Can I Trust The Bible? The Bible Is... (Part 1)

Can I Trust The Bible?: The Bible Is…

January 4th, 2026 | Seventh Day Adventist

Intro:

Good morning Pinewood.

It is the first Sunday of a new year, and whether you are the kind of person who loves New Year’s resolutions or the kind of person who absolutely despises them, most of us do the same thing when January arrives, we begin to reassess our rhythms and priorities and ask ourselves what we are actually building our lives on.

Good time to make a calculated decision. Not be impulsive.

Guine - pic

We start thinking about what voices we are allowing to shape us, what inputs we are trusting, what stories we are believing, and whether we realize it or not, we begin deciding what will carry authority in our lives this year.

Have you ever thought to yourself, I love Jesus, I believe in the church, but I honestly do not know what to do with the Bible? If you have ever felt the tension of wanting to believe while also having so many questions, then you’re not alone. And if you have ever wondered whether we can actually trust this book, whether it has integrity, whether it has been preserved faithfully, whether it deserves the authority Christians claim for it, these questions are not rebellious, they are honest… and I believe they can be very helpful.

Because the Bible is not a side accessory to Christianity, it is not a supporting document, it is not optional reading, it is the source text of the faith, which means if it is unreliable, then faith becomes preference, spirituality becomes personal opinion, and truth becomes whatever feels meaningful in the moment.

But if it is trustworthy, then we are dealing with something weighty, something living, something that does not simply offer helpful advice, but lovingly demands a response.

So I want to say this clearly at the beginning.

I am not asking you for blind faith, and I am not asking you to suspend your questions. I am asking you for honest consideration.

Passage: 2 Timothy 3:14-17 NKJV

But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, 15 and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Roadmap:

Let me tell you where we are going so you can track with me.

First, we are going to define a few common words you hear but rarely stop to understand, which are the words “Bible” and “inspired”.

Second, we are going to walk through the historical and literary evidence that shows why the Bible is not simply another ancient religious text, but it is unique in its authority.

Third, we are going to talk about manuscripts and transmission and why the Bible is actually the most textually supported body of literature from the ancient world.

And finally, we are going to look at Jesus, the apostles, and the early church, and confront a modern assumption head on, which is that there was Scripture long before there was ever a bound Bible.

Main Point: What Is the Bible and Why Is It Unique

When we use the word Bible, what we are actually using is a word that comes from a Greek phrase meaning the books, not the book, but the books (library), which already tells us something important about what we are dealing with.

That matters because when people criticize the Bible, they often talk about it as if it is a single document written by one person at one moment with one agenda, when in reality that is not even close to what the Bible actually is.

The Bible is…

a library of 66 books

written over about 1,500 years

Across 3 continents

In 3 original languages

By more than 40 different authors.

Those authors include kings and shepherds, prophets and poets, fishermen and physicians, scholars and exiles, people with radically different life experiences, educational backgrounds, and social positions.

From a purely literary standpoint, that alone is unusual. But here is where it becomes genuinely startling. The Bible is not simply a collection of religious thoughts or spiritual reflections gathered over time, but a unified storyline that moves with intention and direction.

It begins with creation and meaning, it moves through humanity’s fracture and failure, it centers on God’s promise of redemption, and it builds toward fulfillment and restoration.

From beginning to end, the Bible is telling one cohesive story about who God is, who we are, what went wrong, and how God intends to make it right.

Now, that does not prove inspiration all by itself, but it does raise a question that any honest skeptic has to wrestle with, which is what kind of process could possibly produce that level of coherence across that much time, culture, and human limitation.

Reality Check

Imagine trying to do something like this today.

You start with Leo Tolstoy writing about sacrificial love and moral responsibility, then two hundred years later Frederick Douglass adds a chapter shaped by Scripture and justice, then C.S. Lewis jumps in and somehow manages to make theology readable, then a Christian scientist explains why faith and science are not enemies, then a philosopher clarifies why belief in God is not intellectual laziness, then a trauma counselor adds a chapter on suffering and healing, then a prison chaplain writes about repentance and grace, and then someone from a persecuted underground church quietly contributes knowing it could cost them everything.

And then, sixteen centuries later, you put it all together and somehow it tells one unified story. That would never happen!

It would become the worst group project EVER! Where one person disappears halfway through, one rewrites everything the night before, one changes the font for no reason at all, and someone submits it early without your name on it. That is what human collaboration normally looks like. And yet the Bible holds together.

What “Inspired” Actually Means

When Paul says that all Scripture is inspired by God, that word is often misunderstood. Some people assume it means the writers were robots taking dictation, while others think it simply means the Bible is inspiring or emotionally moving, and others assume Christians decided it was special after the fact. But the biblical claim is far stronger than that.

The word Paul uses means God breathed, which carries the idea that God spoke through human authors in such a way that their personality, vocabulary, style, and historical context are fully present, and yet what they wrote is exactly what God intended to communicate.

Revelation is God making Himself known, and inspiration is how that revelation was delivered in written form.

So when Christians say the Bible is inspired, we are not saying it is merely human reflection about God, but that it is God’s Word to humanity, communicated through human authors.

That is the claim we are actually evaluating today.

Story: A Bible Worth Dying For

Before we talk manuscripts, I want you to feel the weight of this conversation emotionally, not just intellectually.

In the fifteen hundreds there was a man named William Tyndale who believed that ordinary people should be able to read the Bible in their own language, not just clergy or scholars, but farmers, mothers, and children.

That idea was illegal.

So Tyndale went into hiding and translated the New Testament into English by candlelight, constantly moving, constantly hunted, knowing that discovery would cost him his life.

Eventually he was captured and imprisoned for over a year in a cold, damp cell, cut off from community, weakened by sickness, and awaiting execution.

Before he was killed, his last recorded prayer was simple and haunting: Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.

He was strangled and then burned. And within a few years, the English Bible was legalized, largely built on his translation.

You do not give your life for a book you believe is a political invention. You give your life for what you believe is the voice of God.

And what breaks me about that story is that we live in a moment where the Bible is everywhere, on our phones, on our shelves, in translations Tyndale never dreamed of, and yet many of us quietly do not know what to do with it.

That is not condemnation.

That is invitation.

Main Point 2: Can We Trust the Text We Actually Have

Most skepticism today is not really about theology, but about transmission.

People are asking how we know the text was not changed, corrupted, manipulated, or lost over time.

A manuscript is a hand copied document, and an autograph is the original writing produced by the author.

We do not possess the autographs of most ancient works, including the New Testament, and that is completely normal.

The real question is not whether we have the originals, but whether we have enough early copies, spread across enough regions, to reconstruct the original text with a high degree of confidence.

That discipline is called textual criticism.

And here is the mind blowing part.

The New Testament is the best attested body of writing in the ancient world, with around five thousand eight hundred Greek manuscripts, plus thousands more in early translations, some of which date within decades of the original writing.

That level of evidence is staggering by ancient standards.

A Necessary Comparison

Take Tacitus, one of the most trusted Roman historians, whose work survives through a very thin manuscript tradition, and yet no one dismisses Roman history as unreliable because of it.

The same is true for Plato, whose writings many of us read in college without questioning whether we were reading something close to what Plato actually wrote, even though the manuscript evidence for Plato is far thinner and far later than the New Testament.

The same is true for Homer’s Iliad, which is treated as a cornerstone of Western literature despite having a manuscript tradition significantly less robust than the New Testament.

No one dismisses Plato or Homer as unreliable.

So the question becomes unavoidable.

Why is the Bible treated as fragile while everything else is treated as trustworthy?

Historically, the Bible is not fragile.

It is robust.

What About Variants

A variant is simply a difference between manuscripts, and variants exist because we have so many manuscripts to compare.

Most variants are spelling differences, word order changes, or minor scribal mistakes that do not change meaning.

And scholars across the spectrum agree that no core Christian doctrine rests solely on a disputed variant, including the resurrection, the deity of Christ, or salvation by grace.

The Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, our earliest Hebrew manuscripts were about a thousand years after Jesus, but the scrolls pushed that evidence back centuries.

What shocked scholars was not difference, but stability.

This is not wishful thinking.

This is ink, papyrus, and history.

Summary:

The Bible we hold today is not a distant game of telephone, but a text with an unusually dense, early, and geographically widespread manuscript tradition that allows scholars to reconstruct the original with high confidence.

Main Point 3: Why the Bible Was Recognized, Not Invented

Here is the myth we need to confront, because it sits quietly underneath so many modern doubts about the Bible.

The myth is that the Bible became authoritative only after it was collected, organized, voted on, or bound together centuries later, as if Scripture started out as a loose collection of religious opinions and only gained weight once the church gave it power.

But historically, that is simply not what happened.

There was Scripture long before there was ever a bound Bible.

What is striking when you slow down and pay attention to the New Testament is that the earliest followers of Jesus did not treat Scripture as something they were experimenting with or negotiating over, but as something they were already standing under.

Jesus Himself consistently quotes Scripture, submits to it, fulfills it, and holds people accountable to it, not as a flexible tradition that could be reshaped when it became inconvenient, but as the authoritative voice of God speaking into real life.

One of the clearest places we see this is after the resurrection.

In Luke 24, Jesus is walking with two disciples who are confused, disappointed, and disoriented because everything they thought would happen did not unfold the way they expected, and they are trying to make sense of suffering, loss, and shattered hope.

And Luke tells us something remarkable. Later that same evening, with the disciples gathered together, Jesus says it plainly.

Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” - Luke 24:44

On the road, Jesus does not calm their doubts with a mystical experience or bypass their questions with emotion, but beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He walks them through the Scriptures and explains how the entire story has been pointing to Him all along.

Later, when those disciples reflect on that moment, they say that their hearts burned within them while He was opening the Scriptures to them.

Which tells us something profound.

Jesus believed that the way to anchor confused hearts was not less Scripture, but more Scripture rightly understood.

Jesus treated the Scriptures as the interpretive key to reality, the lens through which suffering, redemption, and hope finally make sense.

So when someone says, I love Jesus but I do not trust the Bible, they are not just making a personal preference statement, they are creating a tension they have to wrestle with honestly.

Because Jesus trusted the Scriptures.

Which means either Jesus was naïve about the very texts that framed His identity and mission, or the Scriptures are far more trustworthy than our modern suspicion assumes.

And this confidence in Scripture did not stop with Jesus.

While the New Testament was still being written, it was already being treated as Scripture by the people closest to the events.

In 2 Peter 3:15-16, Peter refers to Paul’s letters and says that people distort them, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures, placing Paul’s writings in the same category as the sacred texts Israel had trusted for centuries.

That means recognition was happening in real time, among eyewitnesses and early leaders who were not removed from the events by centuries, but standing right in the middle of them.

This was not politicians inventing power from a distance.

This was the earliest Christian community recognizing that something uniquely authoritative was being spoken and written in their midst.

The authority of Scripture did not come from later endorsement, but from early recognition, because these writings carried the voice, the truth, and the power that aligned with the story God had already been telling.

Which brings us to a sobering realization.

The Bible did not slowly grow into authority over time.

It was recognized as authoritative because it spoke with authority from the beginning.

And that means the question is not whether Scripture deserves authority in our lives.

The real question is whether we are willing to place ourselves under the authority it already claims.

From Evidence to Invitation

Paul did not say Scripture is inspired so you could win arguments, but so that it could teach, rebuke, correct, train, and equip you.

If the Bible is trustworthy, then it is not merely interesting, but lovingly confrontational, because truth always presses us toward response.

Many of us do not struggle to believe the Bible.

We struggle to submit to it.

Illustration: The Mirror

James says the Word of God is like a mirror, and mirrors do not insult or exaggerate, they simply tell the truth.

Most of us avoid mirrors not because they are inaccurate, but because they reveal something we are not ready to deal with yet, which is exactly how Scripture confronts us, with honesty.

Closing:

If you came in skeptical, you are welcome here, and you are invited to ask, examine, and weigh the evidence honestly, because this is not a fragile text.

And if it is true, it is not optional.

If you came in as a believer, some of you did not drift from Scripture because you rebelled, but because life got loud and attention got scattered.

God is not calling us into vague inspiration this year.

He is calling us into formation.

So here is the question.

If the Bible is this trustworthy, what place will it have in your life this year?

Because something will shape you.

Walking Points

1. Some of us need to say, God, give me intellectual honesty and the courage to follow truth wherever it leads.
2. Some of us need to say, God, rebuild my appetite for Your Word, because I have been feeding on noise.
3. Some of us need to say, God, help me obey what I already know, not just learn more.

Let us make the Word of God a priority this year, not as a checkbox, but as a foundation, as a lamp, and as the voice that forms a people.