Chuck Missler - How We Got Our Bible

Within recent years, many members of Protestant denominational churches and the Roman Catholic Church have turned away from the Bible as the fully inspired Word of God. We hear arguments that the Bible contradicts itself or that it contradicts the truths of modern culture and science. Many people say the Bible contains the Word of God, but cannot be relied on to be the Word of God in all its entirety. This is a key issue. Is the Bible really true?

Ultimately, there are two basic world views we can hold. One view regards everything we experience as the result of some cosmic accident. In the Beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded. The other view is that everything we experience is the deliberate result of a Creator. Of course, there are numerous variations on each of these views, but each of us must decide where we will place our trust. Each of these world views holds possible solutions to the biggest puzzles of life:

• Who am I?
• Where did I come from?
• Where am I going?
• To whom am I accountable?

It is ultimately important that we find the true answers to these questions.

You and I live in a time of rebellion and self-worship. Parental and marital authority are challenged in the homes and courts. Political, academic and ecclesiastical authority are challenged across the land.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

Genesis 3:1

Here, near the very beginning, we are introduced to Satan, the serpent, our adversary, and the first thing we see him do is question Gods Word. Yea, hath God said ?

His next step is to slander Gods character with straight denial. Ye shall not surely die , ( Gen 3:4 ). Thus, Satan encouraged the rejection of Gods authority at the very beginning, while humanity was yet in its infancy. Eve failed to trust God, Adam followed her in directly disobeying what God had told him, and humankind lost everything as a result.

We find the same pattern today. A number of social indicators deteriorate rapidly after 1963 in the United States. There were fewer than 10 births per 1000 unmarried teen women (ages 15-19) prior to 1947, and between 1955 and 1964, the number remained steadily between 15 and 16. Divorce rates escalated, families broke up, crime rates rose, and the acceptance of homosexuality became commonplace. As of 2015, more than 58 million unborn children have been murdered in the United States because they were considered inconvenient. Fifty-eight million. That is nearly ten times the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust.

Its noteworthy that in 1963, as a result of the combined court cases Abington School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett , the U.S. Supreme Court banned school-led reading of the Bible and recital of the Lords Prayer. These court cases alleged to uphold the principles of freedom and human dignity, yet the end result of turning our backs on God has been destruction and misery. As we choose our own way over Gods way, were losing everything. There is little dignity in divorce or high crime rates.

It is ironic that the elements we most desire in life are rarely attained through our own weak wisdom and fleshly desires. After trying our own methods, over and over again we have had to learn that we experience human dignity and true freedom only through moral obedience and accountability to the Creator who fashioned human beings for a high spiritual destiny.

Skeptics have brutally attacked the Bible throughout history, and during the past century it has become popular among intellectuals to regard the Bible as merely a conglomeration of Jewish writings. Its considered respectable to dispute the authorship of the books of the Bible and to disregard fulfilled prophecy as events reported after-the-fact.

In 1898, Hermann Schultz, professor of Theology at the University of Gottingen, declared:

Of the legendary character of the pre-Mosaic narrators, the time of which they treat is a sufficient proof. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing, a time separated by an interval of more than four hundred years, of which there is absolutely no history.

Yet, the patriarchal accounts in the Bible have been corroborated by archeological evidence. The common skeptical assertions thrown about in academic circles can be shown to be short-sighted.