God’s Word is Trustworthy (1)

“Divine trustworthiness is above all the trustworthiness of the divine speaking. Since the primary record and embodiment of this divine speaking is to be found in the Bible, which is quite literally ‘the word of God,’ we can speak of a trustworthy God only on the basis of a trustworthy Bible. If the human authorship of the biblical writings makes them in any serious sense untrustworthy, then divine trurstworthiness is inaccessible to us, for trustworthy divine speech would then be so adulterated by untrstworthy human speech that discrimination between the true and the counterfeit would be impossible. How could we know whether the prophetic ‘Thus says the Lord’ prefaced a genuinely divine speaking or an all-too-human speaking seeking to absolutize itself by claiming divine authority? If, however, the Bible is untrustworthy, then the trustworthy God would not have spoken clearly and unambiguously enough to elicit our trust. Yet divine trustworthiness must surely be manifested as such if we are to actualize the trust of which God is said to be worthy, and a trustworthy Bible is therefore a necessary condition for our ability to trust God – that is, to regard God as trustworthy.”

– Francis Watson from The Trustworthiness of God