When Christ reveals His ultimate purposes and plans to His church, to prepare her, guide her into all truth, edify and comfort her, He doesn’t simply send a prophet, an apostle or a teacher; Christ reveals the message to a trusted apostle and enables him to write it down in a book. (Re 1:11) This may seem uneventful to us at first glance, but I think it’s significant.
As we pursue truth, particularly in spiritual things, we have very few options:
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- We may trust God to speak directly to us to confirm what’s true.
- We may trust other “selves” to tell us what God has revealed to them.
- We may trust what we read in a book which claims to be inspired of God, a text which bears up under the most intense scrutiny over time.
The first two options are obviously problematic because we’re all flawed and tend to misunderstand and misrepresent truth, even when God clearly reveals it to us. Even when we’re trying our best we often get it wrong, much less when we’re actually trying to deceive ourselves and others. This makes even written materials suspect, since they’re likely just more permanent variations of the same.
To be rightly grounded in truth, we need a book which not only claims to be inspired by God, but which proves itself out to be so over many generations, generally received as God-breathed by those loving and pursuing God, based on how its words encourage, strengthen and direct us.
And, ideally, this would be a book written down by holy people who both love God supremely and also suffer greatly in providing it to us, who receive its message under persecution and difficulty, who actually do suffer in their own pursuit of God, and who have no hope of profiting personally in any way from writing it.
And if this book actually is inspired by God, we expect to find those who aren’t pursuing God to be careless with it, taking it out of context and using it for their own benefit. And we find those hostile to God relentlessly and irrationally attacking it, opposing it, maligning and mocking it, blind to their own irrationality in the process.
The Bible, the Word of Truth, fits this expectation to a “T”, and it’s the only book which does. It’s the foundation of Western civilization, an ongoing miracle for us all to discover and cherish. Many who won’t claim to be Christians take it as truth on a moral and spiritual level, astonished at how such a book could have come to us by any natural means.
And those who attack and denounce it must inevitably take it out of context, twisting its words as they would no other text to which they’d give an honest read. It’s clear they hate its Author and cannot give it the chance it deserves. (Ro 8:7)
To love God is to love His word; it becomes the joy and rejoicing of our hearts (Je 15:16), just as He is. (Php 4:4)
The Quran is perhaps the only other scripture which even pretends to rival the Bible, and it fails the above tests miserably. Its content is obviously self-contradictory, requiring the concept of abrogation to justify it, its author(s) are of uncertain identity and character, and they evidently did expect to profit significantly by claiming to capture Muhammed’s teachings within it, who also did not suffer in pursuing God, murdered those who disagreed with him, and profited immensely from his claims to inspiration.
I think that one is a good start. One of the issues in it, though for an unbeliever would be the concept of truth. How does one actually know the truth? Can we believe anything we read about ancient history and why do people believe some historical accounts but refuse to believe others? And of course, the big issue with unbelievers in the Bible is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Based on all worldly scientific understanding, humans cannot be resurrected from the dead, and the fact that the Bible claims that Jesus was God, how can anybody know that to be the truth? Or even that God exists at all? And I think part of that may involve a discussion of how the Bible came into being in the first place. Who wrote it when and why and how did it change overtime etc. Another words what versions can be trusted and which ones cannot be trusted and why So I was going to focus on these topics: The origins of the Bible. The reliability of eye witness accounts, that the fact that the people aware of these accounts were willing to die and were killed because of their beliefs, that so many people throughout the world throughout history have accepted this fact, (OT is the basis for the 3 of the 4 main religions of the world-Buddhism is listed as a major religion, but is really just human philosophy). The more scientific aspects would be the irreducible complexity of the human cell and the deficiencies of the theory of evolution, the fact that scientists cannot, and will not be able to explain the origin of life. And the fact that a lot of the historical narrative of the Bible are found in science, such as physical evidence of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and even the separation of peoples via the continental drift theory, differences in language, the prophesies of Jesus in the OT coming true, the prophesy of the world, turning against the state of Israel, which we can almost see in real time, etc. Plus the unexplainability of the persecution of Jews around the world throughout history. Is it a coincidence that the OT describes the persecution of the Jewish people, and that they (and only they as a people) have been a target ever since then by every country they have lived in up until the present time with no explainable rational reason for this other than what is described in the Bible? Anyway, this is what I have been thinking about lately.