Day 3 — Can I Trust the Bible?

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work.”

— 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (BSB)

Someone in your class says it with total confidence: “The Bible’s been changed so many times that nobody knows what it originally said.” It sounds convincing. Is it true?

Start with what the Bible claims about itself. Paul tells Timothy, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” Real people wrote it: shepherds, kings, fishermen, a doctor, a tax collector. You can hear their different personalities on the page. But behind their words is God’s own breath. He spoke through them, so what they wrote is what He meant to say.

Of course, a book claiming to come from God doesn’t prove that it does. So here are some reasons to take that claim seriously.

It holds together. About forty writers, over roughly fifteen hundred years, in three languages, wrote the books of the Bible. Many of them never met. Yet it tells one story from beginning to end: God creating, people turning away from Him, and God coming to the rescue through Jesus.

It was copied with remarkable care. We don’t have the original pages written by Paul or Luke, but then we don’t have the originals of any ancient book. What we have are copies. For most ancient writers that means a handful of copies, often made many centuries later. For the New Testament, scholars have more than five thousand handwritten copies in Greek alone, some of them made within a few generations of the originals. With that many copies from so many places, scholars can compare them and spot where a tired scribe slipped. Most of the differences are spelling and small copying mistakes, and none of them overturns a central belief of the Christian faith.

It has been tested. In the 1940s, the story goes, a young shepherd near the Dead Sea threw a stone into a cave and heard pottery break. The jars inside held ancient scrolls, among them a complete copy of Isaiah about a thousand years older than any Hebrew copy known before. When scholars compared the two, the wording was overwhelmingly the same.

But the best test is the one Paul gives in the very same sentence. Scripture is “useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In other words, it does something. It doesn’t just sit there being old. It reads you while you read it. It shows you your own heart, puts you right, and trains you to live differently.

Derek Prince was a brilliant young philosopher at Cambridge who thought the Bible was one ancient book among many. When the Second World War came, he took a Bible into the army and began reading it straight through, as an intellectual exercise. Months later, in a barrack room, he wasn’t analysing it any more. He had met the Person it talks about.

You don’t have to settle every question before you open the Bible. Read it honestly, and see what happens.

Think about it: What have you heard people say against the Bible? Which of today’s reasons speaks to it most directly?

Try this: Pick one short book of the Bible, such as Mark, Philippians or James, and start reading it straight through this week, a chapter a day, asking only: What does it actually say?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of Derek Prince — tells how a sceptical Cambridge philosopher read the Bible through for some nine months as a soldier and came out convinced of two things he said for sixty years: that Jesus Christ is alive, and that the Bible is true. Start with chapter 2, “The Philosopher in the Barrack Room”.

Father, thank You that You have spoken, and that You have kept Your Word safe through all these centuries. When I open the Bible, open my heart too. Let it teach me, correct me and train me, even when that’s uncomfortable. Help me to read it honestly and to meet Jesus there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.