As soon as I met the Lord Jesus Christ in salvation, believing that He died for my sins and rose again to be my High Priest, I decided to study the Scriptures. I believe that the Bible is God ordained and God inspired. The Bible says:

2 Timothy 3:1-7 (ESV) But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. 6 For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

This is a perfect picture of American culture today. A nation that was built on the faith of the Puritan Christian, Americans have become detached from God and enamored of the Serpent of Eden, that Old Devil called Satan (Revelation 12:9). The devil has, through godless media outlets and social networks, promoted the ideology that “we are our own gods”. This started in the Garden of Eden when Satan suggested that Adam and Eve depart from the Word of God and eat that which was forbidden. The Devil said, “God knows when you eat of the forbidden, YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD. You will determine what is good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, AP).

When Jesus came into the world, He came to “fulfill the Scriptures”. The Bible is the written Word of God, but Jesus is the Living Word of God, the Incarnate Word. John 1:14 (ESV) tells us “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth”.

God gave humanity His Word – both written and Eternally Living – because He wants us to know the way of peace and blessing, the way to abundant LIFE.

The Bible Testifies About Christ

The Old Testament of our Bibles – every type, figure, sacrifice, altar, and even the Tabernacle and Temple – speak to the coming Christ of the New Covenant. The Bible says:

Luke 24:27 (ESV) And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, {Jesus} interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.

Luke 24:44 (ESV) Then {Jesus} said to them, “These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

And Jesus told the Pharisees and the Scribes who stood against Him:

John 5:39-40 (ESV) You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life.

Jesus held the Scripture in high esteem, because the Scripture He preached from – the Old Testament that the Jews maintained – foretold His Messianic coming. Jesus told them:

John 5:46-47 (ESV) if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

The Scripture is not a man made book. It is a PROPHETIC Book. It PROPHESIED about Jesus, about the coming Messiah. The Old Testament believed in Jesus – and Jesus believed in the Old Testament, the Scripture, as God ordained. Throughout His ministry Jesus said:

“It is WRITTEN”

He was not talking about some philosophy or human writing, but about the Bible, the Word of God. When Jesus was questioned about marriage He replied:

Matthew 19:4-6 (NKJV) “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Jesus spoke authoritatively about the things of God because He viewed the Scripture of His day – the Old Testament – to be the Word of God. Jesus believed, like Solomon, that

Proverbs 30:5 Every word of God is pure: He is a shield unto them that put their trust in Him.

Jesus chastised the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadduccees and Herodians – the religious leaders of that day – for they twisted the Word of God rather than merely presenting it. Jesus told them:

Mark 7:13 (AP) You have made the Word of God of NO EFFECT THROUGH YOUR MAN MADE TRADITIONS – these things you keep saying and teaching …

Jesus lived His life following the true Word of God, the Bible. He said to the devil when tempted, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but BY EVERY WORD OF GOD” (Luke 4:4). Jesus told those seeking a blessing, “blessed are they that HEAR THE WORD OF GOD and KEEP IT” (Luke 11:28). Jesus as God Incarnate, God in the flesh, knew that the Bible is NOT a man-made thing. As the Apostle says:

2 Peter 1:21 (ESV) … no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

We started out by addressing this fallen world through 2 Timothy 3. The world detached from the Word of God gets crazier and crazier every day. After stating this premise, the Apostle writes:

2 Timothy 3:14-16 (ESV) But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

God uses the Word of God, the Bible, to not only save us, but to grow us. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing BY THE WORD OF GOD” (Romans 10:17). “The sword of the Holy Spirit is THE WORD OF GOD” (Ephesians 6:17). We are “BORN AGAIN BY THE WORD OF GOD, which lives and abides forever” (1 Peter 1:23)

We Have No Original Signed Books Of The Bible.
How Do We Know OUR Bible Is THE Bible?

One of the frequently made objections to belief in the Bible is:

“There are NO ORIGINAL COPIES of any book of the Bible in existence. How do we know what we are using is accurate to the original texts?”

or “The people that are obeying it to the letter of the words, they might not be following what Jesus really said because it’s been passed down from so many different people … So, do we really know what the Word of God in the Bible is?”

WHY are there no original signed texts {autographa} of the books of Scripture? Why do we have only copies? I believe it is because God knows our hearts. We as humans are prone to idolatry. When Israel was left by Moses so he could receive the first five Books of Scripture from God, the Israelis got a “Committee” together, went to Aaron, and said “Make us gods who will go before and lead us” (Exodus 32:1, AP). Aaron quickly complied. Had God left us with an original “signed” text (an autographa) from Moses, or Peter, or Paul, or King David, we would have put it in a glass case, and stood around it worshiping the scroll rather than the God Who gave us the Word.God wrote the Ten Commandments with His finger in stone (Deuteronomy 9:10), and gave it to Moses. Israel put the Ten Commandments inside the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:16; 31:18; 40:20). The Ark of the Covenant was first taken by the Philistines (1 Samuel 4-8), and 40 years later it disappeared when the Babylonians sacked the Temple (586 BC). The Bible tells us that the only Ark of the Covenant is now in Heaven:

Revelation 11:19 (ESV) God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail.

The earthly Ark of the Covenant was a shadow or copy of the Heavenly (Hebrews 9:23; 8:5). I suspect God took away the earthly Ark because God’s people started to worship the THING rather than the CREATOR OF ALL THINGS. God despises idolatry. We are repeatedly told throughout Scripture:

1 Corinthians 10:14 … Dear friends, FLEE FROM IDOLATRY.

1 John 5:21 … Dear Children, KEEP YOURSELVES FROM IDOLS.

God told us “those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them” (Jonah 2:8). God says to His people, “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:3-4).

Like Israel did with the Ark of the Covenant, we would have stopped looking to the God Who commanded the Ark be made, and instead look at the Ark as a type of god or rabbit’s foot. God does not want this. He wants our faith to be in Him, and wants us to follow His Word because He gave it.

We have no “autographa” or original signed copies to protect us from ourselves.

Word Study: So how do we know that the Bible we have today is the same as the Bible which was originally written? If we only had a few copies of manuscripts we would not know what the original said. However, God has left us with a vast number of copies of “manuscripts”. The word “manuscript” is from two Latin words, “manu” (by hand) and “scriptum” (written). So “manuscript” means “that written by hand”. My source at Houston Christian University notes:

“There are approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in other languages. The New Testament autographa, the manuscripts written by the original authors, are unavailable, but manuscripts have been discovered that are dated as early as the 2nd century.”

Though Moses received the Ten Commandments written on stone by God, Moses wrote down what God told him. The Bible says:

Exodus 24:2-4 (ESV) {God said} Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him.” 3 Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” 4 And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 31:9 (ESV) … Moses wrote this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.

Moses wrote the first five Books of the Law: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He gave the Law to the priests, the sons of Levi to guard and transmit to all of Israel. Once the Law was given:

The LAW = The TORAH = The PENTATEUCH = MOSES

to the Priests, the Priests that tended to copy the Scriptures were called Scribes (Hebrew groups of Scribes were Soferim, Tannaim, Amoraim, and Masoretes). My commentary notes:

“In the Mishnah (a Jewish collection of exegetical works that form the first part of the Talmud, or Rabbinic teachings) they are presented as pre-rabbinic teachers with authority, as well as copyists and teachers.”

The best known Old Testament Scribe is Ezra (Ezra 7:6). He was both priest and Scribe. The Scribes were considered guardians of the Law of God. The Scribes carefully copied Scripture on:

Parchment, made from lamb, goat, deer or cow skin, or
Papyrus, a reed plant that grows along the Nile.

Scripture was written in Scrolls (rolled pieces of papyrus or parchment) or Codex (bound like a book). The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, Chaldean, and Aramaic. Apologist Josh McDowell notes on his website:

“Paul D. Wegner, professor of Old Testament studies at Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California, shares further safeguards and protocols that aided scribes in their copying and storage of biblical texts:

~ Jewish writings mention that the temple employed correctors (meggihim) who scrutinized the scrolls to safeguard their precision.

~ At some point during the Talmudic period (100 BC to AD 400), meticulous rules were developed to preserve the Old Testament text in synagogue scrolls. These included only using parchment made from clean animals, using only black ink, lining the page before adding letters, and establishing a set column width and word spacing (the space of a hair between each consonant, and the space of a consonant between each word). Too, the scribe had to be freshly bathed and in full Jewish dress before beginning to copy the scroll.”

The Uniqueness Of The Bible

The Bible is unique in it’s writing. It has God as it’s Author, though God used human agents to accomplish His work. We saw earlier that God spoke as Moses wrote the Pentateuch or the Books of the Law. As God spoke through the various Prophets, they used phrases like:

Jeremiah 1:4 (ESV) Now the word of the LORD came to me …

We are told in:

Hebrews 1:1 (ESV) Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets

As the New Testament was written by the Apostles that our Lord Jesus hand picked, these Apostles often referred to the Old Testament. The Apostle Paul wrote:

Galatians 3:8 (ESV) … “the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’”

The Apostle who wrote Hebrews (most believe it was Paul) quoted Psalm 95:7-11 and attributed the writing not to King David, but to the Holy Spirit:

Hebrews 3:7 (ESV) Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice,

The Bible was written by more than 40 humans, but they were not its author, but God is. God called people to write Scripture from all walks of life:

Kings Generals Peasants Philosophers Poets
Fishermen Tax Collectors Musicians Politicians
Scholars Shepherds Farmers Priests Servants

And on and on. Moses was saved from death by the princess of Egypt, and murdered a man – but God used him to write scripture. King David started out as a shepherd, and at one time failed God by committing murder and adultery – but God used him. Amos was a herdsman, Joshua a General, Nehemiah a lowly cupbearer for a foreign King. Daniel was enslaved, but rose to be Prime Minister in two kingdoms. Luke was a doctor, Peter a fisherman, Matthew a tax collector for the hated Roman Empire, and Paul a failed Rabbi.

God used various and broken people to write His Word, but the Word was flawlessly transmitted because God was its Author!

The Bible was written over a period of 1500 years by people from the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Bible, as I said before, was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Chaldean for the Old Testament. Aramaic and Hebrew were common languages in the Old Testament times:

2 Kings 18:26 (NKJV) … Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people who are on the wall.

Daniel chapters 2-7 and Ezra 4-7 are in Aramaic. There is also Aramaic in the New Testament. For instance, where Jesus cried out from the Cross:

Matthew 27:46 (NKJV) … about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

At the time our Lord Jesus ministered on the earth, the language of the people was Aramaic, Koine (Common) Greek, and Latin (Rome). This is because Alexander the Great, a Greek, conquered the world before the Roman Empire did. As Alexander conquered areas, he demanded that the people in those areas learn Koine or Common Greek. When the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he wrote in Greek rather than Latin. Why was this?

As Israel had wandered from God, and had been under the conquest of: the following nations:

Assyria (740 BC)
Babylon (597 BC)
Medo-Persia (539 BC)
Greece (329 BC)
Rome (63 BC)

Had Israel followed God and revered His Word, they would have never been captured and held against their will. God used the nations to punish His disobedient and wayward people:

Isaiah 9:13-17 (NKJV) For the people do not turn to Him who strikes them, Nor do they seek the Lord of hosts. 14 Therefore the Lord will cut off head and tail from Israel, Palm branch and bulrush in one day. 15 The elder and honorable, he is the head; The prophet who teaches lies, he is the tail. 16 For the leaders of this people cause them to err, And those who are led by them are destroyed. 17 Therefore the Lord will have no joy in their young men, Nor have mercy on their fatherless and widows; For everyone is a hypocrite and an evildoer, And every mouth speaks folly. For all this His anger is not turned away, But His hand is stretched out still.

Israel continued to reject God. The Bible tells us that when the Messiah came:

John 1:11-13 (NKJV) {Messiah} came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Much of Israel had become so hard hearted to God, that they would not repent nor turn to the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ. Over time, many Jews – particularly Jews living in Alexandria – had forgotten how to read Hebrew. The Bible speaks of this in:

Nehemiah 13:24 (ESV) … half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people.

As the Jews could not understand Hebrew, they could not understand the Bible So a plan was devised to translate the Bible into Koine Greek, the more common language of the people of that day.

Around 250 BC the Hebrew Old Testament was TRANSLATED from Hebrew and into Koine Greek.

This is the earliest translation of the Bible. Called The Septuagint (which means “70”) because there were 72 translators, 6 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Septuagint was considered by many to be on equal footing with the Hebrew text. The New Testament writers, like Matthew, often quoted the Septuagint as Scripture. Consider Isaiah 7:14, quoted in

Isaiah 7:14 {Hebrew} “Behold, the YOUNG WOMAN [‘almah] shall concieve”

Isaiah 7:14 {Septuagint} “Behold, the VIRGIN [parthenos] shall concieve”

Matthew 1:23 “Behold, the VIRGIN [parthenos] shall conceive.”

It is very likely that the Bible the New Testament writers referred to was the Septuagint. What do we learn from this? God has always worked to insure His people have an understandable Word of God, Holy Scripture. The Bible tells us that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth:

John 16:13-15 (NKJV) However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. 14 He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. 15 All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.

What is the “Truth” that the Holy Spirit will guide us into? Jesus later said, as He prayed for His Church:

John 17:17 (NKJV) Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.

God the Holy Spirit gave us the Bible through over 40 human writers. The Bible is divinely inspired, written by man, but its output was controlled by Almighty God. May God bless us as we learn of His Word. Amen.