First of all, is this an important question? Does it matter whether we believe the Bible? I don't like to argue over unimportant questions. I've heard people say that they believe in God but not in the Bible. Well, if there is a God (and I do believe there is), then there is one truth about him. He is either loving or not loving, merciful or not merciful, all-knowing or not all-knowing, all-powerful or limited, eternal or mortal, etc. How would we know these things about Him? Either we would have to observe those things about Him directly, be told by someone who had observed Him directly, or be told those things by God himself. If you don't know God personally, then the only way you can know anything about Him is if there is a record of His words and the words of people who knew Him personally, i.e., the Bible. If you don't know Jesus personally and you throw out the Bible, then you don't know enough about Him to even form an opinion. Now that we've established that the question is worth exploring, let's look at the question itself.
In order to believe the Bible, we must establish the following:
- The authors knew the truth
- The authors wrote the truth
- Nothing important was excluded
- Today's Bible is essentially unchanged from the original
We'll cover each of these in separate entries over the coming weeks.
What do I mean by truth? The purpose of the Bible is to describe God and how we can have a personal relationship with him so the accuracy of those types of facts are crucial. If a date, or number of horses, for example, is incorrect, that does not affect the truth of the important points. Of course, factual errors like that could cause us to doubt that the writer really knew what he was talking about. We'll explore those questions too.
