I learned recently that a lot of atheists are narcissists, as well as those who are into New Age. And you can guess why–because in both of those, you are god. No one else, you don’t bow down to anyone–you are your own god.
One of the things that I find most common with anyone who is a narcissist, of course, is that they know everything, and they are always smarter than you in their own mind–whether they are actually smarter than you or not. When dealing with an atheist narcissist–they think they know more about the Bible than you. Yeah, even me, a pastor, who studies and teaches the Bible professionally, apparently this atheist knows more about the Bible and Christianity than anyone in this church.
So, reading the Bible, and knowing the Bible are two different things. Of course, reading The Bible and believing The Bible, are also two different things. Just because you read it, as an atheist, agnostic, or someone of a different religion entirely, doesn’t automatically make someone a believer.
There was a recent tick-tocker who was an atheist who started reading the Bible for the first time, and she had a complete meltdown because it wasn’t what she had thought. Even though she was an atheist, she still probably–she didn’t say this, but you put two-and-two together–and she probably thought the Old Testament was going to be full of a Mr. Rogers-meets-Oprah-Winfrey Christianity where everything is nice and rosy and ‘love your neighbor’ and all that.
And so she just went into a full-blown Gen Z ugly-cry, screaming meltdown like a three-year-old.
The Bible isn’t what a lot of people think it is. It’s raw, and unfiltered, and the main characters have a lot of egregious sins. God is harsh, yet merciful. God is love, yet angry. God is holy, and we are not. God is patient, we are not. And the Bible depicts all of these things–the good, the bad, the ugly–warts and all. This is the fall and redemption of humanity, through the history of Israel, seen through the lens of God and man. And we talked about Israel’s importance as the setting of The Bible and the lineage through which mankind would be redeemed, a few months ago.
Some treat the Bible as if it’s any other ancient religious myth. And I dare say that there are a lot of Progressive Christians who fall prey to that as well. They cherry-pick what they want, and make the decision for themselves on how true a troubling passage is based on how troubling–to them personally–a troubling passage is. If it’s too troubling, they won’t believe it. So if that’s the case, and if The Bible is God isn’t standard, then, I suppose man’s standard is God’s standard? Wouldn’t that make man higher than God? Wouldn’t that make them, God? And so you can see how Progressive Christianity lends itself to narcissism as well.
But today’s sermon is not on narcissism–again; it’s on The Bible–again.
So if you have your Bibles, please turn with me to 2 Timothy 3, and we’ll read verses 14-17. And as you’re turning there, let me tell you another quick story about scripture critics.
This is from Chuck Colson:
The Bible has, amazingly—no doubt with supernatural grace—survived its critics. Thirty to sixty million copies are produced annually. The harder tyrants try to eliminate it and skeptics dismiss it, the better read it becomes. Voltaire, for example, who passionately sought to erase the Christian influence during the French Revolution (between 225 and 235 years ago), predicted that within a hundred years no one would read the Bible. When his home was later auctioned off after his death, it was purchased by the French Bible Society. As one pastor said, the Bible outlives its pallbearers.
Let’s take a look at what The Bible says about itself.
2 Timothy 3:14-17:
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Now, most people who are skeptics would say, “You can’t prove the Bible with the Bible.” And that’s true. Just because The Bible says it’s true doesn’t make it true. Just because the Koran says it’s true doesn’t make it true. Just because The Book of Mormon says it’s true, doesn’t make it true.
According to statistics, 25 percent of evangelical Christians believe that The Book of Mormon is scripture.
I could see 2-5 percent, but not 25 percent!
The apostle John tells his readers to ‘test the spirits.’ This is another way to phrase the Psalm that says “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Test the spirits would also mean to test the Bible for yourself. Paul dared his readers to go ahead and ask the 500 witnesses who were still alive at the time if they saw the resurrected Jesus with their own eyes.
And in Acts, we read that the Berean Jews, “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” The Greek synonyms for ‘examined’ could also translate to: “scrutinize, investigate, interrogate, determine.”
So, skeptics will still say, “Yeah, but you’re still using scripture.” Okay, well what about the examinations of theology, history, and thought over the past 2,000 years? That’s the type of thing we learned in Sunday School this past Spring. If it weren’t true, Christianity would have never existed. It would have ended with Jesus’ death on the cross. The disciples would have run and fled; and at best, would have gone back to their lives as tax collectors and fishermen–if the Sanhedrin didn’t end up arresting them too.
Then there are geological and other scientific discoveries that align with Genesis. There are vast archaeological discoveries, and most importantly, the greatest apologetic, the billions of testimonies of people throughout the past 2,000 years.
I could go on and on, but I don’t want to get bogged down in apologetics. The point is, The Bible is not just “The Good Book” or “a religious book which has given its readers inspiration for thousands of years,” it is God’s truth revealed to us and preserved for us for all time.
Jesus himself said, “35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” Kind of reminds you of what I just read from Chuck Colson: The Bible has always outlived its pallbearers.
And the Bible has always been preserved for us. Some people will argue that the only true Bible for English-speaking people is King James. And I’m not going to get into that, but I have to say I don’t read the King James Version because I can’t understand it. So how can I preach the word of God if I can’t understand the word of God?
It reminds me of Paul’s words to the Romans:
13 for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
14 How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?
And I would add to that, how can someone preach unless they can understand what they are preaching from?
God’s Word has been preserved for centuries, and it is still to this day being translated into languages that it has never before been translated into. Did you know that in some third-world countries, The Gideons hand out Bibles in schools? And because of that, it’s how children learn to read because it’s not only the first book that children get to own, but it may be the only book that some children ever get to own. So the teacher can use that to teach reading because it’s a book that all of the children have.
God’s word has been preserved for all people of all the world for all generations and all languages, including the ever-changing English language.
Some will say that the Bible was never really preserved well to begin with. How do we know that what we have today is original and not tampered with?
We learned this in Sunday School too. We don’t have the original hand-written works of any scripture. The earliest copies that we have of New Testament scripture are hand-written copies from within the first to the second century. But when it comes to other writings from that time period, the earliest copies we have date hundreds of years later, and they are not exact copies but have a lot of embellishments. But with The Bible, they are almost exact copies of one another, with only slight variations–usually human copying error–all the way down through the centuries of hand-written texts.
The last Sunday School curriculum we did was, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Sean and Josh McDowell. It’s based on their best-selling book by the same name, and in the book, Josh said, the earliest (partial or whole) New Testament manuscripts found date between 114 and 325 A.D. McDowell refers to Sir Frederic Kenyon who states that when it comes to ancient manuscripts, “In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.”
In addition to the relatively short time span of existing documents to its original date, McDowell points out that there are some 25,000 copies of the New Testament in existence today—the greatest number by far of any other ancient text. The Iliad comes in second with a mere 643 manuscripts. All New Testament copies are nearly identical to each other, which cannot be said of other ancient writings. This accuracy is also seen in various translations.
In other words, God has carefully and intentionally preserved His word for all people, and for all time.
The reason why I bring up apologetics in Sunday School and today at the pulpit is because in order to really examine why we need to read scripture, it’s important in this day and age to examine, “What is scripture? Is The Bible truly the Word of God or the Word of man? Is it truly reliable? Was it made by just a bunch of guys who decided to make a religion?”
I could go on and on about that, but I’ll just remind you that researchers truly believe that if Christianity were not true, then it would have died with Jesus. The truth of Christianity hinges on The Bible being true, and the Bible hinges on being true if the resurrection of Jesus and the indwelling of The Holy Spirit is true.
How can we know that either is true? Like I said, examine it. Test it for yourself. While maybe we can examine the resurrection as a historical event, what about The Holy Spirit? How can we ‘test the spirits’ as John instructed? Well, it’s easy. The Holy Spirit resides in our Bible reading. I couldn’t think of a better way to say it, only to say that The Holy Spirit resides in our Bible reading. We have a living Word. The Holy Spirit is there as we read. The Holy Spirit speaks to us as we read. Not only does The Holy Spirit live within us, but is active in us as we read God’s Word.
The writer of Hebrews put it best when he said, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Eugene Peterson said, Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
And going back to our scripture verse in 2 Timothy, Paul says that scripture, “is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
Enduring Word Commentary says this: When we come to the Bible and let God speak to us, it changes us – it makes us complete and transforms us.
It goes on to say that…
i. One way the Bible transforms us is through our understanding. Romans 12:2 says, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” When we let the Bible guide our thinking, our minds are renewed and transformed, so we begin to actually think the way God wants us to think.
ii. But there is another level by which the Bible transforms us: by a spiritual work, a spiritual blessing which God works in us as we come to the Bible and let Him speak to us. This is a spiritual work that goes beyond our intellectual understanding.
But what about those who read the Bible, like that atheist tik-toker I mentioned, and they don’t get anything out of it other than a temper tantrum? What about the skeptics who read the Bible and just find a bunch of stories? What about the doubters who once believed? They’ve read the Bible. Or the Progressive Christians who cut-and-paste the Bible to fit their own personal Western 21st Century worldview? Where’s The Holy Spirit when they read?
Well, I doubt someone filled with The Holy Spirit is going to have that kind of experience. I believe that someone filled with the Holy Spirit is going to be fed by The Holy Spirit.
Now, that doesn’t mean that a person is going to understand or even be able to obtain or retain everything they read all at once. It’s a process, and it’s why we preachers harp on our congregations to read the Bible continuously, because the more you read, the more you’re going to be fed. Only makes sense, right?
Going back to Enduring Word, it says, “Because of this spiritual level on which the Word of God operates, we don’t have to understand it all to have it be effectively working in our lives.”
A critic once wrote a letter to a magazine saying, “Over the years, I suppose I’ve gone to church more than 1,000 times, and I can’t remember the specific content of even one sermon over those many years. What good was it to go to church 1,000 times?” The next week, someone wrote back: “Over the past many years, I have eaten more than 1,000 meals prepared by my wife. I cannot remember the specific menu of any of those meals. But they nourished me along the way, and without them, I would be a much different man!” The Bible will do its spiritual work in us, if we will let it.
And again, if we let it. As I said, The Holy Spirit will do His work in us as we read, but we also have to be willing to allow The Holy Spirit to do His work.
A few hundred years ago, the prince of Grenada, an heir to the Spanish crown, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Madrid’s ancient prison. The dreadful, dirty, and dreary nature of the place earned it the name, “The Place of the Skull.” Everyone knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The prince was given one book to read the entire time: the Bible.
With only one book to read, he read it hundreds and hundreds of times. The book became his constant companion. After 33 years of imprisonment, he died. When they came to clean out his cell, they found some notes he had written using nails to mark the soft stone of the prison walls.
The notations were of this sort: Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter J; the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible; no word or name more than six syllables can be found in the Bible.
This individual spent 33 years of his life studying what some have described as the greatest book of all time. Yet he could only glean trivia. From all we know, he never made any religious or spiritual commitment to Christ. He simply became an expert at Bible trivia.
Let’s not allow that to happen to any of us. Let us be transformed by The Bible. Let us know and understand that it was written for us, through God’s inspiration to man, so that we can know God. We can know salvation. We can know righteousness. We can know that we are sinners and what God’s standard of holiness is. We can know forgiveness, and we can know peace and we can know purpose.
Going back to Romans, Paul says, What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”
A few verses down he concludes this thought by saying, “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.”
So we, through the Word and power of the Holy Spirit, understand what is good, and how we’re not. Let me read to you again what Paul says a few chapters later: for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
I know you’re not supposed to add to the Bible–but I can’t help but add, “How can they learn without reading?” That’s not adding to the Bible, but remember, they didn’t have a whole Biblical canon readily available to them like we have today, which is why these letters were so important. One or two letters, copied and disseminated throughout a church or region were the only Bible that they had.
But, we do have a Bible. We may have more than one Bible. Do we read it? We can obtain one online for free. Just google biblegateway.com, and you can read it in any translation you like at the touch of a button–all for free.
God wants to speak to you. Let Him do His work in you as you read and study The Bible. Pray along as you do. When you come to the blessings of God and His promises over your life, pray into that. Pray for holiness when The Bible convicts you. Pray that the Lord would help you do good works whenever you get to those passages and say, “Lord, I can’t do this on my own.” Draw closer to God through this process, be filled with his peace, be filled with his joy.
There is a lot going on right now, and we can’t see the future. As an unstable world swirls around us, let God’s word refresh you, strengthen you, and fill you with complete confidence that the one who sits on the throne is Lord over all.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on First Baptist Church of Watkins Glen
Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay
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