Sermon: "Why Trust the Bible?"

Second in the "Real Questions" series.
Delivered August 21, 2005 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Theme: There are a lot of reasons to trust what the Bible says. I want to give you 6 reasons I trust it. But the main reason I trust the Bible is Loyalty to Jesus- because Jesus trusted the Bible.

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Sermon Notes are at the end.

I want to begin today by reading to you a few verses from the gospel of Matthew, the 5th chapter. These are the words of Jesus and he's talking about the Word.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven".

Let's pray. God we are grateful for this your Word. We are thankful for what Jesus says to us. We pray now that we might have ears to hear that we might respond with the obedience that comes through faith. For we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

Well, I want to tell you about a debate I was part of back in high school. In high school you know sometimes they give you these opportunities for extra credit sort of things. It was after school. We had a debate. I was on one of the debate teams and the issue was-Is the Bible the Word of God? And I was on the team that was saying no, it isn't. Because that's what my conviction was. Now, I had this great insight. Teenagers listen to this. You will regret some of your great insights. This is one of mine that I regret. I had this sense that genius of the Bible was that before you had police forces, before you had policemen, you had this great book written by people to make you feel guilty so people wouldn't do as many things wrong and so it kind of controlled the population. And so now that we have policemen, policewomen, now that we have forensics, we don't need the Bible. That was one of the fascinating points that I made in that debate. I have no clue who won, but if we won I dread to think what the other argument was.

What I find fascinating is that to that point in my life I had never, ever, one time to my knowledge, opened a Bible. I had taken this position. I have read excerpts from the Bible in other pieces of literature, but I had never had a Bible in my hand and opened it up and actually read it, up to that point in my life, and here I was taking this incredible stance. Well, when I graduated from high school a Baptist friend of mine gave me a Bible, which I promptly brought to my room, my college dorm room, and put up on a shelf and forget it for 14 months. But one day, one day in one hand I had a book called "How to Experience God's Love and Forgiveness", a book that I had received through the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. Thank you God for that. And in the other hand I had the gospel of Luke. And I started to read the gospel of Luke and in that gospel I met Jesus. I met a Jesus who knew what my inner struggles were. I met Jesus who said that he had come and at great sacrifice. He had made a way for me to know God and to live in an entirely new way; to have purpose in my life and to have fellowship with the God who created me. And so as I read those words from the gospel of Luke, I made the decision 33 years ago to follow Jesus Christ. Now was that a sad mistake? Was the picture we see of Jesus so distorted, is the Bible so untrustworthy that 33 years ago I made a decision based upon deception and false ideas? Or was it a moment where God spoke to me? I believe that God spoke and I believe I can trust what I read in the Bible. Now I can't tell you all the reasons that you should trust the Bible. What I am going to share with you today is why I trust the Bible.

The first reason that I trust the Bible is that what we read in the Bible is what was actually written. What I mean by that is that what's written there might be something we disagree with. You are entitled to disagree. People can disagree with what's here. I don't think it is always wise, but we can. But what the point I am trying to make is, is that the description of the events, the description of how God has worked in history that we have in this version of the Bible is substantially and accurately what the original authors intended to communicate. There are some 24,000 copies of the New Testament, pieces and manuscripts handwritten. One of those pieces comes from within one generation of the original author. We've got almost the entire New Testament handwritten, pieces of it within 200 years of the death of Christ; the full New Testament pieces of it. We have all kinds of copies of this to compare to one another to see if it is substantially accurate, and what we find is that there is about 155,000 differences between those 24,000 manuscripts. Now that sounds like a lot, but the vast majority of them are differences like in one version it says Christ Jesus and the other version it says Jesus Christ, or in one version it says Jesus only. Out of all of those differences, only about 50 are theologically significant. So when we pick up a copy of the Bible, whether we like what it says or not, whether we believe what it says or not, what is there can accurately be assumed to be what the original people put first down on paper to communicate to the people that they were ministering to and to communicate to us. So, the first reason that I trust the Bible is that what we read is what was written. It hasn't changed.

The second reason I trust it, is that in those places we can test its historical accuracy; we find that the Bible is accurate. There are parts of the Bible in the Old Testament that describe a society that existed 2,000 years before Christ, and as archeologists go and find out about those societies, as we make comparisons with other sources, we find that town names and town places, tribal names, individual names, and customs all matched the picture of those societies that we are building now through archeological excavation. When we look into the New Testament the description of city plans, the names of officials, the positions they hold, when we look at their description of society and customs and compare it to other sources, again we find that even in the New Testament there is an accurate description of what daily life was, and it's my feeling that if all the Bible talked about was daily life, there would be no arguments at all about the trustworthiness of the Bible. The issue is embedded in all this description of daily life, embedded in all of this accuracy there is this assertion that the God that created heaven and earth is actually communicating to us, and actually has come and visited us in the person of Jesus Christ and has died in order to build a relationship with us and has been resurrected. If it wasn't for the description in the Bible that God is at work, we wouldn't be having any discussions, because it is better attested, it is as accurate as anything else we have to deal with in ancient literature, but it asserts so much and because of that people struggle and doubt. So, one of the positions that I have taken is that if it's reliable on the things that we can prove, I will trust it on the things that we can't prove through other sources.

The third reason. You've got to remember that the Bible is not written by one set of people. Its 66 books written across the span of about 1,500 years. It says that the original authors of the Bible were back in the time of Charlemagne, and we had just finished writing it sometime in the 1900's, that sort of span of history and yet in this book we have a series of separate authors, separate books and it comes together with an internal unity and majesty. It's one story. And there are parts of things that are said in the very earliest part of the Bible that come to full completion and we come to understand it completely in things that happen in Jesus Christ. There are hundreds of times in the Old Testament that there is something said that comes to fulfillment later. I just want to share one picture of this and it's one of my favorites. It has to do with the life of Abraham.

Abraham lived most likely somewhere around 1,500 years or more before Jesus Christ. The words, even the most radical scholars know that the words were written down at least 750 years before Christ, and I think that better scholars suggests that it was written down about 1,200 years before Christ. So we are talking about a huge time distance and here's this story about Abraham in the 22nd Chapter of the Book of Genesis. Abraham is asked by God to take his son, the son through whom God had promised that he was going to change the world and bless the world; take this son and sacrifice him on an alter. Abraham hears God and he decides to obey. Now, this is a horrific thing for us to consider and it was horrific even then, but at that time in other cultures parents would sometimes sacrifice their children. So Abraham takes Isaac, he takes the wood, he takes a knife and he goes searching for the mountain that God is going to show him. He comes to a mountain. God shows him this place. He takes the wood, he binds his son up, he pulls out the knife and he is about to plunge it into his son when God stops him and says, "Wait. There's a substitution available." A ram was caught in a thicket and instead of Isaac; Abraham's sacrifices the sheep.

Fifteen hundred years before Jesus Christ and in this picture of Abraham, we have a picture of the father being willing to sacrifice the son and we always think of Isaac being a little bitty kid like this, Isaac might have been a young man and so we might even have a picture here of the son being willing to be sacrificed. We have a picture here also that we deserve death and yet God has provided a substitute, a sheep, a ram, a lamb. And it's all done on a mountain called Mariah. And a little later in Israel's history David the king picks out a place for the temple that was going to be doing sacrifices and pointing to Jesus Christ, though they didn't know it and the mountain he choses is the mountain known as Mariah. It might even be the same mountain. Now is this luck? Do you believe in that sort of chance? That this sort of picture that does not make any sense until we see Jesus Christ and then all of a sudden ah I know what Abraham represents. I know what Isaac represents. I know what the ram represents. I know that the mountain has significance. All of these things come to fruit later. This happens again and again in scripture. So one of the reasons that I trust it is that is has an internal unity and majesty that boggles my mind.

Another reason I trust the Bible, is that it rings true about human experience. Here we have things that were written 3,500 years ago, written about famous people in the lives of these countries, this nation Israel and yet when we look at these heroic people, whether it's in the New Testament or the Old Testament, what do we see? We see people who are fearful when they face battle. We see people who doubt God. We see people who argue and make mistakes. David, one of the most amazing people we can find in the Old Testament, trusts God in so many ways and yet David commits adultery and arranges for someone to be murdered.

If there was ever someone that you would want to protect their image it would be Peter, because a whole part of the church views Peter as the most significant member of the church, apart from Jesus Christ the most famous, the most important person in their history. If you are going to whitewash somebody, let's whitewash Peter. And yet, what do we see in the New Testament about him? We see that he is an impetuous guy. He speaks his mind. What's on his mind isn't often what's on God's mind. That's the problem. But we see this picture of this sort of guy; we see a picture of a guy who despite the input that Jesus had made into his life denies him three times. And when we do see Peter change the glory does not go to Peter, it goes to God because it's when the Holy Spirit comes upon him and Pentecost that Peter's life radically changes. We've got Jonah. We've got Thomas. If you are not familiar with some of these people, as you read the Bible you will discover their stories and in none of these cases are we dealing with people who are epic, heroic, make no mistakes sort of folks. They are real people and I can relate to that and I can trust that and that's one of the reasons why I trust the scriptures. It's because the very founders are presented to us in such a broken and human fashion.

Another reason that I trust the Bible is that in God's hands people who read the Bible change. That's what happened in my life; not just when I was converted, but every time I have gone to the Bible since. People read the Bible and lives change. I want to tell a story about a particular person, a guy name Sukan. Sukan was a Sufi Moslem studying for the priesthood. He was taught in the Moslem equivalent of our seminary. He was taught all kinds of things about Christianity; about the things that made Christianity wrong and one of the things that he was taught was that God would never punish a righteous man on the cross. And so what actually happened on the cross was that Judas was converted into the image of Jesus and it was Judas that died on the cross instead of Jesus. And so God's justice was done on this infidel.

One day Sukan was walking along and saw a piece of paper blowing in the wind on the street and he reached down and picked it up and it turned out to be a portion of the gospel of Matthew. In it he read the words where Jesus is on the cross and he says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Now, as Sukan repeated that over and over to himself and thought about it, he thought to himself you know this can't be Judas talking, because Judas would know why God had forsaken him. These are the words of a righteous man. And so as he thought about it, Sukan came to the point where he realized that it was actually Jesus who died on the cross and right there with just that little piece of the gospel of Matthew, Sukan made the decision to trust Jesus Christ as his Savior and to follow him. Now, he had to pay an incredible cost for having done that because he was thrown out of his seminary. He lost all of his friends. He ultimately became a missionary to India and ultimately became a Methodist bishop in India. How did it happen? It all began with one page of the Bible. One of the reasons I trust the Bible is when people read it, so many change.

Let me give you another reason then. This is my last reason. One of the reasons that I trust the Bible is because I trust Jesus. Out of loyalty to him and submission to him I trust the Bible, because Jesus trusted the Bible. So, as a follower of Jesus I have learned to trust it as well. These are Jesus' words, the onesI read at the beginning of this sermon.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them."

Jesus' image of what God had done in what was there in front of him, which we would call the Old Testament, was that something happened there that couldn't be abolished, couldn't be set aside, but something that had to be fulfilled and that he was fulfilling in his life.

"I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished."

That's Jesus' view of the written record that he had received, and that he read. And what we see Jesus saying and what we believe as Christians, even though we don't do everything exactly as it was done in the Old Testament, when we do live a different kind of life it's because Jesus fulfilled something and, therefore, changed something, and that's why we live differently and in all the other places we live exactly the same way. Jesus came to fulfill. When he fulfilled some of it changed. When he fulfilled it, some of it just went deeper, but he didn't abolish anything. It will stand until everything God intends to do in this world is accomplished. And so one of the reasons I trust the Bible is because Jesus, the person I trust, the One who I believe is God's Son, the One who I believed came to die for my sin and was resurrected, the One that I believe will come again to judge the living and the dead, that Jesus trusted the Bible.

Thirty-three years ago I first trusted Jesus, and I began a lifelong journey of not only trusting Him, but in trusting these words. Do I have all my questions answered? Am I totally free of all doubts? No. But each year, each step that I take, more and more of my doubts are dealt with and more and more of my questions are dealt with. And so I invite you to press forward in your own journey with God. First, trust Jesus. But then also trust the Word that Jesus trusted.

Let's pray. God we thank you for your Word and for what we learned about you in your Word. God you know that there is so much, so much we need to understand and know, and so we pray that through the power of your Holy Spirit you might enlighten our eyes as we read, as we think, so that we might know the true hope that you have called us to and might know you better, for we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Sermon Outline Notes:

Why Trust the Bible?

• What we read is what was written.
• When we can test its historical accuracy, the Bible is accurate.
• It has an internal unity and majesty.
• It rings true about human experience.
• It has changed lives.
• Loyalty to Jesus— Jesus trusted the Bible.

© 2005, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org