All Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Timothy 3:16 esv)

Transcription

1 Progressive Christianity: Fact or Fiction Pt 2 "Does It Matter That the Bible is Reliable?" Gary Emmons May 24, 2015 Pastor Randy was shooting a video of my car last week when.well...watch How do you know what to believe? Did a satellite fall on my car? (no) only an app made that happen. How do you know what to believe? Are we smarter today than the people in Jesus day? Were they uneducated and needed to follow a God because they couldn t lead themselves? Do people in 2015 still need to be lead or have we gathered enough fruit from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil to chart our own path? Today, we are in prt 2 of our current series, Progressive Christianity, Fact or Fiction? Does Christianity progress through time? Is the Bible trustworthy and Reliable in 2015 or just part of it, maybe? The Apostle Paul addressed this to Timothy. All Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Timothy 3:16 esv) I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus. preach the word; (2 Timothy 4:1-2 esv) By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, (1 Timothy 1:18-19 esv) It sounds like Paul is warning Timothy to say on coarse of following scripture, which begs the question to us, Are these words we read the same that the first century read?

2 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1) And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14) The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29) Did Jesus best friend John really say this? Or has history corrupted the original, making this look like Jesus was the Son of God, God in the flesh, coming to take away the sin of the world? In the beginning was the Word. The word is Logos in Greek. We get the word logic from it. So let s use logic to give us a MAP of the reliability of the words of John and all the books in the Bible. We ll use the acronym MAPS to chart our way. 1. M - Manuscripts confirms the accuracy and reliability of the Bible. a. The Bible is 66 books that had to pass a test to be included in what we have in our hand. b. The Bibliographic test considers the quantity of historical manuscripts and fragments and when they were written. i. If I were to say, do you believe that Julius Caesar really existed what would you say? (yes) Why? Because of the Bibliographic test of historians. ii. Do you know how many ancient documents historians base the reality of Julius Caesar on? (10)

3 iii. How about to Plato s? (7) Aristotle? (49) iv. The NT? There are currently (5685) ancient copies whole and partial of the New Testament. And unlike the above documents, these copies were written less than 100 years of the NT events. 1. NT scholar and Princeton professor Bruce Metzger made a comparison of the copies to see if they were the same. There was 99.5% accuracy between them. v. What does all this mean? It means two things. 1. The WORDS in the Bible are important. As the letters and books in the Bible were copied from the originals to be passed around the world they made sure that every word, comma and period was there. 2. The second thing the bibliographic test means is if you discount any scripture, that has shown to be accurately recorded, then all ancient history needs to be questioned as being unreliable. Matt Slickdocuments his source material; vi. The NT has revealed 5685 but the OT has 14,000 manuscripts and fragments with the oldest dating back to B.C. Then of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1948 gave the world some 800 manuscripts of every book, part or whole, of the OT except for the book of Esther. The words we read are the exact words Jesus read. The scrolls were hidden just before the

4 Temple was destroyed by Rome in A.D. 70. Matthew 5:18 (NIV) For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. vii. viii. ix. f. The Eyewitness test is the second test that the books and letters in scripture had to pass. The human writers of the Bible had to eyewitness or had interviewed the eyewitnesses. vi. Moses was there. David was there. Matthew was there, Luke interviewed. Peter was there. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. (2 Peter 1:16) x. Have you heard of the Gnostic Gospels? 58 ancient manuscripts that have been found all within the first few centuries and all rejected by the early church fathers who put the Bible together. None of them met the bibliographic or eyewitness test. xi. Television and News magazines call them the lost gospels. Authors make money off of them. They are called; the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, and the book of Philip. The documents identify themselves using familiar Biblical names, but they never passed the test. xii. For Example: There is 1 copy of the Gospel of Judas which shows that the early Christian people were not interested in copying it. Why?, because It wasn t valid and didn t pass the test. More like reading the National Enquirer.

5 d. External Evidence are extra-biblical accounts of the events in the Bible that others wrote referencing the events recorded in the Bible. i. For example, Josephus was a Jewish historian in the first century who confirmed Jesus crucifixion and confirmed the resurrection. The Roman historian, Tacitus (A.D. 120), The Roman Governor, Pliny Secundus (A.D ) reference Jesus and other New Testament events. ii. The sermons and writings of church leaders such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Julius Africanus, and Clement of Rome all wrote confirming the events and scriptures in the New Testament, all before A.D 250. iii. There is strong external evidence to support the Bible s manuscript reliability. 5. A Archaeology has proven to support the reliability of the Bible. d. The discipline of Archaeology has confirms names, places and events in the Bible more in the last 100 years then all the years before. i. For example, sometimes Archeology confirms missing people. 1. The 5th chapter of Daniel contends that King Belshazzar was the final ruler of Babylon, but until 1929 the extra-biblical evidence pointed to King Nabonidus as king at the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. The apparent conflict was solved when documents were discovered revealing that Nabonidus spent time in Arabia, leaving the affairs of the kingdom to his oldest son, Belshazzar, who reign as co-regent.

6 ii. Empires only mentioned in the Bible have been later confirmed by archaeology. 1. Professor Hugo Winckler discovered the Hittite Empire in his archeological digs in 1906, indicated in Genesis 10. iii. Sometimes archeology confirms places edentified in the Bible 1. 1 Kings 9 claimed King Solomon brought back 16 tons of gold from Ophir. But some historians were skeptical and didn t believe that there was a place called Ophir. In 1956 there was a dig in Israel that confirmed its presence and dealings in gold. iv. Entire books in the Bible have been confirmed by archeology. 1. Historian scholar, Sir William Ramsey, set out to disprove the historical reliability of the Books of Luke and Acts. However, through his extensive work in the Mediterranean archaeological digs, he became a convert to Christianity and verified the authenticity of Luke s writings. 3. P - Prophecy has been proven to support the reliability of the Bible.

7 And if you say in your heart, How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken? when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18:21-22) a. Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events-in detail-many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter no errors. i. Mathematicians have concluded that the odds for all these prophecies being fulfilled by chance without error is less than one in (that is 1 with 2000 zeros written after it)! b. According Dr. Hugh Ross, having a PHD in astrophysics from the University of Toronto, says that the probability that Jesus accidently fulfilled 8 of the 300 prophecies he did fulfill is 1 in S -God s SPIRIT is the last letter in our the acronym of MAPS that confirms the reliability of God s Word. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:21) a. We have just concluded the what we hold in our hands is accurate. It says the God wrote this through human writers.

8 b. If man merely wrote it, we could debate and challenge its writings. We could change it. But, since God wrote, it through man, we cannot change it one letter. c. Logically then, God s Word forces us to wrestling with it. There are difficult passages that we need to deal with, not eliminate. d. It is amazing how the Spirit of God used 40 different writers over 1500 years with three different languages and it reveals the thread of the Gospel in every book. e. God redeems and leads his people. The story will alway be that. I will close with the words of the Apostle Paul as he writes the church in Corinth. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:12-14)