The Reliability of Scripture
Selected Scriptures
It's been, I was just telling someone about 15 years, I think since I've had the privilege of speaking in this very building here at UCLA under some other circumstances and I'm very happy to be back and I congratulate your institution on winning the PAC-10 basketball championship last night. That's pretty exciting and one of these days our little college, the Master's College, will attempt to put you on our schedule just so, just to make your record look better. But it is a privilege to be here. I'm very thankful for any opportunity to speak concerning the Bible and it's part in the life of anyone who submits himself or herself to its truth.
Let me begin in a world that for the most part has no absolute standard for its life and behavior. Basically we are under a system that you could morality by majority vote, or whatever feels good sets the standard for behavior. That really runs contrary to everything we know about our world. From a physical standpoint, for example, in the scientific dimension there are absolutes. Our entire universe is built on fixed laws. That's why we can send little shuttles up into space and why we can send satellites into space and totally and absolutely to the very nth degree predict their behavior because of fixed laws.
Points of reference: science like, whether you're discussing biology or botany, or physiology, or astronomy, or even mathematics, engineering, any part of physical life is controlled totally by unalterable and viable laws. And when you move from the physical into the spiritual you have the same kind of world where there are fixed laws.
Yet, it seems as though in the moral world we want to live without law, we want to live without absolute and try to figure out our points of reference from our own minds and our own determination. That's impossible. We cannot remain at harmony with the moral, spiritual dimension of existence without laws anymore than we can remain in harmony with the physical dimension without laws.
There is a morality built by God right into life. Just as there are physical laws there are spiritual ones. Recently people have asked me, not once, not twice, but dozens of times if I believe that aids is the judgment of God. Let me respond to that by saying this: aids is the judgment of God in the same sense that sclerosis of the liver is the judgment of God or that emphysema is the judgment of God. If you want to drink alcohol all your life you're liable to get sclerosis of the liver. If you want to smoke all your life you're liable to get emphysema, heart disease and if you want to violate God's standards for morality the chances are you might get venereal disease or even aids. It is an exorable law that the Bible calls sowing and reaping.
Let me give it to you in another illustration. God made a law called gravity. I don't think anybody here wants to argue gravity. That's a fixed law. You may not believe in gravity. In fact you may not like gravity. You may even be an atheist and want to deny that God invented gravity, but no matter what you believe if you jump off a building I promise you you'll go down. You don't have any option. It's not a question of what you believe. It's a question of an inexorable law. It will go into effect if you put it into test and it's the same in any area of physical law. We watched Challenger explode in the sky because physical laws were violated inadvertently and the result was devastation.
The same thing is true in the moral and spiritual dimension and to segment life and assume that we have a physical universe with fixed laws that cannot be violated without negative circumstances and assume that when you transition into a moral or spiritual dimension that's not going to happen dichotomizes the universe in an impossible way. The same God who operates the physical things by fixed laws operates the moral and spiritual in the very same way.
Now where do you go then to find the laws of morality? Where do you go to find the fixed standards of human behavior? Where do you go to determine what is, to put it simply, right and what is wrong? Well there's only one source that I know of and that's the Bible, the word of God.
Now let me just talk about it for a moment. There's so much to say that I can barely scratch the surface in the brief time that we have in this hour. But the Bible is an incredible book. I have spent the years of my life studying the Bible. I wasn't always so committed to the Bible and I didn't grow into this. I wasn't born into this commitment. It's a commitment that came to me very strongly after my freshman year in college when I came to grips with life and destiny and my future and wanting to know the source of truth and I found my way intentionally into the Bible and it has satisfied me ever since.
But it's an incredible book, not only because of my own personal experience, but let me just share some things with you for example. The Bible presents the most viable understanding of the universe. It presents what I believe is the only proper explanation for things the way they exist. It presents a God who creates. That makes sense to me. I find it very difficult to believe that everything came out of nothing. I find it impossible to believe that nobody times nothing equals all things. I have a lot easier time assuming that everything that is was produced by someone. That seems to me to be at least as viable as to believe that everything that is was produced by no one.
And so the Bible tells me who that someone is, that someone is God. And then the Bible also explains to me how things become the way they are from a geological standpoint, from the study of creation around us and that is through catastrophism. And the Bible explains a catastrophic creation in six days and then it explains a worldwide universal flood that through catastrophe explains a geological things and all kinds of other scientific issues that make sense to me.
The Bible also, when it moves into other areas of science, is curious because it deals, for example, with the law of thermodynamics, which is a relatively modern concept that is the law of the conservation of mass and energy. And yet you can go back in the Bible to a document that is thousands and thousands of years old and you will read in, for example, the prophet Isaiah 40:26, speaking of God, that it is God who creates things and God who holds them together by his power and not one of them ever fails. That's the Bible's way of stating the law of thermodynamics that nothing really ultimately is ever destroyed.
In Nehemiah, another ancient book in the Old Testament, it says of God, "You have made heaven, the earth, and all things therein, the seas and all things therein and you hold them all together." And then we read in Ecclesiastes, another ancient book, "Is there anything of which it may be said, 'see, this is new.'" And the answer is everything has been from old time.
The ancient writers of the Bible, thousands and thousands of years before the law of thermodynamics was ever stated, were affirming the conservation of mass and energy. The second law of thermodynamics is that that mass and energy, which is always conserved, is nonetheless breaking down and going from order to disorder, going from cosmos to chaos, system to non-system. And the Bible says that as well. In Romans 8 it says that creation groans because of its curse and that curse is reflected throughout biblical teaching.
Another thought that came to mind, I don't know if you've studied the science of hydrology. Hydrology is the cycle of water and it basically goes, as you know, from the sea through evaporation to the clouds. The clouds are moved over the land, they drop the water through precipitation, it comes down as rain, the rain runs into creeks, the creeks run into streams, the streams run back into the sea and the evaporation process takes place again. That hydrological cycle known as evaporation, transportation, precipitation, is described in detail in Scripture, which is amazing. Both in the book of Ecclesiastes Chapter 1 and in Isaiah Chapter 55 it gives the entire water cycle as a cycle, and then in Job it speaks in Chapter 36 of evaporation and condensation. This is centuries; this is millennia prior to scientific discovery.
Then you have the field of astronomy and of course you know that even in 1473 to the middle 1500's when Copernicus presented the idea that the earth was in motion people were astounded because they believed it was like a record, it was a disk flat, and if you went through the pillars of Hercules at the Rock of Gibraltar, you'd fall off. And along came men like Keppler and Galileo in the 17th century and gave birth to modern astronomy. Prior to that there was this confused idea that we were a flat disk and above us were approximately a 1,044 to 1,046 or 56 stars. That was the number that had been counted.
And yet the Bible says in Isaiah 55:9 that the heavens are so high they're immeasurable. In Job 22:12, it talks about the height of the stars. In Genesis the first book of the Bible it equates the number of the stars of heaven with the number of grains of sand on the sea. Genesis is the book where it all begins. Jeremiah said that the stars can't be counted, chapter 33:22. And we now know that there are probably a hundred billion in our galaxy alone.
It's interesting to note that the oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. It predates Christ by a couple of thousand years. In that book it says in Job 26:7, he hangeth the earth on nothing. Amazing statement when you stop to think that you can read in other sacred books of other religions that the earth is on the back of elephants who produce earthquakes when they shake. You can read Greek mythology, which says the earth is on layers of honey and butter and sugar but the Bible says he hangeth the earth on nothing.
The oldest book in the Bible, Job, says that the earth is turned like the clay to the seal. Fascinating statement because if you wanted to sign your signature in those days soft clay was used in which to write, you had your signature on a little seal with your name in it. This is the way it was, it was a cylinder hardened clay with your signature raised on that cylinder. Through it was a stick so that you could roll it like a rolling pin and you would roll your signature across the soft clay and sign your signature. That was in Job's time, in the ancient times and he said the earth is turned like the clay to the seal, which means it rotates on its what? On its axis long before anybody discovered that.