The Marks of Divine Inspiration

                It seems that the credibility of the Bible has lately come under attack from various quarters. First there was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, supposedly revealing how Christianity is a great hoax foisted on the world by the Roman Catholic Church. Then came the National Geographic Society and its efforts to restore and translate the “Judas Gospel”, an ancient Gnostic manuscript discovered in 1976. Next will be Ron Howard’s movie version of Da Vinci, starring Tom Hanks.  It is alleged that Da Vinci and the Judas Gospel offer serious challenges to the veracity of the Bible. But do they? I’ll save the answer to that question for the next article. For now, I want to discuss the Bible’s marks of divine inspiration. In our previous two articles we discussed how the Bible has come down to us intact from the original writings and that it is both historically and scientifically accurate. But beyond this, there are the supernatural marks of its divine inspiration, i.e. characteristics that go beyond the ability of man unaided by a supernatural, divine power.

                For example, the Bible is actually not just one book, but a library of 66 books written by at least 40 different authors who lived over a period of 1500 years and came from several different countries. The incredibly varied authorship of the Bible includes shepherds, kings, priests, a prince of Egypt, physicians, tax-collectors, fishermen and many others. Some were Israelites, some were Gentiles. In addition to recording over 10,000 historical events, these men wrote about the most controversial subjects known to man, e.g. the nature of God, the origin, purpose and destiny of man; sin, salvation and eternal life; the nature of angels and spirits, etc.  Yet they never contradict one another. We do not get 40 different views of God, but one. We do not read 40 different views of man’s origin, purpose and destiny, but one. We do not have 40 different views of sin, salvation and the after-life, but one. The degree of internal consistency between these 66 books is utterly amazing and can only be explained as the Bible itself explains it, i.e. one guiding Mind.

But this is not all. There are also the hundreds of predictions made in the Bible of events long before they occurred. For example, the Old Testament prophets made as many as 300 predictions of the coming Messiah as well as many predictions regarding the rise and fall of cities and nations. All were fulfilled perfectly. Only God can predict the future, because he controls it (Rom 4.17; Isa 45.21). Examine the evidence for yourself and see that the Bible is the truly God’s word.

© 2006  Randy Hohf