Okay, so God is there, but what makes the Bible special?

1.     Its ideals.  “The best of men could not have written it; the worst of men would not have written it” as someone has said.

2.     Its efficacy: its ability to transform lives.  Anybody who has experienced this in themselves finds it easy to accept the Bible as God’s word, even the difficult parts.

3.     Its integrity: the presentation of details that can be corroborated.  An example is Luke 3:1-2: “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.” The more details in an account, the greater the chance of error, but the Bible is not afraid of detail.

4.     Its composition.  About 40 people from 7 countries composed it across 1600 years, yet it is internally consistent and presents a unified theme (which is found in Isaiah 51:16 in the Old Testament and in Hebrews 2:10 in the New Testament). 

Is. 51:16: And I have put My words in your mouth;
        I put my words in your mouth
    and sheltered you in the palm of my hand.
    I stretched out the heavens,
    laid the foundations of the earth,
        and said to Zion, “You are my people.”¹

Hb. 2:10: For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings.²

What these words are telling us is that God is preparing a people, “many sons”, for “glory”.

5.     Its indestructibility. Various regimes have endeavored to destroy this book, but it always flourishes.

6.     Its foreknowledge: about one-third of the Bible is prophecy, “history written in advance”.

7.     The Bible must be God’s book if Y’shuah is God.  He treated it as the word of God, and since we can show that he is God (which is a separate discussion, and I don’t want a diversion within this diversion from the discussion about love), we can see that any attitude he has is valid.  If we accept Y’shuah as God, we have to accept his theology as reliable.

The first question in the next post on this theme will likely be “So the Bible has God’s word, but how do we know that the entire Bible IS his word?  How do we know that there isn’t manmade composition with it?”  We are headed for the question of “If God exists, why is there so much suffering?” There is a purpose in this and it is leading us back to the discussion of love.