IS THE BIBLE THE WORD OF GOD?
Dr. Eugene Stock has said, “When I was a boy, I read a story which showed me the different ways in which we can be sure that this great library of Sacred Books, which we call the Bible, is really the Word of God, his Revelation to mankind. The writer of the story had been explaining three different kinds of evidence – the Historical, the Internal, and the Experimental. Then he told how he once sent a boy to the chemist's to get some phosphorus. The boy brought back a little packet; was it phosphorus? The boy reported that he went to the shop and asked for phosphorus; that the chemist went to his shelves, took some kind of stuff from a jar, put it in the little packet, and gave it to him, and that he had brought it straight back. That was the historical evidence that the packet had phosphorus in it. Then the gentleman opened the packet. The substance inside looked like phosphorus and smelled like phosphorus. That was the internal evidence. Then he put a light to it – ‘See how it burns!’ That was the experimental evidence.”
Along some such line as that we propose to set forth the evidence – so far as that can be done within strict limits – that the Bible is the Word of God. In reply to the question before us, we give a threefold answer, namely, It Seems to Be; It Claims to Be; and It Proves to Be.
The conclusiveness of the evidence is not in any one of these answers taken by itself, but in the three together, which constitute irrefragable proof that the Bible is of divine origin, and therefore of sovereign authority; that is, that it is the Word of God.
What evidence is there of this?