IS THE BIBLE TRUE?, 3-15-26, Associate Pastor Jerry Koon,

How Do I Know the Bible is True?

Many People Say: 

• The Bible is just an antiquated collection of fables and myths

• The Bible is full of contradictions and mistakes

• Why are some ancient texts included in the Bible while others were excluded?

• The Bible has been proven false by historical records and archaeology

• The Bible had been changed many times over the years

8 PIECES OF EVIDENCE AS TO WHY WE KNOW THE BIBLE IS TRUE

1. Internal claims

2 Timothy 3;16-17 - All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

2 Peter 1:20 -21 - knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2. The testimony of Jesus

Jesus testified directly that God’s Word, the Bible, is truth: Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.  John 17:17

3. Internal consistency

imagine another book, written over 1,500 years by 40 different authors, living on 3 different continents, writing in 3 different languages.

4. History and Archaeology

there are more than 30 sources other than the Bible, written within 150 years of the Jesus’ life that also testify to more than 100 facts regarding His life, teachings, crucifixion and resurrection.

5. Scientific accuracy

6. Manuscript evidence

Perhaps you have heard people claim that the Bible has been copied and translated so many times down through the centuries that we just can’t trust that what we have today is trustworthy

The Dead Sea schools: Those 800 scrolls contained fragments from every book of the Old Testament except for Esther and they included a copy of the entire book of Isaiah that dated back to around 75BC.

Scholars were then able to compare those scrolls to the Masoretic Text from around 1000 AD that is the primary source for many of our current day translations. They found that there was 95% word for word accuracy over almost 1100 years of hand copying the text.

And out of the 5% variance were nothing more than omitted letters or misspelled words.

7. Prophecy

That was one of roughly 300 different prophecies in the Old Testament regarding the first coming of Jesus and every single one of them was fulfilled literally by Jesus.

Using very conservative assumptions they calculated that the odds of any one person being able to fulfill all 8 from the beginning of time up until he published his work in 1958 was one in 10 to the 17th power (1 in 1017). That’s a big number!

To put that in perspective, the odds of winning the Powerball are roughly 1 in 259 million. That means that odds of Jesus fulfilling all 8 of those prophecies is something like 50 billion times less likely than winning the Powerball.

*Photo – Just How Big is the State of Texas

8. The power to transform lives

If the Bible is indeed true, then the decision you have to make is whether you’re willing to change your life to live out what it says.