This is the first version of my sermon, The Word Became Flesh, preached at Fellowship Filipino Baptist Church in Vancouver, BC on August 15, 2010. Text is from John 1.

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I’d like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to share withyou today… Especially about something that is very near and dear to myheart – the Reliability of the Bible. Now there are of course manyways of looking at how the Bible is reliable. Often quoted is theverse from Second Timothy 3:16…“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, forreproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

It is one of the classic texts to talk about the reliability ofscripture because it is talking about how Scripture was “Breathed outby God”. Which is another way of saying that the Bible is reliablebecause it is inspired by God. In fact, Inspired by God is a commonway of translating the Greek word behind this English phrase. Anyway,while this is of course very true, this verse and Biblical Inspirationin particular isn’t actually what I wanted to talk to you about today.What I wanted to talk to you about today is an often overlookedquality of the Bible, which is that it is rooted in History. Thingshappened, someone remembered it, and under God’s guidance – or,“Inspiration”, you might say – he wrote it down. And now, manythousands of years later, these things are preserved for us to readand learn from.
It’s an incredibly simple truth, but it’s one that, actually manypeople really do not think about.

Yes, today, I want to speak about the historicity of the Bible withtwo particular points in mind: Number, 1) The history recorded in theBible is reliable. And Number 2) The Bible itself as ancientliterature is historically reliable.
I am first going to talk about these two text, and then I will move onto our text for today, found in John 1:1-14, and see how thehistoricity of the Bible is ultimately reliable because of thehistoricity of the one to whom the Bible points… Jesus! The WrittenWord reveals the Living Word, and the Living Word gives authority tothe Written Word. It’s a little circular, I know. Kind of like thechicken and the egg. But I hope, at the end of all this, that you willgain an appreciation for history in general, and really begin to seehistory a little bit like I do. I’ll talk a bit more of that later.
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