Who decided which books belong in the Bible? Do we still have the original manuscripts? And if Scripture was written in ancient languages, how can we be confident we’re reading it rightly today? These are questions many Christians quietly wonder about. The good news is that they’ve been taken seriously for a very long time.
Why does the Bible come in two parts? And why does the New Testament have four Gospels rather than one? The answers take us to the heart of how God’s Word fits together.
Does God’s Word have anything to say about ordinary life? Not just the great sweep of history or the deep places of the soul, but the everyday stuff: marriage and parenting, friendship, work and business? The Old Testament’s answer is a resounding yes. And the part of Scripture that says it most directly is its wisdom literature.
Why do the Psalms feel so personal? Open them almost anywhere and you find words that seem to come straight out of your own heart: praise, grief, fear, thanksgiving, longing. Yet these are also God’s Word. How can a book be both deeply human and fully divine? The story of how Israel’s songs became Scripture helps us see how.
When you hear the word “prophet,” who comes to mind? Isaiah? Jeremiah? Perhaps Daniel? The prophetic books take up a big part of the Old Testament. But the story of prophecy in Israel is much bigger than the books that bear the prophets’ names, and the way their words came to be written down tells us a great deal about how God gave us his Word.
Have you ever imagined the Bible arriving all at once, bound and complete, dropped from heaven in a single moment? It didn’t happen that way. Once we see that God’s Spirit worked through the real minds and lives of the people who wrote Scripture, we can also do full justice to the human side of the Bible. And that human side has a fascinating story to tell.
If the Bible is God’s Word, spoken by his Spirit, where does that leave the people who actually wrote it? Were Moses, Isaiah, Luke and Paul simply taking dictation? Did the Spirit switch off their minds and use their hands like a pen?
When we say the Bible is “inspired,” what exactly do we mean? The word gets used for poets, artists and great thinkers too. So is Scripture inspired in the same way as a brilliant novel? Or is something quite different going on?
Is the Bible just a collection of human writings about God, or is it God’s own Word in written form? The best place to begin answering is the Bible itself, which bears clear witness to its own origin. Here are four lines of that testimony.
Where does our knowledge of God’s revelation actually come from? Whether we’re thinking of the general revelation God gives to all people or the special revelation he gave to his people, the answer is the same: it comes to us from the Holy Scriptures.
