“The secret service confirmed that the dollar bill you had was legit,” the woman told me over the phone. Living in central Indiana working a fairly boring job means my run-ins with the secret service just do not happen, ever! But recently a banker told me the dollar I tried to deposit was a fake. She had another banker look at it. They both agreed it was fake and had to report it. I had no idea. It wasn’t even the same size as a regular dollar bill. However, about a week later, I received a phone call from the banker. She said the secret service confirmed that the dollar bill was legit! It had just been bleached!
I realized after the excitement of it all, that the truth can be verified, and still stands true. Fakes can’t do that. Fakes, when investigated, are found to be false. Jesus warned His disciples about false prophets increasing in the end times.
“Jesus answered: ‘Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people’” (Matthew 24:4-11).
Jesus warned twice in this passage about false teachers. We are living in the last days where false teachers abound. How do we tell the difference so we are not deceived? We verify what they are saying with the timeless Truth in the Word of God, the inerrant Bible. If something they preach sounds hard to swallow, we have to read the Bible for ourselves. We might, like the secret service, find out the teacher who sounded false, was right. Through verification, we might find out teachers who were great speakers spoke falsely. Verification by reading God’s Word on our own works.
We have all heard about how bankers are trained to recognize fake money. It’s not from looking at a bunch of fake money, but instead by looking at a lot of REAL money. Once they know what the real thing is, they can easily recognize a fake. But what if they get it wrong? What if a real dollar looks fake?
Well, then they have to have it verified by the secret service. Our secret service in Christ is prayer, fasting, and the Holy Spirit. If something looks good on the outside, but we get a sense that we should say no, perhaps it’s time for prayer and fasting in order to decipher the truth. We need the Author of Truth to help us know what’s true and what’s false in these last days. Don’t be deceived. Trust in the Lord and His Word. It’s been proven through centuries.
For more information, consider the following examples of people who have found the Bible to be verifiably true.
Lee Strobel, a Chicago Times award winning journalist, set out to disprove the Bible and Jesus. He found nothing but evidence for the life of Jesus and His death and resurrection. You can read the evidence in his book, the Case for Christ.
Another atheist and cold case detective decided to approach the Gospels with what he’d learned in order to see if they held up under scrutiny. They did. You can read about that in his book Could Case Christianity.
Another man, top in his medical profession, explains how everything he knows about medicine comes from his relationship with Jesus Christ. Science and archeology do not prove the Bible wrong. Instead, they prove the Bible’s Truth.
