Let's talk about the authority of scripture.

Imagine a radio with 66 stations.

As you flick rapidly between them, you notice something very odd.

The songs sound different. Country and Western collides with

hip-hop, collides with opera, but each new vocalist is developing the same story.

The Bible contains 66 documents. Approximately 40 authors wrote in three

different languages over a period of about 1500 years. Some of the authors were young, some were old, some were

professionals, others were peasants. Some were soldiers, others were civil

servants, fishermen, farmers, or kings. They wrote in wildly different genres, history, population

statistics, poetry, travel diaries, law, prophecy, family trees, biography, geographical surveys, architectural blueprints, song lyrics,

and it wasn't like a relay race with one author handing on the batten to another.

Often the authors were writing centuries apart. They were writing in

different periods of history, in different geographical and cultural situations to

different groups of people. Consider that for a moment. What if multiple authors, all with very

different educational and cultural backgrounds, had each written a single

sentence of the script for this broadcast.

What if each of those authors wrote in different genres, in different centuries,

and in different countries with no master plan for them to consult. Would it make any sense at all?

And yet the 66 documents of the Bible have a single theme running all the way through them, like rings in the trunk of a tree.

They tell the unified coherent story of humanity's creation by God, humanity's rebellion against God, and God's

redemption of his people. It's like flicking between 66 different stations and

finding that each is advancing the same story, a grand symphonic drama that only

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