Obstacle: I Am Not Sure I Can Trust the Bible
Does the Bible feel trustworthy to you – here are three strategies to change that.
Listen to the conversation above, then read on.
Another common reason people give for not studying the Bible is that they feel they cannot trust it. If that thought has ever crossed your mind, you are in good company — and this post is for you. Below you will find three practical strategies that address this obstacle directly and give you a concrete place to start.
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Obstacle: I Am Not Sure I Can Trust the Bible
The Issue
You grew up believing the Bible without question. Then your education introduced you to other ways of thinking — about science, history, and how ancient texts work — and the questions started piling up. The miracles. The contradictions people point to. The way different people read the same passage and reach opposite conclusions. You still believe in God, but you are not sure the Bible can carry the weight people put on it.
Those questions deserve to be taken seriously, not dismissed. The good news is that the people who have engaged most rigorously with those questions — historians, archaeologists, philosophers, and textual scholars — have not found the Bible collapsing under scrutiny. Most of them have found the opposite. Doubt is not a reason to walk away from the Bible. It may be the best reason to engage with it more seriously.
3 Strategies to Overcome This Obstacle
- Read scholars who take your questions seriously.Start with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God. Both were written by people who had serious intellectual doubts and worked through them honestly. Neither will ask you to park your brain at the door. They will give you a framework for engaging your questions rather than suppressing them.
- Investigate the manuscript evidence.The New Testament has more manuscript evidence supporting its reliability than any other ancient document — by a significant margin. Books like The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel or Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams walk through this evidence accessibly. Understanding why scholars consider the text reliable changes how you read it.
- Bring your questions into the text itself.Rather than reading the Bible defensively, read it as an investigator. Write your questions down. Look for places where the text itself addresses them. The Gospel of John in particular was written specifically for skeptics — the author says so explicitly in John 20:31. Starting there with your questions open is a completely legitimate way to engage.
Source: Adapted from Hendricks, Howard G., and William D. Hendricks. Living by the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible. Moody Publishers, 2007.