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OPENING
We’re continuing our sermon series this morning, “Questions and Answers.”
We answered the question last week, “What Are the Riches of God’s Grace?”
Some of the other questions I hope to answer in the coming weeks are:
“Is My Salvation Eternally Secure?”
“Do My Words Have Power?”
“What is Pentecostalism and What is the Deal with Speaking in Tongues?
But the question that I hope to answer for today is: “Can We Trust the Bible?”
The list of people and things that I trust is growing shorter by the day.
News
Media
Internet
Can’t even trust myself some days
What is the truth?
Fact vs. Fiction
Reality vs. Conspiracy
Sanity vs. Stupidity
You can’t take some people at their word anymore, but there is One whose Word we can trust!
He cannot lie
His Word is 100% accurate
We can trust the Word of God
We can rely on it
We can depend on it
We can build our lives on it
We can stake our eternal souls on it
But the trustworthiness of the Bible is under attack today like never before.
The question is:
Is the Bible the Word of God?
Is the Bible the truth?
Is the Bible our authoritative source of faith and conduct?
The answers to those question may seem like they should be a simple yes, but believe it or not, there is a lot of confusion and disagreement about the trustworthiness of the Bible.
And not just from atheists, but from evangelicals.
And in some cases, from prominent mega churches here in the U.S.
Play clip from Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
SCRIPTURE
MESSAGE
How Did We Get Our Bibles?
From Divine Revelation
God has chosen to reveal Himself to us.
Ill.
Hide and Seek
Types of Revelation:
General Revelation
Special Revelation
Through Divine Inspiration
Back in our text from 2 Timothy, it says that Scripture came by “inspiration of God.”
“Inspiration of God” means “God-breathed.”
God the Holy Spirit superintended the writing of the Bible.
This does not mean it was mechanical dictation.
The Holy Spirit moved on these men to write exactly what God wanted written, but God allowed their personalities, writing styles, and experiences to be written into the text.
By Divine Illumination
How can we be sure that we can understand the Bible and exactly what God intended to reveal to us about Himself?
These things are revealed to us through the Holy Spirit.
The reading of God’s Word is not like reading any other book.
A believer, who is in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit, has divine assistance in understanding God’s Word.
Why Can We Trust the Bible?
The Bible is Inerrant
Inerrant means “without error.”
God is perfect and cannot lie and cannot make a mistake.
He is inerrant.
Since God is inerrant, His Word is inerrant.
The Bible is Infallible
Infallible is similar to inerrant, but has a slightly different meaning.
Infallible means “incapable of error.”
Not only does God’s Word not contain errors, but it is incapable of having errors because of God’s nature.
So how do these terms inerrant and infallible apply to the Bible?
The Bible was written over a period of almost 1600 years by around 40 different authors.
God so perfectly superintended the writing of the 66 books of the Bible (39 Old and 27 New) that they are all in perfect harmony with each other.
The Bible is a miracle of God both in revelation and preservation.
But we do not have any of the original autographs.
What we have are called manuscripts, which are hand-written copies of the originals.
But we don’t even have first copies of the originals or even copies of the copies of the originals.
When we say that the Bible is “inerrant” and “infallible,” we are referring to the original autographs.
So what about our modern English translations?
Can we trust them to be the Word of God?
Since our claim to “inerrancy” and “infallibility” apply to the original autographs, and we have none of the original autographs, here is what we are not saying:
We are not saying the KJV is the only inerrant and infallible translation.
If it is, then why has it been revised multiple times since 1611?
We are not saying the NIV is inerrant and infallible.
We are not saying the Thomas Nelson publishing company is inerrant and infallible.
We are not saying that the chapter and verse numbers are inerrant and infallible.
What we are saying is that the Word of God is inerrant and infallible as it was given to and written down by the original authors through divine revelation and inspiration.
So the question then that we really need to ask is can we trust that the Bible translations we have today are the Word of God?
And the answer is yes, we can be assured that our major translations of the Bible, to the extent that they are faithful to the original texts, reliably communicate the infallible Word of God to us today.
But doesn’t the Bible contain errors and contradictions?
This is a fair question, because skeptics will use the fact that we do not have the original autographs and the fact that there are discrepancies between different manuscripts and apparent errors in some manuscripts to say that the Bible is solely a man-made document that is filled with errors and therefore can’t be the Word of God as we claim.
First, let’s distinguish between the Old and New Testaments.
We have fewer manuscripts for the Old Testament, but they are of a very high quality and they contain very few, what are called, variants, or discrepancies.
The New Testament has a lot more quantity of manuscripts let’s focus on the New Testament.
Today we currently have around 28,000 manuscripts of the New Testament.
When all of these manuscripts are compared to each other, some claim that there are up to 400,000 variants.
But there are only around 138,000 words in the New Testament, which means there would have to be more than 2 variants per word.
So what’s up?
About 99.8% of those variants are trivial differences.
Like differences in spelling.
The remaining variants, which are only a few hundred, do not affect or change any major doctrines.
So the differences are basically meaningless.
Also, we have an incredible number of sources other than the 28,000 or so New Testament manuscripts that confirm the consistency and accuracy of the Word of God.
There are approximately 500,000 letters and documents that we have from the early church period that have Bible verse quotes in them.
In fact, there are so many, that we have enough of these letters and documents, that even if we didn’t have one single manuscript, we could still completely reconstruct the entire New Testament.
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