06.04. Reasons the Word of God is Settled
Reasons the Word of God is Settled
The Word of God is referred to as a mirror, seed, water, lamp, sword, hammer, fire, precious metals such as gold and silver, nourishing food such as milk, meat, bread and honey. It is the most remarkable book ever written and is in fact the anchor of the revelation of God to mankind as we have previously discussed. Notice a few verses that tell us it is forever settled, settled in heaven and I trust in our hearts as well. Psalms 119:89 For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.
Isaiah 40:8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
1 Peter 1:25 But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.
Matthew 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
How settled? Notice it said one jot or tittle. [one jot — the smallest of the Hebrew letters. one tittle — one of those little strokes by which alone some of the Hebrew letters are distinguished from others like them.] I- The Unsettled:
Before we delve into the reasons I think God’s Word should be settled for us lets take a look at those I called the unsettled and see what some detractors have said about the Word of God. The Bible has held its ground so we do not need to fear when men speak against it. The story is told of a visitor who toured a blacksmith shop. Viewing heaps of discarded hammers but only one huge anvil, he asked: "How often do you replace the anvil?" With a smile the owner replied, "Never! It is the anvil that wears out the hammer, you know!" So it is with the Word of God. The hammers of persecution, ridicule, higher criticism, liberalism, and atheism have for centuries pounded out their vicious blows upon the divine anvil, but to no avail. There they lie, in rusting piles, while the mighty anvil of the Scriptures stands unbroken, unshaken, and unchipped. (Willmington’s Guide to the Bible, p 811). One of the things that the cults almost all have in common is they claim that the Bible is not enough. You must have their writing to understand it. One illustration of this is the Jehovah’s Witnesses founder Charles Taze Russell (1851 – 1916). Mr. Russell calmly announces in the opening pages of his Studies in the Scriptures that it would be far better to leave the Bible unread but read his comments on it than to omit his writings and read the Bible.
Many times outside the church men cry against the Bible but the saddest cry is when those who are within the church who are in charge of crying out the truths from Scriptures cry out against it. Notice one. The Position of Liberalism – Probably the most famous liberal of the twentieth century was the late Harry Emerson Fosdick He has written the following words which typify the liberal attitude: When one moves back to the Scriptures with a mind accustomed to work in modern ways he finds himself in a strange world.... Knowing modern astronomy he turns to the Bible to find the sun and moon standing still or the shadow retreating on a sundial. Knowing modem biology he hears that when Elisha had been so long dead that only his bones were left, another dead body, thrown into the cave where he was buried, touched his skeleton and sprang to life again, or that after our Lord’s resurrection many of the saints long deceased arose and appeared in Jerusalem. Knowing modern physics he turns to the Bible to read that light was created three days before the sun and that an axe-head floated when Elisha threw a stick into the water. Knowing modern medicine he finds in the scripture many familiar ailments, epilepsy, deafness, dumbness, blindness, insanity, ascribed to the visitation of demons.... We live in a new world. We have not kept the forms of thought and categories of explanation in astronomy, geology, biology, which the Bible contains. We have definitely and irrevocably gotten new ones. ((A Guide to the Religions of America, Leo Rosten, ed., p. 160) Willmington’s Guide to the Bible p 794. Willmington’s Study Library says after this. But at the end of his life Fosdick may have seen the error of this false liberal approach to the Word of God. Note his evaluation: Today, however, looking back over forty years of ministry, I see an outstanding difference between then and now with regard to what is standard and who must do the adjusting, What man in his senses can now call our modern civilization standard? It is not Christ’s message that needs to be accommodated to this mad scene; it is this mad scene into which our civilization has collapsed that needs to be judged and saved by Christ’s message. This is the most significant change distinguishing the beginning of my ministry from now. Then we were trying to accommodate Christ to our scientific civilization; now we face the desperate need of accommodating our scientific civilization to Christ. (Quoted in Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, p. 168)
II- Settled:
So we see that both within and with the church many are unsettled on the fact that the Bible is God’s Word to men. So we come now to why I think it settled and should be settled for all men who will approach it with a mind that does not reject it off handed but truly searches for the truth. We have talked about the unity of it a little being written over 1500 years by 40 or so authors and still it has not contradictions. Let notice briefly a few others.
A- Indestructible:
God does not need men to protect His Word. He can do a pretty good job of it. He just needs men to believe it, practice it and share it. In A.D. 303, Emperor
Diocletian thought he had destroyed every hated Bible. After many tireless years of ruthless slaughter and destruction, he erected a column of victory over the embers of a burned Bible. The title on the column read: "Extinct is the Name of Christian." Twenty years later, the new Emperor Constantine offered a reward for any remaining Bibles. Within 24 hours no less than 50 copies were brought out of hiding and presented to the king.
In 1199, Pope Innocent III ordered the burning of all Bibles.
Voltaire – He once said, "Another century and there will be not a Bible on the earth." The century is gone, and the circulation of the Bible is one of the marvels of the age. After he died, his old printing press and the very house where he lived was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society and made a depot for Bibles. On December 24, 1933, the British Government bought the valuable Codex Sinaiticus from the
Russians for half a million dollars. On that same day a first edition of Voltaire’s work sold for 11 cents in Paris book shops.
Matthew 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
B- Historical Accuracy:
The Bible is not a history book but when it makes a statement that is historic it must be accurate to be what it claims the word of God.
Less than a century ago, the agnostic took great glee in sneeringly referring to the "hundreds of historical mistakes" in the Bible. But then came the science of archaeology, and with each shovel full of dirt the sneers have become less visible, until today they scarcely can be seen. Willmington’s Study Library
The history recorded in the Bible about civilizations that lived and died out was made fun of but with each shovel that turns there is evidences upon evidences of the historic accuracy of the Bible. While this will not prove that God exist it does settle the question of the historic accuracy of the Word. Let me give us a couple of examples. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was thought to be spurious until evidence revealed that all five of the cities mentioned in the Bible weere in fact centers of commerce in the area and were geographically situated as the Scriptures describe. The biblical description of their demise seems to be no less accurate. Evidence points to earthquake activity, and that the various layers of the earth were disrupted and hurled high into the air. Bitumen is plentiful there, and an accurate description would be that brimstone (bituminous pitch was hurled down on those cities that had rejected God. (The New Evidence That Demand a Verdict, Josh McDowell, p 94-95) One more that shows the accuracy of the Bible historically. Jericho- During the excavation of Jericho (1930-1936) Garstang found something so startling that he and two other members of the team prepared and signed a statement describing what was found. In reference to the these finding Garstang says: "As to the man fact, then, there remains no doubt: the walls fell outward so completely that the attackers would be able to clamber up and over their ruins into the city. Why so unusual? Because the wall of the cities do not fall outwards, they fall inwards. And yet in Joshua 6:20 we read, ’The wall fell down flat.Then the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.’ The walls were made to fall outward." (Garstand FBHJJ, 146) (The New Evidence That Demand a Verdict, Josh McDowell, p 94-95) We could spend a lot more time here but lets move along for the sake of time.
C- Scientific Accuracy:
Like the Bible is not a science book it however makes some amazing scientific statement that predate what we now accept by sometimes thousands of years. First the earth is know to be a round planet. 700 or so BC Isaiah said in Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
Contrast this with the view that most common man held unto the introduction of the compass and the sixteen hundreds with the voyages of Columbus and Magellan that the earth was flat.
Besides that the Bible tells us what we now know that the earth rest upon nothing according to Job 26:7 He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. Now the contrast here is really stark. In the time of Job about 1500 BC one of the most advanced "scientific" theories concerning the earth was that our planet was flat and rested securely upon the back of a gigantic turtle who was slowly plodding through the cosmic seas of some sort. Sir Isaac Newton in 1678 or some 3000 years after Job got it straightened out. The innumerable stars in the sky was spoken of to Abraham who could have only seen about 1200 or so. We know that there are billions of stars. The Bible teaches us that there are as the number of sand grains of the seashore. But as late as 150 AD some leading astronomers claimed there were only 1056. Now one of my favorites. Jonah 2:5-6 The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. 6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God.
Until just the last 100 years or so the ocean’s volume and size was viewed as a watery bowl, which sloped from the coastline gently downward toward the middle, where it was deepest. It then was thought o proceed upward to the other side. Jonah had declared that he went to the mountains at the bottom of the sea however. David also spoke of canyons at the sea bottom. 2 Samuel 22:16 And the channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the world were discovered, at the rebuking of the LORD, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.
We obviously know now that there are canyons and mountains on the sea bottom. Another world exists there. The deepest canyon found so far is some seven miles under the sea near the Philippines.
We also know that there are springs and fountains as well as currents in the sea. Psalms 8:8 HCSB birds of the sky, and fish of the sea passing through the currents of the seas. This verse revealed to a man named Matthew Fountaine Maury that there were highways in the sea. He is the father of today’s oceanography. And on and on we could go. We will discuss more of these type things when we look at the doctrine of creation.
D- Prophetic Accuracy:
We come to the last one we will look at Prophetic Accuracy. There are literally thousand that we could look at. Lets look at a few of the most amazing. Ezekiel 37:15-23 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 16 Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions: 17 And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand. 18 And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these? 19 Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand. 20 And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. 21 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land: 22 And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all: 23 Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.
Israel went into captivity as two nations some 100+ years apart but God brought them back together as one.
Next is concerning an individual by the name of Cyrus. Cyrus would become King over the empire that overthrew the Babylonians. Isaiah the prophet, writing at a time, 712 BC, of peace about for Judah told us Isaiah 44:28 That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.
Nebuchanezzar took them Jerusalem captive in 606 about 100= years later. After 70 years, which also had been prophesied as well, notice what happened. Ezra 1:1-2 Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, 2 Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Now before we get caught up in all this remember the reason the Bible exist is that we might have a personal relationship with God through His Son, Christ Jesus. He is also a walking fulfillment of prophecy as well. Just one for the road so to speak. Psalms 16:10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Now notice Jesus in John 2:19-22 Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. 20 Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? 21 But he spake of the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.
May I say we must also believe the scriptures and the words that Jesus said. He is the way, the truth the life, he is the door in which we must enter. The Word of God is settled and therefore the way to heaven is settled with it.