Why Should I Believe 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
This has been a great week.
I got a couple of very exciting emails this week.
I don’t think we are going to have any worries that this financial recession is going to affect us.
Christian Widow in Nigeria email
One email I got was from a Christian widow in Nigeria whose husband was a Dr. and worked for an embassy. She said in her email that she wants to give several million dollars to a Christian cause because she is dying and childless and out of nowhere, I get her email. She heard of us from an unnamed acquaintance. I want to tell you the name of Hickory Creek is really getting around.
I am trying to get a hold of the lawyer she told me to contact and it may cost us a few thousand dollars upfront, but that will be more than made up when we get the millions of dollars she wants to give us.
Microsoft Email
Not only that, but I received another email about Microsoft doing some email testing and they are going to send me a check for every person that I forward an email on to as well as money for every person that my friend forwards it on to.
Is this awesome are what?
I am waiting on the checks now.
From the looks on your faces, I would say some of you don’t believe me.
I bet there are some of you saying,
“Scott, you can’t believe everything you read! Those things are Urban legends, Myths, hoaxes. They aren’t true. There are no dying widows looking to give you millions and you aren’t going to be getting any money from Bill Gates. Don’t believe everything you read!”
I know you are right.
But if we can’t believe everything we read, how do we make a determination about what we should believe?
How do we know what we should believe or not?
Now, this may not seem too important in regard to scam emails that have no bearing on our lives anyway, but
should we believe the warning labels on medicine?
safety precautions when dealing with electricity?
Should we believe warnings we hear during inclement weather?
I am sure all of you would say we need to trust those things, because they can have great bearing on our lives, so it is important that we
learn to judge truth from falsehood and
know the difference between things that matter and things that don’t.
Now, in the case of hoax emails, we can judge the truthfulness by a quick search on the internet of hoaxes or by checking with the source of where the hoax is coming from.
I could call Microsoft and ask them if this is true. They would say no and that would be the end of the story.
But what about things that are harder to check directly?
How do we determine the reliability of what we read or hear in those cases?
Today we are going to look into that in regards to the Bible and ask the question
Why Should I Believe the Bible?
Slide
This is not so much a message from the Bible as it is about the Bible.
It is extremely important for people to understand and know why they believe the Bible.
This is 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 this is really the word of God and that we should believe the Bible?
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
Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible
Slide
Whenever we investigate the believability of something, we want to check into the sources.
First we want to know what the Bible claims about itself?
In the Bible we find that it tells us the Scripture is the inspired word of God.
Slide
2 Timothy 3:16 - All Scripture is God-breathed…
Peter says in
2 Peter 1:21 - prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
God spoke what He wanted us to know through those he chose.
Jesus even tells the apostles that the Holy Spirit will remind them of all that Jesus said and did.
John 14:26,
“the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”
And both Peter and Paul equate the Apostles letters and teachings with Scripture.
Peter writes in
2 Peter 3:15-16
15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Peter equates Paul’s letters with Scripture.
Paul says in
1 Thessalonians 2:13
13 And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe
Paul says that the teaching of the Apostles is the word of God and God confirms that through miracles which He performed through the Apostles.
Ok, so just because the Bible says it is the word of God doesn’t make it so. Anyone or anything can make claims about itself, but that does not make it so. That is right, but we would expect that God would tell us if something were from Him, even though that doesn’t prove it to be true.
But not only do we want to see what the Bible says about itself.
We want to scrutinize the sources to find out if they are reliable.
Are the Manuscripts Reliable?
Slide
How can we be sure that what we are reading is actually what God intended through the Apostles?
Handwritten Copies
Aren’t the manuscripts we have just handwritten copies of handwritten copies?
I mean, maybe over time, things were changed or altered for their own benefit.
The truth is that we can be very certain that we have what the apostles and prophets actually wrote.
That is because 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.
“Ok, so they made them as accurate as they could, but I don’t care how many safeguards you make, mistakes still get made.”
Large number of copies
True, but then we have about 25,000 New Testament manuscripts and fragments of to compare together to be more assured of the accuracy of the New Testament.
When we compare them together we can find any errors that would have been missed in any part of the copying process.
That is because if errors were made by individual copyists, they would not all make the same mistake. Having a bunch of copies to compare helps discover those and be assured of the accuracy.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Maybe you still don’t believe this could be too accurate.
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 1000 years.
Transition
Ok, so we can trust that the manuscripts that the Bible is translated from are accurate recordings of what the Apostles wrote.
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
Slide
We need to see if what is accurately recorded for us is reliable and can be checked against reality.
To do that, we need to ask
Are the Apostles Reliable?
Slide
Can we trust these guys?
Are they liars?
Did they make this stuff up for their own benefit?
We see guys today start religions.
Maybe 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.
As they went around proclaiming the gospel message, listen to what happened to them.
Acts 5:40 - They called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go.
Because of what they were preaching,
that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and
that He died for our sins and rose from the dead, and
we need to trust in Him for salvation,
these apostles were beaten, flogged and even killed.
Listen to Acts 12:1-3.
Acts 12:1-3 - 12:1 It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. 2 He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. 3 When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also.
Suffering, persecution and death were the reward for these apostles for preaching the gospel. And yet they did it.
These same guys who faithlessly fled on the night Jesus was arrested, now fearless proclaimers of Jesus as the Christ, dying yet rising from the dead to live forevermore.
What happened?
What happened was they were transformed by seeing and believing in the Resurrected Christ.
Were they crazy?
Some would say they were crazy. What they were saying sounds crazy.
Jesus was dead and now is alive?
But crazy people are not all crazy in the same way. They will 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
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.
Maybe they were just fanatical
Maybe they were just fanatics. People today die for what they believe
We see people blow themselves and others up for their beliefs.
What is the difference between them and the apostles?
Well there is actually a big difference.
The apostles knew what they were claiming as 100% true or false, they were not really proclaiming it by faith.
John 20:29 - 29 Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
Some of you will remember Richard Nixon and Watergate, (I myself am barely old enough to remember cause I am so young, lol) you know that people are not willing to go to jail for what they know to be a lie.
These guys were willing to die for what they knew was either true or false. If what they were proclaiming was not true, they would not have been willing to suffer and die as they did.
Not only do can we test the truthfulness of the Apostles and see if they were reliable, but we want to ask
Is the History Accurate?
Slide
If the Bible is really the word of God, then God is not going to make mistakes concerning history. After all, He knows history before it even happens.
So is the Bible historically accurate in the things that can be checked?
The Bible has proven to be incredibly accurate.
Archaeology has confirmed so much 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 1900’s, evidence of the Hittite people was discovered in the area of Turkey, showing once again the historical accuracy of the Bible.
There have been discoveries that continue to confirm the people groups, the places the Bible mentions, the political leaders of the time.
So many times has archeology caught up to confirm the Bible. Granted that there are times, that archeology doesn’t answer our questions or raises more questions, but over time, we always see our knowledge catch up to what the Bible has to say as we uncover more in terms of archeology.
A noted Archeologist, Dr. Nelson Glueck, was quoted by the New York Times for a Book review as saying, “No discovery has ever been made that contradicts or controverts historical statements of scripture.” (Book Review, Oct. 18, 1956).
Archaeology has been a great friend to Christianity in supporting the history that is revealed throughout the Bible.
Transition
Ok, Maybe the apostles and prophets are reliable and the history is accurately recorded, but what about all those prophecies?
Can the Prophecies be checked?
Slide
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 something did not happen.
Now being that some prophecies have yet to be fulfilled, this could be challenging for critics to do, but what we can do is look at how many prophecies have been fulfilled.
Now there are prophecies for many different things but I just want to touch briefly on the Messianic prophecies because Christians claim that the Messiah, Jesus Christ has come, so we can check to see if Jesus fulfills the prophecies about the coming Messiah.
“Well, hang on a minute.”
If these prophecies were made before Jesus was born, couldn’t he have read them and just set out to try and fulfill them?
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.
Well, when we Scrutinze 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.
So, we need to 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
12 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
23 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
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, the 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 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, many 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.
Maybe you have never accepted what the Bible has to say about Jesus Christ.
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.
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.
