We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be verbally and plenarily or completely inspired Word of God, and inerrant in the original writings, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments are the complete and divine revelation of God to man, and therefore are the final authority for faith and life. The Scriptures shall be interpreted according to their literal, contextual, grammatical, historical, and dispensational meanings." So, That gives a summation of our theological meanings there. The meaning of inspiration. Inspiration to the scriptures means that when the writers finally took that which in some cases, remember we talked about it, it was given orally. and they spoke it orally, and it was written down at a later time. But when the scriptures were finally written down, how that came to be is that the Holy Spirit would work within that individual using their life experiences, using their vocabulary, using their education, using their understanding, and would not just dictate the words to them, but use them and their minds and their understanding, and yet when the final product was put forth, it was exactly the words that God wanted said. Now I know that's kind of hard to understand and so we're going to wade into it a little bit deeper as we go on and do our study. But that is the meaning behind it. So the scriptures actually are of divine authorship and they are also the other key thing that is vital to remember here is that they're infallible in the original autographs. Now Today there is a huge concern and argument across the landscape, especially in Baptist circles, about preservation of Scripture. In one sense they're saying that what God has done, especially in the 1611, as we talked about that, that God has absolutely preserved every, you know, jot and tittle, the two smallest marks in the Hebrew alphabet, that God has preserved every single word exactly as it was in the original autographs. And so they're arguing that to say that if that isn't true, then we really don't have a copy of the Word of God. I want you to put your thinking hats on for just a second. Because what that is really saying is that man, no matter what man does, cannot possibly corrupt anything in the transmission of Scripture. And obviously human beings can corrupt that which God has given, and yet we understand that God is sovereign, and there's gonna be a limit to that, isn't there? They cannot completely corrupt it away. In other words, God, it's sort of like the remnant principle. God is going to have some people somewhere that are going to want to copy out the scriptures in a very accurate way. When the scriptures were copied, especially during the times of, in the Old Testament, and even in the times of the New Testament, they were done in such a way as to where the scribes would have a copy of the scriptures here, and they would have a parchment, piece of paper, and they would put them together in what was called a codex, and they would letter by letter copy that out. And when they were done with that particular sentence or phrase, they would actually count the letters. And in some of the earliest manuscripts, you would see little notations up in the corners as to where they counted the letters. Then they went and counted the words. And they would do that painstakingly so that they would have an accurate copy. But can you imagine we take, let's use Randy for an illustration. We take Randy and we put him in a little stone room with some candles or lamps and we say, okay Randy, 12 hours a day I want you to be copying scripture. Well, I promise you, folks, after a while, even though that it's the Word of God, it gets kind of monotonous here. You know what I mean? It gets really kind of boring here. And so what would happen is even though they were careful and they didn't want to make any mistakes, sometimes they had, and when you would come along later and study those manuscripts, you were looking for stuff. One of the forms was called haplography, another one was called datography. Another one was called Homo Oteloton, and the idea behind those, what they were looking for is sometimes they would write a phrase and just because they're in La La Land, they would write the phrase again. And that's called dittography. And sometimes they would read the phrase, and they'd be writing it over here, and they would forget to write that phrase, but they thought they wrote it down. It wasn't because they were literally trying to make a mistake, or it wasn't because they weren't reverent or trying to be careful. You see, you've got to remember they're human beings. And human beings, when you copy stuff down, make mistakes. They do it, even when you're trying, even when you do it so painstakingly, you count the letters, okay? So sometimes, some of those manuscripts, and remember, because of their reverence for the manuscript, once they made the new one and they counted the words, counted the letters and all this, and they got it down as exacting as they could, what would they do with the other ones? They would burn them. They would destroy them because they didn't want it to be in a disheveled form. So they were destroyed. So you've got to understand that we don't have the original, original, originals. And then you remember the persecution that came from Emperor Diocletian in the 300s. He demanded that all manuscripts be destroyed. So many of the earliest manuscripts, especially what we call the unseals that are in all capitals, they were destroyed. We don't have those anymore. We do actually have, I think, three or four copies. Ayliff B., Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus. They're really ancient, and they're in pretty good shape. But most of them are what's called monoscules. They're in lowercase Greek letters. And the Greek letters, also that you need to remember, were all written, there was no break between the words, they were just Greek letters across the page, and you had to be able to read it so well. Can you imagine even if I wrote you a letter in English, and I never used any capitalizations, no commas, no periods, no breaks, and I just wrote the letters all together. I mean, you'd kind of have to sit there and circle the words out, wouldn't you, in order to be able to read it. Well, that's how good they were at reading their language. That's how good they were at studying these things. And so I want you to understand those things because in the transmission of Scripture, in the writing down of the copies of Scripture, that's why I am not just what's called a Textus Receptus guy. meaning that just the manuscripts that were put together by Erasmus, that were compiled into a group of manuscripts called the Textus Receptus, I am what's called a majority text guy. And that means I want to take the majority of all of the texts that we have found that have been preserved that are what are called extant, and you study all of them. And as you read and study all of them, You come to a conclusion that the manuscripts that primarily came from Antioch and Syria, some that came from Alexandria, and some that were preserved in Constantinople, you compare all of those together, yes, and I do give priority to many of those that were part of the Textus Receptus, but when you compare them all, then you know, you can come down and say, okay, here's where a mistake was made, here was one. These 30 copies of Mark all agree, and there's seven over here that don't. Well, we're going to take the 30 that do, and we're using those. The 40 copies of Matthew that all agree, but there's 15 that have some what's called textual variance in it. We're going to dismiss those variants, and we're going to give priority to those that all agree. That is the way what we call lower textual criticism is done in a biblical, accurate, and careful way. And that is done. But to have the modern King James only rabid viewpoint that what God did is double inspiration, he re-inspired, and you have to carry that, not only to 1611, but to all the revisions that were done in the King James Version until ultimately we have this copy here. That's just, it's pure myth. It's pure fable. And you don't need it to have an accurate copy of scripture anyway. And that's why God tells us that we are to study. We are to examine the manuscripts. We are to study to show ourselves approved and to see exactly what is the Word of God. So an understanding of inspiration as it relates to the original time that the Word of God was put to writing is critical for you to understand. And the reason why is you may get a future pastor or a pastoral candidate in here. And that guy stands up and tells you that, I believe the King James Bible is the word of God. So do I. So do I. But if he believes in double inspiration, or inspiration that goes beyond the setting down and the writing of the original autograph at the time when Paul wrote the general epistles, the pastoral epistles, Luke wrote the book of Luke and the book of Acts. If they say that it goes beyond that period of time, number one, they have no biblical justification or example of that. None. Zero. And then they have to demonstrate that it not only took place after at some point in time, but how many times? Is it still going on today then? Is it still going on today? And if it's still going on today, then the sign gifts are still functioning today. And it opens just a humongous can of worms that most of them do not have, I don't know if it's The intellectual desire to be honest or whether it's just the wanting to come up with a simplistic system to say that we still have the Word of God. In some cases I know that it's just pure ignorance. In others it's pure myth manipulation. And I'm warning you that it's out there, and it is a major thing afoot. It is a major thing going across the landscape. Some of our Bible colleges are really struggling with it. Some of the faculty believe this, and some of the faculty don't. And there's warfare going on there. And so be very careful, my brothers and sisters, that you stand on what the Scriptures say. You stand on what the scriptures say about that. Now, the claim for inspiration differs from that from credibility. We were talking last time about scriptural credibility. In reference to the former, the scriptures are affirmed to be the word of God in such a sense that its words, though written by men, and having indelibly impressed on them the marks of their human authorship, were written nevertheless under such an influence of the Holy Spirit as to be also the words of God were written nevertheless under such an influence of the Holy Spirit as to be also the words of God." Let me try and illustrate this to you as best I can because theologians, and you get into seminary and postgraduate work, man, they argue these details ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And so one of the things that I'm trying, I'm gonna try and give you an illustration of this. Okay, let's say right now we go back and we could watch the Apostle Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit write the epistle to the Ephesians. And the Apostle Paul is in a quiet place, and God the Holy Spirit is working within him in a very special way. So as that he is actually going to write down the book of Ephesians. How it does not work is, you picture the Holy Spirit in what is called the dictation theory, as if there was a person sitting next to him. And this is not how it happened. But some theologians have espoused this to be the position, as if the Holy Spirit was there and he's saying, okay, write these words. And the Holy Spirit gave him a phrase, and he wrote down that phrase. The Holy Spirit gave him the next phrase, and he wrote down the next phrase. That is not how it happened. That's called dictation theory. Now, many people want to say that if God didn't dictate it in that particular way, then there's no way that it really is the words that God chose. But I submit unto you that we're dealing with God. And so God is going to move in such a miraculous, special way that as the Apostle Paul is using his mind as, you know, as he's thinking there, he is going to use his vocabulary, that which is words that he knows in his head. And so God the Holy Spirit is going to, in 2 Peter 1.21, the idea is, bear them along, in other words, like carry their mind along, so that as Paul writes under the church at Ephesus, as he's writing those things, God the Holy Spirit is so moving in his mind to help him to be able to communicate that which God wants exactly communicated, but in such a way that he's not dictating it from one person to another. but he's doing it in such a close connection that the thoughts of the Apostle Paul are actually the thoughts of God the Holy Spirit in so much that when he writes those words down those thoughts have been governed and administrated by God the Holy Spirit so they come out as God's Word. But you must always remember it isn't like a dictation, like I call in a secretary and she takes shorthand and I say, alright, you know, write on to Dr. Belding that in two weeks from now we're going to have a meeting that I really want you to attend and please send that off to him. And I just dictate what I want said. It's not like that. God the Holy Spirit literally working within them. And you wonder, I hope you recognize the difficulty in my ability to describe what is going on. And one of the reasons why it is difficult is because it's miraculous. It is nothing short of a miracle. And I want you to be impressed with how hard it is to understand because it isn't something that often happens. And it is something that is extremely significant and unique. And we must recognize that process as clearly of divine origin and of divine power and divine enablement. And when we recognize that process, that it isn't just, you know, God dictating. And the reason why I think it's so significant to recognize it's miraculous is because do people believe today that God speaks to them just like the Word of God? Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do. And in most cases, they say, I have a word of knowledge from God and this is what God told me. And then they stand up and they'll quote something. Remember I've told you one of the seminary guys at Bob Jones University went to a church where they believe in that the sign gifts are still there. And in speaking in tongues, this person stood up and spoke in a tongue. And then somebody else was supposed to stand up and interpret. And so what happened is that somebody spoke in tongues and said, God told me this to tell you this today, and they spoke in tongues. And then somebody stood up and said, well, what God said there, and begin to state what God said. And actually the person that stood up and did that originally was this Bob Jones University student. And what he did is quoted Psalm 23 in Hebrew. And the person that stood up and gave the interpretation gave some fanciful, I meant just pure myth, just made up something. And he said, you're a liar. But not only were they lying to make themselves spiritually look good, my point is, is that the way God did inspiration? No. God did not do it that way. And that's why it's critically important that we understand that. It wasn't dictation, mere dictation. It came from God the Holy Spirit working in a divine and very special way. So that, nevertheless, under such an influence of the Holy Spirit as to be also the words of God, the adequate and infallible expression of His mind and will for us, although the Holy Spirit did not select the words for the writers, listen to this, although the Holy Spirit did not select the words for the writers, It is evident that he did select through them the words that the writers wrote down. He didn't select them for them. He selected them through them. And that, brothers and sisters, is a huge difference, a huge and dynamic difference. Thus, while the credibility of the Bible means only that it takes its place with the best that humans have ever written, the inspiration of the Bible implies that however it may resemble in such histories and other books, it belongs to an entirely different category because of this process. that as no other writings are, it is only reliable, it is the only one that is completely reliable, errorless, and incapable of error, and that it is this, because it differs absolutely from all other books in being itself, even as to its words, the very word of God. Which, by the way, means that when we come to study the Scriptures, in learning how to study the Scriptures, we approach the Word of God differently than any other book on planet Earth. And that is the reason for that. We need to be very careful. Now, we're gonna transition on to some of the proofs of inspiration. Let's see here. Proofs of divine inspiration, and then we're going to go on to several other points. But we're gonna bring this up first. The proofs of inspiration, we're gonna look at Archaeology. And I don't know if any of you, are any of you students of archeology? You love to look at archeological stuff? A little bit. Okay, good. A little bit. Yeah, it's fun to do. The marks of the divine are always distinguishable in that they are evidence that which is above the natural. In other words, the word of God demonstrates to us as supernatural in multiple different ways. The scriptures are distinguishable from all human productions in that they produce characteristics which are made necessary to recognize the classification. We're recognizing that their classification is supernatural, and it's of divine origin, and it sets it apart from all other writings. The testimony of archaeology is corroborative evidence of the pick and spade to the accuracy of scriptures. And by the way, down through the years, they have mocked the scriptures because they said, wow, there is no evidence because of these things. And the longer they do archaeology, The more the Scriptures are proved, the more it validates the Word of God. The testimony of archaeology to the truthfulness and credibility of the Scriptures may also be regarded as corroborative evidence of inspiration. If the Scriptures are to be relied upon, and don't all of you, when you study the Word of God, aren't you trying to rely upon them as the sole rule of your faith and practice? If the Scriptures are relied upon as a statement of truth with no mixture of error, then their witness to their own inspiration may be accepted as trustworthy." You know, I forget who it was, there was a famous preacher in the seventies that talked about Jesus is either a lunatic or the Lord. Well the Word of God is either true or it's a mixture of error. And many of the modernists come along and they want to say that, you know, yeah, in areas of faith and practice the Bible is true. I defy anyone on planet earth to show me a verse that says the word of God in areas of faith and practice is true, but you need to really take it with a grain of salt in all other areas. Show me a verse that says that. Now, the Bible says, rather, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. How much? The Greek structure there of grapho, every word of all of it, every single word of all of it is profitable for doctrine, for instruction. And is God saying there, well, some of it's fallible, but you can use it as instruction anyway? No. That's not what he's saying. He's saying that all of it is valid. The following are illustrations. How do we know that the archaeological evidence supports? Let me give you some really neat things. The story of Abraham has been referred to as no more to be believed in the story of like Achilles or King Arthur. But as a matter of fact, documents written in the time of Abraham in the land in which he was reared are now brought to light of his day. His birthplace has been discovered. For a long time they didn't know where Ur the Chaldean was. The details of his sojourn down into Egypt are now known to bear every evidence of historicity. And we have similar confirmation proof concerning his famous battle with the Confederate kings mentioned in Genesis 14, where for a long time they said those Confederate kings never even existed historically. Historically, even Melchizedek, whom he met, is not the mystery he was as having been proved by the Tel el-Armana tablets. And let me give you some of the stuff that he doesn't cover in here. When we use a phrase like Tel el-Armana, a tel means a dig. That simply means a dig. It's their word of saying when you dig in that spot, it's going to tell you something. So it's an abbreviation. Anytime you do an archaeological dig, the place where they're doing it is called a tell. So you see like Tell el-Armana, that's the dig that's going on at the town of Armana. One of the interesting things that they did when they did an archaeological dig, a tell, at Armarna is they came up with some ancient letters that were written during the time of Joshua in the conquest of Canaan. Now many of the liberals believe that that was pure myth and there was just some kind of the Bedouin sheep herders finally migrated over there and they're trying to take away from the veracity of scripture. What actually happened is the Canaanite kings, or the Hittites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Perizzites, and the rest that were in that era, they wrote letters unto the king of Egypt. And they said in the one which I believe it was Now it wasn't in Akkadian, I read it a long time ago so I'm digging in the archives. But anyway, they wrote it and said the Habiru are eating up the land like locusts. Please send your forces to come and deliver us. and so they were they were pleading with the egyptians to help fight against the habru which are what? the hebrews the hebrews are coming they're eating up the land and nobody can stand before them won't you come and deliver us so what we're seeing is we're seeing a letter that was found through archaeological evidence from a unsaved canaanite king writing to the the king of egypt to send their forces to deliver them that it totally corresponds in time in progress in history with what? The book of Joshua. Exactly. It corresponds with that. So what we're seeing is the longer that they do archaeology, the more it proves what? The veracity of scriptures. Even though, do we just rest on the veracity of scriptures anyway? Yeah, but it's nice to know that whenever archaeology is done, it does nothing but verify the scriptures. The treasure city of Python. by the Hebrews during the time of their hard bondage in Egypt, as recorded in Exodus chapter 111, has been recently unearthed in the Tel el-Kabir dig, and the walls of the houses were found to be made of sun-baked brick. But it's very interesting When this was built was during the time when Moses was asking the children of Israel to be released from Egypt. And what was one of the punishments that Pharaoh did upon them? He said, you're going to double your production. And not only that, you're going to have to go dig your own clay and you're going to have to go and dig the straw and mix it with that to build your own bricks. And it was very interesting that when they found at this dig at Tal al-Kabir, they found out that some of the bricks were mingled with straw exactly in accordance with Exodus chapter 5 and verse 7, written 3,500 years ago. And it totally correspond down to the little details of the straw and the brick from that particular era. What is it telling you and me? It tells us that the word of God is true. And that only someone, especially when that was written down a long period of time after the actual event. Remember we talked about inspiration not only is the word but also corresponds with the event that God was governing. God is showing that only someone who was alive at that time could be inspiring a writer at a much later time to write it with that degree of accuracy because no one would have got all of those little details of the story that accurate over that long period of time. From the time of the event to the time of the inspiration, the committal to writing, that process of what we call inscripturation. Only God could have gotten it that right. Only God. And so that proves to us the divine origin of the scriptures. Recent explorations have made clear important matters concerning the journeys in the wilderness. For example, the point of crossing at the Red Sea, the real character of the desert, the location of the giving of the law at Kadesh Vernia, and other important places. Great light has been thrown upon the history and character of several of the peoples that inhabited the land of Canaan, the Hittites, the Amorites. revealing the reason of God's anger against them for their gross iniquity and showing the necessity for supernatural intervention of the Israelites were to triumph over them. Honestly, I can't even describe for you some of the ungodliness of these people and some of the things that they did to their children and what they did to women. I can't even publicly describe for you some of the vile things that went on. And if I were to describe them to you, you would literally be sick in your stomach. You literally would be sick in your stomach. And so when God said, I want you to go in there and I want you to wipe them all out. When you think about that and say, well, that's like saying we need to go wipe out Canada. And you go, why? There's so many good people there. But if you understood what was going on in some of these cultures of debauchery, beyond anything that you have going on on earth to our knowledge right now, Beyond that, at least to our knowledge. I mean, it's understandable. You sometimes go and read the practices of punishment of the Assyrians to their enemies. I don't know how you can think up such vile things that they thought up. Another case is the mention in the book of Daniel of Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans. This one's really neat and I'm going to give you kind of some insight into this beyond what the book is saying. And so for a long time they said, hey, we have the chronicle of the kings that were reigning in Babylon. And there is no, there absolutely is no Belshazzar. He doesn't exist. And at that time, according to the Chronicles of Babylon, there was supposed to be a king by the name of Nabonidus who was ruling and reigning. Let me give you the little gist of what went on. After Nebuchadnezzar stepped off the scene, Nabonidus did indeed take over. But Nabonidus was a man who loved to do traveling and he also loved archaeological digs. And so much of the time, Nabonidus, though he was the reigning king, he was not there. He was off on his excursions, you know, he loved to travel, he loved to do these things. And so who co-reigned for him was his son Belshazzar. Well, when you get to Daniel chapter five, remember there's the writing on the wall, mene, mene, tekel yufarsin, thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting, and this night the Medes and the Persians shall come. And it says, that night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans was slain. Well you check all the secular records and it says that there is no Belshazzar. He doesn't exist. There's only, according to the official record, that who was king during that time? Nabonidus. Well guess what? Nabonidus was king, but he wasn't there most of the time is what we found out later through archaeological evidence and through extant manuscripts. And we find out that Belshazzar was, Belteshazzar was literally the ruling and reigning king at that particular time, who went and took the gold vessels and silver vessels out of the house of God, and praised the gods of gold, silver, and stone. And that's when the finger of God wrote on the wall, Meinei, Meinei, Tekel Upharsin, thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting. This night thy kingdom is divided, and it shall fall into the hands of the Medes and the Persians. The great wall of Babylon was so big around the palace that you could ride seven chariots side by side all the way around it. They said, surely no one can take this impenetrable city. Our forces are too great. And at that very time, what had the Medes and Persians already done? They had stopped the aqueduct rivers. They had poured rubble into the aqueduct rivers that flowed underneath Babylon, stopped the flow of that, and their armies were marching underneath Babylon at that very moment and took the city with almost no fight. He said, this night, thy kingdom shall be taken from you. That's when Daniel gave that interpretation. Isn't it very interesting that it took a long time for secular archaeology to catch up and validate that which we already knew was true in the word of God? And yet, who could possibly write all that down in absolute precision? Unless they were observing all of that, there's only one who could do that. Not even a man who was there would have understood all of the details and all of the ins and outs. There's only one who would have that vision from heaven to see all the parts and pieces together. There's only one who could write it that way. And that's why we believe in the inspiration of the scriptures. Brothers and sisters, that's why we know God wrote this. And we know he wrote it in and through people in such a way as to communicate what he wanted to communicate. In 1854, Sir Henry Rawlinson discovered in Ur of the Chaldees some terracotta cylinders containing an inscription by the above-named Nabonidus in which he makes mention of Belshazzar, my eldest son. But there still remains the difficulty of how he could be king, and I've already explained that. In 1876, Sir Henry Rawling's workmen were excavating on an ancient part of Babylon when they came upon some jars filled with more than 2,000 cuneiform tablets. One of these was found to contain an official account by no less personage than Cyrus, king of Persia, of the invasion of Babylon, in which, after stating that Nabonidus first fled and then was taken prisoner, he adds that on a certain night the king died. seeing that Nabonidus, who was taken prisoner, lived for a considerable time after the fall of Babylon, this king could have been none other than Belshazzar, of whom the old discredited Bible record long ago that in the sight of Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was certainly slain in Daniel chapter 5 and verse 30. It is evident that Belshazzar was acting as regent during his father's absence and was ruling in his absence. The fact which has thus come to light that Nabonidus and Belshazzar, his son, were both reigning at the same time explains that nothing could Belshazzar's offer to make Daniel the third ruler in the kingdom. Nabonidus being the first and Belshazzar the regent in second. And that's why he says, I will make you third ruler of the kingdom and not second. Many illustrations similar to these are found. For instance, the walls of Jericho did fall outward in confirmation of Joshua chapter 6 and verse 20, and the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy in regard to Tyre and Sidon. Also in chapters 26 and chapter 28 of the book of Jeremiah, excuse me, Ezekiel. These are also validated. So what we're saying is that when you study the archaeological evidence, by the way, If you want a really good book on that and you want to study some archeological, Merrill F. Unger wrote a really good book on archeology in the Bible. And also he wrote a companion book to that. Two books actually. He wrote Unger's Bible Dictionary and he wrote another one called Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible. And I recommend all three. They're great reads. They're really good reads. And you get those into your library, you will be greatly enriched. And so if you come across the passage of scripture, especially like in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you go, hey, it looks like there's a discrepancy here. You go to Unger's book, and he'll explain what's going on. And so it's a very, very valuable tool. So Merrill F. Unger, OK? The one is Unger's Bible Dictionary. The other one is alleged discrepancies in the Bible. And so those are going to be really, really helpful for you. And the other one is on archaeology. I don't know the exact title of the third one on archaeology. If you go to Amazon, when I go to Amazon, I order so many books off of Amazon. I'm reading, by the way, another good book, just a little sidebar here. I'm reading by James M. Stalker, The Life of the Apostle Paul. It would be a book that you'd really enjoy reading. It takes all of the writings of Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and the general epistles, the pastoral epistles, weaves the whole narrative line together and gives you a storyline, a writing of the life of the Apostle Paul. Really neat book. And so, James M. Stalker, The Life of the Apostle Paul. Now we're going to go on here, we're going to talk about, we've looked at the internal proofs. We're going to look at the internal proofs from the Bible itself. The testimony of the Bible. What does the Bible say? Internal proofs of the divine origin. The unity of the Bible. There are 66 different books written by some 40 different authors over a period of 1600 years in at least three different languages. Now why is this significant? The human writers were brought up in different countries and they were so remote from each other in time and space that they could have no mutual acquaintance and could neither have conspired for an evil end nor combined for the best purposes. In other words, there is no way that you can get covering the span of three different continents, 40 different authors, over 1600 years, that there was some kind of, hey, let's all get together and write a book and call it from God. And we'll agree on subject matter, we'll agree on purpose, we'll agree on theology, we'll agree on all these points. Sometimes, you know, you wonder and say, why didn't God just in the Garden of Eden sit down with Adam and say, okay, here's the Bible, man's manual for life? Well, you know what? If he did that, it would be really hard to validate that that truly came from Adam and that God did it all at once. But if God uses 40 different authors over 1600 years in three different languages, from three different continents. God does a miraculous work like that. And all of those scriptures are in agreement. Even somebody who's only got the electricity to the brain like me can come up with this conclusion, that there has to be a divine author there for all that to agree. There has to be. Even if you've only got 36 brain cells like me, you still have to come to that conclusion, folks. that obviously there's a divine author that is behind all of this. So, these human writers clearly were directed by God. They did not have an acquaintance one with another. The subjects upon which they wrote were very diverse and various, some historical, some prophetical, some devotional, some ethical. The form of the writings was in some cases prose and in others poetry. And yet, notwithstanding all these divergent elements, they have produced essentially one book. Not only is the Bible as a whole an unrivaled phenomenon, but its features all phenomenal and none more so than the convergence of contents like rays towards one common focal point coming from people of diverse background, different languages, different cultural settings and the diversity there which brings it to a focal point can only say that the process of inspiration was evident in the lives of these multiple people. I've got a question for those people when I get to heaven. I'm not alone about you, but I've got one of those brains that's always got to think up questions that I need answered, that can't be answered on earth. But the question I've got to answer, and I want to walk up to the Apostle Paul and say, okay, okay, okay. Tell me When the process of inspiration was going on and it resulted in the inscripturation, the writing down of the Word of God, tell me what that was actually like. Describe that for me. Because I needed first-person narrative. I want to do that and then turn around and ask God, God, tell me, God the Holy Spirit, tell me how you did that from your side. through this individual. So you can ask God the Holy Spirit and you can ask the Apostle Paul. How did that actually work? Wouldn't it be neat to have the answers? You know one of the reasons I believe God doesn't give us the real detailed mechanics of that? What happens when we learn of the detailed mechanics of God? We try and do what? Synthesize it, copy it. We try and synthesize it to say that we're really doing it of God. Does the Roman Catholic Church do that to this day? Yeah, they do. And they said the Pope speaks ex-cathedra. By the way, the Popes have gotten burned by that multiple times down through the years by speaking ex-cathedra when it turned out to be absolutely wrong. And so you notice that they don't do that very often anymore because they got really burned in the past doing that. The unity of the Bible is unique. Never elsewhere have so many different treatises, historical, biographical, ethical, prophetical, poetical, been combined together making one book as all the hewn stone and timber make one building. Or better still, as all the bones, muscles, and ligaments combine in one body. This again, while indisputable as a fact, is unparalleled in all literature. And all the conditions of being humanly, speaking not only unfavorable, but fatal to such a combination. In other words, there's no way human beings could possibly even do that, even if there was a collaboration amongst the wisest people that ever lived. I submit as evidence, the theory of evolution can show me something. that the secular scientists, biologists, historians, and educators have worked at harder than developing and deploying the theory of evolution. And to this day, you have to ask the question, which theory of evolution do you believe? Because the one I was taught in school in the 70s is completely different than the one that is being taught now. So if the theory of evolution is really based on empirical evidence, evidence that is testable through empiricism and conclusions that are observable and repeatable, if all that is true, then why has the conclusions been so incredibly varying? And why is the Word of God so absolutely theologically, historically, culturally, linguistically absolutely accurate. Though it was written over 1600 years, three different languages, 40 different authors, multiple cultural backgrounds, and yet you factor in all of that which should have produced what? An absolute litany of difference. There's an absolute unity to the Bible. Brothers and sisters, you cannot come to any other conclusion but this conclusion. Now that's miraculous. Absolutely, absolutely miraculous. Okay, we're going to, I've got a lot of other neat stuff I want to get into, the unique representations of the Bible and all of those kind of things, but we're going to stop for Q&A time. I hope that you're enjoying this. I thoroughly enjoy this. But let's have a brief word of prayer and then we'll take it up in a minute. Father, thank you for the Word of God. Thank you that it touches and changes and transforms our lives. Thank you that we can depend on it. Thank you that you interrupted and intervened into the flow of human history to communicate your truth. For it's in Jesus' name we thank you. Amen.