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I Don’t Know What To Trust

Good day. I’m in the middle of many doubts that have arisen lately. I am an Adventist, but I have realized by reading that Elena [EGW] is not a prophetess and that my entire faith has been practically based on a lie. I would like to ask for help. I have found your podcast on Spotify, and I would like to ask you if you are willing to help me. 

My doubt is actually about the Bible. All this has led me to think that maybe the Bible is not even legitimate. By this I mean, how were the books selected? What was the basis on which the canon was formed? Who decided which books would be chosen? Maybe they’re all just one more Ellen White, so to speak. I’ve read in different places, but they all give me different explanations. I don’t know what to trust. I hope you can help me; it’s very important to me. Thank you.

—VIA EMAIL

Response: Thank you for writing. You ask a very important question!

Adventists are taught that Ellen White was inspired exactly as the Bible writers were inspired. Ellen White even said that the words were not inspired, but the writers were inspired. Using this explanation, the logical conclusion, then, is the one Adventists use—the one which I learned in Adventist school: the prophets and writers of Scripture were given inspired ideas, but they were left to explain those ideas the best they could according to their limited understanding. 

Thus, they explain, different writers had different ideas about God and how He worked. They also used this understanding to say that the Old Testament writers wrote about God in the context of the primitive and pagan nations that were on the earth at that time. They further said that God dealt with people in the Old Testament in a way their primitive, warring cultures could understand, but with greater learning and knowledge as time went on, they began writing about God in more civilized ways.

Further, they used this explanation to validate their claims that Ellen was inspired just as the Bible writers were inspired. Adventist leaders have always known that Ellen made many mistakes and had internal disagreements both with herself and with Scripture, but they explained those errors by saying the Bible writers were just like her. Because they had to try to explain Ellen’s mistakes, they felt free to explain away things that they didn’t like in Scripture.

Ellen said that if anyone begins to question and abandon her testimonies, they would eventually abandon the Bible. This idea is woven into Adventist theology and its worldview in order to keep its members loyal. In fact, as Dale Ratzlaff says, atheism is built into Adventism because Adventists are taught that if they can’t believe Ellen, they can’t believe the Bible. 

It is most common that people leave Adventism but do not become Christian. The reason for this fact is that Adventism taught its members that if their prophet is false, they have to consider the Bible writers to be false also.

Jesus’ Authority

Over the years there has been much secular criticism of the Bible. Unbelievers who do not have faith in the Lord Jesus approach Scripture with the purpose of finding fault with it according to their own worldview. Much like Adventists, these critics of Scripture have raised many questions about the Bible and have planted deep doubts into the minds of people. 

I will not try to go into the history of higher criticism—that information is readily available—but I will address how we can know the Bible is valid. 

First, one of the most surprising things I learned about Scripture was from our pastor Gary Inrig in sermons over the years. He reminded us that the Lord Jesus, God the Son, referred to Scripture throughout His ministry and confirmed both its authenticity and showed its consistency and fulfillment in His own ministry.

For example, I once heard an educated Adventist pastor teach a class on the book of Jonah. He led with this statement: “Jonah is more true than if it actually happened.” I was still Adventist then, but his statement caused me to doubt. Was the book of Jonah actually true, or was it a “myth” that had been used to make some statements about God? 

Jesus, however, referred to Jonah as a historical figure whose story was fact. Look at this passage from Matthew 12:38–42:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.

This is only one example of many, but I use it to demonstrate that Jesus Himself—eternal God who had inspired the book of Jonah—used the Old Testament as an authoritative document that had roots in history and also foreshadowed His own ministry. 

In the passage above, Jesus also confirmed the historical fact of the Queen of Sheba witnessing Solomon’s glory, and He said she would condemn the unbelieving Jews in the future because they had One in their presence who was greater than Solomon. 

In other words, the Lord Jesus treated the Old Testament as completely and utterly reliable and real. 

Jesus also equated His own words and works with the words of the Father. Notice, for example, this passage from John:

So they said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been telling you from the beginning. I have much to say about you and much to judge, but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” They did not understand that he had been speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” As he was saying these things, many believed in him.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:25–32).

In other words, Jesus not only referred to the Old Testament as to a reliable, historical document but also as the word of God which revealed God’s will for humanity. Moreover, He equated His words with the words of the Father and His works with the works of the Father. 

Jesus assigns authority

When Jesus was finally about to go to the cross, He prayed to His Father in the presence of His disciples, and He said that the apostles’ words would carry the words of life, and all who believed in the age to come would believe because of the apostles’ word. 

Look at these words of Jesus:

“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:6–22).

Here we have Jesus declaring—in a prayer His disciples hear and which John recorded in the eternal word of God—that He was giving His disciples the very words of God, and that all who believe in the Lord Jesus in all the ages to come would believe because of God’s words which the apostles would record.

So now we come to the ways we can know the Bible is reliable. Since God the Son—who would KNOW from eternity—affirmed both the Old Testament validity and historicity and delegated apostolic authority for the carrying of the gospel to the world, we can read Scripture from the perspective of hearing what God said.

We KNOW that Ellen lied and plagiarized and contradicted Scripture. Therefore, what she taught about how Bible writers are inspired is unreliable. Since Jesus affirmed Scripture’s integrity, we have to be willing to look at its words and read them in context. “Words matter, and context is everything.”

Since Scripture says this about itself, and since Jesus affirmed Scripture is God’s word, we have to approach Scripture on the basis of its claims. Look at these:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work(2 Timothy 3:14–17).

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account (Hebrews 4:12–13).

Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for

“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

And this word is the good news that was preached to you (1 Peter 1:22–25).

I know this may sound like circular reasoning: if the Bible makes claims for itself, we must believe them. Yet the Bible is the only sacred book that claims to be God’s own living word, and it’s the only book that claims to change us and to give us new life in Jesus. Since Jesus affirmed its integrity, we need to take His affirmation seriously. 

According to the passages from 2 Timothy and Hebrews 4 and 1 Peter above, the actual words of Scripture are God-breathed and powerful, able to penetrate our hearts and minds and to give us new life. These declarations mean that the writers were not just given ideas and then set free to interpret them the best they could. This means that God was sovereign over the words that were written for us.

The fact that God used human writers that spanned over 1400 years and who spoke different languages and lived in three different continents means that Scripture is a miraculous work that He produced. In the way that the hypostatic union of God and man in the Lord Jesus is a mystery and a miracle we cannot explain and yet is completely true, so the God-directed inspiration of the words written by human authors is a mystery and a miracle we cannot explain.

Adventists mock the idea of the words being inspired by saying that would mean the prophets did “automatic writing”. Yet Scripture reveals that something far more amazing happened. God gave the words and chose the writers—and He used the writers’ own “voices” to say His chosen words. It is a miracle similar to the incarnation of God the Son in a human body. We can’t explain it, but He was 100% God and 100% man. So Scripture consists of 100% the words of God as revealed to men who were not just given vague thoughts. They were given God’s words.

Ellen White was NOT inspired in that way. She was not inspired by God at all because her “gospel” contradicts the gospel of the Lord Jesus and places Satan in the Adventist version of atonement and salvation. Her message is antithetical to the biblical gospel. 

Marks of Authenticity

According to Jewish tradition, the books of the Old Testament were organized by Ezra the scribe after the return of the exiles from Babylon. Thus the Old Testament existed before the time of Christ, and it had been translated also into the Greek Septuagint by the time Jesus was born. 

The New Testament was received and organized by the first century. Originally there was no specific meeting when these books were voted on and finalized; rather, the early church accepted the books we find in the New Testament as authentic because they consistently bore the marks of apostolic authority. Since Paul had been appointed an apostle by the risen Christ and had been given the job of explaining the administration of the new covenant and preaching it to the gentiles (see Ephesians 3:8-10), his books were recognized as official apostolic writings. 

Thus the books that found their way into the accepted opus of authentic works had to bear the mark of apostolic authority: they were either written by an apostle or by someone who was known to have worked with an apostle. (Mark is one such book; his gospel is usually considered Peter’s gospel. James is another; he was considered an apostle and leader of the early church in Jerusalem, but he was not one of the twelve. He was, however, Jesus’ half-brother and was listed in 1 Corinthians 15 as one to whom the risen Jesus revealed Himself—a requirement for being an apostle.)

Apostolic authority and the general acceptance of the church in the first century were major factors in what books made it into the canon. Some books which have been proposed as “left out” books, such as the gospel of Thomas, for example, were not written as early as the books that are in the New Testament and do not bear the marks of apostolic authority nor do they carry the same message of the finished gospel of the Lord Jesus that the accepted canon bears. 

The mark of the Holy Spirit was also one of the ways the early church evaluated the books. That is a more subjective measurement, but the power of the word to penetrate minds and hearts and to convict readers of the work and person of the Lord Jesus had to be a mark of a true book. 

Finally, the real “proof” of Scripture’s validity is its power to reveal Jesus and to change us when we read and believe. Scripture is the only physical thing on the earth that claims to be 100% reliable and directly from God. If we take it at its word and trust God to teach us what He wants us to know, it is self-authenticating. It will change us. No other holy book can do that. No other “scripture” can give us new birth and lead us to be reconciled to God and to find peace with Him. No other book can change our hearts and desires and make us trust our sovereign God. 

Further, no other book tells us the truth about ourselves. Scripture reveals that we are born sinful, spiritually dead an unable to seek or to please God (Eph. 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–15). We must be born again, and when we see what Jesus did by becoming sin for us on the cross and trust Him, He makes us alive and forgives all our sin. Even more, He seals us with His Holy Spirit, guaranteeing our eternity with Him (Eph. 1:13–14). The Father adopts us and makes us heirs with Christ, and He teaches us to know He is our true Father (Rom. 8:14–17). 

Here is an audio recording from one of our past FAF conferences about how we can know Scripture is reliable. The speaker is Jon Rittenhouse, and he addresses the inerrancy of the Bible: https://lifeassuranceministries.org/faf2007/JonRittenhouse2007.mp3