Why The Bible?

Introduction

Take this Job and shove it

Why do people leave the church?

One of the top reasons is doubt about the Bible.

Here's what we teach them:

Jesus loves me, this I know

For the Bible tells me so

or

The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.

The problem is that we don't follow that up with why we believe the Bible.

We also act like we worship the Bible instead of God.

You can't doubt the Bible or you're not a Christian.

But is that what we believe?

Here's what I believe:

Jesus died on the cross for my sins and that he rose the 3rd day. Judgement is coming and we have fallen short. If we put our trust in Jesus, we can be saved.

We know those things from the Bible, but nowhere in that does is say that our salvation hinges on what we believe about the Bible.

When I became a Christian, I had all kinds of doubt about the Bible, but I trusted in Jesus. Since I trusted in Jesus, I came to trust what the Bible says.

I think sometimes we put the cart before the horse.

I want to make it clear here before we go further: I believe what this passage tells us. I believe that the Bible is inspired by God.

But I didn't start with that belief. I started with Jesus.

Tim Barnet with STR, tells a story about one of his girls. I think he said she was 6 at the time.

She came to him and asked him "what does 1 2 smells like?"

He didn't understand her at all. He tried repeating it and asking her what she meant by that and she kept repeating, "What does 1 2 smell like?"

Finally, his younger girl (who was about 4) understood the confusion and said "You know Dad, You look like a Monkey and you smell like one too."

To vs Too vs Two

Sometime we use language that our kids don't understand.

Faith is one of those words. Faith is not blind - it's trusting in someone. It's to believe Jesus and to believe what he said.

So to help the confusion of this idea of blind faith, I'm going to use the word Trust

Just like I trust in this podium to hold up my iPad and the stage to hold up the podium.

I trust in Jesus because I saw Jesus in other people. They held up Jesus for me to see.

I came to believe the Bible after I trusted in Jesus.

But some people come to trust in the Bible and that leads them to faith.

Cold case detective J. Warner Wallace came to faith after looking at the NT and coming to the conclusion that the Bible was true.

I don't want to tell you to just take what the Bible says as true, I want to give you reasons to believe it's true.

I could list a bunch of reasons why I think it's true, but we are going to cover 3. All of these are related to both Paul, who is the author of this letter, and to this passage in 2 Timothy.

We are going to talk about why we should trust what the Bible has to say.

The New King James Version Chapter 3

10 But you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, 11 persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra—what persecutions I endured. And out of them all the Lord delivered me. 12 Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. 13 But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. 14 But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, 15 and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

It’s true because of Persecution

The first 3 verses are talking about we will suffer persecution. I'm not talking about getting banned from Facebook because you posted a Bible reference, I'm talking about physical persecution.

If anyone knew about persecution, it was Paul. Most scholars believe that this is one of the last letters written by Paul and many believe it was that last letter written.

He was in prison at the time and he would be beheaded shortly after writing this letter.

He was killed for his faith.

Now here's the question before you: How could a man who was at the time Christianity's greatest enemy become its greatest Apostle?

You need to look back at the history of the church. Paul was responsible for the stoning of Stephen. He then proceeded to persecute the church. Everyone was scared of him.

Then, something happened. He went from the greatest protagonist, to the greatest proponent.

How does that happen? Power? Prestige? Pesos?

Nope, he was beheaded alone, with no money, and he went willingly. All he had to do was renounce his trust in Jesus.

He died with the name of Jesus on his lips.

Something happened to him. We know what happened. We call it "the road to Damascus"

He claims he saw Jesus. After Jesus was tried, beaten, crucified, and stabbed.

Paul saw him and it changed his life.

The Church grew exponentially while being persecuted.

They were killed if they had copies, but they made them anyway.

We know that in 303 Diocletian made it illegal to have scriptures and ordered all found to be burned.

But the persecution started as soon as Christianity started spreading.

Nero executed Christians, Pliny did, and many local authorities as well.

What's my point here? In spite of the persecutions, we have the Bible.

It's a testimony of how works and it's a proof of its authenticity.

It's true because of propagation

You need to know how scrolls were transmitted back then. The Jewish Scribes were very careful about copying the Bible.

For those of you don't know, the movable type printing press wasn't invented until 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg. The first thing that he printed was the Bible. Before that, everything was copied by hand.

So, back to the Jewish Scribes. They would count the letters and if they were off on the scroll, they would burn it. By the way, there were no books yet. Books would come later. Actually the word Bible comes from Greek which means book.

When the NT came, they just made a lot of copies. When we look at how accurate the text is compared to other ancient literature, the NT is unparalleled.

If we take the works of

Homer: about 2,000

Plato: 7

Aristotle: 49

NT: 6,000+ in Greek (24,000 in other languages)

Let's play a game.

The green puppy went to the market yesterday.

So the first accounts about Jesus were told orally, but were written down pretty quickly.

One of the questions you might ask is when was the Bible written. Most Christian scholars date it at 64, but even the critical scholars date it between 70 and 90. That means even the critical scholars date it within the lifetime of some the apostles.

Now we played a game earlier, but what if I told everyone in the room what I wrote down?

Do you think we could construct what I actually wrote? What if I wrote it down and I had all of you to write it down?

That's what we have with the Bible. We can be sure that it is true and that it really happened because of the crazy amount of copies of the Bible that we have.

Also, because of how early it was written compared to other ancient documents that we have.

If we can't trust the Bible, then we can't trust any history that we have.

What happened is that early Christians took literally what Paul told Timothy here:

The New King James Version Chapter 3

14 But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, 15 and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

Since we can trust the Scriptures then we need to do the same.

It's true because of power

Pay close attention to our last couple of verses

The New King James Version Chapter 3

16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Do you see the power of the scriptures? Do you see what it's good for?

I don't completely understand how God did this, but the Bible is written by many authors and each one has their own style. Yet, God somehow dictated it.

There is no other work of literature like it.

I want you to think about something. Think about how much wisdom is in the Bible, especially the words of Jesus. He taught how we should behave, how we should treat one another. Even non-christians appreciate what he has said.

However, instead of saying how great Jesus is, we use his name as a cuss word.

Why don't we use Mohammed or Buddha that way? It's only Jesus.

The writer of Hebrews tells us:

The New King James Version Chapter 4

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

I don't fully understand it, but there is a power in the word of God. I know that it's the Spirit of God.

Even before I became a Christian I knew that there was a power.

Do you feel that power?

The Persecution of the early church

The Propagation of the Bible texts

The Power of the Bible

We have talked about how we can know that that Bible is true because of

The Persecution of the early church - Nobody would have went through what they did

The Propagation of the Bible texts - It's a miracle that these texts survived

The Power of the Bible - Just look at the power of what the Bible can do

People will tell you that the Bible has been translated and re-translated so many times that you can't trust it. They will say that it was written hundreds of years later. They will also say that there are more errors in it than there are words in it.

However, the truth is that we can get to close to the original text. It's not re-translated a bunch of times.

I believe that it was written by the people we think it was. That means Galatians was written by Paul, which contains the gospel, in the 40 to the early 50s and that's what secular scholars say.

We have a fragment of John dated to about 125 AD.

So what about the errors. It's true that there were a lot of errors, but that's because there were a lot of copies.

Let me be clear here: when I say errors, I mean typos, not errors as in contradictions.

But here's the thing: even with the typos, all of the major doctrines remain unchanged.

If you don't think the Bible it true, let's talk about it. If you want to hear the truth, I'll lay out all the evidence.

If you are questioning something, we can discuss it.

So, I think we have really good evidence that the Bible is true.

What do you think?

When we figure out that the Bible is true, Then we need to ask: what should we do?

When I was wrestling with God, when I was struggling with my sin, I could only remember one thing: Trust in Jesus

That's what I did, how about you?