The BIBLE
Eph5:17 wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is
1Tim.2:4 who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth
The Worthy Word
by Brother John Dorman
Our focal verses for this message are a part of a long list of instructions to the Church in Thessalonica. We are going to break into the list at verse 19
1 Thess 5:19 Quench not the Spirit. 20 Despise not prophesyings. 21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 22 Abstain from all appearance of evil. 23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 25 Brethren, pray for us. 26 Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss. 27 I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read unto all the holy brethren. 28 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. KJV
We have learned by personal experience that as believers we have no cocoon of insulation from problems and questions. We have to face our world every day, just like everyone else. The issues that dominate our culture are the very same issues with which we must grapple.
Do we have answers to the questions people are asking? I don’t mean pat answers, full of clichés and simple solutions, what I call bumper sticker theology, but answers that have substance and are grounded in truth?
We believers contend that it is the Bible, which gives us this ultimate authority. Indeed, we believe that the answers to the problems, which beset us, and our society can be found on its pages.
But the world asks “What is so special about the Bible. Is this book any different than any other book?”
Some say it is inspired. If so, is it merely inspired like a classical masterpiece of art or literature? Or is there a higher inspiration?
Some even dare to call it the very Word of God. Are they right? How can we be sure? Is the Bible full of myth as its critics would have everyone to believe, or is it a message from God?
I have actually had people say to me “Everybody knows the bible is full of errors” as if that were a commonly held assumption. But when they were asked in return to point out one of those errors they suddenly had other things to do. It was evident they had never read it and were just parroting some other ignorant critic.
This morning, let’s see who and what we can call to the witness stand to give testimony concerning this book.
The Testimony of Scripture
Look with me first at the testimony of Scripture itself. Now you may be thinking that Scripture is an odd source of evidence to quote as proof that we can trust Scripture. I mean, so what, if Scripture claims to be true? That doesn’t prove anything. And you would be right, it doesn’t.
But it is a common judicial practice in a court of law to allow the accused to testify on their own behalf. What they say may or may not be true, that is for the jury to decide, but the fact that it may be true makes it important.
The rules of evidence say that testimony needs to be upheld by more than one source. And just as other evidence must corroborate testimony in our courts, so we will verify the Scripture’s testimony to itself by other evidences as well. But let’s first examine the testimony of Scripture.
Peter makes a powerful statement concerning the origin of the Bible. 2 Peter 1:20-21 says, Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. 21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost .(KJV.)
The Bible claims for itself to be a book of divine origin. Even though it is a product of human authorship, those human authors were men "moved (or inspired) by the Holy Spirit." This passage of Scripture says that these men "spoke words from God." In other words, the Bible claims for itself to be a message from God.
Another powerful passage is found in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. (KJV)
Here again Scripture testifies about itself that God inspires it. The word translated "inspired" is a word which literally means "in-breathed." The Bible’s claim for itself therefore is "God-breathed."
Divine Inspiration is God breathing forth the Holy Scriptures, using the human skills and education of various men, to place down in written form the very word of God.
Think for a moment of the various brass and woodwind instruments in an orchestra… In walks a maestro of great talent and ability. One by one he picks up the instruments and breathes into them in the prescribed way and each instrument, under his control plays the same tune, but each does so with a different voice.
The Oboe does not sound exactly like the Clarinet and the Flute differs from the French horn but the melody is the same. Each instrument produces notes pure and clean, but entirely different in sound. Yet the tune is recognizable as being identical although individually produced.
Indeed, anyone who reads the Bible cannot help but be struck by the assumption that it is God who is speaking. Over and over again you hear phrases, such as "thus saith the Lord…" and "the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying…." The Lord Spake unto me…" The Bible clearly represents itself as a divine message to sinful man.
But even so, we can still distinguish the style and the vocabulary of most of its writers as being very distinct. Each man’s individual identity is not stifled nor replaced, but yet the word of God comes through them, filtered by their background and culture, yet totally free from error.
Christ himself considered the Scripture to be the Word of God. In Matthew 5:18 we hear Him saying, For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. (KJV)
When Jesus encountered Satan in the wilderness temptation, He quoted Scripture as a final authority. He said, "It is written…."
And goes on without any elaboration, or explanation. He expected even Satan to acknowledge complete authority and accuracy because it was written down in the Holy Scriptures.
He spoke of His own life being a fulfillment of the Scripture. Finally, one of His most powerful statements is found in John 10:35, "Scripture cannot be broken." (KJV)
If you accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord, and then rejected His opinion concerning the Scripture as being the Word of God, wouldn't that be coming into disagreement with the very One whom we acknowledge as being the eternal God? The very one upon which we hang our every hope for eternity? I don’t know about you but I don’t think I want to be on that side of the ledger.
What we know and believe about Christ we learn from the pages of this book, either directly or indirectly, though someone who did learn from its pages. Doesn’t it make sense to defend the very manuscript wherein lies our only claim to eternal life?
The testimony of Scripture is clear. Scripture itself testifies to us that it is the very Word of God. But this alone may not enough to convince the doubters. There are others we may call to the witness stand.
The Testimony of History
History is next to take the stand. What is the testimony of history concerning the Bible? Simply put, the testimony of history is that the Bible is a unique and supernaturally enduring book.
There have always been skeptics, people who predict the demise of Christianity and the Bible. The noted French infidel, Voltaire, said around 1750 that in 100 years Christianity would be swept from existence.
Alas, much to Voltaire’s chagrin, that has not happened. In fact, less than fifty years after his death the Geneva Bible Society purchased his house as a place for printing the Bible. Later it became the Paris headquarters for the British and Foreign Bible Society.
It has been said an entire six-volume set of Voltaire’s work was once sold for ninety cents. The Bible is still a best-seller.
As a matter of fact, the first religious book to be taken into outer space was the Bible. It was on microfilm. While in space one of the astronauts read from Genesis 1:1 -
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…."
Some of us remember that event, on Christmas Eve night 1968 while in orbit around the moon, Astronauts Borman, Anders, and Lovell broadcast the first ten verses of Genesis chapter 1, and it was heard around the world. So much for a book that Voltaire said would be extinct by 1850.
Consider the continuity of the Bible. It was written over a 1500-year span, by over forty authors from every walk of life. Here are just a few:
· Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt;
· Peter, a fisherman rude and rough;
· Amos, a herdsman who proclaimed himself to not be a prophet nor even the son of a prophet;
· Joshua, a military general;
· Nehemiah, a cup-bearer for the King;
· Daniel, a prime-minister;
· Luke, a doctor;
· Solomon, a king;
· Matthew, a tax-collector for the Roman I.R.S.; and
· Paul, a Jewish Rabbi.
The Bible was also written in many different places.
· Moses wrote in the wilderness.
· Jeremiah wrote in a dungeon.
· Daniel wrote in a palace.
· Paul wrote many times inside prison cells.
· Luke, the doctor, wrote while traveling.
· John wrote while in exile on the isle of Patmos.
The Bible was written on three continents:
· Asia,
· Africa, and
· Europe.
It was written in three languages:
· Hebrew,
· Aramaic, and
· Greek.
Yet, in spite of its diversity in every respect, there is a harmony and continuity from the beginning to the end.
From Genesis to Revelation there is one subject throughout; that runs through the warp and the weft of the fabric of the word, like a scarlet thread. It is God’s plan for the redemption of man. The Bible has a unity that cannot be explained except by it having been overseen by a supernatural spirit.
The only explanation, which fits the circumstances, is that God was coordinating the entire project.
The Bible is also unique in that it is the best-attested document in terms of its reliability. In others words, there is great evidence that the Bible we hold in our hands today has been reliably and accurately transmitted over the years.
There are more than 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament alone. You can add to that over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and another 9,300 other early versions. There are more than 24,000 manuscript (Hand written) copies of various portions of the New Testament in existence today. It has been said that no other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers and such affirmation.
By comparison, the second place document is the Iliad by Homer with only 643 manuscripts (or hand written copies) that are still in existence.
Additionally, the interval of time between the original writing and the earliest manuscripts is incredibly short in the case of the Bible compared with other ancient literature. So much so that Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, who was the director and principal librarian of the British Museum, said,
"The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest existing evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible…. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established."
The same can be said for the Old Testament as well. One of the greatest modern discoveries confirming the truthfulness and accuracy of the Old Testament was made in February or March of 1947.
About 8 miles south of Jericho, on the west side of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin shepherd boy named Muhammad who was searching for a lost goat. He tossed a stone through the dark opening in a cliff. Instead of hearing the stirring of his strayed goat, what he heard was the sound of shattering pottery.
There on the floor of the cave where several large jars containing leather scrolls which were wrapped in linen cloths. The jars were carefully sealed, preserving the scrolls in excellent condition for nearly 1900 years.
These scrolls were made up of ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament, predating the earliest known manuscripts by 900 years. One scroll was the text of the book of Isaiah.
The Dead Sea Scrolls proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Hebrew text we have is accurate. Gleason Archer, a Harvard Ph.D., says concerning the Isaiah copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that they
"Proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. The 5% of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."
Incidentally, where there were variations, none of them changed the meaning of the text in any significant way. The fact that the text of both the Old Testament and the new has been transmitted so accurately is nothing short of miraculous.
But not only has history shown that the Bible is unique in its continuity and in the reliability of its transmission, history also shows that the Bible is unique in its factual accuracy.
The Bible has come under attack from many over the years who thought that it was full of errors. Bernard Ramm, a noted Biblical scholar, said, "A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put."
We have seen the Bible dissected and criticized by many so-called intellectuals. The phrase "the assured results of higher criticism" used to be tossed about by those who would apply a rational literary criticism to the Bible.
They came up with something known as the "Documentary Hypothesis." They claimed that the first five books of the Bible could not have been written by Moses because the "assured results of higher criticism" had proven that writing didn’t exist in his time.
I heard that some time ago on one of the TV programs where they supposedly were “In Search of the Bible.”
In my humble but ever so correct opinion they were not in search of the Bible but rather “In Search of a Loophole”, which they could wiggle through so they would not be held accountable by the Bible’s standards.
On that program was a brilliant professor of stupidity from some institute of congealed reasoning and petrified spirituality who declared that it was obvious that the First books of the Bible were the concoction of a much later date than our fore-fathers believed, because writing had not yet been invented, therefore Moses could not write.
Those who embraced this theory concocted the scheme by which they parceled out the verses to various hypothetical traditions of writers. We know it today as J,E,P, and D, where each letter stands for a certain style of writing by some anonymous author. They even divided one verse amongst three authors.
Now, I take a chance at boring you with all this to let you know that critics of Biblical authority have been around for a long time and in some so-called halls of higher learning.
But then these “brilliant” scholars were blown out of the water by some other people who discovered an ancient marker with some wedge-shaped characters on it. It contained detailed laws known as the code of Hammurabi.
Here was a well developed written language. So, according to the conclusions drawn by the psudeo-intelligensia and their assured results of higher criticism it must have been dated well after Moses' time, right? Wrong! It was discovered that it predated Moses by at least three hundred years. So much for the theory of Moses having no access to writing
In another instance the advocates of "assured results of higher criticism" declared that there were no Hittites at the time of Abraham, since there were no records of them apart from the Old Testament. Wrong again! Today, because of the results of archeology, there are hundreds of references indicating more than 1200 years of Hittite civilization.
Robert D. Wilson, who is said to be fluent in more than 45 languages and dialects, said, "I may add that the result of my 45 years of study of the Bible has led me all the time to a firmer faith that in the Old Testament we have a true historical account of the history of the Israelite people."
Nelson Glueck, former president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and one of the greatest archaeologists ever, said, "I’ve been accused of teaching the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Scripture. I want it to be understood that I have never taught this. All I have ever said is that in all of my archeological investigation I have never found one artifact of antiquity that contradicts any statement of the Word of God."
We could go on. Suffice it to say that history gives clear testimony to the veracity of the Scripture.
One professor remarked, "If you are an intelligent person, you will read the one book which has drawn more attention than any other, if you are searching for the truth."
Oddly enough there are many who profess to love the word but they are not looking for truth. They are looking for a way around having to believe it, they are looking for battering rams to use to pound on those who disagree with them.
Some are looking for proof texts to support their own concoction of what they wish the Bible said. Some are looking for authority to feather their own little kingdom, here on earth. Or they are looking for errors so they can set aside the parts they don't like in order to interpret the rest to suit themselves.
We have heard from the Bible it self, we have heard from history
The Testimony of God
The final witness to take the stand is God Himself. We come now to the testimony of God concerning the Scriptures, a testimony which is powerful indeed.
Philip Hughes, who was educated at the University of London, says, "If the Bible is in reality the inspired Word of God, it must be, as such, self-authenticating; it is in no need of human sanction. God Himself witnesses to the truth of the Bible. As it’s Author He also authenticates it to the heart and mind of every believer. It is by the operation of the Holy Spirit that we are brought to faith in Christ, and that saving faith is founded upon the good news proclaimed in the pages of the Bible, and nowhere else. It is by the internal witness of the Holy Spirit that we acknowledge and appropriate the Biblical message and are assured daily and constantly that `all Scripture is inspired of God.’"
The power of God working through the Scriptures in the life of all who believe them is the supreme proof of the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
The Bible is a powerful book, because God is a powerful God. While we may defend the Bible and seek to offer proofs that authenticate the truthfulness and accuracy of the Bible, the Bible really needs no defense.
C.H. Spurgeon, a London preacher of the past, compared our defending the Bible to defending a lion. He said, in essence, that the best way to defend a lion was to let it out! It will defend itself. That is precisely what we need to do to the Bible. The Bible is its own best defense.
We’re told in Hebrews 4:12, that "the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (KJV)
The Bible is alive. Its truth pierces through all of the facade, all of the plastic pretense of who we claim to be. It speaks powerfully to who we really are.
If you don’t yet believe it, then I say you haven't read it. Its truth will powerfully grip you. Your inner spirit will agree with the words you read. And God, by His Spirit, will begin to open your eyes to see the truth.
There is no book like the Bible. It is a supernatural book with a supernatural origin. It has a mystical power about it. It is the power of God. As you read it, you will come to believe it, because you will experience that power first hand.
Remember, finally, that the theme of the Bible is not to teach us astronomy, or quantum physics, nor science, but rather it teaches us about God’s redemption of man.
So, the primary purpose of Scripture is to lead us to Jesus Christ, the One who died on the cross save us from our sin. Paul said to his disciple Timothy that the purpose of the Scripture was "to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." (2 Timothy 3:15 NASB)
Indeed, that is the purpose for which the gospels were written. It says in John 20:30-31, "Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (NIV)" Jesus Christ is the focus of the Bible. You may not have all the answers, but if you will come to Jesus, He will lead you to the truth.
Jesus said, in Matthew 7:24-27 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (KJV)
If we are to stand firm before the onslaught of error in our day, we must have our intellectual house built on the rock of God’s Word. We must learn to think Biblically about all the issues of life.
If you have issues with the word then my advice to you is get them settled and by faith accept the plain and clear message. "Christ receiveth sinful men…" and that is a worthy word.
