Is The Bible The Word Of God (Part 4)

We are assuming in these articles that a person at least believes there is a
God in the first place. After all, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is
no God” (Ps. 14:1). If a person is a fool, you won’t be able to convince
him/her anyway that the Bible is God’s Word.
The very presence of the Bible begs the question: “Who wrote it? How did it get
here?” Only two possibilities: (1) Either “good men” wrote it, or (2) “bad men”
wrote it. If “good men” wrote the Bible, we should believe what they said. The
penmen who wrote the Scriptures claimed over 3,000 times that they were writing
the Words of God. Either they were telling the truth or they were lying (or they
were crazy lunatics). If they were telling the truth, then the Bible is God’s
Word (see 2 Peter 1:21). If they lied 3,000 times, you could hardly call them
“good men.” That leaves you with the only other alternative: “Bad men” wrote the
Bible. However, if the writers of the Bible were “bad men” (or crazy) how do you
explain the fact they produced a book that makes bad people good? Can a book
containing over 3,000 lies be considered a “good book?” Hardly.
Someone has said, “The Bible is a Book that man could not have written if he
wanted to, and would not have written if he could.” Only a perfect God could
produce a perfect Book. (We will deal with the perfections of the Bible in a
future article.)
For a moment consider the a prior argument that God indeed wrote a Bible
in the first place: “Man being what he is and God being what He is, we may
reasonably expect a revelation from God and also an embodiment of such parts of
that revelation as are needed to supply an infallible source of theological
truth.” [Henry Thiessen, Lectures in Systematic Theology (Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1949) p. 81]. If there is a God, why wouldn’t He want us to
know about Him? What better way to reveal Himself to us than by an infallible
Book? It is reasonable to conclude that a perfect God has provided us with a
perfect Book.
Let the Bible speak for itself— “All scripture is given by inspiration of
God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Either that statement is
true or it is false.
The next question is, if God wrote a Bible one time, what happened to it? We’ll
deal with this in Part 5.
Stay tuned…