How the Bible Came to Be

When you hold a Bible in your hands, you’re holding more than a book. It isn’t magical ink on paper, as if the pages themselves carried power. No—it’s much more powerful than magic. It is the very Word of God. In it, we find life.

Martin Luther called the Bible not antique, not modern, but eternal.

I think the book of Hebrews put it best:

I was reminded of that just last week when a friend told me how a passage he read in Scripture spoke directly to his situation. He lived out what he read, and God changed things right before his eyes. That’s the living Word in action.

I recently began a four-week series at our church called From Scrolls to Scripture: How God’s Word Was Preserved and Made Plain.

Why? Because I want our church family to fall in love with the Bible—not just as a book to respect, but as the very bread of life for our souls.

Jesus said...

So in this series, I’m leading our church through the story of the Bible. How did we get this amazing book that, most of us, have several copies of?

I think that a robust understanding of how the Bible came to be will help every Christian love and cherish the good Book.

There are two lenses we have to look at when asking this question:
1. We need to find out what the Bible says about how it came to be. (Let the Bible speak for itself.)
2. We need to look through history to trace how God kept His promise to preserve the Bible for us.

This post focusses on that first part: what the Bible says about how it came to be. In a seminary classroom, they would just call it "Bibliology".

Let me give you a brief sketch from start to finish of what the Bible has to say for itself...

“Revelation” simply means God revealing Himself. He has spoken in creation (Psalm 19:1), through prophets, through dreams and visions, and most clearly through His Son, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1–2). And finally, God revealed Himself in written form—the Scriptures.

The Bible was written by human authors, but under divine direction. Peter said, “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). That means Scripture isn’t just man’s words—it’s God’s Word, breathed out by the Spirit.

In the ancient world there were no printing presses. Scripture was copied by hand on stone, clay, papyrus, leather, and parchment. Scribes painstakingly reproduced God’s Word so it could be passed on to others. This faithful work ensured that the Bible didn’t stay hidden but spread from person to person, community to community.

From the beginning, God’s Word has crossed language barriers. One of the earliest major translations was the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Amazingly, Jesus Himself used this translation, showing that God’s Word in translation is still His Word.

Did you catch that?

If Jesus didn't dignify the act of Bible translation by using the Septuagint, we'd be having a very different discussion (and you and I might be learning Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).

God promised His Word would endure forever (Psalm 119:89; 1 Peter 1:23-25). Despite persecution, loss, and even attempts to destroy it, the Scriptures have been preserved. Today, we can hold a Bible in our hands as living proof that God has kept His promise.

How do we know which books belong in the Bible?

One huge clue that helps us know which books of the Bible are.. well... the Bible, is the fact that different authors of Scripture verify other authors of Scripture within the Bible.

In other words, within the Bible every author is verified by another.

• Jesus affirmed the Old Testament as Scripture (Luke 24:44-45). 
• Peter recognized Paul’s letters as Scripture (2 Peter 3:16).
• Paul recognized Luke's writing as Scripture (1 Timothy 5:18).
• Peter affirmed prophetic and apostolic authority (2 Peter 3:1-2). 

That pretty much covers the 66 books of the Bible. So, we can look into the Bible to determine a lot when it comes to the canon.

But what about the early church?

The early church didn’t “decide” the canon. God did. It's His Word and, though this is an unsatisfying answer for a critic, there's an element of faith that necessarily has to be there for a believer that the assembly of the Bible was God-guided. He assembled the canon His way, and it's more like the early Christians "recognized" it for what it was.

By the second century, Christians were already using the same 27 books of the New Testament we have today. In other words, God’s people recognized God’s voice.

Even with the Bible in our hands, we can’t understand it without the Holy Spirit. Paul wrote, “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:14). But through the Spirit’s work, believers are taught, guided, and given understanding of God’s Word (John 14:26).

As the church grew, so did the need for the Bible in every language, and the story of the Bible is the story of God’s Word spreading to every tribe and tongue. Translation is a massive part of God's mission here on earth because without the Word of God there is no good news!

These eight truths remind us that the Bible didn’t just fall from the sky. God revealed it, inspired it, preserved it, and gave it to us so we could know Him.

And because God has gone to such lengths to give us His Word, we can trust it, treasure it, and live by it.

The Bible is more than a book. It’s God’s voice. And when He speaks, everything changes.

- Pastor Keith