Why Should I Believe The Bible?

Can you really believe what the Bible says? How do you know? Today we will answer this question: Why should I believe the Bible? Maybe you’ve never questioned your belief in the bible. Is it because your parents or maybe a Sunday school teacher told you the Bible was true and you just accepted it? Is that enough of a foundation to place your faith in it? Do you believe everything in the Bible or just the parts you agree with? It has been said that if you believe the parts of the Bible you agree with, but you reject the parts of the Bible that you don’t agree with...It’s not the Bible you believe in, it’s you that you believe in. If that’s how you have lived your life, you have set yourself up as the judge over what the Bible says. And that is completely upside down from how we are called to think about the Bible. We are supposed to adjust ourselves according to what it says, not try to adjust the Bible to our way of thinking. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Look at this verse. 2 Timothy 4:8 “8 Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” That sounds great doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want an award from the Lord? We like that part and so we agree with it. But did you see the word it started with? It begins with “henceforth”. Which means in order to understand what it’s talking about, we have to

go back and look at the verses that come before it. It basically means...I came to this conclusion based on what I said earlier. If we back up a couple of verses we find out what he said earlier. 2 Timothy 4:6-7 “6 For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. 7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Paul is about to die, but he has been faithful to what God has called him to do. What does it look like to “Keep the faith?” 2 Timothy 3:12-13 “12 Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” Persecution? We don’t like that idea at all. But there it is in the same book of the Bible. We can’t ignore the verse that talks about persecution and try live our life based on the verse that talks about a reward. You see, we don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the Bible we accept. This really comes back to what I say often, and that is context is everything. Here’s an extreme example. Let’s say, you need direction for an important decision about your finances, so you pray and ask God what to do. Then you decided to open the Bible and see what God says. You don’t know where in the Bible to turn, so you what a lot of people do, you just randomly open it and read the first scripture you see, assuming that is the verse God has sent you. You close your eyes, put your finger on the page, then open your eyes and read this:

Matthew 19:21 “21 Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Well, Ok, hang on a minute, that’s not what you wanted to hear. So you decide to give it one more try just to be sure. So you open it randomly again and read this. Luke 10:37 “37...And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” We like to quickly move past the verses we don’t want to follow and search for one we like. The Bible is not a bunch of random verses to be taken out of context. And that brings me back to my original question. Why should I believe the Bible? If you are talking to someone who doesn’t believe in God and all you can say to them is “the Bible says that God is real.” You don’t really have an answer for them...because they don’t believe the Bible. You can’t use the Bible as proof, if they don’t believe the Bible is true. You can always follow up with this question, “If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?“ It’s an honest question, that requires an honest answer. Most people would say yes, because they believe there is no way to prove the Bible is true. Then it’s up to you to show them why the Bible is a reliable source of information. And more than just information, it’s a source for absolute truth. The good news is that you don’t have to go do all the research yourself, to learn why the Bible is a book that we can trust.

I want to tell you about a guy who did all the research for you. His name is Lee Strobel and he wrote a book called “The Case for Christ.” You may think that a guy who wrote a book with that title was a biblical scholar, pastor and was raised in a Christian home. But you would be wrong. This is how Lee described himself when he started to investigate whether or not the Bible is true. "I lived an immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic, self-destructive kind of life,” Lee was an avowed atheist, who was also an award winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune. As I tell you Lee’s story, you’ll learn how to share with people that the claims of Jesus in the Bible can be trusted. Lee used his journalistic standards to investigate, and it led him to one place... a place he didn’t expect to land. But if he was going to evaluate the evidence honestly, and follow it wherever it it took him...he had no choice but to accept the outcome, whatever it was. Here is Lee’s story: Lee’s wife went to church with a friend one Sunday and gave her life to Jesus. As you can imagine, this did not sit well with Lee. He decided to go to church with her just to see what it was all about. That day, he heard a sermon on the basics of Christianity and thought to himself "If this stuff is true, it has huge implications for my life.” So Lee, being a journalist, decided to investigate Christianity and the claims of the Bible. He decided he would write an article for the Chicago Tribune to discredit his wife’s new faith. He assumed that this would be a very easy assignment and Christianity could be debunked quickly and easily. That turned out not to be the case. His investigation lasted two years and took him all over the country.

The place he started was with the central theme of the Bible. If he could show that Jesus wasn’t who He claimed to be, the “Son of God,” and if He didn’t rise from the dead after His crucifixion, the rest of the Bible would fall apart fairly quickly. The resurrection of Jesus is the key to believing if the Bible is true. To discover the truth about the resurrection, here are some of the questions Lee Strobel asked and the answers he found. Q: How can anyone talk about the resurrection as a historical fact when the resurrection is by nature a miracle and miracles can’t be proven by science? A: You don’t have to prove a miracle to prove a resurrection. All you have to do is show that Jesus died and then was seen alive afterwards. There are historical records of specific eye witness accounts that date back to within a few months of the resurrection. That same record says that over 500 separate people saw Jesus at the same time. There are at least 9 ancient sources both inside and outside of the Bible confirming that people saw Jesus after His crucifixion. Q: Was the resurrection a hoax? Was it just a lie the disciples told to further their religion? A: No one would give their life willingly for a hoax. The disciples and other martyrs gave their life because they had personally seen Jesus the resurrected Savior alive after He was crucified. If it were a lie, at least one of them would have come clean in order to save their own life, when they were being told to renounce Jesus or die. Q: How can we be sure of the reliability of the historical manuscripts that record the resurrection? How do we authenticate them?

A: By using the same standards we authenticate any historical document. By comparing and contrasting the copies that have been recovered. The more copies we have, the more we can cross reference to see if they agree about what the original document says. The older the better. In other words, the closer in history that the copy is to the original source, the better. For example, Homer’s “Iliad” was considered by the Greeks to be their bible for centuries. There are 1,565 Copies that have been discovered, and some of them date back to 300AD. Yet, it was actually written 800 years before Christ. Which means that the copy is 1,100 years from the original. That’s not too bad. There is only one ancient writing that has more copies than the Iliad. It’s the New Testament. There have been 5,843 copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts found by archeologists. That’s 4 times as many as the Iliad. The earliest fragment of the Gospel of John was found in ancient Egypt less than 30 years from the original. There are no other ancient manuscripts that come close to the Bible in its ability to trace its reliability back to its original source. The Iliad has 4 times fewer copies to compare than the New Testament, and yet no one questions the validity of the Iliad. There are only 7 copies of Plato’s tetralogies and only 5 copies of anything from Aristotle. And again, no one questions that those copies are accurate representation of the original. So based on the standard scientific method of determining a documents validity, the Bible is by far the most accurate ancient historical document that is in existence.

Q: Why would the gospels record women as the first ones to find the empty tomb? Women were not regarded as reliable witnesses in those days. A: If it were a hoax or just a lie, the gospel writers would never have allowed women to be the witnesses. They would have certainly used men as the primary source to convince others. But if it’s true, it doesn’t matter who reports it, it will hold up. Q: What about if Jesus had just recovered from His injuries instead of coming back from the dead? The muslims koran says that Jesus didn’t actually die. It’s called the “Swoon Theory” and it says that Jesus just passed out rather than actually die. A: The first problem is that the Koran was written 6 centuries after Jesus. That’s way too far apart to be able to discredit the New Testament account. As you may recall I mentioned earlier parts of the New Testament book of John were found to be as early as 30 years after the original was written. There is medical support for actual death: Jesus was flogged before He was crucified. A Roman flogging involved a whip that had metal balls and bone fragments braided to the end, so that when it was used, it ripped open the skin and tore into the muscle and connective tissue. The flogging itself would have left Jesus with massive blood loss. That’s why scripture records that He collapsed under the weight of the cross. But as we already know, Jesus didn’t die on the way to be crucified, He survived the flogging. The death of crucifixion is much more horrific than that. Death on a cross is caused by asphyxiation. The way the chest muscles contract on the one being crucified because of the nails holding them on the cross, prevent the lungs from working. To breathe, you’d have to pull

yourself up to relieve the pressure on the lungs, by using the very nails that held you to the cross that are driven into your hands and feet. Eventually exhaustion prevents you from breathing. When the soldiers drove the spear in His side, the Bible records that blood and water came out. This is a description of pericardial effusion...which is the medical term for what happens as a result of death by asphyxiation. The Journal of the American Medical Association said this: “Clearly the weight of the medical and historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to His side was inflicted.” The death of Jesus is one of the best attested events in the ancient world. He most certainly died. And based on the evidence He most certainly rose again from the dead. Any honest intellectual evaluation of the evidence will point to only one place. If the most outlandish claim of the Bible...the resurrection of Jesus, is indeed a fact. Then you can only come to one conclusion...the The Bible is true.

Q: What would motivate Jesus to go through all this?

A: LOVE. C.S Lewis, who began as a skeptic to the message of Jesus said: If Christianity is false, it’s of zero importance. But if it’s true, there is nothing more important in the entire universe.” At the end of his investigative journey, Lee Strobel had followed the facts and stacked up the evidence and made his conclusion. The article he was supposed to write for the Chicago Tribune was rejected because they refused to follow the evidence honestly and accept his conclusion.

So, instead of writing a newspaper article, he wrote a book that detailed his journey from skeptic to believer. His book, “The Case for Christ” has sold more than 5 million copies and has greatly impacted millions of lives for the kingdom. If God can use an atheist to win people for His kingdom, then He can certainly use you. All you have to do is be willing to follow His word...because you can believe it...all of it. If you accept that the resurrection is true, and the Bible can be trusted...you must also accept the other things it says about Jesus. He was not just a man who died and rose...He is God. Mark 2:5-12 “5 And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? 10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” 12 And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!” By forgiving this man’s sins, Jesus is claiming the same authority as God the Father. This is the big question to answer. Is Jesus God? There are several other verses that show Jesus claiming He is one with God the Father.

So you are left with a dilemma. Is Jesus God? If not, you only have two other options. If He is saying He is God and knows He’s not, then He was a lier. He would be an out right fraud and had everyone around Him deceived. The only other option is that He was a lunatic. He actually believed He was God, but wasn’t. That’s what we would think if someone showed up here and claimed to be God. If you believe, as we have seen today, Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and said He is God, then we must conclude that He is the Lord. Salvation is just the act of accepting that fact. Confess He is Lord...repent of your sins.