The Foundation
"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."
2 Timothy 3:16
There is an old Bible in many houses. It sits on a shelf, or in a drawer, or in a box in the basement, and it has a name written inside the cover in handwriting that belonged to somebody who is no longer living. Most people who own such a Book have never read it through. But almost nobody throws it away. Something in us senses that this particular Book is not quite like the others — that to discard it would be to discard something we have not yet understood. This article is written for anyone who has ever picked up that Book and wondered, honestly: how could anybody know whether this is really the Word of God?
It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer. It will not do to say "you must simply have faith," as though faith were a decision to believe something without reason. That is not what the Bible means by faith at all. Nor will it do to say "the Church says so," because then the question only moves back a step: how does the Church know? What follows is the case as the Scriptures themselves present it — not proof of the sort that compels a man against his will, for God does not deal with men that way, but evidence of the sort that an honest mind can weigh.
Before we ask whether the claim is true, we must be clear about what the claim actually is. And the Bible's claim about itself is not modest. It does not present itself as a collection of religious reflections, nor as the accumulated wisdom of a devout people, nor as men's best thinking about God. It presents itself as God's own speech.
"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
Weigh the word all. Not some of it. Not the parts we find agreeable. Not the moral teaching while the history is left uncertain. All of it — given by inspiration of God. The word translated inspiration means, quite literally, God-breathed. The Scripture is presented as something that came out of the mouth of God the way breath comes out of a man's mouth.
Now this is important, because it means there is no middle position available. A book which makes this claim is either telling the truth or it is not. It cannot be a merely good book, a helpful book, a book of noble sentiment. A merely human book that claimed to be God-breathed would not be noble; it would be the most audacious forgery in the history of the world. The Bible has removed the comfortable middle ground from under our feet on purpose. It forces a verdict.
And it is worth noticing how completely at ease the Book is with its own claim. It never argues nervously for its authority. It never appeals to a council, a scholar, or a majority. It simply speaks — thus saith the LORD — and leaves men to answer. That confidence is itself worth pondering. Forgers protest their honesty; kings do not.
But if the words came from God, what of the men who held the pen? For the Bible does not hide them. We know their names, their trades, their failures. Moses was a shepherd who had once been a prince and once a murderer. David was a king who fell into terrible sin. Amos kept livestock. Luke was a physician. Peter was a fisherman who denied his Lord with oaths. These were not faceless scribes; they were men with histories.
"For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:16)
The Bible explains the relationship plainly:
"Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." (2 Peter 1:20-21)
Notice both halves. Negatively: the prophecy came not by the will of man. It did not begin in a man's mind, arise from his reflections, or serve his purposes. Positively: holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. They spoke — with their own vocabulary, their own style, their own tears — but they were moved. The word carries the sense of a ship carried along by the wind. The sailors are truly aboard; the sails are truly theirs; but it is the wind that determines the course.
This is why the books of the Bible do not read alike. Isaiah writes like a court poet, Amos like a herdsman, Luke like a careful historian, John like a man still astonished. God did not flatten His servants into machines; He used their whole personalities. And yet He so governed their writing that what came out was His word and not merely theirs. It is worth adding that this is precisely what we should expect if the account were true. A forger imitating divine dictation would have produced a uniform book — one voice, one style, one texture. Only a real God working through real men would produce what we actually have.
Because the word is often misused, let us be exact.
"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." (Matthew 24:35)
Inspiration does not mean the writers were merely gifted, the way we call a poem or a symphony inspired. That is a compliment paid to human genius. The Bible's claim is of a different order altogether.
"But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." (1 Peter 1:25)
Inspiration does not mean that the Bible contains the Word of God somewhere inside it, like gold in ore, so that a scholar must sift the divine from the human. That idea sounds humble but is in fact the opposite: it makes the scholar the judge and the Scripture the defendant. It leaves every reader dependent on an expert to tell him which parts God said. The Bible's own claim is not that it contains the Word of God, but that it is the Word of God.
Nor does inspiration mean that everything recorded in Scripture is approved by God. The Bible faithfully records the lies of Satan, the folly of Job's friends, the boasting of wicked kings. The record of these things is inspired and accurate; the things themselves are not endorsed. This is an ordinary distinction that careful readers make in any document, and it removes a great many supposed difficulties.
What inspiration does mean is this: that the Scriptures, as God gave them, are exactly what He intended to say, without error, and carry His own authority.
Now consider what sort of book this is. We speak of the Bible as one book, and rightly, but it is a library of sixty-six documents. They were written over roughly fifteen hundred years, on three continents, in three languages, by some forty men of wildly different circumstance — kings and prisoners, statesmen and fishermen, a tax collector, a physician, a shepherd. Most of them never met. Many were separated by centuries.
"The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple." (Psalm 19:7)
Now imagine trying to reproduce that. Take forty writers from fifteen centuries and three continents, with no possibility of collaboration, and have them each contribute to a single volume on the most contested subjects there are — the nature of God, the origin of evil, the meaning of suffering, the way of salvation, the end of history. What would result? We know exactly what would result, because men have tried. It would be a quarrel bound in leather.
Yet the Bible tells one story from beginning to end. It opens with a paradise lost and closes with a paradise restored. It opens with a tree of life man may not touch and closes with a tree of life whose leaves heal the nations. It opens with a curse pronounced and closes with the announcement that there shall be no more curse. From the third chapter of Genesis, where a Deliverer is first promised, to the last chapter of the Revelation, where He says Surely I come quickly, there is one unbroken line, and it moves in one direction.
More striking still, the story develops without contradicting itself. Later writers do not correct earlier ones; they build on them. The sacrifice in Genesis, the lamb at the Passover, the whole apparatus of the tabernacle, the prophecies of a suffering Servant — all of them converge on one Person, and none of the men who wrote those parts lived to see how the pieces fit. A man may write the second chapter of a book knowing the first. He cannot write the second chapter of a book whose first chapter will not be written for four hundred years. That kind of coherence has one plain explanation: a single Author behind many pens.
Here the Bible offers a test that no other book dares to offer. It stakes its credibility on prophecy — on telling, in advance and in detail, what has not yet occurred. This is a dangerous thing for a book to do. Prophecy is falsifiable. A single specific prediction that failed would discredit the whole.
"Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure." (Isaiah 46:9-10)
"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14)
"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14)
Yet the Scriptures are full of them, and they are not vague. The prophet Micah named the village where the Messiah would be born — Bethlehem, a place so small it was barely worth naming — some seven hundred years before the event, and he added that the One born there had goings forth from everlasting. The prophet Isaiah described, in his fifty-third chapter, a Servant despised and rejected, wounded for the transgressions of others, silent before His accusers, numbered with transgressors, buried with the rich — written centuries before crucifixion was a known form of execution among the people to whom he wrote. The twenty-second Psalm describes a death by piercing of hands and feet, mockery from onlookers, and soldiers casting lots for clothing — written by David, who died in his bed, at a time when Israel executed by stoning.
Nor is prophecy confined to the Messiah. The Scriptures named Cyrus, the Persian king who would send the Jews home, long before he was born. They foretold the fall of Babylon and of Tyre in terms so specific that the ruins still answer to the description. They traced the rise and succession of world empires in a sequence that history afterwards walked through.
Now, there are only three ways to account for this. Either the prophecies were written after the events — but the manuscript evidence, including copies of Isaiah predating Christ by generations, forbids it. Or the fulfilments were arranged by the men involved — but no man arranges the village of his own birth, the manner of an execution not yet invented, or the disposal of his clothing by strangers. Or God, who alone knows the end from the beginning, said what would come to pass, and it came to pass.
This is precisely the test God Himself proposed. Through Isaiah He challenged the idols of the nations to declare things to come, and rested His own case on His ability to do it. He has never withdrawn the challenge, and no rival book has ever taken it up.
Consider next what this Book has survived. No other volume has been so consistently and so violently opposed. Roman emperors ordered every copy burned. Successive authorities forbade its translation and executed those who attempted it — men were strangled and burned for the crime of putting these words into the common tongue. Enlightenment philosophers announced its imminent irrelevance. Modern states outlawed it, confiscated it, and imprisoned those who smuggled it.
"The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever." (Isaiah 40:8)
"There failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass." (Joshua 21:45)
And the Book is still here. It is not merely surviving; it is the most published, most translated, most distributed volume in the history of the world, and it is not close. The men who confidently pronounced its funeral are themselves footnotes, and often the very houses they built have ended up printing it.
This is not an accident of history. It is the fulfilment of a promise:
"For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven." (Psalm 119:89)
Settled in heaven — that is, fixed, established, beyond the reach of earthly hands. Empires legislate against it and pass away. Scholars announce its death and are buried. The Word stands. The Lord Jesus Christ said that heaven and earth themselves would pass away before His words would pass away, and twenty centuries have not dented the claim.
A God who troubles Himself to give His Word to men is not likely to let it be lost by them. Preservation is simply inspiration continued.
For the Christian, there is a further consideration which outweighs all the rest.
"But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." (Matthew 4:4)
"If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken." (John 10:35)
"And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me." (Luke 24:44)
That is His own settled estimate of the Book, stated inside an argument, as something even His opponents would have to grant. The scripture cannot be broken.
"And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27)
The Lord Jesus Christ treated the Scriptures as the Word of God, without qualification, in every circumstance of His life. Tempted in the wilderness, He answered not with argument but with it is written, three times. Disputing with those who knew the text best, He rested His case on the tense of a single verb, and declared that the Scripture cannot be broken. He spoke of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah as real persons in real history, not as instructive legends. And when He prayed to His Father on the last night before the cross, He said:
"Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." (John 17:17)
Not thy word is true, though it is. Thy word is truth — the standard itself, the thing by which other claims are measured.
The force of this is worth feeling. If the Lord Jesus Christ is who He said He is, then His verdict on the Scriptures settles the question entirely; there is no higher court. If He is not, then Christianity has collapsed for reasons far larger than the Bible. There is no version of the Christian faith in which one may hold Christ in high esteem while holding His Bible in low esteem. He did not leave that option open. He staked His own authority on the Book.
And He did something more. After His resurrection, walking with two disconsolate men to a village called Emmaus, He began at Moses and all the prophets and expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. He treated the whole Old Testament as a portrait of Himself — and told them their slowness to believe what the prophets had spoken was the root of their sorrow.
All the foregoing is evidence a man may weigh at a distance. But there is a further witness, and it is the one that has persuaded more people than all the arguments together: this Book does something to those who read it.
"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)
Quick is the older English for living. And that is the strange experience nearly every serious reader reports: the sense, somewhere in the reading, that the Book has turned around. You began by examining it and find that it is examining you. It names things about you that you had not told anyone. It gets past the defences — past the reputation, past the explanations we have long since made to ourselves — and puts its finger on the actual thoughts and intents of the heart.
No other book behaves this way, and the effects are visible in the world. Men bound by drink and appetite for decades have been set free by it. Bitter men have forgiven. Cruel men have become gentle. Cultures that received it produced hospitals, orphanages, literacy, and the abolition of slavery — often against their own economic interest, and driven by people who could give no other account of themselves except that they had read this Book and could not go on as before. Whole nations have been altered by it, and no army was required.
This proves nothing to a man determined not to be persuaded, and it is not offered as a substitute for the evidence already given. But it is a fact about the world, and honest people should account for it.
Which brings us to the only reasonable next step. The Bible does not ask to be accepted on someone else's word. It invites examination.
"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11)
When the apostle Paul preached in a town called Berea, the people there did not simply take his word for it, nor did they dismiss him. They received the message with readiness of mind and then searched the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. And Scripture praises them for it — calling them more noble than their neighbours precisely because they checked.
"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11)
So check. Do not begin with the arguments about the Book; begin with the Book. Read the Gospel of John from beginning to end — it will take a couple of hours — and ask, honestly, what sort of Person is being described here, and whether any man could have invented Him. Read the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, then read the account of the crucifixion, and ask yourself how the first came to be written seven hundred years before the second. Read the Psalms when you are in trouble and see whether they know something about you.
And read with an honest posture. There is a kind of reading that is really a search for exits — that scans for a difficulty in order to be excused from the whole. There is another kind that says: if this is true, I want to know it, whatever it costs me. The second kind of reader finds. The first kind has usually decided the verdict before opening the book, and no evidence in the world will move him.
One last thing must be said, or all the rest is beside the point.
"For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope." (Romans 15:4)
"Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart." (Jeremiah 15:16)
The Bible was not given to settle arguments, to satisfy curiosity about the ancient world, or to furnish material for study. The Lord Jesus Christ once rebuked men who searched the Scriptures diligently, believing that in them they had eternal life — and who would not come to Him, of whom those very Scriptures testified. It is possible to know the Book and miss the Person. That is the saddest form of Bible study there is.
The Book exists to bring you to a Saviour. And it does so by telling you the truth about yourself first:
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)
"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)
It shuts the door on every attempt to save ourselves, so that we will look where salvation actually is:
"Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us." (Titus 3:5)
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)
And it tells us what God did about our condition, at His own cost:
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)
And then it tells us, in the plainest words, what to do:
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)
That is what the Book is for. Every prophecy fulfilled, every empire that failed to burn it, every line of its unlikely unity, exists to bring a sinner to the Son of God and leave him there.
Perhaps you have carried a quiet suspicion for years that this Book might be true, and have never done anything about it. Perhaps you were given reasons long ago for setting it aside, and have never examined whether the reasons were good ones. Perhaps you have simply never read it.
The evidence is there for any honest mind: a Book that claims to be God's own speech and behaves like it; forty writers across fifteen centuries telling one story; prophecies written before the events and fulfilled in detail; a volume that has outlasted every power that tried to destroy it; the settled verdict of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; and a living power upon the human heart that no other writing has ever matched.
But evidence was never meant to be the end of it. Take the Book down from the shelf, and open it, and read it as though God might actually be speaking — because He is.
"For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven."Psalm 119:89
Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Your throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Your presence.
We thank You for Your beloved Son, and for Him who is the Word made flesh, and who honoured the Scriptures in every temptation. We praise You for Your preserved Word, which declares "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Timothy 3:16), and which cannot be broken.
We confess before You that we have held a Book we call inspired and left it unopened for days together. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
We beseech You for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Your Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Your Son before this day is done.
Strengthen Your people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to give every reader an unshakeable confidence in the Book You have preserved, for Your glory and not for ours.
We pray all of this to You, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?
You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.
If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:
Dear Holy and Almighty God, I come to You just as I am. I confess that I am a sinner. I have broken Your law, I have gone my own way, and I deserve the judgment and the everlasting fire that my sin has earned. I cannot save myself, and I bring You nothing.
I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is Your Son; that He loved me and died on the cross in my place, shedding His precious blood for my sins; that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day.
Here and now I turn from my sin, and I trust Him alone — not my works, not my religion, not my goodness — to save me. Lord Jesus, come into my heart, forgive my sin, and be my Saviour from this moment and for ever.
In the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.
1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).
2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).
3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.
4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.
5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).