Reliable (Putting the Bible In Its Place #2)

In the fall of 2003, while I was working as a young adult pastor, I was planning a spiritual retreat for college students. The plan was to talk about why Christianity is true.

So I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. I would go online, find a bunch of stories from people who used to be Christians and had walked away from the faith, present those stories at the retreat, and then debunk them — proving Christianity to be the one true religion so the students could walk out with their faith bolstered.

Things did not work out the way I hoped.

In fact, in the planning, I almost lost my own faith.

This was my first real exposure to some of these stories and arguments. What I read on an internet forum of people who had deconverted from Christianity was genuinely stunning. Some of it was deeply sad. And I found that I could not simply say, ah, I see the flaw in that argument. Instead I kept thinking, I had never actually considered that before.

Rather than debunking what they were saying, I found myself sliding down the same path, asking: Have I fallen for the biggest trick ever? Is Christianity a hoax? Have I been taken in by a sham?

Because I do not know about you, but I do not want to follow Christianity if it is fake. I am not going to say, well, there are a lot of nice people here, so I will keep at it because I do not want to lose all this. No — I could probably use my Sundays differently. I would certainly spend my money differently.

But if Christianity is true, then I absolutely want to give myself to it, because it changes everything.

So How Do You Decide?

How do you go about deciding whether it is true? Is it just a leap of blind faith — I want it to be true, so I will act as though it is? Or is there some way to actually test it?

On that forum, as I read those deconversion stories, I noticed a pattern. Every person’s story was unique, but taken together a shape emerged.

The stories often began with a deeply negative experience. Usually it happened within a church, sometimes within a family. It typically involved hypocrisy, or abuse — physical, sexual, or emotional.

But here is what I noticed next: almost nobody used that one experience as their justification for leaving the faith entirely. What usually happened is that the negative experience launched them on a journey to determine whether Christianity is true. And the way they went about it was to study the Scriptures.

Many of them became convinced the Scriptures were wrong — full of errors, inconsistent, merely the product of human beings. And in a sense they felt that by debunking the Bible, they had struck the foundation, and all of Christianity came down with it.

So their journey started with a negative experience and continued through the conclusion that the Bible is unreliable — which justified staying away.

Because the Bible is what gets attacked when people want Christianity to crumble, today we are asking: is the Bible reliable?

Because if it is, then the stories in it — particularly the story of Jesus — are true. And that means we can take it at face value that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who came to earth, lived a sinless life, and died in the sinner’s place on a cross — and did not stay dead.

If the Bible is wrong, we can ignore that story. If it is reliable, that story changes everything.

It turns out the skeptics and critics are right about one thing: the Bible really is foundational to our faith.

So today I hope to show you it is reliable. If you are a skeptic, I hope you hear some evidence for why I believe it. If you have been wrestling with doubt, as I was in 2003, I hope this reassures you. And if your faith is doing well, I pray this bolsters it and creates a greater hunger to study the Scriptures.

The Text: 2 Timothy 3:16–17

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

My worst teacher ever

My freshman year of college, every student had to take Western Civilization. That fall the professor who normally taught it was on sabbatical, so we had an adjunct — and she was honestly the worst teacher I have ever had. Not just the worst professor in college. The worst teacher of my life. My kindergarten teacher was substantially better.

What made her so bad was how inconsistent she was.

You would walk into class and we would be all over the map — jumping across timelines and countries with no cohesion, no theme linking anything together. When you turned in a paper, there would be a letter grade at the top and no markings anywhere. You had no idea why you got an A, or a B, or a D. Just a letter. And when you tried to ask, she avoided you. Or she would answer in a way that had nothing to do with the question.

I was not alone in this. Essentially everyone in that class complained about her constantly. I have no proof, but I would not be shocked if she received the worst evaluations in the school’s history, and I highly doubt she was invited back.

If the Bible were like that, the critics would have an excellent case. If it were that unreliable — that scattered — there is no way you could let it teach you. You would not trust it to correct you. You would not believe it could train you in righteousness.

But Paul, writing to his protégé Timothy, says all Scripture is useful for exactly those things. Which means Paul is convinced it is reliable.

Six Pieces of Evidence

So I want to try to convince you, with six pieces of evidence. If you are a note taker, this is your day.

Anyone here like puzzles? Good — for a second I thought I was alone. I have one in my basement right now that I have not had time to work on.

There is something satisfying about finding the right piece, seeing where it goes, and watching the picture come together.

Now, if I brought one puzzle piece and held it up, none of you would say look, a puzzle. You would say that is a puzzle piece.

Likewise, I do not think any single one of these six evidences is by itself enough to prove the Bible reliable. A couple of them I find genuinely remarkable. But to see the full picture, you need all of them.

Some critics assume that if they can discount one, the whole thing collapses. I am convinced that even if you removed one of these, the other five would still be strong enough for you to see the picture.

1. Self-admission

We should at least recognize that the Bible claims to be the word of God.

Within Scripture we hear God say that he does not lie. And there is something in us that recognizes that for God to be God, he cannot lie. So if he cannot lie, and these writings claim to be his word, then in a sense God is saying: this is reliable.

Now, I recognize this can be considered circular logic — the Bible claims to be reliable, therefore it is reliable. That is why this is only one piece. By itself it is weak. But combined with everything else, it helps us see that the Bible genuinely presents itself as reliable.

We see it in how the Old Testament prophets speak: hear the word of the Lord. They believed what they delivered was something people could rely on — something meant to teach, correct, and train them.

We see it in how New Testament writers treat the Old Testament, quoting it as the word of God. And even within the New Testament itself — in 2 Peter, Peter refers to Paul’s writings and identifies them as Scripture. In Acts, you find sermons preached with the confidence that what is being given is God’s word.

Basic argument. Not convincing alone. But worth noticing.

2. Historical accuracy

When a crime is investigated, prosecutors may build a case using DNA evidence. We cannot use DNA to prove the Bible reliable — but we can look at archaeology.

And the more archaeological work that gets done, the more it continues to confirm the Bible.

There are cases throughout history where historians looked at the absence of archaeological evidence and concluded a biblical figure never existed.

King David is a good example. For a long time historians treated him as essentially mythological — a man who slays a giant, wins wars, and has everything break his way. Surely legendary. And then archaeology uncovered records referring to a king of Israel named David.

Or take Luke 3:1, where Luke mentions a man named Lysanias and calls him a tetrarch. Historians objected that Lysanias was not a tetrarch but the ruler of a different province — and roughly fifty years before Luke’s setting. So Luke was wrong. Until archaeology unearthed records showing there were two men by that name, one of whom was indeed a tetrarch under Roman government.

Let me stay with Luke, because of all the biblical authors he is the most detail-oriented. He wrote both the Gospel bearing his name and the book of Acts. Read them and you find name after name after name — and he does not merely name people. He tells you where they are from, or who their family is, or gives their exact governmental title.

If anyone is set up to be caught in an error, it is Luke.

And archaeology has shown Luke to be accurate. Not roughly accurate — consistently accurate. There are non-Christian archaeologists who will say that whatever they think of his theology, his historical details hold up.

That matters to me. Because when someone is that detail-oriented and gets it right, it suggests that when he writes about Jesus and his death and resurrection, that is accurate too.

But maybe archaeology is not enough for you. Then consider that ancient historians — Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, and others — write about many of the same events Scripture describes.

You might push back: maybe the Bible mixes true historical events with fictional stories. Come on — Noah’s ark? Jonah and the great fish? Manna in the wilderness? Maybe those were woven in among the real events and genealogies to make the whole thing sound more plausible. Or maybe, after so long as an oral culture, they mistook legend for history.

I have a friend who believes the Bible is the word of God but does not believe Jonah actually happened. He believes God gave us that story because there are deeper truths in it — like a parable. To him it is metaphor, not history.

Put an asterisk there. We are coming back to it in evidence number six.

3. Fulfilled prophecy

The Old Testament contains over two thousand prophecies. And the thing about them is that they are often remarkably specific.

That is the challenge with prophecy. The more general it is, the easier it is to claim fulfillment. The more specific, the more problematic it becomes.

Suppose I stood up here and said that in 2024 a great leader will rise up and be elected president of the United States. That is so general that whatever happens, I can claim to be right.

But suppose I said that in 2024 a great leader will rise up and be elected president — and she will be a third-party candidate from the state of Idaho, and she will serve a four-year term, be defeated, return four years later, win a second term, and be regarded as the greatest president in history.

If you are a betting person, do not put a dollar on that. It is statistically absurd. I have just eliminated half the population by specifying gender. She cannot be from Iowa or South Dakota — only Idaho. She cannot belong to either major party. And she has to win, then lose, then win again.

General prophecy: anything can fulfill it. Specific prophecy: you narrow it toward statistical impossibility.

Of those two thousand Old Testament prophecies, over three hundred concern a Messiah. And they do not merely say a messiah will arise. They say he will be born in Bethlehem, in the line of David, born of a virgin, that his hands and feet will be pierced. The detail is extraordinary.

A mathematician named Peter Stoner once took just eight of the most well-known messianic prophecies — only eight, not three hundred — and calculated the probability of any one person fulfilling all of them. His figure was one in ten to the seventeenth power. That is a one followed by seventeen zeros.

And if numbers do not do it for you, Stoner offered a visual: take that many silver dollars and spread them across the state of Texas, and they would bury it about two feet deep. Mark one of them, stir the whole mass thoroughly, then blindfold someone and tell them to walk out and pick up the marked coin on the first try. That is the probability.

And that is only eight prophecies. Jesus fulfilled over three hundred — and that does not touch the remaining seventeen hundred Old Testament prophecies, or the New Testament ones, some fulfilled in their own time and some concerning the end of history.

It is statistically impossible. And Jesus fulfills them.

4. Unstoppable durability

Every year or two, one of the major magazines runs an article about Jesus. Usually the headline claims that new archaeological evidence proves Jesus was not who we thought — and scholars and skeptics list all the ways we have been wrong and why the Bible may not be as trustworthy as we assumed.

And then a couple of years later another article appears, saying somewhat different things to roughly the same effect.

Because Christianity simply keeps going. It is almost as though the Bible does not notice these articles. It just keeps moving.

The Bible has been the best-selling book of all time, and it is not close — which is why bestseller lists generally exclude it from their rankings. Roughly 160,000 Bibles are sold every day. In 2021, around 80 million Bibles were produced across many languages.

The Bible has been fully translated into over 700 languages. Another fifteen hundred or so have at least the complete New Testament. And thousands more have at least one book translated, with translation organizations aiming to reach every language group of meaningful size.

Which is why record-keepers estimate that since the invention of the printing press, somewhere between five and seven billion Bibles have been printed.

Now, in fairness to the critic: popularity does not equal truth. All of us can think of cultural fads that were enormously popular and now seem embarrassing. And we can point to things nearly everyone once believed and now recognize as wrong — the flat earth, or the acceptance of slavery, which some people even attempted to justify from Scripture, though the servitude described in the Bible differs substantially from the chattel slavery of our own history.

So enormous sales alone do not establish reliability.

The manuscript evidence

Let me show you durability in a different way.

A manuscript here means a portion of Scripture from ancient times. It might be an entire book, but usually it is a portion of a scroll — sometimes a single page, sometimes only a fragment with a few verses, sometimes torn mid-sentence. Each still counts as one manuscript.

It may bother you to learn that not one of them is the original. We no longer possess the documents the biblical authors physically wrote.

But before that troubles you: no ancient work has its original document. All we ever have are manuscripts.

Let me put it in perspective.

For the historian Tacitus, on certain of his books we have a single manuscript, dated roughly 650 years after he wrote.

For Josephus and his work on the Jewish war, we have around nine Greek manuscripts, dated a thousand to twelve hundred years after the original. And nobody says, well then, Josephus must be unreliable. Most people accept that this is what he wrote.

For Homer — combining the Iliad and the Odyssey — we have over three hundred manuscripts, dated fifteen hundred to two thousand years after composition. That is one of the strongest cases in ancient literature.

I could go on through Caesar, Shakespeare, and other works. In every case, all we have are manuscripts, often separated from the original by many centuries.

Now: the New Testament alone has over 5,000 manuscripts, dated between roughly 30 and 100 years after the originals. And that does not include Latin translations. Combine the Latin Vulgate and other translations and the number rises to something like 24,000.

We have a wealth of documents.

But suppose we burned all 24,000 of them. Historians would be furious, but suppose we did. Could we reconstruct the New Testament?

Go to the church fathers — the generation after the apostles, many of them discipled directly by eyewitnesses. If you collected all of their writings and the Scripture they quote, you could reconstruct the entire New Testament except for about eleven verses.

Thankfully we do not have to burn anything. And having such a wealth of manuscripts allows us to compare them. Sometimes we find a difference in a particular copy — and then we notice that a small cluster reads one way while the overwhelming majority reads another, and certain manuscript families prove more trustworthy than others.

This is why conservative biblical scholars believe what we read in our English Bibles is roughly 99.9 percent identical to the originals. Perhaps a word differs here or there. This is precisely why we do not say our English translations are inerrant — we say Scripture is inerrant in the original documents. But we are extraordinarily close.

5. Remarkable consistency

In 1947 a shepherd boy realized one of the family’s sheep was missing, and he suspected it might be hiding in caves some distance from home. So he made the trek out.

The caves were dark, so rather than climbing in blind, he threw a rock into each one. The rock would clatter off the walls, and if the sheep were inside it would startle and bleat, and he would know to go in.

So he walked up to one cave and threw a stone. Clatter, clatter, nothing. Climbed to the next. Nothing.

And then at one cave he threw a rock and instead of clattering, he heard shattering pottery.

He made his way in and found enormous clay jars — and inside them, scrolls.

That is how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered: by a shepherd boy looking for a lost sheep. It became one of the greatest archaeological finds in history.

Why was it so significant? Because of the sheer number of scrolls and their remarkable condition. The environment had preserved them; ordinarily papyrus breaks down, but conditions there were exactly right.

And when scholars carefully unrolled and studied them, they discovered these documents predated anything they previously had by roughly a thousand years.

So they compared the thousand-year-older texts against what they already possessed.

And found almost no changes.

There were some differences — but roughly 99 percent of them were spelling variations. Rather like how Americans write color and the British write colour. Same word, different spelling.

And of the remaining differences, not a single doctrine in Judaism or Christianity was affected.

That is remarkable consistency across time.

Consistency within itself

But the Bible is also remarkably consistent internally. Stop and consider what this book actually is.

Sixty-six books, written across fifteen hundred years, by forty different authors, in three languages — primarily Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New, with portions of Daniel in Aramaic. And across a huge range of genres: poetry, history, genealogy, instruction, prophecy.

And yet there is an astonishing consistency from Genesis to Revelation. To me, that is evidence of God at work through so many authors across so much time.

Now, skeptics will say there are all kinds of inconsistencies. Some months ago I showed you a well-known chart produced by a noted atheist author, mapping thousands of supposed contradictions with red arcs.

When you dig into it, a great many of those turn out to rest on a lack of understanding about biblical interpretation. So many were so easily explained that other atheists told him it was embarrassing and he should take it down — and he did. You cannot find it on his site anymore.

And some of the things people label inconsistencies are actually paradoxes, and they are intentional.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd. Earlier in the same book, John the Baptist describes him as the Lamb of God. So which is he — shepherd or lamb?

Christianity says Jesus is the great high priest — and also the sacrifice. Which is it?

Scripture says Jesus is fully human, and Christians believe he is fully divine. Which is it?

The answer is yes. He is both priest and sacrifice. Both shepherd and Lamb. Both fully human and fully God.

It is not a mistake or an accident or an inconsistency. It is a paradox. To be a Christian is to live in that tension. We believe there is one God revealed in three persons. I do not fully understand how that works. I know that it is true.

So what many label inconsistency is actually the Scriptures showing themselves to be deeply consistent.

6. Exceptional acceptance

You may have noticed we live in an age where nobody agrees on anything. If you doubt it, go home and turn on the news.

We cannot agree on politics. Or race. Or public health. Or sports. We cannot agree on where to go for lunch.

So I find it genuinely exceptional that across so much of history and so many cultures and so many branches of Christianity, believers say together that the Bible is the reliable word of God.

Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all affirm this. Next week, when we discuss the canon, we will see they differ on precisely which books belong. But it is not as though Protestants call it the word of God while the Orthodox deny it. The acceptance is remarkably broad.

But here is the acceptance that matters most

Jesus, in his teaching, refers back to the Old Testament and treats it as reliable.

Remember that asterisk from evidence number two — about Noah’s ark and Jonah and the manna? Here is the point.

When Jesus refers to those events, he does not speak of them as fiction. He does not treat them as parables from which to extract a lesson. He speaks of them as things that happened.

Why? Because if Jesus is who the Bible says he is — the eternal Son of God — then he was there. He was there when Noah climbed into the ark. He was there when the great fish swallowed Jonah. He was there when manna fell in the wilderness.

He saw these things. So for him to deny them, or reduce them to fiction, would be to lie and to deny himself. He can only speak of what he saw and knew.

And he is present not only as witness. As God the Son, he is there with the Spirit as the Spirit breathes through the biblical authors, giving God’s people exactly what he wants them to have.

Which is why Mark records that Jesus taught with authority. Notice the first part of that word: author. Jesus is the author of the Scriptures. That is why he carries such authority, and why he speaks of the Old Testament as reliable.

This is a critical point. Jesus said that the Law and the Prophets all point to him. If Jesus had said, the Old Testament has some good ideas, but it is not God’s word, the entire structure collapses.

Instead he says the whole thing points to him — that there are hundreds of prophecies he fulfills, that all of it converges on this moment, that he will give his life and rise from the dead.

And then he pulls it off.

So I do not know about you, but I am going to side with the man who had the power to raise himself from the dead. If he says the Bible is reliable, I am going with him.

Now It Comes to You

For me it is convincing enough. The archaeological record. The ancient historians. The manuscripts. The prophecies. The consistency. The breadth of acceptance. And ultimately, for me, it comes down to Jesus — because he says this is the word of God and it is reliable.

You can read it and trust it, even translated into English, because scholars have studied those tens of thousands of manuscripts to give you something that will help you find Jesus and follow him.

So now it comes down to you. I have laid out the evidence. You have to decide whether it is enough to say, I put my faith in this.

To me, it would be foolish to look at all of that and not. But it is up to you.

And if you are convinced — will you give your life to following Jesus? Will you let the Bible take its proper place in your life? Will you let God stir up a hunger in you, so that this is not only something you hear about on Sunday mornings but something you read on Monday and Tuesday and every day, letting these words penetrate your soul?

Because God breathed them out for a purpose. He loves you, and he wants to shape you into the image of his Son. He wants you to live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved.

Let Us Pray

Heavenly Father, help us see your Scripture for what it is, and trust that it is reliable.

For the person wrestling with doubt — maybe I have not done a good enough job convincing them — keep teaching them this week.

For the skeptic still scoffing, let this be a seed that is planted and begins to take root.

And for the person listening who has deconverted and wandered away: I recognize I have not answered every question. There are things in the Scriptures I do not fully understand myself. But I believe you have given us more than enough to know that your word is reliable and can be read and trusted. So I pray that person would begin the journey back toward you — that having left, their faith would be resurrected and built stronger than ever, and they would know you as their loving God.

Thank you for giving us your word. Help us be people of the book, and let these words become part of who we are — shaping how we think, how we use our time, how we use our money, and how we use our words — so that we might become more like Jesus, who displayed the furthest reach of love by going to the cross to die for our sins.

Help us show that kind of love, and give our lives to follow you and be a blessing in this world — living like Jesus lived and loving like Jesus loved. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.