Bobby Killmon - "Why Do You Choose to Believe the Bible?"

Oh, praise the Lord, everybody! Amen! What a wonderful time we're having, man! I just walked out of the hotel this morning, I thought, "Amazing weather!" How many of you were going to go ahead? There's some amazing weather for camp! Amen! Amen! What a tremendous time we're having!

Hey man, I'm gonna do something a little different today, and if you'll indulge me and just let me say, I was sitting with my wife last night and we were reflecting a little bit and talking about what the Lord was doing and being so thankful for the church, for the house of God, and the people of God. And when you realize the work that we have to do and the things that we're facing, at the end of the day, you do have to realize you cannot do this by yourself. But the beautiful thing is, you don't have to do this by yourself. And we are united together as a fellowship, and even wider than that, the body of Christ. Say, "The brother Feiler, brother at French," I think he's tallied over 750 Oneness Pentecostal churches in the world. So we have a massive body of believers that the Lord has allowed us to be a part of, and we're a part of the body of Christ. Aren't you glad we're a part? We can't do it all by ourselves, but the Lord has blessed us with little beacons of hope and light planted all over the world, and in schools, and on jobs, and in cities where churches are planted. You ready? But that light of the Lord is shining, and then the body of Christ is strong and vibrant, and we want to get stronger, right? We want to get stronger, right? We don't want our generations to get weaker and weaker. We want to be stronger and stronger and more committed to the things of God than ever before, so that the Lord can use us in this hour. So let me just thank you for being a part of the church. Turn to your neighbors, say, "I'm glad you're here." Amen! Amen! Amen! We can do more together. We can do more together. I promise you that.

I have a good couple of friends of mine that have challenged me to do something. So if you indulge me, I want to aim at something today that might seem a little strange, but I want to dive into a little topic because they said, "For the Killman, you need to press this and teach this in more places than what you're doing." So I'm gonna obey some elders and some wonderful ministers that I respect today, and I'm going to teach something, brother a filer, that they've asked me. They said, "You should teach this until every young person in the organization hears it." So I got them for one more day, so I'm gonna take a crack at them today. So I'm gonna ask you a question: How many of you in here, you believe the Bible is the inspired and errant Word of God? Amen! Amen! You believe the Bible is, in fact, the Word of God? That's wonderful. Anybody? How many of you, besides that, you choose to believe the Bible is a, you might think that you're going to operate your life by that? Okay. You know, I won't ask, given the negative, is there anyone here in here that doesn't believe the Bible? But I do want to challenge you today, because I would ask you a question, and it's a new question that we have to deal with today, because we're in a changing climate. By the plateau, where there are people that no longer hold the values that were kind of the bedrock of America. We did that the first day that I taught and said, "The shifting in America away from the Bible as the end." You ready? They move it, they reduce it to being something like the record of the people of faith, or they put it on par with every other holy book in the world. So I have a question for you today that you need to be able to answer in this changing type of climate that we're in today: Why do you choose to believe the Bible?

So I want to dive in. Let's just say that you say, "Well, I believe in the Bible." Like it, like we've said today, we believe that the Bible is the Word of God. And they said, "Well, you got a book, and maybe you bump into a Muslim person, and they say, 'I have a book too. Now, what makes your book better or different than my book?'" And so you, you ready? You need to have an answer for that, because there's an influx of immigrants all over either the United States. And whatever you choose to feel about that, I'll just give you some information on that. That Islam is trying to place a mosque in every major city of the United States. Now, you can be intimidated by that fact, or you could say that the Lord is bringing people into your reach. You ready? That you couldn't reach any other way, because you can't go to those countries because they're closed to us. You ready? But nationals that are ones to the Lord can then be sent rather Feiler back over to their home country, and we can have revival. But when you're talking to a Muslim person, you have to, at the end of the day, say, "How do I know that the Bible is different than the Quran?" And we could talk about it today. I wish I had brought my Quran with me. And I don't necessarily think that maybe all of you young people, you have to talk with your pastors about this. But you ready? At some point, one of the most beautiful things that you can say to a Muslim person is, "Yes, I have read the Quran. I've studied. I've looked at it. Are you scared? You ready? What is your faith based on? Something now, I'm gonna be a little strong here. Is what your belief based on something fragile and weak? Are you intimidated to look at your book and compare it to other?" I'm just gonna tell you today that this book is different than every other holy book in the world, and that's not a blind faith statement. That is a faith statement because I know it's true.

All right, so we're gonna look at that a little bit today. I want to strengthen your faith and strengthen your heart, that way you can say, "Look, I understand how a seventh-century man like Muhammad could get this wrong." Like, you ready? He, in about seven or eight different places in the Quran, it embraces the Flat Earth theory. And you say, "I understand how Muhammad, a seventh-century prophet, as you would call him, could get that wrong. But I don't understand, brother Willis, how an all-knowing God named Allah could get that wrong." Now, you'd say it much kinder than that, softer than that, but the house with the good people of God, somebody a little stronger that you could heretical, and you would say to them, "I understand how Mohammed could think that the melons are like tin spikes, you ready, that holds the tent down and stops it from shaking." So, you ready? Mountains stop the world from shaking because that's what the Flat Earth needs. Now, what Mohammed didn't know as a seventh-century man is that actually earthquakes cause mountains, not the other way around. I can understand how he can get that wrong, but I don't understand how an all-knowing God named Allah can get geology wrong. And we could just go through many, many, many examples where I could show you the historical inaccuracies and in there, and the scientific inaccuracies. How a baby is born, it says it starts with a blood clot, you ready, and then it forms the skeleton first, and then the flesh comes on the baby. No, again, I don't, I get that Muhammad had never been a real where they had ultrasounds. But Ray, I don't understand how an all-knowing God could get the creation of a baby in the womb wrong. You ready? That's what makes my book different than your book. So when you begin to tell them, when God says many times in the Old Testament by the prophets, "God sits on the circle of the earth," and the Hebrew, "sphere." How did they know the earth was round? Because holy men of old, rather, Hebert moved on by the Holy Ghost, and the Creator of all things inspired the text. So that's what we're gonna look at today. What, why do you choose to believe the Bible?

Let's just say, "Well, I have an experience with God." I've even had an experience with God. See, I like that word, but I'm gonna give you another word, maybe that you could substitute in there to help you today. I've had an encounter with God, because experiences can be subjective, can be psychosomatic, and it can be, Paul says in First Corinthians, it can be other stuff. He said, "Behind every idol, there's a demon spirit." Okay. How many of you still believe in that stuff? Little quiet now. How many of you still believe that there's a spirit world, and people that worship idols are interacting with something demonic? Okay. Now, you're going stronger, because if you're gonna reach people that more that the East comes into the Western civilization, you're ready, you're gonna have to say that somebody who says, "Yeah, I have a holy book, and I have an experience." You ready? Because what we would say then, this is in my opinion, one of the most important questions today. Why? Because the Apostle Peter says, "Be ready to give an answer to every man that asks of you of the hope that lies within you." So you have to be ready to give an answer. The Greek word is apologia, and it's where we get our English word apologetics. You have to be ready to give a reasoned response. So your brain, way, there's too much evidence on your side. Now, I'm gonna try to not lose my mind today, but I'm so, I love talking about the Word of God. Okay. So I'm gonna show you that when you walk into young people, when you walk into a college class, or you hear something on the culture and people saying, "You can't trust the Bible. That's written by men. It's not even historically accurate." You're gonna be able to say to that professor, "Sir, I understand that you're a history professor. You just talked yourself out of a profession, because if you lose this book, you have to lose all of the books of history." We're gonna get there in Jesus' name.

So what did Peter say? He says, "Give an answer." Now, let me give you some inadequate answers. Now, this worked. Some of these answers worked in times past, brother Lear, because we were living in a different climate where everyone believed that the Bible was the Word of God, and you had a foundation. And then after that, we moved into postmodernism, where they said, "Experiences everything." And so when you talk about your experience in postmodernism, that was powerful. That's no longer the case anymore. Postmodernism is still working in the culture, but you're ready, scientific empiricism, you know, there are avenge of Darwinism, as it were, atheism, and modernism is coming back and just saying, "I have an experience." It's not enough to say to people anymore. "I'll prove it to you." Saying, "Well, I was raised like that." That is an inadequate answer, because this is what they're doing on college campuses today. There's all sorts of terrible things occurring, like they're having deep baptism ceremonies. How many of you heard of this? Anybody? Appreciate. Hi, just curious to see how many people are. Yeah, let's see it. Baby. Okay. Well, let me get you caught up, because remember, if you send your kids to college now, they don't. Why send your kids to college? Well, because if you know you're gonna work 40 hours, you should get as much money as you can. So first of all, don't go there and study under bottle underwater basket-weaving. Get a marketable trade, something to make you money. I get some more email from the parents or somebody. My God, if you're gonna dump 40 grand on a college education, or sixty grand on a college education, I hope it makes you money. You read. Even when they walk in, rather recently, they get on that college campus, the questions that are asked, and the things that are thrown in their face, like this, the baptism ceremony. You ready? At the end of the day, they come in there, and it's all snarky, tongue-in-cheek, make fun of. I set up a little booth, and you go in, and they take a hairdryer, and they just kind of blow it on you, and then many say it's, they're gonna blow off the waters of baptism with the air of reason, and it's a public confession that you are distancing yourself from your Christian roots. And that's happening in all sorts of other things on college campuses today. So you're ready, just saying, "I was raised like that," won't work, because you'll get in a room with the college professor, and they'll say, "Where were you raised? What city are you?" "So, what city do you live in?" "You live in Duluth?" "You're Duluth, Minnesota." There's a wonderful man up there named brother Taylor, right? All right. So let's just say brother Taylor is your pastor, and you're in Duluth, Minnesota, and you go to, let's say, the University of Michigan, or I'm sorry, University of Minnesota. And there you are in the University of Minnesota. A professor may say something like this to you: "The reason that you're Christian is because you grew up in Duluth, Minnesota. If you were raised in Turkey, you'd most likely be Muslim. Ready? Appeal? Raised in Salt Lake City, most likely you'd be Mormon." So he would say to you that, you ready, you're Christian, and your Christianity, it's not any kind of deliberative thought. It's an accident of birth. Now, what are you gonna say in a moment like that? Well, you can talk about your encounter. That's a good place to go. You ready? But there's more that you can say than that, and that's what we have to equip our young people to say, because you're ready, there's a changing context, and the assumed foundation is not there anymore. So saying, "I was raised like that," that's not gonna work. It's not gonna work out well for them.

Let me give you another one. "I tried it, and it worked for me." Now, that's a good statement, but there's better things to say. But let me just give you an example of why that doesn't work. Let's talk about, like, when one man said it this way, if you go into Alcoholics Anonymous, they, they ain't telling God, but I'm not shooting or taking shots at Alcoholics Anonymous, right? God bless everybody who's trying to help people overcome, right? They're doing it through human efforts. We got the baptism of the Holy Ghost, but they're doing it through human efforts, right? But God bless everybody who's trying to bring about good, right? All right, good. So I'm not making fun, but this is what they would say: "You need to embrace some type of higher power to ask you to make it through your sobriety, and you need to check in with that higher power and kind of ask a higher power to move you." So let's just say I was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was, I didn't believe in God, and I looked out the window, and I see this beautiful red squirrel, and I said, "I'm going to embrace the squirrel as my higher power. I'm gonna get up every little morning, I'm gonna have little acorn devotionals, and you're ready, through discipline and hard work, and in, and you're ready, cutting out friendships, making sure that I keep myself accountable." How many of you know people can quit drinking without the baptism of the Holy Ghost? You ready? I could say to you, "See, I tried the squirrel, and it worked for me." You ready? I'll give you another one. What if you bump into a person that was Indian, and they say they've embraced the Bhagavad Gita? You ready? And the Bhagavad Gita is a holy book. And you would say, "The reason that I am, I'm embracing the Hindu faith is because, you ready, I go to the temple of Shiva, or another picture, three million gods, and I have an encounter that is a true spiritual encounter. It is truly spiritual. It's just the moment." You ready? And they could say, "I have an experience that validates my belief in this book." Now, what makes sure? You ready? Again, I'm gonna hit you again. What makes your belief different? Because we don't just worship in spirit. True worshipers worship in spirit and truth. And you need to know, you ready, that the Bhagavad Gita is like every other holy book, like the Book of Mormon, and like all of those other books. You can show the historical inaccuracies, the mistakes in science. You ready? It has no divine fingerprint on the text, right? So we're gonna get there, right? And I know some of you think, "Well, Killman, this sounds weird." I know, because we're in a new day. And if you're not careful, you're gonna be like a Model A Ford going down the road, thinking everything's okay. And you're ready, you're in a different day. You got to reach people. He that cometh to God must believe that he is. You read, even without that holy book, why should I believe the Bible is the Word of God without that holy book? They are not going to believe in him. Okay. So, good. We're in a new day. It'll be good. But you know.

Okay, so I tried the squirrel, and it worked for me. Look at what the Apostle Peter says. He says, "For we have not followed cunningly devised fables." No, no. What is he talking about? This is not the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is not all of these other early kind of traditions. You ready? He says, "When we make known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, what were eyewitnesses of his majesty?" Now, what does it mean that they were eyewitnesses of his majesty? He's saying that what the Old Testament prophets said, we've seen witnessed in the life of Christ. You ready? What the Old Testament prophesied as a holy book, we saw it fulfilled. Can that data, that fact, is what we're talking about. He says, "For he received from God the Father honor and glory, when there came such a voice unto him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, whom I am well-pleased." I wish we had time to deal with the quotation there being a smash-together version of Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42, but what maybe we'll deal with that later this week. "And the voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount. We have also a more sure word of prophecy." The book that we follow is different than every other thing in the world, not cunningly devised fables, where until you will do well that you take heed as unto a light that shineth in a dark place until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts." Now, notice the "ye" there, and then you read either "ye" there. Well, now, why does it say they do that in the King James? That's to show you that it's plural in the Greek. Everybody in the world needs to know that there's only one book that you need to follow. "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved on by the Holy Ghost." How do you know? Because we saw prophecy fulfilled. Okay. Good. All right.

So, so what are you saying, by the Killman? Well, first of all, the Bible is a reliable. This is what I would say: "Why do you believe that the Bible is different than every other book in the world?" What's very simple? What you would say is, "I believe the Bible is a reliable record of historical documents." Maybe go, "I don't believe that's true at all." Okay. So, well, then let's look at it. They used to say, now I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna try to be good today, help with Jesus, but you know, I love him. He was a wonderful professor of mine in seminary. I went to a very, very, very aggressively liberal seminary, arguably the most definitely the most liberal school in the Midwest, probably in the nation, probably only one place up in New York competes with it. Had a couple lady instructors that were dating each other at Christian Theological Seminary. It was a wild place for the planner. And so I had a wonderful professor there, Dr. Allan. He was wonderful. I love him very much. We don't agree on hardly, but man, we had lots of conversations. Fun admissions. He's not a Trinitarian, which maybe we could talk different times. Wonderful, wonderful admissions about what the Bible actually says. And we were talking, and he says, "What you have to understand is that, you know, when they wrote the Bible in the old days, you, because you're living today and you're worried about historical accuracy and all that, they didn't, they didn't worry about that, brother Willis." In biblical times, because they just kind of wrote stuff to inspire people. And so I'm in the back, I'd raise my hand at some point, I'm sure, in the years that I've been working on my master's degree. They started cringing a little bit. I was a little me, but brother Platt, for saying that genre of writings, not history. The type of writing they were trying to do is not history. I said, "But let's just say, like, an author gets the picky details right again and again and again and again, not central to the idea of the story, and you're ready, they get him right again and again and again and again." And so, for instance, let's say there was a blind man at a pool, there were five porches, and he wanted to go down. And when they're telling this story, you know that because liberal people would say, I said, people would say, liberal people would say, "Brother Platt, for that, that was a made-up story. It's not in the rest of the Gospels, so probably it was made up." I said, "Anything they're kind of digging around in the dirt over there in Israel, and they find, they find the pool, you ready, and there's not one, two, three, four porches, there is." And guess what? That little picky detail, not central to the story, has been vindicated again and again and again. I said, "Now, yet the author does that, don't you know what kind of genre they're trying to write? Accurate history." As a matter of fact, I used to make fun of us Pentecostals because you really like Luke, because the Gospel of Luke and Acts, they said, "Acts is a terrible record of history. Why would you believe the book of Acts, and why would you take Luke seriously in his gospel? Because, you ready, he's not a careful historian." This is what you would say. And now, the fascinating thing is, everywhere in the Gospel of Luke and in Acts, where you can find a ruler, and you can compare it to history, you ready, not only do you get the name right, you get the title right, every single time. Some of those officers existed every two years. And now they're saying, "You wonderful Pentecostals, that, you ready, Luke is one of the most careful historians in history." You ready? And all of you that are just believing the Bible have been blessed by that accurate history. Anyway, but now scholarship is saying, "Yeah, yeah, you can believe." I'll have to wait for them to vindicate my belief. I know already. You can look at this book, you can test it any way you want, and I promise you, it's different than every holy book in the world. So, all due respect to my wonderful professor, whom I really do love. So, Luke 1, chapter 1, look at what he says: "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order, not haphazard, in order, a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, O most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know." Not blind faith. That thou mightest know maybe some kind of history, a little bit? No, you ready, the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed. They were not pretending. They were not making up stuff. You know, help me, Jesus. Okay, I'm gonna try to calm down.

All right, now I'm gonna promise you that what Lucas just said is now being proven by historians that are studying the book of Acts. I wish we had time to talk about the three-volume work of the current one, but I'll thousands of about 20,000 footnotes in a three-volume set on the book of Acts, it shows the historical accuracy. You're any of people in seminaries everywhere going home, "Look at the book of Acts." We're like, "Yeah, okay." So it's been historically validated. Man, I can do, I can do like an hour of just this. Let me just point out some things. So the biblical cities have earned Sodom and Gomorrah, or where Abraham come from him and in Sodom and Gomorrah, you ready, and up until the 1960s, they made fun of us as Christian people for taking the Bible seriously when it mentioned or the Cowley's and in Sodom and Gomorrah, because, you ready, science, or archaeology rather, has not found that yet. And "Hahaha, all you dumb Christians, you believe in that." And then, you ready, in the 1960s, they found the Elbe tablets in Syria, and guess what? Oops. You ready? It's there, and all three of these cities are mentioned. You ready? There are other people, I, brother Pilar, that would say that Moses couldn't have written the Pentateuch because he was kind of like a caveman back then, and there was no written language. So probably they made up Moses, and they edited in redactors, put all this stuff together, and you had the Deuteronomists that was kind of piecing all that stuff together. It's not Moses. Now, the problem you got with that is, Jesus says, "Moses said." And if you pardon me, but if you believe that other garbage, you go ahead, but you just lost the Incarnation, because either Jesus doesn't know, you ready, or he's lying, and either way, he can't be God. But when Jesus says, "Moses and the prophets said," you can take that to the bank. Why? Because again, on the helmets have--let's say a thousand years, brother Feiler, before Moses, all of a sudden we meals, while they did have a winter English, and you can believe the Bible again. You know how much. All right. So the Hittites, a major civilization, listen, 36 times in the Old Testament, you ready, and this is what they say: "There's no evidence for a Hittite civilization has ever been found." And scientists, and skeptics, and archaeologists, and atheists, and scoffers, all made fun of the church. You ready? Until 1884, and the archaeologists found proof of the Hittites as a major civilization. And you ready, "Oh, and we can believe the Bible again." Now, I'm gonna tell you, you base your belief, I understand if all you've had is the encounter, I get it. But I'm telling you, you can strengthen your faith by digging into the Word of God, and not just studying the text itself, but studying how it came to be. Ready? And what it says, and what it says about creation. And the Kayson is amazing. Every time I was challenged with my faith in that very, very liberal place, I promise you, I didn't believe them just because they have a PhD doesn't mean that they don't, they know everything. Can I give you one story? Oh, help me, Jesus. Maybe it's my time. Okay. All right. So I was in, I was in seminary, and my wonderful feminist professor who was teaching me systematic theology, she was wonderful. Holly, I'm sorry, Dr. Helen Russell, and she was wonderful in many ways. We didn't real macho. I have a grace my hands they're a lot to me. And she was talking money, and she said, "In Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, where the Peppard, the Bible says, 'In the beginning God,' God is Elohim." That Hebrew word, Elohim. She says, "So you have in the very first verse of the Bible an argument for God is a plurality, and God is feminine." And it's like, "Okay, I just been to IBC, and like, I'm sure ABI teaches the same thing, and TBC, and all of them, because look, truth, it when it's taught, it's just in you, and you just like." I said, "Dr. Russell, I said, 'Is an Elohim Quanah plural? Hyuna plural, like dear, you know, God? Because the Bible calls Moses Elohim. He's not eternity.' I said, 'Now, isn't it quite a plural, like dear? So if I say a dear, you know how many there are? And isn't Barack the word created a singular modifier? So we know how many there are.' I said, 'Isn't it the amending actually masculine?'" She turns to Torti, a father Kirk Messick, who's an Anglican priest, who has more language. And he says, "That's the way we understand the Hebrew." Now, body just say I'm right. You ready? Or you can just say the Bible's right. You start messing with that text, you're not gonna have a foundation for belief. But you ready, you study yourself. "Study to show yourself approved, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed." And you're gonna understand why you can base your belief and your ministry and your life on this book we call the Bible. Okay. What is that?

Okay, so the second thing I would say when someone says, "Why do you choose to believe the Bible?" We have a writing by eyewitnesses in the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. Now, what does that mean? It means this. When they say, "We were eyewitnesses of his majesty." If you are going to propagate a lie, brother Willis, let's just say someone decided, "We're gonna make the book of Willis." Your son here, I'll pick on the entire. Let's say we're gonna make the book of Tyler Willis, and let's just say we wanted to propagate all these lies and say, "Brother Tyler came to Kent, Galilee, Denis walked across the lake over there, and let's get a child pull the down a wine beautiful. We ran out of food in the cafeteria, and he took that bread and he broke it, and he made pulled pork sandwiches." Of course, he would have been Jewish back then, so that wouldn't work. So we made up all these things, and we wrote a book, and we put it out, and we published it here in Minnesota. You would say, "I love my son, but a Messiah he is not." And see, that's the problem with these claims, because, you ready, you have eyewitnesses in the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. And you ready, all they had to do to prove that Jesus was not the Savior and resurrected from the dead, you ready, it simply produced some body. And as a matter of fact, we know the first argument is that they stole the body, and we could get into the details on that. I'll just point you to an easy read called "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. Now, that will show you that's impossible to believe. Or the swoon, or like a smooth theory that Jesus was actually dead or close to the death in a common cold tomb, resuscitated him, and he came out, may mistook it for a resurrection. Okay, you ready? This is what it would look like. Jesus had his back flayed open by discouraging. Would have died from that alone. He's been nailed, brother Taylor, to what one historian calls three points of agony, crucifixion. There was no word in English to match it, so they invented the word, you know, then explain the pain on the cross. It's called excruciating. It means literally "out of the cross." So there he is, and maybe, okay, can you imagine trying to walk, and he stumbles into the upper room where the disciples are, and they're like, "Yeah, no." They would say, "My God, get him a doctor." That would not have convinced them. You ready? It turned cowards and deniers into world shakers. Why? Because we saw him. That's why. The Apostle John says it this way: "What was from the beginning, what we have seen with our eyes, what our hands have handled." There's another little book by, oh, I got so many books, hallelujah, I just want some more than paper. So you're ready, there's no, there's a wonderful little book by J.P. Moreland called "Jesus Under Fire." And again, I was in seminary, and they were saying that, you know, you have to be careful because they're not trying to tell again, the literal history thing is his history. And you're ready, when you look at the context of the ancient Near East, this is what they would say. Let's just say there was Rabbi Willis, I'll pick on you, brother Willis, again, he's my friend. So brother Willis, let's just say we're gonna write the book of Willis, and you're gonna make a holy book. You ready? You would be the rabbi, you would teach them their sayings, and let's just say brother Pilar and I were in an argument over what the book of all this Willis means, and we would say, "Okay, no, I think it means it's um." And brother Final, you say, "No, over the coming, I love you, but you're wrong, and I think it means this." And we'd argue back and forth, as good people do. And you ready, at the end of the day, brother Willis wouldn't leave us without a witness. You would pick rabbinical experts, people that would follow you around. You ready? And when you were gone, they would tell you what the teaching of the rabbi actually was. And you would say, "Brother Killman, let's go look at the rabbinical experts. You pick him up, ready, and you say, 'Haha, brother, come when I was right. Let's see.'" And see, that's what's going on in the text. And when you read this type of language, that's what J.P. Moreland points out. He says, "This is rabbinical expert language." You ready? "What our eyes have seen, what we've seen with our own eyes, what our hands have handled." He said, "You can't say that that's any kind of history made up. That's rabbinical expert language." Now, I know that doesn't mean much to us happen socks, because we just believe this is the Word of God. But I promise you, it's throwing scholarship votes on its head. It's turning liberalism over and no spending them around. Oh, what you believe, it's true. It's not just powerful, it's true. Let me see, let me see if I can, I can dive in. So we have eyewitnesses in the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. So Paul says in First Corinthians 15, verses five through eight: "He appeared, verses to Peter, then to the twelve, then to 500 brethren, he says, most of whom are alive until now." And at the time of her scrin thien's, most scholars, even skeptics and liberals, will say there had to be a minimum of 300 people alive when Paul wrote First Corinthians. Now, why is that important? Well, thankfully, they were, because these people were willing to die for their faith, to die as martyrs. Now, now, what does that mean? Most one mark. Let's look at that. The big three. Let's look at three examples. What would they gain? Now, Peter, James, and John, because people say, "Well, they did it for political power." And oh yeah, you want to go leave? Okay, let's just look at the Apostle Peter. All right, so Peter was willing. He was crucified upside down, you ready? And all he had to do is say, "I was just kidding. Jesus didn't rise from the grave." You ready? And on the death of the most horrific death in human history, and he, ready, he's willing to face it. Why? Because he said, "I saw Jesus." And all he had to do to get out of that type of horrible punishment was to say this: "I was just kidding." And he could have been safe. How about this? James, the half-brother of Jesus. Do you have any siblings? Yeah. What's what he had brothers, two sisters. What's his name? Cole. Okay, let's just say Colton is, you grew up, Colton, right? Yeah. So he's a good guy, most days. Okay. So let me ask you a question. Do you believe that Colton, I saw him praying, he loves Jesus. Do you think he could be the Messiah? No. Why? Because I lived with it. You know, every day. How many of you have a sibling you think they could be the Christ? You think they're perfect, never sinned? Can you imagine growing up in the house with Jesus? "Why can't you just be more like Jesus? Come on, Colt. What would Jesus do?" Okay. Jesus taught us again, ready? And see, in the most, the greatest skeptics are your own family. At one point, Mary comes with his brothers and his sisters, his half-brothers and sisters, they come to them, and you ready, and they tried to stop Jesus from saying he's the Messiah. Why? Because they didn't believe. You ready? But after the resurrection, when James knows, he doesn't even say, "Hey, in his epistle, I am James, the half-brother of the Messiah." He says, "I am James, the servant of the Lord." You ready? He is a resurrected Messiah. I don't even relate to him that way anymore. How can you convince your family unless you saw? I'll give you another one. Paul, the Apostle Paul. Paul was a member attached to the Sanhedrin. We could talk about that. Some people dispute that. I think the evidence is really clear already. But not only a member of the Sanhedrin, he was taught by Gamaliel. He was probably in line to be the next great rabbi. I mean, all you have to do is read his epistles, and you understand, "Wow, he could have been many things in Judaism." Because of his dual citizenships, he was a Roman citizen. He could have got involved in politics. He could have been involved in representing the Jewish nation to Rome. And arguably, that's the case. You ready? Paul gave all of that up to go lead mostly poor people and slaves. Why would Paul do that? Because on the road to Damascus, you ready, he was struck down, and the, "Who art thou, Lord?" Curiosity equivalent of saying, "Who art thou, Jehovah? Yahweh?" You ready? "Who are you, God of the Old Testament?" "I am Jesus." And Paul was willing to die for his faith. Why? Because he said, "The resurrected Lord came to me." Now, no, I know, I know there's some objection now. I can, you can hear me that, "Yeah, but by the Killman, there are people that are willing to die for their faith today." Understand Islam, panes in two towers, and do all sorts of terrible things. You're ready? But the big difference between the disciples and what people do today is they are dying because, let's just give the example of Islam, they're dying for what they hope to be true. "I'm gonna get so many rewards and so many types of things in the afterlife." This is their reasons. The Apostles died because we saw him. Not what we hope to be true, but what we know to be true. That makes their witness different than any other witness and then the other holy book.

Now, let me see if I can hasten to. Let me give you some examples. You ready? The Apostle James, both decapitated, beheaded. Matthew was nailed to the ground and decapitated. Jude was beaten to death. The Apostle Peter, crucified upside down. John Mark, who wrote the telling the Gospel of Mark, Paul's account of Peter's rather's account, mostly of the life of Jesus, was dragged through the streets until he died. Luke was hanged. Timothy was beaten by a mob. And all of these people, you ready, they were willing to die for their faith, not because it was blind faith, but because they knew they had saw the resurrected Lord, and they were not witnessing to a lie. Can I give you one more? Okay. So it's like there's a, when I was at that cemetery, I mean, cemetery, so hold on, dead theology, where I was xxx or when I was in seminary there, there was a guy who wrote a book, guys things, Joe Jones, and grammar of Christian faith. It's a terrible book in many ways, but there's one good thing he said. He said, "Let's just say that you're an alien, and you're flying over Jerusalem at the time of the life of Christ." He says, "And as you fly over in your little UFO, there you are, and you see, you ready, the mighty Roman Empire, and you see this fledgling disciples that were following their leader that are now scattered in fear and hiding because he was killed by capital punishment." He says, "Who do you think, brother Baumann, is going to survive? Who do you think, which of the two do you think will exist in history?" He said, "Every one of us would have to pre-epic the Roman Empire. But just in a few hundred years, the Roman Empire is going to disappear and become a Christian Empire." We could argue whether or not that's good or bad later. But you ready, and this fledgling group of disciples turned into this massive worldwide thing. He says, "There's a hole in history the size of a resurrection." And historians have to look for causes. You ready? And he says, "If there's not a resurrection, you got to find something else that big to put in that hole of history." Now, that is a very, very liberal, not apostolic at all, professor saying, "You got to take history seriously." Why? Because the resurrection happened. Okay. All right.

So now I got to teach you to be historians. Turn to neighbors, say, "I promise this is gonna be good. It's gonna be good." Now, I'm gonna teach you to do this, because again, when you deal with people that are miseducated, I feel way too good this morning. It's like Jay Buddha Chesky says, "There's some types of education, some types of stupid you can only get through education." Forgive me for that. All right. So what does that look like? Historiography. Historiography is history, and the Greek word grapha, which is writing. So it's looking at the historical reliability of variety. Everybody got it? Very, very easy to understand. And he says, "When you look at it, this is what is." This is the. Okay. Now, the reason I'm gonna throw language at you is because I don't want people talking down to you in some type of cultural setting, whether it's an institution or on Facebook, and they throw big words. I'm convinced for the pipe, right? You said at the other night, I'm convinced that theologians invent words to cut people out of the conversation. So what I want to do is I'm gonna clip you with a few words so that people can't talk down to you, because you know more truth than people with PhDs. How many of you believe they have a solid Doctorate? How many of you believe it? You ready? Then you know more truth than people with that. Just forgive me for that, but it's true. All right. So let me give you the two components of the bibliographical test. Now, what does that look like? It's very simple. We're gonna look at three things. Oh, that's terrible. You can hardly read it. We're gonna look at time from the original. But the filer, when you, when the book is written, how many years after do we have the soonest copy? Because people will say, "Yeah, but we don't have the originals of the Bible. We don't have the original." What we're gonna, we're gonna punch that in the face a little bit later. But you ready, by the rules, we don't have the original writings of Plato. We don't, we don't have the original writings of Aristotle. They still teach it in college, and nobody's storming the college campus ripping down things because they're teaching Aristotle. Okay. We're gonna get there. All right. Let me give you another one. All right. How many manuscripts do you have? Okay, that means how many copies do you have? You can check all those copies against original, and that means, yes, we have the original. And what we're gonna do, all I'm gonna do is use what historians will say is absolutely allowable. It's over. They just don't know it. Okay. And then third, we're gonna compare the Bible to other books of history and see how it stacks out. So, test number one: Time from the original. Now, what does that look like? So the writings of Pliny the Younger, the earliest copy we have is 750 years later after his writing, and every historian, catch that, every historian says, "Trustworthy." Okay. You ready? Caesar, the writings of Caesar, the earliest copy we have is a thousand years later. The writings of Plato, twelve hundred. Aristotle, fourteen hundred. Sophocles, fourteen hundred. Euripides, fifteen hundred. Katka Tallis, sixteen hundred years later. Every historian will say, "Absolutely reliable." You tracking? Okay. Good. All right. Now, let's see what that looks like. So in time from the original, you have Catala seer, 1600. You have.

Your Ripa Diez, 15, they say that's good. Sophocles, 1400. You ready? Aristotle and Plato, which Western civilization was built on their ideas. They say, "Absolutely allowable." You ready? Caesar, around a thousand years. Pliny the Younger, 750 years. That's incredible. You ready?

In the New Testament, we have one that's written from 66 AD. Now, like Mr. History Professor, "Why can't I believe the Bible?" Again, because of the data? No. You ready? Because you don't want it to be true. Because if there is a God that's given us a text, then you have to obey that God. And that's more about the lusts of your flesh, not the facts of history. And I want to say so much here. Help me, Jesus.

Okay, so this is what it looks like. You're ready? You have Tacitus. There it is. That's a long time from the beginning. The writings of Herodotus. That's a long time to get back to the original. You ready? Plato, it was written in 400 BC. The earliest copy, 895. That's a long time. You ready? But every historian. Caesar, yeah. Homer's play, the Iliad. It's written in 800. It's only the earliest copy, 400. That's incredible. And there's the Bible, 50 to 180, around that time. Where it was written about 90 AD for the Apostle John. You ready? And the earliest copy we have, people would say, is, you ready, 130. That's just a few short years later. You ready?

"Why can't I believe the Bible?" You don't believe all of this, and you're not gonna believe this. Why? Turn to your neighbor, poking the shoulder, saying, "You know why? They don't want it. It's not a fact issue. It's a heart issue." Let me go. Now, I'll blow your mind, maybe a little bit. Peter Theed wrote a little book called "Eyewitnesses to Jesus." He was studying some manuscripts, the Magdalene Papyri. And he looked at it by the papyrus. And he said, "When you look at the papyrus," he says, "because he does dating of many scripts, that's what he does as a living." He walked in, he looked at it, and he said, "300, this is wrong." He looks at it. He says, "Let me do some microscopic laser kind of scanning." That's what they do to find the dating of a manuscript. And when he did it, you ready? This is what he says: "The earliest copy, this is from 60, the time of the Apostles themselves."

Now, I'm gonna help you. Ready? There is nothing in antiquity. There's no other ancient book like this in the world. And what you need to tell that little history professor, "All due respect, sir. All due respect, ma'am. If you say I can't trust the Bible, you have nothing left to teach me. Because the Bible is the most historically attested book in the world."

But the Willis, they were they were taking a part in Egyptian mass because they found out it was made up of manuscripts, old manuscripts, kind of put together. And now they're saying that there's six manuscripts. It's coming out. I'm keep waiting on the data because they're talking about it, but that released in a book for him yet. But they say at least two of them are our first century, and some of them are second and third century. And the beautiful thing is, is some of it is the writings of the pastoral epistles, which liberals say Paul never even written. Rewrote. You ready? But now we have manuscripts from that time, and you can believe the Bible. You see, I know I get excited about manuscripts and books of antiquity. Why? Because when you realize how much weight is on the Bible, it's almost embarrassing to stand in a class where someone makes a counterclaim, because you have a tidal wave of ammunition, a tidal wave of evidence on your side.

All right, let me let me give you another. Okay. So in the first year, 200, and the first 200 years, the average book of antiquity, you find 60 manuscripts. So for that verse, 200 years, 60 manuscripts. That's the average. Well, what does the Bible look like? There, there it is. You ready? It's when the Bible is three times. I'm sorry, I got that wrong. 200. The first 200 years, you can find 60 manuscripts of the Bible. That's not counting the early, the early translations from the second, the Old Latin, Coptic, and Syriac translations, all about about 40,000. Those, brother. Well, this is just so much. And you ready? In the first 200 years, we find 60 manuscripts. That's three times the average classical author. Then they can produce in 2,000 years.

"Why can't I believe the Bible?" Again. Poke 'em one more time. Stays, "You know, they don't want it to be true. This is not an evidence issue. It's a heart issue." Let me give you the second part of the biblical bibliographical test. How many copies do you have of the manuscript that show that it was actually a book of antiquity? So anywhere from ten manuscripts to 200 manuscripts, every historian, brother Baumann, would say, "Absolutely reliable."

Okay, so let's look at what the, how the Bible stacks up. So, well, we'll do some comparison from history. Caesar, we got about ten of his works. Plato's technologies, about seven of his works. Tacitus, the Annals or the Histories of Tacitus, about twenty. Pliny the Younger, seven. You ready? That's Thucydides or Suetonius or Herodotus, the father of modern history. We have about eight. And these are the father of modern history, and everyone respects that. You know, you get down to Demosthenes, if you want to name for a son, that's what you should call it. You'll be able to spell it. So he's in the third grade, it'll be all right. About 200. You ready?

Now, how does the Bible stack up? Twenty-four thousand, six hundred and thirty-three. And we're finding more all the time. Look, it's not even close. Okay, brother, come on. That's a lot of it. How many know it's a lot of evidence? Okay. Oh, sure, but you don't understand what that looks like until you compare it. The Bible is the number one book attested to in history.

So, how does it compare to the number two? The closest thing to it, in terms of manuscript, is Homer's play, the Iliad. Right? How many do we have? One thousand. They found some more, 1757. That's the number two. Okay. What does that look like? It looks like this. You ready? You have this many, 24,633. And then you have the Iliad, and that's the number two. What we base our faith on. We have a reliable record. We have something that's been attested to throughout time. All of history is on our side. You ready? There's a divine fingerprint on the book. That's why we believe what we believe.

So let's compare it to the averages of the books of antiquity. So the largest stack of the writings of the other books of antiquity, you can get about 4 feet tall. Somewhere, somewhere about right here. You ready? If you stacked up all the copies of the Bible, it would be over a mile high. Why the illustrations? Cuz I just want you to see how much weight is on your side. So that people won't mis-educate you when they make fun of the Bible.

All right, let me give you another visual. You ready? There's Tacitus. Tacitus. There's his writings. There's, if we were looking in the wall where they keep them, that's that's how many copies we would have. Herodotus' history. There's a little more. We got a few of those. There's the time in history, and we have 109 of those. You ready? Plato's writings. A lot more. We got 210 of those. You ready? Then you got Caesar's writings. You get more of those. Man, we got 251 of those. And then you go along Homer's play, The Iliad. That's what it looks like, man. There's a massive amount of those. You ready? What's the Bible look like? This is what it would be like. There's a thousand. There's, there's up to 5,000, 10,000, 15,000. That's 20,000. You know, and you're just like, "Okay, how many manuscripts do you want to see before you're gonna bow the name?" See, this is what it looks like. There you go. There's the most attested to works in history. There's number two. And there's the Bible. See, don't let someone steal this book out of your hands.

[Applause] I mean, let me close today with this. Yeah, but brother Killman, couldn't the Bible have been changed over time, like the game telephone? Well, let's look at it. I wish we had time to deal with the Masoretic text, and I wish we had time to deal with the Textus Receptus, and why the, that, why which manuscripts you read in the Greek are right. 95% of them all agree. They come from all over the Christian world. About 5% come from one place, brother Platt, for Daleks, Andrea, Egypt, where we know they messed with text because they were Gnostic and all sorts of terrible theology. And they said, "The literal reading is not important anyway. All you want is the spiritual meaning." So they changed the text. But it's only one place, and we know where it's at. Why? Because God's watched over his word. A God that inspired his word can preserve it. So that's what we're dealing with.

So let's talk about this manuscript conspiracy. So this is what that looks like. They would say, "Yes, it's been translated many times." And they have this, and it's a lie propagated on college campuses today. And unfortunately, even Christian, secular Christian denominations say for the planet Christian campuses. And they say, "Overzealous monks got together, and they changed the writings all to match over time." Okay. That's the case. This is what you'd have to do. There would be three levels of conspiracy.

The first conspiracy would be the, the Greek text conspiracy. The Greek Bibles. You'd have to go all over the Greek world. There's around six thousand New Testament manuscripts. You ready? And you'd have to go change all of those Greek texts to match each other, never show your ink work, and never get caught. Pardon illustration. That's some serious ninja skills. So you ready? You sneak in. So six thousand times, sneak into the libraries of all those Greek people. You ready? And go to, like, let's just say, Acts 2:38. "Then Peter said unto them, Repent, be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ." Let's just say you're reading your Bible and you see this, like a little pin. Aren't going scratch, scratch, scratch. And my mother, father said, "It only goes." Would you be suspicious? So you ready? You got, you got to sneak in, change all of those, never get caught, and never show your ink work, six thousand times. Does anybody see that as believable? But that's only level one.

Level two is, is the translation level. Where rather tailor them, they said to go, "Jesus, go make disciples of all the earth, make all people groups." And the problem with all people is they speak different languages. So in the first century, you have the Bible copied and translated into Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. Cannot. Let me just, okay, you guys, okay. I'll show you what that looks like. So we just did that Greek level. You get 24,000 portions of manuscripts, 6,000 Greek alone. But by the time you get to, you ready, all of these other languages, you got 24,633 copies throughout time. But even in the first century, you have three major languages. And now you're up to doing this 24,633 times, traveling all over the known world, never getting caught, and never showing your ink work. Now, how in the world can you propagate a lie of that magnitude on a college campus? Because if you want to talk people out of having to listen to God, you got to destroy the book first.

All right, let me give you another one. You ready? Uh, that's the translation. Oh, don't look at that. We just talked about that, right? And then level three, the level of the early church fathers. Now, what does that mean? Here's the problem with preachers. They quote the Bible. So Bruce Metzger, Bruce Metzger is not a guy that's on, on my position. He's a very liberal guy when it comes to biblical textual studies. So I'm going to use him to make this statement for me. He says, "You can produce 95% of the New Testament just from their writings." Why? Because preachers quote the Bible. You ready? Over sixty-seven thousand times. And in the early church fathers' writings, I have the multiple volume set. You ready? They quote the New Testament, and you can reproduce 95% of it just from the quote. You ready? So it wasn't invented later and inserted in the text later. You ready? It was in the original. If they quoted it in the first, second, third, all the way to the tenth century, it wasn't invented later and it started in the text. So you ready? Not only do you have to go in, rather, filer, and and and deal with all the Greek world, then you got to go all over the known world and get the 24,633 translations and copies of from the Greek. You ready? Now you got, now you got to sneak into brother Filer's office. You gotta get into a sermon notes. You ready? And you got to go scratch, scratch, scratch. Father, Son, the Holy Ghost. Or brother, what if I was like, "Well, I don't remember preaching that."

Now, what is the problem? What am I trying to say today? All I'm trying to say is that when you, when you evaluate your encounter with God, that's endorsed by this book we call the Bible, spirit and truth is a witness on your side. And there's nothing that this world can say that if you'll just study a little bit, if you'll just dig a little bit, you ready? You go to your pastor, you seek some sources, you ready? And you can find an answer of the hope that lies within you. I'm gonna, that's, I'm gonna close.

Damn, how much weight is on our side? Well, the evidence is clear. All you have to do is get a little courage and equip yourself with some answers that we, you ready, brother Lehrer? May be a generation ago, we did not have to answer these types of questions. But you ready? Just because there are new questions doesn't mean that our faith is weak.

[Applause] Can I just tell you today? I'm glad I have the Word of God. Stand with me today. The first attack recorded in Scripture is this: "Hath God said?" Now, I just come to encourage your faith and to strengthen you to say, "Man, not only is it true." I, I wish we had time today, we could go into all sorts of detail. Some brother Bauman, so much archaeology on the, on the side of the Bible. That one archaeologist said, "If you're gonna be a good archaeologist, you need a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other."

There was a French poet and liberal, and there was, you know, a kind of a hedonist, Voltaire. He said, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna write my book, and just a few hundred to three hundred, I think it was a hundred years," he said, "forgive me, I think it may have been three hundred years," he said, "there won't be a, there won't be a Bible left in France." Wrote his book. And he said, "There are forty-two examples from archaeology." Brother Little, he said, "They don't even exist in history." That's why he can't believe the Bible. "All those idiotic Christians." And look, look, archaeology is not in there, son. Even on this time, he was only twenty years from the archaeological revolution. And guess what? Every one of the last one was was more to KI says it. Look, if there was a Persian king that was saved from an assassination attempt, and you ready, it would be, it would be in the annals of the Persian kings or the history of the Persian kings. And we can't find that. Against what they found that the story and Martyred, the Persian equivalent of Borakii. Right?

Now, I always do this. It makes my wife nervous. How many of you like money? Okay. Well, let me ask you this way. How many of you know you need money for life? How many of you would like some today? I'll give $1,000 to anyone who can name Voltaire's book with the 42 examples. Come on. You don't like money? Does anybody want money? Raise your hand. Heavy. No, I'm serious. Flag me down. What? Why? You ready? Because no one remembers Voltaire's work because all of it was proven boss. You ready? But everyone knows what this book is. It's still the number one book sold in the world.

[Applause] Brother Filer, the Prince Bible Society bought Voltaire's house a hundred years later and started printing Bibles on it. Because the Word of God is true, and you can have an ironclad belief, and nothing the enemy says can rip this from you. Not because we have to just believe it on blind faith, but because the evidence, because of God at work in history, and He's on our side. Aren't you glad the Lord has watched over His Word and preserved it so that we can have an accurate belief to know that our encounter is real? Amen. Amen. Amen. Brother Fleming.

[Music] Every promise in the book is mine. Every book, every chapter, every line. I am so thankful we have the Word of the Lord. And one day, guess what God's gonna do with that book? He's gonna judge every man, woman, and child by that book. I think it's forever settled in heaven, just like Jesus said. Amen. Aren't you glad for the Word of the Lord? Aren't you glad for God's Word? I think we're going to thank God. A God that can't protect His Word is not God. But He's protected it. Amen. Praise God. I think this is awesome. Do you have more? Did you enjoy this? Oh, hallelujah. Praise God. I think it'd be good if we just kind of gathered around and just, well, let's just be where we are because we can't get everybody up here anyway. But I think you'd be good if we just thanked God for His Word and gave Him praise and glory and honor. Would you do that? Jesus, we're thankful for the Word of the Lord. We're thankful for what we have heard, Lord. We had no idea.