Can You Trust the Bible with Bodie Hodge

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00:02

I'll have to edit that out. I forgot that it wasn't auditing, didn't start recording the video. 520, okay.

00:09

So for folks who don't know Bodhi much about you, because you're kind of, your name is like on a lot of books there at Answers in Genesis.

00:18

I know when I go to the bookstore and just go through, it's like, I think your name's on all of them, actually.

00:23

It could be. It's either you or Ken Ham, I don't know. Or you and Ken Ham, I don't know, most of them. But just give folks a little bit of a background of who you are, what you do there at Answers in Genesis, and then we'll get into some of the works that you've done.

00:39

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I've got a bachelor's and a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and I actually specialize in material science.

00:46

But I've always had this love for history and theology. And there is a connection between all that because theology, for example, is the queen of the sciences.

00:54

It's kind of the foundation to look at any of these sciences. So I get to see that connection. But I used to teach at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, I used to teach engineering.

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I also used to work at Caterpillar as a test engineer, large construction equipment, things like that. And then

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I went into the ministry of Answers in Genesis. I've absolutely loved it. So I've gotten a chance to use the history, the theology and the science all here together.

01:16

And I'm a speaker, a writer and a researcher. The Lord has taken me to four different continents over the years.

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I've got to see sites you never dreamt to be able to see. I've floated down the Grand Canyon. I've seen the

01:29

Northern Lights. I've swam in the Great Barrier Reef. And all this is really just the

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Lord's doing the work and he's just dragging me along the way. But I have been involved in a lot of books, somewhere between 25 and 30 books.

01:44

It's got my name on it somewhere or another, whether I'm a contributing author, whether I'm a general editor or the sole author of the book.

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I've also been involved in a lot of web articles, magazine articles, technical journal articles, you name it.

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I've kind of been all over the place, but when it comes down to it, all that stuff doesn't matter. I'm a sinner saved by grace and that's the one that matters, so.

02:07

Amen. Yeah, so now you and I met and we're out at Anselm Genesis and you could probably laugh and bust on me a bit.

02:18

Was I not like a kid in a candy store when we got up to the Ark Encounter and you were showing me the big...

02:23

So folks, I think I've mentioned this on a previous episode, they got a 70 foot by 22 foot

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TV that from the very... I mean, how big is that auditorium? Like, because from the very back.

02:37

Yeah, you can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 22, 2300 people in there easily. It's just gigantic.

02:43

So the stage is huge itself. Oh, it was very... I mean, it's because it's longer than a TV, so it's way over 70 foot, but how deep is that?

02:51

I mean, because from the very back, I'm saying it like 100, 200 feet at least.

02:58

Oh my, I can't even remember the actual dimensions on it, but there's so much space up there. We can play a small game of basketball without a problem up on the stage.

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That TV was so... I mean, it was like high def from a huge distance back.

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And I was like, so excited to like go up there. Then you get up there, you showed me like, it's all just a bunch of LEDs.

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Yeah, there are a whole bunch of smaller TVs put together to make a gigantic screen. The whole back of the stage is the screen.

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And there's so much we can do with it. It really is amazing. It was, so I was sitting there like a little kid going like, oh, this is so neat.

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Yeah, most people are like, wow, look at the size of the arc. He's like, look at the size of the screen. Yeah, I mean, most people probably get up on the stage and look out at the audience to see how many people it holds or how big it is.

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I'm like, I was, okay, I'm nerdy. Most people would be looking at the audience.

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I'm looking at a TV going, getting excited about that. But we met there and we started talking and found a whole lot of topics.

04:04

You and I have written on some of the same topics, things like world religions, things like reliability of scripture.

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And we wanna, you've written on all things of dinosaurs, Tower of Babel, contradictions in the

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Bible. I'm trying to think of some of the others. Yeah, anything from Genesis one to 11.

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I've been in and out of that up and down. Old books on the fall of Satan, a flood of evidence and you name it.

04:32

Kids books, teens books, answers books. So let's zoom in on one series of books you've done, which is, you've done two series that are close to my heart in a sense of one being on the world religions, one because we've written on the same thing.

04:47

A second one that you've spent a good amount of time writing on a series called, How Do We Know The Bible Is True?

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Basically, how do we trust the Bible? I mean, sort of with that, you've done some things on contradictions in the

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Bible, but let's delve into this question because of the fact that someone who does a lot of evangelism,

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I know this is the number one issue when you evangelize that people are gonna raise.

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I'm not a prophet, not the son of a prophet, but whenever I train people and teach people to do evangelism,

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I will tell them that you will be asked in one way or another, can you trust the

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Bible? This question comes up over and over and over again. And a lot of people don't know that there's answers.

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They don't know how to defend it. So let's dig into that. First off, you have several volumes with this.

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What are each of the volumes trying to cover? Well, just as a big picture, we're trying to hit a lot of the apologetic subjects, what we call general apologetics.

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Anything from how do we know the Bible is true? How do you interpret the scripture? What about the resurrection? What about miracles?

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Is the Old Testament trustworthy and New Testament trustworthy? These are the types of things that we're dealing with in this

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How Do We Know The Bible Is True series. We have two volumes in it, volume one and volume two, and they're just amazing books.

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I've actually got them sitting here. Let me hold them up so people can see what they kind of look like. And hopefully people can kind of see that.

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I know sometimes things flip backwards and so forth, but it gives you an idea of what's going on.

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I'll put links in the show notes for folks as well. But these are wonderful books.

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They're multi -author. We actually had a number of different people who are experts in those areas write those particular chapters.

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And me as a general editor, I got a chance to go through all of them, same with Ken Ham. And then at the same time, we're authors on certain ones as well.

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So it was really nice to be able to dive into this and work with some really good people to get some pretty good subject material out there.

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So why do you think, I mean, I gave the reason why I think this is so important. Why do you think this subject is so important for Christians today?

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Well, there's a couple of things. First, I totally agree with you. When you're out there witnessing and talking to people, this is one of the issues that come up.

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How do you know the Bible is true? Because that actually is how you view

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God. That's how you're gonna view the nature of who Christ is. It all depends on their view of scripture, of course.

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Another aspect is the issue of authority. We're in a culture where people have largely rejected the

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Bible as the authority. And as a result of that, by default, man's ideas are then elevated to supersede

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God and his word. And so by default, that's the religion of humanism. So this subject actually relates to the religion subject here because all other religions one way or another are humanistic because they've elevated man's ideas to supersede

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God's to take people away from God and his word, whether it's Islam, Hinduism, atheism, you name it, all these different religions.

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But particularly in the Western world, the secular forms of humanism are what are dominating. And in that mindset, the

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Bible's automatically thrown out. They've already tossed it out. So when we're witnessing to people, of course, yeah, we have to deal with the subject of how do we know the

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Bible's true, but also a lot of those other general apologetics questions, they're all interrelated right there.

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And that's why it's so important because it's the face -to -face evangelism. You need to know how to answer these questions.

08:24

So, I mean, the main question of the book, how do we know the Bible is true? Let's dig into that. Yeah, well,

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I love that subject. In fact, that's a pretty deep subject. Sometimes people don't realize how deep it really is.

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I love talking to say atheists on this or even people who are Hindu, just because I understand their worldviews.

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I understand their religion. So when they come out and they ask the question, how do we know the Bible's true? They've automatically assumed a few things.

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They've assumed truth exists. They assume knowledge exists. And they assume that we're made in such a way that we can actually understand truth and knowledge.

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So just to ask the question, I want people to realize the Bible has to be true. Now, why do I compare that to say an atheistic worldview?

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An atheist, they are by definition materialistic. They're not out there saying maybe there's no

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God. They're saying there is no God. They're being absolute with that. And their religion is actually built on what's called materialism.

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The only things that exist are the material universe, matter, energy, things like that.

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So they have no spiritual realm. They have no God in their worldview. But when you think about that and take that religion just a little bit further, if everything is material, well, then all of a sudden truth can't exist.

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Knowledge can't exist. Logic can't exist. Because in their own worldview, those things are not material.

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So in their own worldview, they can't even ask the question. So if atheism is true, they can't ask the question.

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They can't get an answer. A lot of times an atheist doesn't realize that. So what they have to do just to ask the question, well, how do you know the

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Bible is true? They have to give up their religion, stand on the Bible's truthfulness, because truth comes out of a biblical worldview.

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We're made in the image of a truthful God. We can understand knowledge. God is all -knowing. We're finite in our knowledge.

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But the thing is they have to stand on the Bible just to ask the question, which is a great way to refute their religion on it.

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Same sort of thing happens with Hinduism. In Hinduism, all is one. Everything is spirit. The material doesn't exist.

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This is the doctrine of Maya. So all the physical stuff doesn't really exist. I know that might scare people's brains, but New Age, Taoism, all these are just rehashes of these

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Eastern religions. And in those religions, if all is one, well, that means that truth and falsity are one and the same.

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Knowledge and having no knowledge are one and the same. So you can't even ask the question in a religion that's an

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Eastern religion. So they actually start to undercut themselves. Now, to bring that back then, how do we know the

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Bible's true? Well, the Bible has to be true. God has to be the truth in order to even ask the question.

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And a lot of times we don't think of it that way. Now, we have a lot of confirmations that the Bible's true, and we can see that in a lot of different areas, but I like to hit the philosophical part first, just to get people's brains going right off the bat here.

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And for those who are not familiar with certain terminology, what you're actually defining is a type of apologetics called presuppositional apologetics.

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Yeah, I really am. Yeah, and this is something I think a lot of people are confused with with Answers in Genesis.

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I've noticed this over the years, and most people think that Answers in Genesis is an evidential apologetic organization, but listen to the arguments made.

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I remember the debate that Ken Ham had with Bill Nye, and it's like that, what was he doing?

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Making a presuppositional argument. I think that a lot of people are confused with Answers in Genesis in that way.

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I had, years ago, we had Chinese people, students at universities that were going to be

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Chinese missionaries in China. What they were doing in that is they were using, it was an exchange student program.

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So they would go there with the purpose of being exchange students for a summer to do this leadership program with Chinese students.

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They lived with the students, so it was like this future leaders, they want to get to learn Americanism.

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So they would talk about what it's like in America, but what these guys would do is all talk about things that led them to sharing the gospel.

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They'd talk about Christmas and Resurrection Sunday, things like that. Well, one of the students, he was a physicist, actually did volunteer work out at CERN, if you're folks who are familiar with CERN, and he was very much against Answers in Genesis.

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And his argument was, because he does science, and he was all into believing the science of things, but I discovered he really didn't know much about Answers in Genesis.

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And I remember asking him, I said, so what's the purpose, do you think, of Answers in Genesis? And he goes, well, to prove that creation is right and that science is wrong.

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And I said, no. So you missed the main point of it. The point of Answers in Genesis, as Ken Ham always says, is to give

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Christians trust that the Bible is accurate. It's not so much for the unbelieving world, and that's what people think.

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It's not a ministry as much for the unbelieving world, but for the believing world. And so, go ahead, explain about that more.

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Yeah, there is those misconceptions about Answers in Genesis. We're a Bible -upholding ministry.

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We often want to go out and preach biblical authority. That's what we're on about. As a corollary, you get a relatively young age of the earth out of that.

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And the scientific aspects of creation. But yeah, first and foremost, we want people to walk out of here going, wow, the

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Bible's true. And because the Bible's true, the message of the gospel's also true. And guess what? Things start lining up.

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But when it comes to presuppositional apologetics, sometimes we throw that name out there and people are like, well, what is that?

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Sometimes they haven't heard of it. So sometimes I like to explain it before I talk much about the name.

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But basically, we start with God as the absolute presupposition. And by extension, of course, then

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His word comes with the authority of God Himself. And there is no greater authority than God and His word.

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You know, I like to think of Hebrews 6, 13, when the Lord swore to Abraham, He swore by Himself because there is nothing greater.

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There is no greater authority than God in any matter. And of course, His word comes with that authority of He Himself.

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So that's what we're standing on. We're standing on the authority of God and His word before we look at anything. Now, you know, there's evidential apologetics and classical apologetics, a lot of different methods people have thrown out of there.

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Those are methods that more came from the Greeks where you start with logic and you try to look at things from a, you know, you try to look at evidence from a logical perspective and you try to build on that.

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And if you get to a certain point, then, oh, well, maybe the Bible is true or maybe God does exist. But those are all probabilistic arguments.

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We flip that around. A lot of times, you know, people who are familiar with presubstantial apologetics, you might go back to Cornelius Van Til or Greg Bonson.

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Greg Bonson was famous for the great debate where he debated an atheist, Dr. Gordon Stein, and just left the guy speechless on the stage.

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And, you know, he pulled the rug out from under him, you know, because this atheist, he couldn't account for logic in his own worldview, you know, which is pretty powerful.

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So let me clarify a couple of misconceptions here, though. You know, with presubstantial apologetics, we do use evidence.

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You know, in an evidential perspective, they do have presuppositions. I think a lot of people, they just don't understand the methodologies properly.

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You know, as somebody back in my youth, I actually used to be a diehard evidential and classical apologist.

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And then once I understood presubstantial apologetics, I'm like, oh, wow, okay, this solves everything. Let's flip it and let's let

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God be the absolute authority from the very first verse. And it really is a powerful apologetic when we do that.

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Yeah. I'm getting feedback from somewhere.

16:19

Okay. Hopefully that's not me, but yeah. Okay. So this is what we end up seeing is the fact that it's your starting point, right?

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And if we have the right starting point, which is what answers in Genesis has been about, right?

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The starting point is not the world has got the right answer when it comes to science. It's that the

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Bible has the right answer. Right. To start with for everything. And yeah. Isn't the catchphrase defending the authority of scripture for the very first verse?

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Yeah. The very first verse is in the beginning, God, then that's where you begin. That's where scripture begins. That's where we begin.

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And that's where our apologetics must begin. That's right. And all this different scientific aspects or the different arguments that we make, whether it's general apologetics and so forth, those are nothing but a confirmation of what we expect to find in scripture.

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And that's why I like to use that terminology. When we look at chemistry or biology or physics, these are a great confirmation of scripture.

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The secular world, because they're not standing on the authority of God's word, sometimes they can do some good science.

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Sometimes their conclusions and things can go way off the mark and sometimes they don't understand why.

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So, you know, the way we do it, starting with the Bible, looking at science, things actually make a lot of sense.

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Let's look at - To the disciplines. Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, go ahead. All those disciplines, archeology, science, whatever it is, logic, reason, those are just, those disciplines only make sense in a theistic worldview.

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That's right. You know, just look at biology. One of the few laws in biology is the law of biogenesis.

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It states that life comes from life, not non -life. Well, that destroys an evolutionary worldview right there because they believe in abiogenesis, that life had to come from matter.

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Well, that actually goes against the law of biogenesis. Well, life comes from life. That's what we expect in a biblical worldview.

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Even the very first life here on earth ultimately came from God, who is the ultimate life. So even that law of biogenesis is a great confirmation of what we read in scripture.

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Second law of thermodynamics. I know, hopefully I'm not scaring everybody. You probably have a lot of theological people out here.

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Get a science guy on here. But second law of thermodynamics, you know, teaches that things in a closed system go from an ordered state to a disordered state.

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Well, look at the universe as a whole. Where did the order come from in the first place? The only way that could possibly occur is by God's hand.

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You know, in the secular world, they wanna say, well, it popped into existence from nothing. There was no time, no nothing.

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It popped into existence. It was almost infinitely dense and almost infinitely hot. And then it's been degrading ever since then.

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That's all just conjecture. That's just arbitrary storytelling. When you look at it, according to their view, if you look closely, you cannot get the order in the universe.

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There's just no sense within their own worldview. So that's a great confirmation of the Bible. Let's see, when we look at these different laws over and over again, when you have a proper understanding of it, they're a great confirmation of scripture.

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Yeah, and I think the other thing that you end up seeing is that if you don't start with the

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Bible, and I know I've heard Ken Ham say this, not exactly this way, but if you don't start with the

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Bible, right? You start with evidence. Someone else is gonna have different evidence, right?

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The Bible's the answer. And that's what makes it so important to say, well, can we trust it? Because if we can't trust the

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Bible, and yet we're saying that's the standard, what does that end up doing with everything that we're gonna hold to and believe?

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Yeah. Yeah, the Bible's gotta be that standard. Just when

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I was involved in that World Religions and Cults book series, it's interesting. I would see this in every other religion.

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They wanna look at something, but they wanna start with their own ideas to look at it, whether it's humanism, whether it's

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Hinduism. They're appealing to people. In an atheistic worldview or humanistic worldviews, they're appealing to people like Charles Lyell or Charles Darwin and their viewpoints on different things.

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You look at Hinduism, they're appealing to ancient sages. You look at different cults, they're appealing to a particular person.

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Even different religions like Buddhism and Confucianism, you're appealing to a particular person.

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And in every case, they're taking people away from God and his word. And guess what? All those religions run into massive numbers of problems.

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It all comes down to authority. Either God is the ultimate authority or man is the ultimate authority.

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And so that's where it comes down to. Now, that actually relates to a fallacy. I love logic. I've written a lot on logic as well.

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And there's a fallacy in logic called a faulty appeal to authority. Let me kind of explain that.

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Let's say you've got some sort of a medical problem. You can go to a doctor who is an expert on that particular medical problem.

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They've spent 20 years researching it. They got their degree specializing in that. Or you can go to a kindergartner and say, what's my assessment?

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You know, the kindergartner, hey, go have some M &Ms and you'll be all right tomorrow. You see, that would be a faulty appeal to authority because the kindergartner has no authority next to that doctor.

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When it comes to every other subject, the greatest authority in every single matter is God. And so when we reject

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God and go with some sort of man's ideas, you've already committed the fallacy of faulty appeal to authority right off the bat.

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As soon as someone wants to object, so I don't believe the Bible or I don't trust Genesis, they committed the faulty appeal to authority fallacy right from the start.

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Yeah, well, most people don't understand logic and fallacies to start, but yeah.

22:08

So let's dig into the question. I mean, can we trust the Bible? What the argument that we'll get, and we can go through some of the arguments that people will give.

22:20

The Bible has been edited over hundreds of years ago.

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It's an old book. We don't have original copies. People changed it. How do you know you can trust it if people have been changing it over time?

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Yeah, you know, that's actually considered a prejudicial conjecture because when people actually study that subject, that's not really what's happening.

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People aren't just going through, they're making changes, that sort of thing. And I love the fact that we have massive number of ancient copies of the scriptures.

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If you just look at the New Testament alone, we have over 24 ,000 copies and fragments, over 5 ,000 just in Greek.

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So it's not difficult to say, okay, let's take a look at this and figure out what is the text actual saying?

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And I know you've done some writing on this as well. This is called textual criticism. And textual criticism is not an attack on scripture.

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It's trying to actually look, what is the actual verses saying?

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Sometimes words are spelt different over time. Sometimes the grammar is flipped around.

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But you can look at these different ancient texts and determine what it is easily.

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And a good comparison to that, some of the other writings of the ancient world, we don't have very many copies of their stuff.

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Whether it's Plato, Plato, I used to read Plato and nobody ever questioned that Plato wrote Plato. And we only have a handful of copies of what he's done.

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And many of them are separated significantly from when Plato actually lived. Yet the

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New Testament is nothing like that. But when it comes to the Old Testament, we have a number of different texts that have

24:00

Old Testament texts. We have some early translations, the Latin Vulgate, we have the Septuagint.

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So we have a number of things like that. But I mean, Jesus affirmed the

24:11

Old Testament. So it's not like we have to go back to the time of David to affirm it. So when we look at those kinds of subjects, yeah, the text can be trusted.

24:20

That's not a problem. But most people, they just don't understand it. And they wanna throw out those stories. Oh, some monk in the dark ages probably re -edited it or changed it.

24:29

But the texts we find all over the Middle East, North Africa, they all agree with each other.

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So that's not a problem. In fact, I read an apologist once that said, if you take all the variant readings in the

24:42

New Testament and put it on an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper, you can fit it on both sides.

24:49

And yet none of those have anything to do with any significant theological differences or anything like that. So it's not much at all.

24:56

Yeah, when we get to, I'm just gonna,

25:02

I don't know if that's coming from Jim. You just. I'm just sitting here being quiet, man.

25:09

And I was hearing something, okay. Every time you talk, it's the, people don't like to listen to it.

25:14

They just start to get new feedback. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not hearing anything on my end, so.

25:19

Okay, well, we'll have to see if it comes through. I'll just have some editing to do.

25:29

But then I think what the question was. Yeah, trustworthiness of the

25:37

Bible and textual criticism, we kind of dove into there just a little bit, so. I was just gonna ask you a question on something you had said.

25:47

Hey, when that happens. It's all Jim's fault. I'll blame Jim. Yeah, it's all Jim's fault.

25:52

It's the new guy. All right, well.

26:01

You know. Talking about textual variants. Yeah, that's it. And the number of textual variants. Correct, that was it.

26:07

When people say that scripture has been changed over time, nobody can ever point to that.

26:13

In order to make that claim, they have to be able to show what it was and then what it has become. And they can't just assume that they know what it was when there's no manuscript that would reflect what they say that it was.

26:24

Right. Yeah, we deal a lot with that with regards to Islam.

26:30

You know, they wanna call these conflicts when there's a variant. But, you know, in their same Quran, I mean, you see the same sort of variants.

26:38

I know they destroyed a lot of early ones, you know, back in the early days, you know, because they had some of those variants, but, you know, there's those types of issues.

26:46

But just because you read a variant doesn't mean it's a conflict. And so we have to be very careful of those types of claims that people make too, so.

26:54

Yeah, when they say the word conflict, are they talking about a contradiction? Are they saying that that's a contradiction? Yeah, I think that's what they're trying to imply.

27:03

When they see a variant, you know, like, oh, well, this word is spelt a little bit different. That's, it's not a conflict at all.

27:09

It's not a contradiction by any means. You know, there's nothing wrong with that sort of thing, so. And that's actually an interesting subject with Islam because most of them, it's amazing with Islam, you were talking logic.

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I tell this when I teach on evangelizing to different groups like Muslims, you will watch them throw logic right out the window.

27:29

They will understand that in their history, their own history, you know, the third

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Khalif, Uthman, had, because they had the Quran supposedly memorized, you know, verbally, they needed to write it down as their soldiers were being destroyed.

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And it was like, well, okay, what we need to do is write this down. And so he had the soldiers, and there weren't that many of them that wrote it down, but he put, he gathered them all as they wrote them down.

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And his own decree said, we have to burn the abhorrent texts. That right there means they had variances, right?

28:06

They had different ones. In fact, some of them he calls abhorrent, which means these are not like little contradictions.

28:14

And so I'd like to bring that up. And one of the things, there's a guy in the UK, what he actually did was take all the

28:20

Qurans in Arabic, different regions, and shows that there's variances today in the

28:27

Quran. But when you start that way, you can control the texts and say, okay, we only have one, but we know from their own history that there's those.

28:37

And if they're abhorrent, it must have affected, I'm assuming calling it abhorrent affected doctrine, and that's why he would want to burn them.

28:45

But you look at the New Testament, or you look at the Bible, and you realize that when you look at these and say, okay, which ones are meaningful changes?

28:54

So you make spelling mistakes. That's not meaningful. We can get back to the original.

29:00

So we look at whether it's meaningful and viable, whether we can get back to the original. And so spelling mistakes, punctuation, which there was no punctuation in the original, that's 75 % of them.

29:10

There's only 1 % in the category where it's a meaningful change, and we can't get back to the original.

29:15

Those are the ones, like you were saying, you could put on two pieces of paper. And it doesn't affect a single doctrine.

29:21

We wouldn't call any of it abhorrent. I mean, it's things like, was Jesus a carpenter or the son of a carpenter?

29:26

Well, the meaning does change there. We can't get back to the original, but big deal. Does that affect any doctrine?

29:34

Right. And a lot of times, if your dad's a carpenter, you're a carpenter too, so they might - So they could both be true.

29:41

Right. Yes. So it doesn't really affect it one way or another. I know when dealing with a lot of these different world religions,

29:50

Islam is probably one of the biggest ones people want to throw up. They want to say, well, they've got an equal and opposite book.

29:55

And say, why the Bible next year compared to the Quran? Or sometimes people want to say that about Jehovah's Witnesses.

30:02

Well, they got their scriptures, or Mormons, they got their scriptures. The problem with people trying to bring those up is

30:09

Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, they all generally agree that the Bible is true. And that surprises a lot of people.

30:16

In the Quran, a number of times, it says that the Bible's true. I've got a whole list of the verses that say it.

30:22

Repeatedly, it affirms that the Bible's true, but then it goes about to contradict the Bible. Well, all of a sudden, that actually puts their religion into a problem.

30:29

When they say that the Bible's true, but then they deviate from it. You know, in the Quran, it says that no one can change the word of God.

30:37

You know, which means the Bible shouldn't have been able to change. And yet here they are arguing that the Bible's verses have changed.

30:43

Yet at the same time in the Quran, it says that its verses have changed. Just to give you an idea, that's 6

30:48

Surah, that's chapter 6, 34, and chapter 10, 34 in comparison to Surah 2, 106,

30:58

Surah 15, 90 through 91, and 16, 101. That's just, you know,

31:04

I don't want to throw all these numbers out there, but I just want to have a reference. So people realize that we're not, I'm not just throwing some of this out,

31:10

I pulled it up. But other little things, you know, the Quran claims that the triune

31:16

Christian God is actually three different gods, the father, mother, and the son. And that,

31:22

I mean, no Christian holds to anything like that. It's father, son, and Holy Spirit. But they say that two different times in Surah 5, 73 through 75, and in 116.

31:34

So, you know, we see that a number of different times. And these things kind of surprise people because they want to say these are equal and opposite, but they're really not.

31:45

They're affirming that the Bible's true, but then they're the ones that are making the contradiction and the deviations.

31:51

Yeah, I remember I was debating Joshua Evans, and I brought up that exact issue that you mentioned.

31:59

And when I brought up the Trinity and said the father, the mother, and the son, there were a lot of heads going like this until Joshua Evans, who grew up in a

32:09

Christian home, knew what the Trinity actually is. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, we don't believe that. And all these heads went from up and down to no.

32:16

It was amazing how they just followed the lead. And I always wished that I had the video like on them.

32:25

Because most of those in the audience didn't know the Bible. And this is the thing that I end up finding with Muslims is

32:31

I will ask, it was in New York City, and a guy that you may know of, but Anthony Silvestro, who

32:38

I do ministry with, we were in New York, and he saw this family of Muslims.

32:44

And he goes, hey, yeah, my friend over there, Andrew, raise your hand, he'll talk to you. And so this family came over.

32:50

He just didn't want to deal with addressing Islam as he was doing open air evangelism. So this whole family comes over and they're telling me, this guy, he is a professor at a university, teaches

33:03

PhD students. So he's not an unintelligent man. I watched him throw logic out the window over and over.

33:08

And he goes, I understand Christianity. Well, you believe in three gods.

33:14

And I said, no, we don't. No. And so literally we got 25 evangelists out there and I'm grabbing one after another, just asking him to find the

33:23

Trinity, to find the Trinity. And after like six or seven people, he goes, okay, I get it, I get it, right? And so this was the thing

33:30

I ended up leaving him with was, here's the thing, have I misrepresented your religion at all?

33:35

And he goes, no. I said, but over and over again, you've misrepresented ours. The definition of the

33:41

Trinity, these aren't small things. Definition of the Trinity, who is the Trinity?

33:46

And then some Christians may have heard you say that and go, what? But they would argue that the

33:52

Trinity is made up of the father, the mother, and the son. That we believe Mary is

33:57

God. Even Catholics deny that, though they put her, they give her attributes of deity.

34:03

And so I can understand why we would make the argument that they actually put her up there, right?

34:09

But for a lot of Christians, they probably heard you, Bodhi, go, and went, what? Because they probably don't know the

34:14

Quran so well, but Muslims don't know the Bible so well. So they look at this stuff and their starting source is the

34:22

Quran. And then they say, well, the Bible's wrong because the Bible doesn't agree with the Quran. And yet the

34:28

Bible was the one written first, right? It's like, okay. And see, that's a big point.

34:34

I'm actually glad you mentioned that because you're supposed to use previous scripture to judge any later scripture.

34:41

That's always been the principle in the Bible. Use Moses to look at the prophets. Use the Old Testament to look at the

34:46

New Testament. And that's what we saw. We saw Paul arguing for Christ, not from what was being newly written, but from the

34:53

Old Testament. So you stand on the previous scripture to judge any later scripture. So when it comes to something like the

35:00

Quran or the Book of Mormon or whatnot, you're supposed to be using the Bible to judge those. How convenient is it for people to come up with something new and say, well,

35:07

I'm gonna use this as my standard to judge the old. How convenient. Believe it or not, Baha 'i does that to Islam.

35:15

They say, well, no, there's another prophet, or actually a few others that come after Muhammad.

35:21

And now we're gonna re -judge Islam. So they're doing to Islam what Islam was trying to do to Christianity. But now they have it back to front.

35:28

You use previous scripture to judge the latter. Which is kind of interesting because that's actually what

35:33

Islam says, right? The way they explain earlier, like things that were written earlier in time in the

35:40

Quran. Well, if there's something written later, they'll say, well, okay, we start with that, but then it's superseded.

35:46

Right, it's abrogated. Yeah, it's abrogated. So they have that doctrine, but they don't apply that doctrine.

35:53

So what they say, instead of saying, well, the Quran abrogated the Bible, they just say the Bible was changed.

35:58

And yet, as you have pointed out in the Quran, it says that the Quran, inside the

36:05

Quran, that the book, and that's what they'll refer to it as, the book cannot be changed.

36:10

The words of God can't be changed. And they'll refer to the people of the book. That's one of the things I find amazing when we talk about like textual criticism.

36:18

In Islam, they will say in the Quran that you can trust the people of the book and that the book, you know, the

36:26

Bible - The book, the Bible, right. Now, here's the thing. The Quran came about,

36:32

Muhammad was in 700 AD. And so the thing we could actually do in textual criticism is say, okay, in 700

36:40

AD, do we have copies of the Bible that would be in Muhammad's day? Yeah, hundreds of them.

36:47

Yeah. And we can compare them to Bible today. Any changes, Bodhi? No, it's surprisingly accurate.

36:56

You know, and we even have it in multitudes of languages. We have, you know, the Latin Vulgate, we have the

37:02

Septuagint, you know, we have it in Assyriac and so forth. So we see it already in a multitude of languages and they all actually agree with each other as well.

37:12

So, you know, that's a big one. Now, I know a lot of Muslims, you know, sometimes they don't understand

37:18

Christianity. One of the things that I've always encouraged them to do is go back and read the Bible. And, you know,

37:23

I prefer they actually start in Genesis, but, you know, at the very least, read the New Testament, see what the

37:29

Bible says for itself. Because like you said, so many of these guys, they don't know what the

37:35

Bible's actually teaching. They don't understand the theology from the Bible. Just encourage them to go back and read it.

37:40

The Bible, the word of God that is, never comes back void. So if we can get them into it, that's a big encouragement.

37:48

Yeah, so we answered the question of, people say that it's been edited and been changed.

37:55

Some people will say that the Bible's not reliable because it's so old. You know, therefore, you mentioned some of the other writings.

38:06

I mean, one thing I do find always interesting, people don't question the gospel of Mary Magdalene.

38:15

The, you know, the code, the Da Vinci code was based off of this. And yet, so few people realize that we have one copy of that document, and it's in French.

38:28

It's not even in an original language. So we know it's gotta be old enough that the French language was created. And the fact of what we have, we know there's more missing than we actually have because some of it was just time, got destroyed.

38:42

And the whole purpose of it was to prove that the French emperors were descendants of Jesus.

38:49

So we could see a political motive in it. And yet no one questions that book. And we have one copy.

38:56

Why does it become important when we look at comparing that and people trust that, or they believe the works of the life of Julius Caesar, where we have only a handful of copies,

39:06

I think like a dozen copies. Why did the number of copies affect this understanding of trusting the

39:13

Bible? Well, the more copies you have, the more reliable it really is. So it's almost too simple of a concept, but so many people miss it.

39:24

But when you have a multitude of these copies, particularly ancient copies, it allows us to see what the original text was.

39:32

And when you see these different texts and you bring them together and you can compare them and be like, oh, well, guess what? They match up.

39:38

Guess what? They match up. Guess what? They match up. We can be pretty certain that these were the texts that people were copying as they go about.

39:45

And you know what? Yeah, people are gonna make grammatical mistakes. They're gonna do little copious glitches or punctuation.

39:50

That's going to happen, especially when you look at variations in languages. You know, when

39:56

I did that book on the Tower of Babel, you know, languages change. They're constantly changing.

40:01

You know, I marry a lady who was from Australia and let's just face it, that's a whole different language. It's English, but it's different.

40:09

You know, I've been to Canada, hey, take off, we're about to get to States. You know, it's a different language.

40:16

Tennessean is a different language. When I went to England, there's actually a multitude of variations of English just in England.

40:23

And yet English is considered a Germanic language. So when you think back, even at the time of the

40:29

New Testament, being copied and going to different places, you've got variations in the Greek, you've got variations in a lot of different things.

40:37

So sometimes these people are copying it, they want to put it in their local variant. And there really wasn't anything wrong with that.

40:43

That communicated to their local audience and that was actually correct grammar. But we look at that today and we say, oh, we see some of these variations.

40:51

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. It actually shows the reliability compared to something like Plato or, you know, some of these

40:59

New Testament apocryphal books or stuff that's written long later. You know, like that French copy there.

41:07

I suggest that was something written way later, probably just as a story. You know, people write stories all the time, you know, and people do plays and things like that.

41:17

So we had to be very careful of that sort of thing. But we still see that even today among a host of subjects.

41:23

You guys remember when the Noah movie came out with Russell Crowe? I mean, that's just a rewrite of what we read in the

41:31

Bible that was so bad, so atrocious and so unbiblical, it's not even funny. And the sad part is people watch that and they go, oh, wow, that's what

41:40

Christians believe? That's in the Bible? You see, I mean, people are doing that all the time and yet people don't question, you know, that script.

41:48

They don't question those types of things as much. But when it comes to the Bible, they wanna question it, even though there is no doubt we've got the scriptural support for it.

41:57

There's someone who I know who actually believes that the mountain ranges are basically rock giants that died.

42:07

Where do you get that? I've never heard any of that. I think it was from the Hobbit. The movie, The Hobbit, I think is where that came from.

42:12

Oh, okay. I don't know. You know, it's funny you mentioned the Noah movie with Russell Crowe.

42:18

I actually, my wife and I, we didn't pay to watch it. We are cheap. We go to the library. Not gonna give them money, but the library gives it for free.

42:25

So we got it when it was out in the library. And I literally took notes. I wanted to see how many things they got right that were biblical.

42:34

I counted six. And I mean, that included they got the names right. Yeah. It was a big arc.

42:40

There was a flood. I mean, I had to go that level. They couldn't even get the number of people that were on the arc right.

42:46

No, no. I mean. Yeah. I was trying and I could only come up with like six things.

42:53

You know, that movie. You know, here at Answers in Genesis, people are already asking us before the movie ever came out, what's the movie gonna be like?

43:00

Of course we hadn't seen it. So we got a whole group of researchers. We grab our tablets and we all go there, right?

43:05

I'm not kidding. Within the first minute, we're all looking at each other and we're writing so fast.

43:11

We're like, there's so many things wrong. We can't keep track of all of them. It really was that bad.

43:17

See, I took the easier route. Probably because you heard of everyone else by the time I saw it. I just counted how many things they got right.

43:24

It was a much easier way of doing it. Well, I kept thinking if they would have switched the names,

43:29

Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and put other names in there, they probably could have released it as an epic film and nobody would have had any idea that this had any inkling to do with the

43:38

Bible. You know, it's interesting you talk about languages because, and I don't know if there's articles that you guys have at Answers in Genesis on this, but I remember,

43:48

I take a lot of different courses when I would run, I would watch or listen to courses from great courses.

43:55

Again, I got my library to buy them all because they're very expensive. And then I took courses on all different types of subjects.

44:03

And one that I thought was fascinating at the time was a course that I took on languages. And they were explaining how you can actually watch how people move around the world by their language, how it morphs, how it changes.

44:20

You get someone from one area, they move into another area and they start to get a mix. I mean, I grew up hearing

44:25

Yiddish. What is Yiddish? It's a combination of German and Hebrew. And so it's a very common thing that was spoken, especially by Jewish people after the

44:36

Holocaust. But what is that? That's two languages merging together. And you could see how people move around the world.

44:43

And the thing I thought was the most interesting thing with it was the professor explained that there are what they call proto -languages, first languages.

44:52

He said there was 12 to 13. And the reason there's a possibility is there's a click language where they just make clicking noises.

45:00

And so it's not speaking, it's clicking. But he argued it does have a grammar that defines a language. Some people don't define it as a language.

45:08

So 12 or 13. And here was the thing I thought so fascinating. You got 12 or 13 proto -languages, first languages that aren't from something else.

45:17

All these other languages we have are combinations of other languages or morphing languages.

45:22

Mixings and - Yeah. And so you look at that and you go, well, where did those all begin?

45:28

I mean, if evolution was true, would that mean that suddenly someone in China, you have a person who, they all spoke one language or spoke no language is really what it'd have to be.

45:39

And they spoke no language and migrated. And then different areas, they all just started speaking a language.

45:45

I mean, to me, that was an argument I'd make for the Tower of Babel that just blew people's minds on the streets because they never heard the argument.

45:52

I always look for arguments people never heard of. No one knew anything about proto -languages. And so I would start speaking about that.

45:59

And I don't know any other, I haven't seen any other Christians bring that up. I know you got working on a Tower of Babel over there at the

46:07

Arc. Yeah, we do. And we've got researchers behind the scenes, but there have been a number of people that have done it and given lectures on it.

46:13

Even in that book, the Tower of Babel, I go through some of that and give a little bit of history because there are certain root languages that come out of Babel.

46:23

And then those root languages tend to change. Some of them have gone extinct, actually. Some of them, we don't know exactly where they went and which languages they became, but others we can actually trace pretty well, which is kind of a neat little aspect.

46:35

You know, one root language was the language of Eber. That's Peleg's father.

46:41

Eber became Eberu or Heberu. That's where the Hebrew languages came from. And you have

46:47

Arabic that came out of that. You got the Chaldean languages, East and West, that came out of it. Edomite, Biblical Hebrew, even

46:55

Modern Hebrew. You know, they all have those roots that go back to that. So you see those variations in those languages.

47:01

The Germanic language family actually goes back to Noah's great -grandson, specifically

47:06

Ashkenaz, who settled up in that particular region. And we still see a reflection of his name,

47:13

Ascandinavia or Asaxon. So those names still reflect, but a lot of times people don't put those together because they don't realize where it came from.

47:20

And, you know, English is kind of a mixture language between German and the French Norman when the

47:26

Normans conquered England and the two languages mixed. But I don't want to scare everybody with that.

47:32

But the point is, as we study languages and different linguists look at this sort of thing, it really does,

47:38

I would say, provide good support. It's a good confirmation, if you will, of what we read in scripture, particularly

47:45

Genesis chapter 10 and the breakdown of these different languages. So, yeah, there are people doing that.

47:52

And I know a lot of people who translate the Bible or some of the people behind the scenes, at least studying some of these languages, trying to get into these various languages all around the world, especially some of the newer places.

48:05

Now, I don't want to scare people, but people are creative. They can come up with new languages.

48:10

And we have a lot of new languages that have been developed. Just think of something like Morse code.

48:16

That's essentially a type of language that's been created. Esperanto is a created or constructed language.

48:23

And there are people out there nowadays speaking Klingon. That's officially a type of language.

48:29

But it also shows the brilliance of a creative mind being made in the image of a creative God.

48:37

So, you know, I see even that kind of stuff as a confirmation of what we read in the early pages of Genesis.

48:43

Hey, Bodhi. Yeah. How many languages would you say all the languages could go back to?

48:49

When Andrew talks about having 12 or 13 root or original languages, what would we postulate was actually split up at the

48:57

Tower of Babel? How many would there have started with then? Yeah, well, I know we always had to be very careful of the secular world whenever they throw out some of their numbers, because out in the secular world, they have a motive to try to get it down to a single proto -language.

49:10

Some sort of grunting type of thing that came out of Africa from some dumb brute. But when you look at Genesis chapter 10,

49:18

I would say that there's probably a minimum of somewhere between 70 and 78 root languages.

49:24

Like I said, some of those have disappeared, so we don't see those reflected today because they've been conquered, they've been assimilated so much that we've lost some of that.

49:34

So somewhere in that neighborhood. Now, I say a minimum number there, because when you look at Genesis chapter 10 and it breaks down the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth that gives you a listing of all these people that came out with new languages.

49:48

And if you tally that up, you get a certain number there. Some of them are cities that could have been named for a son, so there's a little questionability in there.

49:56

So that's why I say around 78 -ish or so. But at the same time,

50:02

Shem's line, it doesn't give you everyone in Shem's line. In Genesis chapter 11, when it re -picks up Shem's line, you see that there were other sons and daughters in there.

50:10

So there might've been some others there too. So when it comes to those root languages, I like to give a range, but at the same time, we always have to be very careful about what the secular world says.

50:20

But I love the fact that the secular world, they're doing everything they can to get it down to one proto -language and they can't.

50:27

They stop at like the 12 or 14, and they're like, there's just no way these languages come together because they're so incredibly different.

50:36

You can't even make a case for it. Yeah, and we're really dealing with a lot of presuppositions that go into numbering that as well.

50:43

In the secular world, their presuppositions would include that we have to, or we can go back to one proto -language.

50:50

They're really not using anything as a guide other than the presupposition that man evolved from a primitive state and we all would have spoke the same language at some point, which you and I would agree that all of humanity spoke a common language at one point, but they wanted to eliminate the flood in the

51:06

Tower of Babel. And so their presupposition is that we can get back to that original number. Our presupposition is that you can, that at one point there was an original language, but that there was instantaneous explosion and languages were created out of thin air by God who confused the languages of humanity.

51:24

And notice how it all comes back together. Sometimes we miss this at Pentecost, by the power of the

51:29

Holy Spirit, we got to see those languages come back together and it shocked people in that day.

51:34

So I think it would give us a taste of what it's going to be like in heaven, you know, seeing all that come back together. So you're hoping that eventually you'll be able to speak

51:43

Australian? Oh my, I don't know if I can ever master that one.

51:48

So after I got married, my wife yelled out the window, hey, bring up the Esky. What's an

51:55

Esky? So I literally went to the truck, grabbed everything out of it. I laid it out in the kitchen.

52:00

I'm going to figure out what an Esky is. And she walked right over and grabbed the cooler. Esky, Eskimo, cold.

52:06

And I'm like, oh, I would never figure that one out. Yeah, I mean, that's,

52:13

I always tell a story. I had a friend of mine, he was, you know, he went down to South America to speak and he said the phrase, you could take a hike, which they didn't understand.

52:25

They don't know hitchhiking. And he took his thumb, put it in the air, as we understand in America to hitchhike, you put your thumb in the air and you with your fingers closed and you just raise it up and down as if you, you know, for people to know, hey,

52:38

I'm trying to hitch a ride. I want to ride down the road. And the guy, the translator was looking at the ground because he didn't know what take a hike means, but then heard an audible gasp.

52:51

And he looked at the crowd and then looked at the speaker and the speaker's doing his hand signal. The guy takes his hand, puts it down and asks him, what does take a hike mean?

53:01

So he explains it, then he translates. Well, my friend who was the speaker realized something happened and he asked him afterwards.

53:07

And basically in that country, the way to pick up a prostitute is to put your hand in the air that way.

53:14

So here the translator's silent because he doesn't know what take a hike means. And this guy's doing this obscene gesture, right?

53:21

And he doesn't know, he doesn't know. But that actually happens with culture.

53:27

And so when we look at the Bible, this is one of the things that people often do.

53:32

We look at our culture and we read the Bible in our culture and try to say, well, for example, we talked earlier about Islam.

53:41

One of the things many Muslims will say to me is the Bible never says that Jesus is God. There's nowhere where it says

53:47

Jesus is God. And the way that they'll phrase it, and I had this with the debate with Joshua Evans.

53:53

He says, nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say, I am God, worship me. And I sat there and I agreed.

54:00

And which he's surprised. I said, that's absolutely right. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that exact phrase.

54:06

And nowhere in the Quran does it say, this is the Quran written by Muhammad or from Muhammad and it's from God.

54:14

It does, that exact phrase doesn't exist either. Therefore Quran, we could throw it out, right? Yeah.

54:20

How much is it that, how much does culture play into the reliability of the scriptures?

54:27

Well, it plays an immense, especially when you're reading the context of what's going on in different situations.

54:33

And I would say that a lot of people who claim that there are contradictions in the Bible is probably because they

54:39

A, haven't read the context or they don't understand the actual situation that was going on back in that culture.

54:46

You know, I mean, just think of little things like, you know, Jesus has, you know, cast the legion out.

54:51

This is a legion of demons that had inhabited someone. He cast them out into the pigs and then they run over the cliff.

54:57

Well, at that time, they're not supposed to be eating pigs anyway. You know, so somebody shouldn't be doing that in the first place.

55:05

There go the pigs. Everybody was a bit upset, but hey, guess what? In the old covenant, you weren't allowed to eat pigs.

55:11

They were considered unclean. Swine was unclean. It wasn't until later on that Jesus declared all foods clean. Now you can eat pigs.

55:18

Jesus just got rid of the last of the unclean ones, but I don't know. He did it like that, but sometimes people don't understand.

55:26

Well, why did Jesus go out there and attack all those pigs? That's people's food. See, they're not understanding the culture of the times, and so sometimes they run into some of those problems, but that's just one of many instances.

55:39

There's so many things, especially you go all the way back to the time of Abraham, you know, that people don't understand those little intricacies, and so they try to read it as though it was written here in the

55:49

United States or in England, and they struggle with some of those things, and that's why

55:54

I like to encourage people, go back, when they're reading the Bible, don't be afraid to dive into some of the old commentaries just to get a little bit better understanding of the situation before they go off and try to make any attacks on the

56:06

Bible. You know, just recently this past week, I was, the past week of when we were recording,

56:13

I was preaching through Mark 13 and came upon one that many people struggle with, and that's where Jesus seems,

56:20

I mean, we say Jesus is God, so he's all -knowing, and yet there's a passage where it seems like Jesus is saying he doesn't know something that he doesn't know the day or the hour, only the

56:32

Father knows, and this is a thing where, and I've heard people explain this and say how, well, in his humanity, he doesn't know something, but in his deity, he does.

56:42

Some try to split those two, which is a heresy. Some try to explain that he laid down his divine attributes, which becomes a problem as well.

56:51

Some just say he willingly just didn't exercise those attributes, which we do see him doing that at times, where the exercise,

57:00

I mean, he still has them, but to say he doesn't know something, and I see people struggle with that, and I said to my congregation, the thing is when

57:08

I was, when I first heard this preached, my pastor spent a lot of time trying to explain this, like 20 minutes trying to explain this, and I came up to him afterwards and said, why didn't you just explain that it's a

57:20

Jewish idiom? And he was like, it is? And so I ended up realizing that, I mean,

57:25

I heard that growing up in a Jewish home. It's a reference to a marriage where the father would, basically someone would get a house ready, get it together, and he doesn't know the day or the hour he's gonna go get married, only the father knows, and it's a phrase to say you should have to live an expected lifestyle, like any moment is the moment, which, if you look at the context, is exactly.

57:48

Yeah. What it talks about. And so when you look at the culture and understand the time, and we don't always have things that help us with that, but if we understand some of the idioms, it saves us from getting into where people will say, see, here's a contradiction in the

58:03

Bible. Jesus is supposedly God and knows all things, but here he admits he doesn't. And I've heard people try to make that argument, and it's like, well, it's a

58:10

Jewish idiom. It's like saying, I'm so hungry I can eat a cow. I'm sure you think I wouldn't actually be able to eat a cow, and it's probably because you've never seen me eat when

58:18

I was much younger. Let's go hit the sack. Huh? Let's go hit the sack. Yeah. That's another one.

58:26

Sometimes people don't understand some of that phraseology. And sometimes I kind of wish that certain translations of the

58:33

Bible would actually nail some of that stuff just a little bit better. Sometimes people really wanna be word for word, but then you miss those idioms.

58:41

In other cases - You have to change with time, and this is what even the King James writer, translators knew.

58:46

They wrote it in the prefix, right? That language is gonna change. And there's no contradiction either when we have that.

58:54

And I guess that is something we should mention. When you speak to people like Muslims or other groups, when they say there's contradictions in the

59:02

Bible, they're usually talking English translations. Yeah, right. So is a different English translation.

59:10

So we have a King James, New King James, ESV, Legacy Standard Bible, which just came out.

59:16

You have these different ones. They're gonna word it differently. Are those contradictions, Bodie? No, they're not. An alleged contradiction, somebody at least wants to try to bring one up.

59:26

They really need to go back and compare it to original language texts. Because when it comes to translations, people can make those mistakes.

59:35

But yeah, the key is in the original. In fact, a lot of people's statements of faith, and we have that here at Answers in Genesis, is the text is inerrant in the original autographs is the way we oftentimes like to word that or phrase that.

59:50

So that people have to be very careful saying, well, here, this English translation says this, and they kind of mess it up.

59:56

And a lot of times I've had people wanna bring that up and they wanna say, well, see, look, the message says this. Well, that's kind of a paraphrase in the first place.

01:00:05

So we have to be very careful of the thought for thought kind of things where you can get some of those glitches. The word for word where it's a lot more accurate, but sometimes you miss the idioms.

01:00:15

So, you know, trying to have a good balance in there is probably the best, but I know that's a whole book in and of itself to write up all those, but...

01:00:24

Yeah. So getting, if I can insert something here, Andrew, getting back to something that's connected to the reliability of scripture is the issue of sufficiency.

01:00:32

And this is something that I've written on. Is the Bible sufficient that we can make the case that the

01:00:38

Bible is accurate and true, and yet there are many Christians who would affirm that, that the Bible is inspired, it's inerrant, it's infallible, it's true, we can trust it, it's been accurately translated, it's been accurately transmitted.

01:00:50

We can have confidence that what is written today reflects what was originally written and they can make that entire case and believe all of that.

01:00:58

And yet at the same time, not believe that scripture itself is sufficient for all of life and godliness. And these are two things that though they're separate, they really are connected.

01:01:07

If the Bible is true, it's also sufficient. So maybe you could talk for a moment just about the connection between those two items, those two positions.

01:01:14

Yeah, that's really good. In the book of Jude, it talks about, the faith is once for all been delivered to the saints.

01:01:21

There shouldn't be a question about the sufficiency. That doesn't mean the Bible is giving us all knowledge. It's giving us what is sufficient for us.

01:01:28

And at the same time, all scripture is useful for correcting, rebuking and so forth.

01:01:34

So the Bible is sufficient. The 66 books of the Bible, that's our standard right there.

01:01:42

We don't need anything else. But that's where it gets interesting because a lot of the cults and a lot of groups that wanna add something to the

01:01:48

Bible or take something away from the Bible, that's where they're attacking. They're attacking the doctrine of sufficiency to say, okay, well now let's add, say the

01:01:56

Book of Mormon or doctrines and covenants, or they wanna add the Quran or whatever it might be.

01:02:02

They're attacking the sufficiency of scripture. But once again, use previous scripture to judge the latter, and that's usually not a problem.

01:02:11

Correct. Well, Bodhi, how can folks get ahold of you if they wanna learn more?

01:02:18

I mean, obviously they could go to Answers in Genesis, and I have the link from Answers in Genesis in the show notes.

01:02:24

And they could see, you've written quite a number of articles, quite a number of books, so they could just go. I'm sure

01:02:29

Answers in Genesis would not mind if they would go to the bookstore and just buy everything that you've written, I'm sure.

01:02:35

That's right, yeah, they sure could. Yeah, AnswersinGenesis .org. Of course, if they come to the

01:02:40

Creation Museum or the Ark Encounter, a lot of the books are featured in there as well.

01:02:47

I do wanna encourage people, hop on the website. There's so much to read on our website.

01:02:53

I mean, we refute things like evolution, millions of years, but we also refute false religions and so forth.

01:03:00

But there's so much on our website that I've written or even that some of my colleagues have written, or a lot of the stuff on there

01:03:06

I've actually reviewed over it. So I've still got my fingerprint on it whether you see some of that or not. But they may as well bookmark our website,

01:03:13

AnswersinGenesis .org, because they could spend millions of years on our website. Oh, my jokes go downhill after a while.

01:03:21

Yeah, but yeah, a number of books. I write most of the stuff.

01:03:28

I want it to come through to a general audience. I mean, junior high, high school kids, adults should be able to read most of it.

01:03:33

Every once in a while, they might get to something that's kind of a higher level. And I've even written some stuff for kids.

01:03:40

But most things that they see, I would say that the general layman and the few should be able to read that and get a lot out of it.

01:03:47

I will say this. If it's gonna take millions of years to read everything in Answers in Genesis, I'll tell you this, what the audience will need is a good pillow.

01:03:56

And so now might be a good time for us to announce our sponsor, which is MyPillow. They are an

01:04:03

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01:04:09

As regular listeners, you know, I have been trying much of their products. I keep trying, every month or so,

01:04:16

I try something new. This month, I got their slippers, which I absolutely love. And so I work out of the house, so I'm in slippers most of the time.

01:04:25

Bode, your wife was from Australia, my wife was from Hong Kong, so we don't wear shoes in a house. And so I wear slippers.

01:04:32

And so, you know, I usually go out and get these cheap slippers every year because I get them from like Costco or wherever where they're like 10 bucks.

01:04:41

And at the end of the year, they're got holes going through. Well, I have these so far, we'll see how they, I'll give a report at the end of the year and see if I'm throwing them out and getting new ones.

01:04:49

But they're very, very comfortable, I have to admit. And right now, they're having their sale, the lowest price ever on their pillows.

01:04:58

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And so you can get an American -made pillow. And at the same time, if you use promo code SFE, that will help to support striving for eternity.

01:05:14

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01:05:26

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SFE to get their discounts. So thank you for that. And you might need one, if you're gonna read everything that Bodhi said is there,

01:05:38

I had answered just because you need to take some naps. Listen, this is a lie. I know you can go through everything on the website in seven literal 24 -hour days.

01:05:47

And you can even spend one of them resting. There's your transition to the pillow.

01:05:55

Yeah, that would have been a better one. See, and that's the whole thing. We used to, Jim, in the old days, we'd play the spiritual transition game, which we haven't played in a while.

01:06:03

Maybe we should play that with Bodhi. So Bodhi, before we end, we'll play a game and let me find if I still have the music for it.

01:06:11

But here's the music. Then we'll transition into the transition game. Let's dive now to start the spiritual transition game.

01:06:22

Okay, Bodhi. So there's no pressure on you. All the pressure's on me. So the reason we started this game is because many people think that the hardest thing in evangelism is the swing from the natural world to the spiritual world.

01:06:38

And most Christians feel, if I get into a spiritual conversation, I'm great. Then I can handle it.

01:06:43

I know the Bible, but how do you get that conversation going? And people pray, Lord, please give me an opportunity.

01:06:50

And I've said for years, you don't need to pray for an opportunity. You just need to make an opportunity. If you practice over and over, transitioning from the natural to spiritual, you could take anything and get into a gospel conversation.

01:07:03

So the way this game works, Bodhi, is you're gonna come up with something, whatever it is, and I get to take whatever you say and transition from that to the gospel.

01:07:13

And folks, this part, whenever we play this game, I do not edit this. So if there's long pauses or stupid things I say, they remain in there.

01:07:20

So you get to see how long it may take me to transition. And Bodhi, I will have to admit to you, because people seem to like to do this,

01:07:28

I am pop culture illiterate. So if you give me sports, music bands, movies,

01:07:33

I'm clueless, okay? So anything you can think of.

01:07:40

All right, that's a nice shirt you've got. Not really. It looks kind of holy, because it has in the anchor list.

01:07:50

No, I'm not going that way, Jim James. Oh, that was low. That was just, that was cheap, man.

01:07:57

You gotta come up with something better than that. Oh, I wasn't planning to go there, but I just, when I looked in the, when he said it,

01:08:03

I just looked in the camera and realized like the dots really do look kind of bad. It's not as clear as the

01:08:09

TV at Answers in Genesis at the Ark Encounter. But, you know, the thing we think about with clothes,

01:08:16

I mean, why do we even wear clothes? If you think about it, right? We live in different cultures, different temperature, different areas where some places need more clothes, some people, some areas need less, even at different seasons, which is an amazing thing to think about that we have these seasons.

01:08:30

If we didn't have all these seasons, we wouldn't survive. I mean, the earth is in this perfect rotation where we have, the sun is a right distance from the earth to be able to have all this.

01:08:41

The rotation is just right. So we have different seasons where we can have the winter and the summer. And yet, even with that, we ended up having to change the clothes we wear.

01:08:50

But, you know, it wasn't actually that way in the beginning. In the very beginning, you didn't need that. You didn't need to have all the clothes because everything was a perfect temperature.

01:08:59

And this is going way back, but what happened? Well, actually the entire universe was affected by something that two people did when they broke the commands of God in the garden and ate of fruit.

01:09:10

And the curse of sin came into the entire world. And God even says in Romans chapter eight that he's gonna restore the entire universe at some point.

01:09:18

But here's the thing. You and I are in a state where we are in that state where the effect of sin has affected you and I, and we both break

01:09:25

God's law. And because of that, we are accountable to him. We are criminals in his sight, but God himself came to earth, died on a cross that we could be set free and be forgiven of sin.

01:09:36

So that's one way of going from my shirt to the gospel. Without talking about holiness there, Jim. As far as my shirt being holy.

01:09:47

But it is a practice, folks. If you get used to practicing that game, and I've told this many times, my first pastor is the one that got me doing it.

01:09:56

But the more you practice, the easier it gets. It's like anything else. Practice makes permanent, not perfect.

01:10:04

This is something you learn in martial arts, right? You practice incorrectly and you're going to do it incorrectly. But the more you practice, the better you're gonna get.

01:10:12

And you no longer have to say, Lord, please give me an opportunity to share the gospel. You can make that opportunity, even over a shirt someone mentions about you.

01:10:20

Yeah. Hey, I've got a question for Jim, as a pastor's take on something. You've got different people that come into your church.

01:10:29

Some, they've been there for years. They're probably very well -articulate in a lot of these types of things.

01:10:35

But then you have the person that comes in that knows hardly anything, off the street kind of a person. When you preach to a lot of these guys and you want to get into some of these apologetic type subjects, how do you do that from the pulpit, knowing that you've got some people that are up here and what they know, and other people that are down here?

01:10:52

How do you make the rubber hit the road when you deal with some of these apologetic subjects? You know, in fact,

01:10:58

I just did this last Sunday I was preaching on Hebrews 11, three. By faith, we understand that the worlds were formed or prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen is not made out of things that are unseen.

01:11:09

And I'm just preaching through the book of Hebrews right now. So I didn't pick that passage because you and I were going to be talking about creation.

01:11:15

I didn't know you and I were going to be having this conversation until late yesterday. So when

01:11:21

I preach on a passage like that, there's obviously a lot of apologetic issues that come into it. There's an epistemology is wrapped up in that verse.

01:11:28

It's like, how do we know what we know? Are there things that we know by faith and things that we can know without faith?

01:11:34

So the issue of epistemology is in there. Apologetics, I think that there's a presuppositional approach to apologetics in Hebrews 11, three, that it is by faith and embracing what

01:11:43

God says beginning in the book of Genesis, that we are actually able to know that certain things happened. And so there's that issue.

01:11:49

And then of course, there's just the issue of the nature of faith and how that ties into the context. And so on Sunday, when

01:11:55

I was addressing that issue, I talked a little bit about epistemology, but I tried to make it very, not pop culture, but on a popular level, something that everybody can understand.

01:12:05

What do we mean by how we know what we know? What is epistemology? And what is a presuppositional approach to apologetics?

01:12:12

And then in dealing with some of the objections to the text, I'm trying not just to give the answer to those objections, but I'm trying to give the answer to those objections in a way that clicks with people.

01:12:23

So that when I say that by faith, we understand that everything's created out of nothing, I would then say that the atheists or the evolutionists also believes that everything came from nothing, but they just believe that it came from nothing by no one.

01:12:35

And we believe that it came from nothing by someone. And of course, by faith, we understand that there's a logical contradiction in their worldview.

01:12:42

And sometimes I think you can just point out that, what I try and do is point out that logical contradiction in a humorous, sometimes straightforward, sometimes really, yeah, just a blunt way almost, and I think that that resonates with different people on different levels.

01:12:59

There are gonna be people there who, when I say that there's an epistemological view in this verse, they understand exactly what

01:13:05

I mean. And then there are other people when I say, epistemology just simply means, how do I know what we know? And how do

01:13:11

I justify what I know? And how do I know that what I know I know I actually know? You know, I can put that down and people are like, oh, okay,

01:13:18

I understand what epistemology is then suddenly. And you're kind of putting it in a way that I think, I try and shoot for everything there.

01:13:26

There are gonna be kids there that aren't gonna understand what I'm saying, but there are gonna be adults there that don't understand what I'm saying on some levels.

01:13:32

But I try and put hay on every level of that as I can and throughout the message so that everybody's walking away with something.

01:13:39

I am aware that there are people there that are gonna be coming in with no concept of what I'm talking about or some of those issues that are tying in.

01:13:47

And, you know, I'm trying to make sure that they're understanding what this text means. And sometimes I just putting it bluntly and simply,

01:13:54

I can do that. I'm always aware that I've got people at various levels there. All right, thanks.

01:14:01

And that's actually the sign, Jim, of what I would say of a good speaker, preacher, pastor.

01:14:07

It's something that my first pastor drilled into me as well. Use the terms, use the big terms.

01:14:12

Don't be afraid of them, but you must define them. And I think that's why I look at our school, the

01:14:18

Striving Fraternity Academy. We have people who are pastors who watch, take those courses.

01:14:24

And then we have people that are in homeschooling that take them. And I've always been amazed at homeschoolers because it wasn't geared toward high school or junior high.

01:14:32

And yet they learn. And the thing that parents always say is it's exactly that because you don't just use the term, but define the term.

01:14:40

Now, granted, it might be some of my quirky humor that keeps their attention, but hey, at least they're learning. But I think that's a thing that many people don't do.

01:14:50

And I think there is a branch within Christianity where you get guys that wanna use the big terms because it makes people look up to them and look how much they know.

01:15:02

The worst thing I think someone could say to a pastor is, boy, that was deep. Because what that typically means is

01:15:09

I had no idea what you were saying. Yeah. And I think one of the challenges in communicating is that we don't talk down to people, even though we know that there are people that are on that level.

01:15:19

I always try and make sure that I'm not making those people feel like I think that they're stupid or that I'm up here and I'm trying to dumb it down so you podunk morons off the street can understand this or you simple

01:15:33

Christians who've never heard anything profound can understand this. You don't wanna talk down to people. You wanna recognize, you wanna put things in simple terms, but without making them feel like you're stepping down out of your ivory tower to communicate with the hoi polloi down in the valley.

01:15:49

And that's a challenging thing to do. And sometimes you hear seeker sensitive pastors do this all the time where they will try and, they're aware that they're appealing to the goats.

01:15:59

They're aware that they're appealing to unbelievers. So they bring these people in and then rather than taking complex theological issues and trying to make them understandable, what they do is they just kind of gloss over the complex issues as if those aren't important.

01:16:11

And we're just gonna really keep it simple for you simple people. And that's how it comes across. And if we have a simple person in our congregation,

01:16:19

I want that person to walk away thinking, okay, he knows that I'm here. I don't understand what he's saying, but he asked me to reach up.

01:16:26

Rather than putting on a level where I had to look down at what he was saying, he was asking me to look up because this guy who's speaking from the pulpit actually thinks that I'm intellectually capable of understanding these things.

01:16:37

And I want people to feel like they're always asked to look up and to aspire to something rather than putting it down so low that everybody feels like you're just talking down to even the kindergartner in the class.

01:16:48

Yeah, and that's a good point. One of the things that I always struggle with when I'm out there chatting with people,

01:16:55

I don't know who's gonna walk up to me or when I'm chatting with someone, are they at this level? Are they at this level?

01:17:00

Where do I start? Where do I begin? And so the key is trying to understand where that balance is just within the first two minutes of chatting with someone to find out where they're at to be able to kind of take them to the next level.

01:17:15

Or not take for granted. And this is what I do is whenever I'm speaking to someone,

01:17:20

I've just built in the habit of using the terminology but then defining the terminology. And guess what?

01:17:26

If someone knows the terminology, they're not offended when you define it. And so you use it, they know what it means.

01:17:33

Jim used the word, it's okay. So you use this word, do you have to say, okay, that is the history of the way a word has meaning.

01:17:44

Right, do we gotta define etymology? Okay, well, if they know the word, great. We use presuppositional apologetics.

01:17:51

Did we define it? Yes, right? It's so, you could throw the word out and someone that knows what that word means goes, okay, gotcha, right with you.

01:18:00

And if you define it, they don't look bad at that fact. They just, typically what most people do that understand the term, when you define it, they're looking to see if they have the same definition as you, which is actually another benefit because if they have a different definition, then it gets corrected.

01:18:17

I mean, there's so many terms that we have within Christianity that people have different meanings.

01:18:23

I mean, the one that has the biggest term that has more meanings than people is probably the word

01:18:29

Calvinist. I think everybody has a definition of a Calvinist. Some people have two or three, right? I'm using definition 37.

01:18:36

Yeah. Doing that, if you're gonna use a term and then you define what you mean by that, if someone has a different meaning, they correct it and now you know where they're at.

01:18:48

And that helps you sink because you've dealt, Bodhi, with different religions.

01:18:53

You deal with Mormonism. They're gonna say a lot of language that we would agree with. They believe in a

01:18:59

Trinity, but it's a very different Trinity than us. Right. It's the definitions behind it, yeah. Correct.

01:19:05

And so by doing that, even a term that we could take for granted like Trinity, if I'm speaking to someone who

01:19:11

I don't know if they're a believer or not, they're out on the street witnessing, I will define it that, you know, well,

01:19:19

Trinity, that there's three separate distinct persons in one being as a

01:19:25

Godhead so that each of them are separate and distinct, but they're each God, right?

01:19:30

Now that's gonna help because if I get some person that says, well, Jesus isn't God, right? It causes a stumbling block, even though they may say they believe in a

01:19:37

Trinity. And so it's helpful to do that and then you can gauge.

01:19:44

They help you gauge where they're at by agreeing with you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

01:19:50

Hey, thanks guys. Yeah. Well, Bodhi, we appreciate you coming on. We appreciate all the work that you're doing there at Anson and Genesis and you really don't do a lot of writing, we understand.

01:20:02

You just sit around all day. Yeah, I need to get some slippers and a MyPillow in here in my office.

01:20:09

There you go. The only reason I'm co -hosting for Andrew right now is I was promised a pair of MySlippers, we'll see.

01:20:15

Ooh. I think you got a MyPillow, didn't you once? I did, yes. So for the slippers, are they the correct size, you know, or do they run a little big, a little small?

01:20:25

They do run different and they end up, they say on there that they run smaller. So if you do get those, you want to get them.

01:20:33

So I had tried to get them some time ago and realized these aren't going to fit me. And so I gave those away and then bought a new pair.

01:20:43

I got you. Yeah, they do run, I think mine were about, I'd have to check the order.

01:20:49

I think mine were like a size or two off. So yeah, you definitely want to get a little bit larger.

01:20:56

And they say that on there. Okay, that's good to know when you go to order, so. Yeah, so far my favorite thing is the mattress topper.

01:21:05

I love their mattress. I have the three -inch mattress topper, love it. It helps me sleep and I don't like to sleep much, so.

01:21:16

So Bodhi, thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing, I'll be back out your way in May. All right.

01:21:22

Truth Matters Conference. So I look forward to getting together with you then. And maybe we can grab lunch and talk more.

01:21:29

Yeah. Hey guys, appreciate it. It's been great being on. And if I can ask you to be praying for the

01:21:34

Ministry of Answers in Genesis and our various outreaches. So folks, be praying for Answers in Genesis, be praying for Bodhi with all the work that he does there and all the writing he's doing.

01:21:45

The reality is folks, we need people like this to be able to get the truths of God's word into our hands.

01:21:53

And so he's someone who you may not know, maybe you didn't see his name. You usually see his name next to Ken Ham's and you see

01:21:59

Ken Ham and forget about his name. But the reality is these are the people behind the scenes that we need to be praying for.

01:22:06

There's a lot of people in Answers in Genesis that are behind the scenes. Most of them are behind the scenes, probably 99 % of them are behind the scenes and be praying for them, pray for the ministry.

01:22:17

If you have a church that is not familiar with Answers in Genesis, maybe you can have one of their speakers come out, have one of their workshops at your church.

01:22:28

They do that as well, but their website is full of resources. So we thank

01:22:34

Bodhi for coming on and we look forward to talking to you next week. This podcast is part of the

01:22:39

Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.