Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

Can we really trust the Bible? Is it God's word or just a collection of ancient myths? Welcome to Focal Point and another edition of Ask Pastor Mike. We're sitting down in the pastor's study to tackle a question about the reliability of Scripture. What sets the Bible apart compared to other world religious books? Are there mistakes in the Bible? Well, glad you've joined us today. We'll hear credible answers to those relevant questions.

Today, Pastor Mike Fabarez sits down for a conversation with our executive director at Focal Point, Jay Wurton. I'm Dave Drewy, and every week I look forward to this program, don't you, when we get to interact with Pastor Mike and talk about important, timely issues.

So let's get started, shall we? Here's Jay kicking off today's conversation.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dave.

Pastor Mike, we've been talking on the radio about the centrality of scripture and how we should accept what it says to us and about us.

So a listener has written us and says, can we really trust the Bible? Hasn't it been rewritten many times and contains many errors?

Speaker 3

Well, yeah, we certainly will never hold to the centrality of scripture if we don't believe in the veracity or the truthfulness of scripture. And, you know, this has been the going line in popular society that you can't trust the Bible because it has been rewritten millions of times or, in the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code tradition, it was put together by Constantine in the 4th century, and we have no idea what was really written originally. They go to the Gnostic Gospels to try and show us what was really written. Just a whole boatload of nonsense regarding the history of the Bible.

But the Bible is the most attested to work of antiquity. There's no other book in all of antiquity that has more evidence to show that what we're reading in our English translation draped across our lap in church is exactly the best preserved work from the ancient world. There's nothing that even comes close to comparing to the truthfulness. And by that, I mean the legitimate representation of what was originally written.

Now, of course, we don't have the original manuscripts, right, of the Old or New Testament, but what we have is copies that were made very close to the original writing of the New Testament text, for instance. And where you have a bigger gap in the Old Testament, what you have is a kind of religious, judicious, careful kind of copying done by professional priests whose whole point in making these copies was to be excruciatingly accurate about the copies.

So, yeah, we don't have the original manuscripts, neither do we have original manuscripts from any ancient document that was written anytime from antiquity. But we have the best attested picture or record of the ancient text of Scripture. So you can put it up against anything, and you'll find we have more manuscript evidence, which means more copies of this dating back to the earliest dates. And there's no doubt that when you're reading your New Testament in English, we've got a very, very, very, very, very accurate picture of what was originally written by the authors of the Bible.

Speaker 2

Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the Old Testament writers and the New Testament writers copied manuscripts as they were moving on in time.

Speaker 3

Well, in the Old Testament, the scribes were given this task, and they were very judicious, very cautious about making sure that they had made a copy. This is the only way you could make a copy: to sit down by hand and make those copies. No manuscript or document was ever copied with more care than the Bible. They counted letters, they counted lines, and they had checking and cross-checking. So this is what went on in the scribal class that was professionally employed to make these copies.

And again, if this were a product of sitting around and just playing the telephone game and changing things, you would see a lot of changes in the text to work to try and harmonize things, say, between Samuel and Kings or even the prophets that we have in the Old Testament. But we don't see that. We don't see this kind of evolving story. That's why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so important for us to find this 1st century BC to 2nd century BC library that was uncovered in 1947, which looks exactly like all the manuscripts that we have of the Old Testament that postdated that library by 10 centuries.

The Book of Isaiah was exactly what we had uncovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was a set of manuscripts that predated what we had existing on Isaiah by 900 years, a thousand years. So, yeah, we have a great copy of the Old Testament because it was done by a very careful professional class of scribes.

The New Testament is a little bit different in that churches were passing these letters back and forth from the apostles. You have more mistakes that were made in the handwritten copies from each other. But we know that because we have so many copies; this just exploded in terms of how many ancient copies were done of Romans, Mark, John, or First Corinthians. We can compare them and recognize pretty quickly, as just being a simple detective, what was originally written by looking at the very small, minute mistakes that we find in these unprofessional scribes who came along and made these copies—the early Christians who could write and wanted these things copied for their own church.

The differences are very easy in most cases to decipher in what we call variant readings. A lot of them are so small; they're spelling errors or transposed letters—very small. So, there are very few passages that are affected by the copying that wasn't done in as professional a manner as it was in the Old Testament. And like I said, the way that we know that is because we have such a multitude of copies to compare.

Speaker 2

So when someone says the Bible contains many errors and sometimes they'll name, you know, tens of thousands of errors, what are they really referring to?

Speaker 3

Well, you'd have to ask what they mean by that. But most people are trying to say the material that we have is filled with errors. In other words, that didn't really historically happen. Now, if you're talking about scribal errors or transcription errors, well, then, yeah, there are plenty of those kinds of errors. But you don't have an error in the original manuscripts because according to the Bible itself, this is God's text breathed out through the apostles and prophets. So we know what was originally written is exactly what God wanted to say.

Now we have to assemble the picture of that original manuscript by comparing all the copies that we have existing, or what they call in the field, extant copies of manuscripts. So when they say errors, usually what most people look at is they open the Bible, they find a part they don't like, and they say, well, there's an error there, and they find another part that doesn't seem to match their science textbook and say, well, there's an error there.

Well, understand that this is a manuscript that describes God's intervention in time and space. Jesus turns water into wine. That's always going to be an error in the mind of a modern person who says, well, water can't turn into wine by someone saying a word. You know that's impossible. Well, yeah, of course it is in a naturalistic mindset. But this is a record of God intervening in time and space. And so that's certainly not an error. The question is, is this what John wrote when he wrote of the marriage at Canaan and the reception there and Jesus turning water?

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 3

Is this exactly what John wrote?

And we can say that we have a very, very 99.99% accurate picture of almost every passage that we have in Scripture, Old Testament, because of the very meticulous care given to the transmission of the text.

And in the New Testament, by the sheer volume of comparisons that we can make because of so many ancient manuscripts.

Speaker 2

Well, that I guess explains why we can trust what's come down to us. But what internally is written. How can we trust that the Bible is true and what it's telling us?

Speaker 3

Well, because of predictive prophecy. That's probably the most telling thing that shows us that God's got his fingerprints all over this book. No one can tell the future. This is very clear predictive prophecy. And that I think should lead any reasonable person to say this is no normal book. God has written this because only God can tell the future.

And the only way you could get around that is to say that all the predictions were written after the fulfillments, which there's no way you can say that about the Testaments. In other words, the Old Testament was wrapped up 400 years before the New Testament. And we actually have dated documents that are prior to the life of Christ that have 38 of the 39 Old Testament books. We've got copies of these.

So we know that, for instance, in the biggest sense, the Old Testament was clearly written undoubtedly before the New Testament. And the New Testament fulfills all these promises of the Old Testament. So we have a book that's unique. It's got God's fingerprints on it. God has predicted the future and that's what makes a unique book.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. I'm sure this conversation has been informative for our listeners, and I hope it'll help them trust their Bible more.

And we're going to continue this topic with a message you gave called "The Reliability of the Bible: A Batting Average You Can't Beat."

Speaker 4

The American phenomenon. Interest in the psychic in our country was escalated and pushed into the forefront a number of years ago when a then unknown Jean Dixon made a prediction about the 1960 presidential election. She predicted before it happened that a Democrat would win and that that Democrat would die in office. She was right. She became the psychic to the celebrity. She told then actor Ronald Reagan that he would one day become the President of the United States. Of course, he did. You might not know it, but Jean Dixon, America's favorite psychic, was a devout Roman Catholic. She went to mass every morning and claimed that her gift of prognostication and the ability to see the future was one given to her by God. She claimed she was a prophet of God and spoke to proclaim things that God had shown her in her own time. With God.

Now, if you are kind-hearted, you might say, well, she was just a good guesser. But if you were to even read a brief study done by a Temple University mathematician on Jean Dixon's predictions, you would realize she was rarely correct. She occasionally hit the jackpot with one or two well-publicized predictions, but for the most part, she guessed about things that did not come true. And if you're biblically savvy, you may even say she is outright, without question, a false prophet.

Turn in your Bibles, if you would, to one example in Micah chapter five if you can find it. It's tucked away in these minor prophets. We call them a number of writings at the end of the Old Testament. They are called minor prophets simply because they're shorter, not because their message is any less important than Isaiah or Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Daniel, but they're short prophets. So they've called them minor prophets. And in the minor prophets, they're full of major prophecies. You should always know that.

Let's just turn to Micah 5:2. Now in Micah 5:2, there's going to be a prediction about Jesus Christ, the coming Messiah. We can see in the Old Testament his name is predicted and all these things. Let's just look at where he will come from. Here's one thing about where the coming, reigning, ruling king would come from. Now, before you even look at Micah 5:2, let me remind you of some predictions way back in the book of Genesis. It all started in Genesis chapter three when God said to Eve, "You guys have messed up, but I am going to win because I am going to send someone from your seed." He says to the woman, interestingly, we could talk all morning about that, "Who will crush the head of the enemy and the enemy will only bruise his heel." He predicted there would be someone to reverse our problem; there would be a coming reigning king.

In Genesis 49, he said, "I'm going to tell you where he's going to come from." Now, there are 12 tribes. If God is not involved in this, if this is Gene Dixon stuff, you have a 1 in 12 chance that you're going to be right about a prediction that the ultimate king of Israel, who would come and save the people, would be from the tribe of Judah. You have a 1 in 12 chance. The Bible then goes on as it talks more about this coming king and tells us, "You want to know where he's coming from?" He's not only coming from the tribe of Judah; he will come from the family of King David.

Now, pick a king. There were 44 kings in Israel and Judah. Pick one of them and say, "From your line, they're going to come." There were 11 dynasties, make it 12 dynasties in all of Israel. And from one dynasty, it says, "From David, from your line, from your family, because you're a part of Jew, from your family will come the Messiah." Just think, it's like someone coming up to you and saying, "Your family, you know, hundreds of years from now this will happen." Well, who's to know that your lineage could even survive for hundreds of years?

Well, I know they had a lot of wives and they seemed to have a lot of babies and all this. There were times, if you read the Old Testament, where the line of David got down to one little baby stolen away by a maid to keep from an evil queen, from another line coming in and killing all of David's ancestors. And down comes the line through the line of David. That's why the gospel writers, two times, Luke and Matthew, give us almost a full chapter on how Jesus came from the tribe of Judah and the lineage and family of David.

Now go to Micah 5:2 and look at that if you would. Now I'm going to pick a city. And it's not even a city; it's just a town. It's a little village. Basically, the Bible says in Micah 5:2, "But you, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel." I love the way God does. He picks a little dusty village, and hundreds of years before it happened, he picked the tribe, he picked the family, he picks the city. Born in a little manger outside of Bethlehem with kings coming and bowing down and offering gifts and all the Christmas story that you know about, hundreds of years before that happened, God calls it.

Now this is just. We've looked at even just three I've called your attention to, and we've looked at one prophecy. That's pretty impressive, isn't it? Matter of fact, it is so impressive that I'm tempted to say that prophecy must be a hoax. This must have been written after it actually happened. You know, now that would be that number one, that kind of accusation, pretty serious. I mean, that's saying the Old Testament, New Testament. Well, you know, the New Testament was written. The Old Testament was written off of the New and put before it. And so it looks like it's before, right? I mean, you got a conspiracy going here, right?

Because scholars who did not want to believe that God really wrote the Bible began to say the Old Testament prophecies are undeniably clear and it's too specific and it's too obvious. Obviously, this must have been written after the fact. It became the prevailing scholarly view even in seminaries. That was the view. Now, there were a lot of things that should prove different, but the linchpin, the nail in the coffin was in 1947. If there were any doubts, I mean, it was clear enough, and you know, you can make up theories, I suppose.

And God decided to crack a theory when a rock cracked a pot outside of the Dead Sea in a little cave. When a little shepherd boy took out this deal and realized, "You know, this looks interesting; maybe I can sell this for a few bucks." The guys came in, the scholars came in, and they uncovered in this cave 38 of the 39 Old Testament books, some so perfectly preserved that you can go to Jerusalem today in a little museum called the Shrine of the Book. You can look at the Isaiah scroll, laid out 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah. Every verse is there, and it predates the time of Christ. There's no scholar out there that's going to date that after the time of Christ. No serious scholar, I suppose. Any skeptics going to claim conspiracy, maybe a UFO landed and put them there, and this was, you know, who knows what they might say?

But any honest scholar is going to say the Dead Sea Scrolls put to death any kind of view that might try to predate the New Testament before the Old Testament or to try and write in Old Testament scriptures to believe that, you know, well, this was just all kind of made up to make these believers feel good about their Jesus. Micah 5:2 was in the caves. It was right there as clear as day, along with the 450 other predictions about Messiah. Jesus stepped on the scene and said to these guys, "I didn't come to abolish the law. I came to what? Fulfill it. I'm it. I'm the guy. Want to see my birth certificate? Born in Bethlehem. Want to see my tribal adherence? You want to know what family I'm from? And then watch what else I do." And he fulfilled 450 Old Testament predictions about his life. It was amazing.

Can't say it. Predict. And it's not general. You know, I read my horoscope yesterday. I don't normally do that. I don't know that I've ever done that. I did that yesterday in preparation for this sermon. I thought, well, I better look at my horoscope. So I looked at my horoscope, and here's what it said. It said, "The sun is in Gemini and the moon is in Leo." That was important information for me, I suppose. It says, "This is a good weekend for you to clean things out. So clean out your attic, your backyard, your closets." Well, they didn't realize I don't have an attic and I don't have a backyard. But nevertheless, whatever. Try tidying up things wherever you go. Mainly you'll toss things out and da, da, da, da, da. And it says, "Here's the prediction. You'll feel much better after it's all done." I'm going to feel better with clean closets and an organized attic and garage.

Speaker 3

Wow.

Speaker 4

You know, all I'm saying is this. When you look at scripture, it's very specific. It is not general. It doesn't say anything. All this stuff about, you know, the Messiah will be a good guy, you know, he will be from, you know, the nation somewhere. It's very specific. We need to be impressed with the Bible. It is an impressive book because God says it and it comes true. The prophet's words are certain. And Peter says, we have the words of the prophets more certain. Second Peter, chapter one, it says, and you will do well to pay attention to it. As to a light shining in a dark place, we do well to pay attention to it. Circle that word. Attention.

That is the word translated elsewhere in the Bible. First Timothy, chapter three, verse eight. You know when it says that church leaders should not be addicted to wine? It means, don't be obsessed with this. It's also used in Acts, chapter eight, when the people of the town were said to have been obsessed with Simon the magician. Remember that? Simon the sorcerer in Acts, chapter eight said the people were hooked. They always came out to see what he would do. That obsession, that interest, that being hooked on it. When it says pay attention to it, you'd be do well to pay attention to it. It's not just saying, you know, you ought to have one and everybody ought to have a good, you know, copy of the Bible in their house. It's saying, you ought to be obsessed with it. It ought to be your life. It ought to be the focus of your life.

Not only should we be impressed with the Bible, number two on your alley, we ought to be obsessed with the Bible because if it be marks of God speaking, who's the only one who can predict the future to the T before it happens with a hundred percent accuracy. Then all of us ought to give our lives to it. Turn in your Bibles to the middle of your Bibles. Psalm 119. I want to show you a picture of that shepherd boy who was to become king, who was told by Samuel the prophet, as he let the oil drip from the sides of his beard, he was told, you are the next king. He heard the words of the prophet, and he watched the fulfillment of what the prophet said. And he stood back and said, the words of the prophets are impressive. And because they're impressive, he said, I'm gonna be obsessed with this book. And he does.

Psalm 119. Drop down to verse number 97. It says, how I love your law. I meditate on it all day long. Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they're ever with me. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes. I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey your precepts. I've kept my feet from every evil path that I might obey your word. I've not departed from your laws, for yourself have taught me how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth. Your word, verse 105, is a lamp unto my feet. It's a light to my path. I've taken an oath, and I've confirmed it. I'm going to follow your righteous laws. I've suffered much. Preserve my life, O Lord, according to your word. Accept, O Lord, the willing praise of my mouth. Teach me your laws.

Though I constantly take my life in my hands, I will never forget your law. The wicked set a snare for me. But I haven't strayed from your precepts. Your statutes are my heritage forever. They are the joy of my heart. My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end. David knew these things are so impressive. They're not even really the words of the prophets. They're really the words of God. And if they're the words of God, I had to be obsessed with these things.

New Testament translation Colossians, Chapter three. It says, let the word of Christ richly dwell in you. And we should be people who hold up the light of God's word in our world and say, we are impressed with it, we are obsessed with it, and we are going to be people that are confident about it. Then you will be modeling the truth of God's word. Because Christians are impressed and obsessed. And when they're impressed and obsessed, trust me, they let that light shine in a dark world. They are confident about it. They cling to it. I hope that's your understanding and commitment to Christ.

Stand with me, please, as we close. Oh God, in our world of relativistic thinking and all the philosophies of man that float around and talk down to our Christianity because they've not taken the time, it seems, to look at scripture and understand that it is not just a religious document like all the rest. It is a book that is filled with predictive prophecy almost on every page. The fingerprint of God is there. God, we thank you that we don't serve a God who's cloaked himself in fables and myths, but we serve a God who's revealed himself to be true by the authenticating act of predictive prophecy. We're thankful for that. In Jesus name we pray.

Speaker 3

Amen.

Speaker 1

You're listening to Focal Point, and a message from Pastor Mike Febara is titled "A Batting Average You Can't Beat." To hear the full unedited message, go to focalpointradio.org, and while you're there, feel free to leave your own questions for Pastor Mike.

Well, what an encouraging reminder. God's prophecies are 100% accurate, and that gives us confidence that scripture is truly his word to us. And, you know, that's why at Focal Point, we're so committed to clear, accurate Bible teaching. You can trust that every time you tune into this program, you'll hear what the Bible says—no watering down or sugar coating.

Well, with Christmas in the rearview mirror, there's a very important deadline coming up tonight. Right, Mike?

Speaker 3

Yeah, we're right at the finish line for 2021. Hard to believe, but these last few days of the year are critical for Focal Point. Believe it or not, more than 10% of all of our production costs and all that we have to pay throughout the year to make this ministry happen happens in the final week of the year. I know that's hard to believe.

A lot of times people are thinking about it because of taxes. But I know the real reason that people partner with us in Focal Point is because they want to get expositional teaching out to more and more people. They want to see their impact, their gift magnified across the Internet, across this country, through radio.

So that's why I'm inviting you to stand with us right now and just take a step of joining with us in that much needed gift before midnight on December 31st. And together, we can have a lot of people out there across the country explore the depths of scripture throughout this new year and beyond.

So on their behalf as ministry is magnified, I just want to say thank you.

Speaker 1

We're grateful for every gift because each dollar helps magnify the reach of this ministry and, by extension, magnifies the impact in the lives of listeners. We couldn't do this without you. So as you learn and grow through Pastor Mike's hard-hitting, unvarnished Bible teaching, will you reach out with a gift of support today?

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Well, happy New Year! I'm your host, Dave Drewy. So glad to have you with us, and be sure to come back again next time as we continue exploring the depths of Scripture right here on Focal Point.

Speaker 3

Foreign.

Speaker 1

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