Why Trust This Book

Start by seeing clearly what this book is. Sixty-six scrolls, around forty writers, composed over roughly sixteen hundred years, in three languages — Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek — across three continents. The writers include kings, priests and prophets, and also shepherds, fishermen, a tax collector and a physician. Most of them never met; many were separated by centuries. And yet when you read the sixty-six together, one line runs through them: God made the world, people turned away from him, he made covenants to rescue them, and in the end he came to do the rescuing himself. No editorial board, no one to harmonize the manuscripts, and still it reads as though it came from a single author. That fact by itself asks for an explanation.

Paul's explanation is this: "Every Scripture is God-breathed." The word behind it (theopneustos) literally means "breathed out by God" — these words come from God and carry his breath. But notice how Peter describes the process: "holy men of God spoke, being moved by the Holy Spirit." People spoke, and it is God's word. Inspiration is not dictation; God did not turn the writers into typewriters. David's psalms smell of the pasture. Luke says he "investigated everything carefully from the beginning" (Luke 1:3). Paul's letters carry real tears and real anxiety about real people. Human style, human learning and human scars are all present, and God is the final author. So this book is fully the words of human beings and fully the word of God — which is exactly why it comes so close to us and still stands so far above us.

For anyone following Jesus, the heaviest evidence is how Jesus himself handled Scripture. Tempted in the wilderness, he answered three times with "it is written" (Matt 4:4-10). He said "the Scripture can't be broken" (John 10:35). He said he had not come to abolish the law and the prophets but "to fulfill" them (Matt 5:17). He walked step by step to the cross in line with what was written. The trust of a Lord who rose from the dead carries more weight than any argument. Outside evidence is not missing either: in 1947 a scroll of Isaiah was found in a cave by the Dead Sea, a thousand years older than the earliest Hebrew manuscript known before it, and the content had essentially no substantive differences — this book was copied far more faithfully than the skeptics imagined. But in the end, most people do not prove it in a laboratory first and then believe. We were caught by these words while reading them — the way you are standing in a crowd and suddenly hear someone call your name.