As Christians, we believe the Bible was written by human authors, but under the supernatural impartation from God. We believe the Bible is the supreme source of truth for Christian beliefs about living. Because it is God-breathed, it is truth without error. (2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:20-21). However, there are a lot of folks out there that are not "convinced" yet and we know a lot of Christians have questioned things at some point in their walk. In this post, we want to share some points that reiterate our assertion that, yes, you can trust the Bible!
The Bible consists of 66 Books, written by 40+ authors over the course of 1,500+ years. The internet wasn't a thing and there weren't libraries with volumes of reproduced/printed artifacts for reference and/or plagiarism. The consistency of thought and the number of prophecies fulfilled throughout the Bible is simply amazing!
There are people that say the Bible we read today is some jumbled up, contemporary translation of translations and it isn't the original anyway. Let's be very clear about something...Bible translation is not like the game of telephone, that we played as kids, where you tell someone something, then they tell the next person, and then that person tells the next, and so on. By the time you got to the end, the message was always messed up. That is not what happens with Bible Translation! Consider the NASB and NASB95. The "95" didn't simply translate/update the original NASB. The team consisted of expert theologians from multiple denominations, as well as linguists, historians, archeologists, and others that were both believers and non-believers in Christ. That team reviewed the original artifacts and records to write the NASB95 translation.
Speaking of original artifacts and records...we have 5,000 full or partial manuscripts supporting the truth of the Bible and that list keeps growing.
The Bible contains thousands of prophecies fulfilled with uncanny precision, including 300 specific prophecies, written hundreds of years earlier in the OT, that are fulfilled in detail through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The odds of that happening by chance are less than one in 10,000,000,000...(add another 1,990 zeros to the end).
Consider Psalm 22. It references the crucifixion that would take place some 1,000 years later and crucifixion didn't even exist at the time Psalm 22 was written!!!
There are numerous accounts in the Bible that science didn't catch up to until hundreds (thousands) of years later....innumerable amount of stars (Jeremiah 33:22), light moves (Job 38:19-20), use of running water to clean (Leviticus 15:13), and many more!
The odds that Jesus would be able to fulfill JUST 8 of the prophecies are crazy!! The following is an excerpt from "The Mathematical Probability that Jesus is the Christ" and I would suggest reading their entire post and how their findings were even approved by the American Scientific Affiliation.
"After examining only eight different prophecies, they conservatively estimated that the chance of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies was one in 10^17. To illustrate how large the number 10^17 is (a figure with 17 zeros), the professor gave this illustration: If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten. Suppose that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They’ll cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up the one silver dollar that has the special mark on it. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would’ve had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time."
Comments