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Now, here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. I'm Dr. Jeffress, and I'm glad to study God's word with you every day on this Bible teaching program. On today's edition of Pathway to Victory… We should know about the Bible. Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress.
You know, in a world where everyone's opinion is considered equally valid, Christian beliefs are under attack. More than ever, we need to stand firm on the clear teaching of God's word. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress explains why we can trust the Bible as the foundation for our faith. Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress? Thank you, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. We're delighted to have you join with us today. Over the years, I've come to realize how many Christians, myself included, are prone to focus on non-essentials, at the risk of overlooking the essentials.
Have you noticed this as well? We tend to gravitate toward stuff that really doesn't matter, while missing the things that matter most. Well, today I'm beginning a teaching series that addresses this weakness. It's called What Every Christian Should Know. In my series, I'm going to help you gain a working knowledge of 10 core beliefs that set our Christian faith apart from any other religion in the world. By doing so, you'll be equipped to focus on what matters most. Plus, it'll bolster your confidence in your faith and help you defend against false beliefs. In addition to the teaching series, I've also written a best-selling book for you. The title is What Every Christian Should Know, 10 Core Beliefs for Standing Strong in a Shifting World. At the close of my message, I'll explain what's required to receive your copy of my book.
One more thing. While it's only a few months away, there's still time to sign up for the Pathway to Victory cruise to Alaska. The dates are June 15th through 22nd.
That's less than five months from right now. Space for this exclusive tour is limited, and I want to make sure that you're included. So, go to our website, find the itinerary, and most importantly, reserve your spot on the Pathway to Victory cruise to Alaska by going to ptv.org. Now, it's time to get started with our first message in this new series called What Every Christian Should Know. I titled this first message What Every Christian Should Know about the Bible. The Bible uses many different metaphors to describe the church. The church is referred to as the body of Christ, or the bride of Christ, or the vineyard, or the sheepfold. But to me, one of the most intriguing images of the church is found in 1 Timothy 3.15, where Paul refers to the church as the pillar and the support of the truth. In Paul's day, great architectural structures were supported by columns or pillars. And Paul is saying that the church is that pillar, that supporting instrument that lifts up the truth of God for a darkening and decaying world.
Over the next weeks, we're going to be looking at the 10 pillars, the columns, that support historic Christianity. If we, the church, are to be the support, the foundation, the thing that lifts up the truth of God, we need to know what that truth is. And over these next weeks, we're going to look at the 10 foundational beliefs, not of Baptist doctrine. I say it over and over again, I don't care what Baptists believe about anything.
I'm a Christian who cares what the Bible says. And we're going to be talking about what the Bible says is the truth of God that he wants us to understand. We're going to talk about what every Christian should know about the Holy Spirit, what every Christian should know about salvation, what every Christian should know about the church, what every Christian should know about the end times. But today, we're going to start by looking at the most foundational belief of all, what every Christian should know about the Bible.
Think about it. What would we know about Jesus Christ apart from the Bible? So today, we're going to answer the question, how can I know the Bible is the Word of God? We're going to talk about the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Have you ever wondered, as you've read the Bible, how do I know this actually happened?
How do I know this is true? What is it that separates the Bible from the Quran or the Book of Mormon or any other religious book? Well, let's look first at three reasons we can trust the Bible. First of all, the Bible is inspired.
Thomas Edison famously said one time, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well, the apostle Peter said famously, the Bible is 100% inspiration. 2 Peter 1.21, for no prophecy of Scripture was ever made by an act of the human will, but then moved, carried along by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. Peter, Paul, Luke, Moses, David, they didn't wake up one morning and say, you know, I think I'll spend an hour writing some Scripture today. No, Scripture was not initiated by an act of the human will. God is the one who inspired the Bible and he carried along those human authors to record his message. Inspiration is the process by which God communicates his message without error using the personalities of men to compose and record God's message without error. 2 Timothy 3.16 says, for all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. You've heard me say many times that that word inspired is the Greek word theos nousos. All Scripture is theos, God, nousos, breathe, it is God breathed. And as Dr. Crystal used to say, and God doesn't have bad breath.
He doesn't suffer from halitosis. Every word of the Bible is God breathed. And think about how God did that.
It's just so miraculously. God's message was poured through the human personalities of authors. And God's message includes the angry outburst of Moses, the emotional outburst of King David.
It includes the systematic reasoning of the Apostle Paul. It even includes the lies of Satan written in Genesis 3. If anybody asks you, are there any lies in the Bible?
Don't let them trick you. Yes, there are some lies in the Bible. Satan's lie to Eve, you shall not die if you eat of this tree was a lie, but God wanted us to hear that lie as well. God inspired the Scripture. He breathed the Scripture. Secondly, not only is the Bible God breathed inspired, secondly, the Bible is unified.
It's unified. Do you ever remember in school having to do a group project? When we were in junior high school, Amy and I were in an English class together and the teacher loved to assign group projects.
And then we were to meet for weeks and put all this research together and come up with a unified project. I used to love those group projects because Amy would invariably end up in my group. I had a crush on her.
I was too shy to ask her out. And so I would invite her over to my house to work on the group project. We poured a lot of Saturdays into those projects. But the point is, it doesn't matter how long you spend on a group project. It always was a hodgepodge. You'd have, you know, a graph here, this here, be written by different students, different styles. It never quite came together. I was thinking of that this week. The Bible, when you think about it, is the ultimate group project.
Think about this. It was written by over 40 different authors over a period of fifteen hundred years. Authors came from various countries. Most of them didn't know one another. They used a variety of styles. Some wrote history, some law, some poetry, some biography and some personal correspondence.
And yet it all fit together perfectly. It has one unified theme, and that theme is Jesus Christ. Jesus said in John 539, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.
It is these that testify about me. The theme of the Bible is Jesus Christ. You know, you compare that to the Koran. And some of you are going to think I'm being anti-Muslim when I say this.
I actually got this from Newsweek magazine 20 years ago, a feature story they did about the Bible. And they contrasted the Bible with the Koran. And they talked about the fact that when you read the Koran, it's just one thing after another. It doesn't fit together at all.
It's an outburst here, something else here. But it's hard to find a single strand through the Koran, which is interesting because it was written by one false prophet named Mohammed. And yet you look at the Bible, 40 different authors, 1,500 years in various countries. One of the authors was a shepherd, the other a king, the other a rabbi, the other a physician.
Yet the whole thing fits together perfectly. The one theme is Jesus Christ. The theme of the Old Testament is Jesus is coming. The theme of the New Testament is Jesus has come and saved his people and is coming again to rescue his people.
It is all one theme. That is an evidence of the inspiration of the scripture. The Bible is inspired.
It's unified. Thirdly, the Bible is inerrant. It is inerrant.
Now you hear that word a lot. Maybe you don't know what it means. It simply means the Bible is without error. Now, there are some critics, some skeptics today who think the whole doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible is something new.
It's something recent. It was conjured up by a bunch of evil old men in the Southern Baptist Convention who wanted to take over the convention. So they invented this idea of inerrancy. Anybody who says that is ignorant beyond description doesn't deserve to be listened to.
You look at history. The inerrancy of the scripture has always been a foundational belief of the church. First of all, the scripture itself testifies to its own inerrancy. Hundreds of times you find in the Old Testament passages containing a variation of this phrase, the Lord said, the Lord said. Look at Exodus 21. God spoke all of these words. Isaiah 1, 2, for the Lord speaks.
Jeremiah 1, to whom the word of the Lord came. The Bible claims to be inerrant. Jesus, by the way, believed in the inspiration and inerrancy of the Old Testament. For example, he affirmed the Genesis account of creation and God's blueprint for marriage in Matthew 19, 4 through 6. Remember what he said to the Pharisees? Have you not read that he who created them male and female, created them that way from the beginning? Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.
What a great word for us today. Again, have you heard people say, oh, God never addressed homosexuality. He never addressed gay marriage. Yes, he did.
He addressed it right there. He said, here is God's pattern. God is the one who makes you male or female.
It's not male, female, question mark. He's made you male or female. And God's plan for marriage is one man comes together with one woman in a lifetime commitment called marriage. And any variation from that is against God's will. That is the clear teaching of scripture.
And how does Jesus justify it? He does it by going back to the Old Testament. He used the story of Jonah and the great fish to illustrate his resurrection. In Matthew 12, he said, just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the ground. And then he used, of all things, the story of Noah and the building of the ark as a reference to his second coming.
In Matthew 24, 37 to 39, he said, for just as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the coming of the Son of Man. You know what's interesting to me about that is Jesus took the three most disputed stories in the Old Testament. The critics loved to ridicule the idea of God creating man instead of man evolving from some primordial soup. They have the creation of man, the story of Noah and the ark, the worldwide flood, and Jonah and the great fish.
Those are the three stories that critics ridicule. And yet, it's those three stories that Jesus went out of his way to affirm and said, no, it really happened. You know, I remember some years ago, Bill O'Reilly had a segment on his TV program about some TV special about Noah and the ark and so forth. And Bill made the offhand comment that he thought Noah and the ark was a fable to tell a good story and so forth, that it didn't really happen. Well, he got into all kind of trouble, so he called me and said, you know, could you be on my show tonight to talk about that and give the other point of view? And I said, well, sure, so I came on. And he was making the point, it doesn't matter really whether that story happened or not, it's the lesson that it teaches.
And I said, well, you know, think about it. Jesus linked his second coming to the story of Noah. Just imagine Jesus has said, just as it was in the days of the Easter Bunny, so shall it be when the Son of Man comes. Would you have any confidence that Jesus was coming back again if he linked his second coming to the story of the Easter Bunny? No, both have to be true for the analogy to work.
And that's true here. Jesus believed these weren't just Aesop fables, these were actual stories. By the way, it's not just the Old Testament that is called Scripture, the New Testament is referred to as Scripture as well.
To me, this is so interesting. In 1 Timothy 5, 18, Paul was writing to Timothy instructions for the church and about why the elders ought to be paid. And he quotes Scripture to verify that idea that you ought to pay the elders.
Paul says, for the Scripture says, you shall not muzzle the ox while he's threshing. That's a quotation of Deuteronomy 25, 4. Paul's using Scripture. And then he quotes a second Scripture, the laborer is worthy of his wages.
Where does that come from? Did you know that phrase isn't found anywhere in the Old Testament? That phrase comes from a New Testament book, Luke 10, 7, that had just been written a few years earlier than Paul wrote his letter to Timothy. Paul was saying what Luke wrote, a New Testament writer is Scripture. Interestingly, even the Apostle Peter, who didn't see eye to eye with Paul on a lot of things, admitted that Paul's words were Scripture.
In 2 Peter 3, 15 to 16, he refers to the letters of Paul as a part of the Scriptures. No, this idea of inerrancy, that the Bible is without error, is not some new idea. Early church leaders, starting with Irenaeus and then Augustine, Martin Luther, John Wesley, they all believed that the Bible is without error. Our late member and theologian, Dr. Charles Ryrie, said it best when he said, inerrancy simply means the Bible tells the truth. When you read the Bible, you can know you're reading truth and not error. Well, a discerning mind would say, well, you've just tried to use the Bible to prove the Bible is true.
That's circular reasoning. Is there any evidence outside of the Bible that it is God-breathed and without error? I'm so glad you asked that question because I have four evidences for the trustworthiness of the Bible.
Let me briefly go through them with you. First of all, the dates of the New Testament book. It wasn't that long ago. I remember in college and hearing this, that critics of the Bible, in fact, most people, believed that the New Testament books were written 100 to 150 years after the fact of Jesus' birth, death, and resurrection, and that the gospel accounts were just fraudulent names slapped onto the gospel, attributing them to an earlier apostle. But now, even the most liberal critics concede, because of archaeological manuscript discoveries, that most of the New Testament was written between 40 and 65 A.D. That means many of the books of the New Testament were written within a decade of the events of Christ, marked the earliest gospel just a few years after the resurrection of Christ.
Why is that important? Why does that give us confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible? Because when these books came out and started being circulated, there were people who were alive when these events, the gospels referred to, took place. And so, if these books were fictional, made up, not trustworthy, they would have been discarded immediately. Instead, they were accepted and treated as scripture.
Corresponding to that, secondly, the early acceptance of the message. Not only did these New Testament books record these events, but apparently, the earliest followers of Christ believed them so much, they were willing to give their lives for these beliefs. Remember, most of the New Testament converts, early converts, were Jews. And notice how quickly they changed their belief system. I mean, almost overnight, they changed their day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. They gave up the sacrificial system. They exchanged the act of circumcision, the mark of faith.
They replaced that with baptism. All of these seismic changes showed that they actually believed what they were writing and proclaiming. You know, it's true, religious zealots throughout history have given their lives for false beliefs. But the key is, they thought it was the truth.
No religious zealot intentionally gives his life for what he believes is a lie. The point is, the disciples were willing to endure imprisonment, torture, and death, rather than recant the testimony that they had seen the risen Christ. A third evidence that's external for the inspiration of the scripture is the fulfilled prophecies that the Bible records. Prophecies from the Old Testament that came true in history. By the way, there are no fulfilled prophecies in the Book of Mormon. There are no fulfilled prophecies in the Quran or any other book. But we have just hundreds of examples of prophecies made in the Old Testament that were fulfilled later in the Old Testament or in the New Testament.
Let me give you just a couple of examples of that. To me, one of the most fascinating is one recorded in 700 B.C. in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah the prophet recorded in Isaiah 39 verses 5 to 6 that Babylon would one day conquer the nation of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel, and take her captive. Now what's interesting is, when Isaiah made that prophecy in 700 B.C., Babylon was not a major world player.
It was a minor country. But Isaiah didn't stop there. He said not only would Babylon become the world power, not only would he take God's people captive, but he also predicted that one day Babylon would be overthrown by another nation, the nation of Persia. He prophesied that in Isaiah 21 verse 9.
Persia is modern day Iran. But he didn't stop there. He said God would raise up the king of Persia, a man named Cyrus, who would give the orders that would allow Judah to go back to her homeland in Israel. And he made that prophecy. Isaiah wrote that in 700 B.C., 100 years before Cyrus was even born. Isaiah was able to pinpoint this character, call him by name, prophesy what he would do, and that's exactly what happened. In 586 B.C., Babylon took Judah captive. We know that in 539 B.C., Persia conquered Babylon.
And in 538 B.C., King Cyrus decreed that Israel should go back to her land. How do you explain that? I mean, it's a written fact.
How do you explain Isaiah prophesying something that specific 150 years before the fact? Aren't you glad that our Christian faith is founded on facts? Sure, it requires faith to believe in Jesus Christ. But, gratefully, God has given us irrefutable evidence that reinforces our confidence. This is my very first message in this teaching series called What Every Christian Should Know. And I hope you'll stay with us for all 10 studies ahead this month on Pathway to Victory. Earlier, I mentioned my book for this series. It's also called What Every Christian Should Know, 10 Core Beliefs for Standing Strong in a Shifting World. And I truly believe this could be the most important book you'll read this year. You see, doctrine matters.
Here's why. Our foundational beliefs about God affect every part of our lives and even shape the way we interact with the world. In my book, I'm going to help you grasp 10 essential doctrines that will help you stand strong in your faith. In fact, if you have children or grandchildren who've begun to second-guess their Christian faith, this would make a tremendous gift.
False teaching runs rampant in our day, and these are the non-negotiable facts about God and His Word. Ask for my book, What Every Christian Should Know. It's yours when you give a generous gift to support the growing ministry of Pathway to Victory. As you contemplate the amount of your gift, please be generous in your support of this nonprofit ministry. We couldn't provide these daily programs without your generous partnership. If it's been a while since you have given, or maybe you've never been in touch with us, why not reach out today?
Now, here's David to explain how. Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. To receive a copy of the bestselling book by Dr. Robert Jeffress called What Every Christian Should Know, simply contact the Ministry of Pathway to Victory with a generous gift. Call us toll-free at 866-999-2965, or visit our website if you'd like, ptv.org. Now, when you give $75 or more, we'll also send you the complete collection of audio and video discs for the teaching series, What Every Christian Should Know.
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Again, that's P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins. Join us again next time when Dr. Jeffress continues this message called What Every Christian Should Know About the Bible. That's right here on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a Pathway partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in His Word. To become a Pathway partner, go to ptv.org slash podcast and click on the donate button or follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.
