Question to be asked: It seems like we put an awful lot of weight on what the Bible says. What makes it different from any other religious writings? It’s so old, and there are so many different ones, how can I even be sure that it’s worth trusting?
What a week this has been! We came back from a trip, and in a matter of 48 hours, life as we know is has been changed - at least for the time being. And in the midst of that, our governor closed schools statewide at least until March 30th. College and university campuses also are closed - many for the rest of the year. It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
But I want to tell you something about students in IL, and nationwide, that’s of even greater concern to me than a virus named Covid-19. It’s some statistics that I was reminded of at the Iron Sharpens Iron conference last weekend - that some 2/3 or more of young people who grow up as a part of the Church drop out for a year, or forever, when they reach college age.
I was at a workshop last weekend where the presenter talked about that and then asked us “Why?” Answers varied. But I think we should probably be asking, “Why not?”
Why wouldn’t they drop out? Think this through. They grow up, learning the stories, learning to act Christian, and learning that being around their Christian friends helps them to keep that up. Then, they leave for college. For all those years growing up, they accepted that the Bible was reliable, or at least they were consistently told that. Suddenly, that’s not what surrounds them, and their faith collapses.
Sure enough, we rely, completely, on the reliability of the Bible, yet there are huge numbers of people, young and old, who follow Jesus who really aren’t sure why they believe what they believe.
And, at times of crisis or challenge, they’re confronted with the questions: why should you believe in a literal creation of the earth like Genesis talks about when so many smart people don’t? Why should you believe in the story of the flood, the Exodus, water from a rock, bread from Heaven, walls falling down, children raised from the dead, Jonah and the whale? Why should you believe that we have the actual story of Jesus and words that He actually spoke? And why should you believe that the words He spoke are true?
Faced with those questions, and having no adequate answer, the faith of many people collapses.
When CCC’s leadership studied together and clarified our “Core Values” about 18 months ago, the first one on the list was this: we follow biblical authority.
That means, we’re not some kind of democracy. We don’t determine what’s true and right by voting.
I saw a church cartoon that showed a meeting of people around a table. One of them was saying, “It says here in the bylaws that the will of God can’t be overturned without a 2/3 majority.” No. We’re doing our best to follow an authoritative standard. That’s the Bible.
There’s a verse in Ephesians that describes the church being…
Ephesians 2:20 …built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,
So, the Church a rich history, but we’re built on something more. We’re structured and organized a certain way, but we don’t exist because of the way we’re structured. We’re more than an organization. We uphold some good traditions, but those aren’t the foundation. We’re together this morning because together we believe some important truths, and those truths are unchanging.
Pull the Bible out from underneath that, and what happens?
Well, the Church splits into countless denominations. Young people approach adulthood and decide that what they believed no longer holds their loyalty. Others move from church to church, because whether a church teaches and practices what the Bible says is no longer an important focus.
It leads us to this important question - one that you really need to be asking and that you really need to settle just as soon as you can. Can I trust the Bible?
If you haven’t ever thought this through before, I hope that today you will leave with a much more solid appreciation for why this book can and should be trusted as God’s word.
Some groups will tell you that in order to believe their Scriptures, you should read them, and the Lord will just cause you to feel good about it - a kind of enlightenment will come upon you and you’ll have assurance that it’s true.
Some groups will tell you that to deny their Scriptures or to desecrate them in any way makes you worthy of death!
Some groups will tell you that their Scriptures are good and useful, but that you’ll just have to come to that conclusion all on your own.
This morning, I’m going to give you the really cosmic, super-spiritualized, impressive reason that you can trust the Bible to be true:
You can trust the Bible for the same reasons that you would trust anything that has been written.
That is, you can trust the Bible because of Its Author, its writing, its preservation, its cohesiveness, and its effectiveness. When those things are all established about something that has been written, you trust it.
Ill - You’re in a courtroom. A last will and testament has been read, and someone has disputed it. If the will is trustworthy, you’ll inherit millions. If it’s not, you’ll get nothing. What does the defense attorney do to prove that the will is trustworthy? He might very well talk about its author, its writing, its preservation, its cohesiveness, and even its effectiveness. If those can pass the tests, then the court might agree that the will is authentic and binding. The same is true of the Bible. If it will pass the tests that we apply to anything else that has been written, then we might well agree today that it’s authentic. I think you can. You can trust the Bible because of…
1. Its author
Anytime you write some claim, of any kind, you need to be able to point to your sources. That’s especially important in an era where there’s the resource of information called the internet. Anyone with a smartphone and a signal can be an instant genius…sort of.
For instance, there’s Wikipedia. Pick a subject, there’s probably some entry on Wikipedia about it. Wikipedia is an open-source knowledge base. Most anyone can log onto it and contribute or make changes to articles. They can even do it anonymously. So, teachers probably aren’t very impressed if you turn in a paper in school and the only source you site is Wikipedia.
Here lately it has become important to consider who your source is when you make decisions about how to live under the shadow of Covid 19 - the Corona virus. If you get onto social media and there’s an article from “a health expert,” it will give you advice about what to do and not to do. But, scroll down a few more articles, and some other health expert says something different. Suddenly, it may dawn on you, it really matters who the author of your information is! Is that person authoritative and trustworthy, or not?
Our mayor even sent an Email around to churches that urged us to adhere to the recommendations that the regional health department had issued and not meet, but at the same time those guidelines assumed churches and places of business were still going to have groups meeting! So, we checked our sources and the health department said what we’re doing today was just fine.
Here’s what this all should remind us: If you care about what’s true, you’ll give some attention to your sources.
Knowing that something comes from a reliable source is an important part of being able to trust it.
Now, what if you can determine that the original source of the Bible is not just a group of some 40 human beings, but God Himself? What if God has communicated His very mind to us?
The Bible makes the bold claim that it is God’s word, not just the writings of man. If that’s true, I can trust this book!
You should want to find out if God really wrote this or not. It certainly makes that claim for itself.
That doesn’t prove it, by the way. It’s also going to take the other evidences we’re looking at today to help verify that. By the end, I think you’ll be able to see that the author of this book is God Himself. If that’s true, (and it is), then you can trust what it says.
Here’s the 2nd reason you can trust the Bible…
2. Its writing
Let’s talk about a word for a minute. In English, we usually call it “inspiration.” That word gets used some different ways, so we need to consider what we mean when we refer to the Bible.
Ill - Someone gets up, gives a great speech, and a review of it all says the speaker was “very inspirational.” In fact, his speech was so inspirational that it inspired 150 young people to take to the streets, break windows, and burn cars. They were inspired.
But when we read 2 Tim 3:16 in some different translations, we’re introduced to this word “inspired” to describe how the Bible was written. Here’s how it reads in the ESV…
2 Timothy 3:16-17
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
That’s really a good way to put it. Take the word “God” and attach it to the word “pneumatic” and you have the word used here. Have you ever taken a pneumatic hose, hooked up to an air tank, and pressed down on the valve? What does it do? PSSSSSSSSSS…. Or a balloon, and you release the air… PSSSSSSSS.
That’s what this word means. All Scripture is the outbreathing of God. In English, we call that inspiration. In Bible study circles, inspiration is the oversight of the HS that made sure that the written words of the human authors were kept completely accurate and were the very words that God intended to be written.
As they are writing it, and as they look back at what they wrote, the human authors that God used to write the Bible were conscious that they weren’t just writing their own ideas…
2 Peter 1:20b-21
…no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Paul and Luke were on a ship that was supposed to be headed for Rome, but it got caught up in a severe storm, and Luke describes how it was “driven along” by the wind before they shipwrecked. That’s how these men spoke from God - carried, driven along by the HS. It wasn’t their thoughts. It was the mind of God driving what they wrote.
So, in the OT, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets spoke and wrote, they often added, “This is what the Lord is saying…”
Paul told the Thessalonians
1 Thessalonians 2:13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.
When you’re asked, “How was the Bible written? Who wrote the Bible?” you can have the right answer. Just like when you open up a book and it tells you, right there on the inside, who wrote it, the Bible, all throughout itself, says that its Author is God. Oh, He used about 40 different human authors, but all Scripture, it says, is the outbreathing of God. Once again, you’ll want evidences that verify that claim, and I think the evidences are certainly there. It will pass the test.
A 3rd reason you can trust the Bible is…
3. Its preservation
Some people look at the Bible, see that it was finished over 2,000 years ago, some of it over 3,000 years ago, and assume we can’t possibly be sure that what we have is what was originally written - especially when we don’t have one original. How can we trust copies - handwritten copies?
Go back to the courtroom and the last will and testament for a minute. What would the defense attorney do to prove that the document was well-preserved? He’d talk about the reliability of the copies, how close they were made to the original, how many copies existed, where were the copies from, and what was their story.
When we start to ask those questions of the Bible, we have a mountain of reasons to believe in its reliability.
Some years ago, I engaged in a study to see how the Bible described its own history, and I was surprised about how much it had to say - over 6 pages of verses that describe it in one way or another.
From as early on as Exodus 17, Moses is told by God to start writing. By the time Moses stops writing, he will have written the first 5 books of the Bible.
Exodus 17:14
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
Moses’ writing becomes important to the nation of Israel - the book of the Law - it’s called.
Deuteronomy 30:10
when you obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that are written in this Book of the Law, when you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
And that Book is passed on and added to through Israel’s history. They realized how important it was, and they were careful to preserve it. So that, one day in a synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus stood up to read and He was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah - the same Isaiah who 700 years earlier had predicted the arrival of Jesus.
Today, because of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have copies of the whole book of Isaiah that were tucked away 150 years before Jesus was born.
When it comes to the way it was saved and passed along to us, the Bible passes the tests.
Another reason we can trust the Bible is…
4. Its cohesiveness
There are tons of reasons that you would expect to find discrepancies in the Bible - written in 3 different languages, by about 40 different authors. It took over 1,500 years before it was finished. It deals with different cultures over a big geographic area. It contains histories of kings and beggars, heroes and villains, but all throughout it contains one central message: God’s story of creating and redeeming the human race. That’s usually referred to as “internal cohesiveness.” That means it agrees with itself.
You couldn’t say that about just today’s edition of the Rockford Register Star.
Let’s look at one last reason you can trust the Bible:
5. Its effectiveness
It’s not the only book that has impacted history. Many books have. But the way that the Bible has changed history is important. That’s not proof that it’s trustworthy. Just add that to the reasons to believe you can trust the Bible.
Then, how has it affected you? That’s not proof either, but your personal experience is another thing to add to the reasons you have to believe you can trust the Bible. Don’t start with it, but don’t discount the importance of your personal story.
What’s your favorite Bible book, Bible verse? What passage of Scripture helped you at a crucial time in life? What do you want read at your funeral? Why? What do you quote when you’re scared or feeling overwhelmed? When you’re rejoicing? When you need to be rebuked? When you’re tempted?
Lives continue to be transformed by the message of Scripture. Yours may be one of them, or perhaps today it could become one of them.
God’s word can be trusted. We’ve scratched only the surface today of why that’s true. I hope it helps you to have confidence that this book is more than just the words of men. It is the very word of God, given to us, and for us, so that we can know God! Do you believe it?
Now, if you really believe that is true, let me ask you: “What about your time in the Word is demonstrating that? How much are you making God’s word the foundation of your thinking?”
Ill - Take out your smartphone - Android or iPhone. I know that not everyone will be able to do this. If you don’t use a smartphone, just sit there and look judgmental and indignant at someone near you as he or she does this.
iPhone. Go to “Settings” - Tap on your phone’s name “Sherm’s iPhone 6” - “Last 7 Days” Have a look at what you did on your phone for the past 7 days. Look at the big numbers that show your average per day. Then, have a look at the totals in different categories or apps for the week. Scroll down and have a look at your “pickups per day”
Android version: is called “Digital Wellbeing.” Open that up, and you’ll find a way to see how much you’ve used your phone. Then there’s a breakdown of the apps you’ve used, and how many times you opened your phone.
OK. I don’t need to interpret that for you. Put the facts in front of you. Put your interpretive skills to work and ask the question: How is my life demonstrating that God’s word is very important to me? Is it?
Conclusion:
This is the application part of all this.
There’s no value in being able to trust the Bible is we’re not benefitting from what it says. I don’t mean having a single verse taken out context framed on your wall so that it looks nice. I mean hiding God’s word in your heart; allowing the living active word of God to cut deep into your life and judge your thoughts and attitudes; skillfully handling the sword of God as your weapon of defense against temptation and falsehood; the implanted word which is able to save your soul.
That word of God, that we can trust, is the only way we can know God. That word of God is what tells us we must do to have life in His name…
