Talking with a man one day about spiritual things, I mentioned the Bible. "Well, the Bible," he said, "is a book, just like any other book." He was mistaken.On the night before He died, Jesus prayed for His disciples: not only for His disciples at that time, but also for all those that were to come. In His prayer, he told His Father "Your word is truth" (John 17:17).
In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, reformer John Calvin tells how the Scriptures, although written by men, come to us with authority from God; he says, what's more, that every true believer will come to the certainty that they are in fact the word of God. This conscious realisation, he says, comes by what he calls "the inward testimony of the Spirit."
Says John Piper: "[The Holy Spirit] awakens us, as from the dead, to see and taste the divine reality of God in Scripture, which authenticates it as God's own Word. . . the witness of God to Scripture is the immediate, unassailable, life-giving revelation to the mind of the majesty of God manifest in the Scriptures. . .
"God witnesses to us of his reality and the reality of his Son and his Word by giving us life from the dead so that we come alive to his majesty and see him for who he is in his Word."
Theologian J. I. Packer explains it this way: "Calvin affirms Scripture to be self-authenticating through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. What is this 'inner witness'? Not a special quality of experience, nor a new, private revelation, nor an existential 'decision,' but a work of enlightenment. . .
"The internal witness of the Spirit in John Calvin is a work of enlightenment whereby, through the medium of verbal testimony, the blind eyes of the spirit are opened, and divine realities come to be recognised and embraced for what they are. This recognition Calvin says, is as immediate and unanalyzable as the perceiving of a color, or a taste, by physical sense - an event about which no more can be said than that when appropriate stimuli were present it happened, and when it happened we know it had happened."(1)
A few weeks before I was converted to Christ I moved to an area where I had not previously lived, but not far from the home of a committed Christian family I knew. I remember one evening I went out looking for a pub. I had difficulty finding one, and when I did, the beer tasted awful.
Almost without intending it, I ended up at the home of these Christians. The conversation quickly turned to spiritual matters. I started asking questions about eight o'clock, and I continued asking questions until midnight. That night I was given answers to my questions straight from the Bible. I clearly remember walking home in the early hours of the morning, saying to myself "Well, either the Bible is true or it isn't: one or the other."
I can't remember exactly at what moment I came to an incontrovertible conviction that the Bible is true, but one thing is sure: the revelation changed my life.
How about you?
(1) J. I. Packer. John Calvin: A collection of essays. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966, p166
