Can I Trust The Bible?

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Let me tell you about a habit I have. Maybe you can relate.

I can wake up with a weird pain in my side. It’s probably nothing. I slept weird or sat in a chair wrong yesterday. And even though I’m sure it’s nothing — I reach for my phone before my feet hit the floor — and I type in my symptoms.

And four minutes later — I’ve diagnosed myself with a disease that exists in exactly three countries — none of which I’ve ever been to by the way — and I’m reading a post somewhere from some guy named Greg — who’s not a doctor — but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express one time — so I’m sure he’s an expert.

And now — I’m mentally drafting my eulogy. And thinking about all the things I need to do before I meet my untimely demise.

And then… it goes away by lunch.

We

We do this with everything.

Where should we eat? We don’t ask the guy who’s lived here for 40 years and has eaten at every place on the West Side… we just check to see if a restaurant has 4 point 2 stars… or 4 point 4 stars — as if that “point 2” rating is the difference between life and death.

Is this a good deal on a car? Scroll.

Should I take this job? Scroll.

Should I marry this person? Scroll.

We will ask a search bar a question we’re too nervous to ask an actual human being who loves us.

And we’ve gotten really comfortable trusting the fastest answer available instead of the most reliable one. If it loads first — we treat it like it’s true.

And most of the time — that habit is just a little embarrassing. You spend a Tuesday convinced you have a tropical illness. But it turns out Greg was wrong. And you’re fine.

…But we do the exact same thing with God.

Somebody at work asks a question you don’t have an answer for… “Can I actually trust the Bible? Doesn’t it contradict itself? Wasn’t it changed a hundred times before it got to us?”

And what do we reach for?

Not the book.

We open an app. Or read a thread. Or watch a nine-minute video from a guy with a ring light — a bookshelf he’s clearly never read — and a great deal of confidence. We let people who have never once opened this book for themselves tell us what’s inside of it.

We’ve stacked up a whole lot of middlemen between us and the source.

“CAN I TRUST THE BIBLE?” GRAPHIC

So today — we’re going to find the answer to that question ourselves: “Can I trust the Bible?”

See — some of you have been handed somebody else’s version of this book your entire life. You’ve been told what it says. You’ve been told what it means. You’ve been told what it thinks about you. And maybe — you’ve never sat down to actually read what it says for yourself.

So this morning — I want to hand you something back.

We’re going to open this thing together — and we’re going to ask the real questions — the ones people are actually asking. And I want you to walk out of here with this truth:

“THE BIBLE DOESN’T NEED A MIDDLEMAN” GRAPHIC

The Bible doesn’t need a middleman.

God

For the next four weeks — we’re going to be doing something a little different.

“BIG TRUTHS SHORT TAKES” GRAPHIC

We’re starting a new series called “Big Truths — Short Takes” — and the idea is simple.

The internet has made everybody an expert. Which means the internet has also made everybody a theologian. There are people in comment sections and 30-second clips — explaining Christianity to millions of people. And some of them have never read a page of what they’re explaining.

So over the next four weeks — we’re taking four of the questions people are really asking… the ones that come up at work — and at school. At the dinner table. At two o’clock in the morning when you can’t sleep. And we’re going to see what God’s Word actually says about them.

Next week — we’ll look at “Why does God allow suffering?” The week after: “Is Jesus really the only way to God?” And we’ll finish with a question a lot of people struggle with: “Why does God seem so distant?”

But we have to start here. Because every one of those questions gets answered from this book. And if you can’t trust this book — then nothing we say for the next few weeks is worth your time.

“CAN I TRUST THE BIBLE?” GRAPHIC

So let’s deal with it. Can I trust the Bible?

If you have your Bible this morning — that’s a good first step. We’re in 2nd Timothy Chapter 3.

While you’re flipping there — let me set the stage. The Apostle Paul is writing to a young pastor named Timothy. Paul is near the end of his life. He’s in prison — he knows how this ends — and he’s writing what amounts to a final letter to a kid he mentored.

And of all the things he could say with limited time — this is what he chooses.

Take a look with me — 2nd Timothy 3 — verses 14 through 17:

2 Timothy 3:14–17 CSB

14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed. You know those who taught you, 15 and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Notice here what Paul does in this message to Timothy. He doesn’t just tell Timothy what to believe. He reminds him who he learned it from. Paul is saying: consider your source.

See — Timothy learned this from his mother and his grandmother — and from Paul himself… people who staked their lives on it. We see evidence of this earlier in this letter. In Verse 5 of Chapter 1 Paul says:

2 Timothy 1:5 CSB

5 I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and now, I am convinced, is in you also.

And that’s the same thing we’re asking this morning… consider your source.

As we consider that source today — there are three common objections people have to trusting the Bible — and we’re going to walk through each one.

“HAS THE BIBLE BEEN CHANGED” GRAPHIC

The first objection is: “Hasn’t the Bible been changed over the years?”

You’ve probably heard the version of this that goes around every few years — that the Bible got re-written by some council in the 300’s. That a room full of men picked the books they liked — threw out the ones they didn’t — and then handed us a version that suits them. It’s in the movies — and in the comment section on social media — and it always comes with a lot of confidence and zero footnotes.

It’s like a bad game of telephone.

Now — this is a fair question — and the answer is better than most people expect.

So start with what the book claims about itself. Verse 16 of our passage today says:

2 Timothy 3:16 CSB

16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness,

And the Apostle Peter says the same thing from another angle… in 2nd Peter Chapter 1 — he says:

2 Peter 1:20–21 CSB

20 Above all, you know this: No prophecy of Scripture comes from the prophet’s own interpretation, 21 because no prophecy ever came by the will of man; instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

The same Holy Spirit who carried these writers is the same one who meets us when we open it. This isn’t a museum piece — it’s where we live.

Now — you can’t prove a book is from God just because the book says it is — so let’s look at what history actually shows.

When historians want to know whether an ancient document is reliable — they ask two things:

How many copies do we have?

And how close are those copies to the original?

The Iliad by Homer is considered to be one of the most reliable texts of the ancient world. Nobody argues about it. Scholars quote it frequently. We have nearly 650 copies of it.

And nobody’s making videos about this. You have never once scrolled past something on YouTube that says “What they don’t want you to know about Homer.” Nobody’s deconstructing the Iliad!

At the same time — we have over 53-hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Add other languages and you’re past 20-thousand.

When you have that many copies — you can lay them down — side by side — and compare. If a scribe in one century made a mistake — we can see it — because we have hundreds of other copies that didn’t. The volume isn’t a problem for reliability — the volume is the reliability.

Are there differences between manuscripts? Sure. Spelling variations — and word order — or maybe even a scribe’s tired hand at two in the morning by candlelight. But not one core doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed passage.

“DOES THE BIBLE CONTRADICT ITSELF?” GRAPHIC

The second objection: “Doesn’t the Bible contradict itself?”

This one is common — even inside the church. You start reading something — and you hit something that seems to clash with something else — and you don’t have anybody to ask — so you file it away and stop reading.

Let me give you the principle that unlocks most of this: Scripture interprets Scripture.

This isn’t a clever phrase that somebody invented — it’s how the Bible handles itself.

Here’s a good example:

In the Book of Romans — Paul says that a person is justified by faith — not through works. In other words — we don’t earn our way to God. And then in the Book of James it says that faith without works is dead. Sounds like a fight — right?

But it’s not. They’re answering different questions. Paul is answering: “How does a person get right with God?” The answer — faith. Not effort. And James is answering the question, “How do you know a person’s faith is real?” The answer — it shows up in their life. Paul is talking about the root. James is talking about the fruit.

And look at this — they both reach for the same guy to prove it. Both of them quote the same thing Abraham said from Genesis 15:6:

Genesis 15:6 CSB

6 Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

Same man — and same verse from Genesis. Two different points that don’t cancel each other out.

Paul and James are not back there throwing hands in the middle of your New Testament!

Most things we think are contradictions work like this. They dissolve when you stop reading verses like fortune cookies and start reading them for what they are. In context.

It’s the equivalent of walking into a movie halfway through and trying to guess the ending. It doesn’t make any sense!

“SHOULD WE JUST FOCUS ON” GRAPHIC

And the third objection: “Shouldn’t we just focus on the words of Jesus?”

You’ve probably heard this one. Some Bibles print the words of Jesus in red — and somewhere along the way people got the idea that the red letters count more than the black ones. You might hear something like, “Jesus is the point… Paul was just a guy with opinions.”

And I understand the instinct. But go back to what Verse 16 of our passage actually says:

2 Timothy 3:16 CSB

16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness,

All Scripture is inspired by God. Y’all know what the Greek word for all meant? All.

So if you want to keep the red letters and just throw out the rest — you’ve got a problem. Because Jesus Himself treated the Old Testament as authoritative. He even tells us this in Matthew Chapter 5:

Matthew 5:17 CSB

17 “Don’t think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.

You can’t take Jesus seriously and take His Bible less seriously than He did.

The red letters are a publishing decision — not a divine one.

And the Apostle’s writings in the New Testament don’t sit in a lower tier either. In 2nd Peter — the Apostle refers to Paul’s letters and puts them right alongside “the other Scriptures” — his words. An apostle called another apostle’s mail “Scripture”.

So here’s what ties all of this together — and it’s the part I most want you to hear.

The Bible is not a collection of religious sayings. It’s not a rulebook. It’s not a collection of stories about people who lived a long time ago and behaved strangely.

It’s one story.

“METANARRATIVE” GRAPHIC

There’s a word for this. It’s metanarrative. It just means one overarching story — the big story that all of the smaller stories fit inside of. The Bible is a metanarrative.

66 books. Roughly 40 authors. Written across about 15-hundred years. Kings — and fishermen — and shepherds — and doctors — and tax collectors — writing on three continents across three languages — most of them never meeting each other.

And it tells one story with one arc:

The creation of man

The fall of man

The redemption of man

And the restoration of man

And the redemption of man isn’t an idea. That’s what Jesus did. He came to earth — lived the life we couldn’t live — died the death we earned — and walked out of a grave three days later. That’s the hinge the whole library turns on.

Every word of Scripture from the first Verse in Genesis to the last Verse in Revelation points to that.

You can’t assemble that by committee. Get 40 people from the same town in the same decade to write about God — and you’ll get 40 different books that argue with each other. Spread them across 15 centuries and 3 continents and you should get chaos.

Unless there’s one author standing behind them. And that author isn’t finished speaking.

That’s what Paul means when he says all Scripture is inspired by God. Human hands wrote it — but one author divinely inspired it.

You

Sit with that for a second. For 15-hundred years — God was telling one story — and He was telling it toward you. Before you were born. Before this church existed — He was already saying something He wanted you to hear.

So if everything we just walked through is true — if this book came from God — holds up under scrutiny — doesn’t fight with itself — and tells one story from start to finish — then our question stops being “Can I trust it?” and starts being “What am I doing with it?”

Some people here have never read it.

You know about it. You’ve absorbed a version of it from movies — or from arguments. Maybe from somebody who used it against you like a weapon — or a video that told you what it says about people like you. You’ve got opinions about this book — and those opinions were handed to you by somebody else.

Here’s the thing, though, friend — you’re allowed to check.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Fact check it. Open it. And see for yourself.

Some people have read it — and then you stopped.

You hit something that didn’t sit right. A passage that seemed to clash with another one. Or a question you couldn’t get an answer to. Or maybe just an instruction or a warning you don’t agree with.

Here’s what I’d ask you to consider: the thing that stopped you probably has an answer. And not a dismissive one — but a real one. And the answer is usually somewhere else in that same book.

Bring the question back. Bring it to God. Bring it to me. But don’t let one hard passage keep you from the whole story.

And some people read it constantly — or at least read about it.

You listen to sermons. You follow accounts. You’ve got podcasts and devotionals and a plan on an app. And none of those things are bad. But if you’re honest — most of what’s forming your understanding of Scripture right now is somebody else’s processing of Scripture.

You’re eating pre-chewed food.

There’s a difference between being taught and being fed by proxy. Paul told Timothy to continue in what he’d learned — and Timothy had been in this since he was a kid — taught by his own grandmother. Depth didn’t excuse him from staying in it himself.

But before I tell you what to do with this — I have to tell you the most important thing I’ll say this morning.

Trusting that the Bible is reliable will not save you.

You can be completely convinced the manuscripts are sound and the history checks out and the story holds together — and still be far from God. Plenty of people know this book is true — and have never let it be true of them.

Look back at Verse 15 of our passage today:

2 Timothy 3:15 CSB

15 and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

The point of the book isn’t the book itself. The point of the book is the person it’s pointing at. At its core — the Bible isn’t information to evaluate. It’s an invitation to accept a relationship with the person who wrote it.

If you’re here this morning — and you’ve been standing at a distance from God — maybe because of doubts about this book — maybe because of what somebody did to you in a church — or maybe just because you’ve never wanted to hand over the keys to your own life — the invitation is open. Not to agree with a doctrine. But to come home.

You don’t need somebody to do it for you. You don’t need a professional. You don’t need a middleman. God’s invitation into a relationship with Him is simply asking Him for that relationship. Simply saying — “Lord, I can’t do this on my own. I need you to save me.” And He will.

And whether you make a decision to come home to Him this morning — or if you’ve been walking with Him for 40 years — here’s where you start this week:

Pick a passage. Start with this one in 2nd Timothy if you want. Or one of the Gospels. Or one you’ve never read before. Read it. Actually read it — not just skim it — before you read anything about it. No commentary first. No video. No study notes. Just you and the text and whatever the Holy Spirit does with that. It’s just you — and the text — and the Spirit who’s been waiting for you to open it.

Then ask three questions:

“WHAT DOES THIS SAY” GRAPHIC

What does this say about God?

What does this say about people?

And what does it ask of me?

That’s the whole assignment. And if you do that four or five times this week — you’ll know more of God’s Word than you did the entire year before it.

The God who breathed this book is the same God waiting in it. He doesn’t need a middleman — and neither do you.

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