INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE

by Raymond T. Exum
Crystal Lake Church of Christ
April 27, 1997

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Let us consider a request made by another member of this congregation for a lesson to validate the Bible as the word of God. In other words, is the Bible inspired of God?

It is interesting that in the United States today there are thousands and thousands of books that are published every year. In fact, you can go to the library and find two books, two volumes, each of them are very thick, entitled Books In Print. In Books in Print, if you can read the tiny print, you will find there are thousands and thousands of books currently listed as being in print, that is, for sale today. Most of those books will go out of print sometime between the fifth and tenth year after publication. Usually after ten years you very, very seldom ever find a book still in print.

Yet we come to the Bible and we see something entirely different taking place: we see the best seller year after year. In fact, it has been taken off the best seller list because it is always going to be number one. What is the appeal of the Bible that makes it the most popular book in this country and probably the most popular book in the world?

There are several remarkable characteristics that we could go into this evening if we had time. One would be the unity of the Bible, the fact that it all hangs together and makes sense. Think for example about this. Suppose that you took 40 of your neighbors and asked them each to write an essay on a certain subject. Let's say that you asked them to write an essay on the meaning of life. Each of these 40 people then will write this essay. They turn them all in and we read these essays. Is there any way in the world that they are going to be in agreement on that subject? The answer is, of course, no. We will find all kinds of different ideas, contradictory ideas expressed by those 40 people.

Consider the Bible. It was written by approximately 40 people, not even at one time. It was written over a period of about 1500 years. It was written by people with very different levels of education. On one extreme there was the apostle Paul, perhaps one of the most highly educated men in the first century. On the other hand there was the apostle Peter, who was a professional fisherman. Yet we find that Peter and Paul do not contradict each other. We find in these 40 writers many different cultures. We find that they are from three different continents. The original manuscripts were written in three different languages. It was not written just on one subject, such as what is the meaning of life. They wrote on many, many different subjects and yet there is unity to the Bible. You can read it straight through and it makes sense.

Maybe sometimes we have not appreciated enough the unity that we find in the 66 books of the Bible. If we had time this evening we could look at the fact that there have been many attempts to destroy the Bible off the face of the earth. In 303 A.D., Diocletian, the emperor of Rome, ordered that all copies of the Bible were to be destroyed. In fact, he was so confident that he would be able to stamp out the Bible that he had a medal engraved and the words on the medal said, "The Christian religion is destroyed and the worship of the gods is restored." He was a little premature in making that claim.

In the year 1199 A.D., Pope Innocent the First ordered that all French Bibles were to be burned and that people were forbidden to read the Bible. In the year 1234 A.D., Pope Gregory IX again ordered all people to surrender their Bibles for burning. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, the very ones that sent Columbus out to find the new world, ordered the Bible to be turned in and destroyed. There are many other examples that we could get into this evening, where people tried to destroy the Bible, and yet it has survived.

If we had time tonight we could look at the remarkable prophecies in the Bible. For example, please listen to what Ezekiel said about the nation of Egypt. This is a prophecy you find in Ezekiel 29:15. This is the prophecy: "Egypt will be the lowest of the kingdoms and it will never again lift itself up above the nations, and I shall make them so small that they shall not rule over the nations." When Ezekiel wrote that, Egypt was one of the two most powerful countries in world. Ezekiel was a slave. He was back there in Babylon writing the 29th chapter of his book. Yet we find Ezekiel was correct. Egypt became a third world nation. It is a third world nation today. It will always be a third world nation because that was the prophecy that Ezekiel made.

We could get into a lot of areas this evening to validate the Bible as the word of God, but I would like to spend some time on three specific areas for you to think about. Number one would be the historical accuracy of the Bible. If this literally was inspired -- and the word inspired literally means God-breathed -- if this is literally a God-breathed book, that is, if He through the Holy Spirit inspired these writers to put these words down, then we would expect that there would not be historical mistakes in this book. That is exactly what we find. The Bible does not disappoint us. There are no historical mistakes in this book.

There are many charges that have been made against the Bible along these lines that later have been proven to be false. Back in the last century the most common charge against the Bible was that it was mistaken in referring to the Hittite nation. Remember Uriah the Hittite? In fact in the Old Testament there are 48 references to the Hittites. In the 1800's there were no references outside of the Bible to the Hittite nation. Therefore, that charge, very famous in the 1800's, was that the Bible made a mistake. This was an imaginary group of people.

In 1876 the remains of the Hittite empire were discovered in the country of Turkey, and that settled the question once and for all. There was a Hittite nation as the Bible said. Today you can look at any encyclopedia and you will find a lot of material on the ancient Hittites as the Bible said that they did exist.

You can bring it on up to recent times. In the summer of 1993, the first reference outside of the Bible to King David was found by archaeologists. Up until 1993, if you didn't believe in the Bible, all you had to say was, "Well, David was a fictitious person. There are no references in historical material to this king. If he was so great then why don't we have some material about him today?"

In the summer of 1993, archaeologists were excavating the site of Dan, a city again mentioned in the Bible. As they were bringing up the debris from the ancient city of Dan, they found a fragment of stone that was engraved with a reference to the house of David, the king of Israel. This was a great event in 1993 as the archaeologist again confirmed the historical accuracy of the Bible.

We could come to the New Testament and there are probably hundreds of examples of how historians and archaeologist have shown the New Testament to be correct. There are comments in the New Testament that almost seem off hand, like they really don't have to be there. Yet they have been shown to be very precise in view of history and archaeology. For example, you may recall in John 4 when Jesus was speaking to the woman at the well. There's a little statement inserted there in John 4:11. She said, "Sir you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep." Jacob's well has now been measured and the depth of that well is 80 feet deep. That is quite a height. If we were to compare it to a modern sky scraper, that would be an 8 story building. So just an off hand comment like that has been proven to be correct.

Let me give you another example that again seems to be just an off hand comment. On the apostle Paul's fourth missionary journey, he was being taken to Rome as a prisoner to stand trial before Caesar. You may recall the shipwreck in Acts 27. There's a little statement in there in Acts 27:40 where the Bible says that as they were trying to steer the ship through this awful storm they loosed the rudders, plural. They loosed the rudders of the ship in Acts 27:40. This sounds like a mistake. Ships don't have rudders, they have one rudder. At least all of our ships today have one rudder. The Bible clearly says there that they unloosened the rudders of the ship. In 1969, the remains of an ancient ship were discovered in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Cyprus exactly in the area where Paul's ship went down. As they brought these ruins to the surface, they found that this ancient boat was steered by two rudders. In fact, National Geographic had an article on this. It is in the National Geographic Magazine, November, 1974. You can see the evidence they brought up. In the ancient world ships had two rudders.

We can look throughout the book of Acts and find similar things. In the book of Acts, there are 32 countries that are mentioned, 54 cities, and 9 Mediterranean islands are referred to by name. There are 95 persons listed by name in the book of Acts. As far as history and archaeology can validate, all of those places and all of those names, everything is precise. It is exactly as the Bible says that it was in the first century.

We can look outside of the Bible to a great historian in the first century, Josephus. Josephus was not a Christian. He was a Jewish man in the employ of the Roman Army. You can buy his collected works. In my office here I have the collected works of Josephus, and you can read what he wrote as an historian in the first century A.D. He wrote some interesting things. He referred, for example, to John the Baptist. When Herod was defeated in a war, please listen to what Josephus had to say about this: "Some of the Jews were of the opinion that God had suffered Herod's whole army to be destroyed as a just punishment on him for the death of John called the Baptist. Herod had killed John who was a just man and had called upon the Jews to be baptized and to practice virtue." That is amazing. A secular historian who makes a reference to validate what the Bible says about John the Baptist.

Certainly the most famous statement that Josephus made was about the Lord Jesus Christ. In his book Jewish Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, Section 3, please listen to the words of this first century Roman historian: "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man -- if it be lawful to call Him a man. For He was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to Him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ and when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men among us had condemned Him to the cross, those who loved Him at the first did not forsake Him, for He appeared to them alive the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning Him. And the tribe of Christians so named for Him still exists at this day."

Incredible statement there. Just incredible. Again we see that the Bible is validated as the word of God. There are dozens of books that you can read on the historical and archaeological accuracy of the Bible. It did not make mistakes.

Let's look at another area, the Bible's support of view of science. Let's go back to the beginning, that is, the creation of the universe. In past centuries the theory for the creation of the universe was known as the Steady State Theory. Some of us grew up hearing teachers talking about the Steady State Theory which said the universe had always existed. It had always been in existence. It was in a steady state and therefore it had always existed from eternity and would exist to eternity. Yet just outside Flagstaff, Arizona, at the Lowell Observatory in 1912, there was an astronomer taking a series of photographs of a certain spot in the sky. He began to notice that there was a shift from one photograph to the other. This led to what today is known as the Big Bang Theory. He could tell that the universe was expanding. He could measure the expansion of the universe because the universe was expanding. Therefore, he knew that there was a beginning. It had started at one point. It was now in the process of expanding from that point. The Steady State Theory therefore has been discarded for the idea that the universe did have a beginning.

They didn't need to wait until 1912 to discover that. Anybody can read the first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The Bible has always taught that there was a beginning of the universe.

About two weeks ago a dear sister in Christ asked me a question. She said, "Do you believe that the continents at one time were joined together?" Today there is a theory called the Continental Drift and that is, if you take a map of the world, take North American and South America and move them over to Europe and Africa, it makes a pretty good fit. Her question was "Do you believe in the theory of the Continental Drift?" I said "Not only do I believe it, I know that it was correct because the Bible refers to it."

In Genesis 10:25 there's a little statement inserted there in a long list of genealogies. It says two sons were born to Eber. The name of one was Peleg for in his days the earth was divided. Maybe that refers to something else, but I think it can certainly apply to the division of the continents in what we call today the Theory of Continental Drift. That's Gen. 10:25. The earth was divided in the days of Peleg.

We can look at so many other areas. Two weeks ago my dad flew up for two days and he wanted to go into Chicago and do whatever I thought would be interesting in there. I took him to my favorite museum and that is the Museum of Surgery on North Lake Shore Drive, the International College of Surgeons Museum. It's just an incredible museum. There are four floors there on the history of surgery all the way back to the ancient world.

On the second floor they have a Hall of Fame. They have beautiful statues of the great surgeons in the history of medicine. One of those statues is of Dr. Ignats Simulvies, a Hungarian physician who operated in Vienna in the middle of the 1800's. You might say why would they create this beautiful statue in memory of Dr. Simulvies? He noticed something among the women giving birth in that hospital. He noticed that about one out of every six women died of what they called at that time child bed fever. He noticed as he looked at the situation that it seemed this would spread through the hospital. Therefore he started demanding that the doctors there wash their hands between patients and wash their tools, which they had not been doing. Once the fever got started, it would be spread from one lady to the next and throughout the entire hospital. Therefore, it was Dr. Simulvies who came up with the practice of sanitation in hospitals.

He was so persecuted. In fact he was mistreated so badly by the other doctors of that day that it brought on mental illness and he died before he was 50 years old just from the way people were treating him. The year of his death, 1865, Dr. Joseph Lister performed the first antiseptic operation in the world and proved that Simulvies was right in saying that diseases can be spread because doctors do not wash their hands. He was a great surgeon and a great thinker, and yet he was not the first to come up with this.

In 1445 B.C. when Moses was writing the book of Leviticus, (in Lev. 13, 14 and 15) we read there various sanitation practices where Moses said you've got to wash your hands in running water, in clear water, you've got to burn the bed sheets, the clothing, you've got to burn the saddle that a sick person has sat upon. You should go back and read that sometime, Lev. 13, 14, and 15 and see how modern it is. What did Moses know about bacteria? Maybe he didn't know anything about bacteria, but he was writing as a person inspired of the Holy Spirit and therefore these things were correct because it is the word of God.

There are many other things we could get into this evening. For example, we could get into what Jesus said about His second coming in Luke 17:34-35. "I tell you, on that night there will be two men in one bed; one will be taken, the other will be left. There will be two women grinding at the same place; one will be taken, and the other will be left." We say just a minute now. If they believed in a flat earth in the ancient world, then at the second coming of the Lord we should all either be in daylight or darkness. Yet Jesus says right there in Luke 17:34-35, that when He comes, some will be asleep in bed; others will be up grinding grain at the millstone. Darkness and daylight. Notice the Bible there supports the idea of a round earth, a spherical earth; not a flat earth. When the Lord returns, some indeed some will be in darkness and some will be in daylight.

I think it'd be great someday to have a study on the subject "Mistakes the Bible Does Not Make." The Bible does not talk about spontaneous generation of life from dead matter. The Bible does not talk about a flat earth. The Bible does not talk about bleeding people as a way to cure their diseases. Really, up until this century, doctors thought that if you put a leech on a person, you get the bad blood out and that would make the person better. Yet the Bible does not endorse any of those false ideas.

There is one more idea I would like to mention this evening: the effect that the Bible has had on the lives of so many people. Somebody might say, "Well, you're getting away from apologetics and getting into feelings here." I don't think so. I think there are many of us here this evening who know the effect this book has had on our lives. We know from living through the scriptures that this is the Word of God.

I want to read what Jesus said in John 7:17: "If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself." In other words, if we will try living the Christian way of life, we will come to know that this in fact is the Word of God.

Suppose that there's a man out here that has a high school biology text book. He's reading it. Can you ever imagine that man saying, "I used to steal and lie. I was an alcoholic. I used to swindle people and abuse my family and gamble. I used to break into houses. I never paid my debts. I finally read this text book on Biology, and now I'm a good person. Now I go to church. Now I treat my family decent and I pay my debts and live a good life. I'm a good neighbor and a good citizen all because of the influence of this book." Beloved that is never going to happen. Many of us know that that has happened in our lives based upon the reading of the Bible.

I'm reminded of a message that was found several years ago written inside the cover of a Gideon Bible in a motel room in Birmingham, Alabama. This message had been written in there by hand: "May God bless the man who placed this book here. I am a young lady, 21 years old, fatherless and motherless. Tonight this book saved me from taking a wrong step. May the next reader find in it the comfort that I did."

As we look at the Bible, therefore, it is historically and archaeologically correct. It is consistent with what the facts of science are, and it is a book that can change our lives. I would suggest several things if you would like to pursue this subject further. I would recommend, number 1, any of the books by Josh McDowell. You can go to a religious bookstore just about anywhere in the country and find that Mr. McDowell will have a number of books on apologetics and defending the faith by reason and so forth there for sale. He has answers to tough questions.

I have all of these in my library: Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity is perhaps the grandfather of all books on apologetics. Evidence that Demands a Verdict is an excellent book on validating the Bible. The Resurrection Factor is an outstanding book proving that Jesus was raised from the dead. I would strongly recommend his books. Many of his books were written with a scientist helping him to get all of the facts straight. I think that I could certainly recommend them.

There is another book I would recommend. This is the book of the Spiritual Sword Lectureship from October of last year at the Getwell Church of Christ in Memphis, Tennessee. The theme of the lectureship was "The Inspiration of the Bible." Just this past Friday, I ordered a copy of this book for our church library. In a few weeks we should have that and you can read it. In Chapter after chapter and speaker after speaker you will find material here supporting the Bible as the Word of God.

There is something else that I have recommended many times in the past and that is Reason and Revelation, an excellent paper. It is only $6.00 per year and is written by our brethren Wayne Jackson and Burt Thompson and some of their assistants down in Montgomery, Alabama. Every issue is devoted to apologetics; that is, defending the Bible, defending the faith. This month's issue is devoted to a discussion of Carl Sagan, the astronomer that just passed away and how such a brilliant man could have been led astray to believe in evolution. It was a very thoughtful article and I would certainly recommend that you subscribe to this paper. There are many other books and publications that you can get on this subject.

The Bible is indeed the Word of God. It is the printed word of God. Did you know that there is also a physical Word of God? That is, the Word came to us in a fleshly form in the life of Jesus Christ. Remember these beautiful words from the first chapter of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." We do not have that physical Word with us anymore. We are awaiting His return, but we do have the printed word that is the Word of God that we can base our lives on.

Maybe some of these comments have encouraged someone to think about obeying the gospel tonight, and we will tell you from the Word of God that you must be immersed in water for the forgiveness of your sins to be brought into the family of God. If you have been persuaded by the scriptures to accept Jesus Christ and His plan of salvation, as we sing the next song won't you please come to the front and make that known to us?

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