Psalm 119:18
Open my eyes to see the wonderful things
in your word.
ARE YOU AN ADDDICT?
I HOPE SO!
Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:12-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:10-13
DRAMA: Bible (Junkie) Addict by Isaac Air Freight
2 Timothy 3:12-17 (To the Individual)
In fact, everyone who wants to live a
godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, 13 while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and
being deceived. 14 But as for you,
continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you
know those from whom you learned it, 15
and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make
you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is
useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly
equipped for every good work.
Do
you believe 2 Timothy 3:12-17 to be truth?
Do you believe the bible to be truth?
Do you believe the bible to be the very word of God? Do you believe the bible was completely
authored by God? Do you believe the
bible is the only written authority for the Christian faith? If you answer “yes” to all of these, espcialy
believing God is the author of the bible, how could you do any less than be in
love with the scriptures and want to know them better than anyone else you know? Let’s see what you believe by looking on
facebook about the FAITHBOOK. On my facebook page and the church’s I asked the
question Do you believe the bible is the word of God? Why or why not?
Facebook on FAITHBOOK
1. Do
you believe the bible is the word of God? Why or why not?
Joan Swicegood Yes,
because I have followed His teachings these 75 years since I accepted the Lord
Jesus Christ into my life to B a disciple for Him. My God is an awesome
omnipotent God. AMEN & AMEN!
Connie Simpson Lukacs yes and saddened by after 2000 years Christians today are choosing
to change the teachings of God to fit their wants. I believe it b/c Christ said
it and historical documents
being discovered.
Charmel Jacobs YES
- God has amazed me over and over with the relevance of His Word for every need
and situation I am in - that is, when I seek Him in His Word. He's proven to me
that He is there ready to meet me always.
Mike Nachtigall Yes, I believe the Bible is the word of God because
it tells us where His heart is
for us
and how we can be a part of Him. I'd rather be a part of Him than apart from Him.
Jay Chester Yes i do! Because i
just feel it from the inside. Maybe
it’s the Holy spirit telling me! Idk
but i just know it is from deep within myself! I have felt it all of my life!
Nancy Wheeler Glaesemann Yes. For me,
it starts with the fulfillment of Old Testament
prophecy in the New Testament. No human mind could author it.
Since the Bible claims to be the
only inspired Word of God, it has become the focus of many attacks. The critics
of the Bible have tried to discredit it by chipping away at its authority and
credibility.
The Bible is not without its
difficulties. After all, some of its older books were written 3,000 years ago
in a radically different culture than our own. There are cultural barriers to
overcome as well as contextual issues to consider when delving into the Bible.
The first major attack against the
Bible began with what is known as "higher/historical criticism." It
arose in Germany around the end of the 17th century. The promoter of
"higher criticism" insisted that the Bible was a human product,
brought about by the church to express what individual men had to say about
God.
The people who pioneered the
"higher criticism" of the Bible did not believe that Jesus was the
promised Messiah, the incarnate Son of God. To transmit their unbelief to their
intellectual peers, and from them to the general public, the higher critics did
their best to remove people's faith in the Bible.
In the past few decades, the enemies
of God have declared open warfare on the Bible. Anyone who doesn't believe in
the authenticity of Scripture is given an open forum to launch an attack. It is
very important to defend the Word of God against these critics. If a falsehood
is allowed to stand, it can become regarded as truth by default.
How can you defend the bible? You cannot defend it by saying, I believe it
or because God said so, or because I just do and so should you. You need to have a factual and logical
defense for those who do not believe – and with good reason, few Christians can
defend it in such a manner. It will take
several weeks to give you enough defense so that you are well armed. Let us begin however with the simplest
defense…
The
Test of Time
One of the easiest ways to defend
the Bible is to point out how it has withstood years of attack. If the Word of
God had a fatal flaw, somebody would have found it by now--after nearly 2000
years of scrutiny. Despite the critics, the Bible remains the world's
best-seller of all time. The Bible is reliable; it has earned that status.
No book has been more intensely
scrutinized or hotly debated. The Bible has outlasted many governments that
sought to ban or destroy it. Scholars, intellectuals and even theologians have
pored over every verse, seeking a way to disprove its divine inspiration.
Voltaire, a French Enlightenment
writer and deist, once said that within 100 years of his time, Christianity
would be swept away from existence and pass into the obscurity of history. Yet
50 years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society used his house and printing
press to produce stacks of Bibles. It is now way past his deadline and the Word
of God is still going strong.
Any book that wishes to challenge
the Bible needs to first prove its worthiness. Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci
Code, claims the Bible is full of error, but it only took investigators a few
weeks to show that Brown's writings are totally based on a collection of
fraudulent views of history. Most of these more recent attacks on the Bible are
more of a sign of the times than they are a test of time.
Famous Testimonies
Many legendary world leaders have
testified to the Bible's special nature. No other book can claim to have such a
comprehensive record of personal endorsement. Here is what a few have said
about God's Word:
Sir Walter Scott, the British poet,
on his deathbed, said, "Bring me the Book!" When asked, "What
book?" he replied, "There is but one Book."
Andrew Jackson, the seventh
president of the United States, said, "That Book is the rock on which this
republic rests."
Queen Victoria gave the Bible credit
for the British Empire's global supremacy.
Prime Minister William E. Gladstone
once commented: "The Bible is stamped with a Specialty of Origin, and an
immeasurable distance separates it from all competitors."
John Quincy Adams, our sixth
president, said, "The first and almost only book deserving of universal
distinction is the Bible. I speak as a man of the world to the men of the world
and I say to you, 'Search
Isaac Newton, English mathematician
and scientist: "We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime
philosophy. I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any
profane history whatsoever."
Robert Dick Wilson, fluent in more
than 45 languages and dialects, said, "I may add that the result of my 45
years of study of the Bible has led me all the time to a firmer faith that in
the Old Testament, we have a true historical account of the history of the
Israelite people."
Many people seem to think there are
only a handful of master copies of the biblical test. The truth is that there
are more than 24,000 manuscripts of New Testament writings. We could destroy
every modern translation of the Bible and perfectly reproduce their content
from these manuscripts.
Dr. Ravi Zacharias at Oxford
University made the following statement: "In real terms, the New Testament
is easily the best attested ancient writing in terms of the sheer number of
documents, the time span between the events and the documents, and the variety
of documents available to sustain or contradict it. There is nothing in ancient
manuscript evidence to match such textual availability and integrity."
When one compares the text of one
manuscript with another, the match is amazing. Sometimes the spelling may vary,
or words may be transposed, but that is of little consequence. Concerning word
order, Bruce M. Metzger, professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary,
explains: "It makes a whale of a difference in English if you say, 'Dog
bites man' or 'Man bites dog'--sequence matters in English. But in Greek it
doesn't. One word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where
it stands in the sequence."
The Dead Sea Scrolls have proven to
be an excellent resource for proving the accuracy of the Bible. Their writing
goes as far back as 400 BC and include a copy of every old Testament book minus
the book of Esther. The text of each book has been found to be a mirror
reflection of the translation we have to today.
William
Tyndale c. 1492–1536) was an English scholar who became a leading figure in
Protestant reform. He is well known for his translation of the Bible into English. He was influenced by the work of Erasmus, who made the Greek New Testament available in Europe, and by Martin Luther. While a number
of partial and incomplete translations had been made, the grass-roots spread of Wycliffe's Bible resulted in a death sentence for any unlicensed possession
of Scripture in English—Tyndale's translation was the first English Bible to
draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English one to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It
was taken to be a direct challenge to the Roman Catholic Church and English
Laws to maintain church rulings.
While
Tyndale had to learn Hebrew in Germany due to England's active Edict of Expulsion against the Jews. Tyndale took the
ill-regarded, unpopular and awkward Middle-English "vulgar" tongue, improved upon it using Greek and
Hebrew syntaxes and idioms, and formed an Early Modern English basis that Shakespeare and others would later follow and build upon as
Tyndale-inspired vernacular forms took over.
In 1535, Tyndale was
arrested and jailed in the castle of (Filford) outside Brussels for over a year. In 1536 he was convicted of heresy and
executed by strangulation, after which his body was burned at the stake. His
dying request that the King of England's eyes would be opened seemed to find
its fulfillment just two years later with Henry's authorization of The Great Bible for the Church of England—which was largely Tyndale's own
work. Hence, the Tyndale Bible, as it was known, continued to play
a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking
world. His version also worked
prominently into the Geneva Bible which was taken to the New World to Jamestown in 1607, and on the Mayflower in 1620. Notably, in 1611, the 54 independent scholars who
created the King James Version, drew significantly from Tyndale, as
well as translations that descended from his. One estimate suggests the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's, and the Old Testament 76%.
1 Thessalonians
2:10-13 (To the whole church/kingdom)
You are witnesses, and so is God, of
how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. 11 For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his
own children, 12 encouraging,
comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his
kingdom and glory. 13 And we also
thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you
heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is,
the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.
ARE YOU AN ADDDICT?
A Bible addict!? A Jesus addict!? I HOPE SO!
