The Permanent Promise

The Permanent Promise
Matthew 24:1-35
October 4, 2026

Heaven and Earth Will Pass Away, But My Words Will Never Pass Away

I believe God has given us a message that many of you will want to share with unbelievers; friends, family-members, neighbors — all those who you have a relationship with, but each time you bring up your faith, someone says; prove it, show me, I’m just not convinced.

This evening, I want to start off with a short riddle. I want you to see if you can figure out what every single thing on this list has in common with everything else on the list.

 Oldsmobile, Fleetwood Mac, Seinfeld, Friends, Pan Am Airways, Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game record, the Berlin Wall, Woodward and Lothrop, Jordache Jeans and Michael Jordan.

 Now, what do all these things have in common?

Well, there was a point in time when everything I just named seemed like it was going to last forever, and then in a moment of time they were all gone.

Now we live in a world where things just don’t last. And that makes the statement of Jesus we’re going to look at today so radical and outrageous.

We’re going to focus on only three verses tonight because these three verses provide an anchor for your faith. 

I. The Promise of the Word of God

If you were to search for and name Jesus’ most outrageous sayings, you could find twelve that Jesus said and you may ask, “What difference does this make to me?” These can all be found in the gospels of Matthew and John. 

1. “Before Abraham was, I am,” John 8
2. “My Blood Shed for the Remission of Sin” Matthew 26
3. “No One Comes to the Father Except Through Me” John 14
4. “Unless You Eat My Flesh & Drink My Blood” John 6
5. “They Shall Never Perish” John 10
6. “The Fields Are Already White Unto Harvest” John 4
7. “Ask and It Will Be Given To You” Matthew 7
8. “Not peace, But a Sword” Matthew 10
9. “Can Any of You Prove Me Guilty of Sin?” John 8
10. “You Are of Your Father, The Devil” John 8
11. “They Will See the Son of Man Coming on the Clouds” Matthew 24

 Matthew 24:1,  As Jesus was walking out of the temple, his disciples began to call his attention to the temple buildings.

 Now of course this is the temple in Jerusalem, and the temple that existed there in Jesus’ day was actually the second Jewish temple. In 586 BC the first Jewish temple, built by King Solomon, was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. In 536 BC Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, allowed the Jews under Zerubbabel to rebuild the Jerusalem temple. But this rebuilt second temple was paltry by comparison to the majesty and the grandeur that had been in Solomon’s first temple.

 Ezra 3:12 says,  Yet many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ households, the old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, while many shouted aloud for joy,

 Well, things remained this way with this temple being there in Jerusalem for the next 500 years until 37 BC, when Augustus Caesar, the ruler of the Roman Empire, appointed Herod the Great as king of Judea. And Herod, you know, was not a Jew.

He was an Edomite from down around the area of Petra, modern-day Petra is in southern Jordan. And so to win the favor of the Jews as their king, Herod launched a massive rebuilding program, a massive beautification program on the Jerusalem temple, which at the time of Jesus had been going on for 46 years.

 We find out from the Bible that Herod used only the most enduring building material: all white marble and white stone and gold, which made the temple in Jerusalem not only one of the most impressive structures in the world, it also made it one of the sturdiest structures in the world. And this is what the disciples of Jesus were referring to when they pointed out all these buildings there that Herod had built over the last 46 years.

 Matthew 24:2, And He said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down.”

Jesus said, “Hey fellas, as enduring and as permanent as all of this looks, it’s all coming down.” And 40 years later in 70 AD, General Titus and the Tenth Roman army destroyed the temple, fulfilling Jesus’ words.

 But Jesus’ comments about the temple being torn down led to a long discourse that followed here in Matthew 24:3-24 about the future. And as part of this discourse Jesus told his disciples that not only wasn’t the temple going to last, but he even told them that this planet itself wasn’t even going to last. And all of that sets Jesus up for one of the most outrageous things He ever said.

Matthew 24:35, Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

 They are the only thing on this earth,” Jesus said, “that’s going to last forever.” 

A. Inspiration—God-Breathed

With these words, Jesus exalts the Bible to a position of significance, to a position of permanence that surpasses everything else in this world.

 We want to talk about this book that is going to outlast the world—the nature and the character of this book. What does the Bible really claim for itself?

 2 Timothy 3:16, All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;

What does it mean to be inspired? Well, the Greek word literally means to be God-breathed. In other words, the exact words that God wanted written down in the Bible, He breathed those words through the writers of the Bible and then down on the paper.

That is what the Bible is claiming for itself. Folks, inspiration means that if God Himself had written the complete Bible and handed it to Moses on the top of Mount Sinai to bring down to the people, the Bible that Moses would have brought down is the exact same Bible that you and I have today.

Inspiration means that if Jesus Himself had sat down at a desk in Nazareth and written out the entire Bible just the way He wants it, what He would have handed Peter, Paul, James, and John is the exact same Bible that you and I have in our hands today.

You say, “Well, exactly how did this process work—you know, this process of God breathing His word through these people?”

2 Peter 1:20, But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,

In other words, Peter one day just didn’t sit up and say, “I think I’ll write the Bible today.” No, the Bible goes on to say that these men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

 All the Bible tells us is that the men who wrote the Bible were in some kind of a supernatural condition when they wrote it. We don’t know exactly how this process worked, but we do know what the result of this process looks like. It looks like a collection of 66 books which contains God’s direct communication to the human race.

Now not only does the Bible claim to be inspired, but it also claims to be inerrant.

B. Inerrancy—Without Error

 Think about it now. If Almighty God personally breathes something out, then if it comes from God, by its very nature it has to be perfect. It has to be flawless.

Psalm 19:7, The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

 Inerrancy means that the Bible is without error.

Inerrancy means that the Bible is just as correct when it speaks to areas of science, geology, geography, astronomy, cosmology, and history as it is when it speaks to areas about religion per se.

 Inerrancy is the linchpin of biblical Christianity. Rob the Bible of inerrancy and all of biblical Christianity crumbles with it.

This is why John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote and I quote, “If there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.” End of quote.

 In other words, if Jonah and the fish is untrue, then how can we be sure that the resurrection of Jesus isn’t untrue? If what the Bible says about Adam and Eve is wrong, then how do we know that what Jesus said about heaven and hell isn’t wrong? This is a package deal.

 I recently had a conversation with someone at the Men’s Retreat whose friend had begun reading the Bible but asked, “How do we know the Bible really comes from God? What do I tell her?” That is the question I want to address tonight.

II. The Evidence of the Word of God

A. The Historical Accuracy of the Word

 Well, to answer that question there are really three issues we’ve got to deal with.

 Issue number one is the historical accuracy of the Bible. Critics claim the Bible is historically inaccurate. That’s their claim. And if that’s true, they say, it must also be spiritually inaccurate.

 Well, I’d like to turn that around and say, “Okay, but if we can show that the Bible is historically accurate to a fault, then isn’t it reasonable to postulate that the Bible must be spiritually accurate too?”

What about the Bible’s historical accuracy? Well, over the last 100 years archaeology has given us an unbroken string of discoveries that confirm the historical reliability and the historical trustworthiness of the Bible in an amazing way.

I could fill the rest of today and tomorrow with examples, but let me give you a few. Critics once said the Hittites mentioned in the Bible never existed. The Bible says they had a huge empire—well, was the Bible is wrong. We have no record of these people in history.”

Well, that was until 1906 when Hugo Winckler excavated a city in central Turkey, the capital city of the Hittite empire, and found that the Hittite empire was a massive empire that spread through Turkey and Syria and much of the Middle East in exactly the time when the Bible said it existed.

So for all of these centuries historians had been wrong and the Bible had been right all the time. Critics of the Bible used to say, “You know, all that gold that the Israelites supposedly—and silver—that they brought out of Egypt at the Exodus, and they built the ark of the covenant out of it and the tabernacle and all that stuff—you know, that’s preposterous. There was never that much gold in Egypt.”

 Well, people said that until 1922 when Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun — you know him today as King Tut—and found so much gold and silver in that tomb that according to his own records, He had to sit down and catch his breath before he could even walk in.

 Do you know the coffin in which the mummy of King Tut was found contained 243 pounds of solid gold—the coffin—and that was just again one little thing in this whole tomb. You should know King Tut was a small-potatoes pharaoh. He only ruled for nine years, about 90 years after Moses was around.

You can only imagine how much gold there must have been around 90 years earlier in Moses’ day. Of course the Bible was accurate on that point as well.

Critics also questioned whether David existed outside the biblical record. Well, until 1993 when archaeologists north of Israel near the Lebanese border around Tel Dan found a slab that had an inscription on it from King Hazael of Damascus, and on this inscription—not by a Jew but by a Syrian king—is the name of David, just as big as you please.

 B. The Faithful Transmission of the Word

Critics of the Bible used to say, “You know, Pontius Pilate—he never even existed at all. We’ve never found his name in a single inscription outside of the Bible. And Caiaphas, the high priest that sent Jesus to die—we’ve never found record of him anywhere other than in the Bible. The Bible’s just making up stories and people.”

 Well, that was until 1961 when archaeologists in Caesarea on the Mediterranean Sea in Israel found this big old slab of stone, and big as life on there was the name Pontius Pilate. And then in 1990 there was a construction crew using a backhoe in Jerusalem and they accidentally broke into a tomb they didn’t know was there, and inside this tomb was an ossuary, a bone box full of a person’s bones, and written on the side of the ossuary is — guess whose name? —Caiaphas the high priest.

God’s got a sense of humor! I mean, how cool is this? The guy who condemned Jesus to death — Jesus rose from the dead — and we’ve got bones of the guy who sent him to the cross.

And you know I could keep going and do this all night long, but just let me give you one more example. This is an example of how the historical accuracy of the Bible actually led a man to Christ. His name was Sir William Ramsay.

 He was a professor in the late 1800s at Oxford University in England. He was a professor of classical Greek and classical Greek archaeology, and he was an atheist.

 He had no interest in God—made that perfectly clear. But he had a bunch of students in his classes who were witnessing to him and trying to share Christ with him. These students had actually come to Christ as a result of Dwight L. Moody’s evangelistic crusades in England 10 or 12 years before, and they were trying to get their professor to consider the claims of Christ.

Sir William Ramsay became so angry at these students that he said, “All right, all right, all right,” “I’m going to fix their wagon once and for all.” So he took a one-year sabbatical, took the Bible — the book of Acts — and went to Turkey and Greece and decided he was going to follow the book of Acts, Paul’s journeys, using the book of Acts as his road map.

 And being a classical archaeologist and being an expert in classical Greek, he said, “I’m going to find so many historical inaccuracies in the account of the Bible that I’m going to come back, show them all to my students, and tell them to shut up and never bother me again about this Jesus thing.”

You know what happened? He found out that the book of Acts was so historically accurate that while he was on the trip he gave his life to Christ and came back to Oxford to become one of the greatest defenders intellectually of the Christian faith in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. And what led him to Christ was simply the historical accuracy to a fault of the book of Acts.

 You know, I love to say, the more we dig out of the ground, the more the Bible proves to be right. And do you know Time magazine actually agrees with that? Here’s what Time magazine once said, and I quote:

 “Over the past 200 years the Bible has been subjected to the most rigorous examination of any book in history. It has been looked at archaeologically, historically, and text-critically. Not only has the Bible withstood the test, but it has actually emerged better for all the fracas.”

 C. The Fulfilled Prophesy of the Word

Now the next issue that we have to deal with to answer this man’s friend’s question is the issue of the transmission of the Bible. We have to admit we do not have a single original copy of any book of the Bible, and that’s left us open to the criticism of critics who say, “You know, the Bible’s been copied so many times over so many centuries—why, you don’t even know if the Bible you have today is anything close to what the original was.”

All that changed, though, in 1947 with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Suddenly we had manuscripts of the Bible — of many of the Bible books—going as far back as 250 BC.

• The Great Isaiah Scroll found in the Dead Sea caves — this scroll is dated by liberal scholars to between 100 and 150 BC. 

• There’s the Psalm scroll from Cave 11, dated to 50 BC. 

• There’s the Jeremiah scroll, one of several, dated to 250 BC. 

And when we look at these manuscripts what we find is that they are practically letter for letter the same as the Bible that you have sitting in your lap open right this minute. 

These manuscripts show that the transmission of Scripture was treated as a sacred trust and carried out with remarkable care and precision.

 So, is your Bible corrupted? Is it distorted after centuries of transmission? Absolutely not. No way. You say, “Well, okay, I’ll give you maybe the Bible’s historically accurate, and I’ll even give you that maybe it hasn’t been corrupted in transmission, but neither one of those points proves that the Bible is a supernatural book directly from the living God of the universe.”

And that brings us to our third issue, is the Bible really a supernatural book?

 The greatest objective proof that I can bring to the table is the issue of fulfilled prophecy.

Isaiah 46:9, “Remember the former things long past,
For I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is no one like Me,

 God says, “I am God and there is none other, and I declare from ancient times things that haven’t happened yet.” God said, “I wrote down in the Bible things that haven’t happened in time and space, and I wrote them there centuries before they were going to happen so that when they did happen exactly the way I told you they were going to happen, you would know this is not a natural book, because nobody could naturally predict that. You would know that I wrote this book.”

Isaiah 13 predicts the fall of the city of Babylon 200 years before it happened in a way that is so precise it is phenomenal.

In Daniel c2 and in Daniel c11, over 500 years of the political fortunes of the ancient Near East are predicted in the Bible —

• the rise of Persia
• the conquest of Alexander the Great
• the death of Alexander suddenly
• the splitting of his empire into four kingdoms
• the rise of the Roman Empire.

In fact, it is so precise in its predictions of what was going to happen politically across the Middle East that the only way that critics can deal with chapters 2 and 11 — the only way they can answer this — is to accuse it of being a hoax written 400 years later and being attributed to Daniel as a fraudulent book, because there’s no other way to explain the unbelievable precision of these prophecies.

Finally we’ve got all the prophecies related to the Lord Jesus in the Old Testament, all of which were written at least 500 years before Jesus ever lived on this earth:   

• The prophecies of his virgin birth
• Being a descendant from David
• Being born in Bethlehem
• John the Baptist preceding him
• His using Galilee as his headquarters
• Judas betraying him for 30 pieces of silver
• The potter’s field
• All the events of the cross; the resurrection, being buried in Joseph’s tomb. 

A research scientist and mathematician, formerly employed at the Pentagon, who researched 30 of the clearest Old Testament prophecies referring to Jesus, and she calculated that the probability of one and the same person fulfilling all 30 prophecies is one chance in 10 with 100 zeros after it. 

Look, you can’t be wrong with 10 to the 100th power. You can’t be wrong. And so what that means is that the Bible is exactly what it claims to be. The Bible is exactly what it says about itself. It is not only a trustworthy document, but it is a spiritual document directly from the hands and the mouth of Almighty God, because God can predict the future as easily as you and I can look back and predict the past. And he did it in this book to show us that the real author of this book is not Isaiah or Moses or Matthew or Mark — it’s God. 

May I say that if you’re here today and you’ve never trusted Jesus Christ in a real and personal way, one of the reasons people hesitate is because of this very issue: Can the Bible really be relied upon to tell me the truth? 

John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” 

If that’s true it means you’re not getting into heaven with your good works or your religious activity. You’re not getting into heaven by trying to keep the Ten Commandments. You’re not getting into heaven trusting another theology or religion. No offense, but that’s what God says. 

You can only get in by trusting what Jesus did on the cross. And if the Bible’s what it says, then that’s true. And I would urge you to give your life to Jesus Christ and take advantage of God’s offer to give you eternal life. The Bible’s telling you the truth, and I hope you’ll take it to heart. Don’t be fooled; you are choosing God’s path to life eternal or you are choosing a place of eternal separation from God. 

The whole issue here is the Bible. The Bible claims to be a supernatural book from a supernatural God giving a supernatural truth about a supernatural Messiah who died on the cross to give us a supernatural relationship with God so that we can live a supernatural life that has a supernatural destination in heaven. 

There will always be people who try to shake your confidence in the Word of God. Don’t let them do it. An example would be teachers and professors who, in order to justify their own godless lifestyle, are going to try to undermine your confidence in the Bible. 

Until they can find a way to unconfirm world history, until they can find a way to undiscover everything that archaeology has discovered, until they can find a way to undo 1 times 10 with 100 zeros after it, you stick with the Bible. 

You plan to get to heaven the way it tells you to. You live your everyday life — the way it instructs you to. And you learn to see the world with the biblical worldview that it presents to you. And I promise you when the smoke clears in eternity you’re going to be glad you did. 

The wise man built his house upon the rock. The rains came down and the floods came up, but the house on the rock stood firm.  

God said it. I believe it. And that settles it. We want you to build your life — to build your family and your eternal destiny around the truth of the Word of God.

And I’m telling you that heaven and earth may pass away, but if you build your life on the word of God — what did Jesus say? — the house on the rock stands firm. Your house will stand firm. And one day in heaven you’ll turn around and say, “Thank you, Lord, that I had enough sense to follow that simple truth.” 

The Word is permanent.

The Word is inspired and inerrant.

The Word is historically trustworthy.

The Word has been faithfully transmitted.

The Word contains fulfilled prophecy.