It has been fashionable over the years and in some circles to look at the Bible as if it were just good for stirring up religious feelings and giving comfort to people in hard times.   Some people will accept the idea that the Bible is a spiritual book that has valuable life lessons in it, that it could maybe even have spiritual power to help find God and connect with Him in their own way.  That all sounds good, but none of it is the whole story.                                    

It is one thing for the Bible to be religious, it is quite another thing to claim that it is that plus the written historical record of God’s personal, sometimes miraculous, actions in this world.  If we think about it, one way to see if the Bible’s supernatural history is true is to also find out if the other facts of history in it are correct.  After all, if it doesn’t fit into real world history, how could it claim to add the miraculous things on top of it?  This chapter is about whether or not both the spiritual and the earthly writing inside it fit together.

Prophecy

Prophecy is a big deal.  If God knows everything, is infinite and eternal, has endless power and runs everything, it stands to reason that, He would have chosen people as His mouthpieces at certain times to reveal important things He planned to do latter.  They would have been people of great faith and the best representatives for Him to their own people.  They would have been, in a word, prophets.

Now remember, when God speaks, He speaks from being perfect, purely truthful, and never makes mistakes.  That means that even when He chose to speak through prophets, what they had to say for Him would also have to be 100% accurate.  As a matter of fact, under Old Testament law, if someone claimed to be a prophet of God but was found to be false, they could be sentenced to death. 

The Bible is full of prophesies that have been fulfilled.  In 740 B.C., the Jewish prophet Isaiah warned ten of the twelve tribes of Israel who held land to the north, that God had given him a warning for them.  If they did not get rid of their idols and immoralities, judgement would bring them to destruction.  Eighteen years later, in 722 B.C. the Assyrians invaded, destroyed the capitol city and carried away all but a minority of the population; men, women, and children.   In 605 B.C., the prophet Jeremiah was given much the same message of judgement  to the last two tribes who had the southern territories and for almost identical reasons.  In that case it took 19 years (586 B.C.) before the Babylonians invaded and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple.  Another prophet, Ezekiel, predicted the destruction of the city of Tyre over 250 years before hand.

Incredibly, the most important predictions were about Jesus.  His birth and crucifixion were both prophesied by Isaiah over 700 years earlier and His being raised from the dead was described by Israel’s King David in the 1,040 year-old Psalm 16.

Character

There is an old saying that “character matters”.  Believe it or not, the same thing should hold true for any writing that claims to be telling the truth.  For the Bible, character is massively important.  It was written in three languages by over 40 men from all kinds of backgrounds over a span of 1,500 years who lived on three different continents (Asia, Africa, Europe). Yet its most important teachings never changed over all those centuries.  No matter what the details of each situation were, everything centered on one thing: God saving mankind and creation from the lostness and destruction caused by sin.

Over all that time, as the message became more and more focused, the Bible also stayed true to real life.  Among all other “religious” books, it is the only one that honestly records the good and the bad and the ugliness of human lives.   It never shies away from the same controversial issues that our nation is struggling with now, but always with an eye to God’s mercy, justice, love, and saving grace in action. 

It is no small thing that Jesus Himself validated the Bible’s history, teaching and authority and called it Scripture.  The apostle Matthew recorded that Jesus said the Old Testament from beginning to end had authority from God and would never go away.  In other places in Matthew, Jesus treated people like Adam and Eve as real and events like Noah and the flood, Jonah and the whale, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as actual history.  He even used the account of Jonah as a lesson about His coming resurrection from the dead.

How Did God Do It?

So, if the Bible is so different and claims such big things, how did God get it finished and what were all those writers like?  Those questions really get down to the heart of things.  The answers can tell us if we need to take all of this seriously or if the Bible needs to be put on the shelf as just another religious book like many others.

Remember that in chapter seven I mentioned the ideas of inspiration and special revelation.  Special revelation  is God showing Himself through certain events at certain times in certain places, communicating to certain people.  Inspiration was God giving His truth to different people in writing – in some way giving them certain things to say or write down for the sake of future generations.  But how did it happen? 

There was a lot more to inspiration than we might expect.  The Bible gives some important information about how God used a combination of different tools to get His message out depending on which person He was using and what the situation was each time.  Remember, God is all-knowing which means that He knew every one of the Bible writers intimately.  We also know from chapter six that He works everything together as He sees fit.   The writers would have been specially chosen by God for the part they played.  That means that He set them apart and that they could not have been just random individuals that somehow found a way to be self-inspired.  These great people would have known God, understood exactly what they were a part of, and been sure of what God was giving them to share. 

As an example:  the Apostle Paul made it clear how God’s communicating process worked.  In one place, in a letter to a church, he wrote that God’s Holy Spirit was actually teaching him and other apostles directly.  In another letter, this time to fellow minister, Timothy, he reminded Timothy that everything in the Bible was, as he put it, “breathed out” by God.

 God also used the New Testament writer Luke.  When Luke opened his letter to a man named Theophilus, he let him know that everything he was recording came from eye witness testimonies.  On top of that, he told Theophilus that he had also personally investigated everything.  So, that part of inspiration used actual witnesses and good old investigation.

Another New Testament writer, John, was very close to Jesus during His ministry and ended up writing two of the historical books of the Bible (John and Acts) and three letters to the church (1st, 2nd, & 3rd John).  His testimony is very personal.  His claim  in his first letter was pretty dramatic:  He was sharing what he had heard with his own ears, seen with his own eyes, and actually touched with his hands!  In his case, just like the other writers in the Bible, God’s method of inspiration came through real men and their personal experiences.

But probably the most important testimony came from Jesus Himself.  He is recorded many times challenging people in His teaching by using Old Testament  sections as authorities from God.  One time, by using a story, He put it very bluntly.  He said that the writings of Moses and the prophets were so important that if anyone did not believe those scriptures, that they would not believe even if someone rose up from the dead! 

After all is said and done, the most important thing to remember is that, after getting to know more about what God is like and what He cares about, He is the only one who is qualified to open Himself up to us.  To do that, He had to be the motivator behind the things the Bible writers shared.  It also means that, because of God’s perfections, what He gave them to communicate had to have been exactly right.  That is why the Bible is the physical centerpiece of Christianity and why it is essential for knowing Him and for having a real relationship with Him.  Scripture is not the product of human ingenuity, or of Divine manipulation.  God used a perfect balance of the Divine and the human in order to achieve exactly what He wanted to achieve—His exact written Word.

Because it comes from God, it tells us things that no one could possibly know otherwise and it’s all there for our benefit and for us to use in real life.  Because God is perfect and holy (chapter five), what He has given has to be 100% reliable without mistakes or contradictions because, if all the clues fit together, it has come out of His perfect personality. 

The Bible’s basic message is always the same:  Man is corrupted, God has always offered to save him, and the coming Savior would be the answer.  If all this is true, that makes the Bible the standard of authority for all of life.  It puts all of us in the position of having to make the choice to respond or ignore it with consequences to follow.