Sola Scriptura

Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.

Sola Scriptura

Spencer Cary

Transcript

Morning. My name is Spencer and I am one of the pastors here. So we're going to be looking at Sola Scriptura today. We are in a series called the five solas. These are the five anthems that came out of the Protestant Reformation. And we are in, well, last week, Chet walked us through kind of an overview of all five and we're posting up in Sola Scriptura today, which means scripture alone.

So when I was in college, I was a new believer. I was excited about following Jesus. And when I got to college, I was like, I need Christian community. As Chet said at the very beginning, like you Christians need community. I realized that. And I was like, I want to find some people to love Jesus.

I went to a college, Presbyterian college, though it's called Presbyterian college. It was very much not a Christian college. So I got on campus and I met some people that said, hey, come to this, this discussion group, this faith discussion group on Monday night. And I said, sweet, I'm there. So I rock up, got my pocket Bible, ready to go, excited.

I walk in and they say, oh, they pointed at my Bible. You're not going to need that here. I said, what? No, seriously, like we, we don't, you're not going to need that here. And I was like, oh, okay. So I put it down and, uh, I was like, this is gonna be the worst Bible study ever, but we'll give it a go.

Uh, and for the next hour, I listened to a bunch of 18 and 22 year olds pontificate and theorize about what Christianity was all about by never pointing to the Bible at all. And it just blew my mind. It would be like going to a calculus class and day one, the professor just says, hey, put your books away. You're not going to need that this semester. What do you think math is? What is math to you?

You'd be like, no, I'm out. Well, guess what? I stayed the whole hour and, uh, because I didn't want to disturb the herd and make it seen. I was like, okay, I'm just going to be curious here and watch and see what happens. And it blew my mind that you could actually have a discussion about Jesus and Christianity without actually opening the Bible. And what I did not realize at the time is that I had been shaped by a view of the scriptures that has a long tradition.

That tradition is called sola scriptura. I like how one pastor defines this. He says, sola scriptura, he says, is the Bible has the final say on everything. The Bible has something to say about that. The Bible has the final say on everything. The Bible has something to say about.

So sola means alone. Scripture alone is the final authority for what is true. That's why I found that group so shocking. And also why I never went back that you could actually have a discussion about Jesus without going to the scriptures. And as I would go on to learn over the coming years, is that these beliefs were rooted in the Reformation tradition of sola scriptura that goes not just back to the Reformation, but goes all the way back to the early church. So today we're going to look at sola scriptura in this series.

It's basically what the five solars are answering this question of how are we saved? Okay. And if it's as Chet was walked us through last week, if it's by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, if that's what that is, then we've got to have some source material for that statement. And this is where Protestants and Catholics have a different answer. Have a different answer for what the answer is for that. So we're going to walk through this today.

I'm going to walk us through the history of how this came to be. And then we're going to sit in what the Bible teaches on this. And then we'll close with some encouragements that I think are good for us as we continue to reform as the Protestant tradition is. That we can grow in this encouragement to continue to be people of sola scriptura. So let me pray for us.

And then we will jump in. Lord, we love you. We thank you for the goodness of the gospel, that it sets us apart to be a people that can sit under the authority of your word. God, I pray that you would mold and shape us this morning in your image, that you'd help us be present, and that we respond in Christ's name. Amen. Okay.

So one of them, one of the common misconceptions about the Reformation is that Martin Luther and the Reformers came up with new ideas. These were not new ideas. Luther was not the first to say these ideas like scripture alone. This goes back all the way to the first century church. The first century church believed the Bible was the final authority on what is true. And if that is the case, then how do things go awry?

How do the church go off the rails? In order to do that, we've got to walk through some church history. Now, I know when I say history, some of you are like, please, no. Like, don't. I hated history in high school. I don't.

Listen. Church history can be helpful. So come for the church history. Stay for some of the incredible baby names you're about to hear. For those of you that are thinking about starting families, boy, oh boy, do I have some special names for you. Church history is chock full.

It is fertile with baby names. All right. So you can stay for that and listen. But we've got to walk through some history to understand what's happening here. So like each of the five solas, the slow fade began when the Western church became the Roman Catholic church.

Because early on in the New Testament, the New Testament church, the New Testament people believed that the Bible was the final and sole authority for what is true and what is good. You can see that. We'll walk through a lot of the biblical evidence here in a little bit. But you see that in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, when it says, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Like the church believed this out the gate, that if you want to be equipped for every good work, you went to the scriptures that would grow you and shape you in what is good.

This is what they believed early on. And as the final books of the New Testament were being written, and as the New Testament canon was being finalized, canon is just a word for standard of the books. So this is the standard, which is the 27 books in the New Testament, 66 books in total in our Bibles. The early church looked at the Bibles. You can look around. You got blue Bibles underneath your seats in front of you.

Okay? That blue Bible, the words that are in it, this is what guided the early church. They looked at this as the chief authority for their lives. Now there are skeptics that will say, wait a second, no, no, no. Didn't they just choose what they wanted? They just choose which books of the Bible they wanted.

They kicked out some of the other ones. What about the Apocrypha? What about the things that were included? I don't have the bandwidth to be able to get into the Apocrypha today. If you want to have a discussion on that, we can have that later. But that is a false argument.

That is not true. Early on, you can see it in early church history. They looked at the books of the Bible, and they didn't choose them and say, these are the ones. They were already recognizing, these are the scriptures. These are the scriptures that were handed down to the church. You can see that through the early church fathers.

You can take it Clement. Clement, a church father in 95 AD, was writing about this, pointing to these scriptures that were authoritative. You can look at Ignatius in 115 AD. Get your pens ready, guys. We'll see some baby boys named Ignatius. It's a good one.

All right? You can look at Polycarp. Maybe not a good one. You can give it a try. It's the Wild West of names these days, guys. You can name whatever you want.

Polycarp in 108 AD. Irenanus in 185 AD. Hippolytus in 200 AD. Church father after church father after church father is simply pointing out, these are the books that guide and shape the church. These have authority. Let me make this very clear.

The church did not choose the scriptures. They merely recognized what was already authoritative as the word of God was handed down to them. And for 300 plus years, for 300 plus years, the church was guided by this belief as it exploded across Europe and North Africa. And then early on in the fourth century, Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert Christianity. And then in 380 AD, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And that's when it became the Roman Catholic Church.

Rome meaning centered in Rome, Catholic meaning Latin for universal. So the universal church as centered in Rome. And a few things happened when that took place. The first is that it was now politically convenient to not just be a Christian, but to be a Christian leader. Because when the church got morphed into government, it became convenient to be a political leader and a church leader and corruption started to seep in. The elite started to convert to Christianity and become political leaders because that was convenient.

Second, the Roman Catholic Church commissioned one of the early church fathers, Jerome. They commissioned Jerome to create the first Latin translation of the Bible. The Bible was written in the Old Testament, Hebrew and Aramaic, and the New Testament, Greek. They commissioned him. We want you to translate that into Latin because Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire. So he did this and his translations ended up becoming something called the Vulgate and became the translation of the Bible for a thousand years.

From 500 to 1000 AD, that was the chief and almost sole translation in the Western church. Now around this time is when Rome finally falls. The Roman Empire falls and we enter into a period between 500 and 1500 AD, which is known as the Middle Ages. Okay, so in the Middle Ages during this time, there's no longer a need for everybody to learn Latin because the Roman Empire has fallen. It's a time where there's not a lot of technological advancement. There's a lot of disease that goes through.

There's not a lot of education. Some of the stuff you see in movies may be overplayed, but it certainly wasn't a very good time. And while this is happening, the only scriptures that are circulating around the churches in Europe and Northern Africa are in Latin. And the Catholic Church had those. And no one else except the elites knew Latin, which means, this is why this is really important. It means that for a thousand years, they held the keys to what the scripture said.

They're the ones that knew it. And everyone went to the priesthood, went to the bishops to find out what God said because they weren't going to be able to read it for themselves. And this is when around this time is when the Catholic Church stops looking to the scriptures as the chief authority and it starts looking within. And it starts looking within. And that's when councils are start forming and bishops start forming doctrine and the church starts forming doctrine that is completely disconnected from the word of God. And the scriptures stop becoming the chief authority.

That is why to this day in the Catholic Church, the church is greater than the scriptures. The church is greater than the scriptures even today for the Catholic Church. That is how certain Catholic doctrines creep in that have no basis in the scriptures. Take purgatory, for instance. Purgatory is the idea that there's this limbo place between hell and heaven, that if you don't commit these super bad mortal sins, when you die, you have some venial sins. You can go to purgatory.

You can be purged of that before you enter into heaven. That's found nowhere in the scriptures. There's not a scriptural basis for that. You can go back to Platonic philosophy. You go back to Plato, who was a pagan Greek in the 4th century BC. But you're not going to find that in the scriptures.

And that's what happens. A lot of times with Catholic doctrine, they have debates, scholars have debates, and they have councils. And over time, it develops into a doctrine that's cemented. It's a little bit like a game of telephone. The game of telephone when you're a kid, where you would, you know, one kid would whisper to the next kid a phrase, and the next kid would whisper all the way around the circle. Then you get back to the final person.

They stand up and they say their phrase, and it's not the same thing. That's a little bit of how some Catholic doctrine came in to be. It was passed, it was passed, it was passed, it was passed, and then it's completely disconnected from the scriptures. And then in 1274, in 1274, purgatory became an official Catholic doctrine. And this happened with a host of issues we'll see in the other five solos. Things like pilgrimages, things like veneration of the saints, which is praying to Saint Mary or Saint Thomas.

This happened with things like indulgences. We'll see that more in sola fide, with paying to get out of purgatory. There are different doctrines that crept in and became official Catholic doctrine. And that was until about 300 years before Martin Luther steps on the scene in 1500. About 300 years before, there were some people that finally started to challenge the Catholic Church on this. And I'll give you a few examples.

From 1200 to 1400 AD, there were three different main figures in Europe. They started to challenge this idea that the church is not the authority on what is true, that the Bible is the authority. There's a man named Peter Waldo, who was a French merchant that began to challenge this with a movement. There was a man named John Wycliffe, an Englishman, a professor at Oxford, who began to also, like Peter Waldo, translate the Bible into their native tongue. They're like, we don't have the word. The common people need the word of God.

There was a man named Jan Hus, which is Czech. Hus is Czech for goose. So again, baby names, y'all. Hus. Who doesn't want a name? That's boy or girl, right?

Hus. Okay? Each of these figures over the next two to three hundred years began to challenge the Catholic Church by translating the Bible into the common tongue and preaching it to the people in their own language. And when they did this, well, the Catholic Church was not very happy. Back then, the Catholic Church did what they did best back then. They absolutely destroyed dissent.

Like during that period, if you challenged the Catholic Church, it did not go well for you. They came at you very hard. It's a little bit like, if you've ever seen Parks and Rec, which is an episode, which is a TV series on local town government, there's this episode of Parks and Rec where a Venezuelan diplomat comes into town to observe local town government. And then he, there's this, he shows up to a town council meeting and the people are doing what happens at town council meetings. They're yelling at the council members and they're protesting. And he sees this and he's like, why are they not being taken to jail?

This does not happen in Venezuela. If you do this, you go to jail. All right? You play music too loud, jail. You drive too slow, jail. You drive too fast, jail.

You undercook fish, jail. You overcook chicken, jail. Jail, jail, jail, jail, jail. All right? That's, that was the Catholic Church. You challenged them, jail.

You challenged them, inquisition, torture, death, crusade. During this period, they went hard after anyone that showed dissent. And that is what happened. So there's a first, there was a high stakes game of where's Waldo? Waldo, because Peter Waldo and his people were being hunted down. Peter Waldo was actually not killed by the Catholic Church, but thousands of his followers, thousands of his followers were called the Waldensons.

They're absolutely crushed. The Catholic Church couldn't get to Wycliffe. He was in England. They couldn't kill him, but they did excommunicate him and they did get him fired from his teaching position in Oxford. And then after he died, they dug up his bones and they burned him for good measure. And then Hus, they said, Hus, come to Rome.

We want to hear your ideas. We'll give you safe passage. And then he got to Rome and they said, ha ha, we don't make deals with heretics. And they arrested him and then they burned him at the stake. And there's this urban legend. I don't know if it's true or not.

I like to believe it's true, but we don't know for sure. That when he was being burned at the stake, that he said a hundred years from now, somebody is going to take up this cause. And then a hundred years later, Martin Luther steps on the scene and Martin Luther steps on the scene. And when he realizes that the Bible is actually the chief and final authority, when he begins to discover this, boy, the backlash was intense. It led to a very aggressive resurgence of this. Because when you're deprived of something that's really, really good, you get a little angsty when you realize you've missed out on it.

Like Chet and I were talking a few months back, we're talking about biscuits because Chet loves biscuits. About twice a year, you're going to hear a sermon illustration about biscuits in heaven. It's going to happen. He loves biscuits. And we're talking about biscuits. And I was like, man, I love biscuits too.

I don't eat them a whole lot. And then it hit me. I was like, I don't eat them a whole lot because we don't have them at home. And we don't have them at home because my wife doesn't like biscuits. And she's the one that makes the grocery list. And she's the one that cooks.

I was like, Chet, I've been deprived of biscuits for 10 years of our marriage. We haven't had biscuits. And I went home and I saw Anna. And I said, Anna, we don't have biscuits. Why don't we have biscuits? Why don't you like biscuits?

I want biscuits in this house. She's like, calm down, crazy. I'll get you some biscuits. All right. I was a little angsty because I was like, I want this. I've been deprived of something that's very good.

And we now have biscuits. I saw it yesterday in the bottom drawer. And I was like, yes, we have biscuits in our house. You could argue that Martin Luther's stand was as important as my stand. But he stood aggressively.

Y'all, he was in a debate. He was in a debate one time with a guy named Sylvester Prius, who's a Catholic scholar. And the scholar came at him. And this is what the, this is what the Catholic scholar Sylvester Prius said. He says this, he says, he who does not accept the doctrine of the church of Rome and the pontiff, that's Pope of Rome as an infallible rule of faith from which the Holy Scriptures to draw their strength and authority is a heretic. Now, look, look, look at that again.

He's saying, if you don't accept the doctrine of the church of Rome and the pontiff of Rome as the infallible rule of faith, the scriptures too support it. The scriptures support the Pope, it supports Catholic doctrine. But if you don't actually accept this, you are a heretic to which Martin Luther responded in true Luther form. You cited no scripture like an insidious devil. You pervert the scriptures. And that's Martin Luther in that show right there.

Very angsty, responds very aggressively. But that right there, that distinction of the Catholic church had a counter-reformation after this period. They reformed a lot of their corruption in a lot of ways. Thank you, Jesus, that that happened. But that right there, that argument that Sylvester Prius made and that Luther countered with, that still is the law of the land today.

That you either accept what the pontiff of what the Roman Catholic church teaches with the scriptures being underneath it, or that's heresy to them. And Luther says, no, it is the scriptures alone. And we're going to see this in the coming weeks, that as he realized what is in the scriptures, as we were going to see in Sola Fide, and Chet introduced this last week in Romans 1 17, when he read, for it is, it for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. When he read that in Romans 1 17, and realized the church teaches something different.

The church teaches faith and works. And he was so tormented by the works aspect of that, that he had to earn God's favor. He had to be good enough. When he realized that, no, it is by faith. When that clicked for him, he realized, oh no. No, no, no, no.

The Catholic church has completely missed the boat on this. And he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg on October 31st in 1517. And from that moment forward, Luther was guided by the scriptures are my authority. I don't answer to the church, I answer to God and his word. And the Reformation tradition continued after him through Zwingli, through John Calvin, through John Wesley, and the Reformers that followed, that the scriptures are our chief authority. And it shows up even today, literally in this moment right now.

That when we gather together on a Sunday, we are shaped by that tradition. It's the reason why the songs that we sing come from the scriptures. It's the reason why we read scripture all the way to the biggest moment of our Sunday morning gathering is the proclamation of God's word and a pulpit that is centered in the room. All of that is built upon sola scriptura because we find our chief authority in the word of God. So that's 2,000 years of church history for you.

You guys made it. Good Job. All right. But that's what shaped 2,000 years of history for why we believe the Bible is authoritative. But more importantly, let's look at the scriptures and see what the scriptures have to say on this.

All right. In order to look at the scriptures and how the scriptures speak about itself. Well, you have to acknowledge something. So we do believe, as I said earlier, the Bible has the final say on everything. The Bible has something to say about. But we argue as Protestants, the Bible is self-authenticating.

The Bible speaks to itself. And there have been skeptics who have said, wait a second. That is circular logic. That is circular reasoning. And we say, yes. Yes, it is.

It is a matter of faith for us because what circular logic, circular reasoning is, is that God has spoken in his word. And God speaks truthfully in his word. And the word actually testifies to who God is, that we should believe and trust in him. Because God has spoken in his word. And his word is true. And we trust his word.

And his word speaks to who God is truthfully. And therefore, we trust God. And God has spoken. You see how that works? And we say, absolutely. We take it as a matter of faith that God has revealed himself.

And he's revealed himself in the scriptures. And we believe that God has revealed himself truthfully. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, if you really do get hung up on that, you and I can have a, have a fun chat later. We can have an epistemological argument, which is just an argument about how we know things.

And I will show you why it is that most of the things that you know that you might accept as fact, whether it's science or from other systems, work in the same kind of reasoning. We make assumptions all the time. There's not much logic that's actually concrete and foolproof. But we can have the discussion later. I spent the majority of our collective attention span on church history. I'm not going to subject to 98% of that.

You can come talk to me later. But the scriptures are absolutely self-authenticating. All right. Go back to 2 Timothy. Let me give you some lead into verse 16 and 17. He says this in verse 14, but as for you, and this is Paul writing to Timothy, a young pastor, but as for you continue and 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.

We pause for a second. What's being referenced there is what he says earlier that his, uh, his Christian mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois are the ones that led him in faith. And it would, well, I love that is as you're saying, listen, you know, you've learned the scriptures from, your mama and your grandmama, which y'all, this is why we care so much about teaching our kids the Bible. This is why we're trying to equip you to train your children, to, to love Jesus and to know his word. It's so important. That's why we developed, we had a whole training weekend in the fall on this.

We developed something called roadmap that is meant to help you lead your children in faith. It's so important to leave a legacy of faith by opening the sacred writings, as Paul says here, because you've been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise, for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And these next two verses are worth committing to memory. He says, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. The man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Amen.

The Bible is, hear this, breathed out by God. That is a metaphor that God has breathed out. He has inspired. He has spoken. And as we look at his word, it is a gold mine for teaching and for reproof and for correction, for training in righteousness. It's meant to guide our lives that all other wisdom, all other advice.

We hold that against the scriptures to see whether it is good and true. The Bible is the standard for what is good. You can go back to the Old Testament. You go to Psalm 119, a passage out of the Old Testament, and just look at it over and over again, showing that the Bible is the chief authority. Verse 24, it says, your testimonies are my delight. They are my counselors.

That the Bible, that his testimonies counsel us, that leads us. In verse 25, it says, give me life according to your word. It is life-giving. In verse 31, it says, I cling to your testimonies, that you cling to it like a life raft in the raging sea. He clings, he says, I trust your word in verse 42. In 105, he says, your word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.

In the midst of the darkness of this world, that it lights up the path for us to ultimately pursue what is good in Christ. Over and over again, you see this view throughout the Old Testament, end of the new, that the scriptures are the chief authority, that no tradition, no outside teaching goes above it. Absolutely. Jesus addresses this head on in Mark 7. In Mark 7, the Pharisees are very upset that Jesus is not washing his hands before he eats. You might be thinking, wait a second, I would like him to wash his hands before he eats.

It's not an issue of sanitation. That's not why the Pharisees are upset. They're upset because it's a religious ritual, a religious ritual that you're supposed to wash your hands before you eat. Only problem is, that religious ritual is found nowhere in the Old Testament law. It's actually based on Jewish outside commentary, Jewish tradition. A Jewish tradition that they followed, and Jesus absolutely just cuts through their argument.

And how he does it is so important for how we view the scriptures versus tradition. Verse 9, he says, And he said to them, this is Jesus, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition. For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. So he's saying, You have some tradition. You get a fine way of rejecting that, and he references one of the top ten commandments, right? The ten commandments.

Honor your mother and father. He says, You have a fine way. And this is how he addresses this head on is where it absolutely makes sense. He says, But you say, If a man tells his father or his mother, Whatever you have gained from me is korban, that is, given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his mother and father. And what Jesus is getting at in that is that he's calling out what the Pharisees were actually doing themselves. You see, the scriptures in the Old Testament teach us to honor our father and mother, that as they grow in their age, to continue to take care of them.

But they started this outside practice that was outside the Old Testament law, that was in this Jewish commentary tradition called korban, that you could actually bypass giving money to your parents to take care of them and give it directly to the temple. Because that was the holy thing to do. I'm not going to take care of my parents. I'm going to give it to the temple. And the Pharisees were doing this themselves. And what makes this so evil is, is that when the Pharisees did this, they were enriching themselves because they were the beneficiaries of what went into the temple treasury.

How messed up is that? And Jesus just cuts through their tradition to absolutely see you make voices, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down and many such things you do. You see, it cuts through it. Is it in the word of God or isn't it? If your tradition does not line up with the word of God, you have made void the word of God. And this is still what the Catholic church does today.

They have teachings that do not align with the scriptures and those teachings sit over atop the scriptures in authority. And as Protestants, we say no. As Protestants, we join Paul as Paul in first Corinthians when he writes, he says, I've applied all these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, that you may learn by us hear this, not to go beyond what is written. The word for written, there's the same Greek word for scriptures. Don't go beyond the scriptures because the Bible is the final authority for us. It is why Jesus in Luke six says, everyone who hears what I says and does it is like a man who's built his house on the rock.

It is why over and over again, when he's in debates with the religious leadership, he says, have you not read? Have you not read? Meaning, have you not read what the scriptures teach? It's why when he's in the wilderness facing off with Satan, that he's quoting scripture in defense. Here's the reason why when you have a study Bible and you open up your study Bible and you look in the middle and there's these things called cross-references. It's these Numbers that have different letters that correspond to different parts of the page.

And if you look at that and you follow this verse, actually cross-reference to this verse and this verse and this verse, because the Bible is quoting itself all the time, alluding to itself all the time, because the Bible sees itself as the chief authority. That is the biblical argument. And I could cite verse after verse, after verse, after verse, after verse, after verse that proves this. Now, some of you may be thinking, that's great. I see you're really excited about that. Thank you.

I'm not Catholic. I wasn't raised Catholic. Why do we have to spend so much time making that point? The reason why, because there are ways that we as Protestants, as Baptists, there are ways that we functionally reject sola scriptura today. Though our faith is built upon that tradition that shows up in a lot of ways, even in this moment, there are ways that we functionally reject scripture alone as our final authority. And with the time we have left, I just want to give some encouragements for us to continue to grow in scripture alone.

So first, we need to know our Bibles. We need to know our Bibles. One of the ways that we function, we show a functional disbelief of sola scriptura is we just don't know the Bible. That we're biblically illiterate. There are Christian survey groups, y'all, that survey those who identify as Christians. And the results that come back every year get more depressing in a lot of different ways.

But one of them is, is this idea of biblical literacy, people knowing their Bibles. I saw one survey that said slightly over half of the Christians who surveyed on that said that you can get to heaven by being good. You can get to heaven by being, just be a good person. You can get to heaven over half. And the scriptures adamantly say, no, you can never be good enough. That's the whole point of why Christ died for us.

There's one survey, survey, that 70% of the self-identifying born of Christians, born again Christians, in this survey, ages 18 to 55. They said that Jesus was not the only way. 70%, that's off by 20%. That's startling. Our faith is built upon, no, Christ is our only hope, as we'll see in Christ alone. He is our only hope.

Another survey, 66% of evangelicals answered and said that Jesus was not God. Jesus was, our faith is built upon that, that Christ is God. These are the most basic Christian beliefs. And what it reveals is a few things. One of them is, is a lack of biblical teaching in pulpits across the country. But another thing is that we just don't read our Bibles like we should.

We don't read our Bibles enough. Y'all, we need to know the scriptures. Y'all, this is worthy of our focus. It's worthy of our lives. That passage in 2 Timothy 3 shows the riches of the scriptures. Y'all, if I told you that I had a prophetic book, and this prophetic book had every single stock pick that you should make every day the stock market is open, the stock market is open over the next 10 years.

And if you, or something you ought to do, crypto, there you go, for the rest of you. That if you follow this book every day over the next 10 years, you will be a billionaire in 10 years. And you're like, I don't know, I'll give it a shot. And a month in, you're like, I just made $1,000. Two years in, I just made $10,000. A year in, I'm a millionaire.

You would read that book every single day the market opens so that you could make the trades because that's a tangible thing. Of course, I want to be a billionaire. And the scriptures show something that is infinitely and eternally better than riches. That there's a wealth of eternal riches in the scriptures. And our lack of reading, it shows a functional disbelief that it is the sole authority for what is good in this life. We need the scriptures.

If we want to do the things that we talk about being a gospel centered community on mission, if we want to make disciples, if we want to train our children to know who God is, if we want to share the gospel to a dying world that desperately needs Christ, if we want to taste and see that the Lord is good, we need the Bible. We need to know our Bibles. And if we don't, we functionally show that we don't believe the Sola Scriptura is true. Second, we need to submit to our Bibles. We need to submit to our Bibles. We are increasingly shaped by an anti-authoritarian culture.

There's a culture that does not care about authority. And this shows up. I mean, we have conversations and we're not unique. We talk to other pastors. You read about other pastors online. They're having the same conversations that you sit across the table from somebody who is choosing sin.

And you open up the Bible. You say, you should not be cohabitating with the person you're dating. Don't do this. Let me show you from the scriptures why this is sin. That you should grow in generosity. To not be stingy with your money.

Jesus talks a lot about this. We sit across the table from someone that says, I'm getting a divorce because I want to be happy. And say, no, look at what the Word of God says here. Don't do this. And we have heard people say, and we're not unique in this. We've heard people say, I don't care what that says.

I'm going to do what I want to do. And where the Bible supports my life, I will, I will, yes and amen. But where it doesn't, I will reject it. And the Bible becomes a buffet where you choose what you want and you reject what you don't. And that anti-authority, that, that shows up. Y'all, every now and then I have this complex ethical situation, like a variety, just complex ethical situations that come up.

And I'm like, oh, goodness. I know that I'm supposed to consult God's Word. I know I'm supposed to pray. I know I'm supposed to consult other Christians who are consulting God's Word. And there's a part of me that just says, that's really exhausting. I just want to go from here.

I want to go from the gut. Let me just make the call. And that is a rejection of the authority of God's Word. And we'll submit the lesser things, y'all. We will go to the internet. We will go to mom blogs and to podcasts and to anything else to find advice and wisdom.

Or even worse, we'll go just with ourselves. We'll see ourselves as the authority on what is good for us. We spent a summer, last summer, in the Proverbs. And the Proverbs basically acknowledged that. The assumption is, is humanity, yes, you want to choose what is good for you because of your fallen flesh. Here is what the wisdom of the Scriptures says otherwise.

But we show a functional disbelief in Scripture alone when we say, I don't want the Scriptures. I want what is best for me. And the Bible holds a better way out. It shows an eternally better way that is for us if we would just submit to God and His Word. Last, we need to stand on our Bibles. Not literally.

We need to stand on our Bibles. That song we were singing earlier, it's based on the solid rock, comes from Luke 6, 47. It says, Everyone who comes to me and hears my word and does them, I will show you what he is like. He is like a man building a house who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. Y'all, the Scriptures are worth our lives. We can stand on them.

They are trustworthy. They are tried and they are true. Every now and then, I will hear the objections say, the Bible has contradictions. The Bible has this in it. Look at this. When I was a younger Christian, I used to wig out.

I am like, oh, where? And then over the years, I hear someone say, oh, look at this in the Gospels. Look at this. And I go and I look at it and I study it and I go deeper, deeper down the well, deeper into the riches. Consult commentaries from 2,000 years of church history, of church interpretation. I look at it and I look at it.

I'm like, man, no, absolutely. This is true. And it's good. And the older I get, the less I'm not thrown off when someone says that. I'm like, no, show me. Show me the Scriptures.

Let's study it together. It is trustworthy and it is true. It is worth banking our eternities on what it says. We can firmly stand on the Word of God. Martin Luther understood this. He understood that the church standing on its own authority is a road lined with corruption that leads to self-destruction.

And that is why when he stood on trial for his teachings, his teachings like this on Sola Scriptura, when he stood on trial and they said, you need to recant. And he knew exactly what he could face. He knew what happened to Hus a hundred years before him. He knew that he could be burned at the stake. And he considered it for a day. And he came back later and he said, here I stand.

I can do no other. And what he was standing on was the Word of God. The Word of God alone as his authority. And from that moment forward, I mean, he would rather have faced a gruesome fate from a wayward church than disobey God and his Word. And that tradition has continued over the last 500 years. We are beneficiaries of the ones who stand on that tradition while we also look at the ways we can continue to grow into it.

Matt's going to come up and he's going to sing a song over us that you have not heard before. My hope is that you would consider those three things that are behind me. Consider how we have functionally rejected the scriptures alone as our authority for what is good and what is true. We have fallen short. And how we need to absolutely know our Bibles, we have fallen short in the ways we have said, I don't want to submit to this. We have fallen short and not standing firm on the scriptures.

Praise Jesus that Sola Scriptura isn't the only five, one of the five solas. That we can receive grace because the faith has been gifted to us in Christ. That where we fail to believe this, there's mercy that is given to us. And that we as Christians get to walk this out in beautiful repentance saying, I want God. And his word. And I get to commit the rest of my life to that.

Let me pray for us. Lord, we lack faith and wisdom. But you have it in abundance. God, may you grant that to us and more so. That we would trust you and your word. That we would see your word as valuable, as profitable, and as beautiful and good.

Help us be a people that continue to stand on scripture alone. Because it is one of the most beautiful gifts that you've given us in the church. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. The beginning of the Psalms.

And Psalm...

Bible

Bible

Chet Phillips

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.