The Beauty of the Word

Sermon Transcript:

(transcribed with AI)

Promontory Community Church exists to make disciples of Jesus who know, live, and share the gospel for the glory of God. Amen.

Well, good morning everyone. It is good to be here. For those of you who might not know me, my name is Jonathan, privilege of being one of the pastors here, and kids, welcome. You guys get to join us for big church today. Kids, if you did get a coloring sheet, there are more at the back, you can grab them. If you draw something or color something from the sermon today, you can go to the back, you can see Pastor Rich, and he has some candy for you. So there is incentive, you gotta listen for something, and see if you can draw it. There's gonna be all kinds of stuff we're talking about today, as we talk about the Bible.

If you are joining us, we started a new sermon series last week called Ancient Beauty in the Modern World, and what we are doing throughout this series is seeing how God's word not only speaks to our world today, but actually has more beautiful answers than anything else to modern life. This morning, we're gonna start at the beginning. And the beginning here, what I mean is, what exactly is this book? We have these little Bibles, and we carry them around, they might be on your phone. What exactly is this book and where did it come from? The question I'm really trying to ask is, why can I trust the Bible? Where did we even get this book from?

Honestly, as a pastor, it is a question I get quite a lot as people try and figure out this ancient book. The New Testament is at least 2000 years old, so where did it come from? The Bible wasn't written all at once. In fact, it was written over a very long period of time by a lot of different people, and so oftentimes we get a lot of questions about how that all happened, how did everything come together? Our Bible is written in English, but it was not originally written in English. So where did it come from? How did we get it, how did it get translated, and probably one of the biggest questions I get all the time is, didn't they change it? Hasn't the Bible been changed over the years, over and over again, countless times?

Some people will say they've excluded certain books, right, the church trying to hide or cover up something, got rid of certain books because they didn't like them. If you've ever seen The Da Vinci Code, that's the whole plot basically. But is that what happened? Is that what's going on in our Bible, is it just some edited, changed version that eventually people liked well enough to keep? What do we do with these other ancient books, sometimes Christian, sometimes pseudo-Christian? Or maybe you're looking at it and you're thinking, well, an ancient book like this, certainly a lot has changed over the years. If anyone's ever played the game telephone, you know what I'm talking about. You whisper a message into the first person's ear, and then they whisper it to the next and the next and the next, and it goes all the way around a circle until the very end, and it's this jumbled up mess that everybody laughs at. Well, isn't that what the Bible is? Just a whole jumbled up mess over 2000 years that people have changed, either intentionally or not, countless times.

So this morning, that's actually what I want us to look at. This is probably going to be a very different kind of sermon than I think I've ever given before, but it's honestly a question we need to ask. Because if I'm asking you to actually trust what is in the Bible, how can you trust it? How do you know if that is something that is honestly what happened? Not only can we trust the Bible, but in fact it comes on good authority.

So this morning, what we're gonna do is open our Bibles. If you have one, please open it and go all the way to the end. The very last chapter, the very last verses of our Bible, Revelation 22, is where I'll invite you to turn. We're gonna look at how the Bible ends. Our tradition is to stand as we read God's word, if you're able to, would you stand with me?

Revelation chapter 22 starting in verse 18: "I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this book. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen."

Amen, you may be seated.

Well, these are the final words of the Bible, and really what they are is a warning — do not take anything away from it, don't add anything to it. Essentially, that's what John is writing here. As they are to receive this book, he says, now don't touch it. You can copy it, but do not change anything. Now, let's be clear, this is talking more specifically about the book of Revelation, this final book in our Bible. In one sense, it really just applies to Revelation, but Revelation is not only the last book in our Bible, it's the last book that was written. It was written by the apostle John when he was quite old, probably around 90 AD, so he would have been around 75 years old at the time. He was off in exile, and at the time he was the last living apostle. Every other apostle at this point has died, he's the final one, and he is writing what is the final book in our Bible. So while this warning really only applies to Revelation, it really applies to the whole Bible — here is the conclusion to the whole thing.

But the question we need to ask is, OK, but did anyone listen? Did anyone listen to this warning? We've said, aren't there all kinds of changes that have taken place in the Bible over all these years? How can we actually trust what we have? And so here is our question: can I trust the Bible?

I'm gonna answer this in really two halves. The first is we're gonna have to ask, where did we get this book? And the second is really, on whose authority? Why should I trust it? So this morning we're gonna start with that first question: where did the Bible actually come from? And what we find is the Bible is reliable — it is the reliability of the word of God that we can trust.

Let me be very clear for just a few moments. Our Bible comes in two sections: there is an Old Testament and a New Testament. The Old Testament was written from about 1500 BC all the way to about 400 BC, and it follows the nation of Israel, how God has dealt with this nation. The New Testament is written from about 40–50 AD up to about 90 AD and really focuses on the life of Jesus and his apostles. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, the New Testament is written in Greek.

What we really need to understand when we approach the Bible as a whole is that the Old Testament, by the time of Jesus, is fully understood. Everyone actually understands which books are part of scripture at that point. In fact, Jesus himself is going to confirm it for us — we'll see that a little bit later. But often it's the New Testament that becomes the question: how did we get these books? And really the first answer is they come from eyewitnesses of Jesus. Who wrote the Bible? It was the people who actually followed Jesus, who saw Jesus with their own eyes. Matthew and John are two of the gospel writers who followed Jesus. Luke did not personally see Jesus, but he was with Paul, and in fact he interviewed all sorts of eyewitnesses — he makes that very clear in his account. Mark was not a disciple of Jesus, but he wrote with Peter and followed what he said.

And so the first answer to why can we trust the Bible is because it was written by people who actually saw it — it was an eyewitness account. And what's so interesting is that even in the New Testament, as they were writing, they recognized that what they were writing was actually scripture. Listen to Peter in the book of 2 Peter, talking about Paul and his letters:

"Just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters, there are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures."

So Peter here is putting the letters of Paul on the same level as all of scripture. They recognized even then that what was happening under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was not just off the cuff ramblings, but was scripture itself. I also find it very encouraging that Peter apparently found Paul hard to read too.

But again, the question is, OK, but how do we know? Sure, it claims to have been written by these people, but how do we actually know they wrote it? How do we know it wasn't just made up later? Here's the truth — we don't have the originals. We sometimes call them autographs, the ones they actually signed. We don't have those original writings, so how do we know when they actually were written? How do we know it wasn't just hundreds and hundreds of years later?

Well, the answer is actually because we have copies — quite a lot of them — and not from hundreds and hundreds of years later, actually just from a few years. There is a fragment of the Gospel of John that's been found called P52. The P52 is one of the oldest fragments of the Bible that we have, and it dates to the 2nd century, even as early as 100 AD. This is John 18:31–33. To put that into perspective, that would mean this is a copy from just a few decades after it was originally written.

In comparison to other historical documents, you need to understand how incredible that really is. Take for instance Homer's Odyssey. Homer's Odyssey was written somewhere around 800–700 BC. The earliest fragment of a manuscript that we have of Homer's Odyssey is from 300 BC — so 300–400 years later — and then the first actual manuscript that we have of it comes from 1000 AD, 1700 years after it was written. In comparison, our first fragment of the Bible comes a few decades after it was originally written. In fact, even the first almost complete manuscript of the Gospel of John comes from the 3rd century, not actually that much longer afterwards.

So while this hardly shows us everything that was written, what this does confirm for us is that the gospel had to be written in the 1st century — in fact, it couldn't have been written later because we already have fragments from the second. And so when we ask the question of how do we know these were written by eyewitnesses, well, it's because we know when they were written. Added to that, this is what the church fathers have always told us.

There is a man by the name of Irenaeus, an early church writer who had a book he called Against Heresies. He writes about 180 AD, the middle or end of the 2nd century. He says:

"We have learned from none other the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the gospels come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public and at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the scriptures to be the ground and pillar of our faith."

Essentially in 180 AD he is saying, we have learned about salvation through the apostles who preached the gospel and then wrote them down. In fact, he goes on to say:

"Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what was preached by Peter. Luke, also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia."

So Irenaeus not only confirms here are the four gospels and names the writers of them, but says they were all written by these eyewitnesses and held as scripture. Hear me, there is actually good reason to trust that these are genuinely what was written by the eyewitnesses of Jesus.

But now you're gonna ask me, OK, but how did they decide on those books? Because Irenaeus really only mentions 4 there. How did they come to the 27 books of the New Testament? Weren't there other books that were rejected? What about the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Barnabas? How come the church got rid of them? It's a good question, because actually, we don't get a full list of the books of the Bible until about 367 AD. And that might sound pretty late — what took them so long? And actually, if you know your history, the answer is very simple: they were being persecuted. The early church did not have the freedom to hold a big church conference and discuss this. They were very much on the run. Up until 312 AD when Constantine comes into the picture and says Christianity is now a legal religion, at times they were massively persecuted. So finally, when there is peace, now they can actually get together and start discussing all of these things.

They actually had criteria about what books would be included, because what they weren't doing was choosing, well, I like that one, let's take those. No. Their criteria was: it must have been written by an apostle, by someone who saw and was commissioned by Jesus; it must be an ancient writing, actually coming from the 1st century, not just some late edition; it had to actually agree with the doctrine that was taught in the rest of the Bible; and it had to have always been accepted by the church. So what they were doing was not making up new books, but saying, these are the ones we have always recognized to be scripture itself. And that's where we get our books.

So why did they ignore the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Barnabas? The answer is really simple — they're written 200 years after Jesus lived, died, and rose again. They don't meet any of the criteria that were laid down. They were way later written. So was it an eyewitness account? No — it was something that someone just made up later on, and so of course the church was not going to accept them. There were all kinds of books, even really good ones. There's a book called The Shepherd of Hermas — read it, it's a good book. And they said this is a wonderful book, but it wasn't written by an eyewitness. It's a devotional book, the same way we have Christian books today. They recognized, yeah, that's good, but it's not scripture. So the church was not trying to hide books, but trying to recognize the scripture God had always given to us.

So, hear me — if these are the right books, if they were written by eyewitnesses, the next question is then, OK, but how do we know they weren't changed? How do we know they haven't been changed either intentionally or just unintentionally? Going back to the game of telephone, how do we know it hasn't all been different? Here's where we need to recognize that we don't have just one copy. In fact, we have over 5,000 copies of the New Testament alone from the ancient world, and about 25,000 fragments — fragments ranging from tiny little pieces to almost complete manuscripts.

What we have seen is not just a game of telephone, but in fact we're seeing thousands and thousands of examples of exactly what the Bible has said. What our Bible is, is scholars going, OK, because we have so many, we can actually see what was originally written. Now we need to recognize that yes, there are differences between all of these copies. The number is gonna sound really scary — there's something like 500,000 variants. That sounds really big, right? 500,000 differences that they have found. And that sounds scary until you realize that over 90% of them are spelling and typos — they're just misplaced letters. In fact, they don't affect anything at all. In the same way that you might text someone and make a mistake and they still go, yeah, OK, I know what you're saying. H-Y-E, you probably meant hey, right? It's not a big mystery, it's not a concern to anyone. Even spelling changes over time — we throw a U in the word color, others don't. So actually, the majority of these mean absolutely nothing, and even when they are what we would call significant, they're hardly significant.

In fact, your Bible is going to tell you about the most significant variants. If you still have your Bible open to Revelation 22, look back at verse 20 and 21. It says "the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all," and there should be a little footnote in your Bible there, and you look down and it'll say some manuscripts say "all the saints." That's a variant — in fact, that's one of the most significant kinds of variants because we're showing it to you. Now what's the difference between "all" and "all the saints"? Nothing, because we're already talking about those to whom the grace of God has come. What difference does it make if we say "all" or "all the saints"? None. In fact, we need to realize that in all the variants we have between copies, not one of them would change a single doctrine that we hold. None of them affect what we hold to or believe or teach, and in fact, all of them are very simply shown right there in your Bible — your Bible is actually showing its own work.

The Bible holds up to incredible scrutiny. It's been picked apart for literally thousands of years. The people who transmitted the Bible, who copied it, did so with incredible care. They actually took that warning in Revelation seriously. In fact, if you know the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls — this was a discovery made in Israel in the 1950s. A little shepherd boy was out, bored, and just throwing rocks into caves. As he did that, he didn't hear a clink, he heard a clash. He went up into this cave and found literally hundreds of different scrolls, all kinds of them, and a whole bunch of them were from throughout the Old Testament. In fact, the most famous one is the scroll of Isaiah. They found an almost complete scroll of the book of Isaiah, and what makes this so incredible is that this discovery was about 1,000 years older than anything we had before. That's a huge amount of history — 1,000 years earlier than anything we had seen before. And again, what was the biggest difference? Spelling. What they found is that over 1,000 years, the book of Isaiah had been transcribed and transmitted nearly perfectly all throughout that time.

Here's where we need to recognize the example of telephone really doesn't work with the Bible, because what you have is not someone whispering into the ear one time, but people who have spent their whole lives studying and learning and training to be scribes, to actually copy out the Bible, and a whole community of people around them double-checking, making sure their work is accurate. In fact, there are stories from some of these communities that if they got something wrong, they would have to start again. If you spelled the name of God wrong, you would burn the scroll because that wouldn't be allowed — they took their job seriously. And actually it gives us an incredible amount of confidence to trust what we have in our Bibles.

But now here is the final hurdle for us today. We are reading our Bible in English — we're not reading in Greek or Hebrew. And very often people will ask, well why are there so many different versions of the Bible? And the answer is really simple. If you speak another language, you know that to translate something from one language to another is not always a one-for-one thing. In fact, often you kind of have to paraphrase into another language, and so there is a whole spectrum of ways to do that. There's everything from a paraphrase — trying to get just a big thought and translate that thought into another language — or you can do more thought-by-thought translation, or you try and do it more word-for-word, where each word you try and find the best replacement in another language.

We use the ESV here at Promontory. It's on the word-for-word side of things. Partly that's because it makes a really good way of studying and trying to understand what the original said and keep as close as we can to that, but sometimes that means it's harder to read and it's harder to get the meaning of what is said — that's the trade-off because it is a translation. We can say the people who've translated have done a good job, they've studied hard. So we don't have a bunch of different Bibles, we have one Bible that's been translated in slightly different ways.

Now let me be clear — I have barely scratched the surface on a topic that people devote their entire lives to. There is so much more to say on all of this. My hope and goal with all of this is simply to show that the reality is the Bible that we have is one of the most well attested, well preserved, well documented books on the entire planet, and it is worthy of your trust. The Bible that you hold in your hands is what was written.

But now hear me — having said all of that, let me suggest that's still not really enough. That's not really enough for you to trust completely. Because just because something is accurate, just because it is a reliable transmission, doesn't mean that it's true. You could accurately pass on a lie over and over and over again. So again, we come back to this question: on whose authority? Why should I trust the Bible?

Imagine you walk into a car dealership. You're looking at this car and you're thinking, man, I might want to buy this one day, and someone comes up to you and says, here's the keys, you can just take it. Would you get in that car and drive away? Or would your first question be, I'm sorry, who are you? What are you doing just giving me a car? Do you have the authority to say what you've just said? See, that's really the question we're trying to ask when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible makes even bigger claims. The claims the Bible is making is not only that there is a God, but there is a God who has created everything, and that includes you and I. That not only has God created us, but that we have fallen short of what he has created us to do. That because of our sin, that rejection of God, going our own way, that's made a problem between us and God. There is a problem he is going to judge us for, and the only way for our sin to be forgiven is through faith in Jesus — that for everyone who trusts in Jesus, we have a promise of eternal life. Hear me, that's a lot of claims to be making. And so the question is, well, why should I believe it?

And so here it comes down to the word of the risen Christ. Listen to Luke chapter 24, Jesus speaking to his disciples:

"These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."

By the way, when he says the law, the prophets, and the Psalms or writings — that's the whole Old Testament. So here is Jesus both confirming that yes, the Old Testament is scripture, the word of God, and now commissioning his disciples to go and actually write the New Testament. All of it is centered on Jesus. He is the one giving authority to all of the words of God.

So what qualifies him to say that? Those are big claims to make. He's gotta prove it. And let me suggest the proof is in his resurrection. What could prove that someone has the right to not only talk about, but to promise eternal life? Well you would have to show that you have the ability to conquer death itself, to reverse death. In fact, this one point is so important that even Paul himself will say our entire faith rests on it. 1 Corinthians 15:

"If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain."

It's all useless without the resurrection of Jesus. If he didn't rise from the dead, don't worry about anything that he said. If he didn't rise from the dead, he doesn't actually have the authority to say what he has. And this is why every single one of the gospels makes this point so very clear — that Jesus not only died, but three days later he rose again.

I know so many people say, well, sure, but they just made it up. Hear me — if they made that up, it was the worst lie in all of history. Because they didn't get anything for it. They didn't get money — they were poor and broke. They didn't get fame — they were constantly kicked out, beaten, and attacked. They didn't gain power, they didn't gain prestige, they gained nothing for committing to this if they made it up. In fact, all of the disciples, with the exception of John himself, were executed for holding to this story that Jesus Christ came, lived, died, and rose again. Not one of them ever recounted that story. All of them went to even horrific deaths to continue preaching that message. Either that is the greatest and largest scale, longest mass psychosis in all of human history, or they're telling you the truth. They're telling you what they saw. And in fact, God has not only recorded it, he's transmitted it through all of history so that you and I can actually see what it is that Jesus has done.

The hope that we have in him — the beauty of God's word is not only that it is reliable, not only is it true, but it is for us here today. Look back at Revelation 22:20:

"He who testifies to these things" — the risen Jesus — "says, surely I am coming soon."

Jesus is the one who is coming back, and he is the one who commissioned his disciples — go write down my words, preserve it, transmit it — so that we here today could hear the message of the gospel and the invitation to trust in him. At the end of John's gospel we're told:

"Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

The entire Bible has this message. God has done so much in our world, we could not contain the full amount of it, and yet this was written down so that we might know and trust in Jesus Christ, that we might come to understand that even though we have sinned and fallen short of what God has created us for, though we can't fix it on our own, Jesus came, he died and paid the price for our sins. He rose again so that we might know and actually come to understand that we'll have eternal life with him.

That message is for us. God has kept it for us, and not even just for us — it is for our neighbors, it is for our city, it is for the world around us that people might know the good news of Jesus Christ. Hear me, if you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, let me invite you — this is for you. God has written this down so that you even here today might know what he has done and the salvation that is ready for you. If you have more questions, come talk with me, come talk with someone you know, we'd love to help you place your trust in Jesus Christ.

The beauty of God's word is that he has preserved it, he has kept it for us, and he has shown us why we can trust him in the resurrection. The beauty of God's word is that it is well-founded trust. It's not blind or ignorant of reality — we can place our trust in what Jesus has done and his word to us. God has kept his word that you might know the beautiful truth of Jesus Christ.

Let's pray together. Our heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for the work that you have done in even preserving our Bibles for us. Lord, you have kept it, translated it, brought it to us so that we could understand who you are and what you have done, so that we might encounter Jesus Christ who died for our sins, who rose again that we would have the promise of eternal life. Father, thank you for that. Thank you for the history of those who've gone before and have faithfully kept your word so that we might hear your gospel. Father, would you be glorified as we hear, take, receive your word and share it with those around us. We ask all this in your name. Amen.