We can pray for the help of the Holy Spirit. We need God’s help to believe God’s word. One of the most important claims the Bible makes about itself is that it was “breathed out” by God the Holy Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16; cf. 2 Pet. 1:21). The Spirit of God is not a subjective feeling but a living, supernatural person—someone who has the divine power to confirm our minds and hearts in the truth of Scripture. John Calvin wrote beautifully about the Spirit’s work in his famous Institutes.

When We Have Doubts

If we are honest, we have to admit that what happened to Eve is a temptation for us as well. Sometimes we have our doubts about the stories we read in the word of God, about its moral convictions and the promises it makes.

We know how truly human the Bible is, and we wonder if it is also fully divine. We question whether Adam and Eve were the parents of the entire human race. Can we square biblical teaching with scientific evidence? Our culture struggles with the Bible’s sexual ethics, and maybe we do as well: two sexes, two genders, and one definition of marriage, in which a man and a woman are united in a lifelong covenant. Is the Bible right about the sanctity of life inside and outside the womb? Is it for or against women? Does it have a righteous view of justice, including racial justice? Does it give us a true perspective on the fundamental unity and the eternal diversity of humanity? Is it really true that our bodies will rise again and that we will all stand before God’s throne for judgment?

In the face of such questions and objections, many skeptics believe (!) that the Bible is “scientifically impossible, historically unreliable, and culturally regressive.”¹ Most of us can relate. If we read the Bible carefully, eventually we encounter something we find hard to accept, and maybe difficult to believe at all. The question is this: What should we do when this happens?

By way of answer, here are several practical steps we can take to give us growing confidence in the word of God.

First, we can confess that we are not neutral observers but are predisposed not to believe what God says. This is one of the sad results of humanity’s first, morally fatal transgression. As soon as Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they hid from God—a clear sign that they were no longer aligned with his divine holiness. God called to Adam and said, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). This showed that the first man had ended up far from God. Adam’s sin has noetic effects on all of us; in other words, it distorts our spiritual ability to reason. Spiritual doubt comes more naturally to the fallen human heart than genuine faith does. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin reminds us: “We are not honest inquirers seeking the truth. We are alienated from truth and are enemies of it.”² If this is true, then we need to doubt our doubts and stay skeptical about our skepticism.

Second, we can keep studying the Scriptures. When we do, we will find out how reliable they are. The Bible is easily the best-attested text from the ancient world. We have—by far—more well-preserved manuscripts of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments than we do of any other history book or sacred text from antiquity. We know what the Bible says.

Furthermore, the general trajectory of biblical scholarship is to confirm rather than to deny biblical history. To cite one notable example, some scholars used to cast doubt on the historicity of David, despite all the biblical evidence to the contrary. Those aspersions were set aside for good when archaeologists discovered a stone artifact at Tel Dan in 1993 and saw “the house of David” among its inscriptions. This proved that David’s reign was engraved in stone as well as written in Scripture. Or consider Luke’s assertion that Jesus was born “when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:2).

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