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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Subodh Pandit

Is The Bible Truly Unique Literature?

I am Subodh Pandit, physician, internist, licensed and board certified, but born and brought up in India, land of tremendous diversity.

I went on a search for 20 years to ask certain questions that I thought I wanted answered for myself.

And I'm going to share with you just a little bit.

We did some last night, and then I'm going to share some a little bit now and then a little bit more this afternoon from 04:00.

If you want to speak to somebody and really give them a message, then the first requirement is that you learn the language of that person.

We, when we come into a room like this, we have our jargon.

Here I'm talking to a person who has never been to church.

I tell him, hey, you've got to wash your garments in the blood of the lamb.

No, no, there's a fountain filled with blood.

I thought we got to clean the garments of blood.

Oh, will there be enough time for me to go home and prepare dinner for him?

Nah, He's coming in the clouds of heaven.

I'm talking about English language that we use as a jargon which nobody else will understand except if you are a Christian and you know, Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

And higher than that, last day Seventh-day Adventist Christian.

It's time we, if you really want to help others prepare for eternity, then learn the language first.

It's no use going to New Guinea where they speak in pigeon English and start your normal talk.

So what we did last night was try to get us to think the way a secular mind thinks and address the same questions that he or she and I have.

So that's what we're going to do this morning.

We're not going to talk about this literature called the Bible, whether it's the Word of God.

That means nothing to somebody else outside there.

I don't even know where there's a god in existence.

So we've got to think like them and first ask whether you and I are actually enamored with what's there.

Not I've got to do it in the morning you know, 10-20 minutes, okay 2 chapters.

And it cannot grip you as the word of God first.

In the field of literature, does it have something that will grip you?

That's what we're going to look at today.

After I had done, this is my search, I had questioned myself, can a rational mind ever accept the concept of the supernatural?

And we found that if you really honestly follow science, reason, and logic, it is a non-negotiable issue.

There is beyond the natural something known as the supernatural.

And logic and the order principles of science will tell us that if there is something there, there has to be a being out there.

And that personality most probably is also omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

This is without looking at any verse in the Bible, without looking at anything in the Koran or in the Bhagavad Gita or in the Dhammapada of the Buddhists.

Now once we come to that point, The question really is, has that being broken through the barriers between the supernatural and the natural and told us anything?

So my first question was, OK, what's the claim?

And is that claim written down so I could mull over it?

And from that supernatural world, the claim was the absolute truth resides there, not here.

So I asked the question, is that literature, can it be classified so that it would give me some hope and some credibility in my own heart?

So the question was, How do you classify that literature?

Ancient literature is classified into 4, basically.

Folk tale, folklore, legend, myth, historical.

Folk tale, there's no attempt to state a real true story.

The main intent is to be interesting and bring out a lesson or a moral.

In other words, they know that it's not true.

The birds and the animals got together in a big committee meeting.

When it comes to a legend, it's probably based on a real true story, but changes have crept in over a period of time, and those changes are exaggerations so that You come from the natural to the supernatural.

To really make a true legend, it requires centuries.

Because the changes must start after the next generation, when there are no eyewitnesses left to challenge your change.

A myth is so far back in history that it's generally accepted as somebody's imagination.

And the time period is usually centuries or even millennia.

Historical, the attempt is to state the story as it is.

No significant additions, no core changes.

Because every ancient literature has changes.

The question is whether the changes changed the story.

Yeah, those peripheral bits, every story has.

Did it change the tenor, the run of the story?

The closer to the event, the greater the credibility.

So with this, I looked at 5 claims out there.

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Is The Bible Truly Unique Literature?

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