We believe here at Bethlehem that the Bible is the inspired word of God and therefore we believe that the Bible is true.

The word of God written, it doesn't contradict itself, it is coherent, it hangs together,

it doesn't teach us anything that is false. The reason we believe this is that Jesus Christ

himself has shown himself to be real to us and he has proven himself to be standing forth from the word of God, the son of God,

he has taught us that the scriptures cannot be broken.

John 1035, he has commissioned apostles

and he has promised to lead them into all truth.

John 1613, and he has given us his spirit whereby we are unable to see reality

for what it really is as light breaks forth from nature and from history and from the Bible and from

our own consciences and all the possible ways of seeing it are boiled down to one way, namely the light of God through the power of

his Holy Spirit.

So we have come to receive Christ's word is the very word of God, free from error, free from

contradiction, and that's because God is true and not a God of confusion. But it doesn't mean there are no problems for us in the Bible,

for us in the Bible. Because we are finite and we are sinful and we are culturally biased and language itself comes to us with all of its ambiguities and uncertainties

and at times maddeningly confusing similarities and differences.

Same word means something different and the different words mean the same thing and we want to sometimes

in conversations and disputes pull our hair out because we can't figure out how the other person is using language.

An example maybe for the children if you wonder what's he talking about.

If you take the word rock, I can think of four meanings for the word rock. They're probably more.

One, a stone, two, a kind of music. Three, what you do in a rocking chair, and four, an old-timey movie star that none of you

ever heard of probably.

So the same word can mean different things.

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