How To Know The Bible Is Reliable
The Bible has been read more than any other book. Bible sales in North America amount to more than half a billion dollars. The average North American household has 3.2 bibles. 27% of Americans own at least 5 bibles. It has been translated into 350 languages. Portions have been translated into 2000 languages.
In the last 100 years, 2.5 billion bibles have been printed and distributed. An article in times of London said,
“Forget the modern British novelists and T.V. tie-ins, the Bible is the biggest selling book every year… As usual the top seller by several miles was the Bible. If cumulative sales of the Bible were frankly reflected in bestseller lists, it would be a rare week when anything else would achieve a look in. It is wonderful, weird, or just plain baffling in this increasingly godless age-when the range of books available grows wider with each passing year-that this one book should go on selling hand over fist, month in, month out… It is estimated that nearly 1,250,000 bibles and testaments are sold in the UK each year.”
When the Bible Society was asked to offer an explanation, they said, “Well, it is such a good book.”
Montero Williams, a professor of Sanscript, who spent 42 years studying Eastern Literature, said this
“Pile all the religious books on the left side of your study table, but place the Bible on the right side all by itself, all alone, and with a wide gap between them. For there is a gulf between it and the so-called sacred books of the east. There is a gulf that cannot be bridged.”
No book has been so burned, banned, and outlawed than the bible. Voltaire-the French philosopher-one of the western world’s most aggressive antagonists of the Bible, had a printing press in his home and used it to spread volatile propaganda. He said, “Within 100 years of my death Christianity will have been swept away from existence and passed into history.” Voltaire died in 1778, and has passed into history while the Bible’s circulation continues to grow. Fifty years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society purchased Voltaire’s house and used his own printing press to print Bibles.
I remember my uncle telling me the story of the blacksmiths shop. A boy was watching the Blacksmith at work in the Blacksmiths shop. The boy noticed a pile of hammers in the corner, and asked the Blacksmith why they were there. He replied, “They are the hammers I have worn out on the anvil.” The boy then asked, “How many anvils have you worn out?” To which he replied, “This is still the first.” So it is with the Bible. The hammer blows of its enemies have come against the Bible, but one by one they have worn away, while the anvil of the Word of God still stands. The prophet Isaiah said in 40:8, “The grass whithers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.” The Bible is reliable.
Not everyone shares that conviction of course. Some believe the Bible is just a collection of colourful stories like Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale, and David and Goliath, and Daniel in the Lion’s den. Others say, the Bible was written by mere men. Still others say, “I have my own source of truth. I think the universe through cosmic radiation implants truth into our mind.” Another person says, “It’s too old to be relevent. I don’t read car manuals from 50 years ago. I buy a computer program manual and it’s outdated in a matter of months.” Why read a book that’s 1000s of years old? Others assert, “The Bible is full of contradictions.”
In this lesson we will discover five reasons why the Bible can be trusted. The Bible claims to be the very words of God. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed…” We will show that this claim is a reasonable claim and can be substantiated. Let’s see why the Bible can be trusted as God’s inspired and flawless Word.
Five Reasons Why The Bible Can Be Trusted As God’s Inspired Word
1.”The Unity of Theme” Proof
The Bible is actually not one book. It consists of 66 books, written by over 40 different authors, over a 1500 year period, in three different languages, on three different continents. And the amazing thing is that in spite of that diversity of authors, languages, geography, and time, the storyline of the Bible is about one central person-the hero of the Book, and His name is Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Imagine taking a class of 66 students, and assigning each of them the task of writing one chapter of a book, to create a total of 66 chapters. But you don’t tell them anything about the storyline of the book. You don’t provide them with any information regarding setting, genre, or character. You send each student to a separate classroom to write the assigned chapter, and you prohibit anyone from collaborating with any other student in the class.
Now, when the chapters have been written, collected and assembled into a “book” of 66 chapters, what is the possibility that each of those chapters could ever merge together to tell a cohesive, sensible story, with a solid consistency of character and theme? In fact, if those student assignments did contain a common theme and consistency in character, we would naturally assume that someone provided collaboration between each of the writers. It couldn’t happen any other way. That is exactly the claim the Bible makes for itself. God provided outside collaboration with 40 authors, over 1500 years to tell the redemptive story contained in the Bible with a consistency of theme, and a central Character by the name of Jesus Christ. For example, in the Book of Genesis, Jesus appears as the seed of the woman. In Exodus, He is the Passover Lamb. In Joshua, He is the Commander of the Lord’s Army. In Ruth, He is the Kinsman Redeemer. In the Psalms, He is the Good Shepherd. In Proverbs, He is Wisdom. In Matthew, He is a King. In Mark, He is a Servant. In Luke, He is a Savior, In John, He is God. And on and on, all through the Bible, until the Book of Revelation where He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, the Lion of Judah, the Lamb of God, the one who is worthy to receive worship and praise, and adoration. That’s why the Bible is trustworthy. Because of the unity of theme, in the diversity of authors.
2. The “Authorship” Proof
Our judicial system is heavily dependant on the testimony of witnesses. And every courtroom goes to great lengths to ensure that the testimony a witness provides is true. So, the witness must first promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then, the witness’s credibility, or believability, is established. In fact, if a witness is caught in a lie, the entire testimony is usually deemed to be worthless, because credibility is lost. Courtrooms rely on various kinds of witness to provide testimony. There are expert witnesses who can offer opinions on a particular matter, such as a medical doctor giving an opinion on a medical issue. Then there are eyewitnesses who typically give firsthand accounts of something they saw, heard, or experienced. The Apostle John opened up his little epistle by saying, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of Life-the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness, and declare to you” (1:1-2). John is giving eyewitness testimony to that which he saw, heard and experienced.
Someone said to me one day, “I don’t believe the resurrection of Jesus, because I don’t believe what the Bible says.” I would point out to anyone who rejects the resurrection of Jesus because of a disbelief in the Bible, that the testimony about the resurrection of Jesus is not from one person, but rather nine people, most of whom claimed to be eyewitnesses. It was nine people, including the Apostle John, who wrote the New Testament where the testimony about the resurrection of Jesus is found. So to reject the facts of the resurrection is to reject the testimony of nine people. Imagine if you were sitting in a jury with eleven of your peers, listening to a criminal case, and nine eyewitnesses came to the witness box, and each witness gave essentially the same basic facts about what they saw, heard and experienced, and that those testimonies established the guilt of the accused. And that furthermore, the defence offered no testimony to rebut the testimonies of the other nine witnesses. It would be hard to imagine any jury not bringing a swift conviction. So it is with the compelling resurrection testimony of the nine New Testament writers. To reject the New Testament accounts of Jesus Christ and His resurrection is to believe that these nine men fabricated the stories they wrote.
It’s significant also, to note that eight of these nine New Testament authors were executed because of their written claims about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The ninth, John, was imprisoned on the Isle of Patmos, a kind of 1st century Alcatraz, directly because of his testimony about Christ. The apostle Peter, tradition tells us, when he was about to be crucified, asked to be hung upside down, as he was unworthy to be killed in the same manner as his Lord. His wife was supposedly crucified before his eyes, shortly before he was killed. All this because of their testimony about Christ.
All this raises the question, why would anyone willingly die for something they wrote and testified to, if they didn’t believe it to be true? History demonstrates that men will willing die for a cause they believe to be true, but no man will willingly give their life for something they know to be a lie. The New Testament is true because these men were eyewitnesses who died for what they wrote about Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The Old Testament is true, because Jesus puts His stamp of approval on the Old Testament in the record of the New Testament. He said, “I have not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them... one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the Law till all is fulfilled” (Matthew 5:17-18).
3. The “Prophecy” Proof
The Bible says that God is omniscient. That means He knows everything about everything. Psalm 139:1 says “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.” He knows our thoughts. He knows the length of your days. He knows the exact moment when the world will end. He knows what events will transpire in the days leading up to the end of the world. Only God knows all that, and because the Bible is God’s supernatural book, the Bible is a prophetic Book. It describes events that will happen before they happen. God has described many events that will occur in the days shortly before Jesus comes back in His Second Coming. Many of those events described in the Bible are being fulfilled in our newspapers today. For example, God prophecied that Israel would be back in its homeland before Jesus returned, and that occurred in 1948, when the United Nations voted to give back to the Jewish people their own homeland. Matthew 24 contains a startling list of signs, such as war, famine, earthquakes, disease, increased immorality, false teaching, and the spread of the gospel, that Jesus called birth pains, that would occur before the return of Jesus. And his use of the imagery of birth pains indicates that these signs will increase in intensity and frequency, just like labour pains, as the end gets closer. These are compelling prophecies that demonstrate that the Scriptures are written by a supernatural mind that knows the future.
There are also over 300 prophecies written in the Old Testament, describing the first coming of Jesus. The place of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was prophecied in Micah 5:2, over 500 years before it happened. The humble setting of his birth in a manger was prophecied, as was his sinless life, and miracles, the manner of his death by crucifixion described in a day when crucifixion had never been invented or heard of, and His resurrection. Jesus fulfilled every one of those Old Testament prophecies completely. How could men have known all those facts hundreds of years before they came to be in the life of Jesus Christ? The prophecies of Scripture are compelling evidence of the supernatural nature of the Bible.
4. The “Ring of Truth” proof
There is a story told of a blind begger who had become so accustomed to hearing the sound of a coin hitting the pavement at his feet, as kind passersby took pity on him, that he could tell by the sound of the coin, what size of coin it was. He could tell the difference between a dime and a dollar, or a quarter and a penny.
When you hear a story passed on from a friend, in trying to determine the authenticity of the story, you listen for the sound of the ring of truth. You can often tell whether a friends’ story, sounds “off,” something doesn’t sound right, or whether it has the ring of truth. In other words, it makes sense. The Bible has the ring of truth.
Let me give you some examples. In Genesis 2, God said, right after making the first man, “It is not good for man to be alone.” That has the ring of truth to it. We recognise that we are relational beings. We don’t like loneliness. That’s why most of us get married, because we don’t want to grow old alone.
Then God puts Adam in the garden and tells him to work the garden and take care of it. In other words, God gives Adam something to do. He gives him a purpose. So right in the opening chapters of the Bible God reveals that man has two deep longings. A longing for relationship and a longing for purpose. We experience those two longings in our lives and we know they exist in everyone’s life. These two longings drive the motivation for everything we do. So the identification of these two longing have the ring of truth. It sounds like something man’s designer would write.
Here’s another example. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and sin instantly infected the human race, the record says, that God came looking for Adam, and Adam said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid.” The first negative emotion experienced by the first man was fear. The Bible contains the words, “Fear not,” over 300 times in the Bible. No other negative emotion comes close to the attention given to fear in the Bible. Fear is mentioned first, and emphasized the most because fear is the undercurrent that drives every other negative emotion in the human experience, such as anger, worry, guilt, sadness, even depression. That has the ring of truth to it.
Jesus said, “The greatest commandment is to Love God... and to love people.” In other words, get love right and everything else will fall rightly into place. Every child longs to be loved. Every adult who fails to cultivate loving relationships senses an emptiness, that no amount of accomplishments can fill. Jesus said, “The world will know you are my disciples by your love for one another.” The world’s most common complaint against the church is hypocrisy. Jesus is saying, the world will pay attention to the church when they see the church express genuine love for one another. Jesus’ words have the ring of truth.
Pick any topic-money, leadership, relationships, work, wisdom, sex, health, mind, emotions, words, God-when I share a passage of the Bible that talks about any of these subjects-people say that makes sense-it has the ring of truth
The ”Personal Transformation” Proof
King David loved the Scriptures. He says of the Scriptures, “More to be desired are they than gold, Yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). But the reason why David loved the Scriptures was because He loved the Shepherd of the Scriptures. It was David who wrote the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” David had a personal, intimate, loving, vital relationship with the God of The Scriptures. You can’t fully understand the Scriptures without experiencing a relationship with the Christ of the Scriptures. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me: But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40). You have to meet Jesus in the Scriptures personally before you can understand the Scriptures.
Imagine giving a copy of your car’s owners manual to someone from the Amazon jungle in South America. That person has never seen a car, never seen a picture of a car, never sat in a car, never lifted the hood or trunk of a car. And as they leaf through the contents of the car owners manual, they see pictures of your car, and descriptions of the car, and all the bells and whistles on your car, but it doesn’t make any sense. They don’t know what it all means, because they have never experienced a real car before. A car owner’s manual only has relevance to someone who can relate the text on the page to the experience of a real automobile.
So it is with Christ. You cannot understand the text on the page, without having had a real, personal, relational experience with the actual person of Jesus Christ.
Paul said, in 1 Cor. 2:14, “The natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
In May, 1928, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said, “The Bible is a high explosive. But it works in strange ways and no living man can tell or know how that book in its journey through the world has startled the individual soul in ten thousand different places into a new life, a new world, a new belief, a new conception, a new faith.
Some additional questions for further Study
1.How do we know the copies of the Bible we have today, are accurate translations of the original manuscripts?
It is important to keep in mind that the authors of the books of the Bible did not have printing presses, or photocopy machines. So the originals had to be hand copied. And many of those copies are still extant, or in existence, today.
To give some perspective, Homer wrote a few famous books (not Homer Simpson)-The Illiad and The Odyssey-around 500 b.c. Many college and university students are required to read them.. There are 643 extant copies of the Illiad. Nobody disputes the authenticity of the copies of Homer’s Illiad, because of the 643 copies that are available to authenticate it.
By way of comparison, there are 24,000 copies of the New Testament manuscripts, and 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the whole bible.
Now, this raises another important question. Do all the copies agree? Sir Frederick Kenyon a noted authority on NT textual criticism, said, “There is no fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith that rests on any disputed reading. It cannot be too strongly asserted that… the text of the Bible is certain, and especially is the case with the NT.”
Then, finally, how much time lapsed between the original writing and the copies we have? In 1947, a shepherd boy threw rock into a cave around the Dead Sea area, and heard a clay pot shatter. The world was about to discover the Dead Sea Scrolls-40,000 Biblical and extra Biblical manuscripts, 1000 years older than anything ever found previously. Included was an entire copy of The Book of Isaiah. These documents have proven to be essentially identical to manuscripts already in hand.
2. Have the discoveries of archaeology, bolstered, or undercut the reliability of the Bible?
James Montgomery Boice, a reputable Bible commentator said, “Imagine a line 100 feet long, representing all the passages in the Bible that puzzled scholars 100 years ago. Archealogical discoveries over the last 100 years has cleared up and answered many of those passages, and therefore has shortened that line substantially . In other words, the line gets shorter, not longer with each new discovery. For example, critics have claimed that Moses didn’t write the first five books of the Bible because 1500 years b.c., they believed there was no intelligent language, and no complex government. Then the Elbar tablets were discovered in Syria, in 1974, containing 17,000 ancient tablets. This discovery proved there was written language years earlier than Moses, and a complex legal system all over Mesopotemia.
Critics claimed there were no Hittites, though the Bible references them. Then they found 1200 years of detailed history of the Hittites. In other words, archaeology has confirmed the Bible, not refuted it.
3.Aren’t there a lot of inconsistencies in the Bible?
Many who say that, usually also have trouble providing one as an example. However, it is true that there are examples of apparent contradictions in the Bible. That is, at first glance they appear to be contradictions, but each is ably, sensibly and satisfactorily explained. For example, In Matthew 27, the text says, “Judas hung himself.” But in Acts 1, the text says he fell head long and burst open in the middle. That sounds like a contradiction. Surely both can’t be true? That is, unless you’ve been to the Valley of Heman. There are trees hanging over a cliff. Matthew describes what Judas did. Acts describes what they found when he fell off the tree and down the cliff.
Another example is found in Acts 9:7, Luke says the men heard a voice. But in Acts 22:9, describing the same event, it says they did not hear the voice. Sounds like a contradiction. But we all understand that it is possible to hear a voice, yet not understand it. That’s what’s going on here. In Acts 9, Luke notes that they heard the sound of a voice. In Acts 22, He is specifying that they didn’t understand what the voice was saying. Each apparent contradiction in the Bible has been ably answered and explained sensibly and satisfactorily.
For further reading on these questions and others, relating to the origin and reliability of the Bible see The Origin of the Bible by FF Bruce, Tyndale Publishers, 2004
