The Difficult Questions: Can We Trust the Bible?

Yes.

We’ll see you Sunday.

Ok, maybe this is a question that requires a little more than just a one-word answer.

On the heels of last week’s discussion of the Bible, its authorship, and the difference between reading and understanding it, we promised to ask some difficult questions moving forward — questions like this one about the Bible: Can we trust it?

This cam be an uncomfortable question for a Christian to ask, but it is of particular importance in the context of our world in 2022. Never before in history have people had access to so much information. In that environment, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s false; or, perhaps more correctly, who’s more right?

As anyone who has ever created a true-false test for students knows, the easiest way to make this type of test difficult is to make false statements that are close enough to the truth to seem like they could be true. (We did this exercise a couple months ago.) And, obviously, in this context, only one of two possible answers is the correct one.

That, for better or worse, is not how the world works.

In simpler times, I didn’t know about how the Bible came into being; I didn’t know the social, cultural or historical context of the Bible stories I was told; I didn’t know about the fossil record. Like we discussed last week, I just trusted that it said what it said and meant what it meant.

Then, of course, I became an adult. Once that happened, my simple world of black and white was painted over in shades of gray. In this world, where truth is revealed, God is revealed. In this world, what I can know about God is not limited by what I can read in the Bible.

I can say without an ounce of doubt that the Bible is the most scrutinized book in human history. No text has been read, re-read, interpreted and re-interpreted more than the Good Book. What’s left, for us, can be a confusing mess. And sometimes, it’s hard to know what to believe, what we can trust.

The great thing about the Bible, and the rich historical accounts that underly it, is that its truth reveals itself in so many different ways. The promises we find there are true; what is revealed about the character of God through the example of Christ is true. What we can learn about the earliest followers of Christ reveals truths about humanity that speak to us today.

So yes. The answer is yes.

See you Sunday!