If someone asked you what the best selling book in the world, in say the last 50 years, what would your answer be?
I can tell you, you won't find it on the New York Times best seller list.
You might think Harry Potter, but you'd be wrong.
You might put The Lord of the Rings at the top of the list, but you'd be way off the mark.
The Da Vinci code? Hey, it sold well, made a lot of money for Dan Brown, but it's not even close.
Time and again one book not only tops the sales charts it blows them away.
The Da Vinci code has sold around 57 million copies.
The Lord of the Rings slots in at 103 million.
Good old Harry Potter is sitting on a very healthy 400 million, thank you very much.
These guys face complete embarrassment.
In the last 60 years, the book we know as The Holy Bible has sold 3,900 million copies.
Wow.
3.9 billion.
Let me throw some other statistics into the pot, to give it a bit of flavour.
On a quick interweb search I discovered that the YouVersion Bible app has been downloaded to around 100 million devices. At any one time, according to the people at YouVersion, that on average 66,000 people have the app open any given second.
Not day, not hour ... second!
That's an awful lot of people reading the Bible.
Why?
I mean, what's the fuss? Why read the Bible?
To answer that question, at least on a personal level, let me take you on a bit of a journey.
Back in the day, before I was serious about my faith, I studied for and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in English literature.
I was always a bit of a bookworm, so it was inevitable I guess. And it was one thing I promised my mother when I dropped out of school at the end of year 11 having failed all but two subjects.
I went to university to become an archaeologist. For various reasons that didn't work out. My first year I took a course that had the wonderful title "From Chaucer to Jane Austin." A grand landscape overview of English Literature. And I had fun. I read a lot of books, I mean a LOT of books, and plays and poetry, and essays, and yep, more books.
For me, the one thing that stood out, was the realisation that every writer was looking at the human condition. Although they might not necessarily have found answers to the problems their readers were facing in terms of life outside their characters and plot, it was the searching that was important.
Then, years later, with this pretty solid grounding in literature, I met my beautiful wife, and I came back to the Lord and it was natural for me to want to read His word. I was given an NIV Study Bible, and of course I opened it at Genesis and I started to read.
I began with Genesis 1:1, and I didn't stop until I closed the book, with the words of Revelation 22:21 shining bright in my mind.
1991 pages in the NIV version I have.
726,109 words.
It's a rare feeling when you finish a book, and you know you want to go back to the beginning and start reading it all over again. That's the feeling I got when I closed my Bible at the end.
"The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen."
What an amazing book. But the Word of God? Really. How can I be sure of that?
When you study English literature you get into some critical theory, and that can be kind of dry, but some of it also gives you an idea as to how everything works, how it all hangs together.
There's this thing called "organic unity." It demands that a book is thematically and dramatically consistent. Basically it's how the book hangs together.
The Bible is actually 66 books, written by around 40 different writers over a period of 1500 years.
And it is difficult to find fault with it's organic unity. It hangs together. Almost as if the same author was responsible for the whole work. Which in fact is true.
It wasn't hard for me to accept that the Bible is God breathed. But some people still aren't so sure.
That's where the Bible stands in it's own defence.
The main question we have to settle in our minds, is what source of authority are we using in order to validate the text?
If we were talking about a novel by Charles Dickens for instance, we can know with pretty fair assurance that Charles Dickens is the person who wrote that particular book.
We know when it was published, we know how many editions it went through, etc.
And everything we know about Charles Dickens, whom I am a bit fan of by the way, goes into the pot to flavour his writing as we read it. There is a lot of biographical information available on Dickens. We know when he was born, we know when he died, we know that when Dickens came into the world King George III was on the throne, and that Queen Victoria became the monarch in 1870 after George died.
When you read Dickens, and if you haven't I highly recommend you do, he was one of the most amazing authors, and his insight into the human condition was extraordinary, you get a sense of the time he lived, and what life was like when he wrote. He wrote about the time he lived in, he wrote within terms of his own life and social context.
And the more you read the more you find that this is what authors do. It's hard not to. Even if they are writing science fiction or fantasy, they work within worlds that are recognisable to the reader. They have to by default as the person writing the book is a human being, with human thoughts, and feelings, and who lives a life within a specific social and historical context and who wants to deliver a specific message.
OK, so what we have is a social and historical context. Charles Dickens is author of his books, we know that, and he gives a singular testimony: His own.
His writing speaks of the writer. Sure. I can go along with that.
Now, we can add a few herbs and spices by looking at the history of the times, we can find stories of how people lived, we can look at crime in Victorian England, we can look at the poor and the gaols, and lots of other verifiable historical information, but to my mind what this does is validate Dickens as the author of his work.
It goes to strengthen the internal testimony of his writing. It doesn't take away from it. Now here's the point. We know, without any doubt at all, that the words we read on the page of a Charles Dickens novel, are written by Charles Dickens.
Think about that in terms of the Bible. Yes, we have someone by the name of Moses who supposedly wrote the first five books of the Bible (with a little help from his friends) but Moses is not writing about Moses. Well, not when you look at the Big Picture. He gives himself a few mentions along the way, but hey, he is part of the story.
Moses is writing about what happened to the people of God. Why? Because God is directing what Moses writes. And God through the Holy Spirit directs all of the other 40 authors in the Bible to put the words down on the page.
This is where this idea of organic unity comes into it. It hangs together.
How?
Because the same person wrote it.
Let me say that again, because it's important, the Bible, 66 books, written by 40 different people, over around 1500 years, hangs together in the most amazing way, because it has the same author!
That is mind blowing.
Friends, until we meet again, I pray that you are blessed by deeper wisdom as you open and read God's word.
(The above is a transcript from The Bible Bloke: The Podcast.