By Paul Tatham
tatham47@hotmail.com
I was having a discussion with a non-Christian once over what the Bible has to say about a certain topic. As I recall, it had something to do with capital punishment.
After pointing him to several Old Testament and New Testament verses, he turned to me and said, “Well, it seems that you’ve made a pretty good case. But the problem is that I really have doubts about the Bible. In fact, isn’t it just a lot of fanciful myths?"
His reply ratcheted the discussion up a notch to a whole new level.
For many people, verse-pointing carries no clout whatsoever because they don’t believe the verses are authoritative in the first place. In other words, they don’t believe the Bible is divine. When you find yourself in such situations, it’s good to have a ready response.
I suggest you keep the following four points in mind, and although they may not necessarily convince the non-believer, they will at least give him something to mull over.
The Bible is a unique book that must have a divine origin because of
• Its amazing unity
The Bible is an amalgam of 66 separate books written by 40-plus authors, many of whom had never met. They were not even necessarily familiar with each other’s works. They were separated by time, geography, and language.
Yet, despite its apparent disjointedness, everything in the Bible meshes beautifully. It has a central character, Jesus Christ, with a central theme, redemption.
A simple analogy might be two people who decide to co-author a mystery novel. One writes all the even-numbered chapters while the other writes all the odd-numbered chapters.
One lives in Tampa while the other lives in Munich, Germany. Before launching into the project, they don’t even huddle to agree on the basic plot and, once started, they never correspond with each other.
Yet, miraculously, when the finished book is published it all makes perfect sense — the names of the characters, their likes and dislikes, their daily habits, what they did and why they did it,etc.
The odds of such harmony happening by chance are laughably minute.
• Its scientific accuracy
Long before man stumbled onto many scientific truths that we accept without question today, the Bible had beaten them to the punch. Usually by centuries.
The book of Job points out that the earth floats in space, rotating on its axis, and that the moon gives off no light of its own. Isaiah added that the earth is round. Psalms revealed the oceans have currents, while Ecclesiastes at least alludes to the water cycle.
• Its fulfilled prophecies
Daniel accurately predicted four coming world empires. Isaiah named the Persian King Cyrus a full 200 years before Cyrus was even born. That would be like us predicting the exact name of a U.S. President centuries before she took the oath of office.
Isaiah had foretold the Babylonian captivity 100 years earlier, while Ezekiel prophesied the destruction of the city of Tyre 250 years before its final destruction by Alexander the Great.
Hundreds of details concerning the coming Messiah are scattered throughout the Old Testament, and in that one area alone the law of probability rules out all lucky guessing.
• Its archeological veracity
Hundreds of excavations have been undertaken in the Middle East that point to the fact that biblical events actually transpired. A charcoal layer found in the ruins of Old Testament Jericho corroborates the fact that Joshua did indeed burn the city (Joshua 6:24).
King Hezekiah dug a water tunnel to ensure that Jerusalem could survive an impending siege, a tunnel that still exists today, complete with pick marks and even a plaque outlining the details of this awesome engineering feat.
For centuries, skeptics mocked the existence of an oft-cited biblical people known as the Hittites, until traces of their towns began to surface in present-day Turkey. Although not everything in the Bible has been confirmed, there is nothing that has been found that abrogates it.
There is yet to be one turn of the spade that refutes the Bible’s truthfulness.
Believing the Bible does not require blind faith. As the evangelical apologist Josh McDowell put it, “I cannot accept with my heart what my head rejects.”
Thankfully, we don’t have to park our brain at the door when we enter God’s house.
