This week we are considering the question of whether or not we can trust the Bible. What makes it unique, setting it apart from other religious books? How can we be sure that what we have is what was originally written? And how can we know that it is actually from God?

A quick reminder: we are not looking for absolute certainty. We are looking for confidence. Can we have confidence that God has spoken to us in the sixty six books of the Bible? Here are six reasons that I believe we can.

1. The Unity of Scripture

The Bible was written over 1,500 years by over forty authors in three languages on three different continents, yet it tells one cohesive story about God and man. All of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation centers upon the Son, the Seed, the Servant, who will save his people from their sins and reconcile them to God. His victory is promised in the first book of the Bibe and is realized in the final book of the Bible. How amazing is it that all of the biblical authors, in different languages, in different centuries, write in such unity with each other?

2. The Explanatory Power of Scripture

This unifying story is an apologetic in and of itself. It answers all the biggest questions of life: How did we get here? Why are we here? Why is the world the way that it is? Why is there suffering, pain, and death? What hope is there for us? What should we live for? What comes after this life?

The Bible possesses the greatest explanatory power for all of the major questions of life. It explains who created us, how sin entered the world, why we experience pain and suffering, and how God, in his mercy and love, has purposed to save us in His Son and redeem us from all the effects of sin. It explains to us who God is- the One in whom we live and move and have our being. It gives explanation to life in a way that nothing else can.

3. Fulfilled Prophecy

At many points in this unfolding story, God speaks through prophets who specifically predict future events. Some of them are so accurate in their predictions that liberal scholars claim that the books must have been written after the events predicted (the book of Daniel, for example). A couple of these prophecies include Judah & Israel’s exile and captivity, Isaiah’s prediction of Cyrus leading the Jews home, and Jesus prophesying the destruction of the temple within a generation in Matthew 24.

However, the most impressive prophecies are those that are made about the Messiah that were fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. Conservatively, Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophecies from the Old Testament. Some of these include specific prophecies such as his birth in Bethlehem or his family fleeing to Egypt, but also include typological prophecies such as Abraham sacrificing his only son, Isaac. God tells Abraham to spare his son, of course, but the story points to God the Father sacrificing his Son, Jesus.

4. Historical Reliability

The first three reasons are impressive, but not if the story and prophecies have been edited and re-written over the centuries to make the Bible appear more impressive than it is. Can we be confident that what we have in our modern Bibles is what was actually written thousands of years ago? Yes we can.

We have greater historical evidence for the Bible than any other work of antiquity. In seminary, I focused on the work of textual criticism. I was able to compare several different manuscripts (copies) of the New Testament and evaluate their similarities and try to make sense of their differences. Get this: we have well over 5,000 copies of the Greek New Testament, and some of those copies go all the way back to within 30-50 years of the originals. And these copies agree 93-95% of the time!

There are, of course, minor differences between the copies. They were all handwritten copies, so we should expect differences to appear. We call those differences variants. But the vast majority of the text of the New Testament has been miraculously preserved through centuries of copying. When we put the copies side by side, the original (what we call the autograph) emerges, and we can be confident that we have what was originally written.

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