Is the Bible true? A conversation with pastor Zak Tindal (2024)

SPRING CREEK — Zak Tindal is a pastor at The Bridge Church in Spring Creek since moving to Elko County from the Dallas area in 2018.

“When I was 13, I went to a Bible camp. And that’s where I first heard the Gospel,” he said. “That’s where I first heard about Christianity. I became a Christian and started going to a youth group.

“And it wasn’t too many years into that, that I just started to have a pretty deep respect for my youth pastor and for the pastor of that church. And I really felt called to get into ministry. I was 13 or 14 when I really felt a desire to do that kind of work.”

Tindal first entered the ministry in 2011.

He said he met his wife, Kattie Tindal, at Masters Commission, a nine-month Texas-based discipleship program which he described as “a hands-on take on Bible college.”

“The idea was that we worked side by side with pastors in a church doing the ministry,” he said.

He is pursuing a pastoral degree through online classes with Trinity School of the Bible and Theological Seminary.

“Our church is an elder-led church, which means we have pastors/elders who do the preaching and the teaching here. So essentially, what we do is we have five of us who rotate. On any given Sunday, any one of us five will be preaching,” he said. “I primarily do the youth ministry and the worship ministry and I’ll still preach at least once a month, just like the other elders.”

Some churches treat ministry like putting on a show, Tindal noted. He said during his time in church leadership, he has learned how pastoral ministry is about people, whether helping them follow Jesus or helping families build a love of God.

“It’s so much less about a weekly event and more about relationships with people. And that’s something that I love about our church is, we’re not trying to be a show,” he said. “We are a family that gets together weekly to worship God together and to understand His word better, rather than a group of spectators.”

He said 2 Timothy 4 has been an important source of guidance to him. “I think that it really clarifies the working of what the church is supposed to be doing and teaching,” he said. “It goes into this idea that we’re supposed to preach the Word. Tell the truth, even when people don’t want to hear the truth.”

2 Timothy 4:1-5 NIV says: “In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”

“I believe that our culture, to varying degrees, is looking for people to tell them what they want to hear, rather than what is true.” Christians are no exception to this pattern, often hoping to hear messages which reinforce their personal desires, he said.

“People will pick churches based on that or pick teachers to listen to based on that. This passage is saying, what is true is more important than what I want. And so, despite the fact that people want to hear what they want to hear, we need to lovingly give them truth,” Tindal said.

Many modern places of worship have evolved away from Jesus’ intentions for the church, he said.

“The idea of Christianity in a lot of places it’s: I come to a building, I sit, I consume a product of entertainment or I consume a product of teaching. And then I leave, and that’s it. Whereas what Jesus started was a family, a tight-knit group of believers.”

He explained how Acts 42-48 show how members of the early church provided for each others’ needs. “It was a family that devoted themselves to the teaching of the Bible. They devoted themselves to eating together,” he said.

If Christians do not see the church as an interconnected family, then “they don’t see the depth of it and it’s just like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing we did Sunday morning growing up,’” he said.

“Another thing that’s really made a lot of impact in my life is the study of apologetics, which is centered around making a defense for the faith of Christianity,” he said. “I think that a lot of people grew up in churches where, when they had a question, people’s response tend to be ‘Well, I don’t know,’ ‘Stop asking questions,’ or ‘Well, the Bible says so.’”

“There’s a lot of misinformation spread about the Bible,” he noted. “For example, when people ask the question, ‘How do I know the Bible is true?’ usually the answer is something like, ‘Because it says it’s true,’ which is extremely unhelpful,” he explained. “The Quran says it’s true, the Book of Mormon says it’s true. If we’re gonna say, ‘It’s true, because it says it’s true,’ then everyone who’s a politician is telling the truth.”

The question of whether the Bible is true “should be backed up with evidence,” he said. “That’s why, I’m still a Christian today, is because I looked into that evidence of, ‘Why are the Gospels reliable?’”

When the early disciples were tortured and killed for their beliefs, they “were actually coming from a place of knowing that it’s true. They were there to see the resurrection,” he said. “And when they faced consequences for sharing the gospel, they just kept sharing it, they just kept being killed for it.”

Fulfilled prophecies also serve as proof of the Bible’s verifiable truthfulness, he said. The Old Testament prophesies to Jesus’ birth and death, as well as the worldwide results of his ministry, he noted. For example, Zechariah 14:9 says the whole world will acknowledge the Lord. In addition, Jesus prophesied the 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in Luke 21.

Tindal said many people are susceptible to trendy misconceptions about the Bible.

“A common objection you hear to the Bible being true is, ‘Well, the Bible was translated thousands of times, it’s like the game of telephone.’ So their impression of how we got the Bible, it’s something like, someone in the first century wrote something down, and then someone translated that into another language. And then they had one copy in that language which translated to this other language.

“With the exclusion of the original, they have no idea what it said and they’re just translating, translating, translating — which is not actually what happened,” he said.

New Testament textual criticism proves “we can go back to extremely early manuscripts from within 100 years of the originals,” he said. “We can look at all of the copies that we have — which, we have over 5,000 copies of the New Testament alone, many of them extremely early.

“It’s not like the New Testament is translated from the most recent translation. Every new translation of the Bible is translated from the same old manuscripts,” Tindal said.

“I believe that one of the tasks of the church in our culture will be to help Christians to understand why what they believe is true, instead of just telling them what the Bible says. I think that anything that is true, can be demonstrated to be true when held under the highest of scrutiny,” he said.

“Our country is more divided now than it has been in recent decades,” Tindal noted. “It’s created a culture of anger and divisiveness between people of different political parties. And I believe that the answer for that is not more division. I believe the answer to that is finding unity in Jesus.

“I’m excited for the future. I think that the future is bright. I think that, through Jesus, through finding hope in God, Christians can help to unite the divide that we see in our culture,” he said.

To learn more about The Bridge Church’s upcoming events, including its monthly Worship Nights, visit thebridgechurchnv.com.