Apologetics 101: The rock of Scripture — Michael Penfold

All scripture is given by inspiration of God. Literally all scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. So that's our verse tonight.

Scripture as the Impregnable Rock

The Bible claims that itself, all of it, all of scripture is God-breathed. So tonight we've called this the rock of scripture. Now I've really taken that from a former Prime Minister of Great Britain there.

We, long before any of us were born, there was a Prime Minister by the name of William Gladstone. He was actually Prime Minister more than once and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a great combatant with Disraeli.

Anyway, enough of that. William Gladstone in 1890 wrote a book called The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. Somehow I can't imagine many Prime Ministers writing that today. But anyway, William Gladstone wrote a book called The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.

In other words, he's saying the Bible is a rock. It's a solid foundation. So that's the question tonight. Is the Bible a rock or is it sand? Can you rely on it? Is it true? Is it reliable? Should we bother with it?

Or is it just some relic of ancient history, well past its sell-by date, full of myths and legends? We've been looking this week at an event in history called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, roughly 1685 through to 1815, otherwise known as the Age of Reason.

On Monday night, we looked at how the Enlightenment undermines the concept of truth, moving us away from God as the source of truth to human reason as the source of truth. And we looked at various men like Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant and Spinoza, these men who said, we don't need to subject our minds to a book.

We can think our way to truth. Then on Tuesday, we looked at how the Enlightenment and the years that followed up to today had undermined belief in God as a creator. The average young person in Great Britain today does no longer believe that God created the world.

Wednesday, we looked at how the Enlightenment undermined belief in God as a designer, the old argument that everybody used to believe that because we were complicated and life was complicated and everything was just beautifully designed, there must be a God.

And between Mr. Hume in the Enlightenment years and Darwin later, they said, no, there's another explanation. It all came by natural selection and adaptation. Again, the design argument has fallen flat on its face.

Even though it's a very sound argument, people have believed the lie of evolution. But tonight, we're going to look at how the Enlightenment undermined belief in the Bible as the word of God. You say, how did the Enlightenment shift people away from believing in the Bible?

Enlightenment Rationalism and the Rejection of Revelation

Well, if you remember from night one, the man called Descartes who started this whole business in the 1600s, who was the father of modern philosophy, he said, we don't need to subject ourself to this book.

We can think our way to truth. This was the beginning of rationalism. It's very good to be rational, but rationalism says we don't need God, we can think our way to truth. So that was already a shift away from bowing down to a holy book and accepting a revelation from God.

Forget revelation. Forget something being revealed to us that we don't already know. We can find out all we need to know by ourselves. So already the word of God's being shaken at that point. We don't need it anymore.

We can think our way to truth. But then in 1687, Isaac Newton, who was a believer in God, no doubt about that, he published a three-volume book called Principia Mathematica. It was a life-changing, world-changing book.

He expounded in that book things that people didn't know about before. The law of gravity, the laws of motion, how the planets all move, and he actually boiled it down to mathematical equations. Prior to that, people kind of thought that the whole thing was really sort of unpredictable and unquantifiable, and now it was almost like, oh, now we see how it works.

Now, of course, Mr. Newton was quite happy about that. He was saying, isn't this wonderful that God has designed it like this? But the atheistical enlightenment thinkers like Hume and so on, well, what they thought was this.

Well, if the universe is like a machine and it goes by laws that we didn't know about, like gravity and the laws of motion, and if it's all something that you can work out on a piece of paper, it's obviously, the world in which we live is a mechanical world.

It's got laws to it. That's not a world in which we can have virgin births. That's not a world in which we can have miracles and people feeding 5 ,000 with five loaves and two fishes and fire coming down from heaven and burning up Sodom and Gomorrah and floods and Jonah swallowed by a whale.

We can't have that because this universe has laws, and to have miracles would break those laws. So we really can't have all that at all. And so a lot of people, as a result of that, they shifted from being theists to being deists.

You say, what's the difference? Well, a theist, if you're a believer in the Bible and a believer in God and so on, you're a theist. You believe that there is a God and he can do whatever he wants. If he wants to do a miracle, that's fine, not a problem.

You're a theist. But a new category came along called a deist. They couldn't really bring themselves to say there's no God. But a deist says God started it and then he backed off and he has nothing to do with it.

It's like a clock. He winds it up, he sets it going. There is a God, but he doesn't do miracles and he doesn't do anything special. He's not involved in this world anymore. So it was a kind of a halfway house between atheism and true belief in God.

But of course, once you start shifting, you keep shifting. And the children and the grandchildren of the deists ended up being atheists because if there are no miracles, what do you do with a book that's full of miracles?

See the point? If you start doubting that we can have miracles, that God can intervene in his creation, that people can be healed, that floods can come, that Samson can pull down the pillars of the temple of Dagon.

Well, if we're to believe that's true, then well, it's gonna make it not very intellectual and how are we gonna fit this all into enlightenment science? And so what began to happen was, people began to go back to the Bible and said, well, maybe it doesn't really mean what it says it means.

And a whole discipline was born called higher criticism. I was taught higher criticism at school. So actually what happened when Jesus fed the 5 ,000 was this little boy pulled out the loaves and fishes.

And when he did that, everybody else felt so guilty that they pulled out their five loaves and two fishes too. That's what really happened. And they went back and reinterpreted the Bible and tried to sort of explain away all the miracles.

And well, there really wasn't a universal flood. There was just a local flood. And Mary wasn't really a virgin. She was just a young woman. And they went through biblical history and they found no miracles there.

And they went through heaven and they found no gold there. And they went through hell and they found no fire there. And they went through Jesus Christ and they found no God there. And they went through this book and they found no inspiration there.

No divine authorship. And that's where we are today. You could find a Bishop in the Church of England. I'll just speak about the Church of England from where part of the world I come. You could find a Bishop in the Church of England who believes everything I've just said.

Such is the end result of this enlightenment thinking that we can't have miracles and we can't have a book that talks about miracles. This is all unscientific. It's not enlightenment. So this is a massive issue.

I hope you understand that. This is a massive issue. We Christians are staking our all on the fact that it is the word of God. And the atheists are staking their all on the fact that it's not the word of God.

I mean, if they're wrong, they're in trouble, right? It's very important to them this is not the word of God. It's very important to us that it is the word of God. So what I'm gonna do is seek to point in the direction this evening that this is the word of God and that it stands up to scrutiny and that you can discover that for yourself.

I don't want you to believe this is the word of God because I tell you. I want you to believe this is the word of God because you read it for yourself and you discover that yourself. But I'll give you some pointers towards it.

The Textual Reliability of Scripture

Now, we're gonna ask a couple of preliminary questions rather than just go straight in. Here's the proof. This is the word of God. We need to just back up and take a couple of preliminary questions. The first question we need to deal with is how do we know that we actually have in this Bible what was originally written?

Talk to the average atheist and they'll say, oh, that's not the same Bible that was written years ago. It's been changed. It's been corrupted. Talk to the Mormons. They'll say the same thing. Oh, you need to have the Book of Mormon because the Bible's changed.

A lot of people, even religious and non-religious people will tell you that this isn't the same book. So I just read to you a letter which apparently Paul wrote to Timothy. What's the chances that it actually is the same as he wrote 2 ,000 years ago?

That's a question you need to ask. So there are three ways that we can deal with this. There obviously was some kind of letter written years ago from Paul to Timothy in original Greek and it's been copied and copied and copied and copied and copied and copied and copied.

Then it was translated into English and then into other languages and it's been copied and copied and printed and printed and printed. And I've got a version that was printed in whatever year. How do I know this is what Paul wrote to Timothy?

There are three tests that you can do with the Bible and with any other book to determine whether you've got what was originally written. The test of proximity, the test of frequency and the test of accuracy.

You say, what does proximity mean? I don't know whether you've ever done this but when you copy something out by hand it's very easy to make a mistake. You copy the same line twice or you miss out a line or you miss out a whole paragraph because that line repeats itself and you took up on the second one.

You can imagine since the days of the printing press obviously very few mistakes get made because you just get a photocopy. But back in the days when things were done by hand on the back of a mule, as it were, on papyrus it's very easy to make mistakes.

So how do we know that loads and loads of mistakes were made and we haven't got the same thing? Well, if we could get a copy that was close to the original so this was written, my margin says AD 66. If I could get something sort of quite close to that I'm likely to have less mistakes.

The longer it goes on and the longer the gap there is well, it's very, very difficult. Well, you can actually track this if we put the next slide up. In this slide here on the left hand side you've got a bunch of books from ancient history.

Then you've got a list of when they were written. Then you've got a list of the dates of the oldest copy available and then it works out the gap. So for example, there's an old book called Homer's Iliad.

Homer was a man and he wrote a book called the Iliad. He wrote it 880 BC. The oldest handwritten ancient copy that exists in a library somewhere is 400 BC which means there's a 480 year gap between the date he wrote it and the oldest copy we got.

So quite a lot could have happened in that 480 years wouldn't you say? How do we know it's the same as Homer wrote? It was copy to copy to copy to copy to copy. We lost the copies, we've only got this one.

Same for Caesar's Gallic Wars, a thousand year gap. Same for Tacitus's Annals, he's a Roman historian. A thousand year gap between the first copy and the oldest copy that's still around in a manuscript library somewhere.

And yet nobody questions Homer's Iliad, nobody questions Tacitus, nobody questions Caesar's Gallic Wars. But here's the wonderful thing. The New Testament was written between 50 AD and 100 AD. We actually have a copy of part of John's Gospel from 114 AD.

You can go and see this, it's in Manchester. It's called P52, P means papyrus because they're written on papyrus and 52 means there's a 51 and there's a 53, this happens to be number 52. This is a scrap of the Gospel of John.

There's two bits because there's a front and a back. It's John chapter 18, if you can read Greek, you can read this, it's John chapter 18, verse 31 to 33 on one side and verses 37 to 38 on the other. There were no verse numbers back then, but we know that now.

The date of that copy is somewhere between 100 and 120 AD, it was found in Egypt, which means since the Apostle John actually wrote the Gospel of John in 95 AD, well, it's not the original, but it's within somewhere between five and 20 years of the original.

That is mind-blowing. The gap between the oldest copy of John 18 and the original is less than some of the teenagers here. It's not 1 ,000 years. So somebody says, oh, but John 18's been changed. You can check it, go to Manchester and check it.

You can actually go to Dublin. If you've been to the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, they got stuff like that in there. There are various libraries around the world that has got copies of the Bible.

You say, well, that's just a scrap of John. What about like the whole of John? Well, there is a complete New Testament. You can go and see it in London. It's in the London Library. Go any day, it's free.

Go to London Library, there's a big book there. It's called the Codex Sinaiticus because it was found in the Sinai. It's dated 325 AD. Remember, the New Testament was all completed by the end of the first century, which means we have an entire New Testament copy, a handwritten old, old, old manuscript that is within 225 years of the closing of the New Testament.

You say, well, that's very interesting. Yeah, well, not only the proximity, how close it is, but the frequency. If you look in the far right-hand column, you've got how many ancient copies are available.

So Homo Zillia, there are 643 ancient handwritten copies in libraries all around the world. Caesar's Gallic Wars, there's only 10. And you can buy probably a penguin paperback of Caesar's Gallic Wars, but we're talking about ancient handwritten manuscripts.

There's only 10. So if you want to work out exactly what Caesar said, you've got 10 books to choose from. And if there's changes between them, well, you pick your bets. Nine say this, one says that. Six says this, four says that.

It's not going to take you very long, is it? Because you've only got 10 witnesses. Tacitus' Annals, 20. The New Testament, 5 ,366. So I've got a more recent figure than that one. I pulled that off Google today.

5 ,686 ancient handwritten Greek and Latin manuscripts of the New Testament. Which is to say, the New Testament is the most highly documented ancient book in the world, with more handwritten manuscript evidence for its reliability than any other 10 ancient books combined.

So if somebody says to you, you can't rely on what the Bible says, it's all been changed, they don't know what they're talking about. You say, okay, well, what about the accuracy? You mentioned proximity and frequency.

What about accuracy? Well, the Bible exhibits a massive level of accuracy. Now, the reason for that is this. If I'm copying out an article from the daily newspaper, I'm not really bothered if it's absolutely perfect.

But if I'm a Christian about to be thrown to the lions, and I believe this is the word of God, and I happen to have a copy of Matthew's gospel or a page of John's gospel, and a friend says, can you make me a copy?

Because I believe this is God's word. I'm gonna be very careful to get it copied out properly because I don't want it to be changed because it's not my word, it's God's word. The Old Testament scribes, the Jewish scribes, when they used to write out the Hebrew Old Testament, they would actually count the number of letters at the end of each page.

And if it didn't have 326 letters for that page, tear it all up and start again. And they would wash themselves every time they wrote the word Jehovah and so on. It was a whole elaborate business. Now, let me give you an example.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Isaiah's Preservation

I really hope you're listening at this point because this is fantastic information. There was a book in the Old Testament called Isaiah. I-S-A-I-A-H. It's an ancient book, which is particularly loved by Christians because it seems to talk about the Lord Jesus Christ before he was born.

Now, what do you do with that if you're an atheist? Well, probably what you'll do is, oh, that wasn't. If it talks about the Lord Jesus, then it probably was written later and somebody claimed it was written older, and this is how they get on.

Now, up until 1947, you could probably have got away with that because up to 1947, the oldest copy of Isaiah was dated around about 900 or 1 ,000 A .D. So let me just paste this out for you. So Isaiah writes his book around here, 700 B .C.

700 years before Jesus was born, Isaiah writes a book. His original gets lost. It's not on durable paper. It doesn't last. Somebody copies it, somebody copies it, somebody copies it. The Lord Jesus is born, dies, and rises again.

We keep going, 1st century, 2nd century. Right over here, we're now in the 10th century, and there's a codex Aleppo. There's another codex. His name's just gone from me now, but there's a couple of codex.

The codex Leningrad, that's it. This is an entire copy of Isaiah somewhere around 1 ,000 A .D. Can you work out how long that gap is? That's a 1 ,700 year gap between when Isaiah wrote it and our oldest handwritten Hebrew manuscript.

Now, an atheist can have a field day with a gap like that. He can say, well, what's the chances that that copy over there is the same as the one that was originally written? And, well, it's very difficult to sort of make a watertight empirical case that that's so, until 1947.

So in 1947, there's this little shepherd boy down by the Dead Sea on the northwest coast of the Dead Sea in a place called Qumran, and he sees some sort of caves up above him in the rocks, a sort of arid kind of place, and he picks up a stone, and he lobs this stone into this cave, and he hears a cracking sound, and they kind of think, I wonder what that was.

And they clamber up, and they go into this cave, and they find jars, big, big jars like this, full of scrolls, and cut a long story short, they found 1 ,400 documents. It was over 100 ,000 scraps of paper and some big ones, and in one of the jars, there was a copy of the book of Isaiah.

You're not gonna believe this. An entire copy from chapter one to chapter 66. It was written on 17 parchments stitched together. It's 23 foot long, because it's a scroll, it's rolled up. They dated it, and they discovered, you can check this up anywhere online, it was dated 125 BC.

So it's definitely written before Jesus was born. So if it says anything about the Lord Jesus, that's quite amazing. And number two, it put the gap back from being 1 ,700 years to now being 600 years.

So there was great excitement, because now you can actually look at it and say, well, is it different? Is the one that we've been relying on all this time, the Christians have been saying, this is what Isaiah, is it really what he wrote?

Because now we can turn the clock back, so they got this scroll out, and they actually compared it. Now, the chapter that is more loved than any chapter in Isaiah is chapter 53. Now, the reason everybody loves that chapter is because it talks in detail about the Lord Jesus Christ.

It doesn't mention his name, but it talks about how he will be despised and rejected, he'll be buried in a rich man's tomb, he'll be crucified between two thieves, all of that is there. So they got the 1 ,000 AD copy, and the Qumran caves copy, and they compared them.

You can actually see them line by line on the internet. Anybody can see this for free. And in Isaiah 53, apart from a number of spelling changes, slight grammatical things, there was only one word different.

In verse 11, the Hebrew word light, L-I-G-H-T, which is actually only three letters in Hebrew, was added into verse 11. They were the same after 1 ,100 years, all bar three letters, which means to say, this book is the same as was originally written.

Now, I spent quite a long time on that, but I think it is very, very important that you grasp that. This Bible can be trusted because we have what was originally written. Some of you may remember a fellow from Prince Edward Island called Peter Oroszuk.

He came here and preached the gospel. He was a drug dealer and a drug user from Prince Edward Island. I met him a number of times. In fact, he came to Bicester and preached the gospel. The first time he ever heard the gospel was when somebody visited his home.

He had a gun sitting on the table and all of this, and he was a complete and absolute atheist of everything. And they tried to sort of share the gospel with him, and he was having none of it. He mocked it.

Oh, Christianity is just a crutch and all this, and they didn't know what to do. And one of the men said, let's just read the Bible together and then we'll go. And so this man who was visiting the drug dealer read Isaiah 53.

Now, he didn't tell him, he didn't introduce it. He just, let me just read a chapter from the Bible. So he read this chapter, and Peter later said he felt like crying when he heard it read. And he was kind of shaken up by just this chapter from Isaiah 53.

And when it was finished, he kind of gathered himself together, and he said to the man, oh, I know the Jesus story. I know the Jesus story. I know the Christmas story. Well, he didn't realize he just put his foot right in it because the man said, how did you know that was about Jesus?

So he's this drug addict. He doesn't read the Bible. And he immediately knew that this chapter was about Jesus. So it was like, well, anybody would know that. And then he dropped the bombshell. He said, the chapter I just read to you was written 700 years before the Lord Jesus Christ was born.

So how could it be about the Lord Jesus? And that was the first bit of light in that man's darkness. He eventually was converted to Christ and became a preacher. That is empirically provable. You can go to the shrine of the book in Jerusalem and actually see Isaiah 53 in a copy that predates Christ, talking about his life and his death and his resurrection.

Internal and External Evidence for Trustworthiness

There is no excuse for you to be an unbeliever. But the second question is, not is it the same as was written, but is it trustworthy? So this is the second question we have to ask. We've asked the question, have we got what was originally written?

We've answered that. But even if we've got what was originally written, can you trust it? I mean, you could have someone that was originally written and it's just a fairy tale. That doesn't mean it's the word of God.

So we have to just take one more step. Is it trustworthy? We know we've got what they wrote, but is it just a pack of lies? Is it a bunch of exaggerations? Is it just a load of ramblings from the first century?

So we have to answer this question. Now, there are two ways that you can answer it. You can give internal evidence and you can give external evidence. In other words, you can read this book for yourself and you can find out if it's full of exaggerations, if it's authentic, if it's totally biased, you can read it for yourself and you will find it's not.

For example, if you were to read the gospels, you would find that the disciples talk about their own failures. So Peter talks about how he denied Christ. I mean, if he wanting to concoct a fantastically exaggerated rose-tinted spectacle story, would he include that?

If they were following the Lord Jesus as their Messiah and they wanted everybody to join them, would they include things like the Lord Jesus saying, if you want to follow me, you have to give up everything.

You have to hate your father and mother and love me. Would they include things like when Jesus rose from the dead, the first witnesses were women, back in a century when that would not have counted in a court of law?

Would they have included the fact that they didn't believe and wouldn't believe and refused to believe? You know, sometimes people look at the gospel of Matthew and the gospel of Mark and they go down and say, ooh, there's a contradiction here.

In one, it says there were two blind men in Jericho and the other one says there was only one. Oh, it can't be true. Well, just think about it. It's quite possible that there were two and that the gospel writer who only mentions one wanted to home in and emphasize one.

That's perfectly explainable. That would have been in a daily newspaper. But if you think about it, that's actually more likely to be a reliable unbiased account than if you went through Matthew, Mark and Luke and John and found them exactly the same in every spot.

If they were exactly the same in every spot, what would you be saying? Oh, they all copied each other. This is a con job. This is just collaboration. So the fact that they give different angles is actually part of the story of its authenticity.

Authenticity. But not only internal evidence, but external evidence. You say, what do you mean by that? Well, what that means is this. Well, let's take archeology. 25 of the New Testament is written by one man.

His name's Luke. He's a doctor. He says he's a doctor. Now, even though he only writes two books, he writes Luke, strange to say, and he writes Acts. These are two big books. And if you put them together and add up the words, it's about 25 of the New Testament, one man.

And if you go through those two books, what you'll find is he mentions 32 countries, 44 cities, nine islands. He had mentioned assorted ports, streets, gods, temples, theaters, officials, officers, customs.

There's lots of room for mistakes and lots of room for errors. Now, back in the 1800s, there was a man called William Ramsey. He was the top authority on Asia Minor, archeology and everything. And he was not a believer.

And he decided he would put this to the test. I will go to the Middle East and I'll have Luke in one hand and Acts in the other. And I'll say, right, okay, let's see if this is true. Do these 44 cities exist?

Was there such and such a person? Was there such and such a place? Did they used to do this in those days? And back in England, the skeptics and the atheists and the enlightenment scholars were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought that this top man, William Ramsey, would come back and say, it's all rubbish, it's not true, it's not there.

But when he got there, he found it was there. And William Ramsey became a Christian. And he came back and much to their disappointment, he said, you know what? You could go with a Bible in one hand and a trowel in the other.

And you just go, it should be here somewhere. Oh yeah, there it is. I'll tell you what he said. And I'll quote you. Luke was a first rate historian and his book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world.

Written with such judgment and skill and art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement. That's just external evidence that this is not a bunch of made up nonsense. It contains the facts of the matter.

But secondly, contemporary literature. Now you don't have to know this stuff to know that the Bible was a word of God, but it is useful. Now maybe you didn't know this, but back at the times when the Lord Jesus Christ was on earth, it wasn't just Matthew, Mark and Luke and John who wrote about him.

There are 17 other non-Christian books contemporary with the Lord Jesus Christ who mentioned him and to give something like 50 details of his life. You can check these up yourself because of Google, you can read all this.

So look out for people like Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Lucian and so on. I'm just gonna give you one and then move on. A man called Tacitus. If you've never heard of Tacitus, he was a Roman.

He was the greatest historian of the Roman Empire. And he wrote a book called the Annals of Tacitus. And he wrote all about the emperors and the wars and all of this stuff. Now he was not a Christian.

In fact, he hated the Christians. Most Romans wanted to get rid of the Christians and they burned them at the stake and they threw them to the lions. So this man is not only a witness, but he's a hostile witness.

Now a hostile witness is very important. Someone who's on your side could potentially exaggerate or could say, well, it was really wonderful when it wasn't. But if you've got someone who's a witness, a first century witness, but he's actually against you, then what he's likely to say is gonna be very interesting.

So let me quote you what he said. I think we've got it on a quote, the next one. This is a Roman historian on the first century who's against Christ. And this is what he said. You can read it online for yourself.

AD 115, Nero, the Roman emperor, fastened the guilt for the burning of Rome and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class, hated for their abominations, called Christians by the population. Christus, that's Jesus Christ, from whom the name Christians had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty.

That's how they described crucifixion. During the reign of Tiberius Caesar, at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. What do you think of that? That's not Bible. That's the greatest historian of the Roman empire.

Now, I don't say that to you because that's more important than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or we should now breathe a sigh of relief that we now actually have some evidence. I don't say that at all.

I'm just throwing that at you to say, as external evidence that what's in here is reliable, you couldn't get anything better than that. The archeology tells the same story. The contemporary literature tells the story.

You have internal evidence that you've got a trustworthy volume. You've now got external evidence that we've got a trustworthy volume. So, we've established two things in brief. There's a lot more we could say for obvious reasons.

We have in the Bible what was originally written, and it is trustworthy, and we can prove that internally and externally. Now, we need to move this to a whole new level. The Bible that is what was originally written and is generally trustworthy claims it is the Word of God.

The Bible’s Self-Attestation and Inspiration

So, is that true or is that false? And if it's true, how would we know it was true? So, that's what I want to do for the final section of our session tonight. How do we know this book is the Word of God or isn't the Word of God?

Now, in answering that question, I want to deal with two issues. Number one, if we can have the next slide, the Bible's self-attestation and the Bible's self-authentication. Now, self-attestation is simply, I'm just simply telling you that the Bible claims to be the Word of God.

So, we read it, 2 Timothy 3, verse 16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. There are other places we could have gone. I'll just use that for now. The Bible is claiming that it is the inspired Word of God.

That doesn't just mean it's an inspirational book or it makes you feel inspired when you read it. It means that God breathed out scripture. Now, the great issue that atheists will always say to it, who wrote the Bible?

If I had a pound for every time somebody asked me that, I'd be quite rich. Who wrote the Bible? Now, village atheism is a very annoying thing because they don't start even to wait for the answer. But the answer to that is this, God is the source of scripture, but he used men as the channel of scripture.

You got that? God is the source of scripture, but he used men as the channel of scripture. So, when the ink was dry on the page, it was exactly what God had planned to say, even though men wrote it down.

Now, the process of that is called the inspiration of scripture. And what it means is this, the Bible is not claiming to contain the Word of God. The Bible is claiming to be the Word of God. Word by word, line by line, chapter by chapter, Jesus Christ himself said, heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will never pass away.

And while I'm on that topic, if you deny that Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and if you deny that Sodom and Gomorrah were burnt up, and if you deny that there was a flood in the days of Noah, you've got a massive problem with Jesus Christ.