If you’re browsing the new release section at Barne’s and Noble and you see a name on the cover, you automatically assume that he's the author. I doubt you go, "Uh, I'm not sure this can be trusted!" Without good reason to doubt the book's claim to authorship, we accept it.

The Bible claims to be written by an author as well. Without good reason for rejecting its authorship, should we not let it speak for itself?

Now this does not mean that God Himself pulled out a pen and personally penned the words, but that He wrote exactly what He wanted to say through men.

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16)

But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God (2 Pet 1:20-21).

The sum of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous ordinances is everlasting (Psa 119:160).

Likewise, we have yet to be given one reason to doubt that the Bible is telling the truth when it says, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” What is all Scripture? All sixty six volumes of the Bible. When Paul wrote this he referred to the Law and the prophets (that’s the Old Testament) and the writings of the apostles and their associates (that’s the New Testament).

So here are two reasons for believing the Bible is God's Word. There are many more, but these first two are the most important:

1. We believe the Bible is God's Word because the Bible claims to be God's Word.
2. We believe the Bible is God's Word because the Holy Spirit tells us it is God's Word.

If you are a Christian, you have already experienced this. On the day of your conversion to Christ, could you prove that the Bible is God’s Word and that Jesus rose from the dead? I have yet to meet a single Christian who could. Then why did you believe? Why did you entrust your entire destiny to a book that you couldn’t even prove to be accurate? (Note: not being able to prove something does not mean that something is not provable). Because the Holy Spirit told you it was true.

Give me two sinners, equally hardened against the gospel, give them the same presentation of the gospel and yet one believes and the other does not. Why? The Holy Spirit.

John the apostle tells us that the Spirit is a valid and truthful witness to the deity of Jesus Christ (1 John 5:6-11). This Holy Spirit tells us that God’s witness of His Son is true and that we have eternal life when we place our faith in Him (1 John 5:11). This same Spirit “testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:17) and opens up the Word to us (1 John 2:27).

There is no physical or empirical way of proving that the Holy Spirit told you something. In this sense, He is completely intangible, and to the unbeliever, almost absurd. The fact is, you can’t prove the Holy Spirit to someone any more than you can capture the wind in your fist and say, “Here it is!”

And yet, every believer knows the Spirit to be true and His Word to be true because at the moment of conversion the Spirit entered the believer’s heart with indescribable authenticity and told him that it is true.

The Holy Spirit is not just a witness of God. He is God the witness! It is one thing to use fulfilled prophecy to prove God’s Word. It’s another when God steps in as a witness of His own Word! If you stood in a court of law, falsely accused of stealing a package of bubble gum, and the judge is about to bring down the gavel, you’d want a witness to stand up and defend you. A single word in your favor could keep you out of the electric chair. But can you imagine if that witness was God Himself?

All the evidences in the world minus the Holy Spirit will not convert the sinner to Christ. As Charles Spurgeon: “A sinner can no more repent and believe without the Holy Spirit's aid than he can create a world.”

But let the Holy Spirit tell the sinner that this Bible is true, and that sinner will be saved. That’s why Jesus said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). God the Father sends God the Holy Spirit to draw the believer to Himself.

And again Christ said: “But when [the Helper] comes, He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8).

This does not invalidate the power of other evidences of the Bible's truthfulness like archaeology, history, science, continuity, manuscript consistency, fulfilled prophecy, people willing to die for Jesus after seeing Him rise from the dead, and many, many more. But the testimony of God the Spirit is the most convincing and irresistible witness of the truth of God's Word.

To an unbeliever, the Holy Spirit proving the Bible to be God’s Word sounds irrational and even ridiculous. And this is hard for many Christians, because how on earth do you use the Spirit as a witness to convince people? The fact is, we can't. Jonah himself knew this when he prayed from the belly of a fish, "Salvation is of the Lord" (Jonah 2:9). Jesus admitted this when He told Nicodemus,

The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8).

We can't predict when the Spirit is going to move, nor manipulate Him into moving. But Scripture is clear that the one thing He will honor is His own Word. When you tell a non-Christian the truth of God's Word, that is one thing the Holy Spirit can use. Your intellect, your wisdom, and your illustrations can all complement and help explain the Spirit's Word, but it is His Word alone that He will use to change a sinner's heart. That's why Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. for I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God (1 Cor 2:1-5).

So at the end of the day, the Spirit's greatest witness is His own Word! Peter told his own flock that the witness of God's Word is more sure and trustworthy than Peter's own witness of seeing Jesus miraculously transformed into a supernatural body on the mountain (2 Pet 1:16-19).¹ Abraham told the rich man in hell that if the rich man's brothers did not believe the testimony of the Law and the Prophets (the Old Testament), than even Lazarus rising from the dead would not convince them that heaven and hell are real (Luke 16:31).

The truthfulness of God’s Word does not depend on people's approval or critique in order to make it true. God gives the evidence of His Holy Spirit which is far superior to any human endeavor.

Christ promised this to His disciples, “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me” (John 15:26).

Evangelist, Rusty Wright, went waking one day with a philosophy professor from Georgia Tech. The professor peppered Rusty with skeptic questions about Christianity and Rusty answered them the best he could. Finally Rusty asked the professor, “If I could answer all your questions to your satisfaction, would you put your life in Jesus’ hands?” Without hesitation the professor replied: “[Expletive] no!”²

What was the professor’s problem? With all his questions answered how could he not believe? Apart from God's saving power, we are so dead in our sins, so blinded by Satan, that until the Holy Spirit convicts us, we will not believe. We can’t. And that is why the Holy Spirit is the most powerful witness of the inspiration of the Bible.

Peter’s witness was credible, but he admitted that God’s witness is ten times more credible than even Peter’s own experience (2 Pet 1:16-21). The Westminster Confession says, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God.”

Here’s a question we must ask ourselves: If the trustworthiness of Scripture depends on people's tests, what happens when people conclude that it is not God’s Word?

Are men and women so objective and non-prejudiced that they come to sound conclusions in religious matters all by themselves? And is the Bible so helpless and weak that without human approval it cannot be trusted as God’s own Word?

Gleason L. Archer said it well: “Every man must settle for one of two alternatives: the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, or the inerrancy of his own personal judgment.”³ The Pharisees had all the evidence, but they did not believe. In fact, the evidence only further hardened their hearts against the truth! (Mat 28:11-15).

Over one hundred years ago Benjamin B. Warfield wrote,

If faith in Christ is to be always and only the product of a thorough historical investigation into the origins of Christianity, there would certainly be few who could venture to preach Christ and him crucified with entire confidence; there would certainly be few who would be able to trust their all to him with entire security.⁴

I like Strobel’s two books, Case for Faith and Case for Christ and I agree that those hundreds of evidences support the fact that Jesus truly is the Son of God. But how many people have time to spend ten years of their life investigating all the evidences for Christianity? And if evidence is going to be the final factor that wins someone to Christ, is looking at Christianity alone going to be enough? Is not the seeker compelled also to look at the 500 thousand other religions out there so he has seen all the evidence, not just the evidence for one of them? But that's physically impossible. It's hard enough to thoroughly understand even one percent of all the religions in existence today.

So if historical investigation is not enough, what is? God’s testimony! The witness of God’s Holy Spirit! Jesus said to His disciples, “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me” (John 15:26). The Holy Spirit is not only a flawless witness of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the most convincing one! Without His witness, no one would ever be saved.

Endnotes

1. The King James Version and the New American Standard do not give a very helpful translation of this passage. I’d suggest you read it in the English Standard Version or the New International Version to get a more accurate rendering.

2. The Complete Evangelism Guidebook edited by Scott Dawson (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2006), 209.

3. Gleason L. Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press, 1964), 31

4. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Phillipsburg: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1948), 121-122.