In the last few posts, I have been answering the question: How can we know the Bible is the Word of God? When beginning to answer this question, I introduced the acronym M-A-P-S as a way to remember the answer. The first post addressed the M: Manuscript Evidence; the second post addressed the A: Archeological Evidence; the third post addresses the P: Prophecy. These first three posts demonstrated that the Bible is reliable in regard to transmission, accurate in regard to historicity, and trustworthy in regard to its spiritual claims. This post is going to address the S: Statistical Probability. What exactly to I mean by statistical probability? I mean that when all the facts are in concerning the Bible, the statistical probability that men artificially generated the Bible is unlikely.

So what are the facts? To begin with, the Bible was written over a time period around 1500-2000 years. Furthermore, the Bible is a collection of 66 books written by 40 different authors in 4 different languages. Yet the Bible is one continuous story.

Considering those facts, let’s imagine that I challenge you to a task. My challenge is for you to generate a continuous story out of 66 books by 40 different authors. Let’s also imagine that as I issue this challenge to you, we are standing in the Library of Congress, which has millions of copies of books. In fact, it is estimated to contain 32 million cataloged books. Do you think you could accomplish this task? It is possible, but highly doubtful. But when one throws in the requirement that there be 4 different languages (The Library of Congress has books in 470 languages) and the books must span 1500-2000 years, it becomes impossible—even with millions of books at hand.

Think about the language requirement for a moment. America has only been a country for a little over two hundred years. Think how much our language has changed in that short time period. Go back just two hundred more years and English becomes essentially a different language. It would be nearly impossible for the average person to sit down and try to write a sequel to a book from the 1600’s. It would take someone familiar with Old English to take on such a task. That is what one faces when trying to claim that men sat down and came up with the books of the Bible. Not only is simply a language problem over time, but then you have completely different languages in the Bible as well.

After looking at the facts surrounding the Bible, one can come away with the confidence of knowing that it is most unlikely that men sat down and invented the Bible. What is even more emboldening is taking this in conjunction with the manuscript evidence, archeological evidence, and the specific and fulfilled prophecy contained in the Bible. Looking at four of these aspects, it become clear that the Bible is most certainly the Word of God. Some of you might be thinking, “That’s great, but how did we get the Bible? Did it fall out of the sky or something?” My next post will address this very topic—just how did get the bible as we know it today?