NAIL IT DOWN
“Fake news: how can I know the truth?”
2nd Peter 1:6-2:3
Glad you are all safe today. You may have heard Just last week there were reports that if Irma kept growing it would become a category 6 Hurricane. Sharks were being sucked up into the air from the water and we would see sharks coming down. All of this was on the news on the internet. There are no category 6 hurricanes and sharks will not rain down. By now you’ve heard of fake news. President Trump has been talking about it in most of America is now talking about it. This has been going on for years now. For decades now it has been said that Madalyn Murray O’Hare was working to have all religious programming removed from TV and radio waves and would also ban schools from singing Christmas carols. According to many people she is still working hard to do this-I still have people who bring petitions to me to ask the church to sign them to stop her-by the way she has been dead for 22 years now. It’s a hoax. It’s fake news. But somehow it just won’t go away.
Are you aware that a man named Cameron Harris, during the presidential campaign last year was actually hired to create fake news. He bought a domain name and started publishing all kinds of fake news in an effort to sway the campaign. If you listen frequently to Pres. Trump or follow him on twitter as I do your then aware that he speaks out against fake news every single day. How can we know the truth? It ss now a question that we ask daily. Because with the Internet today it is possible to spread fake news, to ruin someone’s reputation, to close down a business, to start a rumor that may never die and it’s possible to do all that quickly so it leaves us asking the question, how can I know the truth? How can I know that what I believe is actually the truth?
500 years ago people were asking the same question. The year was 1517 and people were asking the question, how can I know if what I believe is actually the truth? The apostle Peter who was one of the early followers of Christ wrote a letter to early believers... Listen to what he had to say. 2nd Peter 1:16. 500 years ago the world look very different than it does today. In Western Europe in what we call the holy Roman empire, people practice their faith in a radically different way than we do today. They knew about Christ, they had been taught about Jesus but they were simply not sure what to believe.. Addresses the question by telling us this-there will be a day when day will dawn-when you will know the truth; Paul says when we will know is we are known, but until that day; listen to v. 19.
Now 500 years ago people were struggling with this. Things were different. The church controlled every aspect of life. In Western Europe the church controlled everything from the cradle to the grave.
• You were baptized as an infant in the church
• you were confirmed in youth by priest
• you were married, and if the church approved, by a priest
• you received last rites by a priest on your deathbed
• and along the way you needed mass given to you by the priest
• you also needed to confess your sins to a priest
And it was through each of these areas, that you received grace. The church and priest controlled the path to God.
There was also a huge gap between the priest and the people. The biggest separation by the way at that time was in literacy. People did not need to be able to read for their jobs. The priest did and just a few other professions did so the priest could read the Bible. But the people could not. In fact in that day most people had never held a book in their hands. So the priest had to read the Bible for them. They depended on him in order to understand the Bible.
Now in 1440, the printing press was invented and everything changed. Suddenly people could get books and someone said, hey the Bible needs to be put in print and not only that, needs to be translated from Latin into a language the common people can actually read. So John Wickliffe translated the entire Bible into English and he did it by the way without permission. And when he died there were so many people who hated him for doing this that they dug up his body and burned it and through his ashes into the River declaring that the act of translating the Bible into modern language so people could understand it was completely unacceptable.
Here’s what happened as a result. The church began to elevate the teaching of the Pope with the teaching of Scripture. They were considered to be equal. So over time, if the Pope said it, it began to carry the same weight as Scripture. 9 case you don’t know, that’s hogwash. It ain’t so. The book of Revelation closes by telling us not to add to Scripture yet by the court waiting the 2 that is exactly what they were doing. This is when people began to believe in things like:
• Purgatory
• infant baptism
• praying to Saints
• many others
None of which are taught in Scripture by the way. But because the Pope said it, it meant the same thing. Listen, what I have to say does not carry the same weight as this book has to say. Now enter Martin Luther. In 1505, Martin Luther was 21 years of age and was training to be a lawyer. He was caught in a thunderstorm and he prayed if you will save me I will become a mock. And he did. He fasted, he prayed, he slept without blankets yet his best efforts never assured him of his salvation. In 1510 he served his 1st mass. And he was terrified. He crawled up the steps of pilots Castle on his knees, step-by-step saying the Lord’s Prayer. When he got to the top he wondered, who knows if I am truly saved or not?
He would spend as many as 6 hours on his knees clearly confessing his sins but in the end he still did not feel forgiven. Now in Wittenberg, Germany, he studied the Scriptures and taught Romans and Galatians and began to understand Scripture for the 1st time. God impressed him with the statement that the just shall live by faith. He said I felt reborn. The words of Paul became a gateway to heaven for him.
Luther became more and more upset with what the church was teaching that he went down to the church in Wittenberg and he nailed 95 theses/points to the door. And he got everyone’s attention. It would be the equivalent today of posting something online. And in today’s language it went viral. Luther had no idea, that this would be the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Whether you know it or not this changed everything for you and me:
• if you enjoyed our singing this morning in worship
• if you enjoy using your own Bible
• if you believe in the priesthood of the believer
• if you believe you can go directly to God for forgiveness and don’t have to go through the priest to grant forgiveness….
Then you should thank God for what happened 500 years ago. It wasn’t a new teaching-it was bringing us back to an old teaching. In 2nd Peter 1, Peter answers the question, how do I know what to believe? How do I know what is true?
I want to give you 3 things Peter says that give us the foundation for what in Latin is known as Sola scriptura, Scripture alone. Our final authorities God’s word. Hopefully we learn from the pastor, you learn from your family, but in the end it all comes down to this, what does God’s word have to say about it?
There are 3 reasons we should believe that Scripture alone is our final authority. (1) Scripture is an eyewitness account. Verse 16. Not just passing along some rumor, some fake news I heard-I was an eyewitness of his Majesty. I saw it! Then he describes an event that is described in Matthew 17-we call it the Transfiguration. Peter, James and John were carried upon a mountain and they suddenly saw his glory. Peter is now writing about it decades later. I’m not saying something I heard on CNN, I saw it! If you read the Corolla and you will learn that it is one man’s vision. The book of Mormon, is one man’s vision. Scientology is based on one man’s vision. When we read the Scripture we read a book that has been breathed by God into existence. 2nd Timothy 3:16. Open the Bible and you are reading history. It happened. Not one person but over 40 authors over a span of 1500 years you all can say let me tell you what I saw. It is an eyewitness account. They were men who were moved by the Holy Spirit and they wrote it down. We believe it was written and inspired by God.
(2) It is an inspired revelation. It is what God says.
(3) It is superior authority. There were false prophets and there will be false teachers-false teaching will occur just outside the church, it will happen inside the church there must be an authority and this is it... Scripture. Scripture alone was, is and always will be our final source of authority. If we ever teach anything that does not agree with Scripture, throw it out. This teaching rocked the church. Luther was taken to court and he was asked to recant. To take back all he had said. He stood and here is what he said- “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason-for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves-I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant. Here I stand. God help me. How do you know what’s true? How do you know what to believe? The answer is what does God’s word have to say? Scripture alone is the only source of truth.
