Thus, we do not grant the non-Christian the right to sit in judgment on God's Word as to whether or not it meets his approval. He is a creature and as a creature he is subject to the Word of his Creator. He is to believe it. He is to obey it. He is never to judge it. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. From electricity that keeps the lights on, to petroleum that fuels millions of cars, to the sun that brings warmth to the globe, God has given our planet an amazing array of power sources that we all rely on every day. But there's none more trustworthy than the one you carry to church each week. John MacArthur focuses on that power source today as he begins a series titled, Is the Bible Reliable? But first, John, on one of last week's broadcasts, you said that when you speak to a national audience, one of the points you always want to make is that the Bible is the supreme authority. And that relates to the series we're launching today called Is the Bible Reliable? Because the Bible can't be the supreme authority if it isn't reliable. So how do we know that the Bible is reliable? Well, I think the primary way you know the Bible is reliable is by its claim. From the beginning to the end, the Bible claims for itself to be the Word of God.
So you only have one of two choices. Either the Bible is true as it claims to be, or it's lying. And if it's lying, you can throw it in the trash heap with all other false religions. But the problem is, to anyone who studies the Bible and reads the Bible and looks into the Word of God, it declares its own validity in magnificent ways. The Apostle Paul talked about how that the Bible, the truth itself of Scripture, self-manifests.
It has the ring of truth. I know you can defend that the Bible is true on the basis of fulfilled prophecy and certain other things that defend Scripture, history, archaeology. But the real test of Scripture is to dig down into it as deeply as you can and find out that this is truly the Word of God. I mean, just think about how long the Bible has been attacked and how unsuccessful all the attacks have been. And if there is a single doctrine of Christianity that has stood the test of time, it is the doctrine of divine inspiration and inerrancy.
The enemy cannot overthrow that doctrine. It has stood the test of time. And the deeper you go, the more it validates itself. I think this series will encourage believers strengthening their confidence in Scripture. And it's going to give unbelievers a lot to think about. And the study is titled, Is the Bible Reliable? Nothing more important than that, because everything in the Christian faith, everything is based on the Bible. And if it is true, then Christianity is true.
And that makes all the difference in the world. The study is going to help you understand what you believe in, perhaps for some of you who don't yet believe it's going to bring you to the point of faith. So stay with us. It's going to be four weeks of looking at is the Bible reliable?
Can't think of a better way to spend the next four weeks. NORC and I, thank you, John. And friend, how can you be sure that studying God's Word is worth the effort, that it's a sure guide for how to handle your relationships, your career, really all of your life? Keep that in mind as John begins his study, Is the Bible Reliable?
Here at Grace Church, we make a great deal about the Word of God. We have some very strong convictions about it. And certainly we ought to be able to support those convictions. We ought to know why we believe the Bible. We ought to know the evidence that the Bible is valid, that it is true. We ought to know it well enough to be able to communicate it to others.
Certainly we ought to know it well enough to have confidence in it. And since we spend all of our time here studying the Bible, preaching the Bible, teaching the Bible, learning the Bible and living by the principles of the Bible, we should be able to face some very important facts about the Bible with a positive confidence. You say, well what do you believe about the Bible? We believe that the Bible is the only book ever written by God and it was written to reveal Himself. We believe the Bible is the only authoritative and absolutely reliable source of revelation from God with regard to the origin of man as well as his dilemma, his salvation and his destiny. We believe that the Bible is the single measuring standard, the only moral and spiritual standard for man. We believe the Bible is true in every detail even to the very words in the original manuscripts. And we believe the Bible is believable. We believe God wrote it every word.
That's what we believe. We believe that the Bible is the source of all knowledge about God and that apart from the Bible there is no revelation. There is nothing a man can ever learn about God from human reason. There is nothing a man can ever learn from philosophy or even from experience about God ultimately unless God reveals Himself. God alone is the source of the knowledge about Himself and He has chosen to reveal Himself in this book totally and in no other. That's why we believe the Bible.
Now I hasten to add this. This is not the view of all Christians, or at least of all who claim to be Christians. There are many people who claim to be Christians and some who no doubt are Christians because they do believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but they do not believe that this is totally and in every word the revelation of God. And so because we believe this, we stand apart even from some other people who call themselves Christians. There are some people who claim to be a part of the church of Jesus Christ and they do not believe what we believe about the Bible. They deny its authority. They laugh at the idea of inerrancy, that is that there are no errors.
They have humanized its inspiration so that God didn't write it, but men did. You know what happens to churches like that? They become impotent, insecure, confused, without conviction, uncertain and inevitably revert to social or political activism.
Packer says this and I think it's worth reading. Listen, certainty about the great issues of the Christian faith and conduct is lacking all along the line. The outside observer sees us as staggering on from gimmick to gimmick and stunt to stunt like so many drunks in a fog, not knowing at all where we are or which way we should be going. Preaching is hazy, heads are muddled, hearts fret, doubts drain strength, uncertainty paralyzes action. Unlike the first Christians who in three centuries won the Roman world and those later Christians who pioneered the Reformation and the Puritan awakening and the evangelical revival and the great missionary movement of the last century, we lack certainty.
Why is this? We blame the external pressures of modern secularism, but that's like Eve blaming the serpent. The real truth is that we have grieved the Holy Spirit. We stand on a divine judgment. For two generations our churches have suffered from a famine of hearing the words of the Lord, end quote.
That's a tragic truth. Self-styled man has decided that his own intellectualism is the answer to everything and his intellectualism rises from higher criticism and rationalism and the result is it destroys the truth. We've talked about the higher critics who came along and said, well my mind can't handle the miracles so I'll just take my big vacuum and suck the miracles out of the Bible.
One such German rationalist came up with 26 verses left. Then there's not only intellectual rationalism, but egoism plays a part in this. You know, the man who has such a big ego that he does not permit himself to submit to authority has a hard time acquiescing to the authority of Scripture. And our society has become a society of self-centered deciders who will determine for themselves what truth is. And then I think tragically the church has substituted programs and activities for the study of the Word of God. They've given in to the social problems and relinquished the real priority of the Word.
They become content with entertainment, psychology and a lot of other things. In America we've got 330,000 churches, a third of a million churches. That's too many. We can't get along. Consequently we're so fractured and split up that there's a lack of spiritual leadership. Now in the midst of all of this mess, the Word of God is lost. Let me take you to a bombshell prophet by the name of Amos. Amos chapter 8. I just want to share with you verses 11 and 12 to give you an illustration of what happens when the Word of God is lost. Amos 8, 11, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.
Now listen, if you're not there yet, don't worry about it. I'll send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water but of hearing the words of the Lord. And they shall wander from sea to sea and from the north even to the east and they shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord and shall not...what?...find it.
God says there's going to come a day when I'll send a famine and people are going to try to find the Word of the Lord and they'll never find it. Eight centuries before Christ, the northern kingdom was very self-confident. It was true that moral standards had come crashing down, honesty was gone, poor people were being abused, the upper class was vile and money was plenty and prosperity was going great.
So they just kind of relegated the spiritual dimension to the background and figured if they were making it monetarily, that was sufficient to live and everything was great and they were still cranking out their worship, they were still doing what they normally did in terms of ritual and they thought everything was well. And then all of a sudden, God dropped a bomb by the name of Amos right in the middle of the northern kingdom. He stormed into Samaria as a prophet of doom and He said in chapter 2 of Amos, God's going to judge.
And in chapter 5 He said this whole nation is going to be enslaved and deported. And He says in chapter 8, worst of all, the streams of revelation are going to dry up and there's going to be a famine of the Word of God. They who would not listen to the prophets whom God sent would find that there were no prophets to listen to anymore. God's Word will be unavailable. And Amos goes on in his little book here to picture the scene of spiritual destitution that results when you can't find the Word of the Lord, when you don't have any revelation.
And he pictures restless, frantic souls wandering everywhere, listening in hopes of hearing God's voice but it has never heard. And for them, as for much of the so-called church today, there's a famine of the hearing of the Word of the Lord. And I think it's judgmental on God's part. I think it's the legacy of liberalism, egoism, programism and denominationalism.
The people who viewed the Bible as a human document, as a fallible book with mistakes, those who used the Bible as a pretext for false kind of preaching and simply rattling off their opinions have contributed to the sad demise. And I don't know how many out of those churches really teach the Word of God, but I know this, almost every city I go to people say to me, do you know of a church in the city where we can learn the Word of God? What's happened when people have forsaken the Word of God and I think God judgmentally has moved into the church and just left the famine there?
What happens in a situation like that? First it undermines preaching where there's doubt as to whether the text is really the Word of God. There's no preaching with conviction. It's weak in faith. People don't know what to believe anymore. It's discouraged Bible study.
Why would you study the Bible if you're not too sure what it's all about? So consequently the church today suffers from the terrible plight of having its authority undermined in the loss of confidence in the Word of God. Now to add to the problem that we face in the church, the world hasn't got any confidence in the Bible either. The non-Christian world has obviously rejected the Word of God, so we stand alone as a little island. There are others like us, praise God. But we stand in the middle of a world that doesn't believe in the Word of God.
We stand in the middle of a church, quote-unquote, called the Christian church that is not committed to the authority of the Word of God. And you know, whenever you go around and say, I believe in the absolute inspiration of the Bible, there are always some people, and I faced this when I used to travel around and teach in seminaries and things, they'd say, man, if you believe in that old thing that all the Bible is true, the inspired Word of God, you've committed intellectual suicide. And somebody might say, well, you know, are you more intelligent than a non-Christian? Or are you more intelligent than this super professor with 49 little degrees after his name who studied all the manuscripts and he doesn't believe in inspiration? Are you more intelligent than he is? After all, he's examined the evidence. Does Grace Community Church and does John MacArthur and a few other people in the world have some kind of inside information which the rest of the world doesn't have and that's why we've got the secret that the Bible is really inspired when the non-Christian world says baloney and the majority of the theological world agrees with him? Have we got inside information? How in the world can we stand in the face of the philosophers and the intelligentsia of our world and claim the Bible to be authoritative and to be inerrant when everybody keeps telling us it isn't?
Let me say this. In the first place, and hang on to this, in the first place, it is not because we're more intelligent. You know that? There are a lot of people in this world more intelligent than me, a whole bunch of them, a lot of you. There are a lot of much more brilliant people than me who have studied all kinds of things about theology and they continue to reject the Bible's claim to divine authorship. Acceptance or rejection of the authority of the Bible is not a matter of intelligence.
In the second place, we don't have special information. I don't have anything that an unbeliever doesn't have. That's all I've got right there.
That's it. I've only got two eyes and one small brain and I just read. You know, some people think that we've got inside information and that the reason the unbeliever doesn't believe in the Bible is because he doesn't have sufficient proof of its authority. And that if all we could...if we could just get to a bunch of unbelievers and if we could show them all the proofs for the authority of the Bible, they'd all believe. No, that's not true. Because it isn't a question of proof any more than it's a question of intelligence. People say, well, if they only understood the unity of the Bible, if they understood the miracles, the scientific accuracy, the archeological evidence, the transforming energy and power of the Bible, if they only understood fulfilled prophecy, they'd believe. But you know something? It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work. Now all those proofs are important. You know why they're important? Because they strengthen the faith of a Christian. You know, I'm a Christian.
I believe the Bible. Then when I study it and I see its unity and its miracles and its scientific accuracy and its archeological data, its transforming power in my life, its fulfillment of prophecy, I get excited about that and my faith gets stronger. Same unbeliever hears the same thing and he just walks away from it.
Now let me tell you something. Those proofs are important to strengthen the faith of a believer. But listen, there's a basic fallacy and I want to say this at the very beginning of our series. There's a basic fallacy in thinking that all of those things will prove something to unbelievers. That's a fallacy. And I'm not going to do the series in order to convince unbelievers. You say, well don't you think it will convince unbelievers? Well I don't even want to approach it that way because I see a basic fallacy in that.
What's the fallacy? Listen. If I am going to try to use proofs to convince an unbeliever that he ought to believe the Bible, I am in effect violating a very direct fact that's in the Bible itself.
And that is this. No man has the right to sit in judgment on the credibility and truthfulness of the Bible. God is the Creator.
Man is the creature and that's how it is. And God never gives to the creature the right to evaluate the Creator. When you place a man who is a non-Christian in the position of being judge over the character and the credibility of the Bible, you're giving him a right that God doesn't even give him. So I'm not going to use this as just a way to prove to unbelievers.
I want to use it as a way to strengthen the faith of believers. Man is never, unbelieving man, non-Christian man is never granted the right to sit in judgment on God. That's why God doesn't even defend Himself. When we appeal to an unbeliever, you know, we say, well here's all the evidence.
What do you think? Pass judgment on the divine authorship of the Bible. You're giving him a right to do something that God doesn't give him the right to do.
It allows no man to sit in judgment on it. No, we don't believe the Bible because we're smarter, because we're not smarter. We don't believe the Bible because we have more proof either. You know, you can give the same proof and I've seen it done and I've done it myself. I've gone to college campuses and I have given so much proof. I did a series, I remember at Whittier College on why the Bible is believable. For three solid weeks, for one solid hour every week and for an hour after that I answered questions.
I mean the weight of evidence was astounding. You know how many people responded to Jesus Christ in three weeks? Zero. Zero.
And my assumption was wrong. Those people didn't have the right to be offered the choice of making an evaluation of the truth of the Bible. Let me tell you something, folks. You know why we believe the Bible? Let me give it to you simple. Because God made us new creatures, illumined our minds with His blessed Holy Spirit and told us it was true.
Did you get that? It's a question of revelation. Take your Bible and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 2. First time Paul arrived in Corinth, he could have taken an apologetic approach, could have said, and I want to give you the reasons to believe what I say. I want to give you the reasons to believe in God. I want to give you all the proofs of God, all the proofs of Christ's deity, all the proofs of this, the proofs of that, the proofs of the other.
But he didn't do any of that. 1 Corinthians 2, 1, I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and... what? He didn't deal with... he didn't deal with proofs of anything, he just preached the cross. Because when a man is redeemed, the Holy Spirit takes care of the convincing.
I was with you in weakness and fear, much trembling. My speech and my preaching were not with enticing words of man's wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. You know, I'm not interested in convincing somebody to be saved, I'm just interested in presenting the gospel so the Holy Spirit has the tools to recreate him.
I don't want intellectual converts. However, we speak wisdom among them that are perfect. Yet not the wisdom of this age nor of the princes of this age that come to nothing, but we speak the wisdom of God in the mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages unto our glory, which none of the princes of this age knew, for if they didn't know that, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.
Watch, here's the reason they don't know it and here's the reason the unbelieving man cannot absorb legitimate proof. As it is written, I have not seen nor heard neither enter into the heart of man the things which God's prepared for them that love him, but God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. The reason I know that the Bible is true is because the Spirit of God has convinced me of that. For the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man except the Spirit of man that is in him? Even so, the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world but the Spirit who is of God that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. You'll only know the gift of revelation from God when the Spirit of God convinces you that it's true because human reason doesn't perceive it.
Verse 14, the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them because they're spiritually discerned. If I can throw Ephesians 2, 1 in and he's spiritually dead, I believe the Bible with all my heart, people. You know why I believe it? I believe it first of all because the Holy Spirit came into my life when I received Jesus Christ as Savior and the Holy Spirit has given me confidence in the Word of God. And I'll tell you something, as I've studied the Bible and I've seen these truths that we'll be sharing in this series and I've seen the archeological evidence, the miracle evidence, the prophecy evidence, the scientific evidence, all that's done is just strengthened and undergird the faith that the Holy Spirit planted there to begin with.
Here's the point of this whole series. This is for you that love the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to strengthen your faith. I want you to see what a marvelous book it is and if you can get more confidence in the Bible and you can pour more of your life into the Bible, you're going to be a richer Christian for it, is that right? I want you to believe it with your whole heart.
Like Spurgeon said, I want your blood to be bibbling. The Bible says that God by His grace has dealt in a very special way with Christians and He's removed the barriers. He's removed the blindness. You know, 2 Corinthians 4 says, the God of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them. They're blind, they're ignorant, they're dead.
There's no way they're going to understand it. When God gives spiritual life, then the apprehension of the Word of God comes to us. You remember what Jesus said?
I think it's beautifully illustrated in John 10. He said, My sheep hear My voice. His sheep hear His voice. You know why you hear His voice in the Word of God?
You're a sheep. Remember the verse in Galatians 3, I think it's verse 26 where He says, For you are all children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. Listen, I'm a child of God and I know when My Father's talking. I pick up this Bible and I say, yep, that's Him. He's talking and I'm hearing.
If I don't know Him, I don't know if it's Him talking. So only when the Holy Spirit does a regenerating work, opens the mind, tears down the scales of blindness, gives life where there's death, plants the marvelous understanding of the revelation of God, will we ever understand. You say, Well, John, are you telling me that all those traditional proofs have no purpose?
Yes, they have a wonderful purpose. But I don't think their primary purpose is to convince unbelievers. The only way an unbeliever is ever going to get saved is when the Spirit of God is a miracle in his heart. And I'll tell you something else, all the proof in the world, if the Holy Spirit's already doing the work, really isn't that necessary. So this is to undergird the faith of Christians. Now the Spirit may use it in the life of an unbeliever to bring that final convincing, I pray that He does.
Let's do it this way. Instead of saying prophecy has been fulfilled, the Bible is scientifically accurate, miracles occurred, the Bible produces radical and revolutionary changes in lives, therefore it is the Word of God. Let's reverse that whole thing and let's say this, the Bible is the Word of God. We believe that. Therefore, prophecy has been fulfilled. Miracles have been done. Scientific facts have been given that are accurate.
Lives have been transformed. Prophecy has been fulfilled, etc. Instead of saying these things are true, therefore the Bible is the Word of God, let's say the Bible is the Word of God, therefore these things are true.
These aren't proofs, friends, these are products. Thus we do not grant the non-Christian the right to sit in judgment on God's Word as to whether or not it meets His approval. He is a creature and as a creature He is subject to the Word of His Creator. He is to believe it. He is to obey it. He is never to judge it. So in a sense, our studies for Christians. You know, the unbeliever, he just...he can't evaluate. You know what I always think of when I think of this?
I think of the life of Jesus. Is there any way conceivable to explain away the fact that a population of Jewish people totally and absolutely rejected their own Messiah when He did for a period of three years miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle incessantly in the face of all of them when it was all said and done they screamed for His blood and executed Him? Now you talk about proof. Jesus Himself said, if it isn't the words that I've said that should convince you, it's the deeds that I've done. But Jesus knew that wasn't convincing to them. Most of the miracles that Jesus did throughout His entire ministry were the convincing of the disciples, not the world. Sometimes they came and said, hey, Jesus, do a trick.
Do a trick. And Jesus said in John 6, yeah, you want a trick so you can get some food. Not so you can be convinced who I am.
And sometimes when they came and said, show us a sign, He said, I'm not giving any more signs to this evil, a dullerous generation. It's for you that I'm going to go through this series because I want you to really fall in love with the book and I want you to have absolute confidence that every word here is true. And when somebody nails you to the wall and says, why do you believe the Bible? I want you to be able to say, this is why I believe the Bible. Not so much for His sake, but for your sake so you're secure in your faith.
So this is for us. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur. Pastor, author, chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary in the Los Angeles area, John's current study is titled, Is the Bible Reliable? Friend, if you want to dive even deeper into John's current radio study, keep in mind that you can download all 12 messages from the series, Is the Bible Reliable? You can review them at your own pace. Just go to our website and do that today.
Our web address is gty.org. You can listen to the audio of those messages. You can also read the transcripts.
Both can be downloaded free of charge. This is a great study to share with a new believer or with anyone who is wrestling with doubts about the Bible's dependability. Again, you can download the series called, Is the Bible Reliable?
for free at gty.org. And remember that gty.org gives you access to all of John's sermons free of charge in both MP3 and transcript format. That's over 3,600 messages covering the entire New Testament and many portions of the Old Testament. At the website, you can also read three daily devotionals from John. You can keep up with the Grace to You blog featuring articles on current issues affecting your church and much more. So take advantage of all of those free Bible study resources when you visit gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for making this broadcast part of your day and be back tomorrow as John continues answering the vital question, Is the Bible Reliable? It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
