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Thus far in the “Prove It” conversation, we’ve looked at the practical reality of faith, how it’s something that we deploy in the context of our everyday living and it’s anything but a refusal to be rational as much as it’s just part of how you function as human being.<\/p>\n
Then we looked at the Resurrection from the standpoint of someone who was needing some evidence apart from Scripture and we considered the secular writings that reference the Resurrection, not so much as a theological concept but as a historical reality.<\/p>\n
In this segment, we’re going to look at the Old Testament and why we can be confident that we’re not just reading some pretty stories and wise words, but we’re hearing the Words of God Himself.<\/p>\n
Josh McDowell\u2019s book \u201cEvidence That Demands a Verdict\u201d devotes an entire section to Old Testament prophecy and it is a fascinating read. One prophecy that McDowell references is the prophecy made by Nahum pertaining to the city of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian empire. It was an impregnable center of military might \u2013 the kind of stronghold you would expect to be the capital city of the most powerful empire in the ancient world at that time.<\/p>\n
Nahum, in stark contrast, is a single individual belonging to a conquered people. For him to be proclaiming a message that translates to Nineveh\u2019s ruin is ridiculous if not potentially lethal.<\/p>\n
To give you an idea as to Nineveh\u2019s size and overall presence, understand that the walls surrounding it were over a 100 feet high and wide enough to accommodate three chariots driving side by side. And this is just the first wall. You had two other walls reinforcing the first separated by a deep ditch. According to excavated remains, the distance from the inside of the inner wall to the inside of the outer wall was 2,007 feet or just under half a mile. Nahum declares that Nineveh would\u2026<\/p>\n
Nineveh was attacked by a force consisting of Babylonians, Medes and Scythians. Here\u2019s the account of the battle for Nineveh in the words of Lenormant and E. Chevallier in their book, \u201cThe Rise and Fall of Assyria:\u201d<\/p>\n
In 612 B.C. Nabopolassar united the Babylonian army with an army of Medes and Scythians and led a campaign which captured the Assyrian citadels in the North. The Babylonian army laid siege to Nineveh, but the walls of the city were too strong for battering rams, so they decided to try and starve the people out. A famous oracle had been given that “Nineveh should never be taken until the river became its enemy.” After a three month siege, “rain fell in such abundance that the waters of the Tigris inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls for a distance of twenty stades. Then the King, convinced that the oracle was accomplished and despairing of any means of escape, to avoid falling alive into the enemy’s hands constructed in his palace an immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold and silver and his royal robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives and eunuchs in a chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disappeared in the flames. Nineveh opened its gates to the besiegers, but this tardy submission did not save the proud city. It was pillaged and burned, and then razed to the ground so completely as to evidence the implacable hatred enkindled in the minds of subject nations by the fierce and cruel Assyrian government.1<\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n And in an account from \u201cDiodorus of Sicily II,\u201d we read of how the king of Assyria was overly confident in his city\u2019s defenses, despite the presence of an enemy force camped just outside its walls. He began to indulge with his soldiers and in a feast that included a significant amount of food and alcohol. News of this reached the ears of Arbaces, the enemy general through deserts and a night attack was scheduled. Not long after, thanks to the walls that were now vulnerable as a result of the rain, Arbaces was able to take the city of Nineveh.2<\/sup> \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until the Enlightenment that the inerrant dynamic of Scripture was questioned.3<\/sup> Independent thinking evolved into a scenario where the Authority of Scripture was cast off should its content prove to be inconsistent with current scientific trends or even personal preferences.\u00a0Darwinism took it a step further by providing a scientific sounding platform that gave atheists more reason to dismiss God from their thinking as well as their lives. As has been mentioned earlier, Scripture doesn\u2019t claim to merely accurate. Even in the Psalms, you hear David referring to the \u201claw of the Lord\u201d as perfect (Ps 19:7 [see sidebar]). That includes theological matters as well as scientific. Consider some of what the Bible has to say about the physical world:<\/p>\n ASTRONOMY<\/strong>: The Bible claims the universe had a beginning. Philosophers and scientists rejected that claim for over two thousand years, but now astronomers believe the universe had a beginning, the so-called big bang (though with a very different time frame).<\/p>\n ANTHROPOLOGY<\/strong>: The Bible claims that all humans are \u201cone blood\u201d descended from one man and one woman (Acts 17:26; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Genesis 3:20). Some nineteenth-century biologists argued that different races descended from lower animals, but today genetics has verified that there is only one human race.<\/p>\n BIOLOGY<\/strong>: The Bible claims that God created animals \u201cafter their kind.\u201d Nineteenth-century biologists argued that animals evolved from other, very different animals, but today biology confirms that creatures reproduce within their own kind.<\/p>\n GEOLOGY<\/strong>: The Bible claims that God destroyed the earth and the creatures inhabiting it in the worldwide Flood. Nineteenth-century geologists argued that rock layers and the fossils found in them were formed as sediments were deposited slowly, but today geology confirms that many rock layers were deposited catastrophically, burying fossils within only minutes or hours.4<\/sup><\/p>\n While the passion of the Talmudists and the Massoretes is admirable, it\u2019s not necessarily conclusive as far as proving that what we have today is an accurate copy of the original given the fact that up until 1947, the oldest handwritten copy of the Old Testament was 900 A.D. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, experts and scholars were thrilled to learn that the scrolls had been dated to around 125 B.C.. When the two manuscripts were compared to one another, the consistency was nothing short of noteworthy. This is why the Dead Sea Scroll discovery is so significant \u2013 because of the way in which the Old Testament was validated by comparing two manuscripts that were written 1,000 years apart and still matched almost word or word. The discrepancies were differences in spelling and nothing more:<\/p>\n Gleason Archer (noted author and scholar) states that the Isaiah copies of the Qumran community \u201cproved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.5<\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n The table below represents 70 of the over 300 Old Testament references to Christ. Conservative estimates date these prophecies to be removed from their fulfillment by a period of at least 250 years!6<\/sup><\/p>\nScience<\/h3>\n
2) Scientifically Validated<\/div>\n\nThe Law<\/div>\nSometimes the whole Hebrew Bible, or any part of it, is referred to as “the law.” In John 10:34 where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, He tells them that part of Psalm 82 is “written in your law.” In 1 Corinthians 14:21 there’s a quotation from Isaiah 28:11 that Paul describes as having been written “in the law.” And in Romans 3:10-19, there’s a chain of quotations from the Psalms and the book of Isaiah that is referenced as “whatever the law says.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAccuracy<\/h3>\n
Jesus<\/h3>\n