Back to the Basics:

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the heat again. Wow, it’s hot. It’s not hot, it’s hot, it’s Ohio. But it’s not bad at all. We do need some rain, though.

So, I started this as proving the Church that’s kind of a three-part series, I guess you could call it, looking at how, when you’re baptized, you go through three different things you have to focus on. You have to prove that the Bible is the Word of God, prove God exists, and in the order: you prove God exists, prove the Bible is His Word, and then you prove where the true Church is.

Ironically, as I said in the last message, you lose it in the opposite order. You tend to forget where the Church is, start to give up the Bible, and then eventually lose God altogether. So, as we did in the first part, proving where the Church is, today we’re going to pick up that baton and continue to walk down this path as we try to prove what the Word of God is, what the Bible is, and why do we have it. It’s important. It’s a huge, huge thing. It’s something that I think many of us, especially over time, just simply take for granted.

Because if it’s not God’s Word, it’s just a history book. Then the promises, the teachings, the doctrines, the commands, they collapse. If we can’t prove this is the Word of God, the foundation of what you and I believe, and frankly what billions think they believe in, professing Christianity, collapses. You need the Church to show you how to put the doctrines together, but you need the Bible to be able to have those doctrines have a source. God’s not talking to human beings today.

I hope by the end of this sermon, you see that book on your laps a little bit differently. A little bit more... says, look at it with more sincerity or more seriousness. How unique it is that God put that book together, and we’re going to hit it in a bunch of different ways. I don’t think I’m actually touching on anything that’s in the Bible Authority book, so you can even go further than this. But trying to hit it with different ways, so you walk away and think, “Wow, it’s special that this three-quarters of a million words, seven hundred and fifty thousand-ish words exists, and we can learn from it.”

Some of these proofs will be more self-proofs as they’re self-references. They’ll be proofs from in the Bible, confirming the Bible, but by the end of the message, you’ll see we’ll get to a place where we’re proving things that are impossible using the Bible as the only source of that knowledge. So let’s start it right in at Luke chapter one. Luke chapter one and verse one. Luke chapter one and verse one. “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us.” I still hear flipping, so Luke one verse one. It’s a really hard book to find, I understand.

That was verse one. Verse two. “Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” So eyewitnesses. “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto you in order, most excellent Theophilus, that you might know the certainty of those things wherein you have been instructed.” Go back to what the epistles are.

Stop for a second and realize, have you ever written a letter to someone and it went in the mail, it went however it got there, you can even modernize and say an email. Most of the time, those are transitory, they’re temporary. You write a letter, if you’re someone who saves, you may file it away somewhere, but it sits hidden, gone, the letter’s done. But that’s not what happened with these letters, because that’s all they were. They were just simply letters. Luke here focuses on the eyewitness testimonies that took place over and over again.

Yes, if you’re going to step back and take a scientific approach, you can’t use the Bible to prove the Bible. Well, you’ll see you can, but at the same time, these foundational elements of these eyewitnesses simply build on the picture that we’re going to put together. Let’s go to First Corinthians, see Paul’s perspective. Chapter fifteen. First Corinthians chapter fifteen. We’ll start in verse one here as well. First Corinthians fifteen and verse one.

“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have received and wherein you stand, but which also you are saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain. You could forget it. For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, that how Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen of Cephas, and then of the twelve after...” Look how detailed this is. How specific details that were laid out here.

If you’re writing, unless you know something, you do not do this level of detail. You broad stroke it. You paraphrase. Unless you’re familiar with specific details of something, you don’t go into this level of specificity. “After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remained until this present, but some have fallen asleep. After that, He was seen as James, and then of all the apostles. And last of all, He was seen of me also as I was born out of due time.” He came along later. That was a blow-by-blow showing visualization, or description of the times that Christ was seen within just a few years after His death, when this was written.

This was someone who knew the details. It’s interesting. You can find some other early, call it Christian, call it whatever you want to do, because sometimes you get into what, were they Catholics, were the true Church, and sometimes history makes it a little bit blurry on some of the manuscripts you can find. But there are a couple from the late second and third century, so you’re now getting into second century, third century, so some time has started to pass, that include huge portions of Paul’s epistles. And several of them have even some of the Gospels.

You think, “Okay, why is that a big deal?” Well, if it’s just a letter, people aren’t copying and copying and copying it, and it’s getting distributed to various places. The fact that these other examples show it shows that there was something more going on with these letters at the time. There was a recognition that there was something more to them than just simply some letters to congregations. And they were accurate, too. This is the interesting thing as you go through this history and the samples. The accuracy from copying remained very, very good.

So that was Paul. Let’s go to John, John chapter twenty-one. Again, we’re just building up here. John chapter twenty-one, we’ll start in verse twenty-four. John chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-four, “This is the disciple which testifies of these things, and wrote these things, and we know that His testimony is true. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they had been written, should be written every one, I suppose even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” There was so much detail about Christ’s life that could have been written that wasn’t.

But in another case, John said, I was there. I’m a disciple. I testified. I was an eyewitness of these things. Fascinating, and this again, is history, we get little snippets of papyrus or stone tablets or various others that show up all throughout history that give us a window into how serious it was to make sure we were accurate. Ryland’s papyrus is around a hundred and twenty-five A.D. So just about a hundred years after... a little less than a hundred years after Christ died, actually contained large fragments of this gospel account, John’s gospel. Again, accurate.

The fact that it was circulating, everyone made copies of it. You don’t do that with a letter. Even if you get love letters from someone overseas, you’re not making copies and then sending them out to everyone. That’s not what happens with letters. But yet, these were recognized as something different, something very different. Then in... it’s another fellow called Papias or Hierapolis from Hierapolis, second century. I’m going to brutalize a lot of names in this sermon, just so you’re aware. Why can’t it just be Peter and Paul, and John? Historians make them sound smarter, I guess.

The early second century Church, around this time, Eusebius, was quoted or cited by Eusebius in this book, this fellow. Let me explain this clearly. You have Papias. He was a figure in the second century. Eusebius wrote Ecclesiastical History, so one of those early history books. But he quoted and referenced Papias. Why is that special? Well, those quotes were talking directly from what Papias did in his five-volume summary, which has been lost to time, but this history book has snippets of it. He detailed, and his mission was to give firsthand accounts and record firsthand interviews of people who had seen Christ.

The fragments talked about how he saw Mark, from memory, write his Gospels out. You think of the Holy Spirit brings all things back into remembrance. So he was remembering all of these details from memory, and this fellow, recorded through another individual, saw it happen. He saw Peter. He tried to meet some of the others. I think he was a friend of Polycarp. So individuals that, for us, are just names in a history book, but the fragments of the history come forward into our modern time, so we can see how the Bible was laid out. They were copying all these epistles.

So that was, what, sixty to a hundred and thirty A.D., about that time. Then you had two or three around similar, a hundred and twenty A.D. historians who, in their works, specifically Pliny the Younger and Tacitus, I’ll go with that, wrote in their manuscripts about these “Christians”. So a hundred and thirteen, a hundred and sixteen A.D. Again, we are less than a hundred years, seventy-five, eighty years from after Christ died. That these Christians, he wrote, as called them, derived their name and their teaching, this is not quoting, from a “recently crucified Christ”. That was in his manuscript. These Christians followed those teachings.

It was Christus, and it even included details that had happened in Judea. Josephus, the one most of us probably recognize, Jewish historian, considered Christ... He was a little further back, ninety-three, ninety-four A.D. this was written, mentioned Jesus was a wise man who was crucified under Pilate, reflecting early time in that period of history. That’s incredible. It’s so easy for you and I just to assume, because I do the same thing, I just assume, okay, Christ in His two thousand years ago, how He existed, but there were individuals who stopped and recorded events of His life outside the Bible to recognize and help us understand that He existed in a way that fortifies the Bible.

But again, we’re just getting started here. This is not meant to prove it. I’m just laying the framework and the foundation. But there are other witnesses, one that’s a little more known. Let’s see here. Go to Matthew chapter four. Matthew chapter four. Christ was also a witness to events that happened. Verse one, Matthew four, verse one, “Then was Jesus led up into the spirit, into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” Familiar account. “And there He fasted forty days and forty nights, and He was afterward hungered,” to say the least.

“And when the tempter came, he said, if you be the Son of God, command these stones be made bread.” But what did Christ do? How important was the book, the scrolls at the time? “He answered and said to him, ‘It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’” God wasn’t walking around speaking. The word of God, the knowledge of God came from, at that time, would have been the scrolls that would have been stored in the temple, taken care of, very precious. And Christ said, no, that’s what you’re looking for. Go back to the scrolls.

Go ahead to Matthew chapter nineteen. Matthew chapter nineteen. Start in verse three, Matthew nineteen, verse three. “The Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him, saying unto Him, ‘Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?’ And He answered and said unto them, ‘Have you not read...’” Even by this point of time, Christ kept going back to the scrolls, the Bible, the Old Testament. “Have you not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female? And said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be one flesh.”

Two things here. God not only validated the Old Testament scrolls, He validated the creation of it. And there are other places throughout the New Testament where He talks about Adam, talks about Eve, furthering proving that the Old Testament was factual. This would have been the time, if there was something wrong, if God somehow, suppose, got off on Isaiah, or some part of Deuteronomy was inaccurate because of copying, this would have been the point when Christ was there, God on earth, to correct it. And He never did. He just simply pointed back to the Old Testament over and over and over again.

Okay, there’s one more here. John chapter ten. John chapter ten. Again, we’re self-proving right now. We’re using the Bible as a proof that would not hold up in a court of law, but it is building the foundation we’re looking at. John chapter ten and verse thirty-four. Verse thirty-four of John ten reads, “Jesus answered them, is it not written in your law?” He knew that they knew the scrolls, the Bible, the Old Testament. “Is it not written in your law I said you are gods? And if He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken,” or loosened or dissolved, is what it means.

Once Scripture is established, once those have been canonized, the Old Testament, they are locked. God says, “No, I’m not going to let it happen. I’m God. I lie not. I change not. Scripture cannot be broken.” So there are promises inherent in that. But again, we haven’t proven the Bible yet. If this isn’t the word of God, all the things that we’ve read are just simply history. But it wasn’t to the people of the time. It was unique for the last thousands and thousands of years of how they treated those scrolls. They saw them for what they are. And again, we’ll build up to some proofs that you can explain away.

The importance of those words were fundamental. Let’s go back to Deuteronomy when we’re kind of all started with some of the explanation. Deuteronomy chapter thirty-one, about two-thirds away through the book there, right near the end. Deuteronomy thirty-one. I’ll be jumping around a little bit today here. Deuteronomy thirty-one and verse twenty-four, thirty-one-twenty-four. “And it came to pass when Moses had made an end of the writing, the words of this law in a book...” So he finished writing all of what he wrote, “...until they were finished that Moses commanded the Levites, which bore the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, saying, ‘Take this book, take what I just wrote down, and put it in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there as a witness against you.’”

He said, “This is so important, I want you to store it on the side of the Ark.” Everything that was written, everything that was put down. God’s always considered the Bible and what He calls, and we call, understand as the word of God to be crucial to what you and I have as a foundation. We don’t have the instruction manual without these books. We live in a cushy time now. It’s so much easier to do Bible study with computers and technology and cross-translations, tons of materials that are available.

But without those early manuscripts, without them being meticulously copied over and over again, we wouldn’t have gotten to a time when things can be digitally stored and saved and permanently archived. Imagine generation after generation just sitting there, writing out the books, putting those scrolls in the temples, putting those scrolls wherever they were at the time, and then be able to save them and archive them, and control them. A lot has passed since then, but God’s always considered what His word is to be solid, undissolvable, and the foundation of what you and I are doing.

Let’s go back to the New Testament, Second Peter. Second Peter, chapter three. We’ll start in verse fifteen. Verse fifteen of Second Peter three. “And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation, even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him has written unto you...” Again, these are just letters. It’s almost impossible for you and I to appreciate what should be so insignificant became so significant because we see it as the Bible. We see it as the canonized Bible in the modern time that all sitting here, they were just letters. They were just letters.

But even in that time, they understood. And you wonder, was God’s spirit guiding them? Of course it was, but how did they fully understand what we’re about to read? Verse sixteen, “As also in his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to be understood...” some of his writings. “...which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, even unto their destruction.” That’s a huge word. Peter just called Paul’s writing Scripture. How did they understand it at the time? He knew that there was something there, which makes complete sense why fifty or a hundred years later, those writings were being copied and distributed.

It was understood they were part of Scripture. Just a simple word in the Bible changes what that meaning could be, the other Scriptures. So it should be no surprise that people were keeping track of them, and they’re showing up in manuscripts and various other documents throughout that early Church era. Because they saw these were not just letters. The epistles were not just writings to a congregation. They were God-breathed, we’ll see later. They were something that was inspired, and then they were inspired to take care of them and preserve them in a different kind of way.

Let’s go back to the end of the Bible, Revelation twenty-two, very end. You know this, but it’s interesting how God capped it when we’re talking about the canonization and the structure of the Bible. Revelation twenty-two, and verse eighteen of Revelation twenty-two, “For I testify unto every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book. If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city.”

This is the point, the end of the book of Revelation, God said, “We’re done, close it up. It’s been canonized. This is the Bible. Don’t add to it,” in this case, specifically referencing Revelation, but you can think of the concept of the whole Bible. It was done. Scripture was in place. We have to bring ourselves back. They didn’t have these. Documents were not simply bound and sitting on your lap with a nice leather cover, being able to put them in your bag, and take them out. No, they were scrolls that had to be very carefully maintained, or they disintegrated. They were stored specially, they were kept in containers. Preserving them was far more difficult than what you and I do today.

Now you get free Bibles. You don’t have to even think of it. And this time, oh, it was very, very different. How did they even store the New Testament? The Old Testament was easy because it would have been in the temple until it was ransacked. And, at the time, they would have had systems in place for what would have been thousands of years. But what about the New Testament? Many of those writings would almost be considered in a word at the time, illegal to have. They were going after those early Christians. But yet they somehow, somehow, managed to maintain all of those documents, copy those documents, accurately continue to reproduce them until the sixteen hundreds when we could start printing them.

It was all done by hand before that. Let’s go to Psalm twelve. Psalm chapter twelve. We’re reading several verses you’ve probably read before, but we’re emphasizing aspects of them that you probably haven’t thought about. Here’s one you’ve probably... you’ve memorized this one, or at least the last part of it. Psalm chapter twelve and verse six. Psalm twelve, six, “The words of the Lord are pure as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” How many times have you said, “Well, the Bible’s been purified seven times.” This is the verse, but we often don’t continue on to the next verse. “You shall keep them, oh Lord. You shall preserve them from this generation forever.”

What’s it coming off of? It’s coming off of the words of the Lord are pure. God keeps those words. He preserves them for this generation forever. So it should be no surprise that we have the book that we have today and the precision that it exists because God said, “I’m going to preserve those words. I’m going to keep them. I want to make sure the instruction manual that I created, my word, word of God for mankind, doesn’t get corrupted or distorted,” because any other publication of any sort that would be passed down over generations and generations slowly gets changed.

Play telephone with someone, play telephone with five people, and give an easy statement. Let that get passed down or through a group. And then it comes back to you and you think, “What in the world?” Because that’s how humans work, to meticulously write and transcribe what would have spanned potentially in languages they didn’t understand. It’s incredible to think what had to go into place to be able to make sure the Bible stayed the Bible. But then again, God says, He’s the one that did it. He’s the one that forced it.

We’re here in the Old Testament, so we’ll go to Isaiah forty. Again, we’re still just setting up. This is all foundation. We’re getting to a point, and we will cross over there. We may not be there for you yet, or you may get there eventually, of where the coincidences and the improbability start to stack up too much. And you think, “Okay, there’s no way. You may already be there, but it’ll keep going. We’ll keep building it until we get to a point where you just simply can’t explain things. And there are things you already know, but you often don’t think about them in terms of how the Bible is structured or proving the Bible is the word of God.

Isaiah chapter forty and verse six, verse six of Isaiah forty, “The voice said, cry. And he said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and the goodliness thereof is of the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fades because the spirit of the Lord blows on it. Surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever.” We often talk about God standing forever, the word of God standing forever, about what God teaches. And that’s true. But what about what’s been written? It’s just as important because we can’t teach off whatever the document, the teachings, the doctrines, if we don’t have the original printed word as it exists today.

So when God says that, it’s not just His philosophies or approaches or teachings or doctrines exist forever. They do. He doesn’t change. The actual book does too. And it’s careful. If you look through the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they’ve done really specific comparisons, especially of Isaiah, which is fitting that we were reading it. But Isaiah has a lot of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So it’s particularly good for that in the historical context. But that ranged from, they’re written from anywhere about two hundred B.C. to right around sixty-eight, seventy A.D. So spanning about two hundred and seventy years.

If you compare it to what we have today and what the Jews were doing at the time, in Masoretic writings and what we have in the original languages, the Dead Sea Scrolls are ninety-five percent accurate to what we have today. Ninety-five percent. That’s remarkable. What’s even more remarkable is it wasn’t a hundred percent. Because if it was a hundred percent, you’d think, “Oh, no big deal.” But the fact that it was five percent off means God allowed some things to change. But He didn’t allow it to continue to change, or didn’t allow the changes to keep going, pulled them back. However, God did it. It’s mistranslations in the modern Bibles.

God allowed things to get into His word that were different than what was written in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was more accurate. We can’t know. But the nature of copying should have meant over time, it became less and less accurate. But it didn’t. It’s within five percent of accuracy in Isaiah. Again, these coincidences, they just keep building up, don’t they? This book is not Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s so much to it. You think of all the major publications you’ve read through the years. You get some big books, War and Peace, some really big novels, or history books.

Typically, those are written by, usually you have your main author, you’ll have editors and proofreaders, but you generally have an author, maybe two. There’s a reason for that. You have a voice, and you’re able to follow the story through. It’s like anything. It’s like a sermon. If I stop halfway through a sermon and I give my notes to someone else, they’re going to deliver and approach it and give that material in a way that’s different than what I would do it. Because each individual is going to do it differently. And that could be how they say it, what they say, and why they say it.

Take a book written by forty people over centuries, and somehow it doesn’t change. There are points when hundreds of years pass and there’s not another book of the Bible written. So that would have been generations copying what had existed. Then someone else came along. You had Isaiah, and you had the other ones that were contemporaries. And they had a different assignment, but yet what they said matched. God’s inspiration in the Bible means doctrines didn’t change for centuries, fifteen centuries plus of having forty writers writing three or seven hundred and fifty thousand plus words. That’s not possible without God saying He’s going to preserve them. Didn’t shift, didn’t change.

There are some, depending on how you count it, there are three hundred, over three hundred Old Testament prophecies about Christ, depending on how you break them apart. The fact that they were recorded accurately in various books, some referencing other books, some not even related, or they would have been contemporary, because that would have been the hardest thing to be accurate. If you’re a contemporary of another prophet, but you’re not, let’s say, assigned to the same city, the fact that their writings matched is actually more inspiring than if you were a hundred years after, because you had those writings to read, to come off of. But you had both.

Look at the nature of God throughout the Old Testament and the New. Didn’t change. Didn’t shift. Wasn’t modified. Human nature. Basic concepts to you and I today, we take them for granted, but the only reason we know is because they’re in the Bible, and for writers to keep that thread accurate through thousands and thousands of years, that has to be inspired. It has to be directed and guided externally.

Sin. Sin is defined in so many different ways by people who don’t use the Bible. And it shifts and changes, and modern sin, but sin is the same sin defined in the Bible from Genesis, when they just started out, disobedience of God, as they continued through, and as it was defined and shaped, and then finally we get, it’s a transgression of the law in the New Testament. But it’s been clear and it didn’t shift. And all throughout the book, the reward stayed the same. Focusing on the kingdom of God.

It’s almost difficult to not, I guess for me, but not get excited about the fact that coincidences happen. Of course they do. But to have everything line up, to have all of the words not contradict each other, and that’s another aspect of this single message. You should have contradictions in the Word of God. By any nature, a good author, an exceptionally good author who writes series of books, have to go back and will have mistakes that they contradict themselves, or they mess up a character, or they have an aspect to a story that changed over time. We do it with our own memories.

You and I will tell, as you’ve heard the expression, fish tales. So when I caught that little bluegill, that little bluegill I caught in the lake, and you tell that story ten minutes later, that bluegill that I caught in the lake, it expands over time, because that’s the way our minds work. We embellish and excite. But if you do that as you’re writing the word of God, or copying scrolls, or whatever the case may be, the story, the picture, the meaning, the message changes over time.

But we have on our laps a book that hasn’t changed over time, that hasn’t had contradictions slip in. Every time we see one, it’s always interesting, because there’s a few translations of the Bible. We use the King James, of course. Preach out of the King James. I enjoy reading from the New American Standard, because it’s very smooth, easy reading. But even the issues we have with translation, you pick up a new King James Bible and look at some of those, and they usually fix most of the translation issues that we have.

That said, God allowed it. And usually when there’s a contradiction of some sort, it’s simply you just go back to the original meaning, or look at a different translation and say, “Oh, okay, that was just translated wrong.” Or that expression was an old-time expression that means something different today. How do you have a book of this many words not contradict itself, not disagree in some way, shape, or form? Written over, again, centuries, millennia, by multiple writers, but yet the message stayed the same. It’s hard to even understand.

It’s so much so that when you get to the New Testament, what do they do in the New Testament? It’s not blazing a new trail here with the epistles. They’re simply pointing back to the Old Testament, and often not even accurately. So remember, you could take a different perspective. So you have all these New Testament writers, all the apostles, and Luke, and others who are quoting verses in the Old Testament loosely, to say the least. They’re paraphrasing. But yet, their paraphrasing add to the meaning of the message. They don’t contradict the message, or the expression, or the verses in the Old Testament. They build on them.

That in itself is miraculous, because they weren’t trying to be a hundred percent accurate. They were simply paraphrasing what was from the Old Testament. Of course, when they were writing, they didn’t have the scrolls out, looking at, “Okay, that was so sudden.” It would have done what you and I do when we talk about, well, the Bible talks about it being refined seven times, or the New Testament sends the transgression of the law. I’m paraphrasing those verses, and that’s what they did in their writings. But that is usually a recipe for contradictions and mistakes that would have fought what was written in the Old Testament. But it didn’t. It built and strengthened the Old Testament over thousands and thousands of years.

Let’s go back to Daniel. Look at some more of these. You’ll start to slip into some of the items that you just simply can’t explain away. Daniel chapter five. You probably know the chapter. I’ll let you turn there. Daniel chapter five, and verse twenty-five. Five, twenty-five. Jump in the middle of the account here. “And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE, God hath numbered your kingdom, and finished it.” Then twenty-seven, “You have been weighed in the balances, and are found wanting, and your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.”

You know what’s amazing? For years, I remember this going back because this was a verse back when I was atheist, and I liked to debate creationists. This was a verse that was used to show the Bible had contradictions, showed the Bible wasn’t historically accurate. Because there was no account of... was it Belshazzar? I’m getting the words today. There was no account of him being king. And I thought, how’s that possible? It’s written in the Bible. So therefore, the Bible’s not right. Not until about the mid-nineteenth century, and then it later became more prominently known, that they found these cylinders in Babylon that referred to both the king, Nabonidus is his name. And also his son, Belshazzar was his son.

And that document specifically mentioned that they co-reigned. So both were acting as king, which makes sense because if you think of the account in Daniel as it continues, what is that? Daniel, I think Daniel five, Daniel five, or Daniel seven. It talks about that he was given the third position. Daniel was given the third position in the kingdom. How could you get the third position if you were given it by the one who would have been in the first position? So he got the highest position next down underneath this king, but the Bible describes it as the third position because you had two co-reigning kings. So the next highest position would have been the third position. And that’s why Daniel’s role was so exquisite.

But for many, many years, people looked at that passage and said, “Ah, see, look, the Bible’s not accurate. The Bible doesn’t say everything,” but you needed both the accuracy of those scrolls or the cura forms, and also being able to have the detail that showed that it wasn’t just one king. No, they were co-regents. So therefore, Daniel got the highest position or received the highest position in that kingdom underneath the kings. Why does that matter? Well, it shows the historical context of the Bible being accurate. It shows how little details meant this book was accurate.

We search and find and dig and find various aspects to show history, how people get so excited to find a scroll or a cura form or a monument or whatever the case may be to be able to understand an element of history. It’s all written. It’s all here. And every time we keep learning more, we find new things or there are new discoveries. It just reinforces the book. Brethren, God has given you access to knowledge that no one else understands. They pick this up, not understanding or appreciating the way you and I can with God’s spirit how unique the Bible is, how unique of a document, never mind that it’s inspired of God. Never mind it’s the instruction manual for mankind.

If this was about horse maintenance and it lasted thousands of years and was written with forty authors over centuries, it would still be an amazing book. It would be impossible. But not when God says, “No, I’m going to maintain my word. I will keep it throughout time.” Let’s go to Second Kings. Let’s touch on some of these historic events. I’m going to look at some elements where we bring in monuments and scrolls, and various other outside items that were from periods of time that reinforced the Bible.

Again, this is showing its history is accurate because a core element is making sure the Bible is not wrong. So if it’s wrong, then it’s not the word of God. The standard is so high. Did you know there is a percentage standard, acceptable incorrectness, if you will, for Britannica? They allow a certain level of incorrect in there because it’s also natural to happen. Things get wrong, misprints, someone sources things wrong, and that’s considered a crucial encyclopedia. It’s so bad that on major subjects, Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica on certain subjects.

So the standard doesn’t have to be perfect for Britannica or Wikipedia, or any other historians. They’re not held to the, “It’s got to be perfect standard.” But the Bible is. If it’s not perfect, mistranslations, yes, but if it’s not perfect, then it’s not the word of God. That says a lot. That is a very high standard to hold. Second Kings, you’re probably there. Chapter eight. Second Kings eight. We’ll start in verse sixteen. Second Kings eight and verse sixteen. “In the fifth year of King Joram, son of Ahab, and began Ahaziah to reign over Judah. Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he began to reign. And he reigned one year in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Athaliah, the daughter of Omri, king of Israel. That’s important. Omri, king of Israel. And he walked in the ways of the house of Ahab, and his mother was his counselor to do wickedly, and he did evil in the sight and the Lord, etcetera.”

The son or the daughter of Omri, the king of Israel. Why is that a big deal? Because they found a monument, a Moabite monument dated about eight hundred and forty B.C. So accurate in timing that references Omri and the house of Israel, just like it’s described here in Second Kings. In fact, in most of the time, it’s when Israel did poorly. The historians are... what do they say? It’s the winners who write history. So usually the accounts we have that corroborate the Bible are often because Israel, Judah were making mistakes and God let them be taken over, put into captivity.

And when they lost whatever war they were in, well, the people who won wanted to write that down. “We took down Israel.” So, it was basically boasting of how they took down Omri, the king of Israel. It’s called the Mesha Monument from King Mesha of Moab. There’s another monument, an Egyptian one that’s carved by a Pharaoh about his campaigns in Canaan. And most significantly, this is one of the first extra-biblical mentions of historic Bible references because it was discovered first. The date’s about twelve hundred and eight B.C. So, it goes really far back, but it’s the first extra-biblical mention of Israel outside the Bible.

It seems, well, of course, Israel’s in the Bible. Well, you and I believe the word of God. If you’re coming into this way of life or trying to prove it, these historical connections are huge because most people dismiss the Old Testament. Even people who believe the New Testament or profess to will dismiss the Old Testament as old Hebrew literature or Hebrew folklore because they don’t believe the flood. They don’t believe creation. They dismiss the accuracy of the Old Testament. And it’s a little bit eating crow even for professing Christians when they find out, “Wait a second, that account was accurate.”

“Oh, look, Pharaoh did take out Omri, the king of Israel.” Or the words, when they’re translated, it says, “Israel is laid waste. Its seed is not.” Little did they know God was just on their cycle. Israel goes up, Israel goes down. There’s another one called the Tel Dan inscription from about ninth century B.C. It’s an Armenian king triumphing over “the king of Israel,” the house of David. It’s interesting because that was one of the first times there was an outside source that referenced the kingship of David in the Bible, because there’s not a lot of historical notes. And that is also what makes the Bible amazing.

So you have these little snippets we get of pointing to Bible figures and Bible references, because there’s not a lot of information, yet, we have this book that has been accurate for thousands of years. Thousands of years. That’s what we’re given. Here’s another one here. Let’s go to Second Chronicles. Second Chronicles chapter thirty-two, right near the end of Second Chronicles. Verse thirty, chapter thirty-two in verse thirty, “The same Hezekiah also stopped up the upper water course of Gihon and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his works.”

Okay. Just a little reference that’s thrown out, of a tunnel that was not until more recently, discovered, that it was accurate. When they discovered the tunnel, eventually digging it out because it all filled and whatnot. Once they dug it out, there’s actually a writing in this description, the Siloam Inscription that in ancient Hebrew describes the exact moment when the two teams met together and the tunnels were two separate tunnels. They dig from each side and they meet in the middle, which is remarkable when you didn’t have GPS or all the technology we have. So they couldn’t be too high, couldn’t be too low, left, right, but they met together. And then someone inscribed on stone how they met and what happened.

And it’s there. It was buried, and now we see it recounting this account. Again, thousands of years passed by. There’s another, it’s called Sennacherib’s Prism. It’s a book that he wrote, this ancient king, Assyrian king, how he caught Hezekiah like a bird in a cage is the phrasing he used. If you stop and read through Second Kings eighteen and nineteen, those two chapters, you will see that’s exactly what happened. But again, you have to lose for others to write your history down. But losing in those times also allowed us today to be able to see how the Bible continues to be accurate in all of these different references.

Okay, let’s continue to the New Testament now. John five. John chapter five. You’re in your mind thinking, “Okay, I get it, Mr. Schleifer, the Bible’s accurate.” This is the second thing you lose after you lose the Church. But if you fortify the Bible in the New Testament, you’re going to lose the Bible. You’re going to lose the Bible. You’re going to lose the Bible. You’re going to lose the Church. But if you fortify the Bible, you fortify your understanding of God’s Church. You further prove God exists, which we’ll do in my next sermon. You fortify the Bible, which means you fortify your understanding of God’s Church. These all work together.

It’s why they’re studied before baptism, so you and I know what we’re getting into and have that base foundation. And every once in a while, it’s good to go put a fresh coat of paint on that foundation. Help it last longer, be stronger. John chapter five and verse one. “And after this, there was the feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” Now they’re at Jerusalem by the sheep market, a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethsaida, having five porches. Remember this, five porches.

“And these lay a great multitude of impotent folks, of blind, of halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. And for an angel went down at a certain season of the pool and troubled the water and was healed. And a certain man was there, verse five, which had an infirmity for thirty-eight years. And Jesus saw him lying. He knew how long. He had been a long time, in this case. He said unto him, ‘Will you be made whole?’”

And you know the account. He said, “No, I can’t, I can’t get up. No one’s going to help me.” And then Christ healed him. That means in the Greek, it means a house of kindness. Questioned if it ever existed until relatively recently, in the last fifty, seventy years or so. Excavators were, as in Jerusalem, because you know old cities, they generally when they build old cities, they just simply knock everything down, tamp it down, and then build on top of it. Knock it down, tamp it. So you have layer after layer, and the cities get higher and higher over time. But that means there’s something underneath there if it’s carefully extracted, and archaeologists will do so.

So, excavators unearthed a deep complex tunnel of two pools and traces of ancient columns that were very, very consistent with this description. As they kept going, they found formations that formed into five pools. And then they continued on with those two pools, excuse me, and then five porches around those pools. Exactly like the account in John. Right down to the details. Because remember, the key elements were the accuracy in the detail. We started early with Luke and John, and others, and Paul recording tiny little details. If you weren’t trying to... if you were trying to pull the wool over my eyes or yours or whatever, you skipped the details because the details are where you get wrong. You get found out.

So why was so much detail given? And you can think of the mind as they write these. They found bathhouse that was related to it. They found other channels. And all of that account was verified by being able to dig up those ponds and porches and columns, and everything that would have been accurate for John’s time. Okay. You can dismiss everything that I’ve said thus far. We’re in a place where, “Well, Mr. Schleifer, that’s history.” Okay, great. The Bible is a good, accurate history book. Or the Bible doesn’t have flaws in it. That’s really good. That’s good to see. And does that make it the word of God? God’s spirit. And you probably say, yes.

But if you’re being a skeptic, so be a skeptic for a moment and say, “Okay, I don’t know about this.” You self-proof. So you use the Bible to prove itself. That’s circular proof. That would not hold up in a logic debate. You said the Bible was the word of God because it happened to get some historically accurate details correct, or historic details were accurate. And there were other things that it talked about that we found out that actually existed, those pools and the porches. But I’m not buying it. That just means it’s a good history book. That just means that someone did a really good job of keeping it accurate. Of course, the probability of that and everything we’ve talked about before doesn’t get thrown out the window.

But now we’re going to switch gears. Everything else we cover in the time remaining, we’re going to look at things that are impossible unless it’s the inspired word of God. So let’s go to Isaiah. You’re going to know most of these, but you haven’t framed them in the context of what we’re framing them today. Isaiah forty-six, a little setup on this, and then we’ll continue. Verse nine, Isaiah forty-six, and verse nine. “Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is none else. I am God, and there is none like me.” Verse ten. “Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far. Yes, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it, I will also do it.”

God alone is the being who can say things before they happen and then make them happen. No prophet or religious text or any of those documents. In fact, you get crazy people. They try to predict things, and they have to change and tweak them. And remember Nostradamus, it comes up every so often. Now it applies. No, God said, if I say something, it will happen. Okay, that was the setup. Daniel now. You don’t have time to read the whole account here in Daniel, but we’ll spot through it a bit. Daniel chapter two, excuse me.

Again, we take these for granted. When you were called, this was one of those mind-boggling things when the Bible was made so plain. Daniel chapter two and verse twenty-seven. Verse twenty-seven of Daniel two, “Daniel answered in the presence of the king, and said, The secret which the king demanded cannot wise men, astrologers, magicians, soothsayers, show unto the king. But there is a God in heaven that reveals secrets and makes known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days. Your dream, and the visions of your head upon your bed, are these.”

Daniel says, “It’s not me. It’s God in heaven who can reveal these things. These things that will happen in the future.” And God tells Nebuchadnezzar, “You’re the head of gold. The silver and the iron goes down the body, the feet that are mired with the clay, and goes on to describe these will be kingdoms. These will be successive world ordering kingdoms that one will succeed the next as you continue to go through of the Babylonians and the Medo-Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. Major world ruling empires that were announced hundreds of years in advance.

There’s no tweaking or interpreting. He simply says what’s going to come to pass, and it does. Hundreds of years in advance. Finally, describing what at the time would have been a foreign concept to the king, Nebuchadnezzar, but a stone that’s cut without hands. Obviously, the kingdom of God, which smashes those feet, and that man, when the kingdom of God comes to earth.

This was a prophecy that was recorded in Daniel hundreds of years before it happened. You know it so credibly well. You think about it, the iron head or the iron man. You can think of the pictures in our booklets. But you and I, it’s so easy to take it for granted that it’s just knowledge we know because it describes those kingdoms, and it helps us frame the king. But it was said hundreds of years before those kingdoms came to be. Never mind the kingdom of God is not here yet, and it saw the Roman at all of those times.

That’s one prophecy. Let’s go to another one, same Daniel, Daniel nine. Again, this is one you and I take it for granted because we read this all the time, especially when we’re looking at prophetic events today. Daniel nine and verse twenty-four. Verse twenty-four, “Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and on the holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make the end of sins.” The seventy weeks prophecy. “And to make reconciliation for iniquity, bring an everlasting righteousness, and seal up the vision and prophecy, and anoint the most Holy” and it continues on, “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem and the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks.” You know this account.

“Threescore and two weeks, and the street shall be built again, and the wall, even a troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks the Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself and for the people of the prince. They destroy the city and my sanctuary and the end thereof with a flood,” and continuing on. And we can often look at it because we’re trying to figure out the last week.

But we overlook the fact that the first sixty-nine had already taken place and defined exactly to the correct year when Christ would come, when Christ would die, and when Jerusalem would be upended. That’s impossible. It’s actually one of the verses that even Bible skeptics have trouble with, because you can’t guess that far in advance and get so accurate as it does with the seventy weeks prophecy. The only way you know that in advance is a being who exists outside of space and time, who can look at the entire timeline of mankind and say, I want you, Daniel, to record this. Because at some point in time, people will be amazed, like we get to be today, of how accurate I can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years in advance.

The Word of God is the Word of God. There’s no other book like it. There’s no other set of articles or stories or letters that attach together to form the picture that God gives us in this instruction manual. It’s just a gift that we’ve been given. You can think of other prophecies. We don’t have time to cover them all today. We wanted to build everything up, but we’re not done yet. We still have more time. Because you can use prophecy to prove the Bible. We looked at some. Go to Bible Authority. Can it be proven? Read that booklet again. You’ll see other elements in it. But there’s one that I particularly enjoy. You’ve heard me say before. Let’s go to Job twenty-six.

It’s saying, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s accurate. If you don’t know it, you don’t know it. Job twenty-six and verse seven. Verse seven of Job twenty-six. Let’s jump right in there. “He,” God, “...stretches out the north over the empty place and hangs the earth upon nothing.” That means to suspend. Hang, to suspend. So it’s no fancy way with the word. So here’s Job many, many, many thousands of years before we had any concept of how the universe works, who’s spinning where, what’s spinning around. It’s even more recently that we’ve really got the concept of being able to see how we fit in the Milky Way and all of the universe fits within itself to move and shape and expand, and all of the elements of space.

Yet here, just written in a verse in Job, defines that the earth is sitting out in space. It’s sitting and hanging on nothing. It’s not what they believed. At the time, the belief was there was either there was someone underneath the earth that’s holding it up. You’ve seen those statues, and I guess the Greeks who leaned on that and others thought it was dragons. There’s so many different things that went throughout history because the concept of nothing was not even something at the time. The idea of zero or nothing was not something that was really around or thought through, for probably what? Seven hundred years after. So the idea of suspending the earth and nothing would have been so foreign and impossible to a mind that no one would have conceived it. Yet it’s written in the Bible.

Brethren, that’s impossible unless you have a being who created those laws, who created the universe, who put that earth in the spot that’s absolutely perfect. The more you study the universe, the more precise it has to be. If that earth was a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, the moon was a little closer, a little further, any of those variables change. We don’t hang. We crash. Either the moon crashes into us or we take a slow, looping ride into the sun. But God said, “No, I’m going to hang it.” If you put your shirt on a hanger and hang it, it doesn’t go anywhere. That’s what God did with the earth. He suspended it in space, something that wasn’t even conceivable to the ancient mind. It wasn’t even conceivable two thousand years ago. Never mind, when this was written, what? Thirty-five hundred years ago or so. Only divine inspiration can do that.

Ecclesiastes one. It’s fun because often modern science tries to disprove the Bible. And so it’s a little bit of a joy for me to use science to prove it when modern science wants to disprove it. But there’s no answer for these because these are some of the most simple ones. I gave two-part sermon series on science in the Bible. So I’m just hitting a couple of the big ones. Ecclesiastes chapter one and verse seven. Another extremely simple one. Verse seven, “All the rivers run into the sea.” That was not understood, but it got more complex. “...yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, whither they return again.”

So what’s described here? So you have water going into the sea and then it comes to a place where it was clouds, rains back down, and continues that hydrological cycle. That happens over and over again because no one would have understood how on earth does the ocean not get fuller and fuller and fuller because all that water is going there. Not understanding the evaporation and that whole evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and then return to the ocean. That was understood and written here in Ecclesiastes twenty-five hundred years before modern man figured it out. Twenty-five hundred years.

Again, brethren, impossible without God. It’s not written in any other book. It’s not written in any other scroll. It’s not written and handed down over time in both of these facts. It’s written in the word of God that could only be constructed if there is a God who decided to preserve it, to inspire it, to include these facts, these details in it. Otherwise, it’s impossible.

Again, this book should feel so different to you by the time we’re done today. It is so special what we’ve been given, what we get to understand from it, the knowledge, the truth, all of the aspects that we sometimes can get blurred and caught up in the modern age when at the fundament of this is we get access to a book that the God who created the earth, who hung it, who created the hydrologic cycle, who did all of the things, the universe, we get access to the book he authored. We get access to be able to read the instruction manual for mankind that the one who created man authored. That’s why you prove that the Bible is the word of God, because it’s not anything that anyone else could have ever done. It’s unique of any book, of any knowledge.

Let’s look at another one here. Psalm eight. Psalm chapter eight. Got a couple more that we have time for. In verse eight. Psalm eight in verse eight, “The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas.” And that means paths. Paths of the sea. That inspired, it was Matthew Maury in the 19th century. He read that verse and said, “What do you mean paths of the sea?” At which he decided to start looking for them and discovered that the oceans have currents.

Because the Bible now, again, thousands of years before we understood this, said, no, no, he didn’t call motion currents. We call the motion currents, but they are paths. If you look at the jet stream and see when it hits those currents, what it does to the air, never mind the currents in the sea, or you take a boat or anything and drop it somewhere, that’s why you get items that wash up from across the ocean over in California or in the East Coast, because they’re following the paths of the sea. And here we are in Psalm, having it recorded, again, thousands and thousands of years. This one was by David. That is impossible.

Think what the Psalms even are. This was just a song. So David penned a song, obviously inspired by God, that included scientific knowledge that wouldn’t be understood for thousands of years. And it was just a song. I’ve got a son, we make up songs, we sing. It’s like, oh, I’m just randomly coming up with cold fusion. He just jotted down the song. And yet, it’s knowledge from the Bible that it would take us until the nineteenth century to even understand what it meant.

I think I fit one more, Leviticus. Leviticus thirteen. You’re probably seeing why I set up that I did today by looking at the authors and looking at what was said and how they talked about the Bible, why they cared about the Bible, how they felt about the Bible, preserving it, wanting to keep it where it was. Because once we get here, you and I should feel exactly the same way. We should not just see this as a simple book. Yes, we can print them and get more of them today. But the words, the knowledge, the understanding is precious. That’s why they were so careful. That’s why they thought of it over and over and over again.

Leviticus chapter thirteen and start in verse forty-five. Verse forty-five. “And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent,” or removed, “and his head bare.” So loses his clothes, shaves his head, “And he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean.” Oh, to be a poor leper. Imagine you’re basically... I’m hoping you got something to cover yourself up after you took your clothes off in this case, but doesn’t say it in the passage.

So not only that, you get a little something on your upper lip, and a mask is what was put on his upper lip. Do you think it was covering his upper lip? Because he was about to speak and say unclean, unclean. So they were trying to stop the germs that were coming out from his mouth, removing the clothing and his hair to get rid of the germs that could have been spread to other people. And he’s saying, “Unclean, unclean, keep your distance away from me. I’m not safe to be around until I get over this leprosy.”

Verse forty-six, “All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be made unclean. He is unclean. He shall dwell alone without the camp,” so outside the camp, “...shall his habitation be.” We’re going to put you in quarantine because you’re sick. It took three thousand years for people to realize that’s how germs work. Three thousand years to understand. It’s why the Jews got blamed over and over again through history, because they followed these laws that only could have come from God, that were written in a book that he inspired.

But people looked at them and said, “Oh, they must have caused this black plague or this illness,” because they followed these quarantine laws. And when someone was sick, they were put out of the camp. And understood how infection and bacteria, and things transferred. I didn’t get into the detail of how they worked, but God said, “This is what you need to know to fix the problem.” Again, thousands of years before, we would come to understand it today.

Brethren, the book you have on your lap, the book I have in front of me up here, is breathed of God. It’s given to us by our creator. It is the most profound facts, text, words, however you want to frame it, put together under a spine, under a cover that we have access to or will ever have access to. It’s the instructions on how you and I live. It’s instructions on how we can grow, how we can build character. The whole message today, we didn’t talk about the doctrines, the teachings, the truth, all of those elements that we get from the Bible, because those don’t matter if we can’t prove the Bible. They don’t matter. They don’t apply.

So we started today. We traced some of those eyewitnesses. We looked at them. We tried to determine, referencing why they were serious about it, how elements played out as they continued through the Bible. We saw that Christ did the same thing. He stood back and said, “No, I’m referencing Genesis. I’m referencing creation.” All these things are fulfilled. All the elements that he said he would do were done. Those hundreds of prophecies about Christ and he did them.

We looked at how careful they were when the Bible was canonized, all the details. We didn’t add extra books. The only folks that add the books are the Catholics. Everyone else agrees to the same Bible. That’s uncanny, because there are other manuscripts that could have been slipped in. People aren’t a little bit this, a little bit... No. It’s these words, these books, these chapters, and it was formed up to the point you got to Revelation, and Revelation said, “Okay, we’re done. Don’t add to it. Don’t take away.” What did the Catholic Church do? They add a bunch of books.

Then we looked at how complicated it would have been for that internal messaging with all of those writers over that span of time to create that unified message, how impossible it would have been to do that over thousands and thousands of years. Then we stepped back, looked at archeology for history, saw that it was accurate historically, and then proceeded to look at how prophecy would tie in to prove that the Bible foretold things that would be impossible otherwise. Then, finally, we looked at some science, whereas the Bible talked about elements of science that wouldn’t be discovered for thousands and thousands of years.

All of those together allow us to stop and then confidently look at that book on our lap and know, better now, hopefully than when we started today, and know that this isn’t man’s word, brethren. This book is not man’s word. This book, the one you have, the one I have, the one we can carry with us digitally, physically, that book is the Word of God.