Chapter Three: Has God Spoken?

Text: 2 Timothy 3:14-17 | Supporting: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Hebrews 1:1-2

Checking the Label

Chapter Two ended with an instruction: check the label against the contents. This chapter is that check, applied to the most important label ever printed.

Here is where the trial stands. In Chapter One we established that God exists, and that His witnesses in creation testify to every person alive. But recall what those witnesses can and cannot do. The heavens can tell you that God is, and that He is powerful. The heavens cannot tell you His name, and they cannot tell you how to be saved. Theologians have names for this distinction, and both belong in your vocabulary. General revelation is what creation tells everyone, enough to leave all of us without excuse. Special revelation is what God tells us in His Word, who He is, what He has done, and what He requires.

Therefore, everything now depends on one question. Does special revelation exist? Has this God actually spoken? The Bible claims that He has, and that it is His speech. That is a claim of fact, and claims of fact must be examined. Let us examine it.

The Text: 2 Timothy 3:14-17

Hear the Word of God:

“You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:14-17, NASB 1995)

God-breathed

The key word in this passage is the one translated “inspired by God.” In Paul’s Greek it is a single word, theopneustos, and it means, literally, God-breathed. Scripture’s claim about itself is not that its writers were unusually wise men, and not that they were religiously inspired the way we say a painter was inspired. The claim is that what they wrote was breathed out by God Himself, through human writers, in human language. Peter describes the mechanism: “no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21).

Notice also what Paul says this God-breathed Book is for. Before it teaches, reproves, corrects, or trains, it is “able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” The Bible’s stated purpose is not to win arguments. It is to lead people to Christ. Keep that in view all chapter, because it is where this chapter is going.

Part One: Why We Believe

Now, the moment I quote the Bible’s claim about itself, an honest objector will raise his hand, and he will be right to. “You cannot prove the Bible by quoting the Bible. That is circular reasoning.”

Correct. And we are not going to do it. The claim of inspiration is the label on the bottle, and labels are not self-verifying. Therefore, we will begin by treating the Bible as what it undeniably is, whatever else it may be: a collection of ancient documents that make checkable claims. Then we will check them. Three checks.

Check one: fulfilled prophecy

Scripture itself nominates this test. God stakes His own identity on it: “I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done” (Isaiah 46:9-10). He even challenges the idols of the nations to compete: announce the future, and we will know you are gods (Isaiah 41:22-23). The reasoning is sound. Only Someone standing outside of time can write history in advance, and we met that Someone in Chapter One, the Uncaused First Cause, who is not bound by the time He created. Therefore, fulfilled prophecy would be exactly what we should expect if the Creator wrote a book, and it would be exactly what no merely human book could contain.

Consider the exhibits. Isaiah names Cyrus as the ruler who would send the exiles home, by name, roughly a century and a half before Cyrus was born (Isaiah 44:28). Micah names Bethlehem as Messiah’s birthplace seven centuries before the manger (Micah 5:2). Psalm 22 describes the piercing of hands and feet, the mocking crowd, and the gambling for garments, written centuries before crucifixion was invented as a method of execution. Isaiah 53 lays out the whole passion, despised, silent before accusers, pierced through for our transgressions, buried with the rich, seven hundred years early.

And here is the evidentiary lock. A skeptic’s natural response is to claim these prophecies were written after the events they describe. The Dead Sea Scrolls closed that door. Among them is a complete scroll of Isaiah, physically dated to more than a century before Jesus was born. The prophecies were demonstrably on the shelf before the fulfillments occurred. That is not a devotional claim. That is an artifact you can go look at.

Check two: the record arrived intact

The second objection is familiar: “It has been copied and translated so many times, like the telephone game, that nobody knows what it originally said.”

The facts run the other direction. The New Testament is preserved in thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts, while the ordinary works of antiquity, the histories and speeches nobody doubts, typically survive in a handful of copies made centuries after the fact. No ancient document on earth is remotely as well attested. And the Dead Sea Scrolls serve double duty here: that Isaiah scroll is roughly a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copy we previously possessed, and when scholars laid the two side by side, they matched, across a millennium of hand copying, in everything that matters. The copyists were faithful.

One correction while we are here, because most people have simply never been told. Your Bible is not a translation of a translation of a translation. The translators of your NASB worked directly from the ancient Hebrew and Greek. There is no chain of whispers. There is one step, from their language to ours, made by scholars who could be checked, and were.

Check three: the impossible consistency

The third check is the one you can verify at your own kitchen table, and I will introduce it with my wife.

My wife is an avid reader, a trait every one of our children has embraced, and for entertainment she reads fiction, mysteries and dramas mostly. And she will regularly report to me how often authors reveal their own inconsistencies. One author described a character’s vast property, a ranch of some kind, and had the driver explain to arriving guests that they had been driving across the owner’s sprawling forty acres for the past several miles. Now, the only way to drive several miles inside forty acres is if the forty acres contains a mountain and you are climbing it by switchbacks. The likelier explanation is that the author had no idea what an acre is. I watched an old John Wayne Western recently in which a handcuffed man was told to hide his hands in his hat, knocked on a door, and walked through it, and when the camera picked him up inside the room, the handcuffs had simply vanished. A professional film crew, with a person whose entire job is continuity, missed it.

Am I criticizing these mistakes? No. I make many more of them. I will say Moses from this pulpit when I mean Noah, and some of you have heard me do it. That is the point. This is the honest human baseline. One professional author, writing one book, in one lifetime, with editors on the payroll, cannot keep her own forty acres straight. We are human, and we err.

Now weigh what the Bible is. Sixty-six books. Roughly forty authors. Shepherds, kings, fishermen, a tax collector, a physician, a tentmaker. Three languages, multiple continents and cultures, across some fifteen hundred years, most of the writers never meeting one another. And the result is one consistent storyline of redemption, one unfolding plan, one Hero, with a beginning in a garden and an ending in a city, and the promise made in the third chapter of the first book kept in the final chapters of the last one. The thing a single author cannot do across three hundred pages, forty authors did across fifteen centuries. On human terms, it makes no sense. Therefore, the sensible conclusion is that the terms were not merely human. This is what a book looks like when it has many pens and one Author. “Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”

The verdict on the label

Three checks. Prophecy that only Someone outside of time could write, with the Dead Sea Scrolls sealing the dates. A manuscript record without rival in the ancient world, proving the text arrived intact. A consistency across forty authors and fifteen centuries that human authorship cannot explain. Therefore, when this Book claims to be God-breathed, that claim is not circular reasoning. It is the best explanation of the evidence we just examined. The label matches the contents.

And the writer of Hebrews tells us where all that speech was headed: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). The Book is not God’s final word. The Son is. The Book is how we meet Him.

Part Two: How We Share It

So what do you do on Tuesday, when somebody says “it was just written by men,” or “it has been translated so many times,” or “it is full of contradictions”?

First, the diagnosis, as always. In thirty years I have found that these objections are almost never conclusions a person studied his way into. They are secondhand slogans, picked up and repeated because they excuse the listener from the Book’s authority. Because that is what is really at stake: if this is God’s Word, it has claims on the reader, and the throne is in question again. Evidence answers the head, but only surrender answers the heart.

Therefore, do not open with a lecture. Open with a question, and here is the most disarming one I know: “Have you ever actually read it? As an adult, I mean.” Ask it kindly, because you are not scoring a point, you are stating an invitation. Most people attacking the Bible have never read the Bible, and many of them know it the moment you ask.

For the telephone-game objection, you now own the one-minute correction: thousands of manuscripts, a scroll of Isaiah older than Jesus that matches your Bible, and a translation made in one step from the original languages. Deliver it in a minute and stop. You are informing, not burying.

For the contradiction claim, ask sincerely, “Which one troubles you most?” Most people cannot name one, and the question exposes that gently, without you saying a word. And the man who can name one deserves a real answer, or an honest “let me look into that and get back to you,” which is a promise you should keep, because keeping it will say more than the answer does.

And here is your shareable exhibit. Hand somebody Isaiah 53, with no introduction, and ask two questions: who is this describing, and when do you suppose it was written? Then tell them. Written seven centuries before the cross, sitting in a physical scroll that predates the manger. Let the Word do its own work, because God has promised that it does: “so will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; it will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire” (Isaiah 55:10-11). Notice how the Lord frames that promise, as rain and snow that come down from heaven and water the earth. The same God who did not leave Himself without witness in the rains has not left Himself without witness in His Word, and the Word’s stated purpose is the one Paul gave us at the start: wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

The Charge

The forty acres could not stay consistent for one novel. The Book has stayed consistent for fifteen hundred years of writing and two thousand more of copying, and its oldest scrolls agree with the Bible on your shelf. God has spoken, brothers and sisters, and He has not mumbled.

So here is the charge, the same one that ends every chapter in this book. The evidence is in. The verdict is yours.

The Juror’s Assignment: Read Psalm 19 out loud, once, slowly. Then write one sentence finishing this line: “I trust the Bible because…” Keep your sentence in your case file. If you cannot finish the sentence honestly yet, write down the question that stands in your way, and keep that instead.

Next: Chapter Four, Can We Trust the Gospels?