How Can I Know The Word is True?

The evidence for the accuracy of the Bible is overwhelming. The only question is what you'll do with it.

I know the objections. "The Bible was written by men." "It's full of contradictions." "Science has disproved it." "That's just your interpretation."

I've heard them all. I used to say some of them myself — back when I was an atheist with a drinking problem and a mouth that would make a sailor blush.

But something happened. And now I preach this Book every week.

So let's talk about trust. Because if you can't trust the Bible, then it has no importance to our lives. But if you can trust it — if it is true — then there is nothing more important to our lives.

Science Is Catching up and Confirming the Bible.

Here's something that should stop you in your tracks.

Job 26:7 was written approximately 3,500 years ago. Long before telescopes. Long before satellites. Long before anyone had a framework for understanding what held the planets in place. And yet Job — a man living in the ancient Near East — wrote that God "hangs the earth on nothing." No pillars. No cosmic sea turtle. Nothing. Just the earth, suspended in space. Isaac Newton didn't formally describe the law of universal gravitation until 1687. Job beat him by over three millennia.

Isaiah 40:22 — written around 2,800 years ago — describes God sitting above "the circle of the earth." That's a spherical earth. At a time when the dominant worldview placed humanity on a flat disc. People were still debating the shape of the earth when Columbus set sail in 1492. Isaiah wasn't debating anything. He just wrote what God said.

Amos 9:6 describes what scientists now call the hydrologic cycle — the process by which water evaporates from the oceans, forms clouds, and falls back to earth as rain. It sounds simple now. But formal scientific understanding of this process didn't emerge until the 17th century. Amos was writing about it in 760 BC.

Ecclesiastes describes wind patterns moving in circuits through the atmosphere. Psalm 8 references "paths of the sea" — what oceanographers now identify as major ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, invisible to the naked eye but real enough to shape global shipping routes. Matthew Fontaine Maury, the father of modern oceanography, reportedly pointed to Psalm 8 as the inspiration for his research.

Here's the point: these weren't lucky guesses. The writers of Scripture described physical realities that no human being in their era had the tools, the science, or the framework to discover on their own. The Bible didn't catch up with science. Science caught up with the Bible.

Technology Caught Up Too.

Jeremiah 50:9 contains a description that puzzled Bible scholars for centuries. Writing around 600 BC, Jeremiah describes arrows coming against Babylon that are "like those of an expert warrior — none shall return in vain." But here's what catches your attention in the original language: the skill and intelligence described isn't that of the archer. The skill and intelligence is in the arrow itself. The arrow is like an expert warrior. The arrow finds its target. The arrow does not miss.

For 2,600 years, readers didn't have a category for that. Now we do. Guided missiles — smart missiles — are exactly that: weapons with onboard guidance systems that identify and lock onto their targets independent of the shooter. Jeremiah described the technology. The world just needed a few millennia to build it.

Revelation 11 is another one. The Apostle John, writing from exile on the island of Patmos around 95 AD, describes two witnesses who are killed in Jerusalem. And then he writes something that would have seemed utterly impossible for most of Christian history: that "those from the peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations" — the entire world — would see their bodies lying in the street. And three and a half days later, that same global audience would watch them stand up.

For 1,900 years, that passage required theological gymnastics to explain. How could the whole world see one event simultaneously? Then came satellite television. Then came the internet. Now it's the most unremarkable thing imaginable. John saw it in a vision nearly two thousand years ago.

Archaeology Keeps Confirming It.

This is where the rubber meets the road for skeptics — because archaeology deals in physical evidence. Coins, ruins, inscriptions, bones. Things you can hold in your hand.

For generations, critics pointed to cities and figures mentioned in the Bible as proof that Scripture was more legend than history. Nineveh — the massive Assyrian capital where Jonah preached — was considered by some to be mythological. Archaeologists found it in the 1840s, including the palace of Sennacherib referenced in Isaiah and Kings. Gath, the Philistine city and home of Goliath, was similarly dismissed. Excavations beginning in earnest around 2010 confirmed it in extraordinary detail, including evidence of the very siege described in 2 Kings 12.

And then there's Pontius Pilate. Some critical scholars in the 20th century argued he was a literary invention — that no Roman records confirmed his existence. In 1961, a limestone block was uncovered at Caesarea Maritima. Carved into it: Pontius Pilatus, Prefect of Judea. Case closed.

The Bible’s track record is remarkable: when archaeology weighs in on biblical sites and figures, the Bible has been confirmed. No other ancient religious text comes anywhere close. The contrast with the Book of Mormon is striking — after extensive searching, the Mormon Church officially acknowledges there is no archaeological evidence supporting the cities, peoples, or events described in that text. The geography simply doesn't match. The artifacts aren't there.

But with the Bible, they are there. And the more archeological digging we do, the more the Bible is confirmed.

Prophecy Seals the Case.

If the science, technology, and archaeology are compelling, the prophecy is in a different category entirely — because fulfilled prophecy eliminates the possibility of coincidence.

Consider the fall of Tyre. In Ezekiel 26, written around 590 BC, God pronounces a remarkably specific judgment on the coastal city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon. He says Nebuchadnezzar will attack it. That many nations will come against it. That its stones and timber will be thrown into the sea. That it will become a bare rock — a place for fishermen to spread their nets. And that it will never be rebuilt. Twenty-five years after Ezekiel wrote those words, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the mainland city. Then, 250 years later, Alexander the Great took the rubble of that destroyed city, threw it into the sea to build a causeway, and used it to assault the island fortress where Tyre's inhabitants had fled. Ezekiel's prophecy — specific, detailed, seemingly impossible — was fulfilled to the letter over the course of centuries.

The destruction of Jerusalem is another. Jesus stood in the city in approximately 30 AD and told His disciples that the temple — that magnificent, massive structure of enormous stone blocks — would be so thoroughly destroyed that "not one stone will be left upon another." Forty years later, in 70 AD, the Roman general Titus sacked Jerusalem. The temple burned. Soldiers tore it apart searching for melted gold between the stones. Not one stone was left upon another.

And then there is Cyrus the Great — arguably one of the most astonishing fulfilled prophecies in Scripture. Isaiah 44 and 45, written around 700 BC, names a coming king called Cyrus who will issue a decree to rebuild Jerusalem and release the Jewish people from captivity. At the time of writing, Jerusalem hadn't even been destroyed yet. The exile hadn't happened. And yet Isaiah names the man — by name — who will authorize the return. Cyrus the Great rose to power roughly 160 years later and issued exactly that decree.

And then there's Jesus. Over 300 messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures — written across centuries, by different authors, in different historical contexts. Jesus fulfilled them all. The mathematician Peter Stoner calculated the odds of any single person fulfilling just 8 of those prophecies by chance: one in 100 quadrillion. That's a 1 followed by 17 zeros. To picture it: fill the state of Texas two feet deep with silver dollars. Mark one of them. Blindfold a man, drop him anywhere in the state, and ask him to reach down and pick up the marked coin on the first try. That's the odds for 8 prophecies.

Jesus fulfilled over 300.

Mohammed: zero prophecies fulfilled. Buddha: zero. Jesus: 300-plus.

This isn't a close call.

And Then There Are the Changed Lives.

My life is Exhibit A. Alcoholic. Atheist. Couldn't sleep. Language that didn't belong anywhere near a pulpit. Marriage heading somewhere I don't want to describe.

But now? Delivered from alcohol — completely. Sleeping soundly. Standing in a pulpit every week preaching the Word of God. Teaching on marriage with my wife Rebekah. Watching people receive healing, restoration, and genuine freedom at Grace Life Fellowship in Wildwood, Florida.

The Word works exactly like it says it will. I'm not a theory. I'm evidence.

So What Do You Do With Your Doubting Mind?

Here's the part nobody talks about in apologetics class.

You can marshal all of this evidence — and your mind can still push back. That's not a character flaw. Romans 8 is explicit: the unrenewed mind is hostile to God. It doesn't submit to the things of the Spirit, and it can't on its own. The natural mind will always generate an objection, always find a reason to hesitate, always produce another question.

2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us what to do with those objections: cast them down. Take every thought captive. The weapons that demolish mental strongholds aren't intellectual arguments — they're spiritual. They're the Word itself, applied with authority.

When your mind says "that can't be right" — you don't negotiate with it. You decide.

Decide comes from the Latin decider, which means “to cut off.” When you make a true decision, you cut off the alternative. You're not keeping a back door open. You pick a side and you stand there.

The science, the technology, the archaeology, the prophecy, the changed lives — all of it is asking you the same question:

How much evidence do you need? At some point, doubt isn't a logical position. It's a choice. And so is faith.

Decide to believe. Assure your heart — as 1 John 3:19 puts it — that the Word is true and that everything contradicting it is the deception. Not because you're ignoring the evidence. Because you've looked at the evidence and you know exactly where it points.

You can trust the Bible. Not blindly. Not naively. But because the evidence overwhelmingly supports it.

— Pastor Rick © 2026 Rick Porterfield | Grace Life Fellowship