Mark Moore - Why Would I Trust The Bible?

Show Notes

Mark Moore - Why Would I Trust The Bible? by Browncroft Community Church

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Peter Englert: Welcome to the Why God Why podcast. My name is Peter Englert. I am the host of this wonderful show. We are brought to you by Browncroft Community Church. We respond to the questions that you don't feel comfortable asking in church. We are brought to you too, by our wonderful producer, Nathan. Today is a question that you probably have hinted at, at some point, and you've asked, and the question is, "Why should I trust the Bible?" We have author, professor and pastor Dr. Mark Moore here with us. Mark, how you doing today?

Mark Moore: It's a great day here in Phoenix, America.

Peter Englert: Well, you're wearing a shirt that should be a Rochester shirt, Into the Storm, so there you go.

Mark Moore: That's right. It actually came out of one of our sermon series where it was one of the weirdest series we've ever done, The Rhino, the Buffalo and the Lamb.

Peter Englert: Oh.

Mark Moore: This was the Buffalo Series where the buffalo is the only quadruped on the planet that when a storm comes, they go into the storm because they know that's the quickest way out of the storm, so that's the way we roll around here.

Peter Englert: You know what? You just gave our listeners in Western New York the is compliment by saying that, because that's literally who we are, so awesome.

Mark Moore: That's right.

Peter Englert: Awesome. Well, hey, I introduced you a little bit. Why don't you just share a little bit about your story, about how you came to follow Jesus and your faith journey and where you're at today in Arizona?

Mark Moore: Yeah. Well, I grew up on the opposite side of New York in Sacramento, California, and went to church, growing up a small, conservative Bible- believing church. My mom, during her PhD in psychology, left the faith, left our family. Eventually, both of my brothers went to live with her. I stayed to live with my dad, little bit of my just personal journey, but it shaped me in a way that at age 12, I had to make a decision about literally which parent I would live with, and that was based upon who would follow Jesus. Now, I wasn't a particularly genius kid, but I knew enough to know that if I wanted to keep following Jesus, I should probably align myself with a parent who had that kind of faith, even though I was closer to my mom, so that's a little bit of the short version of my growing up years.
When it came time for college, I really felt a call of God to go into ministry, and so I went off to Ozark Christian College in the middle of America, which was, for a kid from California to live in Joplin, Missouri, it was like a whole different world for me. But it set me up through my adult life to say, "I'm going to go wherever God calls me to go, and every sacrifice I make, I'm just going to trust him to backfill." Like Jesus made the promise. When you give up mothers, father, sisters, brothers, you will get 100 times, that's a 10000% increase, and that's certainly what, he's been faithful. He has promised.
After college, a really brief story. I went to San Antonio, Texas to preach in a bilingual church there Anglo-Hispanic, returned to the college to teach at a stupid young age. Nobody should have hired me at 27, but I was a professor from 27 to 48, so 22 years in the academy. Then I got an invite to this church here in Phoenix. I had had other job offers. I'd never actually seen a church or actually been invited to be on staff of the church that prioritized outsiders over in the insiders, so I just couldn't say no. Besides that, all the young bucks at the college, they were about to be better than me as a professor, and I figured if I left before they figured out I could stay a legend. So that's a bit of my story.

Peter Englert: I want to back up a little bit and I want to make sure I heard you right. At age 12, you had to make a decision to be with one of your parents and you said the deciding factor was the parent that followed Jesus?

Mark Moore: That's right.

Peter Englert: Tell me a little bit more about that, because that's something surprising for a 12-year-old to figure out. As you reflect on it, it seems like it was a major decision in your life.

Mark Moore: Other than following Jesus in the first place, I was nine when I gave my life to Jesus. Other than that, it was the most definitive decision I've ever made because my older brother who, obviously, older brother you revere, he went and lived with my mom. He wanted to live with my dad, but my dad was our narcotics probation officer and he was dealing pot at the time, so it was a little conflict of interest. I was closer to my mom and I wanted to go live with my mom, and even to this day, our personalities are much more similar than my father's. She's a better conversationalist.
I felt more love and support from her, but she was walking away from the church, not just my dad. So both my parents, all three of us, lived with my dad for three months, then we lived with my mom for three months, then we had to make it a decision. So my younger brother stayed with me, with my dad. Eventually, well, it's a sad story, he got kicked out of the house and he went to live with my mom. Both my brothers eventually wound up in her home and under her surveillance and I stay with my dad. How I did that? People have asked me before, "How does a 12-year-old decide that?" I can take zero credit for it. I don't even know the answer to that. If it wasn't the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I have no other explanation.

Peter Englert: Well, and the reason I ask that is because when you think about this question, "Why should I trust the Bible?" It's almost as if, I don't know how else to say this, the more ignorance you have, the more faith you have because I have a similar story. I was following Jesus. I was probably 13 and I was playing basketball in a park and someone offered me pot. When they offered me pot, their next thing was, "Jesus smoked pot." Being the brat-nosed Christian school kid I go, "Where's that in the Bible?" But-

Mark Moore: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Englert: ... I look back at that and there was never a, "I'm going to go do this," but you can see God was there. I guess as we look at this question, it's almost as if the less you know, the more faith you have. Is that the tension, or how do you look at it in regards to this question, "Why should I trust the Bible?"

Mark Moore: It's interesting, Peter, because as soon as you said that, "The less you know, the more faith you have," I disagree with that. I want to explain why, because first of all, this was not in my earliest formative years, but in the last probably 10, 20 years, I've dug into the definition of faith quite a bit, and I think it is one of the most misunderstood words in Christianity because we've accepted a cultural definition of it, both on the conservative Christian right, as well as the liberal non-Christian left. I don't mean that all conservatives are Christians and those who are politically liberal are not, I don't mean that at all. Here's what I do mean, that those who often are most critical of the faith of Christianity tend to de define faith as a feeling. Well, that's not biblical at all, and those who tend to be closest to biblical faith often define faith as intellectual ascent.
That's not biblical; rather, the Greek word for faith, pistis, could more reasonably be translated as loyalty or allegiance. Getting back to the statement, "The less knowledge you have, the more faith you have," I don't define faith either as a feeling in your heart or knowledge in your head; I define it as loyalty in your hands. Now the second thing and I recognize, Peter, that for many people, that description fits, "The less knowledge you have, the more faith you can have." It's never fit for me because God wired me academically, and I'm a logical, kind of studied, that's where I got my self-esteem is reading a lot of books and that kind of thing.
Faith, I have more questions than I have answers, but if you just piled up all the questions I have on a table and all the answers I have, even about the Bible, we'll talk more about that. The stack of what I don't know is way bigger than what I do know. Those that lack faith focus on the stack of questions, and those who have faith focus on the stack of what we do know. Instead of counting the questions, I weigh them. What I know about Jesus Christ, what I know that I know that I know, the bodily resurrection, the integrity of the biblical text, the crew of the world by God, those things that I do know, though, the stack is short, it's like the questions are cotton candy, and the answers that I have are lead. They weigh more, so what I know can bear the weight of what I don't know. Maybe that's the best way to describe it.

Peter Englert: No, I love that we threw that grenade and I want to follow up. I think this is super helpful to this question. Jesus says things like "Have the faith or have the allegiance of a child," and we can read that as a 21st century person. I'll also say this, I grew up Pentecostal, and so I don't believe that ignorance equals more faith, but it's just I think it's a thought that's out there, but so I guess, how do you wrestle with that when Jesus makes statements, "Have faith like a child, and obviously, you know what the Greek means to that, but you are someone that's super intellectual and you even just described, "Hey, I have a lot of questions, but I have a lot of answers. I put more weight into that." How do you wrestle with that?

Mark Moore: Yeah. I don't want to spin off into any specifics, so I'm not even to tell you the topics that I wrestle with, but there's some things that I read in the Bible, and I just sit back and go, "That's hard to wrap my mind around." I wrestle with it in a similar way that Job does, which, by the way, I think Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible. It answers the deepest question of all humanity, of every religion of all time, and that is, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" That is the faith-destroying experience of many people, "I lost a loved one," or, "There's a crisis and God just can't be good if my life isn't good." Job is so brilliant what he does, he changes the question. Our questions are "Why?" Let's just take an example. Someone gets brain cancer. It's a terminal cancer. I've got three months to live.
If I could to answer your question of why you got cancer, would that take your cancer away? No. Would it help you feel better? No. Would it help you heal? No. So the "why" question that is so destructive to people's allegiance to God is the wrong question. Even if I was a pagan therapist, I would still not allow my clients to ask the "why" question, because it only spins you off into deeper darkness. Here's what Job does, he changes the question from "why" to "who," who can help? God, again, because I am intellectually oriented, I analyze this with data and stats. If you look at the good that God has done in the world, like biblical Christianity, you take biblical Christianity out of our society, God would never have to send anyone to hell because we would create hell ourselves, and we have.
Case in point, the big question is, "Why should I trust the Bible?" Well, because of what it's done for society. In every culture around the world where the Bible has been preached, there is greater human rights track record than countries where the Bible has not been preached, period, exclamation point. You can trace that through education, through women's rights, through sexual abuse, through slavery. It is stunning that anyone who says they care about humanity and the human rights of people would criticize the Bible. Even if it's not true, it is the best myth for creating the best life on this planet.

Peter Englert: Wow. I want to back up, because I don't think people hear someone with this much passion on the Bible. I joked with you in our pre-meeting. I said, "We could have recorded a podcast right now, you would've been fine."

Mark Moore: Yeah.

Peter Englert: So describe to our listeners your journey of engaging, experiencing, and receiving transformation from the Bible, because I think it's so different. From what I'm hearing from you, there's times when things don't make sense, but it seems like you just can't get enough of it. Describe that journey for us.

Mark Moore: Yeah. I'll just tell you where I am now and then back up and tell you how I got there. If I were to doubt the Bible, it probably wouldn't be Jonah. That's the big one that people say, because being swallowed by a whale or a big fish, really? Life itself is a miracle. Whether you believe in God or not, there is no explanation for life. There is no explanation for love. There is no explanation for music outside of a divine creator. I've already crossed the bridge over supernatural, so that doesn't throw me. I'll tell you what does throw me, Jesus, it's only in Matthew, he tells Peter, Peter, Peter having a conversation. They said, "Does your teacher pay the temple tax?" He said, "Oh yes, yes, yes. He pays the temple tax." Then Jesus said, "Peter, why would you say that?" "Do the sons of the Kings pay taxes? Why should I have to pay taxes? But I'm going to pay taxes, so here's what we're going to do.
Go down to the lake and throw your line in, catch a fish, and there's going to be two coins, a two drop coin in the fish's mouth. Go pay the temple tax for me and for you." Now the skeptic in me goes, "Okay, you have a preacher and a fisherman telling a story. The likelihood of exaggeration is 110%." That kind of passage, I just cocked my head and go, "Did that really happen?" I believe what I do not understand based upon the foundation of what I do understand, and that started for me, Peter, literally in the eighth grade. I remember well I was in a church that talked a lot about water immersion. The friends I was around, their churches. Didn't talk about water immersion. I just thought, "Man, I think we're making too big of a deal over water immersion." So I got this book, I discovered it. It was like someone finding a gold mine. It's a strong concordance. You remember those things?
Everything's digitized now, but before computer someone literally went through the Bible and every "the" they marked it down and the verse reference, and every word of all the King James Bible. In the back of this, they had a definition of every Greek word with a number to it, so you don't have to actually know Greek to understand the Greek word. I'm 13-years-old, and I discovered this and I thought, "Wait a minute, I can get back to the original source. How cool is that?" I looked up every verse in the New Testament that talked about the verb "baptized" and the noun "baptism," and it altered my mind. It altered my view, and I just got hooked. Reading Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict, it was the same year I read that. It was like my brain was waking up to the fact that the faith my father gave to me actually has a historic, logical, archeological, systematic foundation, and it was like the way God wired me and the tradition that I had been given suddenly aligned.
I had justification for the faith that I had. That journey then led me to Bible College, led me to five years of studying Greek and four years of studying Hebrew; later came Aramaic. I have been incredibly blessed to be paid to study the Bible for 30 years. I can't believe that God gave that to me, and so the excitement, in fact, it's funny. My son-in-law is a worship pastor, much more on the emotional side. He worships through music. I have a hard time worshiping through music. I know that probably makes me a bad person, but like I'm sitting in my office now, when I discover something I literally dance in worship in my office. I can't stay in my seat. I got to go to the other players on our team and say, "Hey, look what I just discovered." They know when they see Mark coming, I've just discovered something new in the Bible, and it's a time that we worship together through the word of God, aligning with my creative nature.

Peter Englert: Let's back up. You're with some people you serve, you said Phoenix, right? I want to say Tempe or Phoenix, in Phoenix-

Mark Moore: Yeah, Christ's Church of the Valley in Phoenix, Arizona.

Peter Englert: Yeah. You've made it your mission to help people love and engage the Bible, but I talk to people they'll say things like, "I'm way too busy," which hints to other things. I think people are hesitant, "I don't know what this means." "I don't know what to do with it." As you engage-

Mark Moore: Yep.

Peter Englert: ... and have this passion, what are the things that you think really keep people from engaging the Bible?

Mark Moore: Yeah. We actually know.

Peter Englert: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark Moore: I was just at the Bible Museum in Washington D.C. last week, and I was reminded again, the very first book ever printed on a printing press Gutenberg Printing Press 1453, was the Bible. Since that time, every year, year-over-year, there is not a close second to the number of Bibles printed to any other book. It's this book that has massive distributed power and massive cultural impact and yet, people are more and more pulling away from biblical text. You asked the question, "Why?" Why do people, even good Christian people, have their bucket list. "I'm going to read through the Bible this year finally." Well, we start in Genesis in January and that's cool. You got some naked people in a garden, that's interesting. You got to flood, and then Abraham and a little bit of family turmoil, that's interesting. Exodus, plagues, that's interesting. Then you get to Leviticus, and so middle of February, Valentine's day, you're going, "Yeah, I'm out. I'm out, done, because none of this makes sense."
So here's the simple answer to your question. There are two things that keep people from reading the Bible. It's a big book and it's an old book, that's it. I don't know if we were planning on talking about this, so the church I serve is we have 12 campuses around the Phoenix area, about 30,000 in attendance on the weekend, plus whoever's online. We have some really busy executives and high-powered people. They're not going to spend an hour a day reading the Bible. In fact, they're probably not going to read through the whole Bible, so I thought, "Well, wait a second. In our other lives, everybody who's busy is really careful about what they invest in, and they lean into the Pareto principle, 80/20 principle, that 80% of the benefit you get from anything comes from 20% of the effort."
So what if I, as the expert, just said, "Okay, you don't have to read the whole Bible. Here are the pieces that are going to take you further, faster in your faith." I literally wrote a book called Core 52. It is the 52 verses of all the Bible that preachers keep preaching because it keeps changing lives the most. Core 52 is just an index of those 52 verses with some online, for each of the 52, I produced a little video. You can find it on YouTube or Vimeo where I teach through that passage of scripture in about six minutes. Then I offer some commentary. Honestly, Peter, this is bathroom reading. It's like five pages per verse where, because it's a big book, I've made it small; because it's an old book, I'm acting as a field guide or a tour guide to show you just briefly how to get the most out of this verse. We've had people all over the country say that that has revolutionized their biblical literacy in just one year.

Peter Englert: Now, we are going to talk-

Mark Moore: So that's a tool.

Peter Englert: Well, we were going to talk a little bit about it, because we want to recommend to our listeners because our assumption is whether our listeners are dechurched or unchurched or they attend church regularly, they're asking this question, "Does the Bible work?" I think that that's what you're trying to hint at, is that these ancient doctrines and theologies that don't seem really practical are really helpful. From even what you're saying in your life, the truths of the Bible, they work in real life.

Mark Moore: Yeah, and let me give an example of that. This is actually one of the chapters in Core 52 on happiness, universal desire to be happy. I started looking at Psalm 1, and there's 150 Psalms in the Bibles. It's right in the middle of the Bible. That's our worship text. Well, Psalm 1 is actually a gateway, and if you walk through that gateway, you walk into this world of worship in the Bible, and in that gateway, it gives the mechanism for happiness. It begins by saying, "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the council of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of scoffers." That text might be familiar to some people, but it begins with a word "blessed." If you want a happy life, Psalm 1 is the gateway into this worship world that brings you happiness. But if you take Psalm 1 and you lay it next to the science of happiness, I'm talking about the biological science, there are three chemicals in your brain that bring you happiness.
One is oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. Each of those chemicals are released by different kinds of activities. Oxytocin is the comfort chemical. You connect with someone. Serotonin is for respect, when someone says, "Sir," or, "Ma'am," or opens the door for you. Dopamine, my favorite, like I'm an addict, is for when you have an adrenaline rush. The way you get those three chemicals in your brain that lead to happiness or a chemical cocktail of happiness are outlined in Psalm 1. It has to do with relationships for oxytocin, adventure for dopamine, which is going out and following the commands of God. The other one is serotonin is significance of understanding who you are and the value you have. I think it's freakishly genius that the psychology of modern medicine was actually reflected in a text that is 1,000 years before Christ. God knew how our brains worked, and so that's one example. I could give you 1,000 examples of how the Bible in the modern world actually makes sense.

Peter Englert: No, I think that that's super helpful. So I have a similar story to you. I got a Thompson chain reference Bible when I was 12, and I would look at the different verses. The more I studied, the more I just got intrigued and loved the Bible. That's why I'm a pastor hosting a podcast. But I think a lot of people wrestle with the literalness of the Bible and people's interpretations of the Bible, because it's not like there's one person that we look to and say, "Hey, you've got it all." So how you help people, and even help yourself, wrestle with this is a book that was written for us, not to us? It was written to ancient audiences, but then they had different rules about genre, So if you read even just the biographies of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're not playing by the same rules that we have for the autobiographies of other people and famous people today. How do you wrestle with the literalness and the interpretation?

Mark Moore: Yeah. Let me answer the question in two different ways, because that's such an important question. The first thing is, I'm going to give your audience, a starter kit for reading the Bible in 30 seconds, that if they did this today, tomorrow, and all week, they would begin to see a transformative power of the Bible in their own lives. Here's what I mean by that, Peter. Some sociological studies have looked at what happens in people's lives who engage in the Bible four days, a week or more on their own. We're talking about five minutes, 10 minutes. Just reading the Bible. Drunkenness goes down by over 60%; sexual immorality drops by 60%; self-esteem raises by 30%; isolation lowers by 30%, so in intangible, practical ways. If you're a pre-Christian listening to this, you're not fully committed to Jesus, that's okay. No judgment.
Try reading the Bible for 30 days in a row and see if it doesn't help you with your mental health, with your relationships, with your personal disciplines. Now, obviously, we believe that the Bible is much more than a self-help book, so here's the 30 seconds. Everyone can do this. Read one chapter a day. Isolate one verse from that chapter that you want to implement today, and try for one hour to live it out, just one hour. You can't do more than that. So for example, you read Matthew 7, it's part of the Sermon on the Mount. There's 20 verses there that I want to live out. One of them is, "Do to others what you want others to do to you." Okay, so I'm going to choose that one. I'm going to isolate that verse, and then for one hour, I'm going to try to do exactly that. That will blow your mind. Read one chapter a day. Isolate one verse to practice. Practice that verse for one hour. That's pretty simple.
Now, that doesn't answer your question because what happens when I come to a verse that I don't know what to do with? Well, this may be simplistic, but I would literally write a question mark in the margin of your Bible and ask your pastor on the weekend or ask a mentor, "What do you think that means?"You don't have to agree with everyone's opinion on what it means, but they're going to be able to, again, like a field guide or a tour guide, they're going to be able to say, "Well, in Jesus' day, this is what a Pharisee was and this is what they believed." You're going to go, "Oh, wait, that makes so much sense." It's like, this is maybe a crash illustration, but when I went to India, they said, "Do not shake people's hands with your left hand, because it's for personal hygiene for people who don't have toilet paper. Don't do it."
Well, if you don't know that, that's a mystery. Every culture has their own idiosyncrasies, and I think is courteous when you go to another country that you should learn a little bit of their habits and protocols so that you can fit in, and we're just doing that with a Bible. Because it's 2000 years ago, you might need a tour guide on some passages. Okay. Now, let me answer the question as you intended it, because what about literal versus figurative? If you're watching a Western, some guy comes out in a black hat and he's in the middle of the street and what's going to happen? There's going to be a gun fight. You interpret that genre according to its innate rules. If you read a Hallmark card, you read it very differently.
If you read a newspaper, you read it differently. Learning the genre of the Bible has been a great blessing for me, but again, it's like learning any new kind of literature. You have to learn the rules and there are some really helpful, good helps. I would say to everyone listening, if you're a busy business person, you don't have to go to college and take a class. Just pay attention in a sermon on the weekend how your pastor handles that text, because they have had the class of hermeneutics. Will they all agree? No, but I'm going to guesstimate. If you ask 100 pastors, their opinion on 100 verses, you're going to get about a 95% alignment on 95% of the verses. For practical implementation of the Bible. That's way more than sufficient. I'll say one more thing and take a breath. I don't know, I just keep rambling here.

Peter Englert: I love it.

Mark Moore: I think the big problem, well, I don't want to put this on your church, I'll put it on our church. The biggest problem in with people in my church, and I was in my small group last night, the biggest problem with my small group is not that they don't understand the Bible, but it's they don't implement what they do understand. When you implement what you do understand, that which you don't understand will either drop off as unimportant, or get clarified by the actual practice of the scripture you do understand.

Peter Englert: You know what? Because of your last phrase, I want to go in a different direction, so I want to back up to what you said about one verse, one chapter, one verse, one hour. This morning I read John 12, and it's about Jesus washing his disciples' feet. There's one whole verse that talks about Jesus knew who his father was and it ties this identity to Jesus takes off his apron. He starts washing his feet, and so immediately this isn't rocket science, but you're thinking, If I know who I am, if I know how God's created me, I don't have to feel slighted if I serve in a different way, so I-

Mark Moore: That's-

Peter Englert: Yeah, go ahead.

Mark Moore: ... huge. When you said John 12, I immediately thought, "So Peter's going to tell everybody, so I'm going to serve somebody today." That's actually not the most important thing in that verse. Identity-

Peter Englert: Yes.

Mark Moore: ... is the most important part of the verse.

Peter Englert: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well-

Mark Moore: Yeah, that's right.

Peter Englert: Well, and then I want to hear more from you, so I read that and lo and behold, my one-year-old wakes up and I have to change her diaper. All of a sudden, not that I don't need to matter, but hey, because God has given me this gift, I have this opportunity to serve my daughter. I have this opportunity to make them breakfast, and so it just hit me differently today. Again, reading the Bible to me is like driving by a house that you see on your way to work and one day it hits you and it says, you go, "Did they have blue shutters? I never noticed that before." You can read the same thing, so I don't know, that's a practice. Fill in more, push back on that, or what are some of your thoughts?

Mark Moore: No, I think that's exactly what I'm wanting to get at people. People make the Bible way too complicated. I'm going to say something that this might be insightful for some of your listeners. It might be offensive to others, but the majority of Christians that I know their knowledge of the Bible is not merely a tool that allows them to live out God's commands, but is a bragging right for their own bolstering of their egos, and particularly those of us who went to a Bible college or maybe were in ministry, the more Bible you know, clearly the better person you are. Well, Jesus said something very different. He said to the Pharisees, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you'll have life, but you refuse to come to me, and I'm the one that the scriptures are pointing to."
If you're looking for the Bible to validate your ego because you know these mysteries, you're going to get spun out into irrelevant doctrine. But if you're looking at the Bible as a template for how to live life in loyalty to God, and there's our faith word again, you are going to find overwhelming practical application for your life in every single chapter of the Bible. Let me give another example. You talked about identity. The most apparently irrelevant chapter after in the Bible is Matthew 1, the genealogy of Jesus. It's a stupid list of names.
Until you realize there are three women in that genealogy who changed the course of history and all of them had accusations of sexual immorality, and no, they were true. I'm sorry, four women, and three of them had bonafide sexual allegations against them. One of them, it was not a bonafide sexual allegation. What did we learn from that about your identity? That God can use you in his genealogy of his son, not just in spite of your background, but because of your background, you can play a part in the divine role of God. So even the most seemingly irrelevant chapters of the Bible, when you read with an applicational mindset and view become extremely practical, especially in Peter, I'm glad you brought this up, when you look at your identity and, "Who am I? Who does the Bible say that I am?"

Peter Englert: You talked about before that ignorance shouldn't be opposed to faith. But even what you're saying right now is you can come with assumptions, or maybe faux intelligence. So what does that humility look like, because we live in this society that you can Google anything? I've heard from professors, they're like, "What do I have to teach? I have all this experience and this knowledge." So I guess I want to manage that tension because you've brought that up of people come to the Bible. There's some people that by virtue of knowing the Bible they're not actually living it out, and they're self righteous. How do you pull all that together to have the intellectual humility to actually be someone that culture can respond to that experiences life in Jesus?

Mark Moore: Yeah. Well, that's been a struggle for me, Peter, because just in full transparency, in my 22 years of teaching at the college, I was a popular professor. My class is closed, and so I'm not saying that I was a failure, but when it came time to class critique and the students write out the evaluations and it's anonymous so they can say anything, the number one criticism I got was, "He's arrogant." I haven't been arrogant a day in my life. Pompous, sure. Brash, absolutely, almost on purpose, but arrogant, no. When I have appeared arrogant, it is because of insecurity, not oversecurity. The appearance of my arrogance is a thin veneer trying to cover over my insecurity. As I've matured and as I've allowed my identity to come more from God, I'm not there yet, but I'm better than I was.
The more my identity comes from my Father in heaven and not for my peers on earth, the more I'm able to shift my focus, even in my preaching. I do a lot of coaching for our communicators around here. The number one rule for preaching a better sermon is to start with your audience and not start with a stage. I used to start with a stage of, "What do I know that I could share that would make people go, 'Wow, he's smart,' or, 'Wow, he's funny?'" As I have settled in my identity in Christ, I have the bandwidth to focus on the needs of others so that my knowledge now becomes a tool of service. It is an act of foot washing, not of self-promotion. Because of that, look, I am no less interested in the Qumran Scrolls or the Talmud or the mission, or different translations.
I geek out over that stuff, but it's no longer what I need to share. I share what is important for the other person to take their step towards Jesus. That's where life is. If we would just get the mindset from the Bible, that it is not a tool to like, you're not being you're not being judged by your faithfulness to Christ by how much you know. It is not a multiple choice test, and the ones with a higher score get closer to heaven. It's like a coach's guide in the huddle, "Man, here's how you run the next play," and you run the next play and sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't. You watch the film, you regroup, you come back to the huddle and you do it again.

Peter Englert: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark Moore: But Bible study is the huddle, the game is where the action is.

Peter Englert: You could almost, to some of our skeptics that are listening, or even to some of people that say, "I don't have time to read the Bible. I don't fit it in," you're almost in a way pushing back and say, "What is it about you that's keeping you from reading the Bible?"

Mark Moore: Yeah. Yeah. What it is about most people is, "I don't want to feel stupid," and, "This book is so big, I don't know where to start," and, "What if I don't finish it?" What if I just took all the pressure off and said, "Look, don't worry about reading the whole Bible. Okay? Don't. Why don't you start with the book of James? It's five chapters towards the tail end of the Bible. Look it up in the concordance. They'll tell you where it is. Go to that page. Read James, five chapters. Read that for five days. After James, why don't you to try John? It's a simple book, 21 chapters."
Those two will take you a month to go through. Simple enough. I promise you, if you would just do that, by then, you would have the confidence to choose another book that might make sense to you for where you are in life. The other thing I think for those that are skeptical of the Bible, they talk about, so let's get into some of the critics of the Bible that it's not relevant. How much of it have you read? Seriously? If you're saying the Bible's not relevant, just be honest. How much have you actually read? Because if you go to Proverbs, for example, here are the five primary topics of Proverbs: friendships, sexuality, finances, work ethic, and faith in God.

Peter Englert: I don't deal with any of those.

Mark Moore: Yeah. Seriously, come on. Job, oldest book in the Bible. It deals with number one question that people are asking. Here's another like that, Romans 8. Roman's 8, I think, is the greatest therapeutic text of the Bible. In fact, I had a young woman, she came to me a year-and-a-half ago, triggered, anxieties through the roof. She said, "What do I do?" I'd never met her before in my life. I said, "Well, I challenge you to memorize Romans 8." A year later, she comes up to me and goes, "I did it, word-for-word, I memorized Romans 8." She was in therapy for her anxiety. Her therapist said, "You don't need to see me anymore." She doesn't credit the therapist, she credits the word of God, because as you mentioned earlier, Romans 8 is all about your identity, and she rewrote her identity, and her therapist said, "You don't have to come anymore."
The reason she's so excited to tell me this is we had a guest speaker at a church and he talked about tithing, giving 10% of your income. She said, "I was sitting in church going, 'I can't tithe. I don't have the money to tithe. Wait a minute. I'm not paying my therapist anymore. I can tithe.'" The act of generosity that flowed out of her brought more healing to her. It's just one of those stories where the word of God does its best work in us when we get it in our hearts and we put it into practice. If you're skeptical that by Bible's not relevant, that doesn't even make sense to me from someone who actually reads the Bible. Here's the second objection people have that, "This book is full of errors." Now I'm going to get a little technical, so buckle your seat belts. If you compare the manuscript of the New Testament to every other ancient writing, like for example, Caesar's Gallic Wars. He inscribed his own Gallic War, wrote autobiographically how great he was when he conquered his enemies.
That document about the same time as the New Testament, a little earlier, about 50 years earlier, that document was put in the National Archives of Rome, protected by soldiers. We have eight copies of that document, which is not bad for a 2000 year old book, right? Compare that to the New Testament, 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. So the documentary evidence is so much greater for the New Testament. Because of that, and because all of these documents were handwritten, there will be some variations over the years from one manuscript to another, and that's throwing a lot of people off. Well, Peter, I was sharing this with the church and I wanted to show a picture of one of these ancient documents from the second century. It's the Book of John, the story of Jesus turning tables over in the temple.
I am literally looking at this photograph of this manuscript, and I go, "Wait a minute, somebody squiggled something in between the lines. What is that?" They added the letters T-A to the end of the word, Karma. Karma is coin, it's singular, coin. So the original text said Jesus turned over the coin. Well there's more than one coin, right? It should have been plural. Now, we can still talk about coin, singular, as plural as in the phrase, common coin. So it wasn't grammatically incorrect, but it wasn't as clear as it could be. So some scribe added T-A, which is in our language it would be like adding an S, coin, to coins. Is that really an error that you're talking about? Look, I have examined thousands of these variants, thousands of them. None of them are more significant than that.
There are few that we really have questions over, but Christianity, and I don't mean to berate any other religion, but Christianity, has shown has always been more honest about our original documents than say, the Book of Mormon, which has some changes that have been hidden, or the Quran, which that those changes have been hidden. Even the documents destroyed to hide the changes we've never done that. We put our documents in museums for everyone to see and compare. So if you're a skeptic out there, I would just, not in an aggressive way, but I would challenge you look at some of the variants and see if those are the kind of variants that shake your faith in the text getting back to the original wording. Now, I'm not saying you have to believe is God's word, but there is no doubt that it is the document that the original Christians read with an accuracy estimate of 99.9%.

Peter Englert: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Wow. Wow. Our time went by really fast and I felt like I went, it was a mix of going to class and enjoying the professor, having coffee with you and hearing a sermon, so that is one of the best compliments I can give the guests. That means we got to have you back on. What I want to do-

Mark Moore: Thank you, Peter.

Peter Englert: ... is before we close, I always ask this question, what does Jesus have say about this topic? So I answer it, the great thing about you is you get to clean up any heresy that I leave there and then we'll go from there. Then at the end of it, we'll give some next steps because I think our listeners are going to want to take some next steps. What does Jesus have to say about this? It's interesting to me that Jesus, one of his most repeated phrases was, "As it's written ... " or he points back to scripture like, "This is fulfilled."
I think there's a lot of statistics that say people love Jesus more than they love the church, more than they love the Bible. From this conversation in my life, you just can't disconnect Jesus from the Bible that he read. You can't disconnect Jesus from the Bible that obviously, he saw that. I think it's not happenstance. It's not irony. It's not coincidence that if you Google Bible and mental health and you Google all these statistics, the way that this is communicating and engaging almost the unexplainable way, it just matters in your life. I think that Jesus would say, "Yeah, read the Bible," so that's mine. What about you?

Mark Moore: Yeah. I will go one step beyond that. Not only would Jesus say to read the Bible, if you look at how he read it, it was so careful. It was so respectful, but beyond just being careful and respectful, he was looking in a mirror. He didn't just look at the Bible as if it was an ancient artifact. He was saying, "Where am I in the Bible?" Now, obviously, he is prophesied as Messiah, but you and I are prophesied as well. Jesus, in his final prayer, John 17, talked about disciples who would be unified and love each other.
You can find yourself in the Bible, and when you find yourself in the Bible, that's when the transformation really comes out. Then Jesus did one other thing. He studied it carefully. He read it autobiographically, and then he applied it in the most difficult seasons of life. So when he is being tempted by the devil, he quoted scripture. When he was on the cross, he quoted scripture. We don't have to know all the Bible, but as you get the text into you, in points of pain it will come out of you and create a path for you through the pain of your life. Please read the Bible, even if you don't believe it. Read it and apply it to minimize the pain in your life.

Peter Englert: What a great way to end. So Mark, let me ask you this. You mentioned Core 52. I have a copy of it. I'm reading over it right now. I love what I see. What's the best way for people to get ahold of you, and if you could give them, and this is shameless plug, give them one step, what would you tell them to do with the Bible?

Mark Moore: Well, my one step would be read one chapter a day, focus on one verse, and apply it for one hour. Core 52 is available really, wherever books are sold, but if you go to core52.org, we have packed that with resources for you that are no additional cost, questions for group discussion, videos to watch. This is so fun. I did a three-minute video for each of the verses to help you memorize it if you chose to take that next step. If you're serious about knowing the Bible better, your life will be better.

Peter Englert: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's really good. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're definitely going to have you back on. We'll have to pick a really difficult topic like the violence in the Old Testament or something. We'll have fun with that.

Mark Moore: Thanks for having me, Peter. God bless.

Peter Englert: That's great. Well, anyways, thank you so much. If you want to get a hold of us at Why God Why, go to whygodwhypodcast.com, click the subscribe button and we look forward to seeing you in other episodes. You'll get this emailed to you directly every week and other episodes. Thank you so very much.