SUMMARY KEYWORDS

bible, god, menlo, jesus, faith, love, people, story, life, matter, extremes, describe, years, talked, passages, side, heard, called, discover, grew.

SPEAKERS

Phil EuBank

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Hey, Good Morning, Menlo Church. Welcome back, we are continuing a series called Explore God. And during the last few weeks, we have been in discussion groups and in services across all of our campuses, asking some big questions about faith with the goal of, hopefully, discovering or maybe for some of us rediscovering of faith together. I want to give a special welcome to our campuses around the Bay Area in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Saratoga, and for those of you joining us online. We're actually joining more than 160 other Bay Area churches in this important conversation around faith together in this season.

Today, we're gonna broach a pretty big topic that can be honestly kind of polarizing, we're going to be asking the question, Is the Bible Reliable? And I could give you a quick yes or no, but that will make the sermon so short, right? What would you even do with your time? But honestly, we probably have some instinctive answer to a question like this, and whether for you it's a quick yes, or a quick no, it's likely that the answer is more nuanced, then we want to give it credit. And together we're going to examine that subject over the next few minutes. Before we begin, I want to reiterate something that you have heard me say if you've been around Menlo for a little while, and as important as this conversation is, as big of a deal as we believe the Bible is and we do, the Bible is not the foundation of our faith. Ready? Gasp, go… that was a good one, you guys crushed it. Great job, don't tell the 8:30am [service], you are way better than they were.

But like we talked about last week, the resurrection of Jesus actually happening 2,000 years ago, that's the foundation of our faith. The Bible is the authority for our faith. And that distinction is really important, because we will not see eye to eye on every detail of biblical interpretation. And that's okay. We can have unity in the gospel without uniformity in every scriptural interpretation. One of the ways that we describe that here at Menlo is something we call generous orthodoxy, that we can have unity in the essentials while we still continue to wrestle with the rest.

Now, before I go any further I'm gonna pray for us, and if you've never been here before or never heard me speak, I pray kneeling. And the reason that I do that is because this thing we're about to talk about, this thing we're about to read, The Bible, it's actually reading us too. And we need God's help, to be able to make sense of it in our lives, to be able to understand where it might show up, or how it might show areas that we need God's direct intervention with. So wherever you are in your faith discovery process, would you humble yourself wherever you are, and pray with me?

God, we recognize that we simply cannot do this without you. Would you be with us over these next few minutes? Would you help us get to see you truly as the north star of our lives, and no matter what the Bible has been or represented, God, maybe open our eyes to what it could mean for us in the days ahead. It's in Jesus name. Amen.

So when did you realize that your parents weren't perfect and didn't know everything? Now, for some of us, we chuckle right, because of the way that you grew up, or how you think about your parents today. But it's easy as kids to have this idea of your parents on some level as this like all knowing superhero. And over time, there are these little cracks in the wall, there are these little pockets of discovery about their humanity. Maybe it was a fight you weren't supposed to see, maybe it was, you know, an injury that they struggled to recover from, maybe it was a financial setback that changed how you live. And those things sort of shined a light that you didn't know before.

Our childhood memories, they can go from magic to nostalgic pretty quickly. We know that our parents aren't perfect, but we can still think back to Christmas mornings, or we can think back to special vacations or we can think back to long road trips that we have stories we still tell now even years and years later, like it was yesterday. It's fun, but at some point, you stopped depending on them for kind of your daily solutions to problems the way that you had to out of necessity, as a kid.

I remember seeing my mom with my aunt when I was little and they interacted like friends in a way I'd never seen my mom do before. I remember traveling to Southern California where my parents grew up, and my dad showing me some of the things he loved about Southern California that he could remember as a child. I'd never seen that side of him before. I remember years ago for my dad, and months ago from my mom, going through their things after they died and reading the things that opened a portal into their thoughts and feelings that I didn't know before, they were more nuanced than I had given them credit for. We are great, by the way at giving that credit to ourselves and aren't we?

If you have kids, you probably remember the moment when you realized how unsure you were as a parent, or as a parent, you think to yourself, I don't think they should have just like, let me take these kids home, like I have no idea what I'm doing. And if you're honest, you realize that as unsure as you are in that moment, your parents had the same level of living unsure as parents of you. And that's a scary moment. I think that sometimes that's how we see the Bible too, if we're honest. If we're honest, we maybe grew up in church, or maybe you didn't, but the Bible is just sitting on the shelf somewhere in your house. And it represented sort of this magic spell book, it had power you didn't know it contained information you weren't aware of.

But over time, maybe in church, maybe Sunday school, maybe it was in college, your understanding of the Bible changed and not all the time, for the better. You went from magic to nostalgic. In your view of the Bible. It was a cute memory from your past, but it couldn't help set the trajectory for your future right? After all, we've heard the objections. The Bible is full of contradictions full of violence and genocide, often condoned or commanded by God. The descriptions of nature and history are at odds with science. It's written by ignorant and ancient people who have no relevance to us. Christians themselves can't even agree on what it's saying, why should we waste our time? Some of you are like, finally, you're saying what I think, you know.

The thing is, even Christians wrestle with this sort of cognitive dissonance, fearful - can I really depend on and trust the Bible, but also remembering and clinging to verses like this one, “All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man [or woman] of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” And so which one is it? Well, I have good news for you. Just like we talked about last week, the Bible can handle your scrutiny, it has been holding up to the weight of that scrutiny for thousands of years. But we have to offer some clarifications for what it is and what it's trying to do. Let me give you the bottom line of our time together, if you don't take anything else with you today, remember this idea? Here's what the Bible is, the Bible is a true story about a real problem with a profound solution. It's a true story about a real problem with a profound solution. Even if you've never seen it that way. Give me just a few minutes to try and show you by debunking a few of the myths that we can sometimes semaphore in our understanding of the Bible.

The first myth about the Bible is that it is a book written by God. The truth is that the Bible is actually a library written by dozens of people over more than a thousand of years inspired by God. Now that makes feel like a distinction without a difference.

Except if no one's ever told you that before, and then you hear that it can feel like they deceived you. It can feel like it was kept from you. And the thing is, the Bible as a library that communicates a central story is actually way more impressive than the way that sometimes we think about or settle for understanding the Bible. Like we talked about this summer, sometimes our faith starts very simple out of necessity, and it grows over time. And I have good news for you. As your faith matures, as you mature, your understanding of the Bible can handle it. God's word can take it.

The central story of the Bible can be broken down into these parts, if you've never heard them before creation, fall, redemption and restoration. If you've never heard that before, at the macro level of the entire story of the Bible and all of human history, that's the pattern. And if you look at individual stories within the Bible, and honestly, even in your journey with God, that is the same pattern that God is regularly showing to you and to me, that there's this progression God wants to do in our lives and in the world. There

are definitely parts of the Bible that are designed to be understood as historic facts, even if science or archaeology has not caught up yet. Here's the thing, with less than 5% of discoverable archaeological evidence found in the world, we as human beings just simply haven't found everything yet. And so with 5% of the information available, saying we haven't found something, well there's 95% still available to be found. That doesn't say a whole lot yet. But I can tell you there are examples that do show this over time, that there are things that have been dismissed for a long time as completely unbelievable in the Bible that turned out to be very believable.

In Joshua 1:4 we see a group of people named the Hittites, who are referenced and for centuries, scholars used this to discredit the Bible; they had found no archaeological evidence to support the Hittites. Every time the Bible conversation came up, well, what about the Hittites? Well, the thing is, if you kind of fast forward to 1834, French scholar Charles Texier found the first Hittite ruins in the exact region that the Bible describes that would be. Not everything has been discovered yet. And so that's going to be true throughout the Bible, but this is a believable book. This is a book that the things it describes we have consistently found evidence that they are in the direction of reality.

Another example comes from a passage that's considered a messianic prophecy, or a promise about the Savior of the world in the book of Isaiah, written more than 700 years before Jesus’ earthly ministry with passages like this, “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors. That feels like a pretty specific example of what Jesus would do, right?

As a matter of fact, it was so specific because the most ancient copies we had for a very long time, were dated after Jesus' earthly ministry, every scholar would just say; well, obviously, that was written after Jesus was on earth, there's no way that that could have been written before. And because the documents that we had couldn't prove it, it was like, well, that's a hard conversation. We'll fast forward to the 1940s, in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and everything changed. With more than 3,000 pieces of manuscript evidence and a full Isaiah scroll, they went to this scroll that was dated more than 1,000 years older than anything we had, and hundreds of years before Jesus' earthly ministry, and it was shockingly accurate to what we had today that actually, God had this big story that He was even telling, back then archaeology had caught up.

Again, this big story that God uses an entire library of books to communicate, it has unity across what is shared with every reader, throughout human history. I shared this last week, but it bears repeating that the central claim of Christianity is what's called The Gospel, that God made you in His image with infinite dignity, value and worth. And that humanity, you and me sinned against God and continue to do it by living in rebellion against His ways. And so God, He sent Jesus His Son to earth fully God, fully man, to live a perfect life in yours and my place, to die for us and to come back from the grave. So that now you and me we can turn from our way, our patterns of rebellion against God, choose to follow Him and experience life with Him forever. And that forever starts now. And it's the only way to experience that eternal relationship.

That exclusive claim is called the gospel. And that exclusive claim was predicted in the Old Testament delivered in the Gospels and explained throughout the rest of the pages of Scripture, that you and I might model it in our lives. That story told first in the creation narrative, then throughout God's selection of a specific people Israel, then offered to all in the person and work of Jesus is still the story of the Bible today. The Bible is a true story about a real problem with a profound solution. The second myth about the Bible is that God is love. Uh Oh, and therefore everything in the Bible confirms that character.

The truth is that God is love, but he defines that concept as the supreme being, not us.

Now, no matter how limited your news consumption is, you have heard about the atrocities taking place in the Middle East over the last week or so. It's easy to create a moral equivalency and to take aside based on our heritage or our political leanings, but as Christians, we are people of peace, rooting for an end praying for an end to the bloodshed taking place even right now. And while Israel today looks quite different than the picture of Israel in the first five books of the Bible. We pray, especially for this place, because I believe that God has a specific plan for this group of people, and as we see how God will ultimately deliver the world and restore it, that the Middle East the areas that we're talking about will be the epicenter of that future reality.

And I know that this plan that God still has for this specific group of people, it can contradict the view that we think well, if God is love, He wouldn't do it this way, in this 21st-century kind of love. But our kind of love is confusing a little bit, right? We say things like, I love my spouse, and I love my kids, and I love this restaurant. We say I love this sports team, and to be fair, some of you when you say you love a specific sports team it's on par with how much you love your spouse, but that's a different sermon. We use one word to describe many things, but that's not actually what the word love means when we see it written in the pages of Scripture, it's much deeper than that. Believe me, by the way, you want God to be the one who defines love. Our definition of love, it's fickle and frail. But God's faithful definition of love, it extends us, even when we aren't faithful back, God's love is still extending towards us.

We may have picked a different Old Testament nation to bless or have a plan for Israel. We may have a different way to save humanity than sending Jesus but trust me, God's plan is better. God's plan is trustworthy. God's plan is worth setting your life on. If God was simply a weak but welcoming divine figure, as we would describe love in the 21st century, when something was wrong in your life, he would be powerless to do anything about it. We want the version of love that we hear in the taken movies, when Liam Neeson out of love for his daughter wages a one man war to get her back from the enemy. That's the kind of love we want. We want God picking up the phone to the kidnappers and saying, I have a very special set of skills like that's the kind of love we want. We want a God whose love is so powerful that it includes wrath on the enemy for our protection, power over the obstacles for our deliverance and divine knowledge to see what's coming in your life and to prepare you and me for it, that we would walk through it faithfully with Him. That's the kind of complex real love that God extends to you and me.

See the pattern in our life, it meets the problem that comes when we treat God like little kids treat parents. See when little kids come up to parents, and there's something that we really want and our parents are holding it back from us for our good. If we're the kids in the scenario, we say this with puppy dog eyes, we say I thought you loved me. And that's what we say to God, isn't it? But the kind of love that God has for us is so much better than that. The late great Tim Keller challenges our view of the scriptures this way, he said “Contemporary people tend to examine the Bible, looking for things they can't accept; but Christians should reverse that, allowing the Bible to examine us, looking for things God can't accept.” God's love. His definition, it's different than ours, and His is better. The Bible shows us things that don't all seem loving, but they are all part of a loving story. And because it is a library they are often descriptive of a broken people that God is working in spite of, rather than a prescriptive pattern picturing a world without sin that simply doesn't exist.

The third and final myth that we're going to take a look at is that the Bible is a scientific textbook, that should be taken exclusively literally. The truth is that the Bible never intended to be a scientific textbook, and we should examine it within the literary genres that we are reading. This library that we have, either on our shelves or maybe on our phones, it contains this incredible story of God redeeming sinful humanity through a sinless savior. And it happens through the story of God using broken people to get it done. With that in mind, there are a bunch of different genres in the Bible. One of the reasons that we get in trouble is because we don't think about it that way, we read all of the Bible as though it's exactly the same, trying to communicate with us in exactly the same way. And so maybe you've never heard it this way, but here are the parts of your Bible and each one brings a different way of reading:

(1) There's the Jewish Law, (2) there's Historic Narrative, (3) There's Poetry, (4) Wisdom literature, (5) Prophecy, (6) the Gospel Accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, (7) and Letters, what oftentimes get called Epistles, and studying each one of these takes a different approach. They're all telling the same story, but one of the reasons we get in trouble is because we expect them to do it the same way. I enjoy watching movies with my kids, but I'm not going to try and watch the new Paw Patrol movie with the same storytelling filter as Braveheart or Top Gun. Right? I saw the new Paw Patrol with our youngest, actually there is no story telling filter, you just survive it, if that's still in front of you just letting you know. They're different. Even when we're looking at the same thing, we can have different perspectives. But we should do the work to unearth why. We shouldn't just make assumptions.

As a matter of fact, there's a friend of mine who uses a structure to explain this that I'm gonna use for you; if you’re wondering why is this dry-erase board up here? No reason, actually, I just wanted you to wonder this entire time. That's not true. He uses a description or a framework of how to describe this that I think is really helpful. Some of us, we grew up in what sometimes gets called a fundamentalist environment, and in this environment, you know, the questions that you're allowed to ask, you know, the things you're not allowed to ask. Others of us, we grew up in more of a progressive environment, and you got to ask different questions in this one, there are different priorities. And before you think, oh, he's talking about politics, don't twist this up with politics. I'm talking about the way we think about and understand the nature of the Bible.

On the fundamentalist side, here's the thing, we have questions and ideas that we're allowed to ask, and the primary filter that we're thinking about this through is the literal interpretation of the Bible. Some of you are like, yeah, I'm glad that that stuff there.

That's the way I think about the Bible. If you grew up in a more progressive environment around the Bible for you, maybe you think about it as literary; you are immediately trying to think about how do I take this thing that's hard to understand hard to explain, and process it through what I'm reading about? They sometimes get pitted against one another, but they're actually not at odds. When we understand the Bible as a library, we can understand that this is points along a spectrum.

Our goal is to avoid the extremes on either side of this. On this side, we are concerned primarily with accuracy, we want to be right, and we are concerned with the metaphysical. What does this actually mean? How do I describe the reality as I see it? And yeah, my handwriting is incredible. On the literary side, we are more concerned with artistry, and we want to know; how is God through this beautiful picture of how He's working the world creating art, and the metaphorical. And so the metaphorical sometimes gets pitted against literal, but even the most conservative person theologically, you know, there are parts of the Bible that are literal, and parts of the Bible that are metaphorical.

When Jesus says I am the door, He wasn't then getting hinges installed onto the side of his body, it was a metaphor, right? And then when Jesus goes to Thomas, after he's come back from the dead, and He says, Thomas, touch the wounds in my hands, that wasn't a metaphor, that was something that literally happened. It's understanding that the text itself helps shape our understanding in the individual components of how we read and understand it. Now, here's the thing; on this side, people will absolutely in the extremes sit under the authority of the Bible. But sometimes what happens is, we trade ignorance - we're just not going to ask that question, we're not going to read the next book, we're just going to stop discovering it - for a false sense of certainty. And so now I don't have to look any harder, I don't have to keep digging or growing. I'm good, my understanding is set.

On the extreme on this side, we trade arrogance of I know how this works, I don't really have to have a whole lot of faith, if I don't believe it, I don't have to. And we trade that for autonomy. And so God doesn't get to call the shots in my life I do; if I don't like the way that he is describing something that I should live a certain way I'm just going to ignore it entirely. Now, here's the thing. We all live along this spectrum, somewhere. There are very few of us that live in the extremes that I just highlighted. And so even if you think you know somebody in your life that you are like the closest friend of and you think we're on the same page, we think exactly the same way on this stuff, you don't. As a matter of fact, the challenges of life and obstacles do this crazy thing along the way where at some points in your life, you're going to find yourself on different points of this map, and based on what you're studying, you're going to find yourself on different points in this map. And that's a part of life. When you face challenges and obstacles, when you face adversity in your life, you may find yourself at a different spot.

Jesus starts everybody down here with this call to come and see, come and see that the Lord is good. Come and see that there is hope, that this hope is eternal, that it's bigger than your circumstances. But if you walk with Jesus long enough, you will discover that come and see, as you faithfully follow him becomes come and die for all of us. That what it means is self-denial, that what it means is that what I want, I surrender for what I really need, and the bigger plan that God is going to do in my life. And I hope that as you see this, what you don't see is, well, if you think this way, or you think this way, you can't be a part of Menlo. I'll tell you what a Menlo, we have people all over the map and that's okay. I hope that we can always be a place where no matter where you are or what you believe, you can find belonging here, even with a different set of beliefs, even on your way to discovering and accepting Jesus for yourself. Even if you don't see the Bible the same way.

But can I offer a resource for you, especially if you're skeptical about the Bible, if you find yourself kind of writing it off, there's a book called How (Not) To Read The Bible, by Dan Kimball, and it addresses a lot of the big issues I talked about early on in our time together in more detail than I can give in 30 minutes. It's well worth your time. If you're somebody that skeptical of faith or the Bible, it can be a great resource for you. If you're somebody maybe thinking about coming back to faith - I had a conversation with somebody like that earlier today - could be great for you. And I'm so encouraged and impressed, including in conversations this morning, about some of you who are faithful followers of Jesus, and you're consuming these resources so that you are better equipped to have conversations with people in your life, who are close to you but far from faith, that is such a gift that they don't even know you're preparing to give them.

See, in a conversation like this about the Bible. I'm reminded of the 19th-century pastor and scholar Charles Spurgeon, he has a famous quote about the Bible. He says, “Scripture is like a lion. Who ever heard of defending a lion? Just turn it loose; it will defend itself.” I hope you know this about Menlo, but nobody's going to try and twist your arm. You can believe whatever you want. My goal is to help you understand that this is a believable reality. This is rooted in truth. And the greatest thing that some of you can do to experience the power of the scriptures is to just open it and read it. Open to the book of John this week and read the life and ministry of Jesus, and maybe discover a side or a picture that you never thought possible and meet God in the pages that He has preserved for 1,000s of years for you.

For others of you, it may mean that you buy a copy of a book called How To Read The Bible For All It's Worth, and discover that some of those areas that you've been studying, assuming things about how to study them is not maybe the most helpful way to study some of those passages, and it could unlock an experience of studying God's word that you didn't even know was possible. Now, you may not know this about me but I have severe dyslexia, a learning disability and a reading disability; it's been a struggle for me my whole life. But a unique gift that God has given me is that none of that affects me when I read the Bible. And it's this really fun reminder for me - and I know that's not true for everybody, maybe reading the Bible is really hard for you - but for me, it reminds me how the Bible describes itself; “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and a spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning to the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

No matter what you believe about it. As you read the Bible, it reads you and God meets you in it. If you don't have a Bible, your campus pastor has one that they would love to give you today as our gift to just let you try this. It's not a magic spell book, but it can be more than nostalgic, and God will meet you and use it in unique and special ways in your life. Throughout this series, I've tried to be very honest with you about the fact that I can't convince you of any of this. Ultimately, this is a decision that you will make and I'm simply trying to show you a reasonable faith that is worth considering. The rest it's up to you and God. But I believe the Bible is God's word, and I believe that because of some very specific reasons I've heard it framed this way; The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses, that report supernatural events that took place in specific fulfillment of prophecies that claim their writings are divine, rather than human in origin. I believe that to be true. And I think even the claim of it is worth considering for you. Here's the thing. There's an original movie is kind of a throwback, called the Matrix. And in the matrix Morpheus who's a believer that there is a world that is more real than the one that we can see, and lives as though that's the case is challenged by another character. And that character says to Morpheus, Morpheus, not everyone believes like you do. And Morpheus just says, my beliefs don't require them to.

The good news is that the Bible is God's word whether you believe it is or not. It can do the work that it claims to do whether you believe it can or not; that God is real and loves you whether you believe He is or not. God is pursuing you even if you don't believe He is. God has a plan for your life, whether you believe He does or not. So no matter what skepticism you're bringing to it, no matter what hurt or pain from your past, or your present is holding you back. God is still pursuing you with this never stopping and never giving up love, that He was willing to give up His own son to restore relationship with you because of love.

So this week, beyond your skepticism, beyond your cynicism, beyond turning off to an extreme. What if together, we saw God through His word. What if together, we weren't just the kind of place that talked about this, but we modeled it. Can I pray for you?

God, I pray for moments like this with people in rooms across the Bay Area, people in front of screens that God you would wake us up to the fact that there is something so much more powerful available to us than simply settling for a few minutes in a room or a few minutes talking about this. This isn't just about passages we see on a screen God it's about opening up your book, being in the pages day by day and meeting you there. God thank you for preserving your words for us for 2,000 years as we read the New Testament. Thousands of years, as we read the Hebrew Scriptures, would you help bring it to life, that our life might be more characterized by your ways? God, we're so thankful. And for those that are thinking about maybe faith discovery, and this has been a barrier, I pray that today gave them a path of hope, a path of discovery, a path of permission to see that your word is reliable, and they can find you in it. It's in Jesus name. Amen.

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