Scripture: John 17:17
Sermon Series: The Biggest Questions – Sermon 03

Do you love GPS? I do. I’ve found that it not only gives me directions, but it warns me of closed roads or traffic jams. It’s wonderful when it’s right.

Tragically, GPS is not infallible. One dark, stormy night in September of 2022, 47-year-old Philip Paxson was driving home from his daughter’s 9^th birthday party. Unfamiliar with local roads, he relied on Google Maps to navigate him through a neighborhood. His GPS directed him onto a road leading toward a bridge that had washed away nine years earlier and had never been repaired. Because it was dark and there were no barricades or warning signs posted, Paxson drove directly off the edge. His Jeep plummeted into the river below, where he tragically drowned. Isn’t that horrible?

But what if the Bible isn’t true? What’s at stake is not just our physical, but our eternal destiny. We’re continuing our study, The Biggest Questions, and want to work through today: Can you trust the Bible?

Consider this, if you can’t trust all the Bible, which parts are true and which aren’t? Think of it this way, would you trust a heart surgeon who had a 50% failure rate? If the Bible is not the GPS for your life, where do you turn? What’s your final authority in life? When you’re cornered, when you’re forced to go nose to nose with reality… Who do you turn to?

Before you answer too quickly, think about it for a moment. When it comes to establishing a standard for living, what’s your yardstick? When you are in a stormy sea of emotions which lighthouse shows you where to find the shore?

Let me get more specific. While getting dressed you notice a dark mole on your side. A few days later you notice this same mole is now surrounded by red, sensitive flesh and it’s becoming increasingly more sensitive. You finally talk yourself into seeing your doctor. He probes and asks some questions, takes a few X rays, and finally says with a frown, “I don’t like the way this looks. Let’s do a biopsy.” After the procedure he tells you that the report isn’t good, and he quietly informs you, “It’s a bad kind of cancer.” To whom or to what do you turn? You need something solid to lean on. What is it?

One more: You’ve been married over twenty-five years. You’ve recently celebrated your silver anniversary and have raised three children. You’re thinking the future will soon reward you with much deserved relaxation. You’ve been faithful to your mate. But out of the blue one evening your partner wants to talk, “I can’t keep something from you any longer. There’s someone else. I want out of our marriage.” What gives you the stability to go on? Where do you turn for hope? What holds you together when all hell breaks loose? What’s your final authority in life?

There is not a more reliable authority than God’s Word. The Bible alone provides us with the shelter we need in the storms. It’s where Job turned when everything in his life unraveled. Read the first two chapters of Job for yourself. The Bible is the resting place for our cares, our griefs, and tragedies.

Yet we face a true dilemma.Can we trust the Bible?Is it true? Heaven help us if it’s not! Less than 50% of Americans believe the Bible is trustworthy. So, if we can’t trust the Bible on the physical, historical, earthy stuff that we can see, how can we trust it on the spiritual, prophetic, heavenly matters we can’t see? If we can’t believe the Bible in things we can verify here, why trust it on matters that are out of reach for ordinary mortals like us? Jesus Himself powerfully makes this point in John 3:12, If I told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things? In John 17:17, He prayed to His Father, Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. If the Bible isn’t true, Jesus didn’t know what He was talking about.

Too often Christians are distracted with peripheral issues that are important yet not foundational, like morality, sexual behavior, racism, abortion, etc. All those are symptoms of failing to address the deeper question: Has God left us with a trustworthy revelation that guides us in how to be reconciled to Him and how to live? Either the Bible is God’s Word and free from error, or it’s not and is full of mistakes.

Today we’re going to work through this. To fully work through this could take months. Because of time constraints, we’re only able to skim the surface.

1. God claims the Bible is true and thus, trustworthy. 

In World War II, Nazi bombs flattened much of Warsaw, Poland. One building was largely destroyed, the headquarters for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Still legible on the surviving wall were these words: Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away (Matthew 24:35). The Bible has withstood countless attempts to destroy it.

The Bible is inspired or God breathed. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. The Bible is the result of the breathing out of God. It’s God’s Words and completely accurate. In saying the very words are what God wanted doesn’t mean He dictated them to a “secretary.” The personality and background of each writer comes through. God didn’t overwhelm the individuality of the writer.

It’s why Peter wrote, No prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God (2 Peter 1:20-21). The word moved is the same word used in Acts 27 to describe the ship carrying Paul to Rome. It was moved by the wind. Though the ship was at the mercy of a storm, it didn’t stop being a ship, though it did cease having control over its own course. Writers of Scripture were also moved in their writing to produce the words God intended. Some 4000 times in the Old Testament writers wrote, the Lord spoke or the Lord said or the word of the Lord came. They were convinced they were communicating the very Word of God.

The Bible is without errors. There is a popular lie that says the Bible has been copied and translated so many times we can’t trust it. On The View the Bible came up in their discussion. One of them dismissed the Bible with Oh, the Bible has been translated and retranslated like over 65 times, so you can’t really trust it. And everyone agreed. Really?

Comparing the Bible to the “telephone game,” is a common analogy, but scholars note that it doesn’t accurately reflect how ancient scribes worked. In contrast, Old Testament copyists were committed to writing and preserved through physical manuscripts rather than oral repetition. Hebrew scribes treated copying Scripture with extreme professional and religious reverence. They used meticulous counting methods, counting and tracking letters, and words to ensure that a newly copied scroll matched the original. You may not like the Bible, but you can’t say we don’t have what was originally written.

God’s Word is infallible which means it’s “incapable of error.” If something is infallible, it’s never wrong and absolutely trustworthy. The word inerrant, also applied to Scripture, means “free from error.” The Bible is never wrong.

The Bible claims to be infallible, 2 Peter 1:19, We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable. Many Bible writers who claimed it was God’s Word, died for it, including Peter and Paul. Who dies for a lie?

The Bible is uniquely preserved. The extraordinary preservation of the Bible through 4000 years of world history only happened because God did it. Today, after the Bible has been translated in part or whole into hundreds of languages, some with multiple versions with millions of copies printed, it’d be nearly impossible to destroy the Bible. That’s not always been the case.

Until the Reformation the Bible was preserved by the laborious work of copying it over and over by hand. During this same period the Bible was under terrible attack. Many authorities tried destroying it. At several points in history, it was a capital offense to even own a Bible, yet the Bible survived.  

There are some who attempt to discredit the Bible suggesting it was written so long ago and with so many copyists that what we have today is unlike the original manuscripts. There are many ancient writings of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, etc. Homer was the most widely read of ancient times. Today there are 643 copies of manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad, butthere are 25,000 copies of manuscripts of the New Testament. The earliest copy of the Iliad is 500 years after Homer wrote it. The earliest copy of the New Testament manuscript is only 25 years after it was written. An honest Bible denier has to admit there’s more evidence for the preservation of the Bible, than there is even in Shakespeare! Our sovereign God has preserved His Word!

The Bible has a unique unity. One of the most remarkable witnesses of the Bible’s inspiration is its unique unity. The Bible has 66 books; dealing with hundreds of subjects, written by 40 authors over a period of 1500 years in three languages; Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Yet the Bible is unified in both theme and perspective. That’s true in spite of the fact that the authors came from very diverse backgrounds; kings, shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, prophets, priests, missionaries and physicians.

No one group or person put the Bible together. There was no collusion or master plan. Different individuals wrote without knowledge of the overall structure and most of the time without knowledge of what others had written.

Books of the Bible were kept once they were considered to be the inspired Word of God. Only in retrospect was it discovered that the 66 books were one Book. From cover to cover the Bible presents unity concerning God, man, sin, morality and salvation. It’s the continual story of God’s plan of redemption.

Can you imagine a medical book written in 2000 B.C., teaching the same beliefs about medicine in 2026? In 2000 B.C. doctors saw medicine as a blend of religion and magic. Illness was caused by angry gods or demons. Yet, the Bible has unity from its very first words.

From Genesis 3 onward, Scripture is powerfully clear about the sinfulness of all humanity. From Genesis 3 onward, Scripture is clear in the promise of the coming One who’d solve the sin problem, through the massive number of Messianic prophecies, about the ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There’s amazing unity of focus on the Lord Jesus.

This incredible unity couldn’t be humanly engineered. Despite the fact that the Bible was written by many different individuals over a period of 1500 years, there isn’t a single place where one writer disagrees with another.

You may have heard that the God of the Old Testament is a God of judgment, while the God of the New Testament is a God of love. Read the Bible for yourself. You can’t read God’s tender descriptions of His love for His people in the Old Testament and then read Jesus’ descriptions God’s love and of judgment and hold that opinion. James Montgomery Boice alluding to the incredible unity of our Bibles said: There is only one way of accounting for it: behind the efforts of the more than forty human authors is the one perfect, sovereign and guiding mind of God.

2. History and Archeology confirm that the Bible is trustworthy. 

The archaeologist’s shovel has repeatedly documented the historicity and accuracy of the Bible. There are so many of these, I only have time to share one.

Over the last hundred years the reliability of the Bible has been vindicated again and again as more evidence has been discovered. Let me point out a great resource, Josh and Sean McDowell’s book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Here’s one great example.

During excavations of Jericho in the 1930s John Garstang, an archeologist discovered something startling. Here’s what he wrote: As to the main fact, then, there remains no doubt: the walls [of Jericho] fell outwards so completely that the attackers would be able to clamber up and over their ruins into the city. Why is that so unusual? Because walls of cities don’t fall outwards, they fall inwards. Yet Joshua 6:20 reads, The wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city every man straight ahead, and they took the city. While archaeology doesn’t prove Scriptures are trustworthy, no archaeological discovery has disproved the reliability of the Bible.

With all the facts TV special after special still question the historical accuracy of Scripture. Kenneth Boa, Most professional archaeologists and historians acknowledge the historicity of the Bible and yet many theologians still embrace prearchaeological critical theories about the Bible. The evidence strongly supports the accuracy of the Bible…but in many cases it has been overlooked or rejected because of the philosophical presuppositions that run contrary to the Scripture. In other words, the evidence doesn’t matter. It’s not an intellectual problem; it’s a willful one. They’ve simply chosen not to believe, despite the insurmountable evidence.

3. Science confirms that the Bible is trustworthy. 

The Bible isn’t a scientific textbook, but it contains statements about science. There are statements in the Bible that are advanced beyond the scientific knowledge at the time they were written. Scientists in the past considered that the stars were countable. Ptolemy said there were 1,056. Centuries before, the Bible declared what scientists now know to be true—the universe contains more stars than can be counted. I will make the descendants of David as countless as the stars in the sky (Jeremiah 33:22) Ancient scientist taught the earth was flat and sat on a table. The Bible had it right long before the scientists. Job 26:7 says, He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; He suspends the earth over nothing. Isaiah 40:22 says, He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth.

Science continually changes. For ages medical science was unaware of the danger of contagious infection. Infectious isolation protocols follow what the Bible said thousands of years ago: As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp (Leviticus 13:46).

Phillip Schaff said, There is no conflict between science and the Bible. It’s just that sometimes the theories of science need time to catch up.

4. Prophecy confirms that the Bible is trustworthy.

In the writings of Buddha and Confucius, you won’t find prophecy. In the Koran there is one, a self-fulfilling prophecy that he, Muhammad, would return to Mecca. Quite different from Jesus’ prophecy that He would return from the grave.

Jesus fulfilled over 300 Old Testament prophecies in His first coming, but the Bible contains many prophecies about ancient world kingdoms, Babylon, Nineveh, Tyre, etc. Today it’d be like having prophecies about Washington, D.C., Moscow and Berlin, and they were fulfilled with unbelievable accuracy. Specific prophecies written hundreds of years before they came true.

In Ezekiel 26 it was prophesied that the city of Tyre would be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, many nations would come up against it, the ruins would be scraped from the city site and thrown into the sea, leaving a bare rock. The site would then become a place for fishermen to spread their nets, and the city would never be rebuilt again.

Tyre was to the sea what Babylon was to the land. It was an ancient Hong Kong. Every one of the prophecies came true. Nebuchadnezzar besieged the mainland city for 13 years before destroying it. But the citizens of Tyre moved to an island and renamed it Tyre. This island city remained invincible until Alexander the Great overthrew it in 332 B.C.

How did he do it? Alexander had no navy, so he built a causeway. And where did he get the materials? His army scraped the ruins from the old city and threw them into the sea, leaving the old site a bare rock. The mainland city has never been rebuilt, and fishermen still spread their nets there.

R.C. Sproul said, The very dimension of the sheer fulfillment of the prophecy of the Old Testament Scriptures should be enough to convince anyone that we are dealing with a supernatural piece of literature.

5. Jesus confirms that the Bible is trustworthy. 

It’s common for liberal theologians to divorce the Bible from Jesus. It can’t be done. If you reject the trustworthiness of Scripture, at the same time you reject the trustworthiness of Christ. Jesus had the highest regard for the Old Testament.

That’s demonstrated in His temptation by Satan in the wilderness. Three times Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy to rebuke the Devil. Then, the three most attacked accounts in the Old Testament are Creation, Noah’s flood and Jonah swallowed by a huge fish. All three accounts Jesus validated as fact, not myth! To throw out the Bible means that you also throw out Jesus Christ.

Jesus considered the Old Testament to be without error. He considered the Old Testament authoritative, but how far can we take this? How authoritative did Jesus believe the Old Testament was? He said, But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the Law to become void (Luke 16:17). Christ believed in the inerrancy and accuracy of the Bible down to the smallest letter. It’s the equivalent of the Old Testament being authoritative down to the dotting of an “i.” Jesus confirms that the Bible is trustworthy.

6. The Bible is not a smorgasbord. 

How many of you, growing up, hated certain foods? But when it comes to the Bible, we can’t cut out what we don’t like. We can’t say, “I don’t like what the Bible says there. It’s out of touch. Or the New Testament is derogatory of women?”

We’re not the authority. God’s is! We can’t cut or reshape it. Today the Bible is being rejected because its accused of being outmoded or regressive.

I was shocked to learn last week of a pastor in Cleveland, Pastor Israel Ford, founder of Lifeworks Church who posted on Instagram of his first wife, Pastor Lydia Ford, and introduced Shakayla Talley Ford to their congregation as his second wife. He says they’re polygynous and he could even take a third wife. When God’s Word is not the final authority, anything goes. God’s plan for marriage is one man and one woman, Genesis 2:23-25.

We must submit and obey God’s Word. It begins with salvation first. The Bible tells us that the only way we can be forgiven and go to heaven is admitting that we’re sinners. We’re not nice or good. It’s why Jesus had to die on the cross to pay our sin debt. If we think there’s another way besides accepting God’s free gift of salvation, God must sentence us to hell.

Now sometimes we don’t understand the Bible. Sometimes to our modern minds it seems harsh or judgmental. We don’t understand God’s holiness or justice. I know I struggle with the doctrine of Hell, yet it’s what the Bible teaches. Jesus taught it. Jesus spoke of hell more than anyone else in the Bible.

It’s dangerous to deny or cut out parts of the Bible we don’t like. It’s what King Jehoiakim did. He famously cut up and burned a prophetic scroll God gave Jeremiah, so God pronounced judgment on the king: Therefore this is what the LORD says about Jehoiakim king of Judah: He will have no one to sit on the throne of David; his body will be thrown out and exposed to the heat by day and the frost by night (Jermiah 36:30). This was fulfilled when Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem. According to Josephus, Jehoiakim was killed during the siege with his body thrown over the city wall. God’s Word is trustworthy and our authority, whether we agree or like it.  

It is dangerous to add or take away from the Bible. Revelation 22:18-19 warns us, 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, and 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. Many are like Mark Twain when it comes to the Bible, who said, It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

To cut out or ignore parts of the Bible you don’t like is as foolish as jumping off the Willis Tower because you don’t like gravity. It costs you. God’s Word is the final authority. We must trust, submit and obey it.

Conclusion

Want to know the greatest proof that the Bible is true and trustworthy? It’s the hardest one to deny. It’s a committed Christian!

Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, The only letter of recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your lives are a letter written in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. Clearly, you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This ‘letter’ is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.

A committed Christ-follower is the greatest proof the Bible is true. It’s seen in how we treat our spouse, children, how we work, what kind of neighbor we are – it’s how we live. It’s how we talk, think, how we serve and how we love!

A key to being a committed Christian is not just having God’s Word. It’s reading, studying, and applying it to your life. Someone said, Be the closest thing to the Bible the people around you will ever read.

A thousand words about Jesus can’t compare to a life that reflects Him. The gospel was never meant to be something we just talk about. It’s to be something that we live. Every Christian is either helping others believe God’s Word is true or it’s hogwash. Which one are you? It’s hard to doubt the Bible is true when you meet a true Christian. I want to be one, don’t you?