The Flawed Christian

Chapter 6
Beer, food and the Bible

I was pleasantly surprised by the Home Groups it was very relaxed and there a few non-Christians, like myself, there as well as wine, beer and food.
They talked about the Bible even some of the Christians were unsure what some passages meant. There were some disagreements but it never got hostile and everyone was encouraged to say what they thought, no matter how off the wall it seemed.

Myself and another guy sort of formed an unspoken allegiance we were the ones along with my wife who asked all the awkward questions.
I felt a sort of resentment building up inside of me not because these Christians were self righteous or smug or anything because they weren’t it was just because you got the feeling that they actually believed what they were saying was true.
My Grandfather was a Methodist Lay Preacher so I knew some of the things they were talking about and yet I still doubted that all of it was true. How come they didn’t doubt? Sure, you can hope that at least some of it’s true but there was no way you could believe all of it.
Then over the space of about a month several things happened that brought everything to a head………………….To be continued.

Chapter 5
The Home Groups beckon.

After moving back to London from Cornwall the area we moved to seemed as if it was teeming with Christians really there were only about three or four families but it seemed as if there were a whole lot more. My youngest had only just been born so there was a mother and toddler group and a school just up the road and so we all became friends.
But it felt as if there were Christians crawling out of the woodwork it got to the point where I’d check under the bed before I got in and I’d tense up when opening the wardrobe just in case someone leapt out with a Bible in their hand saying “Have you been saved?”
Now it wasn’t quite like that. Any pressure was in my head but they did all tend to speak Christianeese they had these strange ideas like God was a real person and that Jesus was still around duh! He died two thousand odd years ago. I remembered from my RE days at school and Sunday School they nailed him to a cross.
About this time we were invited to what they called a ‘Home Group’ my instinct said “No don’t go” but the offer of free wine and food won me over.
As I said these born again (whatever that meant) Christians weren’t threatening so I went with my wife willingly. (a lamb to the slaughter )
I was unemployed for a short period and helped one of the husbands who was a kitchen fitter so I was never far away from this Christian-speak.
Although these people were out of touch with the real world they were OK and sort of……. Well nice.
Anyway I started going to these Home Groups…………………..To be continued

Chapter 4
Onwards and upwards

I put my thoughts on evolution and the like firmly behind me and put all of my efforts into finding a job and the pursuit of girls, both of which came quite soon I took a job as an apprentice Scientific Instrument Maker and I was married at nineteen.
Not long after I moved from London to Cornwall I lived there for the next twelve years and became the father of three children. After twelve years I moved back to London.
Occasionally though I would think about what this life was all about.
On one occasion I came across a book with all the answers. It was Erich Von Danekin’s best seller ‘Chariots of the Gods.’
It was obvious when you come to think of it, God was……………………………….a spaceman!

This book even had photos, not drawings but actual photographs (so it must be true) of ancient artefacts that Mr. Danekin had come across. They were primitive models of spaceships dating back thousands of years. And you know those circles you get round the heads of Jesus and other saints, in old paintings, they were, in fact, space helmets not halos like Mr. Moon had told us.
These spacemen came to earth and as part of an experiment and created man. This is why there are no legitimate transitional fossils between an ape and man. Men from outer space had created Adam and Eve.
The UFO sightings we often hear of are in fact these same spacemen coming back to see how we are getting on.
I know I missed the obvious, who created the spacemen? But hey! No theory had all the answers.
In the 1970's / 1980's the BBC TV series Horizon totally rubbished his ideas. Erich Von Danekin was exposed as a fraudster the artefacts he had were made by a Mexican villager who used special ageing techniques that he used for making and selling ancient Mexican art to gullible tourists. Another theory bites the dust.

The one positive thing this episode did, was to rekindle my search…………………To be continued

Chapter 3
Evolution - fact or theory

I should say here I am not academic and most of my questioning came about because a group of us just liked to bug our science teachers. One of the questions that used to come up regularly in our class test was the 2nd. Law of Thermodynamics. This stuck in my brain because it was great to use when talking to girls. “Hey guess what I learned today……..”

Although I bought into this evolution thing as a fact of life there were still things that that didn’t make sense.

Thermodynamics is what they call an exact science that is based on a limited number of specific mathematical concepts. The part that stuck with me was that when a thing changes and because energy become less available that change becomes irreversible. For example metal will rust and can not return to what it once was. True, but……
If the temperature drops below freezing, the probability of water becoming ice is very high. The change from water to ice is thermodynamically irreversible. If the surrounding temperature should happen to rise above the freezing point, the probability of water becoming ice, or remaining as ice, is zero. Under these conditions the reverse change of ice to liquid water is also thermodynamically irreversible.

Other things they used to throw at us to prove that evolution was a fact was missing links like the Nebraska Man and the Piltdown man. This must be true after all there were colour pictures in our text books.

(An excerpt from one of my sermons)

“Kids, welcome to biology 101 In this class we are going to learn about all sorts of interesting stuff. We’re going to learn how to cut up a frog. We’re going to pick flowers and learn about pistols and stamens and all sorts of fun stuff. But first of all boys and girls, what you must know above all else is, that you are an accident. You have absolutely no reason for being here, there is no meaning or purpose to your life.
You’re nothing but a conglomeration of molecules that came together purely by chance billions and billions of years ago.
All the dust and the gas in the galaxy for who knows how long and then bumped into each other and said “I know let’s be organic” and so they became organic and they became these slimy things swimming around in the primordial soup, and they grew little feet and they crawled up on the land and grew all these fur and feathers, and then became these higher forms of life, and they turned into monkeys and the monkeys turned into apes and the apes decided to shave, so they shaved and they became what you are today!
You know from goo to you by way of the zoo and as such you don’t have any reason for being here, your existence is pointless and the world won’t mind a bit when you die you’ll just be so much compost.
Class dismissed kids, now make your way along to room 102 where we are running that new class on self esteem.”

The Nebraska Man was named in 1922 from a humanlike tooth which had been found in Nebraska. Evolutionists used one tooth to build an entire species of primitive man, complete with illustrations of him and his family, before further excavations revealed the tooth to belong to a peccary, an animal similar to (and closely related to) pigs.

such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate." (quoted in Wolf and Mellett 1985)

In 1912 Charles Dawson discovered the first of two skulls found in the Piltdown quarry in Sussex, England, skulls of an apparently primitive hominid, an ancestor of man. Piltdown man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni to use his scientific name, was a sensation. He was the expected "missing link" a mixture of human and ape with the noble brow of Homo sapiens and a primitive jaw. Best of all, he was British!

In the Readers Digest in 1953, the truth came out. Piltdown man was a hoax, the most ancient of people who never were.

These hoaxes I only found out about later on after I had left school.

And finally how could an eye evolve???? It’s either an eye or it isn’t????

The question is that if Science was wrong about evolution what does that leave us with………………………………….To be continued

Chapter 2
The searching begins.

It probably began as a search for the meaning of life and it started in my early teens. I was in one of the Government’s flagship secondary modern schools.
Tulse Hill Comprehensive School. It was a typical sixties style building all glass, oblong, and twelve floors high.

It was here that I was first exposed to religion.
Mr. Moon was a good, soft spoken teacher, who wore a brown corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Religious Education (RE) was probably an afterthought for him as his main subject was Music.
He taught RE as an academic subject without any hint of passion, and as RE was just before a double period of maths, this made it an ideal time to catch up with the previous night’s homework (my ‘street cred’ would have suffered terribly if I had stayed in at night to do it).
Mr. Moon must have thought we were studious bunch as he looked over his class, there we were always furiously scribbling notes (we always kept a spare sheet of paper handy in case he ever left his desk, which he never did.)
We could always rely on the class swats to ask a meaningful question every so often.
I always got a good school report from Mr. Moon but I never felt guilty about it as he was trying made up fairy stories for old people.
Science was where it was at. You could blow up things in science or make incredibly potent stink bombs. Science was cool.
Science teachers were in the real world they knew religion was rubbish because they had all the facts. There were the fossil remains of the Piltdown man, the missing link! The ‘Big Bang’ and Charles Darwin’s book on the ‘Origins of Man’ Yes! Our ancestors were apes, and looking at some of the teachers and fellow pupils you could see this was true! Science teachers had all the facts at their finger tips backed up by modern discoveries. Didn’t they?.............................................. To be continued

Chapter 1
To search we need somewhere to start searching from!

As we trudge through life we develope mindsets. These often get stuck in our minds and becomes our truth!
But sometimes these truths are challenged and we come to a point where we have to re-think our mindsets and re-evaluate our set of truths and then there are times when it becomes so obvious that our truths were wrong that we have to change our mindsets, our way of thinking, completely. Like the time you found out that Father Christmas isn't real.
It's a time that I call my Homer Simpson experience, it is usually accompanied by a hard slap on the forehead by the palm of the hand - the Doh! moment.

My biggest 'Doh! Moment came when I became a Bible beleiving, church going born again Christian.
But to fully understand the enormaty of this life changing event I need to go back to a time  long before my Doh! moment.......................................................................... (to be continued)

From a second sermon (sorry about the length I'll try to keep them shorter in future)
A frog goes into the gypsy fortuneteller’s tent after the frog had crossed her palm with silver she gazed into her crystal ball. After a few moments she says to the frog, “You are going to meet a beautiful young woman. From the moment she first sees you she will have an insatiable desire to know all about you. She will be totally fascinated by you. The frog couldn’t contain his excitement any longer. “Where am I going to meet her will it be the local hop? A singles bar?” “No none of those,” says the fortune teller it will be in her biology class.”
In the last post we looked at the historical and archaeological evidence that goes to prove that historically the Bible is a book you can trust.
We found out that there have been over 25,000 archeological sites found in the middle east concerning people places and events in the Old Testament alone and none have ever put the Bible in doubt, instead they have confirmed the accuracy of the Bible. Dr. William Bright, who was a skeptic and who was probably the foremost authority on Middle Eastern archaeology in his time said this about the Bible...”There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of the Old Testament.”

We also found out that The Bible is the most documented ancient manuscript in our civilization.
With over 38,000 fragments in existence which show that although the Bible has been copied many times throughout history there is less than a 1% difference in the book we have today. The remaining 1% variations are extremely minor and do not affect the meaning.

In this post we are going to be looking at how the Bible is validated through fulfilled prophecy. But first we need to understand what we mean by prophecy.
There are many who predict the future in our society today and in our recent past. And more and more, people are turning to the supernatural to try and find what the future holds, the trouble is they are looking everywhere except the Book that has all the answers. They are turning to people like Jeane Dixon (1918-1997) who was an astrologer and alleged psychic who was thought by her many followers and herself to have a gift of prophecy.
In 1956 she made this prediction for the American presidential election: "As for the 1960 election Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office though not necessarily in his first term."
Her followers would point out how accurate she was - a Democrat did win the election John F Kennedy and he was assassinated on November 22 1963. What her followers forget to mention is that the elections weren’t dominated by Labour and that during the 1960 elections she had a vision that Richard Nixon would win.
She also had a vision that on February 5, 1962, a child was born in the Middle East, who would transform the world by year 2000, creating a unifying world religion, and bringing world peace. She saw a cross growing above this man, until it covered the whole earth. This child was a descendant of the very beautiful Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.
Then we have probably the most well known prophet of recent times Michel Nostradamus (1503-1566) he was a 16th century French physician and astrologer. His modern followers see him as a prophet. His prophecies, say his followers have a magical quality for those who study them: they are muddled and obscure before the predicted event, but become crystal clear after the event has occurred:
1
He who by iron shall destroy his father, born in Nonnaire.
Shall in the end carry the blood of the gorgon,
Shall in a strange country make all so silent
That he shall burn himself, and his double talk
2
The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt.
The evil deed predicted by the bearer of a petition;
According to the prediction another falls at night time.
Conflict in Reims, London, and pestilence at Tuscany.

Confused 1- Adolf Hitler 2 – John F Kennedy and his brother

But these are not prophets in the Biblical sense?
Numbers 12:6 says, "When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams.”
Another sign of a true prophet is that the predictions they give must come true.
In Old Testament times there was no room for; “You know I’ve got this feeling that God wants us to……” or “I’ve had this dream and I think God is saying…..”
If the prophecy didn’t come true they took you out and stoned you to death.
So you didn’t say, “God says…” unless you were 100% certain it was from God.
All of which brings us to today’s post: fulfilled prophecy proves we can trust the Bible.
And I’m not talking about airy fairy predictions that could mean just about anything you want it to like we see with the Nostrodamus’ prophecies and I’m not talking about Jeane Dixon type prophecies that are a bit hit and miss. I’m talking about accurate predictions which name names, times, places and the like. The Book of Daniel is so accurate in its predictions that historians and scholars tried to alter the dates of when it was written, as they said it was impossible to have been written at any time other than after the event. Except that as they did further research they had to concede it was written in 553 BC, 14 years before the fall of Babylon
In our reading today we are looking at a dream that Daniel had, in Daniel chapter 7 but we will also be looking at a dream someone else had namely King Nebuchadnezzar himself because we will see that both dreams are interlinked. Just as John’s vision in the Book of Revelation is.
Daniel’s dream begins with four beasts coming up out of the sea. Now before you get visions of godzilla like creatures coming up out of the sea we need to realize that the creatures and the sea are purely symbolic. We are told what the sea represents in; REV 17:15 Then the angel said to me, "The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages. So the great sea represents peoples or nations and the beasts represent kingdoms coming out of the people.

The first beast we come across in our reading is a lion with the wings of an eagle. This is a symbol that is closely associated with the Babylonian Empire. In fact archeologists have found winged lions carved in to the wall and gates of this once magnificent city.
The lion is regarded as the most powerful beast on the Earth and the eagle is the most powerful bird of prey. All of which symbolizes Babylon, which was the most powerful nation in all of the known world. Then we read in verse 4 I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a man, and the heart of a man was given to it.
Which is precisely what happened to Babylon and its King, - King Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar was no longer content with just being a king and so he declared himself to be a God and was struck down by God and became like a demented wild beast for a period of time until his heart was changed and he turned to the God of Daniel and for the short time he had to live he used his considerable power and influence to tell his subjects of his conversion to the one true God of Daniel, but by then it was too late the lions wings were torn off and Babylon was losing its power.

In verse 5 we read “And there before me was a second beast, which looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of its sides, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth.”
History tells us that this was the Medo-Persian Alliance led by Cyrus which defeated Babylon in 539 BC but we’re not looking back at history - it may surprise you to know that if the Babylonians had studied the prophecies in the Bible they would have known the who, when, and how of their defeat. Jeremiah 27:6 Now I will hand all your countries over to my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; I will make even the wild animals subject to him. 7 All nations will serve him and his son and his grandson until the time for his land comes; Which means that Babylon will only last until the reign of Belshazzar Jeremiah also said it would be an army from the north other prophets predicted that it would happen during a drunken feast. And the Prophet Isaiah even named the leader of that army 175 years before Cyrus was even born, that’s right 175 years before Cyrus was born Isaiah said this in;

ISA 45:1 "This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut:
And how did Cyrus get into the impregnable city of Babylon? Through a gate that was left open in the aqueduct during a drunken feast.
But why was the bear that Daniel saw, raised up on one side this was a symbol the unequal alliance between the Medes and the Persians with the Medes being the most dominant although this turned around during the reign of Darius. And the three ribs in the bear’s mouth were the three nations the Medo-Persian army defeated. Lydia, Egypt and Babylon.

Now we come to the fourth beast, the leopard with four wings and four heads this symbolizes the Greek kingdom led by a brilliant young tactician called Alexander the Great he defeated the combined Medo-Persian Army in 334 BC Alexander’s army was known for its swiftness as it moved from place to place conquering the known civilized world you could say he moved with the speed of a leopard with wings. Why four heads? This was because when Alexander died at a young age of pneumonia his kingdom was divided up amongst his four generals. Being divided as they were, they were easily overcome by this fourth beast coming out of the sea.

In verses 7 & 8 we read; "After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast--terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns.
"While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth that spoke boastfully.
This next beast which was the last Kingdom to dominate the civilized world was the Roman Empire which subdued every nation in its path this Empire stretched from India right across Europe to Southern Britain and down to North Africa.

If you notice no other beast followed this one out of the sea. Rome was the last World Empire. Rome was never defeated on a battlefield. Rome just became fat and lazy and fell apart from within.

I said that this dream is linked to Daniel's interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel chapter 2: If you remember Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a huge statue but would not tell anyone what he had dreamed. The king demanded that his magicians, exorcists, sorcerers, etc. describe the dream to him, and to interpret its meaning. Maybe he didn’t tell them what the dream was in order to test their psychic abilities. Understandably, they failed. Daniel then described the dream, which was a statue made from different metals and explained that the metals that the king dreamed of (gold, silver, bronze and iron) each represented one earthly kingdom: his own and three to come in the future.

*******
This is how the statue may have looked. A head of gold, chest and arms of silver, Belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of clay mixed with iron. We can also see at the bottom of the statue the rock not made with human hands which eventually caused the statue to crumble and fall.
How do these two dreams link with each other; again we can see this from this table.

*********
As I said earlier Rome was never defeated as a whole on the battle field there was no world dominating kingdom to follow Rome up to the present day many have tried like Hitler but none have ever succeeded.
So what we have in our present time grew out of the Roman Empire but none compare with its strength and dominance and we can see this in the fourth beast you will remember it had ten horns and if we look at our statue again we see its feet made from clay and iron. Iron being the remnants of Rome.
The feet also have ten toes which corresponds to the ten horns. And from our next table we can see how those ten horns or toes became the kingdoms that shaped our modern world;

Kingdom Modern Equivalent

Alamanni Germany
Ostrogoths Austria, Switzerland, and
Yugoslavia
Visigoths Spain
Vandals North Africa
Suevi Portugal
Burgundians South France
Heruli Italy
Anglo-Saxons England
Lombards Hungary
Franks France

Now I could go on to explain how the little horn represents the coming antichrist and how the rock not made from human hands represents Christ who is coming to bring and end to all the man made kingdoms. But that concerns prophecies that are still to be fulfilled. We are looking at prophecies that history proves were fulfilled.

What I would like to turn our attention on now briefly is the single most important event in history, and what the Bible is all about….. Jesus. There are 360+ prophecies about Jesus as the coming Jewish Messiah in the Old Testament made hundreds of years before he was born and fulfilled when Jesus was born, died on a cross and rose again 3 days later. Over 360. And out of those 365 prophecies that were fulfilled by Jesus, there are 109 that only Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah could have fulfilled. What I mean by that is there were probably thousands of babies born in Bethlehem over the years but how many were the result of a virgin birth?

Now I know I have shared this with you in the past, but it’s worth repeating to illustrate the enormity of one man fulfilling just eight of these prophecies.
Peter Stoner, a mathematician, in a periodical ‘Science Speaks’ (Moody Press, 1963) shows that its beyond coincidence that any man, let alone Jesus, could fulfill these prophecies by chance, is ruled out by the science of probability. Stoner says that by using the modern science of probability in reference to just eight of these prophecies, 'we find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is 1 in 10to the power of 17." That would be 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. In order to help us comprehend this staggering probability, Stoner illustrates it by saying. "Suppose we take 1017 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover the whole of the state of Texas with a 2 feet layer of silver dollars. Great Britain covers about 94200 square miles. Texas covers about 268,601 square miles, Nearly 3 X bigger "Now mark one of these silver dollars with a red cross, and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the one with the red cross on it. What would be the chance that he had picked the right one? Its the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man."
Stoner considers 48 prophecies and says, "we find the chance that any one man fulfilled all 48 prophecies to be 1 in 10 to the power of 157, or 1 in
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
In comparison these are the odds of matching 6 of 6 main numbers in the national lottery is - 1 : 13,983,816

But Jesus didn’t fulfill 8 prophecies he didn’t fulfill 48. Jesus fulfilled over 360 I would’ve shown the probability of all of them being fulfilled by one man but this blog isn’t big enough.

And finally one last prophecy;
In Isaiah 66 we read this prophecy concerning the Jews; “Who has ever heard of such a thing? Who has ever seen such things? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment?”

Who would have thought this could possibly happen. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. The Jewish people were scattered all over the world they no longer had a land to call home they were no longer a nation. But Isaiah’s prophecy accurately describes what happened on May 14, 1948 - when the Jews moved back to the land we now call Israel and declared independence for the state of Israel as a united and sovereign nation for the first time in 2900 years.

During that same day, the United States issued a statement recognizing Israel's sovereignty. And, only hours beforehand, a United Nations mandate expired, ending British control of the land. During a 24-hour span of time, foreign control of the land of Israel had formally ceased, and Israel had declared its independence, and its independence was acknowledged by other nations. Modern day Israel was literally born in a single day just as God said it would.

Did you know that the Bible is ⅔’s prophetic and over ½ of those prophecies have already been fulfilled exactly as they were written and if over half have already been fulfilled we can be sure the rest will be fulfilled exactly as God said they will.

2Timothy 3:16 ”All Scripture is God-breathed”
The Bible always brings you to a crossroads. There is no middle ground with the Bible. You can’t say “I think it’s a good moral book but I don’t believe it was inspired by God.” Or “ I believe some of it is true and some of it isn’t.” The Bible doesn’t give us that option. If it’s not what it said it is then it’s a book of lies and deserves to gather dust on bookshelves all over the world. But if it’s true then we have the very words and the very thoughts of God himself written to you. If the Bible is what it says it is you have the most powerful and priceless and precious book ever written.
If the Bible is what it says it is don’t you think you should be treating it with the reverence it deserves?

These are the notes from one of my sermons..........

WHY YOU CAN TRUST THE BIBLE 1

A father asked his son what he had learned in Sunday School.
”Well,” he said, “We learned about how Moses went behind enemy lines to rescue the Jews from the Egyptians.
Moses ordered the engineers to build a pontoon bridge.
After the people had crossed, he sent bombers back to blow up the bridge and the Egyptian tanks that were following them. And then...”

”Did your teacher really tell it like that?” the father asked.

The son answered, “No, Dad, but if I told you what he really said, you wouldn’t believe it!”

While we can laugh at stories like these but, the sad truth is that many think you can’t believe or trust what is written in the Bible.

These are some of the opinions I have got off the internet of what people think of the Bible;
• It’s a good moral book
• It’s full of lies and deception designed to oppress the people
• It’s full of fairy tails, myths and legends
• It is full of made up stories used to illustrate spiritual truths
• The Bible was corrupted by the Jews and you can’t trust it
• The Bible was disproved by scientists hundreds of years ago
• It has been copied and translated so many times that it is nothing like the original.
• It’s a vitriolic attack on peoples freedoms

Theologian Bernard Ramm said this:
A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and the committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put.

No other book in human history has been attacked so often with such venom and scepticism and yet it has remained unchanged since it was first written.

This book that we’re talking about today contains 6000 years of recorded history. It tells the story of the Jewish people, of Jesus and of the early church. It contains intrigue and romance, love, betrayal and biographies. Yet, within that book that is not often opened by very many, and is gathering dust on countless bookshelves throughout the world, we read an incredible unity of themes from Genesis through Revelation, progressively revealing God’s plan to restore His relationship with His creation. Someone once said that the Bible contains a golden thread which is woven throughout every page in the Bible and that golden thread is Christ.

But let’s start with some basic stuff.

The Bible was written by 40 different authors from 20 different occupations from 10 different countries over a 1500 year period in 3 different languages with a cast of 2930 characters in 1551 different places it contains 66 books and is divided into two major portions, the Old Testament with 39 books and the New Testament with 27 books. There are 1189 chapters in the Bible: It has 31,000 verses and over 774000 words and over 31/2 million letters.
The Longest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 119 with 176 verses. The shortest chapter is Psalm 117 with 2 verses. There are 594 chapters before Psalms 118. There are 594 chapters after Psalms 118. Add these numbers up and you get 1188. The centre of the Bible is Psalm 118 verse 8 Psalm 118:8.
The Longest verse is Esther 8:9 the shortest verse is John 11:35.
The Bible was divided into chapters by Stephen Langton about A.D. 1228. The Old Testament was divided into verses by R. Nathan in A.D. 1448 and the New Testament by Robert Stephanus in A.D. 1551. The entire Bible divided into chapters and verses first appeared in the Geneva Bible of 1560.

Surely the Bible is a book of faith? Well yes and……… no.
In the Bible there is much theology and doctrine which we accept by faith but many of these doctrines are tied to specific events. For instance; If, there wasn’t a Garden of Eden how did sin get passed down through the ages? If there wasn’t an actual virgin birth then Jesus lied when he said he came to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament? If there were no actual crucifixion or resurrection how could our sins be forgiven?
There are basically three world views that have shaped modern society.
Judeo – Christian
Secular Humanism
Post Modernism

Judeo – Christian world view: Absolute truth, knowable through scripture and divine revelation from God.

Secular Humanist world view: Cannot know truth from God, God does not exist. Man is the definer of truth not God.

Post Modernist world view: Cannot know truth from God, God does not exist.
Cannot know truth from man because there is no truth. What is good for man is true, what is not good for man is not true.

All religions and philosophies are in the main derivatives or combinations of these three world views.

If there is no God then all rules and laws are man made and according to the post modernist view which would mean that if a law is not good for us we should ignore it because it is not true.
I cannot prove there is a God just as no one can prove there is not a God.
So we can only go by what the Bible says and make up our own minds.

Whatever we may think about it, the Bible is historically accurate and almost daily further proof of its accuracy is being revealed.

But for many years Biblical critics have categorically stated that you just can’t trust the Bible.
The basis for this was the historical and scientific evidence or lack of that supported their arguments.

The Bible tells us that Moses was the author of the first 5 books of the Bible, and this was confirmed by Jesus in the NT. For many years, unbelieving historians laughed at the thought that Moses could have written anything. ‘that’s impossible’, they said, because there was no such thing as a written language when Moses lived, everything was passed down through the ages verbally!

Archaeologists continued their work, and guess what in 1887 in N. Egypt 300 clay tablets were unearthed, which were Letters and business transactions between Egypt and Palestine, dated centuries before Moses was even born.

And you remember the story in the book of Daniel, when he wrote of Belshazzar and how during a drunken feast human fingers appeared and wrote on a wall. For centuries historians sneered and dismissed that story as mythology, stating that they have the Babylonian records, which show that the last king of Babylon was NOT Belshazzar, but was Nabonitis. As a matter of fact, they said, we have no record anywhere that any Belshazzar even existed!
Well, guess what one day a clay tablet was found by archaeologists which revealed the truth: Nabonitis was the father of Belshazzar, and they were co-regents, that is ruling together! While Nabonitis traveled the world, his son Belshazzar ruled the kingdom. Now we have a better understanding of Daniel 5:16

16 Now I have heard that you are able to give interpretations and to solve difficult problems. If you can read this writing and tell me what it means, you will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain placed around your neck, and you will be made the third highest ruler in the kingdom.” Nabonitis Belshazzar Daniel

And then there’s the story in the Book of Joshua where Joshua sent in two spies to gather intelligence in the city Jericho and when the authorities found out Rahab the prostitute had to hide them and help them escape by lowering them out of a window on a rope from her house which was built into the northern city wall and that she had to gather her family in her house and hang a scarlet cord from her window so that she and her family would be saved when the siege of the city took place. And in Joshua chapter 6:2 it says,

Then the LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the people will go up, every man straight in.”

Critics claimed that this was just another fairy tale it couldn’t have happened like that. Well guess what!
A British archaeologist named Kathleen Kenyon reexcavated the site using modern methods in the 1950s upon finding piles of bricks she determined that they were from the city wall which had collapsed when the city was destroyed!
The story in the Bible goes on to say that when the walls collapsed, the Israelites stormed the city and set it on fire. Archaeologists found evidence that the walls had fallen outwards unlike a normal siege where the walls would be battered inwards. They also found vast amount of grain which pointed to a very short siege and that there was massive destruction by fire just as the Bible relates. Kenyon wrote in her excavation report,
“The destruction was complete. Walls and floors were blackened or reddened by fire, and every room was filled with fallen bricks, timbers, and household utensils which were all heavily burnt.”
Kenyon went on to say; The most likely explanation was an earthquake. But the nature of the earthquake was unusual. It struck in such a way as to allow a portion of the city wall with a house built in to it on the north side of the site to remain standing, while everywhere else the wall fell. Was this Rahab’s house perhaps?
For years critics ridiculed the Bible because of King David. They said he is one of the main characters in the Bible and we can’t find a reference to him anywhere this shows that the Bible full of made up stories. Well guess what! They kept on digging in Israel and they found multiple references to King David.
Critics also cast doubts about Sodom and Gomorrah. There was nothing in history they said to confirm these cities ever existed and then they found the foundations of Sodom and Gomorrah and that all of the houses had been burnt from the rooftops down. Ominously, excavations revealed a layer of ash and associated debris some five feet thick. Volcanic action couldn’t have produced this, because no volcanoes exist here. Found under the rubble of a fallen defense tower, two human skeletons point to this city suffering a sudden end. Much like skeletons found at the Roman resort of Pompeii, suddenly buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., they had no time to flee. The whole site is dotted with salt formations, asphalt pits, and sulfur (“brimstone”) deposits, this area geologically is a prime candidate for the location of Sodom and Gomorrah

That’s the Old Testament but how about the New Testament is there any evidence to back that up? Well I’m glad you asked that question.
In the late 1800’s/early 1900’s Sir William Ramsey was a well-known archaeologist and historian. He was professor of humanities at Aberdeen University. He was considered to be the world’s most imminent scholar on Asia-Minor, and its geography and history. He read the book of Acts and said,
“the book of Acts is a highly imaginative and carefully colored account of primitive Christianity” (in essence, “of my knowledge of history, I have no respect for Luke as a historian”)

There were three major sticking points in Luke’s account and don’t forget Luke claimed to be an historian; Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,

In Luke 2:1 we read In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.
LK 2:4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.

The three major sticking points in Lukes gospel were these;
1. There was no records of any census being taken at the time of the birth of Jesus
2. There was no Governor of Syria named Quirinius
3. There was no record of people having to return to their home town for a census
If these three things were untrue then the whole of Luke’s Gospel is called in to question.

So Sir William Ramsey went to the middle east for the sole purpose of proving the Bible wrong in its history. When he came home again he wrote a book called, “Luke, the beloved physician” in which he proclaimed Dr. Luke to be one of the world’s foremost historians.

He discovered that Quirinius was twice Governor of Syria (or there were two people named Quirinius) the first when Christ was born and the second at a later period. The cycle of census which was 14 years shows that the one recorded by Luke took place in 6 – 5 B.C. which is commonly accepted by historians as the date for the birth of Christ.
And a piece of papyrus found in Egypt written by a Roman official confirms that everyone must return to their home town.
Here’s a quote from Sir William Ramsey…this was after looking carefully at the evidence:

“I take the view that Luke’s history is unsurpassed in its trustworthiness. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian, and they will stand the keenest scrutiny, and the harshest treatment.”

In his Gospel, Luke named thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands without making a single error.

There was also Pontius Pilate – he was said to be a figment of the imagination that was dreamed up to be the bad guy in the crucifixion story because there was no external record of him having existed. Well guess what! A helicopter gun ship was flying down the coast of Israel and they noticed a circle in the sand. Archeologists began to dig and excavated an entire city called Caesarea Philippi and a magnificent amphitheatre. There was also a plaque dedicating it to the man who had it built, Pontius Pilate.

There have been over 25,000 archeological sites in the middle east concerning people places and events none have ever put the Bible in doubt;

Nelson Glueck, a famous Jewish archaeologist, states, "No archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference !" Dr. William Bright, who was a sceptic and who was probably the foremost authority on Middle Eastern archaeology in his time said this about the Bible..."There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of the Old Testament."

Maybe the Bible is historically accurate but is the Bible we have today written by the original authors?
The integrity of any historical document depends on the number of manuscripts we have to examine.

The Bible is the most documented manuscript in civilization.
There are 14,000 manuscripts and fragments of the Old Testament. There is only one variation in every 1,580 words. And 99% of the time the variation is a minor spelling mistake.

Critics used to say there was 1,300 years between the first copy and the copies we had. So surely it cannot be accurate.

But then there was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – In 1947 young Bedouin boy who one day, while he was chasing his sheep threw a rock into the cave at a place called Kumran heard the sound of a pot break. He looked into the cave and found what has come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They now had portions and complete manuscripts of every OT book of the Bible except the Book of Esther.

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls the oldest manuscript we had was dated around 900 AD. But the Dead Sea Scrolls took that date back to 1,000 years earlier.

When compared to later manuscripts they found that 95% of the text was exactly the same and the other 5% were minor spelling mistakes an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ that type of thing so you can be sure the Bible you have is exactly the Bible God wants you to have. This was down to the accuracy of the copyists who knew they were handling the very words of God.

What about the New Testament? Well, if you think 14,000 manuscripts is good.

There are 24,000 copies of the New Testament in different languages from all over the world in Latin, Greek and various other languages. In all of those manuscripts there is less than 1 variation in 1,000 words. Those variations are extremely minor and do not affect the meaning.

You may not like what the text says but it is exactly what the authors wrote.

The Bible is the most documented manuscript in the history of ancient civilization and the Bible has more textual credibility than any other ancient document in history. Which is why today you find people are attacking its doctrine rather than its historical accuracy.

2Timothy 3:16 ”All Scripture is God-breathed”

Does all of this prove to us that Bible is the very words of God? Of course not but it does tell us that the Bible is historically accurate and if it’s historically accurate then the chances are that the three thousands references in the Bible that say God says are also accurate and we should listen very carefully to what He is saying.

Overall if we read the Bible from cover to cover , within its pages we find there is;
• One hero – the Messiah Jesus Christ
• One villain – Satan
• One problem – Sin
• And one purpose – Salvation

The Bible tells us;
a. About our sinfulness
b. About our inability to save ourselves
c. About the one way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

Do I need to be convinced that the Bible is accurate? The answer is no.
But it’s good to know I have an accurate book and not just a book of fairy tales, myths and legends. I know I can trust the Bible and when I read it I know I’m reading the very words of God. In conclusion then, what does my Bible mean to me? I think this last illustration sums it all up;

Dr. W.A. Criswell tells of a small New Testament that was taken from the breast-pocket of a fallen American soldier in Vietnam, a young boy from Georgia. When Mr. Pat Zondervan held up that New Testament before the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Dr. Criswell could see the light of a bullet hole through its middle. Later, when Dr. Criswell held it in his hands, he saw that the pages were stained with the blood of that fallen soldier. Flipping through it, he found an inscription in the back that had survived intact. It read, "On this date, I Wilton Thomas take Jesus Christ as my personal Savior." Then it was signed and dated by the hand of that young man.

That is what the Bible is for. It is not to amaze us with its scientific accuracy or impress us with its historical integrity, but to lead us to a personal knowledge of God through Jesus Christ as our Saviour.

The purpose of this site is to reflect my faith, I'm still searching and still learning.
There is nothing we can do to make God love us more.
There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.