Need Proof?

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This morning's lesson was inspired by last week's lesson from Pastor Steve, so I'm not continuing on his series,
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I'm just sort of interrupting it while he's away this weekend at a conference, but what he talked about last week, he talked quite a bit about this idea of debating unbelievers, remember?
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For those of you who were here last week, he talked about debating doctrine with unbelievers and sort of the futility of that, and about this idea of proof, and he even at one point mentioned some things about biblical archaeology, and I thought to myself, you know what, that would make a really great topic for me to just sort of expand upon and discuss this week, and so we're going to talk about that in detail this week, and so I've titled this lesson
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Need Proof, Need Proof. So we'll start with talking about faith and reason, alright, faith and reason, and for that we're going to start by reading
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John 20, if you could turn there, read John 20, we're going to read about a disciple who kind of gets a bad rap, and he has a saying named after him,
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Doubting Thomas, right, Doubting Thomas, and to this day, because of his actions now, whenever anyone is skeptical about something and says that they want proof of something before they believe it, they are called a
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Doubting Thomas, and this is the time that comes to mind. So John 20, verses 24 through 29,
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Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the twin, was not with them when Jesus came, so the other disciples told him,
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We have seen the Lord, but he said to them, Unless I see his hands, in his hands, the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side,
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I will never believe, never, he says, and of course it goes along, eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them, although the doors were locked,
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Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you, then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here, and see my hands, and put out your hand, and place it in my side, do not disbelieve, but believe,
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Thomas answered him, My Lord and my God, Jesus said to him,
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Have you believed, because you have seen me, blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed, and in that category of those who have not seen, and yet have believed, are all of us, none of us have seen the
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Lord face to face, none of us saw his resurrected body, but yet we believe.
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So the nature of faith, what does it mean when we say, we believe, right?
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What is it that we, how do we kind of balance this idea between believing, knowing, understanding, what's going on between heart and head that we talk about?
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Hebrews 11 .1, sort of the famous definition of faith, could somebody, would someone like to read that?
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Hebrews 11 .1, the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen.
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The assurance of things hoped for, so we're going to talk a bit about that, about what it means to be assured of something, to be convinced of it, right?
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To have it settled in your mind, and then, and conviction really, two words that sort of relate and mean the same thing, to be totally convinced in your own mind of its truthfulness.
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Faith for the Christian is not a hope -so faith, if you've ever heard that said before, it's a know -so faith.
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We're not just hoping that maybe, crossing our fingers, that it's true, that hoping that Jesus really was raised from the dead, hoping that we're going to go to heaven someday, it's that we know it's true.
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We know that he died for us, that he rose again on the third day, that we are going to be risen with him and live forever in heaven with him.
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We know these things, and Paul, over and over again in his epistles, constantly uses that phrase, we know, we know, we know, over and over.
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Hebrews 12 .2, who could read that for us? Sure, right. And so, in this, we see where our faith comes from, right?
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That Jesus is the founder, the perfecter, the author of our faith. He is the one who is the creator of it, and he is the one who gives it to us, right?
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Ephesians 2 .8 -9, that the faith, even our faith is a gift from God, and it's created by him in us, instilled in us.
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We're going to read through these three passages in John that come kind of a little while, 6 and 7, they come right in a row, but then also
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John 11. So, who could read John 6, 66 -71, the kind of longer part, anybody?
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Okay, thanks, yep. John 7 .17, okay, and John 11 .40,
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okay, all right. All right, so let me set the scene here in John chapter 6 before we start to read it.
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So, this has come at a time in Christ's ministry where he's started to say some difficult things.
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And just before this, earlier in chapter 6, at the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus performs the miracle of feeding the 5 ,000.
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And now, he's attracted a really great crowd because all those 5 ,000 people, the 5 ,000 men and all their families along with them who got well -fed that day, now they're following him very closely because they very much are interested in food and continuing to be fed.
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And so, they're following him around now. They're hanging on. He's built himself a very big crowd. And then, towards the end of chapter 6, just before this passage, he starts to say some really hard sayings in which he tells the people, you're looking for physical food, but I'm not really here to give you physical food.
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I'm here to give you spiritual food. I'm here so that you can eat my flesh and drink my blood, is what he tells them.
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And that's not even actually an allusion to the Lord's Supper. That's just the sense of that, to be totally united with him, to be that, to have that very close, such a close relationship that it's as if we are consuming him, okay?
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And when he says this, that giant crowd that had been following him around, they were like, well, wait a minute, we didn't sign up for that.
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We just thought we were getting manna from heaven, you know, that you were Moses come back and we were going to get fed every day and we wouldn't have to worry about the toil and the work and that's, we're not in for having to serve you or anything like that.
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We just wanted to be served. And so the crowd kind of peters off and disappears, right?
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And so that now we come to John 6 verses 66 through 71.
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Go ahead. So he turns to the 12 and he says, are you going to leave me too?
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He's down to just the 12. And the 12 say, Peter says for the 12, as the spokesman, good old
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Peter, all nice, always nice and brash and ready to give an answer. He jumps right up and he says, Lord, of course not.
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We're not going anywhere. You have the words of eternal life, right?
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You have the words of eternal life. And he says that we believe and have come to know the
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ESV says in the version that he read it, believe in our shore, right?
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And that order is important. We believe and we have come to know.
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That's the biblical order. God says, believe, and then I will teach you.
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And then you will know it's the divine order. As I put here in the handout, the divine order for true understanding and spiritual things.
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We can only begin to know him through trusting him first. And that's very backwards from how the world normally does things, right?
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We want to know all about it. And once we know all about it, then we feel like we can trust it.
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Right. If you're going out to, let's say, make a big purchase of a house, a house is a great example, right?
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I, I had to buy a house recently, a couple of years ago or last year. And any of you who've ever bought a house, you know, the process that goes on.
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First, you go, you look around, you go to the open house, right? Or you go for a visit with the realtor, you check everything out, you see as much as you can.
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And if you're like my wife and I, you take all sorts of notes about everything that you see. Mostly so you can keep straight all the different houses that you've gone to visit.
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But so you take all these notes and you, and you, and maybe you bring a ruler along or a measuring tape and you measure things like, are the, are the windows big enough?
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And is the room big enough? Can we fit the bed in here in this room or the, or the kids stuff in that room, right?
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And all that sorts of stuff. You take all this data, right? And then even then, before you're ready to commit to buying, even if you make the offer, there's a contingency clause, right?
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Of the inspection. And now we're going to learn even more about the house. We're going to have an inspector come and we're going to have the inspector come.
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And he, he's, we're going to pay this guy many hundreds of dollars, but you can't get back many hundreds of dollars.
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And he is going to comb the house to the best of his ability to find everything wrong with it possible, right?
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And he's going to print out this giant report. Like ours, our inspector, he gave us this huge, like more than maybe a hundred pages worth of report of, of just like, you know, a lot of the stuff just said, good, good, good, good.
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But you know, there's the few things that weren't right. And then now you're ready to trust buying the house, right?
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You've done all the research. Okay. Now, now we'll buy it, right? That is not how
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God works or how faith is supposed to work. The Christian faith,
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God actually commands us to believe first. And then tells us that he'll, that from that, he will teach us.
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Let's read who had John seven 17. Go ahead and read that. There you go. That first, the man, we have to be willing to do
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God's will, right? That we want to do God's will. And then once we are willing to do it, then we're going to find out as we do it.
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That it's the right thing to do. And we're going to learn more about him as we do his will.
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And we are going to grow, excuse me. Peter in one of his, in the opening to a second,
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Peter says that grace and peace be multiplied to you through what, through the knowledge of the
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Lord, Jesus Christ. That as you sanctify, as you're sanctified, as you grow in him, that you're going to know more and more and more about him.
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And that almost in a, in this great feedback loop is going to increase your faith. You'll know more and that will anchor you more and you'll have more assurance and you'll be able, and you'll be even more convicted of the right thing of doing
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God's will of doing the right things. And that will lead you to greater knowledge of him, which will then turn around and lead you to a greater conviction of wanting to do right.
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Right. And around and around you go. It's very interesting that back in John six, notice that Peter doesn't cite
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Christ's works as the reason to follow him, even though he just saw in this one chapter.
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So just in the previous few days, Peter has seen Christ feed 5 ,000 people from just a few crackers and anchovies.
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Right. And walk on water. And yet still
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Peter doesn't say, Lord, I'm following you because, because, you know, you can walk on water, man.
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I definitely need to listen to you. Right. No, he says, we'll follow you because you have the words of eternal life.
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Where else could we possibly go? We want your words, not his works.
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And God teaches divine truth to those who live by it. And even that right is done by faith.
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How we live by it. John 1140. Right. Did I not tell you if you believe, then you will see.
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Right. Again, we see that order. If you believe, then you will see now to get to why
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I'm telling as to why this is relevant to what we're talking about, about this idea of proof is that because it's not the same as because we believe that proves it's true.
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All right. That's not, it's not the same thing. We're trying to make an argument for, for whether or not the promises of Christ are true.
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It's not just because we believe in them that proves they're true. Then you're getting into some kind of kooky word of faith type of thing.
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Okay. It's not our belief that validates God. God is true, whether we believe in him or not.
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So let's talk about proof and how we get proof. And even then we can't really talk about proof so much as we can talk about defense.
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And when we talk about defense, we're talking about apologetics. It comes from the
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Greek word, apologia, apologia. It's all Greek to me.
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Amen. Means defender of the faith. Okay.
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Defending the faith. And we won't read it now for sake of time, but in first Peter, Peter tells all of us to be prepared to give an answer, right?
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For all of us to be defenders of the faith. And in Titus one, Paul specifically charges elders says that it to be an elder as a qualification for an elder, that they must be good at this.
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They have to be always ready to be a defender of the faith. Now there are three styles, so to speak.
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There might be more, but these are the three main styles that you would talk about. Three methods for apologetics.
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All right. And Steve mentioned the one last week, presuppositional and evidential and classical.
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Okay. Now, presuppositional, I kind of put some quotes here that try to help summarize for you what it really means, what each one means.
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Presuppositional means that you presuppose in the point of your argument, you'll presuppose that God already exists.
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But there's no way to have this argument without at least originally saying without any question.
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Yes, there is God. That he exists and he is true. And so a way to put it is that I believe in God because God planted the belief in my heart.
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Right. And so MacArthur is presuppositional in his apologetics. James White is presuppositional in his apologetics.
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Then there's evidential. Evidential is I believe in God because miracles and fulfilled prophecies prove his word and thus he himself are true.
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Okay. So they look for the evidences. They want some data. And they say, all right, well, look, we know that these miracles happened.
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We can look at the Bible and we can see all these prophecies that he made hundreds and thousands of years early in the
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Old Testament that all came true as the Old Testament unfolded and then into the
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New Testament times. Right. And so all those things are proof. We've got lots of data points of proof that God is true.
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And that the Bible is true. Because if the Bible is true, then God must be true since he's the one who wrote the Bible.
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Okay. One famous person who used evidential apologetics quite a bit is
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B .B. Warfield. And then and then there's classical or traditional.
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Sometimes it's called apologetics. And this is R .C. Sproul School at Durbin Geisler School. And they would say,
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I believe in God because it is philosophically, rationally and compellingly reasonable to do so.
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So it's kind of a mix of the two because they both they have presuppositions that they try to establish in the debate, but they also lean on evidence and they sort of they construct rational, logical arguments following sort of just the same rules, laws of logic and philosophy that we would do use in secular schools of philosophy to just sort of make the laid lay out the argument for the existence of God.
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If you've ever heard people talk about I'm not going to recite them now, but if you've ever heard people talk about the cosmological argument for the existence of God, the idea that the universe can't possibly have always existed.
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And so there must be some everything has a cause. And so there must be some uncaused first cause.
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And that first cause is God. And then there's the teleological argument. And so these are arguments from classical, classical apologetics.
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OK, now, apologetics are different from sciences, but I'm going to talk about three sciences today, just as examples.
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There are other sciences. These sciences are not necessarily, as we're going to see, they're not about proof.
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They're not about proving. All right. And sometimes I think we look to them to try to prove stuff for us, but they themselves are not providing the proof.
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The apologetics is the proof. We can use these things as tools, what they discover, what these sciences discover in our apologetics, but they themselves are not the defense.
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And it's foolhardy of us, as Steve said last week, to try to argue from these points to convince an unbeliever to believe in these things.
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All right. So first off, creation science. All right. And so creation science is the study of the natural world, right, to better understand the mechanisms of creation and then the later catastrophes that the
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Bible describes, the curse, the flood, Babel, so forth. All right.
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Now, what's very interesting about creation science is a lot of times people have this picture in their head that if you imagine we look at the whole natural world and we say, all right, we've got all these bits of data out there.
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Okay. As we examine the world, we look at rock layers, we look at fossils, we look at astronomical measurements, right?
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All sorts of things like this, right? We look at all this data and some of the data, this is the incorrect view, but we have this mistaken belief that some of the data says creation, intelligent design, and some of the data says evolution.
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Okay. And we're trying to like fight this battle of if only we could get more creation data than we'll win, right?
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We're keeping score type of thing. That's not how it works at all. The both of them are looking at the same data.
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They're sorting through the same data. We're not sorting through it to pick and choose and score who's the winner.
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Rather, they're both looking at the same data through different filters, through different worldviews.
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And it's a matter of how you interpret the data that you see. And so creation science is interpreting the data through the biblical framework.
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And creation scientists are far more honest about this to themselves and to others that they have a bias, that they have a presupposition, which is that the
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Bible is true. And we're going to examine the data through that filter. And from that, make hypotheses and then testable theories as to the mechanisms of how
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God created and how God operates today in the natural world.
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All right. So I thought maybe it'd be fun just to sort of, or any questions about that?
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I haven't really paused enough to let people ask questions. Does anybody have any questions about what I'm talking about here with creation science?
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Is that making sense? Yeah. Yes. Right. Everyone has their own bias, their own prejudice, as they would call it, right?
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That you have this set of starting beliefs. And in fact, the scientific method was invented as a precaution against that.
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It's supposed to try to get that initial bias out of your thinking, where you make the hypothesis.
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And again, it's not so much about that you can get it out of your thinking as it is if you're just honest and open about what it is by stating your hypothesis up front that then you go through and try to test that hypothesis, right?
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Yeah. It's not that one is bad or good, that we should use one more than the other. It's sort of, as Harry's saying, it's kind of like the mode.
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Like, when are they appropriate? It depends on the audience and the target audience of who you're discussing with.
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All right. So I thought it'd be kind of fun for all three of these sciences that I'm going to talk about to just give you a couple little gems that I've learned once and carried with me that I just think are really great.
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And these are evidences, so we're doing a little evidential apologetics right here. So one is, for creation science, one is irreducible complexity.
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And that's the idea that we see around us in biological systems an incredible amount of complexity into interdependency that could not have evolved in stages, that it had to go from nothing, if it evolved at all, it would have had to go from not to done in one step.
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Some great examples of this, my ear. Your ear, too.
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But my ear, just yesterday I went to the doctor because my ear has been bothering me. I've got a lot of fluid in my left ear.
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And the reason I got a lot of fluid in my left ear is because there's a tube that goes from my ear down to my throat.
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And that tube, the eustachian tube, helps balance the air pressure and helps to let fluid, if fluid does get in there, drain out.
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Right? All of us have them. If little kids, that tube is shorter and bent a little bit funnier.
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And that's why kids get your infections a lot easier than adults do. But that tube is extremely important because all the time air pressure is changing around us.
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Right? And if it weren't for that tube to balance out the air pressure, when a thunderstorm comes through, everyone's eardrums will go boom!
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And snap. Right? And so you get this idea with the irreversible complexity.
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It's like, well, if we have an eardrum now and the eardrum and all the little bones that connect to the eardrum and all those things put together, all are what lets you hear.
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If we didn't also get the tube simultaneously to balance the air pressure, you know, that protoplasmic first mammal, right, didn't also get that tube, then that hearing would have never worked for that guy.
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And so why would evolution have kept hearing around? Right? It's sort of this idea of irreducible complexity.
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There's lots and lots of examples. Dr. David Menton, who works with Answers in Genesis, has a couple of videos about the ear, the eye, about various other creatures.
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And even if you just think about how I am constantly amazed as I study science of the beautiful interdependency and complexity of just all the systems of nature that God has instituted in nature, things like the water cycle and the way that the sun introduces heat and energy into the system, and how all of this stuff just completely, it's also even self -healing in a way, that if things perturb it, that it can get itself back on balance and back on course.
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And all these things are all really an evidence of the faithfulness of God and how consistent
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God is. They're a reflection of their creator. All right.
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Another one, rapid fossil creation conditions. And this is just the idea that not everything that dies becomes a fossil.
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If it did, we'd have a lot more of them, right? And what we've learned is that in order to get a fossil, you have to get buried in mud and muck really, really fast.
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Really fast. There's actually a very famous fossil of an ancient fish in the process of giving birth.
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Like it got fossilized with the baby kind of half out of it. The baby fish coming out, right?
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And so you see that and you're like, well, that must have happened instantly, right? For it to die, because you don't just die like that and then lay there for a couple of weeks or months.
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Of course, things come along and eat it, right? Scavengers come along or just decay happens and all that type of thing.
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And it would have been, it would be gone, but instead it must have had some kind of cataclysmic thing that came along and covered it up with mud and muck.
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And then we say like, oh, kind of cataclysm. Does the Bible talk about that? Suddenly put a whole lot of water and dirt over everything, right?
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We say, ah, the flood. Right. The flood. I think it's really funny that there was a headline.
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It's been a long time because I've been teaching about creation for a long time. So maybe 15 or 20 years ago now, but there was a headline when the
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Mars, when some of the Mars rovers had first gotten to Mars and they were studying all the erosion patterns and things up there, and they were making discoveries about whether or not water had once existed on Mars.
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And there was a headline that said, NASA scientists say flood of biblical proportions once happened on Mars.
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And I kept that headline because I laughed. I said, NASA scientists are okay with a biblical flood happening on another planet.
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Just not on ours. Right. Just not on ours. That we can't do.
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All right. And then the last one, gravitational time dilation and anisotropic synchrony convention.
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And this is physics. Yes. Physics. For all the
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WPI folks out there. These are questions to try to answer the idea of starlight.
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The supposed starlight problem, which is the idea that if all these galaxies, stars and galaxies out there are thousands and millions of light years away, and it takes a light year is the distance it takes light to travel in a year.
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If it's millions of years, light years away, that means that it should have taken the light millions of years to get here.
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And so if our Earth is young, like the Bible tells us, then how could the
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Earth light have had time to get here? And both of these theories are attempts at helping to explain that.
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They're not, they're really just in their infant stages as proposed theories, but they're both very intriguing.
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Gravitational, they both rely on Einstein's theory of relativity. I'm going to geek out on here for a little bit, but just bear with me.
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The first one is about the idea of gravity, that when light passes by things with a lot of gravity, it actually speeds up just like you do when you pass by something with a lot of gravity.
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And so light, even though we tend to think of light as going at a constant speed, that in fact, light can speed up and slow down as it goes by heavy things.
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And so there's this theory of like, well, at the beginning, maybe because we know that the universe is expanding, so maybe when
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God first created the universe, everything was a lot more packed in, a lot more dense, and so light just went faster.
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And now it's slowing down as things spread out. But once upon a time, early on in creation, light went a lot faster.
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Another one, this anti -astropic synchrony convention, that's a mouthful, is the idea about the speed of light, and that we can only measure the round -trip speed of light for reasons
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I'm not going to get into now. But essentially, you have a clock, and you could fire a laser. And I imagine that I had a mirror way down at the end of the hall, and I fire the laser, and I can measure how long it takes for that laser beam to go out to the clock and back.
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What I can't measure, because I cannot perfectly synchronize them, is how long it takes for the light to go from here just to there.
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Because those two clocks, I can never get perfectly synchronized. Never. And that is a rule by Einstein's theory of relativity.
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I cannot possibly synchronize them to the level of detail that you would need to measure light. And so all
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I can measure for the speed of light is back and forth. And the anti -astropic,
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I can't even pronounce it right, three times in a row, that, the hypothesis that light, the round -trip speed we know, but we don't know the one -way speed, and it's perfectly reasonable within the laws of Einsteinian relativity physics, that light could be going faster one direction than the other.
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Which is mind -blowing, but just go with it. Okay? Maybe don't use that one on your friends until you can really explain it.
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After you get your PhD from RPI. That's right, I said it, Andrew. Okay.
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All right. Moving on. Biblical archaeology. We are way behind on time. Biblical archaeology.
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The study of artifacts and remains related to cultures and events mentioned in the Bible. Let me go through them quick here.
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Some great gems. One is the non -existence of Pilate. For a really long time, there was no extra -biblical record evidence of Pilate, Pontius Pilate, existing.
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For a long time. And Bible critics loved to pounce on this. Because he's obviously such a prominent figure in Christ's life, right?
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And they said, there's no record of there ever being a governor of Judea named Pontius Pilate. And there wasn't, for a really long time.
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And they harped on it, harped on it. And then, whoops, we found some tablets. Oh, it turns out he really was a guy.
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We found the inscriptions, and dated to the right time period and everything else. And so, yep, now there is no doubt that, historically, he was a real person.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls. Which they, in themselves, are just fabulous. Because, especially the
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Book of Isaiah scroll, which is the most complete one of all the scrolls that they found. But it's all these scrolls that were preserved from around the time of Christ.
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And so they're all Old Testament. They're not New Testament. But what's amazing about them is that we can open up those books and see that there's almost zero change from what was written there to the
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Hebrew that we have today from those books. So we can see how, even over these intervening 2 ,000 years, that we still have, you know, it's a little bit of a textual criticism one, too, that we still have exactly, we're right on track with the original wording in Hebrew of the
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Old Testament. An Egyptian manuscript of John 18 from 130 AD. Which, that's maybe 40 years after the
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Gospel of John was written. And we have a copy that old. This papyrus sheet that we have.
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Licinius of Luke. Another person who supposedly didn't exist. In Luke 3 -1, he talks about a governor of Syria, Antioch area, named
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Licinius. And the only Licinius that we knew in the historical record had lived in BC time, like several decades before.
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And so, again, the Bible critics harped on that saying, oh, there was no such thing. Luke made a mistake.
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And then, lo and behold, once again, we finally dig up a tablet and an inscription about him being governor of that time.
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And so now there's other evidences as well that have come up. And sure enough, there's no more doubt that he was a real historical person.
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The plaque of Erastus in Corinth. In Romans 16, Paul talks about greeting.
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Erastus sends his greetings. And he's a government official, the city treasurer. And then in Corinth, we find a plaque on a road that had been paved saying, this was paved by Erastus, from the funds of Erastus, the city treasurer.
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You've seen it. Oh, wow, yeah. The joint worship of Zeus and Hermes in Lystra, that in Acts 14,
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Luke describes that when Paul and Barnabas come along, that they say that Paul is Hermes and these
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Greek gods, right? And Barnabas is Zeus because Paul's the one who does the speaking and everything else. And Greek historians sort of harped on that because they're like, each town usually just had their one deity that was their patron deity.
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And they didn't usually do joint worship. And then, sure enough, we go back and we look in Lystra and we dig it up.
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And we find evidence of the two of them being worshipped together, those exact two guys that Luke mentions in Acts 14.
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And then arguments over Josephus. There is a Josephus who was Jewish, not a
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Christian. But he was a Jewish historian. And he wrote a very long and detailed history of the
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Jewish people around the time of Christ. And there is one paragraph that was written about Christ.
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And a lot of people tried very hard to prove that Josephus didn't really write that. And that some
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Christian author snuck it in later because it talks about that he was the so -called Christ and that he rose from the dead and all these types of things.
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And when you read it, you can sort of hear in Josephus' voice, in his tone of how he wrote that it's sarcasm, right?
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He's accusing these Christians of being cuckoo. But even still, people didn't even want to allow for that there might have been some external source to Christianity that even was willing to discuss the fact that Jesus might have rose from the dead.
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But now we know for sure that he really did write that. All right. Textual criticism.
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It's a scary -sounding word, but don't be too scared about it. It's the study of manuscript evidence from the
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Old Testament and the New Testament. All right. There are two types of textual criticism.
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One is lower criticism, which despite its name is probably the better kind. It's the kind that involves objective study of verifiable data.
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And it's focused solely on the words themselves. Do we have the right Greek and Hebrew words?
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Okay. Higher criticism, quote -unquote, is more speculative and subjective.
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And it concerns itself with theories of authorship, alleged editors, the process of transmission, things like that.
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So the Jesus Seminar folks, if you know about them, who tried to go through all the
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Gospels and say like, oh, this was Jesus said this, Jesus didn't say that. That's an example of higher criticism.
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And obviously, I don't think too highly of it. And so that's much more speculative.
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And it's not really that great. But the lower criticism is good. It's scientific.
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It's logical. It's provable. And just to give you an idea of what's going on here when we talk about variants, you look down in point two there under the gems that there's 200 ,000 variants.
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But a variant is any kind of misspelling. So if you imagine you had five manuscripts of this one verse in John, and one of the five leaves out a the.
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And the other four all have the the. Then you'd probably say, well, that one, the scribe, when he was copying it, he just left off the the.
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And really, there is a the there. Or maybe you have four manuscripts where two of them misspell a word and two of them don't.
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And so there's a tie. But you might say like, well, but these the two that don't misspell the word or have this spelling of the word, they're older manuscripts.
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And they come from two different places. Whereas the two that have the misspelling are later. And they came from the same place.
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And so it's more likely that those two are the incorrect one and that the other two that were from two separate places, that those two are the correct spelling.
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So and so you put all that together and you can reconstruct or you can make sure, really, that what we have when we talk about our
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Greek and Hebrew original words really are the original words of the Bible that we're translating from. There are
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I'm just going to have to finish here. There are. But these gems of discovery, there are an overwhelming and I mean, overwhelming number of manuscripts about the
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New Testament and the Old Testament, too. But let's just focus on the New Testament this morning. There are 5 ,300 different manuscripts out there.
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Now, they're not like it's not 5 ,300 complete copies of the New Testament. But we do have several very good full copies of the
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New Testament. And we also have many just sort of individual sheets of papyrus and scrolls out there that are just bits, single books or parts of books and things like that.
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5 ,300 manuscripts, OK? Let's compare that to some other famous works from around the same time.
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Caesar's Gallic War. So Julius Caesar, he wrote it in 40 BC. We have 10 copies of that.
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10. No one doubts that Julius Caesar wrote the Gallic War. OK? But we only have 10 copies of it.
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Livy, who was a Roman historian, we've only got 20 copies of his. Plato's works, the famous Greek philosopher, we only have seven.
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And they're not even all complete. And the second best ancient document in terms of number of manuscripts
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I put there is the Iliad, which is the epic poem by Homer. And that has only 643 manuscripts.
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And we have 5 ,300 for the New Testament. And we're still finding more, more and more every day.
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And out of those 5 ,300, we have, quote unquote, 200 ,000 variants. And that sounds like a humongous number.
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But realize that it's any little misspelling. When they count a variant, these scholars, they're counting just one letter out of place, or one dropped word by accident, or you skip a verse as you're copying.
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Because remember, all this stuff got hand copied over and over again, OK? And so part of the reason you have so many variants is because we have so many copies.
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We have 5 ,300 copies. But because we have so many copies, it's very easy for us to figure out which ones really are, you know, to trace back to the originals, as I described in that process a few minutes ago.
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And what's great is that of all those variants, even though there's so many of them, there are none that in any way, shape, or form make a material alteration to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
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There's not some variant out there that, like, denies that Jesus rose from the dead.
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Yeah? I think one
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I would recommend for any of you who are interested, it was actually the very last, in all of MacArthur's years of preaching through the
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New Testament, the very last sermon he preached on going through the New Testament was the long ending of Mark.
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I don't know if he exactly chose to do it that way on purpose, but the last book he preached through was Mark. And so his last sermon about through the
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New Testament was the long ending of Mark. And that's a really great sermon about this whole controversy and about how to better understand the long ending.
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So I highly recommend looking that up on, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So if you're interested to learn about it, read that. But I would also just finish with just this idea, like I said, that scripture interprets scripture, okay?
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And so what Bob said is great, that we don't want to, we never try to establish any doctrine on single passages, particularly questionable ones, like this long ending of Mark.
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But that really the whole Bible fits together, right, in a, searching for a word here, in a coherent, cohesive, yes, thank you, in a cohesive fashion, right?
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Okay. All right, well, I'm way over time, so let's pray.
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Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you so much for this morning. We thank you for the men who, and women who have spent so much of their lives devoted to the study,
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Lord, of the sciences that we talked about this morning. And for the hard work that they do to provide us with illustrations, with data,
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Lord, that I pray, Lord, that to help to really to fuel the apologetics of your word.
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And Lord, we know that you command us to defend your word, but that you are the one who ultimately defends your word.
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That we are weak and feeble vessels, and try hard as we might, if we were doing it completely under our own power,
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Lord, we would have no great effect. And yet, through the foolishness of the cross, through the foolishness of preaching, and the defense that we give,
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Lord, from your word, you have chosen to use that, Lord, to change hearts, to save souls.
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Lord, I pray for all those who go out regularly to defend the faith boldly.
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May you give them continued courage and endurance and strength to do that.
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May you be with the pastors and the elders who preach your word. May they do it consistently.
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May they do it, Lord, seeking only to preach your word and not inject their own.
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That the truth, Lord, might go out from pulpits all across this land and throughout the whole world,