Why The Bible Is True

Why the Bible is True

Do you know what your Youth (Church Kids) believe?

Evangelical Fundamental Born-again Youth

Eighty percent (80%) of kids involved in church agree that religious beliefs are important to them, and

Sixty-one percent (61%) say the Bible is accurate. (39%) do not believe that the Bible is True!

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But do all religions pray to the same god?

An alarming sixty-three percent (63%) of our kids think so, and seventy percent (70%) of them say there is no absolute moral truth!

So how do they determine what’s right or wrong?

Seventy-two percent (72%) say they can tell when something is right by whether or not it “works” in their lives.

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And do our kids believe Jesus rose from the grave? Do they think the devil and the Holy Spirit are real?

Fifty-one percent (51%) of our kids don’t believe in the resurrection of Christ, sixty-five percent (65%) don’t think the devil is real, and

Sixty-eight percent (68%) don’t believe the Holy Spirit is a living entity!

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Stats from Josh McDowel "Beyond Beliefs to Convictions"

This is a crisis on so many levels…

Not being convinced of what the Bible says.

Being more influenced by the culture than Biblical Christianity.

It is a crisis in the nature of truth itself.

Why the Bible is True… Let me explain what I mean as “true.”

61% of Churched Youth believe the Bible is true… BUT 81% believe that “all truth is relative to the individual.”

Truth is NOT individually determined; people don’t make up “their” truth.

Question: Do you say the Bible is true because you believe it or do you believe it because it’s TRUE?

Objective:

Demonstrate that the Bible is TRUE apart from what anyone “believes” about it. I want to convince you tonight to believe the Bible because it is TRUE!

Why is the Bible True? Three points… The Bible is…

I. REAL- authentic (manuscripts) [what it is]

II. RELIABLE- accurate (predictive prophecy, archaeology, inerrant) [what it says]

III. RELEVANT- applies meaningfully to life [what it means]

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I. REAL- authentic (manuscripts) [what it is]

Quote: “The Bible has been translated so many times, passed down to us over all these years, its full of so many mistakes, it just can not be trusted.”

How do we know that the Bible we have today is what was originally spoken by God to the Prophets and Apostles?

A. Manuscripts Evidence- pieces of paper that copies of the Bible where written on.

Has the Bible been handed down to us accurately?

1. Old Testament

a. We have very few copies of OT manuscripts because of the way Jewish scribes copied and viewed the texts. They took great care in copying them and discarded old copies.

b. The oldest copy of the OT we had dated 900 A.D.

c. But in 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls where found in Qumran by the Dead Sea. The scrolls where 1000 years older than any of our existing manuscripts.

This provided scholars with a real test about whether the OT was passed down to us accurately.

After comparing the entire Isaiah manuscript from Qumran with the present Hebrew text of Isaiah, Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer concluded that the Dead Sea Scroll “proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.” 1

Geza Vermes states: “The Qumran Biblical documents cover the whole Hebrew Bible with the exception of the book of Esther, and are about one thousand years older than the most ancient codices previously extant. With this newly discovered material at their disposal, experts concerned with the study of the text and transmission of the scriptures are now able to achieve far greater accuracy in their deductions and can trace the process by which the text of the Bible obtained its final shape. Moreover, they are in position to prove that it has remained virtually unchanged for the last two thousand years.” 2

2. New Testament

a. We have about 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the NT today and about 19,000 other ancient translations.

We can compare the manuscripts and know exactly what the NT writers said.

b. ILLUSTRATION

Remember; this is answering the question of how we know that the Bible we have today says exactly what God said to the Prophets and Apostles.

Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum: The text of the Bible is certain; especially in the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or the other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book. 3