This is the question I will deal with this weekend at EVC. I hope you will come and invite someone to come with you. This question is critical because everything we believe about God, Jesus, salvation, the church, our religious practices...come from the Bible. We have to be sure we can bank on it's contents. Dave Wright, one of our EVC elders wrote the following concerning this subject.

I'm looking forward to Tim's upcoming series, "Prepared to Give an Answer", and to the Small Group study that goes along with it. One of the things we'll consider is the question about the reliability of Scripture. Is it consistent? Is it accurate?

This was on my mind when I saw a recent article about the Dead Sea Scrolls - one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century. If you have never heard the story, young shepherd boys, looking for a lost sheep in 1947, stumbled into a small cave containing dozens of jars. The scrolls they found in these jars turned out to be the biggest and oldest trove of Old Testament manuscripts ever discovered.

Why does this matter? Because these documents, once translated, have conclusively demonstrated that the biblical documents you and I hold in the air when Tim says, "Got your Bible?" are the same as those hidden in those caves. Despite the passage of two thousand years - or more - the text is consistent. That is miraculous!

Remember that these documents were transcribed BY HAND. This was no "copy & paste" keyboard command. This was cumbersome, hand-cramping, letter-by-letter pen-and-ink copying (and re-copying) over centuries by people trained for and dedicated to the task. Sure, there are occasional, very tiny errors (we'll learn about these in Small Group) but modern technology has helped us identify, trace and correct them.

If you want to learn more about the Dead Sea Scrolls, visit the great new online home for the digitized collection: http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/

And if you want to understand more about why the Bible is reliable, come hear Tim's series beginning this Sunday. And join a Small Group! It's free!