Evidence Proves the Bible is NOT God’s Word

Suppose your daughter returns home from her first year of college and says: "Dad I don’t know why you and mom still believe in a Bible that is patriarchal, sexist, and doesn’t even understand homosexuality. Don’t you realize that church leaders chose the particular gospels they wanted to support their power, that the Bible is full of errors—and that miracles were made up to explain natural phenomena that we now understand through science?" What would you say?

As young adults leave the influence of their homes and churches, becoming more exposed to the Internet and pluralistic American culture, more and more of our sons and daughters are questioning 1) the miracles in the Bible, 2) the historical reliability of documents used to compile Scripture, and 3) what they consider its socially regressive views of women, homosexuality, and slavery that they believe originated from sexist, bigoted, Hebrew men—NOT from a loving God. Some in this population don’t completely renounce their faith—they just jettison the beliefs they don’t like. This movement, called progressive Christianity, deconstructs the orthodox Christian faith, rejecting the Bible’s teaching about gender roles, sexual morality, hell, and Christ being the only way to God. It is easier to be people-pleasers than to stand for counter-cultural biblical truth.

WHY DOUBTS ABOUT THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF SCRIPTURE ARE SO COMMON

Christian thinker, Jonathan Morrow, author of Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible’s Authority, suggests that the rising generation is facing the perfect, three-part storm to undermine its confidence in Scripture:

1. “The Growing Secularization of Culture. Our culture has largely divorced the spiritual from the rational… Spirituality is now largely understood as being experiential, emotional, and private. It is not publicly accessible and therefore not able to be critiqued by argument or investigated rationally. The word faith has been the nebulous placeholder for this attitude.
2. The Strong Anti-Institutional Attitude Among Those Under Age 35. In The Millennials: Connecting to America’s Largest Generation, Thom and Jess Rainer reveal that 70 percent of this generation has an anti-establishment view of the church…. The las thing the millennial wants is a corrupt, hypocritical institution that is inwardly focused and often negative telling them what the spiritual life is all about or should be.
3. Sophisticated Attacks on the Bible’s Origin, Credibility, and Reliability. This generation has unprecedented access to a mind-blowing amount of information. The new reality is that young people are far more likely to consult the Internet than their pastor when it comes to questions about the Bible or Christianity….Skeptical videos and blog posts that challenge the very foundation of Christianity can go viral on Facebook and YouTube reaching millions in just days."

ANSWERING THE 3 MAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE BIBLE’S TRUSTWORTHINESS

A. Objection #1. WE CAN’T TRUST THE BIBLE, SCIENTIFICALLY. “Miracles,” it is argued, "are just explanations for physical phenomena that the biblical authors couldn’t explain." Paul’s vision on the Damascus Road was an epileptic seizure. “Demon possession” was, actually, the psychological condition of schizophrenia. But, as we saw last week, the ideology that says miracles can’t happen, i.e. naturalism, has zero evidence to support its assertion that there is no being OUTSIDE of nature; they just ASSUME it. And naturalism is not logically tenable. It cannot explain the intuitive sense that all humans have that things like love, courage, and justice MATTER.  They are more than mere chemical reactions of our brain. Most fundamental of all, the adherents to naturalism cannot adequately explain the origin of the natural world. No credible scientist believes matter is eternal, and the self-creation of the natural world is a logical impossibility. The only plausible explanation for the existence of the physical world, is that it was created by a being OUTSIDE of the natural world. For the being who CREATED nature, to SUSPEND nature in the form of a miracle is therefore, perfectly logical. In fact, IF A REPRESENTATIVE of God came to speak FOR GOD, we might even expect God to give that representative miracle-working power to prove he IS FROM GOD. That is exactly what the Bible teaches--that miracles authenticate revelation from God.

B. Objection #2: WE CAN’T TRUST THE BIBLE, HISTORICALLY. It is widely believed today that the Bible is a historically unreliable collection of legends. A highly publicized group of liberal scholars calling themselves “the Jesus Seminar” has stated that no more than 20 percent of Jesus’ sayings and actions in the Bible can be historically validated. It is often asserted that the four NT gospels, were written so many years after the events happened, that the writers accounts of Jesus’ life can’t be trusted. These stories were highly embellished if not complete fiction. Many believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were only four out of scores of other texts and that they were written to support the church hierarchy’s power, while the rest, including the so-called “Gnostic gospels” were suppressed. This view has been popularized by the novel and movie, The Da Vinci Code.

Why should anyone trust the historical accuracy of the Bible? Orthodox Christianity reasons this way: 1) Jesus claimed to be God. 2) God authenticated the radical claims of Jesus by raising him from the dead. 3) Jesus taught the divine inspiration of Scripture—through his view of the OT and in the NT by entrusting to his apostles the authority to speak for him. Therefore, the books of the Bible are God’s inerrant Word to us. Let’s review the evidence for these three propositions.

Assertion #1: Jesus claimed to be God (and his enemies put him to death for it).

• He said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
• He said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
• He said, “Before Abraham was, I AM”—a claim to be Yahweh (John 8:58)
• He claimed the authority to forgive sin (Mark 2:1-12).
• Claiming authority over the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28).

Assertion #2: God authenticated this claim by raising Jesus from the dead (For a fuller discussion of the evidence for the resurrection see S2, Episode # 22 4/4/22.) Let’s address the argument that the NT gospels, which claim that Jesus rose from the dead, were fabrications to support a legend, which Jesus’ followers made up.

• Legends can’t grow during the lifetime of those who know the facts. The following summary of what the Christians believed was already circulating before Paul cited it, just 20 years after Jesus’ death: 1 Corinthians 15:  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 
• Church history reveals that nearly all the apostles were martyred for their faith. No one would go to his death for believing a lie.
• There was nothing in either Greek culture or Jewish culture that would have led anyone to imagine an individual resurrection in the middle of history. The Jews who did believe in the resurrection believed only in the resurrection of the righteous at the end of time.   
• The gospels' claim that the very first witnesses to the resurrection were women. Since women in that culture were not allowed to give evidence in court, why would the gospel writers have invented them?
• The early belief in the resurrection is not based on one or two individual sightings. A large number of people, across a diversity of circumstances, testified that they had seen the risen Jesus. Peter Williams gives the list: The resurrected Jesus is recorded as appearing in Judea and in Galilee, in town and countryside, indoors and outdoors, in the morning and in the evening, by prior appointment and without prior appointment, close and distant, on a hill and by a lake, to groups of men and groups of women, to individuals and groups of up to 500, standing, walking, and always talking (The Reason for God).

When you look at the eyewitness testimonies to the resurrection recorded in documents proven to be historically reliable, the only plausible explanation is that God did raise Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, proving Jesus’ words to be true.

Assertion #3: Jesus taught the divine inspiration and authority of Scripture.

• He said about the Torah—the OT Scripture used in his day, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished (Matt 5:17-18).
• During his debates with the Jewish leaders of the day, he appealed to the Hebrew Scriptures to settle the matter. In Mark 7:8 he criticized them for neglecting the revealed commandments of God in the Torah.
• Jesus appointed his apostles to be his authoritative spokesmen (Lk 6:13, John 14:26).
• The apostles understood that they were speaking and writing with the authority of Jesus himself, as did the early church. The church, Paul tells us, is built on the foundation of THE APOSTLES and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone (Eph 2:20).
• As Christian faith communities tried to identify which texts were the Word of God, the two primary criteria were that they bore the Apostles’ authority, and that they were consistent with the rest of the Apostolic teaching. By the time Church councils got around to discussing texts for the New Testament (finally settled at the Council of Hippo in AD 393) those faith communities had already recognized the four gospels and many of the letters.
• In short, Christianity believed the books of the OT were God’s Word because that is the way Jesus treated them, and the books of the NT to be God’s Word because they were validated by Jesus' appointed representatives.
• Can a thoughtful person today seriously believe that the Bible is the very speech of God himself. Yes.

C. Objection #3 WE CAN’T TRUST THE BIBLE BECAUSE ITS TEACHING WAS CORRUPTED BY THE PATRIARCHAL, RACIST, SEXUALLY REPRESSIVE CULTURES SURROUNDING IT.

1.Example: I can’t trust the Bible to be inspired when it commanded the Israelites to commit genocide. This is a tough issue, but here are some things to keep in mind. God’s command to drive out the Canaanites was not race-based, but behavior-based. Canaanites practiced infant sacrifice, ritual sex, bestiality, and incest. Scholars believe that the babies who weren’t slaughtered for sacrifice may have been suffering horribly because of the way that various venereal diseases contracted through bestiality had spread to them—and that God had to destroy all the people to prevent such horrible disease from spreading into the rest of humanity.

2. Example: I can’t possibly trust the Bible to be inspired, when it says, “Slaves obey your masters.” This appears to be a legitimate argument. The church needs to own its failure to oppose the horrible African slave trade. But the failure is the church’s not the Bible’s. Tim Keller explains slavery in the NT:

When the NT was written, slaves were not distinguishable from others by race, speech, or clothing. They looked and lived like most everyone else and were not segregated from the rest of society in any way. From a financial standpoint, slaves made the same wages as free laborers, and therefore, were not usually poor….By contrast, New World slavery was much more systematically brutal. It was “chattel” slavery, in which the slaves’ whole person was the property of the master—he or she could be raped, or maimed, or killed at the will of the owner. In the older bond-service of indentured servanthood, only the slaves’ productivity—their time and skills were owned by the master…..The Bible unconditionally condemns kidnapping and trafficking in slaves (1 Tim. 1:9-11; cf. Deut. 24:7). (The Reason for God).

3. When people reject the Bible because it seems culturally outdated, we need to humbly remind them that such a belief might be based on an unexamined belief in the superiority of their culture and historical moment over all others. For example, in Western culture, a woman not BEING ABLE to serve in the military is seen as unjust, but throughout most of human history, a woman HAVING to serve in the military would be seen as unjust. In the Western world, saying that Christianity is the one way to God sounds to egalitarian ears as impossibly narrow-minded. But in the Middle East the adherents to religions have no problem believing that their religion is the correct one. Because of the fall, we expect every culture to reflect both good, because we bear God’s righteous image, AND sinful practices that need correction.

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE FOR TRUSTING THE BIBLE

A. Fulfilled Prophecy. In the OT alone, there are over 2,000 predictive prophecies. In contrast, the writings of Buddha and Confucius contain zero prophecies and the Koran only the self-fulfilled prediction that Mohammad would return to Mecca. This difference between competing claims to be revelation from God is HUGE. Let’s consider a few of the incredible biblical prophecies about the city of Babylon. that history proves came true. D James Kennedy writes,

“The Historian Herodotus tells us these walls (of Babylon) had towers that extended the 200-foot walls to the height of 300 feet. The walls were 187 feet thick at the base. The city of Babylon was impregnable. But God said of those towers and that city: “The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken….It shall be desolate forever” (Jer 51:58, 62)…The prophet could not possibly have written his prediction after the event because the fulfillment of the prophecy was not completed until after the time of Christ. The OT had been completed five hundred years earlier! In the fourth century AD, Julian the Apostate came to the throne of Rome…While engaged in a war with the Persians near the remains of Babylon, Julian completely destroyed the remnants of the wall of Babylon, lest it afford any protection in the future to the Persian army. But God had much more to say about the city. “Because of the wrath of the Lord it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate….It shall no more be inhabited forever” (Jer 50:13, 39)…Ruins like those of Babylon, composed of heaps of rubbish impregnated with potassium nitrate, cannot be cultivated. The former, incredibly fertile fields around the city of Babylon now can grow nothing, because God has doomed this area to perpetual desolation, and not a blade of grass will survive. It is a barren desert.”

“Consider these two specific, but apparently contradictory, prophecies. “The sea has come up on Babylon; she is covered with its tumultuous waves” (Jer 51:42). The other prophecy describes Babylon as, “a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness” (v. 43). Claudius James Rich, in his Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811, writes, “For the space of two months throughout the year the ruins of Babylon are inundated by the annual overthrowing of the Euphrates so as to render many parts of them inaccessible by converting the valleys into morasses.” After the subsiding of the waters, even the low heaps again become sunburned ruins, and the site of Babylon is a dry waste, a parched and burning plain. But God said it would never be built again—a prophecy radically contrary to all the expectations of the past, where every city of the Near East that had been destroyed had been built again. Babylon was situated in the most fertile part of the Euphrates valley, and yet 2500 years have come and gone, and Babylon remains to this day an uninhabited waste.”

“God said the city would not be rebuilt again, yet the mightiest man the world had ever seen—Alexander the Great—decided that he would rebuild Babylon. Coming across the ruins of Babylon, he determined to make this the capital of his worldwide empire. He issued six hundred thousand rations to his soldiers to rebuild the city of Babylon…History records the fact that immediately after making the declaration to rebuild Babylon, Alexander the Great was struck dead (and died in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace)." (Why I Believe).

B. Archeology. Biblical Christianity is not a fairy tale that begins, “Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away.” Rather, its stories begin with historical details like, In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, etc, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness (Luke 3:1). The Christian faith is based upon historic facts. Over and over and over again, the relatively new field of archeology has verified the historic details of the Bible. Scholars, Joseph Holden and Norman Geisler write: “Today, all the major biblical sites and geographical features have been located…To date over 60 biblical figures in the OT have been identified.” Another archeologist writes, “All told, eighty-four facts have been confirmed in the last sixteen chapters of Acts alone.” Archeology has often proved sceptics of the Bible’s accuracy wrong. In the early 1800’s, for example, liberal scholars scoffed at the Bible’s mention of a powerful people called the Hittites. But by 1884 so much information about the Hittites had been discovered through archeology that William Wright published an entire book entitled, The Empire of the Hittites and the Hittite Cuneiform language was later taught at Harvard. 

C. Logic leads us to postulate the infallibility of Scripture. Here’s why:

• The Orthodox view of Scripture is not that the ESV or any specific edition of the Bible is inerrant (does not err) and infallible (cannot err), but 1) that the original autographs were without error and 2) that the translations we have are sufficiently close to the original so that we can have complete confidence that no part of God’s revelation to us has been lost. Why does this matter?
• If God’s inspired Word has errors in it, then my mind and reason sit in judgement upon God’s Word. MY MIND determines which verses in the Bible are authoritative. So, I might easily rationalize that texts that don't seem right to me are not truly the Biblical teaching. Many have done that by saying that the biblical teaching about men leading the church and about homosexuality were culturally determined and not relevant for today’s church. This is the result of elevating MY MIND over GOD’S WORD. But obviously, God wants his WORD to sit in judgement over MY MIND. It is illogical that God would permit historical errors or cultural contamination in what the Scripture teaches.
• But, if believing in inerrancy is necessary for us to submit to it, which it is, why didn’t God supernaturally preserve Pauls’ original letters, or Mark’s original gospel? This question haunted me for a while. But I think I now know the answer--BECAUSE IF HE DID, WE WOULD WORSHIP THEM. Hundreds of years after Moses had fashioned the bronze serpent in the wilderness so that those who looked to it were saved from the fiery serpents, the Israelites had turned the bronze serpent into an idol—and were making offerings to it (2 Kings 18:4). Think of how, in our day, the Shroud of Turin, supposedly reflecting the face of Jesus, has become an object of worship. If humans had the original tablets of the decalogue, or the parchment on which John penned his gospel—I guarantee humans would be worshipping them.

Hoestly, the logical case for believing the Bible is God’s Word is overwhelming. But the strength of the case is not the issue. The issue is whether our rising children and grandchildren are hearing it from us! Proverbs 18:17 comes to mind again. The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. Brothers, we need to do our job!

For Further Prayerful Thought:

1. How would you argue that belief in the miracles of the Bible is not being unscientific?
2. What to you are the most compelling arguments that we have historically accurate gospels of the story of Jesus’ life.
3. In what ways is the Christian view of Scripture based upon Jesus’ view of the OT? His view of the NT?
4. What did you learn about responding wisely to those whose initial take on the Bible is that it is culturally regressive, corrupted by the unenlightened, chauvinistic cultures around them?