Why Do We Have The Bible?
Deuteronomy 6:4-19 2 Timothy 3:10-17 September 15, 2019 Pastor Rick
If someone were to ask you, why do have the Bible, what would you be your first response?
The Bible has been called the Word of God. It has been called the Scriptures. God has told us to read it, study it, and apply it to our lives. God has allowed the creation of the smart phone so that you can have the bible with your 24/7. If you have a smart phone, the first app you should download is Youversion, bible app. The second is New Life At Calvary. Before you get influenced by anything on your phone, read some of the word of God. Remind yourself, your first information should come from God.
We live in a society that wants to either rewrite or ban the bible and without really knowing what they say or what it is all about. Whereas at one time the Bible was seen as the final authority, today we often try to make it just another book. When you get to college they put it on the same level as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
But before we say that’s a shame we have to look at ourselves. Haven’t we even place out own opinion above the truth of God’s word. Either openly or silently, we have all said, “I don’t care what the bible says, I am going to do this anyways.” How many times can a person you love tell you, “I don’t care what you say, I am going to do this anyways before you start to lose your love for them.”
Yet we serve a God who is revealed in the Scriptures who have seen us put our fist in defiance in God’s face with our rejection of God’s word, yet God still loves us and invites us back into a relationship with Him through His Son Jesus Christ. No matter how much time you spend communing with in nature, nature is not going to reveal that truth about God to you.
How many of you have ever seen the show myth busters? A couple of guys go out and challenge certain things that people think are true, but may in fact not be true at all. We are going to begin with some myth-busters about the Bible, so that we can all be on the same page talking about the same book
1. The Bible is a book written by the white Man to keep everybody else under control.
• The bible is not one book, it is actually 66 books.
• The Bible was written in one person’s lifetime but took 1500 years to write.
• The Books of the bible came from Asia, Europe and Africa.
• The first five books were written by an African married to a black Woman. His name was Moses.
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2. Everything in the bible is True.
• The bible records the lives of people. It records, the truth, half-truths and lies depending on what is being said. When Satan told Adam and Eve, if they eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would not die, but would become like God. It’s in the bible, but it was a flat out lie.
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3. God APPROVES of everything in the bible.
• In Judges 19 a woman was violently raped in the bible and died as a result. God records this action but does not approve of rape. The resulting consequence was 60,000 soldiers were killed in battle stemming from this incident.
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4. The bible teaches, Judge Not.
• The Bible teaches that we are always to judge, but we are to judge fairly. The rest of the passage says, that when you are judging make sure that you are not doing the same thing, otherwise you can’t help the person who has the problem. In Matthew 7, Jesus was dealing with being a hypocrite in Judging. He speaks of a log in your eye with a speck in your brother’s eye. First take out the log, then help your brother get out the speck.
• I Corinthians 5: tells us to judge the behavior of other believers.
5. Every book in the bible carries EQUAL weight today.
• Some books were to point us to Jesus. Those books that were to point us to Jesus have things in them that no longer apply. The purpose of the books on the sacrifice of animals was to show that one day God would provide a sacrificial lamb whose blood would take away the sins of the world. Jesus is that sacrificial lamb whose blood did just that.
That is why we no longer offer animal sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice that took away our sins once and for all .
Some books are more relevant to our Christian lives today, especially the New Testament. You are going to know more about how to live your life for Christ reading Colossians than you will from reading Haggai.
6. The Bible is written in chronological order from Genesis To Revelation.
• The Bible tells the story of God creating mankind. We reject God and can’t do anything about making things right again. God promises human beings, that He will not abandon them but will send a savior that can bring them back into a right relationship with God. God sends the Savior and there is still rejection. God eventually brings an end to human history as we know it with the creation of a new heavens and a new earth.
• As a new believer, get to know the New Testament First. Start your reading with Matthew.
7. All of the bible should be taken literally.
• Some of the bible is poetry.-God is my rock.
• Some of the bible is history, hymns, biographies, parables, letters, some is straight teachings and sermons.
Not everything is the bible is addressed to us. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute. Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for your frequent stomach illness. God told Noah to build an Ark.
8. The Bible is full of contradictions.
• The Bible has to be allowed to speak for itself. You have to look at the context in which a verse is written both what comes before it and what comes after it.
• Most people who think it is full of contradictions cannot think of anything that has to do with the necessity of believing in Jesus Christ for our salvation.
Most of the differences people refer to have to do with numbers. One account talks about 3 people being present where another only mentions 2. It doesn’t mean the 3rd person was not there, it just didn’t matter to the person.
• If the Bible allows something in one section and forbids it in another, then we must examine why to know the truth. In one passage, it says “I do not allow a woman to speak” and in another it says a Phillip had five daughters who prophesied. We need to find out what’s going on here.
• The Bible does not teach Jesus was born on December 25th and it does not teach Jesus died on Good Friday. Jesus was most likely crucified on Thursday. We must also not allow tradition to overrule the bible.
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9. The Bible teaches that A Woman Should Not Be Allowed in the pulpit. There are no pulpits in the bible. For the first three hundred years, there were not any church buildings. The church meant the people. The first evangelist Jesus sent out with the news of the resurrection were women.
10. The Bible has stories that can’t possibly be true. Why would Jesus lie to us?
• Jesus spoke of a real Noah and the flood and compared it to his coming.
• Jesus spoke of a real Jonah in the belly of a fish and compared it to his death and resurrection.
• Jesus spoke of a real Sodom and Gomorroh and compared it to the judgment to Come.
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11. I have to believe everything in the Bible to be saved. The Bible never says that. Our faith hinges on the resurrection not on the Bible.
12.The Bible teaches that we are all God’s children and on our way to heaven. The Bible teaches that we are all created in the image of God and that God desires to have a relationship with us. But because of our sinful nature we are children of darkness on our way to hell.
To become a child of God we must be adopted into the family of God by accepting the work of Jesus dying on our behalf. The New Testament speaks of the children of light and the children of darkness.
Why do we have the bible. It is going to be the map that leads us to a knowledge of who God is and what God is wanting to do in our lives.
The starting point in becoming a Christian is to recognize “I are a rebel living in opposition to God, and I need to surrender myself to the authority of God if I am to have any hope of being saved.”
We deceive ourselves if we come to God on any other terms. God wants to save us, but God will not do it by force. Each of us has to make that decision for ourselves.
Here’s what we miss. God wants to do more than save us from hell. The biggest thing about God’s grace is not simply that God has saved us from hell, but God has saved us in order to show the life of Jesus Christ in us.
Coming to Christ is more than, “now I don’t have to go to hell.” It is, “now I am obligated to allow Jesus Christ to show Himself in me in every area of my life.”
God’s Desire Is To CONFORM Us To The Image of Christ.
How do we know, what God wants to show in us, or what it is that we should be becoming. This is where the Scriptures come into our lives to let us know if we are being conformed more to the life God is calling us to live. God is not conforming us to simply die in the grave. God is conforming us for a work we are to do in heaven.
There is nothing in the bible that says life after death is made up of people floating on clouds or heaven being one eternal worship service. Jesus spoke of people being in charge of cities based on their faithfulness here in this life. Heaven is going to have all kinds of assignments for people to do. God’s trying to get us ready for those assignments now.
D. The purpose of the Scriptures is to PREPARE us For The Present and The Future.
We find in 2 Timothy 3:16 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (TNIV) 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that all God's people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
1. The Scriptures Are To EQUIP Us For What God Wants Us To Do
Notice that it says all Scripture, not just the parts that we like. We can’t pick and choose which parts we want to obey just to be accepted by other people or to try to make ourselves or others feel more comfortable with sin.
The bible is going to hit all of us with something we want to do that God has rejected. Do our natural desires get to override the word of God? My sinful desire may be different than yours, but the desire is still sinful and need to be brought under the authority of Christ.
Jesus did not tell the woman caught in adultery, “I understand you were born with that desire for a man in your life”, he said, “Go and sin no more.” I know there were things inside of me when I was born. No one taught me to lie or steal but by the time I was 9 I was very good at both of them.
The Scriptures are for teaching which means that we come to Scriptures for wisdom on how to make good choices for the things we are facing. We find knowledge on what to do in various situations. If we would read Scripture with a commitment to obeying them, we would not have to spend time searching for what we should do. It is God’s will for us to live holy lives.
We are to come to the scriptures as a student eager to learn, not as a new teacher seeking to change the meaning of the Scriptures to suit our own ends.
Can you imagine showing up to learn a foreign language, and telling the instructor why the rules for the language are all wrong, because that’s not how the rules apply in your own language.
The Scriptures are for rebuking which means that all of us are going to discover, there are times when we are going in the wrong direction and will need to get back on course. When our actions do not align themselves with the Scriptures, we are the ones who need to make the change. Don’t tell people, “stop judging me, instead say thank you for revealing the truth of God’s word to me.” The Holy Spirit and I will take it from here.
The Word of God isn’t to be changed or adjusted based on the cultural values or norms going on in the society. God knows that every sin carries within it its own consequence for destruction. It may not be immediately apparent to us, but it is still there.
If you notice, the Bible never tells us what kind of government to set up, it never tells us which political party to belong to, it never tells us what kind of church building to build or what kind of clothes to wear. The reason is the word of God is to permeate every culture, in every time period, in every place of the world.
No matter what the structure is, our goal is to transform that institution, that government, the job, that society and make it more Christ like, by winning the people in it to Jesus Christ so that they can influence the society
The Scriptures are for correcting, which means they give us guidance on how to restore what we have broken through our actions. How many of us have been aware when we have broken a relationship through our words or deeds or lack of deeds.
What do we do when we have wronged another person? The Scriptures provide an answer. What do we do when we have disobeyed God? The Scriptures provide an answer. What do we do when someone asks us if what they are doing is wrong? The Scriptures provide an answer.
The Scriptures provide training for righteousness. So often people want to know, how far can I go before it becomes sin. But the Scriptures tell us to be holy, because God is holy. Jesus evens has the audacity to tell us be perfect therefore as you heavenly Father is perfect.
None of us have reached the standard of holiness that God is calling us to and none of us have reached the level of Perfection Jesus spoke of. A true Christian never thinks he or she is better than anyone else, because what matters is whether he or she is at the place God is calling him or her to live.
The goal isn’t how close can I live to sin, but rather how close do I want to be toward God. We all have temptations for sin that we want God to make a tiny exception for. Instead of turning it over to God, we may choose to keep it close by just in case we want to reach out for it.
Some of us will not come to Christ, because we would rather hold on to our personal sin than change our behavior for Christ. We need to ask ourselves, “in a 150 years will I still be happy with the choice that I held on to the sin and kept Jesus at a distance.” Always look at life with eternity in view.
The Bible helps to understand, that God was in the beginning and that all of us are His creation and all of us will give an account of our lives to God. God loved the nation of Israel, but God gave it the freedom to reject Him and His word, which they did.
Eventually God gave them what they wanted, and their enemies slaughtered many and took the rest into captivity. God’s love for them kept postponing the judgment they would face, but eventually their sin won out.
There is a spiritual enemy who wants to keep our rebellion against God a secret from us. He wants us to believe, we are all okay with God. The Scriptures are honest enough with us to let us know, that’s just not true. It is up to us to decide if we will stand before God as a rebel in defiance or as a servant trying to live for God’s Son Jesus Christ.
God does not send anybody to hell, we go there on our own. God simply gives us what we died demanding which is a life either away from Christ or one with Christ.
There’s no reason to think if you do not want Christ now, that you will be entitled to him in heaven. There’s every reason to believe, that if you desire to live for Christ on earth, you will want to live with him in heaven.
We may call the bible old fashioned, narrow minded, out of date, and bigoted, but calling names never changes truth. We have the bible to let us know, Jesus is the Way, the Truth and The Life, No-one comes to the father except through Him.
