Equipping Kids to Defend the Bible: Answers to Common Questions

Not according to the Bible itself. The Bible says that it alone is the sacred Word of God. That claim is either true or untrue. Other religious texts do have some wisdom to impart, but on the question of truth, you do ultimately have to choose between the Bible and the others. Logic demands it.

God himself says you have to choose. He emphatically says that we can’t have it both ways. He doesn’t force us to pick Him, but He does force us to choose between Him and others. Those are His conditions.

There are very good scientific reasons for choosing the Bible. Despite popular opinion, when you read through the Bible, there is nothing that contradicts scientific fact, as there is in other religious texts.
Skeptics point to certain scientific theories, such as age of the earth or evolution. Are we supposed to believe God really created Adam out of the “dust of the ground’?” they might ask. But evolution or the earth’s age is never mentioned in the Bible. However long it took or how it happened, none of it happened without God’s direction.
We also can’t fixate on unknowable details. What if the description of Adam’s creation is somewhat poetic? What if the passage means that God created humans not literally out of dust but out of the elements available on earth, and then God breathed life into this body? The point is, there’s nothing in the Creation account that’s obviously off base, as there is in almost every pagan story of human origin.
The God of the Bible created an ordered universe we can study and understand. He is the God of mathematics and science, or He’s not God at all. Don’t believe the science versus-faith shtick. It’s just not true.

There is so much historical evidence for the Scriptures being the same today as they were when first written that, in comparison, all the works of ancient Greece and Rome are on very shaky ground. And that’s saying something because historians never go around saying the ancient Greeks didn’t say what we think they said. In the case of the New Testament, we have more copies and earlier copies than we do of anything Aristotle or Plato wrote.
The evidence for the continuity of the Old Testament manuscripts is similarly solid and fascinating.

Every time you turn around, there seems to be a new archaeological confirmation of what the Bible tells us. For example, about 20 years ago a reference to the House of David was found on a 3,000-year-old stele column discovered in the Middle East. Before that, historians thought that perhaps the Davidic kingdom was just a legend. Then out of the sands of Palestine, we find an ancient reference that provides hard evidence.
And this trend toward archaeological corroboration of the Bible has been going on for hundreds of years.

Only the parts that are meant to be taken literally. Of the many kinds of writing in the Bible, some are literal, while others are metaphorical. But isn’t that true of most writing? When the poet William Blake wrote “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,” he didn’t expect anyone to picture a flaming tiger sprinting through the jungle and smelling of burnt fur, did he? He didn’t mean it literally. And in the Bible, when Jesus said, “I am the door,” He didn’t mean He was made of wood or that He swung on hinges. When He told parables, He was using metaphors.
But when we read about Moses or King David, these are accounts of historical events. They were written that way, and they’ve been read that way for centuries. Most important, Jesus read them that way.
Sometimes, Bible accounts may feel more like metaphorical stories. Some point to Noah and Jonah and even Adam as stories that fall into that category. But, again, Jesus spoke as if they did exist, as if they did accomplish the things the Bible records about them. It’s hard to fathom how Jesus, who is God, could have made a mistake or been deliberately misleading.

No. To be accurate, people who were inspired by God wrote the Bible. In other words, God is behind every word, and He inspired every word. But He didn’t dictate every word.
The Bible was written by about 40 different people over the course of 1,500 years, but taken as a whole, it comes from one point of view. That, in and of itself, is stunning. All 66 books fit together. There are themes that begin in Genesis, weave throughout the Bible and are finally resolved in Revelation, as if a single author had been working on it.
And, of course, He was.