Haddon Robinson was the dean of American preachers for a generation. He wrote a book called simply Biblical Preaching, and if you ever intend to preach, it is where you start. I heard him a couple of times up at Knox in Fort Lauderdale — I was never a student there, but they let me slip in and audit.
He told a story I have never forgotten. Robinson did his doctorate at the University of Illinois, and one afternoon he went to see his faculty advisor, who kept office hours in the library. When Robinson walked in, the man had laid out across the table the great works of Western civilization. Plato. Aristotle. Marcus Aurelius. Cicero. Kant. Hume. And off to one side, a Bible.
The professor said: Haddon, do you know the difference between these books and that book?
This is the man who signs off on your dissertation; you do not want to get that one wrong. Robinson stood there working out what to say, and the professor answered it himself. He pointed at the Bible.
That book's alive.
Bread in the wilderness
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
The tempter says: if you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread. Consider how good that had to sound to a man who had not eaten in six weeks. And consider that Jesus would have had a clear recollection of another temptation in another place. Not this godforsaken wilderness — a garden, perfect and green, where the first man, representing the whole human race, was tempted by the same tempter using the same lever: food. He fell for it, and opened the door to sin and decay and death.
Now here is the second man, starving in a wasteland, and he will not budge. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. That refusal opens a different door.
We are not short of bread in this culture. Nobody here is missing meals unless they are trying to. We are starving somewhere else entirely — on a diet that, as Henri Nouwen put it, is like the last meal given to a man awaiting execution. It tastes good. It does not keep him alive.
The American Bible Society ran its survey again this January. Sixty-eight percent of Americans read the Bible less than once a year. Forty-two percent never read it at all. When people report reading "a little," what that often means is that they were at a football game and somebody held up a sign that said John 3:16, and they are counting it. We are living in the most biblically illiterate culture this nation has known.
And notice what Jesus does with the tempter. He answers by quoting Scripture — the living Word quoting the written Word — and he chooses sacrifice over shortcut. There is no microwave spirituality and no instant discipleship. Nobody grows with a remote in one hand and a phone in the other. It takes the spiritual disciplines, and first among them is reading God's Word. If you are not reading it, I can just about promise you are not growing. There is no substitute, and God never intended there to be one.
So can we trust it?
Isn't it out of date? Weren't these superstitious men writing centuries after the fact, believing whatever they were told?
Let me put some numbers beside it. We hold more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and about 25,000 in all languages, with a gap between the events and our earliest copies of twenty to sixty-five years. Homer's Iliad — 1,800 manuscripts, the earliest four hundred years out. Caesar's Gallic Wars — ten manuscripts, none closer than nine hundred years. Plato, on whom our entire civilization leans — seven manuscripts, the earliest thirteen hundred years after he set down his pen.
Have you ever heard anybody question whether Homer wrote the Iliad? People question this book because it makes claims on them. Because it is alive, and it makes demands.
And the eyewitnesses were still walking around. If any of it had been invented, plenty of people were motivated to say so, and any one of them could have produced a body. History does not record a single attempt. Peter writes that they did not follow cleverly devised myths, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. John, old by then and writing against people who insisted Jesus only seemed to have a body, says in effect: do not fly that nonsense by me. I lived with him. I watched him die. I took his mother into my home. I saw him raised.
Four writers, four vantage points, and they agree on the load-bearing facts. He was publicly executed under Pontius Pilate. He was buried. The tomb was empty on the third day. He appeared alive — first to women, then to the disciples, then to hundreds. Get four eyewitnesses from four angles to agree on the basics and you can trust the account. And if you will not trust this one, you have to throw out nearly all of ancient history with it, because none of it is attested half so well.
One more story
I have known a young man in this church for over forty years — a unicorn in Miami, because he arrives early and sits in the front row. His older sister Olga was in my youth group back then, and was not yet a Christian. Our group did a joint activity with the youth at Granada Presbyterian, and sitting in that sanctuary she noticed a Bible in the rack in front of her, just like the ones in front of you. She picked it up, asked some questions, and somebody told her to take it home.
She set it down on a table at home, and before she had opened it, she had a single thought: this book is going to change my life.
It did. She and her husband are following Christ to this day, raising a family out in the wilds of Colorado.
Mark Twain said the man who will not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. I can make the case all morning that this is the Word of God — and if you never open it, the case does you no good at all.
So get into it. Even if you are a skeptic — especially then. That book's alive.
