Thursday, June 30, 2016
Download MP3 (right click to save)
The crews assigned to the recovery effort after the September 11th attack on the Pentagon had an awful job to do. They were working in 120-degree heat; they were making their way through the wreckage left behind when terrorists flew Flight 757 into the Pentagon. They didn't find any survivors. They did find a mass of concrete and metal debris; the metal too hot to touch. But the news reported that they had found a sign of hope as they looked into that black chasm inside. On a second floor, right next to where the jet sheared off a section of the building, was an undisturbed stool. On it was a thick, open book – a Bible. It wasn't burned. Neither was anything around it or on the two floors above it. The leader of the recovery team was quoted as saying, "I'm not as religious as some, but that would have me thinking. I just can't explain it."
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Indestructible Truth".
I was moved when I read that – because the Bible has been for me, and for millions of people, the one thing that has survived every fire in our life. Everything else might be taken away, but God's words are still true, always surviving life's fires. Jesus said it in Luke 21:33, our word for today from the Word of God – "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away."
If you want to anchor your life to truth that will never let you down, the Bible is that anchor. It's the only book God ever wrote. As 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." It's authored by God and it's life-changing!
The Bible doesn't just claim to be God's own words – the evidence for that claim is overwhelming. The Bible was written by 40 different authors over 2000 years in three different languages – imagine the changing ideas of truth or the changing cultures over that span. And yet the Bible has a unified message – same God, same concept of sin, same concept of forgiveness, of heaven, of morality. Imagine getting forty different people from the same city and the same generation together right now in one room and asking them to write their ideas on those subjects. You'd be lucky to get two of them to agree! But the Bible, written over so many years with such diversity in the authors and the cultures, reads like it had one author. It did – God.
Every time the archeologists have dug up something described in the Bible, it has proven the Bible to be true – even if the Bible was the only book that talked about it. And hundreds of Biblical prophecies, most of them 200 to 2,000 years in advance, have been fulfilled to the finest detail. No Biblical prophecy has ever been wrong. That's God, folks.
But for most of us, what matters most is that this book has proven to be God's words in our own lives, over and over again. His promises have been proven true, His warnings have been proven right, His directions work. The Bible is that rock that never moves, the compass that's never wrong, and the life preserver that never sinks. And though it is an anvil that has been hammered against for centuries, the hammers are gone, the anvil remains.
And right now, as so much in your life may be burning down, as so much in our world and our culture may be changing, go to this Book, trust this Book, stake everything on this Book. These are God's words, and you'll make it if you hang onto them with everything you've got. Jeremiah 23:29 says it so well – "'Is not My word like fire,' declares the Lord, 'and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?'"