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by David Odegard

I know the Bible is absolutely reliable and inerrant. There are several ways that I could go about explaining how this is true, but I would like to share how I personally came to know this.

I met God before I became acquainted with the Bible. My grandmother would tell me Bible stories and that is how I learned more about God. Even before she read me those stories, however, I knew He was there and I could feel His presence in my life. He was drawing me to Himself. I was five years old when I asked Jesus to make a home in my heart and guide me the rest of my life.

By the time I first began to read the Bible, its authority was unquestioned in my life, because it carried the authority of God. That anyone would accept God’s authority and not accept the Bible as completely true and accurate never entered my mind. I still wonder how people can hold that the Bible is full of errors and still claim to believe in an all-powerful God.

When I was a child, my experience with God was the authority that I based my acceptance of the Bible on. Later, however, I realized that what the Bible says is more important and more accurate than my own experience with God and so I had to base my acceptance of God upon what the Bible says. This was a major shift in my understanding, but it was the correct shift, since my own personal experience cannot be the justification for the God of the Bible.

Here are a few reasons why I continued to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture even after I grew up. First, historical validity: archeology continuously confirms Scripture and its claims. From ancient Hittite land sales confirming details of agreements like the one Abraham made when he purchased Machpelah to invasions, kings, dynasties, local customs, or imperial policies, the Bible always gets it right! Contrast the archeological confirmation of the Bible with say the Book of Mormon, and you will immediately see how the Bible shows itself worthy of trust and the Book of Mormon shows itself to be utterly false.

Furthermore, the Bible makes prophetic predictions, and these can be hard to verify, but the Bible predicts with 100% accuracy the events of the future. Just one small example is from the book of Zechariah. He accurately predicted that Jesus would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, that He would enter Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt, etc. Zechariah did this hundreds of years before Christ was even born! How could Zechariah possibly guess the number of coins in the bag that Judas received? Many more examples could be made to fill up entire books. Here are the 40 most helpful fulfilled Messianic prophecies according to Jews for Jesus. Contrast this amazing aspect of the Bible with the fact that modern day psychics can’t even predict an election with any accuracy, even though it is roughly a 50/50 shot.

Another reason belief in the Bible is justified is that it contains eye-witness details of God performing miracles. John the Apostle writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). John was with Jesus and saw Him resurrected; that is how I know that Jesus was actually raised from the dead. There were so many witnesses to the resurrection that could have easily been verified at the time of the writing of the Gospels. If someone doubted what John or Matthew had written, they could have just asked around. If it was untrue, that would be easy to verify.

The Apostles gained nothing from testifying that they saw Jesus rise from the dead, except suffering and death. They lived in the reality that they had met the Messiah and that they would suffer the same fate which He had met, namely suffering for Truth in this life and being rewarded in the life to come. Contrast this with the founders of other religions like Islam and Mormonism. Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young benefitted a great deal from their respective “revelations” (multiple wives being common among all of these men). Although Joseph Smith was killed, he was on his way to a place where he would be revered above all other human authority.

These are just a few justifications that immediately come to mind. But here is another way to think about it. If one accepts that something cannot come from nothing, then either an eternal, pre-existent being must exist or the universe cannot be. The universe is something, so it cannot come from nothing. If there is a pre-existent being who created the universe, then the universe will necessarily show evidence of design - which it absolutely does. Atheists take great pains to show that evidence of design is really just randomness, but they never really convince anyone who doesn’t already disbelieve in God. In the end, atheists like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins reject evidence of design because to admit it is to admit God, which they refuse to believe any evidence exists for. That is, they refuse to see evidence for God because it would be evidence for God, whom they refuse to believe in. Sound confusing? It really isn’t. They insist on NOT believing.

If there is a God who created all of the universe, what kind of God must He be? He would have to have the ability to love, since He placed that ability in us. He would have the ability to reveal Himself too, since we do. If, therefore, God is a self-revealing God who created everything there is, the Bible is something we would necessarily expect to see in existence. God would communicate to us somehow, wouldn’t He? And what kind of Word would that be? It would be inerrant.

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