[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching from God's word you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to him. If you're ever in the Madison, Alabama area, we'd love for you to worship with us on Sundays at 830 or 10:30 a.m. if you have any other questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, find
[email protected] dot. Be sure to also check out our Bible study podcast, Madison Church of Christ Bible studies. Thanks again for stopping by.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: The Pony Express was started in 1860, and the goal of the Pony Express was to move Mel all the way from Missouri to California. That's 2000 miles they're trying to move Mel. And the way that this would work, it was this 14 miles usually journey, and they would put all of that mail on that horse. And so you can imagine if you're trying to get mail from that location all the way to there. That's quite the thing to organize. But also you want to make sure you do one thing, and that's lighten the load. In fact, they had certain requirements is that whenever they would put a saddle on that horse, they would purposefully get the lightest saddle possible to make it easy on the horse. They would also make sure that the shoes that the horse wore were the lightest shoes possible. And sometimes they'd even put shoes on the horse in order to make the load lighter. And then the rider himself had to be no more than 125 pounds in weight.
Now, what was also interesting, if you look at its history, this just kind of blew my mind, that somebody would organize this, that those horses would only ride for ten mile stretches. He would then hop off that horse and get on another one, ride 10 miles, hop off that horse, get on another one. I kept thinking, who is standing in random fields with horses all across America? But somebody was doing that. And so this is quite the amazing thing to organize. You can see the length that they went to lighten the load. But what's interesting, even though they were purposefully trying to lighten the load, there was one thing that was required for every journey.
Every single person on the pony Express was required to have with them a full sized text of the Bible.
And the way that pony express put it, and the reason why they wanted that Bible on their journey is that they valued and they viewed, as they put it, the word of God. As essential for life on the trail.
Last week, Brandon and I started this new series called Lamp and Light. And even in its self description of itself, calling it a lamp and a light, Brandon and I are trying to highlight in this series that there is something relevant, the lamp, in the way that God's word, as we might say, is vogue. It's relevant for right now, the real challenges we face. It doesn't date itself. In fact, it even proves itself more and more when we actually live out those truths. But it's not just relevant to the things we deal with right now, but it also speaks to things in the future. And so the next few weeks, what Brandon and I are going to do is look at different narratives in scripture where God's word was brought into those moments and brought massive change.
In just a few weeks, we're going to look at a group of Mendez that were living one way their entire life. But then the word of the law was read to them, and they went a completely different direction.
We're gonna look at somebody who was in the middle of a very unstable situation, seemed hopeless, seemed helpless, but God's word was an anchor. And so, as we were getting this series ready and we were sitting in Brandon's office, trying to sketch out, well, how do we go about a series like this one to really build people's excitement and their faith in God's word? I. We kept coming back to this, that we felt like we needed to start by talking about these two questions before we talk about the Bible's power. Well, if it is so powerful and I need to use it in my life, well, how can I know the Bible is a book that can be trusted?
How do I know that it's actually reliable?
It's a book that was written a long time ago, over 1500 years. Like, how can I know that it's real?
And so what we decided to do before we go anywhere else in this series is to answer that question. Now, I want to say this morning, for me personally, this series in this particular lesson is very different for me in the fact that I love to stay on one text, slowly walk through it. But this is one where we're going to. It's almost like drinking out of a fire hydrant. We're going to be covering so much material, archaeological evidence, science and historical writings, canonized, non canonized, that talk to and speak to the reliability of God's word.
And as we look at all of these things this morning, I want you to understand that the ones that I'm mentioning, I can only get what I can get in a sermon. In fact, this sermon, by the way, started 15 pages before you leave. We're not doing the 15 page one this morning. We're doing the four page one. Well, that's the page plan. But there was so much material to talk about, the reliability of God's word. It's really hard for me to get in a sermon. So I'm basically picking the top ones that I thought were the most interesting to kind of get the ball rolling as we study this together. Now, I also understand this morning, as you sit there, you might be thinking, all right, well, I'm here because I already believe the Bible. Like, what's the point in us talking about something that is already a motivation for me being here? And that's a good question. But to answer that question, what we're gonna see in one Peter here in just a second, is that. Excuse me. Second, Peter, the church in Asia minor was very scattered. And one of the blessings that we have here, especially in this area, we have a lot of really awesome churches all around us. And, in fact, you think about, like, even our teens get together with other youth groups, what an amazing experience that is. Well, this church in Asia Minor didn't have that. And so what was happening was there was a lot of false teachers, a lot of different ideas about how to view the world, how to view God, were making their way into the church. And so what happened was Peter is writing to remind this group of people, I know that some of you have known God's truth. I know a lot of you have been in the church your whole life. But there is a direct connection between your resiliency in your faith and understanding, and not forgetting that the Bible is absolutely reliable.
But the other part of it is, in this audience right now, we have people that are dealing with doubt, that are dealing with discouragement.
They're wondering if God is real and if the story of God through the Bible is actually reliable.
And so for all of us, no matter where we're at in our faith, we need to understand and talk about it's reliability that impacts our resiliency. And that's exactly what Peter said in two. Peter, he said, listen, we're not following some, like, cleverly come up with myth. In fact, what we're sharing. We were literal eyewitnesses, too. And this morning, we are going to look at a lot of those eyewitnesses that were not Bible writers or authors that proved and spoke to the very things that are in scripture.
But what I love about this verse is. I love the fact that he doesn't just say, listen, you need to believe it, because I saw it and they saw it and other people have seen it. And, yeah, that means a lot. But I love what he says in this verse. He said, you would do so well to pay attention to it.
It's kind of like a lamp that shines into a dark place until the dawn. Day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart. What he's saying, is this really the greatest apologetic proof of the existence of God? The greatest apologetic proof of the reality and the reliability of the Bible is the fact that it brings life change when it's applied.
You know, when we were at our men's retreat this past weekend, one of the things we highlighted is making sure that in our walk with God, it truly is a walk. We jokingly talked about it, but we meant it, though, that we didn't want it to be just like weekend visits, right, where we occasionally visit God's word. And as I was thinking about us having that conversation I had in my mind on the way back from the retreat the other day, I was like, man, you know those days where I wake up in the morning and I start with God's word and I read it? Man, maybe the circumstance of that day doesn't change, but, man, my perspective, the way I handle myself, is so much different. But then those days where I don't read God's word, man, I don't have the same perspective. And then I thought, well, nah, duh, Andrew, that's what God said his word would do.
That it is that light that speaks into darkness, that it shapes my focus, it shapes my steps. And so while we're gonna mention a ton of stuff this morning that points to the reliability of God's word, what I wanna suggest this morning from the very beginning is the greatest proof of the reality and the trustworthiness of God's word is the life change it brings in our lives.
And so before we get started with anything else, I want us to know that as we go through these different facts.
See, because the word that we're looking at this morning, it didn't just show up out of nowhere. God brought it to us. And you're gonna see how amazing this was through the Holy Spirit. So I thought we'd start with something fun before we get into a lot of deep stuff, list some facts about the Bible. You probably knew this. This is one of the most mentioned, is that the Bible is the most purchased, sold book of all time. But oddly, enough. It is also the most shoplifted book of all time. A lot of irony there. And it was reminding me when I was a kid, I remember we would go to Sam's club, and I always loved, like, the middle section while mom was shopping, you know, looking at the different books, the toys. And they have, you know, at Sam's, that little religious section of books, usually. And this was when WWJD bracelets were popular. And if y'all remember those, they stand for what would. What Jesus do? All right, well, they had a bunch of WWJD books with WWJD bracelets and plastic sleeves, and I was trying to pick out one because I wanted a bracelet. But the problem was most of the bracelets were stolen out of the books. Again, very odd, but it's kind of interesting that the most sold book is also the most shoplifted one. But what I want to highlight about the facts of the Bible is there's over 773,000 words in God's word, and it's written by around, like, 40 different authors over a 1500 year span, written from 13 different countries, three different continents.
And what's amazing, if you think about, and you may have seen this picture before, these are all the cross references of scripture. In fact, one of my favorites is if you get a high resolution picture of this graph, you can zoom in really small and get it really close and read every single place where the Bible cross references itself. And those different colors are all the different topics that are covered all throughout scripture.
And so as we start there and think about that, as I was trying to approach the best way to do this message this morning, I came across this. There's a guy named Steve Sanders. In 1952, he came up with something that's called the historical accuracy test. Your books at a secular university, a public school, science books, history books, they are put to this test before they're put in the classroom to say, well, yeah, this is reliable, or whatever. That's usually the test that they go through. And the internal test, of course, deals with those things within itself that speak to its reality. Then there's the external, which could be archaeological evidence, things of geography or geology, ancient historical writings, as we're going to look at today, cuneiform tablets. But then the text itself.
How does the text itself approve or disprove itself? What we're going to do this morning is put the Bible to this test and look at its accuracy and to see if the Bible truly is reliable. So let's start with the internal test. And by the way with all of these I could have had like 20 points but I'm trying to just pick a few.
The first one is this, the eyewitnesses who don't refute the biblical account.
One of the things I know we don't mention very much that is so important to mention is when the New Testament was written and dated. The New Testament was written between 47 AD and 95 AD. And the reason why that matters is the very people that are reading what is being circulated lived it, they saw it. So think about this for just a second. The very people that were there when Jesus fed 5000, which we know to be probably more because of how they counted through census and things like 15,000. And the people that were there at the day of Pentecost with the tongues of fire were dancing over their heads and 3000 people put on Christ and baptism could have been close to right to nine or 10,000 that the very people that are reading this were living it. And if that was not true, one of them would have said, I was there the day with the, you know, the hebrew happy meal turned into a meal for thousands of people. That didn't really happen. Everybody was hiding bread and fish in their pockets and they were passing it out like someone would have said something somewhere. But yet not only did no one refute what was already written, but the writings that we do have actually proved that what they said was actually true. The other thing is this and we could mention several things. There's even a bread recipe in the Bible. There's a recipe for an ointment that we still use today that in the nineties. Sounds like, guys, there's this awesome way to bring healing. It's called aloe. God's like I said that a long time ago, right, but one of those is circumcision. And a lot of you may know this, like, you know little boys today, if they are circumcised they will usually do that like right after they're born. And one of the things that they'll give them is a vitamin K shot to help with their blood, to help it decline so it can heal itself. Well now that's what we do a lot of times. But what was interesting is a lot of people choose to circumcise on the 8th day because the Bible mentioned it. But it's not just because they're like, well I want to do what the Bible says. Well there's actually a reason behind it.
When a child is born that first day, they have 90% of what I think I'm pronouncing this right. Prothrombin, vitamin K, and platelets, it's at its 90% level, but as soon as they come out of that womb and they're born, it drops down to 30%.
On day eight, they are at 110%.
And so, like, when people started later requesting that doctors like, yeah, we actually found out that on day eight, the platelets, the vitamin K, and the prothrombins at the highest. And God's like, yeah, I know that. Like, that's why I said to do that a long time ago. Another one to me that I really think we could stop. The lesson right now at just this one is the people that died for their faith.
You know, people will sometimes die for something they believe to be true, but they definitely won't die for something that they know to be false.
So let's just, for an example, imagine we had Peter right here.
So we say to Peter, all right, all you got to do, Peter, is to deny. Like, just to say that the things that you wrote about, that you talked about weren't real, or they're going to behead you or kill you or whatever it is, just all you got. And by the way, if it wasn't real, what does he have to gain?
All right, and. But then on top of that, think about this. Every single apostle dealt with persecution. Eleven out of the twelve died a martyr's death. And let's go back to Peter for just a second. He's had no trouble before denying Jesus, right?
So one time a little slave girl said, hey, don't you know him? I don't. I don't know that. Mandy, how in the world do you go from, I don't know that man, to all of a sudden when they were put on the block being like, were you with him? And he's like, yes. That you end up dying a martyr's death. Like Peter, where you die upside down like your savior, though upside down on a cross.
How do you go from one stream to the next? Well, he saw a risen savior.
He couldn't shake what he believed, and he wouldn't.
But what about the external evidence, like the non canonized material that is outside of the Bible? What do those sources say? Well, we're going to start with the christian history sources. There's a lot to mention there. But I also know that if you're a skeptic, you're like, well, yeah, that doesn't move the needle for me because that is a christian source.
We'll mention them. Just to mention them. Papias is one that he confirms the teachings of Peter and what Peter experienced and Saul, because, according to Papias, those things were seen and talked about. But I love what Irenaeus talks about, which leads into what we're going to mention next. He says, so firm is the ground upon which these gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them. And starting from these documents, each one of them endeavors to establish his own particular doctrine. What he's saying is, even those that said that they didn't believe in Jesus or that he was the Messiah, they can't shake the fact that he was doing amazing things. And so what I decided to do, as we were looking at the non canonized sources, those that are not christians, there was like 128 ones that I found.
But what I decided to pick were the ones that are used in a lot of our history books, those that are used to shape world history, because we will quote them, use them, depict them, point them out as accurate for history.
But we also have to do the same if we're going to go across the board. So these are the ones, and I'm going to read you some things that they said that is evidence from non christian sources that spoke about Jesus and spoke about the truth of the Bible and some of the things that are there within pliny the younger. Josephus. Tacitus has a ton of impact on our history books. LuciAn Suetonius also has a ton of impact on our history books. The Talmud. These are just a few of the things Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. That's mentioned in Tacitus, Josephus and the Talmud, that Jesus rose from the dead three days later. Josephus actually highlights and discusses a lot of the buzz that was happening in the town when the fact that there was an empty tomb. We could mention a lot of the other folks that talked about and pointed out that the empty tomb, and even in ancient historical documents, how they tried to cover it up.
You have this one, of course, from the Talmud that I thought was interesting, that Jesus enemies confirmed that he was doing miracles. They called it magic. And then this is what they said. He must have had a very unusual birth. Unusual? It was right, that of a virgin. But this is one of my favorites from Josephus. He said there was a man at this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it is even lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works. A teacher of such menta has received the truth with pleasure. Tacitus Suetonius. They refer to and talk a lot about how the miracles that Jesus was doing through the apostles and the way that they were spreading the gospel through Rome. They said, we can't describe it, but it's taking over.
I read about what happened with Nero and the other roman rulers who were persecuting and martyring early christians. The Christians were denying polytheism. You know, people. Like I said, eleven of the twelve disciples died a martyr's death. But this one's also interesting if you do some more study on him. And that's Sir William Ramsay. He loved geography, and he loved geology. And what he wanted to do is he looked at the gospel of Luke and notice all these places and specific times and festivals were mentioned. And there's a lot of writings about those times and those festivals that he wanted to see if the buzz of what was talked about in Luke was accurate and matched up well. Sir William Ramsay's studies found that not only did the locations match up and the geography match up, but a lot of the words that were spoken in other documents match up with what it says, too. Again, so much we can mention there. But one of my favorite things to study is the archaeological evidence.
There's a guy named Nelson Glook, and this is what he said. It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.
Now, this one was very difficult to get into one lesson. And I even thought about just doing a whole entire lesson of archaeological evidence. We're not doing that, but we are gonna highlight a few of them. And one of those is that started in a dig in an excavation in 1907. In 1907, they were excavating and digging the area around Jericho. And as they were digging, one of the things that they noticed is that the walls had fallen outward. Now, the reason why that matters, if you read the Bible in the book of Joshua, we know that the walls fell outward, which is pretty amazing when you know about the land there, the way that the land was situated in, the way that things were built around there. Just kind of like with the World Trade center, when that tragedy happened, it didn't fall outward. What did it do? It fell down. And so just especially in that area, the wall would fall down but not out. But God caused it to fall out so the men and women could come into that city, right? And capture it. So the walls had fallen outward just as it had said. But here's what's really interesting. There is several feet that were this. This real thick layer. Several feet thick of burnt.
And what it was was all the rubble was there, but on top of it, several feet thick, was a burn layer.
And what was in that burn layer was a lot of burned grain, burnt wood, as if people had come into the city and burned it. And we know exactly what happened, right? They came into that city and they took those precious things, they burnt everything down. But one of my favorite parts of this archaeological dig is that the north part of the wall was still standing.
Of course, we know that in that north wall, as the Bible talked about, that one area that was not destroyed was whose house, Rahab's. Who was built into that wall, another one. That is one of the greatest proofs of the reliability of scripture is that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's a shepherd boy that was wandering kind of near this wilderness in this cave, and he got a rock, he threw it into that cave and heard a.
And it knocked a clay pot and broke it. They ended up going in and discovering the Dead Sea scrolls. And here's what they noticed about these manuscripts. These manuscripts were 1000 years older than our oldest manuscripts we had up until that point.
So people that were trying to disprove the Bible were ecstatic because they thought, oh, man, this is it. See, what's going to happen is we're going to see these original documents and show that the newer ones, like they don't match up in the Bible, that people have been preaching the Jesus they've been teaching about, all of those things are going to be disproven. And so they start matching it up and looking at it. And what they found, the more they looked at it, is that these thousand year manuscripts that were thousand years older matched up with the copies we have today with 95% accuracy.
Now, you might think, well, why not 100? What about the other five? Well, there's something called necessary inference we don't have time to get into right now where parts were missing and they had to fill in those blanks, but 95% matched up. Now you might think, why were there some writings in some clay pots in a cave? Well, if you remember, in 80, 70, when Rome was trying to attack the jewish people, they were trying to preserve their most ancient special text, and so they put them in clay pots and hid them so that they wouldn't destroy them. And then you think, well, how in the world did these documents make it from a thousand years before to being so accurate till today? Because y'all played, right, the game telephone when you were kids. Y'all remember that? Like if it was raining outside, we did one of two things. We played heads up, seven up. We might have played hangman sometimes, or we definitely played telephone, and that's where you would sit in a circle and you would say something in someone's ear. You would say, like, you know, andrew's awesome. But then by the end, it was like, what's wrong with that guy? And so, like, you started with one thing, and you ended up with a whole different thing because. Right. The more things are passed along, we wouldn't expect it to be that accurate. Yet the Bible was incredibly accurate, more than any other book. What happened? Well, there are these guys that were called Masorites. That's why you hear about the masoretic text, that what happened with the Bible is that every time the Bible was translated and we'll say transliterated, there was a few things that happened. What they would do is they would look at the original, and you never, like, a perfect Bible translation is not just word for word, because, by the way, there's no, like, what you want in a Bible translation is word for word and thought for thought. We don't have certain words in Hebrew and Greek that they had then, okay? So we have a hard time explaining those things. And so what the Masorites would do, they wouldn't just say, all right, what's the word? They say, what's the thought and the word? And they would go one after the other, making sure it matched up with perfect accuracy before they moved it on to somebody else. And if there was one mistake, they threw it out.
That's how that process worked. They're like, does the thought match? Does the word match? And if it does, we'll let it move on. Another example is cuneiform tablets. There's cuneiform tablets that talk about Esther and her narrative and all the things that happen there. There's cuneiform tablets that reference things and the miracles that we read about in the book of Joshua and so many things in one and two kings and in judges. This one, I thought was so specific and random that I had to mention it. Jehoiakim was an 18 year old king, and at a time in Judah when they were very sinful, God sent the Babylonians to capture them. But there was this guy named evil king Maraduk that he kind of felt bad for him. And so what Morduka decided to do, he's like, well, I'm gonna give this Jehoiakin kid a little bit of grace. I'm gonna give him some grain and some different offerings just to kind of help him. And this was a time where a lot of things were happening yet that was recorded in this random cuneiform tablet. Just as two kings 25 30 said that he was given rations by the king each day.
One of my favorite is the area of Sodom and Gomorrah. And a lot of you probably have heard this one before, but when they were doing excavations in that area, and let me back up a little bit, Josephus actually talked about in his book, on his writings about even during his day, you could visit and see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. But what was interesting is when they're digging up this region, in this area, they found tons of bodies underground, and a lot of the bodies were in fetal position. Well, why are you going to be in a fetal position in Sodom, Gomorrah? Well, if brimstones are falling from the sky, you're probably going to be in a fetal position. And what they also noticed was not only were people in a fetal position buried, but a lot of them, as they were digging, they started to notice that there were these brimstone balls in spheres that were 95% pure that were found nowhere else on this earth. And they believed that at one time they were 100% pure. But once they touched the ground, those impurities started to make their way into them. But what I also thought was very interesting is the things like the. The pieces of wood from what might be like a cart or something in that area, they didn't naturally fall apart, but they had been shattered.
And if you look at the ground in that area still to this day, it has its highest level of calcium sulfate of anywhere in the region. And the reason why that matters is if you burn limestone and you burn sulfur, it makes calcium sulfate. It's pretty incredible. The flood is one of the greatest ones. One of the things you go to the top of a mountain and find the skull and the bones of a fish, like, how did that get up there? Well, the only answer, right, could be if there was a flood. Of course, one of the things that you notice, they've mentioned on even people that aren't believers in God or the Bible, that they all agree upon, yeah, there was a flood somewhere sometime, right? Because at every single continent, what they're noticing is this rapid succession of erosion layers that didn't happen slowly, but happened quickly. But before we get to Mike, and I'm just sorry for interrupting you, Mike.
The video that I'm about to show you is somebody we all love here. Mike Houtz is awesome. He is also, he wouldn't like me saying this. He's also the most humble person I think I've ever met. But he is also probably the smartest human being I've ever meth. And Mike has a master's and a PhD from, by the way, one of them is from the University of Florida. Mike, I didn't know that. And I still love you, but I. Florida, I'm just kidding. But it's in nuclear engineering. And I didn't know people could even study that, but they do. And what was interesting, he went to MIT and he works right now for NASA as their research manager. And a lot of, you know, a little bit of Mike's background and how he and his family came to know Christ. But Mike used to be a very staunch evolutionist, even writing material for books to go to Florida to disprove Christianity and the creation.
Yet Mike literally studied himself into believing that design demands a designer, that there is that thumbprint, that imprint of what colossians talks about, of that invisible goddess. I want you to listen to what Doctor Houtz has to say.
[00:31:47] Speaker C: Romans 120 tells us, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead, so that they are without excuse. And the more we learn about creation, the more this verse is proven true. In fact, we now know that even the simplest life is vastly more complicated than anything people have ever made. And that claiming somehow that life could have made itself is less credible than claiming a jet airplane or any other complicated machine could simply make itself. Also, God tells us to make godly choices. And all throughout the Bible we're told to choose and to choose properly. Well, the fact that we even can make a choice also proves that God has given us a soul. If we were nothing more than just a complex chemical reaction, we could not make even a simple choice, good or bad. And so these verses, coupled with the rest of the Bible really can be encouraging to us. They're encouraging to me, and they can also really help us evangelize people and help to lead everyone to the truth.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: Thank you, Mike. And we've covered internal evidence, external. What about that final test, that bibliographic test? That is really, how well were the documents translated from when they started to today?
Because again, you go to your secular books, your books you use at a university, what you're going to look for is, all right, well, how many copies were there? And what is the difference between the original date it was written to when it was copied? That's how we test things. Reliability, so I have two graphs.
This first graph, when it talks about copies, it's referring to greek New Testament copies. Okay? But I also have in this graph, the most used, mentioned reference books that we have in history that our students are using in philosophy, and that's Plato, Caesar, Aristotle, Homer, and the iliad. Here's what I want you to look at. Look at the date. All those top ones were written, and then their earliest copy, and that date differential. And notice the approximate time, the next line between the original and the copy. Now, the number of manuscripts, and we label all of those top ones as trusted. And that's what we need to go after.
Now, look at the very last one.
And now look at the span between the original and the copy compared.
And we have 5600 original greek copies.
It's incredible manuscripts. Excuse me, but what's also interesting is there's not just the greek manuscripts, but there's manuscripts written in other languages that total 24,000. So if we're going to put that against it, here's another graph and another way to put it. You got the Greek right there in its manuscripts, 5300. And at almost 24,000, we have 24,000 manuscripts of other languages of the New Testament.
Now, put that against the gaelic words by Caesar, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
You got Plato, Pliny the Elder and pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and the list can go on.
But to me, one of the greatest bibliographic tests we could ever do with the Bible, and this is what we're in this morning, is in prophecy. If you're a guest this morning, like, what's a prophecy? Is it like a fortune teller? No, they weren't fortune tellers. They were messengers. They had messages from God that they delivered to people.
There's hundreds of prophecies throughout scripture. I've just highlighted a few that were mentioned in the Old Testament and then fulfilled hundreds of years later.
By the way, we have three of them that are yet to be fulfilled, but we have these that were mentioned, and there is a guy that is a college professor, that what he decided to do was to try to put all these prophecies to the test and basically said, all right, well, yes, anybody can say something and then a few hundred years do it. But then to notice that all of them were fulfilled, he was like, well, what are the odds of that? Well, then he said, well, that's even too much to study. So he said, well, let's just do this. Let's look at the odds of. Of eight prophecies being fulfilled. So what he did is he took eight of these prophecies, looked at where they were as far as time and distance and length, people, communication, all of those kind of things to try to figure out through a group of university statisticians, what are the odds of those prophecies being fulfilled when they got done dissecting again, y'all, this is just eight, not the hundreds of ones. We have just eight. The odds of those being fulfilled were one, and I can't say this number, but one with 17 zeros behind it.
And the way that one of the statisticians put it, he said it would be as if you were blindfolded and dropped into Texas.
And in Texas, what we did is we had filled Texas 2ft deep with half dollars. And on one half dollar we put an x and put it out there and blindfolded you found it.
According to that university statistician, that's the odds of you actually being able to fulfill a biblical prophecy.
You know, at the very beginning of this message, one of the things that I mentioned to you is, yes, we're gonna point out a lot of things.
And I love, love, love what Nick said in his communion remarks today about the faith part, because at the end of the day, read all these and I go through this, and by the way, quite a faith building exercise to go through and look at all the apologetic proofs of the Bible.
But please don't miss this, that the greatest proof of the reliability and the trustworthiness of God's word is how, when applied, the true life change it can bring.
Don't be like me. Like I was when I was like, you know, it's crazy when I read God's word, you know, perspective changes when I don't. It doesn't, you know? Well, nah, Doug, Andrew, that's what I said from the very beginning. You need perspective. I'll give it to you. You need change. I can bring it to you.
And I love this verse because you'll notice, he said, you would do really well to pay attention to them because they're like a light shining in a dark place. And until the day dawns, the morning star is going to rise in your heart.
See, each week, Brendan and I are going to present you with a lamp and a light.
What Peter is telling this group of christians that are hearing all sorts of things from their culture, they're hearing all sorts of different twists to Christianity, that what you were reading and hearing is not random. It was not just thrown together, it's real. But by mentioning it the way he did, what he's saying is that when you know in your head, but also in your heart, that God's word is real and reliable, it helps you to be more resilient.
There's a direct connection between its reliability and your resiliency. But the final thing is this.
The lamp is for your feet right now, but the light is for what's down the road.
I don't know if you guys have ever been a situation where you've been without power for a while, but I remember when we went through one of our hurricanes in south Alabama. We were out of power for a whole week.
And I remember walking through the house and I would turn on light, but, Lorianne, the power's not working. Or why won't the oven turn on? Why does the refrigerator reek? You know, she's like, andrew, we haven't had power for a few days. Like, I'm going through the house still looking for the, you know, the clock on the stove, and it's not there. That it's interesting that it was just impulse for me everywhere I went to turn on that light and see, what Peter's saying here to this group of christians is that that's what light is. Light is so available, but it also provides you security.
See, I know right now there's some of you, as you think about the lamp part, like right now, you are in a dark situation that you're confused by it. You don't understand why it's happening or what you're going to be able to do next.
Well, God's got a word for that. And so if you're here this morning and you're discouraged by something, God's word and his truths may not always change the problem, but they will impact and change your perspective. Maybe what you need this morning is to walk to one of these doors to ask for prayers, for something going on right now.
But God's word is also a light that maybe some of you right now are scared. You're scared about the future with something, with your family. You're scared about the future with something, with your kids.
You know, there's heavy things that you have to deal with all the time.
We were talking at our men's retreat this past weekend about the decisions we make as men every day.
And I shared with them that I found out from a psychologist that the average person makes 35,000 decisions every day. I was like, well, no wonder I'm so messed up. I'm making a lot of decisions, but can you imagine making 35,000 different decisions from a very skewed perspective.
So for whatever it is that you have in front of you right now or whatever you have for what's ahead, I want you to understand that there is a word for that. God speaks to what's happening now, but he can speak and shape your perspective for what's going to happen next. So if you want to come forward and request prayers, maybe the understanding of the reliability of God's word is like man, I want to make that decision to put on Christ like that's not accidental because God does nothing by accident. He always has a purpose. He always has a plan. If you want to give your life to him this morning, I encourage you to do so. While we stand and we sing this song.
