Is the Bible Really the Word of God? | Table Talk S03 E02

So here we are back again in part two of a 13 part series that is covering hard or difficult questions for God. And we talked about the existence of God in our first session together. Gave a lot of powerful, I think, personal experience as well as intellectual thoughts. Insights that I think were compelling to me. I hope they were compelling to our listeners. I don't know. And now we're going to be looking at our second segment. We're going to be looking at the question, is the Bible the word of God? And we're going to be looking at some of the reasons for that. I jotted them down here as Ty and I were taking, or I was taking some notes from him. Historical, prophetic.

Philosophical and experimental. These are some of the aspects or the reasons that we look at in relation to the word of God. And can we trust the word of God? Is the Word of God something that we can look to and believe in and accept and allow it to have a place in our lives?

We could begin by just asking the question, does it even matter? Because increasingly in the world we live in, a lot of people don't care whether or not the Bible is the word of God, whether or not it's an authoritative text. I personally think that it is important. But I think there's a reason. There are a lot of reasons, but I think there's one prominent reason why so many people in our culture are pushing back from the Bible. I think that the Bible has been misrepresented by us. By us. I mean, people who do believe that it's the word of God. Oftentimes we've used the Bible or we have postured ourselves with Bible in hand in kind of a top down authoritarian approach. The Bible says, therefore you ought to believe, rather than taking the Scripture for what it really is. And that is it's an unfolding story that is true to reality as we experience reality in life. What I mean by that is this. I was raised in a very secular environment. There was no Christianity, there was no belief in God, nothing like that.

And then when my mom began to believe in God and she became a Christian, the first thing that, that she did was she put up a Christian evangelist, put him up to converting me. Well, my mom and I were from different generations. For my mom, even though she was not a believer, the Bible had kind of a sacred sense to her, even though she had never read it. She was raised in a generation where if the evangelist said the Bible says, she would say, oh wow, the Bible says that. But then she put this evangelist up to saying similar things to me. And he said, you know, young man, the Bible says. And my natural response, I wasn't intentionally irreverent. It was just that the Bible meant nothing to me. Nothing. So in my mind, the given wasn't that the Bible is authoritative, therefore I should respond. To me, it was on the level of other literature. I associated it with Shakespeare and the Greek myths, and to me it was a book. So when the evangelist said, the Bible says, and he was expecting a similar response that he got from my mom, I was like, and what follows from that? What do you mean the Bible says? It was kind of the. The Bible says that I believe that that settles it for me. And my natural response would be, well, it doesn't settle it for me. Because the Bible didn't already have a.

It didn't have any traction?

No, it didn't have any traction. So I think increasingly we need to answer the question, is the Bible the word of God? Not so much from the standpoint of, for example, imagine somebody saying to you, the Bible is the word of God. To which they respond and say, how do you know that? To which you respond, because it says so. That's called circular reasoning. The Bible is the word of God because it says that it's the word of God. Or. Or is there, if we open it, are there good reasons in the text itself to persuade us that it is what it claims to be? And should we examine those reasons?

I love what you're saying there, and I love the fact that you're saying that in some significant way it's believers that are to blame for the misapprehension. A larger misapprehension in culture. Not entirely. It's not like we, you know, they are not completely adjudicated of their responsibility because God has a claim on everybody's life. However, there is certainly a sense in which we, to some degree, as believers, have misrepresented the text. I look at my own preaching. I've been a Minister now for 17 years, a pastor, and I think of my early ministry. And it was very much as you would say, as you were describing there, the first. Oh, I would say six or seven years of my ministry was very factual. The Bible says this. Therefore you just expect it to elicit a response. Because you said that the Bible says that.

And it does for some people.

And it does. And it does, particularly as you said, the older generation, because the Bible does hold a sacred, hallowed place in our culture. You know, the president puts his hand on the Bible or in A court of law. So there is this sense in which it's regarded by many, and particularly of the older generation as possessing a sacred place in culture. However, I think there's another sense in which we've represented Scripture, and that is that we come to Scripture treating it. And this is similar to what you're saying, but there's a slight variation. We treat Scripture like it contains the answers to a theology quiz.

Like it's a creed or something.

Well, just like, okay, so what happens when you die? Let's find that answer. And what was the third king of whatever, Israel? And then it's like that. And certainly there are answers in there. Encyclopedia. That's great. Exactly where what you said is so true that Scripture presents a narrative, a revealing and an unfolding a story of who God is. And what we are supposed to do is not find. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood on this. We're not supposed to find the Bible so compelling as we are supposed to find the character that the Bible is telling us about compelling.

And those answers to those questions that you're saying, what happens when we die? This or that. You encounter those answers in the story, in the context of the story.

But too many people, they just have the answers without the story.

That's why I like the way the Bible describes itself as the Word. I just want to say this in this context, that the Bible describes itself as the Word. And that means that it is manifest not only in an intellectual outline of facts, Encyclopedia, you know, we've got this. But it's manifest in, according to John, chapter one, in a person. So when we get all mixed up about all of this information, a person actually becomes the Word.

I like this little building block.

A person actually becomes the Word. And this person that becomes the Word, he's manifest among us. And he clarifies now what this book is really all about. This book is really all about a person. It's all about a life journey. It's all about a story. It's all about this individual that we call God.

Yeah, I like the point you're making, because that's really what I was trying to get at. And you pointed us to John chapter one, where it says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And it goes on to say that the same was in the beginning with God. And then the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. This is interesting. The word, Word in the beginning was. The Word is the Greek word logos. And there are various efforts to translate what the sense of that was. But in the local Greek culture in which the Gospel writer would have used that particular language to describe Jesus, he's essentially saying, in the beginning was the Logos and the translation would be this. In the beginning was the logical reason for existence, or in the beginning was the rational basis for human experience, or in the beginning is the meaning of life. In the beginning was the logic that logically makes sense out of. So this is interesting because.

Here John is approaching us and not saying. The Word is data on a page that has authority over your intellect. Okay, follow this.

I've got you.

He's saying the word, as James is pointing out, is a person who is communicating to your intellect. It's not bypassing with authority and pouncing on you with you ought. It's actually coming inside and saying, listen, if you look at Jesus.

This personification of the Word, if you look at Jesus, you're going to see the rational basis for the things your heart longed for. You're going to see the meaning of life in him. So it's approaching us not so much from the top down as from the inside out.

It's initiating. You know, in the Spanish, it says in the beginning was the verb. So the verb, the voice, it is a verb. Yeah, yeah. So it just says, in the beginning was the verb. To me, that just sounds different than in the beginning was the Word. Right. So it just goes with what you were saying. It's initiating. So the Word is basically God is initiating something and inviting you on a journey that you encounter, and then you discover all of life's questions on that journey, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing that you were saying there, Ty reminded me of a theologian I read several years ago. And he said that, you know, it's not a hard and fast demarcation between the Old and the New Testament. But one thing he did bring out, I thought was quite fascinating is that in the Old Testament picture, the Bible is divided into two kind of parts, Old and New Testament. And he was saying that in the Old Testament, God is often there. He's over there. He's at the top of the mountain in the clouds and in the smoke. He's in the most holy place where only one person can go one time a year. In the sanctuaries, there's this sense of the transcendence of God, the otherness of God. And he sort of says, okay, so that's sort of Old Testament. And then he says, you come to the New Testament. And he says, but here's this Same God, Jehovah, God, Yahweh, God in Jesus, sitting across the table, he's sitting down with you. There's kids playing on his lap. There's women that are coming and anointing him in preparation for his burial. And he said, what we have in the Old Testament is largely transcendence. It's up there. What we have in the New Testament.

Is he's right there, a woman is in the kitchen cooking him a meal, and another woman is at his feet asking theological questions.

And so I love this idea here, that John one. And what you're saying is that in the beginning was the one, the logic, the meaning of life, the verb he's coming down in a mutual, not top down. Thus saith the Lord right here, right?

And so became flesh. Like, that's really to see.

We're not going to jump into this right now. But this is really key to understanding pain and suffering, to understand that whole dynamic. Because the answers don't always come with logic, but they come with the fact that Jesus Christ, that God himself has stepped into our experience. He's with us.

He's with us. Have any of you guys seen this book, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris? This is, you know, it has a cover on it. So it's a book, but really it's a letter. It's a letter that Sam Harris, a very prominent advocate in American culture and actually worldwide of atheism, he's an unbeliever, very staunch and militant atheist. And he just sat down and he wrote a letter to a Christian nation, to the United States of America and its population. And it's very fascinating that in this letter he begins to flesh out why he doesn't find Christianity persuasive and why he doesn't believe. I think it's interesting that as you read his letter to a Christian nation, you would expect from an atheist, you would expect him to say, okay, I don't believe in God. And here are the scientific reasons, the reasons from physics and the reasons from biology and the reasons. But this is all pretty much. I mean, he references some of that, but really he's saying, I don't believe in God because the God that has been represented isn't worth believing in. That's essentially the core of it. So he has this one section here in the letter where he deals with the Bible. This is interesting. He says, you gotta remember it's a letter. So he's addressing Christians. He says, you, you Christians, you believe that the Bible is the word of God. You believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that the only. And that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. He goes on and says, you believe, of course, that those who do not put their faith in Jesus will burn in hell and be tormented forever. So he's saying, okay, you want me to believe in God? Okay, you want me to believe what you believe. But the Bible has been represented to me as teaching that there's no way for anybody to be saved who doesn't immediately confess in the immediate sense of a direct connection. You can't be eternally saved unless you have belief in Jesus specifically, and everybody else is going to burn eternally in hell. Now, I find it interesting, and we're going to have a conversation later on that's going to actually ask the question, can somebody actually be saved who never even heard the name of Jesus? And that's going to be a pretty provocative conversation. But right now I'm simply pointing out that a lot of unbelief is based on misrepresentation. Yeah, great point. Of what? The Bible. So if the Bible says that God plays favorites, that God is a respecter of persons, so to speak, that God's a racist, or God in some way will save you because you were born at the right time and heard the right thing, but nobody else has access to this knowledge. But John, chapter one is telling us that even before Jesus by the name Jesus came into the world, he was the Logos. He was the word that was speaking to all people's hearts down through history, in all cultures. But Sam Harris doesn't know that because all he's heard is that nobody but Americans who believe in Jesus can be eternally saved, so to speak. And that's an exaggeration for effect. And anyone who doesn't is going to burn forever in hell. But we can sit here and we could bring Sam to this table and we could say, sam, you're now at a table with people who do believe that the Bible's the word of God, who do believe that Jesus is the Savior. And we don't believe that God will torment people forever in hell. And we don't believe that God is so exclusive and narrow that anybody throughout history who's never had the opportunity can no way be said. We don't believe that Sam. And he would. What would he say then?

Well, let me just add to that real quick. And then we would say, and we don't believe these things based on this. On the Bible.

Yeah, that's right.

In other words, it's not just like, oh, because we would be accused in some circles of, oh, well, you just can't deal with the hard passages of scripture. So you've invented this, you know, airy fairy, you know, nice theology. But no, we're saying the text doesn't teach that same thing.

It teaches the exact.

Yeah, the text actually teaches the opposite. The text teaches that in the end, God will honor everyone's choice. In other words, here's what I'm hearing you say, and here's what I'm hearing Sam say. And you actually went and saw him lecture, didn't you, Jeffrey?

Yeah.

Here's the takeaway. Many people are rejecting God and many people are rejecting the Bible for very good reasons.

That's right.

For reasons that we ourselves, if that were true, would reject the Bible.

Exactly.

We just don't think it's true.

And what's interesting about that is in reality, they're not rejecting the Bible. And they're not.

Thank you.

That's exactly because that's not what the Bible's teaching. It's not the Bible. They're rejecting somebody.

They're rejecting God, which ty brought up the text and it goes on to say, Jesus Christ is the light that lightens every man that comes into the world now. So this man is being enlightened by darkness. Well, he's been enlightened by a reality in his brain that does not jibe, does not, does not equal, does not go along with what he hears Christians saying. Wait a minute. I can't believe in that kind of a God because that doesn't make sense to me. That that is out of harmony with the principle of love. And the Word that I feel is teaching me because God is teaching all men.

Something I want to say in that. And it doesn't mean we don't want to insult Sam's intelligence or anyone else's. It doesn't mean that if you heard the truth that you would have to believe it in a compulsory sense.

He might still say, I don't believe it.

But at least what you say, you would still be. You would be rejecting the. Not a caricature of the thing. You would be saying, oh, so that's what the Bible is. Well, I still don't want to have anything.

At least it's an intelligent rejection and not a misrepresentation.

Exactly.

Not a misunderstanding.

So would you guys agree with this? Is there a sense in which.

There are aspects of. Or forms that atheism takes that you would actually affirm? Absolutely. That you would say if somebody Says, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God, and these are my reasons. And. And we could say to them, we affirm your unbelief. We would say, amen, we affirm your unbelief in that picture you just painted.

Because what you don't believe in is the same thing we don't believe in.

Yeah.

Several years ago, I watched a debate between. That's my alarm going off, waking me up in Australia.

Several years ago, I watched a debate between an avowed atheist, Christopher Hitchens, who passed away since, and the Christian apologist, Dinesh d'. Souza. And watching this debate, King's College Christopher Hitchens, atheist DINESH d', Souza, Christian as the debate is going on, I'm pulling.

For Christopher Hitchens for the atheist.

I'm pulling for the atheist. I'm saying, oh, man, that's a great point. And I found d' Souza's answers to be completely unsatisfactory. I literally was wishing I was in the debate, not because I think I would be anything like an intellectual match for the late Christopher Hitchens, but if he had made his opening remarks, his 10 minutes of opening remarks, just as he had in that debate with d', Souza, I literally could have stood up and said, I agree with everything you said, and sat down.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because the reasons, the objections that he raised against the Bible, against religion and against God are all things that I resonate with. I would have said, I agree with that. I agree with that.

I agree with that.

Okay, next point.

So we have to take a break, but this is a fun discussion and we have the privilege of encouraging other people to sit around the table in their local areas and have similar discussions. It's very edifying. So after the break, we'll just pursue this more.

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So the question we're tackling in this part of our discussion is simply, this is the Bible, the word of God? You've got to admit that's a pretty heady claim. Very heavy to say. Okay, here's a book. Words on the pages. And this is in some sense from God, in some authority. Yeah, that's right, in some authority. So it's a pretty heavy claim that we're making. I think we better say something that backs up why we believe that. So as James mentioned before, there's the historical, there's the philosophical, there's the prophetic and the experiential. What do you want to tackle? Is there something that appeals more to your mind that is persuasive than another? I mean, why do you believe the Bible is the word of God? I guess that's what I'm asking.

Can I ask this question or can I throw this in that mix? We say the Bible is the word of God, but I feel like even that requires clarification. I know that that required clarification for me when I became a believer. Okay, what does that mean, to say it's the word of God? There's many words in there.

Does that mean God dictated it?

Exactly. I like to say it this way. The Bible is God's revelation to the world in a story in the man Jesus. But that doesn't mean that the Bible is the words of God. Now let me just clarify what I'm saying there. What I'm not saying there. God didn't dictate. Okay, write that and write that and then write that and then write that. In fact, in the whole of scripture, 66 books, thousands of chapters, tens of thousands of words, there are precious few words that God himself wrote with his own finger. And those were The Ten Commandments on tablets of stone. So when we're reading, for example, Isaiah, if I just closed my eyes and somebody started reading, you guys could do the same thing. Those that are familiar with scripture would say, ah, that sounds like Isaiah. And then if you just start reading, oh, man, that sounds like that's Paul. Well, what's going on there?

Well, there's stylistic concerns.

Stylistic individuals were actually writing. God did not come into the Bible.

There's a human fingerprint. Again, that's why you could even identify if it was dictated. It would all sound the same.

Yeah, it would sound the same. So then the question is, what do we mean when we say we're asking the question, is the Bible the word of God? And we're about ready to provide these reasons for it.

I like a quotation, a statement that I read a number of years ago where Ellen White said, God as an author is not represented in Scripture, quote, unquote, and then went on to say, not only is God not represented as an author, then went on to say that the prophets were God's penmen, not his pen. Yeah, I've read that too. Not his pen. So this idea is. I like the way Abraham Joshua Heschel. There's a statement I read by him just recently where he said, the prophets are people, not a microphone. And that was his way of saying.

Making the same point.

Yeah, there's a human element. And that human element is expressed by Peter when he says, holy men of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is present and active, moving upon the human agent. And the human agent is then writing. And that's why you see that Paul's writing style is different than Isaiah's.

But it makes perfect sense. Right, because that's a great question. People are different.

I love that explanation.

People are different. The reader is different. We're not all the same. So by having a revelation that consists of different personalities with different styles and different language, it appeals to different people.

Okay, I just want to put that on the table before we. Okay, so in answer to your question, you asked the question, is there one that appeals to you? And I would say, as much as I wish that in some sense I could say, well, I examined the evidences for the historicity and believability of Scripture, and I came to a reasoned conclusion, okay, that's not what happened in my life. In my life, I was in a period of depression. I was in a period of discouragement. And you guys know me, I'm normally a happy Upbeat, buoyant person. This was a dark period of my life. It was a difficult period in my life. I was 23 years old, sort of searching for direction, haunted by aimlessness, and had been through a personal tragedy, difficult situation. And I opened up a book that wasn't even the Bible. It was a book about the Bible. But the thing that I opened up, the whole opening page, was this story of Luke. Not the story. It was the passage of Luke 17 and Jesus. This is the story. Jesus is there. He's sitting on top of a mountain. He's looking at a city, Jerusalem. Now, I don't know much about the Bible, hardly at all at that point. You mean at that point he's looking at the city and he's crying and he's saying, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. How often I wanted to gather you together. And I had a resonance with this guy Jesus. I thought, who is this guy Jesus? He's crying, he feels rejected, he feels forlorn. And that's exactly how I was feeling at that moment.

That's amazing.

And so in a super. What I can only describe as a supernatural synergy, I felt a resonance with Jesus and a resonance with Luke 17 that came before any intellectual, historical, philosophical reasons. Before I ever got there, I was like, man, this is speaking to my soul.

Something very similar happened to me. But as we're all individuals from a totally different angle, I grew up witnessing a lot of concrete evil, a lot of suffering. And as a child, all I saw going on around me was horrible. It was just bad, and I didn't like it. And there was a big problem in my mind. And the problem was that I couldn't accept the existence of God. And I couldn't accept the Bible as the word of God because I couldn't understand how a God with any kind of power that is significant could exist and allow for the kind of stuff I grew up witnessing. So you resonated with. With a book that was about the Bible. Similar for me. And the thing that came to my mind. I love what you said that you saw Jesus crying.

And sad about what was going on in the city of Jerusalem. I suddenly encountered this idea that God is love. I always thought of God in terms of power. If there is a God, I wasn't sure there was a God, but I thought, well, God, if God exists, would have to equate to a lot of power. So why isn't he doing anything? You know, it was a very simplistic.

I think a lot of people have that similarly simplistic view.

Yeah. But then all of a sudden, this idea of love was thrown in the picture. And all of a sudden I thought, wait a minute, there's a different way to look at this. And like your experience, my heart began to resonate. And then, as I mentioned earlier, the evangelist who was saying the Bible says, young man, therefore you ought to believe. Well, I actually believed before the Bible had authority. And then the Bible gained traction with me. I began to see that it was authoritative because it was speaking to me on the premise of the things that were making sense at that point in my life.

You're longing to understand God as something more than just power.

That's right.

Force. The actual verse. I said Luke 17 earlier. It's Luke 19. The actual verse. I can still remember this. I was in dorm room in Laramie, Wyoming. It was October. I can remember the details very well. I could tell you the posters that were on my wall. I could tell you what I'd had for dinner that night. I mean, I was in a moment. This was a moment for me. I think when we look back over our lives, you know, we remember those.

Peaks, so many things in slow motion.

This is in the trailer of David's life. This is like in the. In the trailer, the movie trailer. And it was this verse that I read now, as he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it. And I don't know what it was. I was raised in sort of a nominal Christian home, but the picture that I had of Jesus in my mind did not include him weeping in emotional consternation, frustration, rejection, weeping over a city. And I tell you, the resonance there was like, who is this guy and why is he crying and why is he acting like that? That's not the God or the Jesus that.

It's really interesting because.

We all came in through similar experiences from similar backgrounds. And I remember the verse. That was my verse. You know how it is. Every once in a while, maybe it's a year or a few months, there's a verse you read, and it's your verse. And it's because it really speaks to where you are in your experience at that point. And when I first became. I'm going to say it in a different way. When I first committed my life to the Lord, because I was raised a Christian, so to speak. I went to a Catholic school. I was an altar boy. I went to church every week as a kid. But I was totally immersed in the world, especially in my teenage years. So when I gave my heart to Jesus and actually started studying the Bible, there was a verse that I read, and it's one that's very familiar with all of you. It's Second Peter, chapter three, in verse nine. And that verse basically says that God is long suffering toward us. He's not willing that one would perish, but that all would come to repentance. And that was it for me. I mean, that verse spoke to me and it. It informed me about this God. This wasn't a God that I just had to appease and make sure I went to confession and make sure I said so many prayers and made sure I went to church, you know, so many times a year, including Christmas and Easter. That wasn't him. This was a God that was long, patient, loved me so much. He was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. And he didn't want me to perish. He did not want me to perish. He was not wanting anyone to parent. She wants everyone to come to her fence. And that was it. That all of a sudden the Bible meant something. Now, the word of God meant something to me other than just this intellectual outline of how you practice religion.

The common theme in yours, in your story and your story to my story, is that the first thing that appealed to us in scripture, that really began to give scripture traction or credibility, was a picture of God that was beautiful.

That's right.

God is love. God is patient. He wants to save. Even me. Jesus is weeping. Was yours anything like that, Jeffrey? Or was it.

I'll just take a completely different direction because I mentioned earlier that for sure.

There was a sense of purpose and meaning that I was looking for. But actually the intellectual reasons played a more prominent role for me earlier. And I think it's important to address this now, this idea that God.

Doesn'T expect us to believe without giving us sufficient evidence upon which to base our faith. There's this concept that the Bible is not merely a philosophical proposition. So the biblical worldview, Christianity is not a philosophical system. It's actually a record of things that took place in real time. That's right. Real events with real people. God entering into time and space and things happened. And so that, to me, was really powerful in the idea that the Bible is a historical document really of God's interaction with humanity. And so to me, I began to think, okay, wait, the claims of Scripture are different than some of the other things I've been exposed to. And so there's prophecies, there's prophetic promises in the Bible where God promised that certain things would take place. And so I actually literally went to the library and you Love the word. I consulted different source material to try to figure out if the things that were recorded here actually took place. So to me, no question, the emotional need and the emotional hunger and thirst and searching for meaning was important. But I was confronted with the fact that the Bible is a historical document and the theological claims that it makes are based on the historical reality of that these things actually happened. And then from those things, we jump to the meaning and the theology behind it.

Well, you mentioned prophecy, Jeffrey. Prophecy is a powerful internal testimony to the supernatural origin of the book that we call the Bible. This is very interesting for me. We all are familiar with the fact that there are somewhere between 300, some even have counted 400 prophecies in the Old Testament foretelling the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ, as the savior of the world. And that's hundreds of statements with details that are saying, he'll be like this, he'll do this. There are all kinds of details, just a few of them here. This is just eight of them. The prophet Micah foretold that the Messiah would be born in a particular town, Bethlehem, and Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem. At that point you're saying, oh, yeah, well, so what? Lots of people born. Lots of people born in Bethlehem. But watch where this goes. Isaiah, the prophet foretold that the Messiah would be heralded by a forerunner type figure who would be a country boy who would be out in the wilderness crying out and telling people, hey, he's coming, he's coming, he's coming. And as the story unfolds in the New Testament, Jesus was preceded by a forerunner, John the Baptist, who talked about the fact that he was coming. So that's two now. Then three. Zechariah foretold that he would enter into the city of Jerusalem riding on a donkey. And then, in fact, Jesus did, at a certain point in his ministry, fulfill that exact prophecy. Now we're up to three or four. And then. No, that was number three. Then number four, Zechariah also foretold that Jesus would be betrayed into the hands of his enemies by a friend. And we think of the experience with Judas. Number five, Zechariah foretold that the Messiah was, would be betrayed specifically for 30 pieces of silver. And he was number six, that the money would be used to buy a potter's field. And it was number seven, Isaiah foretold that Jesus would remain silent under excruciating suffering and abuse and false accusations. It was, in fact, false accusations. And finally, number eight, King David foretold that the Messiah would die by having his hands and feet pierced and Jesus was crucified. Now, where I'm going with this is you brought up prophecy. There are 300, approximately 300 prophecies foretelling different details of Jesus coming.

Now, the chances of even 8. I just gave 8. The chances of even 8 of them being fulfilled go in the direction of impossibility for all of those to converge in one figure and to be fulfilled. We're familiar with what's called probability math. And Jeffrey and I were investigating this. And Jeffrey, what are the numbers? I mean, what are the chances that eight things would be fulfilled?

There's a professor, actually, Professor Stoner was the professor who, with his student group did a research project to find out the mathematical probability. And what they came up with was that with just eight, as you've mentioned, the chances of one man in one lifetime fulfilling those, say, would be one in 10 to the 17th power. That's one with 17 zeros. I don't even know what that number. What do you call that number?

It's not googaplex, but it's going there.

Who knows what it's called? But anyways, the analogy that they used was.

That would be the equivalent of taking that amount of silver coins, 1 in 10 to the 17th power and scattering them throughout the state of Texas.

About like 2ft deep.

That number would reach about 2ft deep. And if you were to take one of those coins and put an X on it and hide it and take some subject and blindfold them and have them walk up and down the state of Texas and at some point dip their hand in and pull out one.

Of those coins, that coin, and have.

It be the coin with the X would be. The probability would be 1 in 10 to 7.

That's a good way of illustrating it.

So every time you add number nine, you read eight. When you add nine, the probability goes exponential, it gets wacky. And then you go all the way up. And then they reached as far as I can remember, 48. 48 of the 300 prophecies would be 1 in 10 to the 157th power. That's 1 with 157 zeros next to it. So it's just 49. It just gets crazy.

Just to give another illustration, that would be like somebody right now.

Foretelling that the 68th president of the United States will be born in Riverside, California. Well.

There'S a chance. There's a chance that that could take place. But then you add to that that that person will be voted in in 20, 30 now it's going. That's not likely. That you could. And then you say. And that president will be a woman. And then you say that president will be assassinated and that the assassination implement will be a.22 caliber rifle. You see where it's going for every.

And for every. And you throw in.

It goes into the realm of impossibility.

So what about 300 of those?

Yes, 300 of those. Ands. And. And basically you'd be saying that you would have to have something that could only be called foreknowledge to know that those things are gonna all line up and converge and boom, for one individual. And that's what we're dealing with when we're dealing with this book. We're dealing with that kind of accuracy.

And that's messianic prophecies regarding one individual. But then there's these sweeping prophetic chapters in Scripture where it's essentially foretold the movement of kingdoms and nations and empires and things like that. Like the breakup of the Roman Empire.

How does that work?

Alexander the Great's empire, How it would dismantle. Details of these things are given, and you just can't look away. And that's kind of what got me. I was 17 years old. I just couldn't walk away from that. I had to.

Well, those claims are historical claims. They're verifiable claims.

Because I go to the library and you look and you cross check with the source material, and you just can't. You just have to, you know, face to face with that. You have to deal with that somehow.

It is interesting. And maybe we'll talk about this when we come back after the break. But one of the chief criticisms by people who reject the Bible as the word of God is that some of these things are too accurate. They must have been later than the dates that are traditionally assigned to them, especially with Daniel. Yeah. So it ends up getting like. I love that. I love that as a.

That's a good problem to have.

That's a great problem to have. You're too accurate.

That is so accurate that we gotta find a way to reason around this because it's just too perfect.

Another thing that I think we'll touch on, too is that there's too many inconsistencies in, for example, the Gospels, which I think is another good argument for the authenticity of it. Right.

You said inconsistencies or inconsistencies. Yeah, inconsistencies.

That's right.

So let's take the break that we're obligated to take and then we'll come back and continue.

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I really like this. I think that one of the key for me proofs of the word of God is prophecy. I remember when I first started studying prophecy. This was a little bit later. I'm moving in now to really understanding the Bible and I'm studying prophecy and I'm coming to the conclusion that God has this prophetic outline that includes a history of the world that is authenticated, it's confirmed by world history, but it ends with this idea that the world is going to go in a direction of religious control and enforcement of worship. And I remember this was 1984, I was brand new Christian. And I remember thinking in those days we were living under the umbrella of communism. I mean it was huge. Ussr, they had more tanks, they had more missiles, they had nuclear submarines. I mean this was huge. And in my mind I was challenged because I had seen the prophetic delineation of truth match up with history. But this idea that was being presented as a conclusion didn't make sense to me. There was no. I just how is this going to happen? And five years later, and I accepted it by faith. I was like, okay, the word of God so far. So far, so far, yes, yes, yes. What I guess I'm trying to say is that our viewers and we, I think would agree that while the word of God proves itself and establishes itself, there's still room for faith. There's still room for questions that haven't been answered. And I had those. I accepted it by faith. And then in 1989, in December of 1989 specifically, I remember it when that wall came down, Jeffrey. Wall of those countries.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What year were you born?

I've seen it on TV.

What year were you born, Jeffrey? 1982.

You can go to the library and check this out.

1982, go to the library.

You can tell the archives, you can.

Actually come to my house because I've got all the documentation. Because it was so faith, I mean my faith soared. I went, I was out of the atmosphere when that, when communism fell, I said, wow, Bible prophecy is incredible.

The word of God.

And since that time I have a Bible that was printed before 1985. I bought it in 1985. And people will say to me about, well, the word of God.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm saying.

Let me just share with you this prophecy. This Bible is actually printed before 1985. And here's a prophecy that was fulfilled in 1989. Now let me read you the prophecy from the Bible that was printed before 1985. Of course, we know the Bible's thousands of. And now look at how this was fulfilled and look at how it matches up. Isn't this incredible? And they'll go, whoa, okay. Yes, powerful.

Makes sense. So that's more of what we're referring to as the prophetic evidence that the Bible is the word of God. Because remember, our question here for this conversation is simply, is the Bible the word of God?

Is it?

We've talked about the experiential aspect of that, that question, and how each of us have had an experience with the word of God. But now the prophetic.

And it ties in with historical.

It does, yeah. And then what about the historical? Jeffrey, you've spent a lot of time with this at the library, no doubt, since you love the library online. But seriously, man, what are some historic. Some historical evidences for the Bible as the word of God that you've discovered?

I think one awesome thing is the testimony of archeology.

You know, the spade is unearthing a lot of what has been recorded in scripture that is actually legitimate history. Because one of the main things that we hear is the Bible is a good moral book with good.

Moral counsel.

Do unto others.

Yeah, do unto others. Turning of the cheek and so forth. But it's not actually literally historical. You don't actually believe that the things that are recorded in here actually took place. So one of the things for me that I find affirming in my confidence in Scripture is the fact that there's so many archaeological discoveries that have corroborated the claims of the Bible. For example, it was common throughout universities to deny that David, David in scripture.

Came to be the central figure of.

The Old Testament, that he even existed. And that's a big deal for what you just said. And we're talking about a central foundational figure. And if he didn't exist, a whole lot of the stuff reported in the Bible is New Testament, son of David. Right. Even the identity of Jesus. And then there's a discovery made in northern Israel, Tel Dan, in an archaeological site called Tel Dan, where they discover a piece of stone that literally is recording different ancient military conquests. And it says, from the house of David. And for the first time in modern times, we have extra biblical evidence that is evidence outside of the Bible that confirms that the stories that you're reading actually happen. Right. And there's this thing called the Sennacherib prism, where all of these conquests and wars in the Old Testament between the Assyrians and the Edomites and the Hittites and the Amorites, now we have stones that are records from different civilizations that were not even the people of God, that were not even Israelites, confirming what the biblical historians, inspired historians have taught. So I find that compelling.

It is compelling.

I find that important because I need to have confidence that what I'm reading is actually legitimately true and real in order for me to confidently apply the theological implications to that. Right. So archeology is huge. I think that's huge. I mean, we can go on and on and on. There's a lot of this. I mean, there's even a journal, Biblical Archeology Review, that's published regularly. So, I mean, there's stuff constantly coming out from. And there's over. One scholar said there's over 25,000 archaeological discoveries, some major, some minor, that corroborate different details of the biblical historical record.

I think that's okay.

That's the point I was going to bring out, is that it's not just the individual situations that take place there in Tel Dan or. Or some discovery of this people or the mentioning of this name. I remember a number of years ago, I read about a particular piece of pottery or something that was found that looked to be like a receipt that had to do with Solomon's temple.

There you go.

And it's not just these individual, sort of indirect. Yeah, exactly. So here's the thing that I find fascinating is that the Bible presents a whole story about a time and a culture and a people in a certain place in a location, and those people live there. And there's a river that flows like this. And so there's a whole picture that's painted. Well, we have had centuries now, at least two good centuries of biblical archaeology or just archeology. Just drop the biblical of archeology in the Middle east to either corroborate and confirm this basic template that's presented in scripture or to say what? It's nothing like that. Not at all. And yet what continues to emerge is, as you say, major and minor confirmations of the basic picture that's presented in scripture. Now, does that mean that The Bible is the word of God. No, it could just be a very accurate historical record of various times, places, rivers, mountains.

Except for when you add the prophetic part. Except.

Well, and then you add the prophetic part. And then for me, I love the prophetic part, by the way. It was hugely influential with me as well, James. And I think the thing that we need to say is what makes the prophetic part so important is that you have to have, as you said, foreknowledge. There has to be somebody who's saying in advance, okay, this is what's going to happen. But for me, and maybe this is a little too touchy feely, I don't know. But we'll tell you. I say it this way, you tell me no one could have invented Jesus.

Jesus defies invention. If you were going to create a messiah figure, I'll tell you right now, if a human was going to create a messiah, he doesn't look like this guy. He's not saying that. He's not doing that. He's not acting like that. Who writes this?

Even the Jewish people had a hard time accepting him as a messiah.

And people, they would go to him and they would say, on one occasion there's a story where people are going to go arrest Jesus. And they go to arrest him and they're like, well, we couldn't arrest him. Well, why couldn't you arrest him? Well, because nobody talks like that over and over again. The point is made.

Never evidence that he didn't speak like.

The rabbis, he didn't speak like the scribes, he didn't speak like the Pharisees. And it's not just his words. The way he carries himself many times he holds in, you know, respect the very people that you would have thought, ugh, he's countercultural, he's revolutionary, he's tender yet firm. I just really believe that he defies.

Amen.

Yeah, the assuming should have been written by.

So true.

You know, that's a good point, Ty. There's another really important point point here I think that we should make, and that is that the only way you can really.

Disregard.

This compelling evidence that we're talking about prophetic and historical accuracy is by holding the Bible as a historical document to a different kind of standard standard than we do every other piece of history.

And there's a lot of research, there's a lot of literature out on this. And if you were to take, for example, the history of Greece, everything we know about Alexander the Great and the Greek wars and so forth, you got Two main players, this guy Thucydides and Herodotus, these are our Greek historians. Everything we know significantly about Greece, almost everything, I should say, these two guys, these two main players. Then you have Rome and you have Tacitus, the Roman historian.

The interesting thing is that.

In terms of historical reliability, the New Testament, and again, there's a lot of literature. I don't know how much we want to get into this. The New Testament is far more significantly corroborated than these other sources. And if you look at just the manuscripts, we obviously don't have any original document. We don't have the original scroll with the ink that came from the Apostle Paul or Moses himself. We have copies of copies. Right, Manuscript copies. And so too with Greek and Roman history. But if you were to take all of that and you were to compare it, we have.

Manuscripts of the New Testament that are much closer to the original writing than we do.

Any events.

Yeah, any other piece of history. And yet nobody questions whether what was written concerning Alexander the Great is actually historically reliable. Nobody questions that. Nobody questions the writings of the Roman historians. And yet when you crack open the New Testament, immediately a thousand questions come up. So you wonder, obviously it's because of the implications of what is written. There's prejudice, but it's not basis of sheer history. It's just, it's biased.

I want to just add one small point of clarification and that is to say that it's not the case that in academic circles that people aren't evaluating and being analytical about the things that were written about Alexander or Rome or whatever that is happening, but under the assumption of a basic sense of the overall reliability of the picture that we have. In other words, like, yeah, they're saying, okay, what about this? But when Scripture, because of the implications, if Jesus was who he said he was, who he said he was, because there is plenty of extra biblical confirmation that this guy existed. In fact, there's a guy, John Dixon, John Dixon's a fairly well known, increasingly well known historian, Christian historian and philosopher of history. And he has said repeatedly that if you can show one single credible historian from a credible university that denies on historical grounds that Jesus existed, he will eat several pages from his Bible. In other words, he's issued this as a challenge to secular thinking about Jesus. He's saying, wait a minute, nobody in the great universities of the world denies that a guy named Jesus lived at about this time, lived under these circumstances, was crucified, you know, under these. In other words, there's these extra biblical Confirmations of the basic biblical picture. And so you start assembling and amassing this data, the prophetic, the uniqueness of Jesus, the experiential, the historical, the manuscriptural data. And what we can say, it's not proved mathematically.

It'S not proved. Like you're compelled now to believe and you can't not believe. There's still the element of faith. But you can say that there is.

Good reason to believe beyond reasonable doubt. Yeah, that's a good way of saying beyond reasonable doubt.

I like what Jeffrey was saying too, because the prejudice is there. So much so that if I was to take and say, okay, this is the book of Matthew, this is the book of Mark, this is the book of Luke, this is the book of John, okay, the critics want to tear these books apart, for example, and say, well, they contradict each other. One person says there was two demoniacs, another says there's one demoniac. There's contradiction between these. And so we can't. The Bible isn't reliable, but really that contradiction is actually confirmation that these guys are all together, they all belong together because they prove that there's no conspiracy among the authors. Oh, you gotta say the same thing I say. And you need to say the same thing we're saying.

And you need to say the same.

Thing which would actually make them suspect.

Yes, collusion.

Such a good point.

I love that point. That there's just enough differentiation to not smack of conspiracy or collusion, but the story that's told is consistent enough that they say the Jesus of Matthew, hey, that looks just like the Jesus of Mark, that looks just like the Jesus of Luke, that looks just like the.

Jesus of the smacks of authentic report.

It looks authentic.

And back to the point you were making earlier, David, the fact is that there's a self evident truth quality to scripture and Jesus is the pinnacle of that self evident truth quality. You can't imagine human beings manufacturing a story that completely turns on its head and inside out all the value systems of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, famous atheist who basically gave us the God is dead idea. He looked at Jesus and he was an unbeliever. And he said that this Jesus person represents the transvaluation of all systems of thought in the world. You have this idea that the most powerful person in the universe, God has come all the way down and is crucified. If it's left to human beings to come up with a story that's believable, we're coming up with Zeus and Ishtar and powerful muscle bound gods who are going to do some damage, but all.

Of a sudden who sound a lot like us.

Yeah, but all of a sudden you have an anti king, you have one who is exercising anti power. You have a demonstration of an irresistible quality of love that we find resonant with what we would like to see in a powerful person. We would like to see the most powerful person in the universe winning our respect and our adoration by virtue of humbly serving rather than dominating. And that's what we see going on in Jesus. It's absolutely self evident that there's something going on in this person, Jesus Christ, that we don't see anywhere else in history. And so that brings us full circle back to the fact that beyond all the data, the archaeology, the facts that are pretty persuasive, we believe because there's good reason to believe. Because in Jesus we see something that's believable, beautiful.

Sam.