Why Bother with the Bible?

The title of my message today is, “Why Bother with the Bible?” When I say, ‘The Bible” I mean the entire Bible – Old Testament and New Testament. That’s an important distinction because I have discovered far too many Christians are content to focus their attention only on the New Testament – and some, even only on the gospels.

 

“Why bother with the Bible”? is a relevant question, not only for the unchurched, but also for those here in this sanctuary. It’s relevant because many in the pew and out of the pew DO NOT consider it relevant to their lives in 2024.

 

After all, the scriptures were written thousands of years ago and to a people living a very different life than we live. For the most part, the Bible was written to an agrarian people. We are urban and metropolitan. It was written to people, most of whom never travelled more than 25 miles from their homes. Today, many travel every day to their job much further than 50 miles. In the areas of medicine, economics, communication, industry, scientific progress – in dozens of examples, today is so foreign to the world of the Scriptures.

 

So, what possible applicability can the Bible have for me in 2024? Well, point in fact, it is completely applicable to 2024 because of its originator. I’m referring, of course, to God – who is eternal. Therefore, it logically follows that His words are eternal. Isaiah (40:8) tells us: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” And the Lord Jesus told us: (Matthew 24:35) “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”

 

As an aside, let me remind us that the Bible has a dual authorship. God ‘breathed’ His thoughts – that’s what the word ‘inspired’ means – God breathed out His thoughts to men who, in turn, wrote those thoughts on parchment. And so, for example, St Paul wrote to Timothy: (2 Timothy 3:16-17) “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”

 

The men who wrote the Bible – from Moses in 3500 BC to the apostle John in 90 AD – these men did not act like automatons or executive secretaries, writing word for word, comma for comma, period for period according to the breath of God moving on them. God gave them His words, but they wrote in accord with their own experiences, language skills, and culture. But the RESULT was the very infallible and inerrant word of God on parchment.

 

So, why bother with the Bible? Without sounding overly simplistic, let me answer this way: Because our Creator has some THINGS to say to us – very important ‘things’ to say to us. Critically important ‘things’ that WILL impact our lives for the better – if we pay attention to those things. Otherwise, our lives will be impacted for the worse if we do not pay attention.

 

Therefore, it is no surprise that God's Son, the Word made flesh (as St John wrote of it in the first few verses of his gospel) – it is no surprise that Jesus would tell His listeners of 2000 years ago – and those who listen to Him today: (Matthew 7:24-27) “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”

 

The promise and the warning really don’t get any clearer than these words of our Lord.

 

So, let’s talk awhile about our Creator who gave us the Scriptures for our instruction in righteousness, and for hope, and faith, and of judgment, and of His promise of eternal life. And to begin our discussion of our Creator and His scriptures, we ought to go back to the beginning of the creation which the Creator created.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.  Genesis 1:1-3

 

God is more than just a noun – even a proper noun. God is – well, God is God.

 

In our feeble attempt to describe what that means we use words like ‘omnipotent,’ and ‘omniscient,’ and ‘omnipresent.’ Those words mean God is everywhere in the entire universe at the same time because He is God. Omniscient means there is not a thing in all of history, past, present, future that He does not know and has always known – and that includes our thoughts.

 

Listen to the psalmist (Psalm 139): “You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all . . . Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are

there. . . . If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,” Even the darkness is not dark to You, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.”

 

Omnipresent, omniscient, and – all-powerful. There is nothing He cannot do. Nothing.

 

Why bother with the Bible – especially (as some like to say) it must have been corrupted over the millennia?

 

But think for a moment how utterly irrational is that statement for those who believe in God. What that senseless statement says is: The all-powerful God – who simply SPOKE the universe and all that is in the universe into existence – this irrational idea suggests that this same God is UNABLE to ensure the accurate transmission of His instructions through the prophets and other writers of Scripture. What that ludicrous statement says is that this omniscient God is NOT able to ensure that His scriptures would REMAIN uncorrupted through the millennia. And those who suggest the Bible is full of errors are saying the omnipresent God is UNABLE to personally guide each writer and copyist in the transmission of His supernatural book we call the Bible.

 

In the beginning, God . . . .

 

You might remember what Moses asked God in chapter three of Exodus: “Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:13-14)

 

This foundation of God's forever existence – meaning He exists in the eternal past, the eternal future, and the eternal present because He Himself CREATED time – the foundation of God's forever existence is critical to this discussion of the Bible’s relevancy to us in 2024. “If the foundations are destroyed,” the psalmist David wrote, “what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3)

 

We must be very careful not to neglect foundations. Again, back to what Jesus said to the crowds at the end of Matthew chapter seven: Unless we build our structure on solid ground, the storms of life will eventually overthrow even the most luxurious life. And since God is eternal, it logically follows that His word is eternal, as we saw a few moments ago from Isaiah and the words of the Lord Jesus in Matthew’s gospel.

 

Why bother with the Bible? Here now is some application of that question:

 

On what are you building your life? It’s a question you and I ought to routinely ask ourselves. Are we building it on the solid foundation of God’s word? Or are we building on the shifting sands of humanistic and anti-Christ philosophies brought to us by godless theologians, pastors, teachers, writers, entertainers, politicians, and news media?

Here is some more application: My next-door neighbor stopped me a week or so ago and asked for prayer for his family. He and his wife were on their way to visit, and try to comfort, the family of their 17-year-old son who’d just committed suicide.

 

Not long afterward, I read a tragic statistic in a 2024 article in The Brownstone Institute, an online journal. The contributor lives in a small town with a big problem where suicide is the leading cause of death for youth ages 10-19 years old. Nearly 30% of his county’s resident deaths ages 15-19 years are by suicide. Over 50% of his county’s high school juniors experience chronic sadness or hopelessness.

As I researched a little further, I found a 2021 study reported in the American Psychological Association. Did you know that more than 20% of American teens, in an attempt to deal with their feeling of hopelessness, considered taking their own lives? And adults don’t do much better with coping with life and its often darkness. A few years ago, the highest suicide rate was among adults between the ages of 45 and 54. The second highest rate occurred in those 85 years or older.

 

Why bother with the Bible?

I remember holding my wife’s hand as she dozed in her Intensive Care bed one morning in January 2019. She’d had a hemorrhagic stroke while we were visiting Florida.

She stirred in bed, then turned to me and said, “I wondered last evening . . . I wondered, ‘Jesus, are you here?’” She paused a moment, and then said, “I heard Him say: ‘I am here.’”

Three simple but profoundly comforting words. “I am here.”

 

Why bother with the Bible? That’s what God has wanted us to know all through the millennia. He wanted us – and still wants us – to know for certain that He is here. With us. He did not set this planet spinning into space and took off to the other side of the galaxy. He wanted us to know – and still wants us to know – perhaps especially when we walk through the valleys of the shadows of death – He is there with us, holding our hand. Your hand. My hand.

Which sort of begs the question, doesn’t it? WHY would a holy, HOLY God deign to even consider humbling Himself to speak to a humanity that routinely and repeatedly rejects and sneers at His call to our lives? Why has that Holy and unspeakably pure Creator taken to Himself the role of a slave, to wash our feet, to lead us to Himself through the prophets and finally through His Son whom He delivered over to that excruciating death to pay the price of OUR repeated and most defiant sins?

 

Why? I know it sometimes sounds trite to say it – but say it I will, and I must: Because He loves us. Because it is important to Him that we not feel alone in this universe.

 

John 3:16 is just one of His megaphones. But I think what happens so often is we who can quote the text so freely do so without paying much attention to what it really says – which is this: (Romans 5:8) “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

 

Said another way, God loved me and you, even while we were shaking our fists in His face, shouting, “I want to do it MY WAY!”

 

Yet, despite our lethal arrogance, He delivered His Son to death – and not just to death, but a TORTUROUS death – so that I, so that we, could have the chance to live forever with Him in the place Scripture calls heaven. That we could have a chance for a clean slate, a do-over, for adoption into His eternal family.

 

That we COULD have a chance . . . ‘could’ – because there could never be a chance without the death of Jesus in our place as our substitute. There could never be a chance for eternal life if our sins were not washed away in the most precious blood of the Lamb of God. There could never be a chance for eternal life if we – you and I, and all who have also come to Christ by simple faith – there could never be a chance of eternal life if the Creator did not bring this promise from Isaiah to pass on Calvary: (Isaiah 53:5-6)

 

“But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all
to fall on Him.”

 

God loves, loves, loves us. THAT is why He has repeatedly spoken to humanity ever since the Garden of Eden. That is why He repeatedly speaks to us by His holy and infallible word – to tell us, “I’m here. With you. Always. You are not alone.”

 

Why bother with the Bible?  Because the Bible – from Genesis through Revelation is His love letter to us. Love letters. Letters that tell us in many portions and in many ways how to live and WHY to live that way. The scriptures are His letters to us, His instructions to us, born of His incomprehensible care for us, to tell us how to put our lives together for good – even if our lives are broken and seem unfixable.

 

Without His supernatural guidance through the Scriptures, trying to fix our broken lives would be as successful as trying to put together a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle blindfolded – knowing that one of the pieces is missing.

 

That analogy reminds me of what St Augustine discovered: “God made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him.”

 

That ‘restlessness’ Augustine discovered of is the same one discovered by French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (d. 1662): “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

 

Why bother with the Bible? I think if by now you still have that question – I’d say you’ve not been paying attention to what I’ve been saying.

 

I close this message in this way: If you have access to the internet, you can find dozens of recommendations about how to read the Bible in a year. If you do not have access to the internet, then my print version might be of help to you.

 

I’ve said this many times in the past, and this is a good time to say it again: If you read two chapters every day from the Old Testament (it takes about 10-15 minutes), and two chapters from the New Testament (again, it takes 10-15 minutes), you will read the Old Testament once every 12 months, and the New Testament THREE TIMES in a year.

 

If you do not now routinely read your Bible every day, I hope you will begin today to do so.

 

Why bother with the Bible? We might as well ask, “Why bother eating.”