Questions No.6 Why should I believe the Bible?

A young man, how can a woman keep his her way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart. Do not let me stray from your commands.

I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. Praise be to you, O Lord, teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.

I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches. I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees.

I will not neglect your word. And verse 137. Righteous are you, O Lord, and your laws are right.

The statutes you have laid down are righteous. They are fully trustworthy. My zeal wears me out, for my enemies ignore your words.

Your promises have been thoroughly tested and your servant loves them. Though I am lonely and despised, I do not forget your precepts. Your righteousness is everlasting and your law is true.

Trouble and distress have come upon me, but your commands are my delight. Your statutes are forever right. Give me understanding that I may live.

May the Lord add his blessing to his word. Tell my people I love them. Tell my people I care.

Tell my people I'm there when they feel far away from me. Tell my people I'm there. Tell my people I came and died to give them liberty.

And to abide in me is to be really free. Tell my people I love them. Tell my people I care when they feel far away from me.

Tell my people I'm there. The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want. He makes me down to lie.

In pastures green he leadeth me. The quiet waters by. My soul he doth restore again.

And little walk doth make. Within the paths of righteousness in for his own namesake. Gay though I walk in death's dark veil, yet will I fear none ill.

For thou art with me and thy rod and staff me comfort still. My table thou hast furnished in presence of my foes. My head thou dost with oil anoint, and my cup overflows.

Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me. And in God's house forevermore my dwelling place shall be. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen.

There's a little verse tucked away at the end of the twelfth psalm, which says, and I'm reading from verse six, And the words of the Lord are flawless like silver, refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times. The words of the Lord are flawless like silver, refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times. It's an interesting thing that when you read of God in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, you always read of a being who communicates.

The Lord spoke and the heavens and the earth were formed. And when Jesus came in the full flush of his maturity, embarking on his life's work, it's the Gospel of Mark that says, Jesus came preaching. Generally speaking, God is always generally speaking, speaking to you and speaking to me.

But how does he speak? Well, the Christian gospel says that God communicates through his word. And I would go so far as to say this tonight, that what is upon my heart to try to explain is perchance for many people here who've never responded to the gospel of salvation, the most important thing that they could conceivably hear. We are on this earth, spaceship earth, as sometimes it's called, for a relatively short period of time.

You might make it to 60 or 70. You might even make it to a hundred, as one of the friends in the tabernacle fraternity will reach that, God willing, in just a couple of weeks' time. But even if you chalked up a century, compared with the whole sweep of history, you'd only be on planet earth momentarily.

Your body grows old. Your faculties gradually are impaired. And life according to the Bible is just like the ante room, the dressing room, waiting, preparing, getting ready for something that lies beyond.

And you can have all the tea in China and all the shares on the stock exchange. But when the moment comes, when you've run your earthly course, and when the scythe of death, which stops neither for prince nor pauper, is applied to your life, the most important thing, I predict this right now, with any authority that I might have as a preacher, is how you responded to the word of God. I really mean that from the depth of my being.

I care not if you're an accountant and you're successful. I care not if you're a schoolboy or schoolgirl trying to understand what I'm expressing tonight. The most important thing in life is this book and the message it contains.

With this book, you're rich. With all the wealth in the world, and not possessing this book and understanding its message, you're poor, abysmally, terribly poor. Listen to what one theologian has to say.

Ultimately, as we move out of this world, or as we move through this world, we are to prepare ourselves for a future life which will correspond for each of us to what we have chosen to be here. And we'll have in it more of joy, or for some, more of distress than this world has ever known. Now, if you've followed me thus far, you might realize the burden that's on my heart to try to prevent you from having a fate worse than death, and by God's grace to lead you into an experience that will keep you through this life and on into the next life to enjoy eternity with God.

And the only way that that's possible is by responding to the book. Those who fail to read the Bible are at an enormous disadvantage. Your eternal well-being, I argue, is dependent on your reaction to what this book has to say, for there is no other book in the whole of the world that is comparable to this one.

I could spend some time fielding the arguments, but I content myself with just tracing a few in front of you. Let me talk to you about the originality of the Bible for a moment or two. Who wrote it over the period of 1,600 years it took in its compilation? Well, there were 40 different authors, and they came from a variety of backgrounds.

There was Moses, who was a political leader. There was Joshua, who was a military general. There was David, who was a poet as well as being a shepherd boy.

There was Solomon, who was a king. There was Amos, who was a herdsman. There was Peter, who was a fisherman.

There was Matthew, who was an inland revenue inspector. There was Paul, who was a rabbi. All these people came together over a period of time and responded to a burden that remarkably had been put upon their hearts, and they compiled little extracts which ultimately were bound together in this book that we call the Bible.

1,600 years it took to write. 40 odd different men were involved in putting it together, and sometimes they wrote with a background of differing moods. There were times when books of the scripture were written as the man concerned was in the depths of a depression like the one who penned Ecclesiastes.

There were times when the apostle Paul is writing his letter, and he is bereft of an explanation to know why certain things have happened in his life. Moses wrote when he was in the wilderness. Jeremiah wrote when he was in the dungeon.

Luke, who compiled the fifth book of the New Testament, put it together on his travels around Asia Minor. And Paul did much of his writing when he was in prison. And maybe it's a background of the personalities and the circumstances through which they went, which were used by the Holy Spirit to make this book so absolutely unique.

Whether you're happy or depressed, whether you're rich or poor, whether you're black or white, whether you're free or whether you're bound, whether you're married or whether you're single, this book, like no other book on this earth, has got something to say to you. A word of testimony. I find it illogical to understand at the human level why I am so attracted to scripture.

There are very few books that I have read twice. But this book, I go back to it time and time and time again. Last week, for me, wasn't a particularly good one.

I hit the doldrums. I'm not proud of it. It was just one of those experiences.

And I was going to say, oh, my poor wife had to cope with me. But one of the things which was so marvelous was just reading through the Psalms and discovering how the Psalmist speaks to me. When in one of the Psalms, he talks about your feet standing firm and your body regaining its balance.

I don't know any other book that conveys a message to the moods of people who wish to discover God speaking to them. Why is this book written? What was the basic reason why scripture was compiled? Well, the explanation is quite extraordinary because it seems to be absolutely naive. I talk about 40 different authors.

But really, the original author, and this makes the book stand out in all its uniqueness, is not human. It's divine. It's not man.

It's God. And the reason why God causes these men with differing personalities brought from a variety of backgrounds over a long period of time to compile this book is for this simple reason. God wants to make friends with men and women.

You can't be a friend to someone unless you talk to them. And the Bible tells how in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and how things went askew, things went wrong, but how God still hungered for the fellowship of man whom he created eons ago. And so a plan was devised whereby broken, fallen men and women who've made such a mess of life might be brought by, might be reconciled to God in a word, might become his friends again.

And this book is a letter from man's best friend, even God. And if you'll only read it, and it is understandable to those who are prepared to spend time, if you'll only read it, you will find that God will speak to you through this book in a way that you have never been addressed by any other book on this earth. And because the book was miraculously conceived and brought to birth over 1600 years and has God as its authority, it has a unique accuracy.

It's not just the originality of the book that impresses itself upon me, it's the accuracy of the book. Now many of you perhaps, at least some of you, great misgivings to believe that it was possible to have a volume written so long ago preserved in its accuracy as though we had it fresh from the writer who was stimulated by God to produce it in the first instance. Now the Bible is a Jewish book.

The men who wrote the Bible were Jews. The Jewish nation is an incredible nation, the most remarkable ethnic group of people on this earth. They have thrown up the greatest scholars and the greatest scientists that anyone has ever recalled in history.

And one of the amazing things about the Jews, even to this day, is the meticulous way that they cope with detail. Now you'll have to take my word for this, but I could field you a volume of books for you to read. There were amongst the Jewish community those scribes who were particularly designated to copy the holy scriptures of the Jewish nation.

How they went about their task was absolutely remarkable. They had a particular way of writing and specific instructions as to what to do. Some of these men later on were referred to as the Talmudists.

And if they were going to copy a passage of scripture, these are the regulations that they would follow. They'd get the scroll, they'd make a scroll from the skin of an animal, and then they would fasten the various parts of the scroll together with string taken from a clean animal. Every skin had an equal number of columns.

The length of each was to be no less than 48 and at the most 60 lines, the breadth 30 characters. The ink had to be black and it was made from a special recipe. When the Talmudist or the scribe was copying, he had to look at the original all the time.

He was not allowed to quote from memory. He would take almost a hair's breadth and lay it alongside the writing as he progressed to ensure that each character that he put down was legible and didn't run into the previous one. The closeness of the writing also came under specific regulations and every book had to pass the scrutiny of those who were responsible for the copying work.

And the remarkable thing about Jewish historical books is this, their incredible accuracy. Now listen, I want to be a little more technical, but you can follow me if you concentrate. Up to a few years ago, the oldest manuscript that we had of the Jews, that is of the Old Testament, was dated around the year 900 AD, 900 years after Jesus.

The New Testament manuscripts, completely different. We had a lot more manuscripts dating back from an earlier period. But the Old Testament manuscripts, 900 or so.

And then something happened in the late 1940s. There was a shepherd lad, and he was moving around some of the hills and the caves not so far from Jerusalem. And one day he picked up a stone and he threw it, like any lad might do, into a cave.

And he heard the distinctive echo of pottery being broken. And because of his inquisitive nature, he went into the cave. And what did he discover there? Well, some scrolls, which have become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, for the area was just adjacent to the Dead Sea.

In those scrolls was contained the whole book of the prophet Isaiah. The date of the scrolls goes back to about 30 or 40 AD. In other words, 1,000 years before or approximately the oldest known manuscript available to ordinary scholars.

1948 was the year, if memory serves me right. And people who are into this sort of line, scholars, academics, archaeologists, they were so excited. And the Dead Sea Scrolls were ultimately unfurled and translated.

And so amazing was the accuracy of those who had copied the scriptures for the Jewish Old Testament down the years, that it was discovered that 1,000 years had elapsed. And when Isaiah chapter 53 is compared in the year 900 and onwards with the Dead Sea Scrolls of AD 30 or thereabouts, there is only a fractional difference of one three-letter word. Now that's incredible.

And it serves to show, and I could go on, this is just like honey to my soul, but it may be boring to you, but I could go on for a long time. But it goes to show something of the phenomenal accuracy of the Jews. Just throw out a little bit more honey.

Take some of these New Testament documents, the Gospels. How did they come back into the minds of the disciples? Jesus has died, been raised again, they've been preaching, the disciples have gone around the known world, they're old men now, and they realize that Jesus probably is not coming back in their lifetime. And so they're stimulated by the power of the Spirit to bring back His teaching.

But how? I could hardly reproduce a conversation I had yesterday exactly, let alone tell you what I preached about 10 years ago from this pulpit. Well again, you have the phenomenal memory and the way of teaching that the Jews used to adopt. The language in the day of our Lord was Aramaic.

And if you push some of the New Testament writings back to Aramaic, some of the sayings of Jesus in particular, say the Sermon on the Mount, they go into an easily memorized fashion. And with the trained mind of the Jew, who often had committed to memory the first five books of the Old Testament to recall, to recapitulate with the promptings of the Holy Spirit, the teachings of Jesus Christ was in no way a feat impossible. And when you start to read the Old Testament and the New Testament, it smacks out of an authority the like of which you get in no other area of historical writings.

You've all heard of William Shakespeare, or as they used to call him in my school, Bill Wobbledugger. Work that one through and you'll understand why. Well Shakespeare wrote, I'm now going on my memory, which is rather difficult attempt, 37 plays.

Someone's nodding in the gallery. I'll take it that they're a literary expert, English literature, and that is right. There is not one play of Shakespeare, hardly 200 years old.

There is not one play of Shakespeare that doesn't have at least 100 passages in that one play that are questioned as to whether they are the original that left the pen of William Shakespeare. This is the extraordinary thing about the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, its authenticity. And for the New Testament, the abundance of manuscripts is really quite dynamic.

But of course, it's not just the the preservation of the original that's so important, it's the authority that lies behind that original. You take the Old Testament scriptures. Do you know what the word self-authenticating means? It's got the idea of something producing its own evidence.

Let me try to illustrate that from the Old Testament. Let's assume, for example, and many of you will know what I'm getting at because you have a good knowledge of scripture. Let's assume that the Old Testament in its prophetical sections makes certain predictions regarding the future.

Let's imagine that it predicts the birth of a Messiah. Let's imagine that it not only says that the Son of God, for that's what Messiah really means, the anointed one, is going to be born, but let's suggest that it actually puts the place where he's going to be born. And let's suggest more than this, that the predictions indicate that towards the end of a life that will be terminated early, he endures great suffering.

And let's suggest for a moment that the sort of suffering that is projected has never been known at the time when the man who makes the prediction starts to write. So here are certain things I'm quoting at random. In the Old Testament, for what I am just stretching in front of you, actually did happen.

There was a prediction that Jesus would be born where? Bethlehem. Micah chapter 5 verse 2. Where was Jesus born? In Bethlehem of Judea. Psalm 22, Psalm 24 makes reference to the horrific death of the Lord Jesus.

It describes the pain and the way in which a person would feel when they are crucified. And yet crucifixion was not a known way of terminating a man's life in the day when the psalmist wrote. You can look into the Old Testament and find dozens and dozens of references to the coming of the Son of God, the Messiah.

And you move into the New Testament and you find that to the last letter they are fulfilled. I was going towards the Middle East last December traveling on a Israeli jet plane and sitting next to me was a delightful Jewish girl. And about, took me about half an hour to get over my British shyness and I started to talk to her.

She was an Orthodox Jewess, delightful person. And I told her who I was and what I was involved in doing in Israel. We started to speak about the Old Testament Scriptures and I took her to Isaiah 53 and to the Psalms and pointed her to those verses that spoke of Jesus Christ.

She was fascinated. She had no real idea that the second part of the Christian Bible was so interlocked with the first part. She was amazed at the self-authentication of the total Word of God.

Now I'm not suggesting to you that I led her to the Lord, but at least by God's grace it might have been that I broke up the ground and gave her some seed to think over in regard to the Christian faith. But the point that I'm trying to make is the way that the Bible authenticates itself. We're going to sing a hymn in a little while, standing on the promises of Christ my King.

It's an old hymn. My older colleagues and friends here will know it, younger people will have to learn it. But that hymn is saying exactly what Muriel said when she directed us to a verse in Corinthians which says that the promises of God are yes and amen in Jesus.

In other words, you can test the validity of the New Testament as well as the Old by cashing in on the promises. How would you know that I'm an honest man? Well let me suggest just as a hypothetical example that you're really in distress and I say come to my office Tuesday morning and I will give you 10 pounds or I'll get Ian Land to give me 10 pounds to give to you. Now you would be able to prove whether what I had said was a load of eye wash that adds up to nothing or whether it was indeed true by coming along and seeing just how generous we are here the tabernacle on occasions to those who are in distress.

Now here's the New Testament. Here's Jesus Christ saying come unto me all you that labor under heavy laden and I will give you rest. Here is Jesus bidding people to come to him who are sinners promising that he can give his Holy Spirit and that he can cleanse them of their sins and give them life eternal for he said I am the way the truth and the life no man comes to the father but by me.

Jesus almost said to the religious people of his day a plague on your miseries. What I've come to do is to establish such a fascinating way of life that when people hear of it they will flock into it because there's no other way in which they can find such fulfillment and enjoyment. Now you can test him at this level as many people have done.

You see the word of God is self-authenticating. It speaks of Jesus dying on the cross of Jesus being raised from the dead but you see the reason why I believe the Bible is not simply because it seems to me a credible historical document but what it says affects me. It's an amazing thing that this Bible still with us in the year 1982.

There was a man by the name of Diocletian who lived in the year 303. You've perhaps never heard of him though he thought he was the greatest and he made a decree because he was an emperor. He had all the clout so to speak in the Roman world and his decree was this get rid of the Bibles, get rid of the New Testament, get rid of the Old Testament, let's erase Christianity from the face of the world and he struck a medal which celebrated the abolition of Christianity.

Thirty years later Diocletian was dead and Constantine was emperor and he paid out government money to a man by the name of Eusebius to write out because of course they didn't have printing in those days 50 copies of the Bible. Voltaire the French infidel in the 18th century said give it 100 years and Christianity will be a nobody will want to know anything about it. 50 years after Voltaire died with a strange touch of irony the Geneva Bible Society bought his house, used his press, printed Bibles and stacked some of the copies in the very place where Voltaire had been living.

You cannot get rid of the word of God. There's something so unique that it's bound up within the purposes of God to preserve this book for for everyone. The word of God cannot be bound.

You can't bind a lion, you can't bind someone like Samson not for any length of time and you can't conceivably bind this word. It's God's word, it's self-authenticating word, it's a historical word, it's a true word but the most important thing and I never did get around to using those notes, the most important thing is it's a personal word. I finish with this.

I was alarmed the other day to hear a quote from a leading preacher in this country. I didn't like the particular implications of his theology. He said this, the Bible is God's word yesterday and prophecy is God's word today.

No way. The Bible is God's word yesterday and today and forever and the ministry of prophecy however you understand it from our morning address is to apply the living word of God. When the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews quotes from the Old Testament, do you know how he does so? He doesn't say God said, S-A-I-D or Seth if you're using the authorised version.

He said God says S-A-Y-S. The reason? Generally speaking, God is always generally speaking and where does he speak? He speaks through his word and his word is an authoritative word. It's a personal word but it demands your response as the word points you to the cross and all that Jesus has achieved there.

You meet the Lord God by his word and through the offering of our Lord Jesus and his mighty resurrection. Now have you responded to that? For the man who does not respond to and is ignorant of the message of the Bible is ignorant to his eternal disadvantage. Let us pray.

Father, we come before your throne. You're the God who lives and the God who speaks, the God who communicates, the God who relates and we want to thank you for this. And I want to pray as many mature Christian believers join me in prayer for every young and for every not so young person who is uncommitted to the truths of scripture and we ask Lord that you will cause them to know the fascination of the word of God as many of us here testify to it.

We praise you for the faithful way in which it's been passed down. We thank you for the way that it speaks to all our moods, to all our situations and even the complexity of the 20th century in no way frustrates the Bible because it has something to say to every situation. But Lord you speak most eloquently, most powerfully when the word tells us about Jesus.

Help all here to make a response to him and confess him, the Lord of scripture as being also the Lord of their salvation. Amen. Standing, standing, standing on the promises of my Saviour.

Standing, standing, standing on the promises of my Saviour. And Father for the impregnable rock of holy scripture we give you our thanks but help us to work out the implications of this address and keep us all close to the message of the Bible, chewing it over, digesting it until it becomes part and parcel of our lives and lifestyle and ultimately preparing ourselves for that day when we step out of the anti-room into the great house of heaven itself prepared by the word of God to meet the God of the word. Now send us on our way rejoicing, praising you for the certainties of your word amidst all the uncertainties of life.

Send us out with your blessing, the blessing of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit now and until Jesus returns to this earth or calls us to himself. Amen.