How Can I Know If The Bible Is God’s Word Series

How Can I know if the Bible is God’s Word?

Does the Bible claim Inspiration?

Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible

Are the Manuscripts Reliable?

Are the Apostles Trustworthy?

Test the Truthfulness of the Bible

Is the History Accurate?

Are the Prophecies confirmed?

Examine the Effects of the Bible

Are lives being changed?

Video – Rediscover the Bible

Slide after Video

Have you ever really thought about the Bible?

I mean, is this really true?

Can this really be God’s word to us?

What about the Koran? What about the Book of Mormon? What about any other religious writing?

How can I know if the Bible is really the word of God? Can we know?

This is really something quite important for us to know.

Why?

Because the Bible is our primary source for

most of what we know about Jesus Christ

all of what we know concerning salvation and how to attain it, and

all of what we know regarding how we should live our lives to the glory of God.

This book, if true, is one that will affect every aspect of our life now as well as our life eternal.

So, we had better try and discern if the Bible really is God’s word and is something I should believe and rely on?

To discern that, we are going to begin looking at some of the evidence to make a determination as to if it is trustworthy or not which will help us to decide why we should believe the Bible.

Understand that today, this is not so much a message from the Bible as it is about the Bible. But I try to preach on this every couple years, because this is vital for us to know, if we are going to be able to respond to messages from the Bible.

So, how can we go about determining if the Bible is something that can be relied on as the very word of God?

To start, we want to ask first

Does the Bible claim to be Inspired?

Slide

What does the Bible say about itself. This is an important question, because we would expect that if God gave us something from Him, he would tell us that it was from Him so we would know.

It doesn’t prove anything, but we would expect it. If it doesn’t claim divine inspiration, that would raise some serious doubts.

But in fact the Bible does claim to be inspired.

Slide

2 Timothy 3:16 - All Scripture is God-breathed…

And Peter says in

2 Peter 1:21 - prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Not only that, but Jesus says to the apostles that

John 14:26 - “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

So the Bible claims to be the inspired word of God and Jesus tells us that the apostles would be able to recall and be taught by the Holy Spirit so the things they wrote would be the very word of God.

Now, As I said earlier, this doesn’t prove anything, only this is what we would be expect.

Transition

For us, however, to get a better understanding if this is something we can believe to be God’s word, we are going to have to look at other evidence.

So the first thing we want to do is

Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible

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Is what we are reading authentic? So, we ask

Are the Manuscripts Reliable?

How can we be sure that what we are reading is actually what the apostles wrote down?

Handwritten Copies

Aren’t the manuscripts we have just handwritten copies of handwritten copies?

I mean, over time, things might have been changed or altered or mistakes could have been made.

The truth is that we can be very certain that we have what the apostles and prophets actually wrote.

Copying process

That is because the copyists who copied Scripture took their job very seriously.

They had all kinds of safeguards in place to make sure they produced accurate and reliable copies.

They knew how many words and letters were in each line they would copy, they knew how many lines were in a book, they knew the middle word and letter of each line and book and they would double check these to make sure it was correct.

If they found errors, they would start over!

Dead Sea Scrolls

Maybe you still don’t believe this could be too accurate.

The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has helped confirm the accuracy of this process.

Up until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, the oldest manuscript we had of Isaiah was dated about 900 AD. In the dead sea scrolls there was a nearly complete manuscript of Isaiah dated about 100 BC, that is 1000 years earlier than anything we had.