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Now, here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. God has a motivation and God has the ability to make sure the message we hold in our hand is true and accurate and can be trusted. To me, that's the best evidence for knowing that the Bible is really true. Dr. Robert Jeffress. You know, for thousands of years, the 66 books of the Bible have stood as the primary writings of Christianity.
So, where do they come from and who wrote them? And how do we know the Bible can be trusted? Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress provides compelling evidence for why we can trust the claims of Scripture. Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress. Welcome again to Pathway to Victory. Let me begin our program with a personal question. If you could go back in time and walk with the Apostle Paul on one of his journeys, would you do it? Well, this coming May, let's travel together on the life-changing Pathway to Victory journeys of Paul Mediterranean cruise. The dates are May 5th through 16th. You can walk with me and other believers in the very places where God's Word was written, while surrounded by natural beauty from the hands of our Creator.
You can reserve your spot on the Pathway to Victory journeys of Paul Mediterranean cruise today by going to ptv.org. This month on Pathway to Victory, I've been presenting one of my favorite topical series and one that I believe is most important as we begin a new year together. This in-depth study is called How Can I Know? Answers to Life's Seven Most Important Questions. In conjunction with these daily programs, I've written a best-selling book as well. And while there's still time, I'm inviting you to request your copy for yourself, for your friends and family, and anyone who struggles with doubt. In addition to the topic we addressed on today's program, I tackle questions like, how can I know how to start over when I've blown it?
Or how can I know God is good with all the suffering in the world? Seven answers to seven very important questions. Be prepared to jot down our contact information later in today's program so that you can request my book called How Can I Know?
But right now, let's dig deeply into the subject at hand for today's program. I titled today's message, How Can I Know the Bible is True? How can I really know that the Bible is true? Now, we've talked about all the evidence, the internal claims of the Bible, fulfilled prophecy, unity of theme, early acceptance of the message, archaeology. Why do people object to the idea that the Bible is true? Let me mention today three common objections to the trustworthiness of the Bible. One excuse is, people say scribes must have made numerous errors in copying the text throughout the centuries. Remember the old game of telephone you used to play as a kid?
You'd get in a circle with your friends, and the first person would whisper a message to the second person, and on down the line it went to the last person, and the last person would give the message, and it was completely distorted from what the first message was. A lot of people think that's what happened with the Bible. They think, okay, the originals, which we don't have by the way, the original manuscripts were without error, but surely copyists made mistakes through the centuries.
Well, let's look at that possibility. First of all, in the Old Testament, there is a plethora of manuscript evidence for the reliability of the copyist. For example, do you realize that most ancient literary works have very few manuscripts to support them?
There are only seven manuscripts for Plato, eight for Herodotus, 10 for Caesar's Gallic Wars, and 20 manuscripts for the historian Tacitus, and yet there are over 10,000 manuscripts for the Old Testament. The most amazing of those manuscripts was discovered in 1947 in Qumran, the caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea. It was the discovery of what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls. A young Bedouin accidentally discovered these clay pots that contained scrolls of most of the Old Testament, including a complete copy of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Now, what was amazing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is they were dated to be 100 BC in age. They were copied 100 years before Christ. What is interesting is before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest manuscript we had of the Old Testament was 980, nearly 1,000 years later. Why is that significant? Because it gave us the ability to see how accurate the copyist had been over 1,000 years. Was there a lot of variation in the message?
Not at all. It's amazing. 95% of the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls match what we had 1,000 years later. 95%. Take Isaiah, Isaiah 53, a key chapter in the Old Testament. It has 166 words. The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that out of those 166 words, there were only 17 letters in question. Ten of those letters could be explained by difference in spelling, four letters related to minor things over which conjunction, and or but.
I mean, minor things like that. Only three letters out of 166 words were in dispute, and those letters spelled light, and they have nothing to do with the meaning of Isaiah chapter 53. It's just amazing how God has protected the manuscript through the years. What about the New Testament? There's even more evidence for the veracity of the New Testament. Without doubt, the books of the New Testament were the most quoted books of antiquity. Today, we have nearly 25,000 manuscripts.
Think about it. 25,000 manuscripts for the New Testament. Contrast that to Homer's Iliad. Remember the Iliad and the Odyssey we all studied in school?
There are only 643 copies of Homer's Iliad. In fact, there is more and earlier manuscript evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels. There's more evidence for him than there is for Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great in ancient works of literature.
That's an amazing thing. The original time between the writing of the original books of the New Testament and the earliest manuscripts is only several hundred years. Now remember, the original manuscripts were written within years of the actual events, but we don't have those original manuscripts. We've got the copies, and the copies are dated 100 to 200 years after the events. You may think, well, that is a long period of time, not when you come to ancient works of antiquity. In fact, the average interval between an author's actual life and his copies of his works is 1,000 years. But for scripture, it's only 100 to 200 years. Most importantly, these manuscripts of the New Testament tell us how accurately the New Testament has been copied through the years. In fact, there are 20,000 lines of text in the Greek New Testament. Only 40 of those 20,000 lines is there any question about. In other words, the Greek New Testament fills up about 200 pages.
You could put all the controversial passages or words on one page of 200 pages of the Greek New Testament. Even more importantly, none of these variations has any doctrinal implications at all. It doesn't affect one major doctrine of scripture. Most of the variations in the Greek New Testament have to do with things like, is there an article before the word?
Is it the lion or a lion? It's those kinds of minuscule issues. A.T. Robertson claimed that the variations of the New Testament are only 1,000th part of the entire text, meaning that the New Testament text we have today is 99.9% pure. And by the way, I had somebody ask me this week, well, I don't know I can trust the Bible. How can I trust which translation is the right translation?
Look, the differences are minor. As long as you stick with a major translation like the King James Bible or the New American Standard Bible that I use or the New International Version, you can know you're reading God's Word. God has preserved the integrity of His Word to us. A second objection people have is they say, well, the selection of the books we have in our Bible was arbitrary.
How can we know we have the right books? That refers to the canon of Scripture, C-A-N-O-N. Canon means rule or staff. It's the standard that was used to determine whether books were included in the Bible or not. Let's look at the Old Testament canon. There are 39 books that make up the Old Testament.
With few exceptions, all those books were almost immediately accepted by readers. For example, we find in Deuteronomy 31 that when Moses finished the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, they were immediately placed beside the Ark of the Covenant. Daniel had a collection of Moses' books, including his contemporary Jeremiah.
He had Jeremiah's writings. It's worth noting that there were other books of Jewish religious literature that were immediately ruled out for included in the canon of Scripture. Now, people sometimes say, well, the Old Testament wasn't really decided upon until long after Jesus' resurrection. It was in 90 A.D., they say, at the Council of Jamnia.
No, it was much earlier than that. We can prove that, by the way, by the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was written in 250 B.C., and it contained the canon of the Old Testament that we have today.
The Council of Jamnia in A.D. 90 was simply a reaffirmation of what had already been decided. People wonder about, by the way, the Apocrypha. Have you ever heard about the Apocrypha before? These are books that you find in the Catholic Bible. The word Apocrypha means hidden or doubtful. That ought to give you a heads up right then whenever you get to books that are titled hidden or doubtful.
It ought to raise some doubts. These are books that were never, never recognized by the Jewish people as Scripture. And Jesus and the apostles never quoted from the Apocrypha. Jerome, the Roman Catholic theologian who translated the Latin Vulgate, he did not accept the Apocrypha. And it's interesting that it took 1600 years for the Catholic Church to recognize the Apocrypha.
It has widely been disputed as belonging in the canon of Scripture. What about the New Testament canon? There's even more evidence that the New Testament has been properly formed. For example, virtually every one of the books of the New Testament was written by an apostle or by somebody under the apostle's direction like Mark was under Peter's direction for his gospel. Furthermore, the majority of New Testament books were written between 45 and 100 A.D. You've heard in a previous message that Peter recognized Paul writings as Scripture according to 2 Peter 3.
Paul said Luke's gospel was Scripture as quoted in 1 Timothy 5, 18. And it's true the Council of Hippo officially ratified the canon of the New Testament in 393 A.D. But there's evidence that the early church accepted it much earlier than that.
And here's what's significant. Since 393 A.D., there's not been one serious attempt to either add to or subtract from the canon of the New Testament. Maybe you've heard about the Gnostic gospels. How many of you have ever heard about the Gnostic gospels?
If you've read Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code, or saw the Tom Hanks movie, you know the plot line. But supposedly there was this five or six group of gospels that were written early on that showed that Jesus was merely human. And for political reasons, those books were gathered up and burned by church leaders and kept from the people.
Now, it's true. There were five or six books. We call them the Gnostic gospels that were written. But, first of all, none of them were written by apostles who were eyewitnesses to Jesus. They were written hundreds of years after the fact.
They were written hundreds of years after the time of Christ. And they were rejected immediately by church leaders. And the reason they were rejected, and this is key, is not because they talked about the humanity of Christ. It's because they denied the humanity of Christ. The Gnostics were this cult that believed Jesus never came in human form.
He was only a spirit. So they denied the humanity of Christ, when in fact Jesus was 100% human and 100% God. The Gnostic gospels have no place in the canon of scripture. Now, the third and final objection to the Bible being trustworthy is, oh, the Bible just has too many errors and contradictions in it. I remember being taught in college all the contradictions that are in the Bible. What are we to make of these so-called errors and contradictions? Well, some of them can be explained by the language of appearance.
Now, when you turn on the weather on your television, watch it at night, and the meteorologist stands there and gives you the time of the sunrise and the sunset. Do you yell out, Liar! Liar!
You're lying. The sun doesn't rise and the sun doesn't set. Well, we understand what he's doing. He's using the language of appearance. Sunrise and sunset are appearance terms. It's the same thing in Isaiah 11, verse 12, when Isaiah talks about the four corners of the earth. He's not saying the earth is flat, as some people would say.
He's using the language of appearance. Some of the errors are truly copyist errors. There are not many of them, but there are a few copyist errors. Like in 2 Chronicles 22, verse 2, it says that Ahaziah was 42 years old. 2 Kings 8 says he was 22. Obviously, a copyist got it wrong.
If he had been 42, he would have been older than his father. So we know 22 is the right number. Now, I know you can use this as an excuse for anything that's uncomfortable in the Bible. The point is there are a few copyist errors, and we know where they are.
And finally, some of these so-called errors are poor translations. A good example of that is Matthew 13, 32, when Jesus said, according to the King James, the mustard seed is the least. It is the smallest of all seeds.
People say, oh, Jesus made a mistake. There are seeds smaller than the mustard seed. What you have in the King James is just a poor translation. The word translated least is not a superlative, as is it's the very smallest. It's a comparative. The mustard seed is the lesser of seeds. It's in a category called small seeds, and that's why the New American Standard gets it right when it says that it is a smaller of the seeds.
Not the smallest, but a smaller of the seeds. Some of the errors in the Bible, secondly, are alleged contradictions. Many people claim that there are contradictions in the Bible. Have you heard that before?
Now, here's an example. 1 Corinthians 10, verse 8. Paul is talking about an Old Testament plague, and he says it killed 23,000 people in a single day. And yet Moses, in Numbers 25, 9, claims that it was 24,000 who died. Is that a contradiction?
Not at all. Paul said 23,000 died in a single day. Obviously, there were those who caught the plague who didn't die in 24 hours. They died later.
And so Moses was given the total death count of 24,000. Some of the alleged contradictions can be because of paraphrases. Let me give you an example of that. We have two accounts of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. And then we have another account in Luke 6. And they're different. Jesus' wording is different.
The length is different. How do you account for the difference between the Sermon on the Mount? Well, it's very possible Jesus could have preached that message twice in different locations. He could have given a longer version when he had more time in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. He could have given a summary in Luke chapter 6 of what Jesus said. Now, this will be a help to you.
It was a help to me when I first realized this. You know, in our language, the English language, we have what we call direct quotations. If something has quotation marks around it, it's claiming to be exactly what somebody said. On the other hand, we have indirect quotations, which are simply a summary of what somebody said. In the Greek language, there are no quotation marks. So some of the things that you find of Jesus' words are word for word what Jesus said.
Other times, it may be a paraphrase, a summary. For example, suppose I was preaching on marriage, and I said in a sermon, nobody under the age of 21 ought to get married. And somebody were to ask you who wasn't here, what did the preacher say of interest Sunday morning? And you say, well, Pastor Jeffress said 18-year-olds shouldn't get married. Now, did I actually say that? Well, not word for word, but that's an accurate summary of what I said.
I certainly said 18-year-olds shouldn't get married. That's the same thing with the words of Jesus. Sometimes what we're getting is not an exact quotation, but it's an accurate summation.
And then finally, some of the alleged contradictions in the Bible can be because of complementary accounts of the same event, complementary instead of contradictory. For example, let's say I'm driving up Central Expressway, and I see a terrible wreck. And I call Ben on my cell phone and say, Ben, there's a terrible wreck up here. There are three ambulances.
Ben later and other staff members driving up behind me and calls Ben and says, oh, there's a terrible accident on the expressway. There are three ambulances and two fire trucks. Now, are those contradictory accounts? If I said the only vehicles there were three ambulances, it would have been. But the fact that I didn't mention the fire trucks and was focusing on the ambulances was maybe because I was concerned about the loss of life, not the loss of property.
But this person behind me who gave the account to Ben that included the fire trucks was giving the overall picture of what the accident scene was like. That explains things like in Matthew, you got the account of one angel being at the empty tomb when the women came. And John says there were two angels. Now, is that a contradiction? If Matthew had said there is only one angel, there was only one angel, that would be a contradiction. But it's very possible that Matthew was emphasizing the one angel who actually spoke while John was talking about both angels, one who spoke and one who didn't speak. What I'm saying to you is, as my friend Erwin Lutzer says, you can trust the Bible. And that's what the theme is.
Just because I don't understand what's being said, isn't it arrogance to say, oh, there's a mistake here because I don't understand it. I think about Ron Neil in his book, The Tender Commandments. He makes an interesting point. He says, you know, mothers are always writing letters to their children or sending emails or sending cards. They like to keep in contact. But if you ever got a letter from your father, you trembled when you opened the envelope because you knew something big was up. Somebody must have died or something for a dad to send a written communication.
Just think about it. Our Heavenly Father has gone to the trouble to send a written communication to us because more than anything else, He loves us. He wants us to know His message.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him will never perish but have eternal life. God has a motivation and God has the ability to make sure the message we hold in our hand is true and accurate and can be trusted. To me, that's the best evidence for knowing that the Bible is really true.
Maybe you've never viewed the Bible from this vantage point. My prayer is that someone is listening to me right now who for the first time is beginning to understand that the Bible is a personal love letter handed down from the Heavenly Father who loves you. It reminds me of someone who contacted Pathway to Victory recently. Jim listens to us from Texas and said, Dr. Jeffress, I haven't been to church in about nine years. When you teach, I know the Word of God is taught properly and not watered down. I'll admit my life isn't where it needs to be and I'm not walking right, but God is working through your program to help bring me back to Him. Jim, that's wonderful. I love your honesty and transparency. Now, friends, if you've given a financial gift to Pathway to Victory either as a one-time gift or as one of our valued Pathway partners, you need to know that your generosity is creating these moments for people like Jim all across the country and around the world. Thanks so much for your continued support. And today, when you give a generous gift, I'd like to send you the book that complements this teaching series.
It's called How Can I Know? Answers to Life's 7 Most Important Questions. Even if you have a copy of this book, you could get another one to give a son or daughter or somebody who's struggling with the Christian faith. My book comes with my deep gratitude to you. My book is designed to equip you with clear, incredible answers not only to satisfy your own curiosity, but more importantly to transfer your confidence to friends and family as well. So please, let me hear from you today.
David? Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. You're invited to request your copy of the bestselling book by Dr. Jeffress, How Can I Know?, when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory, or when you give your first gift as a Pathway partner. Just call 866-999-2965 or visit online at ptv.org. And when your investment is $75 or more, we'll also send you the complete, unabridged collection of audio and video discs for the How Can I Know?
teaching series. These newly updated sermons would make the perfect subject for your small group Bible study or Sunday school class. So here's that phone number one more time, 866-999-2965. Again, that's 866-999-2965, or go to ptv.org.
You could also write to us if you'd like. Here's that mailing address, P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222.
Again, that's P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins, wishing you a great weekend. Then join us again next time when Dr. Jeffress answers the question, How can I know I'm going to heaven when I die? 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 donate, or follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory.
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