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The Reflection Series for this month is adapted from Reasoning the Rest, which you can read or download from the main menu. This month, we’re discussing how we can trust the Bible as the inspired Word of God. 

The Christian belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God is rooted in four aspects of the Bible.

1. The Consistency of the Message
2. The Consistency of the Effect
3. The Consistency of the Power
4. The Consistency of the Promise

This week, let’s look at how the promises of God help us trust the Bible as God’s Word.

Our limitations were explained in last week’s reflection, however, one more aspect of our inability to “know” is worth noting. Although our passions and dreams encourage us to do and know more, the reality of our humanness is that more often than not we can’t do more, and we have no ideas or inspirations. The suggestion to know the outcome of a particular situation premature of its conclusion is foolish, given our limitation of foresight and foreknowledge. Thus, we are reduced to making educated guesses and assumptions— nothing of weight in regards to truth or certainty.

Once again, the Bible sets itself apart as a collection of promises, made during times where not nearly enough fact or information is present to support them, consistently fulfilled. There is something uniquely powerful, and also terrifying, about how much God professes to know in the Bible. There is a casual confidence that emerges from the pages of the Bible as God reflects on his plan and the way in which he has, is, or is planning to carry it out, regardless of the will or abilities of man. The casual and almost hypnotic redundancy and consistency of God’s plans and methods throughout the Bible is at a casual glance unimpressive and some might say tired and unimaginative. However, once one understands that this Word is not telling a fictitious story but is telling the history of real people, real places and is still in effect in our present age, one is suddenly and violently thrust from a view of the Word as boring or predictable to an understanding that God has known all along what he was going to do, what he had to do and what he intends to finish.