Tony Evans Teaches On BibliologySample

Your Bible at home is probably either leather-bound or hard-covered. It’s nice, neat, compact and organized. We rarely stop to consider how it got like this, somehow thinking it always existed in this convenient form. But the process was more complex than that, taking thousands of manuscripts, transmitted over many years, preserved by the Holy Spirit, accepting and rejecting certain books, all so that we could have the sixty-six books we have today. But how can we trust the integrity of the process? Well, the same God who spoke His Word, made it living and active, establishing it as the foundation of truth, is the same God who safeguarded it through history until the Bible was completely assembled into the collection of Scripture that we know today. 

God composing the Bible is like going for a walk to a loved one’s house. Along the way, there are some beautiful flowers. You stop, pick a flower and keep walking. You stop again, pick another flower and walk a little further. The next time you stop, you pick a few flowers, walk slightly further and pick another one. When you arrive at the house, you have a beautiful bouquet. But you don’t stop there. You organize the flowers by placing them in a specific arrangement. Imagine how your loved one feels when they receive this hand-picked bouquet given to them in love!

Well as God walked through history, He said, “Moses, you write this. Isaiah and Jeremiah, you write that. Luke, you can write those. Paul, you write these thirteen letters.” And so over 1,500 years, different books are compiled by God into a beautiful bouquet called the Bible. But God didn’t stop there. He oversaw the arrangement of the Bible so that thirty-nine books were grouped together in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New, organized by genre: the Law, history, wisdom, prophets, gospels, epistles and apocalyptic writings. When it was all said and done, God superintended the process through time so He could give us a love-filled, hand-picked bouquet.

How can you regularly remind yourself to appreciate the wonderful gift of God's word?