Bible
Transcript
Good morning. I feel like I have so much room up here. Just run back and forth. We are in the fifth week of our Home Sweet Home series where we're looking at the church and we're trying to understand who the church is, how the church ought to act, how the church ought to practice, how the church ought to, to what we ought to do, what we ought to look like. And so we spent some time talking about that we're the church because of what Jesus has accomplished for us, that the church are the people distinctly loved and saved by Jesus. And that when that happens, we begin to love and we begin to pursue certain things.
We begin to change. We're made different by His work in us. That the church then relates to one another as family, that we are made into a new people of God. And we've just kind of been walking through. And last week we spent some time saying that the church practices baptism and communion for specific purposes, that God's gifted the church with that. And today we're going to talk about something that's actually very important for us to understand, for us to study.
So today we will be, we'll spend most of our time, when we're in Scripture, in 2 Timothy 3. It's going to take us a minute to get there. So I just wanted you to know, if you're like me, and 10, 15 minutes into this thing, you're going, bro, if you don't open the Bible, I'm going to fight you. Like, we're going to get there. We're going to 2 Timothy 3. If you want to turn there, you can.
But it's going to be a minute before you get to read anything out of it, because we're going to be picking up there in a minute. But here's what we're talking about today. Every week, we get together and we say, grab your Bibles, go to such and such a place. I don't know, hypothetically, 2 Timothy 3. It's on page 646 in your Bible, if your Bible looks like this. We'll say something along the lines of, if your Bible doesn't look like this, best of luck to you.
But the assumption is, you're going to somewhere in your Bible. We're going to take some time, and we're going to read this, and we're going to talk about what it means and how it applies to us. For 45 minutes to an hour, we're going to open this up and talk about it. Honestly, the way we structure our sermons is we want them short enough to be bearable and long enough to matter. But we're taking the Bible, and we're going to study it.
When we sit down and do counseling as a church family, we're going to open this up. As Christians, we're going to open this, read it, and then make decisions based off of what it says. What we're going to do with our lives, what we're going to do with our relationships, how we're going to handle something that's currently facing us. We trust Scripture. We go to Scripture. And here's the question.
Can we? When you read Scripture, do you know that it can be trusted? Because in our culture, and currently there's a lot of arguments against that, against the trustworthiness of Scripture, against the truthfulness of Scripture. And so today, we're going to take a minute to just try to say and explain clearly that we believe that Scripture is trustworthy, sufficient, authoritative, and powerful. That we believe Scripture is trustworthy, sufficient, authoritative, and powerful. And that is the church believes that about this text.
I'm going to pray, and then we're going to begin talking about this this morning. God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for Scripture that you've blessed the church with, that we can trust, that we can lean into, that we can make decisions based off of, that we can believe. God, I pray that you'd help us to see clearly some real reasons for that this morning. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Some of y'all maybe have seen this meme. Maybe you haven't, but I'm just going to be on the screen. I'm going to read this quote. Maybe you've seen this on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, some of y'all on your MySpace page. Back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then re-translated, then edited, then re-written, then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts, then re-written, then re-re-written, then translated again, then given to the Pope for him to approve, then re-written, then edited again, then re-re-re-re-re-written.
Again, all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years after they happened to people who didn't know how to write. So I guess what I'm saying is the Bible is literally the world's oldest game of telephone. That's a quote from David Cross in a stand-up routine that he did. Now I'm like you. I get a lot of my information from stand-up comments. Especially ones that's major role was playing a never-nude on Arrested Development.
And if you don't get that reference, probably not worth looking up. But it's not bad because he was never-nude. Alright, we're going to keep moving. If that's true, keep that up there for a second. If that's true, what we're doing right now is an utter waste of time. We should have all slept in.
It was raining. Some of you right now, even though you don't believe that, are like, I should have slept in. It's raining. It would have been wonderful. But if that's true, what are we doing?
Why would we study this? Why would we trust it? Why would we believe it? Why would we look at each other and say, no, you can't do that. Or you should make decisions based off of this. Or you should read this and pray about this and follow this.
Like, why would we do that if this is true? So here's what we're going to do for just a minute before we get into our passage that we're going to look at today in 2 Timothy because we've got to answer the question of when we're reading this, what are we reading? So before we get to 2 Timothy, we've got to do just a little bit of background information. And so we're going to do something that I don't think he messed with much. We're going to look at facts. All right, let's do that.
All right, so the first question is, how do we as humans, how do historians know history? How do we have the information that we have about things that we did not see happen? It's easier now. Well, my wife and I have been watching this documentary on the 60s and it's very interesting, but they're talking about that in the 60s is when people really started trusting and believing in their televisions. That there were, that was really the JFK assassination that people in America realized the best thing for me to do is to turn a television on. But it's easier now because people can show us pictures.
We're even starting to learn now that like even the pictures and the videos that you see aren't always exactly what they were portrayed to be. But how do we know things that nobody videoed? How do we know things that we can't see? How does history go about doing this? So here's what we want.
We want a document that was written down, that was well preserved. We want what they originally wrote. The best thing that we would want is actually, so if we're going to read what Plato said, we want the stuff that came off of his pen. We want the actual one that he wrote in his handwriting. That's known as an autograph. When it comes to the Bible, we don't have any autographs.
We don't have the stuff that came actually out of John's writing. We don't have the stuff that actually came out of Paul's handwriting. We don't have that. We don't have autographs on anything from this time period. So don't feel bad.
So if you don't have the original one, the original document, the thing that Matthew wrote down, what you want is one that was hand copied from that. That's called a manuscript. So you want someone who sat down with Matthew's document, hand copied it. Then we know that that gets passed out. Other people are going to hand copy from that one because they didn't have a printing press. So everything that was prior to the printing press is a manuscript.
If we can get them, then we want them to be dated, the copies that we have, the manuscripts that we have, as close to as possible as to when the first one was written. So, something about the Roman Empire. If we have a copy, a manuscript, of something that one of their historians wrote and we have it within 200 years, we have one copy within 200 years of when the first one was written, we got a pretty decent idea. This is probably fairly close to what was originally written, probably fairly well. I mean, nobody would take the time to write out a manuscript if they weren't trying to at least pass on what was originally written.
So we've got a pretty good idea. If we've got 12 of them, well now we can compare them to each other. We can say, all 12 say the same thing or six of them say this and six of them say that and then we can try to decide timeline on the documents that we have. If we have 100 of them, it makes it easier. When it comes to the New Testament, when it comes to the Old Testament, let's talk about the Old Testament in just a second. We'll spend more of our time on the New Testament.
Old Testament text was, let me go back one step further. When you were holding this, you're holding a book that is 66 books written by 40 authors over the time span of 1500 years in three continents and in three languages. Most of it written in Hebrew and Greek. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New Testament was written in Greek, certain sections were written in Aramaic. But it's 66 books written by 40 authors over the course of 1500 years that tells one really big cohesive story.
And it is written as a redemptive history of God and humanity. That's the point. The Old Testament, the canon of the Old Testament just means the set amount of books that were going to be in it was closed, meaning they weren't adding anything to it by the time of Jesus. It had actually been closed for a couple hundred years. They said, the Jewish people, this is what's in the Old Testament and that's it. We've got some history books, we've got some books explaining the Old Testament, but these are the ones that we believe were written by God.
These are our scriptures. We have about 14,000 copies of the Hebrew Old Testament. 14,000 manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament. They were all relatively not close to when they were originally written because they were written hundreds of years B.C. In 1947, they found a place called Qumram, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they realized, oh, the Bible's written on this. I remember I had a professor in a seminary, really old guy, and this was pivotal for him and he said, I remember when they said they found the scrolls and I told myself, I don't care what they say, I'm still going to believe the Bible.
And it was just like, yeah, it's good, but what if they said completely like the opposite stuff, like we would have some problems here. So they said, oh, we realize that this has got the Old Testament on it and it's dated way earlier than the manuscripts we have. These are much older and so there was this excitement of like, we're going to figure out what the Bible actually says because we're going to realize that people went in and edited and rewritten and rewrote and translated and did all this stuff and you know what they came out and said? It says the same as the other ones. What y'all's Bible says is right in the Old Testament.
So let's just talk about the New Testament. We have 5,760 Greek copies of the New Testament. 5,760 Greek handwritten manuscripts that we can compare to one another. Some of them and they're not full copies, some of them parchments that just have a certain section date to within 30 to 50 years of the original document. Some of these manuscripts were copied down while the people who wrote the original were still alive. But we have 5,760 in Greek.
We have 10,000 Latin Vulgates which was the first translation from the Greek into Latin. We have 10,000 handwritten copies of the Latin Vulgate. We have 9,300 in other languages mostly Comptic and Syriac. So here's what we get to do. He said it's a game of telephone. You ever play the game of telephone?
You have professors say this. They say, we know that the Bible. Ever played telephone? One person is told a sentence and then he whispers it into the ear of this other person. This isn't my same professor. This is a different professor.
They talk similar for some reason. And he whispers it into the ear of this person and the ear of this person and the ear of this person. And by the time we get to the end the sentence is nowhere near what was originally whispered. And if it's like Mail-in-Many School it's because that kid made up a whole new sentence in the middle just for the heck of it. He wanted to make it seem like the teacher said something offensive about Billy. He gets to the end and says, I heard Billy's an idiot.
And it's like, oh, the teacher said you're an idiot. Sorry. But we're told this. The only way that makes sense is if when they translated the ESVs which is what we hold on Sundays some of you have different versions. It's the one in the row there. If they went back to the New King James and if the New King James had gone back to the King James and if the King James had gone to the Geneva Bible and the Geneva Bible had gone back to the Latin Vulgate and the Latin Vulgate had gone to the Greek.
But the problem is when they translated this they looked at 5,760 Greek copies. They went to the original. So if the telephone game was everyone has the teacher whisper the thing in their ear sure it's not a fun game. It's called let the teacher tell you a sentence game. That's what we've got. And we can compare the 5,760 Greek copies to the 10,000 Latin copies what we can do is we can compare them to each other and say does this Greek copy say the same thing as this Greek copy?
Does this Latin copy say the same thing as all these other Latin copies? Do these Compton copies say all the same things as the other Compton copies? Do the Syriac copies say all the same things as the Syriac copies? When you translate them into different languages do they say the same thing? We get to do that with the New Testament. Now just to help you see how this compares to other documents from this time period.
The second most well-attested document in antiquity is Homer's Iliad. Some of y'all read that in middle school high school Homer's Iliad. We have less than 1,800 copies. We have 5,760 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. We have less than 1,800 of Homer's Iliad. The closest one to when Homer first wrote that down is 2,000 years.
We're within 30 to 50 years. Julius Caesar's the Gallic Wars which is what we know about Caesar. We have 10 manuscripts. The earliest one is within 1,000 years. So when they stood up and told you stuff about Julius Caesar 10 manuscripts within 1,000 years.
And they didn't start by saying now we know that this was probably written and rewritten and re-edited and is probably pure nonsense at this point but you'll be tested on it. Julius Caesar. They didn't do that. They said this is what's true about Julius Caesar. Pliny the Younger. Y'all love that guy.
He wrote Natural History which is we learn stuff about Rome. We have about 200 manuscripts within 750 years. Thucydides history which we learn a lot about Greece from. We have eight manuscripts within about 1,300 years. Herodotus history we have about eight manuscripts. That's where we learn a lot about Persia, Egypt, and Greece.
Eight manuscripts within about 1,000 years. Everything we have from Plato seven manuscripts within 1,300 years. Everything we know about Socrates we got nothing that Socrates wrote. We've got the seven manuscripts that Plato wrote and he taught us some things about Socrates. Aristotle's Poetics we got less than 10 within 1,400 years. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales we got about 80 copies.
Greek New Testament we've got 5,760 just in Greek 10,000 in Latin 9,000 in Syriac and Compton. Okay. Oh, one more. I love this stat. Livy wrote 142 books on Roman history. We have about 35 of those that survived in the form of 20 manuscripts.
We're pretty sure one of those 20 only survived because the book of Hebrews was written on the back of it. So you're welcome, Livy. The Bible saved one of your books. And we believe the Bible saves. Okay, sorry. Jesus saves through the Bible.
Anyway. All in all, we have about 25,000 manuscripts. Handwritten copies. Now, obviously, these have to be just written with they just say all different things, right? Like the Syriac, the Comptic, the Latin, the Greek. They're all all over the place.
They are not. 94% is the exact same. If we all got a piece of paper and a pen and had to copy down, I don't know, the New Testament and we got within 94% in the same room at the same time, that's a win. Let's go get ice cream. You copied well. You took minimal bathroom breaks.
You stayed focused the whole time. 94% word for word exact same. At least 6%. Okay, now we got to talk. 3% of that 6% is just like obvious errors. Like it's nonsense.
It's a misspelled word. Sometimes like where it would be verse 12 and then it would be verse 13. It goes verse 12 and then it starts back up at verse 9 and goes back through. So we just know, okay, this guy got confused. He picked up a word. He was like, oh no, I started this verse.
He's like, I'm just going to finish it and just make it seem like this is twice as important. That leaves 3% that are some words in different orders. Sometimes it's a whole different section just put in a different place. We have some that your Bible will say this verse is in a different spot. What we're able to do with that 3% is we start comparing timeline and we say, oh, it looks like somebody added this verse to help explain this section about 600 years later but all the ones back here don't have it. So we know this is more close to what was originally written.
It comes down to about one half of 1% that we're really not sure. One half of 1%. 99.5% of the Bible we're pretty sure is exactly the words they wrote when we look at the Greek. And the other 0.5% has nothing to do with a major point of doctrine. It's not sections where it's like, oh, maybe Jesus didn't rise. No, it's in some sections where if they took it out we'd have the exact same thing we have. when you look at this New Testament, this Old Testament, what you are holding is an English translation from the Greek and Hebrew words that they wrote down.
That's important. When we talk about the Bible's trustworthy, we're really asking two questions. Are we reading what they wrote? Then we have to ask, is what they wrote true? So are we reading what they wrote?
Is what they wrote true? The second thing that comes in here though, the second pushback that you'll hear often is yeah, okay, so you may say that y'all have the most well-attested to document in antiquity, which you do. And nobody's really disputing that at this point, except for David Cross. A handful of other people. You can look it up yourself. Would love for you to.
Nobody's really disputing that this is the most well-attested to document in antiquity. But people do say, okay, yeah, yeah, but they got together a couple hundred years later and they all just picked the books they wanted. And there's a whole bunch of other books that say other things that they just left out because they didn't like them. They took the books that said Jesus was God, they kept those, they edited some of them, which we know they didn't because we've got the older manuscripts, but then they took ones that didn't say Jesus was God and they left those out because they were against them.
They didn't want people to have that. Heard this argument? There's books left out? Okay. Just like the Da Vinci Code, some of those different ones talk about this. The Jesus Seminar, which they called it the Jesus Seminar and then they got together and denied the divinity of Jesus so your seminar didn't go well.
Here's the thing. The answer to that question or that rebuttal to the they left a bunch of books out is nope. They didn't really leave out any actual contenders to anything. By the time they got together at the Council of Nicaea, which was a couple hundred years later, they basically were saying, hey, some random spurious books, some random made-up books are starting to show up. We need to go ahead and just say, clearly, these are the ones that the church has always had. If anything, there was some debate over some of the books that are in here.
The Bible would have been less, not more. There were a couple of books that were written a little bit later, like the book of Revelation was written in the 90s. The first, second, third John were written kind of late. So there was some discussion about whether or not third John should be in there. There was some discussion about whether or not Hebrews should be in there because they don't know who wrote it. But they basically said, which are the ones that say what we've always said, have apostolic authority, we can go back and know who wrote them, which are the ones the church has been using.
We've got, there was a guy who wrote the Acts of Paul and 3 Corinthians in the second century. They, they, basically, the third Corinthians showed up and the Acts of Paul showed up. It was like people were, were passing off bootleg copies of the Bible. Hey, third Corinthians has been hidden but I found it. This is the real deal right here. It's like, why are you darting back and forth?
Just hint, like what is this? Like they, they started just passing these out. It'd be kind of like, it's a hundred years later, it'd be kind of like, um, if I came out now and said, I've got the real declaration of independence. It was Herbie Hancock, John Hancock's brother wrote the whole thing. They don't want you to know about it because of the government. Y'all would say, oh, okay, good.
Let's say I was able to get on the news. You know what would happen? They'd do some research and then they'd say, no. So books started showing up, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Bartholomew, third Corinthians, Acts of Paul. They basically, they found out that a guy really liked Paul so he wrote the Acts of Paul in third Corinthians. He was a pastor and they de-pastored him.
There's a letter with Tertullian's writing to someone else and he's like, we figured out who wrote that. He doesn't get to be a pastor anymore. It's poor pastoring. So if I get up here and I'm like, hey, I got fourth Timothy. Let's do this.
Y'all should de-pastor me. Um, okay, how do we know this? Uh, one of the ways that we know which books of the Bible should be in the books of the Bible and one of the ways that we know that the Bible is what was originally written is we can read the letters of the early church leaders. They quote the Bible 36,000 times. By year 150 AD, the only book of the Bible that was not quoted as a book of the Bible, was not quoted as Scripture and given authority in one of those letters from early church leaders is 3 John. By 150 AD, every other book of the Bible has been quoted.
By 300 AD, there's 36,000 quotes from the Bible. We could almost recreate the New Testament without any of the manuscripts just by looking at the letters of the first Christians. They wrote commentaries on Scripture. When you hold this, you hold what was originally written and you hold what was always understood to be Scripture. Now, best kept document in antiquity. it's trustworthy that you're reading what they wrote, which is good. The other half is, is what they wrote true?
So what we know is that Matthew sat down and he wrote that Jesus walked on water, that Jesus fed 5,000 people, that Jesus had people, made blind people see that Jesus died and rose from the grave. We know he wrote that. The question is, did Jesus? Is what he wrote true? Now, we could, there's a few questions we have to ask when we're asking that question. One is, have we disproven this?
Can we obviously see that the Bible just has some really fake stuff in it? It's got 23,000, we've done about 23,000 archaeological digs, none of which have disproven the Bible. Somebody, there's a quote of an archaeologist, he said, one of the best ways to base an archaeological dig is to base it off of Scripture because Scripture has accurately told us where places are who was where, who was in charge when. We've done 23,000. The reason, if they had disproven the Bible, you would know. They found something, they come out every once in a while and like, we found Jesus' body.
You've seen this on the news? And then at the end of the show, it's like when they're looking for the giant squid or whatever. They're like, we're going to find the giant squid. You watch it for an hour and at the end, they're like, the giant squid has eluded us once again. And it's like, why did I watch this for an hour? You watch that show about we found Jesus' body.
They get to the end and they're like, probably not. Not really. It's not him. But thanks for watching our show. We can say it doesn't contradict itself. We can say that what it says, it continues to say the same thing.
It gives the same testimony throughout. Other than that, when it comes to the truthfulness of Scripture, we can't really prove it. we can say what Scripture believes about itself, what the authors thought, what Jesus thought. So let me tell you a little bit about what Jesus thinks just from passages in Scripture. Jesus says Scripture cannot be broken. He says that heaven and earth will pass away but not a dot will pass away from the law. He's talking about the Old Testament.
He attributed a Psalm of David to being written in the Holy Spirit. So Jesus says that that Psalm of David was written by the authority, the power of God. He referred to what Moses wrote as God said. So at one point when Jesus was quoting Moses, he said, well, God said because he believes that what was written in the Old Testament is the Word of God. Jesus trusts the Scriptures enough and the transmission of Scripture enough to in an argument with the Sadducees, he goes to verb tense. He says that God says he is the father of Abraham.
I am the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he says he is. He am. Therefore, they're alive. He didn't say I was. So what he's saying is that he trusts the Scripture enough to even look at verb tense and say, no, that's reliable.
Then Jesus looks at his disciples and he says, when he's gone, the Spirit of Truth will come and guide you into all truth. And the apostles believed him. They believed that they were being led by the Holy Scripture to write more Scripture, which is words of God. So Peter, Paul, and the apostles believed three things about the Scriptures. One, that they were eyewitnesses, which is how we get testimony now. They believed they were eyewitnesses.
They wrote as eyewitnesses. John says he's writing as an eyewitness. Luke says he's writing an orderly account from eyewitnesses. Paul writes during the time of eyewitnesses, mentions names of eyewitnesses, said there's 500 people, some of whom have died, but there's a lot left. Peter says these aren't cleverly devised myths. This is eyewitness testimony.
They also wrote as apostles, which means sent ones or emissaries or delegates. It's like when I was a little kid and my dad would tell me something and I had to go outside and tell my brother, my older brother Logan. I had no authority over him as proven by all the many fights we got into. I was capable of punching him. I was not capable of punching him enough to where I won. So I didn't have authority over him.
He had authority over me. But I would come outside and I'd say, hey, daddy said you gotta go inside. And Logan never looked at me and said, you tell daddy to come out here and tell me his self. You know what Logan said? Okay. And he went on inside.
I didn't have authority. I was just speaking on behalf of daddy and daddy had authority. When the apostles write as apostles and they say, I'm an apostle of Jesus Christ, that's what they're doing. They're saying, God said, Jesus said, this is authoritative not through me but through Jesus. And they wrote as if they wrote authoritatively. They believed that.
Peter refers to Paul's writing as scripture meaning that he believes it has the weight and the authority of the Old Testament. Paul says, Paul at one point says, as it says in scripture and he gives two quotes. He quotes Deuteronomy and he quotes Luke. He gives a Greek verbatim quote of a part of Luke chapter 10. Paul says that you took my words as not from man but as they were the words of God. Paul believes he writes with the authority of God and he says at one point, he says, if anyone who says they're spiritual doesn't acknowledge what I write, then don't acknowledge them because they're not spiritual.
They're not following God because what I write comes from God. That's a pretty bold claim. They believed, they wrote as eyewitnesses, they believed, they wrote authoritatively scripture and they all believed what they wrote. I'm going to give you a quick rundown list of the authors of the New Testament and of all of the disciples of Jesus and how they were all brutally murdered for what they believed. James, the brother of John, was killed by the sword. That's what it says in Acts under Herod Agrippa.
Peter was crucified upside. A lot of this comes from church history, not from scripture, but what we're, has been passed down in letters and what we understand to be true about these guys after the time of scripture. Peter crucified upside down in Rome. Matthew is beheaded in Ethiopia. Mark dies in Egypt after horses drag him through the streets of Alexandria, which is a form of torture. Luke is hanged in Greece because of his preaching.
Andrew is crucified in Greece. Thomas is thrust through with spears, then tortured, then burned alive in India. Philip is tortured, then crucified in Phygeria. Nathanael, who's also called Bartholomew in scripture, is whipped, then crucified. James, Jesus' brother, who was the leader of the Jerusalem church, is thrown down from the top of the temple. He survives and then is beaten to death.
Simon the Zeal is crucified. Matthew, Matthias, the guy who replaced Judas, is stoned while hanging on a cross. Maybe he wouldn't shut up. I don't know. Paul is beheaded in Rome. John, the only disciple who was not martyred, is boiled alive in oil, does not die, and is exiled to Patmos, where he writes the book of Revelation.
The disciples believed they wrote as eyewitnesses, they believed they wrote authoritatively, and they believed what they wrote. Every single one of them believed that Jesus Christ was God, that they saw him after he had died, and that death no longer had a hold on them. And so when people came to him and said, you better shut up, and you better quit writing what you're writing, and you better quit preaching what you're preaching, and you better just deny what you're saying, they all said, kill me, it'll do nothing, because I believe in the God who rises from the dead. Now, all I have said is that we know we're reading what they wrote, and we know that the Bible says that it is from God.
But that is a circular argument. You can trust the Bible. Why? Because God wrote it. How do you know God wrote it? The Bible says.
Well, how can you believe the Bible? Because God wrote it. It just, it goes in a circle. The Bible's trustworthy because God wrote it, we know that God wrote it because the Bible says it, and we can trust the Bible because God wrote it and the Bible says it. You can have this discussion with people, it just would continue to be the same discussion. Be like, if I said, you can trust me because I don't lie.
And if I lied, you wouldn't be able to trust me, but I don't lie. I just told you that. And you can trust me when I say I don't lie because I don't lie. And you would say, you have said that way too many times and I'm never going to believe a word you say. Okay? Now, that logically, that God wrote the Bible and therefore it's trustworthy and we can trust that because it's written in the Bible, is a logical fallacy.
It's a circular argument. It makes logical sense though and here's why. If the Bible pointed to something else as authoritative, that thing would be more authoritative than the Bible. So if the Bible said you can trust that I'm written by God because that says I'm written by God, then we would say, okay, y'all are either equal or that thing has more authority than you. The reason why when you're talking to somebody, you say, I swear to God I didn't do it. Which you probably shouldn't say, but if you say that, the reason you say that, people say that, is because God has more authority than you do.
God in the Bible says I swear by myself because who else is he going to swear to? So when the Bible says I'm authoritative and you say, on what authority? And it says, mine. It's because it's not going to point to anything else as authoritative. The Bible is. Now, at this point, the third argument that I'm often faced with and that I have discussions with people about is that they say things like, yeah, okay, but we know the Bible isn't true though.
But we just know because of the stuff it says in it. I was watching a comedian the other day and he said, he's British, he said, do we have any Christians in the room? And some guy way in the back, there's this giant auditorium and there's a guy in the back, he's like, hey! And he's like, oh, you're a Christian, what's your name? And if I'm butchering this accent, I don't care, I'm going for it. And the guy says, his name was Paul or something, he goes, oh, Paul, welcome.
I've got a special offer just for you, Paul. Would you like to buy some magic beans? Because if there's one thing I know about you, Paul, it's your really gullible. And then he goes into this thing about the virgin birth and how if you were watching, what I can only, I don't understand, he's British, but I can only assume it's like their version of Jerry Springer. And the girl said that she was a virgin and that's why she was pregnant, that nobody would buy that. And so basically, the argument that we're faced with at some point when we get here is that someone just goes, yeah, but we know the Bible's not true because it says all these things in it that we know are not true.
That argument, though, is also a circular argument. If you came to me and said, my Uncle Ted said he saw a ghost in his attic. And I said to you, yeah, but you can't believe anything your Uncle Ted says. And you said, why? And I said, because your Uncle Ted said he saw a ghost in his attic. So you can't believe what he says because Uncle Ted says he sees ghosts.
That's all I'm doing is basing my argument off of my argument, which is the same thing people do when they come to Scripture. They say you can't believe it because it has miraculous things in it. And if I were to say, well, yeah, but there's a lot of testimony throughout human history of the miraculous happening. And they're responsible, yeah, but you can't believe that. Why? Because those people said that something miraculous happened.
And so all they're doing is it's a belief system that just says, I can't believe that miraculous things happened so I can never believe this book. And they'll say things like, but we all know. And what they mean by we all know is white Europeans for the past couple hundred years know. They don't mean human history and they don't mean the amount of people, like they're not including Asia and Africa and South America where there's a vast majority of humans on Earth that would say there's actually more to life than what we can see. There actually is something beyond just what we can touch and measure under a microscope.
I can't prove the Bible to you. I can show you that they believed what they wrote. As Christians, we know that what we're reading is what they wrote and we know that they believed it. At some point, you have to place faith in that what they actually wrote is true. And there is your personal experience, the testimony of others, and then at some point there's faith. But we do believe that if there is a God, it would be on Him to reveal Himself to us.
He'd have to show up. He'd have to give us something. We couldn't just find Him on our own. And we do believe that He has revealed Himself through Christ. Okay. I said we'd get there.
2 Timothy. So we believe the Bible is trustworthy in both senses, that what we're reading is what they wrote and that what they wrote is true. That's what Christians believe. I can show you verifiably that we're reading what they wrote. You're going to have to come to the conclusion on your own that what they wrote is true. But, assuming that, 2 Timothy, what they wrote is true.
That's what we believe. That's why we open this. That's why we study this. That's why we read this. We believe that the Bible is trustworthy. We believe the Bible is sufficient.
2 Timothy, chapter 3, starting in verse... 14. But as for you, he's writing to a pastor named Timothy. Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. When he talks about the sacred writings, he's talking about the Old Testament. And he says something that Christians don't always know, which is that the Old Testament is sufficient for faith in Christ.
We're going to spend our whole summer walking through the Old Testament and talking about how it points us to Jesus. That was just a shameless plug. It's going to be fun. But he says that they're sufficient. You know that they're... which are able to make you wise for salvation through Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
He says that the Bible tells us what we need to know about salvation and gives us enough to be equipped for everything. We believe that the Bible is sufficient. That it has in it what we need. That it's profitable for rebuke, which means showing you where you're wrong. That we can definitively look at someone and say, no, you are wrong here. The Bible says the opposite of what you were doing.
For reproof, which just means correction. Just kind of getting lined back up for teaching, which means you're ignorant and you get to study it and you get to learn. For training in righteousness, that we might know how to live, that we'd be equipped for everything and wise for salvation. The Bible was primarily written as a redemptive history of God pursuing people. So, when we say the Bible is sufficient, we mean that it has everything we need to know. Not everything that you can know and not everything that is true.
So what I don't mean is this. if you started showing some symptoms of some sickness, I would pray for you. I would encourage you to pray. I would encourage your community group to pray. I would not hand you a Bible and say, study this and you'll find out what's wrong with you. I wouldn't because the point of the Bible isn't to be a medical textbook. I would say, you probably should go see a doctor because they know things about like, maybe what's wrong with you and maybe they'll take a needle and stick it in your arm and then you get all better.
We're going to pray for you and we're going to pray that they know what's wrong with you. But we're not going to do this in a medical textbook. Matt left for Cleveland last night. He and Katie and Emmy to drive all night long with an infant. So that was a good decision.
I did not hand him a Bible and say, use this to find your way to Cleveland. That's not why it was written. This would not be helpful to find your way to Cleveland. It would be helpful to find your way to God to understand the redemptive history of humanity. It's sufficient for what we need to know about God. When it talks about things, it speaks truly about them.
So the Bible, when it refers to the earth, calls it a circle. It says that God hung it out there in nothing, which is some sort of an old school reference to gravity. But it doesn't tell us whether or not Pluto is actually a planet or a ball of ice that's been tricking us for years. Because we have what we need to know about God and redemption and who He is and what He's accomplished. We don't have everything we want to know. That's why whenever somebody comes out and says, I need to tell you about the secrets of the blood moons.
That's a pretty good Hagee impersonation. Y'all don't know who I'm talking about, but man, that was on point. And I need you to know about the blood moons and what the blood moons testify. And I need you to look at this chart and it has a dragon and it has timelines and it has all these other things that I drew up in my basement. Like, my response to that is, that's cute. Bible doesn't say it.
Bible doesn't make a big point of that so it can't be a big point. Somebody's like, you need to know about the secrets of the Shemitah, which is another book that came out and it's like, no I don't. Because the Bible is aggressively plain and aggressively clear that we are sinners in need of a Savior and that God loves us enough to die on a cross for us to rescue us and to make us His and that the secrets and the answers belong to Him and that we get to belong to Him through Christ. That's the point of Scripture. That we get to trust Jesus. So when someone comes out and says, I did the secret Bible math.
No, you didn't. Because there ain't any. And if you're including verses and chapters, which is real cute, but those were added later, so nonsense. Sorry. That annoys me. It's sufficient.
It has what we need. We're going to go to this when we talk about things. We're going to open this up. We're going to study this. Secondly, we believe it's authoritative. Starting in chapter 4.
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead and by His appearing and by His kingdom preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, and do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry. We believe that the Bible is authoritative.
When we get together, when we study, what we're studying is scripture, not our opinions. When we get together, when there's an issue, when there's a problem we're facing, we open this up, we pray, we read, we try to find out what God says, we try to lean into scripture, we try to, when we get together for counseling, we're going to open this up and we're going to say this is what it says. This is what we get to know about scripture. This is what we know about Christ. He's given us authority authority. And this word is authoritative over all of us.
It is the highest authority. It is not the only authority. Which means that if I'm at some point correcting Archer, and I say, dude, you got to, I don't know if I was about to call him bro and dude, but I don't think I'll do that with my son. I'll say boy. How about that? I ain't got to practice this much yet.
I'll say boy. It's 9.15, I told you to go to bed. And if he says something really smart to me like, the Bible doesn't say I have to go to bed. I'm going to say the Bible says to do what your daddy says. And it also says if I spare the rod, I'll spoil the child. So why don't you go get in that bed?
And he'll say, good point daddy. Feats don't fail me now. So the Bible is the highest authority. It gives us other authorities like our parents, like church leaders, like governmental authorities. But all of them have to submit to scripture.
Church leaders have to submit to scripture. That we as a church should be reading this and studying this and if any of our leaders get off or begin to do something weird, we correct with scripture because scripture is the authority. My dad watches the preaching channel. I don't know what it's called. There's always like people with like thrones and globes in the background and all that kind of stuff. And he said he was watching a guy that he was an alright preacher.
He was just watching some, you know, he's drinking coffee in the morning and stuff. And he said he got to watching him one day and he realized the preacher would always start off by saying, turn to page 552. And he said sometimes he'd say things like, turn to chapter 3. We'll be in chapter 3 today by page 221. And he said he got to watching him at one point he was walking around with the book and he realized that the book had the preacher's face on it. That he wasn't preaching from the Bible, he was preaching from a book he wrote.
And that was what he took up on stage and that was what was in the pews and everybody would get his book out and would read it and he was just walking around with his own book and teaching out of it like it was authority. I'm going to tell y'all, I'm going to invite y'all. If I walk up here someday and I have a book with my face on it, I'm going to need you to assault me. And I'm going to need you to punch me in the face that is not on the book but that is on the top of my head because that is nonsense. And I need you going to take the Bible and begin to teach authoritatively out of that because that's the authority and we as Christians submit to it.
We believe that the Bible is trustworthy, we believe that it is sufficient, we believe that it is authoritative, and finally we believe that the Bible is powerful. Jump back up to where we started in chapter 3 verse 14. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings. These are sacred, they're holy, they belong to God. which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus, all scripture is breathed out by God. We believe that God at the very beginning of time and history spoke the world into existence and that he uses his word to accomplish his will and that throughout the history of the church the proclaimed word and the studied word and the written word have been capable of making people wise for salvation, have been powerful to lead to repentance, to see so clearly Jesus Christ on a cross dying for us to save us and that we can be changed through the word.
We believe that it's powerful, that it's capable of making us wise for salvation, it's capable of changing us, it's capable of leading us, that it's sufficient, powerful, authoritative, that we can trust it. And so we're going to get together every Sunday and we're going to open this up and we're going to talk about it. And every church everywhere is going to get together and open this up and study it and read it and go back to it and point to it and bend their own will to it and submit to it and follow it because it's sufficient, authoritative, and powerful and it's trustworthy. When you read this, you're reading what they wrote and what they wrote was true.
That's why we believe the Bible, why we follow it and in the pages of scripture we meet the ultimate Revelation of God which is Jesus Christ who loves us enough to die for us and to make us his. And if you're a Christian and you're not reading the Bible on a regular, normal, active part of your life, you're just missing out on all of the goodness that God has offered to you through his sacred writings that are capable of making you wise, capable of working in your life for your good, capable of leading you to repentance, capable of making you follow Jesus even in the face of opposition and death because of the truth found in these pages. we're going to pray and then we're going to sing together. God, I thank you for your word. Thank you for your word that is capable of leading us to salvation, your word that is capable of giving us hope, changing us.
God, we thank you for preserving it accurately for us, for giving us the document that is most well attested to in history. God, we thank you for that and I pray, Lord, that this would be a church that would trust your word, submit to your word, follow your word, and follow Jesus through it as your Holy Spirit works in us. We love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.