The Bible--God's Message to Mankind ("Definite Convictions in a Do-Whatever World" Series)

Note: This sermon is the beginning of a new, occasional series on my church's Statement of Faith. I will be preaching from our Statement of Faith on the Sundays that we celebrate The Lord's Supper together.      

     

Section 1 of our Statement of Faith is entitled, “Verbal Inspiration,” and it states: “We believe that all Scripture of the Old and New Testament is God-Breathed, is inerrant in the original writings and is the supreme and final authority in all matters of life, faith, and practice (2 Tim. 3:16, Matt 4:4, 2 Peter 1:20-21, Rom 15:4).”

            This title, “Verbal Inspiration,” simply means that God’s involvement with the writing of Scripture extended all the way to the very words that the human authors chose to use to express their message. In other words, God didn’t just give the human authors of the Bible some grand and lofty ideas and then leave them on their own to put those ideas down in writing. That would’ve left the writing process vulnerable to all the imperfections of human beings.

            For example, we’ve all experienced the frustration of having an idea in our minds but not being able to find just the right words to express it. In the end, we sometimes have to settle with an imprecise or incomplete expression of what we truly had on our minds.

            So is that what we have with the Bible? Is it just the best attempt of the human authors to communicate all that God had placed in their minds? No – not at all! God’s involvement in the writing led the entire process from beginning to end, so that even the very words the authors chose to use were the words that God desired for them to use.

            The first statement of this section says, “We believe that all Scripture of the Old and New Testament is God-Breathed.” What does this term “God-Breathed” mean? Well, it comes from 2 Timothy 3:16-17 [READ 2 Tim 3:16-17]. This picture of God breathing out the Scriptures tells us that he is the ultimate source and origin of the Scriptures. Even though it was actually human beings who put pen to paper in order to write the Bible, its message ultimately came from God.

            Think of it like a musician playing a beautiful piece of music on an instrument. Yes, the musician uses the instrument to produce the sound, but the music is ultimately coming from the musician, not the instrument. So it is with the Bible – God used human authors to produce the documents, but the message is ultimately from him.

            The second statement declares that the Scripture “is inerrant in the original writings.” This declaration means that the documents produced by the original authors were free of any mistakes or errors. Therefore, the Bible tells us the truth and nothing but the truth.

            In this statement, though, why do we only focus on the original writings as being free of errors? The reason is that we know mistakes have been made in the copying process that has taken place from that time until now. For example, in 1631, a new edition of the King James Bible was printed in England that became known as "The Wicked Bible" because the printers accidently left out the word "not" in the commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery!” Thus, their Bible made it sound like God was commanding everyone to commit adultery!

            Now how do we know that this was an error? It’s because we have thousands upon thousands of other copies of the Bible that say, “thou shalt not commit adultery.” By comparing all of these copies together, we can spot locations in individual copies where mistakes have been made – such as in The Wicked Bible. By this process of comparison, then, we can eliminate those mistakes and know that we have an accurate copy of what the original authors wrote.

            The final statement of this section says that the Bible, “is the supreme and final authority in all matters of life, faith, and practice.” Notice how comprehensive that statement is – the Bible is the final authority for how I live, what I believe, and for how we do things in the church. This respect toward the Bible is simply the logical response to the fact that the Bible is ultimately a message from God. He is our Creator, our Lord, our Savior, and our Master, so whatever he has declared for us is the standard by which we must measure all things.

Monday Matters

            Now at this point you may be thinking, “This is wonderful information, Pastor Tim, and if I ever end up on Jeopardy it may help me to know what verbal inspiration means. But what difference does this make for my life?”

            That is a fair – and very important – question! When we wake up tomorrow morning, we will have to deal with Monday matters all over again. We’ll have to get the kids out the door and get them to school, and perhaps little Johnny is falling behind in a certain subject and will have to wrestle with some complicated decisions about what to do. And perhaps you’ll head off to another day at a job that you don’t really enjoy, and you’ll put in one more day just so you can pay those bills that are breathing down your neck.

            When you have to deal with those realities, what difference does it make that you know these truths about the Bible? In each sermon in this series, we’ll deal with this question, because it is very important to know how doctrine does connect with daily life.

            In today’s case, the great comfort and help we receive can be summarized like this:

In the Bible, we have a source of divine wisdom and food for the soul.

            In life, we have to deal with so many different decisions that can feel so complicated. Sometimes it’s hard just to form your own opinion, and then on top of that, you may have to sort through all kinds of advice from other people. It can all be so confusing, but in the midst of that confusion, we have a source of light, piercing through the fog, showing us the direction to take.

            The Bible gives us a framework for thinking that is not based on the limited understanding and perspective of men. It comes from above the fray, from a vantage point of unlimited knowledge and wisdom, untainted by sinfulness, and unfazed by the passage of time. The Bible helps us to align our priorities in the proper order so that we can accurately weigh the various options that may be available to us in any situation.

            So as we deal with the complexities of life, we don’t have to simply lean on our own understanding, which is so limited and filled with blind spots because of our own sinfulness. Instead, we can have the confidence that we are following a path that has been laid out by divine wisdom and infinite love. Our Statement of Faith references Romans 15:4, which says, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Remember that hope is the biblical optimism that we have through the instruction and promises of God. It is a biblical optimism, which remembers – as the Apostle Paul stated – that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God, but hope is optimistic nonetheless because it is confident in God’s ability to fulfill his promises.

            So we can see how this divine wisdom is also food for our souls. The Bible nourishes us and sustains us spiritually when we grow so weary because of life in this world. Each one of us knows that even after we have fed our bodies, we can still be malnourished if we have not fed our souls. You can feast on the finest cuts of meat and the most delectable desserts and yet still be empty inside because your soul is fatigued and underfed.

            But the Bible provides the nourishment and sustenance for our souls to give us spiritual energy so that we don’t have to feel beat down and worn out as we go through life. As Jesus himself said in Matthew 4:4, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We find these precious words in his holy book, the Bible, and drinking them in will quench the thirst of even the driest soul.           

           

A New Confidence for a New Year

            As the father of a toddler, I’ve been hearing the song “Jesus Loves Me” quite a bit lately. In fact, Adrianna wants to hear that song at bedtime every night, so I hear it at least once a day! The first line of that song makes a very important claim, one that many people today would reject. That line says, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That may seem like just a simple children’s song, but its actually making an astounding claim—that we can know that a statement is true simply because the Bible says it is.

            That is a very significant claim, and its one that most people today would reject. In fact, many Christians are not willing to give whole-hearted approval to the claim that we can know that a statement is true simply because the Bible says it is. It is not popular in the culture at large to place that kind of confidence in the Bible; thus, it can be tempting for us to hesitate to place our full confidence in Scripture.

            So, should we be willing to say, “this I know, for the Bible tells me so?” Do we have good reasons to be so confident about what the Bible says? Today, I hope to convince you that the answer is “yes!” We’re going to look at a few of the most commonly asked questions about the Bible, and in my opinion we will find some very satisfying answers. These answers will take the form of an acronym that spells out the word MAPS, so that this little memory device will help you remember these answers whenever these questions might come up.

Let’s begin with a question that is common to virtually everyone who doubts the reliability of the Bible.

How do we know the Bible hasn’t been changed over the years?

            Virtually everyone who wants to challenge the reliability of the Bible will claim either that the Bible was deliberately changed at some point in the past or that it has simply picked up thousands of errors as it was copied over the years and thus can no longer be trusted. You will hear this claim from atheists on the one hand all the way to Mormons and Muslims on the other! So how do we know the Bible hasn’t been changed over the years? The answer is the word manuscripts. The “m” in that word gives us the first letter of our acronym.

            Manuscripts are the ancient, handwritten copies of the Bible that we have discovered through archaeology. These manuscripts are copies of the original writings that were meticulously copied and handed on from person to person and group to group. For the Old Testament, these manuscripts were copied by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes. These scholars took their work seriously—they knew how many letters were in each line, how many lines were to be on each page, and if they made a mistake they threw out the whole thing. Their work was so precise that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered around 1950, they confirmed that the Masoretes work was nearly flawless.

            In the case of the New Testament, archaeologists have uncovered literally thousands upon thousands of manuscripts—far more, in fact, than any other ancient work of literature. The New Testament, as you might know, was originally written in Greek, and if we consider only the Greek manuscripts that we have found, we have over 5,000 manuscripts to work with—which is about 8 times more than the number of manuscripts that have been found of any other ancient book (#2 on the list is the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer). Archaeologists have found some copies of the New Testament that date to within 35 years of when the Book of Revelation was written. If that sounds like a long time, its not! In this field of study, 35 years is like a couple of days.

            But, if we also count the manuscripts that we have found that were copied into other languages, like Latin, we have over 24,000 manuscripts to work with! Manuscripts of the Bible have been found all over the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, and when we compare them to each other, we find that the text of the Bible has always been consistent—there is no evidence at all of any sort of vast conspiracy to corrupt the Bible.

Now as far as the question of errors and mistakes in copying, it is true that these individual manuscripts have copying mistakes in them—a misspelled word here or there, or a word accidentally left out of a verse (you would make mistakes, too, if you were copying the entire New Testament by hand!). But, when we compare all of these manuscripts together, it is easy to spot these mistakes and ensure that they don’t creep in to our copies of the Bible today. The copy of the Bible that you hold in your hand is the result of painstaking work to compare all of the copies of Scripture we possess in order to root out the copying mistakes that were made. So you can confidently say that your Bible is not filled with mistakes and errors; instead, it contains precisely what the original authors of Scripture wrote with their own hands.

How do we know the events written about in the Bible actually happened?

            The answer to this question is the word “archaeology,” which gives us the letter “a” in our acronym. As archaeologists have done their work over the years, they have repeatedly found that the historical details recorded in the Bible are accurate and true. For example, archaeologists recently discovered coins from ancient Egypt that bore the name and image of the biblical character Joseph from the book of Genesis. One coin apparently also made reference to the dream that he interpreted for Pharaoh.

            We could mention thousands of other discoveries as well. Many cities and towns mentioned in the Bible have been found. Some of them are still being lived in, like Jerusalem, which still contains artifacts like the aqueduct built by King Hezekiah of the Old Testament or portions of the Temple in which Jesus walked and talked (perhaps you’ve heard of “The Wailing Wall”). All of these discoveries reveal that the people and places of the Bible were real people and real places.

            Let’s compare this for a moment to another religious book—the Book of Mormon. That book makes all kinds of claims about people who supposedly lived in North America many years ago and who became the ancestors of modern-day Native Americans. Archaeologists have never made a single discovery that backs up the story of the Book of Mormon. In fact, you won’t find maps in the back of the Book of Mormon like you do in the Bible because they can’t be produced! Mormons just have to guess about where those people supposedly lived because we haven’t found any proof that they actually existed.

            This observation raises serious doubts about everything that’s found in the Book of Mormon. If it can’t get the facts of history straight, why should we trust anything else it says? Perhaps you can see then how archaeology gives us confidence in the Bible. To paraphrase Jesus, since the Bible is accurate about earthly things that we can confirm through disciplines like archaeology, then we have good reason to trust it when it tells us about heavenly things—like the character of God and salvation.

How do we know that the Bible is more than just the writings of human beings?

            It is certainly true that the Bible didn’t just fall from the sky into our hands. The words of Scripture were actually written down on paper by human beings. But if that’s the case, then how can we claim that the Bible is anything more than just the opinions of human beings? Does it actually bear the mark of a divine origin?

            Yes it does, and we can see this in two ways, which will give us the last two letters of our acronym. The first mark of divine origin is predictive prophecy, which gives us the letter “p.”

            You might be familiar with the fact that the Bible has made certain predictions about future events, but what you may not realize is how specific some of these prophecies are. In general, the Bible’s prophecies are clear enough that their interpretation is obvious, and they could easily be proven wrong if they didn’t come true. Let me give you an example of what I mean—if I said, “We’re going to get an inch of snow tomorrow,” by the end of the day tomorrow it would be easy to prove whether or not my prediction had come true. But if I said, “A wintery sky will arise,” it would be more difficult to tell whether or not my prediction came true. What does a “wintery sky” even mean? Does it mean cold winds? Cold air temperatures? Also, it wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy to predict a wintery sky in December! Such a prediction wouldn’t show any special insight on my part.

            Most so-called “prophets” over the years have given only vague prophecies like my wintery sky prophecy. Nostradamus is a great example of such a prophet. Every so often, you’ll see a supermarket tabloid declaring that Nostradamus predicted some kind of world event, but when you read the so-called “prophecy,” its so vague that you could interpret it in a dozen ways.

            The prophecies of the Bible are very different. Many of them are very specific, and the fact of the matter is that they have come true. Some of the prophecies even give the specific names of kingdoms and people. [READ Daniel 8:20–22] [READ Isaiah 44:24–28]

            We can also look at the numerous prophecies that were fulfilled by the Lord Jesus. By some counts there were hundreds of prophecies that his life fulfilled, with such specific details as the name of his birthplace, the content of his personal character, and the treatment that he would receive in his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

            The fact that the Bible has accurately and specifically predicted future events before they took place is a powerful proof that it is supernatural in origin. It could not possibly be a merely human book because human beings do not have the ability to predict the future with such accuracy.

            The second mark of divine origin is statistics, which gives us the letter “s” in our acrostic. The unique circumstances behind the way that the Bible was written simply defy all odds. The probability that we would even have a book like the Bible is all but impossible. Consider this: The Bible was written over a period of more than 1500 years on 3 different continents by 40 different authors from at least 19 different walks of life, yet it contains one continuous storyline and no contradictions. Most of these authors did not know each other and they were not working in collaboration.

            It is not as though the authors of the Bible got together in Jerusalem one day and came up with a plan for their writing. They worked independently of each other, yet their writings show complete agreement with the writings of all of the other authors. If we didn’t have a book like the Bible, I doubt we would believe that such a book could even exist.

           I believe we can see that the Bible is worthy of our utmost confidence. From this information, I believe that we can be confident that when we build our lives upon the Bible, we are building on a solid foundation. We can truly stand tall and proud when we say, “this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”