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How Do We Know that God Authored the Bible?
CALLER: I have a friend at work that I get talking to about the Word every once in a while. And one time she asked me a question that just threw me off, and I couldn't answer it. I like to use the Word as a reference to what I'm saying. But one time she asked me, "How do you know that the Bible was actually written by God?" You know, "How do you know it's actually God's Word?" And I know that there are verses in the Bible that actually say that the Word will last forever, and so on. Isaiah 40:8 says, "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God shall stand forever." And I could show her these things, where God is saying that the Word is going to last forever, that it is the Word of God. But if she doesn't believe it's the Word of God in the first place, then showing her these verses wouldn't actually prove that to her. And I just wondered if you might have an idea of a way that I could convince her that the Bible is the Word of God?
HC: For example, you could show her Isaiah 53. Now Isaiah 53 was written hundreds of years before Christ came. And no one in the Old Testament had any idea, no human being could have known about the character of the Messiah who was going to come. If they were just ordinary human beings, how could they ever know anything about the Lord Jesus?
But you read Isaiah 53 and see how literally it relates to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and the Lord has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter. And He made His grave with the rich in His death.
Now none of these statements could make any sense, or there's no human being that could have penned those words without being inspired by God, because they identify so closely with Christ. There are many many statements in the Old Testament, and in fact the Old Testament is replete with statements that carry the message of salvation, even though in their historical context it may not be apparent.
Let me give an illustration. Recently I've been working in the Book of Ruth, in the Sunday School class that I teach. And I've found that the Book of Ruth (and actually, I think that the Book of Ruth is just illustrative of the whole Old Testament – As we become better and better acquainted with the Old Testament, I think we would see this pretty much throughout the Old Testament) is a very short book, a little book in the Old Testament, with only eighty-five verses, a beautiful love story of this Moabitish widow, Ruth, who eventually marries Boaz, who is a rich man in Bethlehem. And it's just a lovely love story.
But it has any number of statements in it that are odd, that on the surface don't make any sense. And they only make sense when we understand that they are figures. They're true historical statements, but they're figures of the Gospel, or of the salvation that God is going to provide through the Lord Jesus Christ. Now let me give one illustration. I can give many out of the Book of Ruth. I'm only going to give one.
The Book of Ruth begins with the sad ease that there's a famine in the land of Bethlehem. And this man, Elimelech, an Israelite, with his wife Naomi and his two sons, Mahlon and Chilean, leave Bethlehem and go to the land of Moab, which is a very unwise thing because Moab is a land composed of unbelievers. And lo and behold, Mahlon and Chilean take Moabitish wives. And this is a dreadfully negative, terrible thing for them to do because the Moabites were cursed by God, and they were not to take wives like this. But they did it anyway. They violated God's rules, and they took wives anyway.
Well, that's all very rational history. Finally, Alimelech dies, and then Mahlon and Chilean die, and so now Naomi, the wife of Elimelech, is left with her two Moabitish daughters-in-law. And so the whole thing has become a great tragedy. So far, historically, it just sounds very rational.
Well, then she says in verse 8, "Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, 'Go. Return, each of you, to her mother's house. May the Lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me.'" Now that makes sense, too. It's Naomi's desire to return to Bethlehem, to her own people, and she is encouraging Ruth and Orpah to remain in Moab with their families, because they would be aliens, they would be foreigners in Israel. They had never been to Israel. And so she says to them, "May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me."
And then in the next verse she said something very strange. She says, "The Lord grant that you may find a rest, each of you, in the house of her husband." Now that doesn't make any sense. What person ever told someone who was hoping to be married sometime, "Could it be that you will find a rest in the house of your husband"? You might say, "The Lord grant that you might find a home in the house of your husband," or "that you might find happiness in the house of your husband." But to find a rest, that doesn't make sense, until we realize that Naomi is making a statement that embraces the whole Gospel.
You see, when we study this in the light of the rest of the Bible, we find that the word rest has to do with salvation. Canaan was the land of rest. It implies a rest from our labors, of our desire to go into Heaven by our works, to become right with God by our labors, by our own efforts. We rest in the Lord Jesus Christ. And the desire of anyone that is saved is that his friends and loved ones might find this rest.
Now what toes that have to do with the house of your husband? Well, who is our Husband, if we have really found rest? Our Husband is the Lord Jesus Christ. We are the bride. What is the house of our husband? Well, we become members of the temple of God. The house is actually God Himself. We enter into God Himself. There is no condemnation, for example, for those who are in Christ Jesus. So we find rest in Christ, who is our Husband, who is the Groom and we are the bride.
And so in this brief statement, which is one of many in the Book of Ruth, we find the whole outline of salvation. Now any author penning the Book of Ruth, just a human author, would never have been able to put these statements so beautifully into this love story. He just would not have used this kind of language. It wouldn't have made sense. And if we would go on in the Book of Ruth, we would find many other phrases of a similar nature. They don't make sense standing alone.
But when we understand they are outlines of the whole message of salvation, and they are brought into sharp focus when we look at the words in the light of how they're used elsewhere in the Bible, then we see that God has hidden in the Book of Ruth the whole message of Christ's going to the cross.
And then we can see that it had to have a divine Author. No man could have written this.
CALLER: I'm going to have to study those verses you gave me. That's really interesting.