Finding Jesus in the Scriptures

Listen Online:

Transcript:

This morning we’re going to be in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and then in John chapter 5. 2 Timothy chapter 3 and John chapter 5. There is a, well I’ll just say one of my greatest frustrations is, one of my greatest frustrations is when I read an interview in a newspaper or a magazine or watch an interview on television with somebody who is presented as a Bible scholar that I question whether they’ve even seen a Bible in its natural habitat based on some of the things that they say.

I mean, there’s a reason I don’t really talk about sports beyond go-sooners. That’s about the extent of my knowledge on sports, and so I don’t pretend to be an authority. But there are tons of Bible scholars out there that I listen to, and I think, have you ever even seen one?

Because of some of the things that they say and they teach. And keep in mind, I’m not attacking any of these people. They are, many of them, far smarter than I will ever be.

And yet, just their positions on the Bible. I don’t understand how they arrive at them. There’s one group of scholars in particular called the Jesus Seminar.

And I’ve talked about this for years. I don’t know if I’ve talked about it here or not. But the Jesus Seminar started back in the mid-80s.

And it was a group of people who got together and said, We’re going to evaluate the Gospels and see whether or not they’re trustworthy. Okay, I’m not against evaluating to see if something’s trustworthy. I happen to believe the Gospels are trustworthy, but I’m never going to tell anybody, no, don’t do your own homework, just listen to me.

I mean, I tell you that all the time. Go look this up in your Bible for yourself and make sure I’m telling you the truth. So they’re going to go and evaluate the Gospels and see if they’re trustworthy, but their methodology is way, way, way wrong.

Because they come into this with certain preconceived ideas about how they’re going to judge the text. First of all, they use what they call dissimilarity. Which just simply means it’s more likely that something in the Gospels is accurate if it doesn’t sound like something a Christian would believe or a Jew would believe.

Because they assume that if it sounds like a Christian belief or a Jewish belief, then probably somebody made it up later. The problem with that is, of all the things that Jesus said and taught in the New Testament, he is the founder of Christianity who was a Jew. Everything he says is going to sound like something a Christian or a Jew would say.

Or if it’s self-referential, they say it’s probably not accurate. In other words, if Jesus was referring to himself about something, so things like, I am the way, the truth, and the life are automatically suspect just going into it. They tend to come in with the preconceived idea that if something is just a short, pithy saying that would be easily remembered, it’s more likely to be true.

So they’re okay with a lot of the Beatitudes, but not things in the book of John where Jesus talks about himself. Not in the book of Matthew where he explains Jesus’ lineage and Jesus’ fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah. And what they’re most known for is the way they determine these things they vote.

Because nothing can go wrong with a majority vote, right? They get together and they vote. And I doubt they use a mason jar, but I do know they use colored beads.

And when they’re evaluating a particular line of the Gospels, when they’re evaluating a particular saying, they have one of four colored beads that they can put in the jar. If they believe Jesus absolutely said that, or Jesus absolutely did that, if they think that’s absolutely true, they put in a red bead and it’s worth three points. If they think, well, Jesus probably said that, but we can’t know for sure, then they put in a pink bead and it’s worth two points.

If they think, eh, he probably didn’t say that, then they put in a gray bead and it’s worth one point. If they think, there’s no way Jesus said that, they put in a black bead and it’s worth zero points. They tally up all the points of the beads, they average them out, and then they determine, did Jesus say that or not?

The only problem is a lot of these guys come in automatically believing, They come in already believing that the Gospels are not trustworthy, and that’s reflected in their scholarship as, according to an article I read this week, over 82% of the things that the Bible reports Jesus said, they think he did not. So you see a Bible with a lot of black and gray and pink, but very little red. It’s because they come in with the idea that it’s not trustworthy in the first place.

Folks, when it comes to something as important as who Jesus is, and the things that he said, the things that he taught, on how we were to be reconciled to God, how we were to find eternal life, how we were to live lives that please God, I don’t have enough faith to put my hope for eternal life in a mason jar full of black beads. And they would probably look at me and say, well, yeah, you’re just a cranky old Baptist. You’re from the South. You’re not as scholarly as we are.

I’m not as scholarly as they are. But I do know a few things to be true. I know that we have a mountain of manuscript evidence, especially for the Gospels, going back thousands of years.

In some cases, we have copies of the original manuscripts. We don’t have the original manuscripts where Matthew sat down and wrote, or John Mark, or Luke, or John. We don’t have the originals they wrote, but we have copies from within a generation of when they wrote.

That is almost unheard of in the annals of ancient literature to have well-preserved copies or even partial copies so close to the originals. And we have a mountain of copies of copies. And they don’t all say the same thing.

I will be the first to admit that. They do not all say the same thing. Yet I’m still a biblical inerrantist. I still believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.

Because when Bible scholars and linguists and mathematicians sit down and they put all of these things together, well over 99% of the time they are in total agreement. And in those places where there are changes, in those places where there have been quote-unquote changes over time, it’s usually a spelling error, or somebody put punctuation in the wrong spot, or somebody transposed two words, or one of the copyists looked away from what he was doing and came back and skipped a word. In every case, we can still tell what they were trying to say.

by looking at all of them together. We know what the Bible says. I have no reason to believe from looking at the manuscript evidence, I have no reason to believe that the Bible’s been changed over time.

I still believe that the Bible is reliable, it’s trustworthy. All these things we’re going to talk about this morning, I’ve told you that over the next several weeks, we’re going to talk about some of the basic things that we as Christians believe, and why they matter, not necessarily the arguments for them. I don’t have time to make an argument for you this morning about why we can trust the Bible, other than just the little preview I’ve just given you.

If you’re curious about that, if you have questions in your mind and think, I want to go research that for myself, I encourage you to do it. Go check what I’m saying. There are some great books out there, and if you don’t get these written down, I can give them to you later.

Seven Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible by Dr. Erwin Lutzer. Why I Believe by D.

James Kennedy. There’s another one I just, oh, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. Go buy any of those.

You can get them real cheap on eBay. Go read those and see for yourself. See the evidence that’s presented there.

But I want to talk about not so much the reasons why we believe these things, but what we believe and why they are important. Because all of these doctrinal beliefs that we’re going to look at over the next several weeks matter, but they matter because of what they tell us about Jesus. I don’t want people to know Christian teaching just so they can feel like I’m full of theology.

I know all the right things. I’m better than you. Folks, we need to know what Christianity teaches.

We need to be firmly rooted in the truth of God’s word because of how it points to Jesus. If you take any of what we teach and you divorce it from Jesus, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the way that we point to Jesus with everything we do and say and teach.

So this morning I want to look at how we can find Jesus in the scriptures. Why this matters. 2 Timothy chapter 3 gives a pretty succinct, pretty short explanation of what we believe about the Bible and what the historic Christian faith teaches about the Bible.

It says, starting in verse 15 Paul is writing to Timothy he tells him to continue in the things that he’s seen and he’s learned and heard from Paul and been assured of. And he says in verse 15 and that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures which are able to wise unto salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. So Paul’s telling Timothy, and this is sort of what we talked about a little bit last week, but Paul’s telling Timothy, stand firm in the things that you’ve heard, that you’ve learned.

He says, and I know that from the time you were a young child, you learned the scriptures, the holy scriptures, you’ve known those which were able to make you wise unto salvation, which is in Christ Jesus. He said, from the time you were a child, You’ve been searching the scriptures. You’ve been learning the scriptures.

And those scriptures have pointed you to Jesus Christ and the salvation that you find in him. They have told you the way to find salvation in Jesus Christ. And he says in verse 16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. It says that scripture here is given by the inspiration of God.

That word inspiration in Greek is theonoustos. meaning God breathed, that the scriptures were breathed out by God. And because of that, they are profitable.

They are beneficial for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Now, I’ve taught on these things fairly recently, so I’m not going to go into great detail about what all these words mean. But he reminds Timothy that because the scriptures were given by God.

Now, God didn’t sit down and write them on paper with his hand, or papyrus, or vellum, or whatever they used at the time. God didn’t sit down and with his own hand write those things out. God also didn’t use the apostles or the prophets as robots, that they just write down whatever he speaks.

There’s a process that none of us completely understand, where God inspired holy men, Peter says, God inspired holy men, men who loved him, men who served him, told them the things that they were supposed to write down, and they wrote it down absolutely correctly, and still their own personalities and experiences and vocabulary show through in the text. That God was able to use men without making them mind-numbed robots. And because God inspired every word in the book, because God inspired every word in the 66 books, they are beneficial. When we want to know what the truth is, when we want to know when we’ve wandered from the truth, when we’ve done wrong in our lives, when we want to know how to get back on the right track, when we want to know how to go on to live lives that please God, the Bible is beneficial for those things.

And it says in verse 17 that the man of God may be perfect. That does not mean, as we think it today, to mean that sinless. Oh, you’re just so perfect, aren’t you?

When the Bible uses the word perfect, it usually means what we would call complete, mature. So that the man of God may be perfect, meaning complete or mature, That somebody who studies the scriptures, a Christian who studies the scriptures, will grow on to spiritual maturity because of it. Thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

So that God, through these scriptures, will give us the ability to serve him. Will give us the wisdom and the discernment that we need to be able to serve him in an extraordinary way. So just in this passage, we see a few things that the Bible claims about itself and that Christianity has always held to be the case.

And I know it sounds a little like circular reasoning, a little bit like circular reasoning to say, well, all these things are true about the Bible because it says so. That’s why I encourage you, if you have any question about that, to go do the research for yourself and find out that the Bible has not been altered and changed over the centuries. It says essentially what it did when it was written down.

But these are things that, with all due respect to these Bible scholars, 2,000 years of Christian scholarship have held these things to be true about the Scriptures. First of all, the Bible is inspired and authoritative. When it says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, it’s saying that God breathed these Scriptures out.

These are the Word of God from Genesis all the way through to Revelation. All these things that the churches in the early years held to be Scripture, that were written by the apostles, written by the prophets, these things were breathed out by God. They are God’s word.

These are not the opinions of man. And in quite a few cases, we see things recorded in the scriptures that if I were just, if I were David, if I were Paul, if I were Peter, if I was writing these things down about my life, my journey, my relationship with God, there are things in there that I would not put because they show that I was wrong in a big way. David does not always look good in the record of his life and his journey with God.

Amen? I mean, murder, adultery, these are the big ones. These are the things that made it into the top ten list. Paul doesn’t look so good.

He could have whitewashed over that whole, you know, slaughtering Christians thing. But it’s in there. Peter, the guy who doubted, I’m sorry, the guy who denied Christ. I was thinking Thomas there for a second.

Thomas too, but he didn’t write any of the books. Peter he denied Christ that’s in there and yet these guys wrote about what it meant to live for God with the full knowledge of what they’ve done wrong in the past and I’m sure their conscience calling them out these are not man’s opinions these are not things that they wrote down to make themselves look good or to just say what they believed what they thought was right they wrote down the things that God led them to write down and because it is God’s word it’s authoritative it means it has authority I say this all the time that if your opinions and your lifestyle and your beliefs are not in line with God’s word, it’s not God’s word that has to change. But let me just be fair in this so you don’t feel like the preacher’s just getting on you today.

If my beliefs and my opinions and my lifestyle, if the way I act, if the way I treat my family, if the way I act in traffic, all of these things, if they are not consistent with God’s word, it’s not God’s word that needs to change. It’s me. That’s true for me too.

That’s not just something I’m putting on you. that’s true for me. God’s word has the authority, not my feelings and opinion.

And there are times every week, times every week that I could stand up here and tell you, well, this is what I saw in God’s word this week, and this is where I was out of line with it, and may still be out of line with it, and working on fixing it. God’s word, by virtue of being God’s word, has authority. The Bible is inerrant.

It says it’s profitable for doctrine, for reproof, a correction for instruction in righteousness. Now that word, inerrant, really applies to the originals. Really applies to the originals.

Because we know that there have been copy errors over time. But again, as I said, that does not change what’s great. We still know what the Bible said.

Just because somebody misspelled a word doesn’t mean we don’t know what it said. Oh, got to throw out the whole Bible somebody misspelled a word. Please, we don’t do that with any other book.

We don’t do that with any other book. The Bible, instead of being a book of errors, Christianity historically has held it to be the standard, the standard by which all of our beliefs and practices are measured and errors are revealed. If you want to know the truth without error, we look to the Bible.

Here’s another word. A lot of more liberal scholars like to use the word infallible because it sounds nicer. It doesn’t sound as harsh.

The Bible is infallible. Infallible is even stronger a word because inerrant means it doesn’t make mistakes. Infallible means it could never make mistakes.

I believe the Bible is both. I believe the Bible is both of those things. To show you the difference, I could sit down and make a list right now of everybody who’s here this morning.

And I could go through, okay, row by row, got your name, I’m writing it down, and I could present you the list at the end of the service, and it would be inerrant. There would not be a mistake on it. So I can be inerrant from time to time, but I’m not infallible for one second.

I make mistakes. I am prone to mistakes. Ask my wife.

I make them like it’s my job. The Bible is both inerrant and infallible. The Bible is reliable.

This goes to, again, the idea that there have been changes made over time. The Bible is trustworthy. Again, there is a mountain of evidence that shows us there are no substantial changes to the text in 2,000 years.

And Paul was reminding Timothy, hey, if you want to know the truth, if you want something reliable that you can anchor your life to, go to the Scriptures. He says, you know that from the time you were a child, in verse 15, from the time you were a child you searched these Scriptures, and they made you wise unto salvation.

If you want to know the answers to the most important and most pressing questions that we as human beings all have, why are we here what is this all for where are we going how do I make peace with God they are all in there and the Bible gives reliable answers from page one all the way to the end consistent answers now God may give us more information toward the end of the book than he did at the beginning there’s a consistency and a reliability to the information where the Bible speaks with one voice throughout it’s 66 books and 40 some odd authors the Bible speaks with one voice one reliable, trustworthy voice to the questions of the human condition. And then the Bible’s sufficient. Historically, Christianity holds that the Bible contains all the truth that believers need in order to be reconciled to God and live a life that pleases Him.

Now, the Bible’s not going to tell us everything we want to know. Okay, I have questions about the Bible, and I think, well, why did they do this? I want to know that.

And the Bible doesn’t say. I was studying something the other day that had to do with the Tower of Babel, looking up a question, and I think I got a better answer than I’ve ever seen before. But I still don’t have an answer where God says in black and white, this is why they did this.

But I want to know. God doesn’t promise that he’s going to answer everything I want to know. I finished filing my taxes this week and said a little prayer that I did it right.

Because I don’t think I’d do well in jail. I did my best. I did not go to the Bible and say, okay, how do I do this deduction? First of all, that wouldn’t fly with the IRS anyway.

They don’t care. The Bible doesn’t tell me everything I think I want to know or think I need to know. But when it comes to the things that we absolutely need to know to be reconciled to God, to find peace with God, to find a life that pleases Him, the Bible tells us everything that we need to know.

We don’t have to go look at the tabloids. We don’t have to read somebody’s book. I was going to say those things might be helpful.

The tabloids will not. They’re not all in that category. Somebody’s book might be helpful.

Somebody’s book might help you see something in the Bible that you missed. But the Bible tells us everything that we need to know. It says in verse 17 that it’s given that the man of God may be perfect, may be complete.

Thoroughly furnished to every good work. If you want to live a life that pleases God, this will tell you how. Start off, if you want to know how to have peace with God, If you want to know how your sins are forgiven, it’s right here.

This book will tell you how. It’s not through your own effort. It’s not through your own goodness.

I’m going to go to church. I’m going to give money. I’m going to be kind to animals.

This book tells you that God looks at that and even our best works are like garbage before a holy God. His word tells us that it’s through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and faith. Faith in what he did.

Faith in him as the sacrifice for our sins and throwing ourselves on God’s mercy because of what Christ did. It’s all in there. How do I trust Christ as my Savior?

And how do I live for Him? It’s all in there. Now why does this matter?

I told you my main focus this morning is not just here’s theology for theology’s sake. But why does it matter? It matters because what we believe about the Bible affects how we see Jesus.

If we see the Bible as the jar of black beans, untrustworthy, full of things that Jesus didn’t or probably didn’t say, And we really don’t know who Jesus is. We have no clue. All we end up with is the Jesus we feel like is real. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve discovered that feelings lie to us.

Have you ever been lied to by your feelings? If you’re saying no, you’ve never been a teenager. Okay.

Oh, I love him. I love him. I hate him.

Okay. Let’s settle down. Our feelings lie to us.

Even as adults, our feelings lie to us. My wife and I don’t fight very often, but when we do, it’s usually because of a misunderstanding. And it’s usually on my end.

Well, honey, I feel like you’re saying this to me. And she’s looking at me going, how did you even get that? And I’m upset with her because of what I feel like she’s saying.

And women, you do it too. I hear you out there laughing. You do it too.

I’m just man enough to admit it. She didn’t say that. She wasn’t trying to do that.

It was my feelings. I felt like it was this way or that way and it was not her intent. Feelings will lie to us.

And so if we come and say well I feel like Jesus didn’t say that. I feel like he said this. I feel like he might have said that.

All we’re left with is the Jesus we feel like acknowledging and I don’t have enough faith to put my eternity in that glass jar. Now the Bible gives us tons of information. All the information we need to know, again, that we need to know about who Jesus is.

And Jesus himself said this in John chapter 5, if you’ll turn there with me for just a moment. John chapter 5, starting in verse 36, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, all the Jewish people that were around and were confronting him, and he’s got his own disciples there. He says in verse 36, but I have greater witness than that of John for the works which the Father hath given me to finish the same works that I do bear witness of me that the Father had sent me.

He said there’s plenty of testimony that I am who I say I am. He said there’s more evidence for me than for John. He says because the things that I do testify that the Father has sent me.

And verse 37 says, and the Father himself which hath sent me hath borne witness of me. He said even the Father testifies that I am who I say I am. Because their big problem was, oh, Jesus claims to be the Son of God.

We’ve got to kill him. He can’t say that. You can’t say you’re the son of God.

And he says, I don’t have to. The father said I was the son of God. The father himself who had sent me hath borne witness of me.

Well, my goodness, not long before that, they’d been at the waters of the Jordan River, and everybody heard the father say, this is my beloved son in whom I’m well pleased. Listen to him. He said, I didn’t have to claim to be the son of God.

God said that. God testified of that. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.

And ye have not his word abiding in you. For whom he hath sent, you believe not. He’s saying to them, you think that you’re such experts on what God says and what God wants, and yet you’re not paying any attention to what God has tried to tell you.

That God finally sent the one he’s been foretelling for hundreds of years, and you’re not listening. So clearly the word of God is not in you, or you would have recognized its fulfillment. He tells them, search the scripture.

now the way this is phrased in English it sounds like a command when you look at it in the Greek it’s really not he’s not telling them you go search the scriptures he’s acknowledging that they do and these were the Bible scholars of their day he’s saying you do search the scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life and there was a belief among a lot of the Pharisees that this is one of the things that they’re supposed to do in order for God to love them and give them eternal life it was one of the laws that they were supposed to follow that they had to study and search and memorize the scriptures, but they were just doing it as something to check off of their list of spiritual good deeds. He said, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.

You think that by doing this, God is going to love you, and you’re totally missing the point of the scriptures. He said, and they are they which testify of me. He said, you’re studying the scriptures because you think it’s a good deed to check off of your list, and God is going to love you and forgive you if you just read the Bible hard enough.

And I know they didn’t have all 66 books, but they had their Old Testament. If you just read your Bible hard enough, God’s going to love you. And he says you’re missing the whole point because the Scriptures testify of me.

And as I’ve told you before many times, the longer I’m a Christian, the older I get, the more and more I’m blown away by how present Jesus is on every page of this book. And I know, especially if you’re just starting out in the Scriptures, that sounds crazy. Wait, he’s in there.

Do you know how many pages there are of begatting and rules and all that? He’s in there. Folks, he’s in there.

Genesis 3. 15, where God talks about the serpent’s head being crushed and the seed of the woman crushing his head and the serpent bruising his heel. That is a prophecy of Jesus on the cross.

That Satan’s nipping at his heels and he thinks he’s got him, and yet Jesus delivers the death blow to Satan and his plans. Jesus being the seed of the woman. You look at the book of Ruth, Boaz, who marries Ruth, is a picture of Jesus Christ. Not only that, he’s an ancestor of Jesus Christ, but he’s a picture of Jesus Christ as he’s this kinsman redeemer who takes this unworthy Moabite and marries her and brings her into the nation of Israel.

She becomes part of the lineage of Jesus Christ. She is redeemed even though she doesn’t deserve it because Boaz and his kindness. He’s present in the Old Testament sacrifices. I’ve gone through and looked at the sacrifice of a bull and some of the instructions it gives.

And from the way they do it to the way the blood is sprinkled for the forgiveness of sins, for the remission of sins, all of it points to Jesus Christ on the cross. You go through. I cannot find a book in the Old Testament that does not just scream Jesus.

He’s all throughout it. And he says, you’ve read these scriptures, and you’ve read them as some spiritual exercise, And what you’ve missed is they tell you about me. And folks, if we look at this book as just some dry spiritual exercise, well, I’ll read it and I’ll be a better person.

I’ll read it and God will like me better. I’ll read it and I’ll be smarter. I’ll read it and I’ll know lots and lots of facts and sound learned about it.

We missed the point. The Bible is a book about Jesus. And if we begin to question its reliability, if we begin to doubt its truth, then we quickly get to a point where we know nothing about Jesus and the salvation he offers.

Because the Bible is history’s foremost record of who Jesus is. If you want to know who Jesus is, you go to the Bible. There are other ancient sources that tell us some things about Jesus, but they don’t tell us nearly the amount of information that the Bible does.

You want to know who he is? Read the Bible. The Bible will tell you that he was born in Bethlehem.

the parents who were there to deal with a census and a taxation, that he was Mary’s firstborn son, that he was born of a virgin, that he grew up in Nazareth, that he had other siblings who didn’t always believe that he was who he claimed to be. My sister said she was the daughter of God. I’d laugh in her face.

And she’d do the same to me. They didn’t always believe him. And he was somebody who loved, who just exuded love.

but also was zealous for the truth of God’s Word. And I could stand here all day and tell you about the attributes of Jesus and the characteristics and his history, but I don’t have time unless you want me to preach the whole Bible to you, start at Genesis and go through to the maps. We don’t have time for that.

But folks, it’s all in there. If you want to know who Jesus is, this book is history’s foremost witness to who he is. Without this book, we don’t really understand who Jesus is at all.

It’s history’s foremost record of what Jesus did. Not only what he did, but why he did it. There are other historical accounts that tell us he died on the cross, but nobody explains why.

Luke explains why. Jesus said, I’ve come to seek and save that which was lost. The Jews and Romans think they’re going to kill me as a blasphemer. They thought they were going to kill him as a blasphemer.

They thought they were going to kill him as a political revolutionary. And Jesus points out, I’m dying for one reason, and that’s because we needed to be reconciled to God. The Bible tells us what he did, the things that are important.

One of the gospel writers said that if they were to record everything that Jesus said and did, the world itself could not contain all the books that would have to be written. So we don’t know e