Have Confidence In Your Bible 7

“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged

sword… discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Hebrews 4:12

I think it was Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, who said: “The Bible is neither the kind of book a man could write if he would nor the kind of book he would write if he could.” It might take a moment or two to get your head around that. Here’s what it means.

No mere man, unaided, could do what the writers of the Bible did in achieving such historical accuracy as they achieved, producing such reliable predictive prophesy as they produced or even in coming up with such universally applicable themes as are addressed in its pages. To write the Bible called for something supernatural, but even if any man could have written the Bible unaided, no man would have written it the way it is written.

For example, the Bible deals very frankly with the sins of its leading characters and even of the writers themselves. The sins of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are so patent, who would have given any of them a job? As for the sins of their descendants, if you were trying to sell a religion would you have written about what the children of Israel got up to? David’s adultery with Bathsheba. Peter’s denial of Jesus. Disorder in the church at Corinth. The list could grow very long if we had time.

The Bible focuses on reality and deals with reality in a way that no other religious writing does. None is so honest, none is so true to real life and none so resonates with people like us who struggle with sin and failure.

It seems to me that there is only one thing that explains the existence of the Bible. Those human writers were inspired by the Spirit of God. You can have confidence in your Bible, it is God’s word.

Adapted from Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell. Available to purchase at ICM Books.