In a previous post I argued that God is the only explanation for the stupefying complexity, functionality, and beauty of creation, the first and most obvious of God’s revelations of himself to mankind. In this post I will argue that the Bible is way too mind blowing to have any other explanation than God himself. In my next, I will show how Christ himself is the ultimate revelation of God, and that God himself is the only explanation!
For the last two hundred years we’ve endured a veritable world war on the Bible, driven by the anti-supernatural bias of the so-called Enlightenment. This was sort of understandable considering the limited scientific knowledge of the 18th and 19th centuries (see previous post on creation). The obvious problem was that the impossibility of the supernatural was never proved, but assumed because Newtonian physics (and the worldview inspired by it) required a closed system to work. In other words, we assume a mechanistic universe, ergo, God is unnecessary.
If this is the reigning assumption, what do you with the miraculous in the Bible? Dismiss it! Of course. This bias determines the interpretation of the evidence. But, it is the evidence in the text that compels us to take the Bible seriously as true history, and leads us to the inescapable conclusion that God is the only reasonable explanation for the Bible. Given obvious space limitations, I will present only a couple points that make the case worth considering to the objective observer.
Coherence
The first thing to consider is that the Bible is not one book, but 66 different documents compiled into one book. These documents were written over 1,500 years by 40 authors, in various cultures, mostly in two languages. We must not pass by these facts too quickly. Fifteen centuries is a very long time, yet the coherence of the message is as if it had one author, because it does! What is that message, and how is it coherent?
The message that informs every “jot and tittle” of Scripture is found in Genesis 3:
15 And I will put enmity
between you [Satan] and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
The he referenced points forward 1,500 years to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This promise is the thread that holds the entire Bible together, and it all hinges on God’s covenant promise that he will make salvation from sin and its consequences actual for his people, those Jesus came to save. This goes through Noah, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his 12 sons, to Moses, Joshua, and David, and the son of David predicted throughout the prophets as the Messiah. This Messianic expectation was an obsession for the people of Israel when Jesus came on the scene, and contrary to all expectations, he fulfilled them all in hindsight: the entirety of the Old Testament was about him. To read the story in light of that is nothing short of awesome. God is the only explanation!
Could It Be Made Up?
If the critics are right, the Bible is a figment of human imagination. The question I’m constantly confronted with as I read the text is exactly this: could it be? The critics respond: of course! No problem. Easy peasy. I can promise you, those people have never seriously engaged the text. Their presuppositions won’t allow them to do that, but that will not be a problem for Christians. We will let the text speak, and one of the many ways we can allow it to do that is through the lens human psychology. It’s a challenge in a few short words to convey just how powerful an apologetic this is for the veracity of Biblical record.
What do I mean by reading the text through the lens of human psychology? Human beings are predictable. They act in certain ways in certain circumstances that reveal if the events or stories are real, or can be. Part of the wonder of Scripture as I’ve become more deeply immersed in it over the years is how important it is to try to understand the expectations of the characters. It seems that God is consistently working contrary to every expectation the people naturally have. The examples are ubiquitous, but as we read we have to ask ourselves, do people make up stories that make them look so incredibly clueless, and just plain bad? They expect God to do X, and he does Y, over and over again. Read the stories of Abraham and Sarah, or Moses, or David, or Jonah, or Ezekiel, or the gospels where nobody seems to get Jesus. A consistent theme throughout the Bible is that God’s people, let alone his enemies, are clueless!
Because of all this I’ve come to the conclusion that it would take far more faith, a very big leap of faith, to believe that it’s all made up, than that it’s historically accurate, and ultimately true. There are so many more reasons that we can trust Scripture reveals the ultimate truth of reality to us, but the only explanation for our incredible Bible is God!
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