The Bible is Scientifically Accurate

We officially started our NEW series this past Sunday "40 Days in the Word" with part 1" Is the Bible reliable and trustworthy? You can listen to the podcast at http://www.wyandottefamily.com/listen.html or you can download it from iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wyandotte-family-church/id478735158

We talked about how the bible is historically accurate. There was a lot of great facts so even if you were there on Sunday, I would download the podcast and listen again.

Today through Saturday in my blog we will cover how the bible is scientifically accurate, prophetically accurate, thematically accurate, how Jesus validated the Bible and how it has transforming power.

There is a lot of misconception when it comes to the Bible and science. To be completely honest, most people who think the Bible is scientifically inaccurate probably have never truly studied the Bible and, they probably don’t know science.  Because the truth and reality is God always sets up the laws of science so that his Word does not contradict the laws of science.

The Bible was not given to be a scientific textbook, obviously.  You don’t study the Bible to build a rocket.  And the Bible doesn’t use scientific language. The goal of the Bible was to reveal God’s love for His children and to show the great cost He paid to restore a way for His children to have a genuine relationship with Him again.

 

However, rest assure; The Bible never, never, never gives bad science.  Not once in over sixteen hundred years in which this book was written, does it give bad science.  In fact it is always ahead of science.  There are things in the Bible, the Bible says were true, that we’ve just discovered a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. 

Johannes Kepler, the famous mathematian, the famous astronomer said, “Science is simply thinking God’s thoughts after him.”  In other words, God established the laws of physics and then we discover them.  God established the laws of biology and we discover them.  God established the laws of mathematics and we discover them.  One of the reasons why we know the Bible can be trusted is because it’s scientifically accurate.  And the reason it’s accurate is because the laws of the universe were invented by God.  So he obviously understands them even in years past when we didn’t.  For thousands of years we’ve misunderstood different things.

One thing about truth is it never changes.  But one thing about science is it constantly changes. There’s nothing more worthless than an obsolete science book.  I guarantee you that the science book you had in the third grade is not being used in the third grade today.  A lot of things in that book are no longer believed or even taught.  Nothing is more worthless than a five-year-old computer book.  You can find them in any garage sale and nobody wants them, because things get out of date so fast.  Things that we once scientifically believed, we now know more about it.  In fact in medical science it happens all the time.

How many procedures, medcines or practices do we not do anymore? What is the main reason? We’ve learned more about the drug or about the procedure and have changed the way we do things in order to be more safe and effective. How many articles have you read that now say that something you thought was good for you now causes you cancer?  Or stuff that they said is fine for a pregnant woman to take and then ten years later they go it’s not fine.

Science constantly changes.  If you’ve ever been to Paris, you’ve probably gone to the Louvre, the famous art museum and library, world class library.  In the Louvre library there’s one section that has three and a half miles of obsolete science books.  Three and a half miles!

Because stuff they thought was scientifically fact fifteen hundred years ago was disproven a thousand years ago.  What we thought a thousand years ago was disproven seven hundred fifty years ago.  And what we’ve thought for twenty-five years is disproven ten years ago.  And what we thought ten years ago is now changed to today. 

If you had been reading the Bible a thousand years ago or seven hundred years ago or five hundred years ago, what the Bible says would not have matched the science of that day because it wasn’t up to date. But here is an encouraging and fresh perspective.

God understands stuff even when we don’t and his rules don’t change.

The Bible says this in Psalm 148 “Let every created thing [that is the whole universe] give praise to the Lord, for he issued his command, [God set these rules in motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of psychics] and they came into being. He established them forever and ever.  And his orders will never be revoked.”

The second law of thermodynamics doesn’t work today and not work tomorrow.  It always works because it was true and it was made by God.  Truth doesn’t change.

In 1861 here was a very famous book that came out called Fifty-one Incontrovertible Proofs that the Bible is Scientifically Inaccurate.  It’s a very famous book.  Fifty-one incontrovertible scientific facts that we know, this is in 1861, that the Bible does not agree with and we know that the Bible is scientifically inaccurate.  The only problem is today, a hundred fifty year later, you can’t find a single scientist on the planet who would agree with any one of those incontrovertible facts.  They have all been disproven by science.  Truth does not change.

One of the proofs that we know that this book is not simply manmade, that this book came from God, that God directed men and women to talk and speak and write things down (like we talked about this past Sunday), and we know it’s the Word of God is what’s not in it.  What’s not in it?  Because if this were a human book, you would expect it to be filled with scientific facts of the prevailing day.  But they’re not here.  They’re not in the book.

For instance, for thousands and thousands of years, people believed that the earth was flat.  It wasn’t until Copernicus and Galileo and Columbus that people realized the world’s not flat, it is actually round.  It’s a sphere.  It’s a ball.  So you would expect the Bible to say the earth is flat because it was in existence and being written during those thousands of years when everybody thought the earth was flat. 

Not a single verse in the Bible says the earth is flat.  Not at all.  In fact it says the exact opposite.  Two thousand six hundred years ago, God said this in the book of Isaiah 40:22 “God is enthroned above the sphere on the earth.”  Two thousand six hundred years ago the Bible says the earth is round, the earth is a sphere, the earth is a globe.  Long before anybody knew it.  When that was written nobody believed it.  But God said it and it was true, whether anybody believed it or not.

 For thousands of years, people believed that the earth had to be held up by something.  Depending on the culture you were in, you got certain different beliefs on what held it up.

For instance if you were Greek, in Greek culture you believed that the world was held up by a giant name Atlas.  And we all know who Atlas is.  Atlas held up the world.  Part of the Bible is written in Greek.  Atlas isn’t in the Bible.  Why?  Because it’s not true.  So it’s not in the Bible.  You would expect that during that time it would have somehow found its way into the Bible but it’s not there.

For thousands of years, the Hindus believed that the earth sat on the back of giant elephants.  And that when the elephants moved, that’s what caused earthquakes.  What did the elephants stand on?  I’m not making this up.  You can find this in any encyclopedia.  They believed that the giant elephants stood on the back of a giant sea turtle.  And the giant sea turtle stood on the back of a giant sea serpent who swam through a cosmic sea.  That was the prevailing attitude in the world for hundreds if not thousands of years.  It’s not in the Bible, even though the Bible was being written during this time.  Why?  Because the Bible leaves out the lies. 

The Bible tells us that Moses was skilled and schooled in all of the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians.  Because Moses was adopted as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.  So he went to the best schools in ancient Egypt and was taught what was the prevailing science of that day. 

The Egyptians were flat out brilliant.  They built the pyramids; they were masters at architecture, at engineering, at astronomy.  But the ancient Egyptians were dead wrong on what held up the earth.  Because ancient Egypt believed that the earth was held up by five pillars.  Certainly Moses was schooled in that science because he went to the best schools of the land as Pharaoh’s grandson.  Yet not once in Scripture do you find that the earth is held up by five pillars.  Why?  Because it’s not true.  So it didn’t make it into the Bible.  The prevailing science of the day didn’t make it there.

In fact, the oldest known writing to man is likely the book of Job.  It’s the oldest literature in existence today that we know about.  Job was the first book written in the Bible.  (The books of the Bible are not in chronological order).  Job is the oldest book.  In Job 26:7 the oldest known literature in the human race says this “God stretches the sky over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing.”   Who told Job?  How did he know that?  Everybody knows the earth is flat and it’s on the back of pillars.  Why?  Because the Bible only, always tells the truth.

In all reality, people who flippantly say that the Bible is scientifically inaccurate simple don’t know the Bible very well. If you find yourself in that category I would encourage you to spend time reading the Bible with an open heart and mind. I think you would be surprised.

For instance, for years it was the accepted science that there were about a thousand stars in the universe.  And that they could be counted.  That the number of stars were finite.  In fact a hundred fifty years B.C. a man named Hipparchus counted them and he wrote a very famous dissertation saying that there were one thousand twenty-two stars in the universe.  That’s it.  It was accepted for a long, long time there were only a thousand twenty-two stars in the universe. 

But it doesn’t say that in the Bible.  Three hundred years later, a hundred fifty years AD, a guy named Ptolemy does it again.  And he comes out and says that guy Hipparchus is a nut.  There are a thousand twenty-six.  He found four more stars. 

It is widely accepted today that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the planet earth.  They cannot be counted.

We didn’t know that.  Everybody accepted there were a thousand twenty-six stars.  But two thousand six hundred years ago in the Bible God had said this in Jeremiah 33:22, “The number of stars are infinite.”

I could go into so many different areas.  Into biology and show you what the Bible says about biology.  Into chemistry and show you what the Bible says about chemistry.  Into medicine…

For many years people believed that too much blood in your body made you sick.  For thousands of years this was the accepted custom and they did what was called bloodletting.  Doctors would cut a sick person and bleed them thinking that was going to make them healthy.  That was accepted science.  Everybody knew that was true.  It wasn’t, but everybody knew that was true science.  It was because of Hypocrites; and for 2000 years since Hypocrites they believed that all illness came from four bodily fluids – yellow bile, black bile, red blood or blue phlegm.  Those four fluids also controlled your temperament.

Nobody believes that anymore.  But for two thousand years that was scientific proof.  So people thought you had to bleed people to get the bad stuff out.  Many people don’t know that our first president George Washington was killed by doctors bleeding him to death.  That’s how he died.  George Washington had a heart problem.  Doctors didn’t know what to do so they did the common science of the day and they bled George Washington.  He didn’t get well so a few days later they bled him again, cut and bled him.  He didn’t get well so a few days later they bled him a third time and he died from blood loss.

Today we know you give people blood when they’re sick.  We do the exact opposite of what they did for thousands of years.  You give people blood because we know the life source is in the blood.  And good blood makes people feel better.  That that’s where the life comes from.  It’s called a transfusion.  We give people blood today.  But they didn’t know that for thousands of years. 

But the Bible knew it.  In fact back in Leviticus 17, thousands and thousands of years ago, Leviticus 17:11, God said this “The life of every creature is in its blood.” 

How did Moses know that?  We didn’t even know that blood circulates until around 1650.  It wasn’t until the seventeenth century when William Harvey discovered that blood circulates.  For thousands of years nobody even thought it circulated.  Everybody bought into Galen who was a Greek doctor.  For two thousand years they accepted his idea basically that the heart was the source of heat.  But nobody knew it actually pumped blood.  Yet thousands of years ago the Bible says, “The life of every creature is in its blood.”  They should have just read the Bible!

During the Middle Ages there was the bubonic plague.  The bubonic plague killed one fourth of Europe.  One out of every four people died during the black plague.  Because we didn’t understand germs.  We didn’t understand contagion.  And we didn’t understand infection.  And we didn’t understand quarantining people.  So they had sick people with the bubonic plague who were contagious sleeping right next to healthy people; and people just kept dying because we didn’t know about germs and contagion.  So it became an epidemic and then a pandemic.  They should have read the Bible.

Because thousands and thousands of years before the bubonic plague God had said in Leviticus 13:4 “Put an infected person in quarantine for seven days.”  That’s thousands of years before we even knew what germs were.  God was saying here’s how you take care of people who get infected with an illness.  You put them outside the camp for seven days.  If they’re still sick, he says in the next verse, keep them out there for another seven days.  Nobody understood quarantine because nobody understood germs.  But God was right.

I could go on and on.  The Bible is always scientifically accurate.  It is always ahead of science.

The Bible says this in Proverbs 30:5 “Every word of God is flawless.”  Mine aren’t, yours aren’t, human beings’ aren’t.  But every word of God is flawless.  It’s not only flawless, Psalm 12:6 says “The words of the Lord are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay and purified seven times!”

We know we can trust the Bible because it is historically accurate, archeology confirms it.  And it is scientifically accurate.

 

As I mentioned on Sunday during my message, if the Bible is historically accurate and scientifically accurate then it becomes harder for us to dismiss that it is theologically accurate. I pray that you learn to not only trust the Bible in what it says in the various fields of our world but that you come to trust the ONE WHO SPOKE IT and had it written down. I pray that you learn to trust God's word in every area of your life and that God's Word becomes the ROCK that you build your life on..

 

adapted from Rick Warren's thoughts from the "40 Days in the Word Campaign."