Believing the Best II, About the Bible

By the way, while you're turning there, let me just mention, if you know of any relatives of family members here at North Way that are in the Middle East, we want to get those names in a special prayer covering. So put them on the North Way Communicator, send them in at the end of the service. If one of your own sons or daughters are there or someone that you know related to a North Way family, we want to put those together and keep them in front of the body of Christ for prayer. All right, 2 Timothy 3.16. In fact, let me back up and begin at verse 14. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. For all scripture is God-breathed or inspired, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. People have very strong feelings about the Bible. This book raises tempers or invokes the strongest passions known to man. Some feel it's a pack of lies. Some say it's the hope of the world. Recently a group went to the United States Supreme Court in order to have this book permitted to be studied in school rooms after school was dismissed. They went all the way to the Supreme Court, and just recently it's been confirmed by the United States Supreme Court that you can study the Bible after school is out on school property. One psychologist writes, if you take this book seriously, you're demonstrating a sickening form of dependency that ought to be addressed in long-term therapy. On the other hand, a federal judge recently said, unless there is a widespread return to believing the Bible, our society is doomed. It's going to self-destruct. How strongly do you feel about this book, really? I mean, how do you feel about it? How seriously do you take it? Is it something you've always had around, and you grew up with one, and your grandmother passed hers on to you? If all the Bibles were confiscated right after worship today, would you even miss yours? A recent survey, I'd just done a TV taping with Ron Hembree for a future Project 90 program. A survey that they had access to said that 11% of all Christians read their Bible on a regular basis. I mean regular basis, I mean every day. I ask myself, how much do we treasure this Word? How important is it to us? How much do we allow God to speak to us? How impressed are we with its wisdom, with the counsel that's in it for us? I fear that the old adage is true, that familiarity breeds contempt. We just kind of put it aside. We're used to it. We've always had it around. I want to talk to you this morning, with the preface I've already given you, about why this book is worthy of our cherishing it, why it's worthy of our disciplining ourselves to be in it. I want to talk about why it's unlike any other book. Now some of you young people, I'm glad you're here, you may have never heard this. This book is a treasure. First of all, on our overhead, it's unique. It's a unique book. It's not like any other book at all. It's unique in its composition. It was written over a period of 1,600 years by 40 different authors. No other book comes close to that. And despite that tremendous time lapse and all those different authors, there's a thread that runs all the way through it that's absolutely continuous. It's unique in its circulation. It's the most published book in history. How many Bibles do you think have been published? 28,000 per day for the last 245 years. That's 3 billion Bibles that have been published, probably about 50 of them are in your house right now, like tens of millions every year added to it. Most authors would love to have a book on the bestseller list for a week or two or three. The Bible's been on the bestseller list every year, but there's been a bestseller list. It's a unique book in its translation. The Bible's been translated into 1,200 languages. No book even comes close to that. And yet even as we speak, there's a small army of translators at work adding to that corpus, adding to those who are going to hear the Word of God in their own language. The Bible is unique in its durability. It survived bans and burnings and ridicule and criticism. Countless kings and rulers and dictators have tried to eradicate it, but it lives on and its influence is growing. Even as we speak, the Bible's pouring into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, pouring in. No matter what happens with perestroika, no matter where it goes, the Bible's getting in right now. We as a church gave several thousand dollars earlier this summer to send Bibles into the Soviet Union with your tithes and offerings. The Bible is also unique in what people claim that it does to them when they read it. The Bible is not a book you read once and put on the shelf. In fact, most people, serious students of the Bible, read it and then read it again and re-read it again and never stop reading it. They find information in there that can change and shape their life on a regular basis. They claim that it gives them insight into themselves, into decision-making, into values and relationships, and most of all, into eternity. What other book has this kind of impact than our Bible? None. That's why Bible study has got to be at the bedrock of every one of our Christian lives. That's why I was encouraged on the one hand that 400-some adults came on Wednesday night. I've told you last week that our new focus on Wednesday night was going to be in-depth Bible study, Bible study. But I was also asking myself, aren't there a lot more adults at North Way that really need a deeper Bible study on a regular basis? I think there are. I think there are hundreds of you who need to look at your schedule and say, honey, how can we get there so we can get in God's Word on a regular basis, deeper? The Bible is unique. Number two, the Bible is also accurate. This is going to bless some of you. I want to urge you, write this stuff down since you already know it. Write it down for someone who doesn't, and maybe when you get into a conversation about the Bible, you can give them some of these facts. How often have you heard people say something like, ah, the Bible's full. It's full of contradictions. Ever hear that? It's full of inaccuracies. It's riddled with mistakes and contradictions. The truth is that the Bible passes these tests of historicity with flying colors. And you know, if you've read the Bible, that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of references to historical places and people. And so the Bible's tested over and over and over again. In the few cases where there's an apparent contradiction, in time, archaeology proves that the Bible is more accurate than other historical sources. Let me give you an illustration. Remember the Hittites? No? That's the same ones that go along with the Dramites and the Termites back in the Old Testament. Well, historians could find no trace of these people called the Hittites. And so they were chirping, well, you see that the Bible doesn't know what it's talking about. And then back in 1906, in an archaeological dig, archaeologists unearthed evidence of the entire Hittites civilization, including its capital city and 40 other towns and cities that surrounded it. Once again, archaeology caught up with the Bible. Then another interesting discrepancy. The Bible says in Daniel chapter 5 that Belshazzar was king of Babylon. Well, we have lots of historical evidence about Babylon that's not from the Bible. So historians were saying, no, wait a minute, it says that at this period of time, a man by the name of Nabonidus was king of Babylon, not Belshazzar. Here's a contradiction. Bible's wrong again. Then in 1956, archaeologists unearthed three stones with all these little symbols on them. I have no idea how they figured them out. But they did. And on those three stones, the writings explain this, Nabonidus had been king, had taken his armies off to a distant country to do a prolonged battle, and installed his son to be the king during that period of time. What was the son's name? Belshazzar. Once again, the Bible proves to be accurate. There's no doubt in my mind that other discrepancies, and there are some that still exist, in time will be resolved so that we can say, along with the very famous, not to you perhaps, but to those in the discipline of archaeology, the Jewish archaeologist Nelson Gluck wrote this. We can state categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference. Not even one, he writes. Now, incidentally, have you noticed on TV recently these little ads for the Book of Mormon? I mean, they're pretty slick. And they put the Bible up, and they put the Book of Mormon up right there. Listen just a minute to this now. Listen to why all religions don't lead to God, alright? You see, the Book of Mormon describes a vast civilization that supposedly existed in the Americas, this hemisphere, sometime between 600 B.C. and 400 A.D. It tells of tribes and cities and coinages and mountains and so. And most Mormons accept that lock, stock, and barrel. Yet, not one single historian inside the church, Mormon church, or outside of it, has ever been able to document, to produce one shred of evidence to prove that anything in that civilization ever existed. Not one city has been unearthed. Not one tribe artifact has been found. Not one mountain range. Not one piece of coinage. Nothing. Now, I think to a person who's rational, there's a real problem there. Folks, people say we have to just accept those things on faith. Listen now carefully. Christians do not accept things on blind faith. My faith, and yours I trust, is built on facts. Jesus rose from the dead. It's a fact. It's documented. There's evidence. We're not just bullies. Someone said once, if they found Jesus' bones in the grave, I'd still believe. Well, that's dumb. No. No, they never will. But our faith is built on evidence. Evidence that's documentable. That same charge about never finding anything. The Bible's on the other end of the continuum. It's become the authority for most other historical finds. What a tremendous book we have here. Do you realize that? Beyond being historically reliable, most critics have no idea of the abundance of manuscript evidence that we have about the veracity of our Bible. Let me give you an illustration about that. If you had the privilege of going to college, sometimes even in high school, but usually in your first year of college, it's not long before the prophet signs you to read Aristotle and Plato. Great philosophers of the old Greek culture. They tell you to read these documents and these things are really influential and they've shaped the way man has conducted himself in civilization and all. No one ever asks, well, gee, how many times has this been checked out? Is this stuff for real? Is it authentic? Can I really believe this is what Aristotle said? How do we know Plato really wrote that? Did you ever ask that question? I never did. I just read the stuff. Did you know that there are less than ten existing copies of ancient manuscripts, handwritten ones, that tell us, that were accurately transmitted down from Aristotle and Plato? Ten copies in existence. Now take a guess about how many copies of the New Testament documents there are still in existence in whole or in part. Take a guess. How many do we have out there? Just to compare them to see, is the Bible accurate? Is it true? Can things be trusted? Would you say 20 or 50? If you said 100, we'd have ten times as much as we have of Plato and Aristotle. Wouldn't that be great? Dear ones, there are 14,000, 14,000 shreds of evidence. In some cases, long manuscripts that have been preserved. That's why the Bible is said accurately to be the most well-documented piece of literature from antiquity, period. More than anything else that we base all this philosophy on. So when someone tells you the Bible is just a myth, forget that. Tell them to prove it to you. They can't. And some might ask, well, what about the miracles? And I wanted to get into this, but I won't very much today. But let me say this. If you believe God is God, if you believe God is the one who created all this and sustains it, how many believe that it's probably no problem for him to do a miracle here and there? All right? Now, all the Bible is doing is telling you what God is doing. The Bible records what God did. And one little thing just to think about when people say, I don't believe that he really raised that guy from the dead. I've never heard of that. Think of this. Back then, it's just like today in this way. If lies were being spread, if things that weren't true were happening, don't you believe that someone would have stood up and said, that's ridiculous. I was there and it didn't happen that way. For example, if I said to you, if I stood up here and said, wasn't it marvelous last summer when those giant warrior angels came in and rescued the Chinese rebels from the communist government in Tiananmen Square and they had that great victory by God's power, what would you say to me? I've stepped off the edge one too many times here or something, right? Why? Why? That didn't happen. That's right. It didn't happen that way. They got crushed. Likewise, back then when miracles happened, people were there, Christians and non-Christians alike. And had they circulated documents right around that time that were telling lies, somebody would have said, you people are deceived. This is crazy. And you would have been forced to retract it. Yet the Bible circulated like wildfire. The New Testament manuscripts during that time when eyewitnesses were still alive and nobody ever said, hey, get these things off the market. You see what I'm saying? You follow the reasoning there? So it shouldn't be any problem for us to believe the miracles, even though sometimes I know we all yearn to see more of them. But there's one other thing the Bible is very accurate in, and that's it's accurate in what it says, and this is subjective, it's accurate in what it says about me. Have you discovered that? Do you ever think that the Bible writers looked into your heart before they did Romans chapter 8 or Colossians chapter 3? I mean, sometimes I get pained when I see what the Bible knows about my heart, when it talks about my impatience or my critical nature or my struggles with lust or judging or whatever it might be, and whatever it might be for you. The Bible is unique in that way, and it's accurate. It knows my heart. It speaks to the root issues of character and values and relationships and decisions. Sometimes I kind of wish it wasn't so accurate. But it's interesting to me because the Bible is so accurate in describing the heart, I think that's the reason why a lot of people don't read it. You know what I'm saying? I mean, they don't want to read it because they know if they do, it's going to call them into account before God. It's going to shatter some of their illusions about religion. It's going to talk to them about things like sin and repentance and judgment and heaven and hell. And who wants to invite that kind of rain on the picnic of an otherwise in order controlled life? I'll stay away from the Bible because I know what's in there. A while back, I was in a locker room inside of one of the local health clubs a little while ago. And in my little row, as I was showering and dressing, there was three or four bodybuilder type of guys there just kind of carrying on. They were getting showered. It was very early on a Friday evening, and they were talking about their plans for that night with the gals that they had been working out with. This was certainly an X-rated conversation going on. I'm sitting here. I don't have, like, pastor on my wall locker. I'm just there. And they're talking about where they're going to stop and pick up their beverages and where they're going to go with these gals and some of the things they were going to do and they're carrying on. I started thinking, wouldn't it be neat if I just slipped the Bible out of my locker and said, you know, guys, before you go on this little escapade tonight, how about a little Bible study here to kind of see what God thinks about those things? You know? I mean, some people just don't want to know. And the best way to keep it at a distance is what? You berate it. You criticize it. You make fun of it. Doesn't matter. Bible's full of errors. Have you ever read it? No. I don't know how many times I've asked that question. Have you ever read the Bible? No, but it's full of errors. How do you know? Well, my friend told me. So the Bible, we can be sure, is unique and accurate. But the most important question for today is this. Is the Bible inspired? Theanusis there, the word God breathed that we read, means literally given of God, breathed by Him. Is this a book that God wrote or is it just something that man put together? Now understand this. Here we are. This is 1990. We're Americans. I said last week, you know, we have more going for us than any civilization in the world. But is this a book that some men cleverly slipped the pages together? Or is it a book that God gave to us? Is it God speaking? That's the question. Why do I think the Bible's inspired? A few reasons. Number one, the Bible's inspired, I believe this, because first of all, it says it is. The Bible clearly, I read it today, it says very clearly that it's all Scripture. How much Scripture? That means Old and New Testament is God breathed and is profitable for rebuking, correcting, teaching, and training in righteousness. Also, 2 Peter 1, verse 20 and 22, if you want to jot that down, says this, Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own intent. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of men, but men spoke from God as they were carried along, carried along by the Holy Spirit. Not automatic writing. It wasn't like Paul sat down and said, okay, put a pen in his hand, Holy Spirit grabs him and, dearly beloved. That's not what happened. Inspired has to do with the fact that God moved in their hearts and their lives so that what was coming out of them in the natural life was God's words that He wanted recorded for all of history. Now, you say, well, if you're a skeptic, now most of you aren't, I know I'm speaking to the convinced, but maybe you know a skeptic. Maybe there's one that you know. They say, well, the Bible can't just say it about itself. I don't believe that. What else is there? Well, let me give you a second reason why I believe it's inspired. And that is because of the fulfilled prophecies in this book. I believe I can make an incredibly strong case for the fact that this book is God speaking simply because of the number of prophecies that have been fulfilled. It's a strong case, dear ones. You see, because it was written over 1,600 years, people back in the B.C. period had said, no, I'm going to write down by God's inspiration what's going to happen a few hundred years later. And guess what? It did. It always happened that way. By the way, let me just insert here, that's why you better read Revelation carefully and some of these other prophetic books. Because I don't know how it's all going to happen, but I'll tell you sometime it's going to happen. Jesus said, Scripture cannot be broken. John 10. John 10.35. But one of the most fascinating studies of prophecy are the prophecies about Jesus' birth. And there are a bunch of them in there. I mean the Bible is very clear. It talks about in detail His lineage, the city where He's going to be born, the manner of His birth and all those kinds of things. How He would live and die and rise again. How can you explain the accuracy of those things being fulfilled unless it was God? And may I just give you a little bit of documentation on that. A man by the name of Peter Stoner who was a college professor in mathematics wrote a book called Science Speaks. And he had done a study. He was an investigator. He wanted to know is this for real? And so he studied eight prophecies from the Old Testament. Eight. That dealt with Jesus' birth and life. Just eight of them. And there are many more. But these are the more quantifiable ones. And he calculated the odds that eight prophecies about a particular individual could come true kind of by accident. What are the odds of all eight of these things being said about one person? And this mathematician calculated the odds are one times ten to the seventeenth power. Now how many zeros is that? Seventeen zeros. How many zeros in a billion? Come on math teachers. How many? Nine. Alright. And so a trillion would be ten. Ten to the seventeenth power. Let me give you a handle on what that works out to. In other words, if this just sort of happened to Jesus, he just happened to fulfill these by accident. Here's the odds of that happening. If you walk into our little bathrooms here, you'll see a little bathroom tile. They're about an inch, inch and a half square. Take one of those tiles, put it right down here on the floor of the platform. Take another one beside it, another one beside it. One times ten to the seventeenth power is enough tiles to do this whole building, to do all of Wexford, to do all of Pittsburgh, to do all of Pennsylvania, to do all of the United States, all of North America, South America, Africa, Asia. Every dry piece of ground on the face of the earth would be covered with those little tiles. That's how many that is. And the odds of one person fulfilling those prophecies is the same as you being told now there's an X on the back of one of those tiles. And you walk around anywhere you want to and when you bend down and touch the tile, that's the one with the X on the back. Those are the odds. Why is God's Word inspired? Because it couldn't have happened by accident. I can't tell you what it does to me to tell you this and know that you already believe it. But there are thousands of people that you know that don't. That's the thing. We've got to change that church. The third reason why it's inspired is because Jesus said categorically Scripture cannot be broken. Heaven and earth will pass away but my Word will not pass away. It's inspired then because it claims to be because the prophecies authenticated and there are many more that I didn't talk about and because Jesus said so. Beyond that I want to say this. It's inspired because of the testimony of millions of lives of what the Bible did when people let it get into their hearts. And that's sort of the final word for today is how do you know it's inspired? You only know it if you submitted yourself to it. You only know it if you bring yourself under its teaching, under its influence. I started by asking you how much do you really treasure this book? I wonder when the last time was that you sat down and let the book speak to you and wrote down the things that God might have been saying to you. Was it yesterday? Did you read Hebrews 11 this morning in your Victory Bible plan? Was it last week? Or maybe it hasn't even been in September. Maybe you don't even know what your Bible is. If this book is the Word of God, how can we avoid exposing ourselves to it? Matthew 4.4 says, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds. Every day it proceeds. This book for the believer should be like a meal on a daily basis to your spirit. I felt so strongly about this, I can't tell you, but I decided that next week I'm going to follow this message up and talk to us about how we can clear the rocks and cut the weeds and let this Word fall in good soil. Because I have a deep concern, I do, that we're we're not receiving it. And it's got to change us. Dear ones, I don't care how much you know, I don't care how much you can spout, I don't care how much you've memorized, if it's not changing you, it's not doing what God intended for it to do. A book this marvelous, a book God breathed, a book that's revelation. You say, well, I mean, I read it sometimes and nothing happens. So do I. But that doesn't mean nothing's happening. If I were to ask you what you had to eat three Saturday mornings ago, what did you have? I don't remember. Wheaties. it's kind of dry. But it helped you through the day and kept you going. There are days I fold this up and say, you know, why in the world does it talk about concubines? I mean, I don't even like that word. I go like that with you. Same as you do. But in the end, you see, it builds in us and the word starts being active and we start to establish our decisions and daily life isn't just kind of winging it by our feelings. It's established in us. the word of God. And so I want to just end today by saying to you, I know I've been convincingly convinced, but I want to end with this verse that James writes because it's what I left here last night at 11 o'clock pulsating in my spirit. And if it's not happening in you, then it's not happening James 1.22 Are you there? Just wait another second. A lot of people are newer, coming to terms and I'm really not speaking to you today as much about the need to do this. Maybe you're just being convinced today and I appreciate that. James 1.22 Alright, here we go. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and after looking at himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he's heard but doing it. He will be blessed in all he does. Church, do you understand that? Do you realize how much God has given you? Some of you have sat under good Bible teaching for 20 years. God is not interested in how you rate my sermons but He is interested in rating you and how well you respond to them. And I appreciate your affirmation but that can be seductive. I walk out and someone will say, that was a great message Pastor Jay. Wow, tell me about it. Go ahead. I like that. But I realize something. God is far more concerned about what you do with it than He is what you thought about it. And I feel that way. By God's grace we're not just going to be hearers we're going to be doers. This book is our treasure. Let's treat it like that. Amen. Let's stand together.