II Timothy chapter 3, let's turn there. Because of what you just saw on the video of people saying that bunch of men wrote it, I wonder how many Christians here could give a compelling comeback to that at a moment's notice. I wonder if we haven't become complacen enough to say, "the Bible's the Bible, let's just go on from there," neglecting those who have serious questions about it.

Today we're beginning at two-part series in our series "Rediscovering the Foundations" and you have your outline "The Bible-From God or From Men" and we're going to look at the first part of that and come back next time for the rest.

Let's begin in prayer. Heavenly Father, we do ask that your Spirit would now speak to us. We submit ourselves for the next several minutes Lord, we've carved out this time to honor you with it. And we pray that we might honor you by listening with all of our being and paying close attention to the things that we hear. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Well according to the Guinness Book, the Bible is the best-elling most widely-distributed book in human history. Since the year 1815, 2.5 billion copies of the scriptures have been sold. The Bible has been translated in 2,223 languages and dialects across the world. So, that in and of itself makes it very unique. It's estimated that most households in America own at least one Bible. Ninety-two percent of all the homes in American, including the homes of atheists and unbelievers have a Bible. In the typical household that would own a Bible, the count is three Bibles per household. In homes like yours, there maybe more, you personally may own more than three Bibles. What about reading that book? Well, seventy-five million Americans say, "It's important to read." I guess my question is, "How many that say it's important to read it actually read the book?" You know we might be that like who had the pastor in her small town come and make a visit. When she saw him coming up to the door she yelled out to her daughter in the back of the house, "Honey, quickly bring me the book that Mommy loves so much." So the little girl came back with the Sears catalog andhanded it to Mommy. We love to quote the Bible, it's in greeting cards, it's in plaques, it's on posters. Sometimes it's well-meaning, oftentimes frankly it's out of context. I heard of a church nursery that had the sign over the baby cribs quoting I Corinthians 15 that says, "Behold we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed." (laughter) Somebody gave me this little lists of seven top signs you may not be reading your Bible enough: Number one the preacher announces the sermon is from Galatians and you have to check the table of contents. Number two, you think Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may have had a few hit songs during the 60s (that's Peter, Paul, and Mary). You open to the gospel of Luke and a World War II savings bond falls o9ut. Number four, your favorite Old Testament patriarch is Hercules. Number five, you're frustrated because Charlton Heston isn't listed either in the Concordance nor the Table of Contents. Number six, you catch your kids reading the Song of Solomon and you demand, "Who gave you that stuff?" And number seven, you think the minor prophets work in the quarries. (Get it? Miner prophets.)

The cover of U.S. News and World Report sometime back asked a question. The question was, "Who wrote the Bible?" Which is a good question. Did a bunch of men write the Bible or can we say the Bible comes to us from the minds of God. See, if we say, a bunch of men wrote it, we have a problem. The problem is, what do we do with the uniqueness of the document itself, its ability to predict the future hundreds of yeas before events happened. The unity of forty authors who wrote a document over fifteen hundred year span on three different continents in three different languages, etcetera. And if we say, "God wrote it," we may have a bigger problem. Because if we say, "God wrote it," the question is why don't we treat it like God wrote it? And believe it and love it and study it and carry it and memorize it. If indeed this is the word of God.

Last week we discussed revelation, did we not? Special and general revelation and we said that the Bible is part of God's special revelation to mankind. It reveals the mind of God. You see, if I stand before you today silent, you won't know what I'm thinking unless I reveal it to you. Let's try it, what am I thinking right now? Give up? I'm in Maui surfing on the north shore. You wouldn't know that unless I told you. And you wouldn't know the mind of God unless he told us what he is thinking and what he is wanting.

Well, let's look at II Timothy. In chapter 3, verse 14, we'll begin there, "But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them. And that from childhood you have known the holy scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation, through faith which in Jesus Christ. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work."

The first thing this morning I want you to noptice, and by the way we're only going to be able to make it through the first phrase of verse 16 this morning, that's cause I'm preaching and it usually takes longer when I do it. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God." Notice the designation is the scripture. The scripture. And we often refer to our Bible and sometimes we even call it, The Holy Scriptures. Well here it is in the text, the scripture, the Greek word graphe, we get our term graph from it. And it refers to that which is written. So it tells us that it wasn't enough for God to just think his message or to just speak his message or simply to reveal his message through dreams or visions, but God wanted to make sure that the message was graphed, that it was written down in human language so that we could understand it. Now I don't know why some people have a problem with this. I mean if God has the technology to create the heavens and the earth, certainly God has the technology to write a book and get it published. I mean if you can believe Genesis 1:1 I think the rest is pretty easy. Let's see, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." If you can believe that, the rest is a snap. God wrote the scripture.

The Bible is God's self disclosure and I want to say something about Bible students because sometimes you are accused of being Bibliolators. "Oh, you worship that Bible." We're not Biliolators, we love the Bible for what it speaks to us about. That's sort of like this picture frame that was given to me as a gift and I carry when I travel two pictures: one of my wife, one of my son. And if I'm in a hotel for a few days, I prop this thing up and it's on my nightstand. And I look at it, and when I look at the picture, I'm warmed by what I see. I don't have a relationship with the picture frame. I don't talk to the picture frame and kiss it and caress it. But I'm warmed by it because these two images speak to me of two people I love very much. The Bible speaks to me of the God that I love. It is his portrait, his disclosure to me.

So the apostle says in designating what he's referring to, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God." Here's the question: What is he referring to under the title scripture? Well, immediately we know he's speaking of the Old Testament. Because in verse 15 he says, "From childhood you (Timothy) have known the holy scriptures." When Timothy was a child, the only thing available of course was the Old Testament. That's what Timothy as a Jewish young man was weaned on spiritually. However in verse 16, Paul continues, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" and there is reason and evidence to believe that when he said that all scripture, he wasn't just referring to just the Old Testament but also some of the documents then present which comprised the New Testament. How do I know that? I know that because sometimes Paul would quote the Old Testament and something written by Luke in the gospel of Luke in the New Testament and put it all under the umbrella of the scripture. I want to show you this. Go back one book, I Timothy chapter 5, verse 17, "Let the elders who rule well be counted of double honor especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. For the scripture says," let's find out what the scripture says. Here it is, "You shall not muzzle on ox while it treads out the grain." What scripture is that? That's the scripture out of Deuteronomy 25 verse 4, it's written by Moses in the law. Notice he goes on, "And the laborer is worthy of his wages." Now in my Bible I wonder if it's in yours, that's in red letter. And it's in red letters because there's only one place that it's found, that's the gospel of Luke chapter 10, it was spoken by Jesus recorded by Luke. So here we have Paul including the umbrella scripture what Moses said in the Old Testament, what Luke wrote in the New Testament.

Then there's Peter and Peter refers to the writings of Paul as being scripture. And I'd like to show you that so turen over to II Peter chapter 3 for just a moment. Just turn right, go right, don't use the table of contents. II Peter chapter 3, verse 15, "And consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation as also our beloved brother Paul according to the wisdom given to him has written to you. As also in all his epistles speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction as they do also the rest of scripture." Did you get that? He's saying that people twist the scripture and the do it with Paul's words like they do the rest of it, the other parts of it, inferring that what Paul wrote was also scripture. So he puts Paul's writings on an equal footing with generally accepted scripture of the time. So then, when Paul writes, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God," in his mind he is also thinking of Luke, Peter was thinking also of Paul. And by the way, Jesus himself anticipated the writing of the New Testament. We already studied that when we looked at that upper room discourse. And Jesus stood those twelve men on the night before he was crucified, in John 14, "The Holy Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all the things that I said to you." That answers the question, "How'd those guys remember it all? How can we trust their writings?" Supernaturally Jesus predicted, the Holy Spirit will give them the memory capacity to write it down. And then in John 17 Jesus prays, "I pray for all those who will believe in me through their words," anticipating the writing of the gospels. In John 16 he anticipates the writing of the doctrinal epistles when he says, "The Holy Spirit will come and guide you into all the truth." And then he says anticipating the writing of the book of the Revelation, "And he (the Holy Spirit) will tell you of things yet to come."

Now here's a question and I bring it up because I'm asked this question a lot, how do we know which books are scripture? Okay, we talk about scripture and we just automatically if it's in a Bible bookstore and it's bound in leather, it's okay, it's the scripture. But we have an issue here because the Catholic Bible is different from the Bible that I'm holding up. There are fourteen extra books in the Catholic Bible called the apocrypha which we don't have. The Mormon church will tell you the Bible's inspired but so is the Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrines and Covenants. Christian Science will teach the Bible is good and we should believe it but then there's also Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health. The Seventh Day Adventists will hold up the writings of Ellen G. Wright. So we have all of these extra writings and yet we say, "The scripture is inspired by God." So which canon is correct? Have you heard that term before, canon? The canon of scripture. It doesn't mean a gun that shoots out a warhead but rather an accepted list of authentic books. The word canon means a measuring rod, that which we hold up to a standard to know if it's authentic or not, the canon. Now at the time of Jesus there was an accepted canon. It was the Old Testament and it was put under the category of the law, the prophets and the psalms or the writings, what the Hebrews called the Torah, the first five books of Moses, the kekubine which were the writings including the Psalms, the poetry. Then there was the nebaim or the prophets which included the writings of the major, minor prophets as well as the historical books. And Jesus referred to these on the road to Emmaus in Luke chapter 24. He says, "All things must be fulfilled concerning me that were written in the law and the prophets and the psalms." That was the accepted canon or list at the time of Christ. Josephus the Jewish historian tells us that by the first century the Jews had firmly placed what was that canon or list of scripture to be.

Now if you move on a little bit in church history, right around AD 138, 140 let's say, there was a crisis facing the church. What books, what gospels, what letters do we include as part of the scripture? And here's why there was a crisis. A wealthy heretic, a Gnostic, by the name of Marcion came to Rome and he said, "Anything that's sympathetic with the Jews, any book is not to be scripture." So he threw out the entire Old Testament, he threw out the gospel of Matthew, gospel of Mark, gospel of John, book of Acts, book of Hebrews, book of I and II Timothy, book of Titus. And all he had left as what he called inspired scripture was a convoluted copy of the gospel of Luke and ten of Paul's apostles. And that became known as the Marcion canon. So the early church got together and by the fourth century AD in north Africa, Carthage and Hippo were the two cities, they convened in a council not to determine on their own and decide which books are inspired, but to notice and accept what is chosen by God as the accepted books of the Bible. Now how'd they do that? Well they had a series of questions and tests. Number one, is it authoritative? Is the book, is the writing, does it come with authority in it? Ever notice when you read Isaiah that Isaiah never says something like, "Now I know this may really sound ridiculous but I feel in my heart God is speaking to me." Do you ever read that Isaiah says that? Now you have, "thus sayeth the Lord," right? Very authoritative. Or, "the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah saying." And so they would look at the document to see what kind of authority it promoted in and of itself.

Number two, they asked the question: authorship. Was this a known and recognized prophet or apostle? Someone that substantiated by the spiritual community. And if not, was he endorsed by someone? I just mentioned Luke, Luke wasn't an apostle, he was a Gentile doctor. But because Paul quotes him, Paul endorses him. Mark wasn't an original apostle but he had a relationship with Peter and was endorses by Peter, so that the gospel of Mark we know is really the gospel according to Peter who was with Jesus that Mark wrote.

The third question that they would ask is, Is this document dynamic. Does it have life-changing power in what it says. Does it edify? Does it have correct doctrine? Is it dynamic?

And fourth, is it already accepted? Have the churches taken this in? Have they circulated them, read them, quoted from them? Have the early church fathers quoted from them? For instance, the New Testament quotes hundreds of passages out of the Old Testament. Paul quotes Luke, Peter quotes Paul, they all quote Christ, etcetera.

Now I just want to kind of visit one issue before we move on and that is, what about that apocrypha thing, Skip? You mentioned those fourteen books that are in some Bibles, Christian Bibles, and aren't in others, what about that? Well, the apocrypha were fourteen books, Jewish books written between BC 300 and BC 100. If in your Bible, in the back of your Old Testament, these books appear: I and II Ezvrez, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, the Song of the Three Holy Children, the History of Susanna, the story of Bell and the Dragon, I and II Maccabees, that's the apocrypha. Now why is it that it's not in my Bible but it's in Catholic Bibles? That's because in the 1500s there was a council of Trent and the Catholic church decided that they were now scripture. They had never been considered scripture up to that point but now they decreed this is official scripture. Why don't we accept it? Well, I can't answer that for you, I can answer that for me. I can tell you why I don't accept it. I don't accept those books as biblical. Number one, the Jews whose writings they are rejected them as biblical books before Christ ever came to the earth. Number two, Jesus never quoted once from them, neither did the apostles, though they quote from other parts of the Old Testament. Number three, the books of the apocrypha themselves don't claim to be inspired by God. And number four, they're chock full of inaccuracies. All sorts of problems exist with the text.

So, no the Holy Spirit didn't hand down a list from heaven and say, "Here's my top 66. Put those in the leather." Rather the Holy Spirit used a process of history that I believe he superintended. So if you know anything about the Bible at all and what it possesses in terms of predictability, etcetera, we know enough to say that what we are holding today is indeed the very word of God that is inspired by God. And okay there's things that you don't understand, but there's enough that should wow you and make you understand that, so what you don't understand this part. You can have confidence in the rest of it. Let me give you an example: this last week I had to fly to Puerto Rico and back very quickly. I got on an airplane. And I got on the airplane by faith. I did, it was all an act of faith. I didn't check to see if they filled up the fuel tanks. They assured me they did but I didn't watch it. I didn't check the pilot to see if he had a license to fly. "How do I know you can fly? Show me your license." I didn't do that. I didn't check the credentials of the flight crew but I got on the airplane by faith because, though airplanes do crash sometimes, the safest mode of transportation in existence is still by airplane. And the airline industry has a reasonable history of getting people from Point A to Point B, their destination. My faith was further bolstered when I was getting through the line at American Airlines, they told me about somebody they had just apprehended who was trying to get on my airplane, carrying nineteen baggies of mosquitoes as carry-on. Now this fellow said and it may have been true but they had to stop him, he said, "Well, I'm studying the West Nile virus." Oh great, what I want on an airplane is mosquitoes flying around. And they said, "You can't do that," and they kept him off. So I thought, "Ah, good reason then to put my confidence here, they have a good track record, a good history."

Let me tell you something about the Bible. The Bible doesn't contain everything you'd like to know about God. It tells you everything you need to know about God. It leaves many questions unanswered, it does. Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us that, it says, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God but that which is revealed belongs to us and our children that we may do all the words of this law." And even John, at the end of his gospel said, "Many other things Jesus did which are not recorded in this book." In fact, we believe that of the three-and-a-half year ministry of Jesus, only fifty days are actually recorded. So what's that? .046 right around there of Jesus' ministry is recorded. The Bible doesn't tell us everything exhaustively but it tells us enough truth about God for us to trust in him. I hear people all the time getting bogged down, "I can't understand the Trinity." Join the crowd, I can't understand the Trinity. I believe it. "I can't understand the dual nature of Christ." Join the crowd. But, you know what Mark Twain said? He said, "It's not the parts of the Bible I can't understand that bother me, it's all the parts that I can understand that bother me."

All scripture, all this writing, is inspired by God. Now I contend that if God loved us enough to communicate to us in a book we can read and understand and if people bled and died to preserve this and circulate this, the least we can do is read it, study it, apply it. Charles Spurgeon once wrote, "A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn't." I like that. That doesn't mean, "Okay I'm going to take my Bible, I'm going to make it really look beat up, "Because I'll appear more spiritual." But this is the writing, the graph of God. Now how does he do that? By inspiration. Notice it says, "All scripture (II Timothy 3:16) is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, for instruction in righteousness. How many of you have an NIV this morning? Raise your hands. Don't worry I'm not going to pick on you. You have a better translation of this verse than I do. Because your version says, "All scripture is God-breathed." That's very literal. It's passa graphe thea nustos. All scripture is God-breathed. Thea nustos comes from two words you already know. Theos which means God, theology, atheist, monontheism has that word theos in it. Anthony, Theodore, Dorothy, these are all names that include theos. The second word is pneuma. Pneumatics, pneumonia; means breath or air. So all scripture is a result of God's breathing his will through human beings. What does that mean exactly? Let me tell you what it doesn't mean. When we say all scripture is inspired, we're not referring to natural inspiration. Do you know what I mean by that? When you see a beautiful painting like a Picasso and you go, "Ah, he was so inspired." "What an inspiring musical that was." Some people lower the Bible to the level of a Picasso. "As an inspiring work of art written by a bunch of smart men." Listen, smart men don't write a book that condemns them and points to the only way of salvation outside of humanity, they don't do that. Number two, it doesn't refer to concept inspiration. Some people say that, "What inspiration means is that God didn't really give the writers the words, he gave them the concepts. So for instance, Paul, God inspired him with the concept of love. And so he sat down inspired by that and wrote I Corinthians 13. "Love is patient, love is kind, love does not" you know the text. Well that's not what Paul said. Paul said in I Corinthians 2, "This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught us by the Spirit expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. So that's why the Bible says concerning Jeremiah, "Behold I have put my words in your mouth." Not, "I'm going to inspire you with some thoughts, some impressions in your mind," but actual words. And the argument is closed if we just look at what Jesus himself said, "If we say we love Jesus and we follow him," Well listen to what he said about the Bible. "Not one jot, not one tittle will pass from the law til all is fulfilled. You know that a jot is the Hebrew yod, it's the smallest letter of their alphabet, it's like an apostrophe. A tittle is even smaller, it's an exclamation mark or a pronunciation mark that distinguishes letters from other letters. "None of those will pass away until all is fulfilled." In fact, one day Jesus had a confrontation with religious leaders called the Sadducees and he based his entire argument to them on the verb tense of a single word. Matthew 25, here's the story. Sadducees who don't believe in a resurrection come to Jesus and they say, "Jesus the law says that if a man who is married to a woman, if that man dies and doesn't have children with this woman, that his brother has to marry her and raise up children. Well Jesus, we know this family where there is seven guys, seven brothers, and one guy married a gal and he died. And so the second guy married the woman and he died. And the third married the woman and he died. And the fourth married the woman and he died. And the fifth married the woman..., the sixth married the woman..." Now after a while you're going to think, "What is she putting in the eggs? They're all dying." But it was a hypothetical case. And they said, "So in the resurrection (which they didn't believe in) who's wife will she be?" I love Jesus' response. He said, "You're ignorant. You are ignorant not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God. Have you never read what the law says where God says, 'I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore he is not the God of the dead but of the living." Did you get the tense? God said, "I am the God." Not, "I was the God." And that was said hundreds of years after the patriarchs had died. God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," not "I was," "therefore," Jesus said, "He is the God not of the dead but of the living." He staked his whole argument on a verb tense. Now that is why when we go through the scriptures, we bother to look at language and wording and context because there is so much profound truth in studying the very words of scripture. They matter. It's inspired by God.

I'd like to give you another example of how this makes a difference. There was a woman who traveled overseas by ship years ago, very wealthy. And she found a bracelet she wanted to buy, cost seventy-five thousand dollars. Well she didn't have a cell phone days, there were no computers, no faxes, so she had to wire her husband. "I found the most beautiful bracelet, it's only seventy-five thou, may I buy it?" He promptly responded, "No, (comma) price too high! (exclsmation point). In other words, forget it baby. Well the wire operator left out the comma, changing the entire meaning of the message. Instead of No! (pause, comma) price too high (explaining it). It simply said, "NO price too high." She thought, "Oh, what a wonderful hubby I have." And that little comma cost him seventy-five thousand dollars.

So the Bible is the inspired word of God and theologians call this, "The verbal plenary inspiration of the scripture," meaning the words themselves are inspired by God and the inspiration extends to all the words of the scripture.

Nor is this mechanical inspiration. Some people think that we believe when we say the Bible's inspired that God was dictating up in heaven. "Sit down, Paul, write this. Galatians, I Paul" (I Paul) Now God could have done that if he wanted to. But rather he used the personalities and the writing style of the authors themselves. We know that Luke had a different style than did Paul, etcetera. How did God do this? One final scripture and we close with this. Turn over to II Peter chapter 1. II Peter chapter 1 and we close with this. This is how it works. Verse 19, "And so we have the prophetic word confirmed which you do well to take heed, as a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises 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 but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." You see that little phrase, "as they were moved by the Holy Spirit"? It's a word pheromenoia, it's a maritime, a boating term, that speaks of a ship being carried at the mercy of the winds, carried along by the winds. So that these authors: the prophets, the apostles, raise their sails to speak, they were themselves flawed men. But the Holy Spirit drove that boat to the destination he wanted. So they had their own personality, their own writing style. Within the boat you have all the freedom you want to move around anywhere you want, anytime you want. But the destination is determined by the wind as the destination of the scripture were the very words God wanted to say even though the personalities were individual. It was carried along to the destination determined by God.

Okay, if that's so, if that's true, if every word in this book is indeed inspired by God, every word of it, why don't we read it? Why is it so tough? Oh, we'll affirm, "Oh yes, I'll believe the Bible, it's the word of God. Hallelujah." Okay, cool, read the thing, find out what God has to say. "Oh, but it takes so long to read that book." You know what? It'll take you twelve minutes a day, 365 days you'll have finished it. We believe, we know, it's been done that if you read the Bible at what we call pulpit speed, which is sort of like this pronouncing every word as you go, it'll take you seventy-two hours, fifty-two in the Old, twenty in the New; that's twelve minutes a day, 365 days a year, you can handle it.

Do we want to? Is there anything else competing for our time? I'm not here to lay a heavy hand on you and say, "Never watch television." Or, "Never read anything else." Or, "Never have fun another way," because you know we don't believe in that. But let's have a little perspective here, shall we? "On the table, side by side, a Holy Bible and the TV Guide. One is well worn but cherished with pride, not the Bible but the TV Guide. One is used daily to help folks decide. No, it isn't the Bible, it's the TV Guide. As pages are turned what shall they see? Oh, it doesn't matter, turn on the TV. So they open the book in which they confide, no it's not the Bible, it's the TV Guide. The word of God is seldom read, maybe a verse before they fall into bed. Exhausted and sleepy and tired as can be, not from reading the Bible but watching TV. So then back to the table side by side is the Holy Bible and the TV Guide. NO time for prayer, no time for the word; the plan for salvation is seldom heard. But forgiveness of sin so full and so free is found in the Bible not on TV."

The stuff that really will count is found in the graph that God has written, the Bible. So, I'm just here to say this, if we're really saying that God wrote the Bible, if we really believe that, let's not kid ourselves. If we really believe that, won't it become important to us?

Heavenly Father, we address you as we address you every week and every time we pray, a gracious loving heavenly Father who loved us enough to communicate to us in our own language. And though you use those who were imperfect, the result is they were carried along to a destination you had determined beforehand so that the words that came forth were the words of God. We believe that. We believe that to life and godliness is found in the knowledge of you and your word. Thank you, Lord. We don't love this book in and of itself, it's just a picture that points to you. And so, Lord, we treasure it. In Jesus' name. Amen.