The epistle lesson is from 2 Peter 1, beginning at verse 16. For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honor and glory. when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. And his voice which came from heaven we heard when we were with him in the holy mount. We have also a more sure word of prophecy, where unto ye do well that ye take heed as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, unto the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts. knowing this first that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man but holy men of god spake as they were moved by the holy ghost oh lord have mercy on us grace be unto you in peace from god our father and from the lord jesus christ The primary text for today, The Transfiguration of Our Lord, is our epistle lesson from 2 Peter 1. And the title of the sermon is The Testimony of Witnesses, as we confess that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, in knowing that the Bible, the Word of God, is true. Today in the gospel lesson, we heard about the transfiguration of Jesus. And this, as I said at the beginning of the service, is the culmination of the season of Epiphany, where during the Epiphany season, we hear about Jesus revealing to people through his words and his actions who he really is, the Son of God, the Christ, the Messiah that has come to save the world. And on that Mount of Transfiguration, he takes Peter, James, and John up there, And they see an event. They see an event where the appearance of Jesus is transformed to a shining light. Even his clothing is glowing more brightly than anything they've ever seen before. And then there's two other people that show up, Moses and Elijah. And these are speaking for they are the witnesses of the law and the prophets. And then finally, There's the voice of the father himself, which speaks words that we hear at the beginning of the epiphany season every year with the baptism of our Lord. Very similar words, he says, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased, watch, hear ye him. Basically, listen to him. Our epistle lesson is very much connected to our gospel lesson for today because Jesus tells these three witnesses of the transfiguration something very interesting in verse nine of that reading, the last verse that we heard in our gospel reading. And actually Jesus says this at multiple occasions in his ministry. He tells people to not tell about what they just experienced. But here's something interesting about what it says here. He doesn't tell them to never tell anyone about it. He tells them to share it only after he has died and risen from the dead. So when we read today from 2 Peter, he is, of course, writing these words after the death and resurrection of Jesus. He's writing them as the gospel is going out around the world. So he is very, happy and in the will of God here by sharing what happened on that holy mount that day. He is a witness to that event and he records that witness for us here in 2 Peter. There's no doubt in Peter's mind about what he saw or about who Jesus is. But what about today? Those that doubt the reliability of the Bible, they often speak very loudly and very boldly, questioning the very word of God. We take you back to 2005, and there was a man named Bobby Henderson. And Bobby Henderson sent a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education. And in this letter, he made the claim that a divine being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Some of you are laughing. Maybe you've heard of this or maybe it just sounds crazy, right? Now why did he do that? The point he's making in this letter is it's a satirical attempt where he's trying to discredit the Bible and Christianity. He's basically saying, you guys have as much proof for your God as I have for this flying spaghetti monster. Well, people kind of ran with this idea, and even a fake religion was created out of this, and the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster became known as Pastafarians. I'm not making this up. This is a real thing. If you don't believe me, this is a real thing that happened. And they carried a symbol and everything. I even saw one of these symbols on the back of a car in Athens one time. I was like, I think that's that flying skinny monster thing that I pulled out my phone, and it was. So there's at least one adherent. Probably more than that, actually, but in Athens. But there was somebody who had one of these symbols on their car. But it's basically an attempt to ridicule Christianity. Well, we all know there's these people that are very prominent that are disbelievers in God in the Bible, guys like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. They're very well known and they use their, you know, their biting criticism against the scripture. Well, in the last year, we've even seen a rash of pretty well-known people who tell us that they were once believers in the scripture. They were once believers in Christ, but now they aren't. This includes a prominent young pastor who was once a best-selling Christian author, has renounced the faith. Even a former NFL MVP quarterback now says, well, I used to believe this, but now I don't. But even more disturbing than those two groups of people, those that are hostile to God or those that said, I once believed, but it's not just for me anymore, is that we have many that remain in the visible church that question the reliability of the scripture, and at least parts of it. And I'd rather have 10 Richard Dawkins than one of these people, because they are trying to undermine the church from within. It's like they want to hold on to the name Christian, and they maybe like some of the ritual and tradition, but they don't really want to believe everything that's in here anymore. You know, you've heard these things, right? Maybe from your friends, your family, your coworkers. You can't trust the Bible. You know, it has errors, and it's full of contradictions. You've heard these things, haven't you? Well, as Bible-believing Christians, what do we say? Well, we say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. That means that it's literally God breathed this out to the authors. We say that it is inerrant, that means it's without error, that it's infallible, that it can't make errors. What do our Lutheran confessions say? Well, you have to understand in the 16th century, there weren't a bunch of people running around in Western Europe saying the Bible wasn't true. However, there were people there who said, there's other things that are on par with the Bible. That's really what the Reformation was about. People say, well, the Pope and tradition is on level with the Bible. So the Lutheran confessions do address what we believe about the Bible. and in the formula of Concord in the epitome, it makes it pretty clear that this is an inspired book, and furthermore, it's the only inspired book. It says this, we believe, teach, and confess that the only rule of norm according to which all teachings, together with all teachers, should be evaluated and judged on a prophetic and apostolic scriptures of the Old and New Testament alone. Remember one of the tenets of the Reformation, by the Word of God alone, Scripture alone. From our very beginning, this is important. Now, what about the Bible itself? Well, the Bible itself makes it very clear that it is the inspired Word of God. The verse we often go to, 2 Timothy 3.16. Again, I emphasize this word for point of emphasis. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Well, what did Jesus have to say about God's word? St. John 17, 17, sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. And then in Matthew chapter 24, verse 35, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. Everything else is going to go away, but my word is going to remain eternal. Then there's a little phrase that we see in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament as well. And it actually uses this phrase or a variance of it 2000 times. Now, depending how big the print is in your Bible and how many footnotes you have, that may vary, but our pew Bibles here are about 1100 pages. So that means about two times every page on average, you see this phrase. And what is that? Thus saith the Lord. So throughout the whole thing, it's saying, this is God's word. Our epistle for today, Peter writes, the prophecy that came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God speak as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. So the scripture proclaims very clearly that it's not the work of fallible human authors, but it's certain people God gave them these things to record for us. This isn't a small thing. This is not a small thing. This is not one of those things where we can just say, well, you know, we'll just disagree on this, whether the Bible's the word of God or not, and we'll just all kind of remain in orthodoxy. This is not one of those things. This is foundational. This is bedrock to our faith, that the scripture is the word of God. And I want you to know today that you can trust this book, that you can believe what is here. Well, that's important because we sing about it today, isn't it? That simple hymn that is so wonderful. I could hear y'all just blasting it out because you probably do this from kids, right? Jesus loves me, this I know. Why? For the Bible tells me so. So where do we go to as Christians? The Bible. The Bible tells me this, I know it's true. So if the Bible is not true, that pretty much undercuts everything, doesn't it? What do we know is true and not true then? How do we know that Jesus loves us? Because God's word tells us that. It's not a small thing. Now, in full disclosure, I preached a sermon pretty similar to this before, and I'll also probably preach one again, because I think we need to hear this on a regular basis, because we live in a skeptical age. We live in an age where God's word is under attack, and where people, even some of those that claim the name of Christian, do not stand alone on the word of God, as the song says. They have built their foundation on the wisdom of man, which is, as the scripture proclaims, sinking sand. All right, Pastor, but everything you've told us today about how the Bible is true, you quoted from the Lutheran confessions one time, what if somebody's not Lutheran? You quoted from the Bible several times, what if they think the Bible is full of errors? How do we answer that? Well, let me give you two answers. One's the short answer, and the second's the longer one, which will be the rest of the sermon, okay? The short answer is it really doesn't matter because it's the Word of God. The Word of God is powerful. It's sharper than any two-edged sword. You just speak it, and God is gonna work. That's the short answer, okay? We proclaim the Word of God. It's God's Word, whether somebody believes it or not. The second answer, though, is that we can, in fact, present answers to these questions and that the Bible is a reliable document. I'm going to come back to this at the end. Whether you believe it's God's word and that you submit to it, that's the work of the Holy Spirit by faith. But we can show that the Bible is a reliable document that should be taken seriously from things that we can learn. And the Lutheran Hour a few years ago, they put together a program that they ran on television, and it was called the Bible on Trial. Maybe some of you have seen it. We have the DVD study of it here. But in this program, it basically was set in a courtroom. And again, I was in a courtroom all day yesterday, so this is very appropriate. God put this together before that, but I didn't write this all last night. But for the mock trial, so this was really front and center. But the program is in a courtroom, and it's hosted by an attorney. And basically, he puts the Bible on trial. And what he shows through the program is that there is evidence to support what the Bible is telling us. Maybe some of you like watching police or courtroom shows. Maybe some of you do. I've always found these kind of things interesting. I mean, when I was a kid, my favorite cartoon was Scooby-Doo. Maybe it still is my favorite, Shoshana's laughing, but. And it had a cool dog in it, of course, but the thing I think I really liked about it as I got older, I learned out is because there was the solving of the mystery. They're solving the mystery and then they're catching the bad guys, right? That's still the kind of stuff that I like to watch. I don't watch a whole lot of TV now, but some of my favorite shows are those things. I like to watch Blue Bloods with Tom Selleck. And I watched the show, Lieutenant Kenda, the Homicide Hunter, which just ended. I think I've seen every episode of that. So why do I like that? Why do some of you maybe like those kind of solving the crime kind of things? Well, one is the idea of justice being served. I think we like that. But I think another part of it is, at least for me, is that you have a situation, sometimes a very terrible thing, and then you see the detectives begin to piece together with pieces of evidence and determine this is what happened. This is who did this, and this is who did what. Because they can't just have a hunch, can they? Because if you go to trial good witnesses, and you go to trial without evidence, you're gonna go down in flames, right? You have to have evidence, you have to have witnesses. So what makes Christianity different than all of these other mythological religions? Why is Christianity different than ancient Greek mythology, Norse mythology, American Indian mythology? Why is it different than the flying spaghetti monster? Well, because Christianity is based on history and evidence. It has the support of it. This is what Peter is saying. What does he say in verse 16? And remember, he's in a context where there's Roman mythology as the main religion. He says, for we have not followed cunningly devised fables. He's saying, you guys have a bunch of stories. Our stories are true, is what he's saying. We have not followed fables. Well, people like to find apparent contradictions in the Bible. You could actually explain most of those away fairly easily. And think about this, the Bibles that we have, that you have in your pew, that you have in your homes. This is really not just one book. The Bible is a collection of 66 different books, isn't it? That have been put together. It's really like an anthology of 66 books. How many authors of those books? About 40 different authors. What's the time span on the writing from the first to the last book? 1,500 years. Three different languages. Anything else, if you took that variety of witnesses, that time span, different languages, you're gonna end up with something that's completely discombobulated, aren't you? But when you study the scripture, and I promise you, the more you study it, you will see this. We've been seeing this on Wednesday night of Revelation. It all comes together so beautifully. You think it would have one author. Well, it does, God, but he used different people. It's amazing. Did you catch that in our Old Testament lesson and then what happened to the transfiguration? There's so many things there. Even though they're separated by hundreds of years, different authors, God is putting it all together here. Well, The Bible is consistent. It gives us God's plan of salvation. It's centered in Jesus Christ. It preaches law and gospel. It gives accurate accounts of history and science. It's amazingly consistent from old to Genesis, from Genesis to Revelation, Old Testament to New Testament. But what about that evidence? We're still waiting for that. Well, did you know the Bible has more manuscripts than any other religious book or any other document from the ancient world? That is a fact. How many are we talking about? Well, for the New Testament, if you include all the fragments, and some of these fragments are just little sheets of parchment, we have 24,000 of those, 24,000. You say, well, what if we eliminate all the fragments and we just go with longer copies of the text? You've got 6,000 about, 6,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. What about the Old Testament? Well, we found, well a little shepherd boy actually in 1947 found these things called the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Dead Sea Scrolls are amazing because they are a thousand years, dated a thousand years earlier than anything we had before that. Again, conventional wisdom tells you a thousand years, multiple copies, these things are going to be way different. But what they found is in the high 90s percentage, the Dead Sea Scrolls matched up with what they had 1,000 years later. In fact, there's basically an entire copy of the Book of Isaiah. And the minor little variants that you do find throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls don't change any doctrine at all. It's pretty incredible. Now, just to put it in comparison, I could give you a lot of examples, but I'm just going to give you one. When was the last time you heard someone question whether Julius Caesar existed? Probably never. Did you know that we only have 10 ancient manuscripts about Julius Caesar and that they are dated 1,000 years after he lived? Okay, that's just one example. The Bible, we have thousands of manuscripts dated within the time period of people being alive that saw Jesus literally walk the earth. So my point is this, that even in an academic sense, you can't just dismiss the Bible. You can't just say, oh, it's like a flying spaghetti monster, because there's all these pieces of historical evidence for it. Now back to the title of the sermon, and let's talk about witnesses a little bit. Because in a court case, like I said, you've got to have witnesses. And not just any witnesses, right? You have to have good, reliable witnesses. Because if you don't, your case is going to be destroyed by a skilled defense attorney. It's going to go down in flames. If a witness is giving conflicting testimony or found to give false statements or conflicting information, then it can be discredited. If a witness has a vendetta against the accused, what they say may be doubted as being legitimate. So what kind of witnesses do you want? You want good, honest, hardworking, level-headed witnesses. Those are the best ones. Sometimes kind of hard to find in some cases, but those are the best ones. So what about the people who wrote the Bible? Are they reliable witnesses? Well, they're a pretty diverse group of people. You've got scholars, professionals, military leaders, kings, farmers, even fishermen. It's a pretty good cross-section of witnesses, I would say. Also, they had very little to gain by making up a story. And in fact, they greatly suffered for what they said and they wrote. Because in a Cuban court, if you have a witness say that is testifying against an organized crime ring, and their very life may be in danger, but they still testify, that's a pretty powerful witness. What do we see in the scripture? We see that the people who spoke the word of God, were they popular? No. Old and New Testament, they were disliked. They gained nothing worldly from this. In fact, Peter and most of the other apostles died martyrs deaths for what they said. There was no witness protection program for them in the first century. So to say that all of this was made up for personal gain, that they were kind of creating a conspiracy here, it just does not make any logical sense. Because not only did they not gain from this, they paid with their lives many times. So the New Testament authors, they're either direct eyewitnesses, Matthew, John, Peter, or they were close associates of direct eyewitnesses, Paul, Mark, Luke. Furthermore, the witnesses are naming other people who are witnesses that are alive at the time that if they're not telling the truth could refute what they're saying. Peter talks about this in verse 17. He says that he was there at the transfiguration. He was there at other events. This is not hearsay. This is not some guy told me his brother said this. No, he was there. He experienced it, he saw it, and he wrote about it, and he says in verse 19, this is a more sure word of prophecy. This is not private interpretation, he says in verse 20. So he and the other biblical authors, they wrote what the Holy Spirit inspired them to write. Now there's one other type of witness that's coveted in legal cases. All right, one type of witness you have if there's a group of people that are, let's say, assaulted someone. Well, you might get one of those guys to turn on the other ones and testify for a reduced sentence. Well, OK, that can be an effective witness. But maybe in the back of the jury's mind, they're maybe in this for personal gain. So maybe you take what they say with a grain of salt. But what if you have a witness that saw the assault and they hate the person that got beat up? They have no love lost for him. But they go on the stand and they testify to what happened against this person. Well, that's a pretty good witness because they don't even like this person. They don't care about it, but they're still telling the truth. Do we have that for the scripture? Yes, we do. Remember the Romans, they intensely persecuted Christians for long periods of time. They largely, in the early years, rejected Christianity. They saw us as troublemakers, as people who wouldn't go along with the prevailing moral and political attitudes of the day. Well, but we have Roman historians, like Suetonius, Tacitus, and Josephus, who write as hostile witnesses, confirming many of the same events we read about in the Bible. So again, in a legal sense, this is a slam dunk. We've got plenty of evidence through the manuscripts. We've got a lot of witnesses from a diverse set of backgrounds who are gaining nothing by telling their stories. And we even have hostile witnesses that confirm much of what they said. Decades ago, there was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune. And his wife converted to Christianity and he was an atheist. And so he was very upset about that because his wife was acting different and wouldn't go to church and stuff now. So he set out to disprove Christianity. And he did all kinds of research into the history of Christianity. But what happened through all of his research is he came to discover there is a lot of evidence for this. And he eventually ended up becoming a Christian himself. Now, he later wrote a book about that, and a few years ago, it was made into a movie called The Case for Christ. The name of that journalist's name was Lee Strobel, and he told his true story. But there's one other thing we need to talk about today, and that is we understand as Christians that faith is not an intellectual exercise solely. It's not something, you know, Lee Strobel could have found out all that stuff and said, hey, the historical record is accurate. It looks like it lines up, but he could have still not believed. And he did it for a while. He eventually had to believe the Holy Spirit had to work and call him to faith. That's the work of God. You see, just because the Bible is reliable, that doesn't make it divinely inspired. It could still be a good, reliable historical document, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily divinely inspired. That is where the work of the Holy Spirit, where faith comes in. The church is made by the word of God. The church does not make the word, but the church is made by the word. The church is the body of Christ, his people. So this is the key point here, that the Bible as the word of God is powerful, it creates, and it sustains life. God used human beings to author the scripture, but the words that they wrote were inspired by God himself. Saint Peter asserts that he is an eyewitness to the transfiguration. What ultimately makes the words that he writes true is not Peter, though. It's because holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And the witnesses were key in convincing Peter as well, because remember, in the Transfiguration, who was there? Moses and Elijah. Law and prophets. And the best thing, the ultimate proof, who was there? God the Father. You heard his voice speak, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. So the evidence in an academic sense clearly confirms the Bible should be taken seriously. But as St. Paul writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, 2 Corinthians 4.13, we have the same spirit of faith in keeping what is written. I believe, therefore I have spoken. We also believe, therefore we speak. Verse 19 of 2 Peter says that the word is a light that shineth in the dark place. The message of the Bible, of this book, is Jesus. It's his work of redemption for a lost and fallen creation. Without saving faith in the message of the Bible, we miss the whole point of Scripture. It's a message that needs to be proclaimed. Without Christ, the message loses its value. It must be centered on Christ. The Scripture tells us, the Bible makes us wise unto salvation. And how is that done? through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. So trust it, believe it, live it, share it, and speak it. Amen.