Pastor Matt Crawford Is the Bible true and trustworthy?

Why can we make the claim that the Bible is true? 1) The Bible says so itself (sounds obvious, but it would be a lot harder for us to claim that the Bible is true if these statements were not in Scripture). II Timothy 3:16: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. what a true God breathes out is true! John 17:17: [Jesus praying to His Father] Sanctify them in the truth; Your Word is truth. 2) The Bible agrees with itself (it passes the coherence test of truth). Many claim that this is not true, especially in the Gospels. I can tell you confidently, we studied all of those passages in seminary. NOWHERE does the Bible directly contradict itself. Different authors give different perspectives of the same events, but the way this is done actually strengthens the case because this is how real events are remembered and recorded. To illustrate the MIRACLE that has occurred with the fact that Scripture agrees with itself, let's think about a game of telephone in the front pew. 40 authors, 3 continents, 1500 years!

The Bibles agreement with itself shows that it is not merely a work of man. This must have been the work of God. It must be true. It must be trustworthy.

3) The Bible matches up with our experience (it passes the correspondence test of truth).

A. Science an Intelligent Design argument: Michael Behe (in Darwin's Black Box) offers the irreducible complexity argument. He states that certain parts of living things are too complex to have come into existence through the work of natural selection and random mutations. The living beings which had them would have had no survival advantage through the individual parts that came together to (eventually!) make an eye, for example. Behe's famous example is that of a bacterial flagellum - a sort of motor which has multiple parts and allows a bacterium to move around. This one piece of one bacterium is made up of 240 proteins! These things point to an Intelligent Designer who put the completed flagellum or eye into place to help that living being do what it needed to live and prosper. The Bible matches up with what we see in the scientific world. B. History the Hittites and archaeology denied by critics for a long time until huge archaeological discoveries in late 1800s and early 1900s unearthed the Hittite Empire and showed that the Bible matches up with what we find in the world

C. Scriptural principles like the Proverbs are shown to be true through our experience. Pride really does go before a fall (Proverbs 16:18) In many counselors there really is wisdom (Prov 11:14).

4) Fulfilled prophecies show that the Bible is true. A. Daniel 2:31ff prophecy about empires of the earth (Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, Roman) B. Jesus place of birth in Micah 5:2 (around 270 details of prophecies about Jesus, all of which came true) C. More recently, Israel becoming a nation again in 1948 fulfilled prophecies of God returning His people to the Promised Land