Bible
Study
close
Article

Objection: Is God Really the Author of the Bible?

Many people have called the Bible a “fairy tale” — a book of illogical stories full of contradictions and false statements written by people like us, so it would be utter nonsense to call it God’s Word. Perhaps you think that way, too.

If so, you’re right on one point: people did write the text of the Bible. But what makes it different from any other book in history is the fact that God “dictated” the text to them: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16). So God himself communicates to us His claim to be the author of this book. “Okay,” you might say, “if God claims that, I want to see the evidence for it!” Well, you can be sure that he gives undeniable evidence for this claim!

In the next section, we will examine seven pieces of evidence that show the Bible’s creation involved more than human intelligence. I hope you will agree that the Bible is God’s Word.

Arguments for the fact that God is the author of the Bible 

  1. Fulfilled prophecies

There are many horoscopes, fortune-tellers, and self-proclaimed prophets, but it can be easily proved that they are all wrong. Only God can accurately predict what will happen in the future: “There is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and He has made known […] what will be in the latter days” (Daniel 2:28). Yes, God proves by the prophetic statements in the Bible that it is His Word.

Werner Gitt is a retired engineering professor and a former Head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Braunschweig, Germany. He claims that the Bible contains 6,408 verses that include prophetic statements. Among these, for example, are predictions about the manner in which the city of Tyre would be conquered by Alexander the Great (332 BC), the repatriation of the Jews of the Babylonian captivity to Israel by the Medo-Persian king Cyrus (after the specifically prophesied period of 70 years; Jer 25:11, 12; Dan 9:2), and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. These predictions were made many centuries before they happened. The astonishing thing is that 3,268 of the prophecies in the Bible have already come to pass — the fulfillment of the others is still in the future.

I’ve heard many people say, “That surely happened by chance.” But how could so many have been by chance? Professor Werner Gitt calculated how small the probability of this was: 1÷(1.7x10984). That means there are 983 zeros after the decimal point, and only then the 17! Winning the lottery is far more likely!

This probability is equal to throwing 1,264 ordinary dice at the same time so that all of them show a six. Even winning the lottery with a probability of 1:140 million is many times more likely. The belief that the prophecies were fulfilled by chance is much less believable than that God said they would happen. Would you rather believe in unrealistic chance than in the God of the Bible, who knows everything? He is the only One who can make accurate statements about the future. And if these 3,268 prophecies have already become true, can we be sure the rest of the Bible is just as true? 

Let’s look at three prophecies where the Bible predicted something that came to pass a long time later on:

  • Around 1,600 BC, Moses gave the people of Israel a message from God, in which he described what would happen to them if they were unfaithful to him: “I [God] will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you” (Leviticus 26:32, 33). Has this prediction been fulfilled? Very much so. Various military conflicts (the First Jewish-Roman War AD 66–73, the Kitos War AD 115–117, the Bar Kokhba revolt AD 132–135, the Muslim invasion between AD 636 and 640) led to terrible destruction, including the depopulation of Israel. Because of this, the fertile parts of the land, which were also thickly wooded, became barren, and the desert proliferated. The Romans enslaved the Jews and dispersed many of them into other parts of their Empire. It is still the case today that many Jews are scattered around the world. They have been persecuted down the centuries, and during the Nazi era, antisemitism reached a terrible peak. Every aspect of Moses” prediction has been fulfilled.
  • Around 539 BC, Daniel prophesied (see Daniel 9:25) that the capital Jerusalem, which at that time was in ruins following its conquest by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, would be rebuilt. It was not until 445 BC, 94 years later, that the Persian king Artaxerxes I, surnamed Longimanus, gave the command that the city should be rebuilt.
  • Also, around 539 BC, Daniel prophesied (Daniel 9:26) that both temple and city would be destroyed again. This is exactly what the Romans did in the year AD 70, more than 600 years later.

Some would say that people fulfilled these prophecies deliberately. However, is it plausible to think the Jews would voluntarily stage the kind of self-destructive events that happened in AD 70? Or did the Romans, and later the Muslims, have any interest in fulfilling biblical prophecies? Surely not! It is much more likely that God prophesied what would happen and that this was fulfilled according to His Word.

It is also very interesting to examine the many prophecies made about Jesus Christ a long time before his birth. I list below some examples of their fulfillment, which are easy to verify:

  • Centuries before, Isaiah prophesied that Jesus would be born of a virgin: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son” (Isaiah 7:14). Matthew 1:18–19 confirms this.
  • Similarly, the prophet Micah did something humanly impossible when he predicted where Jesus would be born centuries before it happened — in a little town called Bethlehem (the prediction is in Micah 5:1, the fulfillment in Matthew 2:1).
  • Long before, Zechariah added another important detail in advance. He predicted the price for which Jesus would be betrayed by his disciple Judas: 30 pieces of silver (the prediction is in Zechariah 11:12, the fulfillment in Matthew 26:15). The priests who paid it surely had no interest in fulfilling this prophecy on purpose.
  • In addition, David prophesied the form of execution Jesus would suffer hundreds of years before it was invented: crucifixion. Psalm 22:16 says: “They pierced My hands and My feet”). The long gap between prediction and fulfillment (about 1,000 years) and the fact that crucifixion was unknown to the people of Israel when David composed the Psalm show the only possible source of this prophecy is God Himself.

Surely, it is more credible to believe that God, who knows everything before it happens, is the source of these prophecies than to think they happened by accident. We have only reflected on seven out of 3,268 prophecies, but aren’t these enough to prove that there must be much more than mere human wisdom behind the Bible?

2. The scientific accuracy of the Bible

Many people say they would rather believe what science says than the Bible. They think the latter contains so many things that contradict modern science that it cannot be taken seriously. But is this true?

Here are a few examples that show the Bible’s statements about nature and the universe do not contradict science at all. But in saying this, we must keep in mind that those men God used to write the Bible did so long before the development of modern science, so they employed different terms from the ones we would use today.

  • “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered” (Jeremiah 33:22). What do you mean, cannot be numbered? Jeremiah wrote those words in 600 BC, long before there were telescopes when people could see 6,000 or so stars with the naked eye. Surely, it’s possible to count 6,000, is it not? And yet he makes this statement! The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates the number of stars to be between 1022 and 1024, which means between 10 trillion and a quadrillion. That’s equivalent to a 1 with 22 or 24 zeros behind it — an unimaginably huge number! Obviously, Jeremiah did not know at the time he wrote that the number was so great as to be innumerable – God must have revealed it to him.
  • “By what way is light diffused?” (Job 38:24). Back in Job’s day — probably around 4,000 years ago — people thought light was a state and did not travel. It was not until the 17th century that Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens proved that light travels in waves. But God had already announced it thousands of years earlier when no one could have possibly known it was so.
  • “Your eyes saw my substance [or bundle, unformed lump], being yet unformed. And in Your book, they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them” (Psalm 139:16). Did David have a medical scanner in 1,100 BC to observe what happened after the conception of new life? No, but he knew more than people who lived less than 300 years ago. Even though the existence of the male sperm cell was proved in 1677, many people imagined this was a “mini-man” who would just have to grow! Today, we know that after the union of male sperm with a female egg cell, a bundle of cells is formed at first, and then it develops into a human form only later. How could David know this back then? The answer can only be that God gave him the words to express it!

3. The Fascinating Unity of the Bible

Imagine a book people began writing around AD 400 and just finished today. During that time, the most diverse range of writers contributed to it. Some came from the Roman Empire; others lived in the Middle Ages, some during the Industrial Revolution, and the rest right up until the 21st century. What a mishmash of a book that would be!

But this is the same length of time frame during which the Bible was written: 1,600 years. Around 40 men from three different continents who did not know each other contributed to it. They included an adopted son of an Egyptian pharaoh, a prime minister, a cupbearer, a physician, a tent maker, a general, kings, fishermen, tax collectors, prisoners, shepherds, craftsmen, prophets, scholars, and even someone who was a former enemy of Christianity. It is impossible for those people who never had the opportunity to coordinate their contributions to write so coherently over such a long period. Right? Yet, from its first page (the creation of the world) to the last one (a new heaven and a new earth), each statement agrees with the next. It all fits together harmoniously and finally presents us with this wonderful message: God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to bring salvation to lost men and women.

4. The shocking truth about human beings

Who would dare to write a book in which they describe themselves and every other person as profoundly corrupt? The Bible does exactly this. God shows in its pages that there is no good in any of us (see Romans 7:18, 19) and that we rather love evil. It pronounces God’s condemning verdict: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). It tells us that when Jesus the Savior came here, He was hated by people and rejected. It describes how He was spat upon, beaten, insulted, and cruelly crucified at the close of His life. Is this not a clue to the fact that the Bible is God’s work? How many human authors would paint such a negative picture? We are too proud for that!

5. The evidence of the Bible

Who doubts the existence of Julius Caesar or that he wrote about the Gallic Wars? But when it comes to the Bible, millions doubt the existence of its author and the fact that He wrote it. But why? There are nine copies of what Caesar wrote, dated 900 years after the original. The Bible has thousands of copies, some made only 200–300 years after the original manuscripts. The Bible eclipses every world-famous book from antiquity. There is no historical justification for doubting that it’s God’s Word.

6. Archaeology

Whether it was about Belshazzar, the last king of the Babylonian empire, or the Hittites who lived in modern-day Turkey more than 1,000 years before Christ, archaeologists used to take great pleasure in refuting the credibility of the Bible because they found no evidence for its record of these people. Gradually, however, their excavations confirmed that the Bible is true. The archaeologist Dr Nelson Glueck says: “No archaeological discovery has ever disproved a biblical statement.” It’s also worth mentioning that the archaeologist John Garstang, who excavated the city of Jericho in 1930–1936, found that the walls there had indeed fallen outward (Joshua 6:20) — illogical in the case of a city under siege. But God’s Word spoke the truth about this, too!

7. Life-changing power

God says that His Word is like “a hammer that breaks the rocks in pieces” (Jeremiah 23:29). Surely, the way it’s changed the lives of millions of people throughout history proves the power He has given it. A medicine is licensed for use when it’s proven to be effective. The Bible demonstrates its veracity by changing people for the better. Every conversion and life-changing effect it has on a person proves that it is God’s Word! I have met people who used to be drug addicts and occultists, who led a miserable life of sexual immorality and abuse, completely changed by Jesus Christ.

The American preacher Dr. Harry Ironside was challenged by an opponent of Christianity to a debate at the Academy of Science Hall, San Francisco, on the subject: “Agnosticism (the view that no-one can know whether God exists or not] versus Christianity.” Ironside accepted but on one condition: his opponent was to promise to bring with him two people whose lives had previously been completely ruined by things like alcohol, crime, sexual immorality, or prostitution and who had now escaped these effects of an anti-Christian life and left their misery behind by becoming agnostics. Ironside said that in his turn, he would promise to bring with him at least 100 people who had led similarly broken lives but who had been delivered through the power of Jesus Christ by believing the gospel. What happened? How did his opponent react to this proposal? The answer is telling: he withdrew his challenge to debate the matter.

What now?

These seven brief examples provide us with valid reasons to believe that the Bible is God’s Word. It makes no sense to think that humans are capable of writing such a wonderful book by themselves. They were only able to do so as guided by the Spirit of God, who led them to write word for word what God wanted to communicate to us.

Therefore, if the Bible's historical, prophetical, and factual statements are true, all the other things it says must be true, too. This, in turn, means that what God says about us being sinners is true, as are His descriptions of hell and His urgent warnings against going there.

The consequence for your life

I hope it makes sense to you that the Bible was given by God and that every single word in the original text remains true. If this is the case, I ask you to believe the Bible is God’s Word! He speaks to you personally through it. He tells you, “You’re a sinner whom I have to judge. But because I love you very much, I sent my Son, Jesus Christ, to this earth as a man so that He could die for sinners like you. That’s what He’s done. Believe this!”

One more thing: only those who read the Bible discover its credibility. To prove the Bible is God’s Word, the truth, choose a reliable Bible translation — one that sticks close to the original text of the Bible. There are a number of reliable translations, such as the English Standard Version, J N Darby’s translation, the King James Version, and the New King James Version. Read it prayerfully and carefully, and you will find that the Bible proves itself to be God’s living Word.

“Your word is truth.”
John 17:17

Get in contact
Subscribe to the biblestudy newsletter
Bible
Study
© 2024 thebiblestudy.site