Biblical Reliability

by Dudley Ross Spears

How reliable is the Bible? How do we know it is truly the word of God? What evidence is there that justifies our respect for and allegiance to the Book? In this installment, we will consider the things that prove the Bible to be a reliable revelation of the mind of God to the world.

“The Word Lives and Abides Forever”

Peter wrote to Christians who had been born again “not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (I Peter 1:23). He added, “But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (I Peter 1:25). Jesus said, Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). The Psalmist wrote, “Thy word is true from the begin­ning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever” (Psalm 119:160).

The Bible is the one and only book revealing God’s word to the world. Others have made pious claims to being divine revelation but all have been abundantly shown to be fraudulent. Probably the most infamous of all is The Book of Mormon. The first part of the Mormon document is a flat denial of the reliability of the Bible.

The Book of Mormon reads,

“Neither will the Lord God suffer that the Gentiles shall forever remain in that awful state of blindness, which thou beholdest they are in, because of the plain and most precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb which have been kept back by that abominable church, whose formation thou hast seen. Behold, saith the Lamb of God, after I have visited the remnant of the house of Israel--and this remnant of whom I speak is the seed of thy father--wherefore, after I have visited them in judgment, and smitten them by the hand of the Gentiles, and after the Gentiles do stumble exceedingly, because of the most plait and precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb which have been kept back by that abominable church, which is the mother of harlots, saith the Lamb” (1 Nephi 13:32-35).

Joseph Smith, Jr., whose work is pure plagiarism, had to put this in the Mormon book to set the stage for a “latter-day revelation.” His false assumption is that the Bible has become corrupt through the efforts of Catholicism. He means the Roman Catholic Church when he speaks of that “abominable church.”

The plain passage Smith’s book, The Book of Mormon, contradicts is as follows: “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, 0 LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psalm 12:6-7).

Jeremiah was commanded to write all of God’s denunciations against Israel. The prophet sent Baruch, who served as penman for the words, to go before Jehoiakim and read the scroll. The reaction of Jehoiakim is recorded as follows:

Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him.”And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah 36:23).

In the apocryphal book of 1 Maccabees, there is a record of Antiochus IV who made it a capital offense even to possess a copy of the Old Testament records. He gathered all he could find and burned them -- but we still have the Old and New Testaments.

The Bible is the one and only book that could possibly stand the test to which it has been put. No other book could survive such efforts to destroy it. The old book is reliable and true.

One of the enemies of the Bible was Jean Jacques Rousseau. He confessed, “I must confess to you that the majesty of the Scriptures astonishes me; if it had been the invention of man, the invention would have been greater than the greatest heroes.”

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