Lon Solomon Ministries
The Reliability of the Bible Part 2
Second letter in the New Testament that Paul wrote the Church of Corinth, 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Can you guys hear okay out there? Wave your hands. I know you all are all right in the lobby. Okay, we love you out there. God bless you. Thanks for coming. You know, a few years ago I was traveling with my middle son Justin and we were walking through the Denver airport and as we were walking through out of the corner of my eye I caught this magazine on the rack in one of these little newsstands. It was Life Magazine. It had a huge picture of the face of Jesus on the front and in big white letters and blazing across his picture where these words, "Who was he?" Now when you come from my heritage you kind of pride yourself in never paying cover price for anything. You understand what I'm saying? So I don't like paying cover price but I begrudgingly went up and bought this magazine because I wanted to read it and see what was in it and there were all kinds of quotes of what people thought at the end of this person thought and that person thought about Jesus but one of them that really caught my attention was a quote by John Murray. John Murray is the son of Madeline Murray O'Hare. He's the president of the American Atheists and here's what he said and I quote. He said there was no such person in the history of the world as Jesus Christ. There was no historical living, breathing human being by that name ever. The Bible is a fictional, non-historical book. It's a myth that's simply good for business. End of quote. Now friends last week in part one we talked about the Bible's claim that the Bible is the inspired Word of God without error in any of its parts and utterly trustworthy in everything it says not only about Jesus Christ but about every other subject that it comments to and we agreed that the entire Christian faith rises and falls on this issue of the reliability of the Bible. So the question that we have to answer this morning is how can we be sure when he says that the Bible is fictional, non-historical and a myth it's good for business. How can we be sure that John Murray is wrong? Is there any external evidence? Is there any external proof that we can bring the bear on this discussion that will support the Bible's claim that it is the inspired in errant Word of God given to us by God himself? Well there is and that's what we want to focus on today. There are three arguments, three sources of evidence that I want to present to you that support the Bible's claim. So here we go, number one. The first thing that supports the Bible's claim are the changed lives of the people who simply believe the Bible at face value. Second Corinthians chapter five where I ask you to turn here's what it says. If any person is in Christ, if any person comes into a real personal relationship, a real personal connectedness with Jesus Christ, that person becomes a new creature the Bible says. Old things pass away and new things come. The Bible says if I give my life to Jesus Christ just the simple way the Bible tells me to I will become a new creature. Old things in my life. Things that are ungodly and unwholesome and self-destructive, they will begin to peel away and fall off and new things, things that are holy and wholesome and honorable to God will begin to dominate my life. And the Bible says that this is a transformation that is driven not by human energy, not by self-help theology or feel good flattery or psycho-babble, but that this is a supernatural transformation that happens because of the supernatural power of the Spirit of God living inside of me as a follower of Jesus Christ, a supernatural transformation that changes me from the inside out. Jesus compared it to what yeast does to a loaf of bread, changing it from the inside out, changing its very character. And the Bible says when I come into relationship with Christ, I become a new creature. It's not like we just lick some change, stick it on the outside of me. Oh no! I become a whole new being because of my relationship with Christ. And friends, one of the greatest proofs that the Bible is what it claims to be is the supernatural transformation that takes place in the lives of people who simply believe it and take it its face value. One of the most enduring hymns that all of you know in American Christianity is the hymn Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace was written by a fellow named John Newton. John Newton was an Englishman. His father died when he was seven years old. He ran away to go become a sailor. And by the time he'd become an adult, he'd worked his way up to owning his own ship, being captain of his own ship, and he became a slave trader. He would go to Africa, commandeer, innocent men, women, and children, stick them in the most inhumane conditions under deck for an entire voyage across the Atlantic. Often he would lose 50% or more of his cargo because of the conditions they were in. Then he would sell them like merchandise and go back for more. This was a profane man, a brutal man, a despicable creature. In fact, he even calls himself a wretch in the song and he's right. In fact, one time while one voyage he got so drunk that he tripped and fell overboard. And the only way his sailors had to get him back on board is they harpooned him in the leg. This is true. And they hoisted him back up, hanging on the end of the harpoon. He limped the rest of his life. That was John Newton. One day he was in Liverpool, England, walking through the streets, drunk. And he ran into George Whitfield in the open air, the great preacher of the Great Awakening here in America back in England for a visit, preaching in the open air about how a personal relationship with Jesus could change a life. He stood there and listened, made a decision standing right there to give his life to Jesus Christ. And the change that came into this man's life was absolutely radical. He sold his ship, stopped swearing, stopped drinking, became a preacher, a writer of Christian hymns, an advocate against the evils of slavery. And he wrote his own epitaph. And if you go to day to the tomb to the grave of John Newton in England, here's what you'll see written on his tombstone, because he wrote it himself. He said, "Is what I want you to write, once an infidel and a libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, by the rich mercy of Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy." Man, you talk about a radical transformation. And friends in an audience like this, there are hundreds of you folks who have experienced just such a radical transformation in your life. You may not have been a slave trader. You may not have owned a sailing vessel, but when Jesus came into your life, he changed you into a new creature that you are today. And you may not be able to explain every verse in the Bible. You may not be able to answer every objection that somebody brings up to the Bible, but you know the Bible has got to be true because of what simply believing it did in your life. Some of you are here, not because that's happened to you, but because it's happened to somebody you know, a relative, a friend, a co-worker, and you can't figure out what in the world's going on with these people. You say, "Well, long, wait a minute, wait a minute, time out." We hear what you're saying. But long, there are folks out there who say that their lives have been transformed by Islam, Judaism, Transcendental Meditation, Yoga, Acupuncture, and Weight Watchers, for goodness' sake. I mean, that doesn't prove anything. All right, well, let me move on then to my second line of argument, which is archaeology. Friends, the archaeological discoveries in the Near East over the last hundred years have done an incredible amount to confirm the reliability and the trustworthiness of the Bible. And I could feel the rest of the day literally talking to you about all this stuff. I can only share a few examples. If you've ever gone to Israel with me, we'll let you see this stuff up close and personal. All I can do today is show you a few slides. But anyway, let's launch into this. Critics of the Bible once said that writing was unknown in the ancient Near East at the time of Moses, 1500 BC. There was no way Moses could write the first five books of the Bible, the way the Bible says, because he didn't know how to write. Well, now we know from archaeology that people in the ancient Near East could write and did write all the way back to 3000 BC. We have literally thousands of documents that we have unearthed, everything from law codes to legal documents to sales contracts. You know, Dom Zu gives Nurdu two chickens for three pigs, that kind of stuff. We got all that stuff. And in fact, down in the the Sinai at a place called Seribid El Qadim, there's an old turquoise mine there that the Egyptians used at the time of Moses, they ran it with Canaanite slaves. And right there, we'll show you a slide, we found alphabetic writing on the wall written by these Canaanite slaves, 1500 BC, that is almost identical in its character to the biblical Hebrew of the first five books of the Bible, proving that at the time of Moses, even uneducated common slaves knew how to write. Don't tell me Moses couldn't write the Bible, of course he could. Archaeology tells us, of course he knew how to write, raised in the palace of Egypt. Critics of the Bible once said, Abraham never existed at all. Or if he did exist, he certainly didn't exist the way the Bible talks about him, it's all very distorted in the Bible. They say, for example, or of the calvies, his home city, that city never even existed. That is until 1922, when Leonard Woolsey dug it up and found it to be the prosperous city at the time of Abraham that the Bible says it was. Critics of Abraham say, well, Sodom and Gomorrah, that story is ridiculous, that Lot would go down there because it was rich and burdened and lush, that there was never any good agriculture down there at the bottom end of the Dead Sea. That is, they believed that till Nelson Gleek found that there were 70 cities there from the time of Abraham and a strong thriving culture just the way the Bible said. Critics of Abraham would say, you know, the customs of Abraham as the Bible describes them are completely out of step with the customs of the ancient Near East to 2000 BC when Abraham lived. And they really believed that until 1925 to 1941, when two archaeologists, Chira and Spizer, dug up a city named Newsy, Newsy's in modern-day Iraq near ancient Nineveh from where Abraham came from, and they found thousands of inscribed clay tablets from the time of Abraham telling about the everyday customs in the land where Abraham came from and the comparison between them and what the Bible describes as the everyday customs of Abraham are so exact that it caused the greatest American archaeologist of all time, William F. Albright, to say this. And I quote, "It is now becoming increasingly clear," he wrote, "that the traditions of the patriarchal age," Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob's time, "preserved in the book of Genesis reflect with remarkable accuracy the actual conditions of the ancient Near East in the middle bronze age," that is, in the time when the Bible says, "Abraham lived." Was this man a preacher? No. Was he a seminary teacher? No. He taught at Johns Hopkins University Near Eastern Studies. He was merely a scholar who was honest about the evidence. Critics of the Bible once said that the Bible speaks to the Hittites, but the Hittites never even existed because we never have any records of them. That is until Hugh Winkler went to Central Turkey and dug up Bagascoi, their capital city, and found that at the time the Bible describes them, the Hittite Empire was an incredibly strong empire that covered all of Asia minor and most of modern day Syria, just like the Bible says. Critics of the Bible once said, "You know all that gold that the Bible says Moses and the Israelites brought out of Egypt with them and used out there to build a ark and all that? That's preposterous. That's stupid. There was never that much gold in all of Egypt." Until 1922, when Howard Carter found King Tut in common's tomb, we have a short name for King Tut in common. We call him King Tut. Yeah, that's the guy. And it was so much gold when he opened it up and reached the lantern in and saw it. There was so much gold in that tomb that he wrote that he had to sit down and catch his breath before he could even walk in. Here's the gold mass that came out of the tomb that you can see that's on display in the Egyptian Museum. This is, they have room after room after room of this stuff. As a matter of fact, the inner coffin that King Tut was actually buried in is 243 pounds of solid gold. And this guy was a small potatoes pharaoh. He only ruled for a couple of years. He was a midget pharaoh. Can you imagine how much gold a major pharaoh like your Brenner must have had? I mean, think about it. Of course, that good Israelites could have brought that kind of gold out of Egypt. It makes perfect sense. Hey, critics of the Bible once said that tunnel that the Bible talks about David having Joab crawl through to get into Jerusalem. And that's how we captured it. That's stupid. It's never such a tunnel as that. Oh, yeah. Well, that's before Charles Warren found it. Here's a diagram of the tunnel going from outside inside the city wall. And I'll show you a picture of what it looks like. Here's a guy that's preparing to climb into the tunnel. Here he is. And it's a natural tunnel through solid rock going under the city wall just like the Bible says. Critics of the Bible used to say, "David, he didn't even exist." The only record we have of David anywhere is in the Bible. I mean, this was like Hercules. He was just a made-up character. That is until 1993 when an archaeological team excavating in the far north of Israel had told Dan found this inscription. This inscription was by King Hazael of Syria, not by an Israelite, by a Syrian commemorating his victory over the Israelites. And right here on the Stila, guess whose name he mentions? You won't believe it. David, big as life. He talks about the house of David and his victory over the house of David. Of course, David lived just like the Bible said. Hey, critics of the Bible once said that Pontius Pilate never lived. Because we don't have any record of him anywhere in Roman records at all. The only place he's ever mentioned is the Bible. Then in 1961, excavating in Caesarea, we found this stone. And right here, biggest life in Latin is the name Pontius Pilateus, just biggest could be. Very interesting. Right where the Bible says it ought to be. Hey, people said Caiaphas, the high priest that sentenced Jesus to death, God never even lived. We don't find his name anywhere except in the Bible made-up character. In 1990, big old backhoe, digging in Jerusalem, digging a foundation for a new house, accidentally breaks into a tomb. They didn't even know it was there. There were several ossuaries in it and a sign saying that this is where they buried the high priest. An ossuary is a little limestone box like this. And what they would do is they bury you in the ground, let all your flesh ride off, dig you up a couple years later, take all your bones and put them in a little box like this. Want to meet you? Well, they bring and introduce people to your bones. Here they are in these little boxes. And we found some of those boxes in this unknown tomb where they said they buried the high priest. And on the side of this one that you're seeing was this in old Hebrew script and you'll never believe whose name that is. Caiaphas. So here, isn't this interesting? Now, we got to do to send Jesus to death. We got his bones. Jesus is alive and we got the bones of the guy who sent him to the cross. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Now, this is on display in Jerusalem, not the bones. They took those out, but the box is on display. And you can go see Caiaphas, his name, big as life, just like the Bible said. Hey, we found a synagogue at Capernaum, just like the Bible says. Here's the city of Capernaum. Here's the sea, just like the Bible said. Hey, we found a tunnel. Hezekiah was supposed to have made a tunnel under the wall through solid rock to help with the siege of Jerusalem. Here's the tunnel. We found it. It goes right through solid rock. In fact, there was an inscription about 20 feet in on one side up on the wall, telling how they started at two opposite ends and tunnel together. They could hear the picks coming towards one another and they missed each other by less than a foot through solid rock. How they did it? Don't ask me, but the tunnels there, just like the Bible says. Hey, we found a black alabaster obelisk. It looks like the Washington Monument, just a little smaller. And it's by King Shao Manizar of Assyria. The Bible tells us that in the late days of the northern kingdom, the Assyrians made vassals out of the kings of the northern kingdom. They had to do service and homage to the kings of Assyria. And one of the panels on the black obelisk shows the only existing picture anywhere of an Israelite king. This is King Jehu of the northern kingdom. We know that from the writing across here. And here he is bowing down, giving tribute to King Shao Manizar exactly the way the Bible says he should have been doing. Now I could be like the energizer bunny and just keep going and going and going here friends. But this is just a smattering of what we dug out the ground. Let me give you one New Testament example. Back in the late 1800s, there was a professor at Oxford University whose name was Sir William Ramsey. So William Ramsey was a professor of classical art and archaeology at Oxford University. He was not a believer in Jesus Christ. He was a critic of the Bible. He didn't buy any of this stuff. And he got sick and tired of his students arguing with him in class, trying to convince him the Bible was right. So he took a sabbatical and he said here's what I'm going to do. Because I'm a professor of classical art and archaeology, I know how to do this, I'm going over to Turkey and Greece and here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the book of Acts right out of the Bible and I'm going to trace Paul's missionary journeys out of the book of Acts, step for step, using the book of Acts as my roadmap. And I'm going to prove once and for all that the book of Acts is inaccurate, historically unreliable, wrong, so these students will shut up and leave me alone. That's what he did. Went over there, took the book of Acts, walked through Turkey, walked through Greece, and you know what? Instead of becoming convinced the book of Acts was wrong, he became convinced the book of Acts was so right that he gave his life to Jesus Christ. One of the things that convinced him is when he got to Ephesus, the book of Acts talks about the local rulers in the Ephesus being called asiarks. Now for 1800 years of Roman history, we accused the Bible of being wrong because we knew that Roman rulers of local cities were always called tetrarchs. That's the only thing they were ever allowed to be called tetrarchs everywhere, but you know what Sir William Ramsey found? He found that because of the prominence of the city of Ephesus, Rome made an exception in their case and allowed them to call their local Roman rulers after the name of their province, Asia. So they called them asiarks and they were the only city in the entire Roman Empire that was given special permission to rename their local rulers. So guess what? For 1800 years, the book of Acts has been right and Roman history has been wrong. Where Sir William Ramsey said, uh-oh, maybe this thing's right after all, gave his life to Jesus Christ and became one of the most significant defenders of the Christian faith in the last half of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century friends. The more we dig out of the ground, the more the Bible proves to be right. The more we dig out of the ground, the more the Bible proves to be right. They say, "Lawn, wait a minute." All that proves is that when the Bible writes down historical stuff, it's accurate. And I maybe even can admit that, but you know what? That still doesn't prove your point. Your point is that this is a supernatural book from a supernatural God and the fact that it records history accurately does not prove that. Okay, I got one more to give you then. I'm not done. Third, I'd like to point out to you the third proof that I'd like to bring to bear on this is the proof of fulfilled prophecy. Prophecy means predicting the future when there's no way you could possibly know the future and getting it right. And fulfilled prophecy is one of the greatest objective proofs of the supernatural character of the Bible. One of the reasons God gave prophecy was to confirm to us that he was the author of the Bible, telling us things there's no way any human being could possibly have known to verify to us the author of the Bible was not man but God. Isaiah 46, "I am God and there is none other," the Bible says God declares, "and I declare from ancient times things that haven't happened yet." For example, Isaiah 13 predicts the fall of the city of Babylon 200 years before it ever happened in such great detail that when it actually happened and every single thing happened exactly the way the Bible, there's no explanation. How could Isaiah possibly have known that 200 years before it happened? In Daniel chapter 2 and Daniel chapter 11, the political fortunes for 500 years in the Middle East are all laid out, the fall of Babylon, the rise of Persia, Alexander the Great, the death of Alexander, the splitting of his empire into four different divisions, the rise of Rome. In fact, it is so accurate that the only way critics can deal with it is to accuse the book of Daniel of being a hoax, saying it was written in 50 BC and somebody knew it all, wrote it even though it was history, called it prophecy, put a different name on it and sent it back into time as a hoax that Daniel wrote it 500 years before, but there's a problem with that. That won't work because we have a copy of the book of Daniel from Gacumran from the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated 160 BC. You can't say this was written in 50 BC, we got a copy of it 110 years older than that and it's not the original. So how do you explain that Daniel could know this? How in the world did he know 500 years of political history? How did he do that? Well, the only explanation I've got is a supernatural God told him and how about all of the prophecies of Jesus Christ? How about 30 of them, including the virgin birth, Isaiah chapter 7, being a descendant of David, Isaiah chapter 11, using Galilee as his headquarters, Isaiah chapter 9, being born in Bethlehem, being preceded by John the Baptist, having Judas betray him for 30 pieces of silver that gets thrown in the potter's field. How about the crucifixion being predicted? Psalm 22, the fact that they cast locks for his robe while he was on the cross. Psalm 22, the fact that Psalm 22 even records some things his enemies said to him when he hung on the cross, a thousand years later. How do you explain all that? In fact, I have a letter Richard Park wrote me one of our staff folks and he said long during the past week I was talking with a research scientist and a mathematician who researched 30 of the clearest Old Testament prophecies referring to Jesus and she calculated that the probability of one and the same person fulfilling all 30 prophecies was one with a hundred zeros after it. Now I'm not a professional mathematician. I can't necessarily verify these numbers but even if she's close to right, even if it's only 75 zeros behind it or 50 zeros behind it, still that's an incredible probability. How in the world could the Bible know that if a supernatural god hadn't written it? You go long, you know what? God bless you man but you are such a simpleton. You just don't get it do you? Don't you understand what happened to your son? Jesus knew all this stuff, knew all these predictions and he orchestrated his life in such a way that he fulfilled them. Don't you understand what he did? It's all a hoax. Well folks there's some real problems with that line of argument because tell me if you would please how Jesus could have orchestrated Caesar Augustus to conduct a census that sent his parents to Bethlehem so he could be born there while he was still in the womb. That's a problem. And there's some other problems with this whole thing. You go okay well then we just got it backwards. Jesus didn't orchestrate it. He lived his life and his disciples went back and rewrote the Old Testament. They went back and rewrote Isaiah. They went back and rewrote Psalm 22 to make it look like it had been a prediction but it really is just retrofitting. Don't you understand? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Can't be. Can't be. You meet anybody that tells you that. You look them right in the eye and say to them you are ignorant because you don't have enough information. And I'm going to tell you why because in 1947 when we found the Dead Sea Scrolls one of the things we found there was the Great Isaiah Scroll. Here's a picture of it. The Great Isaiah Scroll 150 BC. You say who dates it dead? Christian preachers? Oh no, oh no. Scholars who have no interest whatsoever improving the Bible is right. That's their date. 150 BC and guess what? Isaiah 7 in that copy reads just like your Isaiah 7 does. Isaiah 9 reads the same as yours. Isaiah 11 reads the same as yours. Isaiah 53 reads the same as yours. 150 years before Peter, Paul, James and John, ever even lived the Bible said in Isaiah what it says today. There's no way in the world those men could go back and change it. We have a copy of the Psalms. This is a Psalm scroll from Qumran. Guess what? Psalm 22 in this version reads the very same it does in yours. This is 100 BC, Psalm 22 reads the same. Nobody went back and changed anything. It's impossible. And besides, even if you believe that how in the world do you explain Daniel chapter 9 where Daniel predicts to the exact year the year the Messiah will be killed. You can get my tape from Daniel 9 in here about it. This is not theology. This is mathematics, adding, subtracting and multiplying. That's all there is to it. How do you explain that? How in the world could Daniel 500 years before it happened know the year Jesus was going to die and how in the world could Jesus orchestrate his life to be born right in time to do that? Come on now. I'm sorry friends we're back to one with a hundred zeros. And if there really is no other way to explain all this prophecy away then what that means is that the Bible was written by a supernatural God for whom predicting the future was no more difficult than predicting the past. It means that the Bible is completely trustworthy and it means that we can have total confidence that the Bible is telling us the straight up truth about God, Jesus, salvation, heaven, the afterlife and everything else. When I was in Israel several years ago we were coming through, we were coming from Egypt back in Israel so you got to go through security. And I had this wonderfully nice young agent, security agent, she was interviewing me as the head of the group and she had my passport and she said, "So tell me," she said, "What kind of group is this?" I said, "Well it's a church group, you know, a Christian group." She looked at my passport, she said, "Your name's Solomon." I said, "Yeah, that's right, I'm Jewish." She said, "You're Jewish and you're a priest?" Well I thought it's not worth trying to explain the difference to her so I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's close enough." She said, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my life." She said, "How can you be Jewish and be a priest?" I said, "Well, because I believe that Jesus is the Messiah." And she said, "What?" She said, "What evidence could there possibly be to support a crazy idea like that?" Oh, what a wonderful opportunity to go, really? Okay, here we go. And so we went through some of this, one with 100 zeros in the whole nine yards and finally she's like, "Okay, okay, okay, I'm just going to stamp the thing. Okay, okay, just forget it, forget it, forget it." But before I walked off, she said to me, she said, "Hey, I just had one question for you." She said, "Don't you ever doubt whether you're right?" And I looked at her and I said, "Never. When I've got 100 zeros on my side, there is no chance that I can be wrong." And friends, when you got 100 zeros on your side, there is no chance you can be wrong. Now that leads us to conclude by asking the most important question. You know what it is? Does everybody take a deep breath? Ready? All right, ready? One, two, three. Say long. So what? So what? Well, you know, I had a lawyer come up after the one of the earlier services and she said, "Listen, I want to straighten you out on something because I've used a term for ponderance evidence." And she said, "I want to straighten you out on this." So I said, "Am I on the clock?" She's like, "No, no, no, you're not on the clock." Well, I mean, it's Washington and I never hurts the ask. I mean, you just never know around this town, you know. So I said, "Am I on the clock?" She goes, "No." I go, "Okay, fine." She said, "Really? You got to understand there in legal terms there are three levels. There is for ponderance of evidence, which means just a little bit past the doubting point. Then there is clear and confirming evidence, which you need in the civil case. And then there is beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt evidence that you need to send somebody to jail. She said, "What you want to be talking about to people is evidence not just that you have preponderance of evidence, not just that you have clear and convincing evidence, but whether you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt." Friends, I have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. There are lots of people here today where you've never trusted Jesus Christ in a real and personal way for the simple reason that you've never been convinced the Bible is really telling you the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I'm here to tell you that I've got so much evidence you wouldn't believe it. And any thinking, reasonable, intellectual person will look at all the evidence we've presented and say it is entirely reasonable to accept the Bible as what it is. Unless it's just a big red herring and you don't really want to believe and it's all about a smokescreen, well then there's nothing I could say to you. But if you're an honest seeker, hey friends, I've given you more than enough evidence to justify the Bible's claim to be what it is. And if it is what it is, then friends, what we're dealing with here is a supernatural book from a supernatural God giving us supernatural truth about a supernatural Messiah who died on a cross to give us a supernatural relationship with God so we could live a supernatural life that ends up in a supernatural destination called heaven. That's what we've got. And friends out in the world system, the world system's going to try to talk you out of believing in the Bible. You know why? Because they don't want a moral source. They don't want an absolute source of truth. They don't want to have to deal with the Bible being what it claims to be because if it is, it means that their lifestyle, their habit patterns and their world do have to be adjusted in the line with the Bible and they want to do what they want to do. Your friends are going to try to talk you out of believing in the Bible. Some smart elect professors in college are going to try to talk you out of believing in the Bible. Some relatives are going to try to talk you out of believing in the Bible. And they're going to come up with all kinds of crazy cockamamie kind and stuff that you can't maybe have answers to. I'm here to tell you, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Until they can untransform your life. Until they can undiscover all that archaeology has found over the last hundred years and until they can undo one with a hundred zeros after it, you got nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about. Friends, you fall in with the Bible. You build your life on the Bible. You build your worldview and your lifestyle on the Word of God. You build your eternal destiny on the Word of God and I'm here to tell you, when you're on the other side of the grave and all the dust is cleared, you're going to thank God that you stuck with the truth of the Bible. It is intellectually defensible. It is reasonable. And beyond a reasonable doubt, you have evidence to support the Bible's claim to be exactly what it is. You stick with the Word of God. Let's pray together. Father, thanks for talking to us today about the Bible. And my prayer is that we would walk out of here today more convinced and dedicated to the position that the Bible is the inherent, inspired Word of God than we walked in here two weeks ago with. God, give us that confidence in the Bible, in the trustworthiness, the veracity, the reliability of the Bible, so that we can feel absolutely right building our life and our eternal destiny on this book and the truth that it gives us about you. Thanks for giving us all this evidence. Thanks for presenting it in such a way that it just can't be undone. And Father, my prayer is that you would give every one of us here the wisdom to simply take the Bible at face value and make it the rock on which we build our lives. Thanks for giving us evidence today that makes that reasonable. Help us respond the way you want us to and bring our lives into conformity with this book we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, fall out. God bless you. [Music]