Why should I believe the Bible?

Someone hands you a book of sixty-six documents and tells you God wrote it. That is an enormous claim, and asking for a reason to accept it is not unbelief. It is honesty.

The place to start is with Jesus, because almost everyone who asks this question already holds Him in some regard. His regard for Scripture was total. He treated the Old Testament as the words of God Himself, down to the smallest stroke of the pen.

Matthew 5:18 (NKJV)

For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.

A jot was the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. A tittle was a tiny mark that distinguished one letter from another. Jesus is speaking here about the law, and His point is that not one stroke of it will be dropped or left unfinished. Every detail God put into it will be carried through to what it was given for. The law does not expire and it is not set aside. It reaches its goal in Christ.

Jesus treats the smallest mark on the page as binding, and that tells you what He believed the page to be. He said elsewhere that “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). He answered Satan three times with the same four words, “It is written” (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). He treated the stories modern readers find hardest to swallow as plain history — Jonah swallowed by the fish, Noah and the flood (Matthew 12:40; 24:37–39). And He prayed to His Father that God's word is truth (John 17:17).

That carries more weight than any other argument on this page. If Jesus is who He claimed to be, then His verdict on the Bible settles the matter. A person cannot think highly of Christ and think little of His Bible. He left no room for the arrangement.

But is this not using the Bible to prove the Bible? First, the Gospels do not have to be received as Scripture before they can be read as historical documents; they are among the best-attested writings to survive from the ancient world. What Jesus said about Scripture reaches us through testimony a historian can examine. Secondly, the Scriptures claim to be the final authority on truth, and this is important because if the Bible could be trusted only once science or history had signed it off, then science and history would be the real authority and the Bible would sit beneath them.

When God made His promise to Abraham He swore by Himself, “because He could swear by no one greater” (Hebrews 6:13). Likewise, there is no higher court for God to appeal to. His Word carries His own authority.

How the Book Came Together 

Sixty-six documents, roughly forty writers, about 1,500 years from the first page to the last. The writers include shepherds, soldiers, farmers, fishermen, a tax collector, a doctor and kings. The thirty-nine Old Testament books were written over roughly a thousand years, mostly in Hebrew with several sections in Aramaic. Then four hundred years of silence, when no Scripture was written at all. Then twenty-seven New Testament books in Greek, inside a single lifetime.

Most of these men never met. Most could not have read what the others wrote. There was no committee and no editor sitting over the whole project smoothing the material into agreement. Yet the sixty-six documents tell one story moving in one direction: God rescuing sinners through a promised Redeemer. Forty men writing across fifteen centuries do not arrive at one argument by accident.

Historical Accuracy: 

The Bible also holds up historically. For most of the nineteenth century the Hittites, who appear throughout the Old Testament, were treated as a people the Bible had invented, since no trace of them survived anywhere else. Then their capital was uncovered in Turkey at the start of the twentieth century, along with an archive of their state records, and an empire nobody believed in turned out to have been one of the great powers of the ancient world.

A stone inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993, carved by an enemy king, names the house of David — David's dynasty named by a hostile source. None of this proves that the Bible is God's Word. It does show that the Bible is not writing fiction when it writes history.

Prophetic Statements: 

Prophecy is where Scripture does something that no other religious book attempts. J. Barton Payne's Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy counts 1,817 predictions across its pages, 1,239 in the Old Testament and 578 in the New, covering by his reckoning about 27 per cent of the text. Anyone can make a prediction. Staking a book's entire credibility on hundreds of them, spoken in the name of God, is a different matter.

Seven centuries before Jesus was born, Micah named the village.

Micah 5:2 (NKJV)

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.

Bethlehem was a small place with nothing about it to attract a prediction. Micah not only names it, he says the One who comes out of it has been going forth from everlasting — a ruler with no beginning. Matthew records the birth of Jesus there (Matthew 2:1), and records the chief priests quoting this very verse back to Herod when he demanded to know where the Christ was to be born (Matthew 2:4–6). The men who quoted it were not Christians assembling a case. They were the religious establishment that would later hand Jesus over to Pilate. And the prophecy cannot have been written after the event, because copies of the prophets were recovered from the caves at Qumran that were made well over a century before Jesus was born.

Conclusion: 

The preacher Voddie Baucham has put the whole answer into a single sentence:

“I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents, written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.”

He draws that straight from Peter, who knew better than most the difference between a story a man invents and something he watched happen.

2 Peter 1:16–21 (NKJV)

For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

Peter draws a line between two kinds of writing. One kind comes “by the will of man” — a man decides to write something, and writes it. Scripture came the other way. Men spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That is the claim the Bible makes about itself, and it is why its authority does not depend on how impressive its human writers were.

Peter also calls Scripture a light shining in a dark place. The Spirit who carried those men along has not finished with what they wrote; He works through it still. That distinction matters for anyone weighing the evidence above. Evidence clears away objections. It can show a sceptic that the Bible is not a forgery and not a legend. What it cannot do is give a blind man eyes. Nobody has ever been argued into faith by a statistic.

1 Thessalonians 2:13 (NKJV)

For this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe.

The Thessalonians heard the same words their neighbours heard and shrugged off. What separated them was not that they were cleverer or more open-minded. They recognised whose voice it was. They welcomed it not as the word of men but as what it is in truth, the word of God.

So the honest answer to this question finishes by pointing at the book rather than at the arguments for it. Read it. Not because reading proves anything, but because that is where the light is, and God gives sight to people who had none.