Note: This guest post was written by Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary Professor and Northwestern Publishing House author Stephen Geiger.
You are talking with a friend; a coworker comes up to you while you’re eating lunch; you read a post on social media. Whatever the messenger, the message is the same: “You need to read this book!”
The messenger gives you the title but doesn’t give you a choice—you need to read this book!
Do you immediately buy the book? You probably first want to know why. Why do I need to read this book?
Answers may vary. “It’s so well-written. It grabbed me from start to finish. I learned more from that book than I’ve learned in a long time. It was so much fun. Once you pick it up, you can’t put it down. It will change the way you think about the world.”
Those reasons may persuade you to read a book. But there is a reason that goes far beyond any of those. And there is a book that absolutely everyone does need to read.
The world needs to read the Bible, and the reason is that God’s Word is power to change eternities.
It’s no surprise that a world that operates naturally as an enemy of God tries to persuade people that they don’t need to read the Bible. The reasons can be many: “The Bible is human opinion. Its morality is outdated. No one can be sure that the words on paper are words from God. The Bible has been copied so many times that no one can be sure we have what was originally written. Translators can make mistakes.”
The Bible is boring and baffling and backwards, a critic might say, and you so much want to reply, but your heart can raise doubts of its own. While you may not raise objections so aggressively, you may wonder whether you can trust what you read in the Scriptures. You have struggled with guilt and do not know how to quiet your conscience. You wonder whether the Bible needs to catch up with the times. You tried to answer a friend who questioned the Bible, and you left with new doubts of your own.
If we want others to read the Bible, we need to know the reasons why. If we want certainty ourselves, we need to know whether the Bible can be trusted.
Read a book that can help you understand why we can confidently read the Book.
How the Bible Came to Be is written both for the skeptic and for the faithful.
This book can give answers to a non-believer who is wrestling with the most basic questions, perhaps not even about the Bible but about existence and God and guilt and the future. This book can equip a college student who is confronting aggressive efforts to undermine confidence in the Scripture. This book can support a mature Christian who is eager to grow in knowledge and be encouraged in the faith. This book can connect with someone who has little interest in the Bible at all, engaging the reader with fascinating stories of discovery and persecution and politics and conquest.
This book takes the story of the Bible from the very beginning, before there was any record of writing. It explores how the books we currently have in our Bibles were recognized as divine. It tracks the copying process over centuries, a careful effort to preserve God’s truth. It presents the purpose and challenge of translation, the tool that can bring divine truth to an entire world.
How the Bible Came to Be tracks the story behind the Bible, from origins to preservation to translations. When you know that story, you are even more ready to say to a friend, and to yourself, “You need to read this book, the Bible.”
How the Bible Came to Be is the fifteenth and final volume in the Bible Discovery Series. It helps you discover how the Bible we have today came to be, so you can have confidence that it really is God’s Word. After reading this book, you will have a much clearer picture of how the Bible we have today came to be. You will be well-equipped to answer those important questions for yourself and others.
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