From His Heart

Speaker 1

Today on From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve, he'll answer this question, why should I believe the Bible?

Speaker 2

Now listen, this is the thing about the Word of God. You say, well, does the word of God change people's lives or does Jesus change people's lives? And the answer is yes, because it's very, very difficult to separate the Word of God and the Son of God.

And when you seek the Lord, you find him, and you seek him in his word, every scar with real truth, real love, real from his heart.

Speaker 1

Thank you for joining us today for From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve, who's going to share how important it is to really believe the Bible. Is it accurate? Is it reliable? How can you know that? You know. Well, that's a big question. And in fact, it's one of life's big questions.

And that's also the name of the current series that we're in this month. Today, Pastor Jeff gives three reasons why we can trust God's word and know that Jesus is his Son and our Savior for absolute truth. If you miss any of these broadcasts, go to fromisheart.org and you can click the listen link to hear part one from last time and also download a free MP3 of any broadcast and Pastor Jeff's sermon outlines to boot.

Hold off now on that. We'll first do some catching up last time. Then we'll open God's Word to hear Pastor Jeff answer this essential question: Why should I believe the Bible?

Speaker 2

Hey, you might have a friend, you might have a neighbor, you might have someone in your own family. You might have somebody at school. And they say, well, you know, I don't believe the Bible. Well, do you just dismiss it like that? Many people say they don't believe the Bible. They don't even know what's in the Bible. They don't know that the Bible claimed all these different things.

Let me give you three reasons. There are many reasons, but three reasons why you should believe the Bible. Number one, the Bible has proven itself to be unique and reliable and true. It's proven itself to be unique, reliable, and true. Now, when we talk about the Bible, we kind of refer to it as just one book. I mean, this is the book called the Bible. But this isn't one book, really. This is 66 books. 66 books, 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament. It's written over a period of 1500 years. It's written by 40 different authors. And those authors come from different walks of life. Some were kings, some were fishermen, some were farmers, some were shepherds, some were prophets, some were priests, all sorts of different walks of life.

It was written in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It is written on three different continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. I mean, the Bible is just remarkable. You think of 1500 years with that many authors and people living in totally different governments, totally different cultures, and yet the Bible has a common theme. The Bible has a common storyline. The Bible has a common message, and the message is the message of salvation.

You go to the library, you go to the greatest library in the world, and here's the assignment: come up with 66 books that are written over a span of 1500 years from men of all different walks of life. And put those together and see if you can come up with a message that is common, a storyline that is common, a theme that is common in those 66 books written from 40 different authors. Well, how are you going to do that? That's impossible.

A professor challenged a student who said he didn't believe in the Bible. He said, well, let me tell you about the Bible. And he told him. He said, here's your assignment. You go find 66 books from 40 different authors, and you find it where it all comes together. Listen, you can't get five historians that talk about the situation with Lincoln being shot to give you the same five accounts. They all come up with different things. It's going to be contradictory. That's with five. How about with 40? And how about with 40 who live 1500 years apart?

Hey, the Bible is unique. You know, the Quran that the Muslims say is such a holy book, that was supposedly given from the angel Gabriel to Mohammed. And he dictated it word for word, one book, one man that wrote it, the angel Gabriel. I think it was an angel, but it wasn't Gabriel. I think it was the angel Lucifer, the fallen angel. That's who gave the revelation. But the Bible is very unique. And the Bible is a book that is reliable and true.

You know, the Bible is not a science book, but it does speak about scientific things. Some people say, well, you know, I can't believe the Bible because of science. Back in the day, many, many, many years ago, the science of the day thought that the earth was flat. And, you know, we learned about that. People thought that the earth was flat. People were going to go out on the boat, oh, don't go too far. Because if you go too far, you're going to fall off. And that was the science of the day. The earth is flat.

You know what God said? He says very clearly in the scripture, in Isaiah 40:22, that the Lord sits above the circle of the earth, literally above the sphere of the earth. Isaiah 40:22, written in the 700s BC, God was telling us in His Word that the earth is not flat. The earth is a globe, the earth is a sphere. They used to say, the ancients, when they were trying to figure out what does the earth rest on, they came up with all kinds of ideas of what the earth rests on. Maybe you've seen one of those ideas where the earth is on the back of Atlas and he's holding it up. Some of the ancients said, well, the earth rests on the back of elephants. And when there's an earthquake, the earthquake comes to be because the elephants shook. And that's why there's an earthquake.

You say, what a bunch of dummies. Oh, it was a long time ago. That's what they thought. You know what God says in His Word in the book of Job, which is probably the oldest book in the Bible? The Bible says in the book of Job that God hangs the world on nothing. On nothing. What have we figured out now? God hangs the world on nothing. His Word is true. The Bible is true concerning science. The Bible is true concerning what it says about history. And archaeology is discovering this when they dig something up and all of a sudden they say, oh, wait a minute, this is different from what we thought. And this reveals that what the Bible said is true.

Let me give you an example. In the book of Daniel, Daniel Chapter 5, when Belshazzar has a big feast in Daniel Chapter 5, and you have the enemy all surrounding the city of Babylon, but Babylon had those giant walls. And he said that we're fine, they can't get in here. And so he had a feast and he was toasting his God. And then he brings in the vessels of the Lord of Israel when they conquered Israel in 586 BC, and he's mocking the God of Israel. And all of a sudden there's a hand that shows up on the wall. You remember that writing on the wall? Mini mene tekel Upharson. And he didn't know what that meant.

And so he heard that, hey, there's a guy in your kingdom, his name is Daniel, and he interprets dreams and he interprets stuff like that. And so he called him in and this guy Belshazzar said, listen, if you can interpret this, I'll make you the third ruler in Babylon. And historians have said, well, we don't have any record of somebody named Belshazzar? There's nothing in the Babylonian record that there's somebody named Belshazzar who was king. The Bible is wrong. And for many, many centuries people said, well, the Bible must be wrong because we don't have any record of that.

Isn't it interesting that in 1853 an inscription was found on a cornerstone of a temple built by Nabonidus, who was the king? And all the records show Nabonidus was the king. And the inscription said this, it was to the God, the false God Ur. And he wrote this. May I, Nabonidus, king of Babylon, not sin against thee, and may reverence for thee dwell in the heart of Belshazzar, my firstborn, favorite son. All of a sudden it's like, oh, there was a Belshazzar. And what did they determine? That Nabonidus was co-ruler with his son Belshazzar. And that's why Belshazzar told Daniel, if you interpret this writing, I'll make you the third man in the kingdom. My daddy's number one, I'm number two, and you would be number three.

And they have to, all the skeptics, they backtrack and they're like, okay, well maybe we have to find something else that's wrong. Hey, the Bible is reliable and the Bible is true. How about with prophecy? How can you have a book that predicts things that are going to happen in the future and then they happen? I mean, no other book has that with 100% accuracy. Did you know when Isaiah wrote, he wrote in the 750s B.C. he wrote 150 years before a man named Cyrus was born? And he wrote about Cyrus, he was going to send the people back to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem. He names him by name in Isaiah, chapter 45. 150 years before this guy was even born. And what happens? A man named Cyrus comes to the throne. He is the king of the Medo-Persian empire. And he releases the exiles to go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and rebuild the temple. What a coincidence. How does that happen? God is the one who is breathing His word. It is reliable and true.

The prophecies concerning Jesus, concerning the Messiah, somebody counted them up and said there are 48 prophecies concerning the Messiah. Now for Jesus to fulfill all of those prophecies, things like where you're going to be born, that's pretty tough to finagle that. But it says in Micah that he's going to be born in Bethlehem and Jesus was born in Bethlehem. And all the different things about out of Egypt I called my son and he was in Egypt and he came back to the land of Israel and the different things, he's born of a virgin. That's pretty hard to finagle, that one too. But all these things that are said.

Now somebody said this. Mathematically, if you take eight prophecies, just eight of the prophecies concerning Jesus, for those to be fulfilled, the mathematical probability is 1 times 10 to the 17th power. You say, what is that? It's a 1 with 17 zeros after it. It's a huge number. And it's hard to get a feel for how big that number is. So here is the way that they worded it. They said if you take the state of Texas and you fill it two feet deep in silver dollars and you put one red X on one silver dollar and you put it somewhere in the state of Texas two feet deep in silver dollars, and you send a blind man out and you say, you got one shot, see if you can pick up the red X. Blind man, go wherever you want, you got one shot. That's the probability that that would be fulfilled in one man.

That's just eight. You know the probability that Jesus would fulfill all 48 of the prophecies, it's 1 times 10 to the 157th power. That's just a mathematical way of saying it ain't gonna happen, it's impossible, it's not going to happen. But it happened in him. Why? Because he's God and because the Bible is true and because God knows the end from the beginning, that's why.

So the Bible has proven itself to be unique and reliable and true. Secondly, the Bible has withstood the test of time and scrutiny. The test of time. People have come against the Bible for years and years and years and years trying to destroy the Bible. Let me tell you something. The devil hates the Bible. The very first thing that he ever utters to a human being, he says, indeed, has God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden. He takes the word of God, he twists it a little bit. He puts a question mark behind it to get you to question, to get you to doubt, to get you to say, well, I don't know if I can trust what God says. That's how the devil works. He's attacking the word of God. Why? Because the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. Because the word is truth and the devil is a liar. And the father of lies.

Scripture says in First Peter, chapter one, the grass withers, the flower falls off. But the word of the Lord stands forever. It endures forever. And people try and destroy the word, but it still stands. Diocletian was emperor in Rome in the late 200s A.D. and right in the early 300s A.D. he hated the Bible. He hated Christians. He hated the whole idea of the God of the New Testament. He hated the idea of the cross. He wanted to destroy it. And so he began a fierce campaign to stamp out Christianity from the Roman Empire. He went and gathered as many Bibles as he could, confiscated Bibles, and burned those Bibles and destroyed churches and killed Christians. It was an awful time.

Diocletian thought he had gotten all the Bibles and he burned the last batch. And he erected a monument on the ashes of these burned Bibles. And he chiseled on the monument these Latin words: Extincto nomini Christianorum. Extincto nomini Christianorum. That means the name of Christian is extinct. 303 A.D. and in 10 years, Emperor Constantine put his faith in Jesus Christ, or history tells us, and he turned Rome into a Christian nation. In 10 years, the name of Christian is extinct. I think not.

Hey, the grass withers, the flower falls off. But the word of the Lord stands forever. You know, one of the greatest testimonies about the veracity of Scripture is in the New Testament. The New Testament. The Old Testament's written over a long period of time, and it covers a long period of time. It covers from in the beginning until about 420 B.C., so there's a lot of years in there. The New Testament is a hundred years, and it's written from about the late 40s until 95 A.D., so the writing is right in there.

So here's the thing. When the New Testament writers talk about Jesus and the things Jesus did, the people who read that, the people who heard that, they're like, yeah, I was there. I saw that. I can testify to that. There are 500 people that saw Jesus when he rose from the dead. He appeared to more than 500 at one time. Wow. All those people could give testimony that what they're saying is true. If what those guys said in the New Testament was all made up, they would have been laughed out of town and people would have said, hey, that's not true. I was there. He didn't do that. But they never said that. Why? Because it was true.

When Paul gave his defense to the King, he said, you know, these things to be true. This wasn't done in a corner somewhere. This was blasted all over the place because everyone was talking about Jesus. Hey, the Bible has withstood the test of time, and it's withstood the test of scrutiny, and it still stands.

And lastly, the Bible is life-changing. One of the greatest testimonies for the veracity of the Word of God is the fact that it changes lives. It will change your life. Peter wrote this and says, for you have been born again, not of seed, which is perishable, but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring Word of God. The seed of the Word of God is imperishable. There's life in this book because it's the Word of God, not the Word of man. It'll change your life if you spend time in it.

Now, listen, here's the thing. Some people spend time in this book, some liberal theologians, they're dicing it up and slicing it up to find hidden faults. You're not going to find if you come to the Word of God with an honest and good heart. That's what the scripture says. When the sower went out to sow and the seed landed on the good soil, it's an honest and good heart. And if you have an honest, good heart, if you have a seeking heart, the seed takes root in your heart and produces a crop 30-fold, 60-fold, even 100-fold.

But if you're a scoffer, if you're a mocker, if you say, well, I already come to the Bible saying the Bible's not true, and now I'm going to move heaven and earth to try and prove what I already have decided is true. If you have that kind of heart, it's not going to change your life. You're just going to try and find things like Daniel, chapter five, ah, we got them. Because there is no Belshazzar. And then the archaeology proves it. And you're like, ah, back to the drawing board. I got to find other things in the Bible that aren't true.

There was a man speaking at the Salvation Army years ago, sharing about Jesus, giving a sermon. And there was a heckler in the crowd. And the heckler was saying, that's not true. There is no God. There is no Jesus. You're just dreaming. And he heckled him. You're just dreaming. You're just dreaming. And a little girl walked up to that heckler and she tugged on his jacket and she said, mister, she said, that's my daddy that's speaking. And she said, he used to be an alcoholic and he used to drink all the time. And he was terrible to my mommy. He beat her. And we didn't have food to eat, and we didn't have enough to get by. But she said then somebody told him about Jesus. And then he began to read the Bible, and he got saved. And she said, his life is totally different.

She said, mister, do you see that woman over there? That woman who's smiling? That's my mommy. She said, mister, if my daddy's dreaming, please don't wake him up. Please don't wake him up. Hey. The Word of God changes a person's life, but it has to be sown in a good and honest heart.

Now, listen, this is the thing about the Word of God. You say, well, does the Word of God change people's lives, or does Jesus change people's lives? And the answer is yes, because it's very, very difficult to separate the Word of God and the Son of God. The Word of God and the God of the Word, they're together. That's why Jesus in Revelation, chapter 19, when he comes back at the Second Coming, it says, he has a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us when we beheld his glory. He's the Word of God. And that's the. This is the Word of God. He's the Word of God. That's the God of His Word. They're connected.

Now, for a man, his word might not be his bond, but with the Lord, His Word is His bond. And the Scripture says he's magnified His Word according to all His name. And so there's a connection with that. And when you seek the Lord, you find him, and you seek him in His Word. Hey, you know what? This book changes lives.

Speaker 1

You're listening to From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve. And perhaps you're someone who'd classify yourself as an honest doubter when it comes to Christ and the Bible. The truth is, if you don't know Jesus Christ in a personal way, but you want to, you just don't know how, then we want to tell you emphatically and assuredly that Christ yearns for you to come to him now.

As the Bible clearly tells us, you do that simply and sincerely by crying out to him from your heart in genuine repentance and putting your faith in him alone. When you do surrender it all to him, he'll come into your heart and you will be changed. You'll want to love him and you'll want to serve him, and you'll want to do that by serving others and sharing who he is to you. You'll be deeply in love with him for what he has done for you. You'll be forgiven for eternity and desire to seek a close walk with him.

To help you in your new walk with Christ, please go to fromhisheart.org and click the "Why Jesus" link. There is lots of free helpful information and materials to download.

Today's message is called "Why Should I Believe the Bible?" It's one of six in Pastor Jeff's series "Life's Big Questions," and you can get this entire series in the format of your choice: USB flash drives, CDs, DVDs, or an immediate MP3 download. When you make your gift today of any amount to From His Heart, we'll also send you Pastor Jeff's booklet, "The ABCs of the Christian Life." It's a timely resource that will enlighten, encourage, and motivate you to live every day in gratitude and awe for who God is and what he has done for us.

Just go to fromhisheart.org to make your gift today, or you can simply call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-BIBLE). Pastor Jeff receives no income from any donations to From His Heart; he is our Chief Volunteer. God bless you for helping us tell the story around the world that God's great love is available through Christ.

Thank you for joining us today on From His Heart. I'm Larry Nobles, and we pray that today's program has blessed you and that you'll be here next time for the answer to the next big life question, which is, "Is true happiness really possible?" The answer is, of course, yes. Here's some of what you'll learn. Then join us on Thursday when we'll open up God's Word and share real truth, real love, and real hope. From His Heart, there is truth. There is truth.

Speaker 2

There is love. There is hope that you always bring love he can heal every scars of truth. Real Love Real From His Heart.

Speaker 1

From His Heart is the listener-supported broadcast ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve, speaking the truth in love to a lost and a hurting world.

Remember that no matter what, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Find out more at fromhisheart.org.