Q. What is the Bible and why do Christians trust it?

A. Simply, the Bible is God speaking to us.  It's God telling us about who he is and what he has done.  It answers some of the biggest questions in life: Why are we here?  How should we live?  Is there life after death?

It is broken down into 66 "books", split into the Old Testament and the New Testament.  The Old Testament is the story of how God created a perfect world, man sinned and messed it up, and God began working towards and foretelling the solution: Jesus.  The New Testament tells us about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, how Jesus was the fulfillment of everything talked about in the Old Testament, and how Christianity developed and spread throughout the world.  It also includes a lot of teaching, telling us about what Jesus did and who he was, and how we should live in light of that.

Christians have a good number of reasons to trust the Bible. 

First, we trust the Bible because science says we should trust the Bible.  We don't have the original documents, but we have very good reason to trust that the Bible we have today is the same Bible that God inspired. 

We trust that the writings of Plato we have today are what Plato really wrote, yet the earliest manuscripts we have of them were written 1,300 years AFTER Plato... and we only have 7 of them. 

We trust that the writings of Herodotus we have today are what Herodotus really wrote, yet the earliest manuscripts we have of them were written 1,350 years after Herodotus... and we only have 8 of them. 

In the scholarly world, there is no belief that we can't trust the writings that have been handed down to us over the years, despite the scarcity of manuscripts and the millenium between writing and manuscript.  Sadly, it seems the Bible is held to a much higher standard by many people.  We have 5366 manuscripts of parts of the Bible, made between 50 and 225 years after the Bible was originally written. 

Second, we trust the Bible because it paints a vision of a supremely glorious, self-exalting, self-promoting, and perfectly good God who is absolutely out-of-this-world. Man could not have made up this God. Man is man-centered.  Man-made religions, namely, all other religions, are ultimately man-centered. They are ultimately about man achieving something. Gaining something. Earning something. Avoiding something. Performing something. Offering something.

The God portrayed in the Bible is absolutely unique. He needs nothing from man. He lacks nothing. He is God, He is perfect, and He is complete. He is God-centered and does all things for His own glory. He exalts most the One who is most worth exalting, namely, Himself. He loves most the One who is most lovely, namely, Himself. He promotes the One who is infinitely invaluable, namely, Himself.

The highest display of His value and passion for Himself is also the highest display of His freely given love and undeserved mercy. It was Jesus, crucified, crushed by the Father, to save me-type sinners from the hell we deserve, and set us free from sin, and our self-absorption, so we can live our lives to make much of Him. Jesus died to bear the wrath of God, yes. He died to purchase salvation, yes. But ultimately, the cross happened to demonstrate and magnify the worth and value of the love of God. He died for His own glory.

That kind of consistency is found in every book of the Bible. God is the center. Man is blessed by association to God, not by any self-produced merit. God is central in God's affections. God is central in God's Word - the Bible. God is central in absolutely everything. That is not something man devises. Man is much too self-centered.

No man has ever dreamed of such a God. No man can fathom (much less, create the idea of) such a God - it is impossible for the human nature that is totally selfish and sinful without exception. No one ever had to teach a human being to be man-centered. No book outside of the Bible and those inspired by the Bible has ever depicted such a God-centered and perfectly good God.

A free online copy of the Bible is available at http://gnpcb.org/esv