"Don't Take the Bible Too Literally"

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Then I wanna kinda talk through some basic things. There is another lie that kinda goes along with this or another misunderstanding. It's, well, doesn't the Bible have errors in it? Doesn't the Bible have errors in it? You know, it's copied from ancient Greek and now we have it in English today. How did that happen without any problems or? This could be a whole sermon. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give you one answer. I'm gonna give you one name. I'm gonna give you one quote. I'm gonna give you one illustration. Okay, your answer, no. Bible does not have errors in it. Anyone who says so is either misinformed or intellectually lazy, truly. I mean, the verdict is in. It has been in for hundreds of years. People who fall for that are just not doing their homework quite simply and respectfully. Like, you've believed a lie on somebody that sounded really smart.

But no, it does not. Let me give you one name. The name is Norman Geisler. Not actually a household name, but this man who passed away in 2018, I believe, 2017, I don't remember. He is a preeminent scholar on the reliability of scripture. Anything that is written by him, you can just take a picture of that dude's name, search that dude's name, and look at the reliability of scripture. Read anything he's ever written. It's all amazing. He's very, very smart and done all the research.

And he quotes the Bible. And he, like, he cites studies. He looks at it himself. Okay, that's the name. Here's the quote. The quote is from an agnostic New Testament critic. In other words, somebody who says, I am not a Christian, but he is a scholar on the New Testament. They're out there, bro, I'm telling you. His name is Bart Ehrman, okay? Here's Bart Ehrman's quote about the fact that there are variations in the early manuscripts. Let me just say this. Manuscripts are just kind of different pieces. Often they are several pages of New Testament kind of original text stuff, okay? 90 AD, 120 AD kind of stuff, okay? So these are the manuscripts that are written. And the claim is that there's errors in those manuscripts, or there's variations in those manuscripts. And that is true that there are variations in those manuscripts. Let me be real clear. Here's what he says about it.

And again, this is a guy who has nothing to gain by saying this. He says, far and away, the most changes, sorry, yeah, the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple, slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another, okay? They have nothing to do with theology or ideology, he goes on to say. Let me illustrate this, okay? Go ahead and put that up. Let's see it, the three lines, here we go. Anybody wanna take a guess on what that says? Anybody just say it loud.

Okay, that was, I need one person, just, Daniel. Okay, how do you know it says that? Because it doesn't say that in any of the three lines. Okay, go ahead. Picking on Oster today. It doesn't say that, but you know it says that. How do you know it says that? Because it's close. It's really close. And what if you had 15 more lines that actually said you have won $10 million? And you would say, okay, well this line right here, you know, yo, v, wam, you know, $10 million, but there's a zero missing at the end, right? You're gonna understand, this is what variations look like. Okay, this is what variations look like. When we're talking about variations in the manuscripts of the original copies that we have, they look like this. And just in case you're wondering, we have 5,700 manuscripts to pull from. That is more than Plato, Socrates, Caesar, and Shakespeare combined.

Okay, you would have more of a difficult time claiming that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare than you would these biblical authors wrote the words that we have in English right here in front of us. Okay, you would have a more difficult time saying, no, Shakespeare didn't really write this. He wrote this over here. You could actually make a better case for that than you could anything in Scripture, anything at all. This stuff has gone through the most tight scrutiny possible by people who don't love the Lord, by people who don't have anything to gain, by people looking for, I always tell this story. In the mid to late 40s, they found these scrolls in a cave called Qumran, okay? Qumran scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls, you might have heard them called, okay, because it's a cave of Qumran right next to the Dead Sea. And they found them, and to be alive in that time, it would have been pretty funny because everybody,

all these non-Christian biblical scholars, all these people, they were having a field day. They were saying, oh, this is some of the earliest manuscripts we've ever found. This is some of the, oh, we have a whole copy of Jeremiah on a copper scroll. This thing is gonna be great. We're gonna show that the Bible that we have today has been changed so much. You know what they found? Nothing, nothing, the largest archeological excavation of scripture ever, and there were no, no deviations from the norm, nothing. That is crazy, that is amazing. And that's the reliability of the scripture that we have. The Bible has no errors, and anybody that says the Bible has errors, they're either misinformed or they're intellectually lazy. Because all this information I found, like five minutes.

I wasn't like three journals deep. Okay, this is stuff that's just extremely open to everybody, anybody who wants to see it. The Bible has no errors. You can completely trust it as God's wisdom for salvation. It's not wrong on that. It's not wrong on anything else. Let's go back to 2 Timothy 3. And the most often quoted verse in 2 Timothy 3, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.

The Bible is theonustos, that's the Greek word, and it really means God breathed. It is the idea that God speaks through his word. That kind of he spoke his word into existence, that the spirit speaks through it. And there's multiple sticking points here, and we're gonna see why. I wanna show you that if God is speaking authoritatively through scripture, then we need to know how to read it, okay? This is actually a really important point. I feel like I could have definitely gone longer on this, but I want you to know how to read it.

But first, I need to address about a million minor things. So I'll do this very quickly, and I'm gonna go through it. What you need to know when you're reading scripture is that you need to read the Bible as it presents itself. We're gonna get to that in a second. But you need to read the Bible as it presents itself, meaning you need to understand the kind of genre that you're reading. You need to read poetry as poetry, et cetera. So I'm gonna say a little bit about all of it so that you, like I said, we're gonna have it on recording, okay? A brief word about prehistory, which would include Job and Genesis, okay?

People have a tough time getting over the flood. How was there enough water, okay? Well, in 2014, scientists discovered a huge water reservoir that was like three times the amount of water that we have on the surface, and it was underground. It's actually under the Earth's crust. And then even in scripture, it talks about water coming out from the deep. Like, look, I realize Genesis is not trying to be a scientific journal, but it is not impossible for the entire world to be flooded, period, it's not. It's very doable. Cain's wife, who is Cain's wife? It could have easily been his niece or his cousin or anything, and that's kind of weird for us to think about, but if it's just a few people, that's okay. And it's okay to not have that chronologically ordered that, you know, it's talking about Cain taking a wife, but there wasn't a lot of talk about other people being born yet,

but it didn't have to be. There are not two competing creation stories. Genesis one is from God's perspective, Genesis two is from man's perspective. This is very common in ancient near-eastern texts, which is what the Old Testament is, it's what Genesis is. Okay. A unicorn, a unicorn in the Bible is a single-horned rhinoceros. That is from 1800s English, like England English, okay? So when it talks about unicorns, people say the Bible has unicorns in it. Yes, it does. They are single-horned rhinocerae, that's what we're talking about. One horn, okay, unicorn. It's not talking about the flying horses with the horn in the front that we talk about. Also, there's a really good resource on this. His name is Ken Ham, three letters each, Ken Ham. He has a ministry called Answers in Genesis. I don't follow him all the way down the rabbit hole, but he points to scripture and he loves the Lord, Ken Ham.

A word about narrative. So it was prehistory, a word about narrative. This would be the Gospels, the Old Testament narratives, you know, with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, King David, Moses, you know, these are all narratives. A really helpful thing to remember is that it shows God's character in the midst of good and bad things, okay? Just because something's described in an Old Testament narrative doesn't mean God approves, okay? It's actually super helpful to read through, okay? A word about Old Testament law. Old Testament law, it was, let me just give you the perspective. Old Testament law was given whenever Israel was not a nation. In fact, they were a nation of half million to a million people that had been slaves for generations. They didn't know how to govern themselves. So imagine dumping a million teenagers on a deserted island and going, okay, govern yourselves.

Okay, so God gave the law, all right? So if you think the law's weird and you think that, you know, okay, what about this? What about mixing fabrics? Okay, look, just calm down. If you wanna write a code, a law code, for a million teenagers on a deserted island, have at it. But I don't think you can do better than what we have in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, okay? That's the Old Testament law. The reason that we don't follow a lot of the Old Testament law today is because Jesus came and he said he has fulfilled the law on our behalf. So I don't need to fulfill Old Testament covenant because Jesus fulfilled it for me, okay? This is a basic New Testament teaching that people get tripped up all over because they wanna make people, it's like, oh, you're a Christian, then if you're gonna live biblically, then you have to, and they start quoting all these Old Testament laws.

And honestly, lovingly, respectfully, you look dumb doing that. Because every Christian worth its all understands, this is a basic tenet, like we're not following Old Testament law. Jesus came to set us free from the law. I mean, it's a pretty basic thing about Christianity. Okay, a word about Old Testament wisdom. I am flying, sorry. Old Testament wisdom, which would be psalms, proverbs, ecclesiastes, Job, this writing is indirect. It is written in order to provoke interaction and discussion. Okay, so psalms, this is how to praise God. Proverbs, this is the way life works most of the time. Ecclesiastes, this is how life works the other times. Okay, Job, why do bad things happen? Where is God in the middle of it, okay? That is Old Testament wisdom. A word about New Testament letters. New Testament letters are different than how Old Testament's written. New Testament letters, which include like Galatians,

Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Romans. Those are written as logical progressions that bring you to specific conclusions and commands and exhortations, okay? So when we read the New Testament as we're reading it, we don't get to pick and choose. It's all written for us to obey, as opposed to when Abraham is taking two wives, okay? That's not prescriptive for us, do you understand? Like we don't get to say, oh yeah, okay, well we get to take two wives because Abraham took two wives. That's foolish. And really, that's just trying to poke holes in Scripture where there aren't any, right? It's pretty cut and dry, pretty straightforward, okay?

One more word, a word about context. So there's talk of slavery, misogyny, genocide, right? Let me just help you a little bit. Just like in your own life, God does not immediately erase all the idiot things you're doing, right, amen? Okay, amen, yes, okay. God does not come in and just slap you around for every wrong thing you do every time you do it, right? What does he do? What's he do? He graciously brings you along, right? Okay, so you see how God does that with you, okay? That is what God is doing in society whenever he's dealing with slavery, abuse, misogyny, whenever he's dealing with those things, but he's not just saying like, no, don't, you know, he's not commanding these things. He is working within what's already there.

So you could say something like, King David took multiple wives and he was a man after God's own heart and God never told him not to take multiple wives. Okay, fine, sure. But does that mean God blesses that? No, okay. That you're confusing, you're confusing genre. You're confusing an epistle for a narrative. You see how it's a big deal that you need to read the Bible as it presents itself? And this is what I wanna tell you.

Oh, but one more word, sorry, sorry. If you're God and you want to eradicate all the, or you wanna deal with all these things, but you don't eradicate it immediately like slavery and sin and all of these abuse and all these things, what would you do? You would work redemptively in the middle of it, which is exactly what God did, right? He sent his son to die to defeat the power of sin and death. It's still slow, it's slow as we count slowness, but it's right on God's time, okay? All right, rule of thumb on this, take the Bible as it presents itself, look for context. Take the Bible as it presents itself. That's something I really want you to kind of, I just want you to have it in your head. How is the Bible presenting itself? So is it poetry? Okay, don't make it like a scientific journal. Is it narrative? Great, don't make it a prescription for how to live. Is it descriptive?

Great, don't make it chronological. Is it commanded? Great, obey it. Okay, right, like this, and really, more to the point, does the Bible say something really happened? Did it literally happen? Is that what the Bible's saying? Believe it. Was Joshua in a battle and the son stood still? Yeah, did the Bible say it? Yeah, believe it. You're like, well, I don't know if we can explain, but I understand the desire for trying to reckon what happened in Scripture with what happens today. I get it, I really do. I am sympathetic toward it, but there's a way to do that, that where you're looking for holes, and there's a way to do that where you're looking for consistency, okay? A lot of times you find what you're looking for. Okay, I wanna look at the two brackets in the verses that we read, 2 Timothy 3 again. In the first it says, but as for you, continue in what you have learned

and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings. We learn Scripture by imitating our teachers. I realize that sounds very basic, very fundamental, but it's actually super important because it has a couple of things that it means, and I wanna bring in the back half of these verses to show you a little bit more about what it means. So look at the N 16B through 17. It says that the word of God is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

These should help us understand that the Bible is taught personally. It is lived out in an embodied faith, right? I don't just read Scripture and guess how to apply it and then do that. I read Scripture, I look around me, I see a church community, I see people I respect, I see all these things, and I can imitate the people who taught me those things. That's why whenever you have qualifications for leaders in the New Testament, which is in 1 Timothy, one book over, it's all the requirements are character-based, not ability-based at all, actually. And so it matters that you can imitate the person that is teaching you something. It matters that when you are teaching somebody that you are living a life of imitation, practically the Bible is practically good for action, not debate, okay? It doesn't mean you never debate at the theological point. It doesn't mean you ever have disagreement over it.

Yes, let's figure out what we know and believe, but then let's do it. Let's not just know it, let's obey it. The Bible is practically good for action, not debate. Scripture of truth must be embodied to be believed. And when you don't do Scripture, and this is my experience, I have seen many people in my life, people I love, people that are close to, people that I just knew as acquaintances, when they quit doing Scripture, the authority of Scripture faded in their hearts and lives.

They tended to not fear the Lord as much because they weren't doing Scripture, and maybe in their heart, I don't know, I don't know kind of what was going on, but like, I know and I get this way. When I don't do what the Lord requires and I don't suffer immediate consequences, sometimes I think I got away with something, right? Sometimes that builds a bad habit, you know what I'm saying? And God in his faithfulness and kindness to me does not smack me down every time that happens, but he does redemptively work in me. He does convict me of sin. He does lead me to repentance in his kindness. The Bible is practically good for action, not debate. And here's kind of the crux of the whole thing, if I can get to it in my notes. If we're gonna talk about like the lie of like, don't take the Bible too literally. What I really want you to understand, reading Scripture rightly is foundational to following Jesus.

And I understand that following Jesus has a lot more to do with what you read in a Bible. I know that because it's about action, it's about doing what Jesus told you to do, it's about right, like it's about following, literally following Jesus in the real world, okay. However, if you read Scripture wrongly, it will distort your view of Jesus, okay. So if you say, if you say, I believe in Jesus, right,

if you profess to say, if you profess to follow Jesus, I believe in Jesus, I follow Jesus. But if that person that you're referring to is not the person who is revealed in Scripture, then you are not following Jesus. Let me say that again. If you say that you believe in Jesus, if you say you follow Jesus, but it's not the Jesus revealed in Scripture, you have, congratulations, you've made up a new Jesus. You've made up a new Messiah, and you've given Him the exact same name, okay.

And I would just ask you, if you're doing that, then go ahead and just start a cult and save everybody the trouble, okay. Not really, don't start a cult. But if you're gonna twist Jesus up so much and just say, no, no, no, I follow Jesus, but it's not the Jesus that's revealed in here. It's like some like, oh, I only follow like red letter Jesus. I only do this, you know, I only take like, you just take scissors to the Bible and pick your favorite parts, then you're not following Jesus. I don't know what else to tell you. You're not following Jesus. You've made somebody else up and you're following that person. You're making somebody up who like secretly visited the Native Americans, like the Mormons believe. You've made somebody up who wasn't exactly God or man or wasn't exactly, you know, he was the son of God but he wasn't actually God himself, then great, you're Jehovah's Witness.

And you think it's like some big gap between what you believe and what they've, no, man, like it's a pretty small gap on who Jesus is. Because even a small gap on that ends up being pretty big. So like, the reason scripture's important is because we trust that the Jesus that we're reading about here is Jesus. We trust that God through his Holy Spirit is speaking to us through these scriptures. That in a very real sense, there's nothing sacred about these pages and this ink and this leather, nothing really. There's nothing sacred about it except that God chooses to speak through it.

That's it. Just personally, I've had many friends and family members who at a vulnerable point in their lives were told that the Bible is not something that you can trust, right? And here's the way it was explained to them and just so you can kinda hear it. That the Bible has kernels of truth in it but you need to peel back the husk of all these things that aren't true. But if you can peel back the parts that aren't true, and you can find what's really true, then you've kinda found the real Jesus. Look, that sounds attractive, doesn't it? It does. You're like, oh, I can cut through all of this trash, all this weird stuff that people have added on over the centuries and I can find what's actually, there's a great appeal to that, right? And if there's not a great appeal to that to you, there's a great appeal to that to people who don't know the Lord and who want to a little bit.

And they're saying, okay, I can just sift through the husk and find these kernels of truth. Well, really what that is, even though it sounds very kind of dramatic and fun and all of these things, it's another way to say you get to pick and choose the parts of the Bible that you want, okay? Another way of saying that is much more alluring would be, hey guys, I have found something in scripture that churches have been missing for 1500 years and I'm just uncovering it now. Come on in here with the Bible. All those other churches are preaching noise, none of them are doing whatever, but if you wanna come, you can hear straight from my mouth what the Bible actually means. Okay, that's just another way of saying, that's another way of saying that there's parts of the Bible that they're gonna explain away and that there's these really core things and you have to give them $49.95

and you'll get a prayer handkerchief, okay? Like it's not any different than that, man. I've seen it. I've seen lots of different versions of it. I've met men and women that were extremely compelling. You wanna believe them, you wanna believe their testimony. Man, like if you've ever listened to a Todd White sermon, okay? Maybe you haven't. If you haven't, don't worry about it, it's fine, it's not a big deal. Todd White's a heretic. Okay, all right. Sorry, there it is. Just so we're clear. Todd White's a heretic. Part of the reason that Todd White is a heretic is because he believes that he has achieved sinless perfection in his life right now. He's like 58 or something, like, no way. Anyway, when you dig a little bit on his teaching and his life, it's there, it's pretty obvious. But when you listen to Todd White talk, he says some things that are super attractive.

Like he's like, yeah, I mean, I wanna, he talks about like being like really close with God. He talks about like waking up and like just walking with Jesus all day and being in the spirit and communing with God all the time. And something, when I'm listening to that, I'm just like, yeah, I want that. That sounds great. And it does sound great, right? But it's not real.

And when you set yourself up for something that's not real, it's pretty depressing when reality hits and sometimes you leave it all behind, right? There've been people that walk away from Todd White, but they also walk away from Jesus. They're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In the lives of my friends and family that have swallowed the lie that you can't take the Bible literally, that you can't believe what it says, this has led to, almost without exception, a dismantling of their faith, right? It's been sad to watch. It's been sad to be a part of, but they have twisted scripture and or Jesus up so much that it's really not him that they're following if they claim to follow him at all. It's some kind of mystical, made up Jesus light version where he's just about peace, love, and happiness and rainbows, but he's not about judgment and sin and salvation and eternity.

So let me just ask, what do you believe? What do you believe? Do you believe in a worldwide flood? Jesus did. What about fish swallowing a man and spitting him up on God's command? Do you believe that? Jesus did. Jesus referred personally to Noah and to Jonah. Do you believe that God appeared to people? Like crazy visions. You believe that? By the way, here's a kind of a way to discern like if you talk to a New Testament scholar who's not a believer, or a biblical scholar, excuse me, who's not a believer, and you say something like, did Moses go up and receive the 10 commandments from God and come down and get that to the people? What they will answer is they will say, I believe Moses had a religious experience. Sound, that sounds really close to true, right? Really close to true. And it actually is kind of true from Moses' perspective.

But what they're saying is it's code for, God didn't really appear to Moses. That didn't really happen. He didn't really receive tablets. It's not really how Exodus describes it, right? It's not just that Moses had a religious experience. He wasn't delusional. He didn't make the tablets of himself. He received something from God in person on a mountain that was covered by smoke and lightning and weird stuff. That stuff, I have trouble understanding. But that's what Scripture says, and I believe it. Do you believe that demons possessed people? Jesus did? Jesus wasn't trying to explain it a different way. He wasn't trying to talk about it different. No, no, it actually happened. And so sometimes we come to Scripture and we say, well, you know, I believe all of it, except for the crazy parts. Or I believe all of it except for the parts that I find morally objectionable.

Or I believe all of it except, you know, there's a part where, man, it really hurts my friends and my family, like it, I just sound, it sounds so condemning, I don't really talk about those parts. Either, either you believe it all or you believe none of it. We don't get to pick and choose. Truly. We take the Bible as it presents itself. It really matters. Either you trust Jesus as he presents himself or you have made up another Jesus. There really is no in between. If you trust that Jesus, then you have nothing to fear. Because Jesus himself, he said this in Scripture, I wanna leave you kinda with this. This is Jesus talking to his disciples. And although unconscious, I'm sure, for many of you, for some of you, this would be more of a conscious thought. Like, you are believing that, I'm gonna quote Matthew 10, 26 through 33, I'm just gonna read it. As I do, you are, if you are in Christ

and you believe Scripture is from God, like, then I'm reading this and you're like, this really happened. This is really what Jesus said to his disciples. He was a real person in history. The disciples were real people. Like, this all really, we got, this is what Jesus said. Okay, you're believing all that as I'm reading these things. I just want you to be kinda just hyper aware of that. So Jesus is talking to his disciples, and it's just, just listen, it's actually not up on the screen. I just want you to listen. So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark say in the light, and what you hear whispered proclaim on the housetops. It do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny,

and not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore. You are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny before my father who is in heaven. Let's pray. Lord, you are our savior. You are the king of kings. You ask us to believe in you and you give us your word. Lord, help us to read and believe. Help us to put all of our own biases against maybe disbelieving something or disobeying something. Help us put all that on the back burner and just come to you open-handed, open-hearted, and just say, Lord, help me to believe in you and to believe you to really know you. Lord, help us to seek you, seek wisdom for salvation in Scripture. Help us to know what you're calling us to.

That's your name that we pray, amen.