The Reliability of the Bible
How do we determine the reliability of things?
Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible
Are the Manuscripts Reliable?
Test the Truthfulness of the Bible
Are the Apostles Reliable?
Is the History Accurate?
Can the Prophecies be checked?
Examine the Effects of the Bible
Are lives being changed?
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Intro
This has been a great week for Hickory Creek.
While we continue to work through some redesign plans for our facility expansion, it appears that the cost is not going to be a problem!
You see I got an email this week from a man in the United Arab Emirates who is dying and wants to give this ministry millions of dollars!
The email said he has somehow heard about me and the ministry that is going on here and since he doesn’t have kids wants to give us that money!
Isn’t that amazing? Now, I am not sure who he heard about me from, but we must be getting pretty famous around the world. He said we could receive millions from him and all we have to do is pay the lawyer several thousand dollars in advance and then the money will be ours!
Isn’t that unbelievable?!
Some of you are saying, “Yes that really is unbelievable because it is a scam and should not be believed! Come on Scott, You can’t believe everything you read!”
And to that, I would say, you’re right. You can’t believe everything you read and you certainly should not believe an email from an unknown source that says it wants to give you millions of dollars and it will only cost you a few thousand upfront!
But how can we determine what we believe regarding what we read? There are some things that we read, that if we didn’t believe them, could be detrimental to us, like warning signs and instruction. So how do we determine what to believe?
Sermon Series Transition
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We are in the midst of a sermon series called the Creed and we have been looking into important beliefs in Christianity that have been attacked or taught against and the church has worked to refute and communicate truth.
Over the years, the reliability of the Bible has been attacked over and over again because if you can discredit the Bible, you discredit much of what we know about Christianity and Jesus Christ and how God has told us how we can be in a relationship with Him and be restored to fellowship.
So the Bible, if true, contains some very important information. But how do we determine if it is true or if it is just a hoax like the email scams of today, something that was written just to get some followers of men and is not really the word of God?
Well, for some things, we can check out resources we trust.
In regards to email hoaxes there are a variety of websites we can check to see if something is a hoax.
But how do we determine if something is true when it can’t be directly checked with the sources because they are not around anymore AND when it is something that could be truly important to our lives if it were true?
Transition
That is what we are going to look into today.
How can we know the Bible is true? Can we trust that the Bible is truly reliable as the word of God?
Slide
Today, this is not so much a message from the Bible as it is about the Bible.
But for us to trust messages from the Bible, we need to be able to trust that the Bible is truly the word of God because the Bible is our source of
most of what we know about Jesus Christ,
all of what we know concerning the Salvation it speaks of and how to attain it, and
all of what we know concerning how we should live our lives to glorify God.
This book, if true, is one that will affect every aspect of our life now as well as our life eternal.
So, what support is there that we can rely on the Bible truly as the word of God?
To answer that Question, we are going to begin looking at some of the evidence to make a determination as to if it is trustworthy or not which will help us to decide why we should believe the Bible.
In checking out this evidence, we first want to do what we would do with any written document to determine its reliability and that is
Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible
Slide
Just like we don’t take some email we get as true and reliable without knowing who it is from and if they are a reliable source, we shouldn’t take something that tells us about salvation and the road to salvation as reliable without knowing if we can trust the sources.
Now for those of you who have attended our Back to Basics Seminar, some of this will be a refresher, but I think it is imperative that we are refreshed on this often so we can continue to walk in the assurance of our faith.
Transition
So as we scrutinize the sources, we want to ask
Are the Manuscripts Reliable?
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How can we be sure that what we are reading today accurately reflects what the apostles and prophets wrote down?
Hand copied!
Because I am not sure if you know this, but the Bible we are reading today is a translation from manuscripts that were originally written in Greek and Hebrew, and they were written and copied through the years BY HAND!
Being transmitted that way through hundreds and even a couple of thousand years, couldn’t there have been errors and changes so that what we are reading today doesn’t even resemble what was originally written?
Well, the truth is, is that we can be very certain that we have what the apostles and prophets actually wrote.
Copying Process
That is because of an incredible copying system that was in place.
You see, the copyists who copied Scripture took their job very seriously.
They had all kinds of safeguards in place to make sure they produced accurate and reliable copies.
They knew how many words and letters were in each line they would copy, they knew how many lines were in a book, they knew the middle word and letter of each line and book and they would double check these to make sure it was correct. If it wasn’t correct, they would start over.
Dead Sea Scrolls confirm accuracy
“Ok, so they made them as accurate as they could, but I don’t care how many safeguards you make, over hundreds of years, there still could be many, many errors and changes!”
Well, the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has helped confirm the accuracy of this process.
Up until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, the oldest manuscript we had of Isaiah was dated about 900 AD. In the dead sea scrolls there was a nearly complete manuscript of Isaiah dated about 100 BC, that is 1000 years earlier than anything we had.
When compared with the manuscripts from 1000 years later, they are a 95% match and the 5% that is not is spelling variations and missed words or lines.
This copying process proved accurate for over 1000 years.
Large number of copies
Not only was there a very good copying process that preserved that accuracy of the Bible, but we also have about 25,000 New Testament manuscripts in Greek along with copes in other languages that we can compare to one another to be more assured of the accuracy of the New Testament.
That helps because even if there are mistakes, when you have so many copies it ensures accuracy because not all the copies will have the same errors, so it helps you to be even more assured that what you have is accurate.
Transition
Ok, so given the evidence, we can believe that what we are reading today has been accurately preserved and translated so that we can be sure it is what was written by the apostles and prophets.
But even if it is accurate, is it true?
If a liar writes something down, and someone else copies it, I may have an accurate recording of what the liar wrote, but that doesn’t help me know the truth because the guy is a liar.
This is where we have to
Test the Truthfulness of the Bible
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We need to see if what is accurately recorded for us is reliable and can be checked against reality.
To do that, I think there are several questions we need to ask.
First and foremost,
Are the Apostles Reliable?
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Can we trust these guys who wrote down what we read as the New Testament?
Are they liars?
Did they make this stuff up for their own benefit?
We see guys today start religions.
Maybe it is for money or power or sex.
What of the Apostles? Did they have anything to gain by starting up Christianity?
Well in actuality they not only did not experience any earthly gain from what they were proclaiming, they in fact suffered for what they were proclaiming.
We talked about this last week with the resurrection, but I just want to reiterate that the apostles gained no earthly wealth or benefit for preaching what they were preaching.
Instead they suffered and were killed for what they were preaching.
And they did not just believe what they were preaching, they knew it to be true because they were preaching what they themselves witnessed.
This was not just a strong faith. This was absolute knowing to be true. They witnessed Jesus die and they saw him alive after he resurrected.
This is why they went from faithless followers to fearless leaders proclaiming the truth that Jesus is the Christ who died for our sins and resurrected from the dead!
Objection - Were they crazy?
Ok, maybe they really believe they saw Jesus, but maybe they were just crazy! Maybe they were just filled with such grief that they went over the deep end and went crazy.
Now granted it can seem crazy to say that someone was dead, and now was alive, but crazy people are not all crazy in the same way. They would not all be saying the same thing. The apostles and Paul and more than 500 others saw that Jesus had died and they saw Him alive.
Paul tells us this in
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1 Corinthians 15:3-6
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.
Transition
Ok so we can see that the Apostles are reliable in that they had no reason to say what they were saying if it was not true, in fact they would have every earthly reason to stop saying what they were saying and we can see that they could not all have been crazy because they would not all say the same thing.
But another question to ask in testing the truthfulness of the Bible is
Is the History Accurate?
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If the Bible is really the word of God, then God is not going to make mistakes concerning history. After all, He not only knows history before it even happens, He is the author of History.
So is the Bible historically accurate in the things that can be checked?
The Bible has proven to be incredibly accurate.
Archaeology has confirmed many of the historical facts of the Bible.
Hittites
For instance in the Old Testament, mentioned 61 times are a people group called the Hittites. You may remember that Bathsheba’s husband was Uriah the Hittite, whom David had killed. (2 Samuel 11:3).
Anyway, up until the start of the 20th century, critics of the Bible scoffed at the mention in the Old Testament of the Hittite people since there was no evidence in history or archaeology that corroborated what the Bible said.
But in the early part of the 20th century, evidence of the Hittite people was discovered in the area of Turkey, showing once again the historical accuracy of the Bible.
There have continued to be discoveries that confirm people groups, places the Bible mentions, as well as political leaders of the time.
It is through many archeological discoveries that knowledge of history has “caught up” with the Bible in what it had to say.
A noted Archeologist, Dr. Nelson Glueck, said
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“It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.”
- Nelson Glueck
. Dr. Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert, (New York: Farrar, Strous and Cudahy, 1959), 136.
http://www.apologetics315.com/2009/07/sunday-quote-nelson-glueck-on.html accessed on 4/30/3015
Archaeology has been a great friend to Christianity in supporting the history that is revealed throughout the Bible.
Transition
Ok, so maybe the apostles and prophets are reliable and the history is accurately recorded, but what about all those prophecies? If God is really God and this is his word, then we would expect that prophecies would be 100% accurate? So, we ask,
Can the Prophecies be checked?
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One would think that if this was not a book from God, that the sheer number of prophetic statements made would be quite a stumbling block for the Bible because all you have to do is show that one thing did not occur that was prophesied to occur up to this point.
Now granted, there are some prophecies have yet to be fulfilled regarding the end times and things yet to come. So how do we check the prophecies?
Well if Jesus is truly the Messiah and the Bible is truly the word of God, then every prophecy concerning the Messiah would have to be fulfilled in Jesus.
Now a critic might ask, well if these prophecies were written before Jesus was born, couldn’t he have just worked to fulfill them?
Well, the reality is, is that is just not possible in many instances, because
many of them have to do with His human ancestry,
some have to do with his death and mode of it
as well as things that would accompany His death
that just could not be orchestrated by anyone except God.
For instance, there are many prophecies concerning His lineage.
Lineage
Messiah would be born in Bethlehem – Micah 5:2
Messiah would be born of a Virgin – Isaiah 7:14
Messiah would be a Descendant of Abraham, Isaac, from the Tribe of Judah, and a descendant of David.
There are many prophecies concerning the events surrounding his death
Death
Messiah would be silent before His accusers – Isaiah 53:7
Messiah would be mocked – Psalm 22:7
Messiah’s hands and feet would be pierced – Psalm 22:16
Messiah would be with wicked and rich at his death – Isaiah 53:9
And these are just a few.
All of these things were true about Jesus and verified in the New Testament.
A Mathematician once calculated the odds of any one man fulfilling only 8 of these Messianic prophecies as 1 in 1017.
To put that in perspective, if you consider that some people estimate that somewhere around 100 billion (1 to 1011) have ever lived in all of history.
That means in all of human history, there hasn’t even been 1 to the 1017 people who have ever existed. Therefore, it is unreasonable to think that someone could fulfill those prophecies by chance.
Transition
When we Scrutinize the Sources, we see that they are reliable, when we Test the Truthfulness, we find that the Bible has been accurate in amazing ways.
The final thing we want to do is
Examine the Effects
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You would think that if God gave us something so we could know Him and know how to live, it would have effects in people’s lives and that their lives were being changed in some way.
So, we ask,
Are Lives being changed?
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By that I mean, how has the Bible changed the lives of those who have put into practice and believed the truth about what it teaches about Jesus.
Has the Bible had a powerful effect on changing people’s lives?
First, we see that the Bible tells us that it is powerful
Hebrews 4:12
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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.
1 Peter 1:23
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For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
The word of God is living and active and enduring.
So if it is powerful, do we see that power changing people?
We certainly see it in
The Apostles
Paul
Even people today
Lives have been transformed throughout the age of Christianity through believing what the Bible teaches.
Objection
But we also see those who claim to be Christians who still do a lot of horrible stuff.
How do we account for that?
Well, one of 2 ways.
First, maybe they are not really a Christian.
There have been people throughout history that have professed a belief in Christ and not really believed. Therefore, there is no effect on their life.
Secondly, it may be because a lack of maturity.
If we are not keeping in step with the Spirit,
If we are not reading the word,
Then we are not going to be evidencing much of a changed life.
That is sad on so many levels. That person is not experiencing all that Christ came to give in this life; Peace, joy, fulfillment. Secondly, they are bad examples for other people who really need the Lord.
But thankfully, most people can tell the difference between a hypocrite and a person that is truly living out their faith in the power of the Lord and growing in their knowledge of the Lord and his word.
That is when lives are truly being changed.
Don’t be like one of those people who don’t mature in Christ by failing to grow in your knowledge of Christ through His word.
The Bible is the Word of God and it has radically transformed many lives, but it is powerless sitting on a coffee table or on a book shelf collecting dust.
We have people here today that have overcome drug addictions, left careers, restored marriages, and experienced incredible fulfillment because they have continued to grow in their relationship with the Lord through His word.
Conclusion
The evidence that the Bible is the word of God is significant.
It has credible and trustworthy sources
It is accurate historically
It records prophecy and shows the supernatural fulfillment
It has the power to change people’s lives by believing the message it has recorded about Jesus Christ.
Have you believed God’s word to be true?
Have you relied on its message and believed in who it tells us is the Messiah, Jesus Christ?
If you haven’t, and if today, you have been brought to a point of believing that the Bible is God’s word and you believe its message, then your next step would be to do what the Bible says in regards to receiving salvation.
The Bible tells us
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John 1:12 - Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God
Romans 10:9 - That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
If you need to receive Jesus as your Savior, then confess your belief as we pray.
