Part 1: Absolute Truth Series

God’s Word is Truth!

Psalms 119:1-8

Online Sermon: http://www.mckeesfamily.com/?page_id=3567

Blessed are those who believe so strongly in God’s word being the truth that they are not only willing to meditate day and night on His statues but are also willing to become living sacrifices by walking in accordance to its precepts! Does this sound like the average church attendee? Living in a culture that has relegated truth to being nothing more than mere perceptions, created and deconstructed from one mind to the next; the truth concerning God has become lost in a sea of never-ending interpretations and outright modifications. To make Scripture more palatable to our spiritual digestive system most Christians either choose to interpret God’s word through “worldly eyes” or “tear out” the parts of God’s word that says the way they are living is a sin! We should not be surprised when some Christians reject parts of God’s word for, we are living in the predicted age when people no longer put up with sound doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3-4)! More than ever the church needs apologetics to preach and teach that all of Scripture has and always will be God-breathed and therefore true (2 Timothy 3:16)! The first part of this sermon series is going to discuss why God’s word is absolute truth and the second part is going to give a warning to those who chose to “tear out” commands they refuse to obey!

Part 1: Absolute Truth

Is the Bible absolute truth? While the Bible answers some of life’s foundational questions such as who created the universe? why am I here? and what will happen to me when I die? this does not mean that the Bible is accepted as truth for most people. Those who outright reject the Bible as being absolute truth do so for a variety of reasons:

1. Oral Tradition. The Bible is a collection of writings that span over 3,500 years. If one believes the Pentateuch was written by Moses, critics argue that his knowledge of events way before his time must have been received by oral tradition and as such would not be accurate.

2. Sin of the Writers. Since the Bible is written by human authors whom all sin (Romans 3:23). Who is to say their sin did not taint what they wrote?

3. Contradictions. There are contradictions in the Bible so how can it represent truth when it contradicts itself?

4. No Original Manuscripts. Since there are no original manuscripts then how can one be certain the word of God accurately represents the events it describes?

5. Translations. The Bible has been translated so many times over the centuries how can one know with certainty it has not been altered to fit modern times?

To prove that the Bible is 100 % truth to the critics of this world lets put the Bible to the test by

1) determining if there are multiple voices and textual agreement of the sources of the Bible and 2) close proximity of time in which these sources are written to the actual events, and 3) the predictability of events.

When we receive a document claiming to know what happened in the past it must first pass rigorous tests to prove its claim for authenticity. Often, we view history as being the exact representation of an event written down to be forever preserved in time. This certainly is not the case. Ever have two people experience the exact same event and come out with completely different details? Or have an event occur but only parts are remembered? Ever hear someone falsify details of an event for their own selfish reasons? Unless we can time travel back in time and see the entire event for ourselves then how can we know for certain any historical document is true?

History truthfully is merely the reconstruction of an event based on those details that have the highest probability of occurrence.

1. The probabilities are increased when the evidence is collected from more than one reliable source. When multiple sources give the exact same details, this increases the probability that they in fact occurred.

2. Also, those sources that were written closest to the event are deemed more credible because the longer times goes on before one writes the more that is forgotten.

These two criteria: agreement between multiple sources and proximity of time that the event occurred and when it was written; is the criteria historians use to prove a manuscript authentic or a fake.

Multiple Sources

The Bible has multiple sources each of which contain text in agreement with our written Bible today.

1. Papyri. Manufactured in Egypt as far back as the 4th century BC, the Egyptians took the papyri plant and made sheets to write on. They took the inner pith and overlapped it, then soaked and pounded the plant material into sheets. The sheets are then pressured dried. Paper was not invented until about 100 BC and not in wide circulation until much later. The oldest source comes from writing done on the Papyri plant in the 2nd Century. We have 86 pieces of Papryi plant with either a single or multiple verses written on them. As you can see, one of the negative things about this form of writing is that the plant material degrades over time making it very hard to read something written almost 2000 years ago.