On needing Evidence that the Bible is the Word of God.
XXXX wrote
So, in turn, that led me to do further research to get a better foundation. I believe the Bible is the word of God and without error. But I felt that I needed some, I suppose you'd call evidence. There's a school of thought called presuppositionalism headed by the late Gordon H. Clark and his disciple John Robbins at the Trinity Foundation. They start with the Bible as their axioms - like Geometry - which, by nature, cannot be proven, and proceed from there. But then there are attacks on that, and that led me to wonder further. I thought to myself, we have to start with the Bible. So then the issue comes to proving that the Bible is the word of God. That's where I'm at. I was constantly being attacked at work, going to places mentally that I shouldn't.
Hi XXXX,
The very first thing that you must do is to take everything that you ever heard anyone speak about the bible saying this, or the bible saying that, and put it into a big pile, one statement after another, and when you have put everything into that pile, that is, what ever you have heard a minister say, what ever you read on the internet, what ever you read in books and magazines, what ever you heard anyone say about what they believe the bible says, or does not say, and put it all in that pile, and you will see that pile of confusion grow to gigantic size. And when it is all on that pile, put a match to it and burn it all down to ashes. And when there is nothing left but the ashes, then blow on those ashes and scatter them to the wind so that there is nothing left. My Friend, that is exactly what everything that you heard, or read, is worth, nothing. For every bit of it is not of God, it is all of man.
Now where we start, you will say "I don't need that. I already know that." But yes you do need that, for you have already so much confusion inside of you that we must go back to Truth. For if you really got rid of all that confusion, you don't know where to start over. And this is the start, So Saith the Holy Lord God Jesus Christ, the Son of the Most High God.
Now after you have done that, gotten rid of all that confusion you had, you can begin all over with the truth!! Lets go to the Basics, the first things. First, is there a God?? Some will be quick to say YES, and some will be quick to say NO, and many will say PROVE IT.
Can it be proved?? It absolutely can be proved. But many will reject that proof because someone, I say someone, said that there was not, and could not, be proof. So how can it be proved? It can be proved just by looking around you at the things that you can see. I know that there are many who will point to this, and to that as examples, such as a clock sitting on top of a stump of a tree. Could we believe that the clock just happened to come together as such a complicated collections of parts all by accident?? And even if it did, could we believe that it then climbed up on top of that tree stump all by itself when it has no movement by itself?? The answer is that someone had to have made the clock, and some one had to have put it on top of that tree stump. There is, and there can be, no other answer. For even 99.99 percent of all human beings in the world would not have the knowledge, or the skill, to even make the clock. So there we see a man, with super intelligence among men, who thought of, and make the clock. Anyone could have put it there, but we know that it could not have put itself there.
Now when we look at ourselves, at our own body, and the bodies of all the animals and creatures around us, we can see that there is no one on the earth which has the intelligence to build a man, a dog, a cat, a bug. for there is no understanding even today of even how it all works, much less how to build one of us. There is no man who knows how to build a tree, or a bush. So we can see that there has to be a super intelligence which did conceive, and make everyone of us. That super intelligence IS GOD!
And every man on the earth instinctively knows, just by looking around him at the things which God made, that there is God. That is why even the people living in the remotest place of the world, worships something. But instead if worshiping the God who created everything, they instead worship the things which God made.
That is the proof that God exist, that God is real.
So that brings us to the Bible, which is the Word of God.
And there are many who claim that God does not speak, that God is so far above us that God cannot even be bothered to look down on us, much less to speak to us. But what man is there who makes something with their hands who is not proud of what they made. The man who makes a table and chair, the woman who makes a quilt. Did they make it just to hide it away?? Did they not make it for their own pleasure?? For them to look at and to make use of? Of course they did. Why then would anyone think that God would not take pleasure in what He has Created?? Did not God create man and all that man sees for the pleasure of God?? Why then would God hide man and all of creation in a deep dark closet, not to be enjoyed?? God did not!! For God takes pleasure in what He has make. And so God speaks to his creation just as a man or woman speaks to what they made. Taking pleasure in speaking to it. Saying to what they made, that you are beautiful, you are strong, you are pleasing to the eye, telling what they made how they will use it. The woman says to the quilt that she made, "I will put you on the bed to keep me warm and to make the bed look beautiful". The man says to the table and chair "I will sit in comfort upon you chair and I will eat my meals upon you table, for you are strong and pleasing in my sight." So it is that God also speaks to His Creations. And God says to us, "I will tell you how you will give pleasure to ME."
And so the Lord God gave us His Word, Speaking to us by, and through, many different men and women, down through the ages. Those words were then written down and protected by God, for the Word of God will never change. Not by even one character.
Now down through the ages even to today, men continue to attempt changing the Word of God. Both by the written word and by the Spoken Word. That is why there is so much confusion about what it is that God did say. This man says that the Word of God says this, and another man says that no it does not, but that it says this. And over and over they fight over who can change the word of God the best and the fastest.
Even among the Early Church Fathers, they were already changing and teaching their own pet ideas, for their glory, and not for the Glory of the Lord God.
For your consideration I include the following: (Bold, and underline are added by me)
on men who change the word.
He bids the Emperor call back to his mind the Faith which (so he says) Constantius is longing in vain to hear from his bishops. Those whose duty is to proclaim the Faith of God are employed, instead, in composing faiths of their own, and so they revolve in an endless circle of error and strife. The sense of human infirmity ought to have made them content to hold the Faith in the same form of words in which they received it. At their baptism they had professed and sworn their faith, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; doubt or change are equally unlawful. Yet men were using the sacred words while they dishonestly assigned to them another meaning, or even were daring to depart from them. Thus to some the three sacred Names were empty terms. Hence innovations in the statement of Faith; the search for novelties took the place of loyalty to ancient truth, and the creed of the year displaced the creed of the Gospels. Every one framed his confession according to his own desire of his own character; while creeds were multiplying, the one Faith was perishing. Since the Council of Nicaea there had been no end of this writing of creeds. So busily were men wrangling over words, seeking novelties, debating knotty points, forming factions and pursuing ambitions, refusing to agree and hurling anathema's at one another, that almost all had drifted away from Christ.
The confusion was such that none could either teach or learn in safety. Within the last year no less than four contradictory creeds had been promulgated. There was no single point of the Faith which they or their fathers had held upon which violent hands had not been laid. And the pitiful creed which for the moment held the field was that the son is 'like the Father'; whether this likeness were perfect or imperfect was left in obscurity. The result of constant change and ceaseless dispute was self-contradiction and mutual destruction.
This search for a faith involved the assumption that the true Faith was not ready to the believer's hand. They would have it in writing, as though the heart were not its place. Baptism implied the Faith and was useless without its acceptance; to teach a new Christ after Baptism, or to alter the Faith then declared, was sin against the Holy Ghost.
The chief cause of the continuance of the present blasphemy was the love of applause; men invented grandiloquent paraphrases in place of the Apostle's Creed, to delude the vulgar, to conceal their aberrations, to effect a compromise with other forms of error. They would do anything rather than confess that they had been wrong.
And so it continues today. And that is why you must ignore and forget all that you have been taught, and let the Holy Lord God teach you what He is saying to you. Place your trust in the Holy Spirit to explain to you what the Word of God actually says, instead of listening to men telling you what THEY think it is saying. It is like a very incompetent auto mechanic who is teaching another how to be a mechanic, they will both be totally incompetent. That is how it is today in the seminaries, where the men who hold a very twisted view and understanding of God's Word are teaching their own twisted beliefs instead of teaching God's word. And those men who are taught in turn are standing at the Pulpit in churches teaching those twisted false beliefs.
The Lord has told us time after time, over and over again, to stop skipping all over when reading His Word the Bible. Read from cover to cover, for there is only One Word, and not 66 different Words.
Do you really think that there can be no differences in the way that I have led my prophets and Apostles and willing servants to write down what they saw? Each has a way of explaining what they saw or heard from Me, which will be understood by someone who does not understand it written another way. Saith the Lord God. Those who try to pick My Word apart do so because they have absolutely NO Understanding, They are the Blind who are leading the Blind. Have you not seen in My Word that when Satan tried to tempt Me in the wilderness, how Satan twisted the Words and meaning of My Word?? Did you not see how I corrected every time?? Saith Jesus Christ.
Do you not understand, that the Written Word of the Book you call the Bible is only meant to lead you to ME, Saith the Lord God. It is only meant to lead you to search for ME. And when you search for ME, then you will find Me, for I am standing next to you. The Bible is NOT the end of anything, it is only the Begining of your journey toward ME. Saith Jesus Christ. My Word in the Bible is NOT meant to explain everything, it is I, the Most Holy Lord God who will explain everything to those who seek me. Those who are not seeking ME, will NEVER understand even the smallest part of MY Word. So Saith Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High God Almighty.
My Friend, test every word. Do not accept blindly what any man tells you, and that includes myself. Take what I say, take what any man says about God and the Word ot God and take it back before God Himself, for it is only there that you will find the truth. When you take it to God, then the Holy Spirit will tell you yea or nay, that it is of God, or it is not of God. And when you have that Holy Spirit in you, and you are listening to that Holy Spirit, then you will recognize when the Lord God speaks to you, even when the Lord God speaks to you through some one else.
With the Love of Jesus
Jack Barr