How Can I know if the Bible is God’s Word

How Can I know if the Bible is God’s Word?
Does the Bible claim Inspiration?
Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible
Are the Manuscripts Reliable?
Are the Apostles Trustworthy?
Test the Truthfulness of the Bible
Is the History Accurate?
Are the Prophecies confirmed?
Examine the Effects of the Bible
Are lives being changed?

Video – Rediscover the Bible
Slide after Video

Have you ever really thought about the Bible?
I mean, is this really true?

Can this really be God’s word to us?
What about the Koran? What about the Book of Mormon? What about any other religious writing?

How can I know if the Bible is really the word of God? Can we know?

This is really something quite important for us to know.

Why?
Because the Bible is our primary source for
most of what we know about Jesus Christ
all of what we know concerning salvation and how to attain it, and
all of what we know regarding how we should live our lives to the glory of God.

This book, if true, is one that will affect every aspect of our life now as well as our life eternal.

So, we had better try and discern if the Bible really is God’s word and is something I should believe and rely on?

To discern that, we are going to begin looking at some of the evidence to make a determination as to if it is trustworthy or not which will help us to decide why we should believe the Bible.

Understand that today, this is not so much a message from the Bible as it is about the Bible. But I try to preach on this every couple years, because this is vital for us to know, if we are going to be able to respond to messages from the Bible.

So, how can we go about determining if the Bible is something that can be relied on as the very word of God?
To start, we want to ask first
Does the Bible claim to be Inspired?
Slide
What does the Bible say about itself. This is an important question, because we would expect that if God gave us something from Him, he would tell us that it was from Him so we would know.

It doesn’t prove anything, but we would expect it. If it doesn’t claim divine inspiration, that would raise some serious doubts.

But in fact the Bible does claim to be inspired.

Slide
2 Timothy 3:16 - All Scripture is God-breathed…
And Peter says in
2 Peter 1:21 - prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Not only that, but Jesus says to the apostles that
John 14:26 - “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

So the Bible claims to be the inspired word of God and Jesus tells us that the apostles would be able to recall and be taught by the Holy Spirit so the things they wrote would be the very word of God.

Now, As I said earlier, this doesn’t prove anything, only this is what we would be expect.

Transition
For us, however, to get a better understanding if this is something we can believe to be God’s word, we are going to have to look at other evidence.

So the first thing we want to do is
Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible
Slide
Is what we are reading authentic? So, we ask
Are the Manuscripts Reliable?
How can we be sure that what we are reading is actually what the apostles wrote down?

Handwritten Copies
Aren’t the manuscripts we have