Reliable Truth

Does it really matter what we put our faith in? If you’re going to really put your faith in something, it has to have a strong foundation to undergird it - otherwise it’s just blind speculation. Think about it this way: you can have very little faith in thick ice and it will hold you up just fine when you walk out onto it. On the other hand, you can have enormous faith in thin ice, and you can drown. It’s not the amount of faith you can muster up that matters. In fact, Jesus says that your faith may be tiny like a little mustard seed, but He says, you must invest your faith in something that is solid. Because the bottom-line is that faith is worthless, belief is worthless, your hope is worthless, if it’s built on that which is false and unreliable.If Jesus is the Son of God, and if Christianity is true, then there must be a uniqueness to them both that sets them apart from all other religions. You see, all the other religions of the world contend that a person comes into the world and gives us information about God and how we’re to live our lives. But in Christianity, God Himself came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. John chapter 1 says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” The apostle Peter adds in 2 Peter 1:16, “We were eyewitnesses of His majesty.”The central message of every other religion is that you are saved by what you do, but the teaching of Christianity is just the opposite. You are not saved by what you do but by what Jesus has done. You’re saved not by following His teaching, but by what He did on the cross. Jesus has entered history and lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died. Atonement has been made. If we are to be saved by grace, these historical events had to happen. Christianity is a concrete religion like no other. It is concerned about truth, reality, and the historical record.

We live in a time where the ideology of religious pluralism is becoming more and more dominant in our culture. A religious pluralist is one who believes that all religions are different paths that lead to the divine, and therefore, all religions are valid. In other words, it’s like there’s this one God out there but He just wears many faces when you look at the landscape of all the world’s religions.You see, all religions make certain true claims about spirituality, but the question is, "Are their claims true?" C.S. Lewis said that modern people don’t seem to care about whether it’s truthful or not. They’re only interested in how it appeals to you and how it makes you feel - how it fits into your life.A couple years ago I was sitting at a table with a guy who wanted to talk about the existence of God. We'll say his name was John. I suggested a good starting point is, that God either exists or He doesn’t. One of those statements is true and one of those statements is false. His response to me was, no, both of them can be true. Well, there was another guy sitting at the table and he was an accountant. The great thing about accountants is that they are very objective. He just spoke up and said, “No, John, Richard’s right. Either God exists or He does not exist. They both cannot be true. They both cannot be true statements.

How do we know the Bible is a divine book? What makes it different from any other ancient history book or book on philosophy? The answer to it is quite simple. Christians believe the Bible is the Word of God for one main reason. Because Jesus says it is. Think about that for a minute. Jesus puts His stamp of approval on the Old Testament. In fact, on 92 occasions, Jesus and His apostles supported a position they took by saying “It is written” and then would quote the Old Testament. And the reason they did it is because Jesus and His apostles considered the Old Testament scriptures to be the written Word of God and therefore the ultimate authority in life. Jesus' apostles were eyewitnesses to His glory. Clearly, as His representatives, they were to write out and approve the New Testament record. In effect, Jesus has confirmed that the written word in the past, the present, and the future, is God’s primary means of communicating with humanity. And therefore, the real question becomes not is the Bible the Word of God, but is Jesus the Son of God? Does Jesus have the authority to put His stamp of approval on the Old Testament? Does He have the authority to appoint men to write out the New Testament? I don’t have that authority. I can’t say the Bible is divine because I say so. Only God can do that. And so, today I close our this study with the big question - is Jesus God?

How can we know that the Bible is the inspired word of God? Amos 4:13 tells us, "Behold, He who forms mountains and creates the wind, and declares to a person what are His thoughts, He who makes dawn into darkness and treads on the high places of the earth, the Lord God of armies is His name." You see, human speech that can be clearly understood, documented through the written word, is the model that God has chosen to reveal Himself to us down through the ages. So how did this written word come into being? In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah said that "the word of the Lord came to him", and in the New Testament Peter said in 2 Peter 1:20-21 that, "No prophecy of Scripture becomes a matter of someone’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." English theologian John Stott says, “So Scripture is neither the Word of God only nor the words of men only, but the Word of God through the words of men,” and Stott goes on to say, “This is the double authorship of scripture to which we need to hold fast.” So biblical truth is inspired truth. Not only that, but it is also eyewitness truth. As 2 Peter 1:16, making reference to the Transfiguration, Peter says, “We were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” So the apostles who authored and approved the New Testament books were eyewitnesses of the Risen Christ.I also will discuss the astounding fact that Jesus fulfilled every one of the Messianic prophecies. This is another powerful piece of evidence that points to the validity of the Bible.

Are moral choices just a matter of individual taste? During the summer of 2008, the imminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted an in-depth interview with 230 young adults from across America. When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people couldn’t answer the question. Instead, they described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong, but aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school, or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. "Who am I to say what’s right or what’s wrong?" many of them concluded. There seems to be a moral confusion in our world today. I contend that God is the ultimate moral lawgiver and his moral law is found in the Bible. The Bible is our moral compass, where we can have moral certainty. It eliminates the confusion that we see all around us, in what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil, what is moral and what is immoral.

Why doesn’t God speak to us from Heaven in an audible voice? Why doesn’t He just speak and let His presence be known? I believe the primary reason is that if the infinite God of the universe regularly spoke to us from Heaven, we would be terrorized into loving and listening to Him. Such a direct and demonstrative communication would create a situation where God actually forced Himself on mankind. Serving and listening to Him would almost become compulsory. True love exists only when we choose to love from a condition of freedom.Ironically, just yesterday, I happened to come across this in the book of John, chapter 12, verse 37. Jesus had performed many miracles, including raising Lazarus from the dead, that was witnessed by large numbers of people. Yet look what the verse says: “But though He had performed many miracles before them, yet they were not believing in Him.” It's true that God has chosen not to regularly appear in a visible way. But it's also true that He has not hidden Himself, so that He can be found by those who truly seek Him. This is the promise He makes to mankind, "If you seek Me, you will find Me."

Is there good reason to believe that the Bible is the Word of God? I am convinced that true faith has to have a foundation, and the stronger that foundation, the greater your faith will be. The Christian's faith is not blind faith. Blind faith is worthless, based only on certain conclusions but not on any evidence. Christianity is the only word religion where spiritual truth depends on the veracity of historical events. But how trustworthy is the Bible?  How trustworthy are those who wrote the Bible? Has what we have today been transmitted to us faithfully over the centuries? Documentation is crucial when it comes to history and truth proposition, which is what the Bible is. And this is why the Biblical documents have been handed down to us with such great care with the passage of time. And yet, there are many people, maybe you, who wonder about the relevance of it. So today, I want to talk about ancient documents, and the Bible in comparison with all other ancient literature that’s been passed down to us.

Are science and religious beliefs at war with each other? There are three different ways that people see the relationship between science and God. The first is the belief that science and faith are at war with each other. This is the approach that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris take - that science has the edge in credibility because it’s about provable facts, and religion depends on faith. The second is that they have nothing to do with each other. The great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard was an atheist and believed that science and faith occupy distinctly different domains. He said that science covers the empirical universe, while religion extends to the issue of morality, values, and meaning.The final one is that the testimony of science points to, it doesn’t prove, but points to the existence of God. Dr. Steven Meyer, who has degrees in physics, geology, and a doctor’s degree in history and philosophy of science, all from the prestigious Cambridge University, says that, “new evidence has come to light in the last 50 years across a wide range of the sciences that supports a belief in God.”Dr. Allan Rex Sandage, who is considered the greatest observations cosmologist in the world, turned heads when he became a Christian at the age of 50. He said that the Big Bang was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. He said, "It was my science that drove me to this conclusion. It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence." And then he said, "Many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work."

Is there credible evidence that shows that the Biblical story is in harmony with secular history?Unlike other religious literature, the Bible is not centered in a series of moral, spiritual, and liturgical teachings. The Bible centers around what God did in history and what He revealed in history. Peter Moore, the founder of Trinity Seminary said that Christianity is the only world religion to make spiritual truth depend on historical events. English historian and author Paul Johnson bolsters this truth by stating, “Christianity is essentially a historical religion. It bases its claims on the historical facts it asserts. If these are demolished it is nothing.”Last week I shared stories of people who were convinced the Bible was a book full of myths. But once they were confronted with the strong possibility that the Bible was historical and true, it led each of them down a path to Christ. If the Gospels are true, then Jesus, the Son of God coming into the world would be even as talk-show host Larry King has admitted, the defining moment in all of history. And so today I want to talk with you about Christianity and the historical record. For me, it all started when I stumbled upon a history book of ancient Rome over 30 years ago. 

How do we know that the Bible is truly God’s written revelation? It’s a legitimate question. This question always seems to come up in our culture and in our world today, and it plagues the skeptical mind. And how can such an ancient document have any relevance to modern life? As C.S. Lewis was on his search, he stated honestly, “What I could not understand was how the life and death of someone else 2000 years ago could help us here and now.” I asked the same question years ago. I realized that I first accepted the Bible as God’s written revelation because several people that I trusted told me that it was. But I was never given a good reason. You know, just believe it. Just have faith in it. As I look back, I felt that I was being told not to doubt. I believe this can be dangerous in a person’s life because it can take us in many different directions. For me, personally, I needed to know why I should believe it is God’s word. What kind of evidence is available, to show that the Biblical story is in harmony with secular history?