Apologetics: Debunking Deconstruction – Is the Bible Actually Reliable? Part 5: Divine Inspiration.

After giving you guys a few weeks on hiatus, it’s time that we return to my Debunking Deconstruction series, closing out this chapter of this series with the last proof that the Bible is reliable, which is divine inspiration, the proof that I’ve been building up to for the past several posts on this topic, so if you haven’t read the other posts in this series, go read them. It will make more sense once you do. From here, I will be arguing against some of the most common reasons for deconstruction, some more obscure reasons, and after that, we’ll see. Stay tuned.

The biggest claim to reliability that the Bible has going for it is that, while it was written by men, it was divinely inspired. Now, while many religions claim this, the difference is that we Christians have the receipts to back up our claim. If you’ve read my past four posts on this subject (which I will link in the comments section below), you’ll know that not only do we have archaeological evidence for the Bible that’s continuing to grow as more things are found and our technology advances, but we also have the grammatical, scientific, and prophetic proof that what it says is true. Thus, from all of this evidence, when the Bible claims that it was inspired by God working through the Holy Spirit in the lives of certain people, is it too hard to infer that it might be telling the truth?

Just look at the fact that all the prophecies in the Old Testament (minus the end time ones that have yet to occur) were fulfilled as God had said they would be, with some of these prophecies being made centuries if not millennia (in the case of Christ’s birth) before they happened. That doesn’t just happen by coincidence.

Or look at the fact that the Bible does not contradict itself, even when it was being written by multiple people over the course of over a thousand years. While there are some areas where it might seem to contradict itself (such as where Jesus preached the Beatitudes/ the Sermon on the Mount), these are not horrible discrepancies that throw into question the entire narrative but are rather differences in perspectives from the different authors, typos that have been fixed due to consulting different manuscripts, or can be/are explained away later. If mere humans were stuck with the job of coming up with a cohesive story building off each other for thousands of years and putting it all into one religious text, could you imagine how many discrepancies there would be? And once again, that’s not even accounting for the fact that some things that were written about wouldn’t even happen in the original author’s lifetime and if they were later additions, we would’ve found out by now from studying the original texts.

The story the Bible (especially that of the New Testament) tells also attests to its validity because it would’ve been so strange to the people of the time. Remember that when the Bible was written, while the people were very religious, they did not believe their gods were personal, omniscient, omnipotent, etc. (unless you maybe count fate, but even then, a lot of gods connected to fate were broken up into three separate gods/goddesses). They saw humans as just a means to an end. They were kind of cute and entertaining, but ultimately, they were playthings that could be discarded. Even schools of thought that came around with the Greeks such as Platonism and Stoicism agreed that if there was a divine being that created the world, that it was impersonal. Furthermore, in the Roman Empire where Ceaser Agustus was seen as a sort of messiah, he was seen that way because he was successful in battle, conquered a bunch of territory and brought prosperity to the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the Bible tells us the story of a God who is personal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, who came down to the Earth in the form of a human baby in a manger who later died for the sake of sinful humans to save them from His wrath. No god in the pagan mythologies that the people worshipped would ever do that, making this story even more unique.

Because of proof such as these, I think that it’s safe to say that what the Bible says about it being inspired by God is reliable and if that’s true, then everything else in the Bible that seems harder to believe (for example: the Creation account or the Flood), is true as well.

Until next time,

M.J.