ODJ: trustworthy

March 8, 2014 

READ: 2 Timothy 3:14-17  

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realise what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right (v.16).

My wife and I were visiting a British Museum last year when we came across a group of people in the Assyrian gallery listening to a man who we thought was a museum tour guide. “This is the Black Obelisk”, he said, pointing to a statue. “It records the triumphs of Shalmaneser III in the ninth century BC. This ruler is mentioned in 2 Kings chapter 8 and if you look closely, just here, you’ll see a carving of the Israelites paying him tribute.”

Intrigued, we followed the group into a room of stone-carved battle scenes. “These panels decorated the walls of King Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh”, the man continued. “They depict his capture of Lachish in Judah in 701 BC, which is described in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles and Isaiah. These panels caused a stir when they were discovered in 1847, as they were the first archaeological confirmation of an event recorded in the Bible.”

Pointing to the Cylinder of Nabonidus, he said, “Nabonidus was the father of King Belshazzar, who is mentioned in the book of Daniel. Secular scholars thought Belshazzar was a myth until this cylinder was discovered in southern Iraq in 1854.”

As it turned out, the small group we joined wasn’t a museum tour but a church group and that ‘tour guide’ was one of the world’s leading archaeologists. As my wife and I left the museum, we wondered what other biblical ‘myths’ were waiting to be proven true by another archaeological discovery.

“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realise what is wrong in our lives”, Paul wrote (2 Timothy 3:16). And, as archaeologists are discovering, all Scripture is completely trustworthy.

—Sheridan Voysey

365-day plan› Judges 6:1-40