Is the Bible a Reliable Guide to Knowing Jesus?

We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

2 Peter 1:16

In Jesus Christ you will find everything you need for life. But if our knowledge of Jesus comes through the Bible, how do we know that it is reliable? Can we trust the Bible?

Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology, identifies four things we need to know about the Bible. Peter touches on all of them here:

1. Authority—Scripture is the Word of God. Peter says, “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1:21).

2. Sufficiency—Scripture has all that we need for knowing Christ. God has given us everything we need for life in knowing His Son, Jesus Christ, and He has given us everything we need for knowing Jesus in the Bible.

3. Clarity—in Scripture God has spoken in a way we can understand. Peter himself says that Paul’s letters contain “some things in them that are hard to understand” (2 Pet. 3:16). But the things that are most important are clear in the Bible. That’s why God says parents are to teach it to their children (Deut. 6:6-7). The Word itself will make “wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7; 119:130).

4. Necessity—what would we know about God if we didn’t have the Bible? From creation we know that God is great and glorious, but we could never know that He is love, or that Christ died for our sins and rose again, or that He is coming again. That’s why we need the Bible.

Imagine your own confidence in the Bible resting on these, like four legs of a stool. Rank each leg from 1 to 4, strongest to weakest.