Have your Bible open, will you turn with me to 2 Peter chapter 1, and I want to draw your attention to verses 16 through 21. And if you wanted one particular phrase, it would be a very negative one. Not cleverly invented stories. Though you can find a far better phrase than that in the passage in front of us. In old age, or expected martyrdom, Peter knew he had to leave something behind that would help these scattered and persecuted Christians to keep strong in Christ. He knows he's coming to the end of his life. Look at verse 14 in the Bible in front of you, and you'll notice he says that. I am not long with you, he's saying. And he wants to remind his readers of the message he's given them again and again, and which he's fairly confident they are standing firm in. He needs to remind us, as God always needs to remind us, because we become indifferent to the truth. Because we don't understand it very clearly. Because we forget what we've learned so quickly. Most of you will have forgotten pretty much everything I say this morning before you arrive home for the lunch table. Pretty miserable thought that is, isn't it? And we don't apply the lessons. And when we do learn a lesson, we rebelliously fight against it. So Peter says, I need to rub it in. I need to tell you again and again. So before I go, I want to remind you of some very important truths. And Peter underlines here the character of what he's giving them. Verse 15, I'm going to make every effort, he says, that you'll still know the truth when I've gone, and you'll always be able to remember these things. And the authority is found in verse 21. Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried, moved by the Holy Spirit. And that's certainly what we find. It's a huge claim, but it covers the whole of scripture. The book that you have in front of you, whether you have it in a proper copy, a hard copy, or whether you have it on your iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or whatever other form you've got, this has been the most ridiculed and opposed book than any other book in human history. By the third century AD, all the scriptures, both Old and New Testament as we have them, were circulating freely right across the Roman Empire and beyond, into Asia, Africa, and all of that in spite of bitter persecution. There were times when the emperor, the Roman emperor, had decreed that all Christian literature should be gathered up and burned. And there had been a kind of program. There was a door-to-door visitation to find Christian literature. But the church withstood that. And Satan lost round one, which was to destroy the Bible. But he wasn't finished. The Roman Catholic Church across the Middle Ages, right across Europe, increased its stranglehold upon the Scriptures, and it became a forbidden book. Satan Rounds 2, having failed to destroy the Bible, was simply to deny the Bible to ordinary people. It was more vigorously enforced here in England than anywhere else across Europe. Back in the 5th century, you see, the monk Jerome had translated the whole of the Bible into the Latin. It was called the Latin Vulgate. The word simply meant vulgar common, into what was then the common tongue. Most people would be familiar with it in the 5th century. And that became the official version of the church. And as Latin, the language of the church and the language of law, and French, which was the language of the court, gradually gave way to Anglo-Saxon English, if you prefer, then people could rarely began to read the book in Latin. It meant no sense to them. And of course, commonly after the Norman invasion of 1066, the church tightened its grip on the Bible. And in England, by what were known as the Constitutions of Oxford, 1407 to 1409, no one was allowed to read even a portion of the Bible, not even a sentence of the Bible, in English, without a bishop's license. The reasoning was that the church only could interpret the Bible and teach the people what they must believe. Unfortunately, vast numbers of the priests couldn't even read, hardly English, let alone the Latin. To give you an example of the power and the strength of this, on the 4th of April, 1519, a woman and six men were burnt alive in Coventry for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles' Creed, which the latter is not in the Bible, by the way, but the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed in English. And in 1526, A boy of nine years old was burnt in Norwich because he was found in possession of a scrap of paper with the Lord's Prayer written on it in English. The church meant business. It was serious about denying the Bible to the people. Fortunately for us, there were many brave men and women in this country who were prepared to disobey the church. So when John Wycliffe died in 1384, he had already been excommunicated by the Church of Rome, not that that bothered him or meant a whit of difference to his eternal salvation, and he and his team had translated the whole Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. 150 years later, as I alluded earlier, William Tyndale, who gave England its first printed New Testament translated from the Greek in 1526, was burned as a heretic in the marketplace in Vilvoorde in Belgium in September 1536. His dying prayer was this, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. The King of England was Henry VIII. Tyndale had read Luther's German New Testament. It was a forbidden book in England, even the German New Testament. But the German merchants smuggled it in to their base at Cannon Street Station. which was then their Stadelhof, their warehouse. So whenever you go to Cannon Street Station, you're right where the German Lutheran merchants smuggled the Bible into this country. And subsequently, after 1526, they smuggled the New Testament in English in as well. The Reformation in the 16th century led eventually to the Bible in English in every parish church across the country. God answered William Tyndale's closing prayer, Lord open the King of England's eyes. Henry VIII ordered that every parish church should display a copy of the Bible in English. One book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English had to be available in every parish church. A year later, he allowed all printers and booksellers the free and liberal use of the Bible in our own maternal English tongue. Satan had lost the first two rounds to destroy and then deny the Bible to the people. But he was not finished. The 17th century was a beautiful Puritan age of great study of the Bible. And scrap any ideas you may have of the Puritans being dull people with big hats and long, somber faces. Actually, they were a very fun-loving people. It may shock some of you to know that Oliver Cromwell, at the wedding of one of his daughters, they danced well into the night. Maybe I shouldn't have told you that, but that happens to be a fact of history. They were a family people. They loved family life. and regarded women in a very high way. They were lifted from some of the drudgery of the past. The Bible was rediscovered. The Bible was being read, and it was a very exciting time. Calvin's influence from Geneva was felt right across the country. The Bible influenced every area of life, politics, economics, social welfare, family life, education, art, music, science. When the Royal Society was founded in England in 1663, 64% of all its members were Puritans. The Bible compelled people to think scientifically and thoughtfully and accurately. And of course, it affected the moral life of the nation. Bible preaching, often at exorbitant length, covered the country. William Gouge at Blackfriars spent 32 years and 1,000 sermons taking his congregation through the book of Hebrews from 1575 to 1653. Paul, you better start soon, next week. Then 1660 saw the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II and a gradual slide away from the centrality of the Bible in national life. By the 18th century, the moral and social life of England was in an absolutely deplorable state, worse than today. I mean that, worse than today. The 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle described the previous century, the 18th century, as stomach well alive, soul extinct. That just about summed it up and you'll probably think it sums up today as well. Only the evangelical awakening in the century rescued the nation by the strong biblical preaching of Wesley and Whitefield and Newton and a host of others. But in the 19th century, Satan, having failed to destroy or deny the Bible, turned to a very much more subtle and much more successful scheme. He set out to downgrade the Bible, leave it where it is, but it's rubbish. So nobody needs to read it anyway. To make it appear irrelevant, ordinary, just another book, and not a very good one at that. You see, Satan knew that man had come of age, the age of reason and enlightenment, so we've got to appeal to the mind. So along comes rationalism, the philosopher David Hume, and the idea that Nothing is true unless we can reason it through. Faith is out. Miracles, the supernatural, abandoned. And the age of existentialism, you may not have met that word and it doesn't matter if you haven't because it's not that, you needn't bother about it, but that really is where we're at today, demanded that we reject rules and creeds and all authorities and simply give ourselves to experience. So anyone who says it is true, this is true and all others are false, is wrong. The only truth is that nothing is true except the truth that nothing is true. And people don't see the illogicality of that. And it was the age of agnosticism, a phrase that actually was invented by Huxley in the 19th century, claimed that God can't be known anyway. We've got to remain in perpetual doubt. And of course, atheism more radically concluded, God is dead. There is no God. And all this was aided and abetted by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, the scientism of geology. And by that I mean the study of geology that determines a conclusion irrespective of observable science. We've come to our conclusion and we will stick to it whatever observation tells us. And all of this dominated the mind of society and tragically even the Christian church. We see this so clearly in our own day when many evangelical Christians interpret the origin of everything not by the plain and clear statements of the early chapters of Genesis, but by the mantras of evolutionary theology and geology. Thus, the Bible was systematically criticized, ridiculed, seen just as another book with truth and error all mingled with it, more error than truth. In fact, the Bible isn't merely downgraded, it is derided, scoffed at, laughed at, along with those who believe that it's true and can be trusted. You've all experienced that if you stood for Christ. The theories of science and archaeology are marshaled to prove the Bible scientifically inaccurate and historically nonsense. And the result of all this has been the apathy, indifference by one generation and the antagonism of the next, which is where we are today. So in the light of all this, And you didn't come here expecting a survey of that, but in the light of all this, why do so many Christians still have confidence in the Bible? Why are there literally thousands of translators dedicating their lives to give the Bible in the mother tongue to the people of the world? so that by September of this year, just a couple of months ago, the Bible could be read in 554, the whole Bible, complete Bible, old and new, could be read in 554 languages across the world, and 2,932, think 3,000, it's easier to remember that, almost 3,000 languages across the world today would have at least some portion of the Bible in. Why waste your time? on a book, despised, ridiculed, scoffed at, nonsense. It happens to still be the world's number one bestseller, and the Guinness Book of Records still claims that. Why? Well, after that long, and for some of you, painful excursion, come back to my passage in 2 Peter chapter one. Why is this book so reliable? First, because of the character of the writers. Look at verse 16. He begins with the word we. We did not follow cleverly invented stories. And the signature of that we is right in verse 1 at the beginning of the chapter. This is Peter, the apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remember what Peter was, just an ordinary fisherman on Galilee. And remember what he became, an apostle of Jesus Christ. And the test, you can test he and his colleagues by the character of their lives. And it's perfectly correct to do so. Which of the apostles in known history ever recanted their claim that Jesus died on the cross, they saw it. He rose again from the dead, they saw it. He ascended back into heaven, they saw it. And they gave their lives for that belief. Most of them died for their firm faith in the message they preached. Take the resurrection, that ridiculous and unbelievable story that this man who had been crucified by the Romans and he really died on the cross, crucified, dead, buried, rose again from the dead. Peter claims he saw the risen Christ and many others saw him also. And here is a test that will be accepted in any court of law. You lawyers, you'll know this. The character of the author of a document is to be considered trustworthy unless or until it is proven otherwise. If you write something and claim something, in a court of law, it is right and proper that it is considered. The whole point is to test its veracity, its truth. A witness is presumed credible until the contrary is shown. You can't just dismiss a witness as a liar because you think he or she is a liar. You have to prove it. So we are right to demand proof if the authorship of these books is to be denied or their characters maligned. Where is the proof of any one of the authors of our New Testament books? Paul, Peter, John, James, Jude. Where is the evidence of any of them in their lives denying their work or betraying their gospel by their lives? The high morality of the New Testament letters did not come from scoundrels and liars. No one taught like Jesus. No one has ever written like the apostles. The character of the writers. Secondly, because of the character of their teaching, Verse 16, in your ESV, it says, not cleverly devised myths. The NIV has not cleverly invented stories. The Greek word is muthos. These were not great and learned men of their age, and yet in Acts 4 and verse 13, the one thing that impressed the Jewish leaders was that these ordinary men had been with Jesus. In Paul writing in 1 Corinthians 2 and 1 and verse 21 says, since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Paul asked the question, where is the wise man? And his answer effectively, if I may summarize it, is this, dead, buried, forgotten, proven inadequate. Peter insists, not cleverly invented stories, muthos. Now scholars will tell us that a myth is an invented story to convey significant religious truth. And the Apostle Paul says that's precisely not what we are writing. The life and miracles of Jesus are true history. The story of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles is true history. In the writing of Luke, in the Gospel of Luke, and in the Acts of the Apostles, there is an incredible amount of history. Scores of people's names are there. Scores of events known in the first century are there. Luke allows himself to be checked out again and again. I always say, Luke must have had a notebook, and we know there were notebooks in the first century. He must have had a notebook to be able to recall all the details that he writes down. The Bible is a great history book. an accurate history book. Peter says, we were eyewitnesses, and he's referring particularly to that remarkable experience of the transfiguration recorded in Mark 9, for example. John, when he's writing in 1 John chapter 1, says, we're writing everything about what we heard, saw, and touched. We lived with Jesus for three years. Don't tell us we don't know what we're writing about. And here's another legal test. The reliability of a report is confirmed by the degree to which the details match known events and circumstances. So William Ramsey spent the whole of his life digging up Asia Minor, that's modern day Turkey, not all of it, but checking out the record in Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which Luke also wrote. And at the conclusion of it, he came to this decision. Christianity, these are his words, Christianity did not originate in a lie and we can and must demonstrate this. Christian, you can walk tall in believing that the Bible is true. It has withstood all the years of the most desperate attempts to prove that it is a book of fairy stories. It has the right to be counted as true. The Bible is full of history. It links again and again with known facts and times and has never been found wanting. So the character of the writers, the character of their teaching, and thirdly, the character of their subject. Another legal test is this. The number of independent witnesses confirms the greater likelihood of the accuracy of their report, and the agreement of their evidence significantly enhances the truth of their record. Do you ever wonder why God bothered to give us four Gospels? The answer is very simple. If God had given us one gospel, the critics would have said, you see, it's only the word of one man, Matthew. Well, he's a liar to start with. So God gives us four. Five, if you want to add some of the rest of the New Testament testimony to the life of Jesus to it. But we'll just take the four. So God gives us the four. And you know what the critics do? They spend all of their lives scrabbling around in the four Gospels to try and prove that they're all a mass of contradictions. Every supposed contradiction has been answered 1,000 times in the history of the Christian church. People like Calvin knew that way back there. They all knew those. They answered all those questions. Nothing new has ever been written. Four gospels and no discrepancies between them that cannot easily be resolved and no disagreement in the theology of the New Testament writers. The New Testament, not even to mention the old, the New Testament is a beautiful mosaic where it fits together perfectly and writer after writer is preaching the same and teaching the same gospel message. And look at that teaching. not man's standard, not man's solution for salvation. The world religions and their holy books have nothing to compare with the New Testament and the Gospels. They may have good teaching and morality, of course, some of them do have here and there, but where's God coming himself to the rescue of men and women? The birth, the life, the death, the resurrection, the promised return of Jesus is all unique and all promised in the Old Testament. I haven't time to go into that. But you should know that the beauty of the Old Testament, that it's a preparation for the new. The gospel begins way back in Genesis 3.15. And it goes on and on, everything linking nearer and nearer to the coming of the cross. So that when Richard Dawkins talks about the Bible as being a chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents, quote unquote, he has no idea, and a well-taught Bible class kid could tell him better than that. The Bible is a beautiful mosaic fitting together for the coming of Jesus so that when the time had fully come, God sent forth his son. Says the Peter here, verse 19, we have the word of the prophets made more certain. How do we have the word of the prophets in the Old Testament made more certain? The life of Christ. He fulfilled all the prophecies. Remarkably so. According to verses 16 and 17 in your passage in front, their message is all about the Lord Jesus. his power, his coming, his honor, his glory. These things I have written to you, says John in his gospel, chapter 20, verse 21, these things I have written to you. Why? That you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing you may have life in his name. Now the message of these men writing in the New Testament may be offensive. It may be in the minds of many ridiculous, the king on a donkey, the savior on a gibbet, the story of an empty tomb. But that's all they have on offer. They have nothing else to shift and change according to the whim of modern ideas. That's the heart of their message. And we also start there with the life, the death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And without that, there is no gospel. We don't move it, we don't shift it, we don't change it. This church has not done so for nigh on 200 years. That'll be a glorious celebration, and I hope most of you, if not all of you, and a lot more will be here to celebrate that. So, writes Peter, all the prophets, this is what they wrote about. The character of the writers, the character of their teaching, the character of their subject, and then fourthly, because of the character of the author, These are the writers. The author of the Bible is God. And in verses 20 and 21, Peter says, first of all, he means by that, this is of first importance. These men claim to have been moved, carried along by the Holy Spirit. Their writing was supernatural. Strictly, they were the writers involved in the transmission. Yes, using their own mind and their own language and their own understanding, but they were not the authors. God is the author. Paul puts it very clear in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 16, when he uses that magnificent Greek word, theopneustos, God breathed. The scripture is God breathed. 2 Timothy 3.16 is where the scripture came from. God breathed. 2 Peter 1.21 is how we got it. Men moved by God. See how the two things come beautifully together? So the promise of Jesus to his disciples was when he comes, the Holy Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all truth. And elsewhere, Jesus said, he will teach you all things and remind you of everything I told you. So Paul is insistent in 1 Corinthians 2, not in human words, but in words given by the Holy Spirit. The character of the writers. the character of their teaching, the character of their subject, the character of the author, a God who does not lie, and fifthly, because of the character of their purpose. Let's be absolutely clear. The New Testament writers are not writing as they do in their letters to make us intelligent, academic, religious, or even simply to reform our lives. In verse 19, The apostle says, this word gives light, truth, spiritual understanding in a dark world. And my dear friends, that is the urgent need of our children in today's society, of our adults and the example that they give to their children, of our teachers as they instruct their minds, of our businessmen in their hotel and boardrooms, as the sick in their hospital bed and as the prisoner in his cell. They desperately need the light of this message to lead them into all truth. This book is like a light, a lamp, which as Peter says, shines brighter and brighter. It's a high energy bulb that lasts forever and ever. Or as Peter writes, shining, notice his expression that follows, Until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. That is the purpose of our Bible. What a beautiful picture. You know, twice in the book of Revelation, Christ is referred to as the morning star. Revelation 2.28, the promise to all who persevere to the end will be that they will be given the morning star. They will receive the fullness of Christ. Or in Revelation 22.16, Jesus himself claims, I am the bright morning star. You all know what the beauty of a sunrise is on a summer's morning, or even, for that matter, on a beautiful autumn morning. The phrase Peter uses is actually the light-bearing day star, from which we get our words phosphorus and even the word asteroid. They all come from this particular word. It's the brightest, the first star of the morning, heralding a new day. Thus, in verse 19, He says we do well to pay attention to this message, to this gospel, to all that we read in the word of God. Why? I repeat, not just to make us theologically clever, not to make us intelligent people, not to give us some idea that nobody else has got, but until Christ dawns in our heart and mind. The purpose of the Gospel, the purpose of the Bible, the purpose that we have in teaching our children is not to indoctrinate children and others into Christianity. That is not our purpose. But to lead them to Christ, that is the glorious destination. That's what we are about. That's what this church is about. the authority and the purpose of this church from its beginning, Joseph Irons, right the way through to your present pastor and on beyond until Jesus comes. is to bring men and women, young people and children to the light of knowing Jesus as their Lord and their Savior. Scripture has only one great goal and purpose, to shine the light of Christ and his salvation into our dark hearts and minds so that by illuminating and therefore eliminating our darkness and shining out the perfect light of Christ, it might lead us to God for salvation. And we will find our fulfillment in him. And then, having found that salvation, the scriptures go on leading us increasingly into the light of Jesus so that we may be more and more conformed to his likeness and become like him. And that is our ultimate goal. And then, one day soon, When Jesus returns in glory, we shall see the full light of the day, the morning star will have risen, and we will be like him forever. Let's pray together.