This message is for the purpose of strengthening you in your faith, to give reason for you to believe in the Word of God, and to help you and I contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3). It is also for you and I to give an answer to every one that asks why you and I should believe the Bible.
Sometime in your Christian lives, it is likely you’ll come to a stage where you’ll ask, is God real and will he help me. How do I know that the God of my mother and father (for some of you), the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible is real, is true and I can depend upon him? Can my faith in him be shaken, can a sceptic bring along a story and make you doubt? Can a scholar bring across a verse you don’t understand yet and make you think that there’s a contradiction in the Bible and shake you from what you believe? After all, if he’s not real, then why should you live according to the Bible? If he’s real though, you and I should do as he commands and desires. whatever that may be.
When the earth shakes, men hold onto all sort of things for stability. They’ll hold onto each other, trees maybe, poles, whatever is near. In your Christian lives, there are only a few things that you can hold onto when a major earthquake appears in your life. Some good things to hold onto are things like:
- answered prayer. If there’s a relationship with God given by faith in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the blood of Jesus Christ which washes away our sins, then the times you have accessed the Father through Christ and he answered your very specific prayer which you can’t explain, demonstrates to you, that you have a God that loves and cares for you and that indeed Jesus Christ is your advocate as said in I John 2:1.
- A changed life. Everyone who has been washed in the blood of Jesus Christ, saved by the grace of God, ought to have a changed life. Their desires should change from sin to holiness, from the law of sin and death in Romans 8:2 to the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. It doesn’t change from sin to religious behaviour, but rather from sin to a life of love, joy, peace, longsufferingness, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. You love your brethren, all believers, not only those that agree with you as in I John 3:14. In fact, your love grows for them so much that you’d be willing to die for them according to I John 3:16. You have the peace of God that passes all understanding, a longsufferingness when persecution comes, a faith that trusts and pleases God, and a temperance, a self control where you are no longer the slave of sin, but you are able to make a choice.
Finally, but the main thrust of this message, is what you know that God has said, and that the Bible could not have been written by man alone, but rather it would have to be as 2 Peter 1:21 says: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
From a scientific perspective, how do you know that God wrote the Bible?
- Firstly, and I use this quite often to get someone’s attention and interest in the Bible is, the God of the Bible because he created it, knows that the earth hangs upon nothing. It works quite often for me. I’d ask my friend, “Did you know that the Bible says that the earth hangs upon nothing”? Where’s that? Well, the first verse is Job 26:7. Please turn there, it reads: “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing”. How could anyone in ancient times know that the earth hangs on nothing. Only when people went into space and could see that could it be verified. Quite often the person would be amazed, but then say, but that’s just one verse, that may prove the book of Job, but how can you prove the rest of the Bible?
- Another good verse to go onto then, seeing that you’re in the astronomical, is that the earth is round. Pretty much everyone in our time knows that the earth is round. But that wasn’t always the case. In the days of Christopher Columbus in 1492, he sailed across the ocean and not many people believed he’d come back. They believed he’d fall off the edge of the world. Where is this verse? Isaiah 40:22 reads: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth our the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:” This circle in Hebrew apparently means spherical. Here you can prove the book of Isaiah is true, which also has the famous verses that talk about John the Baptist in Isaiah 40:3 and that God would dwell among us, Immanuel, and born of a virgin in Isaiah 7:14, and the suffering of Christ for our iniquities foretold in Isaiah 53.
- The third item is that life is in the blood. We know that nowadays, we do blood transfusions, but it was from thousands of years ago until less than 200 years ago that people believed that you should let out blood to heal diseases. What remnants of this is left? Well the Barber stores with its red and white poles originate from there. The white would be the pole that the patient held onto and the red would be the blood that was let out of them. In fact, George Washington died because too much blood was let out of him. Leviticus 17:11 shows that God created us and knows how our bodies work. It reads: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the alter to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for your soul.” This is a double useful verse. Not only does it show that the Bible is scientifically accurate and proves that God knows that we need our blood and it carries life around our flesh, our bodies, but it also shows that for sin to be cleansed, it requires blood to be shed. It shows that we can not be saved by our own deeds, but a sacrifice must be made and its shed blood can make atonement for our sins.
- Fourthly, the Bible’s accuracy describes the underwater springs in the sea and oceans. Without a submarine, how could people tell that water came not only from the clouds but also from the underwater volcanoes under the ocean? The verses read: Job 38:16 - “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?” Proverbs 8:28 - “When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep”. Not only do we know that there are springs in the ocean and the Bible agrees, but here in Proverbs you see that it agrees with the account in Genesis of the flood. The first time rain falls is at the flood. “He established the clouds above”. In Genesis 7:11, put your finger on that page because we’ll be back, it reads “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Genesis 8:2 reads “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained”. Proverbs 8:29 reads: “When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment when he appointed the foundations of the earth:” Here we see that Proverbs 8:29 correlates to the end of the waters increasing during the Flood in Genesis 8:2. Here we can hold onto that the Flood account is true and that Proverbs is a God given guide for life based upon that man could not have known about the underwater springs.
- Finally, a man by the name of Matthew Fountaine Maury. The pioneer of oceanography, proved that Psalms wasn’t written by man alone by the verse Psalm 8:8 “The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.” This verse stated that there were ocean currents, paths which the currents flow and this is what Maury found. Ocean currents were only discovered in the 1840s. How could the writer of the Psalm known that other than that God had told him? Such is the prominence of Maury that there is a statue of him by the US Naval Academy and the state of Virginia for his work in oceanography. Knowing that Psalms can be verified scientifically to be from more than a man, we can hold onto the promises that the Lord is our shepherd in Psalm 23, that he’d be resurrected, not suffering corruption in Psalm 16:10 and in the very same psalm, Psalm 8, that Jesus Christ is the man that God is mindful of in verse 4, that Jesus Christ would humble himself being made a little lower than the angels being in a human body as the son of man, and that he would be crowned as King of Kings with all things under his feet in verse 6 and crowned with glory and honour in verse 5.
Here from scientific verification, from the 5 simple verses above, we can hold onto that Jesus Christ would be fully God and fully man, our Immanuel, that his blood is atonement for our souls, that he’d be raised from the dead, and that he’d rule as King with all things under his feet. Would you hold onto what you have learnt and never forsake Jesus Christ who has promised us: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” Hebrews 13:5