God’s Word or Man’s

Listen Online:

Transcript:

This morning, we’re going to start out in 2 Peter chapter 1. 2 Peter chapter 1. I’m going to let you in on a little secret as far as one of the problems that we have in my home.

Yes, even in the pastor’s home and the pastor’s family, there are problems and hiccups. We have those just like everybody else. One of the problems that, and this is one of the small ones, but one of the problems that we run into quite frequently now is that we’ll tell one of the kids to give a message to the other, especially the older two, give a message to the other one, and they won’t do it in just exactly the right way.

See, for example, Madeline might be in the kitchen or living room with us, and it’ll be about time to eat dinner, and so we’ll tell her, go tell your brother we need him to clean up so you can come to dinner. And she’ll run in there, run, run, run, run, run, and then we’ll hear this muffled argument. You need to clean up.

You’re my boss. And it just goes downhill from there. And we put our heads in our hands and go, okay, where did we go wrong?

They just look for any excuse to fight. And Madeline will come back in there and say, he said, you’re not his boss. No, no, no, no. He said, you’re not his boss.

We heard the whole conversation. Madeline, go back in there and tell him, Daddy said to clean up. Okay.

So she’ll run back in there. Daddy says you need to clean up. Okay, why didn’t you just say that to begin with?

And he’ll start to clean up. Now, I wish he always obeyed. I wish they both always obeyed us that easily.

But when it comes down to Daddy said versus Madeline said, Daddy carries a little more weight. There’s some more authority in there. So it’s important for him, and by the way, he does this to her too.

That’s just the example I gave. But it’s important to know where the message is coming from because the authority is different depending on where it’s coming from. And there’s a great debate that rages over whether the Bible is God’s word or whether it’s just man’s.

And in any number of churches this morning, You could go and hear a message that relates to the Bible from a preacher who will tell you, now this is just man’s word, and we’ve got to figure out what God’s word really, what God was really trying to say, but it’s all been filtered through man, and so you can’t believe all of it. There are churches out there who teach that. And I’m not going to name names because we’d be here all day.

But there are churches that believe that, that this is just man’s word. Now, call me crazy that I don’t really see the point of doing church if you don’t believe that this book means what it says and that it’s God’s word. Because if I had to go through here and sift through and figure out what is God’s word and what is man’s word, that’s a little bit above my pay grade because I wasn’t there when it was written to know who said what.

What I can go by is what the evidence tells me. And the evidence tells me, first of all, the Bible says, if you haven’t turned there with me already, go with me to 2 Peter chapter 1. And this is just one of the places where it says something similar to this, by the way.

2 Peter chapter 1, starting in verse 19, it says, And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, that holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. So that passage right there, from Peter’s own hand, says that the Scriptures were given by inspiration of God. These things were not, he explicitly says there in verse 21, The prophecies of Scripture, these never came because of man’s will or man’s opinion.

This wasn’t something a human prophet thought up and wrote down. He said these things came because the Holy Spirit of God impressed it on people to write these things down. And many of you in the congregation are sitting there nodding your heads.

We’re on the same page. We believe that the Bible is God’s Word. From cover to cover, it’s God’s Word.

Now, there may be some sitting in the congregation this morning, and if not, you may know somebody who’s this way, who immediately, as a good skeptic should, by the way, if you have this question, I’m not faulting you. I am skeptical as well. I just have studied these things and come to conclusions where I’m no longer, where my skepticism has been answered.

I’ll put it that way. The skeptic, whether sitting here in this room or somebody you know, The skeptic would say, well, of course the Bible says that. Of course the Bible says it’s God’s word.

That doesn’t mean anything. When I was in Phoenix a couple years ago, I haven’t spent a great deal of time in large cities. I’m just not a large city kind of person.

And that was an eye-opening experience. I’ve spent time in Dallas and other places with my car. In Phoenix, having to get downtown, I thought, I’ll ride the train.

And I think I’ve told you all some parts of that story. That was an eye-opening experience. I didn’t realize how sheltered I’d been in life until I rode the train around downtown Phoenix.

One of the things that I experienced was at various stops, there would be one man, I don’t know how he got from stop to stop quicker than the train did, but there was a homeless man who would stand out there with a Bible, but he would preach at the, I have no problem with that, He would preach at the people as they were getting on and off the trains. What I had a problem with was his message was kind of crazy. And I’m being kind here because when I say kind of crazy, I mean totally bonkers.

Completely crazy is probably the more accurate way of saying it. He would talk about being a prophet from God and would talk about being Jesus himself. I’m pretty sure I heard him say.

Anybody, and I know that in their day, some of the prophets looked a little strange as well. John the Baptist ate locusts and wore a hair shirt. Jeremiah got locked up because they thought he was a little crazy.

But their message resonated with what God had already said. The guy screaming at commuters coming on and off the train, the things he was preaching didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard in God’s word before. And yet he claimed to be a prophet.

So the point I’m making here is anybody can claim to be a prophet. Anybody can claim, hey, what I’m saying is from God. All right, I could stand up here and tell you that the world is going to end in June, and God told me that.

I could make that claim. I could say it came from God all day. By the way, don’t leave from here telling people, the pastor down at Trinity says God told him the world’s going to end in June.

Because I will tell other people in town, no, they totally were not listening to what I said. If I told you that and said it came from God, that doesn’t prove that it came from God. So the skeptic would look at this and say, just because Peter said that the scriptures were given by inspiration of God doesn’t prove that it was so.

So how do we know? How do we know? Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to look at that.

We’ve been looking at some of the arguments and evidence for our Christian faith. How we can know God exists. and I laid out what I think are three of the, at least for me, the most compelling arguments for the existence of God.

We spent a couple weeks looking at how do we know Jesus is exactly who he claimed he was. And I think the eyewitness testimony, the lives that were transformed, the skeptics whose minds were changed, I think that’s some of the best argument, that these people met Jesus and they came away convinced. For the next couple of weeks, I want to look at how do we know that the Bible is God’s word and not man’s.

And I can already tell you, this morning’s message, there’s no way I’m going to get through it all this morning. It’ll continue into next week. So I hope you’re here next week for the continuation and conclusion of it.

But the Bible itself gives us some tests that we can look at and say, this is how we know. This is how we know it came from God. In Deuteronomy 18, and by the way, this is not some rigged standard.

This is a pretty good standard of proof that is given to us in the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter 18, verses 21 and 22, deals with this question. How do we know that it’s the word of God and not just a human book?

How do we know that it’s not just the prophet, the so-called prophet, speaking the things that are his opinion? And the book of Deuteronomy says, And if you say in your heart, how shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, That is the thing which the Lord has not spoken.

The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You shall not be afraid of him. So he says the book of Deuteronomy gives us a very simple test. If it comes true like the prophet said it would, it’s from God.

If it doesn’t, it’s not. And by the way, I think this is a cumulative thing. A few years ago, there was a man named Harold Camping.

I believe he said the world was going to end in 2012. I think he was one of many people who said the world was going to end in 2012. And I believe it was sometime around the end of May.

And a lot of people were concerned around the end of May. Because, well, he said this, is there any chance it’s possible? I started to look back at some of his previous things he’d said.

And folks, I say things that are incorrect. But I’m not telling you I’m receiving revelation from God. I’m telling you this is my understanding of God’s Word as it’s written in the Bible.

and if I’m wrong, I’ll come back and correct it later. I’m not claiming to receive new revelation. You can look at what God has already revealed in his word and test whether I’m telling you the truth or not.

But if somebody is telling you, no, I’m getting new revelation from God, you need a way to test it. And he gives us the test in Deuteronomy. So Harold Camping, who used to be on the radio, was preaching that the world was going to end in 2012, and people were saying, what if there’s some truth to it?

I looked into it. This was not the first time he’d made predictions. and most of those predictions had not come to pass.

And by the world standard, we’d look at it and say, well, you know, a few of the things he said have been right, so there’s a chance he could be right. And I’ve shared with you the expressions before that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I could make some.

. . If I’m just throwing predictions out at the wall like pasta to see what sticks, eventually something might stick.

But God’s standard that he gave us is not saying, well, look at the probability, or look at the percentages. You know, he’s thrown out a thousand prophecies, 20 of them were right, so you might listen to him. Okay, that’s the kind of nonsense when we’re dealing with psychics.

Ooh, they got something right. Well, think about the 900 things they’ve gotten wrong. God’s standard is different from that.

God says, if they are a true prophet, when they speak in my name, all of it will come to pass. And so you would look at the track record, because he says, don’t be afraid of that prophet if what he says doesn’t come to pass. Well, how do you know whether it’s going to come to pass or not until after it’s already come to pass?

If it’s because you have to evaluate every prophecy and say, well, if that one didn’t come to pass, then we’ll know it wasn’t from God. You’re still worried in the meantime. No, God is talking about the cumulative body of work of a prophet.

And if the prophet said, you know, the world’s going to end in 1988, God told me, and there were people that said that, God said the world is going to end in 1988. Let me give you a real world example. The Jehovah’s Witnesses said that the world would end in 1914.

It didn’t end in 1914, so they revised it and said, well, it was just about a changing of times. So the world is going to end in 1918. It didn’t end in 1918.

Well, 1925, there’s going to be major upheaval, and the world as we know it is going to come to an end. Nope, didn’t happen then either. There were predictions about the 1930s, the 1940s.

I seem to remember 1975. We’re all still here. So we look at the cumulative body of prophecy, and if they were to say, and to my knowledge they haven’t said this, but if they were to say, if the Watchtower organization were to say, the world is going to end in July of 2020, if they were to say that, we don’t have to sit there and worry about, well, could it end?

We’ll only know if it ends, if they were right or not. That’s not what God’s saying here. By God’s standard, what have they said in my name before did it come to pass?

No, then don’t worry about it. That was how you checked in ancient Israel. The things that they’ve said, this has been given to me by the Lord, have they been right every time or have they been wrong?

If they’ve been wrong, you don’t have to worry about it. So the standard that we’re given in Scripture is actually pretty high. So if we’re going to judge Scripture according to its own standards, we can see whether it meets its own standard for being given by God or not.

And I’m going to give you a little spoiler alert here. It does meet its own standard. Because there are two sets of things in prophecy.

Those things that have to have already occurred, and those things that will have to occur in the future. And at no point, obviously the things that will have to occur in the future can’t have been fulfilled yet. So we put those aside and put that in the future category.

We look at the things that the Bible said would already have happened. And if the Bible said, yes, this would happen in this order and we’re already past it, and the Bible got anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about that prophet. But we look at the body of things that the Bible has spoken on that were already events that were going on.

We look at the things that are past, and I’m going to tell you, we see the Bible has a 100% track record of the words of these prophets coming to pass. And this morning, I want to share three of those with you. We’ll get to the fourth next week.

But I want to share three of these with you because God has also said, again, if you believe that Isaiah is telling the truth as I do, in Isaiah 46 verses 9 and 10, Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning. So from the beginning of time, God was already telling how things were going to end.

He started in the Garden of Eden, telling us what was going to happen in the future. As he was handing down his punishment to Adam and Eve for eating that apple, he was already telling us about Jesus Christ when he talked about the seed of the woman crushing the head of the serpent. And it only got clearer from there.

As time went on, God clarified and gave more detail. He said, I’m declaring the end from the beginning, verse 10, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. Meaning, God said, The things that I have revealed, I will do.

He says, There’s no other God like me who can say from the beginning how things are going to end. And he says, And I’ve been doing that, and if I do that, if I tell you it’s going to happen, I will bring it to pass. And he talks about his own pleasure there at the end.

Some translations say, Will. God is saying, I will do all the things. I will carry out my will perfectly, just like I promised you that I will do.

I want to give you three examples this morning of prophecies from the Old Testament. Like I said, we’ll get to the fourth one next week. But I want to try in just the next few minutes that we have together to share with you three prophecies from the Old Testament that are not little bitty things.

They’re not things that one guy could have come along and said, I’m going to make that happen so it looks like Scripture is true. We’re talking about the way God orchestrated the fates of entire nations. We’re going to look and see those and see how God foretold these things way in advance.

And I think that is some of the best evidence that we have. It’s not the only evidence, but it’s some of the best evidence that we have that this book that we hold in our hands is God’s word and not man’s. So if you would, turn with me.

Turn with me to the book of Jeremiah, either in your Bible or on your device, if that’s quicker for you. The book of Jeremiah, chapter 25. Jeremiah, chapter 25.

We’re going to look at a prophecy regarding the Babylonian captivity. Some of you may be familiar with that story. God, you know, God all throughout his history with Israel was trying to get them to behave the right way, to live up to the covenant that he had made with them, that they had agreed to be his people and he would be their God.

Well, Israel oftentimes didn’t act like his people and didn’t act like they wanted him to be their God. They went out after other gods. And so when this would happen, God would bring in another country and let them kind of push Israel around for a little while until Israel would get tired of it and realize that they needed to turn back to God because they needed God’s help.

And so they would cry out to God, God would rescue them, and then they would walk with God for about a generation, and then they would fall away again. And it’s really, that’s the whole history of the Old Testament that went on. And it’s a really bleak picture of what we are like as human beings.

We tend to do the same thing if we’re not careful. We tend to get away from God until we need him, and then we come, oh, okay, trouble. God help me, and he does, and then we come back to him for a little while until we forget, and we do the same thing over.

Well, Israel had gotten so far from God, and things had gotten so out of hand, the country had actually split into two kingdoms. And they fought against each other, and sometimes alongside each other. It was just a big mess for a few hundred years. Until the northern kingdom of the northern ten tribes, which was called Israel, they were overrun by Assyria.

They were just taken over and absorbed into the Assyrian empire. And all that’s left is the southern kingdom of Judah. And it was to the southern kingdom of Judah that Jeremiah wrote.

Jeremiah was dealing with them at this time on God’s behalf, speaking God’s word to them and saying, you know, we are running out of chances here. The nation of Judah is running out of chances because you’ve seen what happened to Israel, the northern kingdom, and you still continue to reject God. You still continue to ignore him, and you’re using up your chances.

God is about to get your attention in a way where your attention is going to stay gotten. And so he comes to them in Jeremiah chapter 25, and he says, let me turn there with you like I asked you to do. Jeremiah chapter 25, starting in verse 8.

He says, therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, because you have not heard my words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, says the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, will bring them against this land, against its inhabitants, and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations. So he says, because you’ve not heard my word, because you’ve not heard God’s word, because you’ve not done it. then God is going to send these other countries led by King Nebuchadnezzar, and they’re going to march in, they’re going to take over, and they’re going to wreck the place.

He says in verse 10, Moreover, I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon 70 years. then it will come to pass when 70 years are completed that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, says the Lord, and I will make it a perpetual desolation.

So he talks about sending Nebuchadnezzar down and taking away the joy that’s in the country, that he was going to make it a very difficult experience. He says he would take away the voice of mirth. There wouldn’t be celebration because times would be hard.

He says he’ll take away the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride. People aren’t going to be celebrating marriages as a joyful occasion. You know, they’re not going to have their massive festivities and celebrations like they used to.

The sound of the millstone, you know, the economy is going to be wrecked in the country. They’re not going to be growing all the grain that they used to and grinding it and selling it and using it. They’re not going to be prosperous like they used to.

And the light of the lamp, he’s saying it’s going to be dark days in Israel. The whole land will be desolate. so desolate that it will be astonishing, and God’s people, instead of serving God, will have to serve Nebuchadnezzar, he says, for 70 years.

And Jeremiah warns him of that. As a matter of fact, by this time, it’s probably no longer a warning. It’s just kind of a heads up.

This is what’s going to happen. You’ve used up all your opportunities to repent. Here’s what’s going to happen.

We get this way with the kids. There’s a consequence. We’re taking this away from you.

We’re taking this trip, this fun thing away from you. Can I earn it back? No, no, you’ve lost all chances.

at this point. We’re just, there’s the consequence. But God points out he’s not through with Israel yet, through with Judah, because he says in the final verse that we looked at, after 70 years, God is going to deal with the king of Babylon.

He’s going to deal with the Babylonians. That’s part of what the Old Testament book of Habakkuk is about, that the Jews under the exile in Babylon are wondering, if we were bad enough to get punished in this way, Why is God letting the Babylonians, who are ten times worse than us, why is God letting them get by with it and them be in charge? And God says, oh, just you wait.

I’m going to restore you, and I’m going to destroy them. Don’t worry about God’s justice. It’ll come in God’s timing.

But right now, for right now, God was going to use the Babylonians as a tool to get Israel’s attention, to draw them back to him. Before this ever even happened, at the beginning of Jeremiah chapter 25, It says that this was in the fourth year of King Jehoiak and the son of Josiah. That puts this at being around 605 B.

C. 605 B. C.

And it was in 601 B. C. , four years later, that Nebuchadnezzar marched in with his armies and overthrew the country of Judah.

Four years before the fact, Jeremiah told the people that God said Nebuchadnezzar was going to come in and destroy them. And the skeptic might be able to say, well, okay, so what? I can tell you things that are going to happen, too.

You know, after the 91 Gulf War, you could have looked at Iraq and said Saddam Hussein is going to continue to be a problem for America, and we’ll be at war with him again. I think just about anybody could have seen that coming. I mean, that man did nothing but try to frustrate the Americans in the UN for another decade.

I think we all probably could have seen that there was going to be some other kind of conflict with Saddam Hussein. Sometimes we can look at trends in history and make predictions and not be too far off. And folks, the Jews themselves didn’t even, in the midst of the captivity, couldn’t even imagine, even though God had told them, couldn’t even imagine being restored to their former place after 70 years.

And yet that’s exactly what happened. Folks, this wasn’t a good guess from Jeremiah. Even if skeptics want to say, well, it’s a good guess Nebuchadnezzar was taking over everything.

It’s a good guess that eventually he was going to come in and take over Judah. How do you explain the prophecy that 70 years later God would restore them back to their land and back to their rightful place? And that’s exactly what he did.

70 years to the day, just about. 70 years later, this prophecy. 70 years after the captivity began.

And 74, something like that, 74, 75 years after Jeremiah foretold it, God restored them to the land and punished the Babylonians. That’s not a lucky guess. That’s something only God could have foreseen.

And I do want to say about these Old Testament prophecies, some people will say, well, the Jews just wrote these things down later. They just edited these things later to make it appear like they’d been told ahead of time. Anybody that tells you that, that the Old Testament was edited later, we’ll talk about the New Testament at a later time.

But anybody that tells you, well, the Old Testament, you know, they added things to it later, it was written later on, doesn’t understand the Jewish mindset at that time. They had groups of people called the Mazarites that made sure they counted the number of letters in each column and each row because they were meticulous in making sure that they recorded things exactly right because they wanted to make sure that they were recording God’s word faithfully. If at any point in the scroll they made a mistake, they didn’t erase it, they threw the whole thing out.

And when they realized our Hebrew language needs vowel sounds so that we can better distinguish the words, they didn’t add vowel letters. I told some of y’all this when I was studying Hebrew last semester. Oh my goodness, it’s an insanely hard language.

They didn’t go through and add vowel letters. because they didn’t even want to change the letters from what God had revealed. The letter shapes and forms. They said, we’ll just add dots and dashes around the letters to indicate the vowel sounds.

These people were scared to death to alter God’s word. Anybody that says, oh, you know, they changed the Old Testament over time to make it look like he foretold these things, does not understand what they’re talking about. All right?

So Jeremiah foretold, as God told him, 70 years of captivity, and then God will overthrow the Babylonians and punish the Babylonians, and God will restore you. And guess what? It came to pass just like God said it would.

I want to take you to another ancient prophecy in the book of Ezekiel. In the book of Ezekiel. This is about the city of Tyre, which is no longer a city, but sits on the Mediterranean coast in either the northern part of Israel or Lebanon.

somewhere in that general area. It’s hard to remember offhand. The city of Tyre.

Ezekiel chapter 26, starting in verse 3. Therefore thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and will cause many nations to come up against you as the sea causes its waves to come up, and they shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers. I will also scrape her dust from her and make her like the top of a rock.

It shall be a place for spreading nets in the midst of the sea. for I have spoken, says the Lord God. It shall become plunder for the nations.

Also her daughter villages which are in the field shall be slain by the sword. Then they shall know that I am the Lord. For thus says the Lord God, behold, I will bring against Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, king of kings with horses and with chariots and with horsemen and an army and many people.

He will slay with the sword your daughter villages in the fields. He will heap up a siege mound against you, build a wall against you, and raise a defense against you. He will direct his battering rams against your walls, and with his axes he will break down your towers.

Because of the abundance of his horses, their dust will cover you, your walls will shake at the noise of horsemen, the wagons, and the chariots. When he enters your gates, as men enter a city that has been breached, with the hooves of his horses, he will trample all your streets, he will slay your people by the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground. They will plunder your riches and pillage your merchandise.

They will break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses. They will lay your stones, your timber, and your soil in the midst of the water. I will put an end to the sound of your songs, and the sound of your harps shall be heard no more.

I will make you like the top of a rock, and you shall be a place for spreading nets, and you shall never be rebuilt. For I, the Lord, have spoken, says the Lord God. So it’s a pretty vivid picture that God gives Ezekiel of what’s going to happen to the city of Tyre.

He says Nebuchadnezzar is going to come in. He’s going to attack your daughter villages that are scattered around the city. He’s going to attack your walls.

He’s going to break through some of them. He’s going to conquer. Eventually, he says, everything is going to be thrown into the sea, and where the city of Tyre sits is going to be swept clean like a rock, and people are going to use it to spread their nets out and dry them there.

Well, history tells us that Nebuchadnezzar did attack the city of Tyre. He did conquer the villages around the city. He did conquer the parts of the city on the mainland.

He broke through their walls. He laid waste to the city. But the prophecy wasn’t entirely fulfilled because King Nebuchadnezzar could never, well, as a Babylonian, he ran a desert kingdom and didn’t have much of a navy.

and the main part of the city of Tyre sat on an island just off the coast in the Mediterranean. So Nebuchadnezzar was not able to completely obliterate the city. So some people might have said, well, there you go, the prophecy wasn’t fulfilled.

But oftentimes what happens in these prophecies is the prophets don’t, God doesn’t tell the prophets every detail. God did say that Nebuchadnezzar would lay waste to the city, But he also says the city would be conquered, things would be thrown into the sea. Ezekiel himself may not have even realized he was talking about two events.

Because a little while longer, after Nebuchadnezzar fulfilled his part of the prophecy,