The Bible Is Trustworthy

The sum of Your word is truth.
–Psalm 119:160

To really appreciate God’s Word and make it a priority in your life, you have to believe it is true. How do we know the Bible is God’s letter to us?

For one thing, we know from what the Bible says about itself. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul wrote, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” The word translated as “inspired” literally means “God-breathed.” Every syllable in the Bible is God-breathed. And as my predecessor, Dr. W. A. Criswell, used to say, “God doesn’t have bad breath.” You can trust every syllable in the Bible.

But frankly, internal evidence is not enough, is it? The good news is there is also external evidence that the Bible is truly different from any other book. First of all, the Bible has a unity of theme. “Newsweek” magazine once ran a story comparing the Bible and the Koran. The reporter said, “To read the Qur’an is like entering a stream. At almost any point one may come upon a command of God, a burst of prayer, a theological pronouncement, the story of an earlier prophet or a description of the final judgment. . . . None of its 114 suras, or chapters, focuses on a single theme.” Now, unlike the Koran, which was written by one person over several decades, the Bible was composed by forty authors over a period of fifteen hundred years. Yet there is one theme found from Genesis to Revelation: the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ.

How do you explain that? My friend Erwin Lutzer illustrated it this way: “Imagine various pieces of a cathedral arriving from different countries and cities, converging on a central location. In fact, imagine that investigation proves that forty different sculptors made contributions over a period of many centuries. Yet the pieces fit together to form a single magnificent structure. Would this not be proof that behind the project was a single mind, one designer who used His workmen to sculpt a well-conceived plan?” So it is with the Bible. There is no way to explain the unity of theme in Scripture except to say God is the author.

A second evidence for the trustworthiness of Scripture is archeology. For example, through archeology, we have confirmed a wall was built around the ancient city of Jericho, and Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect when Jesus was crucified. Archeological discoveries have only supported the trustworthiness of the Bible. And you will never make the Bible central in your life until you are convinced of its trustworthiness yourself.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “The ABCs Of Spiritual Hygiene” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2011.

Kenneth L. Woodward, “In the Beginning, There Were the Holy Books,” Newsweek, February 10, 2002, https://www.newsweek.com/beginning-there-were-holy-books-147993; Erwin W. Lutzer, “Seven Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible” (Chicago: Moody, 2001), 51.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.