THE BIBLE AS AN ACCURATE HISTORIC RECORD OF EVENTS!
I'm talking first here about the New Testament, because that's where we Christians now 'live', i.e., it's our primary source of guidance and information. But can we believe all that's written there, that's the question?
One interesting way to look at this is to borrow a little from basic scientific method. If someone's come up with a new idea, then it's useless until it's tested, right? Does it work? Is it true? So tests need to be set up and performed. The first one works. But that's not enough. We have to do more and more and more until the results are consistent and most of all repeatable. Then we know the idea is right!
Christianity is like that. A friend once called it an 'Experimental Religion' - you need to try it to test it out. No good just seeing it as an idea or theory, no matter whether it looks good or not. That's hardly rational or even scientific! - have to test it. So let's see now. In the New Testament God makes many statements that we can test, to see if He can deliver. I'll mention just a very few out of the great number there. He says that when you accept Jesus into your life then you can expect:
To have a great amount of LOVE in your life
To have deep-down PEACEFULNESS, and
Deep-down JOYFULNESS, that nothing that happens in your life will affect!
To have PERSONAL FREEDOM
To never feel ALONE, having to struggle through life by yourself
To be CONTENTED in your life.
The number of people alive today who have put Christianity and God and thus THE WHOLE BIBLE to the test number as many as 100 million! These have proven that when God promises something in the Bible, then it WILL BE SO!!! Proving God's Word to be true, and not a falsehood. Proving the things set out there are correct, and - as I've personally proved in my own life - CHRISTIANITY WORKS! No one in the world can show otherwise to me and to millions of others (that's a lot of testing, isn't it!), and I would not change my life for all of the money in the whole world!
Maybe that's enough: the 'put it to the test' procedure to show that the Bible is true and God is real!
NOTE: We all live in the physical (normal) world. But there's a true spiritual world too, which God intended us all to live in. Those who accept Jesus as Lord and as Saviour from all sin live in this world. But for us the spiritual and the physical are united into ONE - but we can still see and talk about them separately. As we Christians experience life in the spiritual world, it's real!! But you can't know that without 'becoming a member'. Which is another story I can't go into now.
But if you'd like more, then let's look at the 27 books that make up the New Testament. Up until around the 2nd half of the 20th Century, we couldn't really show or prove that the NT is an accurate record of events. BUT NOW WE CAN! Currently we have over 24,000 New Testament documents, many dating from the time of Jesus' generation! This is nothing short of astonishing. Nothing else from history comes anywhere close! For example to know about Plato and Julius Caesar we have access to less than a dozen manuscripts! Compared to 24,000!!!
It's true that we don't have original copies, but here's the thing. Again the 20th Century proved once and for all that even the later copies of the NT, like from many hundreds of years after the events, all read the same!!! Those who copied them were painstaking in their hand copying, and so what we have today is a PROVEN HISTORIC RECORD of exactly what took place from the time of Jesus' birth and for many decades later, as the new Christian church started to grow and expand.
So Jesus is an historic figure, far MORE proven so than Aristotle or Homer, or Socrates! And we know what He did and what He said. For example He performed thousands of miracles in front of thousands of witnesses, miracles never before or since done by any man. "Jesus, Jesus," the two blind beggars called over and over as He and His party were passing. "What do you want from Me?" Jesus asked. "Our sight!" Jesus touched their eyes, and instantly they could SEE!
"Would you like to walk?" He asked the man crippled from birth. "Oh, yes!" "Then arise and walk!" He got up, walked, jumped, ran! His parents came and couldn't believe their eyes at their adult son, crippled from birth, who was now totally healed. The deaf heard, the sick were healed, even the dead were brought back to life! Many many thousands were fed from a few small fish and loaves of bread - and there were baskets and baskets full left over.
Jesus went to His death for us. But rose the third day to show and PROVE that He was Who He claimed: the Son of God, and even equal with God. He rose out of the grave leaving just the grave clothes. All of this was seen and witnessed by many witnesses who wrote down what they saw and experienced.
AND God's Son treated the OLD TESTAMENT as an accurate record of God's dealings with men and the affairs of men - thus putting it into the accurate and true category also. Which the Jews of Jesus' day knew it was anyway. Never has a race of people (the Jews, or Hebrews) had such a history written down, such that Jews of TODAY know who their great, great, great... grandparents (goodness knows how many "greats"!), e.g., I know Jews from the tribe of Judah, who lived thousands and thousands of years ago!!!
There's even more when we go into Prophecy, which has been tested by accepted scientific method by a University Professor and from memory it was 600 students, showing with NO doubt whatever that prophecies from the OT that were fulfilled by Jesus could NOT POSSIBLY have been a coincidence! God wrote and predicted - and things HAPPENED exactly as written Thus the OT clearly IS God's Book as well as the NT.
Any queries, just ask. I hope this may have been of some help.
- Bondman (ministering the Good News of the Gospel)
