They were amazed at His teaching;

One moonlit night he went for a walk in the woods, pondering the questions swirling in his head. As he related years later:

When Christ began teaching the crowds that thronged after Him, He spoke with unparalleled conviction and authority. He had no doubts about His message because Jesus was the Word of God in human flesh. One of the 12 men Jesus chose to be with Him as His disciples, a fisherman named John, began his Gospel account about Jesus by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2).

Jesus Himself told His hearers, “You search the Scriptures…it is these that testify about Me” (John 5:39). And, in the words of one of the New Testament writers, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son…. And He is…the exact representation of His nature” (Hebrews 1:1-3).

The authority in Christ’s words was evident to those who heard Him. After being tempted he came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

As Christ spoke, people wrestled in their minds to come to terms with what He was saying. “Teacher,” one man asked, “which is the great commandment in the Law?”

As Jesus proclaimed the Word of God, He unfolded its meaning with a power that penetrated people’s hearts. His Sermon on the Mount, for example, recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew – a tax collector also chosen by Jesus to be one of the Twelve – magnified the demands of the Great Commandment with specific applications that pierced external, superficial morality. Far from being a way of salvation, properly understood, the Sermon on the Mount drives us to our knees with an acute realization of our desperate need for Christ’s salvation.

The result of Jesus’ teaching was that people were astonished. “Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks,” they declared (John 7:46).

That’s all well and good, you may say, but I’ve never heard Christ speak. All I have to go on today is the Bible and, like that young preacher, I have lots of questions about it. Is it indeed reliable? Is it, as one historic creed declares, “the only infallible rule of faith and practice”?

My response is that, like that young preacher, each of us ultimately does have to accept the Bible by faith. Doing so, however, does not require blind, irrational faith. To the contrary, it’s quite reasonable. It’s a leap not into the dark but, rather, into the light.

The Bible we have today that has been translated and passed down from generation to generation is supported by a greater quantity of historical manuscripts – and demonstrates a greater degree of textual consistency and  fidelity – than any other ancient document. The Dead Sea scrolls provide some of the earliest corroboration of the accuracy of the Old Testament manuscripts that served as the basis for today’s translations.

Christ Himself affirmed the inspiration and integrity of the Old Testament, which were the Scriptures in existence while He was here. The New Testament was written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses to Christ’s life and ministry, by apostles and others whose work could have been decisively refuted had it been untrue.

And archaeology has repeatedly verified key portions of both the Old and New Testaments. When thoroughly considered, there is more evidence for the reliability of the Bible than other sources of information on which we make decisions and take action every day!

It really comes down to a question of our premise: Could Almighty God, in choosing to reveal Himself to the human race, inspire and superintend the compilation of a cohesive and accurate written record of His nature, ways, and will, or would imparting and preserving such a record be too difficult for Him? From my perspective – in an age when billions of bits of information are routinely stored on silicon microchips – while the Bible is certainly a wonder, producing it was for God (I say this reverently) no big deal. For most people, I think their difficulty in accepting the Bible was summed up by Mark Twain when he said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me – it’s the parts that I do understand.”

Many of Christ’s hearers, especially the religious leaders, were greatly troubled by both what they did understand in His teaching as well as what they didn’t. Jesus, perceiving in some the attitude that His talk could be just empty words, gave them even more to talk about – namely, His amazing works. Those works would leave them, in today’s vernacular, unable to compute.

Especially significant to me…was Jesus’ own view of Scripture. He not only quoted it frequently, but also accepted it as the Word of God…. He also told [His disciples], “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen [rendered in some Bible translations as “jot” and “tittle,” referring to markings in the Hebrew alphabet], will by any means disappear from the Law.”…Shouldn’t I have the same view of Scripture as my Lord?