DTTO
SHOWING YOU THE WORLD IN SCRIPTURE
This page was last updated: August 27, 2009
"The Bible is not a book that men could write if they would, or would write if they could” L.S. Chafer
1) Wouldn’t write if they could:
- Bible isn’t very complimentary about the human condition as says that contrary to what we think we are all guilty of offending God’s righteousness by our sin and that we face His judgement unless we repent (don’t worry there’s good news we’ll get to about this!)
- Bible’s greatest heroes have their greatest sins laid bare across its pages: Moses (murderer), David (murderous adulterer), Solomon (wisest man was a rich, glutton lustful man) e.g. Lot and his incestuous daughters.
- Bible sets out divine commandments that go against our natural disposition because God is Holy – sometimes commented that in ancient times if the “prophet” of a religion was a pervert then unsurprisingly the “god” they taught about was too (i.e. the god reflected the character and disposition of the person, showing they were just making up a god in their own image).
*Not conclusive evidence of Bible’s divine origin, but interesting to keep in mind!
2) Couldn’t write if they would:
- Bible written over 1400 years by around 40 different people from all walks of life (kings, priests, farmers, shepherds, totally random normal people). Yet the book reads as a cohesive whole running narrative which would make you think that there was only one ultimate author. At points there were different prophets in various parts of the country of Israel writing down God’s Words but without any contact with each other yet they were all consistently speaking the same message claiming it was coming from God.
- How is this? Well there’s a claim in that Bible that all of its words have come directly from God. The passage reads: “All scripture is inspired from God…” that word inspired was written originally in Greek and is more literally translated: “breathed out…from God”. If you try to speak without breathing you’ll find yourself unable to do it. What this scripture wants us to picture is that while God spoke His words through 40 different people with different mouths, that ultimately it was His breath that enabled them to speak His Words. So yes you do see different personalities and styles in the books of the Bible, but yet the message is the same because the message was not from these people but from God!
- There are many details contained in the Bible that people thousands of years ago didn’t know, for example the teaching that the universe had a definite beginning point where space and time began as physics tells us today, is expanding (“stretches out the Heavens”), that the Earth is a globe hanging in space, and many other details. There was a famous physicist Dr Hugh Ross who was investigating the claims of religions and he had a series of tests to see if they really did have contact with a deity, and one of them was that their holy book could tell them things about creation that they wouldn’t have otherwise known. Another test was that their book could accurately predict the future, as God must be outside of time if he created space and time (we’ll get to this shortly). Ultimately he concluded that the only divinely inspired religion was Christianity according to his tests, so he became a Christian!
3) Reliability and preservation of the text:
- It’s really important that the text we have today is the same one that was originally given from God. Textual criticism is a science where we see how accurate our modern version of the Bible is with the ancient original.
- The original manuscripts (autograph) of the books of the Bible are long gone as would be several thousand years old by now and the materials they wrote on wouldn’t have lasted. However, we have an abundance of copies. There are more ancient copies of the Bible than any other contemporary ancient writing. Homer’s Iliad has about 650 manuscript copies which date at the very least 13th century (around 1800 years after being written), while the New Testament has more than 25,000 copies and the earliest copies we have are within 100 years. So many manuscripts mean there are some words which are different but not in any meaningful way to change any Biblical doctrine nor bring into question anything about Christ’s birth, death and resurrection!
- The New Testament was written between 30 and 60 years of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which means it was written at a time when the eye witnesses (many of whom were writing the NT) to all the events of Jesus’ life were still alive. This short time span is crucial as it meant mythology and corruption couldn’t creep in in such a short time – no other ancient sources at the time can make this important claim of reliability, so to reject the Bible in this regard is to reject most other ancient literature too! If the disciples had exaggerated or lied then the people would have been able to expose it. Rather the disciples were not discredited; in the very city where Jesus died a few weeks later was seeing on mass conversions to Christianity because they saw Christ die and then saw Him alive again 3 days later. Christianity stands and falls with the resurrection! A very great proportion of the earliest Christians, including all but one of the disciples, were killed for what they taught about Jesus. These guys who abandoned Christ on the night of his arrest were changed by seeing the risen Jesus and so were willing to die for what they knew for sure to be the truth and reality of the resurrection.
- The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 in Qumran meant that we could compare the text of the Old Testament we have today with what it was in 200BC, and the accuracy of the preservation was incredible.
- This was because the Jewish copyists really believed they were copying the words of God, and so if any manuscript had the smallest error, for example an extra space, or forgetting a letter, then it had to be destroyed. They were not allowed to write a single letter from memory even! They even counted out every single letter in a book and did complicated maths to check the document for errors to see if the letter at the very middle of the book was in the right place – that was dedication!!!
- Some people say archaeology doesn’t support the Bible, but on the contrary archaeology has continuously been proving that the Bible is a reliable historical source. This doesn’t prove anything about it being from God, but does show that the Bible is a document that is a reliable source for historical information!
*However, we could still have a well preserved and reliable document but not be sure it really was from God!
4) Key of predictive prophecy to divine inspiration:
- Dr Hugh Ross (mentioned earlier) said that a book truly from God would need to have predictive prophecy as God should be able to tell the future and communicate that to people.
- Case study on the book of Daniel: written around 500 BC and contains hundreds of prophecies regarding the political and military history of the Middle East for the next 400 years (some people try to argue this convincing evidence away trying to say it was written after the events, rather than in advance predicting them but the evidence strongly goes against them on this!). It predicts people, the rise and fall of specific empires (for example describes the rise of Alexander the Great, his early death and the division of his empire between his 4 generals), and most importantly for me it lays out an important timetable for God’s plan for the nation of Israel. This timetable culminates in the death of Jesus Christ in 33AD. The prophecy predicts there will be 483 years between JC’s death and a historical event when King Artaxerxes issues a particular decree regarding the rebuilding of Jerusalem, which at the time of writing was in ruins. I have personally worked through the prophecy and calculated along with far more eminent and respected scholars that the calculation predicts to the VERY WEEK the historically verified event of JC’s death on the Cross before the Jewish Passover (some people can get it to the very day, but I wasn’t that good with my calculation!)
- The prophecies about Jesus in the Bible, there are a few hundred, are incredible and predict so much about his virgin birth, ministry, death and resurrection. It’s been statistically calculated that for one man to fulfil just half of these prophecies would be a chance greater than the number of the atoms theorised to be in the universe! That’s just half but we have reliable testimony and documentary evidence that Jesus fulfilled them all, from the big to the small details. The details of His crucifixion alone are in detailed set out 700 years in advance by the prophet Isaiah who knew nothing of the cruel form of execution that was yet to be invented!
- No man could ever write such predictive prophecies which run throughout the whole Bible and which every time have been completely fulfilled, only God. Therefore I put it to you that the Bible is more than just a book!
