Mark 16:9-20 & New Testament Reliability

This Sunday’s message will be very different than what we are used to. Our steady diet of preaching has been (and will continue to be) exposition through books of Scripture, verse by verse. However, along our journey through Mark’s gospel, we occasionally noticed missing verse numbers (7:16; 9:44), and when we finished Mark 16:1-8, the next thing we saw was brackets around Mark 16:9-20 and a study note that says something to the effect of "the earliest manuscripts do not contain these verses." The easiest thing to do would be to simply make that statement, move on, and start preaching through another book. But this section offers a unique opportunity. Sunday, we will examine how God has reliably preserved His word down through time to us and look at the actual evidence for and against Mark’s longer ending. Rather than just giving you my opinion about Mark’s ending, I will walk you through the process of examining the evidence, which is not hidden or out of reach for Christians. With all the objections to textual corruption, books added to or taken out of the Bible, and the idea that we Christians depend on unknown scholars to tell us what is in our scriptures, I have three goals for Sunday. I hope to show you how the New Testament documents have been reliably passed down to us, let you see and examine the evidence concerning Mark’s ending, and use this opportunity to address how we know the 66 books of our Bibles are the only God-inspired books. Accomplishing those three goals in under 40 minutes will be as miraculous as parting the Red Sea, so we certainly can’t say everything that needs to be said, but in the end, we will see that God has preserved His Word in the Bible that you carry. The Bible you hold in your hand is God’s Word, sufficient and God-breathed, so that you would know Him through the gospel of Jesus. I. Has God Reliably Preserved His Word In the NT? II. Examining Mark’s Ending: Are we depending on "scholars" we don’t know? III. How do we know the books in our Bibles are the only inspired books?