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This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Poole and Gary Schick.
Ben Poole
So last week, if you tuned in, we were talking about different ways people interpret scripture and how it came to those who wrote it down. And we kind of came to a point near the end of our discussion, talking about where the Bible came from, and how that works out into our lives. How can we trust it? Do we take a blind faith to what the Bible says about all these different things? How do we know that the scriptures are true? And so we thought, at least for this week and maybe more, we'll just see where the conversation takes us. But talking more about how we got the Bible and how that plays out into our lives. So I'm gonna hand it over to Gary.
Gary Schick
Well, and yeah, I thought it was a fun conversation last week and you know, the scripture gives us some hints. I mean, like I mentioned last week in Peter's letter, he talks about how people did not just basically write down whatever they wanted, they were carried along by the holy spirit. And we talk about where Paul writes to Timothy, "All scripture is God breathed, it comes from God." So this is what scripture says about itself, but how do we know it's true? And so I just wanted to dwell on that a little bit today because yes, we take God's word by faith, but it is not a faith without evidence. It is a well-founded faith. It is a faith that basically to my mind, it takes more faith to not believe the scriptures than to believe them. And I say that for several reasons, there is both internal evidence in the Bible that shows me that it really is truly God's word and there is external evidence. And so I just want to click off some of the evidences for scripture. First of all, if the Bible really is God's word, what would we expect? We would expect that it actually claims to be so, right? And no kidding. The Bible does claim to be so, over and over again, there are phrases like, "The word of the Lord came," or "The Lord said," and these are things that don't just happen now and then. This kind of, "The word of the Lord came," or "The Lord says," shows up no less than 3,808 times in the Old Testament alone.
Ben Poole
That's impressive.
Gary Schick
Yeah, I mean, I guess you could write a fictional book where in it you say, "The Lord said," so that doesn't actually prove that it's God's word. But if it's God's word, you would expect it to say so and tada, less than almost 4,000 times, 3,808 in the Old Testament, it says, God said. And then you have things like fulfilled prophecy. And I know there are other quote-on-quote scriptures in the world or books that claim to be scripture, but this is really unique to the Bible. Where you have, for example Micah 5:2, the Savior's gonna be born in Bethlehem and then you move onto Luke 2, Jesus is born in Bethlehem and we hear the story on how he gets there. Now Jesus has no control over where He's born. Did it just so happen that He was born in Bethlehem? And you know, that's gonna be of course the argument of people. Well, yes, there's some coincidental fulfillments. Oh no. Oh, over and over and over again in scripture, we read about these fulfillments and not just in Jesus' life. I mean, in the Old Testament, it's such a long book, I mean, it takes over 1500 years to write it. You have these early prophecies of other things that are gonna happen, and you read later on in the Old Testament how these things happen. And not just, sometimes they're within the same book, like the Lord said to the king, "You're gonna win or lose in battle today," and it happened that day. But there's other ones like, you know, when Jericho fell there was a prophecy about what would happen if anybody ever rebuilt it. And several books later, generations later, unrelated people later, it happens. And then in the life of Jesus, I don't have it right in front of me, but even for Him to have fulfilled a fraction of the number of prophecies that relate to Him, the statistics against it happening are gazillion to one. I mean, it's just impossible. And Jesus didn't fulfill a handful of prophecies about the Messiah, He fulfilled all of them. And there are many prophecies. So this one about fulfilled prophecy, that's kind of a big deal. And then you just have the, I guess you wanna say, the continuity of scripture. It really reads kind of like a story from beginning to end, and so what do you need to do that? Well, you need an author, right? I mean, whoever heard of a committee coming up with anything cohesive. And look at the Bible, we're not talking about a committee, we are talking about 40 different writers from all walks of life. Shepherds, kings, farmers, just all walks of life, they lived on three different continents, Africa, Asia, Europe. I mean, they were in different places. Three different languages over a period of 1,600 years with all the changes in people's viewpoint and understanding of how you do life over that kind of a period of time. And yet they come up with a single storyline, and it works from beginning to end. Forty writers, three continents, three languages, 1600 years. And in the Old Testament Christ is coming and in the New Testament He has come and He's coming again. And, you know, Hebrews 1:1-2 kind of talk about, you know, in the past our forefathers, you know, they got the word in various forms, but in our day, Jesus has come. And so we even see why this story has an endpoint because Jesus is the endpoint of scripture. And then God promises, His word is gonna accomplish what it promises. Isaiah 55:10-11, "My word will not come back forth," and it does accomplish. God promises His word will not pass away, Matthew 5:18. Matthew 24: 35, "And His word has not passed away." So there's a lot of internal evidence that God's word is a unique book, that it really is God's word, but then you don't even have to look in the Bible, you can just look at the Bible from the outside. You have the evidence of history, it's not just the Bible that talks about the person of Jesus. There are Roman historians who were not Christians, who reference this man Jesus, who was crucified under Pontius Pilot. His followers said he was raised from the dead. So, you know, does it say one way or another whether Jesus rose again, we could go off, just have a whole conversation about proofs for the resurrection of Jesus. The evidence is, there is early historical evidence from outside of the Bible. Jesus lived, Jesus was a teacher and a healer, He was crucified under a specific Pontius Pilot. And His followers said, "Yup, He rose from the dead." There's sociological evidence, I guess you could call it, there's some things going on in Genesis that just seem weird to us. In terms of, what do you do if you can't have a child? And so Abraham does some things where his wife Sarah gives him her maid servant, and we would go, "Wait a minute." But that was actually common at that particular time in history that Abraham was identified with. We didn't know that until they started, archeologically digging up documents from the era of the Galileans, where Abraham grew up. And oh, some of this stuff that we never could figure out why this was happening it wasn't part of God's plan, but Abraham tried some things that were sinful, but it was common in the culture. And over and over again, the archeological evidence, archeology, you know, there's people would say, "Well, of course the Bible's not true. It says there's a town there and there's no town there." Archeologists start digging with a shovel, guess what they find, they find the town. So there's archeological evidence, there's historical sociological evidence, there's historical evidence. And then there's the manuscript evidence, you know, nobody questions, the writings of Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, or Plato. We have a handful of copies and they're very late. Like Plato lived here and the earliest copies from thousands of years later. We have from the New Testament, I mean, there's a scrap of John that's from, could have been written while John was still alive. We have thousands of copies over and over again, and you can put them all together and you know, is there an error or a change in spelling on a name or something here and there? Yeah. But has there ever been found anything that makes a difference in what we believe? No, probably the biggest question wasn't about the New Testament, it was for a long time about the Old Testament, because the oldest copy that we had of the Old Testament was a thousand years after the time of Jesus. I think it's called Leningrad Codex which is over in Russia. And so people would say, "Well, yeah, that's the Old Testament as we have it now, but what was it really like before Jesus?" Well, then they dug something up called the dead sea scrolls and these things go back what, 2 to 400 years before, or 200 years before Jesus. And so all of a sudden they're reading the Isaiah scroll and they're comparing it to the Leningrad Codex, more than a thousand years later. In a whole chapter, they may find one slight variation in a three letter word, and again, the meaning has not changed at all. And there's a reason for that, the Jews, true they lived in a day when they had to hand copy everything, but they had figured out how many letters were in every book of their Bible. And so they'd get, you know, finished writing the 150 chapters of Psalms, and then they would go back and count the letters, and if it didn't match upright, they'd crumpled it up and start writing over. They were meticulous. So there's the manuscript evidence, it hasn't changed. And then there's just the Bible's endurance in the face of opposition. People have tried to outlaw it, burn it, get rid of it. This book, we still have it, and I don't know about you, Ben, but I've heard about the many lives that the Bible's changed. And I lied, I do know about you cause I know you, I've seen how it's changed your life. I've seen how it's changing my life. This is a living book, this is God's word and it is alive and changing lives. I don't just believe the Bible's God's word because it says so, I believe it's God's word cause I know so in my own life, and then there's all this other evidence besides.
Ben Poole
Yeah, and I think that's really where it comes down to is, as a Christian digging into God's word will show evidence in your life of a life changed. I know for me personally, I would not be in any way who I am today without God's word affecting my life. It's what I love about Hebrews writers says, "Word is living and active and we read it." It's like growing up and I always heard, you could read one passage one time, read it another and you gained something else. I mean, there's always more to learn because the author of the scriptures is the creator of the universe, and He knows what we need in it. And I wanted to just kind of put some numbers out real quick that I was thinking about. When we were talking about these different writers of history that are taken as, how would I put it, secular gospel truth of whatever they were writing nobody questions.
Gary Schick
Or that they wrote it.
Ben Poole
Yeah, nobody questions Homer or Plato for fact. So since Plato lived, the closest evidence of his writing was found 1,300 years later. That's the closest they can come to. There are only seven manuscripts of anything he wrote. Seven, and it is taken as truth. Aristotle, another famous historian that we read about in school growing up. Closest manuscript to his original writings is 1,400 years, there's five copies.
Gary Schick
And they probably don't match up all that well, who knows.
Ben Poole
Right, they are what they call reconstructions.
Gary Schick
Okay, so that means, so they've actually gone in and changed things?
Ben Poole
Things have changed in what was being said. Now let's just look at the New Testament. The closest we come to the original writers is 100 years. Again, could have been while John was still alive in that one piece. There are 14,000 manuscripts.
Gary Schick
Yeah, tons of them.
Ben Poole
And they are all telling the same truth. The reason I believe that there's such an issue with the disbelief of scripture, is because this is Satan's playground. If he can get you to question the authority of scripture, in a lot of ways, everything else crumbles. And that's where we have to be so careful. So this is more than just numbers and we're trying to tell you, there's a lot of actual, physical proof that the scriptures are absolutely true. But you have to in some ways, you've got to investigate and invest into this to know it.
Gary Schick
Well, so confronted with that, are you willing to let the Holy Spirit come in and change your life? And that's, I think why we don't wanna believe it because, if this is true then wait a minute.
Ben Poole
Our life has to change.
Gary Schick
Yeah, I have to line my life up to God. I can't make God fit into my box, I have to fit into His picture. And you know what? That is painful at times. But as I look at where I'm at and where I've been and where I'm headed, I'm just like, "You know, and it's gonna hurt some more Lord, but keep making me more in the image of Jesus," because I don't wanna be who I was without Him. I don't even wanna be who I was five, six years ago with Him. And it hurts, but God, God is faithful, and His word is true. And, you know, you talk about how you keep getting more out of it. The meaning doesn't change, but the applications and the way it applies, you just didn't see it before. And there is just so much depth there, because of its true author, the Holy Spirit.