Isn’t the Bible Just Another Myth? (Spanish)

Is the Bible just another myth? That is the theme of this plenary session, this exposition. And I think another way to ask the question is, Is the Bible reliable? How far is it reliable? We’re going to talk about that, but before we can talk about it, I would like to say a couple of things about what the Bible is—because most people know the Bible as if it were simply a book, a religious book with things you have to do and things you can’t do. And the truth is, although there are things like that in it, that is so far from the truth that we need two or three minutes to identify, to clarify, what the Bible is.

On the one hand, what God has left for us in his Word is a revelation. It is a revelation of his essence—what he is like, as far as our finite minds can understand. It is a revelation of his mind—how he thinks about life, about creation, about himself, about you, about me, about our relationship with him. It is a revelation of his heart—how he feels, what matters to him, what motivates him, what moves him, what honors him—what he likes, if we could use a human word, right? But it is also a revelation of his will—what he has decided, or how he decides, what he has in mind when he receives, when he decides, when he plans.

But it is more than that, because the Bible is the offer—or represents the offer—of God’s salvation to a man who was dead in trespasses and sins. That is what we are. It is the story of redemption from A to Z, from beginning to end. And I think it is important that you and I can know that.

And one more thing before finishing this definition of what the Bible is: the Bible is the representation, or revelation, of God’s character through human stories. In other words—and our church has heard this many times—every time you open the Bible, don’t leave a passage without seeing something about the character of God. Because the Bible is not about Abraham, or Daniel, or Moses, or Paul. No, no, no. The Bible is the revelation of God’s character, using men, transforming lives, and then, after doing that, using their lives—with their shadows and their light—to carry out his purpose. And in that story, you and I are represented.

So, if you have that, I think you now have a better idea of everything the Bible is. The question is: this book we call the Bible—what is it more than that? Listen: it is the Word of God—something that has come from God. So, how reliable is it?

And I want to tell you: the Bible is not only reliable; it is unique. There is nothing like the Bible. There is nothing like this revelation. And I wish we had enough time to talk about all these things, but I’m going to mention right away ten ways the Bible is reliable.

Number one: the Bible is unique—underline that word—in its impact and resilience. We’ll see a little more about that. It is unique in the unity of its theme. It is unique in its currency and diffusion. It is unique in its survival against wind and tide. It is unique in its literary character. It is unique in its moral character. There is no other book in all human literature with a moral character that even resembles what the Bible has or represents. It is unique in its archaeological confirmation—and there we are bringing science into the discussion. It is unique in the exact fulfillment of prophecy—not a fulfillment that is more or less, kind of, according to what happened. No, no, no. Exact. It is unique in its historical value—and there I will refer specifically, perhaps, to the evidence for the resurrection of Christ. And it is unique in its power to change lives. There is no other book that has affected civilizations, the lives of people who then changed their surroundings—laws, ways of living—and contributed to human flourishing.

I’m going to use some phrases, and I’m going to begin with this one from Josh McDowell. It’s a quote. Josh McDowell was an unbeliever, then a skeptic, and at some point in his life he set out to prove the unreliability of the Bible, or the lack of historical proof of the resurrection—as others have done—and he ended up not only convinced of the opposite, but believing. And then he became a standard-bearer—not only for the Bible, but for the defense of this book.

Listen to what Josh McDowell wrote on one occasion about what makes the Bible unique:

No other written work has been so attacked, scrutinized, and persecuted as the canonical books of the Bible. Yet the Bible continues to endure—there is its resilience—enduring firmly every form of opposition.

Bernard Ramm, a former professor of religion at Baylor University, affirms, “A thousand times the death knell of the Bible has been sounded. The funeral procession has been formed, the inscription has been carved on the tombstone, and the burial has been read. But for some reason the corpse—better said, the cadaver—never stays still. No other book has been so torn apart, stabbed, discriminated against, scrutinized, and vilified as the Bible.”

Listen to how the quote continues:

The Bible has enormously influenced Western civilization, laying the foundations for democratic forms of government and law, the rational exploration of the natural world, artistic and literary movements, and moral and social values. The Bible profoundly influenced the maintenance of the justice system in the United States. That is why we affirm that a person has value. There is a human dignity—what Josh McDowell is talking about—that killing a human being is wrong. Likewise, the Bible has been a foundational source for nearly every artistic and literary genre. Great artists—Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and others—are remembered and appreciated for their biblical masterpieces.

Did you hear it? Did you pay attention? The monumental impact—not only on people, but on every area of Western society. So there you have part of its reliability, its uniqueness, its resistance or resilience, as we spoke of as point number one.

But the Bible is also unique in the unity of its theme. I think it’s important that we remember this. The Bible has about forty different authors. Those forty authors came—from different backgrounds. There are kings like David and Solomon; soldiers like Joshua; legislators like Moses; fishermen—Peter, John, James; court officials like Nehemiah; priests like Ezra; tax collectors like Matthew; shepherds—shepherds of sheep; prophets; and a Gentile physician, beloved Luke, as Paul calls him at one point. Forty authors from different backgrounds.

They wrote over a period of fifteen hundred years. That is, the first author—Moses, of the Pentateuch—you place him on a timeline with the last author—John, perhaps with Revelation, his letters, his Gospel—fifteen hundred years of history. It was written in three different languages: in Hebrew, portions in Aramaic, and in Greek—the New Testament—under different circumstances: wars, times of peace, quarrels, divisions. And at the same time it was written from three different continents: Africa, Asia, Europe. Wow. Can you imagine?

Paul at one point is in Rome and writes some of the letters, right? from a prison in Rome. That is Europe. James is in Jerusalem as a leader of the church, and Jerusalem is obviously the capital of Israel, and that is Asia. On the other hand, you have Moses originally, right? when he wrote the Pentateuch, writing from Sinai. Well, that is Egypt, and Egypt is part of Africa. And then you have Daniel and Ezekiel, who write from Babylon in exile, and that is Asia. That strip of land we know today as the Middle East, where Israel is, represents the meeting point of these three continents. On one side is Africa with Egypt; on the other side is Asia, as I just mentioned; but right there also comes Turkey, which belongs to the European continent—called at the time Asia Minor—where the seven churches John speaks of in Revelation existed. Can you imagine? And that strip of land has been at war all the time precisely because of its importance. Armies have come; they have crossed; because they want control of that corridor God chose in his time.

So when you think about the Bible: the Bible has sixty-six books and forty authors, but it does not have sixty-six themes. The Bible has one theme, one single theme, described, developed, and expounded in sixty-six books. And the theme is the redemption of man by the mercy of God and for the glory of God. That is the theme of the Bible. It doesn’t matter if you are in Genesis or if you are in Revelation.

And then you can see, in that one story, the story of man’s sin—from the first sin until the Bible finally culminates where it is announced that there will be no more sin in the new creation, in the New Jerusalem—new heaven and new earth.

So let me keep talking to you about the unity of the theme. There is something we know—and I’m sure some or many of you know—these are the symbols of the Bible. There are many. I don’t have time to describe them, but there is one in particular that, from the day I studied it and understood it until today, has called my attention significantly.

In the Jewish calendar there is a day known as the Day of Atonement—the day the high priest would come to offer sacrifices for the sin of the people. What had to happen that day? Because that day is crucial in the symbolism.

The high priest would arrive at the tabernacle—or the temple, depending on the time—and he would arrive in his garments of glory, let’s put it that way, because he had a covering with threads of gold; he had twelve precious stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel. And he would come to offer sacrifice, but he could not offer sacrifice with that kind of clothing. So he removed his garments of glory, of splendor, and he was left in a white tunic. And with that white tunic he offered sacrifices—seven different sacrifices. And that white tunic, obviously, became covered with blood. Okay.

At one point the high priest would finally pray for the sin of the people, so that symbolically it was as if a sacrifice was being offered that single day for everyone. Okay? So the priest prayed; he laid his hands—there would be goats there, but there would be one goat called the scapegoat. And then he laid his hands on its head, prayed, symbolically transferring the sins of the people to that goat—the scapegoat.

But now this goat, symbolically, was loaded with sin. It could not be left in the middle of the population, and so they looked for a Gentile person to take it out. That is, the Jew did not even want to associate with that goat that was “full of sin,” so to speak, and that person would take it out of the people and abandon it there to be eaten by wild beasts and die.

Why do I bring all that up? That is Christ. Christ in his glory did not come down here in all his glory—though it is not that he lost it, but rather he set it aside—like the priest set aside his garments of glory. And he came and lived without sin. That is like the high priest in his white tunic. And he came to offer a sacrifice, and he was the sacrifice and he was the priest. And obviously he was covered in blood. He was the atonement. He was the scapegoat of the Old Testament.

So what is going to happen to Christ? We cannot leave him among the people. He took the sin of the people upon his shoulders. So what is going to happen? He must be taken out of the people. And that is exactly what happened. He was taken out of the people; he was crucified outside the city, and there a sign was placed above him: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews—which was the way of identifying, as it were, “his sin.” And there he died.

Can you imagine Moses writing fifteen hundred years before all this could happen—could he have thought of something like that? When Christ came, speaking also of symbolism, he spoke of how they had eaten manna in the wilderness and the manna Moses gave them—they ate it and remained hungry, but he is the bread of life, and whoever comes to him and eats of him will never hunger again. There is another symbolism.

So there is an impressive unity of symbolism.

At the same time, we could move to a third reason we speak of the Bible’s singularity, and it is how impressive its diffusion is even today. It is the best-selling and most widely distributed book in all of history. The others do not even come close. The British and Foreign Bible Society estimates that between five and seven billion copies of the Bible have been sold—that is, five to seven billion Bibles in total. And according to the Guinness World Records book, in 2021 it surpassed one hundred million copies in one hundred countries and twenty-three languages.

Let me keep giving you some data because, even though you won’t remember it by memory, it’s good for you to be impacted by this and, in some way, perhaps have access to this information. The Gideons International distribute more than seventy million Bibles a year, and in 2022 the Bible societies distributed seven million New Testaments.

I think many of you know the YouVersion app. That app has been downloaded—listen—more than 875 million times to this day, and it offered translations of the Bible in more than 2,170 languages. Where are you going to find a book like that? Where are you going to find distribution, diffusion like that? Nowhere in history. It is impossible to imagine something like that. In fact, if someone had thought about it one hundred years ago—perhaps even fifty years ago—they could not have imagined it, because it requires technology to do this, and today we have it.

Number four: the Bible is unique in its survival. The Bible was not written—or did not have its origin, we might say—in the great cities of antiquity. It was not in Athens of ancient Greece. It was not in Rome either. No, no, no. It was not in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt at that time. No. It was Jews from that little strip of land I mentioned a moment ago—people who did not have, were not as educated as the Athenians would have considered those great centers of culture and civilization. Those were not the origin, the beginning, the birth of the Bible.

So I want to talk to you a little about the Bible’s survival, but also, under that umbrella of survival, how the manuscripts of the Bible have survived.

It turns out that when historians—experts in these things—judge the reliability of an X text, they have criteria. One of their criteria is: How many copies do we have of ancient documents? You might ask, “Well, but the number of copies itself doesn’t carry that much weight.” Yes, because this is what they do: they place the copies, so to speak, on a table; they compare what this copy says versus that one, versus that one, versus that one, to know whether we can really trust this—because if you have seven copies and the seven differ, you don’t know who told the truth.

So let me give you an idea of writings from the past. Pliny the Younger: we have seven ancient manuscripts. Tacitus the historian: twenty. Livy: nineteen—basically twenty copies. Julius Caesar: ten. Demosthenes, one of the great orators of antiquity: two hundred copies. Plato, the great philosopher of ancient Greece: seven copies. Thucydides: eight. Herodotus, considered the father of history: we have only eight copies. Homer—you remember Homer, the Iliad, the Odyssey—643 copies.

And the New Testament? Well, let me tell you: in Greek we have around 5,600 copies, but we have more than that because that is only one language. We have about 9,000 other copies in ancient languages—Syriac, Coptic (which was the language of Egypt), Latin (the first time the Bible was translated outside the original languages it was translated into Latin, producing the Vulgate), and Arabic—about 9,000 copies. When you add those to the Greek copies, we have around 15,000 copies. Compare that to 7, 8, 20 for the other documents.

So that is vital, because that is one of the criteria experts use to know how reliable these documents are, because it turns out that among those copies there is an enormous similarity in everything they say and how they say it.

But there is something else they consider, a second criterion: when the author was alive and wrote—okay, year one—then take the first copy we have years later: how much time passed? Because if the copy we have is from the same year—or one or two years later—wow. Well, that won’t happen because ancient documents deteriorate over time, but let’s compare the Bible with other documents in terms of time.

Okay. Here is the chart. Let’s think now about the New Testament. There are portions—not a whole book, but portions—of the New Testament that are believed to have been written about twenty-five years after the death of their author. Twenty-five years. You might say, “Well, that’s a long time.” Wait until you see.

Homer—we already cited him—the earliest copy we have dates five hundred years after his life. I’m talking about portions: the New Testament, twenty-five years. Demosthenes, the great orator: fourteen hundred years later we have a copy. Herodotus, the father of history: one hundred years. Plato—everyone teaches Plato in universities; his writings are accepted as good and valid—more than one thousand years passed before we have a copy or several copies of his documents. Tacitus: one thousand years. Caesar: one thousand years. Pliny: seven hundred fifty years.

We could say in our Dominican colloquial language: you’re kidding me—there’s no comparison. It’s like, next, let’s go to the next point. And that is why we keep talking about the reliability of the Bible—in this case, the reliability of the New Testament—and the reliability, the uniqueness, the singularity of this document we call the Bible.

But we have to keep thinking a bit more. We can’t stay only with that.

Up to now we have spoken of the reliability of texts in relation to when they were written versus when their author was alive. The question is: the people who wrote—and the people about whom others wrote—were they eyewitnesses, or did they hear rumors and write? If they were eyewitnesses, how reliable are they? How do experts—I’m not talking about Christian criteria now—experts in ancient documents—how do they decide whether an author is reliable?

Well, among other things, let’s begin with the first: did the hero of the story ever look bad in the story? Why is that there? It reminds us that we like movies where the protagonist always wins, always looks good, never has a bad moment. The hero of the Bible’s story ends up dead, bloodied, ashamed, and naked.

Listen: if you invent a story so others will believe it, you’re not going to make your protagonist die in that condition, because nobody is going to want to believe in that protagonist. What kind of protagonist is that?

Did they include accounts that made the authors themselves look bad? Peter, for example, or Matthew, or John. You know that in the very Gospels written by these men—John, Matthew, Mark, Luke—you know they appear very badly more than once. John and James are called sons of thunder. John and James want to destroy a village and burn it. They looked bad—very bad. They showed their thirst for power: “Give us the right hand; give us the left hand when you come in your kingdom.” Well, they put that in. And that speaks of their reliability.

These authors were sufficiently clear to distinguish between what I say and what God said—or, in this case, what the protagonist said. Remember that Paul, at one point, writes one of his letters and says, “I say this, not the Lord.” In other words, I don’t want to put something on my lips as if it came from the Lord. No—he makes it clear. But also in the Gospels you read clearly: Christ said, the Lord said—versus things that were their observations.

In the end, how did these heroes die? Well, in this case they died, but others had died—martyrs, so to speak. One of the differences—not the only one, but one—is that they died because when they were confronted with “either affirm this or deny this,” they could have lived if they denied it—because that served the regime. “Look at this one who defended the Master so much—look now how he denied it all.” And they died rather than deny something they had seen and heard.

Let me give you one more observation. In antiquity—and for a long time—women were never considered reliable witnesses. They were considered too emotional. Besides, women did not have high value at that time. It’s not like today when we’re trying to elevate their value, their dignity. And yet, when Christ rises, as we say, it turns out that the first witnesses were women.

And notice the reaction. Christ told them to go and tell his brothers. Do you remember that? What happened when they went and told the brothers? Do you know what happened? The apostles considered them crazy. You see? You see the lack of confidence that existed in female eyewitness testimony. But I think God knew that. And it is one of the ways experts say, “No, these authors have to be telling the truth. Who would think of having women, in that era, as the first eyewitnesses, and then leave the evidence there of how they thought about these women?”

If you think about Judaism: Judaism had thousands of years of customs, culture, religious belief—and they were set aside, including the Sabbath day, to embrace an entirely new way of believing, a whole new— I don’t even want to call it a religion, because the Christian faith is more than that— but an entirely new way of believing, an entirely new faith, better understood.

It is not a faith contrary to what had been written, right? It complements the story, but it required leaving behind what had already happened. That does not happen so easily, brothers. To this day, scholars tell us that one of the hardest things to change in a person is: one, their religion; two, their worldview—because they are tied together. You can take a person out of Egypt, but it’s hard to take Egypt out of them. It’s that hard. Well, the Christian faith pulled the former Judaism out of them, and the whole wrong worldview they had, and replaced it with the Christian faith.

Another guideline experts use is this: when these people speak of cities, of figures—were those people real, or do we have no evidence? Well, the Bible mentions more than thirty historical figures that history later says did exist in time and space, and we have dates for when they existed: Herod Agrippa is mentioned in Acts 12; Agrippa II in Acts 25; Ananias in Acts 23 and 24; Annas the high priest at one point in Luke 3; Augustus Caesar in Luke 2; Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, in Matthew 27 and Mark 15; and Tiberius Caesar in Luke 3.

In fact, Tiberius is used to pinpoint the moment Christ came, in Luke 3. Luke 3 mentions—I’m not going to get into the details because that is not the purpose of this presentation and I don’t have time—but Luke 3 mentions five vital figures in the midst of that “who’s who,” as they say in the United States. And in the middle of those five important figures, Luke says, “In the midst of them came John the Baptist, a voice preaching in the wilderness”—that is, a nobody in the middle of five “who’s who” of history.

So there you have another reliability, another reason to trust the Bible.

Number five: the Bible is unique in its literary character. What do we mean by that? Well, when you review the Bible you find that biblical history contains texts of history, law, poetry, prophecy, parables, epistles—and it also has different figures of speech: parallelism, metaphors, allegories, similes. I’m not going to explain each of those, again for the same reasons I’ve already mentioned, but in spite of these different literary genres—forty authors, fifteen hundred years of span—you maintain the unity of the theme.

It really takes more faith not to believe that the Bible is what it truly is than to believe that this is indeed an extraordinary and unique book. Keep underlining the word unique, singular, because there is nothing like it.

The Bible is unique in its moral character. I could talk about many things here, but let me mention two or three examples. Take the Ten Commandments. Where are you going to find commandments like those, with the level of moral demand you find in the Ten Commandments—later summarized in two: love God and love your neighbor? No. The Jews had different teachings and thought you could love the Jew, but the rest of the world didn’t need to be loved. That is not what you find in the Ten Commandments.

Adultery is condemned—something that was commonly accepted in antiquity. Not to mention even dishonoring your parents. Lying is condemned—something practiced every day then and still practiced today. The Sermon on the Mount—the most famous sermon not only in the Bible or from Jesus, but in history. Non-Christians refer to the Sermon on the Mount. People who do not believe Christ is God, but consider him a great teacher—even they tend to quote the Sermon on the Mount, where you are called to love your enemies, bless them, and pray for them. You will not find that in any other book in human history or human literature.

The way the Bible denounces sin—the evil done against the other, against the life of the other—even to the point of demanding the life of the other for certain kinds of sin. There is a brutal denunciation of that sin, the sin you and I commit and treat so lightly. The Bible does not treat any sin as light. And not only that, but when it speaks of sin, it speaks of the sin of all the heroes of this story—with the exception of Christ Jesus, obviously.

What else could we say that supports the Bible’s singularity or reliability? Well, there is an archaeological reliability that is important, because we might say: we Christians don’t need science to confirm the Bible, and that is true. But the unbelieving man needs science, because that’s how he is. He believes in his reason; he believes in what he can think. So archaeology—and I’ll mention only a few things—has been confirming the Bible.

Notice that The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology says something like this—briefly; it says much more, but I’ll shorten it—that archaeology has confirmed the reliability of biblical history and geography. Then they give some examples.

There is a monument found that confirms there was something in the past called the Tower of Babel. On the other hand, there is a tribe called the Hittites, and for hundreds and hundreds of years there were no historical documents where this tribe appeared. However, between 1911 and 1912, Hugo Winckler discovered ten thousand tablets—because that was one of the ways documents were written in antiquity—in the area that has been identified as the capital of the Hittites. The Hittites appeared—the Hittites who did not appear.

Now, when you read the Bible, you have to keep searching, because if they are cited there, they existed—you just haven’t found them yet.

It is interesting that in 1990 Time Magazine published several important things that year— I even have one or two of its covers—and there is an article that talks about the falling of the walls of Jericho. What is impressive is that, according to the article, apparently the way the walls were found points to the walls falling inward into the city, not outward. Of course—because who was outside? The Israelites marching around and blowing trumpets, right? Seven times, waiting for the walls to fall. The walls fell, and that made the city vulnerable. That is not in “our Christian documents”; it’s in Time Magazine, which isn’t even a pro-Christian magazine. You can look it up: year 1990.

We continue. Number seven—remember, there are ten. Give me a few minutes and I’ll finish with you, with us, right? But the Bible—we are still in archaeological confirmation—here are a couple of real photos. This is not a reconstruction. Those are real photos.

Have you heard of the caves of the Dead Sea? Have you heard of the Dead Sea—dead because it is full of salts, with a very high salt content, because the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea, which is a lake, but it has no outlet. So all these salt deposits concentrate there, and that’s why it is “dead.” Around the Dead Sea there are rocky elevations like the ones you’re seeing here that have caves, and one day someone passing by—I think it was a young man—threw a stone into the cave, not expecting to hear anything, and it broke something. Then he went in and it turned out it was a container, like ceramic. Well, the story is long, but in the end it contained astonishing documents.

Listen to what Josh McDowell tells us about some of these documents, because in that area there was a group of Jews who had withdrawn there, called the Essenes, and they were more radical than the Pharisees, not wanting to be contaminated, and decided to isolate themselves. Sadly, the Messiah came and they never came to flee to the Messiah because they lived super isolated in the wilderness.

McDowell says this—but this is the exciting part:

Once the Dead Sea Scrolls were translated and compared with modern versions, the Hebrew Bible proved to be identical, word for word, in more than 95% of the text. The 5% variation is due to spelling variants.

Then he gives an example: of the 166 words in Isaiah chapter 53, only seventeen letters are in question. Seventeen letters. Of these, ten letters are a matter of spelling and four are a change of style. The remaining three words were related to the word light, which was added in verse 11. Light. That was the only difference.

Can you imagine having documents—the Dead Sea Scrolls are estimated to have been written between 150 B.C. and 100 A.D.—and they were discovered between 1947 and 1956, because there are many, and these scrolls have been preserved to this day.

Then McDowell continues, in More Than a Carpenter:

The greatest manuscript discovery of all time reveals that one thousand years of copying the Old Testament produced only totally minor variants, none of which altered the clear meaning of the text or made one doubt the fundamental integrity of the manuscript. Wow.

Again, if you want to be objective, what did Josh McDowell do? He wanted to know the truth. What did Lee Strobel do when, as an unbelieving journalist, he set out to refute the truthfulness of the biblical facts? He ended up converted and publishing multiple books—The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Christ, and so on.

Number eight—and quickly, because there are many prophecies—the exact fulfillment of biblical prophecies is astonishing. In fact, it is so astonishing that critics have tried to say, “No, no, no. That book was written after the events happened, and then they looked back and wrote history,” because they cannot accept the exactness of fulfilled prophecy.

And I want to give you just one example, one illustration. Daniel chapter 2 speaks of a dream the king had and then an interpretation Daniel gave. There it speaks of a statue with a head of gold. It had arms, obviously, of bronze; it had a torso of silver; then it had two legs, and those legs ended in ten toes—ten toes that represented a mixture of clay and iron, iron and clay.

Basically, when you read history, what God revealed was that the head represented Nebuchadnezzar—the gold, all the splendor of Babylon in that era—and that after Nebuchadnezzar, read Daniel 2, another inferior kingdom would come—the two arms—and that kingdom: what was it called? Medo-Persia. And the material: what was it? Bronze—not gold, but bronze. Then another kingdom would come, and it was of silver and represented the torso, and that kingdom would rise impressively. And who came after? Alexander the Great with the Greek Empire. Then the two legs: the Roman Empire. And the ten toes represent ten nations that represent a future empire that is still yet to be seen, and perhaps it will not be long until we begin to see signs of that future empire.

Messianic prophecies—depending on who you read—some think there are more than three hundred messianic prophecies fulfilled in Christ’s first coming. And that is an enormous number. So again: if you want to believe, the evidence is there. But man does not believe—not for lack of evidence. It is a moral problem man has: he doesn’t want to believe; it doesn’t suit him to believe, because he doesn’t want to give an account; he doesn’t want to think there is a Judge to whom he will have to give an account.

Its historical value: the early church left evidence in documents—I don’t have time to detail them. The historical reliability of the New Testament—we have spoken of the empty tomb. You can find the remains of different figures of the past—Muhammad and Buddha and many others. Confucius. The tomb of Christ remains empty. Of course, because he is not there.

Eyewitnesses: more than five hundred eyewitnesses at one point gave testimony of this. The New Testament itself testifies to it. The change of the day of worship: that Jews would be willing to change from Saturday to Sunday. That is almost unthinkable given the worship and even idolatry they had developed toward the Sabbath.

The disciples came to believe despite their unbelief. The disciples did not believe Jesus would rise. He announced it. He said it three times. Christ spoke of his death and resurrection on the third day. When the women went and told them the Master had risen, they thought they were crazy. They believed against their unbelief. The evidence forced them to believe.

And finally, number ten: the power of the Bible to change lives. The Bible has been changing the way people think, believe, and live—for hundreds of years, for thousands of years—across persons and civilizations. Western civilization is collapsing today, but it is collapsing after having been strengthened—after having been in chaos, it was strengthened by Judeo-Christian principles. Today it rejects those principles, and today it collapses, sadly.

Lives changed on every continent for thousands of years. Societies changed. The Bible produced the greatest revolution in history—a non-bloody revolution. The Protestant Reformation, historians say, was not merely a religious movement; it was a revolution. It changed laws; it changed work and moral ethics; it changed the worship life of believers; it divided the church from that church that was behind myths and behind false beliefs and teachings. It changed politics—I don’t know if I already mentioned it—it changed every area; it changed education, the way of teaching and how to teach. Only the Bible could do this.

So let me tell you, as a closing, some things that some have said. What I’m about to conclude with is not mine, but it doesn’t have a particular author either.

So: the Bible is like a seed that saves. There on the screen you can see the biblical citations. It is like milk that nourishes; it is like solid food that satisfies; it is water that cleanses; it is fire that purifies; it is a hammer that shatters; it is a sword that cuts; it is a mirror that reflects us; and it is a lamp for our feet.

And now let me read something that appears at the beginning of the Gideons Bible—anonymous as well. If you’ve been in a hotel, look for it; it’s always there at the beginning. It tells you something about the Bible that is vital, and this is my closing:

The Bible contains the mind of God, the condition of man, the way of salvation, the condemnation of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy; its precepts are binding; its histories are true; and its decisions are immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword, and the Christian’s constitution. In it paradise is restored, heaven is opened, and the gates of hell are exposed. Christ is its grand theme. Our good is its design, and the glory of God is its goal. It should fill your memory, govern your heart, and guide your steps. Read it slowly, frequently, and devotionally. It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory, and a river of pleasure. It is given to you in life, it will be opened at the judgment, and it will be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, it will reward the greatest labor, and it will condemn all who mock its sacred contents.

That is why no church will be able to rise and survive without the authority, the guidance, and the light of the Word of God.