Bible Study Course: Lesson 1 - Why the Bible is the Word of God

Introduction

"It has been my custom for many years to read the Bible in its entirety once a year"—John Quincy Adams (U.S. president 1825-1829)

Today a vital ingredient is sorely missing in our modern lives. We simply are not coping with all the stresses of the age. Our human mechanism—brain and body—is breaking down under the strain. In an overcrowded world, a deep sense of loneliness often engulfs the individual.

Perhaps the most damaging casualty has occurred in our relationships with each other, not to mention our wholesale estrangement from God. Trust is becoming a thing of the past. Long-held community values are evaporating before our eyes.

Men and women encounter tremendous difficulty keeping standards of truth intact in a climate where morality is fading fast and movie marquees advise us to "succumb to our darker side." As one newspaper columnist wrote, "we live in an age which has tried excessively hard to eliminate absolute rules."

We are also losing our sense of security. Describing one prominent Western nation, a newspaper article said that, "if the country had a therapist, the complaint could be defined as a virulent strain of unease, perhaps of national insecurity."

Our children are truly worried about tomorrow—and rightfully so. Jobs don't appear to last all that long, and many marriages end in the divorce courts.

At best the future looks uncertain.

In the words of European parliamentarian Sir Frederick Catherwood, "the all-pervasive rationalism of our own century, infiltrating our whole culture and philosophy, has reduced man to an animal, condemned to a meaningless existence terminated by death." The spread of this type of godless secularism has taken a heavy toll on society.