FreeTruth

Romans 11:33 celebrates the inscrutable, inexhaustible, and unfathomable mind, ways, and spoken judgments or decrees of God. Since God’s mind is impossible to know fully (Romans 11:34), it follows that His judgments and words will be deep, profound, and impossible fully to fathom.

Here is my next reason for believing that the Bible is the Word of God: Because the inexhaustible depth and profound wonders of the Bible evidence an infinite Mind from which they must originate. The Bible presents a profundity of thought, a depth of insight, a wealth of truth that is simply too deep and too nuanced and too balanced and too unfailingly illuminating to the soul to be of human origin.

When I say that the mind and words of God are unfathomable, I do not mean that they cannot be understood at all, but that they cannot be understood in full. It is possible to grasp the truth of the Bible, but just when you think you’ve gotten your mind around a biblical idea, you discover that there is more in it yet to be learned.

I wish space would allow some developed examples. But those who’ve had any time to ponder biblical teachings, will recognize this often repeated thought: “Wow! this truth is amazing–and it’s amazing all over again!” They will hear the echo of these words in their own minds: “I thought I understood this idea from God’s Word but I just saw it in a whole new light that is even more glorious than what I’d ever seen before.”

Serious students of God’s Word who are truly seeking to know God through that Word, will have felt this when thinking over such basic Bible truths as:
–God is all-knowing.
–God rules over every last atom and event in the universe.
–God is wise.
–God is holy.
–God is perfectly just.

Pick a truth, any truth, and the result will be the same. Ponder it for a while, and watch what happens to your soul. It’ll fill with wonder.

I’d suggest that even the simple truth, God loves me, is a reality that will fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder. You and I will never get to the bottom of it, even if we spend eternity plumbing its depths. To really know what that love is, how great that love is, how personal that love is, how faithful and delighted in us that love is, how secure that love is, how very, very, very perfect and joy-giving that love is, how incomprehensibly deep and strong that love is, is simply too much for our minds to grasp.

And the same is true with every idea in the Bible. Every truth is an unfathomable ocean. Dive as deep as you can and you’ll never touch bottom. Go ahead and try. Sooner or later you’ll have to come up for air.

When you do, I suggest you take a moment or two to worship and adore the God Whose truth it is.

We live in a world of talking heads. Watch any news channel and so-called experts line up–people you only see from the shoulders up–to spew their rehearsed viewpoints on every topic under heaven.

What is rare is to hear someone say something that is truly original, unexpected, genuine; something akin to the unvarnished, unpolished, unspun truth. Listen to the various voices and what you hear is rehearsed talking points, all pre-packaged, pre-planned, pre-scripted.

When a political party wants to get its message out it rallies its best talking heads, gives them a few things to say, tells them not to wander from those points, locks them into a few “facts”, and makes sure they’re all on the same page.

What you cannot have in today’s political spin game is someone saying something that is off topic, off script, and in any way even apparently out of sinc with the party’s other yapping mouths. The facade of credibility is maintained by a contrived, artifical, polished agreement between all those representing a point of view.

The trouble with all this–at least for a thinking person–is that it has all the look and feel of intellectual fraud. Truth does not have to be contrived or polished; just spoken.

This is another reason why I believe the Bible is the Word of God: the diverse styles, accounts, and records of the Bible are remarkably consistent even though they do not bear the marks of human editing to remove apparent error or contradiction, or of human polishing to buff up its claims, legendize its heroes or give it an artificial sacred look.

For example, read the biblical accounts of the resurrection and you will not detect polished attempts to line up all the details. The accounts even have appearance of contradiction (not real contradictions, but simply separate details given by different witnesses).

Read the histories of Israel and the early church and you will not find legendized accounts of heroic, larger than life, can-do-no-wrong super-saints. Instead you’ll find real humans who along with their great feats for God committed great sins against God!

Read the poetry and worship songs of the Bible where you might expect to find soaring expressions of astonishing faith and holy worship, and what do you discover? You will find soaring expressions of faith and holy worship. But you will also find shocking expressions of doubt and fear and near depression and even anger against God.

Read the deep writings of the great theologians of the Bible, those whose job, presumably, is to make truth about God clear for all to understand, and what do you find? You will find much that is clear and plain and easily explained. But you will also find mysteries which the writers tell you simply to accept whether one understands them or not (e.g.-the Trinity or the siamese truths of the sovereignty of God and moral responsibility of man). They make no attempt to explain the mysterious or paradoxical; they simply charge the reader to believe.

Make no mistake: the Bible is beautiful, deep, profound, grand, fathomless. But it is also down-to-earth, gritty, unpolished, unspun, genuine, real.

One thing for sure: it is not is contrived. No one met in a back room somewhere and gave the writers of Scripture their talking points and told them to stay on script. What really happened was that God gave them truth to write and told them to write it without concern for artificial points of agreement or appearance of polish. He told them just to write what He said and they saw.

It’s like God said: “Tell it like it is. I don’t care about whether people appreciate or can reconcile everything you say or not. I want truth-writers, not talking heads. The truth will speak for itself, vindicate itself, and set men free.”

Ladies and gentlemen: in many ways, the Bible is not pretty. Neither is it polite, polished, or politically correct. Some see this as excuse to believe it is not true. For my part, I see it as reason to believe that it is.

What do you think?

Another reason why I believe the Bible is God’s Word is this: The Bible has been preserved supernaturally against internal corruption (i.e. the integrity/reliability of its text has been maintained for thousands of years), and against external attack (no matter how hard people have tried to destroy it, it still exists today). This attests to its divine Authorship and a divine intervention to preserve it for all time.

To the often asked question: “How do you know that the Bible is the same now as was written by its original authors thousands of years ago?”, the answer is in fact quite plain and simple. We have thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible (in whole or in part) which can be compared to each other and to what we have today. When these are compared the accuracy of the preserved text is proven.

Let me give you one example. The discovery between 1947 and 1956 of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which include copies of the Old Testament Scriptures written around 100-150 B.C.),has made it possible to compare the text of the Hebrew Bible then with the earliest copies previously discovered, the Masoretic Text (980AD).

A careful comparison analysis shows that the Hebrew text suffered no meaningful corruption or change over that 1,000-1,100 year span! Apart from a letter or word here or there the text is exactly the same. Such comparisons of all the ancient biblical texts reveal astonishing accuracy, an accuracy that lays to rest any serious doubts about the reliability of our Bible today.

What we read in our Bible in 2010 is a careful and accurate record of what the original authors wrote. That claim is not so much a matter of religious faith as it is of established scientific fact. The agreement of today’s Bible with ancient manuscripts is so thorough, so substantial, so nearly 100% (right down to the letters of the text) that we can have have absolute certainty that what we read now is what was written then. The text of Scripture has been preserved remarkably from internal corruption.

It has also been preserved from external attack. No book in all of history has faced such sustained attack as the Bible has. People and even nations have tried to undermine and destroy it. Yet today, the Bible is more available and more widely read than at any time in history.

All this leads to another conclusion: the Bible must have been written and preserved by no one less than God. How else does one explain such remarkable preservation of a text written ages ago, a preservation, I might add, accomplished without the benefit of copying machines and modern technologies? For centuries the 1, 000+ pages of the Bible were preserved without internal corruption, by hand, not machine! It defies human explanation.

And how else does one explain the astonishing ongoing existence of a Book so pervasively despised and so often attacked? The best answer? This is the hand of God.

God had something to do with this.

I suppose natural human explanations can be suggested, but in my mind they would have all the markings of a desperation to deny the supernatural! Friends, God wrote this Book, and then preserved it so that humans may hear from Him throughout all generations.

Any other explanation requires more faith than I can muster. When it comes to the inspiration and preservation of the Bible, to paraphrase one author: “I don’t have enough faith to be an unbeliever.”