[The text below represents an edited transcript of this Tomorrow’s World program.]
Putting Faith in the Bible
Is the Bible the word of God? Or is it merely the writings of delusional men? According to one of today’s most outspoken anti-god crusaders, it’s the latter. One can hear the disdain coming from Richard Dawkins when he declared in The God Delusion:
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and “improved” by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006, p. 90).
On the surface, Dawkins may sound good to those who have an anti-biblical bias, or are simply ignorant of the Bible, but his facts are not quite correct, and he fails to see the overall picture and the unity of thought found in this remarkable book. So what is the answer to the question? Is the book we know of as the Bible the word of God or the work of men?
I’ll answer this question today on Tomorrow’s World, and give you three reasons you can have confidence in the Bible. And I’ll also be offering a resource to further strengthen your understanding, so be sure to have writing material available on how to receive a free copy of The Bible: Fact or Fiction? And stay tuned, as I’ll be right back!
Evolution or God?
A warm welcome to all of you from all of us here at Tomorrow’s World. I’m happy you’re joining us today, because you need to know the answer to the question, “Is the book that we call the Bible the word of God, or the work of mere men?” You may believe that it is or that it isn’t, but have you, not just believed, but have you proved the answer to this question for yourself? You need to know for sure, because how you answer this question has a great impact on how you live your life. Is this book reliable? Can you count on its teachings and its promises, such as the promise of life after death?
You need to prove this one way or the other, and I’m asserting today that you can prove the Bible is more than the work of mere men. It’s the work of the Creator of life—the One who knows best how we ought to live our lives, and the One who has a plan for you and for me. To accompany today’s program, we are offering a resource that gives even more information on this subject, so be sure to take down the contact information that will be shown at different times during this program to receive a free copy of The Bible: Fact or Fiction?
Where do we start in proving the Bible? The answer is that we start with whether there is a God who inspired it. To prove the Bible we have to prove God. So:
Reason #1: The Author of the Bible is real, and you can prove His existence
The theory of evolution has become a great destroyer of faith and from a very young age we are bombarded in nature programs and in school with the idea that life wasn’t created, but is the result of evolutionary processes. And individuals such as Dawkins ridicule those who believe in God.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence (“Editorial: A scientist’s case against God,” The Independent, April 20, 1992).
In the mind of Dawkins, belief in God is based on blind faith, but evolution, on the other hand, is founded on factual evidence. However, not all evolutionists share his disdain, but recognize that evolution also requires faith. In a February 13, 1993 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which the topic under discussion was how to deal with “The New Antievolutionism,” Michael Ruse, a giant in the field of evolution and philosophy, made the following revealing statement:
And certainly, there’s no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion (“Speech by Professor Michael Ruse,” ARN.org, February 13, 1993).
Now lest any misunderstand, Ruse is a hardline evolutionist, and he made that abundantly clear in his symposium speech and in his answers to questions presented to him. Yet, he continued with his admissions that evolution is a secular religion:
But I am coming here and saying, I think that philosophically that one should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely, that evolution…akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically (ibid.).
While Dawkins and many others ridicule faith in God as lacking evidence, it would serve them well, as Ruse was trying to explain to those in attendance at the symposium, to look in the mirror and admit their own faith in their Darwinian god.
Now, we cannot prove that God exists by disproving evolution, but frankly, what are the alternatives? If evolution is shown to be a false religion, maybe one needs to look more closely at that alternative.
This brings me to a crucial point of scientific fact. Before evolution you first must have life, and life rising spontaneously is simply impossible.
The Miracle of Life in a Cell
Life evolving from some primordial soup sounds so inviting, a sure thing. Give the right conditions and it has to happen, but does it? How easy is it to put together a living organism, no matter how “simple”?
Michael Denton highlights what all knowledgeable biologists must admit—life is complex beyond belief:
Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small… each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery… far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Denton, 1986, p. 250).
Now think about that. “The tiniest bacterial cells” are “far more complicated than any machine built by man.” And that, my friends, is no exaggeration. He states further:
The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Denton, p. 264).
The next time a news report comes out about finding water on some distant rock, as though that’s all that’s needed for life, consider this statement from evolutionist Bill Bryson in his new book The Body:
You could call together all the brainiest people who are alive now or have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of human knowledge, and they could not between them make a single living cell… (The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson, 2019, p. 4).
Congratulations to all evolutionists on your unmatched faith. In the next paragraph he refers to life as a “miracle.” Bryson understands that DNA is needed to make our cells, but what is DNA? He says:
Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. (ibid, p. 6).
But how did this instruction manual come to be? Who wrote the code? And get this: It takes protein machines to carry out the instructions to make the proteins. How did the first proteins come into being?
Now if life did not arise by chance, then the best inference is that there is a God of intelligence beyond our imagination and our very existence calls for the question, why? Why do we exist—for what purpose? And would that Creator not give us understanding to that purpose? So where might we look for His revelation? Could it be that the marvelous book known as the Bible is the answer?
Bible Prophecy Fulfilled
[Our first point was] Reason #1: The Author of the Bible is real, and you can prove His existence, and #2: Fulfilled prophecy proves the Bible is the word of God.
It may surprise you to learn that one-fourth to one-third of the Bible is prophecy. And through the words of this amazing book, One claims to be God Almighty, the One who can foretell history in advance. Notice this challenge found in Isaiah 46, and verses 9 and 10:
Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure” (Isaiah 46:9–10).
Has God through the Bible accurately predicted the future? Yes, He has. Many easy to understand prophecies have already come to pass, such as some found in the book of Daniel.
Shortly after taking the throne of the Chaldean (or Babylonian) empire, King Nebuchadnezzar had an unusually realistic dream. In it he saw an image of a man and Daniel was called to interpret its meaning. Here is how Daniel described Nebuchadnezzar’s image—Daniel 2, beginning in verse 32:
This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces (Daniel 2:32–34).
Daniel then explained that the head of gold represented Nebuchadnezzar and his Chaldean kingdom and that there would be three kingdoms to follow. Notice it in verses 39 and 40:
But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours; then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything; and like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others (Daniel 2:39–40).
History confirms the following four kingdoms:
Babylon
Medo-Persian Empire
Greco-Macedonian Empire
Roman Empire
The descriptions of these four world powers are given greater detail in Daniel 7 and Revelation chapters 13 and 17, but we won’t take time on this program to go into those details. However, in the eighth chapter of Daniel, very specific details are given regarding the relationship between the two middle kingdoms where they are described as a ram and a goat...
The ram which you saw, having the two horns—they are the kings of Media and Persia. And the male goat is the kingdom of Greece. The large horn that is between its eyes is the first king (Daniel 8:20–22).
True to this prophecy, Alexander the Great of Macedonia rose up on the Grecian peninsula and overthrew the Medes and the Persians. His empire stretched from Greece to India and south into Egypt. We read further in this prophecy that, upon his death in 323 BC, his kingdom would be divided among four of his generals into four separate kingdoms. Daniel 8:22,
As for the broken horn and the four that stood up in its place, four kingdoms shall arise out of that nation, but not with its power (Daniel 8:22).
While we have past prophecies that we can look to, and there are far more than most people can imagine, there are other prophecies that are happening right now before our eyes. As we have shown on this program numerous times, Daniel accurately describes the time of the end as being a time of great knowledge and transportation explosions. Notice it in 12:4:
But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4).
And there are many, and I mean many, prophecies that are yet to be fulfilled. After all, the Bible contains one-fourth to one-third prophecy and that is a lot of prophecy.
There is yet another proof of the Bible that I want to give you today.
God’s Ways Work
The first reason we covered on today’s program is:
Reason #1: The Author of the Bible is real, and you can prove His existence
Reason #2: Fulfilled prophecy proves the Bible is the word of God
Now for our third reason:
Reason #3: The proof of the pudding is in the eating
To put it another way, God knows best how we ought to live our lives. Consider this challenge given in the book of Deuteronomy in 30:19:
I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live (Deuteronomy 30:19).
That is the challenge set before each and every one of us. But the Bible also reveals something important about our nature—we would rather trust our own judgment than that of our Creator. This point is made in numerous scriptures as well as the recorded history of man, but notice how it is put succinctly in Proverbs 14:12. Where it says,
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Proverbs 14:12).
God reveals that there are two ways of life. One leads to all kinds of blessings and life. The other leads to trouble ending in death. Man’s proclivity is to choose the latter. So let’s see how the Bible gives us the right way to live.
One of the Ten Commandments says very simply,
You shall not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14).
Now I’ve chosen this one because we might all agree that murder and stealing are not good—at least not good for the other person—but rejecting the temptation to commit adultery not only benefits others, but obedience to this command protects the self. Sadly, many in our world violate this command. Most rational people recognize that adultery is a scourge on society that hurts marriages, children, and individuals who commit this sin. As we are advised in 1 Corinthians 6:18,
Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body (1 Corinthians 6:18).
Does anyone disagree that sexually transmitted diseases are only one negative result of sexual immorality? These diseases could be wiped out in a single generation if these intimate acts were confined to faithful, monogamous marriage relations. Yet, human reason allows for people to argue otherwise against all observable wisdom and facts. One could cite many examples of how God knows best, but I want to focus on another example of God’s law as revealed in the Bible, and it’s one that the whole world is currently paying a heavy price for rejecting.
God, out of loving concern, gave mankind laws of clean and unclean meats. He told us what is good for man to eat and what is not. The distinction is first mentioned in the flood account where Noah was told to take animals aboard the Ark, but not all animals were the same. Notice it in Genesis 7:2:
You shall take with you SEVEN each of every clean animal, a male and his female; TWO each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female (Genesis 7:2).
This was centuries before Moses. However, the Bible waits until Moses to delineate the differences between clean and unclean. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 spell out those differences. The majority of mankind rejects these instructions and the result in one word? Coronavirus.
The year 2020 will go down in history as the year COVID-19 devastated the lives and economies of individuals and nations. Whether the coronavirus came from a “wet market” or from a biohazard lab, the origin is the horseshoe bat. Since the 2003–2004 SARS outbreak, this bat, and the coronavirus it carries, has been studied extensively, as it is believed to be the source of that outbreak. However, even though bats are used in Chinese medicine and at the dinner table in China, these viruses normally have to first infect another animal before they can spread human to human.
Popular Science published an article during the SARS crisis in which it stated the following:
In theory, SARS leapt from a wild beast to a human when it acquired the molecular “keys” to gain entry to our cells, explains [Michael] Lai. To do that, it may have first mingled with a human virus brewing inside another species. A pig, for example, can serve as a genetic mixing bowl when co-infected with two viruses, allowing them to swap genes (“SARS: Where Did It Come From?” PopSci.com, July 2, 2003).
The article goes on to make this remarkable statement:
“The fact that both SARS and most flu viruses originated in southern China is no surprise,” says virologist Michael Lai, who believes that the region’s social customs of catching and eating wild game expose people to animal viruses (ibid.).
Now consider the profound implications of this. The cause of most flu viruses is known and if you stop the cause, you stop the flu. Wild game is not the problem, but the KIND of wild game is. Note that the bat and pig are both listed as unclean according to the Bible. So are camels, primates (such as monkeys), and other exotic foods eaten in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the world. Ebola, MERS, the Nipah Virus, the 1918 flu pandemic, COVID-19, and many other diseases are the result of handling biblically unclean meats. While scientists have figured this out, humanity in general has not. We’ve failed to discover God’s revealed truth as shown in the Bible. We think we can reject His revelation and get away with it. So who’s smarter? We will do well to respect God’s instruction book for mankind.
You can prove the Bible to be the word of God. And as we have seen on today’s program:
Reason #1: The Author of the Bible is real, and you can prove His existence
Reason #2: Fulfilled prophecy proves the Bible is the word of God
Reason #3: The proof of the pudding is in the eating
Thank you for watching. Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss another Tomorrow’s World video. And if you’d like to get our free booklet The Bible: Fact or Fiction, just click here. See you next time.
