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As an atheist, I had never read the Bible. My atheist parents told me it was a silly old book full of fairy tales, myths, and superstitions, and I never questioned that belief until I was a junior in high school. There, for the first time, I met people who believed the Bible. By then, I was a militant atheist, aggressively attacking anyone who believed in God and loudly ridiculing anyone who believed the stories in the Bible.
When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Talladega, Alabama, where my father taught at Alabama State Teachers College, an all-black school. In those years, I saw racism in operation and was told by my atheist parents that it was all caused by the Bible. As an atheist, I thought the idea of a worldwide flood, with someone building an ark and taking two of every form of life on it, was ludicrous. I found it easy to dismiss the religious beliefs of those who would buy into the stories of the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, David and Goliath, and the miracles of Jesus Christ.
The turning point for me was my junior year of high school, when I became interested in a young lady. The only point of contention between the two of us was that she was a dedicated Christian and I was living by a different set of morals. I finally decided that the only way I could undermine her morals was to prove to her that the Bible was garbage and not a reliable guide for one's life. I started with Genesis 1:1 because my interest and abilities were in science, and I felt that was the Bible's weakest claim.
An Episcopalian friend gave me a copy of Archbishop James Ussher's 17th century chronology that claimed the Bible said the Earth was created 6000 years ago. I knew that was impossible. When I asked where that was stated in the Bible, my friend could not tell me. What I did find was that if you looked up the Hebrew words used in Genesis, there was not a single word that contradicted scientific evidence. All of this led me to spend a lifetime examining the biblical account for scientific errors. After over 50 years of searching, I have found none.
My colleagues with advanced degrees in history have told me that the Bible is historically accurate. The book of Isaiah, written 600 years before Christ, contains statements that have been confirmed in modern times. The field of archaeology continues to add support to the credibility of the biblical record. We have a free correspondence course and a free 13-lesson video series on archaeological support for the biblical record.
I have good friends who are psychologists who tell me that the Bible is full of accurate psychological principles, and professors of business and economics have made similar statements about biblical statements in their field.
God's Word has proven again and again to be a powerful weapon in the war against crime and drug abuse. The Does God Exist? program has been involved in prison ministry for over 50 years. When incarcerated persons are willing to apply biblical principles to their lives, they can change and break the cycle of crime and imprisonment. The Kings Crossing Prison Ministries in Corpus Christi, Texas, has built a program that brings hopeless criminals into productive lives, and its Christians Against Substance Abuse program (CASA) has helped many men and women overcome drug addiction.
Hebrews 4:12 tells us, “The Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life and the immortal spirit and to the innermost intimacies of a man's being and detecting the inmost thoughts and purposes of the mind.” Biblical twelve-step programs can help people overcome addictions and often work when everything else has failed.
Skeptics attempt to discount all of this by claiming the Bible is full of myths and fairy tales. It is essential when reading any document to ask four questions: (1) Who wrote it? (2) To whom was it written? (3) Why was it written? and (4) How would those to whom it was written understand it? It is also important to ask what kind of literature it is. Genesis, for example, is Hebrew poetry, not a scientific treatise. The Book of Revelation is a book of prophecy about “things shortly to come to pass,” involving the persecution of Christians by the Romans. It is neither science nor poetry but uses a great deal of literary symbolism to convey its message.
We are told in 2 Timothy 2:15 to “Study to show yourself worthy of God's approval, accurate in delivering the Message of the Truth.” A person who does that will become convinced that the Bible is not a fictitious work by ignorant men and women but rather a clear demonstration of the reality of God and his will for their lives.
Picture credits:
Cover: © Koca777/Bigstock.com
© Koca777/Bigstock.com
Scripture links/references are from BibleGateway.com. Unhighlighted scriptures can be looked up at their website.