Reasons To Believe The Bible

Introduction

In the late 1700s the French philosopher Voltaire declared “100 years from my day there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker.” He thought religion was done for, and the Bible would soon be found only in museums.

It’s fair to say that Voltaire was a little off. In fact, 100 years later his home had been converted into a storehouse filled with the Bibles being produced by the evangelical society of Geneva.

The Bible is still going strong. Justin Brierly, on his podcast “The Surprising Rebirth Of Belief In God” describes a printing facility in China run by the Amity corporation which, just last year, produced 13 million copies of the Bible in hundreds of languages. Many were for export, but the majority were actually for the domestic market in China. Those printing presses work around the clock due to demand.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was so popular that an incredible 500 million copies of those books have been printed. But there’s no danger of catching up to the Bible, of which somewhere between 5 and 7 billion copies have been produced. Not quite one copy for every human being that has ever lived, but getting close.

A lot has changed in over the centuries, but one thing that hasn’t is the Bible’s ability to interest, inspire, and influence our world.

We’ve been talking about “reasons to believe” lately, exploring some of the arguments and evidence for Christian faith as well as some of the common objections that people raise. Depending on who you ask, the Bible is both. For many people it is a reason to believe. But for others the Bible is a reason to doubt or reject God or the Christian story. Before we get to Palm Sunday next week and our Easter services after that, I wanted to take this opportunity to focus on the importance, beauty, and message of the Bible.

Why Is The Bible Important

So why is the Bible important? That might sound like a dumb question to a church-goer, but to upcoming generations who have not been exposed to the Bible it’s actually an understandable thing to wonder about.

Strange as this might sound, the Bible is not the foundation of Christianity. Our foundation is Jesus Himself. Jesus’ disciples and the earliest Christians did not have Bibles at least not the ones we have. Some of them knew the Hebrew scriptures, some didn’t, but their newfound faith was established on the teachings they had heard from Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives.

Last time I preached my text included Matthew 7:24-28, where Jesus says:

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Jesus is talking about the foundation of a person’s life, and whether it can withstand the tests of time and circumstances. And Jesus taught that those who listened to Jesus’ words and put them into practice would have a strong spiritual foundation that would not collapse, while those who failed to put Jesus’ words into practice – who didn’t actually do what Jesus said – were building on sand that could easily be washed away.

To the people who were there listening to Jesus He meant that acting on the words He had been speaking to them was their way to know God and live a faithful life. They didn’t need to read about it. But the only way for us to know “these words of mine”, barring some kind of extraordinary divine encounter, is to read them in the Bible.

So the Bible is important not because it is the foundation of our faith, but because it is the primary way that we can learn the teachings of Jesus, the Hebrew scriptures that informed so much of what Jesus taught, and the lessons the early Christian churches learned as they tried to put Jesus’ teachings into practice in community.

That might be a good starting point to explain why the Bible matters to Christians, but it doesn’t go far enough, does it?

Christians claim quite a bit more than this – we believe that the Bible is something God has inspired, working through human authors to record everything we need for abundant and eternal life, and ensuring that these words have been preserved faithfully through thousands of years so that we could have them at our disposal today.

Reasons To Believe The Bible

That’s a big thing to claim. And to critics of religion in general or Christianity in particular, it’s a silly thing to claim. The Old Testament is especially suspect – one new atheist figure described it as the “outdated, irrelevant, and immoral work of bronze age goat-herders.”

The first part of that claim, that the writings contained in the Bible are outdated and irrelevant, is, I think, one of the sillier anti-Christian or anti-Jewish arguments out there.

To western cultures like ours, the Bible is the “book of books.” It has, directly or indirectly, influenced basically all of our art and literature – from our common expressions, wider themes, and important symbols. And that’s before you get to our laws, family structures, understanding of virtue, and many other things. If you somehow removed the Bible’s influence on our culture everything would suddenly be so different that you and I would probably find it unrecognizable.

Irrelevant is a non-starter – the Bible has utterly shaped the world that you and I live in.

Outdated doesn’t work either. Sure, the Bible describes some things that are unique to its historical setting. Its instructions on how to properly conduct animal sacrifices, for example, are not something I need to operate in the modern world.

But that’s not the stuff that keeps Chinese Bible factories working 24/7 to meet demand. What the Bible has to say about the beauty and brokenness of human life, the way of salvation and restoration, how to live wisely, or the depth of what it has to say about love and grace are not outdated. We have yet to rise to the level of what the Bible calls us to.

And as for the bronze-age goat-herders bit, that might be a clever line but to me it’s actually another reason to believe in what Christians say about the Bible. How did these ancient authors of the Old Testament, or the uneducated blue-collar disciples of Jesus, produce something that humanity has found valuable enough to re-print six or seven billion times?

I’ve got a picture for you, and it’s quite cool. This is a visualization of all the cross-references in the Bible. It shows all the connections from one passage to another, where one passage quotes another, or repeats a theme or makes use of the same image, or in some other way refers back to itself. The colours represent how far apart the references are, and the bars on the bottom show the length of each book of the Bible.

There are almost 64,000 of these cross-references, and as you can see, they cover everything, stretching from beginning to end or beginning to middle or middle to end – they are everywhere. The Bible is an incredible tapestry, intricately woven together. Despite being written by around 40 human authors in three languages across about 1500 years it forms a cohesive whole that constantly builds on itself.

It’s enough to make anybody wonder how bronze-age goat-herders and 1st century fishermen could have possibly created something like this. I would say that, on their own, they couldn’t have. I think they had help!

But in 2024 I think the most important objection to the Bible isn’t that it is outdated or irrelevant or the creation of primitive people, it’s that it is immoral, or regressive.

Probably the most infamous quote from Richard Dawkins’ best-selling book The God Delusion is his description of the God of the Old Testament: “jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal… megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, malevolent, bully.” That’s a bit dramatic, but it’s not uncommon for people to compare Jesus to the God of the Old Testament and wonder how they could be related.

I want to single this out for a deeper look. I already spoke about the Bible and slavery two weeks back, so I’ll focus in on some of the violence in the Old Testament along with a couple of general thoughts for those who struggle with aspects of what the Bible describes or teaches.

One of the big accusations against the God of the Old Testament is that an ethnic cleansing or genocide was perpetrated against the various peoples of the land of Canaan when God brought the Israelites into that region and made it their “Promised Land.” This is a poignant topic, because conflict and violence used to try to control that same land has never really stopped, and it’s happening right now in and around Gaza with terrible consequences for those caught in the midst of it.

Let’s take, for an example, chapters 7 and 8 from the book of Joshua. The warriors of the Israelite tribes destroyed the city of Jericho after God caused its walls to collapse. Their next target was a place called Ai. Israel went to attack but suffered an embarrassing defeat with dozens of casualties. Joshua figured out why they had lost – an Israelite had horded some silver and gold from Jericho, which was supposed to have all been collected for the temple treasury. That man and his family, were executed – which is a whole other thing to reckon with – and then Joshua’s army then attacked Ai again with a much better strategy.

Joshua 8:24 reads: “When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day – all the people of Ai.”

OK, not great, right? What do we do with something like that?

Well, first we adopt a posture of humility and recognize that there is a lot we don’t know about ancient history and literature and there may be more to all of this than we see at first glance.

For example, accounts of warfare in that time and place were often highly exaggerated – battles were made to sound much bigger and grander than they may have actually been. In the same way that sports fans use trash talk to say that their team “completely annihilated” the other team, cultures of the ancient Near East used hyperbole in their battle reports – that was normal.

We don’t know if there were actually lots of civilians in some of the walled citadels Israel conquered, or exactly what happened to them. We see claims of certain peoples or tribes being wiped out, but then, strangely, they’re mentioned again a few chapters later, apparently still very much existing.

David Lamb, author of a book called God Behaving Badly notes that examples of Old Testament violence and warfare can be challenging, but that there are four things worth remembering about the conquest narratives in books like Joshua:

1) First, the Israelites were not trying to brutally expand their borders and create an empire like the Egyptians, Assyrians, or Babylonians. They were trying to re-establish a home in the land of their ancestors.

2) Second, before the Israelites even decided to try entering the land they were attacked by an alliance of Canaanites who sought to destroy them while they were vulnerable, having just escaped from Egypt. One aspect of the conquest of Canaan was God’s punishment for this act.

3) Third, the main image used in these narratives is not slaughter, but “driving out.” It’s the same wording as what God did in Egypt, “driving out” his own people from Pharoah’s harsh control. There is evidence than many Canaanites left before the conquest began, and others fled ahead of the Israelite advance.

4) Fourth, the Canaanite conquest was not unusual, because in the ancient Near East, military victors typically either killed or enslaved all the vanquished people. In the case of the what the Bible records, the killing was probably limited and localized.

Lamb concludes “The Canaanite conquest was violent but not unusual, harsh, cruel, or unjustified.”

Wrestling with this requires a return to something I mentioned two weeks ago with respect to slavery in the Old Testament, something called “progressive revelation”. Christians believe that God accommodates the realities of people as they are in their particular place and time, even while God is at work gradually bringing about a new and better reality across the arc of history. God rescued a people from slavery, sought to secure them in particular land, and set them apart to know and worship Him in order to be an example for the world.

It’s also worth pointing out that warfare is often shown negatively in the Bible – something that often cost Israel dearly and which ought to be avoided unless God actively chose to raise His people up to overcome an enemy. Over and over again Israel’s prophets urged the people and leaders not to put their hope or security in alliances or numbers or weapons but to trust in God and be faithful to Him in their worship and by treating each other with justice.

If you just want to paint a picture of a nasty God, you can certainly pick bits and pieces from the Old Testament to do that. But someone who is willing to take the text seriously would do well to consider how the people recording these stories understood this God.

One of most repeated views of God is what is first spoken in Exodus 34: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands [of generations], and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

What is the emphasis here when it comes to God’s character? His justice is in there, yes, punishing the guilty. But the focus is on his loyal love, grace, and compassion. If you do the rough math on forgiveness versus punishment without getting too hung up on the details – thousands of generations of forgiveness versus three or four generations of punishment – then God is many hundreds, if not thousands of times more inclined toward forgiveness.

One last thing about the Old Testament specifically: it was Jesus’ Bible. Jesus lived and breathed these scriptures – he quotes and references them constantly. And so when Jesus calls humanity to new heights of mercy – to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, to serve and sacrifice for those who reject and despise you – He drew on the Old Testament’s teaching and understanding of God’s character. Clearly the Old Testament can be understood and used in a way that is far from irrelevant, outdated, or immoral.

Wrestling With The Bible

If you are someone who struggles with certain things you find in the Bible, or if you know people who do, here are a handful of other things to think about.

One thing that some of the Bible’s biggest critics don’t seem very aware of, or don’t want to acknowledge, is the standard they are using to accuse the Bible of being immoral. Why do they think it is evil when they think they’ve found examples of God seemingly commanding violence or appearing racist or sexist in some way? It’s usually based on moral standards that they have inherited from two thousand years of evolving Christian thinking, which is a problem for that argument.

Let’s also keep in mind that we think the way we think because of our time and culture. Some things that seem wonderful or troubling to us may be seen in the opposite way by someone from a different cultural background. And in a hundred years many of the things we think today may be seen as backwards or immoral. We haven’t reached the pinnacle of truth or morality from which we can correctly judge everything.

Suppose for a moment that the almighty God who created universe did write a book and handed you a copy to read. What would make you, or anybody, think that they ought to understand and agree with everything in it? If somebody’s reaction to the Bible is that anything confusing or troubling means the Bible must not be true, that really says something about how all-knowing and infallible they must think that they are!

But here’s a sort of bottom line thought about all of this: What the Bible says about this or that specific issue or tells us about what happened during the Exodus or conquest of Canaan isn’t unimportant. It matters. But it’s not the main point. What is the main message of the Bible?

That you are a good creation of God in a world that He loves.

That you, like everyone else, are a sinful person in a fallen world that is suffering for having rejected God.

That God has been working to bring restoration to this world, most especially through Jesus who entered this world in the flesh to seek and save the lost and gave His life to overcome the power of sin and death.

That, through faith in Jesus, you can receive God’s grace and a new life, one that is lived with God instead of against God, a life of healing and hope and the opportunity to grow more healthy and fully human.

And that there is wonderful hope for life beyond this life, because when you belong to Jesus it is for eternity.

This is the part of the Bible we should be most focused on! If this is false, what does it matter what other parts of the Bible are true or false or helpful or problematic? And if this is true, then we can do our best to figure out the rest, God helping us, trusting in the character of our Savior as we wrestle with certain things.

I like a good conversation about the fine details of the Bible more than almost anyone! But if I were talking to someone who was getting really tripped up on what the Bible says about specific cultural issues or objections from episodes in the Old Testament what I would hope to ultimately do is bring them around to the larger question of “what is the Bible inviting us into?”

Christians of different times and cultures and denominations have come to many different conclusions about all kinds of secondary and third-order issues.

And through these centuries the Church has grown and spread to nearly every nook and cranny of this Earth, not because of how Christians have tried to answers these specific questions, but because they have understood and proclaimed that the Bible is inviting us into a life unlike any other.

It is an invitation to know God through His Son who became one of us.

It is an invitation to escape from both pride and shame and enter into a life lived by grace and gratitude to a God who would lay down His life to save us.

It is an invitation to begin a journey to better understand yourself and grow into more peaceful, joyful, loving, and resilient version of you by making Jesus king over your life.

It is an invitation to rest in the love of a creator who considers you to be of infinite worth regardless of how people in this world see you, or how you look or perform or otherwise measure up.

It is an invitation to live a life that isn’t hindered by fear – not fear of failure, fear or inferiority, or fear of death.

It is an invitation to join in the mission of Jesus – to serve others, proclaim the good news of the Gospel, offer hope to the hopeless, and spread God’s love through good deeds.

And you won’t be alone – you’ll have the help of God’s Holy Spirit and the companionship of others who follow Jesus who God will bring alongside you. I’m obviously biased, but I think that’s a compelling invitation and I’m thankful for the book that offers it to us.

Conclusion

People have a lot of demands on their limited time and are often juggling a dizzying number of priorities. If you’re wondering what single thing would do the most for your spiritual growth, the answer, for a lot of Christians at least, is getting better acquainted with the Bible.

The Christians who engage with the Bible regularly are the ones most likely to say that they are less angry or bitter in relationships and much more successful in resisting temptations like alcoholism or pornography. They don’t feel as spiritually stagnant, and the likelihood that they will share their faith and disciple others skyrockets.

But not among those who only hear the Bible on Sundays or pop one open occasionally – something important seems to happen when people engage with the Bible at least four times a week – when it truly becomes a regular rhythm of life. If we want to build our lives on a rock rather than sand, Jesus said we need to hear His words and actually do what He says.

Safe to say you won’t be very good at doing what Jesus says if you don’t learn, and regularly remind yourself, of what He said. Lots of people claim to respect or value the Bible. Far, far, fewer actually read it. And not all of them act on what it says. I think the Church and the world need more people to join the ranks of those who do all three, and anyone who does will be glad of it when they look back on their life.

I’ll leave us with something Paul said as a mentor to a younger leader, Timothy, about the importance of the scriptures:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Would you pray with me? Lord Jesus, who is the very Word of God, I thank you for the scriptures that reveal how you and the Father and the Holy Spirit have walked with humanity through history and tell us of your character and love for us.

Though we may struggle to understand certain things in the Bible help us to see the invitation to a new life that it contains – life abundant and eternal. Help us to desire this life that is found through Christ, and may we look to the scriptures so that we can know the words of Jesus and do what He commands, firmly and securing establishing our lives whatever comes. Amen.