Reasons to Trust the Clarity of Scripture
Selected Scriptures
A number of months ago I had the privilege of speaking on the campus of UCLA, of sharing with them the significance of Christian faith and the significance of the Word of God, the Bible. We had a wonderful day; it was a unique event which I enjoyed very, very much.
At that time, of course, since that was a message given other than at our church, some suggested that I might share the things I shared there with you here. It is a message really that pulls together bits and pieces of much of the things that I have taught through the years. Its intent is to demonstrate the validity of scripture and the message of scripture, which is the message of the Lord, Jesus Christ.
We live in a world for the most part that has no absolute standard for life and for behavior. We are under a fluctuating morality. Morality shifts with the whim of the people. The basic standard for behavior is whatever feels right. And that philosophy, which is pervasive in our society, do whatever feels right, whatever's right for you, whatever you really want to do, runs contrary to everything we know about in our world. A relative philosophy of life is contrary to the absolute world in which we live.
In our world, for example, science is based on absolutes. Our entire universe is built on fixed laws, invariable laws, laws that cannot be violated without tremendous and far-reaching and fatal consequences.
We can send satellites into space; we can send rockets into space; we can send people into space and we can accurately predict exactly the sequence of events that will take place, the trajectory of the rocket, the space occupied by the satellite or the space station or whatever it is. We can predict exactly how it will rotate around the earth. We can predict exactly, if it reentered, how it will reenter, where it will go and where it will land and when it will land, because everything is built on mathematics.
The entire universe is mathematically consistent. It is absolute in its scientific definitions. Whether you're talking about biology or botany or physiology or astronomy or mathematics or engineering, it is controlled by unalterable and inviolable laws.
Can you imagine, for example, if the laws of engineering were variable? What would happen? You would build a great skyscraper based upon laws that a week later changed. You'd have an unbelievable disaster. But the laws never change.
We live then in a world of fixed laws and yet strange to say we want to live in a world morally of relative laws. We want to live morally as if there were no laws, as if there were no rules. We want to determine our point of reference in our own mind.
As a man said to me on an airplane flying from New York City recently, he said, "I will determine in my own mind what is truth for me." So in the physical world we're very happy with fixed laws but as soon as we move into the spiritual realm, we want to abandon fixed laws. But they still exist, you cannot exist without laws in the moral and spiritual dimension any more than you can exist without laws it the physical dimension.
Our Creator, who made the universe, made it in terms of its physical identity and its moral and ethical identity as well, and he built morality into life. And just as there are physical laws, there are laws in the spiritual realm as well.
Let me give you an illustration, people ask me all the time whether I believe that AIDS is the judgment of God. And my response is yes, AIDS is the judgment of God in the same sense as sclerosis of the liver is the judgment of God, in the same sense as emphysema is the judgment of God. You say, "What do you mean?" If you drink alcohol you're liable to get sclerosis of the liver. If you smoke cigarettes you're liable to get emphysema and if you chose to violate God's standard for sexual purity, you're likely to contact venereal disease such as AIDS. It is a law. The Bible describes it as the moral law of sowing and reaping.
If you choose to violate God's sexual standard which says one man, one woman, married and that's the only place sexual relationships are to take place, if you violate that then you expose yourself to the law, the fixed law of morality that says, break God's law and suffer the consequence. Sowing and reaping.
Let me give you another illustration. Gravity is a fixed law. Gravity is a fixed law. Now you may come along and say, "I don't believe in gravity. I do not believe in the Law of Gravity." And you may advocate that, you may write a book on that. You may go on a speaking circuit and deny gravity but when you jump off a building, you will die. Because the Law of Gravity is not dependent on what you believe.
There have been some in history, who have, in their sort of Messianic complex, tried to defy such laws, they don't last too long. It doesn't matter what you believe, when you jump off a building you won't go up, you won't go sideways, you'll go down. You don't have an option. It's never a question of what you believe, it's a law. And the law will go into effect as soon as you put it to the test. And that's true in the physical area and it's also true in the spiritual area.
You can't, you see, segment the two apart. You can't say the physical world has laws, the moral world has none. You have dichotomized the world. You can't do that. To segment life into a physical dimension in which fixed laws cannot be violated and the spiritual dimension in which they can be violated is an impossible dichotomy. For the same Creator who made the whole thing built it all on fixed laws, moral and spiritual.
The question then comes, where do we find the spiritual laws? Now the physical laws are visible to us in the world but where do we find the moral laws? Where do we find the fixed standards of human behavior which violated bring about disastrous results?
Where do we find out what is right and what is wrong? Has our Creator given us a standard? And the answer is yes, and this is where you find it, in the Bible. The Bible claims to be the revelation of God in which God delivers the fixed laws of moral and spiritual conduct. It is His revelation and there are many compelling reasons to believe that.
There wouldn't be enough for me to say to you, "Well, here's the Bible, you gotta believe it." You're gonna say, "Well, now why should I believe the Bible? There are a lot of sacred books, a lot of them. Why would I believe that this is the right one? There are a lot of people who say they speak for God. There are a lot of people who say they have revelations from God. How do I know the Bible is really authentic?"
Well let me give you five proofs, okay? Five reasons for believing in the authenticity of the Bible as God's revealed standard of moral behavior, and they go from the lesser to the greater, all right? They're in an ascending order, these five.
Number one; here is the number one reason for believing the Bible. Let's call it experience, experience. One reason that I personally believe the Bible is true is that it gives the experience it claims it will give. For example, the Bible says that God will forgive our sin if we come to Christ. I came to Christ and God forgave my sin and freed my heart and soul and mind from guilt. And I have been freed from the bondage of sin in the sense that I am not under the pile of guilt, because Christ has delivered me. The Bible said God would forgive my sin, I put my faith in Christ and God did.
The Bible says if any man be in Christ he's a new creation. 2 Corinthians 5:17, "Old things have passed away and behold new things have come." I gave my life to Jesus Christ; I found that happened to me. My desires changed, my attitudes changed, my approach to life changed, the things I loved changed. I had a new nature.
I used to crave sin and crave things that were not right. Now I crave righteousness and crave things that are right. My whole constitution is different. My character is different. The Bible said that would happen and it did.
Now millions of people all over the world have put the Bible to the test of experience and it indeed has proven itself true. They've experienced the power of the Word of God. The Bible says the Holy Spirit will come into your life when you give your heart to Christ and he will empower you to represent Christ, to proclaim his truth, to speak for Him. I've experienced that. I've experienced that.
The Bible says that when the spirit of God's in your life God will use you as an instrument to change others lives. I've experienced that. There are many things in the Bible that experience validates. Now that's an acceptable argument. In fact it's a pretty powerful one. When you hear somebody give a testimony of how Christ changed their life, that's remarkable to hear. And many people have come to faith in Christ because of the changed life of someone else and they have said, "If the Bible can do it, as it says, perhaps it can do it for me."
Now, even though it is an acceptable argument, it's a weak one and I'll tell you why. Experience, while acceptable, is the weakest of the five because that makes you the validator of truth and that makes the validation subjective rather than objective.
Truth ought to be something outside of you and the Bible ought to be true if you never experienced it, right? It ought to be true in itself. I mean after all, you could probably line up a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Hare Krishna, Christian Science, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and every other kind of religion and cult and they could all tell you about their experience, too.
And then there are those people who think they see pink elephants but they don't. And then there are those people that get high and hallucinate on who knows what and they have experiences, too. So we don't want to get ourselves in a situation where we just buy into something because somebody says it happened to them. We need more evidence than that.
Let's go to a second line of proof then. Ascending up the scale, science, science. Most people assume that the Bible is scientifically incorrect, that what's in the Bible doesn't match with science and this antiquated old book is scientifically illiterate. That's not true. That's not true.
If you go to the Bible you're gonna find there the most plausible explanation for the existence of the universe anywhere in science, anywhere. And the most plausible explanation for understanding the universe and the existence of life is simply this, God created everything.
Now the alternative is that there was no Creator. So you can take your choice. You can believe God created everything so that the effect had a cause or you can believe that nobody created everything. In fact, you can take this as your view of life, nobody times nothing equal everything.
Personally I'd rather take the thought that God equals everything by creation. So when you talk about science, the Bible is not nearly so hard to believe as is an anti-biblical evolutionary view point which would say nobody times nothing equals everything.
Once there was a puddle, and who knows where the puddle came from and once there was in the puddle a one-celled thing and one day the one-celled thing said to itself, "Let's be two" and they separated and the two got carried away and the next thing you know, here we are!
Now if you call that scientifically plausible you have defied science because science is really a study of what is observable and nobody times nothing is not observable. So the Bible, looking at science, is the most plausible explanation. It also has the most plausible explanation of the state of the globe, the state of the earth.
Evolutionary people tell us that the earth has gotten into this shape by years and years and millennia and centuries and on and on, millions upon millions upon millions of years and it's slowly, gradually shaped itself into what it is now. And science does not sustain that.
The Bible simply says the earth's about 15,000 years old and the reason it looks a lot older than that is because of catastrophes, two massive catastrophes, Creation and the Flood. And creation was God speeding up the process and making a mature world totally populated in six days. But covering all the same ground at a much higher rate of speed.
So what looks, as you examine it, as if it's very, very old is only thought to be very, very old if you accept the thought that everything has always continued at the same speed and that's not true. In the six days of creation, God sped up all the natural forces of the universe and created it all in six days so that it was fully mature, just like he created Adam as a mature man instantaneously.
And then in the Flood, God accomplished through the power of a world wide flood, the reshaping of the face of the earth in a brief condensed period of time, not over millions and millions and millions and millions of years of a supposedly equal amount of forces acting upon the earth. Much more plausible to accept catastrophe.
Someone has reduced it to something as simple as this, how would you get a fossil of a leaf? How would you get a fossil of a leaf? How long do you have to leave a leaf in your backyard until it becomes a fossil? It will blow away. No amount of time would create a fossil. The only thing that would create a fossil would be if your ground opened up and slammed shut on that leaf or if a glacier came through your backyard and pressed that leaf against stone.
Catastrophe, not uniformity creates the earth the way we see it now. The Bible makes that explicitly clear in the catastrophe of a six day creation speeding up all the processes and the universal world wide flood.
And then as you look deeper into the Bible you find it scientifically touched on many, many things. For example, in Isaiah 40:26 it says it is God who creates the universe. It says He holds the stars together by his power and it says not one star is missing. Think of that. Not one star is missing. God created them all, now follow this, and sustains them all.
Now that introduces us to what science now calls the First Law of Thermodynamics. That ultimately says nothing is every destroyed, nothing. Scientists have recognized that things change form, but nothing is ever destroyed. And that's exactly what the scripture says when it says God who created all things upholds all things by the word of His power. The Bible thing introduces us to the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Furthermore, nothing is being created. That which is already been created can be rearranged into other shapes and forms but nothing is being created. Science knows that. Matter is static in the sense that it's never is destroyed and it's never being created. And in Ecclesiastes 1:10 it says, "Is there anything of which one might say see this? It is new." And the answer comes immediately. "Already it is existed for ages which were before us." Nothing new and nothing going out of existence. So ancient writers of the Bible, thousands of years before the laws of thermodynamics had been categorically stated were affirming what science calls the conservation of mass and energy.
Now the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that although mass and energy are always conserved, they are also breaking down and going from order to disorder. In other words, while you never destroy matter, and it's never created, it is disintegrating, breaking down. It goes from order to disorder, from cosmos to chaos, from system to non-system.
This is the opposite of the Theory of Evolution which says that somehow matter is in the process of going upward. It is always improving and it goes from the one celled amoeba to complex man. That's not what science and the Law of Thermodynamics law two, says.
It says it's breaking down. Matter breaks down and as it breaks down its energy dissipates and ultimately the world and the universe as we know it will become dead because of the total breakdown of energy. It'll be unable to reproduce itself and it'll become a dead universe.
The Bible says that. Romans 8, it says the whole creation groans under the curse waiting for redemption from the curse of sin which came in Genesis, Chapter 3, when man sinned and brought sin upon the earth.
So the Bible's very scientific. It understands thermodynamics. Furthermore there's a science of hydrology. Hydrology is the cycle of water. You know that because you were in school. You know the cycle of water. Three major phases, do you remember them? Evaporation, what's the second one? Condensation. The third one? Precipitation. And that's how water goes. Do you realize it's all the same water? Do you realize there's no water being created? It's just the same water, it just keeps going around and around and you get it this year and somebody down the road gets it next year. It's the same water.
That's the science of hydrology. Clouds move over the land, they drop water through precipitation. The rain runs into the creeks, the creeks run into the streams, the streams run into the rivers, the rivers run into the sea and the cloud pulls up the water from the sea, takes it back over the land, drops it again, starts the whole process.
This incredibly complex thing is described in Ecclesiastes, book of the Old Testament, in Isaiah 55 from the Old Testament. It says in Ecclesiastes all the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again.
In Isaiah 55, "For the rain and the snow come down from Heaven and do not return there without watering the earth." So Isaiah says they come down, they water the earth, they go back up again. The water keeps running into the sea but the sea never gets full. Why? Because the water keeps being pulled back out again.
Job 36, the oldest book in the Old Testament, verses 27-28 speaks of evaporation and condensation centuries prior to any knowledge of this. It says God draws up the drops of water, they distill rain from the mist which the clouds pour down, they drip upon man abundantly.
It's incredible. In 1500s when Copernicus first presented the idea that the earth was in motion, up until the 1500s everybody thought it was a flat pancake, you know? In fact, they felt that if you went through the Pillars of Hercules at the Rock of Gibraltar, you'd fall off. And along comes Copernicus and says the world is in motion.
By the 17th Century, you have Kepler and Galileo giving birth to modern astronomy. Prior to that people thought there were one thousand stars in the whole sky, one thousand. I the book of Genesis, first book in the Bible, it says the number of the stars of heaven is equated with the number of grains of sand on the seashores.
God told Abraham, "I'll multiply your seed as the stars of heaven and the sand which is on the seashore." Jeremiah 33:22 says, "The stars cannot be counted." And God is speaking, "As the host of heaven cannot be counted and the sand of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendents of David." Today we know there are millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy and millions and millions of galaxies we haven't even seen.
Furthermore, the oldest book in the Old Testament, the book of Job Chapter 26, Verse 7, says God hangs the earth on nothing. Isn't that amazing? The Koran says it's on back of elephants who make earthquakes when they shake. Why do the Hindus believe that? That's not true; we know that's not true. The Bible says he hangs the earth on nothing.
Job also says, "The earth is turned like the clay to the seal." Like the clay to the seal, what does he mean in Chapter 38, Verse 14 when he says that? Soft clay was used to write in in ancient times. You took a stick, the stylus and in soft clay you wrote your letter and then it hardened. At the bottom you put your signature.
Most people had their signature on a clay cylinder. They had a stick through it and they would roll it on the soft clay and it would lay their signature down. And when he was saying the earth is turned like the clay to the seal what he's saying is the earth rotates on what? On an axis. Credible. Credible.
The Hebrew word for earth is khug, it means a sphere. The oldest book in the Bible says it's a sphere turning on an axis suspended in space. And yet until the 1500s they believe it was a flat pancake not moving at all, sitting on the top of something.
Have you ever studied the isostoce, the study of balance? The earth maintains perfect balance. You ever play basketball with a lopsided basketball? Or a lopsided softball that goes through the air like that? Those cute balls you buy at K-mart do that.
Well, can you imagine if the earth was a little bit out of round? About every five minutes we'd go up and come down again and up and come down. You realize that the earth is spinning at a tremendous speed and yet it's in perfect, perfect balance?
Do you also realize that around the face of the earth there are mountains that reach as high as over 20,000 feet high? You realize there are depths in the ocean that go down that far the other way? And do you understand that the combination of the mountains, the depths of the sea, the weight of the rocks and the weight of the water all have to be figured out mathematically by the infinite mind of God so that the earth doesn't go through space like this, throwing us all into outer space every time it turns?
That's why Isaiah, Chapter 40, Verse 12 says, "God has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens by a span and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure and weighted the mountains in a balance and the hills in a pair of scales." It's incredible to think about how God keeps the earth in perfect balance.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He was famous for applying scientific discoveries to philosophy. And he came up with a great discovery for which he was heralded. He said everything knowable in the natural world fits into one of five categories. Everything knowable in the natural world fits into one of five categories. What an amazing categorization.
He said everything is either time, force, action, space or matter, everything. That's good, Herbert. Took him until the 19th Century before anybody really discovered and identified those categories. Time, force, action, space, matter. Everything in existence fits into one of those categories.
Listen to this, first verse in the Bible, "In the beginning," that's time, "God," that's force, "created," that's action, "the heavens," that's space, "and the earth," that's matter. What Herbert Spencer didn't discover until the 19th Century, God wrote in the first verse of the first chapter of the first book in the Bible and gave us all the categories we needed for everything.
The Bible is incredibly scientific. It doesn't contain scientific terminology, but it is amazingly accurate. Now somebody says, "Wait a minute." I hear your - you're gonna say, "What about when it says during the time of Joshua the sun stood still? That's not very scientific. Everybody knows the earth was moving around the sun and so if the sun appears to stand still what really happened was the earth stopped moving. But it says the sun stood still."
Well, right and why does say that? Because from the perception of the person on the earth, it looked like the sun stood still and that's what you'd say if you were standing here, looked up, and the sun stayed in the same place for about five hours. From perceptions vantage point you'd say the sun stood still.
To show you this, when you got up this morning and looked to the east, what did you say? "Oh, another lovely earth revolving." No, you called that a what? Sunrise. And tonight about 8:30 you're gonna look to the west and you're gonna say, "Ah, what a lovely earth revolving." That's not an earth revolving, that is a sunset. The sun is not setting from a scientific viewpoint but from your vantage point that's perception.
And so when people in the Bible speak of those phenomenal things that happen in life, they speak of them from perception. Nonetheless the Bible is scientifically accurate. The Bible even tells us in Psalms that the sun makes a circuit from one end of heaven to the other and it was only in the last century that the sun is dragging our whole planetary system in a circuit orbit from one end of endless space to the other while we're going around it.
Let's go to a third area of evidence for Bible authenticity and that's miracles, that's miracles. The Bible includes from beginning to end supportive information to establish the credibility of the miracles that it records. The Bible records miracles and you've got all kinds of eyewitnesses, they're absolutely undeniable miracles.
The most monumental miracle of all is the miracles of the resurrection of Jesus Christ who rose from the dead and just to be sure nobody could doubt it there were over 500 eyewitnesses. Over 500 people saw Jesus risen from the dead who knew that he was dead. His death was verifiable, there's no question about that. The soldiers came by, didn't even run a spear in his side - rather ran a spear in his side, didn't even break his legs because he was already dead, hauled him down off the cross, buried him in a grave. That whole process confirmed that he was genuinely dead. And yet 500 people saw him alive.
Now you're gonna have to deal with that in his book. This book is filled with miracles that were verifiable by a mass of humanity. Two million people walked through the Dead Sea and the walls were up on the side. And when they got on the other side and Pharaoh's army came through, they were all drowned. Massive numbers of eyewitnesses saw that event. This is not some subjective isolated whimsical miracle.
So you have to look at this book and say it's filled with the miraculous which is not subjective but objective which is not unverifiable but which is verifiable historically.
Fourthly ascending up the scale, how do we designate the authenticity of scripture from an evidential viewpoint? Prophesy. Prophesy. How can you explain that the Bible predicts the future if it wasn't written by God? How can you explain that? For there are so many, many prophecies.
You know there are more than 300 specific prophecies about Jesus alone? Saying where he's be born, where'd he live, Bethlehem, Nazareth, specific things about him, details about his life, what he would say on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Three hundred and thirty prophesies and there are myriads of prophecies of other than Christ. But Peter Stoner who is a mathematician who worked particularly in the area of probabilities, wrote a book called Science Speaks, if you find a copy of it you'll enjoy it, we probably have it in our library. He said let's just take eight Old Testament prophecies, okay? Just take eight of them and look at the probability of their coming to pass by accident.
He said it would be one in ten to the seventeenth power. For just eight of them and there are hundreds of them. Just take eight and they would have one chance in ten to the seventeenth power to come to pass by accident. This is what he wrote.
Here's the amount that ten to the seventeenth power is, we take to the seventeenth power silver dollars and we lay them on the face of Texas, okay? They will cover, you ready for this, the entire state two feet deep. Silver dollars, two feet deep over the whole state of Texas.
Now mark one of these silver dollars with a little X. Blindfold a man and tell him he must pick up only one and he must pick the one with the X. What chance would he have of getting the one with the X? The same change the prophets would have of writing eight prophesies and having the come true by chance. Incredible, and yet the Bible has hundreds of prophesies, hundreds, and Jesus fulfilled hundreds.
The Bible predicts many other things. The Bible predicts that a man named Cyrus would be born a hundred and fifty years before he was born. That he would rise to power in the Middle East and that he would release the Jewish people from captivity. Read it in Isaiah 44 and 45. Sure enough, a hundred and fifty years later Cyrus the Great became king of Persia and released the Jews just exactly as the prophet had s
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