Can I Trust The Bible? Series

Introduction

a. Last week was the second step in a grand adventure, as we looked at some of the Big Questions thinking people always ask.

i. Where did we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live? Where are we going?

ii. 1st week - Is it okay to question God? To ask questions like, “Do you exist?” “Why do you do what you do?”

(1) God - Psalm 34:8 - Taste and see that the LORD is good . . .

iii. Last week, How can I know that there’s a God?

(1) Discovered that He is or isn’t cannot be proven.

b. This week - look at a book that claims to be the revealed Word of God to humanity.

i. Psalm 119:160 - The sum of Thy word is truth . . .

ii. John 17:17 - . . . Your Word is truth.

iii. Again, can’t prove or disprove - but there is evidence.

c. Many today don’t believe that the Bible is trustworthy because they have been told that much of the Bible is:

i. Scientifically impossible

ii. Historically unreliable

iii. Culturally regressive

iv. Philosophically unattractive

v. Logically flawed.

d. Are going to look at the evidence, then going to look at another reason many people do not want to believe that the Bible is God breathed - the word of God.

2. The five reasons.

a. The Bible is full of the scientifically inaccurate or impossible events

i. Actually, the Bible was remarkably accurate for its time.

(1) At a time when most of the world believed the world was flat, Isaiah wrote of God sitting on the circle of the earth. Isaiah 40:22

(2) When the ancients believed the earth was held up by Atlas, or rested on the backs of elephants or on pillars, Moses wrote in the book of Job - “He stretches out the north over the empty place, and hangs the earth upon nothing.” Job 26:7

(3) When the black plague was killing one-quarter of Europe’s population in the 14th Century, it was the church that led out in defeating the disease. Reading the instructions given by God to Moses in Leviticus 13:45 concerning people with infectious diseases, they developed the theory of quarantine and isolation that helped to end the plague.

ii. One thing that seriously troubles many who are skeptical of the Bible is the prophecies found there.

(1) Daniel 2 - the image

(2) Name of king of Persia, Cyrus, who would free the slaves. (Isaiah 44:28)

(3) Fall of Tyre in Ezekial 26:1-6 (Babylon, after 13 years of siege under Nebuchadnezzar completely destroyed the mainland city. But inhabitants had escaped to an island offshore and rebuilt the city. 250 years later, Alexander the Great came, used the wood rock and stubble from the destroyed city, built a causeway, marched on the rubble onto the island and destroyed it and scraped it bare, which is how it remains today.)

(4) Isaiah 13:20 - Babylon to be destroyed and never rebuilt.

(5) Exact year Jesus born and crucified.

b. The Bible is historically inaccurate;

i. The Bible is not primarily a history book, but it contains very good history.

ii. For over a hundred years, historians claimed that Daniel’s story of King Belshazzar was a fake - there was no record of him. Last king of Babylon was Nabonidus. But then tablets surfaced that showed that he went off to desert oasis and left his nephew in command as regent - Belshazzar

iii. Linguists ridiculed the idea that Moses could have written the first six books of the Bible - Penteteuch and Job - because writing was not developed enough in that area - then the Tel Elarmona tablets were discovered in northern Egypt that contained written material every bit as complex.

iv. Until the late 1800s, the Bible record of the Hittites was ridiculed - there was no record of such a nation ever existing in the record - until whole libraries of clay tablets from the Hittite nation were discovered.

v. One unique aspect of Bible history is the detail rarely found in ancient history.

c. Third objection to the Bible is that it is culturally regressive.

i. Nothing is further from the truth.

ii. In an age where women were chattel, the Bible urged that they be protected and given rights.

(1) Granted from today’s standards, they were far from ideal.

(2) But, in their day they were radical.

iii. In an age where slaves had no rights, the Bible writers urged that they be treated with dignity found nowhere else.

iv. God had to deal with people where they were, in their culture, and he worked constantly to bring them away from the barbarism of their time.

d. The fourth objection is that the Bible is philosophically unattractive.