic for all of her life. She’d never read the Bible. Can you imagine that? She said she never had to, because her priest just told her everything she needed to know.

But a lot of Protestants are like that too, and a lot of evangelicals. Don’t be like that. God wrote this book for you. It’s stood the test of time for you. It’s promises are for you.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but this book won’t. It’s the most reliable book in the world. It’s the most accurate ancient book ever written. It contains the most trustworthy words possible, because they all come from a God who cannot lie. But it won’t be of any use to you at all unless you read it. So read it. Study it. Make it a part of you. Let it transform your life.

Charles Spurgeon once said, “A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to a person who isn’t.” That is so true. And you can start repairing that broken life today by coming to the front as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father so much of our lives involve searching for the right way to think, the right decisions to make, and for the meaning and purpose we need to live well. But in every decision and need, we find your answer within the pages of the Bible. Thank You for the words you’ve given us to live and believe by. Thank You for the comfort this book gives us, and the direction, and the revelation of both Your will and the things to come. In all things, You are faithful. Amen.