Who told you that the Bible is God’s Word?
Do you trust this person with your life?
The person who asserted this claim probably has some credibility with you, if not some influence and perhaps even authority. This person is asking you to base your entire life on this assertion. But relationships shift, and people disappoint. Unless we know for sure personally that the Bible is God’s Word, our trust in the Scriptures will ebb and flow based on human relationships and cultural trends. Our worldview, morals, and conduct— the way we spend money and engage in relationships—must conform to the Bible if it is God’s actual message to humankind.
Whether you received your first Bible as a gift or purchased it yourself, you may have had a sense of holding something holy. The term holy means dedicated to God or something set apart for religious purposes. I remember feeling a weightiness of the Bible— its holiness—when I received it as a gift the night I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I knew I was holding something sacred, something connected to that incredible feeling I had when Jesus entered into my heart.
Then I opened the Bible. Genealogies, lots of blood, murder, sordid tales, redeeming love and faithfulness—and that was just in the first several chapters of Genesis! I was overwhelmed. To be honest, some of the stories in there confused me. Did God really tell Abraham to kill his own son? Even if God didn’t let him go through with it, that was unsettling. Did Jonah really go into the belly of a great fish? Even if it was a super gigantic whale, I just couldn’t imagine that. The many other supernatural stories of parting seas, walking through fire unscathed, and miraculous healings made me start to categorize the Bible into sections. There were the “for sure it’s true” portions, then the “perhaps it’s allegorical” or “I’ll never understand this” sections, and then the “maybe it slipped in by mistake” parts. I never voiced these categories, but the Bible started to fissure in my mind.
Always Back to Jesus
Along our journey, if things seem confusing or complicated, the best place to return to is Jesus. And the question to ask is, what does this text say about Jesus and the message he proclaimed? For example, the story about Jonah and the whale could seem farfetched, except that Jesus mentions it specifically in Matthew 12. He says in verse 40, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” For those of us who are followers of Jesus, we believe that there is a Creator God who spoke the world into existence by his very words; and we believe that Jesus resurrected from the dead. Then it should not be so hard to believe that our timeless God allowed a prophet to detour a few days in the belly of a whale before going to Nineveh—both to share the message of God’s love with the Ninevites and to foretell the kind of resurrection that the incarnate God would demonstrate to the world.
As Christians, we believe that one day all people will stand before Jesus and face whether we believe him to be Lord, liar, or lunatic. For those who are on the journey trying to answer this question, there is much credibility that the writings that attest to Christ’s divinity have been faithfully preserved as canonical. If an all-powerful and all-knowing God can orchestrate whales to swallow up prophets and send angels to stay the hand of murderers, then surely he can faithfully preserve the logos, the Word, that he spoke to humanity.
Susan C. Lim (PhD, UCLA) is a historian and writer. She has been a professor of history at Biola University in La Mirada, California, and is a speaker at conferences, churches, and retreats. She loves to share God’s Word and serve at her home church, Mariners Church in Irvine, California.
Taken from Light of the Word by Susan C. Lim. ©2023 by Susan Chongmi Lim. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
