United with Christ
Session 6
In these programs, we’ve been looking at the fact that we’re all called to be witnesses, and we’re all called to present a defense (apologetic) for our faith. Does the Christian faith make sense? Is it rational, reasonable? You bet, it is. Remember, everyone has to have an explanation for life, what we call a worldview. Many people have never really thought theirs out, but everyone has a worldview. It’s a sort of explanation of what life’s about. Where did the universe come from? Where did we come from? Why are we here, and what are we supposed to be doing with our lives? Is there any purpose? What’s true? What’s good? What’s evil? Are there such things? How can we know?
As Christians, we have a well-thought-out worldview, a very reasonable and rational explanation for things and answers to all these sorts of questions, but we have to think it out. We have to learn about it all. Reading the Bible every day is one of the best ways to get that. But there are also many other wonderful resources out there for you to study. I’ve been referring to one of them on this program, the book, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist,” by Drs. Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. I highly recommend this book! I also highly recommend Dr. Turek’s website, crossexamined.org. You can download his app to your smart phone, and it’ll help you with apologetics.
Today, I want to focus on an area the book spends many chapters on, the reliability of the Bible. We so need to be confident of the accuracy and truthfulness, and the reliability of the Bible! The very first attack Satan launched against humanity was in the Garden of Eden, when he said to Eve, “Has God said?” That’s been his strategy ever since! Every cult twists the Bible. Every false religion attacks the Bible, says it’s unreliable, has been corrupted, is full of contradictions, etc. If we, as Christians are not confident of the Bible’s reliability, we’re sunk! We’ll never be able to really defend our faith, and we won’t be good witnesses for Christ.
The Bible is an ancient book, how can it be relevant for people in the 21st century? Besides, isn’t it full of contradictions and mysteries? There are so many versions, and so many interpretations. That’s why there are all these denominations and sects! How can we possibly understand this book and get anything practical out of it?
There are tons of resources out there to help you with this if you’re willing to look into it, and all of us really need to look into it! Because as I’ve been saying over the last few weeks, if there is a God “out there,” the best way He could’ve communicated with us would be in writing, since mankind has had written records for millennia. Every religion has its “holy book;” There’s the Baghavad Gita, the Hindu Vedas, the Tanakh, what we know as the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and various others. Do they all teach basically the same thing, or do they all contradict each other?
Last week, we talked about how the best way for God to get our attention and assure us that some book was from Him would be by some sort of miraculous validation. After all, a god could do supernatural things, beyond the norm, beyond what we’re used to. We said that the Tanakh, the OT, was validated by miracles. There was the miracle of the burning bush, out of which God called to Moses. That miracle led to many others, which were written down by Moses in the first five books of the OT, the Pentateuch. In fact, God even wrote the Ten Commandments into stone tablets with His very fingers!
Over the next centuries of time, there were various other miracles that attested to the OT being from God. Included in those writings were many prophecies of events to happen in the future. Some of those events happened within the time frame of the OT itself. For example, Elijah predicted three and a half years of drought. Moses predicted that Israel would fall away from God. Isaiah predicted that the Assyrians would invade Syria, Israel, and Judah, and that God would defeat them. Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted that Israel would go into captivity, then come back home. Daniel also predicted their return from Exile. He predicted Alexander the Great’s conquest of the world, the coming of Messiah, and the second destruction of Israel and its temple under the Romans. He even predicted the rise of the first Antichrist!
If you’ve never heard of this stuff, it might seem hard to believe, or it might seem as if we’re just making it up. But you can research it, and you’ll find that these things were really prophesied. They were written down so that, when they were fulfilled, all could see there is a God who knows and controls the future.
Now for some 400 years after the last OT prophecy of Malachi, there was no word from God. It was a time of silence. Many thought God had abandoned the earth, and abandoned His people, the Jews, because of their sinfulness. But suddenly, there was an explosion of supernatural messages, visits by angels, even an astronomical sign that took place! John the Baptist was born of an older couple, a barren woman. Jesus was born of a virgin, and a star showed men from the Middle East the way to where he was. Then God spoke to say Jesus was His Son. Jesus was filled with the Spirit and began to teach and proclaim the Kingdom of God. He did many miracles in the sight of lots of people, to validate Himself and verify that He was God’s Messiah, the Word of God made flesh to dwell among us.
The greatest sign of all that Jesus did was to predict His own crucifixion and resurrection. This was predicted in the OT in places like Ps. 16:11 and Isaiah 52:13, 14 & 53:10-12. Jesus told His disciples about it over and over (though they didn’t understand, didn’t want to hear it, and didn’t really get it all until after He rose.) But the NT explains what the resurrection was really about for us. Acts 17:31 says God has given us the resurrection as a sign and a proof that Jesus is the One who will judge the world at the end. The resurrection is a sign to give us faith in Jesus. Ro. 1:4 says Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection. See, the resurrection is the sign that Jesus is who He says He was, the Son of God, God’s Word, God’s Message, the Messenger of the New Covenant, the Prophet sent to replace Moses and take God’s people to the promised land. Jesus Himself said when He was asked for a sign, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” and the passage goes on to say, “He spoke of the temple of His body.” (Jn. 2:18-21)
No other so-called “holy book” has such miracles and validation. The Koran doesn’t. The Book of Mormon has had to be changed and corrected over 4000 times. The Vedas and other books don’t compare, because their teachings aren’t as clear, they have no miracles, or they have really “far-out” miracles of a totally different nature than those in the Bible, and they do not have the same kind of historical validation or verification as the Bible has. The Bible tells about historical events that actually happened, and we can prove that. I have read the whole Koran, and parts of the various other holy books, and I can tell you, they just can’t compare.
Now, all that I’ve said up to now is stuff that Christians believe about the Bible, and with good reason. But some would say we’re biased. We believe this stuff before we read it, so it’s easy for us to just accept it. A skeptical person coming at it from outside the Christian faith, what would they think? How can they accept this book with all these miracle stories? Isn’t it all just blind faith, accepting something without any evidence, because you think you should or because a religion or a priest or minister tells you to?
No, there is other evidence besides just internal evidence that the Bible is inspired by God. “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” contains a lot of this evidence (as do many other books.) I can only gloss over it on this program, but I hope you’ll look into it in depth.
First of all, did you know there are sources outside the NT which validate the main facts of the gospel? Flavius Josephus, a Jewish man who wrote the most recognized and reliable history of his time, wrote about Jesus and some of the main facts of His life and ministry. Including Josephus, there are ten non-Christian sources who wrote about Jesus or the facts of the Gospel, all of whom wrote within 150 years of His life. Interestingly, over the same 150 years, there are only nine sources who wrote about the Roman Emperor Tiberius! So Jesus is actually mentioned by one more non-Christian source than a Roman Emperor, can you believe it? (And of course, He is written about by 9 NT writers.) And if we include all the authors who wrote about Jesus within those first 150 years, we’re talking about 43! So authors mentioning Jesus outnumber authors writing about a Roman Emperor 43 to 10! (since Luke also mentions Tiberius.) Some of these sources are such people as Celsus, Tacitus, and the anti-Christian Jewish Talmud.
What did these sources say about Jesus or the Gospel message? Geisler and Turek list 12 things on page 223:
- Jesus lived during the time of Tiberius Caesar.
- He lived a virtuous life.
- He was a wonder-worker.
- He had a brother named James.
- He was acclaimed to be the Messiah.
- He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
- He was crucified on the eve of the Jewish Passover.
- Darkness and an earthquake occurred when He died.
- His disciples believed He rose from the dead.
- His disciples were willing to die for their belief.
- Christianity spread rapidly as far as Rome.
- His disciples denied the Roman gods and worshiped Jesus as God.
So then, there is evidence for the main facts of the Gospel outside the Christian Scriptures. People who try to say Jesus never existed and the NT is just a legendary fairy tale simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They need to spend some time studying!
There are also many other facts about the NT that prove its reliability. For example, many wonder if the NT we have today is an accurate copy of what was originally written. Many think we got the NT in a way like the telephone game. Remember that game? (Where children in a circle whisper to each other, and the story that starts off is completely distorted by the time it gets to the end?) That’s not how we got the NT! It wasn’t passed on and on and copied and recopied, changing a little bit each time, until what we have today isn’t anything like what was originally written.
Many people witnessed the events of the NT and committed them to memory. Then nine different eyewitnesses wrote down the story within 40 years after it happened. So the NT isn’t one writing or one testimony. It’s 27 writings by nine authors, writing in different places, bringing out different details that together corroborate and validate the truthfulness of their testimony.
We have more manuscripts and better manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts of the NT than any other book of ancient times. Some 5,800 hand-written manuscripts of the Greek NT, and some 14,000 fragments of the NT found all over the Mediterranean world. There are over 20,000 copies written in other languages like Aramaic, Latin, Coptic and Arabic. These copies we have, these manuscripts and fragments, they were written earlier than other ancient texts. They were written within a few short years of the events they describe!
Did you know that there were many versions of the Koran, and one early Caliph (Uthman) ordered them gathered, and all but one version burned, so they could preserve one version? Did you know the Hadith, the commentaries written about the life of Muhammad, which Muslims revere and use to arrive at their understand of how the Islamic faith is to be lived, were written over 150 years after Muhammad even lived, by people who weren’t with him and weren’t eyewitnesses? The Koran is not a reliable book, especially not when it contradicts the New Testament, which is.
The NT documents were all written by eyewitnesses of the events they describe. Not only is this true, but the NT witnesses all suffered and most died for their testimonies, especially for saying they’d seen the risen Christ. Who would tell a story that would get them ostracized, tortured, and killed?! Why not just recant and say it was all made up? Who would make up a story that would ruin their life?! These people were kicked out of their own communities, they were mocked and ridiculed, they lost jobs and possessions, they had to leave their homes, and many thousands were tortured and or killed. All of the apostles were martyred except for John, and he suffered exile to the island of Patmos, and tradition says, he was boiled in oil, but survived it supernaturally.
The early Christians didn’t have a New Testament. They learned everything by the word of mouth of eyewitness apostles, and they studied the OT to learn the prophecies and the types and shadows of the gospel. But before 200 AD, all the books of the NT were all recognized as canon, the inspired word of God. Did you know that all but 11 verses were quoted by the early Church Fathers, so we could reconstitute the whole NT from their writings, even if every NT manuscript were to be destroyed?
Did you know that the NT books, especially Acts and the Gospels, contain all sorts of details that prove they are historical and historically accurate? The book lists 84 historical facts in the Book of Acts that have been verified, that no one could’ve known if they weren’t really there at that time. It lists 59 historically verifiable facts from the Book of John. It lists the top ten reasons we know the NT writers wrote the truth. (They wrote embarrassing details about themselves, for example, things that might even seem counter-productive.) There are so many precise details, there’s no way this isn’t an accurate record!
What’s the point? The Bible is accurate. It’s verifiable. It’s reliable. It tells us who we are, where we came from, where we’re going. You can base your life and your eternity on it! You can be confident of its message, and you can and should confidently share that message with others. The Bible is a Book from God!
Questions? Comments? Prayer Requests? Feel free to contact me, and I’ll be sure to answer as soon as possible. May the Lord bless you!