4 Big Reasons I Believe the Bible

I recently responded in an online forum as to why I believe the Bible to be the Word of God. These are my thoughts, what are yours?

I believe the Bible is the Word of God as preserved in its original manuscripts. There have been obvious errors in translations but not in the substantive portions. Not everything that is said in the Scripture is God speaking, obviously when Satan is speaking, the description of what he said is accurate although what he is saying isn't the truth. As to how the Canon was put together, the early church received rather than produced the Canon in my estimation. The Scripture must be rightly interpreted and there is room for disagreement between honest people on what portions of the Scripture mean. The different genres must be correctly understood as well. So again to be clear, I believe the Canon to be the infallible Word of God.

I'm certainly open for correction and do not claim to be a scholar in the field of textual criticism. But those who are, have demonstrated through critical study and the weight of the evidence these studies have produced to satisfy the claims of my faith. Faith, to me, isn't a leap, but a walk based upon what I believe to be the historical reliability of the resurrection of Jesus and the Word of God. Jesus, the only person in human history who claimed to be God and backed it up by raising himself from the dead said it was the Word of God. I choose to listen to the guy who raised himself from the dead. There are four big reasons I believe the Bible is the Word of God:

1. The Internal Evidence: multiple human authors, separated by thousands of years point to the significance of one man-Jesus. Hundreds of years before Christ's birth, multiple writers told of specific details of his life that came to pass.

2. The External Evidence: No book in human history has been more faithfully preserved, for example the KJV was translated in 1611 from copies of copies of copies. In the 1970's the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered which were ancient copies of the Bible unavailable to the KJV translators. These copies matched the KJV translation with only a few unsubstantial variations. To me that is miraculous.

3. Jesus: to me it all comes back to the resurrection, the most accurate account of the resurrection comes from the NT, where it is written that Jesus took them through "Moses, The Psalms, and The Prophets" a way of describing all of the OT, which Jesus said were ultimately all about him. If the resurrection happened then Jesus is God, If Jesus is God and He said "Man shall not live by bread alone but by EVERY WORD that comes out of the mouth of God" which was itself a quote of Deut. 8:3, then I choose to believe the only guy who ever backed up his claim to be God by rising from the dead.

 4. If the Bible isn't the final arbiter of truth, than what is? My experience? Your experience? What happens when they are different? Can our experiences be manipulated? My faith in God is too profound to rely on subjective experience alone, I must have an objective source of my faith i.e. the Word of God. As Peter stated it after perhaps having had the most profound experience ever which was the transfiguration of Christ, he wrote: "We have a MORE SURE WORD..." (2 Peter 1:19)