All right, we have been taking some time, going through a series on Bible basics for discipleship, looking at bibliology, if we wanna give it a theological term or topic. and try not to go too deep or throw it over our heads, but important for strengthening our faith, for answering questions about the Bible, for our evangelism, for even those who are young in the faith who don't fully understand some of the foundational doctrines. Saved, yes, trusting Christ, but maybe still very young and immature in their faith and need to grow and we maybe have opportunity to help them. And this is a way that I believe that God strengthens our faith when we see how God gave us his word and preserved his word for us. It is such a testimony to God and who he is and his love for us and giving us his word and sending the living word, Jesus Christ. And I hope that this series is a help and encouragement and strengthens us and gives us opportunity. with evangelism and with discipleship. So we'll go right into 2 Peter chapter number one, and I need to get there myself so I don't misquote the passage. 2 Peter one, we'll come back and make reference to this as well as 2 Timothy three from time to time. The chapter one of 2 Peter verse 19, we have also a more sure word of prophecy. Where into you do well that you take heat as unto a light that shineth in a dark place until the day dawn, the day star arise in your hearts. Knowing this first and no prophecy of the scriptures of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. So we are going through several words. And of course, this is in line with our theme. And we are focusing throughout the year. Sorry about that. We're focusing this year on our confidence being in the scriptures. And if you weren't awake after Marty leading us, then you're awake now after that. So our confidence being in the scriptures, our confidence being in the Bible. And so we have started working our way through words, revelation, inspiration, preservation, we'll get to preservation, translation, interpretation and going with that. kind of a sub-point or part of the same point, and application and working our way slowly through these. And right now, we are looking specifically at inspiration. Now, this is a quote from an article I read this week. No surprise to us, most of the major denominations have drifted away from, in many cases, they were Fundamental, foundational, they were orthodox in their early days, in their beginning days, many of them. Or some denominations were unorthodox from, but we know that there has been significant slide liberalism, unorthodoxy, all kinds of compromise that has affected denominations throughout the years. week was Anglicanism. Now I understand that in many of the major denominations there are conservative churches that might be not as liberal as the denomination. I personally believe those churches ought to be led by their pastors out of those denominations. I don't believe that they should remain in a denomination that is theologically corrupt, unorthodox. I think that they ought to be separated, and that's one of the reasons we're an independent, fundamental Baptist church. foundational doctrines, we're independent. I mentioned on Wednesday night in the business meeting, I'm thankful that I don't get appointed every quarter. I'm thankful that I don't get appointed by some denominational hierarchy and they handpick me and say, okay, you're done in Lafayette, I want you to go to Anchorage, Alaska. I'm glad that they, no offense to Anchorage, Alaska, that just came to mind because Candy's dad was born in Anchorage and there's a missionary that contacted me that's going to Alaska that we may hear from later in the year, but anyway. I'm thankful. I mentioned on Wednesday night that I met a pastor from a denomination, and he was telling me that he had been appointed to his church three years ago. And I was like, what do you mean appointed? I was just young in the ministry. I didn't really understand fully all that. And he said, yeah, there was another guy who was here. And so-and-so in the headquarters, I don't remember how he explained it all, but somewhere up in the denominational leadership, they decided that this other guy And so he got appointed to this church and he said that he didn't know how long he was going to be there before he got reappointed. I was just like, well, I never heard of such a thing. Growing up in an independent Baptist church and having congregational form of government and God's people being led of the spirit to call a man and him receiving that call and uniting together and much as we did here, and I'm thankful for God's leadership through his people and the congregational form of government is, I believe, the most biblically in line with how God desires to lead his church and his people in their choice of leadership and God's call. But Anglicanism, the Anglican denomination has drifted for years. As a matter of fact, in this article, it says, Okay, Anglicanism is the Church of England. The Anglican Church is the Church of England. And we understand that the Church of England started because Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Catholic Church wouldn't give him permission to divorce his wife. Henry VIII was a scoundrel. He was a womanizer, blah, blah, blah. And Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife. And the pope, the Catholic Church, wouldn't grant him the divorce. It wouldn't give him permission. So he said, OK, Phuey, with you, I'll just start my own denomination. And he came up with the Church of England. So of course, it kept a lot of the trappings, vestiges, sacramental system of the Catholic Church, just kind of reorganized it a little bit and exempted himself from the rule about divorce. And so he divorced his wife. The Church of England began. So, in this article, the writer of the article says, the liberal Catholics and other modernists grew in the Church of England and came to die there. Ultimately, unbelief with regard to the Bible's truthfulness flourished, especially during and after the World Wars. So we're talking about the 19-teens into the 40s and to this day. They already were in doctrinal compromise in the early 20th century. The immense pressure of a secularizing British culture didn't help things. So what has brought the Anglican Church to this head where they are having to now make a split or decide whether they're gonna continue as they have been? Know what it is? Because the Anglican Church is now allowing their rectors, their bishops, whatever they call their pastors, to issue blessings on same-sex marriages. They're not going to sanction same-sex marriages. They're not going to perform the wedding for a same-sex marriage, but they are now allowing them to bless same-sex marriages. How did they get there? Because ultimately, unbelief with regard to the Bible's truthfulness flourished, especially during and after the world. They get to this point where they're having to deal with the blessing There's no such thing as blessing a homosexual union, but you understand in the terms of today's language. How did they get to that point where they're arguing over that? Because they left the inspiration and the authority of the Bible over 100 years ago. That's why they're in the predicament there, and we've seen that with almost all the major denominations. They left the inspiration and the authority of God's word 50, 60, 70, 100 years ago, and now they wonder why they're having to make decisions about same-sex marriages. And now we see denominations and leadership in major denominations capitulating to homosexuality and to the LGBTQ, even to the point that a big-name pastor in the Atlanta, Georgia area, who already we have issues with because of his disregard for the Old Testament. Now he came out and he is using very gray, muddy language regarding homosexuality, basically endorsing homosexuality while the other side of his mouth saying, well, it's not such a good thing, because the Bible kind of sort of says some things about it that's not... allowing for it. But at the same time, we need to love these people because they have to deal with all these hardships, and we need to love them because there are still a part of the church. So out of his mouth is coming bitter water and sweet water at the same time, mostly bitter. And if you have bitter water and sweet water mixed together, what do you get? Bitter water. So that man who already undermined the inspiration, the authority of God's word, mega church, thousands of people, he could out-preach me in a hundred ways, okay? He's one of the, if I said his name, even his dad, his dad who is not, as far as I know, gone the direction that he has, I don't know for sure, I understand $100,000 as a retired pastor, wow. But now this preacher's son, who already disregarded the Old Testament, who has already undermined the inspiration, the authority of God's word, is it no wonder he's now compromising on homosexuality? No surprise. So this quote here, I had to put this. I thought it went so well with this. teachers will not accept or obey God as he has revealed himself and so they make an idol they call the Lord and worship him they can refashion and reshape it as they please and what pleases them are socially acceptable sins their renunciation of scriptures reliability allows them to ignore the Bible Conveniently citing it for their progressive social causes, but ignoring it for doctrines and morals that would kill their pride or harm their social status. The reality is that false teachers and their followers do not fear God. Instead, they fear the consensus opinion of the scientific community, the academic world, the social upper crust, or the populace at large. That's where we're at. And that's almost every single major denomination that is here or is here. And we are an independent Baptist church. So we've been talking about inspiration. Trying to adjust this wire here. Proofs of inspiration. I want to get into this because I want to try to get as much of this lesson, if not this entire lesson, complete if possible. We've talked about revelation, we've talked about inspiration, and what inspiration is the God-breathed words of God, okay? All scripture's given, God-breathed, okay, to us, keeping, again, the personality, the experiences of that author, that human author, but he wrote the very words of God. while still retaining his personality, his experiences, his knowledge of the language, Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine Greek, but those words that they wrote were the very words of God, God breathed. So we've spent time on inspiration. We talked last week about the testimony of Jesus. As we look at proofs of inspiration, verification of inspiration, our faith has substance and evidence, Hebrews 11. Now faith is the substance of things that hope for the evidence of things not seen. Our faith has substance and evidence, internal and external. What about the testimony of Jesus regarding scripture? Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. We also see in John 10 in verse 35, the scripture, the scripture cannot be broken. We talked about Luke 16, where the rich man and Lazarus, they died, and the rich man lifted up his eyes in hell, being in torment, and he wanted Lazarus to go back and to tell his five brethren. And Lazarus, obviously, by the inspiration of God, declared God's truth to the rich man in a short window that we have into heaven and hell. What does Lazarus say? He says, if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe somebody who comes back from the dead. That's the words of Jesus in telling the events of the rich man and Lazarus, and giving us a short window into heaven, into this conversation. God doesn't tell Lazarus, Abraham doesn't tell Lazarus, obviously by the words of God, and Jesus doesn't tell the story of this event. by saying, yeah, I wish there was a better way. If I could just get people to come from hell and go back with the fire and the singe and smelling like the hellfire and brimstone, if I could just get them to go, they would be so much better evangelists than these people I left on the earth to do it for me and using the word of God. Is that what Jesus said in that story, in that event? As he gave us the account of the rich man and Lazarus? No. Lazarus knew from God, and as Jesus gave us the accounts, he said, if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe if somebody came back from hell, from the dead, and told them. That's the words of Jesus, speaking of the inspiration, the infallibility, the authority of his word. And then we see it in Luke 24 as well, Jesus on the road to Emmaus, the disciples, and he declared to them from Moses, and the law, the prophets, gave them the scriptures concerning himself. And then all of a sudden Christ disappeared and they realized that he was speaking of himself. So much in that passage that speaks to not only the inspiration, the authority of God's word, but also speaks to the deity of Christ and the fact that Christ is the living word and the Bible is all about Christ. So much in that passage in Luke 24. So if Jesus didn't believe that the Bible is inspired, in the very word of God, then what does that say about the character of Jesus himself? What does that say about our submission to the word of God? What does that say about our respect and reverence for the word of God? If Jesus didn't believe it, then where would that put us? But Jesus did believe it, he declared it. He said, the Bible is the word of God. This is me. This is the God-breathed revelation of me. So if Jesus made that statement, once again, we come back to what C.S. Lewis said, either Jesus is a liar, a lunatic, or he's Lord. So Jesus even stakes his reputation, his character, and the character of God upon this doctrine in the authority of God's word. That's one proof. Second proof, change lives. We talked about Saul and Paul. Why would Saul have given up all of the righteousness that he had to go be a disciple of Christ? When he had everything that religion could offer, he had all the righteousness that he could muster up for himself, he had the spiritual religious pedigree that if anybody could get to heaven on his own, surely it would be Saul. But he became Paul, by the grace of God, who saved him, and he renounced all of that self-righteousness, and became a disciple of Christ, an apostle to the Gentiles, and even was martyred for Christ. What about historical figures? We could talk about John Newton, George Mueller, many, many others, and then what about our own personal testimonies? How Christ changed us. how the Word of God reached us and has changed us and continues to sanctify us and make us more like Him. No other explanation except for the supernatural work of the Word of God in our lives. And then let's talk about some of the fulfilled prophecies. There are a lot more than just these. I just listed several. Let's talk about Israel's conquest of Canaan, its settlement by Israel, the captivity of Israel, and their return. Did not Moses talk about that in Deuteronomy 28 through 30? How did that get fulfilled? Moses just had a really good sense of what would happen hundreds of years later. He just had a really good sense of what might happen. Is that all it was? No, God revealed to Moses, Hank, Oh, right, right, yep, yep, and we'll get to that, but yeah, they just try to change the time, the chronology, good, they use that argument. What about Jeremiah, who predicted 70 years of captivity? Specifically, years, or at least months, if not years ahead of the captivity, and of course their return, so 70 plus years before he preached, this is what will happen because of your sin, What about Isaiah who predicted the decree of Cyrus and named him by name before Cyrus ever came into power? I mean, no one can do that except God reveals it to him. There's these self-proclaimed prophets who have been wrong about the return of Jesus. They've been wrong about however many different things, and yet they continue to sell tickets, continue to get ratings, continue to have followers. Some of them have churches and colleges, big crystal cathedrals, on and on we could go, and they're false prophets. Jeremiah predicted, or excuse me, Isaiah predicted the very decree of Cyrus and named him by name many years in advance. Daniel's prophecies, Daniel has been, parsed up and sliced and diced by all of the revisionists and critical theorists, the German rationalists, theologians, and all those, can I just say, idiots, and false teachers. And they try to take Daniel and try to move him into, as Hank was just talking about, they try to move Daniel's writings several hundred years later, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls are found, and they find Daniel's, the Book of Daniel, and it goes back hundreds of years, and oh, and then all the things that Daniel prophesied came true exactly, and we even have Antiochus Epiphanes, who was a type of, he's the early, The near prophecy, the near fulfillment of the prophecy regarding the Antichrist. I mean, so many things we could talk about. What about Nahum's predictions of Nineveh? The destruction of Nineveh? I mean, that'd be like me saying that Moscow's gonna go down. Yep, I know it. And in detail of how it was gonna happen. Do I really, can I predict that with that kind of accuracy? No way. But Nahum did when it came to Nineveh. Nineveh was a wicked city. They didn't care about no Geneva Convention back then. The Assyrians were wicked, pagan, torturers, murderers. They were awful. And Nahum predicted, obviously Jonah at one point saw a revival there. But in Nahum's case, he predicted Nineveh's destruction. Ezekiel 26 predicted the destruction of Tyre. And then, did not Jesus himself talk about the temple? Not one stone be left upon another, and sure enough, Titus in AD 70 destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. Those are just a handful of historical prophecies. Okay, what about Messianic prophecies? I wish that we had time to go through all of these. There are 300 specific predictions fulfilled regarding the Messiah. For even eight of them to be fulfilled, It would be a one to 10 to the 17th power chance of even eight of them being fulfilled, and yet 300 specific prophecies regarding Christ were fulfilled. Here's just a handful of them. The virgin birth, birthplace in Bethlehem, John the Baptist being his forerunner, the triumphal entry, his side pierced at Calvary, Even specific prophecies regarding what Jesus said on the cross, that's what the word quote is there for, darkness, mocking, piercing of hands and feet, casting of lots, fulfilled precisely, prophesied many, many years in advance. His unbroken bones, vinegar being offered to him to drink, buried in a rich man's grave, And then of course, his resurrection and ascension, all fulfilled, exactly as God said they would be hundreds of years before, in many cases. Incredible. And again, 300, this is just a handful, there are 300 fulfilled. And if even eight of them were fulfilled, they have done the mathematical probability and it's one to the 10th to the 17th power. So that would be 1 times 10 with, I think, 17 zeros after it. Is that right, Dan? That's a lot of zeros. I don't know what that compares to these ridiculous lotteries, the Powerball. Wasn't it up into billions of dollars that was recently won? I don't even know who won it or if they ever found the person. Maybe they're still trying to find a lawyer and a financial person who won't rip them off. I don't know. Oh, and of course, you know, they win a billion dollars and the government takes about 750 million of it, right? Anyway. Oh, but we need to have, can I go ahead and just say this? But we need to have equitable income, distribution of the wealth. So I think if they win a billion dollars, then all of us ought to get a share, equally distributed, right? Isn't that what they talk about all the time? Okay, anyway. So we see historical prophecy, messianic prophecy fulfilled to the T. Not these palm reading, I'm so glad they got rid of that billboard here at Schuyler in Sagamore. Driving home from church and there was this big palm reading. What do they do? Just a bunch of generalities. reading tea leaves and all that nonsense. It's just a bunch of generalities. And our minds then come up with all the specifics. It's just a bunch of bogus. And people will pay money for ridiculous stuff like that. These are fulfilled prophecies to the letter, to the tea. I didn't put all these up. Sorry about that. Here we go. And then we can get into scientific accuracy. And again, these are just a handful. Is the Bible a science textbook? No, but everything it says about science is 100% true and accurate. Okay, we only have time here for a handful. But there's a book that's out called None of These Diseases. I really want to read it. And the last five Circumcision, handling dead bodies, leprosy, indoor plumbing, and sexual morality are all listed in this book, from my understanding, in great explanation of how the Bible, obviously hundreds and thousands of years before all of the modern medical science and technology, gave us healthy and moral stipulations that actually preserve human life and give us a healthier way of living. Out here on Sagamore and, what would it be, South Street, 26, South, right? Isn't it South Street in Lafayette and it's State Street on Purdue campus, something like that? Okay, I get them mixed up sometimes. I just call it 26 most of the time. But out here, we had to tell the boys to look away. Some people out here protesting circumcision. on Sagamore and 26 one day. And we had to tell the boys, somebody warned us ahead of time. And sure enough, we were coming down. And now Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan has made a, has a podcast and he condemned circumcision. And it's, some of them are very graphic, like the signs they were holding up. I won't even describe some of the things they were holding up. But circumcision, obviously we know of it as the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, but it also had a healthy purpose. And actually, the eighth day is medically proven to be the best day for a baby boy to have circumcision. It's the least painful for the boy, and it's at the best time for the blood to coagulate. And it's healthy. It's resulted in a reduce of bacteria that causes various diseases and other things. So we could talk about that. What would seem like a no-brainer, healing of dead bodies. But you don't just go handling dead bodies. There's all kinds of chemicals and different things that come out of the body and can make people very sick. Numbers 19 prescribes specific ways to handle a dead body and keeping people away and the ways of sanctifying oneself if they had to touch or handle the body or whatever. There's specific healthy reasons for that and yet there would be Egyptians who would take a body to the, pyramid to bury it and they would be dying. All the people who would be handling the dead body to bury the people with the Pharaoh and all these people were dying. Well because they were handling this dead body and they were being corrupted by the different chemicals, and bacterias, and germs and everything. And God said in His Word, don't do that. Here's the way to take care of a dead body. Leprosy we know how it was spread in the early days, in the Bible days. And there were protocols that greatly reduced the spread of the disease, quarantines, etc. Even indoor plumbing. Do we know that even into, what was it, 17th and 18th centuries, they were still allowing sewage to flow underneath houses and businesses? It's disgusting. But there were all kinds of diseases in people's homes and businesses because they were allowing the sewage to flow right underneath the city streets, underneath the homes and the businesses. Well, God said in Deuteronomy 23, put the sewage outside, away from the population. Put it away from the people. Praise the Lord, we have indoor plumbing now. We have water treatment plants and all that. But I've been in a little slum village in Nairobi, Kenya and watched raw sewage coming down. Literally, it's not a sidewalk, it's a path like this, but it's just a dirt path and there's sewage just running down and people picking through the garbage. God made it very clear as far back as Deuteronomy 23, as he's warning Israel about how when you occupy the Canaanite lands, they're not gonna be taking care of all this stuff, but here's some healthy reasons because I want you to preserve your life so that you can serve me in the land. It's for your personal, physical health because the body and the soul, the body and the spirit are together, integrated, and the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, So we try to take care of our health. Now some people bow to the God of the body, and then we have a culture today that says that what's inside is really the authentic you, and so you can just take the body and do whatever you want with it. But God said, get the sewage away from the people. Sexual morality, of course, we could talk about just the monogamy. of marriage and premarital sex and fleeing fornication and all the warnings in the Bible about immorality. Not just for the glory of God, ultimately that's what it's for, but also for our own health, our own prosperity, our own success, our own good, for the family, for the fabric of society. And we have seen, have we not, the rampant immorality and the consequences of it in our culture? Scientific accuracy, the water cycle, spherical Earth, Earth rotates on its axis, Earth suspended in space, countless stars, the fact the atmosphere has weight, God said all those things. Medical science or science may have figured out some of that stuff and put it into a scientific method and did all their numbers and research and surveys and articles, but God said it in his word. The life of flesh is in the blood, we could even talk about that. So then let's go to, there we go, archaeology. I love archaeology, and I just find it fascinating. I'm a bit of a history buff, and you could go on and on. I know Dan gave us a little bit of archaeology in one of his series. I don't want to bore us with this, but do you know that there was a mystery about the Hittites actually existing? The Bible talks about them. There was a mystery about this and people were debating, oh, the Bible's not true because the Bible talks about the Hittites. Oh, they never existed. And then the 1800s, they began to discover things. And by 1906, they discovered, and we don't have time to read all of these things, but they dug up these hieroglyphic, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and tablets, cuneiform tablets. And there's a whole website that I have marked there. If you really wanted to go out and read, you could read a lot about the discovery of the Hittites. And they were discovered and proven to be an actual people who lived and reigned and had certain influence and power in the Middle East. And sure enough, Did the Bible not talk about the Hittites? And why did the Hittites not necessarily mention Israel a whole lot in there? Why would that be? They got beat by Israel, right? The Hittites aren't saying, whoa, there was this country ruled by the Lord God Jehovah that whooped us. No, they don't wanna put that in there. Just like the Egyptians, they don't wanna put in there, we had all these plagues and the Lord God Jehovah showed all our gods were false gods. and our firstborn son was slain. They don't want to put that in there. That shows their defeat. We could go to Belshazzar and Daniel's third ruler in the kingdom. I didn't go into great detail on that one. But why is he mentioned as the third ruler in the kingdom? They have had archaeological discoveries that have proven that there was Belshazzar, and then there was another provincial ruler, and then there was Daniel. And they have archeological record now of why that is, why he's mentioned as the third ruler of the kingdom. Now this goes to what they try to say about Moses writing later, some of these books of the Bible being written many years or centuries later. Well, one of the ways that they argued was because, oh, writing was not developed by Moses' time. Well, then they found the Sinai script in 1948, The Code of Hammurabi, this is fascinating. The Code of Hammurabi was a set of 282 laws inscribed in stone by the Babylonian King Hammurabi. What's the years? 1795 to 1750 BC. I don't even like BCE. Sorry, I left that in there because it was a quote. Do we realize what they're even doing with BCE? Does anybody know? Yeah, before the common era. I just like BC, before Christ, and Anno Domini after Christ. And I forget what they use for AD now. What's the acronym for? Is it ACE? Or CE, the common era, that's right, yeah, yeah. Since when? Good answer, right? So they go back and they find Hammurabi, and they find his law code, and they're like, oh, wait a minute here. Oh, the code of Ur-Nammu even goes back to when? 2,100 to 2050 BC. In what city? What city? Ur, and who got called out of Ur, the Chaldees? Abraham, yes. Isn't it amazing, we don't need archeology to verify, we don't need archeology to prove the Bible is true, right? But isn't it incredible, isn't it fascinating how archeology verifies what the Bible already said is true? We just have to come along and get hit upside the head sometimes with a clay tablet to realize the Bible's been right all along, because of course it is, because God wrote it. We could go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's so much about the Dead Sea Scrolls. I love studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's just absolutely fascinating. Manuscripts that go back to 100 BC to 180. There's 950 different manuscripts of various lengths, mostly in fragments, though some were intact. The manuscripts have been classified into three main categories, biblical, apocryphal, sectarian. We could talk about the verification of the Hebrew, the Masoretic text. We could talk about even the timeline, the chronology, and how Daniel and the book of Isaiah, they found the entire scroll of Isaiah and verification of so many things that Bible believers have been believing and living for over 1,900 years before these were discovered in 1947. We believed this, we were living this, and it was true. It wasn't like 1947, they found the Dead Sea Scrolls and said, oh, now the Bible's true. Is that what happened? No, we were believing this, living this, and it was showing itself The Bible, God himself showing himself in the person of Jesus Christ in the written word, showing himself true and powerful, and showing reality before 1947. But it's wonderful to have this kind of witness, to have this kind of evidence, to have this kind of verification with the Bible. Already says it's true. More than 230 manuscripts in the collection are biblical scrolls, copies of works that are now part of the Old Testament. The scrolls contain partial or complete copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible except the book of Esther. Many of the biblical manuscripts closely resemble the Masoretic text, which was the text for the Old Testament. Obviously, then the Septuagint was translated from that into Greek. which was used for many English translations, excuse me, such as the KGV, ESV, and NIV. The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written between the 2nd century BC and 2nd century AD. Jewish scholar Frank Moore Cross and archaeologist Neiman Avogad concluded that the scroll fragments were written between 225 BC and AD 50. Carmen Dating estimated that an animal skin from the scrolls was from around the same period. Bronze coins found around the caves appear to span from 135 BC to AD 73, these are the oldest known copies of biblical works. Just incredible, the evidence, the testimony. There. Yes? Yeah, for sake of time and space, I didn't put the picture of the museum in Israel. But there's a museum in Israel where they are kept, where they're preserved. And they're being digitized and everything. It's really fascinating. There's a whole website just on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they have pictures of the museum and stuff. But I didn't. You could probably go to, well, That's just an article that summarizes, that website is just an article that summarizes the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there's a whole website that's an Israeli, basically an Israeli scholar, and he has a website that just goes into great detail, shows the pictures of the museum and everything. Good question. All right. So then we could go to, I don't know how to pronounce it. This has a specific reference to the house of David. And there were even people who questioned the existence of David as the Bible declares him to be. And this particular stone showed a reference to the house of David. This is another inscription, the Tell Dan inscription. These are incredibly important archaeological artifacts that people reference. We don't have time to go into all the details. And then, if you've seen anything in the news, they just recently opened up the Pool of Siloam for public. and they are going to finish excavating the Pool of Siloam. They've already got part of it excavated, they're gonna do another, they're gonna finish it, and they're giving it some access by the public, and then we could get into the thousands of manuscripts. There's no other book that has the kind of manuscript evidence that the Bible has, none. Nothing even close, nothing even remotely close to the manuscript evidence. And again, I say it all the time when I'm talking about this, but nobody doubts that Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. And yet it has minuscule manuscript evidence, many of which are hundreds, if I remember right, hundreds of years later, but nobody doubts that Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. But people ask all kinds of blasphemous questions about the Bible when plenty, Overwhelming amounts of evidence for the historical, scientific, and moral, and supernatural accuracy of the Bible, and evidence for the Bible. We can get into the indestructibility of the Bible, and we'll have to close with this. Lord willing, next week we'll get into the canonicity of the Bible, which will then take us into the preservation of the Word of God. Diocletian. He decreed in 303, every Bible should be destroyed. By 312, Constantine had removed his pagan symbols and put an end to persecution, and the Bible was free to be distributed. Obviously, it was Latin at that time, primarily in Latin. And we'll get into preservation, translation to English, and that sort of thing. Voltaire, we've talked about him before. He claimed the Bible to be a relic in 100 years. 20 years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his home to print Bibles and became the headquarters for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Isaiah 48, the word of our God shall stand forever. Matthew 24, 35, my word shall not pass away. We have the preservation of God's word. in the manuscripts, and not just from the manuscripts, okay, and we'll talk some more about that as we get to it, but also the entire New Testament could be constructed, reconstructed from the writings of the early church fathers. And none of the church fathers recognized the Apocrypha as part of the canon, as inspired. The early church fathers quoted from the Bible And the entire New Testament could be reconstructed just from the early church fathers, because they recognized the New Testament as the canon, part of the canon of scripture, including obviously the Old Testament. Yes, Hank? We're talking about guys like Jerome, and name some more, I'm drawing a blank. Arrhenius, Augustine. Augustine would have been later. What's that? Polycarp. Yeah, I need to brush up on my names. But we could go into, I forget all the different ones. Clement of Rome. So I'm drawing a blank on some of the others. Earl. Oh, right, they... Right, right. They are just giving some extra biblical evidence, if I can say it that way, to the fact that the Bible is inspired and authoritative, the infallible Word of God. They recognize that, wrote and quoted from, but right, we don't put them into the same level as inspired like the Word of God, but the church would do that, right. They would include tradition in, yeah. Thank you for that. All right, any other comments or questions? I know this was a little bit more academic, and I apologize, but I hope that it was still helpful and encouraging and strengthening to our faith. Let's close in prayer, and then we'll get ready for the service. Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you, Lord, for these evidences that, Lord, help us, but we know, Lord, that your word is true, We know that your word will stand forever. And Lord, we don't need all these evidences. Many people have loved you and served you, having not even known all of these different artifacts and archaeological discoveries. But Lord, we thank you for these further witnesses. But Lord, may our faith rest in you. May we submit to the inspired, infallible, authoritative word of God. Lord, help us not to compromise. Help us, Lord, to continue to stand upon the truth and the faith that was once delivered unto the saints. And we thank you, Lord, for our time together this morning. Pray bless the service now to follow. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, thank you for being here for Sunday School Hour, our Bible study class. We'll get ready for the service to start in about 15, 16 minutes.