Apologetics 101: The rock of Scripture

All scripture is given by inspiration of God. Literally all scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. So that's our verse tonight.

The Bible claims that itself, all of it, all of scripture is God-breathed. So tonight we've called this the rock of scripture. Now I've really taken that from a former Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Long before any of us were born there was a Prime Minister by the name of William Gladstone. He was actually Prime Minister more than once and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a great combatant with Disraeli. Anyway, enough of that.

William Gladstone in 1890 wrote a book called The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. Somehow I can't imagine many Prime Ministers writing that today but anyway, William Gladstone wrote a book called The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. In other words, he's saying the Bible is a rock.

It's a solid foundation. So that's the question tonight. Is the Bible a rock or is it sand? Can you rely on it? Is it true? Is it reliable? Should we bother with it or is it just some relic of ancient history well past its sell-by date, full of myths and legends? We've been looking this week at an event in history called the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment roughly 1685 through to 1815, otherwise known as the Age of Reason. On Monday night we looked at how the Enlightenment undermines the concept of truth, moving us away from God as the source of truth to human reason as the source of truth. And we looked at various men like Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant and Spinoza, these men who said we don't need to subject our minds to a book, we can think our way to truth.

Then on Tuesday we looked at how the Enlightenment and the years that followed up to today had undermined belief in God as a creator. The average young person in Great Britain today does no longer believe that God created the world. Wednesday we looked at how the Enlightenment undermined belief in God as a designer.

The old argument that everybody used to believe that because we were complicated and life was complicated and everything was just beautifully designed there must be a God. And between Mr Hume in the Enlightenment years and Darwin later they said no there's another explanation, it all came by natural selection and adaptation. Again the design argument has fallen flat on its face even though it's a very sound argument, people have believed the lie of evolution.

But tonight we're going to look at how the Enlightenment undermined belief in the Bible as the word of God. You say how did the Enlightenment shift people away from believing in the Bible? Well if you remember from night one the man called Descartes who started this whole business in the 1600s who's the father of modern philosophy he said we don't need to subject ourself to this book, we can think our way to truth. This was the beginning of rationalism.

It's very good to be rational but rationalism says we don't need God, we can think our way to truth. So that was already a shift away from bowing down to a holy book and accepting a revelation from God. Forget revelation, forget something being revealed to us that we don't already know, we can find out all we need to know by ourselves.

So already the word of God's being shaken at that point, we don't need it anymore, we can think our way to truth. But then in 1687 Isaac Newton who was a believer in God, no doubt about that, he published a three-volume book called Principia Mathematica. It was a life-changing, world-changing book.

He expounded in that book things that people didn't know about before. The law of gravity, the laws of motion, how the planets all move and he actually boiled it down to mathematical equations. Prior to that people kind of thought that the whole thing was really sort of unpredictable and unquantifiable and now it was almost like, oh now we see how it works.

Now of course Mr Newton was quite happy about that. He was saying, isn't this wonderful that God has designed it like this? But the atheistical enlightenment thinkers like Hume and so on, well what they thought was this, well if the universe is like a machine and it goes by laws that we didn't know about like gravity and the laws of motion and if it's all something that you can work out on a piece of paper, it's obviously the world in which we live is a mechanical world, it's got laws to it. That's not a world in which we can have virgin births, that's not a world in which we can have miracles and people feeding 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes and fire coming down from heaven and burning up Sodom and Gomorrah and floods and Jonah swallowed by a whale.

We can't have that because this universe has laws and to have miracles would break those laws. So we really can't have all that at all. And so a lot of people as a result of that, they shifted from being theists to being deists.

You say what's the difference? Well a theist, if you're a believer in the Bible and a believer in God and so on, you're a theist. You believe that there is a God and he can do whatever he wants, if he wants to do a miracle that's fine, not a problem, you're a theist. But a new category came along called a deist, they couldn't really bring themselves to say there's no God.

But a deist says God started it and then he backed off and he has nothing to do with it. It's like a clock, he winds it up, he sets it going, there is a God but he doesn't do miracles and he doesn't do anything special, he's not involved in this world anymore. So it's a kind of a halfway house between atheism and true belief in God.

But of course once you start shifting, you keep shifting. And the children and the grandchildren of the deists ended up being atheists because if there are no miracles, what do you do with a book that's full of miracles? See the point? If you start doubting that we can have miracles, that God can intervene in his creation, that people can be healed, that floods can come, that Samson can pull down the pillars of the temple of Dagon, if we're to believe that's true then well it's going to make it not very intellectual and how are we going to fit this all into enlightenment science? And so what began to happen was people began to go back to the Bible and said well maybe it doesn't really mean what it says it means. And a whole discipline was born called higher criticism.

I was taught higher criticism at school. So actually what happened when Jesus fed the 5,000 was he, this little boy, pulled out the loaves and fishes and when he did that everybody else felt so guilty that they pulled out their five loaves and two fishes too. That's what really happened.

And they went back and reinterpreted the Bible and tried to sort of explain away all the miracles and well there really wasn't a universal flood, there was just a local flood. And Mary wasn't really a virgin, she was just a young woman. And they went through biblical history and they found no miracles there.

And they went through heaven and they found no gold there. And they went through hell and they found no fire there. And they went through Jesus Christ and they found no God there.

And they went through this book and they found no inspiration there, no divine authorship. And that's where we are today. You could find a bishop in the Church of England, I'll just speak about the Church of England from where part of the world I come, you could find a bishop in the Church of England who believes everything I've just said.

Such is the end result of this enlightenment thinking that we can't have miracles and we can't have a book that talks about miracles, this is all unscientific, it's not enlightenment. So this is a massive issue, I hope you understand that, this is a massive issue. We Christians are staking our all on the fact that it is the Word of God.

And the atheists are staking their all on the fact that it's not the Word of God. I mean if they're wrong, they're in trouble, right? It's very important to them this is not the Word of God, it's very important to us that it is the Word of God. So what I'm going to do is seek to point in the direction this evening that this is the Word of God and that it stands up to scrutiny and that you can discover that for yourself.

I don't want you to believe this is the Word of God because I tell you, I want you to believe this is the Word of God because you read it for yourself and you discover that yourself. But I'll give you some pointers towards it. Now we're going to ask a couple of preliminary questions rather than just go straight in, here's the proof, this is the Word of God.

We need to just back up and take a couple of preliminary questions. The first question we need to deal with is how do we know that we actually have in this Bible what was originally written? Talk to the average atheist and they'll say, oh that's not the same Bible that was written years ago, it's been changed, it's been corrupted. Talk to the Mormons, they'll say the same thing, oh you need to have the Book of Mormon because the Bible's changed.

A lot of people even religious and non-religious people will tell you that this isn't the same book. So I just read to you a letter which apparently Paul wrote to Timothy. What's the chances that it actually is the same as he wrote 2,000 years ago? That's a question you need to ask.

So there are three ways that we can deal with this. There obviously was some kind of letter written years ago from Paul to Timothy in original Greek and it's been copied and copied and copied and copied and copied and copied and copied. Then it was translated into English and then into other languages and it's been copied and copied and printed and printed and printed and I've got a version that was printed in whatever year.

How do I know this is what Paul wrote to Timothy? There are three tests that you can do with the Bible and with any other book to determine whether you've got what was originally written. The test of proximity, the test of frequency and the test of accuracy. You say what does proximity mean? I don't know whether you've ever done this but when you copy something out by hand it's very easy to make a mistake.

You copy the same line twice or you miss out a line or you miss out a whole paragraph because that line repeats itself and you took up on the second one. You can imagine since the days of the printing press obviously very few mistakes get made because you just get a photocopy but back in the days when things were done by hand on the back of a mule as it were on papyrus it's very easy to make mistakes. So how do we know that loads and loads of mistakes were made and we haven't got the same thing? Well if we could get a copy that was close to the original.

So this was written my margin says AD 66. If I could get something sort of quite close to that I'm likely to have less mistakes. The longer it goes on and the longer the gap there is well it's very very difficult.

Well you can actually track this if we put the next slide up. In this slide here on the left hand side you've got a bunch of books from ancient history. Then you've got a list of when they were written.

Then you've got a list of the dates of the oldest copy available and then it works out the gap. So for example there's an old book called Homer's Iliad. Homer was a man and he wrote a book called the Iliad.

He wrote it 880 BC. The oldest handwritten ancient copy that exists in a library somewhere is 400 BC which means there's a 480 year gap between the date he wrote it and the oldest copy we got. So quite a lot could have happened in that 480 years wouldn't you say? How do we know it's the same as Homer wrote? It was copy to copy to copy to copy copy.

We lost the copies we've only got this one. Same for Caesar's Gallic Wars. A thousand year gap.

Same for Tacitus' Annals. He's a Roman historian. A thousand year gap between the first copy and the oldest copy that's still around in a manuscript library somewhere.

And yet nobody questions Homer's Iliad. Nobody questions Tacitus. Nobody questions Caesar's Gallic Wars.

But here's the wonderful thing. The New Testament was written between 50 AD and 100 AD. We actually have a copy of part of John's Gospel from 114 AD.

You can go and see this. It's in Manchester. It's called p52.

P means papyrus because they're written on papyrus and 52 means there's a 51 and there's a 53. This happens to be number 52. This is a scrap of the Gospel of John.

There's two bits because there's a front and a back. It's John chapter 18. If you can read Greek you can read this.

It's John chapter 18 verse 31 to 33 on one side and verses 37 to 38 on the other. There were no verse numbers back then but we know that now. The date of that copy is somewhere between 100 and 120 AD.

It was found in Egypt which means since the Apostle John actually wrote the Gospel of John in 95 AD. Well it's not the original but it's within somewhere between 5 and 20 years of the original. That is mind-blowing.

The gap between the oldest copy of John 18 and the original is less than some of the teenagers here. It's not a thousand years. So somebody says oh but John 18's been changed.

You can check it. Go to Manchester and check it. You can actually go to Dublin if you've been to the Chester Beatty library in Dublin.

They've got stuff like that in there. There are various libraries around the world that has got copies of the Bible. You say well that's just a scrap of John.

What about like the whole of John? Well there is a complete new testament. You can go and see it in London. It's in the London library.

Go any day. It's free. Go to London library.

There's a big book there. It's called the Codex Sinaiticus because it was found in the Sinai. It's dated 325 AD.

Remember the New Testament was all completed by the end of the first century which means we have an entire New Testament copy, a handwritten old old old manuscript that is within 225 years of the closing of the New Testament. You say well that's very interesting. Yeah well not only the proximity, how close it is, but the frequency.

If you look in the far right hand column you've got how many ancient copies are available. So Homozyliad there are 643 ancient handwritten copies in libraries all around the world. Caesar's Gallic Wars there's only 10.

Now you can buy probably a penguin paperback of Caesar's Gallic Wars but we're talking about ancient handwritten manuscripts. There's only 10. So if you want to work out exactly what Caesar said you've got 10 books to choose from and if there's changes between them well you pick your best.

Nine say this, one says that. Six says this, four says that. It's not going to take you very long is it because you've only got 10 witnesses.

Tacitus is annals 20. The New Testament 5366. I've got a more recent figure than that one.

I pulled that off Google today. 5,686 ancient handwritten Greek and Latin manuscripts of the New Testament which is to say the New Testament is the most highly documented ancient book in the world with more handwritten manuscript evidence for its reliability than any other 10 ancient books combined. So if somebody says to you you can't rely on what the Bible says it's all been changed they don't know what they're talking about.

You say okay well what about the accuracy you mentioned proximity and frequency. What about accuracy? Well the Bible exhibits a massive level of accuracy. Now the reason for that is this if I'm copying out an article from the daily newspaper I'm not really bothered if it's absolutely perfect but if I'm a Christian about to be thrown to the lions and I believe this is the word of God and I happen to have a copy of Matthew's gospel or a page of John's gospel and a friend says can you make me a copy because I believe this is God's word I'm going to be very careful to get it copied out properly because I don't want it to be changed because it's not my word it's God's word.

The Old Testament scribes the Jewish scribes when they used to write out the Hebrew Old Testament they would actually count the number of letters at the end of each page and if it didn't have 326 letters for that page tear it all up and start again and they would wash themselves every time they wrote the word Jehovah and so on it was a whole elaborate business. Now let me give you an example I really hope you're listening at this point because this is fantastic information. There is a book in the Old Testament called Isaiah I-S-A-I-A-H it's an ancient book which is particularly loved by Christians because it seems to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ before he was born.

Now what do you do with that if you're an atheist? Well probably what you'll do is oh that wasn't if it talks about the Lord Jesus that it probably was written later and somebody claimed it was written older and this is how they get on. Now up until 1947 you could probably got away with that because up to 1947 the oldest copy of Isaiah was dated around about 900 or 1000 AD so let me just paste this out for you. So Isaiah writes his book around here 700 BC 700 years before Jesus was born Isaiah writes a book his original gets lost it's it's not on durable paper it doesn't last somebody copies it somebody copies it somebody copies it the Lord Jesus is born dies and rises again we keep going first century second century right over here we're now in the 10th century and there's a codex Aleppo there's another codex his name's just gone from me now but there's there's a couple of codex the codex Leningrad that's it this is an entire copy of Isaiah somewhere around a thousand AD can you work out how long that gap is that's a 1700 year gap between when Isaiah wrote it and our oldest handwritten Hebrew manuscript.

Now an atheist can have a field day with a gap like that he can say well what's the chances that that copy over there is the same as the one that was originally written and well it's very difficult to sort of make a watertight empirical case that's that so until 1947. So in 1947 there's this little shepherd boy down by the Dead Sea on the northwest coast of the Dead Sea in a place called Qumran and he sees some sort of caves up above him in the rocks a sort of arid kind of place and he picks up a stone and he lobs this stone into this cave and he hears a cracking sound and they kind of think I wonder what that was and they clamber up and they go into this cave and they find jars big big jars like this full of scrolls cut a long story short they found 1400 documents it was over a hundred thousand scraps of paper and some big ones and in one of the jars there was a copy of the book of Isaiah you're not going to believe this an entire copy from chapter 1 to chapter 66 it was written on 17 parchments stitched together it's 23 foot long because it's a scroll it's rolled up they dated it and they discovered you can check this up on any anywhere online it was dated 125 BC so it's definitely written before Jesus was born so if it says anything about the Lord Jesus that's quite amazing and number two it put the gap back from being 1700 years to now being 600 years so there was great excitement because now you can actually look at it and say well is it different is the one that we've been relying on all this time the Christians have been saying this is what is it really what he wrote because now we can turn the clock back so they got this scroll out and they actually compared it now the chapter that is more loved than any chapter in Isaiah is chapter 53 now the reason everybody loves that chapter is because it talks in detail about the Lord Jesus Christ doesn't mention his name but it talks about how he will be despised and rejected he'll be buried in a rich man's tomb he'll be crucified between two thieves all of that is there so they got the thousand AD copy and the Qumran caves copy and they compared them you can actually see them line by line on the internet anybody can see this for free and in Isaiah 53 apart from a number of spelling changes slight grammatical things there was only one word different in verse 11 the Hebrew word light l-i-g-h-t which is actually only three letters was added into verse 11 they were the same after 1100 years all bar three letters which means to say this book is the same as was originally written now I spent quite a long time on that but I think it is very very important that you grasp that this Bible can be trusted because we have what was originally written some of you may remember a fellow from Prince Edward Island called Peter Orosik he came here and preached the gospel he was a drug dealer and a drug user from Prince Edward Island I met him a number of times in fact he came to Bicester and preached the gospel the first time he ever heard the gospel was when somebody visited his home he had a gun sitting on the table and all of this he was a complete and absolute atheist of everything and they tried to sort of share the gospel with him and he was having none of it he mocked it our christianity just a crutch and all this and they didn't know what to do and one of the men said let's just read the bible together and then we'll go and so this man who was visiting the drug dealer read Isaiah 53 now he didn't tell him he didn't introduce it just let me just read a chapter from the bible so he read this chapter and Peter later said he felt like crying when he heard it read and he was kind of shaken up by just this chapter from Isaiah chapter 53 and when it was finished he kind of gathered himself together and he said to the man oh I know the Jesus story I know the Jesus story I know the Christmas story well he didn't realize he just put his foot right in it because the man said how did you know that was about Jesus so he's this drug addict he doesn't read the bible and he immediately knew that this chapter was about Jesus so it's like well anybody would know that and then he dropped the bombshell he said the chapter I just read to you was written 700 years before the Lord Jesus Christ was born so how could it be about the Lord Jesus and that was the first bit of light in that man's darkness he eventually was converted to Christ and became a preacher that is empirically provable you can go to the shrine of the book in Jerusalem and actually see Isaiah 53 in a copy that predates Christ talking about his life and his death and his resurrection there is no excuse for you to be an unbeliever but the second question is not is it the same as was written but is it trustworthy so this is the second question we have to ask we've asked the question have we got what was originally written we've answered that but even if we've got what was originally written can you trust it I mean you could have someone that was originally written and it's just a fairy tale that doesn't mean it's the word of God so we have to just take one more step is it trustworthy we know we've got what they wrote but is it just a pack of lies is it a bunch of exaggerations is it just a load of ramblings from the first century so we have to answer this question now there are two ways that you can answer it you can give internal evidence and you can give external evidence in other words you can read this book for yourself and you can find out if it's full of exaggerations if it's authentic if it's totally biased you can read it for yourself and you will find it's not for example if you were to read the Gospels you would find that the disciples talk about their own failures so Peter talks about how he denied Christ I mean if he wanting to concoct a fantastically exaggerated rose-tinted spectacle story would he include that if they were following the Lord Jesus as their Messiah and they wanted everybody to join them would they include things like the Lord Jesus saying if you want to follow me you have to give up everything you have to hate your father and mother and love me would they include things like when Jesus rose from the dead the first witnesses were women back in a century when that would not have counted in a court of law would they have included the fact that they didn't believe and wouldn't believe and refuse to believe you know sometimes people look at the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark and they go down and say oh there's a contradiction here in one it says there were two blind men in Jericho and the other one says there was only one oh it can't be true well just think about it it's quite possible that there were two and that the Gospel writer who only mentions one wanted to home in and emphasize one that's perfectly explainable that would happen in a daily newspaper but if you think about it that's actually more likely to be a reliable unbiased account than if you went through Matthew Mark and Luke and John and found them exactly the same in every spot if they were exactly the same in every spot what would you be saying oh they all copied each other this is a con job this is just collaboration so the fact that they give different angles is actually part of the story of its authenticity but not only internal evidence but external evidence you say what do you mean by that well what that means is this well let's take uh let's take archaeology 25 of the New Testament is written by one man his name's Luke he's a doctor he says he's a doctor now even though he only writes two books he writes Luke strange to say and he writes Acts these are two big books and if you put them together and add up the words it's about 25 of the New Testament one man and if you go through those two books what you'll find is he mentions 32 countries 44 cities nine islands he had assorted ports streets gods temples theatres officials officers customs there's lots of room for mistakes and lots of room for errors now back in the 1800s there was a man called William Ramsey he was the top authority on Asia minor archaeology and everything and he was not a believer and he decided he would put this to the test I will go to the Middle East and I'll have Luke in one hand and acts in the other and I'll say right okay let's see if this is true do these 30 do these 44 cities exist was there such and such a person was there such and such a place did they used to do this in those days and back in England the skeptics and the atheists and the enlightenment scholars were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought that this top man William Ramsey would come back and say it's all rubbish it's not true it's not there but when he got there he found it was there and William Ramsey became a Christian and he came back and much to their disappointment he said you know what you could go with the Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other and you just go it should be here somewhere oh yeah there it is I'll tell you what he said and I'll quote you Luke was a first-rate historian and his book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world written with such judgment and skill and art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement that's just external evidence that this is not a bunch of made-up nonsense it contains the facts of the matter but secondly contemporary literature now you don't have to know this stuff to know that the Bible was a word of God but it is useful now maybe you didn't know this but back at the times when the Lord Jesus Christ was on earth it wasn't just Matthew Mark and Luke and John who wrote about him there are 17 other non-Christian books contemporary with the Lord Jesus Christ who mentioned him and who give something like 50 details of his life you can check these up yourself because of Google you can read all this so look out for people like Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Lucian and so on I'm just going to give you one and then move on a man called Tacitus if you've never heard of Tacitus he was a Roman he was the greatest historian of the Roman Empire and he wrote a book called the Annals of Tacitus and he wrote all about the emperors and the wars and all of this stuff now he was not a Christian in fact he hated the Christians most Romans wanted to get rid of the Christians and they burnt them at the stake and they threw them to the lions so this man is not only a witness but he's a hostile witness now a hostile witness is very important someone who's on your side could potentially exaggerate or could say well it was really wonderful when it wasn't but if you've got someone who's a witness a first century witness but he's actually against you then what he's likely to say is going to be very interesting so let me quote you what he said I think we've got it on a quote the next one this is a Roman historian on the first century who's against Christ and this is what he said you can read it online for yourself AD 115 Nero the Roman emperor fastened the guilt for the burning of Rome and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the population Christus that's Jesus Christ from whom the name Christians had its origin suffered the extreme penalty that's how they described crucifixion during the reign of Tiberius Caesar at the hands of one of our procurators Pontius Pilate what do you think of that that's not Bible that's the greatest historian of the Roman Empire now I don't say that to you because that's more important than that Matthew Mark Luke and John or we should now also breathe a sigh of relief that we now actually have some evidence I don't say that at all I'm just throwing that at you to say as external evidence that what's in here is reliable you couldn't get anything better than that the archaeology tells the same story the contemporary literature tells the story you have internal evidence that you've got a trustworthy volume you've now got external evidence that we've got a trustworthy volume so we've established two things in brief there's a lot more we could say for obvious reasons we have in the Bible what was originally written and it is trustworthy and we can prove that internally and externally now we need to move this to a whole new level the Bible that is what was originally written and is generally trustworthy claims it is the Word of God so is that true or is that false and if it's true how would we know it was true so that's what I want to do for the final section of our session tonight how do we know this book is the Word of God or isn't the Word of God now in answering that question I want to deal with two issues number one if we can have the next slide the Bible's self-attestation and the Bible's self-authentication now self-attestation is simply I'm just simply telling you that the Bible claims to be the Word of God so we read it 2nd Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 all scripture is given by inspiration of there are other places we could have gone I'll just use that for now the Bible is claiming that it is the inspired Word of God that doesn't just mean it's an inspirational book or it makes you feel inspired when you read it it means that God breathed out scripture now the great issue that atheists will always say to it who wrote the Bible if I had a pound for every time somebody asked me that I'd be quite rich who wrote the Bible now village atheism is a very annoying thing because they don't start even to wait for the answer but the answer to that is this God is the source of scripture but he used men as the channel of scripture you got that God is the source of scripture but he used men as the channel of scripture so when the ink was dry on the page it was exactly what God had planned to say even though men wrote it down now the process of that is called the inspiration of scripture what it means is this the Bible is not claiming to contain the Word of God the Bible is claiming to be the Word of God word by word line by line chapter by chapter Jesus Christ himself said heaven and earth will pass away but my word will never pass away and while I'm on that topic if you deny that Jonah was swallowed by the whale and if you deny that Sodom and Gomorrah were burnt up and if you deny that there was a flood in the days of Noah you've got a massive problem with Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ said just like Jonah was swallowed by the whale I'm going to be in the grave and as it was in the days of Lot so it will be in the days of the coming of the son of man and as it was in the days of Noah so shall it be and so on the Lord Jesus Christ believed in the things that people find most inconvenient about the Old Testament so if you want to get rid of the Old Testament unfortunately you have to get rid of the words of Jesus Christ I hear it all the time Elton John said it a few years ago I don't really like the Old Testament but I love Jesus's words well he obviously hasn't read Jesus's words or he's only read select parts of them you can't have one without the other so self-attestation now number two self-authentication now this is just my last section of the meeting here I want to give you how the bible authenticates itself you say well I didn't think I was going to get this I thought there was going to be some sort of scientific proof no no no this is this is very important that we get this the bible contains in itself its own evidences its own indications that it is the word of God it's in there that is to say it has qualities it has attributes it has characteristics let me quote you Isaac Newton which I mentioned to you a minute ago Isaac Newton said of the bible this book has its own marks of authentic authentication that show it to be divine which means to say I know I've been talking about manuscripts and I know I've been talking about archaeology but you don't need actually to go outside of this book to know that this book is the word of God all of that's useful very useful very helpful and and I hope it's a blessing to you but if you're sitting there thinking oh well I'm never going to be able to study all these things I haven't got the time to don't don't you worry about that because this book has God's fingerprints all over it you say well I I just I I'm just not following you I'm getting a bit worried now I've enjoyed you all week but uh you're now telling me that you can prove that the bible is the word of God from the bible that's sort of going around in a circle surely well the whole concept of an ultimate authority is that it has to be self-authenticating so if I say a is true and you say why is a true well because b is true and why is b true because c is true and why c true because well eventually you can't go back forever and in monday we learned that God is the source of truth there is an ultimate authority let me give you a sort of very earthy example those of you that have children let me let me let me give you a typical breakfast scene dad why are we having cornflakes this morning because they're good for you why because they contain vitamins and minerals and why because they put them in there in the factory and then they put them in the box why because they want everybody to why so what are you going to say eventually because I said so that's why let me give you another illustration so you go to court and as you go into court you put your hand on the bible I've never done this and I don't know whether they still do it today but they certainly used to you put your hand on the bible and you swear on the bible to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth now just imagine if God went into court as a witness would he need to put his hand on the bible and swear to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth he's God there's actually a verse in the bible that talks about God swearing not using bad words but promising and it says this it's in hebrews 6 verse 13 when God made a promise to Abraham he swore by himself because he couldn't swear by anybody greater it's a bit like what we were doing yesterday you remember yesterday we were looking at creation we looked at dna and proteins and animals and joints and motors and things in nature and we said that's got God's fingerprints all over it we can see God in nature we can see evidence of God in natural revelation now it's the same for this book if you read this book you will see evidence for God in written revelation God's fingerprints are all over his natural creation God fingerprints are here all over his spiritual revelation and in that sense you don't need me you don't need the church there are some religions who say you need us some of the cults and some even some of the big denominations they say oh you mustn't read the bible on your own you have to come to me and I will tell you what it means and people sort of neglect the bible because they're sort of waiting for this interpretation from somewhere listen this book was written to you it's been given to humanity and God has communicated it in such a way that you can recognize the voice of God in this book so I'm going to finish by giving you four reasons why you can find out this bible is the word of God when you read it that's my challenge to you today read it seriously read it number one you can discover this book is the word of God as you read it by its beauty and its excellency now I'm not talking about its grammar I'm not even talking about its prose I'm talking about what it will reveal to you when you read it so for example in in the psalms there's a man in the psalms and he's he's reading an earlier part of the bible he's reading the law of Moses and he says this how sweet are your words to my taste in other words if you compare I don't know what your favorite author is it might be something as wonderful as Harry Potter or it might be something a little bit deeper it might you might you might read Dawkins or you might read uh Kingsley Amis or I don't know whoever it is Dan Brown or something when you interact with this book you will find it of a different character altogether a different depth a different scope there is a perfection to its content because it is actually revealing to you God it is showing to you his son Jesus Christ it is a unique book in its content and its beauty and its excellency you know some people I've heard Richard Dawkins say oh it's full of violence and it's full of this and full of that if this book was a violent book violent people would like to read it if this book was an immoral book immoral people would like to read it but they don't because unlike your local novel or your sort of horror horror novel this book doesn't glorify violence this book doesn't glorify sex this is a book which has everything in its content and brings in the moral law of God and the excellences of his person in a way that if you read it honestly yes I know in a sense it takes a spiritual mind to understand spiritual things but God has written this book in such a way that he says seek me and you will find me it's an excellent and beautiful book but number two this book is the word of God and it can be proven to be so by its power and efficacy so if point one tells me what it is point two tells me what it does so one of the things the bible claims to be is alive who'd think of that says in hebrews that the word of God is living and powerful sharper than a two-edged sword able to divide your soul and your spirit in other words it can get right between where you are and show you who you are so when I read this book I don't breathe life into this book this book breathes life into me there's a sense in which when you read the bible you don't read it it reads you it's like a mirror and as you read it you begin to see yourself in it it describes you in a way that no other book will ever describe you it will actually bring conviction to you it will show you who you are it may not be a very pretty sight but this book will show you who you are out in brazil a friend of mine his uncle was a missionary there and they rented a little place one time down in the rio grande de sul and they had gospel meetings one night a man came in the back his name is senor calcino he was a local alcoholic difficult character and the man at the door was going to not let him in but the preacher said no no no bring him in it's fine he came and he sat down he listened and he looked around and he saw the christians and he thought they're a weird bunch but there was just something about the whole proceedings that evening which kind of fascinated him and he came back the next night and he came back the next night now he had been dried out by the aa number of times and always gone back to drink he was a violent man big long hair and all this he was just sort of a notorious town difficult drunken kind of a character anyway cut a long story short he was converted to christ and he became a christian and his life was totally and absolutely transformed he died not too long ago his family some of his family have also trusted in jesus christ as their lord and savior this is a true story i can give you the details if you want further details afterwards anyway when his life was totally transformed the ladies from the aa the alcoholics anonymous visited the preacher they were fascinated by the fact that they've been working on this calcino fella for for years drying him out going back to square one drying him out going back to the drink and now his life seems to be just like totally transformed overnight he hasn't touched a drop of drink for months and he's getting his life back together again he seems to be happy and he's just like what on earth is this so they went to the evangelist uh mr john mccann senior and they said to him one day you know can we have a chat with you and he said sure fine uh we want to talk about calcina oh yeah great calcine is a lovely man well um what we'd really like to know is what did you do to change him like we've been working with him for years and we can't seem to get anywhere with him and he comes to your church and he's just totally changed you know so what do you do at your church you know did you did you do a course with him did you you know how did you how did you work did you give him a book to read or when they said did you give him a book to read mr mccann says oh yes actually we did i'll get it for you and he went and got hold of a copy of the bible and he says this is the book we get him to read i'm not sure that he knew what to do with this little explanation how could a book change someone's life we see that's the reality of the power and the efficacy of this book recently an atheist got converted her name was amy jones and she wrote her story a life story out and i like this little sentence she eventually after years and years of atheism and all sorts of things she actually picked up the bible says i'm going to read this she says this book was reading me as surely as i was reading it every time i found fault with its god i ended up finding a fault of my own this is a mighty powerful book and you can find out that for yourself the beauty and excellency of it the power and efficacy of it but thirdly the unity and harmony of it so you've got 40 different authors the span of the beginning of the first one to the end of the last one is about 1600 years some of them are fishermen some of them are kings some of them are herdsmen some of them are doctors some of them are scribes some of them are poets some of them are prophets some live on this continent some live on that continent and yet the amazing thing is this it's all pulled together in this 66 books and you find it has agreement doctrinal agreement historical agreement i'll let you into a bit of a secret mr martin luther was a bit wrong on science i know he's a great hero is all and all that reformation stuff but i have a commentary of his on genesis i picked it up a few years ago and i was embarrassed beyond words because he starts sort of explanations of science which just sound terrible he says that dead meat can produce new life he says that in the winter the birds swim into the distance drop down into the ocean and then in the summer they come but in the spring they come back out of the water again and come onto the land i was like how did he dare write such stuff a christian theologian 500 years ago how could it be so wrong and yet the bible's written way way before that and has nothing like that in at all the bible says the world hangs on nothing the bible says the world has a beginning the bible describes the water cycle in ecclesiastes chapter one the bible contrary to public opinion says the world is round the unity and harmony and consistency of scripture is unbelievable it even begins and ends in total harmony at the beginning we have paradise lost and at the end in revelation we have paradise restored we have a man falling a man bringing the world into chaos at the beginning we have a second man reigning in the kingdom at the end we have curse and death imposed at the beginning we have the curse and death removed at the end we have the heavens and the earth created the beginning we have a new heavens and the earth at the end but those two guys that wrote all that stuff they didn't know each other they lived in completely different worlds one was called john the other was called moses there's a fellow in devon he's he's now gone home to heaven but his name is stanford stanford was a boxer and he was uh not only a boxer he was a communist and when i say a communist i'm talking about a serious communist you can listen to his testimony online just type in stanford testimony and you can listen to it he was a serious communist and he had memorized where do you hear this he had memorized 101 contradictions in the bible you say are there 101 contradictions of the bible no there are but he had memorized 101 supposed contradictions in the bible so here he is he's a communist he's a boxer he's memorized 101 contradictions in the bible he's walking down the road in devon one day and there's a lady coming up the road on her way to a gospel tent a marquee in which someone's preaching the bible and she stops him in the middle of the street says i want you to come to that tent with me he says i'm not coming to that tent oh yes you are they eventually got married so she must have been a very persistent woman she got him to the tent so he comes into the tent he's sitting in the gospel tent a communist with 101 contradictions in the bible a boxer and the man preaches the gospel and he's the whole way through he thinks what a load of rubbish so anyway the meeting comes to an end the man prays he goes to the back shaking hands to everybody and as he goes to this shake hands with stan the boxer he says did you enjoy the meeting rubbish rubbish he said there's 101 contradictions in the bible so he kept a hold of him and he says just come here and sit down let's have a look at these contradictions what's the first one well he'd memorized them so he got out genesis chapter one and genesis chapter two they're obviously written by two different people one talks about elohim the other one talks about jehovah they're all mixed up it can't be right and the preacher says no just hang on a minute this is giving you the historical order this is giving you the moral order this is giving the outline this is giving you the details and what's your next one where did cain get his wife adam and eve only had two sons cain and abel where's the wife he goes over to genesis chapter five after the fall adam and eve begat sons and daughters next one and he got down to about number 96 and you know what stanford said i've heard enough can you tell me what you were saying a minute ago behind that desk stanford that very evening trusted in jesus christ as his lord and his savior why because he saw the bible's not full of contradictions and once he got rid of that nonsense out of his head he was able to take it seriously as to what it was and he became an evangelist and lived his whole life preaching the gospel that he had once lived to destroy so those are three reasons why you can see yourself that the bible is the word of god its beauty and excellency its power and efficacy its unity and harmony but finally its predictive accuracy this book in the past predicted things that would take place in the future the most things that it predicted the fall of babylon the fall of tyre and sidon so many other old testament events that were predicted the most famous things that it predicted concern the life death burial and resurrection of jesus christ it is an indisputable fact that in the old testament books which were written before he was born numerous predictions were made about what he would do and how he would live and so on even the very day that he would ride into jerusalem was predicted hundreds of years before he came if you work out the predictive accuracy of scripture you can do it for yourself i'm just going to do this now i'm going to finish the old testament predicts quite clearly that jesus would be born in bethlehem you can read that for yourself in micah chapter 5 and verse 2 now let me ask you a question how many people in world history have been born in bethlehem is there anybody here tonight been born in bethlehem so you're not a candidate for that the only people that can fulfill that prophecy is a tiny tiny group of people who were born in bethlehem now let's up the stakes the bible says that he will come from the tribe of judah the whole lineage is given in matthew 1 and in luke chapter 3 anybody here from the tribe of judah so you have to be from a particular tribe you have to be born in a particular town the bible further says that he will be sold for 30 pieces of silver how many people do you think in world history were born in bethlehem came from the tribe of judah and were sold for 30 pieces of silver i think we already have who we're looking for don't you think so but he's also going to be pierced in his hands and in his feet you say where does it say that you can look it up in your bible there's no excuses now because you can download it as an app on your phone psalm 22 they pierced my hands and my feet oh well that's easy it's not easy because that was written 1000 years before christ and the phoenicians did not invent crucifixion until 700 years before christ so that scripture was not only written before jesus was born it was written before anybody was piercing anybody through their hands and their feet and so it goes on his garments will be gambled for and there's about 300 different prophecies concerning the coming of christ there's a professor in america called peter there's always professors in america there's a professor in america peter stoner he just took eight prophecies and he ran it through a sort of mathematical calculation and he said this we find the chance that any man might live to the present time and fulfill all of those eight prophecies is one in ten to the power of 17. oh but you say surely he could have made it up you can't make up where you're born you can't make up how you die you can't make up what people will do when you're on the cross you can't raise yourself from the dead to get round these things is the evidence of someone who doesn't want to believe not the evidence of someone who's sincerely seeking because these things are written says john that you might believe now tomorrow night as we finish we're going to look at the consequences of this because if the bible is the word of god then anything that agrees with it is wrong this is the sole authority for life for time and for eternity and its message regarding origin and meaning and morality and destiny is all important and its message is not only good for now it's good forever last evening i passed beside a blacksmith's door and i heard the anvil ringing the vespa chime and looking in i saw upon the floor old hammers worn with beating years of time how many anvils have you had said i to wear and batter all those hammers so just one said he and then with twinkling eye he said the anvil wears the hammers out you know and so i thought the anvil of god's word for ages skeptic blows have beat upon and yet though the noise of falling blows was heard the anvil is unharmed the hammer's gone