Why I Believe the Bible is the Word of God: Genuine Unpolished Records

We live in a world of talking heads. Watch any news channel and so-called experts line up--people you only see from the shoulders up--to spew their rehearsed viewpoints on every topic under heaven.

What is rare is to hear someone say something that is truly original, unexpected, genuine; something akin to the unvarnished, unpolished, unspun truth. Listen to the various voices and what you hear is rehearsed talking points, all pre-packaged, pre-planned, pre-scripted.

When a political party wants to get its message out it rallies its best talking heads, gives them a few things to say, tells them not to wander from those points, locks them into a few "facts", and makes sure they're all on the same page.

What you cannot have in today's political spin game is someone saying something that is off topic, off script, and in any way even apparently out of sinc with the party's other yapping mouths. The facade of credibility is maintained by a contrived, artifical, polished agreement between all those representing a point of view.

The trouble with all this--at least for a thinking person--is that it has all the look and feel of intellectual fraud. Truth does not have to be contrived or polished; just spoken.

This is another reason why I believe the Bible is the Word of God: the diverse styles, accounts, and records of the Bible are remarkably consistent even though they do not bear the marks of human editing to remove apparent error or contradiction, or of human polishing to buff up its claims, legendize its heroes or give it an artificial sacred look.

For example, read the biblical accounts of the resurrection and you will not detect polished attempts to line up all the details. The accounts even have appearance of contradiction (not real contradictions, but simply separate details given by different witnesses).

Read the histories of Israel and the early church and you will not find legendized accounts of heroic, larger than life, can-do-no-wrong super-saints. Instead you'll find real humans who along with their great feats for God committed great sins against God!

Read the poetry and worship songs of the Bible where you might expect to find soaring expressions of astonishing faith and holy worship, and what do you discover? You will find soaring expressions of faith and holy worship. But you will also find shocking expressions of doubt and fear and near depression and even anger against God.

Read the deep writings of the great theologians of the Bible, those whose job, presumably, is to make truth about God clear for all to understand, and what do you find? You will find much that is clear and plain and easily explained. But you will also find mysteries which the writers tell you simply to accept whether one understands them or not (e.g.-the Trinity or the siamese truths of the sovereignty of God and moral responsibility of man). They make no attempt to explain the mysterious or paradoxical; they simply charge the reader to believe.

Make no mistake: the Bible is beautiful, deep, profound, grand, fathomless. But it is also down-to-earth, gritty, unpolished, unspun, genuine, real.

One thing for sure: it is not is contrived. No one met in a back room somewhere and gave the writers of Scripture their talking points and told them to stay on script. What really happened was that God gave them truth to write and told them to write it without concern for artificial points of agreement or appearance of polish. He told them just to write what He said and they saw.

It's like God said: "Tell it like it is. I don't care about whether people appreciate or can reconcile everything you say or not. I want truth-writers, not talking heads. The truth will speak for itself, vindicate itself, and set men free."

Ladies and gentlemen: in many ways, the Bible is not pretty. Neither is it polite, polished, or politically correct. Some see this as excuse to believe it is not true. For my part, I see it as reason to believe that it is.

What do you think?