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SERMON
One morning in 1536 a man stepped up to a post and there he was strangled and then burned to ashes. The man's name was William Tyndale. How did he get into so much trouble? He wrote a translation of the New Testament in his native English which became immensely popular. In the 1960's in the Soviet Union the Bible was a dangerous book to own and even more so if you had a suitcase full of them. People were arrested and imprisoned and treated to the not-so-kind hospitality of the secret police (the KGB) for trying to get the Bible into the hands of Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, again and again a man named Andrew smuggled in suitcase after suitcase of them- braving the possible consequences. In Chinese prisons today Christians pass around hand copied verses of the Bible to each other on little scraps of paper. When asked how the Church in America can help persecuted churches in Communist or Muslim or Hindu lands our Christian brothers and sisters say- send up your prayers and send us the Scriptures- we hunger for the Word of God. Why all of the life and death fuss over a book?
Pastor Alan started what has turned into a summer series on What Evangelicals Believe. He counted himself an evangelical. And so do I. Very much so. Pastor Alan defined an evangelical simply as one who believes the great news that the Holy God of heaven loves us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to die so we could be reconciled to Him. Alan went on to talk about the nature of the God whom we worship- evangelical theology. The following week he talked about the nature of human being- evangelical anthropology. This week I would like to talk about the Bible- this book that evangelical Christians have faced imprisonment, torture and death to get into people's hands, this book so loved and revered. So, again, why all of this fuss over a book? The world is full of book on religion and philosophy and spirituality. What is so unique about the Bible? And how does is book as old as the Bible relevant to us today?
The short answer to all of these questions is very simply: we believe that the Bible is God's Word written to us. It is His self-disclosure. Through the Bible God reveals Himself. It is God's love letter to humanity. It tells us the truth about God, ourselves, salvation and how we are to live. That is why we teach it, preach it, read it in our quiet times every day, study it in Bible studies, memorize it and take risks getting it out into an angry world.
But let's get honest here. Biblical literacy is at a low ebb. Most people who attend evangelical churches do not read the Bible every day, nor memorize it nor even attend a Bible study. Most come in on Sunday, get a little religion, and that's the end of it until next week, or two because Aunt Betty is coming next weekend and the week after…well, there are the kids soccer games…
Many in church do not believe in objective truth at all- the world's mantra "all truth is relative" rings in our ears. If that is the case then the Bible can't be true true. Nice, maybe, if you don't read the bad parts, but not true.
So I feel the need to back up and ask the honest question: how do we know the Bible tells the truth?
First, about objective truth. Ravi Zecharias, a great Christian man, attended the opening of an art museum in Chicago. The architect had built a building with windows that opened onto bare walls and stairs that lead nowhere- all helter-skelter and crazy. When asked why he built such a building he said it was a statement that life is chaos and without meaning and that there is no absolute truth. "Oh", Zacharias said, "did you apply the same philosophy to the foundation." One can talk relative truth or no absolute truth but you cannot live it. Jim Thomas, in his wonderful book Coffeehouse Theology, puts it this way- "…the good news is that truth does exist, and universal, absolute truth at that. That's what objective reality is built upon, and it's quite easy to demonstrate since it's all around us. One example: you go to the top of the World Trade Towers in New York City and step off the edge, it is absolutely true that by the time you get to the sidewalk below you will need a Band-Aid. There is just no question about that." Why should we think it is any different with truth about God or people or death?
Secondly, about God. Many people would say they believe in God or a god. But what kind of god are we talking about? Are we talking about some poor deity up there somewhere who can't even speak? Can't this poor god read and write? Or is this god so spiteful that he just won't tell us what we need to know? The Good News is that God speaks. God is neither stupid, nor spiteful nor powerless. God has revealed Himself in the Bible. He has desired communication with us so badly that He left heaven and became a person, one like us, so we could see who God is and how we should live. And He made sure that the whole story was written down in the Bible. As Jim Thomas puts it- ""Believing the Bible is not nearly so preposterous as believing that God exists but is somehow unable or unwilling to communicate with us."
Why else should we believe the Bible is God's Word written? Well, I think its time to put out the old three points. In II Timothy we read that the Scriptures are 'God breathed'- the words come from God. God is communicating. If that is so should we not expect the Bible to be 1) unified, 2) reliable and 3) powerful.
First, we should expect the Bible to be unified. Let us consider the remarkable unity of the Bible. The Bible was written over a course of 1400-1500 years and in several languages- Hebrew, Greek and a smattering of Chaldee and Aramaic. There are 66 books written by fishermen, peasants, kings, tax agents, doctors, poets and prophets. I would like you to think for a minute about how hard it is to get agreement with a group of people. Our across the street neighbors had relatives over and 8 grown adults went around and around, with much disagreement, over which restaurant to go to for no less than 45 minutes. Mexican, too spicy for Grandma. Chinese, Grandpa hates Chinese. Roadhouse Grill, Auntie is a vegetarian. In the Bible, without overriding the identities and styles of all of the very different people God wanted to use to get His message across, there is a unified and clear message of the plan of redemption. There is amazing agreement on who God is and what He is up to. The Bible's many stories are one story. It is the Word of God written pointing to Jesus, the Word of God incarnate.
Secondly, we would expect the Bible to be reliable and trustworthy. Often, when the subject of the Bible comes up with unbelievers they say they don't believe the Bible. When asked why they reply because it is full of contradictions. My standard reply to this has become- O.K. name five. Of course, they cannot because they have not read the Bible. And so they can go on believing that the Bible is full of contradictions and is not reliable. The amazing thing is- even with the Bible texts passing from hand to hand and being copied and recopied- there are exceedingly few errors and little left that can be called contradiction. Aside from differences in numbers and verb teses- what is left is mostly this kind of thing: one Easter account says the women saw two angels- another account says they saw only one. One account of Judas's death says he hanged himself- and another says he fell and his guts burst asunder. One passage in Exodus says God parted the waters of the Red Sea and another passage says a strong east wind blowing all night did it. These all are easily reconciled and certainly do not affect the meaning of what is being said.
The attempts of the 18- and early 1900's to discredit the Bible by unbelieving archaeologists had just the opposite effect from what they had hoped for. Archaeology has, to an astonishing degree, validated the reliability of the Bible. People and places thought to be fictitious have been dug up. Libraries of other cultures have been found that confirm details of Biblical accounts. Here is but one example from hundreds. In Northern Syria in 1964 a city was found. It was the Kingdom of Ebla. An archive of 17,000 tablets has been unearthed from this city. Ebla reached the height of its power in 2300 BC and was destroyed in 2250. Non-Christian and liberal scholars had long said that the time of Moses was a time prior to all knowledge of writing- that Moses could not therefore have written anything down. Moses was around in about 1400 BC. If we do the math, writing had been around in Moses's neck of the woods for a thousand years! In addition to this, those same scholars claimed that Genesis 14 was unreliable because they couldn't find Abraham's Five Cities of the Plain (Sodom, Gemorrah and three others). Well, one of those 17,000 tablets from Ebla list all five of those cities and in the same order as Genesis 14!
I cannot do this justice now but please know that there are over 5,000 full and partial manuscripts of the NT, some well within 100 years of the life of Christ, sitting in museums in London, Manchester, Leipzig, Paris and the Vatican. Compare this with Caesar's Gallic Wars, with only 10 manuscript copies, the earliest being 900 A.D. It was written in about 55 BC! Or Plato's Tetralogies. There are only 7 manuscripts and almost a 1,200 year gap between the original writing and the earliest surviving copy! There are more NT manuscripts copied with greater accuracy and earlier dating than for any secular classic from antiquity.
Shoot, better stop and get to the best part of an evangelical view of Scripture- its power. The Word changes lives. In Isaiah 55:11 God says- "My Word which goes out from My mouth: it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it." While preparing for this sermon I called Neil over at Christian Discount Books and if he had some stories of people whose lives were changed and came to Christ simply by reading the Bible. His instant reply was "I did." His life was changed and much for the better. Most of us know about the story The Mutiny on the Bounty- an historical event- but how many have heard the part the Bible played. The Bounty set sail from England in 1787. They went out to the South Seas. The sailors rebelled when ordered to leave the islands- they grew attached to the native women and the easy life. They set Captain Bligh and his few loyal men adrift in an open boat. Miraculously, Bligh survived and made his way back to London. An expedition was sent to punish the mutineers. Fourteen were captured and punished. But nine had gone on to a distant island and formed their own colony. Disease, murder, drunkenness and debauchery led to these men's ruin. All of the native men and all but one white man died. The one man, Alexander Smith found a Bible among the possessions of a dead sailor. The Book was new to him. He sat down and read it through. He believed it and let it shape his life and taught it to the women and children of the island. It was twenty years before a ship ever found that island. When it did they found a miniature Paradise. The people there were living in decency, harmony, prosperity and peace.
Martin Luther said- "The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me." I believe the Bible to be the Word of God : because no other book has been so loved and so hated; because, when accepted, people immediately seek for better things; because it brings peace and comfort to heart and mind; because its messages of hope have saved many from self-destruction; because those who seek to destroy it have not furnished any substitute of value; because, as bad as the world is with it, I would hate to see a world without it; because it tells me what God has been doing and is still doing- in me and in you.
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