Our church is starting this tonight, I’m really excited about it as I am about 5 chapters into the book and it is SO.GOOD.
If you’re local and want to join us – click here for more info!
On to the book – there are some really great points that have been made so far, that had me underlining with my pencil (big deal, yk, I don’t write in books!!) and I had to blog about them.
“The New Testament was written a long time ago. How do we know that what they wrote down has not been changed over the years?”
Nicky Gumbel shows a chart comparing other historic texts to show why the NT writings are reliable, he says:
“The answer is that we do know, very accurately through the science of the textual criticism, what the NT writers wrote. Essentially the more texts we have, the less doubt there is about the original.”
‘As one of the greatest ever textual critics, F.J.A. Hort said, “In the variety and fullness of the evidence on which it rests, the text of the New Testament stands absolutely and unapproachably alone among ancient prose writings.”
I’ve never read anything proving why the Bible is accurate. I’ve heard plenty of rumblings about how it can’t possibly be accurate and how we can’t take it literally or really trust it. These things have never rung true to me, and now I know why.
The next part that had me whipping out my pencil was about how we can test Jesus’ claims. If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say, “Jesus was a great man and a wonderful teacher but I don’t believe he was the son of God” I’d be filthy rich. It irritates me to hear that and this is why:
“Jesus claimed to be the unique Son of God – God made flesh. There are three logical possibilities. If the claims were untrue, either he knew they were untrue – in which case he was an imposter, and an evil one at that. That is the first possibility. Or he did not know – in which case he was deluded; indeed, he was insane. That is the second possibility. The third possibility is that the claims were true.
C.S. Lewis pointed out that: ‘A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.’ He would either be insane or else he would be ‘the Devil of Hell.’ ‘You must make your choice’ he writes. Either Jesus was, and is, the Son of God or else he was insane or evil but, C.S. Lewis goes on, ‘let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.’”
And to that I give a big, fat AMEN!!
