How to Understand and Apply the Bible, Lesson 4
Welcome to 30 minute classes, a course of 15 Bible lessons, all about 30 minutes each. Our topic for this course is “How to Understand and Apply the Bible.” In this fourth lesson, we’ll ask and try to answer the question, “how can we know that the Bible’s true”?
But first, let’s remind ourselves of where we’ve been. Our stated goal for this course is that we would gain confidence in our ability to feed ourselves the Word of God, SO that we can also feed others. We wanna be like Jeremiah who ate up God’s words and they became to him a joy and the delight of his heart. And, if something means that much to us, our heart’s joy and delight, then we’re gonna want to share it with others.
We’ve said that we’re gonna work hard like Paul, who worked harder than the rest, but also relied heavily on God’s grace. And God gives us a lot of grace; and we’re gonna need every bit of it.
Alright, so we’ve been laying a foundation of biblical truth, we’ve been working through the doctrine of Scripture. And we’re gonna start here in this lesson to begin building on that foundation. And I promise we WILL get to some real practical stuff soon, but let’s quickly remind ourselves of where we’ve been in the first 3 lessons.
If you’ve not retained anything, make sure you've gotten this—That God is a God who speaks. He loves us, and he wants to talk to us. It’s in the Bible that we get God’s words. God speaks to us through the Bible.
And because they are God’s words, the Bible is authoritative. It is OUR authority. We submit ourselves to it. God’s words are powerful. They have the ability to create and to destroy. God’s words make demands, they create obligations. We ought to believe them and obey. Now God could’ve spoken to us directly, audibly, but if he did, we’d probably respond the way that the Israelites did. God thundered from the mountain, and they ran and hid. They said Moses, you speak to us, or else we’ll die. So God set it up to where we would use Moses and then the prophets to be God’s mouthpieces. God would put HIS words in THEIR mouths. And we saw the same thing with the apostles—God putting his words in the mouths of the apostles. And these words, although they came out of humans’ mouths, they were no less divine. They had all the authority of God’s words.
And these words got written down, the writers of the Bible were inspired, but not like an artist who gets inspired by something, and then gets creative with it. God BREATHED out the Bible, and he worked with the writers so that every word that they wrote was exactly what God wanted, WHILE at the same time, the writings reflected the personalities of the writers. So the Bible is authoritative and inspired.
And then we learned that the Bible is inerrant, it’s without error. It tells the truth; it won’t mislead us. And we talked about how we sometimes get tripped up when we confuse truth with precision. The Bible is true, but it’s not always as precise as we’d like it to be. But remember with the example of my birthday. Sometimes too much precision can get in the way of our communicating truth. So the Bible is inerrant, but it’s also infallible—it’s INCAPABLE of erring. Remember the verse from Hebrews. It flat out says, ‘God cannot lie.’ So the Bible is authoritative, inspired, inerrant, and infallible.
[Let me pause here for a second. You’ve probably noticed that I do a lot of reviewing of previous material, and you’re right. You can expect that we’ll always go back a few lessons and review. I’ve been teaching students long enough to know that repetition is absolutely necessary for understanding and retention. So, don’t tune out these reviews, even if you think you’ve got it. Stick with me, It’s all about repetition.]
Alright, so a little more review and then we’ll get into Lesson 4. We’ve also talked about the Bible being sufficient. The Bible has all the words for salvation, faith, and life. Paul reminded Timothy he’s "acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation.” And that those sacred writings are also “profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” So the Bible is sufficient for salvation and for faith. But God also gives us all things pertaining to life and godliness. The Bible is comprehensive.
Now, of course the Bible doesn’t address every single situation, that would be impossible. BUT, it gives us all the divine words we need. And we do deduce principles from the Bible. Remember we read the statement from the Westminster Confession of Faith, that there are things that aren’t explicitly in the Bible, but “from good and necessary consequence they may be deduced from Scripture.” So the Bible covers all of life.
We said the Bible is clear. We talked about the clarity of the Bible. So, the Bible is understandable. It’s intended for all of us, not just for the super-smart people. Psalm 19:7 says, “the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.” So, us simple folk, we CAN understand the Bible. But, that’s not to say that we’ll understand all of it. God only makes himself as clear as he needs to be.
And that means that God’s always clear about his expectations for us. He will always give us enough understanding to carry out our present responsibilities. [And I believe you’re here in this class, because God’s got more for you—more for you to understand, more for you to do. So let’s keep pressing in!]
Next, the Bible is complete. It’s done, it’s finished. There’s nothing left to add. God wrapped it up with the apostles and prophets, and then in the early years of the church, the writings were canonized; they were closed. So, we said last time, that means that if someone comes along saying they’ve got some new revelation from God then we should run from them. They’re claiming to speak for God; they’re adding to God’s words.
Some of Paul’s strongest words in the Bible were for those who tried to add to God’s gospel. Galatians 1:6-9 says, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.” and listen to this, “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”
Did you catch that? Paul just damned them to hell. And he repeated it for emphasis! Accursed is the man who preaches another gospel. Strong words from Paul. So, the Bible’s complete. It’s done, it’s finished. No one today speaks words that have the authority of Scripture. No one’s adding to it.
Alright, last one, and I’ll promise we’ll get to Lesson 4. The Bible is effective. It does what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t return empty. Remember Isaiah? My words will, “accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” And then Samuel: “none of his words fell to the ground.” They always hit the target, they never missed the mark, they never fall to the ground.
Alright, so, our God speaks, he speaks with authority and with inspiration, he speaks inerrantly and infallibly, he speaks sufficiently, he speaks clearly, he speaks completely and he speaks effectively. This is what we have in the Bible; we have God’s Word. This is the doctrine of Scripture, and it’s that foundation that we’re gonna begin to build on, as we continue to learn how to understand and apply the Bible.
I’ve titled Lesson 4, “How Can We Know That The Bible’s True?” and we’ll try to answer that question, but maybe in something an unexpected way. The way I asked the question, “How can we know the Bible’s true,” it sounds like I’m prepared to give you a lot of scientific or archaeological evidence, and we’ll look at science a little bit later. There are plenty of apologetics resources available, and they’re helpful. I’ll be sure to list some. Scientists and archaeologists have discovered or dug up tons of evidence for the Bible. But what I want to say, and the answer that I’ll give now, is one that maybe you wouldn’t expect [but it’s actually the more important answer, I think]. And the answer is this: We can know that the Bible’s true, because the Bible says it is.
Now, I know, that’s not always the most satisfying answer. And some you have already picked up on this, maybe you were in the Debate Club in high school . . . that's a circular argument, and you’re never supposed to argue in a circle. But, consider this. Every argument regarding ultimate things are actually circular arguments. Think about it. If you’re into science. If you think that science is ultimate. If you think that with the scientific method we can answer all of life’s questions. If I were to ask you how you know that science is true, your answer has to be: Well, because science says so. I’ve made all the calculations, you might say, and the results of my calculations say that science is true. And then I’LL say, but how do you know that science is true? Well, the scientific method showed me, you would have to say. Because science says so. So, that’s a circular argument too. If you make science ultimate, then you can defend it only by appealing to science.
Or, what if you’re a secular humanist—someone who thinks that humanity is ultimate. You might say that your human feelings are true. [And you can see where this is going.] If I were to ask you, how do you know your feelings are true? Well, you’d have to say, we’ll it just feels right; it feels like my feelings are true. Again, a circular argument: If you think humans are ultimate, then you have to defend that claim by appealing to humans.
So, all I’m saying is that we shouldn’t feel embarrassed if we say the Bible’s true, because the Bible says so. Scientists do it all the time. Secular humanists do it all the time. They have to. We all have to. We all use circular arguments when it comes to ultimate truth.
So, in this lesson, I’m mostly going to use Scripture to argue that Scripture is true. And yes that’s circular, but that doesn’t bother me a bit.
Alright. So we’ve been talking about God’s words. The prophets and apostles spoke God’s words and they wrote them down. Now, why was it important to write God’s words down? You know, we’ve talked about God being a person, he talks to us as a person, personally. So why couldn’t God have just talked to us face to face like he did with Moses, or with Jesus? We know that personal communication is sometimes more effective. You can see a person’s gestures, you can get a better sense of their tone. In fact, John, in his letter, 2 John, he writes to a woman and her children. Verse 1, is the greeting, it says “to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth.” And then in closing, in verse 12, he says, “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” So John knew, face to face communication is sometimes better. It’s more personal.
But, there’s also other times when written words are better. And the obvious reason is that they’re permanent. They last longer, and they can’t be messed with. So throughout Scripture God tells his messengers to get the message down on paper. It’s gotta last—a permanent record, a witness to what God said. Because this permanent record, this witness, is going to be a covenant document for the Israelites and then later the whole collection of writings will be the church’s foundation.
So, in the Old Testament, God wrote down the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone. Remember the story, the first set of tablets broke, so they got replaced and this time Moses had a role in the writing. Exodus 34:27-28 says, “And the Lord said to Moses, “Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.”
And then after the Ten Commandments came other laws, like what we read in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And once that covenant document was complete, the ten commandments and the other laws, they put it in the tabernacle next to the Ark of the Covenant. And it became the national constitution. And this constitution was everything to them. Deuteronomy 32:46-47 says: “Take to heart all the words by which I am warning you today, that you may command them to your children, that they may be careful to do all the words of this law,” and I love this sentence, “For it is no empty word for you, but your very life.” God’s written words were their very life.
And even in the New Testament. What Bible did Jesus and the apostles read? It was that covenant document—the Old Testament. For them it was their very life too. But, of course, Jesus filled out and filled up those written words of the Old Testament. And then with the New Testament we got more written words from Jesus in the gospels, and we also got the letters from Peter, and then Peter endorses Paul’s letters. Listen to 2 Peter 3:15: “count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”
So, Peter just called Paul’s letters Scripture. And then Paul reminds Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:20, to “guard the deposit entrusted to you.” So these New Testaments books and letters, they make up an ‘apostolic deposit’ it’s like a fund of Christian tradition. And Paul is telling his protege, Timothy, that after I’m gone you gotta keep this thing going. I’m entrusting this deposit, this tradition to you. Guard it.
And then Jude says we gotta “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” We gotta fight for it. So this deposit, we gotta keep it together, we gotta guard it, SO that it can go on to be the constitution of the church. So if the covenant document of the Old Testament was Israel’s national constitution, in a similar way the whole Bible, all of Scripture, is the church’s constitution. The Bible is for us no empty word; it is our very life.
So, Scripture claims for itself that these ARE God’s words, they make up a deposit entrusted to faithful men. BUT how do we know that what we got is really what was supposed to be passed down? How well were God’s words guarded? Let’s talk about the transmission of Scripture. How was it transmitted—passed down through the ages?
In lesson 2 we talked about the inspiration of Scripture, meaning that the Scriptures were breathed out by God. They’ve got God’s breath all over them. They’ve been authenticated. But when we talk about authentic texts we usually mean those original texts that came straight from the apostles and prophets. The original texts are authentic. They are inspired. But obviously, we don’t have any of those original texts. They were lost to history long ago. What we have are copies. So, can we trust copies of Scripture?
Now, there’s nothing wrong with copies, so long as they match the original. Right? So, it’s really about the content. Do we have the right content in our Bibles today?
Now, we should know that God never promised to inspire all the copies out there, only the originals. So, there actually could be typos. Which is not really all that surprising. If you ever sat down and tried to type out just one book of the Bible [or even one passage], you would likely make a few typos. In fact, and don’t let this throw you, there seems to be a few typos in the Bible. Here’s an example. So, we have an account of Solomon’s riches in 1 Kings. 1 Kings 4:26 reads, “Solomon also had 40,000 stalls of horses for his chariots.” Now, Chronicles contains another account of Solomon’s riches. Kings and Chronicles kinda run parallel to each other, so you’d expect that the accounts of Solomon’s riches would match, but they don’t. 2 Chronicles 9:25 says, “Solomon had 4,000 stalls for horses and chariots.” So, we got 40,000 stalls in Kings, and we got 4,000 stalls in Chronicles. So, which is it? One of them is off by a zero. Most people would concede that that’s a typo. Down through the ages, during Scripture’s transmission, one of the copyists either added or subtracted a zero accidentally.
Now, should we be freaked out by that? I don’t think so. For one, those types of difficulties are actually quite rare in Scripture, AND they never deal with any doctrinal issues. And the reality IS that the Bible has been better preserved than any other ancient document. The ancient writings of Greece, Egypt, and Babylon, for example, all have major problems, and still many historians don’t hesitate to consider those writings trustworthy. Be we, we’ve got great ancient manuscripts, and we’ve been able to piece together so much more than them, to where we can be confident that we’ve got the content right. We’ve got God’s words.
And I guess God could have given us perfect copies. But think about what that would entail. That would mean that every copyist would have to get it right every time, and then that would mean that every translation of every copy would have to be perfect. And then that would mean we’d have to keep going. It would mean that every commentary on every text would have to be perfect, and then every teaching, using that commentary, using that translation, using that copy would have to be correct. And we could even say that every preacher in the pulpit, would have to preach it all perfectly.
Now, God could do that. He could make all that happen perfectly. But God doesn’t really work that way, and I think intended, rather, to have Christians down through the ages work together in Christian community figuring this stuff out. Just like we’re doing here. God wanted the church at every point in history to gather around the Bible and feed upon it together. And yes, we’ll do that imperfectly. And no, we don’t have the original manuscripts, but the teaching of Scripture has been preserved. We can be confident that we have God’s Word.
Alright, so I said earlier that there IS evidence of the Bible’s trustworthiness from science. But, remember, we said that the Bible is not always concerned with precision, at least not a scientific precision. Typically the Bible comments on the world in the way that it appears to people. So the writers were concerned with appearance, the way things looked. And that’s how they wrote. For example, critics of the Bible accuse it of getting things wrong in places, like when it says in Joshua 10:13 that the ‘sun stood still.’ Now, we know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, and I don’t know that that’s what the Bible was ever trying to teach. Rather, it was the earth that stopped revolving, making it appear that the sun stood still. So, the statement was made according to how it appeared—it appeared that the sun stopped moving.
And we do this too. We talk like that all the time in our everyday speech. When you get up in the morning and look out to the east, you say, “that’s a beautiful sunrise.” Now, you know that the sun didn’t actually rise, you know that it’s the earth that’s moving and not the sun, but you still say it. You say the sun rose or the sun set.
So, when you consider that the Bible’s not concerned with precision, but with appearance, we can actually find that God says a whole lot about our world. For time’s sake, I’ll have to limit some of these to just a few examples. Isaiah 55:10 and Job 36:27-29 talk about the water cycle—rain coming down, watering the plants, running off into the rivers into the ocean, then evaporating back into the atmosphere. Or Jeremiah 31:35-36 that talks about the planets' orbits, or Isaiah 40:12, talks about God holding the earth in balance, or Isaiah 40:22, talks about the earth being round. Science doesn’t disprove the Bible, it actually confirms science. Alright, we gotta pick up the pace here.
We can also trust the Bible because of prophecy and miracles. The Bible is full of prophecies that came true. One scholar worked out the mathematical probability of just eight of the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus coming true. He said that the chance of those eight prophecies being fulfilled would be 1 in 10 to the 17th power. And yet they all came true. (Stoner, Science Speaks, 1958). And he explained that 1 in 10 to the 17 power is like filling the state of Texas two feet deep in silver dollars, and one of those silver dollars is marked with an X, and then giving a blind man one chance to locate it. He’d have 1 in 10 to the 17 power chance of finding that marked silver dollar. But that’s exactly what happened. Those eight Old Testament prophecies written hundreds of years before Jesus was born, all came true. And that's just some of the prophecies in the Bible that came true, there’s a whole lot of them. So, we can trust the Bible because God is in control of history, and all his prophecies come true.
In the same way, we could talk about all the miracles in the Bible. The evidence for the resurrection, for example, is staggering. And again we don’t have time to get into all of those. But I’d just point you to some resources. Josh McDowell’s books like More Than A Carpenter, Evidence That Demands a Verdict are great. Lee Stroebel's books, The Case for Christ—they’re all great. They’ll blow your mind.
Alright, we gotta wrap this up. So, we asked, can the Bible be trusted? Yes, absolutely. It’s God’s words. God knows how to get through to us. Down through history, through typos, through explaining things by appearance, through science, prophecy and miracles. God made sure that we got his words. For thousands of years, millions of people have found the Bible to be trustworthy. And if you struggle with doubt, that’s okay, hold on to this hope from Hebrews 6, and I close by reading verses 16-20:
“For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”
We have a steadfast anchor of the soul in the Bible. God has promised with an oath that his words are true. We can believe them; we can trust the Bible.
Ok. Thanks for listening to this lesson. Hope you’ll continue on to the next one, as we continue to learn ABOUT God AND how to live for him.
SOURCES:
Frame, John. The Doctrine of the Word of God. P&R, 2010.
MacArthur, John. How to Study the Bible. Moody, 2009.