Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Honesty of Scripture

In his sermon on Acts 4:33-5:3, “The Unseen Reality,” Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes an interesting point about the honesty with which the historical narratives of Scripture are written. He observed:

You find the same honesty with the Old Testament. Of course, the modern critic is so confused that he contradicts himself. On the one hand he tries to tell us that the Bible is a collection of fairy tales, idealized pictures, untrue to life, and then, with the same breath almost, he says that parts of the Old Testament are unfit for women and children to read–the shocking things we are told about David, for example, his terrible acts of adultery and murder and so on. But what these critics are saying, howbeit unconsciously, is that they too think that the Bible is completely honest. It gives us the truth about every one of its characters, warts and all. You see them with terrible defects. And here in Acts we see the same openness with regard to the Christian church.