Reliability of Scripture

The reliability of Scripture is constantly under attack. Of course, skeptics are happy to take you to task for believing that your Bible is the Word of God while other scriptures are not. Even "Christians" question it. A popular phrase these days is "The Bible contains the Word of God". We are constantly being asked to defend our belief that the Bible is the God-breathed Word, infallible and inerrant.

Over time I have found lots of reasons to believe it. When I say "reasons" I refer, essentially, to "evidence". Despite what you may have been told, there is evidence both for the existence of God and for the reliability of Scripture. These both fall under the broader category called "Apologetics". What kind of evidence have I found?

Well, there is the obvious. The Bible has large portions of prophecy made (and documented) long before events occurred and then perfectly fulfilled. It's not vague stuff like Nostradamus. It's quite clear. And chalking up that kind of track record to "chance" seems less logical than admitting it is inspired. One of the evidences that I personally find interesting is the fact that it was written by some 40 different authors over a couple thousand years but retains one, coherent message. I find that interesting because I am a writer. Once, I tried collaborating with a friend to write a novel. We worked closely together on it and found it extremely difficult to retain coherence. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote their fantasy stories because they complained that single authors couldn't maintain coherence in their own stories. Now, if lone writers have difficulty with it and two authors working closely together have difficulty with it, what are the chances that widely diverse authors over a long time period could do it? A blithe "It could happen" seems more like a fairy tale than admitting Divine Inspiration.

There are lots more reasons for defending the reliability of Scripture. On the other hand, despite all the reasons (read "evidence") that are offered, there will always be detractors, skeptics who deny it. Given the large volume of disagreement, why is it that people like me (and we aren't a small number) continue to hold to the reliability of the Bible? There is a less spoken but nevertheless true reason that underlies it all. Christians (not merely those who profess it, but those who are genuine) have an extra, bottom line factor. We have the Spirit of God. The same Spirit who breathed the words of the Bible to the human authors who wrote it lives in believers. That Spirit teaches us the Word and confirms in us the truth of it. Oh, sure, we may disagree on interpretation at times. We may listen more or less to the Spirit. We may make our own mistakes. Still, in all the disagreement and variation, we still concur together that the Bible is the God-breathed Word, reliable and infallible, because we have the Spirit of God in us confirming it.

I know. That argument doesn't hold much water in an open debate. It's doesn't serve as useful evidence to the skeptical world. On the other hand, we who have the Spirit in us don't really have much choice, do we? We can either deny what is absolutely certain to us (with much or little evidence provided) in order to appease detractors or we can concur with the Spirit because we have the Spirit. To the skeptics out there, perhaps you can see that we're kind of stuck with this notion of divinely inspired writings, then. To deny it would be to deny ourselves and to fly into fantasy and lunacy. Oh, sure, we have evidence -- reasons to believe -- but the bottom line is we are quite sure that God is the one who breathed that Bible for us. We can tell that the so-called "lost books of the Bible" don't fall in the same category. We are quite confident that it wasn't the Church that gave us the Bible, but the Spirit. Absolute proof? No, we don't have it. But we don't have the option of denying what we know because you don't like our reasons, do we?