How to Know the Bible's True
Selected Passages
By Jim Wallace, Th.M.
Pastor, Risen King Community Church
November 13, 2016
One of the most important and debated questions in all of life is whether the Bible is true, whether it is what it claims to be, the very inspired Word of God. I struggled with this question from my youth, and for a number of years did not believe it to be the Word of God. But I soon came across some startling proofs, and I don't use the word proofs lightly—absolute proofs for any thinking and objective person that the Bible, the Old and New Testament, is literally true—it is absolutely the Word of God.
Now this morning, I'm going to give you plenty of information that, in my view, will prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Bible is absolutely true, the very Word of God, that it claims to be. Now we don't have time for all the evidence. But I'm going to demonstrate specifically that the Bible has been proven to be the Word of God in every conceivable way—historically, mathematically, scientifically, archeologically. And I’m going to explain that this morning by showing how the Bible demonstrates its absolute truthfulness thru fulfilled prophecy and mathematics, hard science, archeology and even modern medicine.
Now I must confess to you that at one time I believed the Bible to be a book full of myths and fables, a book that was created by our pre-scientific ancestors to explain what could not be explained prior to our age of scientific enlightenment. I believed that stories like the Creation account and Adam and Eve, the dividing of the Red Sea and Jonah and the Whale were all inventions of some human's imagination and had no basis in fact. I was a thorough-going evolutionist who believed that there were natural explanations for all that has occurred through history.
But the one of the first things that absolutely changed my view on these things was the incredible fact of fulfilled Bible prophecy. Ancient Hebrew prophets predicted in precise detail some of the major events of human history hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before they came to pass.
So how do I know the Bible is true: Point #1: The Bible's ancient prophecies have come true in exacting detail.
What's so interesting about this fact is that it is the very thing that God Himself points to in order to demonstrate that He is alone God among all the so-called gods that we have become acquainted with. In Isaiah 44:6-7, God, speaking through Isaiah, 700 years before the coming of Christ, said, “Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts:
‘I am the first and I am the last,
And there is no God besides Me.
‘Who is like Me? Let him proclaim and declare it;
Yes, let him recount it to Me in order,
From the time that I established the ancient nation.
And let them declare to them the things that are coming
And the events that are going to take place.'"
So, it's right there in verse 7: The God of the Bible says, "Who is like Me? Let him proclaim and declare it . . . and let them declare to them the things that are coming and the events that are going to take place." God is saying the fact that He is the one and only God of all creation can be proved by just one fact—predictive prophecy--the fact that He can declare the future before it happens and do so with absolute accuracy. This is absolute the signature of God upon His Holy Book, the Bible. And He essentially dares any other so-called god or false god to match Him in this unique ability, and none ever has.
I first became aware of this incredible proof of the supernatural nature of the Bible when I read the little paperback Science Speaks by Peter W. Stoner. Stoner, a mathematician at Westmont College, along with his college students, did a scientific and mathematical analysis of a number of different prophecies found in the Old Testament which were precisely fulfilled. The most impressive of these analyses had to do with prophecies about the coming Jewish Messiah which were ultimately fulfilled in the life of Jesus Christ. First, he analyzed just eight prophecies concerning Christ's coming, such as the fact that He would be born in Bethlehem, would have a forerunner who announced beforehand His coming, and would be betrayed for exactly 30 pieces of silver. Between Stoner and his students, they came up with scientifically determined conservative estimates that just these eight prophecies might have been fulfilled accidentally, or by chance, by any man who ever lived. The probability turns out to be one in 1017. That's one chance in ten with 17 zeroes behind it! Stoner then compared this with filling the entire state of Texas three feet deep with silver dollars, checking one of those Silver Dollars red, and sending a blind-folded man into it and having him pull out the red-checked silver dollar on his first attempt.
Then, to confound us even more, Stoner took 48 prophecies of the coming Messiah that were fulfilled in Christ's first coming, and figured out with his students that conservatively, the chance that any person in history might have by chance fulfilled these 48 prophecies was only one in 10 to the 157th power. There's no name for such a huge number. And he compared this to filling the entire known universe at that time with particles the size of electrons, checking one electron red, and having a blindfolded man pick it out on the first try. And then concludes that it takes more faith not to believe in Christ than to believe Christ was who He claimed to be.
Well, some of you might think this only applies to ancient history. Nope, modern history has been predicted by the Bible as well. Repeatedly, the Bible predicted, for instance, that ancient Israel--that is the nation's population of Jews--would be exiled to the ends of the earth, but then would someday return to the Promised Land. For instance, this series of events was predicted in Ezekiel 34:13: "I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and bring them to their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the streams, and in all the inhabited places of the land." Now, it has never happened in all of history that a nation has been scattered all over the earth for 2,000 years, so that it was no longer a nation in its native land, that its inhabitants maintained their unique identity for that whole time, and never has it happened that said nation came back into the land that was originally theirs after having been exiled for 2,000 years and become established as a nation again. But it happened on May 15, 1948. More than this, in recent years Bible Scholar Grant Jeffery, by careful analysis of Ezekiel 4:3-6 combined with Leviticus 26 has shown that the Bible predicted the exact time when Israel would become a nation again. By careful calculation which we do not have the time to explain this morning, he has shown that the Bible predicted that Israel would become a nation again 2,520 Biblical years of 360 days each, after 536 B.C., which brings us, guess what, to the exact date of May 15, 1948, the very day that a vote of the United Nations re-established the nation of Israel in the Promised Land!
Now, just as God predicted through Isaiah, no other god, no other religion, and no other holy book displays such an incredible supernatural nature. As Jeffrey himself writes, "The Classical and Religious literature of the Greeks, Romans and other Middle Eastern Cultures contains no specific detailed prophecies regarding future events, people, or trends. There were no prophecies concerning the coming of Buddha, Mohammed or any other religious leader. Only Old Testament prophecies predicted numerous precise details about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth." The so-called psychics of today do even worse. One study of the predictions of 10 psychics over 4 years showed that their predictions were wrong 98 percent of the time, and six of the ten were wrong 100% of the time.
So the next question which often comes to mind, and it did for me in my spiritual journey, is this: But what about evolution? Hasn't modern science proven that life evolved from molecules to amoebas to monkeys to man by pure chance, in accord with all the natural laws which we observe in the universe every day?
The answer to this question a resounding no.
In fact, the absolute truth of the matter is that Science itself--that is hard science, not theories-- has proven the necessity of an intelligent supernatural Creator. Yes, point 2 this morning, modern hard science has proven the absolutely necessity for an intelligent supernatural creator.
Now the Theory of Evolution, which has only been around for 160 years or so, postulates, theorizes, that life arose from molecules in a primordial soup that evolved into life by pure chance. Note, this was only a theory, though it is taught as an absolute fact in most U.S. Schools and institutions of higher learning all over the world today.
However, though there are many objections to evolution, I'm going to focus on just one fact that completely falsifies this theory. That fact is a scientific axiom which is observable by all human beings and provable by means of the scientific method, whereas the theory of evolution is not. And that fact is called the Law of Entropy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It simply states that all things in the universe naturally work into states of greater disorder. Natural laws at work don't cause things to become more organized, more complex, or more ordered. Rather, things naturally become more disordered and more random with the passage of time, all the time. As a proof of this, just come visit my office sometime this week! Or recount the history of your car repairs, or the upkeep on your house, or the need for housekeeping!
This absolute axiom is violated by the very notion of evolution. Evolution claims that life, in all its complexity, just accidentally came to exist and accidentally came to form the complex forms of life as we know them today. However, this is just absolutely not possible. A complex machine like my body did not just happen accidentally, any more than the machines sitting out there in the parking lot—our automobiles--just happened to come into existence without an intelligent designer.
Now, just think about this for a moment. Imagine putting a pile of rocks on the moon and leaving that pile there for a billion years, and coming back at the end of that vast sum of time. What would you expect would have happened to that pile of rocks? Would you have expected it to have formed into a ticking watch, an automobile, or perhaps a working computer? Absolutely not! If you found anything after a billion years, you would expect it to be at best a messed up pile of rocks, or perhaps a pile of dust, or more likely nothing at all—the molecules would have been dispersed across the moon or the universe in even greater disorder than they were left in by you a billion years earlier. We all know instinctively that this is exactly what would happen unless some intelligent and powerful organizing force—an intelligent designer--intervenes.
Biologist have borne this out. The great biologist Sir Fred Hoyle, writing on the impossibility of the evolution of even one of the amino acids needed for the production of DNA, and says that "Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the earth. If one counts the number of assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings is less than one in 10 to the 400,000 thousandth power." (Fred Hoyle, New Scientist, Where Microbes Boldly Went, p. 412-415). As a result of his findings, Hoyle eventually abandoned his agnosticism and became a believer in special creation.
So if we know Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, rules the universe, then what in the world are we doing buying the theory of evolution?
Even those who believe in evolution admit that it's hard to believe in. For instance, a Nobel Prize Winning Chemist by the name of Professor Harold Urey wrote about the theory of evolution: "All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere." Then he added these words. "We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did." So this evolutionist admits that his acceptance of evolution was not based on logic, or evidence, or even science, but on pure blind faith!
Biblical Researcher and author Grant Jeffery writes about this issue saying, "It is significant that the various educational groups supporting evolutionary teaching have encouraged their members to refuse to enter debates about evolution with creation science supporters at high schools and colleges. The evolution supporters found to their dismay that the audiences almost always believed in evolution before the debate began but that they accepted the evidence for divine creation by the end of the debate." (Jeffery, This Signature of God, p. 121).
Finally some of the greatest quotes on this subject are from an agnostic former NASA astronomer, interplanetary physicist and author by the name of Robert Jastrow: “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.” (http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/87585.Robert_Jastrow)
He has also written" “There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.”
(http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/87585.Robert_Jastrow)
And then he wrote in his book, God and the Astronomers, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/87585.Robert_Jastrow)
Then we have the evidence of archeology. Archeology repeatedly confirms the Bible's Exacting Accuracy. Archeology, another scientific discipline, repeatedly confirms the Bible's exacting accuracy.
I have in my hand this morning an "artifact" that we brought back from Israel when Jeanie and I visited it two years ago. It is a smooth stone from the brook in the valley of Elah—the very same valley where David famously slew the giant Goliath by using a sling and a stone, like one of the "five smooth stones" he had picked up from the brook in the Valley of Elah. When we there our tour guide allowed us to get out of the van and collect some of the stones from this brook. And believe me they were all smooth stones that were in the bed of this brook—an artifact that confirms the details of this ancient Biblical story.
It's amazing what you can find in the Land of Israel when you're there. As I have repeatedly shown you in the photos I brought back, you can find there Peter's house in which Jesus lived in the town of Capernaum on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee; you can see the entire excavated town of Capernaum and the synagogue there; you can see and walk on the Mount of Olives from which Jesus ascended, you can walk through the Garden of Gethsemane, which we did. I even entered the cave of Adullam where David and his 600 men hid from Saul and his men who were searching to destroy him. And yes it has a very small opening on the outside, which could be blocked with rocks, concealing its location. But it is large enough on the inside to house 600 men, once again confirming the biblical record archeologically. You can see the old retaining wall of the Temple in Jerusalem and you can visit Bethlehem the birth place of Christ. We visited Beersheba where the Patriarchs lived, and stood next to the well there which Isaac, son of Abraham, dug 4000 years ago. You can visit the ancient tomb of the prophet Samuel, and the Tell at Gibeah of Ancient King Saul
But more than that are the testimonies of famed archeologists about the accuracy of the Bible despite the skepticism of some years ago. New findings confirm the truth of the Bible against the claims of skeptics all the time. For instance, Dr. Nelson Glueck, the most outstanding Jewish archeologist of the 20th century, wrote in his book Rivers in the Desert, this statement: "It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm the clear outlines or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often resulted in amazing discoveries." Another respected scholar, Dr. J. O. Kinnaman, declared, "Of the hundreds and thousands of artifacts found by the archeologists, not one has ever been discovered that contradicts or denies one word, phrase, clause or sentence of the Bible, but always confirms and verifies the facts of the biblical record."
The story is told of British scholar William Ramsay who as a young man travelled to Asia Minor more than a century ago with the sole purpose of disproving the Bible's history as reported by Luke in His Gospel and the Book of Acts. Ramsay and his professors were convinced these New Testament records must be terribly inaccurate. Ramsay began to dig through the ancient ruins of Greece and Asia Minor searching for ancient names, boundaries and other finds that would conclusively prove that Luke had fabricated his stories about Christ and the ancient Church. To his amazement and dismay, Ramsay found that the statements of the New Testament were accurate in the tiniest of details. The result was that Ramsay eventually was convinced of the truth of the Bible and trusted in Christ as His own personal Savior.
Finally, the Bible's absolute truth has been confirmed by modern medicine. Final point: The Bible's truth has been confirmed by modern medicine.
Now it's important to understand that at the time Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, the most advanced culture of that time, the Egyptian culture, proudly espoused as a means of healing the application or ingestion of such cures as lizard's blood, swine's teeth, putrid meat, stinking fat, moisture from pig's ears, goose grease, asses' hoofs and the dung of donkeys, cats, dogs and even flies.
Also, to fully appreciate the Bible's wisdom, it's important for you to understand that the existence of invisible microscopic organisms such as bacteria and viruses were unknown to us until very late in the 19th century. It is only in the last couple hundred years that we have come to fully understand that infectious disease can and often is spread by unsanitary practices, touching people who are sick or people who have died, eating spoiled and infected meat or food of any kind or even being around people who are ill.
Regarding concern about the proper sanitation in the practice of medicine, it wasn't until 1845 when a brilliant Hungarian doctor by the name of Dr. Ignaz Simmelweis created a tremendous improvement in practical medical treatment and control of deadly infectious diseases. As a young doctor in Vienna in 1845, Semmelweis was appalled by the staggering rate of death by infection of women giving birth in hospitals. The level of infectious puerperal (childbed) fever was horrendous—15-30 percent of such mothers who gave birth in hospitals died in the hospital. Dr. Simmelweis simply noticed that the young doctors examined the bodies of the mothers who died each morning immediately before examining expectant mothers in the next ward, and did so without ever washing their hands! And this was considered normal medical practice in the 19th century!
Simmelweis then insisted that the young doctors under his supervision simply wash their hands between examining the dead and the living. The result was that the level of infections of this childbed fever was reduced from 15-30 percent to less than 2%. However, despite the results, Simmelweis' practices were so unpopular that he was reduced to a nervous breakdown in the course of his career
However, 3300-3400 years earlier the same kinds of sanitary practices were prescribed in the Old Testament Law written under inspiration of God by Moses as Israel was exiting Egypt. In fact, before leaving Egypt, God, through Moses, promises Israel in Exodus 15:26, "If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians."
Two hundred thirteen of the 613 laws gave had to do with sanitary medical practices. The laws that God asked the Israelites to diligently heed were many that reflect that sanitary practices which modern medicine insists on to this day—3300-3400 years before our eventual discovery of these critical medical practices! For instance, there were laws that dealt with
• Burying human waste (Deut. 23:12)
• Forbidding eating animals which died naturally (Lev. 7:24)
• Declaring objects “unclean” when touched by carcasses (Lev. 11:35)
• Requiring the ill be quarantined until well and washed and shaved afterward (Lev. 14:8-9)
• Requiring the washing of hands with running water (Lev. 15:13)
• Having the bodies of the dead removed from tents or dwelling places immediately (Deut. 19:14-19)
• Declaring open containers in the tents or dwelling places of the dead unclean and thus
making them off-limits to human use (Deut. 19:14-19)
Most of us have heard of the ravages of the Black Plague in Europe during the Middle Ages. Forty to sixty million people died of the Black Plague. Whole families, villages and towns were completely wiped out by this scourge of the earth. While members of the clergy were holding their Bibles and praying for those who were ill with this sickness to be cured, little did they know for years that the solution to stopping this terrible plague actually was available to them within their very own Bibles.
Finally, someone decided to actually turn to their Bible, the Word of God, seeking the wisdom necessary to overcome the problem. It happened in Vienna, Austria that some church leaders began to look at the Old Testament's medical and sanitation practices. They discovered in Leviticus 13:46 that Moses had laid down strict regulations from God regarding the medical treatment of those afflicted with leprosy or plague: "He shall be unclean. All the days he has the sore he shall be unclean. He is unclean, and he shall dwell alone; his habitation shall be outside the camp." God answered these church leaders' prayers for deliverance when they finally began to obey His declared commands. Those sick with the plague were removed from the city and quarantined until they either recovered or died. It was then and only then that the Black Plague was stopped in Austria, and when those practices became the norm for other parts of Europe, the plague dissipated there as well.
Finally, there was one piece of medical and spiritual wisdom found in Leviticus 17:11 that is very relevant to both our physical and spiritual well-being. In Leviticus 17:11 were told by God through Moses: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’'
He was here referring to animal sacrifices which were made to cover the sin of Israel. The sacrifices were said to be effective because the life of the flesh is in the blood. That is, when an animal shed his blood as a sacrifice on the altar, that was evidence its life had been given to cover the sins of the people."
This week, when I was given a skin graft to cover the skin which had been cut away from my ear because of a cancerous growth, I was told by a nurse that it was essential to keep the area moist, in order to encourage blood flow. Blood flow was absolutely necessary for the skin graft to take, because, without it, any part of the body that doesn't receive blood dies. And so, it is again confirmed, "that the life of the flesh is in the blood!"
This becomes all the more important to us spiritually when we recognize that the real sacrifice that was made for our sins were not the blood of bulls or goats or any other animal. They were just foreshadowing the blood of the Lamb of God who died on the cross to completely take away, not just cover, but to pay the penalty for our sins. The sinless Lord Jesus Christ was the Lamb of God who died on the cross to take the punishment for our sins, so we wouldn't have to. He took hell on the cross, so we wouldn't have to, if only we would put our trust in Him and what He did as payment for our sins.
This is what I Peter 1:14-15 tells us is exactly what Jesus, the God-man, did for us, when He died on the cross: "Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ."
And this is exactly where God's Word exhorts us to put our faith, our trust or confidence, regarding how we're going to get to heaven. This is what Jesus was referring to when He said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16).
We are to believe, not in our good works, or our ability to be good enough for God, or to keep His commandments, to have eternal life. We can't. The Bible declares us all to be sinners, and tells us that if we keep the whole Law, and yet stumble in one point, we are guilty of all, in James 2:10. Rather Jesus and the Bible says we are to place our confidence, our trust, our dependence, not on ourselves, our good works, our devotion or love for God, going to church, or doing good, but rather in and on Christ alone as the one who died for our sins and proved it by being raised from the dead (I Corinthians 15:1-5).
So today, have you believed what the Bible, God's Word, and Jesus, God's Living Words, have said about how to be forgiven and cleansed from your sins and assured of heaven? Or are you merely trusting in yourself, and your own good works, thinking it's possible you could be good enough to get to heaven on your own? The truth of the matter is that you can't make it on your own—you're a sinner. The good news, or the Gospel, is that Christ made the way for you when He died on the cross to pay for your sins. When you trust in, believe on, have confidence in Jesus, and His work on the cross alone, as payment for your sins, then, and only then, according to the words of Jesus in John 3:16 and many other places, do you have the guarantee, the promise of God, that you will have eternal life.
Why not put your trust in Jesus as your Savior from sin right now? Why not begin following Jesus and giving thanks for all that He has done for you, by a life lived according to the incredible wisdom of His Word, and beginning that journey by expressing this wish in prayer right now by praying this prayer:
"Father, I recognize that I'm a sinner. And that for too long I have ignored the truths and promises of your Word, the Bible. I now understand that I cannot get to heaven or have eternal life by trying to be good person, or doing my best, because your standard of righteousness is far too great for me to achieve. Instead, I'm believing the Good News that Jesus brought when He came—that getting to heaven is a free gift that comes by faith in Jesus, that He died for my sins and proved it when He arose from the grave (Ephesians 2:8-9). Now Father, I'm putting my belief, my trust, and my faith in Jesus, not what I can do, to be saved from my sins. Thank you that He died on the cross to pay for my sins. Now help me to live a life of gratitude and love for You and for Him and the free gift of eternal life I now possess—because of what Jesus did for me, not what I can do for myself. In Jesus' name, Amen."
For more information or more copies of this, call or write:
Risen King Community Church
1855 Sullivan Lane, #160
Sparks, NV 89431
(775)-358-5044
Risen King meets at Reed High School's Little Theater at 10 a.m. Sunday mornings.
Reed High School is located at 1350 Baring Blvd, in Sparks, Nevada.
