Why We Trust the Bible
In the first part we considered why we believe in God at all. We began with the world we find ourselves in: with existence itself, with reason, creation and conscience, and with the different ways in which they point towards God.
But the Christian faith makes a further and extraordinary claim: that the Creator God to whom these things point has made Himself known to His creation.
There is something contained in the name "I AM" which is easily overlooked.
It is a sentence. God speaks.
The word "I" connotes personhood: only people say, "I." "I AM" connotes communication.
This sentence tells us that the ultimate foundation of reality is not an impersonal force or abstract principle, but as One who knows, wills and speaks.
That does not prove that the Bible is true. But it makes the question perfectly reasonable. If the God who made human beings gave us reason, language, personality and the ability to communicate with one another, there is nothing strange in asking whether that God has communicated with us.
So why do we believe that He has spoken through the Bible?
Why this book? Why not another?
The answer cannot merely be, "Because the Bible says it is the Word of God." The Bible certainly does claim divine authority, but a claim by itself is not sufficient reason to believe the claim.
We believe Scripture because of the extraordinary convergence of its testimony.
It speaks to the same realities that creation, reason and conscience have already caused us to perceive. It provides a framework in which the world outside us and the world within us begin to make sense together.
The Bible Explains the World We Actually Experience
Scripture gives us an extraordinary account of man.
It tells us that man is made in the image of God. This accounts for his dignity, reason, creativity, moral consciousness and capacity for love.
But it also tells us that man is fallen.
This accounts for something equally obvious.
The same human race capable of extraordinary love is capable of extraordinary cruelty. The same intelligence that cures disease can devise methods of killing. People sacrifice themselves for others, and people betray those who trust them.
Any serious account of humanity has to explain both sides.
Scripture does.
Man bears the image of God, and man is fallen.
The Bible therefore does not flatter us, but neither does it despise us.
It tells us that we possess great dignity because of the One whose image we bear, while also telling us that our deepest problem cannot finally be solved by greater wealth, education, political power or technological achievement.
Our problem is not merely around us.
It is in us.
We need redemption.
And this is where we come to the centre of the Christian message.
Christ
For many Christians, faith begins much closer to Christ than to an abstract argument about biblical inspiration.
A person encounters Christ in the Gospels.
He begins to admire Him.
He reads His words and recognises something extraordinary in them. He sees how Christ treats the weak, the sinful, the sorrowful, the proud and the hypocritical. He hears Christ speak about anger, lust, forgiveness, love, anxiety, pride and the human heart.
And Christ speaks with extraordinary authority.
Those who first heard Him noticed it:
"And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes." - Mark 1:22
He goes beneath behaviour to motive. He takes commandments which men had reduced to outward behaviour and brings them home to the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
There is a difference between someone who has studied a machine and the person who designed it. Christ speaks about the human soul like its Maker.
And then there is the cross.
The Christian message tells us that our condition is serious enough that we need a Redeemer, but also that God's love is great enough that a Redeemer has been given.
Christ is betrayed, mocked, condemned and crucified at the hands of sinful men, and yet gives Himself for others.
Here is innocence suffering for the guilty.
Here is love answering hatred.
Here is forgiveness answering cruelty.
Here is Christ laying down His life for His people, and a message of salvation that will go out to people of every nation.
Then comes the resurrection: the proclamation that death itself does not have the final word.
These truths possess power before a person has settled every question he may have about Scripture.
This is important.
We do not necessarily begin by proving every proposition about the Bible and only then conclude that Christ must be worthy of our trust.
Often the movement goes the other way.
We encounter Christ, and Christ causes us to take seriously the book that reveals Him.
The living Word leads us to trust the written Word.
The Fullness of Scripture
As we continue reading Scripture, connections like these multiply.
There is a fullness to Scripture.
The Bible was written through many human authors, over many centuries, in different circumstances. Those authors wrote consciously and meaningfully in their own situations.
But if God speaks through them, God's knowledge is not limited to theirs.
God knows every true connection.
He knows the end from the beginning. He knows what Moses writes and what John will write centuries later. He knows Abraham and Christ. He knows the Passover and the cross. He knows the sacrifices and the Lamb of God. He knows Adam and the last Adam.
Scripture possesses a fullness which becomes increasingly apparent as Scripture is compared with Scripture.
Its great subjects develop across centuries: creation, fall, covenant, sacrifice, law, judgement, mercy, redemption, death, resurrection and restoration.
At the centre of them stands Christ.
The Old Testament anticipates Him. The Gospels reveal Him. The apostles expound Him.
This does not erase the human authors. Scripture is genuinely their writing. But where God speaks through them, He comprehends every true implication and connection contained within what He has caused to be written.
That depth is one of the things that makes Scripture unlike an ordinary book.
A Word that Knows Us
The writer to the Hebrews describes the Word of God in remarkable terms:
"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword... and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." - Hebrews 4:12
We do not merely read Scripture. At times, Scripture seems to read us.
It is a Word that knows our hearts, our needs, our desires and our deepest secrets. It speaks to our fears, our sorrows, our hopes and disappointments. It understands the guilt we carry, the love we long for, and the things we struggle to admit even to ourselves.
It sees beyond appearances, exposing pride beneath virtue, selfishness beneath generosity, and hypocrisy beneath religion. Yet it also speaks of mercy, forgiveness, redemption and the extraordinary love of God towards His people.
It reveals us as we truly are, and directs our hearts towards the One who knows us completely, the the Creator who made all things.
The Beauty of the Word
There is another characteristic of Scripture which is more difficult to express in the language of formal argument, but which becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the more one reads it: its extraordinary beauty.
Beauty, by itself, does not prove divine inspiration. Human beings are capable of producing beautiful literature. Shakespeare wrote beautifully. Milton wrote beautifully. Great poets and writers have always possessed the ability to move us through language
But if the Bible really is the Word of God, we might reasonably expect it to possess a beauty worthy of its source.
And remarkably, it does.
The extraordinary thing is not merely that the Bible contains a few celebrated passages of great beauty. Its language rises again and again to heights which seem almost beyond comparison, sometimes in places where we would hardly expect to find them.
Consider the Apostle Paul. He is often dealing with theology, doctrine, disputes within churches and practical questions of Christian living. Yet even in the middle of such writing, his prose can suddenly become magnificent.
Writing to the Colossians, he says:
"For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order, and the stedfastness of your faith in Christ. As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power: in whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it." - Colossians 2:5-15
Who writes like this?
The astonishing thing is that this is not even one of the passages usually singled out as the great literary heights of Scripture. It is simply part of Paul's argument in a letter to a church. Yet the imagery, rhythm and movement of thought are remarkable: rooted and built up in Christ; the fulness of the Godhead dwelling bodily in Him; sins blotted out and nailed to the cross; principalities and powers defeated and Christ triumphing over them openly.
And this quality is certainly not confined to Paul.
One might imagine the prophets to be difficult, austere or dry. Yet open Isaiah and we find:
"Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.
For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee."
- Isaiah 60:1-2
In two verses we move from darkness covering the earth to light breaking upon it, from human gloom to divine glory. The language is simple, but the image is immense.
And Scripture is filled with writing of this kind.
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
"The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want."
"Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts."
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God."
These are not all written by one man, in one century, in one literary form, or even in one language. Scripture was written across many centuries by prophets, kings, fishermen, priests, apostles and others, and yet again and again it possesses a gravity, beauty and memorability which seem peculiarly its own.
There is also something distinctive about the kind of beauty Scripture possesses.
Its beauty is rarely beauty for its own sake. The language serves the truth being expressed. The majesty of the words corresponds to the majesty of the subject.
When Isaiah writes of light rising upon a world covered in darkness, the beauty of the image carries the promise of God.
When Paul writes of the handwriting against us being taken away and nailed to the cross, the beauty lies not merely in the phrase but in the truth it expresses: guilt removed, judgement answered and victory accomplished in Christ.
When John writes, "And the Word was made flesh," the sentence is almost startling in its simplicity. Yet within those few words lies one of the deepest claims Christianity makes: the eternal Word through whom all things were made entered His own creation.
The beauty of Scripture therefore cannot stand alone as a mathematical proof that God wrote it.
But neither should it simply be ignored.
If God has spoken, we might expect His Word to possess a depth and beauty commensurate with the truths it contains. We might expect language which can be read by an ordinary person and yet pondered for a lifetime; language capable of comforting the grieving, humbling the proud, awakening the conscience, illuminating the mind and remaining alive after thousands of years.
That is precisely what we find.
The argument is not simply that the Bible is beautiful, therefore it must be divine.
It is that the beauty of Scripture forms another part of the cumulative case.
Its historical claims, fulfilled prophecy, internal unity, understanding of the human condition, revelation of God and testimony concerning Christ all give us reasons to take its claim to divine authority seriously.
And alongside them stands something which is experienced rather than merely demonstrated: the remarkable beauty of the Word itself.
A Word that Has Shaped History
There is also another kind of testimony: history itself.
Historical influence cannot prove that a book came from God. Many human books have been influential.
But if the Creator of humanity truly gave humanity a message, we should not be surprised if that message left an extraordinary mark upon human history.
The Bible has.
For centuries it was copied laboriously by hand. Then, when movable metal type transformed European printing in the fifteenth century, the first major work produced by Gutenberg using the new technology was a Bible.
There is something fitting about that.
A technology that would transform the transmission of human knowledge began its European history on a grand scale by printing Scripture.
The Bible then travelled further.
It crossed national and linguistic boundaries. It was translated and translated again. People carried it across oceans and continents, sometimes at enormous personal cost. Its stories, language and moral ideas entered literature, art, music, education and public life.
And this is not merely ancient history. Scripture is still being translated into languages which have never possessed it.
The history of the Bible is not simply the history of an old book which survived.
It is the history of a book that has continued to speak.
None of this proves inspiration by itself. Longevity is not divinity, and popularity is not truth.
But history is another witness.
If the God of history gave a message to mankind, we might reasonably expect that message to enter deeply into history.
The Bible has done precisely that.
Why We Trust the Bible
We began by asking why there is something rather than nothing. That question led us to the self-existent God, the One upon whom all things depend. But there are other questions, closer to home: questions of goodness and guilt, love and suffering, the meaning of our lives, and our need for redemption.
Scripture speaks to these things with remarkable depth. It reveals the God whom reason seeks as the great I AM. It speaks to our conscience, explains the corruption we find within ourselves, and reveals a grace greater than our sin.
And at the centre of it all stands Jesus Christ. The God who made all things entered the world He had made, walked among men, spoke to their hearts, gave Himself for His people, and rose from the dead. In Him, the great themes of Scripture find their fulfilment.
We do not believe because questions are forbidden, nor because every difficulty can be answered in a sentence. We believe because, when the questions are followed, the witnesses meet. Creation, reason, conscience and Scripture each bear their testimony, and together they lead us to Christ.
We began with a question about existence. We end with something far more wonderful than an abstract answer.
There is a God. He is the great I AM. He has spoken. And the Word was made flesh.
