Inspiration of Scripture

As part of a push to "sinicize" religion (to make it Chinese in character), the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a 10-year project to rewrite the Bible and other religious texts. In the Gospel of John, Jesus famously confronts the accusers of a woman caught committing adultery, saying "let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her." The chastened accusers slink away and Jesus says to the woman, "‘Has no one condemned you?' 'No one, sir,' she replied. 'Neither do I condemn you,' said Jesus. 'Go away, and from this moment sin no more.'"

A beautiful story of forgiveness and mercy. Unless you’re a CCP official. Then it's a story of a dissident challenging the authority of the state. A possible sneak preview of what a Bible with socialist characteristics might look like appeared in a Chinese university textbook in 2020. The rewritten Gospel of John excerpt ends, not with mercy, but with Jesus himself stoning the adulterous woman to death.

The 10-year project to rewrite the Bible, Quran, and other sacred texts is all part of Xi Jinping’s quest to make the faithful serve the party rather than God. At the 19th Party Congress, Chairman Xi declared "We will … insist on the sinicization of Chinese religions, and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist." In other words, Xi Jinping has no problem with the first commandment, just so long as he and the CCP are playing the role of God.

Yet, even under intense persecution, faith persists throughout China and the number of faithful grows. There are accounts of underground churches, brave clergy, and steadfast believers every bit as courageous as saints of the early-church.

The CCP wishes for there to be nothing higher than their authority, and views love for anything besides their Marxist-Leninist regime with vicious jealousy. In an interview the pastor of one Chinese church stated, "In this war … the rulers have chosen an enemy that can never be imprisoned – the soul of man." The pastor ended with an assessment "[The PRC rulers] are doomed to lose."

A team of archaeologists with the Archaeological Studies Institute believes it has found a tablet dating back to 1400 BC. Institute Director, Scott Stripling, says the tablet pre-dates the commonly held belief about when the Bible was written by as much as 800 years. If true, this would dispel the theory that the Bible was written around 600 years after the occurrence of some of the first events it describes. This means that the events were written as a firsthand account rather than after the fact.

Stripling continued, “Some scholars believe in something called the ‘documentary hypothesis,’ which states that the Bible was composed hundreds of years apart in different sections, and then later redacted. The tablet is a problem for that theory and the idea that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. ... This type of writing is more characteristic of the very beginning of the Late Bronze Era II horizon around 1400 B.C. For those who want to push the Exodus date way off into the future, this is really problematic for them.”

Houston Baptist University Professor, Craig Evans, said; “This tablet contains the oldest text that we know of so far. It also correlates with two passages in the book of Deuteronomy where it talks about going up on Mount Ebal, building an altar and cursing the enemies of Yahweh in Israel … The skepticism that nobody could write Hebrew that far back—is just an unwarranted skepticism."

The tablet has major religious and historical implications. If the peer review of Stripling’s discovery confirms his claims, it could dispel the liberal idea that the Old Testament was written in 600 BC.

In his recent book, The Wisdom Pyramid, Brett McCracken shares the following story about his father:

I will always remember my dad's Bible. As a kid, it was a fixture in our house. Thick, black leather-bound, with gold leaf edges; stuffed full of church bulletins, Scripture, memory cards, and who knows what else. The well-worn pages were adorned with underlined verses, variously colored highlighted sections, and scribbled margins. I saw dad with it almost every day—studying during his quiet time, preparing a Sunday, school lesson, or maybe leading our family in a dinnertime devotional. The presence of dad's Bible nearby was a comfort. I think it made the Bible more credible to me that, for my dad, it wasn't just a prop to bring to church on Sundays. It was his beloved source of guidance for everyday life.

My life was full of the Bible: learning Old Testament stories on flannel graph in Sunday school; memorizing the order of the Bible's sixty-six books in Vacation Bible School; doing "sword drills" in Awana; memorizing the "Romans Road"; singing songs that went:

The B-I-B-L-E

Yes that's the book for me!

I stand alone on the Word of God: the B-I-B-L-E!

The Bible was the book that shaped my life more than anything else, which is odd looking back on it: an Oklahoma kid being profoundly shaped by an ancient collection of Jewish literature and two-thousand-year-old Mediterranean letters. But I was, and I am.

And my story isn't unique. The Bible has been a treasured source of truth and life all over the world, across countless generations. It manages to speak to the soccer mom in San Diego as much as the truck driver in Taipei; it guides the life of a skateboarding teenager in 2020 Buenos Aires as much as it did the blacksmith in 1520 Liverpool. Everywhere you go in the world, people who share almost nothing else in common can say in unison: "The B-I-B-L-E Yes, that's the book for me!" This can be said of no other book in the world. No other source of truth is as universally beloved and consistently cross-cultural as the Christian Bible.

There was no archaeological evidence for the existence of the biblical King David. That is, until 1993, when surveyor Gila Cook noticed a basalt stone inscription by an Aramaic-speaking king celebrating a military victory over “the House of David.”

To date, archaeological evidence has confirmed the historical existence of about 50 Old Testament figures, most of them kings. Archaeologists have also found records of a few other names, such as Balaam, which may or may not be the biblical prophet of the same name.

Biblical people named in the archaeological record:

Foreign kings: 26

Israelite kings: 8

Judean kings: 6

Israelite priests: 3

Israelite scribes: 1

Possible Preaching Angle:

Once again, archaeology confirms that the Bible record is true and accurate and it has a historical framework. “All your words are true” (Ps. 119:160).

NASA’s Perseverance rover was launched on July 30, 2020 and landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. Its mission was to seek for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock for a possible return to Earth.

It’s only reasonable to think that all the components of NASA’s Perseverance rover are new. After all, it is the successor to the Curiosity rover, and it was only launched in 2020. And so, it would be a surprise to find out that the Perseverance’s brain is a piece of technology from the late 90s. That’s right. A processor released by IBM and Motorola over two decades ago, in 1997, serves as the brain of the Perseverance rover. The question is, why?

The craft's developers were more interested in reliability than sheer power. Their solution was a G3 processor used in Apple's Macintosh starting in 1998. Apple veterans remember the G3 fondly. It smoked older Macs with a processor operating speed that topped out at a screaming 266 megahertz (MHz). Or so we thought at the time. Today's processors leave the G3 in the dust. For example, the processor in an Apple iPhone 12 runs at 3 GigaHertz (GHz).

Possible Preaching Angle:

What is old is not necessarily outdated and it can be more reliable than what is newer. This is certainly true of the Word of God. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Matt 24:35). "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens" (Ps. 119:89).

When Sarah Sallon moved back home to Israel, to her job at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, she went looking for medicinal plants which had helped her during a previous illness. And she found lots of them. But she also heard about ancient medicinal plants that had disappeared.

She said, “They're just historical ghosts. Like the famous date plantations along the Dead Sea, 2,000 years ago—described by Pliny; described by Josephus, the first-century historian. They're not there anymore. They just vanished!”

But Sallon realized that seeds from those trees still existed. They'd been recovered from archaeological sites. So, she went to the archaeologists and proposed planting some of those seeds, to see if they'd grow again. It didn't go well at first. She said, “They thought I was mad! They didn't think that this was even conceivable.”

But she kept pushing, and eventually persuaded a few of them to provide some seeds to try this. More than a decade ago, she planted some of these ancient palm seeds. Six weeks later, little green shoots appeared!

Sallon and her colleagues recently announced in the journal Science Advances that they'd grown another six trees from some of those ancient seeds. No wonder God’s Word is likened unto an imperishable seed.

A devastating fire ravaged the building housing Freedom Ministries Church in West Virginia. It was intense enough to justify a joint response from several nearby fire departments. It was so hot that at one point it caused firefighters to back out from the blaze. But after the fire was extinguished, what they found inside shocked them even more.

A post on the department’s Facebook page explains: “In your mind, everything should be burned, ashes. [But] not a single Bible was burned and not a single cross was harmed!! Not a single firefighter was hurt!” Photo evidence showed several compelling photos of Bibles unscathed amidst plenty of charred remains.

"Though the odds were against us, God was not," the firefighters added.

Potential Preaching Angles: God’s Word is the truth, and truth can withstand the attacks against it. Even when it seems like all else will fail, God’s Word remains.

In his book, Faith Is Like Skydiving, Rick Mattson illustrates the reliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and resurrection by drawing a horizontal spectrum on an easel pad. He labels one pole 0% and the other pole 100%. Then he asks people to imagine that four friends named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John attend a sporting event together and afterword write down what they saw. If 0% of the four reports harmonized with each other, we’d think the guys got their wires crossed and attended separate events. Matthew reported on a baseball game. Mark reported on a football game. Luke and John reported on completely separate sports events. By contrast, if the accounts were 100% verbatim, or pretty close to it, we would also be skeptical. We would think Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John huddled in a room somewhere to fabricate a single harmonized account.

But what if the reports were in the 70% range, roughly speaking? What if the broad contours of the stories were very similar, though some of the details different? Say Mark’s account of the baseball game was the shortest and most selective. Matthew’s account was longer and more organized. Luke highlighted some of the underrated players and a distressed female fan who got beaned by a foul ball. John’s was the most philosophical about baseball. Despite these disparate angles, the reports had much in common: the New York Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins 8-4, the game was played in Minneapolis, such and such players were the goats, and one player in particular stood out as the clear hero of the game—knocking in all of his team’s runs and hitting a grand slam on the final out to seal an unbelievable come-from-behind victory.

It seems to me we could feel pretty confident that this game actually took place and that its elements were truthful as reported by the four witnesses. And that’s just what we have in the four Gospels.

Theologian and missionary to India Leslie Newbigin liked to help Christians see the Bible as one story. He often told the story of a Hindu scholar who once challenged Newbigin:

I can't understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion—and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don't need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is meaning of reality as a whole …

Newbigin commented on this story:

There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside [the Bible]. We have fragmented the Bible into bits—moral bits, systematic-theological bits, devotional bits, historical-critical bits, narrative bits, and homiletical bits. When the Bible is broken up in this way, there is no comprehensive grand narrative to withstand the power of the comprehensive humanist narrative that shapes our culture. The Bible bits are accommodated to the more all-embracing cultural story, and it becomes that story—i.e. the humanist story—that shapes our lives.

Geoff Wood writes that a stained glass illustrates the importance of the Old Testament:

High over the portals within the south transept of the 800-year-old cathedral of Chartres in France spreads a great Rose window, forty feet in diameter. At its center sits Christ, while immediately around him orbit eight angels and symbols for the four evangelists, each enclosed within a circle of stained glass-and beyond them orbit the 24 elders of the book of Revelation, each also within its own bejeweled circle—for a total of 36 orbiting circles of blue, red, gold, purple, and white! Enough to make your head spin. Nor is that gigantic wheel of color the only thing to enchant you in that soaring wing of the cathedral, because below it rise five more long and narrow windows, the central one featuring Mary, while the other four show images of the evangelists, Luke and Matthew, John, and Mark-in that sequence.

Now if you look closely at the windows for the four gospel writers, you'll notice something amusing. All four, appearing almost boyish in size, sits on the shoulders of a tall prophet of the Old Testament: Luke on the shoulders of Jeremiah, Matthew on Isaiah's, John on Ezekiel's, and Mark on Daniel's. The four major voices of the New Testament ride piggyback on the four major voices of the Old—just the way a dad might lift a small child on his shoulders. Why would those artists do something as playful as that? Well, it wasn't playful. They wanted to make a serious point, namely that the gospels build on the wisdom and vision of the Old Testament.

Not all symphonies are created equal. Go online and one album featuring Beethoven's Fifth Symphony might cost $5, while another one with the same exact piece might cost $15. One might chalk this up to corporate greed, but the real difference is the conductor. The way the conductor directs the music changes the way it sounds. Thus, a performance directed by one orchestra leader will sound different from one directed by someone else. This is because their individual style, perspective, and purpose in how they direct the music influences the music itself.

Listen for yourself to two versions of the same Beethoven symphony:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuDFyigVcXw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl4mW2Mc9is

Notice the difference? It would be foolish to suggest that these differences in performance indicate a historical weakness in Beethoven's original creation. An expert on Beethoven would state that it speaks to the transcendence and brilliance of Beethoven's music that it could continually inspire new performances. The substance of Beethoven's works remains untouched but the communication of it changes from conductor to conductor.

Students of the Bible can say the same thing about the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. While the substance of Jesus' life and ministry never changed, the telling of it did. So then, the Gospel of Matthew is not a plagiarized sham of an earlier work anymore so than Leonard Bernstein's 1979 recording of Beethoven's 5th Symphony is a theft of his original masterpiece. The four Gospels are merely retellings (inspired by the Holy Spirit) of the life of Christ that preserves the original content of his ministry but is "conducted" by the Synoptic authors in such a way that reflects their styles, perspectives, and purposes.

The Oxford Comma is perhaps the most controversial piece of punctuation in the English language. There are conflicting guidelines governing whether or not the extra comma at the end of a list should be used, depending on which authority one consults. Those in opposition say the comma is unnecessary, while supporters of the comma argue that it serves to clarify in instances whether two items are meant to belong together or not (as in "I'd like to thank my parents, Mother Theresa and the Pope.").

The controversy heated up, however, when a judge in Maine ruled that a dairy company owed its employees approximately $10 million in unpaid overtime expenses for an absent Oxford Comma which rendered a list of overtime exemptions slightly ambiguous. The ruling reversed the decision of a lower court. Though not an official stance, the lawyer representing the drivers said that in cases of ambiguous sentences, the best rule to live by is: "If there's any doubt, tear up what you have and start over."

Potential Preaching Angles: It is amazing what kind of confusion can be caused by one missing punctuation mark. By the grace of God, however, the Bible is abundantly clear when it comes to the inerrancy of Scripture, the Gospel, and the identity of Jesus Christ. We do not need to fear misunderstandings of either the Bible or the Person of Jesus because it has been revealed as unambiguously as possible: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

The power of story is getting unlikely attention. In a fascinating collaboration, literary scholars and neuroscientists have teamed up to explore the impact that stories have on the human brain.

A Wall Street Journal article by Allison Gopnik entitled "Want a Mind Meld? Tell a Compelling Story," described a variety of brain scan studies that show that stories not only shape one's thoughts, but also foster a connection between a storyteller and listener. The closer the connection, the greater the understanding of the story. Gopnik concluded that "results suggest that we lowly humans are actually as good at mind-melding as [Star Trek's] Vulcans or the Borg. We just do it with stories." Other experiments have looked at how stories help develop neural pathways, and affect our relationships by altering how we order and understand information.

Possible Preaching Angles: The best story of all, the story that we need to hear above any other story, is the good news about Jesus Christ.

When a place has been besieged for years and hunger stalks the streets, you might think that people would have little interest in books. But enthusiasts have stocked an underground library in Syria with volumes rescued from bombed buildings—as users dodge shells and bullets to reach it. Buried beneath a bomb-damaged building, is a home to a secret library that provides learning, hope, and inspiration to many in the besieged Damascus suburb of Darayya. As one user says, "We saw that it was vital to create a new library so that we could continue our education."

Since the war, volunteers—many of them also former students whose studies were brought to a halt by the war—have collected more than 14,000 books on just about every subject imaginable. "In many cases we get books from … near the front line, so collecting them is very dangerous," says one of the collectors.

The idea of people risking life and limb to collect books for a library seems bizarre. But volunteers at the hospital use the books to advise them on how to treat patients, untrained teachers use them to help prepare classes, and aspiring dentists raid the shelves for advice on doing fillings and extracting teeth.

But in a besieged town wouldn't it make more sense for them to spend their time looking for food rather than books? One of the library users said, "In a sense the library gave me back my life. I would say that just like the body needs food, the soul needs books. Books motivate us to keep on going. We want to be a free nation. And hopefully, by reading, we can achieve this."

Possible Preaching Angles: Word of God; Bible; Do we as Christians hunger and thirst for God's Word like these endangered Syrians hunger for knowledge? Would we risk our lives to own and read the Bible in order to find hope and meaning for life?

Dr. Rosaria Butterfield, a former tenured professor at the University of Syracuse, was a committed and comfortable lesbian until she had what she described as a "train-wreck conversion" to Christ. At one point in her life, she wrote, "As an unbelieving professor of English, an advocate of postmodernism … and an opponent of all totalizing meta-narratives (like Christianity, I would have added back in the day), I found peace and purpose in my life as a lesbian and the queer community I helped to create." Today she is married to Pastor Kent Butterfield, and mother of four adopted children and numerous foster children.

After her conversion, she describes an encounter with a female counselor who wanted Dr. Butterfield to bend her message about homosexual practice. The woman asked Butterfield to state publicly that homosexual practice is not inherently wrong. Butterfield writes:

When I entered her office, she directed me to a comfortable chair and made one simple request: "Rosaria, I want you to change your message." I found this a bold and disarming request, and so I told her that I come in the gospel of peace. She said, "Change your message." Finally, I asked her what I ought to change in my message. She said, "Tell people that it is only in your opinion that homosexual practice is a sin."

I responded by letting her know that I am not smart enough to have this opinion, but that this is the position the inspired and inerrant Word of God upholds. It comes to me from the historic Christian church … through the pages of Scripture, and so on down to me. I told her that changing my message would involve denying the plain meaning of Scripture, the testimony of the church, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the gospel. But to the postmodern mind … her request seems reasonable enough: just own this position of mine as a personal point of view. But claiming something that is a universal truth to be a mere matter of personal preference is a lie by omission. This is the Bible's message, and apart from Christ, I am more condemned by it than the woman who made this request.

If you were ever affected by a natural disaster, in the middle of an emergency situation, or stranded in the wilderness, would you know what to do to survive? Would you know how to treat a snake bite while on a hike? If you were lost in the woods would know how to make a fire without matches or how to track and hunt wild animals for food? What would you do in case of a terrorist attack? Would you know how to escape or forage for food? How would you survive major disasters like floods, avalanches, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and nuclear aftermaths?

Well, now there's an app to help you with all of these crucial questions. The SAS Survival Guide app takes the bestselling book by John "Lofty" Wiseman and puts it into digital form. Wiseman was a British soldier of the Special Air Service who wrote a best-selling book on SAS Survival.

This app that is jam-packed with extremely useful and potentially life-saving information, videos, and other tips and tricks for how to survive when the worst and unexpected happen. The photo galleries show you different animal tracks, medicinal and poisonous plants, sea creatures, and snakes, while the videos show you various instructions. The app also has a comprehensive First Aid section.

Do you think you've got what it takes to survive? Take the included 100-question quiz and put yourself to the test.

Possible Preaching Angles: The Bible is much more than a survival guide, but it does provide the essential skills we need to prepare for the crises of this life and for the next.

Do you remember the famous story about the six blind men and the elephant? One blind man touches the belly of the animal and thinks it's a wall. Another grabs the elephant's ear and thinks he's touching a fan. A third blind man touches the tail and thinks he's holding a rope. On they go, each grabbing a part of the elephant without any one of them knowing what it is they really feel.

What's the point of the story? We are all blind men when it comes to God. We know part of him, but we don't know really know who he is, we are all just grasping in the dark, thinking we know more than we do.

But there are two major problems with this analogy. First, the whole story is told from the vantage point of someone who clearly knows that the elephant is an elephant. For the story to make its point, the narrator has to have clear and accurate knowledge of the elephant. The second flaw with this story is even more serious. The story is a perfectly good description of human inability to know God by our own devices. But the story never considers this paradigm-shattering question: What if the elephant talks? What if he tells the blind men: "That wall-like structure is my side. That fan is really my ear. And that's not a rope; it's a tail." If the elephant were to say all this, would the six blind me be considered humble for ignoring his word?

Possible Preaching Angles: This story can illustrate the truth of the Bible as God's revelation to us or the truth of Christ as the Word of God. In both cases, God (the elephant in this story) has chosen to speak to us, to reveal himself to us, so we don't have to act like the blind men.

In late 2012 seventy-five year old Marion Shurtleff purchased a Bible in a used book store near her home in San Clemente, California. After making her purchase and returning home, she discovered a couple of folded pages tucked in the middle of the Bible.

The contents of the yellowed notebook sheets contained a child's handwriting that looked familiar. To her amazement, Shurtleff discovered her name at the top of the first page. When she looked closer she realized that she was actually reading a four-page essay she had written as a ten-year-old to earn a merit badge for the Girls Scouts in Covington, Kentucky—more than 2,000 miles from where she had just purchased the Bible.

By her own account, Shurtleff was deeply moved. "I opened the Bible and there was my name," Shurtleff said in a phone interview from her home. "I recognized my handwriting. I was shaking, literally. I was crying."

Although it remains a mystery how the essay ended up in a Bible in a used bookstore half way across the country, one thing is certain. When we look deeply into God's Word we see evidences of our lives, too. In the pages of Scripture we see individuals just like us—people who pursue faith and hope in God, people who also battle depression, doubt, lust, and pride. As we read the biblical stories about Abraham, Ruth, David, Mary, and Peter we also recognize our own life story.

In 2005 a retired merchant seaman named Waldemer Semenov donated a compass to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. The ordinary and small compass (a mere four and half inches in diameter), doesn't look impressive, but this device has a fascinating story behind it.

During World War II, Semenov was serving as a junior engineer on the American merchant ship SS Alcoa Guide. On April 16, 1942, the ship was sailing from New Jersey to the Caribbean when a German submarine surfaced and opened fire with its deck cannons. Semenov recalls, "We didn't have any guns, and there were no escorts. [The Germans] were using us as target practice." The SS Alcoa Guide caught fire and started to sink 300 miles off the coast of North Carolina.

Semenov snatched three loaves of bread ("I knew we might be in the water for a while," he said) as he and the rest of the crew scrambled to lower two lifeboats and a raft into the water. Fortunately, the lifeboats were equipped with a compass. Semenov and his fellow crew members used the compass to sail west by northwest toward the shipping lanes. After three days, a patrol plane, searching for sailors from any of the three ships that had been sunk that week, spotted Semenov's lifeboat. The next day the USS Broome rescued the men on the lifeboats. In contrast, it took three weeks to find the raft, which was drifting aimlessly with only one survivor. In all, thanks to that compass, Semenov and 26 other crew members from the SS Alcoa Guide survived.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God's Word, The Bible—In a survival scenario like this, having a compass can save your life. It is a trustworthy device to tell you what direction to go. The same is true for our spiritual lives. (2) Goals, Vision—They're like a compass that leads us to our next destination.