Is the Bible the Word of God?

The Bible claims to be the word of God. That is not, by itself, sufficient proof — other books make the same claim. What distinguishes the Bible from those other claims is the body of evidence Scripture itself, history, archaeology, manuscript transmission, fulfilled prophecy, and the testimony of Christ supply for its case. The reader is not asked to accept the Bible on bare assertion. The reader is asked to examine the evidence.

This lesson is the first of sixteen. It is built in question- and-answer form: each question is followed by the relevant Scripture passage quoted in full, then by a short note tying the passage to the question. A reader who would like to verify any passage cited may do so in any printed King James Bible. Every Scripture in every lesson of this course is quoted from the King James Version.

Answer

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

The Bible makes a precise claim. It does not claim that its writers were inspired in the way a poet is inspired, or that the texts are merely the human reflections of devout men. It claims that the writers were moved by the Spirit of God and that the resulting Scripture is given by inspiration of God — literally God-breathed. The claim is large. The question is whether the evidence supports it.

Answer

Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.

Even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

The Old Testament prophets spoke under the conscious commission that their words were not their own. Paul wrote with the same conviction, and Peter explicitly classifies Paul’s epistles as scriptures — the same category as the writings of Moses and the prophets. The men who wrote the Bible understood themselves to be writing Scripture. They were not assembled centuries later by a committee that decided to call their work divine. They wrote with the awareness that the words they recorded came from God.

Answer

The Bible was written by approximately forty different authors across a span of more than fifteen hundred years, on three continents (Asia, Africa, Europe), in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek), by men of widely different backgrounds — kings, shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, statesmen, physicians, generals, prisoners. The majority of the writers never met one another. Most could not have read the work of the others. By the ordinary laws of human authorship, a library of writings produced under these conditions should be a heap of contradictions.

Instead, the sixty-six books tell one consistent story: a good creation, a fall into sin, the long unfolding of a promised Redeemer, the coming of that Redeemer in history, the church He founded, and the future He has promised. The themes braid together with a precision no human committee could have manufactured. A theological figure in Genesis is unpacked in Exodus, fulfilled in Christ, and explained in Hebrews. A prophecy made in Daniel is recorded as fulfilled in Matthew. The internal coherence of the Bible across fifteen centuries of writing is itself one of the strongest pieces of evidence that one Mind stood behind the many pens.

Answer

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

For most of the past two millennia, skeptics have argued that the biblical text must have been corrupted in transmission. The argument seemed plausible until 1947. That year, a Bedouin shepherd discovered the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near Qumran. Among the manuscripts recovered was a complete Hebrew copy of the book of Isaiah, carbon-dated to approximately 125 BC — a thousand years older than any previously known Hebrew Old Testament manuscript. When the Qumran Isaiah was compared, word by word, with the medieval Masoretic Isaiah used as the basis of every modern translation, the agreement was over ninety-five percent — and most of the variations were minor spelling differences. The text had been transmitted across a thousand years without substantive change.

The New Testament transmission record is even stronger. The New Testament survives in more than twenty-five thousand manuscript copies, in whole or in part. The next most well-attested ancient document — Homer’s Iliad — survives in fewer than two thousand. Most classical works survive in fewer than fifty. The Bible is, by an enormous margin, the most reliably transmitted ancient text in existence.

Deeper treatment: The Dead Sea Scrolls — a thousand-year manuscript test the Hebrew Bible passed.

Answer

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secular scholars argued that many of the Bible’s historical persons, places, and events were legendary. The spade has steadily contradicted them. Personal seals of King Hezekiah and (probably) the prophet Isaiah have been recovered from the same archaeological refuse pit in Jerusalem. The ossuary of the high priest Caiaphas who condemned Christ has been found in his family tomb. The Pool of Siloam, where Christ healed the blind man, has been excavated in the City of David. The Pool of Bethesda with its five porticoes — said by John in chapter 5 and dismissed for centuries as theological invention — was uncovered in the nineteenth century with exactly the architecture John described. The Tel Dan Stele, a ninth-century BC Aramaic inscription, names the house of David in the same line as the king of Israel.

The Bible has been tested at thousands of historical points. Where independent verification has been available, the Bible has been steadily corroborated. Where the archaeological record has not yet caught up, the working principle of biblical archaeologists like Nelson Glueck has been borne out: no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.

Deeper treatment in three companion articles: Sennacherib and Hezekiah (the Assyrian invasion of 701 BC, confirmed by seven independent sources); The House of David (the United Monarchy confirmed by inscription and excavation); and Christ-Era Discoveries (ten archaeological confirmations of the New Testament world).

Answer

Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.

The Bible places its God on a test no other religious writing’s deity will accept: that the true God can be identified by His ability to declare the future before it happens. The test is open. Anyone can apply it.

The Bible passes the test repeatedly and at city-specific, falsifiable resolution. Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted that the city of Babylon — then the wealthiest and most architecturally ambitious city in the ancient world — would one day be a permanent uninhabited ruin where no Arab would pitch a tent and no shepherd would graze a flock. Twenty-seven centuries later, that is the archaeological site at modern Babylon in Iraq. Ezekiel predicted that the wealthy island-fortress city of Tyre would be scraped bare like the top of a rock and would never be rebuilt. Twenty-six centuries later, the downtown of ancient Tyre is exactly a scraped bare rock, and a fishing village stands on the mainland causeway without ever rebuilding the city the prophet condemned. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Obadiah predicted the desolation of the proud rock-cut city of Petra; Petra is a tourist ruin in the Jordanian desert today, with not one inhabitant.

And above all, the Hebrew Scriptures predicted the Messiah — in detail. The tribe (Judah), the family (David), the village of birth (Bethlehem), the timing (Daniel’s seventy weeks), the manner of life, the details of the death by crucifixion, the resurrection. The New Testament records each prediction fulfilled, written by witnesses who staked their lives on the testimony and most of whom died for it.

Deeper treatment in three companion articles: Babylon and the Prophecy; Tyre, Petra, and the Stones That Speak; and The Foretold Messiah.

Answer

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.

The scripture cannot be broken.

Christ’s testimony to the Old Testament was unqualified. He quoted from Genesis to Malachi as the word of God; He treated its historical narratives — the creation, the flood, Abraham, Sodom, Jonah and the great fish — as actual history; He grounded His own identity and mission in the prophetic record. If Christ is who He claimed to be, His estimate of the Old Testament settles the matter for those who follow Him. And if His estimate of the Old Testament is correct, then the apostolic writings — which He commissioned by His chosen witnesses (Jn 14:26; 16:13) — stand on the same footing.

Answer

To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

The Bible does not ask to be received without examination. It commends the Bereans for testing even the Apostle Paul against the Hebrew Scriptures. It commands the believer to prove all things — including the claim of any teacher, any tradition, any vision, any voice, any spirit — against the prior word God has already spoken. The Bible is the standard by which other claims of truth are measured, not the other way around. Every subsequent lesson in this course will apply that test.

Answer

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Christ’s answer to the seeker is simple. The willing heart — the heart that intends to do what God will ask of it — will be given the assurance that what it is reading is from Him. The Bible authenticates itself in the conscience of the reader who is willing to be changed by it. The skeptic who reads it as a hostile observer will find evidence enough to remain a skeptic. The seeker who reads it asking what would you have me to do? (Acts 9:6) will find evidence enough to settle the question and to walk forward.

Personal response

The remainder of this course will appeal to the Bible at every step. Before continuing to Lesson 2, the reader is invited to settle the foundational question in his or her own heart. The institute commends a simple prayer of the kind any honest seeker can pray:

Father in heaven, if this book is Your word, give me eyes to see and a heart to receive. Show me what is true. Whatever You ask of me, I am willing to do. In the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The reader who prays such a prayer with sincerity will be answered. The Bible will become to him or her, in experience and not only in argument, what it claims to be: the word of the living God. From that settled foundation, the next lesson asks the next foundational question: who is the God who has spoken in this book?