Bible Foundations (2): What is the Bible about, and can it be trusted to be accurate?
What is the Bible about?
Think about how you might answer this question, should someone ask it of you. Take a moment. What is the Bible about? If you only had a sentence or two to answer it. It’s not so easy, is it? It’s a big and complex book! Let me give you some suggestions.
Some like to say it is a handbook or textbook on how to live, but that misses the point. It has some truth to it, but it makes it sound like the main idea is about us living a certain way.
Instead, you could say that this is a book about God and his plans to save people. That captures the big idea.
Or, perhaps better, it is about God’s faithfulness to an unfaithful people. God is always kinder to people than we deserve. That is called grace. The Bible is not about us being lovable, but about God loving us despite us being so unlovable! God has spoken in many ways, but ultimately through his son Jesus (Hebrews 1:1-4). So we see God’s faithfulness to an unfaithful people in the Exodus, in the wilderness, in the conquest, and over and over again in the Old Testament. But we see it most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins that we could not, and he rose again to show this had been accepted. This is the gospel, the core message of the Bible.
We see grace everywhere we look in the Bible. Sure, we also see moral instruction, but the core message is grace and salvation through Jesus.
Is the Bible trustworthy in all its details?
In short, the answer is yes, as will become clearer as we work through some of the objections in a moment.
How do we know? The key way is looking at how Jesus and the apostles use the Bible. Over and over, when Jesus is asked about one topic or another, he says, “it is written”, and then quotes from the Scriptures. God has spoken, in other words, and his word stands. That makes logical sense to us as well. If the Scriptures are the word of God, and God doesn’t change, what he has said in the past still stands. We can rely on his promises and his word about himself and the world.
In fact, we can even rely on the small details in the Bible. Jesus once based a theological point on the tense of a verb; let me show you:
26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
(Mk. 12:26-27 ESV)
Jesus is quoting from Exodus 6, and he notes that God said, “I am”, not “I was”. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had all died a long time prior to Exodus 6. Yet God said he remained their God, present tense. Jesus used this to answer critics of the resurrection. Even a tense matters! God has recorded so carefully what we need to know.
There was a time a couple of hundred years ago when many scholars thought that the book of Acts was fiction, and the history recorded there could not be trusted. But, over time, the details have been confirmed over and over again. Ancient names of Roman Provinces were recorded correctly. Sea routes were the standard ones taken. Governors were called by their correct title and name. We can rely on the details of the Bible. All of them.