Question: How can we be so sure that the Bible is the Word of God? (pt. 2)

Question: How can we be so sure that the Bible is the Word of God, when there are so many other holy books that claim to be God’s Words?

Pastor Bill responds (pt. 2): The Bible (with the Holy Spirit at work in you as you read - pray for that!) not only declares itself to be the Word of God (see last week’s Haven Heart to Heart), but it shows itself to be the Word of God:

• There is an amazing unity in all of the 66 books of the Bible (written over a period of more than 1500 years) that develops themes like God with us, atonement for sin, the need of a perfect righteousness that can only come from God, Sabbath rest, New Heavens and New Earth - all of which are fulfilled perfectly with the coming of the God-man Jesus Christ and his work to redeem us from our sins. No other “holy book”, e.g the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures even comes close to the Bible, either in the way each is written or in displaying such marvelous unity. (And no other “holy book” offers full, free forgiveness of sins in a way that satisfies the justice of God so that we might be saved by grace alone,)

• The Bible accurately describes God, the world, and ourselves. We find satisfaction in the real God, even when it is difficult to understand so many things about Him. (Which isn’t surprising: He IS God!) The Bible describes the world as it really is (full of so many good things, but still under a curse). And the Bible is like an MRI as it describes us. The Bible is REAL: We see ourselves as sinners, but we also have hope because of God’s promises that He will fulfill in Christ. Read any other “holy book” and you will find the view of God very confusing, the view of the world as simply not in accord with reality, and the view of yourself as either unrealistically hopeful or utterly hopeless.

• The Bible (and the Bible alone) enables us to make sense of the great “elephant in the room of human history”: the coming of Christ into the world (which some “holy books”, e.g. in the Buddhist religion, never mention), his death on the cross to conquer Satan and to atone for human sin (which the Koran rejects), and the resurrection and reign of Jesus Christ (which most “holy books” other than the Bible completely neglect or misrepresent). Take away the Bible and you have no way to correctly understand the great person and work in whom there is hope for everlasting life.

• Its consistently specific (and unified) details are vastly different than the vague generalities and often absurd and blatantly contradictory of other “holy books”, e.g. much of the Apocrypha. The Bible invites you to “dig in”, get to know the people and events that are recorded in it, and, above all, to believe in, to love, and to obey the God who tells us of himself in the pages of the Bible, and who wonderfully shows himself in the God-man, Jesus Christ.

So dig in to your Bibles, and see for yourself that it is what it claims to be: The inspired, inerrant, and finally authoritative word of the living God!