EN010310
THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
1. Verification
Has there ever been a book like the Bible?
- So loved and
o so hated?
- So often copied and
o so often burned?
- So revered and
o so reviled?
- So blindly followed and
o so blindly rejected?
- So scrutinized on one hand and
o so ignored on the other?
The answer has to be no… there is no book like the bible in human history. Are there other holy books? Sure, but
- the Koran, the Book of Mormon don’t have the historical pedigree this book does.
- The Vedas doesn’t make the claims this book does.
- The Torah doesn’t move as many different cultures in history as this book does.
So what is the Bible?
- Is it the divinely inspired word of God, trustworthy in every detail?
- Is it merely a collection of ancient fables, fantasies, folklore and fabrications without any credibility in our scientific age?
- Is it a secret code filled with prophetic messages decipherable only by computer
o as the Bible Code has said?
This month we’re launching a series on the Bible that will hopefully answer those questions. I have high expectations for this series – I hope it transforms the way we look at, read, study and apply the Bible - no matter where you are on the spiritual continuum. Long term Christian, or curious investigator… you need to be here this month.
Why?
- If you are a curious investigator, there is no doubt that your examination of the Christian faith hinges on how you look at the Bible. You know enough to know that Christians see it as the Word of God, but you also know enough unanswered problems with the Bible to question that claim. So you have issues with it’s validity. (we’ll talk about many of those problems later in Extended)
o This will be a great series for you because maybe you’ve never really examined the evidence for the Bible like we will this month.
o Maybe you’ve never examined your own prejudices or unrealistic expectations that you bring to the Bible – and you’ll be challenged to be skeptical of your skepticism and to bring an open mind to the text.
- If you are long term believer, you may have a bunch of problems you don’t even realize in your Christian life, because of your current view of the Bible.
o Perhaps you don’t really take the Bible very seriously. I mean you respect and read parts of the Bible, but you’ve never developed what could be called a biblical worldview. Maybe that’s because you don’t know how to read it or apply it or you still have problems with it.
o Other believers treat the Bible as fax from heaven and so you’re troubled by it’s “human parts”. And rather than deal with the Bible’s humanity, you’d rather stick your fingers in your ears. But this causes no end of difficulty.
§ you have no answers for the Bible issues raised by your non Christian friends.
§ If the Bible is golden tablets from heaven you start looking at it as giant rule book or to do list. But some of the to do’s don’t make any sense, so you feel guilty for not doing them!
SO, AC3, we’re starting a new decade with this mission: TO
- be more biblically astute so we can
- walk and talk with a biblical worldview and to know the God behind the book.
VERIFICATION
So we begin today by discussing the first question that confronts us: is the bible telling me the truth? Today we’re not concerned yet with the question of whether it is GOD’S WORD. That’s our question for next week. The first question is simply one of history. We’re not asking if every word, every idea, every event recorded in the Bible has the endorsement of God. We’re asking
do we have reasons to believe that the Bible contains reliable history.
- A book can be reliable without being uniquely God’s Word. There are books on the civil war and American history on my shelf that I’m convinced are historically reliable. But I don’t read a single one of them as if they were God’s Word. Their never claim that this is their purpose.
But the Bible does so claim.
- So while we would rightly assume that any book claiming to be God’s Word would be much, much MORE than historically reliable, but it should certainly not be LESS! Right?
If the Bible is the result of a BEING who is perfectly Truthful, (God) shouldn’t we expect that when it does touch on matters of history, that it will not lie to us?
And if it DOES lie to us, then we might suspect that it CANNOT therefore be the WORD of a all TRUTHFUL God.
This is why we must consider the verification of the Bible BEFORE we consider inspiration of the Bible. That’s next week.
So imagine this wasn’t a church service but a convention of 3M employees and we were at a seminar on the “Poly-fiber bonds of chemical attraction in artificial adhesives”. Riveting right? As I’m going on making enormous claims about molecules and chemicals – you’re yawning trying to stay awake… why? Because as fantastic as my claims are, you don’t know the field of study and so you have no idea if what I’m saying is true or a pack of lies
But suddenly as I’m speaking, a breath of fresh air – I use an analogy!:
- “It’s like the 1995 Mariners baseball team…” I say. Now your ears perk up. You don’t know about laws of chemical attraction, but you know sports. Now you’re listening! I continue:
- “… that year the Mariners finished dead last in the division, and that eventually lead to the team leaving the city of Seattle forever. Just like that, these chemical bonds do not stay…”
- Wait! Hold the phone! The Mariners didn’t finish dead last, and they’re still in Seattle. In fact, they won the division – they played a one game playoff against the Angels. It was on a Monday. And after that, they played a series against the Yankees and won in dramatic fashion in the 5th and deciding game in the bottom of the 11th inning on a Edgar Martinez double.
o Just as you pull yourself back from your Mariners day dream, you go: wait a minute buddy? You’re wrong! What else are you lying about?
Now what just happened?
The speaker just put huge doubt into your mind about the stuff he’s talking about which you DON’T understand and CAN’T verify, BECAUSE he said something false about stuff you DO understand and CAN verify!
See, everything I just said about chemistry is not automatically false because I have no clue about Mariner history. I might just be an egghead non-jock professor type who couldn’t tell the different between a baseball and barbed wire. But the fact is, my lack of historical accuracy on something you CAN verify has cast doubt on all my assertions about stuff you CANNOT verify.
And it leads to this principle:
wrong in some, uncertain in all.”
The same is true of the Bible. The Bible makes huge claims about who God is, what God has done and what our Purpose is in relation to that. Most of those claims cannot be verified in a lab. They must forever remain articles of faith. But not EVERYTHING in the bible is this way. Much in the Bible is presented to us as simple facts of history and with a little study we can validate them or refute them.
If the Bible is validated on the stuff we CAN check out, it leads us one step closer to accepting it’s claims on stuff we CANNOT check out.
- SO Verification leads to Inspiration.
o Now, clarify: Its not God’s Word because it’s true,
o It’s true because it’s God’s word
§ Still if it’s not true, it kills the idea that it’s the work of all Truthful God.
So without a prior commitment to Bible as God’s Word, we ask, can we validate any parts of it?
Before we delve into the evidence, I should be clear that the starting assumption of most biblical scholarship for 150 years has been “guilty until proven innocent.” The Bible has been assumed to be non-historical myths with almost no relevance to actual history.
If that’s true of course, it’s claim to be God’s Word is forever damaged if not destroyed.
But here’s the good part of this prevailing skepticism. In the last 100 years it’s forced a new voice into the debate. The voice of archeology. What do you think archeology would say? Would it confirm that the Bible is empty of historical validity? Or would it at times shock the scholarly world with it’s findings.
1. HITTITES
Back in the late 1800’s, the Bible had a real problem on it’s hands because of how many times it mentioned an empire called the Hittites. According to the Bible, the Hittites were a proud and mighty warrior people living in the north. The problem was there was not one shred of a mention of the Hittites anywhere outside the Bible. So they assumed the Hittites were as real as the Atlantians. How could such a prominent race not be recorded somewhere else?
Well, archeology was a very young science back then and they probably should have been more humble about making such pronouncements.
- Because in 1876, an Englishman named A.H. Sayce discovered writing in Turkey which was attributed to the Hittites. Later in 1906, the ruins of the Hittite empire were found. There is now a whole museum in Modern Turkey dedicated to artifacts from this “mythical” race. Not so mythical anymore.
2. SARGON
The same is true of Sargon, an Assyrian King mentioned in Isaiah 20:1. Considered a myth Sargon's palace was discovered in Khorsabad, Iraq. The very event mentioned in Isaiah 20, his capture of Ashdod, was recorded on the palace walls!
3. DAVID
Now, let’s turn to another Bible “Myth”. It was July 21, 1993 and the workday was almost over a team of Israeli archeologist excavating the ruins of the ancient Israelite city of Dan in the area north of the Sea of Galilee. The team had been sifting debris since early in the morning and now sweating and hot and tired – Gila Cook was ready to quit.
Gila was the team surveyor and was ready to grab for her water, when an unusual shadow caught her eye in the area of a wall they can just unearthed. Moving closer, she saw that it was a flat basalt stone which seemed to have Aramaic letters inscribed on it.
- She called the team leader over. “oh my God” he shouted, “we have an inscription!”
It’s one thing for a team to find a piece of pottery or some other mute artifact…. But when you find an inscription, literally it’s like the rocks crying out from the past with a living voice. What would this piece say? It was a part of a shattered monument of a King of Damascus celebrating his military victory over the nations just to the south. That would be Israel.
But specific words would shock the world:
- I fought and Hadad went in front of me. And I slew the House of Israel. And I slew the king of the House of David…
That might mean nothing to you, friend, but that one reference to David was a historical bombshell. King David is as familiar to you and me as President Lincoln, but to the students of history, David was on the same level as King Arthur. Total legend. Why? Because despite the prominent place he gets in the Bible there wasn’t a shred of extra biblical evidence for his existence – until now.
- These pictures show a temple mount and the Temple ruins in Beth Shan, the place most scholars now believe was where Saul, David’s predecessor was hung after he was killed in battle.
4. HEZEKIAH
Let’s look at one other example. The Bible says that King Hezekiah of Judah prepared for the siege of an Assyrian army in the most interesting way. It says he cut a half mile tunnel through pure bedrock about 120 feet below the streets of Jerusalem. His purpose was to deny water to the Assyrians and provide a water to Jerusalem during the siege.
This tunnel was considered a myth until discovered by American archeologist Edward Robinson in 1838.
- You can still walk through it to this day (Bud)
- You can even read the inscription they found:
o and this is the story of the tunnel while ...the axes were against each other and while three cubits were left to cut? ... the voice of a man ...called to his counterpart… …ax against ax and flowed water from the source
Despite this evidence, the dating of the tunnel was disputed, particularly by anti-Zionists, because they didn’t want to believe there was a sovereign Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem in ancient times. However, in 2003 it was proved rather conclusively by C14 dating in the tunnel that the tunnel was completed in about 700 BC.
Without question, the Bible’s portrayal of ancient Israel’s Kingdom era is remarkably well attested by the weight of modern archeological evidence.
But now the most important piece of evidence because it stands at the center of the Bible and the Christian faith is about Jesus himself.
5. JESUS
When I went to Israel last fall I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the throngs of pilgrims from around the world. They come to venerate the sites of Jesus life. The problem I had was that the most popular sites were the ones that scholars are least confident represest the actual places where those events occurred.
- For example: the church that marks the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed the night of his betrayal was swamped with Pilgrims. They even think they’ve identified a 2000 year old olive tree as a still living eye witness to Jesus passion. But the tree and the place are all highly suspect.
- Same for the church of the Holy Sepluchre. This is supposedly the place where Jesus was both crucified and buried… but many doubt as to whether the location fits the biblical data.
In contrast to these two sites that were swarming with pilgrims, there were two other sites I visited that were next to empty. But to my way of thinking, they were more important by far. Why? Not because they commemorated more important events in the life of Jesus, but because they showed more indisputably the validity of the Biblical record.
And because these sites could be checked specifically with the Bible, it was the only two sites in all of Jerusalem that I could say for certain, “Jesus the Christ walked here”.
SITE ONE: the pool of Bethesda.
In John 5:1-3 we read this:
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie — the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.
Now a pool in Upper Jerusalem has always been known to exist. But when John adds the detail of this pool being surround by 5 colonnades, there was no evidence for that. So again, guilty until proven innocent… Scholars like Dr. Alfred Loisy, claimed that John made up the 5 colonnades to represent the five books of Moses.
But in 1956, digging at the ancient Biblical site of Bethesda, archaeologists unearthed a rectangular pool with a portico on each side and a fifth one dividing the pool into 2 separate compartments. There is was.
I don’t know that I can describe for you the awe of that moment, sitting by that place knowing Jesus was there – really there. Not once upon a time. But in such and such a year, when so and so was king, in the fullness of time… it happened.
John’s gospel that was thought by some to be pure theology is now shown to be grounded in history. Pool of Siloam.
CONCLUSION
CS Lewis former atheist who spent his life dealing with ancient languages and literature once said of the NT documents:
As a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the gospels are, they are not legends.
Time magazine once reported:
“after more than two centuries of facing the heaviest scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has survived – and is perhaps the better for the siege.”
To sum it all up friends, I think we have very good grounds for treating the Bible like generally reliable documents. This has nothing to do with them being inspired or God’s Word.:
It’s just history.
And in the face of this history, you have to make a decision… Here it’s confirmed that there was a man, the central figure of the BOOK who claims to be One with the Father, the only Son of God. So you don’t have to believe that part, you could never prove the claim in a court of law. But look at the things he said, and did. What explains that best?:
- Was he a demonic charlatan, getting himself killed for being such a nutcase?
- Was he everything he claimed to be?
No matter which of those you choose, there’s few things clearer from the Bible than how Jesus saw the Bible:
He accepted It as the WORD OF GOD.
THEREFORE …
- if you accept the Bible as reliable, you may be lead to accept Him for who he said he was,
- if you accept Him for who he said he was, then you accept all of Scripture as Divinely inspired as He did.
But what does that mean exactly? It’s more than just being reliable. Next week, we’re going to look at what INSPIRATION means. Later today, in Extended, we’ll ask the question: if the Bible is RELIABLE, does that mean the Bible is INERRANT?