Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God? - III

Personal Factors
    In our last two blog posts we considered several evidences that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. There is an additional factor, however, that must be taken into consideration. The Westminster Confession of Faith mentions several characteristics of the Bible "whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God," but then adds this qualification: "Yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts" (W.C.F. I.v.). For some people, the content of the Bible is actually an argument against its being divinely inspired. To them the message of sin and salvation is obscene – it condemns men as guilty sinners and requires them to believe on Christ in order to escape eternal punishment. That, they say, is too demeaning to be acceptable!
    What it comes down to in the end is a matter of perception. The average person does not like to see himself as being a sinner and in need of salvation. Thus to him the Bible's whole theology of sin and redemption looks unreal, if not patently offensive. But to the individual whose eyes have been opened to see his condition as God sees it, and is troubled by what he sees, the Bible speaks with a stark realism like no other book can. He knows that he has heard the voice of God speaking through its pages. His conscience tells him that what the Bible says is true, and so does the Holy Spirit when the individuals is in the throes of a conversion experience.
    We might add one other observation as well. Once a person becomes a committed Christian he is likely to find that the Bible is a sure and reliable guide through life's perplexities. He passes through "many dangers, toils and snares," to quote John Newton's famous hymn. He is surrounded by friends and acquaintances who have made shipwreck of their lives. But the believer, if he relies on Scripture as his guide through life, spares himself many sorrows and finds peace and rest at last. This, too, is a testimony to the Bible's divine authorship.
    An atheist, of course, can deny practically anything if he is really determined to do so. But on this issue the atheist has to deny too much. On his scheme of things none of the writers of the Bible knew what they were talking about, and half of them wrote under fictitious names. None of the miracles in the Bible ever took place. Jesus was flat out lying about His identity. The several dozen witnesses to His resurrection were all hallucinating. The apostles got it all wrong, and the entire Christian Church was taken in by the scam! At some point, however, it takes more faith to deny than to believe!

Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God? - II

The Unique Content of the Bible

    But then what about the content of the Bible's message? Does it look as though it might have been divinely inspired? When seen in the context of ancient history one of the most striking features of the Bible is its monotheism. Israel alone among the peoples of the ancient world held to the idea that there is only one God and that He is the sole Creator of the universe. Granted, there was one Egyptian pharaoh, Akh-en-Aton, who took a step in the direction of monotheism in the 14^th Century B.C., but he may very well have been influenced by Moses and the events of the Exodus (the Amarna Letters, written at about the same time, describe the invasion of Palestine by the "Habiru," who may very well have been the Hebrews of the Old Testament). In any event, the reforms of Akh-en-Aton did not last long, and Egypt quickly reverted back to its older polytheism. To us the idea of monotheism seems fairly obvious, but in the ancient world only the Israelites held to the idea. Why?
    Another aspect of Israel's religion that made it stand out from the rest was its lofty ethical standards. The pagan gods worshipped by the surrounding nations were hardly better than their morally debilitated devotees, and pagan worship often involved licentious practices such as temple prostitution. But the Bible holds the human race accountable to a strict standard of morality, sternly condemning every form of dishonesty and exploitation, calling men and women to the strictest standards of fidelity in their relationships to each other.
    By the same token the Bible paints a dismal picture of the human condition. Originally created in God's image, we have fallen far short of His standards. The Bible records a long and depressing history of human failure and perfidy. Even the heroes of the Bible – Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon – are deeply flawed characters who disappoint in the end.
    The question is, how could Israel have arrived at such an unusual religion, and how could such an unusual book have been written? How could a book with a purely human authorship paint such an unflattering portrait of the human race? What possible motive could its authors have possibly had? Again, the answer that the authors themselves gave is that they were telling the story from God's perspective, and they told it from His perspective precisely because they had gotten the message from God Himself.
    Then there is the phenomenon of fulfilled prophecy. This, of course, is controversial. Liberal critics will routinely date individual books of the Bible after the events they predict. But one class of prophecies is not so easy to dismiss, and these are the prophecies in the Old Testament about Christ Himself. New Testament writers could quote numerous passages from the Old that told of a Messiah that would come from the line of David who would be born of a virgin in Bethlehem, minister in northern Palestine, and suffer and die for the sins of the people. All that the modern skeptic has to do is to listen to a performance of Handel's Messiah and hear all these texts set to music!
    The Bible, then, contains an extraordinary message that is not the typical product of the human imagination. In short, the Bible bears the unmistakable imprint of the Divine.

Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God? - I

The Credibility of Its Authors
 The Bible is no ordinary book.  It claims to be nothing less than the inspired Word of God.  "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God . . ." (II Tim. 3:16; NKJV).  ". . . holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (II Pet. 1:21).

But, it will be objected, other religions make similar claims for their sacred texts as well.  How do we know that the Bible's claims for itself are true and that the others are false?

First of all, it should be noted that the Bible itself acknowledges that there have been and continue to be competing voices.  Right from the very beginning there were false prophets and false teachers, all saying different things.  In this cacophony of conflicting claims, how can we tell who is telling the truth?

At the time that the biblical prophecies were originally received there were a variety of ways to authenticate the message.  Could the prophet perform miracles?  Did the prophecy come true?  Was it consistent with earlier, known prophecies from God?  The nation of Israel had witnessed the dramatic events of the Exodus, and had every reason to believe that Moses had received his message from God.  Likewise Elijah, centuries later, could demonstrate through the miracles that he performed that he was an authentic prophet from God, and his prophecies came true.

But what of us today?  We can know these things only from the Bible itself.  How can we know whether or not this testimony is true?

If we were jurors in a court trial, and the witnesses were giving conflicting testimony, how could we tell which ones were telling the truth?  We would undoubtedly look for clues about the witnesses' character, we would look for internal consistency in their testimony, and we would look for corroborating evidence.  And so it is with our evaluation of Scripture.

First of all, what may we gather about the character of its human authors?    While we obviously cannot know them personally, what we can know about them leads us to believe that they were honest and sincere people.  They were earnest preachers of righteousness -- we would hope that they practiced what they preached.  Moreover their ministries often came at a great cost to themselves.  Their message was not always well received.  Elijah, Jeremiah, and Paul, not to mention Jesus Himself, put their very lives on the line.  Would they have done so if they had not felt a higher accountability to God?  It seems unlikely.

But secondly, we want to look at the consistency of their testimony.  They were united in preaching the true religion of the God of Israel as it had originally given to Moses, and they continued to do this even when it was unpopular and the tide of history was running against them.  What is especially striking about this phenomenon is the sheer number and diversity of the human authors involved.  Unlike the Koran or the Book of Mormon, which were both written by solitary individuals, the Bible was composed by at least 25 different authors writing in three different languages over a span of more than a thousand years.  The possibility of that that many different people could have conspired together to produce an elaborate forgery is zero.  What it does suggest, however, is that they had a common underlying source of inspiration, and they themselves identified that source as the Spirit of God illuminating their minds and speaking through them.

We should also note the consistency of the Bible with the known facts of history.  The biblical writers were insistent that they were reporting real history and not mere myths, and that the Lord could be recognized as the true and living God precisely because He actually did things in space and time.  The available archaeological evidence bears out the historicity of the narrative.  The authors were indeed describing real places and people that actually existed in history.

The biblical writers, then, were honest and truthful witnesses.