Introduction:
A. The story is told of a Sunday school teacher who asked his class, “What is Faith?”
1. A young boy raised his hand and answered, “Oh, that’s easy. Faith is believing something you know is not true.”
2. Unfortunately, that little boy’s definition summarizes what many people think about faith.
3. For them, to believe is to make a “blind leap of faith.”
4. In their thinking, they have to give up the rational for the irrational.
B. But the truth of the matter is, Christianity is a reasonable faith.
1. As we will discover in this sermon series, Christianity is based on a set of rational, historical facts.
2. Contrary to being a form of intellectual suicide, given the facts and the evidence, believing in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is the most reasonable choice a person can make.
3. But I must be quick to add that certain matters of faith go beyond reason, but they don’t contradict it.
C. So far in our series “Got Questions? Answering Faith’s Great Questions” we have addressed a couple of important questions.
1. In the first sermon we answered the question: What does God think about the questions of doubters and skeptics?
a. We discussed the fact that doubt is a universal experience and that God is okay with us having doubts, asking questions, and looking for good answers.
2. In last week’s sermon, we answered the question: Does God exist?
a. We explored the evidence and clues that point to the existence of God.
b. We examined the clues of the cause, design and regularity of the universe.
c. We also considered the evidence of moral law or conscience that we all possess.
3. All of these clues are strong evidence for a God who caused, designed, and sustains the universe and who placed within us a strong sense of moral law concerning right and wrong.
D. Today, we turn our attention to the question: “Is the Bible Truly the Word of God?”
1. As you know, there are many books or writings that are looked to for spiritual direction.
a. In addition to the Bible, there is the Koran (the Islam holy book).
b. There is the Book of Morman which claims to have divine origin.
c. The Hindus believe the Bhagavad Vita is the source of eternal truth.
d. Other people look to the writings of Confucius, or to Tony Robbins (self-help guru and motivational speaker), or to L. Ron Hubbard (who began Scientology).
2. So what sets the Bible apart from all these and other books and writings?
3. Can we be sure that the Bible is unique and different from all the rest? I believe that we can.
E. But before we look at the evidence, let’s briefly describe what we mean by the Bible.
1. The word “Bible” is from the general Greek word for “book,” but it is revered as “The Book” or the “Holy Book.”
2. The Bible is a collection of 66 different books divided into two sections (the Old and New Testaments).
3. 39 Books make up the Old Testament, which was written between 1,550 B.C. to 400 B.C.
a. The Roman Catholic church also includes 15 other books in their Old Testament called the Apocrypha, which means “hidden books.”
b. The Roman Catholic church added these books about 500 years ago at the council of Trent.
c. However, for the first 1500 years the Apocrypha was considered good devotional literature, but did not deserve to be considered part of the Bible.
4. 27 books that make up the New Testament were written over a 50 year span.
5. As to different kinds of literature, the Bible contains history, poetry, prophesy, biography, songs, laws, and letters. So it is a library of different kinds of literature.
6. The Bible was the first book ever printed on the printing press, and is the best-selling book of all time.
a. Portions of the Bible have been translated into over 2000 languages.
7. As modern Americans, we are Bible rich.
a. We have over 30 different English translations of the Bible available to us.
b. 24% of Americans own at least 5 Bibles.
F. Now, with that introduction in mind, let’s turn our attention to the evidence that supports the belief that the Bible is the Word of God.
1. I like what C.H. Spurgeon said after being asked if he could defend the Bible, he said: “Defend it! I would as soon defend a lion. Let it out, it can defend itself.”
2. That’s what we want to do today – allow the Bible to defend itself.
3. The evidence for the authority of the Bible falls into two major categories: internal evidence and external evidence.
4. Let’s begin with the internal evidence, and then we will consider the external evidence.
I. Internal Evidence that the Bible Truly is the Word of God
A. The first piece of internal evidence is its’ claim of divine origin.
1. It might surprise you to know that there are relatively few books that actually claim divine origin.
2. You would expect that a book written by God would claim divine origin, but just making that claim does not make it so.
3. The Bible claims to be divinely inspired and to contain the very words of God.
4. Nearly 4000 times, expressions like “Thus says the Lord,” and “The word of the Lord came to me” are recorded in the Bible.
5. In 2 Tim. 3, Paul speaks of the Bible being inspired by God: 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
a. The NIV translation chose to translate the Greek word that means “inspired by God” in its more literal sense “God-breathed.”
6. The Apostle Peter explained something of the inspiration process when he wrote: 20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21).
7. God inspired or carried along 40 different writers over a period of 1600 years in order to complete the Bible.
8. So this is an important first piece of evidence.
9. We would not even consider the Bible to be the Word of God if it didn’t claim a divine origin.
B. A second piece of internal evidence is the unity of the Bible.
1. As has already been mentioned, the Bible was written by 40 different people over a period of 1600 years and yet the Bible doesn’t contradict itself, and presents a singular message or theme.
2. Such a miracle can only be explained by there being one divine Author, God himself, who was in control of all these human writers.
3. Imagine taking 10 contemporary authors and asking them to write their viewpoints on one controversial subject, or asking them to write parts of a story that will later be put together.
a. The only catch is that they can’t consult with each other and won’t have each other’s writings to work from.
b. We can only imagine how different each of their writings would be on any subject, and there is no way they could have a unified story.
4. Yet this is what we have with the Bible.
5. These 40 different authors lived in different times, wrote in 3 different languages, and were on three different continents.
6. The Biblical writers came from many different walks of life; including kings, philosophers, fisherman, tax collectors, doctors, prophets, and herdsmen.
7. But the perfect unity of the Bible, organized around the one theme of God’s redemption of humankind and of all creation could never have come about except by the hand of God.
8. So the unity of the Bible is just another important proof of divine inspiration.
C. A third piece of internal evidence is the fulfilled prophesy of the Bible.
1. Hundreds of prophecies of future events are recorded in the Bible – some of them were written hundreds or even a thousand years before their fulfillment.
2. No other book in history has dared to predict the future to the degree the Bible has and amazingly, Biblical prophesies are batting 1000!
3. The prophecies in the Bible are very specific and accurate.
4. Nostradamus claims to have made hundreds of prophecies that have come true, but if you read his prophecies, you will find them to be vague and unclear.
a. His symbols and language can be taken to mean a number of things.
b. Not so with the prophesies of the Bible.
5. One of the more convincing prophesies was made by Isaiah.
a. The prophet Isaiah foretold that a conqueror named Cyrus would destroy seemingly impregnable Babylon and subdue Egypt along with most of the rest of the known world.
b. This same man, said Isaiah, would decide to let the Jewish exiles in his territory go free without any payment of ransom (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1; and 45:13).
c. Isaiah made this prophecy 150 years before Cyrus was born, 180 years before Cyrus performed any of these feats, and 110 years before the Jews were taken into captivity.
d. Amazingly, the king would accomplish these noble tasks even though he did not “know” Jehovah (45:4, 5). He was not Jewish nor a believer in God.
e. In other words, even though he was a pagan, he was an unconscious tool in the hands of the Lord to contribute mightily to the Jewish cause, and so, indirectly, to the coming of God’s Anointed, Jesus of Nazareth.
6. There are over 300 prophecies made about the Messiah in the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus.
a. These prophecies were made hundreds of years before Jesus came, and they were things he could not have fulfilled just by knowing about them.
b. The prophecies include the place of his birth (Bethlehem), the tribe he would be from (Judah), how he would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, how he would die, that his hands and feet would be pierced, and that he would be crucified between thieves.
7. The verifiable track record of prophetic fulfillment is another convincing internal proof for the truthfulness of the Bible.
8. Let’s turn our attention to the external evidence that the Bible truly is the Word of God.
II. External Evidence that the Bible Truly is the Word of God
A. The first piece of external evidence is the Bible’s indestructibility.
1. The Bible is the most well-known book in the history of the world, and no book has been attacked more than it.
2. Skeptics have tried to rid the world of the Bible.
3. Efforts to destroy the Bible are well-known.
a. In A.D. 303, the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered all Bibles burned, but his effort failed.
b. Voltaire, the French enlightenment writer bragged, “It took twelve men to start Christianity. One will destroy it.” Voltaire failed.
c. Voltaire said, “In 100 years the Bible will be a forgotten book, only to be found in museums. 100 years later, Voltaire was dead, and his house was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society for printing and distribution of Bibles.
d. Robert Ingersoll, well-known 19th century atheist, said, “In 15 years I will have this book [the Bible] in the morgue.” Fifteen years later, Ingersoll himself was in the morgue and in his estate sale a preacher bought his desk and spent his life writing sermons on it. (www.thetruthproject.org).
e. The American Revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, “Fifty years hence the Bible will be obsolete and forgotten.” He wrote that in 1795, but he was wrong!
f. Many atheistic dictators have tried to keep the Bible out of their empires, but it is not possible – the Bible is now welcome and available in China and Russia.
4. Because they have failed to rid the world of the Bible, skeptics have tried to discredit and destroy the authority of the Bible.
a. The Bible has gone through every kind of scrutiny possible, from archaeology, to science, to philosophy and computers, yet despite all the attacks, the Bible proves itself again and again.
b. And so the Bible’s durability and indestructability is a piece of evidence supporting its divine origin.
B. A second piece of external evidence is the Bible’s reliability.
1. Many skeptics believe that the Bible cannot be trusted because the original manuscripts – those documents actually written by Matthew, Isaiah, Paul, etc. – do not exist.
2. What skeptics conclude is that all we have are a few copies of a few copies, so how can we know what the original Greek or Hebrew texts actually said.
3. This is certainly a good point – the original autographs, penned by the authors of the Bible, are indeed no longer available – they crumbled many centuries ago.
4. But we must also understand that the originals of other ancient writings, such as those by Plato, Aristotle, and Caesar have also been lost or destroyed long ago.
5. We only have copies of all the great, ancient writings.
6. Therefore, to judge the accuracy of ancient documents, experts look at a number of important factors; including, how close in age they come to the original, how many copies there are, and how close the content of the copies are to one another. This is a science of its own.
7. With most of the ancient writings, relatively few copies are available and the time span between the original and the oldest copy is great.
a. Works of Plato: 7 copies in existence, the closest to the original is 1,200 years removed.
b. Works of Aristotle: 37 copies in existence, time span 1,400 years.
c. Caesar’s work, The Gaelic Wars: 10 copies, the closest to original is 1,000 years removed.
d. We have 643 copies Homer’s Illiad and there is a 500 year span between the original and the oldest copy.
e. How does the New Testament compare? We have almost 25 thousand copies and there is only an 80 year span between the original and the oldest copy!
f. Furthermore, we have a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to around 29 years from the original writing (John Rylands Papyri 125 A.D.).
g. This is extremely close to the original writing date and is simply unheard of in any other ancient writing.
8. The gap between when the Old Testament was written and our earliest known manuscript copies is larger than that of the New Testament.
a. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, which are the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament ever found, confirmed that the scribes who painstakingly copied the Bible did so with the utmost of care and accuracy.
b. The Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts were a thousand years older than the then-oldest-known Hebrew texts of the Bible.
c. And when they compared them they found only minor misspellings and variant words, but there was no substantial difference.
9. The reliability of the biblical text is a remarkable story, and the fact that the text has been so accurately preserved is another evidence of its divine origin.
C. A third piece of external evidence is the Bible’s historical and archaeological accuracy.
1. The Bible is historically correct, and no one has ever proved it otherwise.
2. The more we learn of history, the more the Bible is validated.
3. Hundreds of statements in the Bible, which in times past have been held untrue by enemies of the Bible, have recently been proved by archaeologists.
4. Nelson Glueck, a renouned Jewish archaeologist, states, “No archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.”
5. Dr. William Albright, who was not a friend of Christianity and was the foremost authority in Middle Eastern archaeology in his time, said this about the Bible: “There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of the Old Testament.”
6. Sir William Ramsey, a well-known archaeologist and historian in the early 20th century, when speaking of Luke, the New Testament writer of Luke and Acts, said: “I take the view that Luke’s history is unsurpassed in its trustworthiness. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian, and they will stand the keenest of scrutiny, and the harshest treatment.”
7. The important thing to realize is that the Bible is historically and archaeologically reliable which is important in establishing its’ trustworthiness and divine origin.
D. I want to conclude this sermon with one final piece of external evidence – what I want to call the dynamic impact of the Bible.
1. The difference that the Bible makes in the lives of those who sincerely seek to apply its message points to its divine origin.
2. The Bible says this about itself: 12 For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart (Heb. 4:12).
3. The apostle Paul said: “Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” (Acts 20:32)
4. The Bible’s power and authority is unlike any other book ever written.
a. Countless lives have been transformed by the supernatural power of God’s Word.
b. Have you ever heard someone say: “I was an outcast, a wretched man, a disgrace to my race, and a nuisance to the world, until I began to study mathematics and learned the multiplication table, but since that time I have been as happy as the day is long. I feel like singing all the time; my soul is full of joy and peace”?
c. No you probably have never heard that, but you have likely heard someone say: “I was wretched; I was lost; I broke my mother’s heart; I was ruined, reckless, helpless, and hopeless, until I heard the words of the Bible.”
d. Drug addicts have been cured by it, homosexuals have been freed by it, derelicts have been transformed by it, hardened criminals have been reformed by it, the hopeless have been encouraged by it, sinners have been sanctified by it, and skeptics have been convinced and convicted by it.
5. Let me share a couple of stories that came out of the end of WWII.
a. After U.S. soldiers marched onto a certain Pacific Island and the Japanese retreated, the natives on the island came out to greet the soldiers and they were carrying their Bibles.
b. When one of the natives approached a soldier holding out his Bible, the soldier said, “We’ve outgrown that sort of thing.”
c. The native said, “You ought to be glad we haven’t. If it weren’t for this book, we would be eating you for dinner.”
6. Another story describes the experience of the American army as they stormed across Okinawa.
a. Clarence Hall, a World War II correspondent, gave this remarkable testimony: “I can never think of the boons and benefits that the Bible invariably brings without thinking of Shimabuku, a tiny village I came upon as a war correspondent in Okinawa.”
b. As the U.S. soldiers moved across the island of Okinawa, the soldiers found villages of unbelievable poverty, ignorance and filth, but then they found a small obscure community named Shimabuku.
c. This community was different, the homes and the streets were clean, and the villagers were poised, cultured, and prosperous.
d. Why was Shimabuku different?
e. Thirty years earlier, an American missionary on his way elsewhere in Japan had paused at Shimabuku.
f. He'd stayed only long enough to make a pair of converts, teach them a couple of hymns, leave them a Japanese translation of the Bible and exhort them to live by it.
g. They'd had no contact with any Christian since.
h. Yet during those 30 years; guided by the Bible, they had built a Christian community that truly honored God.
i. How had it happened? The two converts patterned their lives on Jesus.
j. They'd adopted the Ten Commandments as Shimabuku's legal code and the Sermon on the Mount as their guide to social conduct.
k. In their school the Bible was the chief literature; it was read daily by all students, and major passages were memorized.
l. A whole generation of Shimabukans had drawn their ideas of human dignity and of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship from the Bible.
m. The result was plain to see. Shimabuku for years had had no jail, no brothel, no drunkenness, no divorce and there was a high level of health and happiness.
n. Clarence Hall finished his story: “Later I strolled through Shimabuku with a tough army sergeant. He said, ‘I can’t figure it out—this kind of people coming from a Bible and a couple of old guys who wanted to be like Jesus Christ. Maybe we have been using the wrong kind of weapons to make the world over!”
E. In conclusion, let me say that believing that the Bible is God’s Word is somewhat like farming.
1. The farmer buys the seed, but he wonders if the seed will produce the promised crop.
2. The farmer can weigh the seed, smell it, cut it up and examine it under the microscope, but the only sure test he can run is to plant the seed and see what happens.
3. We have examined the evidence about the Bible, but the only sure test is to read the Bible and try it in life, if we sincerely do that, then we will know that it is the Word of God.
Resources:
Skeptics Answered, by D. James Kennedy, Multnomah Books, 1997
Questions People Ask Ministers Most, by Harold Hazelip, Baker Book House, 1986
The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller, Penguin, 2009
How You Can Know the Bible is the Word of God (Pt. 1 & 2), Sermon by Jerry Shirley, SermonCentral
Ancient Words, Sermon by Scott Cody, SermonCentral.com
How Do I Know The Bible Is True?, Sermon by Dave McFadden, SermonCentral.com
What Christians Think About the Bible, Sermon by Timothy Peck, SermonCentral.com
Authority of the Bible, by Pat Zukeran, www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/auth-bib.html
The Bible is the Word of God, www.believers.org/believe/bel191.htm
