Is The Bible Reliable? Part 1 - Steve Gregg | 8-15-21 • Spokane, WA

okay well i'll make this quick and get out of the way um we want to welcome steve gregg i will say that apart from my family's voices in my house his voice is heard more than any other people in my house because my husband is is studying all the time with steve greg and he's like do you mind if i turn it on i'm like no that's fine and he he loves just to glean so much wisdom he's gleaned much wisdom from him and so we're blessed to have him here today i um read through your bio thinking i'd get a snippet and it's it's it's it's um exhaustive but i learned a few things i learned that he he um is a musician and he used to travel and be in a christian rock band um and then he ministered in music that he has um led a christian school um and that he discovered that god got the biggest bang for his buck out of his life by teaching and so that is what he has dedicated himself to you probably hear him on moody radio and his website the narrow path is where i go when i'm studying for a sermon or teaching something and i am not sure if i go there and i glean great wisdom from him as well and so steve we're just blessed that you came to be with us today and we're excited to hear all that's in your heart [Applause] necessary um i uh this morning on the subject of the reliability of the scripture and also tonight now normally frankly for me to present what i like to present on this subject it takes but there is certainly more at our website the narrowpath.com more longer lectures on this and so i'm talking specifically about the reliability of the scripture that means it's is it can you trust it every faith system has a claim that it makes to being true and each system has different kinds of truth claims for example secularism they don't usually make truth claims they just assume they're right but their assumption is that there's nothing except what you can see there's nothing but what scientists can study it's only the natural world there's no supernatural all religion is superstition now of course if you ask them to test their truth claims of course they cannot there's no way to test whether there is nothing outside of nature the only tests that can be run are on things that are in nature and such testing cannot tell you if there's anything besides nature the opposite of that would be called supernaturalism and of almost every religion has its own supernatural ideas about what is ultimate reality who god is or whatever or how he has been revealed how we can know these are world view questions now many christians like myself were raised as christians from childhood and never had any serious doubts at least in childhood never had serious doubts about the idea of the bible being the word of god because we were raised in a christian environment and the bible is certainly respected and revered in christian environments but when we got out of that environment when we came out into the world we realized that not everybody made the assumptions we made about the bible and in fact a great number of people just assumed the opposite of what we assumed they assumed that the bible is not true and therefore becomes incumbent on us either to uh you know doubt that our view is really legitimately the only true view out there or else to find a way to defend it against all opposition and arguments i took the second approach i actually some of you know when i was in second grade uh i didn't know about evolution hadn't heard of it but i knew something about the bible haven't been raised in in the church and uh our teacher in second grade showed a film strip you younger people have no idea what that is you have to at least as old as i am to know the film strip is it's instead of a video it's like a slideshow on a strip of film they turned and and they taught us that the earth originated by uh breaking off of uh of the sun essentially the sun had explosions on its surface through flaming gases off its surface into space some of them were so far out they never pulled back in by the gravity of the sun but they remained in orbit and they cooled down became solid planets one of these was the earth and i you know they weren't trying to prove this they just said it was true they in other words they're making truth claims but not really defending their claims so i'd never heard that particular kind of claim and i didn't even know immediately that i disagreed with it but it something about it bothered me when i was seven years old and i remember when recess came i was i spent the whole recess wandering just along the the chain link fences surrounding the yard of the school thinking about that and when i came back from recess i pulled my teacher aside and said i think that film strip was mistaken and she said really what do you think was wrong with it i said well the bible says in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and then later he created the sun so i don't see how that can work out that the earth broke off the sun that's the first time i realized that i was going to encounter in my education in the secular world challenges to what i assumed to be true about the bible by the way the teacher was polite back then they didn't have the right to do what teachers do now to christians uh and i think she just said i guess they forgot which is a very diplomatic thing to say but but the truth is that as i got older i realized that this was not just an accidental forgetting what the bible said this was an outright and deliberate rejection of what the bible said in favor of a different worldview and i realized that just telling people what the bible said wasn't always going to be very effective because they didn't believe it like i did so in my youth i became a little more aware a little more sophisticated in my arguments for the bible and now you know i have to say that what i have learned about the reasons for believing the bible are so so exceptional the truth claims the bible are so testable whereas for example the truth claims of the the quran or the bhagavad-gita or the upanishads or the religious books of other religions there's no way to test them they're just basically really just philosophy you can accept it if you like it or don't accept it if you don't like it if somebody says well i really like what jesus said in the sermon on the mount that doesn't mean it was true or inspired you just liked it same thing is if you like islam or if you like hinduism or something like that now i believe the sermon on the mountain because i believe that the evidence very strongly toward the reliability of scripture and i say this now after 50 years of adult teaching and studying and even debating atheists and evolutions and so forth uh and it's not because i'm stubborn although i may be but it's because i actually want to know the truth i don't want to teach the bible if it's not true i don't make a big a great living at it and it's not something that i would do for any other reason then i believe it's entirely true and i believe it fits all the evidence in fact i've come to the conclusion i used to say this on the radio when i was younger i realize it stirs people up too much so i don't say it quite so boldly anymore but it is my belief nonetheless that everybody who is not a christian i can say this based on a lifetime of research everyone who's not a christian is either ignorant or dishonest now can you see why that'd be a controversial statement outside of the church people don't like to be called ignorant and they don't like to be called dishonest now of the two being dishonest is the worst criticism because i believe that if somebody actually knows the evidence for the scripture and they follow the evidence without prejudice they will have to conclude that the scriptures are true because you can test them every which way from archaeology from history from fulfilled prophecy from you know everything they all they always check out and there's nothing that has ever been found that is truly evidence against them now i say that evidence let's just say proof there is evidence that people bring for other viewpoints but as far as proof is concerned there's nothing that has been solidly brought forward that cannot be easily uh undermined by further investigation which would suggest the bible is not true now how i would summarize the reasons for my saying that in the short time i have is simply by a brief overview and by leaving some things out the first thing i really want to talk about is jesus uh he's the most important thing to talk about anyway but it is the case that jesus is what we need to examine first you might think we should examine genesis first or something well we'll talk about genesis but we'll talk about it in the context of examining what jesus says because jesus is what christianity is about i had a friend who was uh agnostic he had rejected the faith he'd been raised by missionaries in i think brazil very intelligent man but he he told me that he he just thought paul for example was crazy now paul's one of my heroes i don't see anything crazy about him at all but he just that was his impression and he said in order to be a christian in order to become a christian do i have to believe that the bible is inspired now i've always believed the bible is inspired and still do but i had to answer honestly no many people were christians before we even had the canon of the new testament they didn't have an opinion about some of these books they weren't even written yet what what you believe about books that are written is not what makes you a christian it's what you believe about jesus and what you've done about that belief before the bible before the new testament was written there were lots of christians around the world because they had come to believe in jesus now of course if you're going to be correct you're going to have to believe the bible is inspired but lots of people who follow jesus are not very correct about other things what saves you is not your belief about the books of the bible what saves you is your belief about jesus and your response to his claims that's what makes you a christian but if you become a christian then of course you place christ's authority above all other if you haven't done that you're not a christian yet if you don't believe jesus is the king and the messiah and son of god then you're not a christian yet though you could come to that conclusion if you simply knew the historical facts about him and knew very little about the rest of the bible and so believing in jesus responding to jesus placing him as the highest authority in your life is what it means to actually be a disciple a christian but once you've done that of course you've got to take him seriously once he's you've decided he's the son of god you figure he didn't lie he knows more than anybody else does and what he said about genesis what he said about moses what he said about the psalms or about even even what he said about his own apostles and their writings which hadn't been written yet but he anticipated them becomes something that we cannot ignore if you're going to follow jesus you're going to have to believe what he said about everything that he said in fact he said that in john 8 31 he said if you continue in my words then you are my disciples indeed so being a disciple or a christian means that you continue what jesus said you believe it you follow it now jesus had a lot to say about moses and and the old testament the prophets and we're going to talk about those things tonight what i want to talk about this morning is jesus himself how do we know what we know about him i'm not here to discuss at least this morning the subject of the inspiration of the scriptures a person could believe the scriptures are true whether they have a view of inspiration or not i believe the scripture's inspired and i think that can be discussed intelligently but the main thing that people have to deal with is it true did jesus really live did he say the things that are recorded he said did he do those things did he die did he rise again is he ascended into heaven is he at the right hand of god reigning and given all authority in heaven and earth if that is true christianity is true no matter what you think about any writings about him of course you're going to learn those things from writings about him because we weren't there when it happened anything you learn about any historical character you get from writings about them and jesus has some good writings about him we've got four gospels and we need to ask ourselves are these reliable if we can establish that they are then we're well on the way to knowing how we should think about everything in the bible because jesus had something to say about everything in the bible so let's talk about the gospels briefly here sometimes unbelievers say you christians you you have circular reasoning you believe in jesus because you believe the bible's the word of god and you believe the bible's the word of god because you believe in jesus and therefore you don't have anything other than an uh a hermetically sealed reasoning cycle that justifies what you believe but that's actually not true it may be true of many people maybe some of you believe in jesus because you first believe that the bible is the word of god and that's fine but that's not why i believe in jesus i believe in jesus because i can look at the four records of his life matthew mark luke and john i can examine them like any scholar would whether i was a christian or not i'd have to look at the same evidence same evidences there for christians as for non-christians to look at those books and decide if they are true if they agree with history if they are historically correct if they're accurate biographies then i can make up my mind about jesus without having made up any theories about whether these books are inspired or not after all i know a lot about lots of historical characters i've read their biographies i've read history and i don't have any opinion about the biographies i've read about these people that would suggest they were inspired by god that the writers of the biographies are inspired but as long as i'm getting good information about the person accurate information i can make up my mind about that person and that's what we have in the gospels or do we some people say no there's a lot of objections that people have to them i want to talk very very briefly about quite a few of them but let me say first of all how would we decide if we were not already believers and we encountered the four gospels remember the bible is not a book that was written as a book it's it's a collection of 66 different books written by like 40 different authors at different times they wrote them in different languages some of it was written in aramaic some in hebrew some in greek they wrote on three different continents in asia and and in europe and africa these these books were from a wide range of places and people and they were later all collected into what we call the bible each book had to be examined or evaluated on its own terms and so suppose we weren't coming at this with the christian prejudice that everything that's between the leather covers is the word of god it is but suppose we didn't have that prejudice we just had what historical people had before these books were gathered they have a book from matthew a book from mark from luke luca book from john what would you think about them well as you look at them the presumption of truthfulness in a witness is frankly a charitable assumption when somebody tells us something is true when a friend tells you something is true when the newspapers tell you something is true when as his history book tells you something is true you assume until you have reason not to that is probably true now you know people lie there are people who lie and there are people who talk as if they know things that they really don't know so not everything you hear or read is going to be true but you don't assume them to be liars unless you have reason to think they are most people you don't just say i think you're a liar unless you can prove everything you say to me i won't believe anything you say uh well i can't prove to you right now that i come from california but i think you believe me if i tell you that i did why well i don't have any reason to lie to you about that if i had to i gave a birth certificate but i didn't bring it with me but the thing is you when someone tells you something about themselves or about someone they knew or something they studied if they're not a liar you tend to think okay unless i find if i catch them in a lie that's a different thing but until i do our presumption of charity for people is that they're probably telling the truth and secondly they have to know what they're talking about some people do speak with great pretense of authority about things they don't know anything about and even if they're honest people they just don't know what they're talking about so to believe a historical document let's say like one of the gospels we would have to presume and it's not hard to do because we do it all the time with everything else we read that the writers probably honest probably knows what they're talking about now that depends a lot on you know who they were were they there did they how did they know but if we'd have the basic presumption these guys they knew what they're talking about and they probably had reason to tell the truth until i find out otherwise treating these as as fairly as i can as far as i treat any other documents i find i'd have to say okay as a starting point i'm gonna believe what they say until i find something that makes it not really sensible to do so now one thing that would make it not sensible to do so if they had ulterior motives obviously if you read something written by a political pundit you know they've got a political view and they're going to slant things that way and and you may read things they say and you think well you know there might be a little truth there but i i they're slanting this this is not really the way it i i have doubts i have doubts about these people being honest but if they have no reason to have ulterior motives and they claim to know what they say again that i'm not saying they're necessarily telling the truth but there's no reason at that point to doubt that they are uh and another aspect of checking out that kind of thing is are there corroborative uh witnesses are there other witnesses who know what they're talking about that have said the same kinds of things or support some of these things is there outside confirmation from other sources the more of that there is the more credible a document is going to be viewed and should be viewed and another thing is there any evidence that would discredit them not just is there nothing to uh not you know maybe you don't have anything to corroborate but you might have problems with this other evidence here that says it's wrong because it's been proven wrong one thing nice about the gospels is that they claim to be written by apostles or people who are close to the apostles who knew what they're talking about we have reason to believe they were honest because many of them died for their faith and none of them made any money at it and they you know they lived hard lives and uh persecuted and imprisoned and beaten and eventually killed most of them because they said this was true that's usually a pretty good sign that the person is honest and there is simply no ulterior motive they could have had for lying some people say well they you know they wanted everyone to become christians well yeah but why would they want to i mean what what did they have to gain by people becoming christians in those days these ministers they lived by faith they didn't didn't they didn't make fortunes uh being christians uh they mostly just got persecuted and there was much persecution in the first three centuries and it was usually targeting the leaders the teachers the pastors they were the ones who were usually arrested and fed to the lions so there wasn't really a real good reason to want to pretend to be a christian and to become a christian teacher or propagator or want other people to i mean frankly if a person knew they were not telling the truth or had good reason to doubt that they were telling the truth and yet they're trying to persuade other people to do things that might get them fed to the lions that make them pretty criminal that make them pretty evil because they're just they're lying to people and if people believe them they might lose their heads over it this is not there's no reason to believe that any of the writers of the scripture had any kind of criminal intent like that now the stories they told are corroborated by each other in many cases and they are independent stories they didn't get together as a committee and decide what they're going to write you can tell that by the differences that exist within them but they they corroborate each other to a large degree and they are separate independent historical documents but you also have corroboration from some non-christian sources from just josephus a jewish historian who is no christian from tacitus and sutonius a couple of roman historians that were not christians in fact were fairly hostile to a christian but they they though these other historians of the period sometimes confirm certain things like you know just who pontius pilate was or that jesus was crucified by pontius pilate that's confirmed by roman historians there and that people claim that he rose from the dead these non-christian witnesses certainly would not confirm that jesus wrote them today because they didn't believe it but they knew that that was the claim that was made about him in other words lots of things in the jewish and roman witnesses corroborate lots of things in the gospels but then there's the other issue no one has ever proven any alternative stories about jesus we've got at least four good stories from good close witnesses to the situation about jesus and there's never been a anyone close to the situation or within the first few centuries afterwards that ever has sought to prove that these things didn't happen in other words all things being equal we've got no reason to doubt them any more than to doubt any other historical documents that have this kind of credible you know witness to them now there are however a number of reasons that many people feel we should doubt them and it's very important for us to know that the gospels are where we get our information about jesus and jesus is going to be where we get our information off the rest of the bible so for us to know what to think about the whole bible the old testament the writings of the apostles and so forth we need to know what jesus thought but if we don't know if the gospels are true then we don't know what jesus said and so i just want to talk about some of the things that you'll hear all the time from skeptics about the gospels themselves that is that it is often said that the people who wrote the gospels are not the people whose names are on them many times they say they're written by people who lived in the second century or something like that people several generations after jesus and this causes people to suggest and that means that the church had time to kind of develop mythology about jesus yeah there was a guy named jesus and he was remarkable and got a lot of attention but he never claimed to be the son of god he didn't really do miracles this is the kind of stuff of myth or of legend that people develop as they admire somebody and as the years go by this kind of uh mythology accrues to him and by the time the gospels were written generations later um you know this kind of unreliable stuff had come to accumulate over his life well the truth is if someone says that the gospels were written more than a generation after jesus they simply have nothing to go on i know that if you go to websites you know what are the dates they're writing about liberal websites which is most of them they'll they'll assign late dates like the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century for the writing of all four gospels that's because they don't believe in jesus that's their starting point therefore they can't believe the records about jesus and since there's no reason to believe that the records were written by liars they want to believe that the people were had made up things and didn't know they'd made them up it's like a myth a legend that had developed like urban legends and they pass it along as if it's true but it's not now the truth is that the gospels were written if you have the best you know the best evidence we consider by the people whose names are on them matthew was one of the twelve john was one of the twelve mark was not but mark traveled with peter and the early christians at the end of the first century witnessed that mark wrote what peter preached so in a sense mark's gospel is peter's gospel that makes three of the four gospels are written by apostles essentially people who were with jesus when these things happen eyewitnesses now luke was not an eyewitness he doesn't claim to be an eyewitness but at the beginning of his gospel he says that he was acquainted with eyewitnesses he hung out with them he traveled extensively with paul for years and paul overlapped he geographically sometime with the other apostles in jerusalem and so luke had occasion to talk to the eyewitnesses and he said there were also some other fairly authoritative written records of jesus life he might have been referring to matthew and mark but he said that he knew of others who had written the life of christ but he said i've had this how luke starts his gospel i've had extensive knowledge i know this very reliably and he said it as one who actually was a personal acquaintance of the apostles and had investigated and so forth so he's not one of the eyewitnesses himself but he's the closest thing you can get to him you got three eyewitnesses essentially and one that's not unless they didn't write these gospels but the truth is that the evidence within the first three gospels matthew mark and luke almost makes it certain they were written before 70 a.d one reason for that is they all have jesus predicting the events of 70d he predicts that the temple would be destroyed in that generation it was in ad70 now if the gospels were written after that they would point out that that had happened because they all all the gospels love to show how jesus fulfilled prophecy or how he predicted something that peter would deny it three times and it happened and so forth they love to point out that jesus fulfilled prophecy and that he made prophecies that were fulfilled and yet they all all three of the synoptic gospels as they're called they record his his prediction of 70 a.d but none of them say and by the way that happened when the romans came and did that you know they just leave that out because it's it hadn't happened yet that's the only reason they would leave it out and there's no reason to believe they wrote any later than that john's gospel might have been written later but if if you think john didn't write it one thing you have to at least say is that john whoever wrote the gospel of john was very familiar with pre-ad-70 jerusalem's geography the writer mentions many pools and walls and things that were in jerusalem before it was destroyed which somebody living afterwards who had never been there beforehand would not know about they've only been discovered by modern archaeology to confirm that they were there pool of siloam and things like that now john mentions those things as if he knows about them and he did uh now that doesn't prove he's john but whoever wrote it claims to have been in the upper room with jesus that would make him one of the apostles and the bo the gospel of john mentioned several of the other apostles by name by the process of elimination the one who leaned on jesus at the last supper uh is the one who is the one who wrote the book it says so and john is the best candidate and all the early christians believed it was john now okay so they weren't written so late as some people think but who wrote there how do we know is matthew mark luke and john well one way we know is because if they weren't no one would claim that they were matthew is not one of the most famous apostles he was an apostle john why would they pick him out but more questionable is why would they pick mark or luke if they weren't the real authors we think of mark and luke is very prominent because they wrote gospels they have their names on them but before those gospels had their names on them these guys were incredibly obscure mark is rarely mentioned in the bible and not as an important person the main thing we know about him is he he abandoned paul and barnabas on the first missionary journey and paul was a little unhappy with him paul said nicer things about him in a couple of epistles later on and peter said that mark was with him when he wrote first peter chapter five but nothing really he doesn't stand out as a very famous early christian and luke even less so we don't know there's no mention of luke even in his own book he does say we a few times it doesn't say who he is his own name doesn't appear in the book of acts though he traveled with paul but the only reason we know luke even existed from the bible is that paul in two of his epistles mentioned luke in a list of people who were with him when sending their greetings so i mean he's like a totally obscure person like aristarchus or you know some of these guys whose names we only know their names and very little about them why would if luke didn't write his works why would the early christians assign him his name they'd pick somebody more famous same thing with mark and who would know better who wrote these books than the early christians who received them from the writers it's obvious these books didn't just show up you know someone woke up one morning there's one on the nightstand and oh there's a gospel there uh i wonder who wrote that no these books were written in in the community of the early church by members of the community and the early church would know who they received it from and it's you know the names of these apostles or are of the writers of the gospels are known to us because the early church remembered them and why would they not want to remember them why would they forget them why would they make it up these gospels were sacred to the early church they'd have very much reason to want to remember and and let other people remember who wrote them there's no there's not one line of evidence that makes sense that would suggest that these names are fictional names or they're not the real names of the authors therefore simply by default there's every reason to believe they were written by the apostles which means they were experts on the subject they wrote about and they also died as martyrs which means they sound like honest men uh and i was debating an atheist on a podcast called infidel guy an atheist podcast and i said well the apostles died for their testimony and the guy said that's nothing at all lots of people die for their beliefs muslims will die for their beliefs that doesn't mean they're true i said i didn't say they died for their beliefs they died for their testimony a testimony is when like you're in a court of law and you say i saw this i saw that i saw that not i believe this i remember once i was called to testify in court against somebody i said well he said that this they said that's hearsay evidence that's you don't know what you're talking about you know well they were right i didn't so the apostles claimed that they saw jesus they saw these things and therefore they testified to their death that they'd seen them it's a very different thing than testifying for your beliefs lots of christians will die for their beliefs but they can't say they saw jesus muslims will die for their beliefs obviously hindus will die for their beliefs but dying for your beliefs is not the same thing because your beliefs are based on somebody else's testimony and maybe somebody else's test beliefs about someone else's testimony or whatever these men died for their testimony that that's a very important thing to to note the main reason i think a lot of people feel that the gospels can't be trusted is because they are miraculous and as you know in our age we're very scientific in our age and the idea that miracles could happen is simply ruled out without investigation actually because once you investigate you find that miracles actually happen a great deal a guy named craig keener wrote a two volume book called miracles where he documents modern miracles from around the world and he's got he's got a whole volume of footnotes you know about this i mean he's very sober very scholarly and you know most atheists i i talk to or people who doubt the gospels their real reason for doubting them is they have a naturalistic worldview which excludes miracles without prior investigation i don't even need to investigate that doesn't happen people don't rise from the dead people don't walk on water well the point is the new testament says that same thing generally speaking they don't that's why people who wrote the gospels knew when a miracle that happened because they knew what usually happens they know that people don't generally rise from the dead they don't walk on water they don't turn water into wine they don't you know cure lepers with a word that doesn't happen except when it does and in the bible some people think the bible is just full of miraculous so it's a bunch of mythology there's not that much miracle emphasis in the bible the miracles that happen are recorded because they are wonderful and they prove something but if you read the old testament you're reading 4 000 years of history and do you know that almost all the miracles in the old testament happened in two clusters one was at the time of the exodus and the conquest of canaan which was a couple generations the the miracles of the plagues of egypt and the parting of the red sea and the miracles in the wilderness and the miracles associated with conquering the land that's when the first cluster of miracles happened and then the next one was hundreds of years later in the time of elijah and elisha and there were quite a few miracles they did apart from those you hardly find any miracles over thousands of years in the old testament thousands of years go by between one miracle and another one the bible does not give the impression that miracles are happening everywhere if someone says well i've never seen anyone rise from the dead i've never met anyone who saw someone rise from the dead i'd say me either the bible doesn't necessarily give me the reason to believe that i should have seen somebody rise from the dead i have heard stories of people who claim that they've seen summer rise in the dead i don't necessarily have to doubt them but i'm not basing it on the assumption that people rise from the dead on a regular basis the bible indicates that god does supernatural things miracles on occasions in in the case of the bible to confirm the word of the apostles and i believe in miracles by the way i still believe miracles happen but i don't think they even in the apostles lives they didn't happen every day there were a lot of miracles in the course of their lifetime in their ministry but some of the things paul did in ephesus in the three years the bible says special miracles were done by him it's not usual uh so that the the miraculous is there can only be a a a mark against the gospels if you assume that there are no miracles and that assumption is strict strictly bigotry honestly there's no reason to rule out the miracles of the bible unless you are a bigot i mean there's no nicer way to say it you're pre you've prejudged you're prejudiced you've decided there are no miracles though you don't know if there are you just are assuming it that's a bigotry that's not science that's not intelligence that's not scholarly um i can only really probably cover one more of these right now and that is that some people believe that the story of jesus makes him out to be the messiah because he knew what the messiah was supposed to do and therefore he kind of worked it out to do what the messiah was expected to do and therefore convince people that he's who he is well the truth is the bible does not depict jesus as trying to prove that he's the messiah do you know there's not one public declaration jesus made to the crowd saying i'm the messiah he said it privately to his disciples at caesarea philippi said it privately to the woman at the well no one else was around he said it was on trial before the sanhedrin those are the three times he actually said he was the messiah now he was obviously the messiah but he wasn't the guy who's going out trying to persuade people he knew what the jews wanted the messiah to be he didn't even try to be that they wanted the messiah to be a military leader on one occasion in john 6 and verse 15 it says that the crowd tried to take him by force and make him king that's what they wanted the messiah to do and jesus he dispersed the crowd went off to pray alone and he didn't let that happen he knew what the messiah was supposed to do as far as the jews were concerned and he made no effort to fit that paradigm he did fulfill prophecies but not the prophecies they were thinking about it was only after his resurrection that the apostles recognized how many of the prophecies by the messiah had in fact been fulfilled about his death his suffering and things like that but jesus did not conduct himself in a way and the gospels do not present him in a way that reflects his fulfilling the messianic hope because the messianic hope was a little off-kilter what they expected was not really what was going to happen so i mean to say that this is all manipulated to convince jews that he's the messiah everything about the gospels proved to be very credible and there's nothing has ever come out to disprove them now those are sweeping statements i can document those with many points in a different setting not here where i have to quit in about one minute so uh but the point is i do talk about these things in more detail in my lectures online the point i want you to know as i close today is that jesus we have very excellent reasons to simply accept the gospel records of jesus as they stand there's been never any credible objection that would lead an honest person to doubt them now that doesn't prove they're true it certainly doesn't prove they're inspired but it does mean that they have reason to be taken as true historical accounts and based on that we can come to a faith that a man who did what jesus did said what he said rose from the dead after predicting he would and then ascended into heaven that he is pretty much the real deal he's he's what he said he would be and if we can reasonably come to that conclusion and and all reasonable people who study the evidence would of course i've just said that some people who study it are not reasonable and that's the other thing you can be dishonest or ignorant you can either be ignorant of the evidence or if you know the evidence you can say i still don't want to believe it well that's that's being dishonest so you're either ignored or dishonest no one has ever come up with evidence against the gospels or against christ it's always prejudice now a lot of people would object to my saying that but what can i say can i help it if i'm right and having said that we know that jesus said things about the old testament he said things about his apostles that would give us reason to believe what they wrote in the epistles and so forth and we're going to talk about those tonight tonight what i want to do is point out what jesus did say about the law and the prophets and and the writings can we trust genesis you know can we trust stories about amazing miracles like you know a fish swallowing a man thing that kind of stuff can we trust that was there a worldwide flood did firing down on sodom and gomorrah i mean did that really happen and and also what about writings like a people like paul who wasn't even around when jesus was on the earth and he's the one who wrote all the rules and all the doctrines for us pretty much and you know what grounds we have for believing him well that's all going to be answered by what did jesus say about these sources of information and and you'll find he said a lot because he wanted us to know what he thought about those things and tonight i'm hoping i have time after pointing out what jesus said about them to look at some of the secular confirmations of what the bible says including many of the things in the bible that scholars had a long time said ah that's that's obviously a legend that's obviously not true that person's obviously fictional and then they found in archaeology the guy's name on an inscription confirming what the bible said that's happened again and again and again and again we have a lot of examples and you know i'd like to give some of that too but the most important thing is what jesus said because jesus has is is the smartest one of all he's the one who knows most and once you believe in him you're kind of bound to believe what he said but it's also nice to know that in addition to what jesus said there's a lot of other confirmatory evidences uh from outside the bible that we will we'll look at some of those tonight

Channel: SteveGreggVideos

Views: 608

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7X0gdrj5PQY

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021