Greg and Amy make the case that the Bible is accepted not by blind faith but by evidence, explaining how fulfilled prophecy, a united message, historical reliability, life-changing power, and enduring preservation distinguish it from every other religious text.
Transcript
Amy: This question comes from Niggle: “A friend asked why he should pay any heed to the Bible, saying it’s just one of many ancient holy books. How can I trust it is special?”
Greg: Well, this, to me, is similar to when people ask the question “There were 300 gods. You look at all the religions. What makes you think yours is the right God?” There are all these holy books. What makes you think yours is the right book?
Well, first of all, there’s not all these holy books. In fact, I had a conversation with Wes Huff a couple months ago on this question. Do ancient Near Eastern religions each have their own revealed Scripture? And he said no. There sometimes are—he used a special word—but, like, prophets or seers that will make proclamations, but there’s no delivered scripture of their god revealing himself to people in any particular way. So, characteristically, this is not true.
Now, you have the Quran. The Quran was written in the seventh century after Christ, so, seventh and eighth. So, it’s not really contemporaneous. So, the Bible is unique here. The Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures are unique in this regard. There are some other things that were there, but it isn’t like everybody’s got their book.
But we’re back to this broader question. You’ve got a multiplicity of options. Why choose one over the other? And the answer is very simple: the reasons. The reasons. Take 300 gods. I have no reason to think any of those gods are real. They all seem to be very much like the human beings who worship them and just as immoral. The God of the Bible is very different. He’s not the kind of God that you would invent. All right? Probably.
So, one has to look. Is there any good reason to believe one option over the other? Look, somebody goes in. He’s got a pain. Goes to the doctor. You have a bunch of doctors to look at him. Okay? And they have all different ideas about what’s wrong with him. Okay, how does he decide which is the accurate diagnosis? He’s got to think about the particulars and the reasons that the doctors give and find out which one’s the most persuasive.
We go through this process all the time of trying to decide between options, and we use our thinking and reason to do so. So, when we come to the Scriptures—I actually just gave a talk this last weekend in Huntington Beach, talking about the very particular reasons we have to think that the Bible—which is really a library of books and not just one book—taken as a whole, has the fingerprints of the supernatural on it. There are six different evidences. Maybe people can come up with more, but I just talk about six that indicate that this is more likely a book by God to men, in some sense, than it is a human book by men about God.
Okay? That’s a process of analysis. It’s the same thing we do with any other circumstance where we have options and the issues are important. We just think through the options.
Amy: So, can you briefly say what those six things are?
Greg: Fulfilled prophecy.
It has an amazing unity from Genesis to Revelation in terms of the development of what I call the story of reality.
It has definite, profound insight into the big issues—the big questions—that have to do with maybe the existential elements. Who are we? Where we’re going. Why are we important? Is there a god? Is there morality? Whatever. And then it answers those questions in a way that resonates with our deepest intuitions about the way the world is. It seems to fit. Okay? That’s the third one.
Fourth one is its historical reliability. So, it’s a record of God intervening in history to show himself in different ways—most profoundly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But you can actually track the history because there’s a lot of detail there, and we can show, in many points, that the history is accurate to the events they describe through archaeology and other sources, etc. This is especially true of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But what’s really key in this, in particular with the Gospels, is that the record to accurate history that we have in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is a supernatural record of events. So, we have supernatural history that’s well attested to by eyewitnesses. Okay? That’s the fourth reason.
The fifth one is the power of this message, this book, this account of reality, when taken seriously, to change and transform lives in a very unique fashion. And this is universal. Doesn’t matter where you live or when you live. People who follow this, not only are individual lives changed, but whole cultures are transformed, like the Wesleyan revival—how it transformed England and saved it in the late 18th century from a revolution that France experienced. I mean, historians acknowledge this without pause, right?
And then finally, the survival of this book in the midst of tremendous persecution and criticism. Attempts to destroy it physically and through criticism have all failed, and it continues to be the number one bestselling book of all history.
And those things taken together, it’s a cumulative case—the supernatural prophecy, the supernatural unity, the supernatural insight, the supernatural events recorded accurately there, the supernatural changed lives, and supernatural survival through time and persecution—taken collectively, is very powerful evidence that this book is not like any other book.
Amy: What makes it easier to evaluate compared to, say, another religious text that might just be ideas about how to live, or maybe their ideas about ultimate reality, or whatever it is—the thing about the Bible is that it’s connected to normal life. Like, it’s connected to history. It’s not just one person’s ideas that came to them that are untestable. You can’t test somebody’s—like, if there’s a single person who has a vision and says, “This is how you should live,” well, there’s not really a way to test if that really came from a supernatural being or whatever it is. But if God is acting in history, now there are so many people involved, writing about what’s happening and how God is working through what’s happening, and we can look back at history and see how these things happened, and it’s just connected with what is happening in the world. And so, there’s a way to look at it and see, well, what is the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead? Why should I believe that? It’s not just somebody saying, “There’s an afterlife.” Okay, well, what do I do with that? There’s no way to evaluate that. So, we do have a way to look at it and figure out what is true. So, that is the advantage, I think, the Bible has.
In addition, there’s—and you mentioned—the unity. I think the unity is a great argument because you have all of these authors over 1,500 years writing down what all comes together in a cohesive unity of what God has been doing, who God is, what he requires, what he’s like. It all fits together. How does that happen over that period of time with the changing culture and the different people? It’s because it’s all coming from the same God.
Greg: Especially when none of those writers had the whole story. They just had a piece, and they didn’t completely understand it. Abraham—how did Jesus put it?—”saw my day and rejoiced.” Okay? Well, okay, we don’t have a lot of content there. We have a promise that we know, given to Abraham as to a future fulfillment of a blessing. Abraham had a little piece, and each piece—and this is why this course that we have at Stand to Reason, STR.org, it’s called The Bible Fast Forward. There are eight sessions, 50 minutes each, and it comes with, like, a 150-page syllabus that I put together. And I teach this to show the connectedness from the very beginning—the call of Abraham—all the way to the advent of Messiah. It’s all connected, and it’s very obvious when you, kind of, go through it. That’s the unity you’re talking about.
Amy: And just to emphasize one more thing that you have in there. It’s the insight into human nature that just blows me away sometimes. The Bible knows who we are. God’s revelation—he has us. He knows who we are. And you can see the reality of that, and you can see the weaknesses of people, and you can see what God does through them, and you see how people interact with Jesus, and it’s just amazing. You can see the truthfulness of the way it portrays human beings.
Greg: It resonates with our deepest intuitions about reality.