Tag: Bible

plinko vs. the Bible

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bible plinko

Who doesn’t like the Price Is Right? If you were on the game show, which game would you want to play? If I were on the Price Is Right I would love to play Plinko. You get the little puck, stand on the platform and try for $10,000. It’s a complete game of luck. It really doesn’t matter where you put the puck. It’s all in the bounce.

Sometime I treat  quiet time with God a lot like Plinko. “What should I study today?” I open the Bible and bounce from passage to passage without a plan and hopefully I will luck out and win big “truths” for the day. I admit there are times when I come to God like this!? Sure God might bless my efforts, but God wants me to approach His Book with a bit more respect and purpose than “drop the puck and hope for luck” approach.

There are some great plans out there for reading the Bible with a purpose. Even for ADHD people like me who do not have long attention spans. Here are a few for starters:

  • Study a theme. i.e. love in 1 John, one another in the letters of Paul, kingdom in Matthew, etc.
  • Look at how a particular book of the Bible describes God.
  • Discover how OT books picture Christ. Be careful not to read into the text too much.
  • Trace the hymns of Revelation and write God a new song for the day.
  • Start a quiet time journal that tracks promises, commands and truths.
  • Read the same book over and over from 5 or more translations and note similarities or differences.
  • Read a psalm a day for 5 days a week. You can go through the Psalms twice in a year this way.
  • Read a chapter of Proverbs a day for an entire month. There are 31 chapters and works perfect for some months with the same number of days.
  • For the heavy reader, read through the Bible in a year. At a pace of 4-5 chapters a day you can read through the entire book.

Be creative. There are an endless amount of ways to study the treasures of God’s Word. God wrote it for a purpose, shouldn’t we have a purpose in studying it?

Deuteronomy 6:4-9, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

real questions: fairytale?

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Ned Anzers: Isn’t the Bible just a fairytale?

What if the Bible were not true? Everything a Christian believes would be a farce!

At the moment I am studying two dead languages that no one speaks anymore, but they are essential to understanding the Bible. As I have studied these languages I have learned a valuable lesson: the importance of accents. Not the accents you use while speaking like British or Jamaican, but the accents placed over letters when you write. They often look like dots, dashes, little rainbows or carrots. They are often missed when reading because they are so tiny. Jesus says something really amazing about these little accents (Matthew 5:18). He says this Book; all of its big and small parts are powerful because it comes from God.

Is Jesus’ view of the Bible really important? As we saw in the last question, Jesus words carried some authority, He calmed a storm, healed the sick, predicted the future, and was even there at the beginning to create the universe.

Jesus never questioned the authority of the Bible; in fact, He considered it authority.

The Bible always has the last word on all sides of the playing field whether in defense or offense. Look at these examples from the life of Jesus: during temptation of Jesus in the desert (Mt.4), and when talking to religious people about His miracles (Mk.12:26-27). Jesus often quoted the OT to expose the wrong-thinking of the religious of the His day. There is no smart comeback line for the Bible!

Jesus even affirmed the Bibles history as true: God created the world (Mt.19:4), Noah and the ark was not a fable (Gen.6-9; Mt.24:38). Rather than a book full of errors, the Bible keeps us from a life of error (Mk.12:24).

My first and only haircut from my mother. When I was about 8 years old I received a haircut from my mother. Needless to say it was the only haircut my mother ever gave. About 3 cuts in, her fourth cut was into my ear. Now it was a little cut, but it did make me a little uncomfortable (more  that she could not stop laughing). Now this story has evolved over the years, and at family outings it has become quite exaggerated. You might hear something like: My mother the beautician was styling my hair when all of a sudden a centralized earthquake appeared in Wisconsin. My mothers hand slipped and cut off my ear. Blood was gushing everywhere. Mom in a hysterical panic called 911. They struggled to save my life. After hours of fighting and a two-month long comma Justin miraculous recovered. He now has an ear skin graphed from a giraffe.

Now some of these documents might be true and people were there to back up some of the facts, but anyone can see this story is an exaggeration. Many have this same view about the NT. Yes, Jesus was a real man that walked this planet. He was a good teacher, moral example, and memorable character, but couldn’t he have been so loved by those closest to Him that stories about Him drifted further from the truth as time went on? Sure. But listen to what Jesus says about this (Jn.14:26; 16:13). He promises His disciples long after He is gone, the Spirit would remind them of His words and lead them in “all truth” as they wrote the NT.

Jesus’ disciples (followers) were no bozo’s.

Luke, was OCD about details. He was a doctor. He wrote 25% of the NT (Lk.1:3-4; 2:1-2, note the details about people/places). Paul, was a history buff and a man of the law. He wrote 50% of the NT and goes on to explain that every disciple (follower) writer was an eyewitness of Jesus. They did not write down hearsay or secondhand information, rather they experienced and saw what they are writing down and they were not alone (1 Cor.15:6, after the resurrection). How could hundreds of people all have the same story?

The Bible is not written like a fairytale, but HIStory.

The Bible is quite unlike any other book. It is a book that has changed lives for centuries, and gives hope for eternal life. It is 66 different books (stories, poems, songs, letters, etc.), written by dozens of authors most of who never met each other, over 5000 years, and yet the Bible has one central theme: Jesus Redeems! God says I can trust all of it even its dots and dashes (Matthew 5:18).

The Bible is backed by archeology, history and prophecy.

It has made predictions of which are 100% truth so far (300 about Jesus). People have put His Word’s into practice and have been changed!

As LaVar Burton of Reading Rainbow used to say, “Of course, you don’t have to take *my* word for it.”

real questions: the Bible?

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Ned Anzers: How do you know the Bible is true? What makes the Bible different than any other book?

Bible simply means book. I believe the Bible is more than a book, but an inspired book.  Inspiration is the supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Scripture writers which rendered their writings an accurate record of the revelation or which resulted in what they wrote actually being the Word of God.

According to 2 Timothy 3:16-17 “all Scripture is inspired.” I believe that “all scripture is inspired” means that the Bible comes from God. Every word from Genesis to Revelation, in its original autographs, is the very word of God. The Bible is the very Word of God, 2 Thessalonians 2:13 says “…you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” When we read the Bible we should realize we are receiving God’s own message, in other words God divinely produced the Bible.

2 Peter 1:20-21 explains that the Holy Spirit moved men to guarantee that no human contribution would corrupt, distort, or in any way diminish the written Word from being the very Word of God. This passage teaches that when one reads Scripture, what they are reading does not only come from a man but also from God. The Bible is the writing of many different men. These men spoke with their own language and style. Peter mentions two dimensions of their speaking:

First, they spoke from God. What the men had to say was not merely from their own limited perspective because they were not the origin of the truth they were speaking. The truth is God’s truth. Their meaning is God’s meaning.

Second, not only is what they spoke from God, but how they spoke it is controlled by the Holy Spirit. The Bible was not left to human voice boxes alone, but also the Holy Spirit. The words of the Bible are the Word of God (plenary) [“all” in 2 Tim 3:16 – Luke 11:51/Gen 4/2 Chron. 24:20-21], and the reality that the words themselves are God’s words (verbal) [Matt 5:17-18].

The implications of the inspiration of the Bible are huge since the Holy Spirit is the author of scripture.  Since the Holy Spirit is the author of truth, the Bible is true (Ps. 119:142) and altogether reliable (Heb. 6:18).

  • It is powerful, working its purpose in our hearts (1 Thess. 2:13) and not returning empty to the One who sent it (Is. 55:10-11).
  • It is pure like silver refined in a furnace seven times (Ps. 12:6).
  • It is sanctifying (John 17:17).
  • It gives life (Ps. 119:37, 50, 93, 107; John 6:63; Mt. 4:4).
  • It makes wise (Ps. 19:7; 119: 99-100).
  • It gives joy (Ps. 19:8; 119: 16, 92, 111, 143, 174).
  • It promises great reward (Ps. 19: 11).
  • It gives strength to the weak (Ps. 119 :28 ) .
  • It gives comfort to the distraught (Ps. 119:76).
  • It gives guidance to the perplexed (Ps. 119:105).
  • It gives salvation to the lost (Ps. 119:155; 2 Tim. 3:15).

The wisdom of God in Scripture is inexhaustible.

I also believe that the entire Bible is the infallible Word of God and without error in the original manuscripts. Infallibility is synonymous with inerrancy. The Bible is without error regarding either assertions or denials even in matters of History and Science. The Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives. The Bible cannot lie and proclaims the truth on each and every matter.

I believe that God’s purposes revealed in the Bible are the supreme and final authority in proving all claims about what is true and what is right. Authority means that the Bible has the right to tell me how to think and how not to think, and how to behave and how not to behave.

If the Bible is inerrant then it must also be authoritative on whatever it affirms or denies.  The Scriptures explain that it is all that is required for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), therefore, I can have confidence that the Bible is authoritative for all areas of life. Jesus Himself said, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). There are many other proofs inside the Bible that declare it is true and authoritative.

According to Romans 3:4 it is stated that God cannot lie. 2 Tim 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 says that God is the author and protector of the Bible. Jesus Himself affirms the authority of the Old Testament authors (John 5:39-47). Also, there are many prophecies within the Scriptures that have been fulfilled. Second, the history recorded in the Bible is accurate with the history recorded outside the Bible (Ex: 2 Kings 20—Hezekiah and Sennachareb/Daniel 11). Third, the Bible is harmonious with itself from Old Testament to New Testament. The Bible’s theme of Redemption is woven in the fabric of each book so clearly and purposefully.

Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, p.225

John Piper, The Holy Spirit: Author of the Scripture, 1984

The Chicago Statement on Biblical inerrancy, 1978

Norman L. Geisler, Inerrancy, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI. p.268