Thursday, September 17, 2009

The Bible is Trustworthy

My favorite Christian apologist is Dr. Ravi Zacharias. I urge everyone to go to YouTube and type in his name and watch a few segments.

In the video below Dr. Zacharias briefly describes why the Bible is a trustworthy document and has survived thousands of years against the attacks of skeptics and critics.

It is in reality not one book but sixty-six. So when you quote the Bible to defend the Bible it is not circular reasoning. To quote Isaiah to defend Matthew about the birth of Jesus is to quote two people separated by hundreds of years.

The Bible has an internal unity that is not matched by any other religious scripture. The Quran can be divided into two contradictory parts. Mohammed wanted the favor of Christians and Jews and spoke favorably of them as “people of the book.”

"Not all of them are alike; a party of the people of the Scripture stand for the right, they recite the Verses of God during the hours of the night, prostrating themselves in prayer. They believe in God and the Last Day; they enjoin Al-Ma'rûf and forbid Al-Munkar ; and they hasten in (all) good works; and they are among the righteous. And whatever good they do, nothing will be rejected of them; for God knows well those who are Al-Muttaqûn." (Sura 3:113-115).

However, when the Jews and Christians rejected Mohammed as a true prophet he in turn rejected them. Afterward his attitude toward them was hostility and aggression. For example, the Quran says that Allah has cursed the Jews and turned them into swine and apes (Sura 5:60-64). This is an example of internal disunity, a conflict or contradiction, within the Muslim scripture.

The Book of Mormon has horses on the North American continent many centuries before they were first brought here by the Spanish Conquistadors. It lists places, events, tribes, religious beliefs and practices, and coinage that have absolutely no evidence in history. This is an example of an external disunity, or conflict with the evidence outside the Book of Mormon.

The Quran is a book of sayings similar in style to Proverbs.

The Book of Mormon claims to be a history similar in style to 1st and 2nd Chronicles.

The Bible, however, is a variety of literary forms. It contains history, poetry, apocalyptic, legal, biographical, letters, and the prophetic.

It was written in widely separated locations including Babylon, Rome, Asia Minor, and of course Israel.

It was written by forty authors from the whole spectrum of Jewish society. They included kings, shepherds, prophets, priests, and even a tax collector.

It was written over a period of 1500 years and despite this diversity of time, place, and authors, it is a unified message that is non-contradictory either internally or externally.

Most of all the Bible has changed lives. But it has also changed cultures, nations, and the world. The Bible’s central character, Jesus, is the dividing point in history, the years being BC (Before Christ), or AD (anno domini, year of our Lord). Western civilization is based upon the heritage of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Watch Ravi and I think you will find yourself watching his other clips on YouTube.