Foundations

This might be surprising to some of you but I really dislike heights. I love rock climbing and I have been cliff jumping multiple times but I still do not enjoy heights. When I was in college, I worked a few summers doing residential construction. One of the things that I hated the most was working on roofs. Roofing of any form is hard work but that's not why I hated it. I would always be incredibly nervous walking on the roof, especially if it was a steep pitch. The worst roofing jobs were when we had to walk on bare trusses and nail down sheeting. This task required moving heavy 4 x 8 foot sheets of plywood while walking on 2 x 4's spaced sixteen inches apart. I was just waiting for that one misstep that would send me crashing through the ceiling and into the second floor of the house. Doing this type of work for a couple summers really put in perspective how "hard" my college studies really were and made it really clear to me why I was in college and not doing manual labor for a career.

I tell that story to make the point that it is good to have a solid foundation under your feet. Life is much safer and more comfortable when you are walking on solid ground and not skipping across planks twenty feet in the air.

The same principle is true as we begin to study together what we believe. We need some solid foundation on which to stand and build our belief system. Many people today have built their belief system on the foundation of personal experience and maybe the experiences of some others close to them. This type of foundation stems from the idea that truth is relative to each individual and thus every individual must build up their own worldview.

Like the truss roof, however, experience is a very precarious foundation. Our experience, no matter our age or how much we have been through, is very limited. There are many gaps of information even in the midst of what we have seen in our life. Many things we experience we just cannot fully understand by logical processing alone. Also, like a roof, experience can only carry us so far until our toes are dangling off the edge and we can only peer into the distance beyond. Experience can be valuable to tell us some things but it only offers a very limited view of what is beyond ourselves. So, if we are to answer the question of “Who is God?” we need something or someone beyond our experience to give us that answer.

This need for an outside source has been understood by man throughout all of human existence. Most cultures and religions have some set of traditions, legends, or a holy book that claims to come from someone beyond the group of humans that exist today. This source is generally some type of God or god-like figure who has come from outside the natural human world to bring the truth to humans.

For Christians, this outside book is the Bible, which explicitly claims to be written by the one God who created and rules over the world. In the Old Testament, there are over 3,800 occurrences of the phrase, "thus saith the Lord" or an equivalent. Each of these Old Testament prophets, authors, claimed to be speaking and writing on behalf of God to give a message to God’s people. By the time of Jesus, the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament had been commonly accepted by Jewish scholars as the Word of God. This view is even confirmed by Jesus throughout his ministry. (Luke 24:44, John 10:35) In the New Testament, Paul makes the claim in 2 Timothy 3:16 that the Bible is the inspired words of God. Later in 2 Peter 1:21, Peter would make the same claim. While these are internal claims and can not make an argument in and of themselves, it is important to understand that these men all believed they were writing God's words, confirmed each other, and were willing to suffer greatly, some even dying, for what they wrote.

Internal claims to be a divine book do not, however, make an ironclad case that a book is divine. Like I said earlier, most religions have some form of teachings that claim to be divine. There are some things however that separate the Bible from other holy books.

First, the continuity of the Bible points to divine origin. The Bible was written over a period of hundreds of years by forty different authors on three different continents. The different books were then collected and compiled in their original form by various groups of Christians during the first centuries AD. (We still have many pieces of manuscripts from this period and close to it.) The Bible was then officially and widely recognized in its current form in the fourth century. Even with this variety in composition and collection, the Bible still follows one main theme with no major contradictions. To see how amazing this is, turn on the news or Sportscenter and notice how hard it is to get even a small group of people sitting in the same room to agree on something.

This continuity issue is huge when you compare it to another book that claims divine authorship, the Quran. The Quran contains the teachings of one man. Those teachings were compiled by one and soon after compilation all manuscripts that varied from the official manuscript and sources were destroyed.

Second, a majority of the Bible describes events that can be archaeologically and historically verified. The Bible describes the actions and events of individuals and groups of people from throughout history and uses these events to teach who God is. It is not simply a collection of sayings. This means the events described can be confirmed by outside sources. One example of this is the Hittite nation often mentioned in the Old Testament. For centuries, this people group was lost to history with the only evidence of their existence coming from the Old Testament. However, in the eighteenth century archeological evidence was found to verify their existence.

The third and final evidence that separates the Bible from other holy books is more personal. As I have studied the Bible over the past few years, I have found nothing that more clearly explains our world. The Bible explains so clearly why we humans behave as we do and the world functions as we experience it. There are also many times where God has used the Bible to guide me through issues in my life with incredible insight and wisdom. I believe there is no other teaching in the world with the richness and depth of wisdom as the Bible.

I encourage you if you do not already buy into the validity of the Bible as God's word to examine it more thoroughly. This post only touches the surface of the argument for the Bible. Remember its important, whether you believe the Bible or not, to have a solid foundation on which to build your worldview. If the foundation is not solid, then you can easily stumble as you build on it.

Finally, going forward I will be using the Bible, without completely discarding experience, as the foundation for finding the truth of who God is and who we are. I will also try as much as possible to give some arguments outside the Bible for my different points because they can only further strengthen our trust in the Biblical foundation.