VCA UA Chapel - Can I Trust What the Bible Says?
Notes
Transcript
Intro/Background
Who I am
Lesson - Can I Trust What the Bible Says?
Since my daughter is a student here, I know a bit about what you’ve been learning - at least 6th grade, are you guys talking about Greek mythology at all?
How many of you guys have learned about Greek mythology either here at VCA or somewhere else?
What is mythology?
What difference does knowing its all a myth (not true) have on you as you’re learning it?
If you know its not true, its not going to impact the way you live
Its interesting to learn about, you might even go on a vacation in Europe one day to see the ruins of the temples built to those Greek gods, but its not life changing. People see it as made up stories, not truth
Now over here, you have the Bible
In Bible class, here in chapel, at church, Christians teach through the Bible
Sometimes the stories in the Bible can seem just as fantastic as those in Greek mythology
Moses parting the Red Sea, Elijah riding a chariot of fire up into heaven, Daniel surviving a night in the lion’s den, Jonah being swallowed by a great fish for 3 days and nights, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead
But the Bible makes some pretty bold claims about itself
It claims not to be myth, but to be truth
Verses 16-17
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2nd Timothy says that all, the whole Bible, is God-breathed, inspired, or directly from God
Basically, the Bible claims that it is not made up, that it is true. All of it
Back to Greek mythology - how would you prove that its not true, that its just made up?
Maybe you don’t feel this way, but there are many people in the world that would say the same thing about the Bible, they would say that its not true and that its just made up
Maybe you have friends or family members that have told you this - I’ve known people who have said this to me
Maybe you have a little bit of doubt yourself, or maybe you’ve never stopped to think about this question - you just consider it one of your classes or something you’re just supposed to read and you haven’t really stopped to think about whether you can put your trust in the Bible
I’ve heard 3 main arguments against the Bible being true
Its been changed over time to say whatever Christians want it to say, it’s not really God’s words
There’s no physical proof for it - like archeology finds or historical records or anything
Its full of contradictions so you can’t trust it
I’ve dug into these 3 questions. A lot of really smart people have dug into these arguments
And you know what we’ve found? That we can trust the Bible
Let me share some of the reasons why - it’s important for you guys to have those same facts so that you can have confidence in your faith and not just take my word or Coach J’s word for it
Argument #1 - The Bible has been changed over time
Before we get to that, I have a stack of books here that I got from the library
The Histories of Herodotus, written ~ 440 BC and considered, “the earliest surviving work of non-fiction” - the oldest non-fiction book in the world
The Iliad and The Odyssey, stories by Homer, the Greek writer, were written around 700 BC
The Three Theban plays by Sophocles, a Greek playwright, written ~425 BC
Five Great Dialogues by Plato, a Greek philosopher, from ~375 BC
On Man in the Universe by Aristotle, Plato’s student, written ~340 BC
Even Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet, the most famous plays by William Shakespeare, written ~1600 AD
How many of you have read or heard of any of these books?
There are some differences/similarities between these books and the Bible that we’re going to talk about
Other than Shakespeare, they were all written at the same time that portions of the Bible were written
Some are fiction, others are non-fiction while the Bible claims to be completely non-fiction (true)
They all deal with the same area of the world as the Bible
Do you question whether any of these titles is the actual book that was originally written? Or whether Shakespeare or Homer really wrote these books?
No! People do that about the Bible all the time though.
But I’m going to show you that there is more proof for the Bible than any of these works
We do not have any original copies of any book of the Bible
What we have comes from what are called manuscripts, which are ancient copies of the text
The idea is that Paul, for instance, wrote his original letter to the Galatians, and that letter got copied and shared with other churches
The letter was copied and recopied to share it.
But that’s how every ancient book was - the printing press wasn’t invented until the 1440s
BUT, none of these other titles here have original copies in existence
Even Shakespeare!
Do you know that there isn’t a single original play or poem written by Shakespeare himself in existence
We barely have any copies of any of his handwriting, only like 6 or 7 documents in total
So how do we know that what we have in the Bible is what was originally written, or what is in the Iliad is what Homer originally wrote down?
There’s a thing scholars use called, “The Bibliography Test” where they look at the number of old manuscripts (old copies), they look at how much time there is between the original writing and the earliest manuscript, and then they look at inconsistencies (are the copies of those manuscripts all pretty much the same or are they different?)
So let’s do this test on a couple of these books
The Histories by Herodotus, written ~ 440 BC (around the time of Malachi in the OT)
This dude is considered the first historian (although I’d argue Moses, who wrote 1,000 yrs before this due, really was…)
We have less than 10 old manuscripts from about 900 AD as our oldest copies of this book (a gap of 1,300 years)
Aristotle’s poems, written ~340 BC (after all of the OT was already written down), we have 49 manuscripts, the earliest is from ~ 1100 AD (that’s almost 1,400 years!)
The most well documented of them all is the Iliad, written around the time of Isaiah, with 1,900 manuscripts & fragments (643 full manuscripts)
There are 17 fragments (not the whole book, but just pieces) from 415 BC, but the rest are from 500-600 AD or later (1200 years)
None of these titles are questioned, they are accepted as written by these individuals, and accepted that what I checked out from the library is the same as was originally written
What about the Bible?
The NT has over 20,000 manuscripts, some just 25-50 years after the NT was written
There was a fragment of the Gospel of Mark from 50 AD, that’s less than 20 years after Jesus died & rose again!
If you were to take the average ancient book that I have here in this pile, and gather all of the old manuscripts for each of them, and stack those manuscripts (copies) on top of each other, the average height of that stack per book would be ~4 ft tall
If you took all of the NT manuscripts and stacked them, it would be a mile high, 5,280 feet tall
There’s no comparison! The NT is so well documented that what was originally written by the authors is exactly what we have today
The OT has 5,600 manuscripts, and some of them are fascinating
Ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
In 1947, a shepherd boy found these old scrolls in a cave in the desert near the Dead Sea, and ended up finding manuscripts of every OT book except for Esther.
These scrolls were from 200 BC to 50 AD
The entire book of Isaiah, known as the Great Isaiah Scroll (which is on display in Israel - I’ve seen it), has the same 66 chapters of Isaiah that you have today, and was from 100 BC
The Iliad, the book that was written around the same time as Isaiah, those manuscripts were from 600-700 years later than the Isaiah scroll
The oldest OT fragment was an inscription from the book of Numbers on a coin from 600-500 BC, it’s the same text that we have in Numbers 6:22-27!
There is so much evidence that what we read in our Bibles today is exactly what was originally written down, it hasn’t been changed at all
Argument #2 - There is no physical proof for the events of the Bible
There was a lot of doubt many years ago, around the 1950s, about the archeology of the Bible.
Stuff the Bible talked about wasn’t found, there was no proof of it, so people started to doubt,
Over the last 75 years, the amount of evidence proving the Bible right time and time again is astounding
Pontius Pilate tablet
The existence of King David
Even growing evidence of the exodus from ~1300 BC!
Jewish communities (houses, pottery, worship) in Egypt from that time that were suddenly abandoned
Handmade bricks of mud and straw made by slaves
Some writings about the plagues even
Archeologists haven’t found everything the Bible talks about, but there hasn’t been a major find that disproves the Bible, no smoking gun and in fact, its been the opposite with all of these discoveries backing up exactly what the Bible says
Argument #3 - The Bible contradicts itself
Some people will say there are a lot of contradictions - you can find lists of them online.
They’ll use the supposed contradictions as proof that the Bible is not reliable
But when you actually read through the Bible, you’ll find its quite the opposite, the Bible has the same theme and message throughout.
It reads as one story that all relates - from Genesis to Revelation
Its crazy that it does have the same message!
If I were to ask you guys to write your opinion on Vail Christian Academy, what you thought of it, your experiences, the best way to navigate through life at school, I’d get 40 different answers.
That would be from 40 of you students who are all about the same age, live in the same place, and live in the same time in history, about a topic that’s not all that controversial
Yet the Bible was written by 40 different authors over a period of 1,500 years, on 3 different continents, in 3 different languages, from people from all different walks of life, and on the most controversial of all topics - God, and the message is the same.
Our Bibles are true, we can trust it as God’s word
Guys, I’ve only scratched the surface on this topic too.
Many people have researched and talked about things like textual analysis, prophecy, among others
So because what we are reading is true and trustworthy, the rest of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 matters.
Verses 16-17
Your greatest resource and tool for growing in your life is your Bible
What you learn in school is super important
What your parents or trusted guardians teach you is great
The skills you learn from a coach or a mentor are incredibly helpful for life
But none of that compares to what the Bible, God’s very words to you, has to offer
I hope this gives you new eyes or excitement the next time you’re reading your Bible, that you have trust in this book that it is God breathed, and that you live out what it says to do.