Sunday Night, December 6, 2020 PM

All right, well, welcome again. We are going to start a study on, I'm titling it Coming to the Bible, Coming to the Bible. And I just want us to do our best to answer some of the most basic but important questions about, that anyone would probably have when you come to the Bible.

This is a study that's going to help absolute novices who don't know nothing about the Bible, but also help people who have been using a Bible for a long time, but maybe have forgotten how useful it is to answer these basic questions.

How helpful it is to keep the answers to these basic questions in mind while we study the Bible. And there might be a few lingering questions that you just never got answered, and you filed away for, we'll get that settled later.

And we may be able to hit on those as we go through. I think part of what we want to acknowledge is how fundamental the Bible is to everything we are as followers of Christ. And that means that it is a very important part of our spiritual lives, a very important part of our faith.

And so we need to know how to answer a lot of the questions that people would have about the Bible, and perhaps some of the questions some would ask to make us doubt the Bible, and so on. So we're just going to start off this evening with the very first question, and it's going to serve as an introduction.

It's gonna serve as an introduction to all the rest of the questions that we're going to be talking about. So again, the title of the series is called Coming to the Bible, and our first question tonight is this, can I have one of those books?

Which was a question asked to me by a visitor. And some of you have already begun to read the story, and to read the, it's just four pages long, what I've written for us tonight. But we're going to spend our time more looking at the scriptures, and in discussion, and so on.

But the handout tonight is written in kind of just a chapter form. You can read it on your own. And I think it'll be edifying. Now, I wanted to say, this is going to be several lessons. The idea, I think, is to look at the Bible for what it is, according to what it says about itself.

That what is the Bible, as a question we're asking, what is the Bible, but instead of getting our answer from an archaeologist, or getting our answer from a theologian, or getting our answer from a sociologist, or so on, when we ask what is the Bible, that we would look for the answer to that question in the Bible itself.

What are the claims the Bible makes about itself? In other words, if God really did give us a sufficient word to tell us all that we need to know for our faith and practice, he's also told us what we need to know about the Bible in the Bible itself.

Like he didn't go hide the information about what the Bible is somewhere. We have to go elsewhere to find out. He's a good God, a good Heavenly Father. He knows that we would need to know these answers, so he put them right there where we could find them.

But of course, you have to study, right? You have to be a good student and diligently study to answer some of these questions, but we're going to try to do that. There is a great deal, there's a great use, a frequent use, an increasing use of the terms, terms like modesty, humility, and so on, and when these words are used in today's vernacular, very often what that means is, do not be certain about anything, okay?

Do not be certain about anything. That if you were to express what you believe to be the clear teaching of the scriptures and not say at the end of it, well, and that's just my opinion. Of course, I could be wrong.

If you don't say that every single time, that you're not being humble, you're not being modest. It's very arrogant of you to have such confidence without any kind of equivocation or doubt or so on that you would know what the truth is.

Now, I want to say that this is not really modesty or humility. I think the truly humble approach is to say, well, I certainly don't know better. I'm certainly in no position to play critic to God. God has said in plain language what the truth is, and I trust him, I believe him.

I think that's humility. I think it's humility for a child to believe the things that his father or her father says and say, okay, I think that's the truth. I think that's humility. And that's the approach that I want us to take when we're trying to answer questions about the Bible, to ask plain and ordinary questions about the Bible and then answer them according to the Bible.

Many studies, many studies take the approach that the goal is to start off with a set of questions about whatever we're studying, and then not to end up with any answers at all. No, that wouldn't be humble.

But to exchange the questions we have at the beginning for other questions at the end. So we're left with a different set of questions, and that's called learning. Well, that's not what we're going to do.

This is gonna be a journey of answers. We are gonna ask questions, but we're gonna look for the answers, and I believe we're gonna find them in very plain and abundant sense in the scriptures. Some people wonder about the legitimacy of answering questions about the Bible from the Bible.

I mean, is that allowed? Right, to answer questions about the Bible from the Bible. But I would wonder at their wonderment. And if they are concerned about, if they are concerned that explaining the Bible with the Bible is circular reasoning, I would simply request that they supply me with a reason for their reasoning, if you see my drift.

The Bible as God's Word for His Image-Bearers

Okay, on to the lesson, the very first lesson, very first question is, can I have one of those books? I was never asked that question before, except we had some special guests one Sunday morning, and I believe the girl's name was Idina.

I could be wrong. If you remember her real name, you can tell me, and I'll leave it as it is, too, you know. But I do remember the young man's name was Christian. And they had come in to the lobby, and we had just started meeting back to church after we had ceased meeting because of the COVID thing.

And they came in, and I remember very distinctly that they were in, they're in bad shape, you know. I think they're both avid drug users, and he was coming down off of whatever he had finished using and he looked pretty sick, and he was using our bathroom, and he was, you know, about to fall out of the chair.

Obviously, they had a lot of needs. You know, what can we do? We tried to help them as much as we could. I let them rest, get some water, gave them a gift card to the oldies down the road, you know, if they needed some groceries, they're out on their own, had no way of getting any food.

They had a baby between them, mother and father, but not married, and where is the baby? Oh, the baby's with my grandma, you know. It's just sad, every which way you looked into their life, as you listened to their story, it was just sad every direction.

And the young lady was crying a lot, too, and she knew it was sad. Just having to talk to somebody about what was going on was difficult for her. You know, you wanna care, you wanna help, so you wanna hear what's going on, but it was, when she's saying the things out loud, it was almost like she was, I can't believe that I'm in this situation.

I can't believe that I'm saying this about myself, and it's true. So she's having to deal with that. And at some point, it had gotten kinda quiet, and she kind of pointed across the room, and she said, can I have one of those books?

And that caught me off guard, and I go, oh, she wants a Bible. She saw the Bibles over there, and she, somehow she knew they were important, okay, and said, can I have one of those books? And I don't know if that was just cultural vernacular, maybe she had some sort of background where they called Bibles the book or something like that, but she just said, can I have one of those books?

And I thought, you know, somebody who's out on their own and kinda wandering around and no place to stay, and it's, you know, you're worried about how much you have to carry everywhere, that they would want a book.

They wouldn't wanna give away a Bible. I mean, it's precious to all believers, but these giveaway Bibles, you know, are made of recycled paper, and they're just, they're not anything that you could pawn or sell or anything.

So I felt like maybe, you know, she was coming to grips with, like, I'm having to admit and confess all these problems in my life, and these people are just trying to help, but I really need to, I need something.

I need change, I need some help. So she asked for a Bible, and so I gave her one, and after Sunday school, they were already gone. The ambulance had come and taken away the young man, and so on, and we never saw her again, but apparently somewhere in the general area, her grandmother lives, and maybe the baby is still with her, I don't know.

But the question, can I have one of those books, if you cast that into, I mean, a larger picture, it could be seen as a very radical request for someone like this young lady to ask for a Bible. You know, I try to think in historical terms a lot, in terms, you know, things we take for granted now have not always been that way, right?

Is it right and good for a common person, or perhaps, in her case, an obvious sinner who is full of, her life is full of the consequences of sin, and thus her life is just full of misery and sadness, and so on, someone like her to ask for a holy book, is it right to give her one?

And of course, we all say, well, yes, and yes, of course it is, but why? Why according, what do we have from the scripture that tells us that that's the right thing to do? And for a time, it was considered a treasonous, blasphemous to give the Bible to commoners, wasn't it?

There's a copy of God's word in the village, but it's chained up in the local church, the chapel or the cathedral. Nobody's allowed to have anything to do with it. You can't take it home, it's in a language you can't even understand, and it's all completely holy and other, and you have no access at all.

And so for someone like this young woman to come in and just ask for, can I have one of those books, and to be given one, to me, it was just a remarkable moment. Wow, who would have thought? And she was able to have a Bible.

Well, what does the Bible say about having the Bible? Which is a kind of a strange question to ask, but we might as well ask it, what does the Bible say about having the Bible? Well, it kind of goes back to some basics, to some fundamentals, that God has made us in his own image and that not only did he create us by speaking his words, but then he directed us and told us what we're all about and how we're supposed to live, and we're supposed to live according to his words.

So he says to Adam, this is who you are, and this is what you're gonna be, this is what you're gonna do, and don't do that over there. Like, okay, so my Adam's life is all about following God's words, believing what God said, and then doing what God said.

His life is completely wrapped up with the word of God. So his life was created by God's word and directed by God's word. Now, of course, we have this truth, by God's words, we are to live, Genesis 1 and 2.

Of course, when we disobey God's word, all sorts of bad things happen, and we follow the story through the first 11 chapters of Genesis and discover that living against God's word is a really bad idea, and that is proven time and time again.

And then we have God's word coming personally to Abram, promising all sorts of wonderful things to Abram, moving the story along. And at some point, you kind of wonder, well, why doesn't God just continue to show up and talk to particular people, and then everybody listened to what those people have to say?

You know, the prophet system. Thus saith the Lord. Somebody says, and then everybody kind of pays attention to that and moves on, the patriarchs and the prophets and so on. Well, it's interesting how things change.

I've tried to note for you in your handout just how at some point, the lifespans of humanity started decreasing, started going down. It's remarkable to think about the fact that Seth, who is the son of Adam, was alive in the days of, or Enosh, the grandson of Adam, was alive in the days of Noah.

Noah was in his 80s when Enosh was still alive. It's like 10 generations down, but people lived a long time. And then to consider that Shem was very much alive and well in the days of Abraham. I mean, Shem was on the ark.

He saw the before and after. You talk about a remarkable person. He saw the before and after of the world, before the flood and after the flood. He was on the ark. Here's the son of Noah, and he is alive and well during the time of Abraham.

Alive during the time of Isaac, even. And this is why some of the Puritans believe that Melchizedek is none other than Shem, who also would be priest of God Most High in the city of Salem. Of course, who knows?

We don't know if Melchizedek was Shem, but that's one of the reasons why some of the Puritans believe that. Because here's somebody who had been on the earth for how long and was the son of Noah and knew God in a way that the others didn't.

Make a very good candidate for priest of God Most High. But at a certain point, the word of mouth becomes less efficient. Just by normal process. Now, Enosh is a good source to go to. In his days, men began to call upon the name of the Lord.

They were worshiping God. He's able to relay all the way into Noah's day exactly what was said to Adam. I mean, he was around his granddad, he was around his father, all the, you know. He could say straight up, this is what was said, here it is.

I mean, that's not too many. And then to be able to do that and then Shem to be able to talk in the days of Abraham, what was like before the flood and so on. These stories are not going to be lost in that given time.

They're gonna be able to be preserved. At a certain point though, we have the lifespans of people going down drastically. So you have generations that are turning over very, very quickly. And God in his benevolent mercy, in his grace, he provides for a permanent record to be passed down for a thousand generations.

And it is for his word to be written down. And Moses, he has Moses write. He has Moses write down the words that need to be preserved. So Moses begins writing down Holy Scripture. And the first 11 chapters that he writes down are stories and things that have been passed down throughout the generations.

But God makes sure he records them exactly the way they ought to be written down. So that's where it begins is with Moses writing it down. He's writing down the scriptures. But the whole point of it is that God was communicating with people in a way that he wanted them to have his words.

He wanted them to live according to the words. God was graciously providing his words. So this whole orientation means what? The Bible indicates from the very beginning that God wants us to have his words.

He wants us to have them. He wants us to live according to them. And there's many different places we could look to affirm that. One thing that I thought was interesting about the 10 Commandments was how often it says in Exodus and Deuteronomy, God himself wrote down the 10 Commandments.

Right, the 10 Commandments that were, Moses smashed the first set, okay? But the second set, God wrote down the 10 Commandments. And those were the tablets of stone that were placed into the Ark of the Covenant.

What God wrote down. That's just another indicator. God's saying, I want you to have my words. Those made in God's image are made to live according to God's word. So there's a lot, everything in the scripture, I think, is just leaning that way.

I mean, wherever you look in the scripture, God just wants to have his words. Have you met someone, maybe just talk with somebody, and they did not own a copy of God's, they didn't have a Bible. Have you ever met somebody who did not own a Bible?

Anybody?

Okay, so one, two, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, so eight of us have met somebody who didn't own a Bible. We, probably more of us have met them, but we just didn't ask, maybe it didn't come up.

Again, people have an idea, I think, and this is probably a good thing. I don't really need one because they're everywhere. But I have asked, more than one person I have talked to says, do you have a Bible?

And they say, no, they don't have a Bible.

Why?

Because grandma has one. Why, if I need to borrow one, I mean, grandma has one. I can always get it from grandma. And how often that is the case. People don't have a Bible. When Victim's Impact panel was meeting in our fellowship hall on a regular basis, we were putting those Bibles out every single meeting, and several were taken every single time because people didn't have Bibles.

But here's one sitting right there, please take it. Oh, please, I'll take it. As I write in the handout, I grew up in a pastor's home in Midwestern America, Oklahoma, you know, Bibles are prolific as teaposts.

I mean, they're just everywhere. But there's no guarantee that people actually have them. All the statistics are here, they're pretty impressive. Guinness World Records cites a study that says that 2 .5 billion Bibles were printed between 1815 and 1975.

That number has been doubled by 2020. That's hard to actually track because a lot of these Bibles are printed privately and given away, and it never enters into anybody else's systems. I mean, the Gideons have given away two billion Bibles in 120 years.

Two billion Bibles in 120 years. I don't even know if those are a part of the other study. So I think we're pretty well, Bibles being printed, well, probably over seven billion. And have you ever seen one of those videos of this, a plane, maybe from, you know, missions aviation, flying in, and they've got boxes of Bibles that have been translated into the language of the tribe.

And the tribe's just going nuts with celebration. That they finally get a copy of, maybe it's just like, you know, the New Testament, but they've got a copy of God's word in their own, have you ever seen one of those videos?

Wow, that brings you up short a little bit. My goodness, to think about someone who didn't have a Bible, but then was given one. How is the translation work going, by the way? Well, Wycliffe Global Alliance reports that at least some of the Bible has been translated into 3 ,400 languages, and these are the main ones because they're used by seven billion people.

Now, there's about almost 4 ,000 languages that have no Bible translation, which leaves 255 million people without scripture in their own language. So think about the majority. So the majority languages have all been translated.

The Bible's been translated into these majority languages. So seven billion people have a Bible translated into their language. It doesn't mean they have a copy of it. It doesn't mean it's been printed.

It doesn't mean it's been delivered. It doesn't mean that they have access to it, but there is a Bible that has been translated into their language. If somebody can get the Bible to them, they could read it if they were taught how to read.

Okay, so all those things are connected. And while 255 million people have no scripture in their language. Now, I want us to think about that in comparison to the early church. Okay, just think about that context to the early church.

Where the word of God, thanks to God's providence, had been spread through the Roman Empire. Moses had been read in all these synagogues throughout the Roman Empire. Okay, but Moses was probably being read in either Hebrew and or Koine Greek, the common tongue, because it had been translated into the common language.

So that's great, but people aren't having it in their own heart language. They would hear it in the trade language, but they didn't have it in their heart language. And you had to go to a Jewish synagogue to get the copies.

Meanwhile, the New Testament is being written during the days of the early church. Nobody has a full copy yet. And these things are more precious than diamonds. You'll hear Paul when he makes requests of Timothy to bring the books, bring the parchments, right?

In the Diocletian persecutions, which happened in the 90s of that first century, Christians would die for their copies of Holy Scripture, but they would willingly forfeit works by Christian authors that were not Holy Scripture.

There was a very clear understanding of what was Scripture and what wasn't. And now we've got the Bible translated into languages used by 7 billion people and probably over 7 billion Bibles have been printed.

Well, praise God. I mean, that is really good news. When you think about what God has been up to in working through all of these different things, we can praise the Lord for that. That is really good news.

Couple of things to think about as we conclude. And this is all just related to that question, can I have one of those? Yes, of course you can. We live in a time when 7 billion Bibles have been printed.

So yes, you could have one. You could have it for free. So that's really good. And you can have it in your language, one that you can understand. And that's the goal for all peoples in the whole world.

And that is a biblical conviction that all the people should get the word of God in their language. All right, that's what happened. We had that at Pentecost. Holy Spirit empowering people to speak in the languages, the heart languages of the people who were there.

Let's get the word into their heart language. Let's give them a Bible that they can read and understand and be blessed by. But when you come to the Bible, you know that there's 66 books in the Bible. But it is all in one binding, is it not?

So of course, the natural thing for Idina to do is say, can I have one of those books? I see a book over there. Can I have a book, one of those books? She sees it all in one binding because it's one book.

And nobody thinks to correct, well, there's actually 66 in there. No, of course we don't. It's all in one binding. That is actually a statement of faith. It's a theological conviction. We'll talk more about that.

But you have a singular book. It is all put together. It is a truth claim to say that everything in this is all by one author, we would say. And we would also say, well, it's by 40 different authors. But we say it's all by one author.

We say, well, there's 66. But it's one book. And that's how we come to the Bible. We do not come to the Bible and decide which one of the 66 books we pull off our shelf to use at that moment. We grab it as a book.

Because this is a collection of the words which are God's words translated into our language that we can understand. So when we come to the Bible, we come to it as a book, singular. And we'll talk more about that in future studies.

In future studies, we're going to answer some of the questions like these. I don't know if they're all gonna be the same order as I give them, but we're gonna answer some questions like, which translation?

All right?

Many times, that's one of the first questions. If anybody has any understanding about the Bible at all, they may not even say which translation, but they may request one without the these and thous.

Right?

They know enough to do that, maybe. But what does the Bible have to say about Bible translation? We're gonna find out.

All right?

We're gonna answer that question from the Bible. Another, I mean, other questions are like, who wrote the Bible? You see over 66 books, why these books and not others? Some people have that question. Other people will have a question of what good is it?

All right?

What good is it? Well, we can use the Bible to answer that question as well. What is it all about? We can answer that question. One question that I think is, on a lot of people's minds, is why all the disagreement about the Bible?

If the Bible is all that, then why is there so much disagreement about it? And for them, that's just the one thing that the big hang up, the disproving whatever,.

You know, well,.

Because people disagree about the Bible, it's not true. So we'll do our best to answer that question from the Bible. The goal, of course, is not to maneuver out of those simple questions. And I think those are simple questions.

Can I have one of those? Yes, you can. Now that you have a Bible, now we can ask the other questions. Which translation? Who wrote it? What good is it? What is it about? Why all the disagreement? And so on.

The goal is not to maneuver out of those simple questions by asking complicated questions and leaving them. I think the goal is to answer the simple questions with the answers that the Bible itself provides.

Simple questions.

Okay, so that's the goal. Any questions about what we talked about tonight or anything you would like to anticipate in our coming studies? Well, yeah, I think that's the point that we'll be talking about.

How is it that we say, you know, when we say who wrote it, and someone says, well, God wrote it. And then somebody else says, well, all sorts of men wrote it. And why do we say that? You know, and how does that fit together?

How can we say that that fits together? So that'll be a goal when we talk about who wrote it.

Yes.

Yeah, and it's great, because we as a church, we get to support the Johnsons and the Palika tribes, and they're translating the Bible into the Palika language, because we support Mitch Tillman in Mongolia.

His mother-in-law, Ayuma, is involved in the translation of the Bible into the Mongolian language, because they've had a very, very poor, bad translation that doesn't really communicate the word correctly.

And so they are translating it from the original languages into Mongolian. They've never had a translation out of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into Mongolian. They've never had that before. You gotta remember, Mongolia has been isolated, and under communist rule and so on, very hard to get into.

But now, we're supporting the Tillmans, which means, by extension, we're supporting that translation work as well, right? So this is really important stuff, and as we support that, we can, I think, more greatly appreciate that we have it in our own, so.

Yes.

Yeah, so why do some churches don't use the Bible, don't depend on it, don't really make a big deal of it? I think that goes to that question of what good is it,.

Right?

What good is it? And if it's a little good, among many other goods, then we kind of package it all together, and we're all about good, and the Bible can be one of those things that can be helpful. Versus, if you look at what the Bible says about itself, what good is the word of God, what does the word of God have to say about how good it is, you come away with, wow, how could I ever live without it?

Yeah, it becomes that important, that vital, and I think if people don't ask that question, or get a good answer to that question, what good is it, then, you know, why use it? Why depend on it? So that's a very important question to answer.

Yes.

Yes, exactly. Right, and, yeah, well, I put a few things in here about that, about how the, it was an interesting thing, you know, when we think about the stats about how many Bibles got printed, well, when you have websites and apps and things that give you the scripture, give you the Bible digitally, then all of a sudden, the question about how many Bibles get printed, that thing is a little skewed, doesn't it?

But there's about 60 of the world that is active internet users, and so they may be accessing God's Word online and not have a printed Bible. Maybe it might even be more accessible for them that way, and then people use apps all the time.

And it's an interesting thing, you know, which one, but it's gonna be, when we talk about which translation, we're gonna be dealing with some of the historical transmission of the Bible, and it went, you know, well, there were stone tablets, we remember that, okay?

There were stone tablets. Well, there was oral communication passing along God's Word. Well, God said this, and so I want you to remember this, okay? And then there was like stone tablets, and then there was papyrus, or there was even, you could have boards with wax over them that you could write on and so on.

Then you have papyrus, and then you have, you know, vellum, you have codices, you have manuscripts, and also it's a different media that were used to copy God's Word and to give it out, to get it to where it needed to go, right?

And so now we live in a time with computers and digital and all that kind of thing, and so, you know, is there something sacred about the oil skin page, right? Right, so I mean, is there, so we'll talk about some of that, because that'll come into play with, you know, in the translation is always going to kind of bring into bear historically what medium was used to get the Word communicated and preserved and moved along.

So, but it was an interesting thing. I was thinking about this, about the question about, you know, when you come to the Bible, some people have come to the Bible and they have never come to a print version.

Isn't that interesting? That there are people who, when they come to the Bible, they have never come to a print version, so do they come to it as a book? And in fact, they do, because the way that the Bible is put in digitally still, what is it?

Well, it's still called the Bible, singular, right? And, but even in the way that your programs on the website and your apps are put together, you have, you do what? You're going to have a search function, but this search function is not going to go outside of the Bible and include Google, right?

If I type in, like, I'm in a Bible program, I type in, okay, love, okay? It's going to give me all the different scripture passages within the Bible that deal with love, right? I'm going to type in, there's a line, I'm going to type in John 3 .16, book, chapter, verse, okay?

And it's going to take me to that portion of the Bible. So there's still this fundamental understanding we're dealing with a unique unit of text that you're going to search for and you're going to move around in, but it's still a book.

Digitally, yes, but it's still a book. It's not going to include this, this, this, and this. So there's still that base. I think it's helpful to have that physical visual connection, but still the people who are making the Bible apps either by common sense or necessity or conviction, they are saying, this is still one book, if that makes any sense, so.

All right, well, that's all we have for tonight and I look forward to the continuation of our study together. And we'll make sure we have time for a Q &A as we go through this series, okay? All right, well, let's close by singing the doxology.

Praise God from whom all praise is due