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Why do so many churches and Christians make such a big deal of the Bible? Isn’t it just an out-dated, irrelevant piece of ancient literature? Shouldn’t we keep it on the shelf and use more modern books to teach us how to live? These are the questions we’ll explore today.

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before we examine the Bible, let’s start with some fun trivia about all those other books on the shelf…

10 notable best-selling books of all time:

1. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss - 10.5 million
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - 20 million
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - 29 million
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - 40 million
5. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle - 43 million
6. Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren - 50 million
7. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis - over 85 million
8. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling - 120 million
9. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - Over 200 million
10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - Over 500 million

Top three best-selling books of all time:

1. The Quran - Estimated 800 million copies sold and distributed.
2. Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-tung - Over 900 million copies sold.
3. The Bible - Estimated 5 billion copies sold and distributed.

So, back to the question we’ll unbox today:

Q. Is the Bible Just Another Book?

Think about how all of those other books were written:

1. All of those other books were the product of one or more clever minds
2. They all followed a similar process:
3. Come up with the concept
4. Create a storyline, characters, etc.
5. Do some research if needed for accuracy
6. Write and re-write
7. My favorite book on the topic: “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser
8. “Simplify, simplify.”
9. “There’s no minimum length for a sentence that’s acceptable in the eyes of God.”
10. “Writers must constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know.”
11. "Ultimately the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is."

But this is what separates the Bible from every other book: it is not the product of one person’s ideas or creativity. Nobody had to dream up the storyline or characters, and no one had to read “On Writing Well” to turn out the best chapters and verses. The Bible, Christians believe, is unique because it alone was inspired by God. Here’s how Paul explained it to Timothy:

2 Timothy 3:16 (NLT) All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.

1. See Where Did We Get the Bible?
2. “Inspired” = “God-breathed” (theopneustos)
3. Jesus himself attested that the Bible is inspired by God: Mark 12:36 (NLT) “For David himself, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said…” Jesus then quoted Psalm 110. He believed that when David wrote that Psalm, he spoke under the Spirit’s inspiration.
4. Verbal plenary inspiration: divine inspiration extends to the very words themselves, and to all parts of the Bible and all subject matters on which the Bible speaks.

Another passage:

2 Peter 1:20-21 (NLT) Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

1. Not just some dude’s random thoughts or ideas

But how did this work? Inspiration means that the Holy Spirit superintended the process so that the very words written were exactly what the Spirit intended. They are both the words of the human author AND the words of God himself.

1. Inspiration does not equal some kind of dictation. Authors were not like copyists or transcribers, writing down the words of someone dictating a letter. The Bible authors spoke in their own language and style, using their own words and thoughts, in response to specific situations they were dealing with.
2. While it is the Word of God, it is also the words of human authors. The two are not mutually exclusive. God spoke through human authors, through their unique personalities, experiences, language, culture and time.

This is why we can trust the Bible. It is not just the thoughts of humans, but God speaking to us, through the human authors.

One more verse on this:

1 Corinthians 2:13 (NLT) When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths.

But how can we trust that the Bible is reliable in the form we have it today? After all, it was written literally thousands of years ago. Are we sure there wasn’t some sort of “telephone game” going on?

1. Explain telephone game

Here are two reasons we can trust the Bibles we have today (see Lesson 2 in The Pursuit for more):

Historical Evidence

Ancient manuscripts and archeological digs have stacked up in favor of biblical reliability. The Bible was written thousands of years ago, long before printing presses and modern technology. Manuscript fragments of the biblical text have endured wars and weather throughout the ages, and the scraps that remain represent just a fraction of the originals. Are those remnants enough to provide a reliable testimony for modern-day readers? And how can we be sure that the message hasn’t been corrupted over the millennia? The good news is that the God who inspired the scriptures was also powerful enough to preserve those writings through the ages.

Consider the manuscript evidence. Manuscript copies in the ancient world were painstakingly hand-written, and not all of them survived the ravages of time. Reliability of ancient writings is determined by the number of copies (or partial copies) of the work in existence. So how does the Bible stack up? See for yourself:

1. Today we have only 49 copies of Aristotle’s writings.
2. Homer’s “The Iliad” does a little better, with...