Discover the profound intricacies of biblical inerrancy with our guest, Robbie Lashua, an established apologist at Stand to Reason. Robbie's wide-ranging experience in sharing theological insights across the country, coupled with his compelling anecdotes, will leave you longing for more. One such story revolves around an atheist who found solace in Jesus through Robbie's podcast, underlining the transformative of the Holy Spirit.
This episode ventures into the labyrinth of New Testament Greek manuscripts as Robby explains text criticism and why the church needs to be equipped with the process. The conversation further stresses the significance of context in biblical interpretation and the potential risks when scripture is misconstrued. It's a fascinating journey into the differences between Absolute Inerrancy and Full Inerrancy, and the potential dangers if we allow Scripture to err.
As we round off our discussion, we delve into the influence of the Bible throughout history. We underscore the importance of adhering to God's Word and its lasting impact on humanity. Listen in, find some answers, and share this captivating episode with friends and family. The takeaways from this discussion could usher in a new understanding of biblical inerrancy.
Discover the profound intricacies of biblical inerrancy with our guest, Robbie Lashua, an established apologist at Stand to Reason. Robbie's wide-ranging experience in sharing theological insights across the country, coupled with his compelling anecdotes, will leave you longing for more. One such story revolves around an atheist who found solace in Jesus through Robbie's podcast, underlining the transformative of the Holy Spirit.
This episode ventures into the labyrinth of New Testament Greek manuscripts as Robby explains text criticism and why the church needs to be equipped with the process. The conversation further stresses the significance of context in biblical interpretation and the potential risks when scripture is misconstrued. It's a fascinating journey into the differences between Absolute Inerrancy and Full Inerrancy, and the potential dangers if we allow Scripture to err.
As we round off our discussion, we delve into the influence of the Bible throughout history. We underscore the importance of adhering to God's Word and its lasting impact on humanity. Listen in, find some answers, and share this captivating episode with friends and family. The takeaways from this discussion could usher in a new understanding of biblical inerrancy.
Welcome to the Be Disciples podcast with your host, kyle Morris, and Dakota Smith. Today we have a special podcast, as we're going to be interviewing Robbie Lashua, who is an apologist at Stand to Reason who has been spent many of his adult years in ministry for apologetics. Specifically, he's got a master's from Biola in apologetics and an MDiv from Phoenix Seminary, and so welcome to the show, robbie. Glad you were able to join us.
Speaker 2:Thanks guys, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've actually had you on before on our early years of the podcast with the Christ Culture and Coffee podcast, and so we were happy to have you on then. It kind of gave us some more listeners. You guys had a pretty good listener base, so that was very helpful for us, and to watch you guys do that was helpful for me to learn about podcasting. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for coming on again. We haven't had too many repeats, but we're glad that you're on and this is today's going to be about the inerrancy of scripture and so a huge topic, a very important one for the church, and so we're glad to have you on and for you to share some of the insights that you have from studying God's Word, and especially from an apologetic standpoint.
Speaker 2:I'm glad to be here to talk about that. It's an important subject.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, as we get started, just one thing that we were talking about before the show. I think this is critical because this is not just for information's sake. But, robbie, would you tell us you shared with us a story about an atheist who was listening to your podcast a couple of years ago, and you know, really our whole goal is to reach people's hearts for Jesus. Share with us the story that you shared before the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, my podcast was we stopped recording in December of 2021. So it's been a year and a half and we've left him up, you know, on Spotify and Apple and all that stuff. And so I got an Instagram message from a guy a couple months ago and he said hey, you probably don't remember me, I was an atheist. I interacted with you a little bit on your you know, social media stuff for your podcast. And he said but I want you to know that I've recently come to trust in Jesus as my savior. Me and my wife are attending a church and getting plugged in and your show was instrumental in bringing me to faith in Jesus.
Speaker 2:Well, and I just thought oh man, like I that you know I haven't thought about that show for a long time. It's just kind of out there on the airway, not even airwaves, digital waves, I don't know what we call it. It's just out there, you know, and God's still using that to reach people's minds and hearts with the truth, which I think is just really cool for us. And and and I applaud you guys for taking advantage of this medium, because a lot, of, a lot of people aren't, and I think that this can just pay huge dividends into impacting people. You know, while while we're asleep, somebody's out, you know, jogging at the gym in the middle of the night listening to your podcast, you don't know how that's impacting them, and so God can use these types of things in amazing ways to speak truth into people's lives.
Speaker 3:Amen to that brother.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit. You've made a transition since you were on our podcast last to from being on pastoral staff somewhere to stand to reason. So tell us now what you're doing with stand to reason. What does a day to day look like for you, the work that you're doing? Give us a little bit of background on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a standard reason. I'm an apologist and speaker, so I get asked to go and speak all around the country, which is really fun. I was out and not I mean not right next to you guys, but I was in Oklahoma, which is closer to you guys than Arizona. Yes, I was there this summer. I was in Iowa this summer. I just spoke at a conference in Temecula a few weeks ago Temecula, California, and so I do that. So I speak at a lot of places. I also help develop content for our STRU online courses. So I've got a course on the Trinity that's coming out on September 30th. So that's one of the things that I do and contribute with. I write weekly, not weekly. Oh, thank the Lord.
Speaker 2:I write monthly articles for our website on apologetics issues. And then also I'm in charge of what are called STR Outposts, which are like chapter groups in the local church that are teaching apologetics. So we started about a year ago with these Outposts groups and we have 90 of them around the country, all in around the world. We've got some in the UK and Africa and these directors who we've added are now training people in their church, in small groups or in Sunday schools or in you know, once a month gatherings in apologetics using STR curriculum. So I'm overseeing that.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. We didn't know about that. That chapter group we may have to look into that ourselves, so that'd be amazing. Yeah, that'd be awesome, and we'd love to have you out here to Kansas as well.
Speaker 2:So I've only been to Kansas once in my life. We were just driving through it, so I'd love to go there and check it out for real. That's most people we drove through it once to get somewhere else, that's Kansas.
Speaker 1:So no, I'm the same way. Kansas is not somewhere I ever thought I'd be, and now I'm here, so that's right. But we got to get you out here. We do something called an OBC Academy, where we bring our church together to teach them new skills, mostly in biblical interpretation. But you know, we're having old professor Dr C L Mitchell out here in October, so things like that similar. We're trying to create that for our church as well. So, yeah, that'd be awesome.
Speaker 2:I'd love to. That'd be great.
Speaker 3:Well, Robbie, let's get it started. We're going to talk about the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Dr Shea would say, you know in his pro-legamana class that this is of first importance for the church. This is the attack. This is the very nature of what God says, and you know Satan seeking to get people to doubt what God says. I mean, that's been the fight all along. So the outline of today's show is essentially going to be what is biblical inerrancy, what are the conversations that surround it, and how does this impact the church? So why don't you just lead us as we continue into this subject and educate us, educate our church, help us to become competent and equipped in what we believe?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the doctrine of inerrancy, like you said, is extremely important and how we define it will really determine how we live our lives and what we follow. And so there's no one definition of inerrancy, right? So many different groups have different definitions, but the big idea through Christian history has been that the Bible is error free, is kind of the idea it's free from error and it's true in all aspects it speaks to, including scientific facts, historic facts, prophecy. It's true in the poetic things that it asserts right, obviously reading them as poetry and interpreting it correctly but it's true in all the things that it asserts in the original manuscripts, and I think that that's an important aspect of this. But it's basically the idea that the all the New Testament are true and error free and what God spoke to prophets or inspired New Testament authors to write, is true and doesn't have error.
Speaker 3:So if you're hearing that definition for the first time or that explanation for the first time, can you elaborate a little further on what you mean by within the original manuscripts? Because maybe that sounds restrictive or limiting at first, but how would you respond to the person who initially asked that question?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I say in the original manuscripts, I mean that when Isaiah wrote Isaiah, what he wrote down in the original is without error. Now, why we say that? Is because since the time of Isaiah, or since the time of Paul, or since the time of Matthew, we have copied those books, hand copied them over time, and we have multiple of these copies, tons of these copies, especially of the New Testament. We have thousands of Greek manuscripts and we can look at these manuscripts and compare them with one another and see that they're not perfectly identical.
Speaker 2:There's mistakes that were made in copying spelling mistakes, word order, different stuff, like that. And so to say that it's, it's without error in all of the copies, that would be an error, right, because we can look at them and say, no, there's a mistake, there's a mistake, there's a mistake that was made in copying. So when we say, when they were originally, given what God breathed, right, what God gave and inspired the authors of scriptures to write, those original manuscripts that were written are inerrant, but there have been mistakes made in copying. Now that doesn't mean we don't know what the original said, right, we do know what the original said because of text criticism, and we can talk about that, but what we're trying to say is listen, we've seen mistakes made in copying, so we're not saying every copy is without error, because that's crazy, but the originals are without error.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's talk about textual criticism a little bit. So now for the person hearing, maybe for the first time okay, so there's errors, or there's, maybe we'd even say variants within all of the manuscripts. Is this truly, then, the game of telephone? I mean, is what I possess today what the scriptures originally said? And you noted a moment ago that through textual criticism we can know what is truly said. But how vast or maybe I'm looking for this word how severe are those copyist errors or variants? What do you think?
Speaker 2:They're not that severe at all actually not at all. Let me explain a little bit about what we mean by variance. So now here's where this will sound crazy and you'll have an internet. Atheist say this, and what they're saying is true there are about half a million variants in the New Testament alone. When we gather all the Greek manuscripts we have the old Greek original language manuscripts we have about half a million variants or differences among them. Now, that sounds pretty crazy in my book. Right, half a million, right, yeah, oh my gosh, like.
Speaker 2:You go to college and, as a Christian student, a professor says that to you and you go, oh right, it kind of arrests your heart and you lose your breath, and I've also heard some atheists say what's more alarming is that there's only about 138,000 words in the entire New Testament.
Speaker 2:So you have half a million variants for only 138,000 words. That sounds pretty scary, right, like, oh man, yeah, what is going on here? An important thing for Christians to remember is that the fact that we know what the problems are, the variants, the fact that we know the differences, means that we have to know what's not a difference. Does that make sense? Like it's a double-edged sword that it cuts both ways. We know what errors there have been because we know what errors there haven't been, and so the fact that we can recognize the variants also attests to the fact that we can know what the original said. So when you deduce and you go through all of the variants and you look at them, a lot of them are easy to figure out. But the latest statistics on this by Peter Gurrie, who's from Phoenix Seminary. He did a really great work in his book Myths and Mistakes, in Translation.
Speaker 3:I've got that book.
Speaker 2:Oh, dude, it's so good. I love that book. It's really really good. He said with the New Testament Greek manuscripts the number of variants that might meaningfully affect the text is 0.3 to 2.8%. Well, so somewhere between 0.3 to 2.8% of the half million actually might mean something. All the rest of them are word order spelling mistakes. They're not big deals at all. But even with those ones that might meaningfully affect the text, we have a science called text criticism on how to deduce what the originals said. So there's rules like the more complicated is probably the more true or the more original. Because you would think, if a Christian is copying scripture, their tendency would to make it more clear than to make it more difficult to understand. So when we see a clearer example or a more difficult, we say the more difficult is probably original, because we can make a sense of why somebody would try to make it more clear as they copy it. So there's a bunch of rules like that for going through and deducing what the originals said. So half a million variants is possible because we have over 5,000 Greek manuscripts where we can deduce and study from. So I think an example helps people understand what this practice is like.
Speaker 2:So imagine I have my great aunt, sally, and she has the best chocolate chip cookie recipe in the world, but she's never shared it with anybody. She keeps it under lock and key, right In her recipe book in the cupboard. But she's getting old and so she doesn't want her recipe to die with her. So what she does is she takes it out and she meticulously makes six copies of it for her six children. Now she gives it out to them so they can carry on the best cookies ever, right. But then they make copies for all of their kids. So each of them has three kids. Now they've made handwritten copies of their copy for their three kids, but then tragedy strikes and Aunt Sally dies in a house fire, and that house fire doesn't just kill Aunt Sally, but it also burns the original recipe.
Speaker 2:So when it comes to the New Testament, we don't have the original manuscripts. We don't have the one that Paul actually wrote, but we have copies of copies. So the original is gone with the recipe. And now you've got the handwritten copies that the six kids have, but then you also have the copies they made for their kids. So you get them all together to try to put the original back together.
Speaker 2:But as you're reading one recipe, it says that the first step is to take three eggs, crack them and blank them in a bowl. And the blank is a smudge because it looks like somebody spilled milk on it and so that word's rubbed out. But then you look at another one and it says take three blanks because there was a little burn hole on it, like they got it too close to the oven, and place them into a bowl and whisk them. Oh well, now I can look at these two recipes and know what this one's supposed to say where the smudge mark is, and know what this one's supposed to say where the burn mark is. It's easy to deduce what the original said, and if you had multiple copies of a recipe it'd be very simple to put back together, even if each one of those recipes, in every line of the recipe, had a mistake in it, because you compare and contrast with all the rest, and that's what text criticism is. We have over 5,000 degree manuscripts of the New Testament to compare and contrast with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was a great explanation, Kyle. Any thoughts as well on the illustration?
Speaker 1:I thought the illustration was great. I think it helps people put it in their own minds, because when they hear a word like text criticism they're like what is that? And then what are all the rules and then all the different stuff. But I think that illustration helps. You're just taking multiple, the same kind of putting them back to back and which ones line up, and kind of filling in the blanks. And I think we do that with a lot of things in life and we don't criticize it as much as we do the Bible, though we should make sure the manuscripts are overlapping and we get the right words. But I think that's a good illustration for our listeners to take and to be able to use it for somebody else. I think that's a good one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, getting back to your original question, dakota on, is this just the game of telephone? Well, the game of telephone isn't about translation, it's about transmission, right? Because one kid comes up with a story, tells it into another kid's ear, to another kid's ear, and then by the time it gets to the ninth kid it's all distorted and messed up. And that's why the game's fun, because it gets mixed up in the transmission of the story into each kid's ear. Well, that's not how Bible translation works and that's not how it's ever worked.
Speaker 2:So when we translate the Bible, we deduce what the best Greek manuscripts, what the original said, seriously, with 99.99% accuracy. So this isn't a faith position, this is a science position. We know what the authors originally wrote. Now, that doesn't make it true, but you can't say we don't have what they wrote. We definitely have what they wrote. So once we have that, we have the superior Greek text. After deducing everything, we then take the Greek New Testament and we translate it into English. Or we go to the Greek New Testament and we translate it into Mandarin or to Spanish or to French. So sometimes atheists will argue well, you had it in Greek and then you translated it into Syriac and then you translated it into Coptic, and then you translated it into whatever Latin, and then finally, you get to English. After moving through all those translations, something must have been lost in the meaning. Well, if that's how we did it, for sure you can't translate through seven or eight languages and keep the same meaning, but that's not what Christians have ever done.
Speaker 2:We always go to the original language and then we translate once. So even Jerome, when he translated the Latin Vulgate, he took his superior Greek text and translated it to Latin. Then he moved to Bethlehem for 10 years and learned Hebrew and took the Hebrew Old Testament and translated into Latin. This is how it's always been done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's an encouraging thing, number one, that we have so many manuscripts, because that provides more evidence for our position. I also think that you know, as we're looking at this issue of biblical narrancy and what we have, do we still have the original words? I think it's just merely discoverable, if I can put it that way or maybe I'm summing up what you're saying, robby is that we can take all of the evidence and we can rediscover or recompile what was originally written. Would that be fair to say?
Speaker 2:That's a very fair way to say it. You could also say God has preserved the original amongst all the manuscripts. It's a really brilliant way to use human beings to spread your word and also to preserve it. It's fascinating. I think God has done a great idea. The problem is, is a lot of Christians think that the Bible is supposed to be like the Quran, that it's God's holy word and every single syntax and this and that is supposed to be locked down?
Speaker 3:Within that language.
Speaker 2:Yeah, within that language, and you can't really read the Quran unless you can read Arabic, right? Well, that's never been what the Bible is about, and I know that because the New Testament right away was a translation. Most of the time Jesus was speaking to Jews he spoke Aramaic, but the whole New Testament, without with the exception of a couple of places in Mark, is written in Greek. It was already a translation. Jesus doesn't want us to worship his exact verbiage and syntax. He wants us to know the message of what he said. And the beautiful thing is, since it's a translation right out of the gate, we can translate it into English or Latin or Chinese or whatever, because it's a book for all people, not just for people who speak Arabic. God actually wrote a book for all people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amen.
Speaker 3:And maybe to wrap a bow on this first question that we have, maybe to just give an additional definition, albert Moller cites the Chicago statement on biblical inerrancy in the book Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy and he writes being wholly and verbally God given scriptures without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts and creation, about the events of world history and about its own literary origins under God, then in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.
Speaker 3:So what we're trying to say is that we have in our possession the words of God himself, showing us what is true, not just self-vifically but also historically and scientifically speaking. If we were to move on towards, like, the challenges of inerrancy today and we've, kind of just by proxy, already entered into that a little bit, but, robbie, what would you say are some of the greatest challenges to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy today? Like what voices out there or what concepts are out there which say, ah, it's not quite that, it's not as binary, but maybe it's really on a continuum? You know, how can we inform our listeners about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the biggest danger currently for us is postmodern Christianity, which has grown into the progressive church movement. Yeah, and so the idea of that is that scripture is not inerrant, it's not God's perfect word, it's a library of texts of people who were following God, so that that definition that Brian McLaren kind of came up with in the early 2000s undercuts that. This is given by God to. This is how humans were experiencing God in their culture in their time period, and we experience God maybe differently than they did in their culture in their time period. So we can be inspired in the sense of like a muse, right, like Shakespeare was inspired to write his plays, we can be inspired by these other people of faith to walk with God in our time.
Speaker 2:But it really just evolves into relativism and it becomes you can pick and choose what scriptures you feel like you like and you can get rid of the ones you don't.
Speaker 2:It's a cut and paste style of religion, and so that's what the Progressive Church is doing today. They're saying well, back then, you know, homosexuality was this thing, but now we're enlightened and we experience it differently and so we don't really listen to that part of the Bible. And so they pick and choose what things they want to follow, which I think is a huge problem, because either I listen to my maker or I listen to myself, or I listen to other men, right? So it's man or maker, right. Those are my choices here, and it seems like the maker probably knows how things work better than I do, and then other people do right. So why, if I'm a follower of his, I should adopt his views on things? Because he's in a better position to have good perspective on how reality works. So the Progressive Church has opted for man's view, to do what they think is best, instead of listening to what God says is best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you kind of pointed out. I mean Millard Erickson calls Absolute inerrancy. Where there's there's no air, there's, then everything's perfect in Scripture. Where there's the one just under it, that's full inerrancy which starts to dip into maybe some of the scientific, maybe some of the historical numbers and things in there. That doesn't really change the meaning of the Bible, maybe a little inaccurate and that's okay. What's the danger of starting to just allow a little bit of Scripture Become wrong, even if it's just something that doesn't really change the meaning, doesn't change anything, do a salvation, doesn't change what God said, but it's still a little bit poking at the true full inerrancy of Scripture.
Speaker 2:Well, the problem with that is, then you become the arbitrator of truth. Yeah, right. So so now I, I'm the one who decides what God actually said, when, now and now. I, now, again, I think we need to study and we need to know where the errors are in transmission, and we need to study things in context and there might be things culturally that we don't understand about Abraham and Sarah. Right, so we have to. We have to be humble enough to say I'm gonna trust what this says, but, man, I don't necessarily understand maybe, everything that's going on. We also have to take things that are poetic to be poetic, right, we? I mean. So there's a lot that goes into it.
Speaker 2:I think so many, I Think so many people in Western culture are so arrogant to think they can just pick up the Bible and read something that's 2,000 years old and totally get it.
Speaker 2:You can't totally get it. Like, like, if I, you know, if 500 years from now, somebody saw a video we're making and I said I laced up my vans and I bolted out the door, I hopped in my armada and I punched it to Starbucks, they would not know what those words mean. Yeah, I mean, like you know, that means I was running late. I put my shoes on, I got in my car and I went as fast as I could to my coffee appointment. But all those things like if they don't know what's the Starbucks and if they're literally saying, well, so he got in an armada, so he had this huge Spanish army that he was eating, do you see how they could miss? And I think we do that a lot with scripture, and that's where Studying it, that's where understanding the context and the, the history, the cultural situations, all of that so vital To understand it, because if you read the Bible outside of context, you're not reading God's word.
Speaker 3:And that's important for us. Well and I think another part of it is by proxy we would no longer be loving God with our entire minds. If we pick it up and we place or presuppose all of our cultural baggage upon the text, then we're reading some type of mixture of God's word along with my experiences, and and God's word has to Take precedence above all of that. So I'm subject to it. It's not subject to me. You know Peter ends. You know I don't know Robby, a fear familiar with Peter ends.
Speaker 2:But yeah of course he's.
Speaker 3:He's the guy who would take the incarnational position of scripture. What he means by that is of the following that we should understand the words of God, and namely through idioms, attitudes, assumptions in general worldviews of the ancient authors. Otherwise our cultural assumptions become petrified and immune to criticism. He's saying that the Bible is not accurate in all of its details and that we should just merely take the experience of the authors. And maybe an example for him would be the book of Jonah. You know, jonah wasn't really swallowed by a whale or some large fish, but that was an experience that Jonah was having with God. And at the end of the day, sometimes we have our Jonah like moments, blah, blah, blah. So eventually, what starts to happen is the scripture becomes degradated and I, as you were saying, I think it cease, ceases to be the word of God in that moment. Because how can we then trust it? I mean, how do I know what I'm supposed to trust, how do I know what I'm supposed to apply and live out if I'm constantly calling it into question?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it becomes a real problem. Um, and I don't. I think if you start to do that, then you'll just do it with anything that you Don't feel like is good and that, again, that's where the progressive church is right. Section. The Bible is against our kind of sexuality. So we're gonna live this out and we want to be inclusive and the exclusivity of Jesus saying I'm the way, the truth in the life. Well, for their culture maybe that was true, but for ours, all paths lead. So again, you're just making scripture your puppet for whatever you like.
Speaker 2:Now, this, this is a tactic I use a lot with people, because I usually don't have like six years to sit at coffee with somebody to explain to them all the evidence for Christianity, right? So instead of getting into all these arguments for God's existence and other stuff, I just try to be aligned to the resurrection of Jesus, because he says that's the sign for all generations and it's it's where we have a ton of evidence, right. So, so with with Peter ends. You know this, this would be kind of my argument against that. I would say, okay. So Jesus said Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be in the earth for three days and three nights, right? So so Jesus seems to think Jonah was in the belly of the fish. Jesus also said that he also sanctioned the, the Torah, and the Psalms and the prophets as scripture. He quotes from all of them, he calls them God's word and he says not any of this will pass away. So so Jesus is hermeneutic, seems to be. He took it literally and he even applied it to his situation.
Speaker 2:Um, and then Jesus died and rose from the dead. So am I gonna trust Peter ends or a guy who rose from the dead? I think I'm gonna go with the guy who rose from the dead. Seems like a way better path. It seems like somebody who's valid. Seems like God's stamp of approval is on that guy and his message. Where, what does Peter ends do? He wrote a book. Well, hitler wrote a book and Joseph Smith wrote a book and Mohammed wrote a book.
Speaker 3:Dang well when you put it that way, you know I mean again, I'm not saying.
Speaker 2:I'm not trying to to to. You know malign people's character, but we really have to say why are you trusting in somebody? And now does my, does my interpretation of scripture Come at the whim of where Peter ends, feels like things should be and shouldn't be like. How do you even apply that to your life? No, I'm a follower of Jesus, so I'm gonna take Jesus word on this, because he's actually proven. He's an authoritative source. He predicted he drives from the dead. Then he did it. Nobody else has done anything like that, so I'm gonna go with the guy who has the most validity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that helped us Transition from okay, proving that the manuscripts are good, like okay, 99.99 whatever, like okay, I say, say I'm a non-believer and I'm okay with that. Cool, you're your Bible's accurate, that's fantastic. But that doesn't mean what you're saying is true. But you've kind of moved into. Well, I can prove that it's true because of Jesus and you went straight to the resurrection, which you know we've talked about many times, like the resurrections where you want to go, especially in evangelism. If you can get to the resurrection, that's the place you want to talk about the most, because that's the one that's going to prove everything to be true. Because if that's true, it is all true. So you've kind of moved there. So is there any other kind of advice or apologetic ways? As we is? If we get somebody saying, yes, I believe the Bible is accurate, but I'm not sure it's fully true all of it, how do you get somebody to move from there to the Bible is actually true? It is God's word.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, first of all, I think that you don't have, you don't have to believe in aneruncy to become a Christian. So first of all, I want them to trust in the gospel, right, because I think you can deduce that Jesus rose from the dead, apart from in aneruncy of scripture. So I want them to believe in Jesus first. But it's kind of a logical conclusion. If God can't lie, which the Bible says, it all over right numbers 2319 says it, psalm 12, 6 says it. John 17, 17 says God's word is truth. Titus 1, 2 says God cannot lie. So if God cannot lie and this is his message to humans then it can't have errors in it, because that's that's what aneruncy is right, yeah, and so I would just encourage them to say okay, listen, I can't prove aneruncy to you. It's a deduction of. God tells the truth always and this is his word. Now we can say well, what proofs do we have that this is accurate? And that's fun because you can look at prophecy, right, I mean, the prophecy in the Bible is insane. That the prophecy Daniel 9 About, I mean to the day, the number of years from the decree to when Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Come on. Also, there's, there's, you know, in the great Isaiah scroll and in the the 12 minor prophets scroll that they found at Kumbhruin, there's the prophecy about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, ephathra right, not Zebulon, because there's another Bethlehem, so it's a specific one we have. We can hold in our hands the kumran document that predates Jesus birth by a hundred years, saying where he'd be born. I mean, so okay, what is that? This prophecy is clearly before him, the prophecy in Isaiah about him being buried in a rich man's tomb. We can hold that in our hands today. That's 100 and some years before Jesus actually was born. So the prophecy part of it, I think is fascinating to delve into. To say no, there's something else behind this and it's not no stradamus, like prophecies that are vague. They're very specific about times and dates and places. So I think that's an encouraging thing for Christians. To look into is Bible prophecy, but also the accuracy in the New Testament. It's unbelievable. The different internal evidences we have of it.
Speaker 2:Telling the truth, one that's really fun is just embarrassment Ancient, what do I want to say? Historical prophets and theologians and historians they look at manuscripts and they'll look for places where there's embarrassing details put in, because they say that's real honesty. If somebody will embarrass themselves in a document, it's because that probably actually happened and they're trying to tell the truth. And all through all scripture we have embarrassing things.
Speaker 2:If I was starting a cult, I would never say that Jesus called me Satan. I'm trying to get people to follow me right and then I'm saying follow Jesus and listen to what I'm saying. And yeah, he did call me Satan. That doesn't make sense. You would never make that up right. You would never add things about women finding Jesus at the tomb, because culturally that was the worst witness to find something. And so there's so many embarrassing details throughout scripture that historians look at and go no, it seems like they're telling the truth in a lot of these areas, not to mention how accurate they are for places and for who's ruling from the Roman side of things and who's ruling from the Jewish side of things. So there's a lot we can study and test against history and archaeology to see if they were telling the truth, which is kind of fun to do, and it's an encouragement to Christians to say now, this book's pretty legit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the reason I brought that up is because, just to kind of summarize, if you want to move from, okay, someone's like I agree that it's all that it's accurate, that it's worth reading, okay, let's read it then. Right, that's how you're going to learn that it's true. You're going to read it. You're going to study the prophecy, like you said. You're going to study the New Testament. You're going to see all of these things. Open the Bible with people and read it with them, like that's what we do on this podcast, that's why we do this podcast, so people would open the Bible and read it together. That's how you're going to prove God's Word to be true is spending time with people with the Bible open and reading it together. And so, yeah, we need to know our Bibles in order to say, yes, god's Word is true, because one God said it in Scripture but also proves itself true over and over, in the most minute details, like you pointed out.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I always think is funny is so many people will say, oh, there's all these contradictions, there's all these issues, and I've never seen one. I always ask them hey, I got a Bible right here, can you show me one? And they never can.
Speaker 1:No, they can't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they can't right. But the other thing is this like for 2000 years, the New Testament has been under extreme scrutiny, and it's the book more studied in history than any other book, and for some reason it just keeps standing the test of time and nobody's proven why it's a miserable failure. Now, people might not like it and they might not want to believe in it, but you can't tell me. There haven't been super brilliant people who have scrutinized this thing only to find out that it's accurate, and so I also think we have like a historical reliability stance on our side. We have all these brilliant minds in history who've studied this book and haven't been able to crack the code. The other thing is, too, is I just don't trust that a bunch of fishermen could come up with the greatest character in all literature for all time, but that's crazy to me.
Speaker 2:There's so many things that we look at to go. No, this book. It screams authentic, it's eyewitness testimony and it's revolutionized the world. And that's the other thing. Not only do we have it, but it has changed culture, and so I think that it's a book worth looking into, and I think it can stand on its own and prove itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and no little brother is going to say, as big brother, is the Messiah, unless it's true, you know no way, no way.
Speaker 2:My brother never say I was God, no way, yeah.
Speaker 1:So so yeah, thank you for breaking that down, because I just think it's important that we reiterate that knowing God's word is so important, because it's what's going to be our tool when we go out there to talk to people. So thank you for that.
Speaker 2:It does come down to a point, though, of am I going to trust what God says is accurate, or am I going to follow my heart? And that's where people are getting tripped up today. Is they're saying I'm going to follow my desires and I'm going to be my true self? Don't be your true self. Your true self is broken. You need Jesus. And so it comes down to that man or maker who are you going to listen to? And I think it's way smarter, I think it's better to listen to our maker than to follow our hearts, because my heart's deceitfully wicked, above all things, and I don't even know how bad it is. Yeah, and so that's where it comes down to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's an illustration actually you gave last time we were on, that I still use today, which is the stoplight, the feelings of the stoplight illustration, where you just said, well, the lights, the lights red, and I can choose to follow what is true or the law, or to make sure I stop so I don't hurt myself, I don't hurt anybody else. Or I can just say, well, I just don't feel like stopping today and I'm just going to follow the things that I feel and I'm just going to go through it because that's just what I want to do. And the danger in going with the feelings, or I feel like the Bible doesn't say this, or it does say that, well, we can't do feelings because all it does is it hurts people and leads people to hell, and so we need to make sure that we're doing things the way God says it in His Word and we don't take away from it, we don't add to it and we stay true to His Word.
Speaker 3:That's right, as we start to land the plane. I suppose you know we moved from defining inerrancy, we moved to discussions about inerrancy, the reason why we should believe in biblical inerrancy. We talked about how it affects the Christian, how it affects the nonbeliever, both positively or negatively, depending on what you do with the doctrine Robbie. If we were to land the plane and if somebody were to say how can I learn more? Where can I learn more? What other resources? Or you know where else should I go to further my education on this topic of biblical inerrancy? Just off the cuff or off the top of your head, what would be some places? You would point them to and you know who would you decide to trust most with this issue, being an apologist yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've actually been having this conversation a lot with my colleague, tim Barnett and some other guys, because we feel like there's nobody who's really defending inerrancy right now like it was, you know, 30, 40 years ago with the Chicago statement. Guys, they're all getting older. I mean Wayne Gruden was on that and he was young back then and he's he's old now. Right, but the guy who I think did it the best is Norm Geisler. He has a book called inerrancy. I mean he stood for this. He left the evangelical theological society over open theist being let in because he said that's not holding to inerrancy. And so he's the man I think still. You know he's, he's, he's passed now he's with the Lord, but he's still the guy I think that does the best job of defining inerrancy and defending inerrancy from scripture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's. That's awesome. We love Norm Geisler. I've never met him personally, one on one, but it feels like everybody who's had an influence in my life was somehow influenced by him, so I know that Dr Geisler has done a lot of great work.
Speaker 2:He was awesome. I got to meet him one time at a conference and I was struggling because at seminary we were talking over do we have the exact words of Jesus or do we just have the message of Jesus? And I went up to him and I asked him what's your? I gave the technical term because I knew what he think. I said what's your view on absysem of ox versus absysem of verb right? And he said Well, we don't have his exact words. And I said Really, why do you think that? And he said Because it's in Greek. And I was like, yeah, like that was it. I was like you're freaking genius, right.
Speaker 3:Like.
Speaker 2:I was probably like 20 or something, you know. But I was like yeah that's true and he's like but we have, we have his message. We know what the message is that we're supposed to take to the world and I was like that's brilliant. So he was man. I look up to that guy a ton and he wrote so many books. So if people are looking for, he literally has a book called inerrancy in Aronty by Norman Geisler, so that's one I would get.
Speaker 3:He's got another book. It's just called Christian Apologetics, I think it's got like a green cover and he does an excellent job.
Speaker 3:When I was 20, I barely knew how to read it, but he essentially goes through all the different worldviews and then explains why Christianity is the most robust and all the evidence is for it. So certainly pick up his book. As it pertains to STR, Stand to Reason. Give us just a couple more things. If our listeners are saying, hey, if I go to Stand to Reason, what am I going to find? How can your ministry equip their faith even further?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if they want to go to strorg, that's where we're at and we have 30 years worth of blog articles on every apologetics issue you could think of. So there's just a search bar and I do this all the time. I'll go in there and I'll search relativism or inerrancy or things like this, and it'll pop up all of these podcasts, all of these articles and you can just nerd out to your heart's content on all of this stuff that we have on there. We also have a weekly well, it's a biweekly podcast that comes out from my boss, greg Cokal, where he does an excellent job at interviewing apologists and theologians, taking calls from people, answering tough questions. But we also have STRU, which is our free online courses that people can take. We have courses on hermeneutics right on how to study the Bible, on the Trinity, on relativism, on why it's got to allow evil the resurrection a whole ton of different apologics issues, and they're free, easy courses that people can just take at their leisure. So that's on the website.
Speaker 2:But we also do conferences around the country. We do six student conferences actually. Next weekend in Los Angeles we're starting our first one, and then we'll be in Seattle and Dallas and Minneapolis and Philadelphia and Georgia over this next year doing this conference and it's actually called man or maker. That's what we're doing it on this year, talking about who do we trust, who's the authority. So yeah, we have a whole ton of things like that. Also, if anybody's interested in becoming an outpost that you know I'm in charge of these chapter groups love to have people go on there under training. You can just click on outposts, learn more about it, apply to become an outpost director and then we'll get you started with curriculum to be teaching in your church.
Speaker 3:Praise God. Can we pray for you in your ministry as we close? Is that?
Speaker 2:cool. I would love that. Yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 3:Father, we thank you for our brother, we thank you for our friend Robbie. We ask you that you would continually remind him of his need for you, of his dependency upon you. We thank you, lord, that you are the one who mightily works within him, that God, your Holy Spirit, resides within him and that, god, he can walk in a loving relationship with you and, as a result of that relationship, he can continue on in the ministry. So, father, please, in the words of C L Mitchell, give him a continued intimacy that he would never recover from, as it pertains to you. And, father, we also just ask for the people who benefit from his ministry that at the heart level, at the mind level, that they would be changed and transformed.
Speaker 3:And whether Robbie sees the benefit of his ministry today or not, whether he benefits from the shade of the seeds he's planting, which he hopes to become trees, or he doesn't benefit from that here in this lifetime, god, I pray that you would continue to encourage him as he moves forward. We thank you, we love you, we pray for him, for his family, his wife, his children, that, god, you would protect them and in the world that we are living in, he would persevere and he would keep on. We love you, lord. We thank you for our listeners. We pray this in the matchless name of Jesus Amen.
Speaker 1:Thank you, robbie, and thank you to all of our listeners. Please share the podcast with your friends and family. We do this just to share the word of God and to help equip believers to do the ministry, and so thank you again and have a blessed week.