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The Book of Divine Authorship (Part I)
Christian faith is not a blind faith; it is not a blind leap in the dark. Our faith is not based upon a guess or what might seem right. We don’t think that there is a God up in heaven; we know it. We don’t think that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; we know He is. Why? We have done the investigation, we have done the seeking out, and based upon the evidence, we have reached the conclusion that the things of the Bible must be true. In John 20:30-31 John wrote,
Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.
He didn’t expect someone to believe just because he said so, but he provided the evidence so that someone could look at it and then believe in Jesus based upon the evidence provided. One of the reasons for the apostles being able to perform miracles was to confirm what they preached (Mk. 16:20). Why were Jesus’ disciples so convinced that their beloved Lord had risen from the dead? Because they were provided the inescapable evidence of the resurrected Savior standing before them, talking to them, and eating with them. When disciples came from John the Baptist asking Jesus if He was “he that cometh,” Jesus sent them back with the evidence to prove it:
And when the men were come unto him, they said, John the Baptist hath sent us unto thee, saying, Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another? In that hour he cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits; and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered and said unto them, Go and tell John the things which ye have seen and heard; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good tidings preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me. (Lk. 7:20-23)
In Acts 17:10-11 it says,
And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Beroea: who when they were come thither went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of the mind, examining the Scriptures daily, whether these things were so.
What were those people doing? They were examining the evidence! They were looking at the Scriptures to see if what they were being told was the truth! And God, by way of inspiration, says that that was the right thing for them to do. What am I doing right now? I am trying to present the evidence to you from the Bible to show that what I am telling you is true. I’m trying to show you that what we believe about God, the Bible, and the church, is all based upon our careful examination of the evidence provided, and based upon that, we know that our faith if grounded in the truth! It may be the evidence of the eye witness testimony of the apostles that tell us through the Scriptures that they have seen the resurrected Christ, it may be a comparison between the things we read about in the Bible and what has been confirmed through archeology, but it is evidence that convicts us of the truth, not some blind leap in the dark, ignorantly hoping that we won’t be disappointed when our lives here upon this earth is over.
There is a lot of skepticism about the Bible today. Many say that it is just another religious book, that it is not inspired, that it is just a product of man. But, what does the evidence say; does the evidence really support that view of the Bible? This lesson is the first part of a study to see if we can tell whether or not the Bible is divinely inspired, and I am convinced that after looking at the evidence to be provided in this study, any person who is open-minded and willing to accept the evidence will see that the Bible is not man-made, and if not man-made it must be of Divine authorship.
The Bible Is From Man Or God
There are only two possible sources for the Bible; there are only two places it could have come from: either it came from man, or it came from God. The Bible is the product of man, or it is the product of God working through man. There is no third option. Aliens, for example, did not write the Bible and drop it off on their way by planet earth. Well, why can’t the Bible be some from man and some from God? The Bible can’t be a combination of human and Divine authorship because of what the Bible claims for itself. “No prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation. For no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20-21). “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Ti. 3:16, KJV). “God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son” (Heb. 1:1-2). “These things have I spoken unto you, while yet abiding with you. But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you” (Jn. 14:25-26). So, the Bible makes it clear to the reader that no part of it is of human origin, all of it is from God by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If there were any part the Bible that were not from God, then the inspired writers of our Bible were lying, all scripture would not be, then, inspired of God, and they would not have been writing by inspiration. Either “all scripture is inspired of God,” or it is not. If, for example, someone were to pick out a particular passage and say that it was not inspired, if that were correct, not only would that passage not be inspired, but it would also mean that Paul was not inspired, because Paul said that all Scripture is inspired. With Paul would go the majority of our New Testament. The same would be true, also, of Peter and his writings. What would that mean for the gospels and Acts, which tell us that Paul and Peter were apostles of Christ and that they were inspired. Those books would then have to be uninspired also. If John was not an apostle and not inspired, then first, second, and third John would have to be discarded as part of our Bibles too, along with Revelation. Do you see what is happening? If we were to continue on down that same line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we would see a kind of domino effect work its way through the Bible until we would find that it would all have to be uninspired. Either God authored the Bible, or man authored it.
If the Bible came from man, then it is a book of lies, it teaches things that are not true. It would have no authority. It would just be a collection of old writings by a bunch of mislead and unfortunate people. We may as well go home, sell the building, and live this life to the fullest, because we would have nothing more to look forward to that we could be sure of beyond this life.
If, on the other hand, the Bible came from God, then we must study it, we must live by it, we must teach it to others, we must have it written upon our hearts and see that we never let it go! It is the very seed that will produce faith in us and lead us to eternal life! It will reveal the mysteries of Christ to us. If the Bible really is the word of God, it would be foolish to ignore it or accept anything other than what it says.
Well, how do we know where it came from? We examine the evidence. If the evidence shows that the Bible could not have come from man, there is only one other place it could have come from—God. It came from man or it came from God, and we learn that it did not come from man, then we can know beyond any reasonable doubt that it did, in fact, come from God. Now lets look at the evidence.
Biblical Prophecy Shows That The Bible Could Not Have Come From Man
The first thing that people tend to think about when they think of prophets is that they are people who tell about something that is going to happen in the future, and while that might be something that some of them did, a prophet is not just someone who predicts the future. A prophet is someone who speaks for God. He may speak of something in the future, but he may have just spoken about something that was going on right then. A prophet bridged the gap between God and man, making known to man the things revealed to him by God.
Jonah is a name that most of us recognize because we remember that he was the one who was swallowed by a great fish in the book of Jonah. But, how many of us think about him as being one of the prophets? He was. He didn’t write about the future, but he was used by God to speak for Him. The reason he was swallowed by that fish was because God had sent him up to Nineveh to preach to the people of that city and tell them that God was going to destroy them because of their wickedness (Jon. 3:1-4). In verse 5 of Jonah chapter 3, it says, “and the people of Nineveh believed God.” They believed whom? “God.” Even though it was Jonah that was doing the preaching, he was just a mouthpiece for God; it was God’s message spoken through the prophet Jonah.
At other times though, God did send his prophets to tell of future events, sometimes things that weren’t going to happen for hundreds and hundreds of years. Since the message that a prophet spoke always came from God, and not the prophet, when the true prophet of God gave a predictive prophecy, it was sure to happen. If someone claimed to be a prophet and said this or that was going to happen in the future, but then it never happened, then that person wasn’t really a prophet at all. This is an important point because there were, even as there have been since, people who were going around claiming to be prophets and claiming to speak for God when they really weren’t and didn’t. So, how could someone tell the true prophet from the false prophet?
And if thou say in thy heart, How shall we know the word which Jehovah hath not spoken? when a prophet speaketh in the name of Jehovah, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jehovah hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him (Deut. 18:21-22).
Not only was that true then, but what does that tell us about the prophecies of the Bible? If the Bible contains prophecies made and fulfilled, then the Bible contains the word of God, it is God-spoken, but if it has prophecies that were made, but they were not fulfilled, then the Bible is not the word of God.
In the book of Isaiah we find an amazing prophecy about the Persian king, Cyrus:
That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loins of kings; to open the doors before him, and the gates shall not be shut. (Isa. 44:28-45:1)
Isaiah was prophesying about the Jews being allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple at the end of their Babylonian captivity. But here’s the amazing part, at the time that Isaiah lived and prophesied, the southern kingdom had not even been taken into captivity yet. But what’s even more amazing than that is that he names the Persian king by name who will allow the Jews to return, and he did it ca.150 years before that king ever came to the Persian thrown. He said, “his name is going to be Cyrus and this is what he’s going to do.” We’re not talking about some guess, we’re not talking about events that kinda sorta fit, but we are talking about a detailed prophecy that was made by a man so far removed from the time and place of the events that he prophesied about that he could not have possibly predicted it without supernatural agency, and that were precisely fulfilled.
In the Bible, we can read of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies in Second Chronicles 36:22-23 and Ezra 1:1-4, 7, 8; 3:7; 4:3, but there are also plenty of sources outside of the Bible that we could look to in order to confirm their being fulfilled. According to an article titled, Cyrus the Great in Biblical Prophecy, by Wayne Jackson, “the Encyclopedia Britannica, an unlikely source, acknowledges that ‘in 538 [B.C.} Cyrus granted to the Jews, whom Nebuchadnezzar had transported to Babylonia, the return to Palestine and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple’ (Vol. 6, 1958, p.940)” (http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/print/cyrus_the_great_in_biblical_prophecy). From the same source: “H.G. Wells, in his book, The Outline of History, concedes that the Jews ‘returned to their city, Jerusalem; and; rebuilt their temple there under the auspices of Cyrus,’ the Persian monarch (1931, p. 253)”; and,
Excavations at Babylon (1879-82) led to the discovery of a clay barrel, known as the Cyrus Cylinder, which contained a marvelous historical confirmation of the biblical narrative. It portrays the benevolent policies of Cyrus in the following fashion: ‘All of their peoples I gathered together and restored to their dwelling-places’ (see: Ira M. Price, The Monuments and the Old Testament, 1899-1907, p. 234).
The only reasonable explanation for this is that Isaiah was a true prophet of God.
In the book of Daniel we find three different prophecies, all dealing with the four world empires that were to come. We don’t have the time to go into any kind of real detail about these, but I just want to point out that when we put these three passages side-by-side, we see that Daniel had mentioned each of these empires by name (with the exception of the Roman empire), he said what order they were going to come in, and gave certain details about them, all of which were completely fulfilled and all were fulfilled completely out of the control of the Jews; they could not have influenced the fulfillment of these prophecies to make them happen. The passages are:
And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee; and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron, forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things; and as iron that crusheth all these, shall it break in pieces and crush. (Dan. 2:39-40)
And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon two feet as a man; and a man's heart was given to it. And, behold, another beast, a second, like to a bear; and it was raised up on one side, and three ribs were in its mouth between its teeth: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. After this I beheld, and, lo, another, like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a bird; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night-visions, and, behold, a fourth beast, terrible and powerful, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. (Dan. 7:3-7)
The ram which thou sawest, that had the two horns, they are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough he-goat is the king of Greece: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And as for that which was broken, in the place whereof four stood up, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not with his power. (Dan. 8:20-22)
Had Daniel not been a true prophet of God, he could not have predicted these things as he did.
Then there are the many, many, messianic prophecies made in the Old Testament and fulfilled by Jesus in the new. These are some of them:
· From the seed of Abraham (Gen. 22:18; Mt.1:1)
Is there even a chance that all of these prophecies could have been made by so many different people, over about a 1,000 years, and all exactly fulfilled in the life of Jesus by accident, or by some kind of fixing things to make them happen? No way! The only rational explanation is that they were all true prophets of God, revealing those things that they had been given by God. Man could not have done it!
Unfortunately, there are some people who just will not accept the fact that the Bible must be what it claims to be—the word of God. So, they look at things like the prophecies of the Bible and they think to themselves, “there must be some way to explain where the Bible came from so that men produced it. There must be some way to get around the all the evidence that shows that it could not be a product of man.” Some people do just choose to ignore the evidence and believe what their going to believe anyway, but others have decided that either the portions of scripture that contain undeniable prophecies made and fulfilled where added after the things happened that they were claiming to have been prophesied of hundreds of years earlier, or people must have just gone back and changed, or updated the Scriptures to match the outcomes of events. Well, let’s think about this for just a minute. We just looked at a whole list of Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ. Those aren’t Christian Scriptures. Yes, they are important for us to study and learn from, but they were not written by or specifically for Christians; they are Jewish Scriptures. Are we to believe that the same people who rejected and crucified Christ would then turn around and change their Scriptures and alter them so that they would appear to identify Him as the prophesied Messiah? That would be the very last thing that they would want to do! If the Hebrew Old Testament contains prophecies made about, and fulfilled in Christ, it is not because of the Jews; it is in spite of them!
Most of us have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before they were found in the middle of the 20th century, there was a lot of doubt about the reliability of the Old Testament Scriptures since the oldest copy then available only dated back to about the 10th century AD (McDowell, Josh. The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. 1999. 77). Among many other things that were found there, was a complete Isaiah scroll (the Old Testament book of Isaiah) that dated back to ca.125 BC! More than a hundred years before Jesus ever walked upon the earth! According to Gleason Archer, the Isaiah text found in Qumran is a word-for-word identical to what we have in our Bibles 95 percent of the time (McDowell, 79); the other 5 percent is mostly spelling variations and scribal errors. In the 53 chapter there was a one word variation in verse 11, where the word “light” was inserted. This confirms that the Isaiah that we have in our Bibles today is the same as that of the Hebrew Scriptures before Jesus; it has not been modified, rewritten, or changed in anyway.
Conclusion
What does the evidence tell us? In a court of law, the evidence is presented and a verdict is reached based on a close examination of the evidence. Either a person is innocent or he is guilty. What does the evidence say?
Well, if a jury can reach a verdict, one way or the other, based on the evidence, then so can we about biblical matters. Either the Bible is a product of man, or it is of God. We must look at the evidence and learn which one it is. I hope you will be back with us next week because I am planning to provide more evidence for the Divine authorship of the Bible, but based on what we have seen today, we should already know the answer. Next week should just add further confirmation to what we already know to be true. Since the Bible contains prophecies made and prophecies fulfilled, it could not have come from the mind of man, so it must have come from the mind, and through the inspiration of, God.
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