Bible: Word of God or work of the devil?

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by Joshua Zambrano

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The Bible is God's work, and I believe anyone who reads it with an open mind and a desire for truth will realize that. Why not examine this question logically like any other?

As Acts 17:11 shows, the Bible calls "noble" those who question what it says so long as they do so with an open mind to find truth, rather than merely to satisfy their preconceived notions about its truth or lack thereof.

Acts 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

God is all about Truth, which the Bible agrees with, since it calls Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and the only way to God the Father (John 3:16). The Devil is all about lies. Therefore, a test for who the Bible's author is is simply "does the Bible speak the truth?" Are the things it says verifiable by archeology and other sources? Furthermore, another test for the Bible's authorship is "is the Bible something men would or could write, or only God?"

Too many times debates like this devolve into petty name-calling or "I'm right, you're wrong." So let's examine some facts, shall we? And let's start with the first test, does the Bible speak truth?

The answer? A resounding Yes! I know a lot of you atheists out there hate all the Bible and Christianity stands for. Maybe you've seen so-called Christians to be hypocrites. Some of those may not be Christians, because calling one's self a Christian doesn't make you one, any more than going in a garage makes one a car. And if Satan is real, than he will plant "tares", fake Christians, to discredit the real ones. What better plot to discredit God's people? The Bible alone is the test for what a Christian is, and who Christians are.

Maybe you think you've seen clear contradictions in the Bible, and I'll get to those later. And maybe you scoff at the idea of supernatural events happening in the Bible, to which I would point out that that doesn't make them any less real. The idea that they are God's doing implies that they are beyond the boundaries of what is ordinarily scientifically explainable and quantifiable.

But back to the subject matter, is the Bible true? I think if you do read the Bible, what will jump out at you is that unlike other religious texts, it does not avoid factual references. In fact, the writers jump at the chance to present factual details such as names, locations, and even dates! In the books of Nehemiah and Daniel, for example, dates are given during which Jerusalem was built and when the events of Daniel were happening according to the Persian calendar.

This is very convenient, since the prophecy of when the Messiah, Jesus, should come named the starting date in Daniel 9:25 as the rebuilding of Jerusalem, so that the exact year could be predicted when Jesus should begin His public ministry. Basically the prophecy said it would be 69 weeks of 7 years, or 483 years from the day Jerusalem was rebuilt, which in Nehemiah 2:1 is said to have been "the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king", and which we know from archeology to have been 445 B.C. And since the Jewish religious year was 360 days, a simple calculation of (360/365)*(69*7) reveals the number of years to be 476.38 from the date of 445 B.C., or approximately 29 AD when the Messiah would begin His public ministry. Pretty exact, isn't it?

There is also the proof of fulfilled prophecy. Even atheists do not try to deny that the Old Testament was around before Jesus, because there is an entire nation who has been safeguarding it and has kept exact records that can be examined thoroughly through the methods used to evaluate the trustworthiness of manuscripts (as McDowell goes into in "More Than A Carpenter").

The exactness of Jewish scholars in preserving their manuscripts has long been noted, the numbering systems they have used to make sure the exact amount of words is on a page, the reverence scribes hold God's name in so that after each time writing His name they wash their hands, and the memory training undergone by Jewish disciples so that as the Mishna notes, a good student was like "a plastered cistern that loses not a drop."

The preservation of the Jewish nation, customs, and culture despite all the captivities they've gone through is suggestive of divine preservation. It is this same people whose culture is perhaps better preserved than any other from antiquity which has been protecting the Old Testament manuscripts and prophecies. There are literally HUNDREDS of prophecies that were given hundreds and even thousands of years before Jesus was ever born that there is complete proof for having been written when the Bible says they were.

To see a thorough list of these prophecies in a beautifully designed website, you can go to www.teachinghearts.o rg/dre03propchristno tes.html. The prophecies range from where Jesus would be born and what his lineage would be to how he would die and how he would be betrayed. Some were in His control and others relied on people besides Him. What is more, even the nation of Israel, who denies Jesus was the Messiah because of a select handful of the prophecies that we as Christians recognize will be fulfilled when Jesus returns, recognizes virtually all these prophecies to be of their Messiah.

Time and again, archeology has proved the Bible correct. You can see some of these cases at www.Christiananswers .net/archeology. There is also an easily obtainable paperback, often costing only $5, which has over 15 million copies in print worldwide called "More Than A Carpenter". Written by one Josh McDowell, the book provides a thorough examination of the Bible's authority, how archeology supports the Bible, and whether Jesus really lived, among other things.

Because I don't want this article to be too long, I am simply citing some sources rather than trying to exhaust all the proofs out there. There are numerous alleged contradictions in the Bible, and some of the broadest and most well-known ones I will address towards the end of this article. Most alleged contradictions are simply stolen from the Islamic "101 contradictions" list. One good refutation of this list can be found at www.bringyou.to/apol ogetics/bible.htm. The book "Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible" by John Haley is also a good refutation of almost any alleged contradictions one will come across, although its index isn't very good.

Another thing I will say about the evidence for the Bible being truthful is that the abundance of archaeological manuscripts is so great as to be mind-blowing. Why should this matter? Because as McDowell in "More Than A Carpenter" points out, scientific evidence is not sufficient to prove historical events, since we can not recreate the events in an experimental setting.

Historians therefore recognize a different set of proofs involving three tests, the internal evidence test, the external evidence test, and the bibliographical test. To see McDowell's thorough discourse on all three I suggest buying his inexpensive book, for I am only going to go over the 3rd test here. The Bibliographical test examines how reliably the textual documents we have have reached us.

A short synopsis of McDowell's points is that historians recognize documents by Shakespeare or Caesar as beyond challenging as to their reliability in regards to the originals because they have as many as 5 or 6 reliable manuscripts (copies) over periods of 1,300 or 1,400 years. The New Testament alone, on the other hand, has more Bibliographical evidence supporting the documents we now have as being reliable with regards to the originals than any other ancient literary work in history.

There are over 20,000 manuscripts for the New Testament alone which agree word for word with one another in 99.9% of all cases, with some of the remaining .1% comprised of paraphrases and scribal errors. The documents are in numerous different languages, have been found on multiple continents, and the degree of exactness with which they all agree not so much suggests as implies divine preservation.

To give you an idea of how mind-blowingly greater this is than the proof for any other literary work, the Iliad is 2nd in manuscript authority to the New Testament with 643 manuscripts and has certainly undergone far less intense textual criticism than the New Testament has over the last century.

As a final note, historians can figure out what is and what is not a scribal error based on looking at the overall amount of manuscripts, outside sources, and what the earliest or most reliable manuscripts say, among other things. What critics of the Bible accusing it of having undergone multiple translations either do not realize or deliberately avoid mentioning is that to discard the manuscript evidence supporting the Bible means discarding the proof for all other historical literary works in history, since the proof for the Bible ranks foremost among them all.

And as for those translation, we actually have manuscripts dating as far back as to be within a century of when the actual events occurred! It is hard to claim the writings could have changed over time when we have documents dating virtually all the way back to the original events showing said documents have not changed, and that the elapsed time period is so negligible that no reasonable amount of translation errors could have occurred.

For one thing, people would have still been around who could instantly discredit any translation errors as such and thus the writings themselves, but this did not happen, and rather, the New Testament's authority was such that Jews by the thousands accepted Jesus as their Saviour (though it took them a while for God to show them that non-Jews could also become Christians!).

As to whether or not the Bible is something men would write, what man would suggest suffering peacefully? This goes against human nature! Yet not only did Jesus die peacefully, but all His disciples were persuaded enough of Him being who He claimed that they died to a man in horribly painful deaths with the exception of John, who died in prison.

What is more, it is human nature to exalt one's self and not reveal one's self. It is common to see the writers of other religious texts like the Book of Mormon and the Quran to see a lot of self-exaltation going on. But the Bible is different.

All throughout the Bible the writers speak of their faults and time after time emphasize that God alone is worthy of praise. David, king of Israel and former shepherd, writes of his horrible sins with Bathsheba and how God punished him for his murder of an innocent man. Moses, one of the great patriarchs in the Bible, writes of how his stubborn unwillingness to accept God's ability to work through his speech impediment resulted in a devastating historical mistake for Israel, and how his pride in rebelling against God meant he could not enter the Promised Land.

The apostles write in the Gospels of their constant bickerings and how they and Jesus' human parents were ignorant of what Jesus was trying to show them until after the events He'd told them of had already occurred. Paul calls himself the "chief of sinners" who didn't even deserve to be an apostle for persecuting the church, and that God had mercy on him only to show anyone can be saved!

Isaiah confesses "I am a man of unclean lips" when he comes into God's presence, and Job, commonly seen as one of the holiest men in the Bible, ends his book admitting "I have uttered things I understood not" and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. The list goes on and on. The self-abasement is so incredible that one is led to believe that, to a man, all the Bible's human authors believed wholeheartedly that the only way to lift up God was to admit their own shortcomings!

Jesus speaks of loving our enemies and praying for them, turning the other cheek, giving freely to those who ask, and doing good to those who hurt us. What could be more contrary to human nature? Furthermore, as Jesus once asked the Pharisees, if He is working His miracles by the devil, than by whom is God working His miracles? And if Satan destroys his own works, how than can his kingdom stand?

Similarly, if the Bible is of the devil, than what manual has God provided the human race? The Quran, with its talk of destroying all infidels? The Vedas and their vague teachings? Now, I know some of you will angrily state the Bible to be equally violent, so I will address that now.

First of all, do you think God should have destroyed Nazi Germany? But the Bible says God cast out those nations for their wickedness, not for the righteousness of the Israelites (Deut. 9:5-6). In Leviticus 18:24 is concluded a list of the things that these nations were guilty of, including nationwide child sacrifice to idols like Baal and Molech, adultery, incest in all its forms, bestiality, and homosexuality.

Whether or not you agree with the rest of the actions being evil, do you think it was alright for those nations to keep throwing their children in fires while sacrificing them alive? How do you think God should have stopped those nations if not utter destruction? And since they were so utterly entrenched in their evil ways, was anyone but the children they were killing truly innocent?

It amazes me that people ask why God doesn't step in to stop evil in the world now that He has said "from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of Heaven [permits] violence, and the violent take it by force" (Mt. 11:12) but when He did step in to stop such horrible things from happening people accuse Him for having done so! Whose ways are not equal?

Thus, God should be perfectly justified in the eyes of anyone with a conscience as to His actions in the book of Judges and elsewhere. For those trying to say the actions of certain people in the Bible mean God supports such things as moral, that is ridiculous. David, for example, was said to be a "man after God's own heart" yet God clearly did not sanction all he did, and punished him horribly for his sins with Bathsheba and his murder of an innocent man.

Samson in the book of Judges is said to have had sex with prostitutes, does that mean God condoned it? On the contrary, God before he was even born commanded that he be a Nazarite, not shaving his head, eating unclean things, or drinking strong wine. Samson broke all God's commandments and upon breaking the last, lost his power which he seemingly did not realize came only from God.

Abraham had one wife, Sarah, but because she could not have children, she had him take her maid to have children with instead. But then when she was able to have children and it caused horrible problems, including the fact that Israel's most horrible enemy nations descended from the maid's child, she admitted her mistake. Did God approve of her mistake just because she was a godly woman? Certainly not!

Atheists sometimes accuse God of being a horrible, violent person who suddenly became loving in the New Testament. But that's not how it works. Jesus said He was not coming to bring peace, but rather division, to separate those who seek life from those who love death. And in the book of Revelation it says He is returning on a white horse, holding the doom of this ungodly world in the Word that proceeds from His mouth.

He will judge every person according to their deeds and reveal all the thoughts of their minds and their hearts before all, and then all will have praise for God when it becomes clear He alone is good.

Furthermore, let me answer the objection that Christianity is a "crutch" because we can be forgiven of anything. That is again, not how it works. Becoming a Christian isn't an instant "anything you do is alright" card. Rather, we are forgiven BECAUSE Jesus makes us new people. If we live in sin, the Bible says this is proof we are NOT Christians.

As Paul says, "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" (Romans 6:1-2) Being a Christian means being born again, and being in a new person who loves God more than our own desires. This means we can still mess up, but as God convicts each of us more and more of our mistakes, that original spirit of forgiveness in us leads us to confess and humbly forsake the actions of our former lifestyles, of which things we are "now ashamed." (Romans 6:21)

As Christians we are not saved by works, but works are the outward evidence of the new life that is in us! (Eph. 2:8-10) I am living proof that we make mistakes, and that God's grace can save anyone, but by God's grace I am not what I was, and He keeps changing me more and more in this new life I have through Jesus, Lord of all.

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