In the days of Pekah king of Israel, Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria came and captured Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and he carried the people captive to Assyria.
(2 Kings 15:29)
The third proof of scripture’s reliability is a gift that keeps on giving, archaeological discovery. There has yet to be an archaeological find undermining the reliability of Scripture, and there are too many to list providing confirmation. To get into this subject, you may read any number of readily available books with titles like Top Ten Discoveries in Biblical Archaeology (2016) by Timothy Kimberley. My friend David Chapman has also edited The ESV Archaeology Study Bible which includes discoveries enlightening every book of the Bible. So frequent are affirming archaeological finds, Christianity Today lists the top ten every year. I’ll just mention two random archaeological confirmations.
About a hundred years ago, scholars accused the Bible of making an error when it identified a king of Assyria in 2 Kings 15:29 named Tiglath-Pileser. However, archaeologists later excavated his capital city and found his name engraved on one of the clay tablets.1
There are numerous examples of scholars falling on their own swords as they set out to prove the Bible historically mistaken (West, Lyttleton, McDowell, etc.) but let me give you just one. In 1895 a professor named William Ramsay wrote a book called St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen. It is the fruit of many years of hands-on study of the places Paul traveled. Ramsay originally set out to prove that Acts was riddled with mistakes regarding geography; however, the more he investigated, the more amazed he was to discover not only that Luke (the writer of Acts) was precise in his geographical details but in all his descriptions of customs and titles for the day (as we noted previously). The result was his own conversion as well as the production of a book that remains unsurpassed and irrefutable 105 years later!
The reliability of God’s Word and the mercy of the Spirit can turn even the most diligent skeptics into believers and advocates. We must trust in God’s Word!
Prayer
Confess your own skepticism to God in the way your circumstances sometimes cause you to doubt what scripture says is true. Ask God, by his Spirit, to make trust and belief your reflex.
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- James Montgomery Boice, Does Inerrancy Matter? (Oakland, CA: International Council for Biblical Inerrancy, 1979), 21, 22.