The Reliability Of The Bible Series

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?

Slide

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

Slide

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.