Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Todd Hampson: Overwhelming Evidence The Bible Can Be Trusted!

Transcript

Todd Hampson: Overwhelming Evidence The Bible Can Be Trusted! · Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo

0:00
The 2027 Worldview Matters Conference will take place April 30th and May 1st at the Tundra Lodge Resort, Water Park and Conference Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
0:10
Speakers include Andy Woods, Brandon Holthouse, Nathan Jones, Matthew Mayer,
0:18
Hadia Miramati Falco, Pete Garcia, Brian Thomas, Steve Smotherman, J.B. Hickson, Mark Henry, Brianna Claussen, Alex Newman, Mark and Amber Archer.
0:35
To register, go to davidfiorazzo.com or worldviewmattersconference.com.
0:46
Welcome to Worldview Matters.
0:48
Discussing controversial issues.
0:51
Discerning current events.
0:53
Defending biblical Christianity.
0:56
No topic.
0:57
Off limits.
0:59
And now, here's your host, David Fiorazzo.
1:03
Friends, family in Christ, I'm excited to bring you a brand new book that, my goodness, this is so good and so important.
1:10
It's from our guest today, Todd Hampson, The Apologetics Guide to Trusting the Bible.
1:16
I mean, there is so much evidence.
1:18
The subtitle is Exploring the Evidence.
1:21
for a reasonable Christian faith.
1:25
And it's not a huge book, so it gets right into the bullet points and the nitty-gritty.
1:29
And I want to give you the website.
1:30
Of course, you can get Todd's info at toddhampson.com.
1:35
The book just came out weeks ago.
1:37
It's on Amazon, of course.
1:39
And you can also go to prophecy.com
1:41
pros podcast.com and catch up with him and Jeff Kinley and brother Todd.
1:48
Thank you so much for the book and for being on again today.
1:51
We appreciate your time.
1:53
Oh, likewise.
1:54
It's always an honor to join you.
1:55
And we love talking about topics we love and want to get the word out.
1:59
So I appreciate you helping me with that.
2:00
Yes.
2:01
So I'm a prophecy amateur.
2:02
You're a prophecy pro.
2:05
And I just appreciate, you know, I mean, you do great animation.
2:09
You've authored some amazing books.
2:10
You have a great podcast.
2:12
You speak everywhere.
2:13
I don't know how you do all that you do.
2:16
Just trying to, you know, on social media, I'm seeing, oh, you're there now.
2:18
There's Todd speaking there.
2:20
Oh, there's another podcast.
2:21
Oh, here's a book.
2:22
Jeez, you must be so stinking disciplined and a good manager of your time, but thank you.
2:28
So the first question, really, after all the books you've done, now you're into apologetics and getting back to why we can believe that the Bible is true.
2:42
Just talk to us about how this book came about first.
2:45
Sure.
2:45
Yeah.
2:45
I mean, and actually Bible prophecy, eschatology and apologetics all stem back to my salvation as a teenager.
2:53
Grew up unchurched, was far from God, didn't believe in God, didn't believe in the Bible.
2:58
Wound up in a Christian school for a period of about three months.
3:02
And I could explain most things away, but the one thing I couldn't shake was the apologetic or the evidence was fulfilled Bible prophecy.
3:09
Yeah.
3:10
That got my attention and then led me to seek out other questions I had as well, like, is there evidence that Jesus was a historical figure?
3:19
Okay, is there evidence for the resurrection?
3:22
And is there evidence that we are created and we didn't evolve?
3:26
So all of these were things I investigated as a teenager.
3:29
Even after becoming a Christian, I had a lot of questions and I investigated all of them.
3:35
My love for apologetics goes back to then.
3:37
So most of the apologetics that you'll find in this book are more evidential.
3:41
They're not so much philosophical or other things, but these are concrete evidences that show we have a reasonable faith.
3:49
So really this book was an outflow of all the books I did on Bible prophecy and was kind of a logical next step to equip other believers and to strengthen the faith of believers and to answer some of the common questions that,
4:02
people who are considering Christianity might have like I did as a teenager.
4:06
Well, yours is a very interesting testimony in that it was the Bible-fulfilled prophecy and evidence that brought you to the Lord.
4:16
And to follow up, you say, No other sacred text is so intricately connected to history, consistently verified by archaeology, or backed up by hundreds of specific fulfilled texts.
4:33
prophecies.
4:34
But Todd, we don't hear a lot of pastors talk about Bible prophecy when it's between a third and a fourth of the Bible.
4:44
And there's so much.
4:46
I mean, any other, I don't know, if you just take sports, if someone gets one or two game predictions, right, just go, wow, famous.
4:55
Yeah.
4:55
But this is like a Super Bowl.
4:57
If you could predict the Super Bowl and get it right.
5:00
But this is so much better.
5:01
bigger than that, because this is historical, and this has actually been proven true and verified biblically.
5:08
So talk to us a little bit about that.
5:10
And I know it's probably fear because some pastors maybe didn't study it in seminary, but talk to us a little bit about that, why you think more churches don't address it.
5:21
Yeah, it's kind of sad because it's so powerful from an evangelism standpoint, from a discipleship standpoint, from a helping us understand Scripture better standpoint.
5:31
But I think, you know, it's been sensationalized.
5:34
It's been scoffed at, as you said, a lot of.
5:36
Seminaries and Bible colleges don't really focus on it that much, but really it gives you a better understanding of the entire Bible.
5:43
You can't get away from Bible prophecy.
5:45
It's part of the Bible.
5:47
I mean, the Bible is the only religious book that claims to be the word of God and backs it up with hundreds of fulfilled prophecies.
5:54
So I call it the built in proof of authenticity.
5:58
So it is kind of wild.
5:59
And I think some of it's spiritual warfare, to be honest with you, that here we are in the end of the church age.
6:06
And the enemy has convinced a large number of those who are leaders in the Christian world to put a keep off the grass sign on Bible prophecy and eschatology.
6:16
When those are the very things that help with evangelism, that help with discipleship, that help people see themselves in the story and takes the Bible from being a dusty book with some important spiritual truths to something that I can use in my life right now.
6:32
So for some of our newer, I should say younger viewers and listeners that maybe are younger to the faith, they're not immersed in apologetics and haven't developed this yet and don't know as much about Bible prophecy.
6:47
Tell us.
6:47
So Christianity is not just a blind leap of faith.
6:51
Because you hear that a lot.
6:52
Oh, you know, it's just take a leap of faith.
6:55
Well, there's more evidence, overwhelmingly so, than any other religious system or belief system in the world.
7:05
So tell us a little bit more about that.
7:07
Yeah, I think that's a common thought, especially for those outside of the faith.
7:11
And that's kind of what I thought as a teenager was, you're expecting me to check my brain at the door and just believe in something I've never seen or see no evidence for.
7:20
And when I slowed down long enough and was able to look at some of the evidence, and I think this is what people will be pleased to find, is that you find it's not a blind leap of faith.
7:28
It's a reasoned step of faith based in reality.
7:32
An analogy I use in the book is everyone's seen the trust fall that you do at different
7:38
a group of people stands behind someone who's standing on a tree or a table and they fall backwards and that group is expected to catch them as they fall.
7:46
Most people who have never seen this evidence believe that Christianity is more like doing a trust fall in a dark room and you don't even know if there's anybody there.
7:56
But far from it, we find Bible prophecy, archeology, internal evidence, external evidence, bibliographical evidence.
8:03
And by the way, there's an amazing collision
8:06
of archaeological finds that fulfill Bible prophecy and show that certain prophecies were written long before they came to be fulfilled.
8:15
Jeff and I were in Israel in January, and even though I knew this was the case, my mind was blown that everywhere we went, there's archaeological finds and sites that verify what you read in scripture.
8:28
And it
8:28
It really takes scripture and makes it a 3D rather than 2D, so to speak.
8:33
But it's based in reality is the point I'm making.
8:36
We don't follow a fable or a made-up legend.
8:39
We follow something, a series of events that is accurately foretold in scripture that actually happened in history.
8:46
Not the least of which is the existence of Jesus in the first century and the resurrection.
8:51
Yeah.
8:51
Amen.
8:51
I mean, it really is astounding, especially when you talk about archaeology.
8:57
My next question is about archaeology.
8:59
But it's really amazing, Todd, that so many people just don't think like, okay, they're digging up things wherever it is over there in Israel or the Middle East.
9:10
It seems to confirm or affirm that.
9:13
Something in the Old Testament, something in the New Testament about people, places, events, facts that were written about specifically in the Bible, and then reinforced.
9:24
So my next question, I want to jump to page 49 in your book, and there's a great quote so you can elaborate on.
9:29
It says, there is not a single archaeological discovery that has been shown to disprove any facts of the Bible.
9:40
We don't hear about that.
9:42
Of course, I know why it's minimized, and the secular culture doesn't want to look at that, right?
9:48
But that is really an astounding fact.
9:51
Tell us more about that.
9:53
It really is.
9:54
I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of archaeological discoveries.
9:59
And by now, if there's something that was in Scripture that was not true, something would have been shown now to show that the Bible was wrong.
10:09
But in fact, the opposite thing has happened.
10:11
As you mentioned, not a single archaeological discovery has disproved anything in Scripture.
10:17
On the contrary, and by the way, we've only scratched the surface on the biblical lands.
10:21
We've barely been able to excavate.
10:23
There's some spots in Turkey.
10:25
There's some spots in Jerusalem and Israel.
10:28
But really, by and large, most of the area of the Bible is Muslim territory, and we can't get to it.
10:33
But the areas we have excavated over and over again prove that the Bible was true all along.
10:40
One compelling example that I love to share is the fact of the Hittites.
10:45
For decades, critics used to say the Hittites...
10:50
It didn't exist.
10:51
The only place they're mentioned is in the Bible.
10:53
So there are made up people in this book of legends.
10:56
And they said that until we discovered the capital city of the Hittite Empire with all its books and records that showed it was a empire that rivaled the size of the Egyptian empire.
11:08
And that's one of many stories just like that, where critics used to say, there's no evidence for it because it's only mentioned in scripture, only to find
11:20
And then once those discoveries are made and affirm or confirm Scripture, they don't say, oh, I'm sorry.
11:26
They don't apologize, and they just say, oh, okay, whatever.
11:31
You know what I mean?
11:32
They don't analyze, okay, is there something I need to do with this information that admitting I was wrong, there's more proof that this is true.
11:40
They don't go there.
11:42
So here's something you write, Todd, that time and time again—
11:46
Critics' assertions are proven incorrect, like what you just said, by archaeological discoveries.
11:53
Can you give us another example or two?
11:56
Sure.
11:57
For me, one of the most compelling examples and probably one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
12:05
And there are prophecies in the book of Daniel, prophecies in Daniel chapter two and seven about a succession of empires, the Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greek and then the Roman Empire.
12:17
And also in chapter 11, there's 135 specific prophetic details all about the intertestamental period from kind of Alexander the Great leading up to the New Testament era.
12:29
And they're so specific and so accurate.
12:32
Critics used to say, oh, obviously the book of Daniel, it's not what Daniel originally wrote.
12:38
Someone added those prophecies in after the fact because they're so specific.
12:42
And proof of that is that the oldest manuscript we have is –
12:47
the Masoretic text from around, I think it's about 800 AD, until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, which showed that there was a full copy of the Book of Daniel that existed in the Qumran area from 200 BC.
13:03
And that there were older copies and fragments of previous copies that they had copied over and over again, showing that it went all the way back to the time of Daniel.
13:11
And guess what?
13:12
All those prophecies were in there.
13:13
There was not a single change.
13:15
There was nothing different from the Bible that you and I read today to the Masoretic text to the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls.
13:23
And by the way, every Old Testament book except for Ruth was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls or Esther rather, I'm sorry.
13:31
was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
13:32
So we have the entire Old Testament in part or in full, including the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is the entire scroll of Isaiah.
13:41
And all of those contain prophecies, which came true in history.
13:46
And we now have many evidences and manuscripts that are older than the prophecies that came true.
13:52
So pretty powerful stuff when it comes to archaeological discoveries confirming prophecy
13:59
and showing that the Bible has not changed an ounce since it was originally written.
14:03
That's huge.
14:04
And you would think, you would think when the information came out after they examined the Dead Sea Scrolls, you would think, whoa, they are incredibly accurate.
14:14
So we can have confidence that the Bible we read today is the same text that was originally written.
14:23
And do you get into how many copies of manuscripts we have?
14:28
Do you get into that in the book?
14:30
I do.
14:31
That's the, I'm sorry, the bibliographical evidence or the manuscript evidence.
14:36
And this really resonated with me.
14:38
I think I used this example in the book.
14:40
I had a music teacher named Mrs. Mosley who would, to get young boys interested in singing, she'd break the ice by doing these goofy things.
14:49
And one of the games she played was telephone, where you tell someone on one end of the room, and they pass it down, whispering it, whispering it.
14:56
And by the time you get to the end, it's always hilarious because...
14:59
either mistakes have been added or somebody's intentionally messed it up because they're a class clown.
15:04
But the point is the original message is never the same as what you get to at the end of the line.
15:09
And that's the assumption I had as a teenager.
15:12
And that's the assumption a lot of people have a scripture since we don't have the original manuscripts.
15:17
But here's the mind blowing thing.
15:19
There's when you add the Old Testament and New Testament manuscripts,
15:22
There's over 68,000 or almost 68,000 manuscripts from all different times, all different places, Old Testament era, New Testament era.
15:32
And when you compare all the manuscripts, guess what?
15:35
They all say the same thing.
15:36
There's only a 1% difference, and it's minor spelling errors or words flipped or scribal notes that were put in the side that weren't supposed to be there.
15:46
Minor things like that.
15:47
Nothing that changes everything.
15:49
a historical fact, a person, a area of theology, a key biblical truth.
15:56
It's all exactly the same when you compare all the manuscripts.
15:59
So the fact that we have so many manuscripts actually
16:03
is a help rather than a hindrance because it shows no changes have been made to any doctrine or any key areas of theology or people, place, or, or things.
16:12
So pretty mind blowing stuff.
16:14
Yeah.
16:14
We have to understand that a large amount of copies is not a bad thing.
16:18
The copies aren't wrong or miscopied.
16:22
These are accurate.
16:23
I mean, I think I've read something like 99 point something percent accuracy, almost a hundred percent accuracy.
16:30
That is amazing.
16:31
If you think about it, when was it written?
16:33
I mean, three continents, right?
16:35
Over what, 1,500 years?
16:37
How many authors?
16:39
66?
16:39
About 39 or 40 authors.
16:40
I'm sorry, 66 books.
16:41
Three different languages.
16:43
Yeah, languages?
16:43
From all...
16:44
Yeah.
16:45
All different walks of life.
16:47
I don't know.
16:48
I mean, you take any other subject and put this kind of it is really is miraculous because it is a supernatural work that God used man to communicate his message.
16:59
So do you ever get that pushback, Todd, that, well, you know, man is imperfect.
17:06
So how can the Bible be God's word?
17:08
Right.
17:09
So how do you explain that?
17:10
How do you how do you respond to that?
17:12
Again, that's one of those evidences that actually you flip it on its head because if one man wrote a full document, take take Muhammad, for example, some people gravitate to that because there's one guy that actually he didn't write it.
17:24
He couldn't write, but had it written down.
17:27
But the fact that you have 39 or 40 authors from all different walks of life, from different time periods.
17:35
1500 year span, and yet nothing contradicts it.
17:39
That shows you that there's one divine author behind the whole thing.
17:42
And that's exactly what we read in 2 Timothy 3.16, that all scripture is God breathed, inspired by God.
17:49
So God oversaw what words made it into the Bible.
17:53
Yeah.
17:54
You know, each book has its own personality, its own author, and all of that is intact.
17:59
Yet God is the divine author behind all of that.
18:02
And one thing I highlight in the book is that there's a study done by a group that showed how many cross references were in the Bible.
18:09
And there's a visual of that.
18:11
And there's, I forget, I want to say, I forget the exact number, but it's tens of thousands of them all pointing to each other and zero contradictions.
18:19
So that shows you.
18:20
Wow.
18:20
There's one author behind it.
18:22
So again, just the very thing you think would be an evidence against scripture.
18:27
If you slow down and consider the facts, you realize it's actually a strength for scripture.
18:32
And by the way, the manuscript evidence, the next closest thing.
18:36
in an ancient document that has multiple copies is Homer's Iliad.
18:41
And it only has about 1800 copies, but you can go get a master's degree in, in Homer's literature, you know, and nobody doubts that we have what he originally wrote because all of those 1800 copies line up.
18:54
Well, with the Bible, we have 68,000 and they all line up.
18:58
So pretty powerful stuff.
18:59
I'll take it to a ridiculous conclusion, ridiculous step of believing what you read and that just a newspaper.
19:07
We read that.
19:08
It's like, okay, people believe that.
19:09
Okay, that's news.
19:10
All right, I believe it.
19:11
But, I mean, they don't look at the Word of God and the evidence.
19:14
Not voted.
19:15
So I do want to mention, if there are any apparent contradictions, there is always an explanation that can affirm or confirm that the Bible is reliable.
19:28
Like, for example, the different Gospels kind of view things with different details through a different lens, but they don't contradict each other.
19:34
And that's for another podcast.
19:36
Todd, in chapter 5 and chapter 6, you talk about, does the Bible pass the internal evidence test?
19:41
And then does the Bible pass the external evidence test?
19:45
And I love that 2 Timothy 3.16, all Scripture, all Scripture is God-breathed, inspired by God.
19:51
But you go to Tacitus and I think Josephus for the external evidence.
19:57
Why is that important?
19:58
Why is that a convincer for some people?
20:01
Yeah, I mean, those of us who believe scripture and have studied it and vetted it, believe it is a historically accurate document on its own.
20:10
But I can understand someone outside of the faith may wonder, well, does anybody else who's not a Christian or who didn't believe, do they mention or record any events in scripture?
20:20
And we do find that there's several examples, two of the most compelling are what I highlight most there in that external evidence chapter.
20:27
And that's the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus, both from the first century,
20:35
both reporting on the same events and including details about Pontius Pilate, about Jesus, about the fact his disciples, that Pontius Pilate had him put to death, that his disciples claimed he was risen from the dead and that it sparked this whole movement.
20:49
And they're non-believers.
20:50
They're not Christians.
20:51
They actually kind of mock Christianity.
20:54
As a matter of fact, there's a few statements from Josephus.
20:57
that critics used to say, oh, he's painting it in a favorable light.
21:03
So somebody must have written that in again, trying to say somebody corrupted the documents.
21:09
But when you compare it with other writings by Josephus and other people of that time, you find what he was doing, he was actually making fun of Christians.
21:17
He was making fun of the fact that they believed in a resurrection.
21:20
He wasn't saying...
21:21
I believe it.
21:22
He makes it clear in other places he didn't.
21:24
But anyway, when you look at it from any investigative angle like that, you see that there are those two and many other extra biblical writers and that recorded dates and people and the movement that started with Jesus and his disciples all recorded for us in the first and second century.
21:42
So I think there's a belief in Islam or teaching, and I'm not sure if it's in the Koran, that Jesus didn't die on the cross.
21:50
Is there an extra-biblical confirmation of someone writing about the crucifixion of Jesus?
21:57
Oh, yeah.
21:58
I mean, Josephus cites that, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, very specific about that, and even that his disciples claimed that he raised from the dead.
22:09
And of course, we know that the Gospels were written at a time when other people were still alive who could have produced the body.
22:17
So that's a whole other evidence I didn't get into because that kind of deserves a...
22:20
a whole book on its own was the evidence for the resurrection and people like Lee Strobel and a few others have adequately covered that as well.
22:27
But there's other avenues.
22:28
I kind of trim this down to the bare minimum.
22:31
Like you said, I wanted it to be an easily digestible book for anybody, for believers to strengthen their faith and to be equipped to answer questions from nonbelievers and for honest information.
22:41
unbelieving skeptics who were really looking for the truth to consider these claims, because my prayer is that, like me as a teenager, it would break down some barriers to belief and cause them to consider the claims of Christ and maybe cross that line of faith and become a believer themselves.
22:56
So if more people would just look at the evidence and really with an open mind, if they're sincerely seeking truth, I think they'd be blown away if not convinced.
23:05
But why do you say in the book the theory of evolution is in shambles right now?
23:12
Yeah, actually, that's kind of a secret among evolutionists right now.
23:17
But within the evolutionary community, I have a couple of books that talk about this, and I've seen several podcasts of evolutionists who are not Christians, who are they're arguing over the fact that now that we know what we know from molecular biology and the complexity of life and DNA and all the billions of things that have.
23:36
have to happen for a simple cell to come together and function.
23:40
Most, well, not most, but a few of those prominent evolutionary voices are actively saying right now, we have to come up with another paradigm because within 10 years, we're not, I'm paraphrasing this, but we're not going to be able to keep the secret much longer that
23:55
evolution is untenable and there's no way we can prove it from science.
23:59
And what we know from science now proves that there is inherent design.
24:03
There is inherent complexity that life at its simplest form and in its most simple function is way more complex than we ever imagined before.
24:12
And yet in our government run schools, they often teach evolution, not as a theory, but as this is the way it is.
24:21
They won't address biblical creation or Genesis.
24:24
They won't address that.
24:25
It's just really amazing, friends.
24:27
We've got to be aware of this.
24:29
You know, Todd, toward the end of the book, and I know we're running out of time quickly, you do get to the nuts and bolts of why believe, because there's enough compelling evidence to know that the Bible is not only reliable, but it's the truth.
24:43
You talk about a tiny word with giant implications, and that is, if.
24:51
And the interview here, talking a little bit about that, the repercussions of answering that question, if.
24:57
Yeah.
24:59
If the Bible is true, if there's evidence that shows us it is factual, then we have to consider the claims of Christ.
25:06
And while I would never assert that we could reason someone into the faith, it still takes faith.
25:10
Scripture is clear on that.
25:12
The Holy Spirit has to be at work drawing us, and we have to be open to his leading and all that stuff.
25:17
But if...
25:19
these things are true, then we have a decision to make.
25:22
So by the time people get to the end of the book, they're confronted with the reality of, I either need to reject this truth altogether, or I need to consider what it means for me.
25:31
If it's true, I need to consider the claims of Christ.
25:35
And if I believe those words of Christ are accurate, I'm told in scripture one day that every knee shall bow, that he is king of kings and Lord of lords, that we need to accept his free gift of salvation, that he died on the cross for us.
25:50
so that we could be made right with God.
25:51
And that's the good news.
25:52
That's the gospel.
25:54
And my real prayer is that the evidence put forth in this book will help people to consider the claims of Christ and to bow their knee to him as Savior and accept that amazing gift.
26:06
Amen, brother.
26:06
Friends, it's really good.
26:08
It's only 140 pages, and it just gets right into the nuts and bolts.
26:13
So, Todd, you say our goal in Christian apologetics is not just to win the argument, because you can't convince someone or force someone into the kingdom.
26:21
So what is the goal?
26:24
That's a great question.
26:25
Yeah, I don't think our goal with apologetics should be to win an argument or beat somebody over the head with it.
26:31
Our goal is to win souls.
26:34
Our goal is to make cause them to consider the claims of Christ.
26:37
And, you know, we're told that we're supposed to be able to give a defense for the hope that we have.
26:43
And that's really what I'm trying to do with this book is to give people the tools they need to adequately communicate why they believe what they believe from a
26:52
a evidential standpoint as well as a personal standpoint on what the Lord has done in their life.
26:57
So those are very important to the purposes of this book.
27:01
And I believe the real purposes to what we call apologetics.
27:05
Amen, brother.
27:05
That's why we're here, if we're still alive.
27:07
If you're a Bible-believing Christian, we're still on earth, we're still alive.
27:11
That's our purpose.
27:12
Draw others to Christ.
27:13
The apologetics guide to trusting the Bible.
27:16
Friends, I encourage you to go to ToddHampson.com or Amazon or wherever great books are sold.
27:22
Thanks for your time, Lord willing.
27:23
We will do this again in the near future.
27:25
Safe travels on your upcoming speaking engagements, and we'll talk to you soon, Todd.
27:29
Thank you.
27:30
Appreciate that.
27:31
Anytime.
27:31
Thanks for having me on.
27:32
You're most welcome, brother.
27:34
Thank you, friends, for sharing this one.
27:35
God bless you.
27:36
And as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.
27:39
See you next time.