Lesson 08 - How Do We Know the Bible is Accurate?

Lesson 08 - How Do We Know the Bible is Accurate?

Introduction

Now, today is October 31. It’s the day traditionally known as Halloween or All Hallow’s Eve. But today is also an important day historically.

The 95 Theses

493 years ago today, in 1517, a young monk by the name of Martin Luther went up to a church door and nailed a large document written in Latin to the door of the church.

Now, it seems weird to nail anything to a church door, but remember, we’re talking 1517 - no Facebook, no telephones, no newspapers.
So if you wanted to put something up for discussion, instead of posting it on your wall, or asking a news reporter to investigate it, you nailed it to the door of the church in your town.

The next logical question seems to be well, which church did he pick to nail this document to?
Easy answer - at this time, there was only one church in each town.
Roman Catholicism ruled the entire Western world. The Pope was the head of all the churches and demanded complete obedience from everyone.
So our boy Martin Luther nailed his document up to the door of the only game in town - the church.

So what did he have to say in this document he nailed up to the door? The document was called the 95 Theses, and was basically a document that questioned what was being done in the church at the time - something called indulgences.

Pope Leo was the main authority at the time, making all the decisions about the church from Rome, Italy. He needed to do some serious fundraising, and used a historic practice the church had relied on in the past.
The idea was this - the church started telling people that after you die, you don’t go to heaven or hell, but rather you go to this kind of in-between zone called purgatory.
The only way out of purgatory was to wait for a long time or to get some special treatment from the Pope, who could talk directly to God, who could get you out of this kind of twilight zone place.
So the Pope decided to start emptying out purgatory, but decided to do it by having people pay the church to get everyone out.

This was the indulgence. By buying an indulgence from the church, you got a stamped document indicating that the Pope had freed your family member (or you) from purgatory and you were able to go straight to heaven.

There’s one major problem with these ideas of purgatory and indulgences. It’s called.the Bible.

No where in the Bible is there any support for this idea that purgatory exists or that one person has some sort of voodoo magical power to release people from it.

And that’s exactly what Martin Luther asked in his 95 Theses.

Let me give you a couple of examples - obviously we’re not going to read all 95 Theses.

“The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven.”

Here, he’s calling into question the idea that the Pope (or any person for that matter) can forgive people of their sins - only God can do that.

“They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].”; “It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.”

Here, he’s calling into question what was said - that when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.

Luther also asked the question that if the Pope has the power to empty purgatory, why in the world is he trying to raise money with that power - wouldn’t he just empty it out of love for God’s people?

The 95 Theses and Luther’s asking very valid questions about the church launched what is called the Reformation.

Luther and those of us who have faith traditions that branch from the Reformation are generally called Protestants. Why? Because there was a protest against the Catholic system.

Today, you’ll generally see people outside the church refer to Christians as either Catholic or Protestant.
Protestants are generally those groups of Christians that are related to the Reformation - Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.

Now, I’ve said all that to say this: One of the central points of the Reformation was the centrality of the Bible.

At the time the Reformation began, there were no Bibles in the language of the people. All the Bibles were in Latin, and only priests were allowed to read them.

No common people were allowed to read the Bible or own one, and even if they did, most of them couldn’t read it.
It had been that way for hundreds of years - people not getting access to the Bible because people thought it was too hard to understand.

Luther and the Reformers worked very hard to ensure that everyday people like you and me had access to the Bible, were able to study it for ourselves, and were able to grow with it.
They said that “sola Scriptura” - Scripture alone - was the guide for our lives.

What we want to think about over the next couple of weeks is the Bible - is it historical? Is it accurate? Why do we talk about it so much in church? How do I study it?
But we take this look, remembering the amazing things that people have done over history in order for us to have access to the Bible.

Years before Luther, men named Tyndale and Wycliffe were killed for doing nothing more than trying to translate the Bible into a language people could understand.
Kings tried to kill Luther and many other Reformers because of the idea that the Bible should be in the hands of people.

So don’t take lightly that Bible you’re holding in your hands - it’s a treasure whether we realize it or not.

The Bible and Christianity

Now, the Bible is something we talk a lot about and in most churches, hopefully you’ll hear a lot about the Bible.

One issue with the Bible we have today is that the Bible is just incredibly easy for us to have access to.
I mean, most of us have several Bibles. You can have your home Bible, your church Bible, your Bible on a Kindle or on an iPhone, a backup Bible, a car Bible. We’ve got lots of Bibles.

And there are Bibles for just about every type of personality. Have you ever looked at a catalog of Bibles (I’m stealing this material from Jon Acuff’s Stuff Christians Like blog):
We’ve got the Outdoor Bible which is waterproof, snow proof, sleet proof, and hail proof. And it comes in a burlap bag.
Your Bible can have body image issues and be ultrathin, trimline, thineline, ultraslim, or compact.
You can get Bibles just for ladies like pink ones that are called “Hugs Bible for Women.”
Dude Bibles are obviously not pink and have one-word names like “Strive.”
You can get Bibles in every color imaginable, massive amounts of notes, illustrated editions, or versions by Max Lucado, John MacArthur or John Maxwell.
And that’s not even getting to the translation questions!

In short, we’ve got Bibles for every situation imaginable today. And I think in part, it can become so cool to look at the outside, Mossy Oak version of the Bible in camouflage that we can forget the important part.

Why is it so important?

The Bible is critically important because it’s God’s revealing himself to us. It’s his communication to us to let us know who he is and what he’s like.
We’ll talk about this more next week, but the Bible is not an instruction manual for life, although it has a lot of great things about how to live life.
It’s not a story primarily about you, although there are lots of principles in there that can help you.
It’s a story first and foremost about God. It’s all about him, from the very start to the very end.

One old preacher used to say you can cut the Bible on any page and it will bleed with the blood of Christ.
Others have called it the Scarlet Thread of Redemption - the Bible is one story about God’s redemption of us.

And as we’ve talked about here, our primary goal in this class is to get to know God - getting to know him is our priority, and the Bible is his way to get to know him.
That is why it is so critical to us as Christians.

Has God Said?

But let’s take a look at this - turn with me to Genesis chapter 3 - the third chapter in the entire Bible.
The story here is set in the Garden of Eden. God has created everything, he’s made it good, and he told Adam and Eve to enjoy everything that he has made.

Basically they had one job - enjoy all of this beauty, this good food, cultivating the garden, enjoying each other.
And there was only one rule - which I’m betting is a whole lot less rules than any of you have in your houses!

That one rule was not to eat the fruit of one tree - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
They could eat from any one of the other hundreds of beautiful fruit trees with amazing fruit, just not the one that God said not to touch.
All they had to do was follow just one rule to not eat of just one tree.

But what happened? In verse 1 of this chapter, we see that the serpent, representing Satan (the devil) came slithering up to Eve and asked her a key question:

“Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”

A better translation is this: “He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

So from the very beginning - even before the fall of man - Satan has a primary focus - calling into question what God said.

For us, what is it that God has said? It’s the Bible - his word.
To this day, Satan has continued questioning whether God has actually said what he has said.

Because if you call it into question, you create the opportunity to undermine all of what God has said.

But let’s finish this story from Genesis 3:

“And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”

So Eve tells the serpent, here’s the rules - don’t eat from this tree, because you’ll die as a result.
But interestingly you’ll notice what Eve does - God had never said don’t touch it - he said don’t eat it.
But Eve is adding something to what God said, probably as another boundary to what the command was.

Then we see Satan’s next line of attack in verse 4:

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

So here’s Satan’s second line of attack - he first asks whether God actually said what he said, and now he calls into question God’s goodness.
Basically Satan first says, hey what God said isn’t right at all - you’re not going to die!
In fact, what God is actually doing is holding you back from the good life - dude, it’s so much fun on this side.

Once you eat this fruit, you’re going to be like God (which is ironic because the people, not the serpent, were already made in the image of God).
And once you get there, you’re going to know good and evil, which is much better (at least that is implied).

So what happens? Verse 6 tells us:

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

And this is what is known as the Fall - sin entered the world and fractured everything because what Adam and Eve both did was not just disobedience - it was treason against God because they were trying to usurp his rightful position.
But the way the fall came was through an attack on God’s words - what God said.

Conspiracies Against the Bible

Satan’s work against what God said continues to this day.
One example that has been highlighted recently is lots of questions raised about the gospels. In the Bible, we have four of them - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Of course, there are many other stories about Jesus that have emerged over the years, and some scholars have argued that these were missed by the early church fathers who first chose the four gospel stories.
According to Dr. Charles Hill, who wrote the recently-published book, “Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy,” some of these other “options” about stories of Jesus were the Gospel of Thomas, an accompaniment to the Gospel of John, and something called the “Q” that was supposedly what Matthew and Luke used when writing their books.

Let me quote Dr. Hill’s comment about one particular conspiracy:

“Here I will mention one claimed proof for this conspiracy theory, and one stubborn problem it faces.
“Proof is said to reside in the ancient papyrus documents which archaeologists have dug from the sands of Egypt over the past century and a quarter. The Christian books yielded up by the unbiased, ancient trash heaps are, we are told, mostly books which were excluded from the New Testament. This would seem to show that the four Gospels were once minority reports and that some popular alternatives have been suppressed by the "winners." All I will say here is that the papyri have both less and more to tell us than this argument lets on.
“The problem for the conspiracy theory is a man named Irenaeus. Irenaeus was crystal clear in his claim that the church, from the time of the apostles, had received just four authoritative Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- and that all the others were bogus. This is just what we would expect from a fourth-century re-writer of history. The problem is that Irenaeus wrote in the second century, long before the conspiratorial rewriting of history is supposed to have taken place.
“Does, then, the conspiracy approach to early Christian history, in either its popular or its academic forms, have it right? Should it bother anyone that those who stress so loudly that the winners wrote the histories are the ones now writing the histories? Let the reader judge ... but also be aware of conspiracies.”

So Satan continues to attack the Bible to this day, but the Bible has been confirmed as true and accurate.

The Witness Within the Bible

Satan has always been out to attack the Bible and its accuracy.
What we want to do now is look at a few witnesses that demonstrate how the Bible is accurate and is what God has said.

We’ll look at the witness within the Bible today, and then on Wednesday we’ll look at the witness from history and the historical record.

So first, we’ll look at what the Bible has to say about the Bible - and just to clarify, the Bible is completely consistent throughout, so we always interpret the Bible by the Bible.

Let’s turn to II Timothy 3:16-17: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect [doesn’t mean perfect but rather competent], thoroughly furnished unto [equipped for] all good works.”

A better way to translate the first part of this verse is that all Scripture is “breathed out by God.”

The entire Bible was actually written down by people, but was written by inspiration of God - basically was being said by God and people wrote it down.

So when we talk about the Bible as God’s word, we mean it is actually God’s words that have been given.

The Bible is brutally honest about the people that are in it. For example, Peter was heavily involved in the writing of the New Testament.

And yet the gospels tell the most embarrassing stories about Peter - I mean, there are stories in there about Peter being called Satan by Jesus, denying that he knew who Jesus was, and just generally putting his foot in his mouth.
Now, if it was me, I would be editing those stories out or at least toning them down so they didn’t sound quite so bad.
But again - we’re dealing with something God inspired, God breathed out - so it’s honest about people like Peter and like David and like other men and women throughout Scripture - we see them warts and all.

And the second part of these verses in II Timothy talks about why we have been given the Bible - it gives us what we need to learn about doctrine, things that reprove how we live, to correct and make sure we’re on the right track, and for instructing us how to live.

We’ll talk some more about this next week when we get into studying the Bible, but God has given us in Scripture what we need to be equipped for life around us - as we get to know him.

Second verse we’ll look at is II Peter 3:15-16

This is a letter from our buddy Peter, the guy who puts his foot in his mouth, and he says this:

“And account that the longsuffering [patience] of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you”

So Peter is referencing the letters that were written by Paul - which are most of the New Testament. And here’s what he said about this:

“As also in all his epistles [letters], speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest [twist], as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction.

So there are two things we can see in verse 17

First, even Peter himself says that some things Paul wrote in his letters are really hard to understand, and can be twisted by people into other things.
But the second thing is that Peter says that Paul’s letters are “Scriptures” - in other words they had the same level of authority as the Old Testament verses.
From this early date, even those closest to Jesus are recognizing these writings that are in our Bible as God’s words.

Last verse we’ll look at is a few pages back at II Peter 1:16-21.

In these verses, Peter is talking about our walk with Jesus in the Christian life. He starts out by relating a story of what happened to him when he was with Jesus.

The story of the transfiguration happened when Jesus and three of his disciples went up to a mountain and were able to see a glimpse of God’s glory in the Lord Jesus. There was a huge flash of light and glory and God’s voice confirming that Jesus was his son, and that he was well pleased with Jesus.
So Peter starts out by telling this story to us - it was a pretty amazing experience:

“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honor and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.”

So Peter talks about how amazing this was - this is not any kind of made-up story of Christianity, but rather this is something that Peter saw with his own eyes. He saw this amazing display of God’s glory, he saw Jesus exalted, and heard God’s voice speaking directly.
Now, if you saw that, would you really believe and would that motivate you to live for Jesus? Of course, we’d say!
But look what Peter says next in verse 19:

“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:”

What is the more sure word of prophecy? It’s the Word of God- scripture itself! Let’s finish through verse 21:

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Peter is telling us here that we have something BETTER than the experiences of seeing God’s glory and Jesus revealed as God’s son. We have the Bible.

And the Bible came from men of God who were moved by the Holy Ghost - they were having the words of God breathed out through them.

It’s pretty amazing that the writers of the Bible would be so insistent that the text of the Bible is more sure than the experiences they had. God has given us something amazing and wonderful in the Bibles we hold in our hands.

From Here

On Wednesday, we’ll get into the witness from history - there is more documentary support for the Bible than for any other historical book. We’ll look at the historical record on Wednesday night.
Then next Sunday we’ll begin with a look into why and how we study the Bible as Christians with some practical tips along the way.
Any thoughts or questions for us before we close today?
Let’s close in prayer.