“Blogging the Institutes” is my on-going attempt to paraphrase John Calvin’s work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can find out more about the series in the Introduction. For all the posts in this series, check out the Master List.
Scripture’s Truth Continues through the Centuries
Another piece of evidence confirming the Bible’s divine authorship is how old it is. Greek writers might try to rehabilitate old Egyptian religion, but no religion today stems from ancient times, before the time of the Moses. But Moses does not write about a new God in his work. He writes about the eternal God which the Israelites had received from the tradition of their ancestors. Their ancestors transmitted the truth of the eternal God from generation-to-generation for a long time. Furthermore, what else does Moses do other than lead the Israelites back to the God who made a covenant with their “founder,” Abraham? If Moses wrote about a God they had never heard of, he would not have succeeded in leading the nation. Israel’s liberation from Egypt, however, must have been a universal fact in the ancient world. Just mentioning it would have elicited interest. It is therefore probable that most Israelites who lived later were acquainted with the 400 years of Israel’s captivity in Egypt. Now, if Moses (who was so much earlier than any of the other religious writers) traces his teaching back to such a remote period, it is obvious how much older the Scriptures are than other writings.