YMCA indoor track on Campus has directional signs, change every other day, so people won’t crash into each other around the blind corners.
On occasion people new to Y, fail to notice the signs and go the wrong way, I’ve warned couple people who have thanked me.
About a month ago, a young lady was going the wrong way and after two laps of others dodging her, I didn’t want to stop what I’m doing, but I thought, I’ll be a good neighbor…I approached her with, “Ma’am…”
Before I could say more, she yelled, “I know, I’m going the wrong way, I’m having a really bad day, okay!”
-I was a bit surprised by the intensity of her response, I said, “Your day will get worse if someone runs into you.”
-She waved me off, and kept going, others diverting around her until an employee showed up and spoke with her and she angerly left the track.
I had several thoughts about my encounter with what looked like, postmodern thought in action at the YMCA.
- Relativism is acting on the belief that the external world must conform to my own internal world.
Others around me should submit to my own feelings and ideas, my truth…I’m having a bad day, SO, I will walk however I want.
*I’m not saying she actively thought this through, but this kind of belief system had shaped her.
- But truth is not actually relative, we have to live in a world with others…if my truth is to go right and your truth is to go left…and then we collide.
Well, so much for my truth and your truth…the truth of physics involving objects in motion, wins.
Now, they could switch the directions of the signs, nothing absolute about that…Tues this way and Wednesday that way could be reversed…but the fact that bodies need to move the same direction on the same days to avoid possible injury is just a fact.
- On a personal level, she was not better off for trying to live “her truth”: She was clearly less happy. She was less safe. She was less helpful to others around her.
“My truth” doesn’t work…”The truth” does.
Why am I picking on relativism so much?
Three reasons:
It’s pervasive (everywhere)…it is the prevailing spirit of our age.
It’s pernicious (harmful its effects…very harmful)
It’s not true…what is absolutely true is that God is there, and God has spoken in his word.
Francis Shaeffer is one of the most influential authors in my life, and in the lives of many others.
He was a brilliant man, who was primarily an evangelist…he loved God, and people…not just ideas.
Since he loved God and people…he wrote extensively with the goal of helping people align their ideas, with the truth of the gospel.
He saw the devastation of wrong ideas in people’s lives.
He and his wife, Edith…invited many people into their homes and lives to see and hear the gospel lived out.
He purposely didn’t begin writing books until he was in his 50s (so he could come to some settled conclusions first).
His first three books, form a trilogy, they are: The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, He is there and he is not silent.
The God who is there is the foundation:
The Bible opens with, “In the beginning, God.”
-There is no defense of his existence, there is the presupposition of it…rightly so.
-This not because of “pre-scientific” thought in the Bible…often science begins with naturalistic assumptions, “In the beginning, not God”
-Though there is no scientific reason to do so…it is a presupposition.
-No one is religiously neutral, universities are not, politicians are not, scientists are not.
God is there…everything follows from this reality…that is the Bible’s assumption.
When people attempt to build their lives on “God is not there”(either as actual or practical atheists)…they can only do so by an attempt to escape from reason, or what Shaeffer called “an irrational leap”
-So, his second book was “Escape from Reason”
*Where he shows how people who deny God and deny meaning…cannot live that way, so they take an irrational leap “upstairs”…they invent meaning because they cannot live with their own view of the world, a world without meaning.
Those who disbelieve in God…sometimes accuse Christians of taking an irrational leap of faith.
The fact is, non-believers must take an irrational leap from reason to continue to live as if things like beauty, love, communication, meaning…exist.
Then, volume 3…He is there and he is not silent…is about God’s revelation of himself in the Bible.
God is there, he is a personal being…so he is a communicating being.
And he has spoken to us so we can know and love him.
Since God is there, and God is personal…we would expect him to communicate clearly to us…and he has in the Bible.
Today, I want to look at what Peter assumes to be true…the Bible is the Word of God, truth with no mixture of error.
I cannot assume you believe this to be true…because there are and there have been so many voices saying it is not true…loud voices.
Or perhaps you do believe the Bible is the word of God…but without the full confidence you could have.
Or perhaps you have full confidence in Scripture and you would be encouraged in your faith to spend a few minutes thinking about the reasons for that confidence.
Wherever you are on that spectrum…I’ll start with a declaration of the fact..
God’s word is true, it is inspired by him, providentially preserved by him, and he speaks to us through it to transform our lives.
Let’s start with a few passages from Peter’s letters…there are many other Scriptures but we will stay with Peter today.
Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow 1:10-11
We already discussed this passage at length, you can go online and review that message if you like.
All Scripture is about Jesus, he is the point of the entire Bible.
*If you are interested, Edmund Clowney, wrote an excellent book entitled “The Unfolding Mystery” Discovering Christ in the Old Testament.
He unpacks in detail how Christ is revealed throughout the OT.
Next verse…
He(Jesus) was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. 1:20
The gospel is God’s eternal plan for the world, even before God made the world, the gospel plan was in place.
Why did he make the world, if he knew we would fall and need to be redeemed?
Because he wanted to, because it was good for him to do so.
It is a bit absurd to exist because God who in his infinite wisdom and power has made you, and yet question God for causing you to exist.
One theologian said the non-believer is like a child sitting on her father’s lap, slapping his face. She would not be able to slap him unless he supported her.
Which brings us to the end of chapter 1
All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.” And this is the word that was preached to you.
1:24-25
God’s word stands forever, because God himself is eternal.
He doesn’t change, his knowledge is perfect and complete, he isn’t getting smarter, or gathering new data.
His word is true an unchanging…human wisdom is changeable, fickle.
Another passage from Peter, here we are skipping ahead to his second letter.
16 We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty….20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:16, 20-21
Peter, who walked closely with Jesus and was transformed by him said, “We didn’t make this stuff up, we were eyewitnesses…I saw it all.
Peter, hand chosen, personally trained, and directly commissioned by Jesus…wrote, that no part of Scripture originates in the will of man, but rather in God.
God used individual minds, and personalities and styles and experiences…but he inspired Scripture.
When Peter refers to Scripture, he means all of what was fully acknowledged by Jesus…what we call the Old Testament.
But he also meant what we call the New Testament.
Listen to what Peter says about Paul’s letters…
15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 2 Peter 3:15,16
Paul’s letters are compared to the “other scriptures”…the Old Testament.
This is not a class on Biblical inspiration and authority.
There are many books you can read if you would like to get into the weeds on this.
This is a sermon, this is biblical proclamation on biblical inspiration.
My assumption and conviction as result of study, experience, and the work of the Holy Spirit in my life…is that the Bible is the completely true, completely authoritative word of God.
I say this as a personal testimony…because even if I did not believe that, if the entire world disbelieved it…God’s word would none the less be true.
Truth does not depend on our ability to defend it or believe it…it is independent of us…though we depend on it.
We must align our lives with the truth of God’s word if we are to thrive as his people…so again, today my goal is to inspire confidence…in order to empower obedience and life change.
I hesitate to commit what might be considered the logical fallacy called “appeal to authority”
This where we attempt to convince someone of something by quoting some supposed expert.
It is called a logical fallacy because even if an expert believes something…it doesn’t mean it is true.
You see this commonly used when people lack a sound argument…so they quote some expert to make their case.
However, since there are so many supposed experts saying so many dogmatic things about how the Bible is not true.
It is fair for me to say that there are many experts in key fields of actual relevant research who believe the Bible is true.
So, let me quote a guy who is certainly not an expert in the field of Biblical studies, or what is called “textual criticism” (the study of ancient manuscripts) but non the less whose writings (fictional novels) have had a lot of influence on how people think about the bible.
Dan Brown published the Da Vinci Code in 2003, it was made into a movie starring Hollywood’s most lovable guy, Tom Hanks.
It is a work of fiction, with no basis in fact…but people often cannot separate Hollywood fiction from actual fact…and again, ideas have consequences, regardless of their source.
Here is a quote from Brown’s fiction.
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.”
None of that is true.
John Mead and Peter Gurry are actual experts in the ancient Biblical documents, translations, and history.
Unlike Brown who is not.
In their book, “Scribes and Scripture”…they painstakingly demonstrate how the truth is the opposite of Brown’s fiction…there are many books like theirs, which actual experts, who can easily refute non-experts like Brown…a novelist.
So, let’s look at God’s gift of the Scripture using five key words (ideas).
Inspiration, Dissemination, Recognition, Translation, Transformation.
- Inspiration: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” 2 Tim. 3:16
Josh Mcdowell’s books, “Evidence that demand a verdict” and “More evidence that demand a verdict”…give many external and internal evidence for the authority of the Scripture.
Things like:
-Thousands of hand copied manuscripts of the original text, unlike any other book in antiquity
-External sources that confirm the Scripture
-Eye witnesses
-It matches what we see in the world (explains things as they are)
-Transformational power…it works.
These things are compelling to some, but not to others.
Much of it is helpful for me, but what is compelling is that the Bible attests to its own authority.
This could sound like circular reasoning…”The Bible is true, because the Bible is true.”
That’s not what I am saying…
It is about starting points, or presuppositions…every human, by necessity has them.
The atheist assumes the validity of their own mind and their ability to reason…they trust themselves as a starting point…with no evidence, larger than themselves to do so…it is a leap of faith, faith in themselves.
-Why do they do this, what evidence do they have that they are not someone’s dream, or they are not a computer program, like the Matrix?
-The assume it…they assume their powers of reason…it is their unproven, presupposition.
*But does evidence in the world support the presupposition that God does not exist, and the world is just a product of blind forces of chance?
*No, it doesn’t…Romans 1 and 2 say otherwise.
Bottom line, everyone presupposes or assumes something.
-The question is, what presupposition has the best evidence?
*I believe God exists, and since the world is personal and clearly designed…then since he is personal, he will communicate.
More specifically…I believe God has spoken to us in his son Jesus…Jesus has confirmed the written word, the Bible.
Jesus is a singularity in human history…no human has had a greater impact than this carpenter who never traveled far from the place he was born.
He is conclusively a historical character (fact not fiction), he conclusively claimed to be God, he proved this through his life, teaching, miracles, resurrection.
Jesus validated the Old Testament in his teaching and life and he validated those who would write the New Testament.
Listen to what two scholars have to say about all this:
“Why do we –scholars who study the Bible’s history–trust it? We’ve seen that the manuscript evidence for the Scriptures is impressive at points; that the level of agreement on the canon is hard to dismiss; and that good English translations are numerous. These factors all contribute to our trust. But the best reason is Jesus himself. He is the very center of our faith, our only comfort in life and death. It would be foolish to hold any view of God’s written word other than the view of God’s incarnate Word.”
Scribe and Scripture: John Meade and Peter Gurry
- Dissemination
God’s providence oversaw the army of anonymous scribes, who toiled in the cold, heat, through back pain and eye pain, with little or no pay…in the pre-printing press days to hand copy the Scriptures so we would have them.
They often valued the text over their lives.
They were real people and this was their career, calling…one of my favorite stories is found in the margin notes of one manuscript.
One scribe wrote “It is cold today”
Another scribe replied in the margin, “That is natural; it is winter”
These were real people, who believed what they were doing was eternally significant.
They copied by hand, day after day after day…there is challenge for us in thinking about their lives…the mundane faithfulness of unknown people…means we have scripture in our hands.
These copies of the original are not inspired…some have some mistakes…the original or what is called the autographs are inspired and are error free.
We don’t have the autographs…they were probably worn to dust by constant handling as they were copied.
We do have thousands of hand copies…and people with the knowledge of the languages and history…are able to discern with great accuracy what texts conform most closely to the original.
Where there is mystery as to what was most like the original, it is not in major areas of doctrine…only minor matters of secondary meaning. (these are footnoted in your Bible)
God directly inspired his word and God providentially oversaw the dissemination of his word.
- Recognition
An intellectual and spiritual giant, BB Warfield wrote, “The Christian church was never without a “Bible” or a “canon.”
This is in contrast to novelist Dan Brown’s fiction, where Brown said there has never been a fully attested Bible, and some pagan king just made it up.
Warfield was a brilliant man of unsurpassed courage and godliness.
-He stood in his time(early 1900) against the tide of attacks on the truth of Scripture…and they were coming from everywhere…inside and outside the “church”
-He was okay with not being in the then current cool crowd of religious academics.
-He was committed to the Lordship of Christ and the truth of his word.
There were various ancient church councils (meetings)…where people gathered and discussed and decided what were the Biblical books.
But they didn’t make it up…they recognized what was already in use in the church, and had long been true.
Long before any church councils met and officially said, “This is the Bible”
The church since its birth had recognized, and utilized the books that make up the Bible.
God determined and the church Discovered what is Scripture.
Your word, O Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Ps. 119:89
- Translation:
The most significant name in English Bible history is that of William Tyndale. He was educated at Oxford and ordained as a priest. Early on, he developed a conviction that God’s people in England needed the Bible in their own language.
When an educated man remarked that having the pope’s law was better than having God’s, Tyndale famously replied, “If God spare my life, before many years, I will ensure that a boy working in the fields will know more of the Scripture than you do.”
God did spare his life, and Tyndale did see this happen…his English translations brought the word of God to everyday people.
He was eventually betrayed and, in 1536, he was first strangled and then his body burned at the stake.
His last words were, “Lord! open the king of England’s eyes.”
Again, God answered his prayers and the kings’ eyes were opened…in four years, four English translations of the Bible were published, sponsored by the King who had him murdered for his translation efforts.
Meade, John D.; Gurry, Peter J.. Scribes and Scripture (p. 227). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
Scripture was written, originally in the spoken languages of the human authors, mostly Hebrew for the OT (a little Aramaic) and Greek for the NT.
It has since been translated into hundreds of languages, languages of the people so they can read God’s word in their own tongue.
Some, who are ignorant of these things…believe that the many translations are a problem for Christians (see, look at those translations!)
Yes, we do see, and we thank God for them…they are not a problem, they are a gift.
If we all had to learn Hebrew and Greek, keep up that skill, and in addition learn the geography, history, culture, idioms of the times the books were written it would mean very few could read God’s word and understand it.
For instance, it would not be enough to simple learn English to understand one of our everyday conversations…you would have to know the cultural background that lies behind our words.
So, God has gifted and called men and women to study the original languages as well as the cultural/historical settings and painstakingly develop translations in our languages.
This is a providential gift of God…I often, as I read…thank God for these people.
-Grace gifts and human grit…blessing the church.
*I don’t have to be an expert in everything…I can’t…I can play my role, on my little “c” team and big “C” team.
If you are wondering…How could God oversee all this and ensure that we have an accurate Bible in our own language.
Let me re-set your thinking
From nothing, God created everything…now, how hard would it be for him to ensure that we have his word in our language?
Some translations are better than others…but all scholarly translations are good, you won’t go wrong…unless you don’t actually read and apply them.
Thank God for faithful translators and good translations.
Transformation
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. Romans 1:16
British preacher Charles Spurgeon was once questioned about how to defend the Bible:
He replied…
“The Word of God is like a lion. You don’t have to defend a lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose, and the lion will defend itself.”.
Now he did give reasons for the truth of the Bible, but his point is well taken…the Bible is the very word of God…it has the power to transform lives.
We can give reasons for his authority…but we don’t need to feel nervous about defending it…we need to more faithfully turn it loose in our lives.
Let me tell you one story of a man from our culture and roughly our time.
His name was DJ Ward, he is not well known, wrote no books…he pastored for 40 years in Tennessee and Kentucky until he died in 2008.
He was born an illegitimate child in the 1940s, he lived feeling shame over this, until he was born again 1952.
His mom was too poor to afford a Bible, he would scour the church looking for loose Bible pages and when he found them, he would tape them together and read those pages over and over.
A couple of years after he was born again, he was given a Bible and he treasured it, trusted it, proclaimed it and was transformed by it for the rest of his life.
As a young believer I read stories of men like Richard Wurmbrand, who was imprisoned and tortured for Christ…in Soviet Gulags.
These men would smuggle pieces of Scripture into prison when they could, but mostly they would have to make their own Bibles pieced together from shared verses they had memorized…these Bible were sometimes written on scraps of paper with bits of charcoal or their blood.
They treasured the Word of God…they knew of its power…often because all the other props that fool us into thinking we are okay on our own…had been stripped away.
*Do you have eyes to see the power of the gospel, the word of God to transform lives?
“Where, I don’t see it…I just see normal people. I see people failing, struggling, doubting, still trying to figure out marriage, and parenting, and work, and life.”
“The church isn’t different…how is it different?”
Look again…I see that all too, but more and more I see the gospel at work.
When a friend sent me a video this week of his kids and grandkids dancing in their living room after a family dinner…a dinner where the children read the Easter story…I thought of where this friend had come from, where his wife had come from.
I thought of where they would be now, apart from the truth of God’s word transforming their lives. I thought of where their extended family, who do not live the truth are, even now.
I answered his short video text of his dancing kids and grandkids, with this reply, “The gospel at work”
If you don’t see this when you look around…look again.
CONCLUSION:
In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Judges 17:6
This verse is embedded in a time of chaos and idolatry and just a big ole mess.
They did get a King, and he went his own way and the mess got messier…but all this pointed forward to the true King and judge, Jesus.
Now, we trust the Bible, because we trust Jesus.
We do not want to do what is right in our own eyes…we want to do what is actually right, what is good, God alone can tell us that.
I’ll ask the question I asked last week…who will you trust as the one who has final authority in your life.
If you trust Jesus, will you trust his Word as your foundational authority?
It has been said that our current culture dislikes authority.
I would say, what person, what culture, in history hasn’t disliked authority, unless they were the authority?
In the Jefferson Memorial in DC is a copy of what is called the Jefferson Bible.
Over 200 years ago , Jefferson cut out the parts of the Bible he didn’t like…different time, same perspective as is common now.
Any miraculous elements, any time Jesus was said to forgive sins…all that Jefferson’s mind judged untrue…outa here!
He said that that he found the task simple enough, writing to John Adams, he said, it was as easy as distinguishing “diamonds in a dunghill.”
The diamonds…where what his mind agreed with, the dung…everything else.
His bible begins with a nonmiraculous birth and ends with Jesus dead in the tomb.
One writer said, he gives us Jesus’s words, but no real sense of why anyone would have listened to him.
The Bible only makes sense when treated as a coherent whole, and it has real authority only when we let it judge us.
We need to read the Bible, and we need to learn to let the Bible read us.
(Meade, John D.,Gurry, Peter J.. Scribes and Scripture (p. 274). Crossway. Kindle Edition.)
You can deeper in the weeds on all this is you want to…or you can say, “nah, I’m good.”
My mom, was smart, but she didn’t read books that got into the weeds on this stuff.
She did read the Bible and she believed it and she was transformed by it.
Our extended family, because of my mom and dad’s faith, is a picture of the power of the Bible to change lives when read, and believed and applied.
My mom couldn’t have won a verbal argument with some scholarly skeptic about the bible.
But her life was proof beyond what any skeptics words could touch…Christ was her hope in life, Christ was her hope as she suffered from brain cancer…Christ is her hope now in eternal life.
She believed and lived and was transformed by the Word of God.
It’s okay…to say…”I’m good to go…I’ll just read, believe, and apply God’s word.”
I’ll doubt my doubts, and I’ll believe my beliefs…I’ll live decided, not deciding.
If you do…you will prove God’s word to be true with your very life.