How do we know the Bible is the inspired Word of God? – Jay Seegert

No matter who you are, you must start somewhere with your beliefs. It’s impossible not to start somewhere. Christians start with the belief that God exists, and the Bible is His Word. And we use that starting point to define everything else. What science and logic are. Ethics, morality, philosophy, history, all those things, are defined by our starting point.

The Starting Point Project – Home

Essential Christian questions and answers

Well! Good morning! It’s been a challenging time getting here but God wanted me here so, here I am. I appreciate you being here!

This is my third time speaking here and it’s always quite a pleasure to be back. I have a very encouraging message for you.

I usually say that James 1.19 says ‘be slow to speak’, but it doesn’t say ‘speak slow’.

So, I go kind of fast. There’s a lot to cover, and I’m going to be focusing on

‘How do we know that the Bible is the inspired Word of God?’

As I travel around, I realize a lot of Christians have a very difficult time answering two questions. And Christianity can be broken down into two major elements:

• Number one: that God exists, that He created everything, and
• Number two: that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

Those are the two most basic portions of the Christian worldview, but many Christians struggle to answer those two basic questions.

When a sceptic asks: ‘How do you know God exists? How do you know He created everything?‘ Or, ‘how do you know the Bible is the inspired Word of God?’ many Christians don’t have the best answer and we tend to fumble around as if we’ve never thought of the question before.

And so, it’s very important for us to have good answers, because sceptics ask very good questions. Most sceptics I know are very smart people, most of them are very nice and they’re asking simple questions, they’re asking questions that I would ask if I was a sceptic or an atheist.

So, I think we need to do a little bit better job of addressing some of these things. I’m excited to be here this morning to talk about some of these things. My wife Amy is here too, in the front, with me. She was here six years ago when I was first here and then I was here again about four and a half years ago and she wasn’t able to make it on that trip.

Just very quickly, for those of you who don’t know my background, I was raised in a Christian home, and you can see very clearly that that is a Christian home. That’s just a warning! I have a very dry sense of humour you have to put up with.

Then, I went to our public school system in the U.S. all the way through high school, so about 18 years old. And when I graduated, I went to a Christian university called John Brown University in in Arkansas. I was studying mechanical engineering and I got a degree there but then I became more interested in Physics. They didn’t have a Physics major there, so I left and I went back to the State of Wisconsin where we live, and I went to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater to get a degree in Physics.

And that’s when my world changed quite a bit because I went from a small Christian university where my engineering professors opened every class in prayer, to a large state university where my physics professors did not open in prayer. They were all evolutionists; some of them were atheists and they were telling me that everything I believed was wrong, and that made me very uncomfortable, to be surrounded by these PhD scientists who, I assumed, had a lot of evidence for what they believed. But I realized for the first time in my entire life that, even though I knew ‘what I believed’, I did not know ‘why I believed’ it.

So, God put it on my heart to start looking into these things. I have been researching and lecturing for 37 years now on these topics and, about 16 years ago, I felt called into full-time ministry traveling around the United States. And I’ve been in eight other countries as well, and I founded a ministry called ‘The Starting Point Project’. It’s all about our starting point.

A sceptic would certainly have a different starting point and you can ask them what theirs is, why they chose that, and why they’re confident that that particular starting point will help them accurately define everything else. That however, is an entirely different talk that I’m not giving this morning.

A little bit more about my background. I was invited to be on the board of directors of a group called Logos Research Associates. It’s probably the world’s largest group of scientists who are Christians and six-day creationists.

Now the founding member, Dr John Sanford (he’s from Cornell University in New York), he’s famous for having invented the gene gun. It inserts genes into the DNA. He is famous worldwide for that, a brilliant scientist but a very, very godly man, a very strong Christian. He used to be an atheist but now he’s a very strong Christian. He founded this group and there’s Dr John Baumgartner, he’s a PhD geophysicist, he has built the world’s best 3d computer simulation of plate tectonics. Off the charts you know! Brilliant! Even secular geologists use that model to see how plates of the earth are moving.

So, there’s these two scientists, myself, and a few other men and I always say, ‘as smart as these guys are, and they’re really smart, if they were here this morning, they’d be the first to admit out of all six board members I am the tallest’. So, I’m pretty proud of that…

Anyway, very smart men, I’m just honoured to be on the board with them. I learn a lot from them because they’re doing cutting-edge science and I get to translate it into something we call English, because it gets a little bit technical. This talk of scientific evidence for the inspiration of the Bible again I mention as I travel around.

I find that Christians struggle with defending their faith. So, I’ll ask Christians this question: ‘Why are you a Christian?’ And they’ll often say, ‘Well, because I believe the Bible’. Okay that makes sense. Then I ask him: ‘Why do you believe the Bible’.

Answer: ‘Well, because I’m a Christian’.

Question: ‘But why are you a Christian?’

Answer: ‘Because I believe the Bible.’

Question: ‘Why do you believe the Bible?’

Answer: ‘Because I’m a Christian.’

And round and round it goes.

That’s NOT a good answer. How do you know the Bible is the inspired Word of God? I just know, I mean, I believe it. I mean, I feel it. Great! Why should anyone else believe it because you feel it? Including your own children and grandchildren?

I’m going to play a short radio interview for you here. It’s only about a minute long. I’m going to play it on my phone. I’ll hold it up to the to the microphone so you can hear it, but here’s the background. This radio program is hosted by an atheist, it’s his show. The caller is a pastor and they’re talking about the existence of God. I will find it on my phone here, play it, and then we’ll talk about it. (recording follows)

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘You disagree because you’re convinced probably because of Romans 1 that everybody knows that God exists.’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘Yeah, yeah.’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘Why do you believe Romans 1?’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘Because it’s the Bible.’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘Okay. Why do you believe the Bible?’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘I wasn’t necessarily prepared for that particular question.’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘Um. You’re a preacher and you’re not prepared for a question on why you believe the Bible?’ I’m not trying to be rude. I mean this to me is like the basics. Why would anybody believe? Why should I care what the Bible is?’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘The reason why I’m not prepared for that particular question is because you didn’t answer what I had to say.’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘I’m sorry, I might have missed a question. What was the question? Because all I heard was you saying you disagreed.’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘Uh. I was trying to make a point for you. It wasn’t necessarily a question. My point was…’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘Well then, how can anybody not answer your question if you didn’t ask a question? Your point is that everybody knows that God exists, and I don’t agree with that. And I’m asking you to prove that it’s true.’

Interviewee (Pastor): ‘It’s not about proving that it’s true. We can never prove that it’s true.’

Interviewer (Atheist): ‘Thank you for acknowledging that you can never prove it’s true, which demonstrates it’s irrational. I’m gonna have to ask you to call back because we’ve run out of time.’

Well, should we close in prayer? That would be pretty depressing!

Now, I think that atheist host was very gracious, and I think most pastors would have a better response to that question. But here is the more important question for you this morning: What would your response have been had you called in that program and the atheist host asked you that question of ‘why do you believe the Bible?’

This is where many people, as I travel, look at me like ‘a deer in the headlights’, you know, they don’t know. They say, ‘Help!’ you know. What should we say?

So, the rest of this sermon is going to be about what our response should be as Christians answering that question. And I have a quiz for you. Before we get any further, I’m going to put a passage up on the screen to see if you can figure out where it’s found. Here it is:

Some people say, ‘Is that Isaiah? No, Jeremiah. No, it’s not Psalms, is it? No, it’s not Song’, Here’s where it’s found: Second Nephi chapter 2 verse 26. And you’re like ‘second what?’

It’s the Book of Mormon! Like, ‘Oh, that’s weird!’

Here’s the question for you: How do you know the Book of Mormon is not the inspired Word of God?

Answer: ‘Well, it’s not.’

Question: ‘How do you know it’s not?

Answer: ‘Because the Bible is.’

Question: ‘How do you know the Bible is?’

Answer: ‘Because I’m a Christian.’

Question: ‘Why are you a Christian?’

Answer: ‘Because I believe the Bible.’

Question: ‘What about the Book of Mormon?’

Answer: ‘No, it’s not.’

Question: ‘Why is it not?’

Answer: ‘Because I believe the Bible’

And round and round it goes again, that is not a good response.

The Mormons believe that the Book of Mormon is the inspired Word of God. Right on the cover, it says, ‘Another testament of Jesus Christ’. It’s given to them by the angel Moroni, written down on golden tablets.

Interesting story, we don’t have time for all the details but there’s no shortage of religious books out there, this is just a small sampling.

How do you know which of these are the inspired Word of God? Maybe they all are! Maybe none of them are! Maybe just two! Which two? How would you know?

Good question!

What is a religion?

Not too long ago, there was a debate in the State of Wisconsin where we live in the U.S. between an atheist and a Christian and the topic was: ‘Would the world be better off without religion?’

A friend called me up and he said: ‘Would you like to go?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go with you‘ but I told him I would never be part of that debate, and he said, ‘Why not?’

I said, ‘Because I’m not a religious person.’

He said, ‘What are you talking about? You’re traveling around the world talking about God and Jesus and the Bible, and Genesis, and science …‘

And I said, ‘Here’s why I think religion is man’s idea of God, and the reason we have so many different religions is: there are so many different people, and they all have their own idea of who God is, what he is, and what he wants from us.‘

I’m not that interested in finding out what everyone else thinks about God.

On the other hand, I think the Bible is God’s idea about God and that fascinates me to no end. So, while I say, ‘I’m not a religious person’, I am a Christian and I believe the Bible from cover to cover.

Now, I realize that Christianity is considered one of the world’s religions so, in that sense, okay, fine, I guess I’m a religious person, but I like to make the distinction between man’s idea of God and God’s idea about Himself which makes it even more important for us to answer the question: ‘How do we know the Bible is God’s idea about Himself and not just something else a bunch of people wrote and now we just have one more option for a belief system?’

How many of you have a book at home that was signed by the author? Any of you? A few of you. The rest of you can buy my books, I’ll sign them for you! But it’s kind of neat. You can get the book out!

Say I met the author. Wouldn’t it be neat to have an autographed copy of the Bible? It kind of makes your head spin a little bit. I think we do. I think God’s signature is all over His Word but how would we know? How do we know the Bible is really from God?

Well, there are four basic tests that you can apply to any religious writing out there to see if it shows evidence of having been written by God. These are not special Bible tests. These are tests you can apply to any book out there.

First. We have Internal Consistency. Does the book you’re looking at, whatever it is, does it contradict itself?

If it does, that’s good evidence God didn’t write that because God wouldn’t contradict Himself.

2. Historical Accuracy. Does the book you’re looking at get history wrong?

If it does, that’s good evidence God didn’t write that because He would know history.

Thirdly. Prophetic Accuracy. If the book you’re looking at makes predictions about the future and they have been proven false, that’s good evidence God didn’t write that because God would know the future. And then,

Lastly. Scientific Accuracy. If the book you’re looking at makes statements that can factually be directly tested by science and it’s been proven false, we can all see that that would be pretty good evidence God didn’t write that because God would know science.

With the time we have, we’re just going to focus on this last one, the Scientific Accuracy which we also call Scientific Foreknowledge. What does that mean?

Well, here’s the point: the Bible was written a long time ago: the Old Testament, roughly about 1500BC to about 400BC; the New Testament roughly about 40 to 180AD, long before we had microscopes and telescopes but there are things in the Bible that scientists are discovering that are perfectly accurate. And they’re wondering: ‘How is that possible?’

These men who wrote these things didn’t have microscopes and telescopes, there’s no way they could have known these things! And that’s true, they could not have known them on their own. This is evidence that God told them what to write.

We are discovering today they were right, over, and over, and over. That’s the premise of this entire presentation. Some of you may be familiar with Bill Nye, ‘the science guy’. He’s very popular in the United States. He’s no friend to Christians; he does not believe in God and Christianity, in the Bible and creation, and this is one thing that he said:

So, what’s he saying?

He’s saying, ‘If you, adults, want to reject evolution and believe in this ‘fairy tale’ of creation, in the Bible, I guess that’s okay, but don’t make your kids do that because if your children and grandchildren don’t believe in evolution, they won’t be able to do science, they won’t be able to cure future diseases, they won’t be able to land on Mars someday’. ‘You can’t do science if you don’t believe in evolution’, that’s what Bill Nye was saying.

Bill Nye is not a scientist, he’s an engineer, but he’s an intelligent person and he’s entitled to his opinion. I’m going to give you a quote from someone else who is a scientist, not a Christian. This is Dr Mark Kirschner, he’s the Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. You can’t be too dumb and have that position. A pretty smart guy and this is what he said:

What’s he saying? He’s saying these men and women do their jobs all day long totally independent of whether or not they believe in evolution. It has nothing to do with that and I think he’s in a better position to comment on these things.

But then, you might be asked this question: ‘What do you believe?’, ‘Do you believe the Bible, or do you believe science’? It’s an awkward question for many Christians to answer.

If you say you believe the Bible, the sceptics are going to say to you like, ‘You know, I could have sworn I saw you on your cell phone earlier today. Oh! But that’s right, you don’t believe in signs that made that cell phone.’

So then, you say, ‘Well, no of course, I believe in science.’

But if you say you believe in science that implies you don’t believe the Bible, and if you don’t believe the Bible, you can’t be a Christian.

So, it can be an awkward question because there’s a hidden assumption here: the assumption is that science has disproved the Bible.

If that were true, then you must choose, you can’t believe both. But the assumption is not true! Science has not disproved the Bible at all!

In fact, most major areas of science we have today were founded by Bible-believing Christians.

If you’d like a few examples, I brought a few along:

Antiseptic, surgery, bacteriology, calculus, chemistry, computer science, electronics, electrodynamics, electromagnetics, fluid mechanics, galactic astronomy, gas dynamics, genetics, hydraulics, hydrostatics, oceanography, optical immunology, palaeontology, pathology, physical astronomy, stratigraphy, thermodynamics, thermo-kinetics, vertebrate palaeontology, and the scientific method were all founded by Bible-believing Christians.

Anyone who says that no real scientist believes the Bible, they don’t only not understand science, they don’t even know history.

This is where science came from, it was birthed out of the Christian community. Science owes its origins to Christianity and most scientists realize that. They just don’t like to admit it.

Where can I find scientific proof that the Bible is true?

Evolution

Here’s an example, something called ‘vestigial organs’. These things are supposedly ‘leftover pieces in our body that aren’t doing anything’. Well, they used to have a use in earlier stages of evolution but now they’re useless.

Here’s a quote from Jerry Coyne, from the University of Chicago, one of the leading evolutionists. He said,

So, we have something in our bodies like the appendix that doesn’t do anything. It used to serve a purpose millions of years ago, in earlier stages of evolution, but now, it’s useless, it’s proof of evolution.

In fact, scientists used to have a list of 86 ‘things’ in your body that are useless, they’re not really doing anything anymore, they used to have a purpose.

This would be proof of evolution because God would not design you to have 86 things that don’t do anything.

This was used at the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in the United States in 1925 as evidence of evolution.

Scientists have studied this list and they’ve dwindled it down a little bit, down to zero. They have found a use for every single one of those things, including the appendix which is part of your immune system. You can you live without your appendix yes, you can also live without your arms, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a purpose.

In fact, doctors are very hesitant to take your appendix out unless it’s going to burst or something else that might force them to take it out, but otherwise, ‘no’, they say, ‘we’re going to leave it in there as long as we can, because it’s part of the immune system’.

It was belief in evolution that got them to write it off: ‘Oh! it’s not doing anything, just take it out’. Whereas a creationist back then would have said, we don’t fully understand the appendix, but we believe it was designed by God, so let’s keep studying it and do better research. And better research shows, ‘yes’ it has a purpose.

Then we have something called Junk DNA. When scientists were studying the DNA, it seemed like only two percent of our DNA did anything, it coded to make proteins that carry out the functions in our body while the other 98%, they said, ‘is useless’, proof of evolution, because God would not design such a thing. Therefore, 98% of your DNA was thought not to do anything.

Well, we studied it further. Now we know the 98% that they were calling ‘Junk’ is more complex than the two percent. Its instructions tell the two percent what to do. I have an entire talk on DNA and just would blow you away how complex our DNA is. There’s no way it’s an accident, there’s absolutely no way it could have evolved over time.

Here’s a quote from an evolutionist. He said,

But they called it ‘Junk DNA’ based on their belief in evolution, whereas the creationists would say, ‘it’s not junk, let’s keep studying’.

People say ‘yes, but the Bible is not a science textbook’ and I would completely agree with that. It’s not a science textbook and I’m glad it’s not because then it would be harder to understand, fewer people would read it, and, more importantly, it would have to be corrected and updated constantly like science textbooks.

So much has changed since I got my degree in Physics! We’ve learned so many new things and so we also realized that a lot of those other beliefs were wrong.

Therefore, the Bible is not a science textbook, it was not God’s intention to write a science textbook to tell us that the mass of an electron is 9.1 times 10 to the negative 31st kilograms.

You guys all knew that that wasn’t the intention of writing the Bible. So, it’s not a science textbook but

Physical Sciences

Space Science

As an example, the Bible gives us a framework to understand astronomy. Psalm 33.6

God is the one who created this universe, and His fingerprints are all over it. But the secular astronomers will say,

‘Well, no, wait a minute! See these swirling gases over here, that’s the birth of a star’.

It’s so beautiful they’ll get teary-eyed and just very emotional. They’re seeing the birth of a star!

You know, what they’re seeing – swirling gases, yes, but they’ll say, ‘gravity will pull these gas particles together to form a star.’

Well, gravity wants to pull the particles together. I know the formula for that, but the closer the gas particles get together the more gas pressure you have pushing out gas. Pressure is much stronger than gravity, they will never pull together. Therefore, the secular astronomers will say, ‘okay, that’s true, but what happened was, there was a star over here that exploded, and this force pushed these gases together to form that star’.

That’s a nice story! Where did that star come from that exploded? Well, they say, ‘You see that was, those were gas particles swirling around in a star over here exploded to push those together.‘

I have another question: ‘Do you have any idea what it might be? Where did this star come from?

They can’t even get the process started. The laws of Physics mitigate against star formation and that’s just one line of evidence.

Then, we have Jeremiah 33.22,

Jeremiah is writing over two and a half thousand years ago and said, ‘the stars are uncountable’. That made no sense to him when he said it because he could look up at the night sky and see pretty much the same stars we see now, which is about 3 000.

Well, today we have telescopes. We have the Hubble Telescope, there’s a new James Webb Telescope, but the Hubble Telescope has been around for a while and astronomers wonder about the universe: ‘Is it pretty much the same everywhere we look?’ Or ‘are there areas that are filled with stars and galaxies and other areas that are empty?’

They looked through the Hubble Telescope, and, when they focused it on one tiny spot in the sky, a 124 millionth of the entire sky, they focused the telescope there and left the aperture open for a few days to see if anything developed in this really dark area. And this is what developed in that area when magnified with the Hubble Deep Fields: Three thousand stars. But guess what! Those aren’t stars, those are galaxies! 3 000 galaxies each of which has probably 100 billion stars in it, in one tiny spot of the sky that’s only 124 millionth of the whole thing.

Then, they used the Hubble Extreme Deep Field that magnifies 132 millionth of the entire sky, a much smaller area and focused the telescope there. They discovered five and a half thousand galaxies, each of which has probably a hundred billion stars in it.

Then, more recently, they had the Hubble Legacy Field with which they discovered 265 000 galaxies each of which probably has 100 billion stars in it.

So, are the stars uncountable? ‘Yes’, just like Jeremiah said when he didn’t have a telescope.

Geology

The Bible also gives us a framework to properly understand geology. An atheist can go to the Grand Canyon today and see there are many layers in the earth, that’s just a fact. A Christian can go to the same place and see there are many layers in the earth. That’s a fact nobody argues about, we all know there are many layers in the earth. How the layers got there, that’s another question because the atheist did not see those layers being deposited but neither did the Christian. So, both of us must figure out why. Why are all these layers here? How do they get here?

The Bible gives us a framework to understand that. Genesis 6.17,

Genesis chapters 6 through to 8 talk about a worldwide flood. Okay, if that happened, what would we expect to see? We would expect to see sedimentary layers all over the planet that were laid down catastrophically by water and probably filled with a lot of fossils because things that were living would have gotten buried. Guess what? We see sedimentary layers laid down by water catastrophically all over the planet, filled with billions and billions of fossils.

The Bible helps us understand what we’re seeing in geology.

A quick side note I have lead tours of the Grand Canyon. It’s fascinating. This is a famous picture of the horseshoe bend.

We are on rafts, and we go around the famous horseshoe bend. There’s a raft, and it’s very, very tiny. That’s bigger than the raft would be in real life it’s about 1100 feet from the rim down to the river there. We just go around the river and then, another day, we’re actually on the rim of the Grand Canyon on the Kaibab limestone looking one mile down to the Colorado River.

I’m afraid of heights, seriously afraid of heights, but I figured this won’t be an issue for me because the Canyon’s not high, just really deep and so, it’s fascinating, standing there as you see this huge canyon there. And you must ask: ‘How did this canyon get here?’ What they will tell you is that the Colorado River, sitting one mile way, way, way down there, over millions and millions of years, carved out this canyon.

That’s a nice story, it also DOESN’T make any sense. There’s a lot of dirt gone. The Canyon represents a big gouge on the earth. The dirt is missing! 900 cubic miles of sediments are gone! Okay, if rivers carry sediment with them, they dump it off at the end and they form what we call a delta.

Can you imagine the massive delta that would exist at the end of this river if it had carried out 900 cubic miles of sediments?

It’s not there because the river didn’t carry it out, it was washed out catastrophically by The Flood and the remaining waters trickled through the groove that was carved that is the Colorado River. It’s an afterthought, it happened afterwards.

Also, when you stand on this rim, looking one mile down, seeing all the sediments gone, you understand that there used to be another mile and a half of sediments above that point. But that’s gone too, it’s not here anymore. How do we know that the sediments used to be there?  Because to the north of the Canyon, those layers still exist, and you can see some remnants of those layers by the rim here. We know they used to exist, but they were washed out.

The Colorado River sitting a mile down didn’t wash out a mile and a half of sediment above the top of the canyon. That is physically impossible, but The Flood could have done that. So, we share all these evidence that there really was a flood. It’s not a silly story in the Bible it happened, and there’s so much evidence.

We also stop on the tour and see some dinosaur footprints. You can walk right around them, they’re all over on an Indian reservation. We all get out of the bus too and take a photo opportunity here, under this rock, just before it falls over and kills everyone.

It’s kind of a fun trip. Sometimes, we even stop and see there’s another canyon right in the area called Antelope Canyon. You may have seen these pictures. This is sunlight coming down through the canyon and people would be standing at the bottom. This is huge!

Anyway, that’s part of the tour that we give. I didn’t bring a brochure along but if anyone’s interested, you could contact our ministry. If you’re interested in coming over to the United States, it’s a fascinating thing to see, especially when you tie it into the authority of scripture.

Life Sciences

Biology

The Bible gives us a framework to properly understand biology too.

Nehemiah 9.6

God’s fingerprint is also all over living things. Everywhere you look, you see evidence of design. In fact, today we have something called the law of biogenesis that states that life always comes from pre-existing life. We have never seen an exception, we’ve never seen life come from a non-living thing, it always comes from something else that was living.

So, why do we teach in every public school system, in state, university that 3.8 billion years ago dead, non-living chemicals came together to form a living cell with a lovely story and just no science behind it? This is so consistent they made a law out of it here’s a quote from an evolutionist. He said,

Genesis 1.24

In the Book of Genesis, God said he would let the creatures reproduce after their kind. Can they produce a variety? Yes! A great variety but always within very specific limits in the Bible.

But what you can’t do is breed a dog and a wolf and get an ostrich. That’s not going to happen. They don’t have genetic information to make beaks and feathers. So, ‘yes’, you can get a variety but it’s always within limits.

Evolution says there’s no limits, it goes from a single cell all the way up to the plants, and the apes, and the humans and all that, but real biology says ‘no’, there are very distinct limits just like scripture says. Leviticus 17.11 says,

We all know blood is very important for life. Today, in fact, every human red blood cell contains 270 million molecules of haemoglobin-carrying oxygen through your body. If you had a slight amount less, you would be dead. It’s very, very important.

What’s interesting about that is that doctors used to drain blood out of people’s bodies when they got sick thinking the blood is bad. We need to get it out of them’ that’s largely how our first president George Washington died. He got pneumonia. He went to the doctor, and they said, ‘Oh! He’s sick, we must get this bad blood out of him’. So, they drained some blood. He got sicker. They said, ‘Wow! He’s really sick! We need to drain some more of that bad blood out’. He got even sicker, and they ended up draining about a gallon of blood out of him and he died. No surprise!

Today, we know you don’t do that. The life of the flesh is in the blood. Had they taken the Bible seriously, they never would have done that.

I have a picture of a ‘barber pole’ up. Here is where you used to be able to go – to the barber – to have your blood drained. They called the bloodletting, they would give you a cylinder like this to hold on to, and then, they would cut your arm, drain some blood, and wrap a towel around your arm to help stop the bleeding and absorb some of the blood. Sometimes, they would take the used towels and hang them on the cylinder and the wind would catch it and it would wrap around the pole, that’s why today ‘barber poles’ have red stripes, this is ‘true trivia’.

Next time you see a barber pole, think about this and you’ll be thinking about the authority of God’s Word because this is really fascinating.

Exodus 15.26 Moses wrote,

Okay, what’s happening here? This is interesting background. God creates everything and it’s perfect. He creates Adam and Eve, and they’re perfect. But they sin and they disobeyed God. They get kicked out of the Garden. Their sin brought death and a curse into God’s perfect creation.

God could have just smashed them and started over, but he said, ‘No! I love them too much; I have a plan. I’m going to send my own Son to die on a cross to pay for their sins’.

God tried to protect His people. In this passage, Moses is saying: ‘listen to the health practices that God is giving to us, and we won’t see the diseases that we’re seeing in other nations around us’.

God’s trying to protect them but, we know from the Book of Acts, that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. So, he went to Egypt.

Today, if someone goes to a university and they get a PhD, and then they write some books, you would assume a lot of the information in those books would come from what they learned at the university. That’s just kind of how it works.

Well, Moses goes to Egypt and then he writes five books, yeah, the first five Books of the Bible. Do we see Egyptian wisdom in the Bible? We should if Moses made it up on his own and that’s what sceptics say: ‘Moses was an ignorant goat herder; he just wrote a bunch of stuff down and now we got another religious book out there‘.

Well, if that’s true, we should see his education coming through in his writing, we should see Egyptian wisdom in the Bible.

Here’s an example of Egyptian wisdom. This is the Ebers papyrus, written about 1550BC, contains over 800 magical formulas and remedies, one of which is if you got a splinter, you’re supposed to apply worm blood and donkey dung.

Modern scientists look at this and they say you wouldn’t want to do that; it causes tetanus spores which causes lockjaw. You could get very sick; you could even die. So modern scientists say, we don’t know where the Egyptians got that but it’s just wrong. That’s bad, you don’t want to do that.

That’s the kind of stuff that Moses was learning in school. Then, he writes the Bible.

So, do we see things like this in the Bible? We should if Moses truly made it up on his own rather than being inspired by God.

Bacteriology

Let’s look what we see in the Bible. Moses talked about touching a dead body. Today, we know about bacteria and germ theory and, especially, we covet all that we know. You don’t want to touch a dead body or dead animal; you could get germs from that. You could get sick; you could even die.

We know about that today. This is what Moses wrote a long time ago in the Book of Numbers chapter 19.

What’s this water of purification? A few verses earlier he says,

That sounds really bizarre. Most of you won’t relate to this but, in the United States, there was a television program on many years ago and there was a character in there named ‘Granny the Beverly Hillbillies’.

‘Granny’ was always doing really weird things in the kitchen, putting some possum in a pot and stirring it around and that’s kind of what this Bible passage sounds like, just a lot of weird things put together. However, modern scientists look at this passage and they say ‘no, that’s not strange at all; that’s really fascinating’. And here’s why the cedar wood and the burning ashes of the cow/the heifer combined to make lye; that’s what we call ‘soap’. If you touch a dead body, washing with soap would be a good thing.

The hyssop plant converts into thiamol; that’s isopropyl alcohol, it kills bacteria. If you touch a dead body, killing bacteria would come in handy.

The scarlet wool forms a gritty substance like we have things called S.O.S. pads in our kitchen; they’re very abrasive. Or there’s something we have called Orange Goop it helps get grease out of your hands. That’s what the scarlet wool does, it’s abrasive, it helps get these the germs out of your hands, and then applying this on the third and the seventh day.

Bacteria grow very well in a damp or a wet environment, so you want to wait a few days for everything to dry out and then you apply this, wait a few more days for it to dry out and you apply it a second time and you’re considered clean.

Modern scientists say this is a great natural remedy if you don’t have the antibiotics that we create today.

Now, did Moses know anything about bacteria and germ theory and isopropyl alcohol? Obviously not. This is evidence that God says: ‘Hey Mo! I want you to write some things down.’ And he writes it down, and then Moses says: ‘Wow! That was fascinating! Is there anything else you have to share with me?’ And God is thinking like, ‘Yeah, I got another one.’

Biochemistry

So, let me just share, before I close, one more example here.

A certain Jewish tradition that Moses wrote about in Genesis chapter 17 verse 12 for the generations to come.

Why did Moses say, ‘the eighth day’. He could have said anything. He could have said the third week, the fifth year, he could have said anything. But he said the eighth day.

Modern scientists have discovered some very interesting things about blood clotting. There are two major things in your blood system that are necessary to clot your blood. If you don’t have them, you can get a paper cut and bleed to death. They are Vitamin K and something called prothrombin.

Now, on a molecular level, there are about two dozen events that must occur in proper sequence to clot your blood. If you miss one of them, you bleed to death.

An event ‘a’ must happen first which triggers event ‘b’, ‘b’ then triggers event ‘c’ and ‘d’, and all the way on down the line. How did that evolve? Slowly by accident over millions and millions of years of evolution?

If a creature had just, by accident, encountered events ‘a’ and ‘b’, that doesn’t do anything; and then, 100 000 years later, it fulfils events ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’, and then, 2 million years later, it gets ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, it still doesn’t do anything. Even if it had ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘I’, ‘j’, ‘r’, ‘w’, would that help event ‘a’? No! It’s got to have all two-dozen proper sequences right from the beginning. That sequence can’t evolve, it has to be designed on the larger level. We’re just going to look at Vitamin K and prothrombin.

Modern scientists have discovered that Vitamin K develops in a baby somewhere between days five and seven, that’s where it starts to develop.

Prothrombin looks like this if we graph it

and I will explain the graph here: the axis line across the left of the graph shows the normal level of prothrombin in your body. The numbers across the bottom are days after birth.

Scientists have figured out that a baby on day one has 90 percent of its prothrombin, that’s pretty high. It’s not bad but then it drops dangerously low down to only 30 between days two and five, that’s not good at all. But then, on day eight, it spikes to a hundred and ten percent of its normal level. It will never ever be that high again the rest of your entire life.

So, if you are a baby and you need a surgical procedure done, day eight would be the perfect day because, for sure, you have Vitamin K by then, and you have more prothrombin than you’ll ever have the rest of your entire life.

Moses didn’t know anything about Vitamin K and prothrombin, obviously not! That is, God said, ‘Mo, write it down’. He writes it down.

Now, when my wife and I had our children, when she was pregnant with our son Taylor – he was our first child – we went to the hospital to go through some classes to learn all about this process.

This was new to us and the nurse said if you have a baby boy and would like this procedure we will take them down the hall and then bring them back and I remember sitting there being very nervous, ‘we’ll come back on day eight’ I thought, but I was too shy to say anything, the nurse kept talking and someone else raised their hand and said ‘Hey nurse, you just mentioned you’re giving the baby a shot right away, why? Why would the baby need a shot right away?‘ She said. ‘Oh that’s Vitamin K’.

So, today, they artificially introduce Vitamin K immediately and you have ninety percent of your thrombin on day one so it’s not an issue to do the procedure today.

Even though I was very shy, I felt like God just lifted my hand up in the air and the nurse called on me and I shared with the entire class what Moses wrote in the Book of Genesis about this. I don’t know if they were excited or not, but it was an opportunity to talk about the authority of the inspiration of God’s Word.

So, it’s just kind of fascinating to learn some of these things.

Take away

The conclusion is, the Bible passes the test of Scientific Foreknowledge, and those are just a few examples. The Bible passes all four tests of Internal Consistency, Historical Accuracy, Prophetic Accuracy, and Scientific Accuracy.

In fact, 27% of the Bible is prophetic in nature, meaning 27% of it is making predictions about the future. That’s over 8 000 passages in here. Some of those predictions are for our future, all the other ones have been fulfilled in every minute detail 100% accurate.

How’s that possible? If a bunch of people are making this up, and there’s so many other things we could touch on – we’re just scratching the surface here – do Christians have faith that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

‘Yes’, we do. But it’s a very reasonable faith backed up by so much evidence that we could go on for hours and hours, and hours talking about all the evidence for our faith.

The Bible claims it’s the inspired Word of God and it gives us ways of testing it.

I say again, this is more of an American thing. There was another television show called ‘I love Lucy’ and the immortal words of one of the characters named Ricky Ricardo were:

“If you don’t believe the Bible’s the inspired Word of God, you’ve got a lot of splaining to do.”

You have to explain a lot of things:

• How do you have 40 different authors writing over a period of 1600 years on three different continents, in three different languages, with all different educational backgrounds and they didn’t just talk about one controversial topic, they covered hundreds of controversial topics and yet they all agree with each other?
• How’s that possible unless God is inspiring those writers? They got history right, they got the prophecy right, they got the science right. It only makes sense that the Bible is what it claims to be, the inspired Word of God from cover to cover.

We have an entire five-part video series on the inspiration of scripture.

I didn’t bring my resources to sell. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put – these are our resources here – we have 11 different physical DVDs and we’ve made them all streamable. You can watch them online.

We’ve got three books that I didn’t bring along to sell but what we’re doing here, with the streamable, there’s 11 DVDs made up of 22 video lectures. We’re going to give them all to you for free. You get all access to everything we have here by using this code you can take a picture of the screen right now. Leave it up for a few seconds here AADUK22.

Write it down, take a picture of it, I’ll put our website up here again what you can do is you can go to our website and find our Resources, find the streaming videos, and you go through the process of purchasing it, but you don’t pay for it, you put in this special code and you get it for free and you can watch it as much as you want from your phone, from your television, from your tablet, anything.

I’m also working on 22 more videos and, when we finish those, they will get added. So, from time to time, you’ll see a new video show up you’ll get that free as well, because we just want to get the information out. We don’t charge for our talks. We’re not, ‘we don’t want to have to sell our videos anymore’ I told my board of directors, I just want to give all the videos away for free.

God provides, we have monthly supporters that help us continue to be able to travel around and speak and it’s been a very big faith journey trusting God. But God’s pretty big and He makes it easier and easier to trust Him.

So, we just want to encourage you and with this talk I gave you a lot of information and the reason I taught you all those facts is so that you can go out and win arguments with people and make them look foolish, right?

‘No!’ Not at all! I shared these things with you this morning to strengthen your faith, to get you excited about the authority of God’s Word.

So then, you can all go out and share the Gospel in a very powerful, very gracious, loving way with other people.

Don’t go out and start an argument with someone about some of these facts. Go out and share the Gospel message knowing that if they ask you tough questions like what about all the violence in the Bible? Did people really live to be 900 years old? What about all the evil in the world today? What about carbon 14 dating? What about dinosaurs? What about whatever you know? Answers exist.

You might not have the answer right away, which is okay. You just tell them: ‘You know what? If you’re really wondering about carbon 14, or the violence in the Bible, I can get back to you with a with an answer. But, if I do, will you be willing to hear more about Jesus?‘

If they say ‘no’, they’re not being serious. If they say ‘yes’, you have your work cut out for you.

I told your pastor you can contact me through our website I’ll put our website up here real quick, fast forward there, you can contact us through our website. You can send me a question and I’m not going to tell you to read 35 books on the subject, I’ll probably give you a link to a short article that will address whatever the question is.

But there’s only one reason we’re still here today as Christians. Have you ever wondered about that? When you place your trust in Christ, why doesn’t God just zap you up to heaven, He leaves you; here to do one thing. You can’t do that in heaven. And that is ‘share the Gospel with the lost’. God wants you to share what you have heard and accepted. He wants you to share that with someone else.

And as I close in prayer, I’m going to pray that God gives you those opportunities this week, that

He brings someone across your path and He convicts you and your spirit that this is someone He wants you to talk to, not to get in an argument with, but to get into a conversation, to ask them how they’re doing.

You will find out very quickly they are very concerned about inflation or COVID, or climate change, or the cancel culture or transgenderism or whatever it is.

Everyone’s concerned about the world being upside down which puts you in a better position to share the only hope that exists which is Jesus Christ. And I always say:

But we just need to be praying for the opportunity.

I will close on a word of prayer and I’m going to plead with you please do not come back tonight alone, don’t come back alone. Bring somebody tonight, bring someone who needs to hear the only hope that we have.

We’re going to be talking about who we really are as human beings. I will address ‘who we are in Christ’ but I will also address ‘who we are as being fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image’. Some really exciting scientific things, evidence that we are created. And it will lead into the hope that we have in Jesus Christ.

So, bring people who might not normally come to church, they will be very graciously welcomed. I always graciously welcome sceptics because they’re not these angry evil people, they’re spiritually blinded, and it’s a spiritual issue we’re dealing with. This is not an academic debate, these sceptics just don’t need many, many, many more facts, they need to realize the starting point they’re using is not good, and that it won’t help them to accurately interpret these facts. They need to see the love of Jesus in us. If they don’t see that, nothing we say will matter. So, invite someone to come back this evening at 6:30.

I will close in prayer.

Dear heavenly Father, we just thank you so much for this time that we’ve had to take a look at the authority of your Word. We can truly trust it from cover to cover and absolutely everything that it says. We don’t need to worry about getting degrees in astronomy or biology, geology or even Greek and Hebrew, we can read your Word and your Holy Spirit can help us come to the truth, so that we can share the truth of the Gospel with others.

So, I pray for each person here this morning that they would be spending time in your Word each day, preparing themselves to meet those individuals who are lost and spiritually blinded and that you would give them opportunity to share the power that’s in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We pray all these things in Jesus’ name, amen.