Transcript

The following is a fictional story, but it makes a good point. A navy captain was sailing and came upon a big light. He thought it was a ship coming toward him.

He was the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy at this particular time. So he got on a big bullhorn and said to the ship behind the light, “Move ten degrees south or we’re going to crash.”

The response was “I will not move. You move ten degrees north so you don’t crash.” The captain was getting irritated.

He said, “Don’t you know who I am? I am a captain in the United States Navy. I say, “You move ten degrees south so we do not crash!”

The voice came back, “I will not move. You move ten degrees north so that you don’t crash. The captain got back on the speaker and said, “Did you hear me says that I am a captain in the United States Navy?” The voice came back, “Yes, but I am a lighthouse!”

The Word of God is our immoveable, unshakeable, unchanging authority for life. We must adjust our course in life to it and allow it to lead and guide us.

The study of apologetics and the archaeological evidences give encouraging confirmations to the Bible. But even without this, we know that the Bible is the truth and we know we can trust it. The Bible changes and transforms lives, and that is the greatest evidence to the truth and reality and power of the Word of God.

Matthew 2:16: “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”

An archaeologist named John was digging under an ancient theatre and discovered 5 pots of gold coins. Ecstatic, he told his lead archaeologist: “Graham, I’ve found 3 pots of gold coins!” Graham replied, “What’s that John? You’ve found 2 pots of gold coins?” John said, “That’s what I said, 1 whole pot of gold coins!”

Many coins have been found in Israel that verify the Herods mentioned in the Bible.

Herod the Great ruled from around 37 to 4 BC. He was the king in Israel at the time of Christ’s birth. Viewing the Lord as a threat to his throne, he was the wicked ruler who tried to have Christ killed after He was born, and killed all the children two years old and under in and around Bethlehem.

Herod had coins made in numerous denominations. Various objects were depicted on the coins, and on one a pomegranate is depicted which is mentioned in the Bible as one of the blessings to the land of Israel.

Deuteronomy 8:7-8 says, “For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and POMEGRANATES; a land of oil olive, and honey.”

The most common coins issued by Herod the Great had a Greek inscription that read “King Herod.”

Masada is an ancient citadel and fortification in southern Israel situated on top of a high rock plateau. It overlooks the Dead Sea. Herod the Great built two palaces for himself on the mountain and fortified Masada between 37 and 31 BC.

In 1996, Archaeologists sifting through a 2,000-year-old garbage dump at Masada unearthed the remains of a clay wine jug dating to around 19 BC inscribed with the name of King Herod. The writing on the jug references his full title: Herod, King of Judea.

Matthew 2:22: “But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee.”

Following Herod the Great’s death, his son Archelaus reigned from 4 BC to AD 6. He was as wicked and brutal as his father. He was such an incompetent and violent ruler, that the Jews pleaded with the Romans to depose him.

He was replaced with a governor appointed by Rome in AD 6 to rule over Judea. And later Pontius Pilate was appointed to this position of governor.

Joseph and Mary had escaped to Egypt when Herod the Great was searching for the Christ child to destroy Him. After Herod died, an angel directed Joseph to return to Israel.

Discovering Archelaus was ruling over Judea, Joseph knew that he, Mary, and the Christ Child were no safer under Archelaus than they had been under Herod the Great.

Joseph’s fears were confirmed by God in a dream, and God warned him to divert his path and go to Galilee. Thus, Joseph took his wife and God’s Son and traveled north to Nazareth in Galilee.

During Archelaus’s reign he had coins created which were engraved with his name and title. Many of them depict a bunch of grapes which was also mentioned in Scriptures as being one of the blessings to the land of Israel, and served as a reminder of the productiveness of the country.

Luke 3:1: “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene.”

It’s interest how Luke in this verse gave a real, historical framework for Christ’s life and ministry. This was not a fairy tale beginning with “once upon a time.”

Instead, Luke listed the political leaders of the regions Christ lived and served in, which can be confirmed by history.

The Herod mentioned in this verse is Herod Antipas. Herod Antipas ruled the region of Galilee in northern Israel during the time of Christ’s ministry. He was the one who had John the Baptist executed. Because of Christ’s powerful miracles and Herod’s guilt and fears, Antipas thought that Christ was actually John raised from the dead.

When the Lord was warned that this Herod wanted to kill Him, I love the Lord’s response, “Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.” The Lord still had work to do for a short time, and no power on earth could or would harm Him until the appointed time.

Later, after Christ’s arrest, He was sent by Pilate to Herod Antipas, who was in Jerusalem at the time, as Pilate tried to push the matter off onto him since Christ was from Galilee.

Herod was disappointed that Christ didn’t speak to him and that He would not perform a miracle in his presence so he sent him back to Pilate.

Herod Antipas had coins minted as well. There were minted in four denominations. They had the Greek inscription Herod the Tetrarch and had wreaths and palm branches.

Acts 12:1-2: “Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.”

Herod Agrippa I was the grandson of Herod the Great and the nephew of Herod Antipas.

Agrippa persecuted the Jerusalem kingdom church and the apostles. He had the Apostle James put to death and because this pleased the Jews he had Peter thrown into prison (Acts 12:1-4), but Peter was miraculously delivered by an angel.

Historical records tell of Agrippa’s death at games which Herod celebrated in Caesarea in honor of Claudius Caesar. The crowds were dazzled by Agrippa’s speech and silver garments that shined in the sun and they proclaimed him a god. And immediately a severe, violent pain arose in his belly and he later died.

Acts 12:21-23 records the same thing, but adds important details about how and why he died: “And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.”

Because he made no effort to refuse their adulation of him as a god, or to give glory to God, he was struck down by an angel with worms.

Herod Agrippa I had coins created and was one of the few Jewish rulers to mint coins bearing his own image.

A common coin of his was inscribed with “King Agrippa” in Greek, and showed 3 ears of barley between 2 leaves with the year. One rare coin of his had a portrait of Agrippa and his son Agrippa II on horseback.

Acts 25:13-14: “And after certain days king Agrippa and Bernice came unto Caesarea to salute Festus. And when they had been there many days, Festus declared Paul’s cause unto the king, saying, There is a certain man left in bonds by Felix.”

Agrippa II was the last ruler of the Herodian Dynasty. In 66 AD he issued a coin showing his own bust on one side with the Greek inscription: King Agrippa.

Here in Acts 25, King Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice came to Caesarea to congratulate Festus on his new appointment as governor.

Festus brought up the matter of Paul to Agrippa, a prisoner that had been left in bonds by his predecessor Felix. Agrippa was intrigued and requested to have Paul brought before him to speak to him.

Before Agrippa, Paul shared his past experiences of being a persecutor, but then being struck down on the Damascus Road by the risen Lord Jesus Christ, and being sent by Him to all people, as the Lord told him,

“To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.”

At the end of Paul’s testimony, Acts 26:28 sadly reads, “Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”

All these Herods were real men and rulers as evidenced by the teaching and truth of Scripture and confirmed by the many coins discovered by each of them.

Flavius Josephus was born in Jerusalem around 37 A.D. He died around the year 100. His father was a priest and his mother was of royal descent. He was a Jewish historian. His works provide a significant and independent extra-Biblical source of firstcentury Jewish history.

His greatest works are “Jewish Antiquities” written in AD 94, in which he gives Jewish history from the Creation to the start of the great war with Rome in A.D. 66.

And his work, “Jewish War,” though written first in AD 75, carries the record on to the destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of Masada in A.D. 73.

In his writings, Josephus mentions many people and places in the Bible: Jesus Christ, James, Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate, King Agrippa, the Galatians, Jericho, Jerusalem, Judea, the Sanhedrin, Sadducees, Tiberias Caesar, the Samaritans, and so on.

Here’s what he wrote about John the Baptist: “Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and was a very just punishment for what he did against John called the Baptist.

“For Herod had him killed, although he was a good man and had urged the Jews to exert themselves to virtue, both as to justice toward one another and reverence towards God.”

Though it is hotly-contested and challenged by scholars, here’s what he wrote about Jesus Christ: “About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.

For he was the achiever of extraordinary deeds and was a teacher of those who accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ.

“When he was indicted by the principal men among us and Pilate condemned him to be crucified, those who had come to love him originally did not cease to do so; for he appeared to them on the third day restored to life, as the prophets of the Deity had foretold these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day.”

Isaiah 40:6-8 reads, “The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

A voice, which is the voice of the Lord, told Isaiah here to cry out to Israel and contrast the difference between God and man. People are like grass and flowers that come up in the springtime only to fade and fail and wither away.

Humanity is transitory and temporary, here today, gone tomorrow. By contrast, God and His Word never fails and it stands and endures forever.

The beautiful green grass that covered the hills of Judah in the spring after the winter rains, that grass would die and the hills were eventually left brown and barren. Man is feeble, weak, fleeting like grass, but the Word of God is strong, sure, and secure.

Josh McDowell wrote, “Written on material that perishes, having to be copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press, did not diminish its style, correctness, nor existence. The Bible, compared with other ancient writings, has more manuscript evidence than any ten pieces of classical literature combined.”

The New Testament manuscripts are better-preserved and more numerous than any other ancient writings. Because they are so numerous, they can be cross-checked for accuracy, and they are very, very consistent.

There are presently 5,686 Greek manuscripts in existence today for the New Testament, dated from 100 to 300 years after the originals were written.

If we were to compare the number of New Testament manuscripts to other ancient writings, we find that the number of New Testament manuscripts FAR outweigh the others in quantity. There are thousands more New Testament Greek manuscripts than any other ancient writing. And the gap between the original writing and the copies is also FAR less.

The New Testament, though, is frequently called into question by critics and unbelievers. While Homer’s Iliad is an ancient work that is rarely ever called into question.

Homer’s “Iliad” was written around 900 B.C. The earliest copy is 400 B.C. That’s a 500 year gap, and there are only 643 copies.

Aristotle’s “Ode to Poetics” was written between 384 and 322 B.C. The earliest copy of this work dates to A.D. 1100, and there are only 49 manuscripts. The gap between the original writing and the earliest copy is 1,400 years.

Plato’s “Tetralogies” was written somewhere between 427 and 347 B.C. The earliest copy is A.D. 900, a gap of over 1,200 years. There are only 7 surviving manuscripts.

Only 10 copies of the writings of Caesar, along with another 20 copies of the Roman historian Tacitus, and 7 copies from the Roman historian Pliny, who all originally wrote in the first century A.D., have found their way to the 21st century.

When we consider the New Testament, however, we find a completely different scenario.

The New Testament was written in the first century AD, I believe between 40 and 70 A.D. The earliest copy is in the second century A.D. That’s just a 100 year gap and there are 5686 copies.

So the bottom line is, there was no great period between the events of the New Testament and the New Testament writings. Nor is there a great time lapse between the original writings and the oldest copies.

Josh McDowell: “There are now more than [5600] known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Add over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and at least 9300 other early versions and we have more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today. No other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers.”

Charlie Campbell wrote this, “In 1947, a twelve-year-old Arab boy, made on the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time. While looking for a lost goat in Qumran, near the Dead Sea, he threw a stone into a cave and heard the sound of shattering pottery.

“Curious about the noise, he entered the cave and found a collection of large clay jars containing carefully wrapped leather manuscripts. What this boy stumbled upon was an ancient collection of handwritten copies of the Old Testament that dated as far back as the third century BC.”

After word of the discovery got out, Bedouin treasure hunters and archaeologists unearthed tens of thousands of additional scroll fragments from 10 nearby caves.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of over 100,000 fragments of text written on parchment, papyrus and even copper, that scholars have pieced together into 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and other non-biblical documents. They were found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in eleven caves.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been called the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times.

They are approximately two thousand years old, dating from the third century BC to the first century AD. Most of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, with a smaller number in Aramaic or Greek.

Included in the discovery was an impressive 24-foot scroll, found relatively intact, containing the book of Isaiah. Partial or complete copies of nearly every book of the Old Testament were found in Hebrew.

Only the Book of Esther was not found. But it is mentioned in some of the other Dead Sea Scrolls so we know the Jews at Qumran were familiar with it and likely had it.

Some thought the find might produce some long-lost books of the Bible, but instead it verified the Old Testament books as we have them.

The highest numbers of Old Testament fragments come from the following books: Psalms with 36, Deuteronomy (30), Isaiah (21), Genesis (20), Exodus (17), and Leviticus (13). Commentaries on the Bible are also included in the scrolls and fragments.

Our Bibles are translated from ancient manuscript copies of the Bible.

Critics of the Bible have said that because the Bible has been translated and copied so many times down through hundreds and thousands of years, we can’t trust what it says.

Scholars imagined that our earliest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible, before the Scrolls’ discovery, were likely riddled with scribal errors and editorial changes.

Prior to discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest manuscripts of the Old Testament were from around 800 AD. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they dated back to the second or third century BC.

Because of the nearly 1000-year difference, critics thought these scrolls would show major corrections and changes to our Old Testament. But instead what they found was that they were nearly identical to the Hebrew text used for our Old Testament in our Bibles!

The differences they found were primarily variances in spelling or the addition or subtraction of a conjunction. This shows the great care that was taken by the scribes who copied the Scriptures down through the centuries.

The absolute accuracy of the Old Testament was supported by these finds. All the texts of the hundreds of manuscripts found absolutely verified our Old Testament! It shows that God has preserved His Word and that you can trust your Bible.

Nineteenth century writer H.L. Hastings once forcibly illustrated the unique way in which the Bible has withstood the attacks of its skeptics:

“Infidels for eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as solid rock. Its circulation increases, and it is more loved and cherished and read today than ever before.

“Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt.

“When the French monarch proposed the persecution of the Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, ‘Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.’ So the hammers of infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures.

“If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die and the book still lives.

“No other book has been so chopped, knived, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles letters of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible?

“With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet? [Yet] the Bible is still loved by millions, and studied by millions.”

You can trust the Bible. You can read it with confidence knowing that this is very the Word of God. You can trust it when it comes to the people, places and events it mentions, and you can trust it fully when it tells you that God loves you and Christ died for you.

We know and trust that God’s Son came to this world 2000 years ago and took on flesh, and He lived a sinless, perfect life. He was crucified, and at the Cross He took our sins upon Himself and paid for the penalty for all our sins so we could be forgiven, reconciled to God, and delivered from an eternity of suffering in hell.

We can trust the Bible when it says that Christ died for our sins, was buried and that he rose from the dead. Through Christ and trusting Christ alone we have hope of eternal life.

We can trust that “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

By faith alone, trusting that Christ died for us and rose again, we have the free gift of salvation and the hope of heaven by God’s grace.