Jesus Walked on Water, Believe It!

Mark 6:45-56
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, May 24, 2020
Copyright © 2020, Gregory Broderick

Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to Bethsaida, while He dismissed the crowd.  After leaving them, He went up on a mountainside to pray.

When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and He was alone on land.  He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them.  About the fourth watch of the night He went out to them, walking on the lake.  He was about to pass by them, but when they saw Him walking on the lake, they thought He was a ghost.  They cried out, because they all saw Him and were terrified.

Immediately He spoke to them and said, “Take courage! It is I.  Don’t be afraid.”  Then He climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down.  They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.

When they had crossed over, they landed at Gennesaret and anchored there.  As soon as they got out of the boat, people recognized Jesus.  They ran throughout that whole region and carried the sick on mats to wherever they heard He was.  And wherever He went—into villages, towns or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplaces.  They begged Him to let them touch even the edge of His cloak, and all who touched Him were healed.

Mark 6:45–56

 

In our scripture this morning, we confront an amazing miracle—an unbelievable story to some:  Jesus walks on water.  Most of us are familiar with this story.  Even unbelievers are familiar with this story.  When you want to insult someone who thinks too highly of himself, you might say, “He thinks he walks on water.”  This is a familiar story, and much has been written and preached about it.  Some have preached that this story shows that Jesus comes just in the nick of time.  Some have said that this story shows the folly of doing things in your own strength, straining against the oars until Jesus comes.

The parallel passage in Matthew 14 focuses on the apostle Peter and his unsuccessful attempt to walk out to Jesus on the water, in which he fails due to his own doubts.  That is the focus of Matthew, but not Mark.  Mark’s gospel presents this remarkable event in unremarkable terms.  The challenge presented in this scripture passage is simple: Do you believe it?  Did this happen or not?  Did He walk on water, or didn’t He?  Is the Bible true?  Is it the inerrant word of God?  Is it infallible or isn’t it?

I will tell you, it is true.  It did happen.  Jesus did walk on water.  The Bible is the infallible word of God recorded inerrantly for us by men chosen by God and led by the Holy Spirit.  It is reliable.  It accurately tells us the facts and it accurately tells us the way to be saved by faith in Christ alone.

The Bible, especially passages like our text this morning, puts to us a stark choice.  We must believe the whole Bible or we must reject the whole Bible.  We must not pick and choose what we like or what we feel is defensible.  We must take the entire text as a whole or reject it as a whole.

Let us look at this clear choice this morning.  The Bible presents itself as the very word of God, and it demands that everyone take a side, true or false.  It is either the very word of God or it is not, and the Bible demands that you make that choice.

Second Timothy 3:16 says it plainly: “All Scripture is God-breathed,” theopneustos, which means God-spoken.  God is its author.  Second Peter 1:21 tells us the same thing: “Prophecy [Scripture] never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

As Christians, we must affirm the truth of the Bible, especially its claim to be the word of God.  That is why the great reformers so vehemently upheld and defended the doctrine of the word of God and placed such primacy on the word as the objective arbiter of truth.  The word of God must sit above and adjust our thinking, our philosophy, our experience, and even our own conscience.  For this reason, the Westminster Confession of Faith starts, not with God or with man, but with the word.  It starts with the word because the word sits above all else in our decision-making and understanding.  Think of it this way:  The word of God, the Bible, is how we know what we know.  If everything we know about God is from the Bible, then we must first believe and know that the Bible is truth.  If not, everything we know is built on a shaky foundation.  So we look at the Westminster Shorter Catechism.  Question 2 tells us, “The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy [God],” fulfilling our purpose on this earth.

Scripture is not just something that we know about.  It is not even just something that we know.  As I said, Scripture is how we know what we know—how we know if something is right or wrong, true or false, good or bad.  Scripture must even sit above our own conscience.  It is how we test our conscience, which can deceive us.  When we compare what our conscience says to what the Scripture says, then we can know if our conscience is right or wrong.

We may use our conscience.  We may use our reason.  We may use our experience and our education.  These things are all aids for us that God gives us to help us.  But they are not the final arbiter of truth.  No, truth is determined by reference to one thing, and one thing alone: What saith the Scriptures?

So when Scripture says in Mark 6, John 6, and Matthew 14 that Jesus walked on water, we too say that Jesus walked on water.  Yes, this is outside of our experience.  None of us have walked on water.  We have never seen anyone walk on water.  It is outside of our understanding.  The physical laws of our universe do not and cannot explain how this happens.  But sitting above all that—sitting above our experience, sitting above our understanding, sitting above our education—is the word of God, the holy Scriptures, which say it happened.  So we overrule the rest of our natural faculties and agree with the word of God.  This is a perfectly reasonable conclusion which I will explain later.

Avowed unbelievers flatly reject this position.  They say that we are wrong.  The Bible is not the word of God, they say.  Consider the words of the American Humanist Association, an avowed atheist organization, whose motto is, “Good without God.”  “Good” compared to what is an unanswered question; “good” by what standard is an unanswered question, but that is their motto.  They say, “[We] reject the claim that the Bible is the word of God.  The book was written solely by humans in an ignorant, superstitious, and cruel age.”[1] Now, one of their primary proofs for why the Bible is not the word of God is that the Bible describes supernatural events that violate the fixed and immutable laws of nature.  In other words, they reject the Bible because of its miracles, and they reject the miracles because they are found in the Bible, which is a somewhat circular argument.

These people have it wrong, of course, but at least their position is consistent and clear.  They reject miracles, they reject the Bible, and reject God.  So at least they are clear.  But there are also those who seek to chart a middle course.  There are those who seek a compromised position.  These are timid people who say they are Christians but who are ashamed of the miracles of the Bible.  These people want to pick and choose which parts of the Bible to adopt and which parts to cut out.  They do not want to be viewed as ignorant, superstitious, or cruel.  Rather than stand on the word of God, they look to explain away the supernatural things of the Bible.

Of course, shortly after explaining away the supernatural things, other “unpleasant” doctrines such as the wrath of God, hell, eternal punishment, sin, also go.  These, they explain, are relics of the Old Testament, the old covenant of works.  Now, they say, we are in a new covenant of grace.  They say that the unreasonable, holy, wrathful, embarrassing God of the Old Testament—that superstitious, ignorant, and cruel age—is gone.  He is replaced by a nice, smiling, grandpa-style God of grace who only forgives, only blesses, and never judges.

But they are lying.  They are suppressing the truth, it says in Romans 1:18.  Worse than that, and worse than even the atheists, who are at least up-front about where they are, these people claim to be Christians, but they do away with the truth of the word of God.  In doing so, they misrepresent God and deny his unchangeable nature.  I would point out that even the New Testament does not describe the God they are describing.  God is unchanging.  The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God, and He has not changed.  Hebrews 12:29 says, “our ‘God is a consuming fire.’” That is not the Old Testament.  In fact, they ignore that Jesus spoke more about hell than anyone else.

So they do away with the miracles.  They do away with the key doctrines.  And, of course, the next thing to go is the need for repentance.  After all, if this kinder, gentler God never condemns but always saves; if He never curses but always blesses, so long as we “accept Him in our hearts”; if that is true, then there is no reason for repentance.  Sin is not a problem for a God who always forgives no matter what you do.  Repentance is not necessary.  It is not even beneficial, they say.  If anything, repentance (and preaching on repentance) is highly suspicious in the view of these people, and it is viewed as an attempt to earn your salvation.  It is not true; it is false.  But that is how they characterize any emphasis on repentance.

Like the holiness of God or His wrath, repentance and any mention of sin is swept away as an embarrassing relic of that ignorant age.  Some go even further, celebrating sin as a God-glorifying act.  This is perversion.  They say, “We magnify God’s grace by sinning and sinning, which allows God to forgive more and more. Isn’t He glorified in the forgiving?” They ignore scriptures like 1 Peter 1:16, which says, “Be holy, for I am holy.”  They ignore that it was Jesus Himself who preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near” (Matt.  4 and Luke 13).  They ignore that it was Jesus who told the adulterous woman, “Go and sin no more,” and who told the invalid at Bethesda, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen.”  And, most pointedly, they ignore or deny Romans 6:1, which hits this heresy head on.  It says, “What shall we say, then?  Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase?  By no means!” So, you see, this is not even a new heresy at all.  It is a very old heresy dealt with directly in Romans 6 almost two thousand years ago.

But that is where you end up when you abandon the truth of any part of the Bible.  You end up ceding more and more ground until you become the opposite of what the Bible says.  See how quickly compromise becomes contradiction.

As I said, the first thing to go is the miracles, the supernatural.  These are a significant embarrassment to this compromise crowd who wishes to be viewed as modern and intelligent.  So they look to explain away these miracles.  We heard last week from Rev.  Perry that more than forty supernatural miracles are chronicled just in the gospels.  Some of these are easily waved off by the compromise crowd.  The feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand are not attributed to the miraculous multiplication by the God-man, Jesus Christ.  They are instead a lesson in the power of sharing and, indeed, an argument for socialism.  You see, he did not take five loaves and two fishes and feed all those people.  No, He convinced them to share their lunches.  The healing of Peter’s sick mother-in-law or the bleeding woman of Mark 5 or the demon-possessed man are not regarded as an actual outworking of Jesus’ sovereign and supernatural powers.  No, rather, they are a testament to the power of positive thinking.  What about the raising of the dead girl or of Lazarus?  Jesus said they were only asleep.  It is a simple misdiagnosis; perhaps they were in a coma or something like it.  Jesus’ resurrection is similarly explained away.  They say that He was revived by the cool air of the rock-hewn tomb.

And why stop at the New Testament?  Let us get rid of the miracles in the Old Testament as well.  The parting of the Red Sea was because of a fortuitous wind that blew at the right time across a shallow marsh, allowing the pedestrian Israelites to pass through while the Egyptian chariots were bogged down and overcome by the incoming tide.  What about the plagues of Egypt?  They were a series of unfortunate but related coincidental environmental disasters.  All those crippled beggars rising up to walk?  Well, they probably were not all that crippled in the first place.  We have seen such people sitting by the freeway signs in our time, so maybe these people were like that—just faking it.

Other miracles, such as the healings at Bethesda and Siloam were dismissed as mere metaphors.  Even though the Bible presents these as factual events, as things that happened, even though they are presented in plain, factual terms, these compromisers mystify them away, saying, “No, they did not really happen.  For example, no one has ever found the pool of Siloam.  Instead, it was just a story to teach a larger spiritual truth.”  So these liberal preachers seized upon the fact that no one had found this pool for a long time and said that no pool means that it was just a story, just a lesson, but not something that really happened.  After all, this pool is supposed to be located in the heart of Jerusalem.  Surely, someone would have found it.  But no one did—until they did.  In 2004, workers in Jerusalem dug beneath a broken sewer pipe and stumbled upon a huge pool with three tiers of stairs—a pool that was two hundred and twenty-five feet long, just where John said it would be.  Yet still they quibble.  Well, we found the pool, but did Jesus really do something?  Did something else really happen there?

So you can explain away some of these things, but the problem with our text this morning is that there is no compromise or alternative explanation that is readily available.  It says, “He went out to them, walking on water,” and it says it twice.  Now, you could put a lot of spin on the feeding of the five thousand.  You could put some spin on reviving a dead man.  Was he really dead or not?  You could put a lot of spin on many of these miracles, but you cannot do anything with a text that says “walking on water.”  Twice.

There is no way to fake this.  There is no way to explain it.  Mark helpfully tells us that the disciples were in the middle of the lake, so there is no argument that Jesus waded out into the shallows.  John adds that they were three or three and a half miles out from the shore, halfway across this eight-mile lake.  And, of course, they clearly saw Jesus.  They spoke to Him, and He engaged with them.  Peter tried to go over the water to Him.  Jesus got into the boat and went over with them to the other side.  So there is no possible mistake or explanation that it was an apparition or some kind of misunderstood ghost in the fog.  Moreover, it is recorded in three gospels and attested to by multiple witnesses.  So hallucination or dementia will not explain it away either.

This scripture puts to us a clear choice.  No compromise or alternative is available.  I ask you this morning: Do you believe it?  Do you know it to be true?  Do you believe that Jesus walked on water?  Or do you deny the truth of this claim?  There is no middle ground and no way to avoid the question.  He either walked on the water or He didn’t.  The Bible is either true, or it isn’t.  It is either reliable or it is not.

This is a clear choice, and it is the most important choice you will ever make in your life.  You see, if this miracle is false, then you have to throw out the entire Bible.  If the factual claims made in the Bible are not true, then none of it is reliable.  It is either fraud, fantasy, or myth.  If Jesus did not walk on the water as described in the Bible, then He did not rise from the dead as described in the Bible either.  He did not ascend into heaven, as described in the Bible either.  He was not the sinless Son of God, as He claimed.  He was just a man—a pitiable and deranged man.

You see, all our evidence for all these miracles, including the resurrection, is from the same source—the Bible.  So they either rise or fall together.  Jesus Himself said His resurrection would be the proof that He was the Messiah, as He claimed to be.  In Mark 9:31, He said, “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men.  They will kill Him, and after three days, He will rise.”  So He put forth His resurrection as His great proof, as His great evidence for the claims that He was making.

Not only did He put this forth, but His enemies also understood that the resurrection would be Jesus’ proof.  If He rose, He was who He said He was, and if He did not, He was just a fraud.  After they killed Him on the cross, these enemies went to Pilate and asked for a guard to watch over His tomb, and they explain why in Matthew 27.  The chief priests say, “He said, ‘After three days, I will rise again.’” So they wanted to go and guard the tomb.  (GTB)   They wanted to make sure that no one would steal the body away and then falsely claim that He rose.  They understood that the truth of this claim mattered.

As Christians, we have always held that the resurrection is the proof.  It is the cornerstone of Christianity.  It is the sine qua non of the historical faith.  If it is not true, then our faith is not true.  The resurrection has been and always will be the central factual claim of Christianity.  As Peter preached at Pentecost in Acts 2:32, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of this fact.”  He said the same thing to the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:10: “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.”  You see the argument.

Jesus’ resurrection and His miracles are the proof.  If they are not true, then His claims are not true.  They are the proof that He was no mere man.  They are the proof that He was infinite God, able to pay the infinite price for our infinite sin.  His miracles, His resurrection, are the proof that He was sinless, so death could not keep a hold on Him.  If He had been a sinner, He would not have been able to rise from the dead, “for the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).  Had He sinned even in thought or speech, had He done any sin, He would still be dead.  So His resurrection is the proof that He never sinned and could pay that infinite price.

If you cannot believe the lesser miracle that Jesus walked out on the water three and a half miles across the lake, then you cannot believe the greater miracle that He was raised from the dead.  You cannot believe that He was the sinless Son of God, that God became man, born of a virgin, and that He paid the full wrath of God in our place as an infinite and perfect sacrifice.  No, if any part of the Bible is false, if its truths and claims are not reliable even in a small part, then it is not the word of God.  It is merely the word of men, fallible, subject to error, misinterpretation, embellishment, and fraud.

If the Bible is merely the word of man, then do not waste your time with it.  Do not bother.  Do not trust it.  If it is merely the word of man, then it cannot be true, and there is no way to know if any part of it is reliable at all.  If its central claim of Jesus’ resurrection, if its central claim that Jesus is God, is unprovable, then we cannot know if Jesus was raised from the dead and we cannot know if he was the Son of God as he claimed.  There is no way to know.  And if that is so, then do not waste your time with Christianity.  It is an uncertain faith.  It is only a hope-so faith.  As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (v. 17).  If He was not raised, if He did not walk on water, if He did not perform every miracle it says in the Bible, then we have been fooled.  We have been taken in.  Paul continues, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (v. 19).  If Jesus is not God, if there is no heaven, if He is not the way and the truth and the life, then we have wasted our lives on a lie.  We have wasted our lives on a lie if the Bible is not true and reliable.

Unlike many other faiths, Christianity is based on historical factual claims, on things that happened.  Those things are either true or false, and the faith either rises or falls on the truth or falsity of those events.  If the Bible is false, if it is not inerrant and infallible, if it is not the word of God, then walk away from it.  Have nothing to do with it.  But if it is true—if Christ walked on water, if he was raised from the dead and miraculously healed the sick, if He was God-became-man and died for our sins and rose after three days—then confess it as true and submit to it.  Walk in obedience to God and His word.  Do what it says, if it is true.  Put your faith in Jesus, if He is God, as He claimed.  Confess your sins and forsake them, as the Bible commands.  Be baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as He said to do.  Live a holy life of thankful obedience to God for his glory, and go into all the world, preaching the word of God, teaching people to obey whatsoever things He has commanded.

This is what happened to me.  I grew up going to church, but I never really dealt with the truth or falsity of it.  Then I came to this church, and I heard Pastor Mathew preach the word.  And I was struck—not by the eloquence of the preaching (though it was eloquent), not by the warmth of the fellowship of the people (though it was warm)—I was struck by the commitment to the truth of these claims.  I had to ask myself, “Do I believe in this truth?” By God’s grace, He allowed me to answer that question, “Yes,” and it changed my whole life from one of false Christianity to one of walking in truth.  Praise the Lord.

The truth of the Bible is the great fork in the road.  You must choose one path or the other, and follow it wherever it takes you.  You cannot stay undecided and stand at the fork.  You have to keep moving.  You cannot dodge the question.  So here is the question.  It is a simple question: Do you believe it?  I ask you this morning:  Do you believe it?  Is it true or is it false?  And it is not just me asking.  It is the Lord Jesus Christ asking through me.  He was always asking this question.  In Matthew 9:28, He asked the blind men, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” He told Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.  Do you believe it?” (John 11:25–26).  He told the apostle Thomas, “Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).  And, of course, most famously, in Matthew 16:15 He confronts His own disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” In other words, “Do you believe that I am the Son of God, as I claim?”

You can hear Jesus asking over and over in the Bible: “Do you believe it?” And He asks you this same question today: “Do you believe it, personally?  Do you believe the miracles?” If you reject the miracles, you reject Him who says He did those miracles.  If you reject Jesus, if you reject the veracity of the Bible, then you have no way to know if there is a God or if there is not, or is this Jesus God or is He not?  In fact, you have to conclude that He is not.

If you reject the veracity of the Bible, which is the only way to know who Jesus is and what Jesus did and said, then you have no other place to go.  If you reject these miracles, I say you are not a believer; you are not a Christian.  If you explain away the miracles, saying that they did not really happen, you are saying that the word of God is not really true and reliable, and you are not saved.  You are not born again, and you are still dead in your trespasses and sins if you do not believe the miracles recorded in the Bible.

But if you do believe it, and you should, do not be ashamed.  Do not seek to compromise.  It is a perfectly reasonable belief.  If God is God, then there is no reason why He cannot walk on water.  There is no reason why He cannot turn water into wine.  There is no reason why He cannot heal the sick or calm a storm.  This God created everything by the power of His word.   He set the heavens and the earth in place.  He wrote the immutable laws of physics and nature.  We have spent two thousand years or longer trying to figure them out and have only scratched the surface.  He wrote those laws.  He created gravity.  He created time and matter and energy.  And if that is true, is it really unreasonable to conclude that He is not bound by those laws that He wrote, by those things that He created?  Is it really unreasonable to believe that He can supersede or suspend those laws when He wants?  Is it really unbelievable to say that His sovereignty and authority in creating the physical laws allows Him to supersede them from time to time?  It is a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

What is not reasonable is to conclude that everything came from nothing at a fixed point in time for no reason and without any cause.  That is unreasonable.  And it is unreasonable to further hold that anyone who questions that view is an ignoramus.  That is unreasonable.  If you begin with the presupposition that there is no God, then you must either confess that you do not really know how things started, and you do not really know much except what you can directly observe.  Or you have to hold to absurdities like something came from nothing, or that the universe is eternal and infinite.  That is one of my favorites.  According to these people, anyone who believes in an infinite God is ignorant, but if I believe that everything is infinite and has existed forever, well, that is perfectly fine.  But it does not make sense that I cannot believe in one eternal thing, but I can believe that everything is eternal.  Which one of us is supposed to be the irrational one?

But if you consider God, if you begin with Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God,” if you believe the eyewitness accounts of the gospels and the book of Acts, then it is perfectly reasonable, logical, and rational to believe that Jesus rose from the dead and walked on water and performed every other miracle in the Bible.  As Paul said, “It is not unreasonable to believe that God raises the dead” (Acts 26:8).  That is no big deal.  That is very easy for him.  He created the whole world by his powerful word.

Friends, never be ashamed of the Bible.  Never doubt the truth of the Bible.  It is God’s word to us and it is God’s word for us.  It tells us who he is and who we are.  God authored it and stands behind it.  It is the most reliable thing that there is.  It is the very word of God, who cannot lie.

You must stand for the truth of the Bible in our time.  So I ask you again this morning: Do you believe it?  Do you believe that Jesus walked on water?  Do you believe that He is the God-man, the Christ, the Son of the living God?  Do you believe that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except by Him?  That is what He says.  Have you put your faith in Him?  It is not enough to believe that these things are true.  You must trust in Him also.

He performed all these miracles so that you would believe.  He recorded them with eyewitness accounts in the Bible so that you would believe.  It is why He did it.  In John 10:25 and 20:31 Jesus says, “These things were done as signs so that you may believe.”  So make a decision and make it today.  Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.  The same Bible that tells us about these miracles also tells us that if we come to Jesus and put our faith in Him, He will not turn us away.  He will allow us to repent of our sins, to forsake them.  He will give us a new heart—this is called regeneration—and we will be able to follow Him, we will be able to obey Him, we will be able to live for Him.

The same Bible that tells us that Jesus walked on water also tells us that He loves us, that He cares for us, and that He extends salvation to us.  As every little child learns in church, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”  And what is the reason?  “for the Bible tells me so.”

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and having believed in Him, live for Him.  Repent of your sins and forsake them.  Obey Him, and live a holy life.  Seek out His will and do it, and spread the gospel to other people.  This is the hard part for most people.  If I believe in this Jesus, there are major consequences to my life.  And I am not sure that I am ready for those consequences.  This is the trap that a lot of people fall into.  If I believe in this Jesus, I must give up my autonomy.  If I put my faith in Him, I must give up my sin.  If I put my faith in Him, I must do all things for His glory—even what I eat or drink, down to the smallest thing, I have got to live for Him.  If I believe in Him, then I am not my own.  This is the stumbling block for most people.

But the consequences that flow from a fact have no bearing on whether that fact is true.  It is true or it is not, apart from its consequences.  So I say, believe the truth that Jesus Christ is God, and follow that truth, wherever it takes you.  And it will take you to a good place.  It will take you to the best place.  It will lead you to life in Christ, to peace with God, to righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.  It will lead you to a life of freedom to fulfill our God-given purpose, which is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

As professed believers, let us stand on the word of God—the whole word of God.  Let us defend the word of God and the whole word of God.  Let us not be ashamed before mere men.  Who are they anyway?  They are nothing.  They are falling blossoms.  Let us not be ashamed before mere men but let us be proud of our God.  Let us be proud of His Book, that He wrote for us. You see, we are right, and they are wrong.  So there is nothing to be ashamed of.  There is nothing to be scared of.  We are right and they are wrong, and it is not me that says so.  It is God who says so.  So let us believe the truth, let us speak the truth, let us walk the truth, and let us glory in the truth.   Amen.

[1] Joseph C.  Sommer, “Some Reasons Why Humanists Reject the Bible,” https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/reasons-humanists-reject-bible/