The question of the ages...
Is the Bible really true
and a message from God?
by James Bramlett, Lt. Colonel, USAF (Ret)
No doubt, this is really the question of the ages! It is a matter of life and death.
How do we know the Bible is true and from God, say, compared with other religious books that are claimed to be sacred? How do we know it can be trusted as a message from the Creator and not just a nice book full of nice religious platitudes?
Well, the evidence is overwhelming, and conclusive!
There are at least eight main reasons why we know that the Bible is from God:
• Proof from its uniqueness among all books ever written. (See sample below.)
• Proof from archeology.
• Proof from prophecy, or the accurate prediction of future events.
• Proof from its own unique, internal claim of flawless inspiration.
• Proof from Jesus Christ Himself.
• Proof from science. (Yes, I said science!)
• Proof from mathematics. (This will blow your mind. See example below.)
• Proof from its impact on people and the world.
Finally, there is the amazing " Factor X ," I will tell you about.
All the above reasons are explained in detail in the book below, but I promised you two samples. Here they are:
1. Proof from the Bible's uniqueness among all books ever written.
In spite of the unparalleled attempts to destroy it, the Bible has survived as the most authentic and accurate ancient document, based on both age and number of manuscripts available. Homer's Iliad ranks closest to the New Testament in number of manuscripts available, 643, with the earliest copy written about 500 years after the original. There are only about 10 good manuscripts of Caesar's Gallic Wars available and the earliest was written over 900 years after the original. By contrast, there are over 5,000 complete or partial Greek manuscripts available of the New Testament (plus over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and over 9,000 other versions), with the earliest written only 25 years after the original!
Shakespeare's 37 plays are only about 200 years old but there are said to be about 100 significant textual variants that are the subject of scholarly dispute. The New Testament is about 2,000 years old and it is estimated that there are only 20 or less such passages. Does anyone ever doubt the reliability of Shakespeare's work?
It can be concluded that if the same tests were applied to all available ancient literature, the Bible would be clearly hailed by all as by far the most reliable ancient document. Or else all other ancient literature, including the classics, would have to be rejected as unreliable!
2. Proof from mathematics!
Could God have actually left his signature on the book He authored? The evidence suggests so.
More work needs to be done on this subject, and at the current time it is controversial. Nevertheless, many brilliant and credible Bible scholars, mathematicians, and computer scientists believe it is true.
Beginning at least as early as the 1800s and through today, gifted people have made exhaustive studies in the original Hebrew and Greek languages of the ancient Bible manuscripts. These researchers claim their results prove that the writings had to have come from an infinite and omniscient Mind.
One person who studied this phenomenon was a Russian immigrant and Harvard graduate, Dr. Ivan Panin, who spent 50 years and accumulated 43,000 pages of notes on the subject before he died in 1942. A more recently published work is Theomatics , by Jerry Lucas and Del Washburn.
Unlike English, in both Hebrew and Greek, the main languages in which God chose to give us the Bible, numbers are not separate characters but are represented by letters of the alphabet. For example, in Greek, the first letter "alpha" (for the English A) is also the number 1. Panin and others have gone to the manuscripts and have assigned the appropriate numerical value for each letter, then they looked for patterns.
The results are mind-boggling -- patterns of numbers that could not have been placed there by humans and probability theory analysis shows that such an elaborate "accident" is impossible. For example, in the first verse of the Bible, Panin found 30 different patterns of the number seven, a number the Bible gives special significance. In English, the verse has ten words, but in Hebrew, only seven. The seven words have exactly 28 (4 X 7) letters. The nouns in the sentence give a combined 777 (111 X 7). The two objects of the verb have seven letters, and so on. The chance of 30 combinations of seven in a seven-word sentence happening accidentally is described as 1 in 33,000,000,000,000.
According to an Associated Press report a few years ago, after subjecting the first five books of the Bible to exhaustive computer analysis, researchers in Israel came to an amazing conclusion. The Torah, or the five books of Moses, had long been assumed by skeptics to be the work of mere men and multiple authors. But Scripture scholar Moshe Katz and computer expert Menachem Wiener of the Israel Institute of Technology analyzed the book's material through sophisticated computer analysis. They discovered an intricate pattern of meaningful words hidden in those books, spelled by letters separated at fixed intervals, the phenomenon called "equidistant letter spacing (ELS)." For example, in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish Torah, the word "Torah" is found repeated at 50-character intervals and "Elohim" (God) at 26-character intervals. It would have been impossible for a mere mortal to have done this, and statistically it could not have happened by chance. Mr. Wiener said, "We need a non-rational explanation. And ours is that the (Torah) was written by God through the hand of Moses."
In all of this, it appears that the omniscient Creator left a persuasive signature on his Word, making the apostle Paul's statement even more graphic and understandable: "All Scripture is God-breathed."
For an explanation of all the "eight proofs" above, plus "Factor X," see the hot new book:
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After His resurrection but before He ascended
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But He also said, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you" (Acts 1:8). He was speaking to His disciples, and to generations of followers to come.
This exact same power is what this book is all
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Author Profile
After 20 years of distinguished military service,
the author, James Bramlett, retired as a regular officer and lieutenant colonel
in the U.S. Air Force. He has more than 30 years of study and experience on
this subject, has written three nationally selling books and many articles,
and is the recipient of an Amy Writing Award.
Jim has a B.A. degree from the University of
Miami (Florida) and an M.B.A. from The Ohio State University.
Order now! Click
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From Xulon Press
Paperback. Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 220
ISBN: 1-591609-82-8
Retail price: only $13.99 + S/H
By the way, have you ever heard of The Four Spiritual Laws?
FREE, at the below link.
This brief, profound message has touched and inspired the lives of hundreds of millions in every nation, including that of this writer. The information is in a little booklet that in the past 50 years has become the most distributed publication in the history of the world, with over 2 billion copies printed and distributed in every major language.
To see a complete, FREE copy in more than 100 languages, click here.
Oh, one other thing. The Bible reveals that we are a three-part being: body, soul, and spirit. It is important to care for the body and do our best to keep it healthy, which is God's desire (3 John 2). The author and his wife are heavily into nutrition and natural methods of healng, and study it extensively. For some breakthrough information that may be useful to you, click here.
God bless you