DAY 365
CHALLENGE
“Why should I pay attention to the Bible at all? It’s an ancient book written by people of limited understanding. Besides, other religions have their own scriptures, too. Why are they any less important?”
DEFENSE
The Christian scriptures are unique and valuable.
The mere fact that the books of the Bible were written a long time ago is no reason to look down on or dismiss them. To do so would be chrono-logical snobbery. Just because a person wrote before you doesn’t mean that person was wrong. If it did, we would have to dismiss all works written in the past, obliterating our knowledge of history and prevent- ing knowledge from being passed from one generation to another.
The question is not when a work was written but whether it contains truth. Because of the growth of various fields of knowledge, we may expect more recently written works to contain more of certain types of truth—e.g., truths about math or science—but the information that we seek from Scripture isn’t on those topics. Instead, we are seeking truth of a religious nature—e.g., about God and his dealings with man—and this is an area that is largely beyond the powers of natural reason to investigate for itself.
Consequently, for us to have this information, God must take the initiative: He must reveal himself to man. If God does so and when God does so is entirely up to him. For it to happen at all, it must take place at some point in human history, and—unless God were to make contact with man for the very first time at the end of the world—future ages would look back on that time and view it as ancient. That’s not an indication it is false or that he didn’t do it. The question, therefore, is what evidence we have that God made contact with man and that the Bible preserves what he revealed to us.
Here apologetics becomes relevant. In particular, the arguments supporting God’s existence and the occurrence of miracles, especially the Resurrection of Jesus, play an important role. The first set of arguments support the proposition that there is a God who might choose to contact mankind, and the second support the Bible as the record of the resulting revelation. Other religions do not have comparable evidence.